#and i think i need to revise how i cope as well

[ladyluscinia]

Izzy, Bottles, and Apologies

Izzy's arc in S2 has been a wild ride.

The S1 Izzy enjoyers are feeling vindicated as hell, many people are fully revising their opinion of him, and the people still hating him have a new criticism or off the wall theory daily. David Jenkins LOVES Izzy and is having the time of his life trying to make sure everyone else does too. They had Con O'Neill sing in drag!

And naturally I have thoughts.

This is gonna be a two part post, I think. First, as much as people are celebrating Izzy having realized his arc and come into his own - from the singing to the apparent BlackBonnet shipping - there are some threads they could pull on that might reveal more arc to come. And I am really hoping they pull them, so I'm gonna tell you why you should too!

And second, I have some minor points I dislike and concerns that this might be the end of the arc. Which would be disappointing but I think I get why, so I'm gonna discuss that too.

To start...

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"How are you handling all this so well?"

Here's the thing about S2 Izzy - while I need to be clear his behavior is not OOC or inconsistent with S1, it is happening rather fast. I'm pretty sure that has a lot to do with out of universe reasons I'll get into later, but in-universe it stands out. Now, he's hardly the only one operating on an accelerated schedule - the timeline for this season is an insanely fast not-even-two-weeks - but Izzy's defining struggle in S1 was fear of change. That was the cause of his friction with Edward, and what made him an antagonist in the first place.

In S2 he's gone through a lot of trauma, yes, but that fear is noticeably less present than I would expect.

Izzy in 2x06 has been cleaned up from his sobbing mess phase for just over 48 hours and he faces Edward with a joke, and then that night sings a moving French serenade to the crew. The next morning he's teasing them about finally hooking up and spends the day offering both Stede and Edward relationship advice.

He's a newly realized man... shedding repression and embracing who he could be. Accepting his breakup with Edward and trying to openly support the relationship that's better for him.

It's fun!

It's also, potentially, a bit of a flag. Maybe not a red one, not yet, but... pink-ish? A bit orange?

Let's look a little closer at those frayed edges.

---

"Well, you see, I have a system..."

There's an exchange from right at the start of the Pilot episode that has echoed through the entire series so far:

"Bottle it up?" -> "No, Frenchie! No, that's the worst thing you could do!"

Not talking to other people, not addressing your traumas... that's the kind of shit that just builds and builds inside you. When the cork eventually pops, the resulting damage can be a lot. Look at the finale of S1, where all of Stede's bottled up guilt and insecurities laid waste to his relationship with Edward, and then inadvertently became the first domino in the Kraken.

S2 is quick to bring this scene back into the forefront. The first time we see the Breakup Boat crew talking in 2x01, Frenchie reveals that "Bottle it up?" wasn't just a random comment he made, but a philosophy of his:

"Ah - well, you see, I have a system for dealing with all the terrible things I've seen. There's a box, in my mind, and I put the things in the box, I lock the box, and then I don't open it again. Works like a charm."

Apparently, Frenchie is the only one it actually seems to be working for.

Now, the show has been drawing some interesting lines between Frenchie and Izzy. From both serving as Blackbeard's First Mate to being frequently shown as a duo - tormenting Navy guys together on Sunday's raid, Frenchie holding Izzy's hand, Frenchie leaning on Izzy's leg in the cell, Frenchie behind him raising the flag in 2x05 - it's fitting that Izzy echoes Frenchie's preferred coping method. First he frames the non-acknowledgement of harm from Edward as just... part of piracy. He's a pirate, so he's fine with it.

And then we get Izzy's little whittled shark reveal and the conversation with Lucius about his leg:

"I don't know what you're talking about. Shark did this... dangling my legs over the side of the ship. Served me right, too."

Lucius calls him out on the unhealthy behavior, and Izzy concedes his point:

"O-kay, that seems healthy. Using a bit of fiction to help cover up your trauma." -> "Yeah, well... not moving on is worse. Twatty."

And to give him credit, he's right in his advice to Lucius. Filling his sketchbook with pages and pages of Blackbeard trauma is Lucius's form of bottling it up - thinking in endless recursive circles about his tumble off the ship and everything that followed. We already know chasing revenge instead of living is bad - Jim and Spanish Jackie established it last season, and Pete just echoed them. When Izzy advises Lucius to move on, that's what Lucius does.

But what Izzy is doing with the shark? That's not the same thing at all. He's lost a leg, grazed a bullet off his own head, and was snarling drunken accusations at himself in the mirror... he's not moving on from that. He's bottling it up with a nice dose of self-blame.

Cutting the legs off the unicorn for not doing it's job right and saying "served me right" about his fictional shark? There's a real dark knot of emotions there.

(Recall, too, that Edward deflected his hurt from Stede's abandonment into a "fictional character" during his chats with Lucius, and that delayed the explosion but couldn't stop it.)

So... Izzy's definitely coping with trauma in a way the show does not advise and often circles back to. Can we see any signs in 2x06 and 2x07?

---

The Weight of Things Unsaid

At the very start of 2x06, Izzy gets the thing he spent all of 2x05 mentally bracing himself to never hear - an apology from Edward for his leg. He walks up to initiate conversation and begins talking like nothing has changed. Edward is back in his leathers. Appropriate, given that his penance onesie was nothing genuine, just "how long do I have to wear this fucking thing for?" And Izzy is ready for them not to address the obvious hurt, to just smooth over a few jabs and go back to normal... but even Edward's mumbled little "Sorry about your leg" is so significant and difficult he flees as soon as he gets it out, leaving Izzy to sit, incredulous, with the acknowledgement.

It's still almost definitely not enough.

There was so much between them in 2x01 - 2x03. The writers literally did BlackHands love confessions on both sides. An apology from Edward Teach - a man who historically does not apologize - is a huge first step but still only the first step. The real things unsaid are so much bigger than a leg.

We get something else, too... Edward commenting on Izzy's drinking.

"Jesus. Really putting that away, aren't ya?"

Izzy has had booze a lot this season. He lost a leg and pain meds aren't really an option, so not surprising, but notable. Edward, advocating for substance abuse to deal with bad feelings, calls him a lightweight in 2x01. When they are found with the dead seabird in 2x03, Izzy takes a pointed drink from his bottle, and then 2x04 he spends the entire episode completely plastered. He seemingly sobered up for 2x05 - probably to focus on sword training and his whittling project - but now the bottle is back again before Izzy disappears for several hours.

And a little liquid courage might explain his going all in for the Calypso's Birthday performance.

I do appreciate that the performance on it's face is something completely unexpected for Izzy, but when thinking about it... it does make sense.

We already know music and performance were available on Blackbeard's ship even before Stede. Edward learned to play shanties on the piano somewhere, and singing is a common and encouraged part of sailing culture. Izzy's choice of song to perform is something a lot more emotional, but this is probably not his first performance for a crew.

Makeup, too, is in fashion for men and women at this time, and OFMD has shown it as such before. Izzy has never worn fashion makeup, or tried to be beautiful, but the concept wouldn't be alien to him. Wee John's description of a dramatic party look might even have intrigued him specifically because Izzy has actually done "looks" before - of the terrifying "theatre of fear" kind. The Kraken did have his whole crew in makeup for their raids. Taking the opportunity to embody something a bit more vulnerable and try to bring joy to this crew that took care of him is meaningful as fuck.

And it's still a drag performance!

It's a good pair of moments - before and after Ned. Proof that all this isn't just coping method - that's not what I'm arguing here - and even if Izzy's still bottling up a lot of feelings he's not doing the same full pressure bomb thing as he did in S1. There's been growth!

(This is why the flags are only pink-ish / orange-ish right now.)

Episode 2x07 though... I'm not so sure he's doing good as much as pretending it's all good.

Showing up to make his joke in the morning is a fun moment. I especially enjoy Edward's little "fuck off" with no bite to it 🤣🤣🤣 Reminder they do live together on a ship, so this is likely not even close to the first morning-after that Izzy has gotten front row seats to. But, at least to me, there's also a very performative feeling about it. Izzy being very Look how normal I can be about you fucking your boyfriend, Ed - and Edward picks up on it too. That's why he turns to Stede and whispers "He's jealous" as Izzy walks away.

Izzy continues to make jokes and give advice through the day to our main couple, but he's... subdued. I think his fake chill also disguises that he and Edward aren't on the same page about what they discuss at the docks, hence his poor advice to "listen to it" when the "it" in question is Edward's immediate desire to run away from Stede and become a fisherman. They are talking again, but haven't resumed communicating.

I also think it's relevant that Izzy goes to try and support Stede after Edward dumps him, because we're still waiting for Stede to stop bottling things up. He doesn't talk about Badminton or feelings of inadequacy or even the babiest little olive branch to Edward about "hey my dad kinda sucked too." Edward's two exes are sitting in the bar corner together, thinking about all the shit they won't talk to him about until it kills all three of them. Exciting!

The pressure is building. It has to circle back to Stede in S3. I'm hoping at the same time, it circles back to Izzy, too.

Hoping we get to explore some of his anxiety, and his internalizing negative self-image and blame. At the moment, I think Izzy might have less gotten over his anxieties and more just let go of the wheel of his life entirely, and fortunately had people around to steer him in okay directions. It would be really interesting to explore that more.

(Even if I have some concerns they may not.)

---

Subtle as a Cannonball to the Face

Izzy's character arc was always going to be a long journey - not because he was somehow morally worse than everyone else, or required particularly painstaking growth, or even because there was going to be some great need to "hold him accountable" for S1. No, it was going to be a long journey from an antagonist start for the same reason I mentioned earlier: Izzy's core struggle is fear of change.

OFMD opens with two protagonists recklessly pursuing change in ways that harm themselves, their relationships, and others, and a primary onscreen antagonist resisting change in a way that harms himself, his relationships, and others. There's no easy morality here - they all fuck up. And they all require the entire show to actually figure out the correct balance of change and growth and facing the past.

"I think the three of them are on an arc together that's pretty inseparable." - David Jenkins (Source, 9 Oct 2023)

So... why is there a chance that everything I've mentioned above is going absolutely nowhere and Izzy's arc has been wrapped up with a bow in S2?

Well.

It's late March 2022, the fandom's age is still only countable in weeks, I personally haven't even watched the pilot yet, had only even heard of the show 3 days before... and one of David Jenkins first post-finale statements is telling people to pay attention to Izzy's POV and his and Edward's love story on rewatches (Source, 25 Mar 2022), and then soon after comparing Stede to a homewrecker in Edward and Izzy's toxic marriage (Source, 15 Apr 2022). Lots of links because this stuff was available to the fandom from the start.

By the first half of May 2022 (while poor Mr. Jenkins is still anxiously trying to get his series renewed for S2, since the confirmation won't come until June 1) the takes on Izzy have soured a lot. It's not a "homophobic gay" joke anymore. Now it's "Izzy is the embodiment of colonialism who enforces a racist and homophobic ideal of Blackbeard on Edward" and "pretending Izzy could be canonically gay is homophobic" and "Izzy bought Edward as a slave from the British". Harassing anons have already started on tumblr. No first hand experience with Twitter but I've heard horror stories. These takes are spreading like wildfire through the fandom, with a heavy backing of white fans accepting and spreading anything that sounds vaguely racially-conscious as something they just missed in their privilege and need to listen to POC about. Or listen to other white fans that say they've been listening to POC.

The anchor hoist in 1x09 (that was a complete directing coincidence, as the crew confirmed in late May) is being taken as incontrovertible proof that Izzy is a violent racist, and the relatively small Izzy fandom pushing back against any of these reads is being likened to toxic fangirls declaring Kylo Ren a poor widdle victim because they think violent white guys are so hot their brains fall out. This is happening loudly and in the public forums of social media.

Can you imagine being David Jenkins right then?

This is one of your favorite little guys, who you wrote a silly little homoerotic pirate jealousy arc for. He's kinda cringefail and tends to be a dick, but you cast a guy who you think embodies him with so much sympathy and genuine emotion. You're so excited to explore his direct relationship to the main couple of your series even more. Unfortunately, you and a lot of the cast and crew are also engaging maybe a bit too much in fandom spaces, which very few of you have much familiarity with navigating as creators. AND there's still renewal stress!

If I were him, I too would consider that perhaps my intended Izzy arc was a bit too nuanced and drawn out, and maybe I needed to clear up some misconceptions as soon as I got the opportunity.

Enter S2.

MAX reduced the budget for the season significantly and it shows - particularly in the whole thing having to squeeze into 8 episodes - and I wouldn't be surprised at all if worries over a S3 renewal / S3 budget impacted S2 writing as well. Character arcs got pinched, goals had to be prioritized... and from the looks of the season, "make sure everyone knows Izzy is not a homophobic villain tormenting Edward as fast as possible" came out as a big goal.

I mean they open with a dream sequence that literally mocks the idea of a heroic Stede rescuing Edward from the dastardly Izzy. It's not subtle.

And the lack of subtlety is kind of what's concerning me.

Izzy's arc is (I think) leaving enough threads that they can extend it into S3 with the reveal he's not actually fine and done developing, but they also seem to want his S2 arc to end in a place where maybe he is. Lots of giant signs pointing to him and saying "Look! Everyone likes him!" or "Look! He's also gay!" at the expense of some of his cringefail or dickish charm. My guy had anxiety he dealt with poorly in S1, and I do think they are trying to frontload or adjust the arc so he's basically (or at least seemingly) over that before the next hiatus.

The best way I've seen it described is that the show no longer trusts the audience to pick up what they are putting down, and so they feel the need to really hammer it in. Not necessarily OOC, but definitely de-emphasizing any of his rough edges that were originally just written to not be any worse than the other characters.

This is why Izzy gets shot by Edward in the very first episode for a bunch of complicated reasons that are really good character work and not super hard to discern, but then later they have Izzy point out to Stede why he got shot twice. It's all very "look into the camera and say the themes", because to some degree they are afraid everyone is going to get easily convinced Edward shot him for calling him a namby-pamby that one time.

It makes me worried they are too afraid of misinterpretation to commit to the arc they originally conceived of, even with the finish line in sight in S3.

And, again, I get it, Mr. Jenkins. In October 2022 he made a funny quip and a boner joke on a tweet about Edward's blanket fort and the hordes descended to scream victoriously about how he was cutting down the Izzy stans for their racist infantilization crimes of thinking Izzy would *checks notes* help hold up a blanket. It's a very reasonable conclusion that this fandom cannot read and needs to be spoonfed Izzy's arc.

It just sucks that a toxic section of fandom's misinterpretations appear to have undercut a strong - and, honestly, not that complicated - character arc so much that S2's BlackBonnet arc can be about fuck ups and backsliding, but Izzy needs at least the illusion of having no flaws left come hiatus time.

#our flag means death #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #ofmd meta #my meta #izzy hands ofmd #izzy hands #character arcs #ofmd 2x06 #ofmd 2x07 #and here's my associated izzy meta because i love to talk about both my blorbos lol #ladyluscinia #david jenkins

[bardraelyn]

On Disaster Puppies, Anxious Angels, and Applesauce

*This post has been revised and expanded from a previous post.

So the key to understanding the end of S2 boils down to this:

Angel!Crowley = disaster puppy (all enthusiasm, not much sense)

Aziraphale = anxious kid who grew up in a house with plastic covers on all the furniture (this bit is important)

Let’s break it down:

When they first encounter each other, in the time Before the Beginning, Aziraphale shows signs of unease when he hears Angel!Crowley questioning God’s Ineffable Plan. I’ve seen it suggested that Aziraphale reacts this way because has doubts—that he doesn’t trust Heaven. Yet it’s well established in S1 that the loss of faith comes later, after the events surrounding Armageddon prove to him irrevocably that Heaven sees humans as no more than tokens in an elaborate game against Hell. No, Before the Beginning, Aziraphale trusts Heaven implicitly, and that trust is the root of his fear. Aziraphale trusts Heaven, Heaven has rules, and rules must be enforced.

Aziraphale doesn’t warn Angel!Crowley off questions because he thinks there’s something wrong with Heaven. He warns Angel!Crowley off questions because he lives in a restrictive environment with rigid rules and is terrified of (vague, unspecified) consequences. Anxious children don’t need to have erred or been punished previously in order to be afraid of punishment. They need only have an expectation (implicit from the mere existence of rules) that punishment of some sort is possible. In fact, having not been punished (because their anxiety mostly keeps them in line without need for actual adult intervention) makes the fear—not threat, but fear—of punishment that much more powerful because they don’t know what the punishment will be, and the unknown is terrifying. (What’s more, they are desperate for praise and reassurance that they won’t be punished and are doing the right thing, hence Aziraphale’s love language being words of affirmation.) Aziraphale is trying to protect the innocent, joyful angel he just met, even though he doesn’t yet know what he is protecting him from. He just knows you’re not supposed to muss the furniture, and what Angel!Crowley is suggesting feels dangerous.

Fear of the unknown explains why Aziraphale’s demeanor shows more of an edge in certain present-day scenes of S2. Thanks to his and Crowley’s post-Armaged-didn’t appearance swap, Aziraphale has now been to Hell and has a much better sense of what punishment might actually look like—not to mention a very up-close and personal understanding of exactly the kind of punishments that were intended for his beloved. Punishment is no longer a vague concept but rather a well-defined set of parameters, and Aziraphale knows how to deal with things that have edges. (Yes, that’s a flaming sword allusion, but it’s also a pointed reference to the notion that things that can be defined can be countered.) Because he can anticipate, he can plan. And planning is something Aziraphale excels at, because anxious children out of necessity grow into meticulous planners.

Having this knowledge of what punishment looks like leads our shades-of-gray angel to become less fearful for himself while simultaneously making him even more protective of Crowley. His thought process has gone from, “Punishment is big and terrifying, and I don’t know how I would cope” to “Punishment looks like this, and it sucks as much as or more than I expected, and I want my beloved to never have to endure it again.” It has also made him more protective of the innocents who are bound to get caught in the middle of Heaven and Hell’s unending conflict. Indeed, he goes truly fierce during the battle at the bookshop in a way that we have not seen before, even at the climax of S1. (While he did pull that tone with Furfur in 1941, that moment arose from disdain rather than aggression, so it’s not particularly relevant to this part.)

This also accounts for why, after his Fall, Crowley has become a demon who only “goes along with Hell as far as he can.” Angel!Crowley had no concept nor fear of punishment. Crowley now has both, but he’s already been punished in the worst way possible (loss of his angelic status and the opportunity to work on more projects like his beautiful nebulas), so he knows what punishment feels like. He knows where to toe the line and knows what to expect if/when he doesn’t. He’s not that bright and enthusiastic puppy anymore; he’s a wary old dog with a long memory, who is willing to take a stand to protect those he’s loyal to, even while he still cowers at certain types of threats (“We can run away together!”).

Angel!Crowley was punished and cast out of the restrictive home with all the plastic on the furniture, and the new house he’s been stuck in for the past 6000 years is run by the sort of abusive f*cks who beat puppies and raise them for dog fights. (I have a theory that Crowley was punished less severely than some of the other Fallen. He is, after all, one of the most beautiful demons we see, and that suggests that the person in charge of doling out punishments was more annoyed at him than angry, and so didn’t curse him with the truly nasty afflictions we see on the more repugnant of demons—like Hastur, who delights in pain, or Beelzebub, who had some leadership role in the Rebellion—but that doesn’t matter because his new home was terrible, possibly in part because of that lesser punishment. I bet that prior to the Rebellion, “Lucifer and the boys” delighted in the cliquish equivalent of “throwing sticks for the Disaster Puppy to chase,” and poor Angel!Crowley didn’t realize they weren’t really his friends so much as a different set of abusers who used attention instead of neglect. But after the Fall, they became his keepers, and his eyes were opened to a whole new level of loss and betrayal. Anyway.)

As a member of the Fallen, Crowley doesn’t remember the names of some angels/demons (Furfur, Saraqael, and yes, Aziraphale at first) but clearly remembers others (like the Metatron and Gabriel), even though they all remember him. I’ve seen suggestions that this is a trauma response or the results of a partial memory wipe, but I think it has a much simpler explanation: He only remembers the names and faces of entities who stood out to him. That enthusiastic angel who bubbled with joy and absolutely annoyed some of the other angels with his exuberance? Of course, he sticks in their memory! But they barely registered to him because they were each just one in a billion random strangers he played with in the park. The Disaster Puppy enthusiastically plays with everyone. He remembers the ones who had the power to slap him on the nose—and the one angel whose daring and kindness impressed him enough for his name to finally stick after it didn’t during their previous encounters.

At their very first meeting, Aziraphale introduces himself; Angel!Crowley doesn’t reciprocate. Names are irrelevant. He’s too caught up in his nebula to even take note of the introduction. So later, when they meet on the wall of Eden, introductions are needed again: Aziraphale because Crowley didn’t recall his name, and Crowley because he never gave his name at their first meeting (and probably never during any of their chance encounters in Heaven, because remember, Disaster Puppy just isn’t all that concerned with names), but also because even if Aziraphale did pick up Angel!Crowley’s name in passing sometime after their first meeting, he absolutely would not assume that the fallen angel still uses it. Rather than risk dead-naming him, he waits for Crowley (or Crawly, at the time) to tell him what he prefers to be called.

So, it’s obvious why Crowley didn’t remember Aziraphale’s name, but did he recognize Aziraphale at all before approaching him on the wall? I would bet on absolutely, yes, but with the vague sort of recollection of a conversation he probably should have taken a bit more to heart. He sees a being who tried at some point in the past to warn him, whose name he doesn’t recall because it didn’t seem important enough at the time, but who makes him feel comfortable enough to approach: “You tried to help me before, which means you are kinder than those other angels who didn’t, and so you probably won’t hurt me now, even though I’m Fallen. I’m feeling conflicted about this notion that knowledge of Good and Evil is a Bad Thing, and as someone who tried to advise me earlier, I feel like I can talk to you about it.” (What neither of them has yet realized is that knowledge of Good and Evil is the key to recognizing that Heaven and Hell are two ends of the same poison pill, and it’s not only humans who have been kept in the dark; a lot of the Angelic Host are also in need of some applesauce.)

All of this is why the memory-wipe theory simply doesn’t make sense. Think about it: Gabriel is the Supreme Archangel, and their intent with him was to perform the equivalent of a full hard drive wipe and reinstall of the base angelic software. They think of him as corrupted beyond repair. If even the highest of high archangels isn’t worth the massive effort of selective file deletion, why would they waste that same amount of effort on Crowley to wipe (and possibly replace) a few select memories from before the Fall? Yes, it’s clear that Crowley was an angel with a reasonably high level of access, given his ability to open the archives, but there’s absolutely no indication that he outranked Gabriel. In fact, his scorn for the Supreme Archangel is exactly the sort of scorn you’d have for someone who used to have authority over you and abused it extremely casually but was mostly the kind of negligent adult who ignored you until you were useful and/or pissed them off.

(As an aside, this also ties back to the question of why angels don’t eat while demons do. Aziraphale eats—with enthusiasm!—so clearly angels can eat, and Crowley mentions “food not that good anymore” in Heaven as part of why he started palling around with the other discontents, so angels certainly did eat at some point, but now they don’t. While Hell plainly has some sort of meal situation—not to mention a fiery beverage dispenser—we don’t see so much as a watercooler in Heaven. And well, yeah. Obviously. Because somebody in Heaven wants to keep everything pristine, so they won’t allow food anywhere near all that Heavenly furniture. It won’t kill the angels to go without meals, because they are immortal beings, so all the ban achieves is a) starvation, b) loss of pleasure, and c) control. After all, food control—control over the basic function of consuming sustenance—is a great way to exert and reinforce control over a group of beings that you want to ensure won’t rebel. And that’s really all it comes down to: Keeping everything pristine and spotless and perfect, and keeping everyone in line. Withholding the literal and metaphorical applesauce. And the Rebellion gave whoever is in charge of those decisions [my bet would be on the Metatron; God seems too self-involved to care about the furniture] the perfect excuse to change the house rules to ban food. And since it’s definitely a cult, all the ones who are deeply indoctrinated just sort of…go along with it. Anyway….)

If Aziraphale feels any guilt over Crowley’s Fall, it’s a mild twinge over the fact that he wasn’t able to convince the Disaster Puppy to stop jumping on the furniture. That’s not the primary motivating factor for why he’s so adamant about protecting Crowley at the end of S2 or at any other time in their long association. Aziraphale and Crowley are both, in their ways, protectors. That is established over and over again, throughout all of their actions and conversations. Protecting is a primary drive for each of them, something that is at the core of their beings, and it often puts them at odds over the exact same objective: Protecting the one(s) they care most about. They withhold information and behave in sometimes appalling ways to protect each other when what they really need to be doing—as they should have learned from the first Armageddon attempt—is working together to protect what they have with each other along with everything else that they love.

Because the reality is that if either one of them sacrificed themself to save the other, that very sacrifice would destroy the other. They are of one heart, and it cannot, will not live if it is not whole. But neither one fully trusts the other to coordinate a defense because of that same history and past trauma. Aziraphale thinks Crowley won’t listen to him because Angel!Crowley shrugged him off, and Crowley is still afraid of being kicked if he lets his guard down because he can see how much his beloved is still a victim of the cult programming (and Aziraphale is not above kicking if he feels panicked). Crowley doesn’t think Aziraphale will hurt him on purpose, but rather because Aziraphale doesn’t see all the angles and manipulations and therefore can’t see all of the threats—and in their conversation at the end of S2E6, the angel seemingly proves him right.

Now, here I want to pause for just a moment to address a certain type of anxiety response, because it’s vitally important to what comes next, and that is diving in without a plan. It is entirely too common for individuals with anxiety to go into a tailspin when confronted with something that feels overwhelming. This is followed by a prolonged period of recovery, which may then lead to meticulous planning to deal with the situation (if it can’t just be avoided entirely). Unfortunately, this process takes time—often too much time. This is why we sometimes see Aziraphale throw himself into situations with very little forethought or preparation (like, say, following the clues to surrounding the appearance of a certain ex-Supreme Archangel at his bookshop), because he’s tapping into a slightly more self-aware (if rather unhealthy) approach to handling things that trigger his anxiety: “I know if I get up in my head about this, it will paralyze me, and shit needs to get done, so fuck it.” He is short-circuiting the possibility of a tailspin by refusing to think before he acts. The kind of energy that accompanies this approach could easily be categorized as frantic.

When Aziraphale is telling Crowley the “good” news, he appears excited, but given one significant fact we do know—that Aziraphale is driven by anxiety—I would argue that his demeanor in this moment could more accurately be read as agitated. Now, we could debate all day what might have happened during his conversation with the Metatron to cause that agitation. It is plausible—indeed likely, given Neil’s intricate plots—that there was something more to it than we’ve been shown thus far. But we don’t need to know the details to understand Aziraphale’s response, because Aziraphale’s anxiety provides all of the necessary context. After spending several minutes enduring the direct attention of the Metatron, Aziraphale is acutely aware of one very important thing: that he and his beloved demon are, at the very least, still under intense scrutiny by his own former side, and that means they still are not, and have never been, entirely safe from Heaven or Hell’s interference. So he does what our darling Anxiety Angel always does when he is terrified and needs to act: He throws himself in before he can think too hard about what he’s throwing himself into.

So this brings us to Aziraphale’s return to Heaven.

I don’t think that Metatron’s intent is to kill Aziraphale. He will almost certainly resort to that if looks like Aziraphale won’t give him what he wants, but right now, he just sees a tool that can help him achieve his goal (provided Crowley is out of the way). Because here’s the thing: the archangels are clueless about some very important things. That has already been established (see: Job and conversations about human birth). Metatron is probably a bit less so than most, but there are things the Angels in Charge fundamentally do not understand, and they don’t know it yet, but Aziraphale is one of those things.

Metatron sees an angel who has not only lived on Earth long enough to truly understand humans, but also (and this is key) has collaborated with a demon—a tempter—and then effectively lived in the company of that tempter for the past four years. Metatron sees Aziraphale as someone who can be tempted and manipulated. That’s why he brings him coffee. He’s trying to use that. He wants a tool he can control. But he, like all of the highest of the Host, is guilty of neglect. He has never paid close enough attention to Aziraphale to see the Bastard Angel: the one who pushes back against Crowley, and even against God, who offers his own temptations, who is stubborn and implacable (much to Crowley’s frequent annoyance even while he loves it), and who isn’t afraid to stand firm in the face of Heaven, Hell, and Armageddon to protect the world and the keeper of his heart. Metatron thinks Aziraphale's resistance to Armageddon was the result of Crowley's manipulation, so he figures he'll just get Crowley out of the way or keep him too busy to interfere, and use Aziraphale for himself. Metatron is so very wrong.

As to why Aziraphale hasn’t fallen yet (and isn’t going to fall, even in S3) in spite of all of his misdeeds and mini-rebellions: it all comes down to the fallout. The Rebel Host—including the poor Disaster Puppy angel running around with them—started a war. In Heaven. They didn’t just individually act up on occasion in ways that could be ignored. They engaged in a violent and bloody act of rebellion. The Fall wasn’t about the small sins; it was about the big one. They messed up the furniture. They had to go. Aziraphale’s not messing up the furniture—yet. By the time he starts, it will be far too late for Heaven to do anything to stop him.

See, that smile at the end of S2E6? It’s not pleasure at taking charge, and it’s not determination to fix Heaven. It’s a mask. Aziraphale spent that elevator ride bottling up his pain and hiding it down deep. Anxiety children become adults who are masters of repression, and he just went through his whole panic attack and packed away his grief in the elevator, while holding a straight face (a very tense, grief-stricken face—it’s all there in the micro-expressions, or rather, the desperate attempt at suppression of all macro- and micro-expressions, about which I could write a whole separate post—but essentially a straight face nonetheless). I would bet my immortal soul that he put on that smile right when the elevator stopped, just before the doors started to open. Heaven is about to learn the hard way why choosing Aziraphale was their fatal mistake. Because the Bastard Angel is broken and angry, and he’s done with their bullshit rules and their plastic-covered furniture. Maybe he pushed Crowley away to protect him. Maybe he really wanted Crowley to come with him to try to change things from the inside. None of that matters. All of the maybes that happened before Metatron came back to collect Aziraphale are irrelevant. Because Metatron doesn’t understand Aziraphale, and he just tipped his hand when he spoke the words “Second Coming.” Aziraphale has long since realized that Heaven is toxic—that’s what he wants to fix—but until that moment he didn’t have the context Crowley had to know why Gabriel left. But he has just learned that his love, his heart, and his world are in mortal danger, and he will stop at nothing to save them. Heaven hath no fury like an angel with a broken heart.

Aziraphale has never worried that Crowley was ever made to forget him. He’s intelligent and observant. He noted that initial un-introduction (and was even a bit disappointed by it), so he knows why Crowley doesn’t remember his name when they meet on the wall of Eden. Their coded-language dance around the depth of their association has never been about fear of rejection over imagined faults but rather the very real threats from their respective Home Offices, which they are too wary to immediately forget even after thwarting Armageddon and their own executions. (They are right not to trust that sense of peace!) It has taken them four years to let down their guards even the tiniest bit, and they are still speaking in code—hence the ball: It's Aziraphale's confession of love without saying the words out loud, because it still doesn't feel entirely safe. And he’s not going to Heaven to throw himself on some sacrificial alter to fix a mistake he thinks he made 6000 years ago by failing to keep an angel who barely acknowledged him from falling in with the rest of the Rebel Host. He’s just doing what he’s always done: trying his best to protect the innocent from Heaven’s caprice.

Only this time, he knows his own heart is innocent too.

#good omens #good omens theory #rebuttal #good omens spoilers #good omens season 2 #aziraphale #crowley #the metatron #angry angel #anxious angel #bastard angel #disaster puppy #no nightingales #this started as a rebuttal post and got out of hand #this post is a six-headed hydra #anxiety and hyperfocus really do explain everything #yes by HIS OWN HEART I mean the HEART THEY SHARE #this is a revised version of an earlier post

[airenyah]

People I wanna know better tag meme

was tagged my @lurkingshan <3

Last song?

ok so there's actually a story behind the last song i listend to: earlier i was revising some stuff we did in my thai class before christmas (bc our new course is starting tomorrow) and one of the words was "earthquake" and i saw the thai word written down in my notes and somehow i heard the word as a melody in my brain?? instead of my normal reading voice?? and so i went to look up the song and sure enough the word is there

actually i heard the melody of the word "earthquake" from this song in somebody's very specific voice and i wish i could say that you can win a prize if you're able to pinpoint who and where exactly i got this song from but alas i don't have a prize, so you'll have to do with my highest admiration lmao . yes i've linked it on my blog before some time in the last few weeks

Favorite color?

blueee i really like blue, esp a nice shiny dark blue

Currently watching?

cooking crush

last twilight

the sign (i'm like 2 eps behind tho)

and i know i just got done with my bad buddy anniversary rewatch only yesterday, but i was thinking of doing another rewatch next month when i'm on semester break bc i wanna track all the times an instrumental version of "just friend?" plays as background music

Last movie?

*gaily* Überraschung!

no, i will not elaborate. this one goes out to all my german speakers. if you know you know 🤭

or actually, i'll let calvin and habs do the explaining

Sweet/Spicy/Savory?

totally depends on my mood and the dish

(unpopular opinion but savory strudel >>>>>>>>>> sweet strudel)

Relationship status?

trying to get over a crush single. bc i'd rather be caught dead than tell anyone how i feel about them. can't let people know we have, you know...

running away and denial is a healthy coping mechanism i know lmao

Current obsessions?

what am i if not a bad buddy blog in its joongdunk era

Last thing you googled?

"100 usd to euro" bc of this poll

Selfie or another pic you took?

enjoy this picture from that one time when boy cat INSISTED that he too needed to go on a walk when my mom took the dog outside and then got really angry when there was, well, snow on the ground

the world sure is not fair, huh

tagging:

@dimplesandfierceeyes @nongnaos @greenteadumplings @sunnenfinster @visualtaehyun @moonkhao @newyearknwwme @gaym3bo1 @ranchthoughts @mommyzhilla @callipigio

#am i doing this instead of working on my paper? yes. yes i am #rip to me i guess #also savory strudel IS better than sweet strudel and i will die on this hill #spinatstrudel my beloved <3333 #oh how i'm craving spinatstrudel rn #where can i get spinatstrudel at 9:30pm #that reminds me i still need to have dinner so i guess i should warp this up #tag game #alsoooo if you can't tell where the movie quote is from then here's another tip: #imagine it said in a gay bavarian voice #the color is also a hint lol #if you still can't tell what it is then you probably haven't seen the movie bc that quote is pretty well known and iconic dfjkfdk #Youtube

[drdemonprince]

Hi Dr Price! In your recent Instagram story you described some of the bad-faith engagement and outright abuse you've recieved as your platform has grown. I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk a little about your journey with navigating abusive responses to your work? I'm very keen to start publishing essays online, but I don't know how well I'd cope with cruel responses or escalating threats. On my best days I have a thick skin, but I've always been sensitive and my emotional armour is easily chipped. Is it primarily a matter of building one's tolerance for discomfort, as you described in your essay on disobedience? Do you have any more advice specific to this issue?

Distress tolerance certainly helps, but you really do need to develop self-control and a firewall of sorts when it comes to not exposing yourself to more negative feedback than you can handle or than is helpful.

My comments are turned off for many reasons, but largely because I have decided I don't want to platform any old random message from any random person who I do not know, cannot vouch for, and who might not have even fully read the essay or post to which they are responding.

Comment sections are a tool for generating advertiser revenue for social media platforms by creating conflict and distraction in the name of "engagement." It is a game I do not play, and I believe that a culture of constantly commenting upon things when we don't have relevant expertise and haven't thought our ideas through actively makes the world worse. Not having comment sections also means I don't fixate on the moment-by-moment reactions of other people to my work. I post and ghost.

I don't read reviews of my books, I don't name search myself (except for the occasional look for new posts on Reddit), and on all socials I have all notifications turned off except for people that I already follow and trust. If someone is in my mentions having a tantrum I don't ever see it (thanks to Philosophy Tube for inspiring this policy). I get my information from books, peer-reviewed articles, and outlets that I have already vetted, as well as from conversations with friends and engagement in my actual community.

I do have a firm grounding in myself, and a strong belief in both my ability to think and my ability to change and revise my point of view, and I don't see other people's feelings or thoughts about me as a reflection of my value. Their feelings about me are their problem. so I don't worry about the fact others disagree with me at times. In fact, after a certain degree of public exposure, one must accept that people are going to think and say all kinds of nonsense about you, and that you do not have the capacity as a single human to take all that data in.

I think getting comfortable with being disliked is probably the highest hurdle for most people. The book The Courage to Be Disliked is pretty great in that respect. But I'd also just say that, you know, if you dont know anything about a person and you have no reason to trust anything they have to say, why should their opinion matter to you? most of its junk data or worse.

[dduane]

Hello there Ms. Duane!

Since you’re a published author of both original fiction and of fiction based upon existing fandom universes, I was wondering if you could answer a question for unpublished writers out there.

How do publishers select an author to write a story based on an existing fandom universe? I’m thinking of course of Star Trek, Star Wars… any of the stars, all of the stars… and even non-star-focused expanded universe stories. ;) Are new authors ever selected for those sorts of things? Or do publishers reach into their lists of their own authors? How does that work, in your experience?

Thanks so much!

Sure! A pleasure to assist.

First of all, let's shift the terminology a little. There's too much possible misunderstanding inherent in the term "fandom universe". To describe the works we’re talking about I’d rather use the name the owners of the big ones (and people negotiating with them) use in discussing them: “licensed properties”. This term means that some corporate entity—could be small,* could be big—owns the (copy)rights to the intellectual property on/in which the storytelling is based, in whatever format, and licenses people to come and work in/with it.

I started working in other people’s universes in the early 1980s, when the concept was beginning to ooze more energetically out of film and TV, where it was born (and where I first ran into it), and into other media such as prose and comics. For the moment, let’s stick to dealing with Star Trek, as it’s not only one of the older licensors, but the one I have the longest affiliation with and know the best.

Bantam Books acquired the license from Paramount Pictures to publish Star Trek prose works in in 1966. Having initially commissioned the well-known SF writer James Blish to adapt the individual scripts of Star Trek’s original series into prose, Bantam then began commissioning original works of novel-length fiction in the Trek universe.

What the Bantam editors would have done was look around the SF field for writers who they thought would work well with the franchise (in terms of tone, voice, style, and availability), and approach them to find out whether they’d be interested in writing for a licensor. (Some of them might have been writers the editors had previously worked with in other fiction-publishing venues.) Alternately, writers might approach the editors through their agents (once they heard that the publisher was interested in commissioning work of this kind) and pitch novel projects to them. I got in through the door the second way, having been profoundly annoyed by one of the Bantam-published books and feeling pretty sure I could do better.

The salient point to note is that whether one was being approached by the publisher, or doing the approaching—even at that relatively early state of affairs—at least 95% of the time, the writer in question had previous credential in published fiction. This makes sense because when you’re writing for a licensor, they need proof that you (a) can come up with a strong enough idea to support the weight and length of a novel, (b) will be able to finish a novel once commissioned, (c) will be able to cope professionally with accepting and correctly implementing notes you’re given on needed revisions, and (d) have demonstrable strengths of writing skill that have been concretely confirmed by previous sales figures.

In my case, I came into the Bantam offices (virtually speaking) with all four of the above, as well as various award nominations and other prizes for my first two books. Paramount looked at the outline and initial three chapters I’d submitted to Bantam through my agent, and more or less immediately gave me the go-ahead (though there was a brief pause while Paramount changed licensed publishers, withdrawing their license from Bantam and passing it to Simon & Schuster / Pocket Books). The deal then went ahead, leading to the publication of The Wounded Sky in December 1983.

The main issue here, though, would have been one of previous credential... and what having that says about the writer’s ability to complete work as expected, hit scheduled turn-in and revision dates, and not screw up the rest of what can be a complex publication schedule with (sometimes) significant money riding on advertising and promotion. Even then, there was very minimal presence on the Bantam roster of writers without previous credential in published fiction. Later on, there would be almost none.

You see where this is going, I suspect. These days, right across the field, increasingly large amounts of money are at stake in the publication of licensed works… and as a result things have tightened up a great deal. It seems likely to me that there are almost no writers for major licensed properties who don’t have previous published-fiction credential. So the answer to “are new authors ever selected?” would have been “Absolutely!” I mean, I was. “...But new never-previously-published ones? Highly, highly unlikely.” (I’m not saying impossible, mind you. If some major name in Star Wars publishing ran into their commissioning editor’s office one morning shouting, “Wow, you need to see this fanfic, we need to solicit this person...!!”, then... who knows? But this isn’t exactly going to be a commonplace occurrence.)

There is only one possibly-effective way around (or through) this situation: get out there and publish something else, something of your own, in a universe that is not the (licensed) one you’re interested in pitching to**… and something that will generate sales figures. This is fortunately easier than it used to be, because even self-publication can serve a purpose here. Either self-publication or traditional publication (if you can make it over that bar, which admittedly is not easy) can serve to prove to an editor that you can plan and outline a book, that you can not just start a novel but finish it, and that (afterwards) someone will buy it and read it.

But most to the point, either form of publication will display to a potential publisher that most difficult of things to convey in shorter works: the sound of your unique voice, the tone of your storytelling at novel length, and the quality of your prose. If you can put something of sufficient quality to demonstrate these into an editor’s hand, your odds of a successful pitch suddenly escalate from almost-zero to “Hmm...”. And a whole lot can come out of something that makes the editor say “Hmm...”. 😄

So my advice to you: get out there and write something in your world. Because anybody can write for Star Trek (or Star Wars, or all the other stars...). But right now only you can write the You-iverse... and until you do, we’ll never have the pleasure of experiencing it.

...Hope this helps!

*For example, the Young Wizards universe is an IP, with one owner: me. If I decided I felt like inviting people or companies into the universe to play there officially—anybody from individual authors to big companies—then (depending on the contractual situation) they would be my licensees, and their works in-universe would be licensed properties.

**Or any other.

#writing #writing advice #licensed properties #Star Trek novels #and others

[potionsprefect]

Expert Advice

Pairings: Ethan Ramsey x Victoria Clarke

Word Count: 1.4k

Summary: As they prepare to sit their exams, Luke and Lily go to their parents for advice

Rating: General Audiences

Category: Fluff

Lily

There were various books taking up a lot of space on the desk in their old play room turned study room. All with hundreds of words scribbled on them, the jargon too difficult for a layman to understand but to Lily Ramsey, it made perfect sense.

All she needed to do was remember it, memorise the content and know when to apply it to the correct situations.

Working in the medical field has been a dream of hers, she wanted to be like her parents but take on a very different kind of medical role. And being an EMT was the perfect role for Lily. She wanted to help the community, and in this role, that’s exactly what she could do.

It was currently the Easter holidays and instead of being outside enjoying the warm spring sunshine, Lily was stuck inside revising. However, she knew it would be worth it. The small sacrifices would benefit in the long run.

She could see her brother lounging about on a chair, earphones in and typing away at his laptop. He too was completing essays for medical school but didn’t have an exam at the moment like Lily did. However, for her this was the final step, Luke wasn’t done just yet.

Lily could see her parents working around the garden, her Dad was mowing the lawn and her Mom was… gardening? She took up some of the strangest hobbies sometimes, Lily thought.

Growing their own vegetables was something Ethan and Victoria loved doing. Luke and Lily thought it would be much quicker to just go to the shops and buy them there. There was no having to wait for them to grow for months.

Lily smiled as she watched her parents share a kiss, they were always very affectionate, something Luke and Lily found gross as kids but now they know it’s a way of showing how much they love each other. Although Luke still got embarrassed, Lily thought it was sweet.

With a sigh, she turned back to her notes, determined to not get distracted. Lily tested herself, ensuring she knew the content, making notes on where she made mistakes and what to do for next time.

A knock at the door made Lily look up from her notes. “Come in.” She called out.

The door opened and Ethan and Victoria walked in.

“I made you an iced coffee. How are you getting on?” Victoria asked setting the drink down on the table.

“Ok I think.” Lily replied.

“Don’t burn yourself out Lil. You need to look after yourself.” Ethan rested a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“I know I just…” Lily sighed. “I feel like any breaks are a waste when I could be learning the things I’m still not sure on. And I want to get it right first time. Otherwise I’ll feel like a failure and that I let everyone down.”

“Hey none of that.” Ethan said pulling Lily out of her chair and in for a hug. No matter how old she got, Lily always appreciated a hug, especially from Ethan. “You have done so much to get here and we are all so proud of you. I know you want to pass first time but if you don’t, so what? You can retake it.”

“I know that. And I know I know more than I think I do. It’s just hard sometimes.”

“Whatever happens Lil we are so proud of you. And it’ll be fine.” Victoria smiled.

“But what if it isn’t?” Lily asked.

“It will be. However you do, you’ll find a way through it. That’s what is so amazing about you.” Ethan smiled.

“How did you both cope with your exams? I know mine are a little different.” Lily said.

Ethan smiled. “I remembered how hard I had worked up until this moment. I was worried naturally that I wasn’t going to do well but I knew that if I put in one hundred percent effort I would come out successful. And if I didn’t? Then I could always try again.”

“I was the same. I remembered that a big and exciting new adventure would start soon and that this was the final hurdle to getting there.” Victoria replied.

“I just want to get it right first time.” Lily huffed.

“We know you do. But don’t put too much pressure on yourself.” Ethan tightened his arms around Lily.

“I’ll try not to.” Lily laughed a little.

“If you put in the same amount of effort now as you have done before you’ll be absolutely fine.” Victoria said.

“I know.” Lily smiled.

“Just remember how proud we are of you.” Ethan pressed a kiss to her head.

Lily nodded. She would get through this final hurdle, she would make sure of it.

Luke

The Easter holidays were about having fun Luke thought as he started at the textbook in front of him. He should be outside, enjoying the sunshine but instead he was in the study room of his house.

He contemplated whether he should actually come home or not. Maybe he would’ve been better staying on campus at UPenn but when the flight came through his email from his Mom and Dad he knew he couldn’t say no.

It wasn’t all bad, he missed his parents cooking and enjoyed sleeping in his own bed again.

He knew he needed to just get through this last bit and then he would graduate, finally his dreams of becoming a doctor would come true.

A knock at the door pulled him away from his thoughts. “Come in.” He said.

Ethan walked into the room. “I thought I’d come and see how you’re getting on.”

Luke sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Honestly, I’m tired. I think I need a break.” He laughed slightly.

“Well you have been up here for 3 hours straight. And awake since seven. I think you’ve deserve some rest. Come downstairs.” Ethan said.

Luke nodded and got up and followed his Dad down the stairs and into the kitchen. Ethan put the kettle on.

“I just want these exams to come and go. My brain hurts from reading all those books.” Luke laughed as he sat at the table.

“I don’t miss those days. But I do thank them. I wouldn’t have been the doctor I am today without them.” Ethan said, placing two mugs of coffee on the table.

“That’s my motivation. I want to be like you and Mom.” Luke replied taking a sip.

“You are but you’re so different. Every doctor is. They see different things, offer different opinions. That’s why we are all so unique.” Ethan replied.

“Did you feel nervous before you took your exams?” Luke asked.

Ethan smiled. “Of course. I knew how important they were and that getting through them would be the start of my career. But that didn’t mean I was worried I wouldn’t pass them. I didn’t want to let myself or anyone else down.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“And that’s perfectly fine. Your sister felt the same doing hers. And now look at her. She passed and is now doing something she loves. And you’ll be the same. I promise.” Ethan said.

“It’s just… I’ve worked so hard, sacrificed a lot of things, I just hope I don’t fall when I’m so close.” Luke sighed.

Ethan sipped his drink, a thoughtful look on his face. “I can guarantee you’re not the only one. Everyone else who is in or has been in your position has felt the exact same. But remember the end goal. That’s the main thing.”

“That’s what I keep working towards.” Luke smiled.

The front door opened and Victoria walked into the kitchen. “What are you two talking about?”

“Men stuff.” Luke laughed. “Just kidding. I just needed a bit of motivation.”

“I know how important these exams are for you. We felt the same. But we are so proud of you. No matter what happens.” Victoria smiled taking a seat beside Luke.

“I just can’t wait for it to be over.”

“I know. And when it is you’ll feel elated. Once this last bit is over, we’ll go out and celebrate.” Victoria smiled.

“Take this advice, you know more than you think you do. It’ll all click into place.” Ethan said.

Luke nodded. Whenever he had a problem, he knew he could always rely on his parents for advice. They were very wise, and they always had a solution for everything he put their way.

He would pass his exams, and he would make his parents proud.

I don't know if my research is 100% correct but from googling, I concluded that as Lily becomes an EMT and Luke goes to medical school, Lily would do her exams before Luke, hence why she is first

Tagging in reblog

#open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan ramsey x mc #ethan ramsey x victoria clarke #ethan x victoria #playchoices #fanfic #open heart fanfic #open heart fanfiction #choices: open heart #fluff #choices fic writers creations #fics of the week

[logicalbookthief]

If you're accepting owl house prompts then 37 with Willow? (or whoever strikes your fancy)

37. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

Prompt from this list

So… Anyone remember how messed up it is that Gus knows about the grimwalkers and what Philip did to Caleb?

“Augustus,” Willow greets, sliding in next to him on the couch. It’s a rare moment when they’re alone in the Noceda household. No Hunter keeping a watchful eye on his self-appointed charge. No Amity leaning on her, a familiar tether in an otherwise strange world. “Mind if I sit?”

Gus narrows his eyes. “I guess,” he replies, utterly skeptical. “What’s wrong?”

Busted already. What gave her away? Too casual in her approach? Or too careful? The pitfalls of having a friend who knows you better than you know yourself. 

Two can play at that game, though. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Willow doesn’t have much to do these days besides worry. Worry for her dads, who she misses like a whole half of her heart. Worry for everyone they left behind in the Boiling Isles.

Worry for Gus, who — while he has improved since that initial night of heartache and terror — can’t quite shake this shroud of despair that he wears when he believes nobody’s watching. 

Of course Willow notices. Not much else for her to do while they’re trapped in the human realm.

Predictably, Gus scoffs at her question. “It would be faster to list what’s not wrong with our lives right now.”

Willow can’t force herself to disagree. Her positive attitude is a far cry from Luz’s tireless optimism, but it’s served her well as a coping mechanism, even on some of the worst days of her life. Only it’s difficult to imagine a situation worse than this.

Even the loss of the smallest things — her plants, her bed, her cozy socks — sting like a thousand papercuts. The more she touches the memories, the more she aches.

“You’re right,” she admits. “And it freaking sucks, because we can’t do anything right now.”

Gus remains silent, staring straight ahead at the television. Usually, he watches cartoons with Hunter or Luz, but this time it’s a news reporter on screen. She wonders if it reminds him of his dad. Another memory, another cut.

“But,” Willow points out, nudging her shoulder with his. “As someone who felt helpless for a long time, I’m not really a fan. So I figure, why not try focusing on what we can do for each other?” 

It isn’t dissimilar from what she told King, what feels like an eternity ago. And oh, Titan, does that make her chest quaver. To think that he might’ve taken her words to heart, taken them to mean he should help by staying behind while they fled—

“Thanks, Willow,” Gus whispers, derailing her one-way guilt trip. “But you don’t need to worry about me.”

“No can do. Worrying for my friends is part of the deluxe Willow Park friendship package,” she states firmly. It earns her a slightly exasperated side-eye, which she responds to with a wink. “No returns, exchanges or refunds.” 

It does the trick. Gus snorts out a laugh, some of the tension in his shoulders loosening.

Emboldened by the small victory, Willow presses on. “Okay, we’ve established that apparently I have no reason to worry. Are you ... worried about anything?”

Lips pursed in a tight line, Gus shrugs. Completely noncommittal. Willow would call it childish, but it’s nice, actually, to see him finally act his age. Still, it means she’ll have to prod further to get him to speak.

“Does it have anything to do with why you’re avoiding Hunter?”

“What?” Gus snaps. “I’m not avoiding him! Kind of impossible to do, when we literally share a room.”

“You’re avoiding something with Hunter,” she revises. True, they’re as joined at the hip as ever. When Hunter isn’t paying attention, though, that’s when Gus stares at the older boy, all wide-eyed and wounded. 

Originally, Willow chalked it up to the fear of losing someone else, the way his gaze tracked Hunter’s every move. As the bags under Gus’s eyes grow darker, she can no longer let it slide.

“I’ve noticed you stealing glances at him—”

“I do?” Gus interrupts. It dawns on her that he may not have even been aware. “I’m looking at him weird? How??”

Taken aback, Willow stammers out, “Well, you.... you look at him like... Like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Gus pales, taking on the shade of a ghost himself. His voice is a frantic whisper. “Has he noticed?”

“I don’t think so,” Willow replies, slowly. Carefully, like she’s navigating a field of thorns. “Gus, is... Is there something you haven’t told us?”

Opening his mouth, Gus hesitates. The words catch in his throat, so he swallows them back again. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he insists.

Even though he can’t articulate it aloud, Willow hears what’s unspoken. Her minds flashes to Hunter, who was still in...  Survival mode, for lack of a better term. Where she felt herself faltering from time-to-time, Hunter remained steady.  Always ready to do a chore for Mrs. Noceda, or comfort Gus, or give Luz tips on rebuilding the portal. Never stopping long enough to process what’s happened, focused only on his future goals.

It’s a defense mechanism, to be sure. And it’s just as sure to backfire on him, eventually. Nonetheless, Willow can’t deny that part of her is envious. At least Hunter’s way of coping allows him to move forward, and be useful, instead of stagnating or feeling sorry for himself.

“I didn’t realize that…” Gus sighs, the words coming unstuck. “When you use the mirror to show someone their worst memories, it... It shows you their worst memories, too.”

Her eyes widen, the seed of dread in her stomach blooming into full-blown horror.

“Oh, Gus,” she gasps, her hand flying to cover her mouth.

“Yeah,” he huffs, that not-quite laugh brimming with self-deprecation. “That’ll teach me to pocket magical artifacts from creeps like Gray.”

“Are you okay?” Willow asks. Her gaze sweeps over her friend, as if she can pinpoint the place he’s hurt, as if it isn't already embedded inside, somewhere she can't hope to reach. “Seriously, I can’t imagine what would scare a monster like Belos—”

“He had a brother.”

And that, that of all things, is not what Willow expects to hear. Belos was always this larger-than-life concept looming over the Isles, more of a myth than a man. To know that he was once just a human is one thing. To know that he was a human with a life, family? Even a—

“A brother who he killed.”  

Her chest constricts, her pulse fluttering in shock. Her hand reaches out for Gus’s arm, as much for his comfort as her own.

Now that the dam's burst, the words won't cease. Gus clutches at the chain around his neck, his eyes clouded, distant.

“A brother who looks exactly like Hunter.” He chokes it out like a confession, like some dark, terrible thing he’s been holding back, but it’s finally broken free to the surface. Tears spring to his eyes, but he doesn’t stop, not even to take a breath.

"Willow, I saw— I saw it, this hand, it was clawing its way out of the dirt, and Belos, he was so— He was devastated, and alone, but he was so, so angry at Caleb, too—"

Caleb.

Her heart leaps to her throat. Caleb. Just a name, not a ghost, right? A harmless lie, a cover story for Hunter. But who had suggested that name? It was Flapjack, wasn’t it? Flapjack, who Belos had seen, and then he screamed, his rage a force of nature as he went in for the killing blow—

"What do I do?" Gus croaks. He isn’t asking, he’s pleading, turning so they’re face-to-face, and Willow sees the full extent of his sorrow. “How am I supposed to tell Hunter that h—he’s a—”

And for all she’s three years older, Willow has no idea what to do. She wraps Gus in her arms, and embraces hard, like she can squeeze the hurt right out of his heart.

She holds Gus, waiting until his shaking to subsides, his sobs drying into hiccups, and she worries. It feels like all she can do nowadays.

#the owl house #toh fic #willow park #gus porter #hunter toh #caleb wittebane #philip wittebane #grimwalkers #fic prompts

[dragon-ball-meta]

You know, I just realize that Toyotaro gave Goku the Hakai and never had him use it again for no reason only to then make Vegeta's move set all about GoD stuff.

He also had Vegeta seemingly outdo Goku at Yardrat training for some reason but then has Vegeta only have an inferior Hakai while Goku has the real deal.

For someone who like to overexplain himself, Toyotaro really doesn't think his stuff through sometimes.

Overexplaining things is, rather ironically, exactly how he finds himself in this position time and time again. Case-in-point, when he decided to overexplain what SSB was, and decided he needed to add the detail that it was a "last resort" transformation where using it more than once in 24 hours resulted in a massive loss in power multiplier. (I still think that was just his way of trying to cope with Vegeta losing to Hit tbh.) Then later he had to revise this and invent a "perfected" SSB that did away with this because it was very obvious that the form would have to be dipped into and out of in order to last in the ToP. We have Goku learning Hakai and then somehow just never using it again because... well, it would wrap up future plots too fast. We have Vegeta going to Yardrat and somehow mastering everything Goku struggled to learn in record time only for him to... forget almost all of it later because, again, it would wrap up the plots too fast. We have Goku "mastering" Ultra Instinct in the Moro arc, only for him to then still struggle with using and maintaining it in the next one and inventing a rule-breaking "compromise" form that he calls "True Ultra Instinct" because it was either that or invent an even higher form for Goku to have to try to reach and neither makes sense regardless. It's a recurring problem for Toyotaro.

#dbs manga #wtf toyotaro?

[tomtenadia]

A Little  Braver - 61

Hello!! Another chapter is here. We are slowly getting closer to the end and I am dreading writing the words The End for this story.

In the following chapters Rowan goes through and healing arc. I love how this will develop his relationship with Aelin. They grow closer and I don’t think I can love them even more. I hope you will love the last part of their journey together.

We get to meet Enda and his husband. 

In this chapter we also have some Elorcan...yes, you read ir right :)

MASTERLIST // CH. 60

A few months had passed and July had rolled around and summer had decided to make an appearance in Orynth. 

It had been a tough couple of months.

Rowan had kept his promise to Aelin had gone to therapy once a week.The progress, albeit slow had started to show. She knew it would take time and was not rushing him. Aelin would wait for him to talk without trying to pry information that he was not yet willing to share. Some days had been good, others he came back home from the sessions and would just stay in silence. It broke her heart seeing him like that, but while he was going at his sessions she had done more research on how to help a loved one with PTSD.

The nightmares had slowed down as well. Rowan had started to sleep a bit more soundly, but some nights he would still toss and turn or just refuse to sleep too scared of closing his eyes. She would hold him in her arms and that seemed to help a lot. One afternoon, while they were out walking in the nearby woods she had realised that Rowan flinched when airplanes passed overhead. A small gesture that she had missed. There was so much stuff she had missed. If only she had noticed the signs before…

In all of that, paramedic school had been progressing well and Rowan had been achieving high scores in all the tests. She had no doubts. He had graduated top of his class at flight academy, had been of of the best students at test pilot school, she was positive he was going to finish at the top at paramedic school too. He had been studying hard and when he was at the firehouse and she was working, he’d hide in her quarters and revised. A couple of times he had spent the night at the firehouse and luckily neither nights dispatch alarm went off. He had been nervous and still did not feel comfortable. Even during the day it was hard, but the nights were his worst fear. Reminiscent of being woken up in the middle of the night while the ship was being attacked.

Aedion was improving too. After Gavriel’s death he had taken a week off and Lysandra did the same to be at his side. Under Lys suggestion, he had started writing letters to his father in a diary. At the beginning he had found the idea crazy, but once he started it had helped. Aedion told Gavriel of his life growing up with Aelin and the bond that formed between them. Then he started telling him about his time in the army. Those had been the most difficult to write. They had stirred memories and experienced that pang of sadness he now felt when he thought about his absent friends. Over the years the pain had dulled but now it had threatened to come back a couple of times. He told his father about him joining fire academy and then meeting Lys. Falling in love with her and realise she was the one. Lys had read the letters too and on a few ones where she was in, she had added post-it notes with her comments, as if Gavriel would actually read them. It had helped, but the regret for having wasted time was still there.

Aelin and Rowan had gone to visit and Rowan had started telling Aedion stories about his father and Aedion had a feeling it was also a coping mechanism for Rowan. On an afternoon everyone was off, the two ladies had left their two men at home alone, both partner agreeing that Aedion and Rowan needed it.

Eventually he had gone back to his station and put himself into work. While at the station he had kept an eye on Fenrys. Given his past problems, Aedion was worried, but the young man had proven much more resilient than him and Rowan. Or probably just in a better place. They had talked and Fenrys had confessed that it was all thanks to his new career as firefighter. It had helped him to combat the bad days and not let them affect him. Losing Gavriel had hurt but he never left the pain overwhelm him.

Aedion had been very proud of him. The whole of south station had been at their side and supported them. They all knew that Fen was an ex airforce pilot and that he had served with Gavriel.

*

It was a sunny day and the ladies of the firehouse had taken some garden chairs and were suntanning happily. “I wish we could have a nice chilled cocktail right now,” commented Ansel while adding a thin layer of sunscreen on her face.

“Where are the boys?” asked Aelin.

“At the back playing basketball.”

“I wish we could be in Ilium on the beach.”

All the women laughed “perhaps next day off, we can all go and bring all the men too,” suggested Manon “Summers in Orynth are a treat, we need to enjoy them.”

They were all chatting together when a tall figure approached the station. Aelin was the first one who spotted him and elbowed Elide who had her eyes closed. Her friend opened them and focused on the point Aelin had indicated. It did not take her long to recognise the silhouette. She only knew one man who was a giant. He still had his uniform on and a big duffel bag on his shoulder. With long strides he approached the firehouse and that’s when Elide gasped at the realisation.

She stood slowly as in a daze, then she ran. Rushed to the man coming her way and jumped in his arms. He caught her easily, dropping his bag, and lifted his girlfriend off the ground. Elide kept her shouts of joy.

“You are back…” she whispered to him after he kissed her “you are here, and real.”

Lorcan nodded “I am back for good,” he said quietly, while brushing hair off her face. He could not care less if they had an audience, he had missed her.

Elide slowly climbed off him but he was reluctant to let her go. Eventually he did and they approached the ladies, with Elide still holding to him.

“Welcome back, commodore,” Aelin greeted him giving a wink to Elide.

“It’s a good thing that we are off at four,” added Ansel wiggling her brows at Elide “You two can go home and celebrate. Just don’t get pregnant. Lys wants to be the first one.”

Lysandra gently elbowed Ansel “Our Elide is a very responsible lady.”

Elide stole a few crisps from Asterin “Definitely more than our dear captain.”

Aelin stuck her tongue out at the woman and Elide joined Lorcan once more “If you don’t mind I am going to catch up with my man.”

She grabbed Lorcan’s hand and they disappeared inside the firehouse.

Elide pushed Lorcan on the sofa and sat at his side and kissed him again, brushing her hand through his long hair “I missed you so much.”

Lorcan’s hand wound around her waist and pulled her closer “It was no fun without you.” He kissed her “But my resignation is in. I still have to do two months, but it will be an office job, mostly picking up my replacement and all that stuff.”

Elide leaned against his chest “I can’t believe you are out. I thought you’d never leave the airforce.”

He sighed deeply “I have done twenty four years, Elide. After I have seen how Rowan is now that he is free, I realised I want that too. It was time.”

She kissed him gently “I am not complaining. I will enjoy a lot having you home.”

“Con, Vaughan and I might even open a flying school.”

Elide smiled at him “that is a very cool idea. You can drag Rowan too.”

Lorcan shook his head “I have asked him but he passed. He is focused on becoming a paramedic.”

“He is quite good according to what Lys tells us.”

A chuckle left Lorcan’s mouth “of course. He was like that at flight school too.”

Elide was about to add something but dispatch alarm went off and the ambulance got called out “Stay here, commodore, I’ll see you soon.” A quick kiss on his lips and she ran to the ambulance.

Lorcan stood and went to look for the guys. He found them at the back playing basketball.

“Commodore, you are back. Does Elide know?”

Lorcan nodded “she just left on a call.”

“Come, can you play basket, sir?” Brullo threw the ball at him. Lorcan grabbed it and ran to the net and dunked quite easily. He was tall enough that he barely needed to jump.

“My uniform is not comfortable. Let me get changed.”

He came back quite quickly dressed in TAF shorts and a t-shirt and trainers.

“Now we can have two equal teams,” added Nox “come with us. Ress, Wes and I need an extra man.”

Lorcan joined them and the game restarted. He used to play in the basketball team while he was a young pilot, then as he climbed the ranks it became impossible, like everything else.

“Here,” he shouted at Ress and the man threw the ball at him, he ran with the ball, dodged Brullo and Luca both trying to stop him and then stopped and shoot a three pointer from a crazy distance.

His team shouted.

“Hell yeah, commodore.”

Lorcan chuckled “Looks like I still remember how to play.”

They kept playing very hard, enjoying the fact that dispatch alarm was allowing them to have some downtime. It was during a break when they realised the ladies of the firehouse were sitting at the side of the court and were watching them while eating pop corn.

Lorcan noticed that Elide was back and smiled at her.

“Go on, it was an interesting match.” Added Aelin while munching away.

They were having fun when the alarm went off half an hour before they were due to go off shift.

The guys swore loudly and ran to the vehicles to get their gear on.

Aelin jumped on the engine.

“Fire in a tunnel on the motorway,” Nox told her as he took the engine out.

“A quiet boring shift, is that a lot to ask for?”

As they approached the site, the traffic got heavier and they struggled to move forward, even with the sirens on “Move!” Shouted Aelin with her head out of the window. The tunnel was just before a busy intersection and the traffic was blocked all around them. Slowly cars started to peel aside and let them proceed. 

They arrived on the scene and saw thick smoke coming out of the tunnel “This is going to be a bitch,” added Aelin as she got ready. Dorian was right behind them.

Aelin jumped off the vehicle and ran to the PD officer walking toward them for an update “What happened?”

The man coughed “Really bad pile up probably two hundred metres in. We have moved the people from the cars here at the front but deeper inside there was nothing we could do.”

Dorian stepped up “Thanks officers, move your men and all these people away. We take it from here,” he turned to his team “Grab all the tools you can carry, spare oxygen, hoses and be also prepared to carry out multiple victims quickly.”

Aelin nodded and started giving orders to engine team while Manon was doing the same for truck.

Dorian turned to Lys and informed that more ambulances were on their way and to expect multiple casualties and get ready for triage.

The two teams started to gather as much gear as they could carry, it was a deep tunnel and could not afford to go back and forth all the time.

They all masked up and finally entered “Lights on guys.” The initial part of the tunnel was not bad. It seemed that the cars had stopped before smashing into the one in front. Carefully they checked and saw that they were all empty. As they progressed deeper they reached the first few pin ins.

“Brullo, Luca, take this car.” Car by car they stopped to help the passenger but as Aelin and Manon got closer to the origin of the fire Aelin started to worry.

Some of her men started tackling the flames with the hoses but Aelin froze all of a sudden. The flames were lilac.

“Stop.” She shouted at Ansel and Kyllian. “Potassium fire.”

Manon looked at her in terror.

Behind the flames they could see a tanker on its side “concentrate the water on the tanks. Keep them as cool as possible.”

“Potassium fires are the worst,” explained Aelin to Manon “They are very hard to put out, they generate their own oxygen and if you hit it with water the hydrogen reacts with the potassium and kaboom. We need hazmat and class D extinguisher.”

“Chief, captain”

“Go ahead Aelin.”

“Potassium fire, chief, we need hazmat stat.”

The two women worked hard with the rest of the team to free the few victims stuck in the cars close to the fire.

“Ress, help here,” shouted Manon as she started climbing inside a car that had crashed into another one.

Aelin in the meantime grabbed another hose and concentrated the water on the propane tanks. If they went up it would create an explosion big enough to level the block and flatten the tunnel with them inside.

“Chief, any updates on hazmat?” And as she uttered those word a small explosion that looked like fireworks filled the tunnel.

“Hazmat is on another call. We have contacted the airport and there’s a van full of class D extinguisher coming your way.”

Aelin swore loudly over the radio “the friggin airport is too far.”

“Keep working, Aelin.”

“Lys, Luca and I are coming out with a few victims.”

“Copy that Brullo, we are ready.” 

Aelin kept looking behind her and saw her team taking out victims one at a time. Good. Then another flareup hit and they all went low on the ground “Chief, the propane tanks are going soon, we need those extinguisher now.” The whistling sound had gotten angrier.

“Ansel, Kyllian, get out.”

“No way captain. If you stay, we stay.” Shouted Kyllian over the sound of the propane tanks.

“Manon, are we clear of victims?”

The woman had finished crawling out of the car “this was the last one near the accident site.”

“The extinguisher are here,” Dorian’s voice came over the radio and Manon ran outside as fast as she could.

“Grab one each and get your arses back inside,” she screamed as she grabbed one from the van and disappeared back inside followed by the rest of the team that had brought out people but had been ordered by Dorian not to go back in.

They all ran back in the tunnel and as they arrived at the fire they began covering the lilac flames with the chemical and slowly the fire died down. As they worked, the propane tanks stopped threatening to explode and Aelin stood down and shut down the water flow “Fuck, that was close.”

The team finally relaxed “Blue fire and now potassium fire. Never a dull moment in this job, eh?” The comment had come from Asterin after she abandoned her spent extinguisher on the floor.

“Chief, fire is out but we still need hazmat to clear the area. This is their jurisdiction.”

Aelin ordered east team to collect all the gear and walk out.

Finally out in the sun once more Aelin spotted Alex jumping off his truck so she walked to him “Sorry, to ruin the fun but you guys are stuck with cleaning duty.”

Alex let out a boisterous laugh “Fancy a job in hazmat, captain?”

“I don’t think I would look too attractive in your funny suit. Thanks Alex, I’ll stick to bunker gear.” They joked a bit and then she briefed him on the situation inside and then walked back to her team.

“Lys, what about the victims?’

“All to Med. No deaths. Smoke inhalations, some minor traumas but nothing serious.” Then she patted Elide’s shoulder “And she ran triage like a pro.”

“Of that I had no doubts.”

“Chief all victims are on their way to Med and hazmat has the scene. Permission to return to quarters?”

“Go, I am sure Pete is eager to take over from you.”

The drive back to the station had taken some time. The tunnel accident had caused traffic all along the peripheral road they were meant to take to go back to quarters and since they had no emergency they couldn’t even run the lights or the sirens, so they had to crawl.

“We could have ran the sirens, those idiots would have been none the wiser.”

“Brullo, you are a lieutenant. I would expect such comment from Nox because he is a little rebel.”

“I just want a shower,” he complained.

When they finally pulled onto the apron they found second shift sitting in the sun, joined by Rowan and Lorcan.

“Look at them, we are out working and they are here doing nothing,” joked Aelin as she got off the engine.

“You had my vehicles, how am I supposed to work?”

“The station is all your, Pete.”

She noticed Lorcan walking to Elide and Rowan to her “No hugs, my bunker gear is covered in chemicals and toxic stuff. Stay with the guys and let me get cleaned first.”

He nodded and went back to the guys of second shift. He was having fun with them.

He had arrived early at the station and found it empty safe for Lorcan. They had their reunion and then his friend told him that the team was out on a call.

They had been at the back shooting hoops when Pete’s team arrived and both had started bonding with the other team and the guys from second team joined in in a short match.

“Guys make sure you clean deeply and put your bunker gear for heavy scrubbing, especially those who were close to the potassium fire.”

The team filed in, all eager to get a well deserved shower.

When Aelin’s turn finally came, she spent a bit longer than usual under the water, she felt disgusting. Once she was satisfied Aelin finally left the shower and went to her quarters to change and found Rowan there.

“Sneaking in, captain?”

“Are you less dirty now?’ He sniffed her and kissed the spot behind her ear.

“Not here, Ro. It’s shift change and this is Pete’s space for the next 24hrs.”

Rowan kissed her nose “Good, you don’t stink of smoke anymore.”

She pinched his side and grabbed her bag and took his hand “Come on, captain I want to go home.”

He followed her and on their way out they said their good byes. Lorcan and Elide had disappeared already and Aelin was positive they had rushed home for a proper welcome back.

While Rowan drove, Aelin was focused on her phone “Down at the park they are having outdoor theatre. I thought it finished last month but they still have some shows, fancy going?”

Rowan nodded happily “I have blankets in my trunk and we can stop along the way for snacks.”

“Stop at Emrys.”

Rowan did a u-turn and stopped in front of the restaurant and Aelin ran inside to get an order to go of their favourite stuff. She came back a while later with a big take away bag “Let’s go, I have a lot of food.”

Rowan hummed happily and resumed driving to the park. It was a lovely warm night, something that did not last long in Orynth.

“They have a play on tonight.” she told him the plot.

“Are there any tickets left?”

Aelin looked at him and smiled, “I just bought two. We are good.”

At the traffic lights Rowan leaned over for a kiss “I am glad you checked, we haven’t been to a play in ages and I like the idea of outdoors theatre.”

Her hand went on his knee “I am your official entertainer.”

Rowan laughed and the sound warmed her heart. After the months he had, it was nice to see him like that. She knew he was not fully well yet, he still had days with dark thought and a touch of depression too but she knew that doing things like these was the type of distraction he needed.

Enda and his husband had even postponed their visit. Aelin had explained the situation to Sellene and the woman had then told Enda what happened and that Rowan was not ready yet. Even Sellene had done her best not to be too overbearing and cause him more stress. Aelin had been keeping her updated.

They arrived at the park a little later and saw a busy car park. It looked as if it was a popular event. 

Aelin grabbed the food and Rowan went to get the blankets and then started walking to the site. 

Tickets checked they reached the open area and found a nice spot that allowed them a nice view of the stage. Rowan spread the two thick blankets and Aelin plopped down on them and tackled the food bag. As usual she was starving. The last call had left her famished, for a change.

Ten minutes later a man popped on stage and announced that the play was about to start.

Aelin moved to sit between Rowan’s legs and later on when he was done eating he held her, arms around her stomach and his chin on her head. It was his favourite position when Aelin sat between his legs. He could held her fully and it felt nice.

He kissed the top of her head and silently thanked the woman in his arms. She had been his saviour. Aelin had stuck at his side through the really bad days, when he had no motivation to get out of bed or do anything. She never left his side and fought with him, day by day. Without her he would have easily spiralled down the path he took when his first student died or worse. He squeezed her and kissed her head once more “This is a nice production,” a soft whisper in her ear.

“It’s funny too.” She added while eating a brownie. Aelin lifted it to his mouth and he took a small bite. Emrys made them with very dark chocolate and they were not as sweet and he could tolerate taking a bite.

It was two hours later when the play finished and the sun had started to set. Aelin stretched and stood “That was awesome, buzzard.”

He took her hand and slowly stood too “I really enjoyed it too. I wished we had remembered sooner, we could have done more shows.”

Aelin kissed him “next year we can try and do as many as we can.”

“Love the challenge.”

Aelin grabbed her phone and saw a text from Sellene asking for an update on her cousin and also saying that Enda and his husband were in town for a while. Enda had found a location for his restaurant and they had decided to fly over and have a look at it.

“Sellene texted me that Enda and Micheal are here. Apparently they had found some premises for the restaurant and have come to have a look and see if they can close the deal.”

Rowan looked at her surprised “He is really doing it.”

“If he is really miserable at his job as Sellene says, why not?”

Rowan took her hand and kissed it as they walked back to the car “you can text Sellene and tell her that I am fine meeting them.”

Aelin looked up at him with a smile “Are you sure?“

Rowan nodded energetically “I am fine and I want to meet Micheal.”

Aelin quickly grabbed his face and kissed him tenderly “That is great to hear, buzzard.”

***

The following day Aelin was off and had spent the afternoon in town running errands and now was walking back to paramedic academy to Rowan. They were scheduled to go to Sellene’s and meet Enda and Michael. She was excited and super curious about their plan for the restaurant. She had been ecstatic when he had accepted to meet them and confessed he was curious too.

As usual she was leaning against the outer wall, keeping an eye for him. Rowan was probably waiting for a strategic moment to avoid Remelle. The woman had been pestering him to no end. No matter how much Aelin marked the territory, she did not seem to be able to grasp the concept that Rowan was not on the market.

A steady flow of students started to exit the big doors and she kept an eye for his head of silver.

His nemesis strolled out and walked to her almost in challenge “Waiting for your man?”

Aelin glared at her.

“And by the way… he is wasted on you. You could never make him happy.”

She had promised. Had promised Rowan not to inflict any kind of physical pain to Remelle, no matter how much she hated the woman. She was stupid and there was no cure to it.

“Oh and you can?”

The blonde woman flicked her hair “I have money, I can give him a life of wealth and happiness. Something a firefighter can’t do.”

Aelin scoffed. How wrong she was. Rowan was not a man for luxuries. He wanted an easy and cosy life. He wanted a family, that was his idea of wealth and happiness and this woman had no idea.

“Well, go and look for a man who wants that because that is not Rowan,” her words came out almost in a growl. 

“Of course he doesn’t want it. He was never offered the chance to live a better life.”

Aelin counted to ten. No punches. No punches.

“Rowan wants kids and a family. That’s his idea of wealth and happiness, can you give him that?”

Remelle looked at her horrified and ran away quickly. Maybe she had finally managed to tame the beast.

Rowan arrived five minutes later with a big smile. Aelin pushed off the wall and walked to him, a smug expression on her face.

“What did you do?” at the same time deposited a kiss on her lips.

“I defeated the monster.”

Rowan was confused.

“I think Remelle won’t be a problem anymore.”

“Aelin… I said no violence.”

She told him what happened “And when I told her that your idea of happiness were kids and a family she was horrified and left in a rush.”

Rowan laughed and hugged Aelin lifting her off her feet “You deserve some of my best moves tonight.”

“It’s almost a shame we have dinner at Sellene’s…”

Rowan kissed her again “Prepare to beg…” a delicate whisper in her ear and Aelin in that instant wanted nothing more than going back home with him.

Hand in hand they got to his car and climbed in. Once at the wheel Rowan looked at her “You are right, having a family, with you, is my perfect idea of happiness.”

Gently she brushed his long hair “I know, and I love you for that.”

The kids talk hadn’t come up anymore but for Rowan was enough to know that she was open to that. That she craved a family too. Aelin had only asked for a bit of time and he was willing to respect that.

Sellene’s flat was in a fancy building and Aelin was impressed that it even had a reception “She is fancy.”

Rowan chuckled “her job is paying for it, she’d never go for something this luxurious.”

She spotted the lifts and walked Rowan there “You take the trap, I will walk.”

He looked at her “it’s seven floors, what if I get scared of the naughty trap? I might need my firefighter at my side.”

Aelin kissed him “press the button and I will see you upstairs. I’ll probably get there before you.”

“Fine.” He pressed the button and the doors slid shut and Aelin began her climb. As she expected she got there before him. Apparently the lift crawled through the floors. The doors finally opened and smiled at him “I almost went down and came back up.”

“Menace.”

Aelin took his hand “come on grampa, flat 722.”

They reached the flat and Aelin rang the bell. A moment later a hurricane of silver hair hugged her “Yay, you are here.” Aelin loved Sellene. Her energy and determination. She had become family quite quickly.

Aelin hugged her back while Rowan gave her cousin a kiss on the cheek “Hi, Sel, thank you for having us over.”

“Come in, both of you. We have guests.”

Rowan looked towards the living room and saw Enda and at his side a tall man. He was dark-haired with dark eyes and tanned skin. The man was a good twenty centimetres taller than Enda.

“Hi you,” his cousin walked closer and gave him a hug. Enda was a hugger, it was a family trait. One that he wasn’t so much of a fan of.

The stranger, Micheal, walked closer and extended a hand to him “I am Micheal, Enda’s husband.”

“I am Rowan, their cousin and this…” he pulled Aelin closer “this is my other half Aelin.”

Aelin took the man’s hand and shook it eagerly.

“Come on you both, sit down. Do you want anything to drink? We got nice wine from Wendlyn.”

Rowan shook his head. He had stayed away from alcohol. He had a feeling that because of his problems he might feel a need to indulge again too much and he could not put Aelin through that so he had told her that he was happy to leave it aside and Aelin had supported him and went dry too. He had tried to protest, but Aelin explained that it was another way for her to help him.

“Iced tea?” Asked Rowan and Aelin did the same. Sellene nodded in understanding and that was why that afternoon she had stopped at the supermarket to grab some non alcoholic drinks. 

She stared at her cousin with an inquisitive eye and Aelin nodded. The woman had kept her in the loop and she was happy to see him smile.

Enda stood and walked to the kitchen “dinner tonight is my creation.”

Aelin was looking forward to it. Sellene had told her about Enda’s amazing cooking skills.

“So you guys are really doing it? Open a restaurant here?” Asked Rowan as Sellene passed him his tea.

“Yes,” was Micheal’s answer. He grabbed his husband’s hand “we talked about it. I think we both need a change of scenery and this was a good reason.”

“Will you be okay leaving Doranelle?”

Enda nodded “My two favourite cousins are here and both Micheal and I are tired of our jobs.”

“Are you ready for winters here? That is usually the biggest challenge for people when they move here from a warm country.”

Micheal let out a deep rich laughter “I am from the southern continent, Doranelle is cold for me, but I have been in Terrasen for work during winter and I am ready.”

Sellene brought some appetisers and placed them on the table between them.

“So, how is the restaurant plan going?” Rowan grabbed some food.

“Swell,” replied Enda all excited “we went to see the place this morning. It’s in Old Orynth, which is a wonderful location,” explained Micheal with the same excitement “It’s full of artisanal and independent shops and a few family run restaurants. It’s the perfect location.”

“It really is a special part of the city. It has personality. Rowan and I have our favourite bookshop and cafe there.”

“Hopefully soon you’ll have your favourite restaurant too.” Added Enda.

“And I can bring customers. I have a firehouse full of hungry, hungry hippos and I know two more that appreciate good food.”

“You are a firefighter?” Asked Micheal.

“I am, a captain at that.”

“That is so awesome.”

The five of them chatted happily until Enda announced that dinner was ready.

“Enda, this smells and looks incredible.”

The man smiled “taste it first, you may not like it.”

Rowan snorted, there was very little that Aelin did not like. He had even managed to have her eat more vegetables.

Rowan took a bite and the food brought back memories of his mum’s food. Flavours of home brought back flashes of his time in Doranelle, the typical spices that he struggled so much to find in Orynth. Wendlyn’s had a very distinctive richness that he sometimes missed.

“Is this one of my mum’s recipes?”

Enda smiled “Yes, your mum was an incredible cook.”

“Where did you find the spices?”

Sellene raised her hand “I brought a lot with me. I knew I would not find them here.”

The meal had been a success and Aelin had made Enda happy by always asking for seconds. She had told him over and over again that he already had a loyal customer. Rowan had sang his praises too.

Now they were in the car on their way home “that was a lovely night.”

Rowan nodded “I like Micheal, he makes Enda happy.” He sighed “He had a bit of trouble coming out. His parents were not happy at the beginning, and for a while he still kept dating girls. But even after he accepted his true self he… well, from what Sellene told me he had a lot of bad luck.”

“Enda is a lovely, caring man.”

Rowan nodded “I am glad they are moving here. I have missed him a lot, and Sellene too.”

“She should leave her horrible company and join Enda and Micheal at the restaurant. Her food is incredible too.”

Rowan looked at her. He was aware that Aelin was always in touch with his cousin “Did something happened?”

“She is overworked and stressed. Two of her senior partners have called it quits. Her boss doesn’t intend to replace them for now as they are still on probation for a month. And if the branch doesn’t prove to be worth keeping, they might axe it. Sellene is doing her best but she has only one senior lawyer left. She is really considering Enda’s idea. He has offered her a job.”

“How did I miss all this? I was so focused on my own problems that I ignored everything else.”

Aelin took a hand away from the wheel and placed it on his leg “Sellene asked me to keep it quiet for now. She wanted to give you time.”

He gritted his teeth “you all need to stop tip toeing around me.”

When they arrived at the house he left the car quickly and went straight to the door.

Aelin was getting used to his small outburst of anger, they had become far and few in between as therapy progressed. He would apologise pretty quickly and they only had one bad fight. So bad that he had spent the night in the spare bedroom and then she had ran to him when he woke up screaming from a nightmare. That had settled the fight and he had joined her back in their bed.

He was much better, but she still worried about him.

She entered the house and saw him standing at the window.

“Rowan…”

“This is not me,” he whispered, still giving her his back “this anger is not me.”

Aelin took a step and encircled his waist from behind, kissing his back “No, but you are not letting the anger take over.”

He finally turned “I feel like I keep hurting you and I can’t stand it,” his voice broke and hugged her tightly seeking comfort in her arms “Hurting you makes me sick, but that’s all I have done since Gavriel’s death,” he sat on the sofa “I do not deserve you.”

Aelin had a meeting with his therapist. The man had requested to meet her. He had explained that although he was improving, the sessions had been bringing back traumas that he had shoved down so hard that Rowan almost forgot about them. All the losses, the pain, the traumas had been hidden deep down in the recess of his mind. Gavriel death had been the last straw. The therapist had explained that losing one of his closest friend had been the ultimate trigger. A dam had broken and thirteen years of forced down traumas had resurfaced in one go.

The therapist had explained that they were working through loss, trauma, guilt and denial. Slowly he was helping Rowan to grieve and reach closure. Apparently they had covered also the Lyria issue. Drawbacks and bad days were expected and she had been prepared for them. After the meeting she had confessed to the doctor that she had no idea how bad it was. Rowan had been a master at hiding how bad he was. Fuzzy’s death had been the only time when he had crumbled and opened up. She felt like the worst girlfriend ever.

A bit of anger sparked at his words. His sense of inadequacy had come from his marriage with Lyria and his mother in law. They had somehow caused him to think that he was not worth being loved. How wrong had they been.

“Look at me,” his green eyes landed on her “you are worth it,” she kissed him gently “and you are not hurting me, I am here for you. We had a pact and I need you to talk to me when you are not well. We are doing this together. Let the emotions out if it helps, you don’t need to bottle it anymore. Not with me.” At those words he hugged her harder and felt his face in the crook of her neck. It had become his favourite position when he was struggling, apparently her scent calmed him down.

“Come, let’s get into our pyjamas and cuddle in bed.”

She felt him nib at her neck “I think I promised to show you some of my best moves…”

“Ro, we can—” his lips stopped her mid sentence.

“I promised to make you beg,” he took her hand and started walking to their bedroom.

She stopped at the side of the bed and started undressing “Please Rowan…” she breathed in a sensual voice while removing her bra and throwing it on the floor.

“I love you, fireheart.”

That night in Aelin’s arms, he slept deeply and peacefully.

TAGS:

@rowaelinismyotp​ @swankii-art-teacher​ @courtofjurdan​ @whimsicallyreading​ @aelin-bitch-queen​ @bruiseonthefaceofhumanity​ @acreativelydifferentlove @mis-lil-red​ @thegreyj​ @sailorsassley​ @leiawritesstories​ @clairec79 @morganofthewildfire​ @sv0430​ @heartless--aromantic @autumnbabylon​ @rowanaelinn​ @backtobl4ck​ @susumaus98​ @gracie-rosee​ @mybloodrunsblue​ @tanvee1231 @avenrebekah​ @whoever-you-choose-to-love​ @theywillnotsingforme​ @universallytreepost @black-daisy-water​ @goddess-aelin​

#rowaelin #rowaelin fanfiction #aelin x rowan #rowaelin fanfic #rowan x aelin #aelin galathynius #aelin ashryver galathynius #aelin #elorcan #elide #lorcan salvaterre

[astramthetaprime]

And Now the Scores...

Okay so here’s that Autism post I mentioned yesterday.  

I have been diagnosed by a professional, a bit over 3 years ago now.  I’m not “officially” diagnosed since as of yet I don’t feel I need to be for accommodations and/or disability purposes.  I don’t consider myself disabled.  I have been and continue to be for the most part capable of earning a living and taking care of my house and myself.  It may not be a “normal” life but I’m coming to realize that was never in the cards anyway.  But I persist, despite it all.  

Still, some actual numbers might not go amiss.  Data is never out of fashion and never unwelcome.  

If you suspect you too are autistic and wish similar data about yourself, I can highly recommend  Embrace Autism. All the tests seen here are on that site and free to take and score, and give you a PDF of the test and your scores after.  Many of the posts I’ve seen on “what to do if you think you’re Autistic” mention taking such tests, printing them out after, and taking it with you when you go to speak to a therapist.  As evidence, so to speak.  I did so myself when I went for my diagnosis, and the therapist was kind of startled I had come so well-prepared.  The tests and scores I speak of today are freshly taken, as I wanted fresh data.  So what you see here is all me as I am at the current time.  

Right.  So to begin, the RAADS-R or more formally the Ritvo Autism Aspergers Diagnostic Scale Revised.  The RAADS is designed to detect Autism in adults and those not diagnosed as children.  As such, if you are older than 16 this is a good place to start.  The scoring breaks down into 5 subscales for a bit of granularity.  The higher the score, the more you’re Autistic.

Total score:  172 (range 0-240, 65+ indicates Autistic)

Language: 9

Social Relatedness:  89

Sensory / Motor:  38

Curcumscribed Interests:  36

So my worst on this is social relatedness, this covers such things as masking, timing in conversations, non-verbal cues, reading facial expressions, difficulties in maintaining relationships, and only interested in people who share my interests.  Sensory / motor I know I don’t have much problem with, except for a few specific things, so no surprise there.  Circumscribed interests involves such things as having trouble when routines are disrupted and of course “special interests”.  In other words, if you want me to infodump like there’s no tomorrow then ask me how I would go about settling a new star system.  Then get popcorn and a drink because you’re going to be there a while.  (If you want to get rid of me, suggest we go get sushi or visit a fish market.)

So the 2nd test for today is the CAT-Q, formally known as Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire.  This test is also intended for adults, to determine how much a person is masking.  Masking is a coping mechanism wherein the Autistic person essentially takes on a constructed persona in order to fulfill the expectations of their family, co-workers, friends and acquaintances.  I think of it as a sort of emulator program, or an interface program.  One can argue that even neurotypical people do this, and that is correct.  But it’s the extent of the phenomenon that causes the problems.  A neurotypical person can drop the mask very quickly when needed, put it aside when no longer needed, without difficulty.  An Autistic person essentially lives in their masks 24/7.  This can and often does cause further mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, and can lead to suicide.  Why?  Because we lose our own identity and are never known for who we really are.  We are forced to constantly play a role for the comfort of society, because society doesn’t want us as we truly are.  

I had thought that I didn’t mask, when all this began.  But yes, I do.  I’m only recently beginning to realize how much.  Anyway, on with the scores!

Total:  131   (Range 25-175, 100+ indicates masking)

Compensation:  40

Masking:  43

Assimilation:  48

Higher scores indicate greater extent on all scales.  

The subscales seem pretty much as read, but in brief Compensation is strategies used to compensate for difficulties, Masking indicates hiding autistic traits, and Assimilation indicates strategies used to “fit in”.  

So yeah, once more batting it out of the park here.  I do mask, quite extensively.  And I do feel the pain of it.  I cannot be myself around anybody.  I don’t speak about space colonization or Buddhism or my writing to anybody for fear of infodumping or being called “weird”.  I don’t even talk about my Autism except obliquely even to my mother.  She knows -- my whole family knows, given I “came out” when we were all out having pizza -- but they don’t want to know.  They want the cute little red-haired girl I was 45 years ago.  My mom wants the successful, skinny, beautiful, married, heterosexual daughter she thought she gave birth to 53 years ago.  The entire family wants a Conservative Southern woman to agree with them on every point.  They want another Christian.  They want themselves reflected in me.  I can’t be that.  I’m not any of those things.  I’m a weird, transgender, bisexual, Buddhist, Socialist, AUTISTIC fat person who is terrified to be known as any of those things to anybody.  So, the mask.  If required to attend family gatherings, I rarely speak.  When I do it’s never about anything I care about.  Every word is censored.  I just eat what is invariably a very fine meal, sit silently internally wincing as their voices get louder from their enthusiasm, and eventually go home.  My family are excellent cooks, I’ll give them their due.  Sometimes, especially lately, I think I’d kill for my mom to make Carbonara or our family stroganoff for me.  

Mom and I talk mostly about our pets and food.  We don’t have much else in common.  It’s all the white spaces inbetween, y’know?  Like, we talk around all the timebombs.  

I have no one else.  No friends, even online.  I’ve got my boy Genji.  As long as we’re out walking he doesn’t much care what I say.  

Su!c!de is real, folks.  Autistic people die from it at an alarming rate.  It’s never off the table for me.  If you were forced every minute of your life to be somebody you aren’t, never able to express yourself as yourself to anybody out of a very real fear of ridicule, harrassment, or worse... wouldn’t you be depressed?  Wouldn’t you eventually consider su!c!de?  What if after all this, KNOWING what you are, you go to a therapist in what is supposed to be a “safe space”... you’re told “you’re not Autistic, you’re not babbling about trains or math and you’re not screaming and thrashing around”?  

“You’re not Autistic because you’re not a little white boy who’s obsessed with Minecraft.”  

“You can’t be Autistic, you’re a girl!”  

It’s real, folks.  I AM AUTISTIC.  

Get the fuck over it and help me.

#actuallyautistic #howbadcanbadget #RAADS R #CAT-Q #tw suicide #allaboardtheangstexpress

[deusexmachinawitch]

hi, i want to ask your opinion on something. i've been having intrusive thoughts today that pretty much went like "good people always suffer and die young, all while literal monsters get away with anything and live long". my initial reaction was that it's a completely baseless belief, and i even went further, i saw it as an assumption i hold about the world which i decided to revise. i affirmed to myself pretty much any of the opposite statement you can think of. coincidentally, i got a call bearing horrible news, distant family member passed away. i'm not saying that i manifested that, i don't believe it. i do however feel like it's a really odd coincidence that i don't know how to process, on top having to cope with the death itself... usually when stuff like this happens, as a loa practitioner i just learn lessons from experiences. like if coincidences are too odd, i try to see if it's a reflection of some limiting belief i was holding about myself, or maybe birds before landing and such. this time i'm kind of startled to say the least

Before anything, sorry for your loss.

Let me go in parts.

I used to hold that kind of belief as well, but I had to ask myself if that came from a selfish place from a bad self concept or if I really had that kind of view. I realized it was both so I decided to change myself to not see myself as a victim and to actually become the shelter of people who need me and are still in a low place in their head. When I put myself on the pedestal, I deleted those monsters from my reality but if they attacked the reality of others, I would help them until they would put themselves on their own pedestal. Precisely because I don’t want anyone to die young and let the monsters live like nothing. Especially because LoAss should be something that people should learn at least to discover their inner power and it’s not easy to pull yourself out by yourself from that dark place. I think that’s why people are so drawn to success stories, as hope because they cannot see the light inside them yet.

I truly believe you didn’t manifest that, but I do think you should take this as a way to focus more on your own feelings, thoughts and views. Still, remember that in LoAss, circumstances mean what you want them to be. If you say it’s a lesson, it is. If you say it’s a call to stop and regain your thoughts, it is. You put meaning to this and I think that you should give it a good meaning also to honor this person’s memory.

I don’t have experience revising someone’s passing, so I cannot advice you on that. But you can revise your inner self, give meaning to this and become your best self to never let the monsters win. Because the more we think about them, the more meaning we give them and they keep existing. Be your own light to illuminate your way and if during your journey you can help someone to find their light by illuminating them with yours… Your journey has even more meaning because the good people will live long and shine bright enough to push the monsters away.

Still, remember. Take breaks if you need to since you’re going through hard times, allow yourself to cry and release everything. Then come back stronger than ever and take revenge on the monsters by being happy and erasing them from your reality. But to do that, take care of yourself first, you’re your most important person and whenever your spiral once you feel better tell yourself this: In a cloudy sky, you cannot see the stars.

Thank you for sharing this with me, I hope it was helpful in some way.

#ask: anon #answered ask 💌

[novemberthecatadmirer]

Arda Marred, from the Ainur’s point of view:

When group project went south because someone decided to be a dick (why was that grumpy melodramatic kid in the group to begin with), and started to throw furnitures around and everyone was stressed as fuck.

(The damned teacher declared well we need a variety of opinions everything was according to plan and refused to take him out. Why can’t he just quietly work on his own project at the side no one will be against his oh so creative ideas of volcanoes, dragons and miserable men bound on top of cliff)

So everyone was upset and ended up fighting that kid. Fine. In the process somehow he put malware in everyone’s computer. (We haven’t figured out how to take it out he’s the tech nerd of the school.) And broke the coffee machine everyone so desperately need. Well not really fine, actually we are pretty angry about that, but we cannot quit now so just have to roll with it.

So we summoned that athletic kid to do damage control (fistfight the dick, we LOVE our coffee machine). The sucker ran away, what a coward.

Things were going well, malware sucked but we coped, we were having great progress, we inspired each other and there were people who fell in love with coworkers, well good for them!

Then that damned kid decided to show up when we were partying and just shoved his creation into our project, which was awful and disrespectful and RUDE. We were almost finished! Everything went into chaos, and then some very smart nerdy kids who loved fire said “well actually his work is not so bad, very menacing and evil in a compelling way.” There’s also this one be like “his work is messy and chaotic, but if I help him to put it into order it will be GREAT.” (We thought he was smart!) (Aüle was sad, poor man.)

Did they still remember the very project proposal asked us to make good, nice things? What will the teacher think of us! Some people still want their credits for the semester!

Well.

Somehow they totally messed up the project and we had to run our computer in safe mode to do damage control. Fine, we cannot quit but we can half quit, let them have that damned corner of the lab they love so much and we retreat to do this all over again.

On the bright side we get to do revisions of our idea. I like trees better than giant lamps, so much more graceful.

For a while we were comfy. The stupid gang fell asleep drooling over their corner of lab. Why can’t they sleep all the time? They should just go back home and sleep in their beds instead traumatizing poor classmates.

And we had to have people watching them in case they awake and start throwing chairs and tables and computers (they are expensive!) again. Why they had to come? Didn’t they know what a group project is? We could just all work on our separate project and have PEACE. But now we have to carry them along all the way and everyone is secretly worrying when they’re going to doom our work again with some oh so creative ideas.

We still can not fix our coffee machine.

Aside from the coffee machine (and the malware) problem everything was going exceptionally well. We’re going to run the first test soon. Hope he doesn’t wake up soon, once we start running the project we cannot really reboot or even run major antivirus programs.

Somehow I get a bad feeling about this.

(In the end of many disasters they rage-fought and shoved the troublemaker out of lab and locked the door, but damage was done and they’ll have to report broken furnitures and frozen computers.)

(No one questioned if they should have asked the teacher about kicking him out. He’ll definitely find some way to be back and collect his credits when we hand in the project for grading, someone pointed out warily. And look, his very awful malware is still here, that counts as contribution to the group project does it. We can still tell our professor we (unwillingly) adapted his ideas. We just… don’t need him to be here all the time.)

(And they still could not fix their coffee machine.)

#silm #silmarillion #tolkien #the silmarillion #melkor #morgoth #valar #ainur #music of the ainur #lotr

[kukies-capabilities]

I posted 131 times in 2022

That's 13 more posts than 2021!

82 posts created (63%)

49 posts reblogged (37%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@gatheryepens

@nietxsche

@spelledslots

@elysianania

@autistudyblr

I tagged 85 of my posts in 2022

Only 35% of my posts had no tags

#study blog - 77 posts

#studyblr - 77 posts

#sixth form - 76 posts

#a levels - 75 posts

#study space - 75 posts

#studywithme - 72 posts

#a level physics - 70 posts

#a level maths - 54 posts

#year 12 - 52 posts

#a level further maths - 50 posts

Longest Tag: 104 characters

#i’ll probably lose but i don’t know what to do with myself and this seems like the best option right now

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

On Thursday I woke up with a migraine and made myself go to school cause there was a show I didn’t want to miss and I had both of my maths teachers that day. I did this with the plan on not going in on Friday. Come Friday I still feel horrible, my skin feels sensitive, my eyes hurt when I move them. I’m suffering. I eventuality take a covid test and it comeback positive.

I wrote off my original symptoms as a combination of me over working myself and stress. This so my first time testing positive since the start of the pandemic. I’m not as invincible as I though. 😪

Day 24: What's your favourite beverage?

Nigerian Fanta. It’s sold in a glass bottle and it so much better than what the one that they sell herein the UK.

Day 25: What does your ideal breakfast look like?

A breakfast wrap/sandwich that contains eggs and sausage (beef of course)

Fruit and yogurt parfait on the side

Day 26: What's the cosiest place in your mind right now?

My bedroom. Just me, my bed and Aristotle and Dante

And the public library I go to. Me and all those books.

26 notes - Posted February 26, 2022

#4

I think I am starting to enjoy revising/studying (would enjoy it much more if my maths exam wasn’t so close but you win some you lose some). I think have a routine that works for me for now.

Ramadan is less than 20 days away and I need to come up with some sort of timetable to ensure I get enough sleep, and can still revise. I wish I was the type of person wi could fall asleep where ever quickly. If I was I wouldn’t Bebe bother changing my routine much. I would just take naps everywhere.

15th March: How do you deal with academic/work stress? Do you have a coping system/mechanism?

I feel like I’m in a constant state of panic so at this point I don’t get affected much.

However every once in a while I do stress more than usual so much so that my appetite is usually affected. In those scenarios I make sure to write down everything I need to do and spread it out over a period of time.

I have learnt that when I have a lot of something to do, that me trying to do it all in one day doesn’t work for me. I get bored and ended up working img slowly. Or I get stressed by how much I have left to do, and end up freezing.

29 notes - Posted March 15, 2022

#3

First week back at school done. It was tiring, and I took today (Sunday) to complete relax and do no work. I know this is gonna be my last peaceful/stress-less day for a while so I savoured it.

I started listening to a true crime podcast called “female criminals” and a history podcast called “history’s b side” both are quite interesting. Would recommend both of them.

I went to my first bookclub meeting. I joined the club a couple months back but never I never went to the meetings cause didn’t have time to read the books. But I managed to this month and it was fun talking to other about books.

Quantum fact: The uncertainty principle tells us that the more we know about one property of a wave the less we know about another. Pairs include Wavelength and location as well as energy and time. For example, the easier it is to pinpoint the location of a wave, the harder it is to find its wavelength.

See the full post

31 notes - Posted April 24, 2022

#2

I went exploring over the weekend!!!!

Saturday 19th March

I went to the Future Robots: Material Futures X DeepMind exhibition in London with a friend. It was cool and interesting. My favourite part was the synesthesia translator

We then went to a cafe in bookstore and worked for a bit. I felt so ✨aesthetic✨

Sunday 20th March

Went to the British library with my friend. It was so huge but a nice change of scenery

Took my younger sister with me and I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. Her being there made it more stressful and harder for me to concentrate as I had to ensure that she was safe

51 notes - Posted March 21, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Day 1: What’s your favourite podcast?

The Magnus archives. Such a good podcast. I have season 5 left and then it’s over 🥲

I did just finish “Fearie” today and that is definitely a good one

85 notes - Posted February 1, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #Kukies capabilities

[munsontm]

DRUG & ALCOHOL ADDICTION: REVISED.

sb: so, you say eddie has an alcohol and drug addiction, huh?

me: oh yes, absolutely.

sb: golly, well, what the heck does alcohol and drug addiction mean?

me: well, in the case of edward munson. it goes a little something like this...

Addiction is marked by a change in behavior caused by the biochemical changes in the brain after continued substance abuse. Substance use becomes the main priority of the addict, regardless of the harm they may cause to themselves or others. An addiction causes people to act irrationally when they don’t have the substance they are addicted to in their system.

sb: i see, i see. but how did this all start?

me: let me tell you the tale of the bard...

Eddie had his first drink around the age of 9/10 courtesy of his father claiming that it would make him a man. Shocker, It did nothing. After that first time, Eddie sometimes drank just to please his father, not that it ever really made the asshole pleased at all. Eddie didn’t drink a lot, but it was enough, you know? No little kid should be consuming alcohol.

It was actually once Eddie was placed into Wayne’s care around 12 that things became worse. And not because of anything Wayne did, because Wayne was the first adult to treat Eddie well. But Eddie was traumatised by his childhood up till then. His mother had died when he was 10 in a car accident that Eddie concluded was suicide because she could no longer stand her situation with Eddie’s father, and would rather die than have to spend her life with him. She was only 19 when Eddie was born, and the Munson’s effectively ruined her life. She didn’t not love Eddie, but she wasn’t particularly present in his life. So, Eddie is likely right that his mother killed herself. And when it came to Eddie’s father, he tried so very hard in those 12 years to earn his father’s love and respect, which included stealing for him---hence the hotwiring ability he has. But it was never enough. No matter what Eddie did he was never given an ounce of love from his father.

And when Eddie’s dad finally went away for 20+ years on a number of charges. The bastard tried to place at least some of the blame on Eddie in hopes of knocking off some years. It was then that Eddie realised his father had never loved him in the slightest, and had only used him for personal gain. And this is where Eddie’s cynicism of love begins because of his father. 

Back to the trauma! Eddie’s way to deal with all these realisations, as well as the sudden shift in his life was to suppress them. He went back to drinking, but on a more regular basis. He started smoking both nicotine and weed. Now, I hate to push the whole weed as a gateway drug bs because it did wonders for myself. But for Eddie, who was under such emotional turmoil. Weed did end up becoming his gateway drug, and it remains his favourite drug. But it led him to trying hallucinogens, cocaine, pills of all sorts, opioids included, ketamine. The list just kinda grew over the years.

Post series when Eddie finally gets to leave Hawkins, one of the larger sources for his trauma. You might think that he could leave his old coping mechanisms behind. Wrong! Now he's living in big cities and living it up on the club scene where drugs are handed out like candy. And having been a drug dealer for some years, it's all too easy for Eddie to get ahold of whatever he wants whenever he needs. It's not so bad in those first few years, he mostly gets messy when he's out for the night. But he will drink and take drugs all night until the early morning hours, and that does eventually spill over into every day life as the years go by. It's a slow change.

Eddie's addictions heat up when CC hits the big time. Eddie is thrust into a world where drugs and booze are handed out like candy on a silver platter this time by producers, managers, other musicians, and even record labels! It's everywhere Eddie looks, and given the slippery slope he was already on. It's pretty much impossible for him to not end up spiralling deeper into addiction. Plus, it's expected of him by the music industry culture at the time, and Eddie doesn't want to let CC down by not playing the game after they tried for so long to enter the but leagues. It's probably the only time in Eddie's life where he conformed to peer pressure (not from the band tho!). Yikes.

Over the next few years, Eddie drastically changes. He becomes less reliable, more argumentative, more unpredictable and prone to sudden emotional outbursts. He always seems like he's on the verge of a mental breakdown; especially when on tour. Eddie becomes reckless with himself and irrational in his thoughts and actions. Yet, Eddie doesn't notice any of these changes. He thinks he's being the same old Eddie because the constant flow of drugs is altering his brain chemistry, so he doesn't notice the changes, which leads to arguments etc.

*The next entries pertain mostly to my main verse with harringtontm, but is also open to other muses ofc.

The only time Eddie seems remotely normal is when with his kids and Steve. But even that is strained due to him being away often while working. Things with Steve during this time aren't great as Steve has made himself aware of how bad things are in Eddieland. He's known longer than anyone else tbh, but didn't know how to address it like he wanted to. And now he's so focused on being a dad that he's even more distracted.

Unfortunately, Steve is forced to confront the problem when Eddie accidentally overdoses one afternoon on the bathroom floor and Steve has to save his life. It serves as an alarming wake up call for both of them and prompts a series of serious conversations that end with Eddie convinced about getting into rehab.

Ultimately, rehab is a game changer for Eddie. He leaves with an understanding of why he is an addict. Surprise, it's trauma! But also leaves with less understanding of who he is as a person. He spent so many years under the influence of drugs and alcohol that he has to question if that person was really Eddie, or part of the disease of addiction. It's a whole journey of self-discovery as well as one of recovery both physically and mentally. He'll always be an addict. That's just fact. It's incurable. He can be sober for many years and still have a relapse at any time. But he has a good support system, which is the most powerful tool an addict can have to stop that from happening.

#important portrayal headcanon 🛡️ #drug addiction tw #alcoholism tw #child abuse tw #𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚌𝚊𝚗𝚘𝚗 : 𝚖𝚢 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚍? 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚍𝚘𝚗'𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚊 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎. 🎸 #v. volume 6 / arc: san francisco feat. harringtontm. #v. volume 6 / arc: los angeles feat. harringtontm #v. volume 6 / arc: chicago feat. harringtontm. #v. volume 5. #v. volume 4.

[toftie]

orv spoilers under sorry

been reading some theories and like i love the idea so much about kim dokja being a co-author to orv, because that means i think everybody in the main trio was a co-author at some point now, possible even everyone in KimCo as well as others who have helped them

1863!revised HSY started writing TWSA in order to save KDJ → but the epilogue was never finished before her ego got integrated into her subconscious → then events of ORV starts (which everything we have been reading was actually recorded this whole time by 1864 HSY) but this was not fully completed by herself this time unlike the first time she wrote TWSA. in the epilogue she notes she actually had to get help from everyone they've met, extracting their fables and asking them to recount their experiences of everything up till now. then at some point she wasn't able to continue writing and YJH had to continue writing his own parts in when he was in space, maybe he even edited some parts where his point of view was needed, and then finally after KDJ wakes up, as the last piece of the final puzzle, he finishes writing the story together with them probably after he recovered, filling in his own point of view on parts that only he would know (which is a lot as he is the main character)

i just love how this was a story started by one person that was only able to be completed with the help of many people, something that would not be possible if KDJ wasn't able to help all of them as he did. it was written with love to bring back/save one person (KDJ) and when he did eventually come back as implied by the ending, he wrote the epilogue in a way that made it so that it was to save the reader (us). rephrasing the beginning texts of TWSA in order to tell the reader that they will be able to survive, just as he was able to survive

also. like i still cant stop thinking about the 0 turn, like i keep thinking is that right? did i read this right? did YJH really choose to regress of own his volition just so he could meet KDJ? like that was the beginning of his regressions right? i kept thinking why? why would he choose to leave his perfect happy ending and go through the hellish scenarios again over and over, granted that the scenarios will be hellish because he loses all memories and KDJ isnt there to help him, just to meet him?

i dont think i'll ever fully understand and i think maybe YJH doesn't understand either, and maybe thats fine and thats just how it is. maybe deep down he feels like KDJ should be a part of his happy ending, like physically a part of it, rather than just an observer or a constellation watching them live it (paralleling the 1864th ending with him watching his avatar live happy with KimCo) since if it wasn't for KDJ, they would not have lived happily ever after. maybe its just how YJH loves, i dont know. i mean even after they finish the 1865th turn and go back to normal lives, YJH literally becomes so restless and unable to do anything with himself that he becomes a terrorist to take the Ark and implying to go to another worldline to find KDJ again. AGAIN. like he was literally haggard and disheveled looking and couldnt even keep up his gamer job because maybe he felt like his happy ending wasnt complete without that idiot(?) he was willing to, and actually did, lose more years of his life going to space, for like an indefinite amount of time, and he knew this, he fucking knew this, and just like the first time he accepted the regression stigma, he went in the great beyond anyway just to find KDJ again. that is insanely absurd to me like explosions are going off rn

oh and actuallt wait no he wasnt alone, the group regression thing by itself was literally insane and also YJH reading ORV written by HSY with others really helped him cope with the burden he placed on himself, as hes the only one capable of doing the impossible (like KDJ with ressurecting)

it also kinda parallels with HSY again as she was initially alone when writing TWSA for KDJ (um i guess the dokkaebi king was with her too but like... that doesnt count cuz there isnt really a solid bond, more like employer and employee thing) which took up many years, and then she writes ORV with everyone's help later on which i think absolutely helped her and everyone cope with KDJ's absence. HSY lost many years of her life writing for one man, including the Kaixenix arc, just like how YJH lost years of his life fighting for one man while KDJ lost many years of his life sacrificing himself for everyone, by doing what he knows best, reading, to keep their stories alive while they lived out their happy ending. i think i am literally just talking in a loop now but when it comes to these 3 the parallels and symbolism are so insane with how interconnected and almost symbiotic everything is

also i was literally just doublechecking the definition of symbiosis and

#orv spoilers

[lacimontiel]

Writing sample

Bipolar disorders can affect relationships, especially marriages, your partner will be emotionally drained and rethink a relationship with you. In the text by Bronte Speirs, she mentions "So, I've gone totally down bad dark holes, and then I'm drinking, and just totally like... fully just like I need to block my emotional pain because I don't have room to deal with my own stuff." (P15, girlfriend, aged 25 years) (Bronte Speirs 1) This evidence proves that not only the patient suffers but their families as well. In this situation the patient's family has picked up drinking habits they did not have before because they are re so emotionally done and are trying to find an escape to feel numb. They are trying their best to be there for their partner, but it is challenging when she herself is drowning and is having her own mental health problems. "Because he can't control himself, I don't think I should have, I think it would be irresponsible for me to have children with him." (P5, wife, aged 35 years) (Bronte Speirs 3) This statement is coming from a wife who is dealing with her husband's bipolar disorder, and she expresses how she no longer wants to have children with him because it would be a bad idea, this shows if she does not view him as the father of her children, she will most likely divorce him. It is important if your partner is dealing with the illness, you help them as much as you can and take days to self-care and self-reflect as well. To keep your relationship stable and keep a happy marriage here are a couple tips you can use. You can seek counseling and help your partner find self-love and self-care. Other methods include nature, exercise, socializing, creative hobbies, yoga and meditation. I truly believe that you can’t expect someone to love you if they cannot love themselves. Families of people living with bipolar disorder experience social deprivation, social isolation, and social rejection, which have great consequences for them. I know dating someone who has bipolar disorder can be draining for carers, but I wanted to really go into depth about the struggles and how to cope with the disorder.

Some changes I have made to this paragraph significantly were adding more analysis explanations after each evidence. I really into detail on specific methods and help guidance you can use. Yes, this revision sample reflects my learning and growth from this course. I am extremely proud of my ability to write a clear and full paragraphs now. I’m still working on how to organize my paragraphs.