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prolix-yuy · 7 months

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A Gift of Light and Joy

Pairing: Javi Gutierrez x F!Reader "Conejita" (Plus Sized Reader)

Summary: Javi wants to spoil you, but his good intentions put you in a difficult position.

Word Count: 4k

Warnings: Explicit, 18+ MINORS DNI, oral sex (f receiving), fingering (f receiving), unprotected PiV sex (don't be a fool, wrap your tool), cumming on someone, minor cum play, negative body image, toxic shopping culture, some angst, Javi is clueless about women's clothes shopping but he makes up for it.

Notes: Happiest of happy birthdays to my darling, my sweet friend, the indescribable @ezrasbirdie! I was planning to post this around November but I couldn't pass up a chance to give you a fun little Javi present. I am so lucky to know you and get to yell about stories together!

While in the two previous stories Conejita wasn't described as plus sized, I always headcanoned that she was from the start. There are a couple references to the previous stories, but you can also dive in right here! Like most stories this is me working through a few bad experiences of my own, and while Javi may be a little thick in the beginning he will get to make up for it.

Cross-posted on AO3

Continued from On the Right Flight and A Bearable Weight

“I have a surprise for today.”

Javi’s gleeful face ramps up your own excitement as he ushers you into his car.

“I thought we were going to have a picnic?” you ask as he flops into the drivers seat, curls bouncing almost as much as he is.

“That was my distraction,” he says, picking up your hand and kissing the back of it. Your heart still flutters, even months after that first one at the stroke of midnight.

Dating Javi had, of course, been just as much of a step off the deep end as you thought. Even being close by now that you’re back in LA for work and he’s hobnobbing with the Hollywood elites, some days getting dinner feels like making a doctor’s appointment. Matching schedules down to the half hour, groaning when something comes up. But it’s all worth it when the stars align and he’s on your doorstep with all-encompassing hugs and breathless kisses.

At first Javi’s dates were low-key and low-stress - a day at the beach, movie nights of course - but as you got closer and closer he started to take you places that had dress codes and extravagant names. He always beamed like you were the only one in the room, but you’d been in enough spaces you didn’t belong to feel eyes and judgements skitter across your back.

You could be poised, and knowledgeable, conversational and charming, but nothing changed how you looked. Javi was always dripping in Armani, Burberry, Brioni. Your paltry wardrobe didn’t stand a chance. Every new art show or movie premiere sent you running to a department store to find a new dress (pretty girls on their rich boyfriend’s arm didn’t reuse eveningwear) and inevitably you’d be pinched or poked or squeezed into something not made for you. Long minutes spent in the bathroom wondering if Javi would notice the bra strap divot in your shoulder, or the dark lines of seams pressed along your skin. Pretending you enjoyed slipping into a silk robe every time you spent the night was more palatable than the embarrassment of wriggling out of shapewear in front of him, or refusing to let him undress you in case a zipper pulled too tightly.

Unfortunately, you didn’t hide your discomfort as well as you imagined. Sometimes you caught Javi’s concerned look when the built-in corset made you squirm in your seat, or when you winced at the chafe of your heels.

So when he parks his car on Rodeo Drive he’s the picture of pride and sunshine. You, on the other hand, leave your stomach on the sidewalk behind you.

“I wanted to do something special,” he’s saying, muffled words bubbling up as your feet trudge to a gleaming glass door. There’s security inside, sales people scattered around holding hangers up to discerning buyers. “And before you say anything about money, I don’t want you to look at a single price tag.” Javi turns your face to him with a gentle nudge, breaking your doom stare through the glass. “I want to spoil you a little. You never let me spoil you.” His pout brings a little smile to your face, dipping in to kiss him.

“We can do anything Javi. I don’t need things,” you try to deflect, hoping you can convince him away from the inevitable rejection you’ll receive inside.

“Just one time?” he asks again, soft brown eyes imploring you. How could you say no?

“Okay,” you breathe out, steeling yourself for the worst as Javi beams back at you.

“I thought this place would match what you like,” he says as two suited doormen guide you inside. It flutters your heart. He’s right, you’ve always liked this designer’s silhouettes and styles. It’s exactly what you’d choose…if you were several sizes smaller.

“Hi, do you have an appointment?” a small-framed woman with black plastic glasses and a bouncy ponytail asks. She’s dressed head to toe in the designer’s current collection, sleek black throughout with stylish red earrings that dangle down her neck. Her smile isn’t as cold as you might expect. You’d heard horror stories of snide sales people practically insulting clients to get them to spend more.

“Yes, Gutierrez,” Javi offers smoothly, placing a grounding hand on your lower back. “For my girlfriend.” You shoot him a lopsided smile. He doesn’t get the chance to say it often, but when he does you love the way girlfriend rolls off his supple lips.

“Ah, yes, miss…” the sales woman begins, letting you offer your name. You catch a fleeting look of concern cross her face. Her cheek sucks in like she’s chewing on it, smile still bright but eyes more cautious.

“My name is Melanie, if you’d like to follow me to your consultation space,” she says, leading you and Javi to a curtained-off partition with several chairs, a changing room and a pedestal that makes your stomach flip.

“So what are you here to find today?” Melanie asks. Javi settles in a chair, spreading his knees and leaning back so sexily you can almost forgive him for the anxiety pumping through your veins.

“Whatever my Conejita desires,” he says, and you’re torn between smacking or straddling him. Melanie turns her attention to you and you wrack your brain.

“I guess…a dress would be nice?” you say. Javi reaches out to squeeze your hand reassuringly, adoration so clear in his eyes. He truly has no idea it’s the most likely to have ease in the sizing. You might make it out with one and blame it on not wanting to overspend. Javi would get his wish, and you would make it out with most of your ego unscathed. Win-win.

Melanie leads you out of the space and into the clothing racks. The choices are sparse, a few items hung per rack in an exclusivity motif. As soon as you’re out of earshot she starts chatting.

“Your boyfriend is very sweet to be treating you today.”

You hum and nod, chewing the inside of your lip. Some of the pieces are very pretty, flattering cuts and classic shapes, but none of the silhouettes look large enough for you.

“Does he…do this often?” Melanie asks carefully, and when you look at her you see an understanding that soothes you ever so slightly.

“First time.”

“A surprise.”

“Yeah, pretty big one.”

Melanie smiles at that, arms wrapped around an iPad. Her nails are very pretty tapping against the device.

“Let’s take a look back here,” she says, leading you off the main floor and further into the store. The racks are fuller back here, but not nearly enough to make you think success is within reach. Your chest tightens, but you put on a cheery smile when Melanie turns back to you.

“Men are just…so thick sometimes,” she sighs, and the sharp change makes you bleat out a laugh. “I’m sure Mr. Gutierrez has the best intentions in mind…”

You nod and finish her sentence.

“...but you don’t have anything here for me.” Her hands clutch at the tablet again, going white around the knuckles.

“We might have a few things, but they’ll be simpler. Not like the current collection.”

“Simple is fine,” you rush to say, her smile making your own come to the surface.

“Okay, let me go digging. I think we can make it work. I’m…” She pauses to clear her throat, lowering her voice. “I’m sorry this isn’t fun. I hate it. I just want everyone to feel happy in their clothes, not…left out.”

You turn your comfort to her, squeezing her shoulder.

“I appreciate you trying to help.”

Melanie scurries off to the backroom, leaving you on the bustling floor with ten other women who could slip into anything off the rack no problem. Weaving aimlessly, you peruse the dresses. Each one holds promise, which only makes it more disappointing when the tag numbers run too small. But you’re keeping positive, searching for Melanie’s bouncing ponytail returning with anything. You’d gush over a mumu.

“Excuse me,” comes over your shoulder, and you turn to another sales woman hovering expectantly behind you. Her brow is lifted high, barely waiting for you to shift before tugging a garment off the rack. She turns quickly, but in the split second before you see it. That stomach-dropping look that screams good luck slathered in sarcasm. Your throat clenches, hands coming to your middle and you wish you could just collapse into yourself like a dying star.

“Fuck this,” you whisper, tears shining in your eyes as you hurry back to the consultation space. You’ll tell Javi you have a headache, that you’re too hungry to shop right now, anything to convince him to get the hell out of here.

“Cone…” he says as you burst in, snatching up your purse and steeling your voice. The sunshiney excitement trades quickly for concern. “What is wrong? I promise the cost…”

“Actually, I don’t really…I don’t…” You try to get out your white lies with an even tone but when Javi cups your face in his large hands your composure crumples. A fat tear breaks rank and rolls down your face, Javi’s eyes widening with shock.

“Conejita, what’s wrong? Did something happen?” His eyes darken a fraction. “Did someone say something to you?”

Your heart skips a beat, which you blearily file for later introspection. Resting your head on his shoulder, he envelops you in his arms. Orange peel and musk surrounds you, Javi’s soothing hands traveling up and down your spine. When your breaths stop warbling you pull back, wiping your face.

“I’m sorry…” you start to say, but Javi moves you to sit. He drops to a kneel, clasping your hands in your lap.

“No, Conejita, you are not apologizing for one second. What has upset you? Was it someone out there?” When you shake your head, his eyes soften. “Was it me?”

“Oh Javi,” you sign, squeezing his hands. Your lashes are still wet with tears, but you can see his dread so clearly. “I really appreciate this, all of it. I’m sure it’s flattered lots of people before. But I’m…me.” You release a big breath, the pain of keeping all your anxieties in finally easing. “I can’t shop at places like this, Javi, I don’t…they don’t make clothes like this for people my size.”

Javi’s concern smashes into confusion.

“But they must have seamstresses in the back. They take your measurements, no? Find an acceptable piece and tailor it?”

The laugh you bark out is watery but it does raise the corners of your lips.

“Men have it so easy,” you bemoan. “I think the closest size I saw was still in the single digits. And even then, the numbers rarely mean anything.” Javi’s confusion only deepens.

“But how do you know what to buy? Surely the measurements are the same. Inseam, waist, sleeve length, how can it be so different?”

“Javi, I’m rarely the same size at the same store.”

Javi sputters. “That’s madness. How does anyone put up with that?”

You giggle lightly, the tears finally receding. “I just go to the department stores. More variety, more sizes. No pushy sales people. Though Melanie is really nice.”

“But you are still uncomfortable,” he says, stroking his thick thumbs along the back of your hands. “I did not want to say anything, but I noticed. You do not seem to feel good in the nice things you wear.”

You shrug. “It’s not perfect, it’s just…easier.”

His eyes implore up at you. “I wanted you to feel good with me.” Your heart patters, Javi’s face falling. “But I have made it worse. Please forgive me, Conejita, I truly did not know this would be so painful.”

You pat Javi’s cheek and give him a quick kiss. “I know, Javi. I know you didn’t mean for it to be.” A tap on his nose makes him smile. “But next time, when the lady doth protest too much, maybe listen?” Javi’s cheeks pink as he nods.

“Shakespeare has always been wiser than me,” he jokes as he helps you back to your feet. He leads you back to the front of the store with one hand on your back, and for a few seconds you do feel like the most beautiful person in the room. Women looking at you in awe, Javi’s fingers pressing in a way that’s subtly possessive. You could be lady Godiva riding a Shetland pony and not feel a lick of shame when he looks at you like that.

“Mr Gutierrez!” Melanie calls as she hurries up to the front to intercept. Her hands are empty, which is a relief.

“Thank you for your help, I just don’t think there’s anything for me here,” you say in a practiced tone that makes Javi pull you closer and Melanie’s eyebrows knit in the middle. She nods, extending a folded piece of paper to Javi.

“I’m sorry they didn’t have something for you today,” she says, and Javi takes the proffered paper. He leads you out of the store and into the fresh sunlight of the street. Unfolding it, he raises an eyebrow then secrets it away in his jacket pocket.

“What was that about?” you ask, tucking your arm into his elbow. He shakes his head.

“Nothing important. What is important is going to get some lunch, then we are going driving with the top down and dinner at my place after.”

“Javi…” you say with a little warning, but he tuts at you as his long stride pulls you down Rodeo drive.

“I know, I know what you will say, but bear with me because I am learning how to love you the right way. Today was not so good, but I would like to try and make it better.” He slows down when he catches your wide eyes and dazed smile. “What? What have I said now?”

“That you love…” the last words disappear on the wind as Javi’s smile crinkles his eyes.

“Of course, Conejita. Dios mio, of course I love…I love you,” he rushes out, barely able to finish before crashing his lips into yours. Wide palm cupping your head, you couldn’t care less that you’re making pedestrians part around you. Javi loves you, even if he’s a little clumsy about it. But when someone wants to learn to love you the right way…how can you not love every atom of them back?

The following weekend finds you in one of the lesser-used rooms in Javi’s house, sitting on a chair by the window. He deposited you there with a cappuccino and a promise to wait, so now you’re doing just that. Javi does love surprises, but you never expected Melanie to walk in the door.

“Oh my god, hi,” you manage to get out, standing up to shake her hand but are treated to a tight hug instead. She looks brighter, lighter than the last time you saw her, black ensemble traded for a pale blue button-up and floral patterned pants.

“Javi told me it was a surprise, and I want it on the record that after this one he’s not allowed any more!” You sit across the little cafe table from her with visible confusion.

“I am a bit…lost…as to the surprise,” you giggle out nervously, which has Melanie opening a smart black bag and taking out folios and fabric swatches.

“I’ve been trying to get my stylist business off the ground and…” She pauses for a moment before making genuine eye contact. “And if there’s anything I was meant to do, it’s find people clothes that make them happy. So I offered him my services and he’s…well, he’s been very generous.”

Pride swells in your chest. So Javi.

“So what we’re going to do today is figure out what you like, don’t like, colors, styles, and then I’ll start building your wardrobe. Sound good?” Melanie’s smile is contagious.

“Sounds amazing.”

You don’t quite understand every step of the process. At one point she drapes color swatches on your chest like a bib and you can’t help but giggle. But it’s fun, maybe for the first time you can remember. She writes down that you hate side-seam zippers and skirts cut above the knee. That you love color but not too garish. And when you catch Javi pacing outside the glass door to the patio, peeking in anxiously every five minutes, your smile softens. She probably doesn’t write that part down. That’s written on your face.

You can’t stop twirling in the mirror, inspecting from every angle. You try to scrutinize, but you can’t find a single thing wrong.

It’s perfect.

After the wardrobe cleanout, the basics overhaul, and the lengthy plan Melanie made, she asked a thrilling question.

“What’s the first piece you’d like me to find?”

“I’ve always wanted a little black dress,” you replied, and her smile almost eclipsed her face.

“I have the perfect one in mind.”

She wasn’t kidding. It’s full and flouncy, smoothing in all the places you normally criticize and accentuates your figure in the best ways. The fabric is sumptuous under your fingers, just the right weight without dreaded sheerness. You can imagine yourself with hair done up, your favorite lipstick, Javi’s hand on your lower back, that possessive glint in his eyes. All of the excitement makes you spin three more times, the room tilting briefly before you catch Javi standing in the doorway.

“Hey!” you call out breathlessly, smoothing the skirt again. “It’s the first thing Melanie’s sent over. I…oh my god, I love it so much.” You turn to look in the mirror again, and in the reflection you see Javi’s mouth parted, eyes dragging over you. His fingers are rubbing together at his sides and…is he clenching them?

“She took everything I said and just found the most perfect dress.” Your thumb catches in the fabric and you spin back around to gasp, “And it has pockets!”

You’ve barely taken your hands out of them when Javi is on you, all greedy mouth and firm hand on the back of your head. His tongue demands on your lips, slipping inside when you gasp for him. Arm banding around your back, he steadily walks you backwards towards the bed.

“Conejita, mi amor, eres tan hermosa,” he pants, his wandering hand settling on your ass and squeezing. It crackles between your thighs, white-hot arousal at how he holds you. Javi has always been generous in bed, and highly competent, but this is a side of him you haven’t seen. Maybe briefly when he asked you if someone bothered you at that awful boutique store.

Before you can rationalize anything further he guides your hips down to the bed, teetering on the edge. He quickly drops to his knees and dives his hands under the skirt, sliding one knuckle along the seam of your pussy.

“Javi…” you squeak out, but his touch leaves to curl around your underwear and yank them down your legs. The rip of a seam makes arousal gush between your legs, spreading them instinctually. He licks his lips before fisting your skirt above your waist and ducking down to taste you for too brief a moment. Your hips buck, teeth nipping at your inner thigh before he lifts up to kneel between your legs.

“Javi, the dress,” you caution, and with a sweeter smile he shifts his knees to make sure the fabric isn’t trapped between. When his eyes meet yours again he plants a hand by your head and laps between your lips, slow and sensual. The clink of his buckle coming undone aches deep in your core, fisting his button-up across his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Conejita, I just…cannot control myself when you look so beautiful,” he confesses as his fingers tease at your entrance. A choked whimper ekes out as he opens you up on two, pumping mercilessly into your clenching heat. He swears in Spanish into your neck, and your quiet whines grow to moans when his thick cock begins thrusting into the crease of your hip. His panted breaths start to take on a rumble, then a growl as his fingers match his shallow thrusts. Overwhelmed, you grasp at what words will make him give in.

“Javi, please, oh my god, please fuck me,” you finally manage, rocking your hips with his frantic pace.

“You’re ready for me?” he husks, your vociferous affirmations drawing his fingers out to leave you achingly empty. He slicks his cock with you, lining up and pressing just the head in before he plants his hands by your head and just…looks at you.

“Dios mio, eres una diosa,” he breathes, all of the sweet man you love. Grabbing around his wrists, you roll your hips down to sink more of him inside. He stretches you so deliciously, filling your cunt and lungs.

“Take it, Javi,” you rasp, head tossed back. “Show me I’m yours.”

Javi bites his lower lip and looks at you with a depth you crave. Infatuation and devotion and a desire so hungry you want to sate him for hours. In a dizzying flick of his wrists he now presses yours into the bed.

“Mine,” he purrs, and the snap of his hips as he buries himself flush draws a lusty cry from your lips. “My beautiful Conejita,” he grits out, grinding his hips deep to press punishingly into your g-spot. You writhe under him, legs clamped around his waist as he slides out just enough to punch back in. “You are mine, aren’t you?”

“Oh fuck, Javi, yes, I’m yours,” you beg, and it’s exactly what he needs to begin fucking you earnestly, scooping his hips to drive deeper and deeper. The friction of his grind strums your clit just right to tremble around him. Pinning you with a rumble, he fucks you into the mattress until his wandering hands can’t stop from palming your breast, rolling your nipple through the fabric. The spike of pleasure urges you to meet him stroke for stroke, riding him just as hard back. He grabs your chin just firmly enough to coax more slick to coat his cock, guiding you back to his demanding mouth. He steals your breath, sucking your lower lip between his teeth and groaning when you shudder around him.

“Not going to last, mi amor,” he whispers, lacing your fingers together as his thrusts lose rhythm.

“Cum on my pussy,” you plead, and with a strung-out moan he pulls out just quick enough to cover your mound with his hot spend. It drips lewdly, sliding to gather in the crease of your thighs. His eyes are fixated on it, the brand of his lust sticky on you. Your orgasm tips over as he slides his thumb through his cum to press firmly on your clit. His name is all you can manage as pleasure laps over your skin, his touch grounding as he praises you over and over.

In the afterglow, Javi folds the length of your skirt well above the mess he made.

“I will be sure to send this to drycleaning before you want to wear it,” he says, pulling a juddery giggle from your chest. He stands oh shaky legs and you glimpse his wet cock in the vee of his open pants, realizing you just fucked like college kids so horny for each other they couldn’t even undress properly. It makes you giddy as he brings over tissues to clean up, careful not to leave any of his spend where it could stain. When he’s finally satisfied he drops down on the bed, opening his arms for you to snuggle into. Once fitted together, eyes heavy, he murmurs in your ear.

“It wasn’t the dress.”

You hum sleepily, sitting up to look into his sated face.

“You are most beautiful when you are happy,” he says, the earnestness earning him another sweet kiss.

“I am very, very happy Javi.”

He doesn’t need to tell you that he is. It’s written on his face, and in his heart.

END

#javi gutierrez x reader #javi gutierrez x you #javi gutierrez x f!reader #javi gutierrez x female reader #javi gutierrez fanfiction #tuwomt fanfiction #tuwomt fanfic #the unbearable weight of massive talent fanfiction #prolix fics

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letsperaltiago · 4 years

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write your story on my heart: come on and make your mark

In the safety of his mom's hoodie Mac Santiago-Peralta quickly learns that his parents are quite alright if not his favorite people in this big, scary world.

the skin to skin-contact oneshot no one asked for 🤔

read on ao3

“One last push! You’re doing so good, honey.”

The second his powerhouse of a wife delivers her last push, fully welcoming the newest addition to their family into the world and the safety of his auntie Roro’s hands, Jake feels his entire cosmos shift and turn upside down. It’s a transition, a feeling he thought the million hours of googling and studying parenting books had prepared him for, only now realising that there is no such thing as being prepared for this very moment.

No book, binder, higher power or even the tangled depth of some Reddit-forum he’d once found could possibly have prepared him for the immense, indescribable joy he experiences rushing through every cell of his body when he hears the first, notably loud cries of his son.

Loud cries are a good sign: it means he has strong lungs, Jake remembers.

“Jake,” he’s snapped out of his reverie by the sound of Amy’s breathy whimpers. Surely she’s more than exhausted after pushing a human out of her. “He’s-” she interrupts herself when she heaves resulting in her knocking her head back against the pillow to gain a breath, meanwhile her eyes search Jake’s face for some kind of conclusion.

The strong urge to take care of them both at the same time, his son and his wife, is tearing him in two separate directions. Although he does quickly settle on turning to Amy. He knows and trusts that his newborn is safe in Rosa and, he shudders a bit at the thought, he has to admit, the fire-fighters care when he sees said glorified EMT is checking his son’s condition.

One last time, he comes to realise this will be, he immerses himself in the feeling of being just the two of them; to have eyes only for her because soon, even though he doesn’t mind one bit, his heart will officially be shared with someone else.

“Yeah, he’s here, babe. He’s here,” he lets out in an euphoric mixture of a breath, smile and sniffle as he leans in to kiss his wife’s forehead. Beneath his touch he can feel her trembling from the adrenaline, still very much red and sweaty but oh, how she’s never been more beautiful to him, and although it’s a very close second, not even clad in white on their wedding day.

His lips stay plastered there for a few seconds but somehow feels like an eternity put into slow-motion. Yes, he knows he could be attending so many other, more useful, matters, but there’s no resisting the overwhelming pride he’s currently feeling knowing his incredible wife once again, this time more than ever, has proven to be the superhero he’s always known her to be.

“You did it,” he exclaims joyously through the cry threatening to crawl up and out of his throat once his lips slip off of her skin. From his new vantage point, having pulled back the slightest, he can tell she’s crying along to the sound of their son’s furious wails, and he can’t blame her. It’s paradoxical: somehow the most beautiful and heartbreaking sound he’s ever heard.

“You’re so incredible, Ames,” the words come spilling out of his moth hopped up on adrenaline which results in them stumbling over each other but he doesn’t care. She needs to know how amazing she is.

As intimate as an interrogation room containing their best friend and some random firefighter can be, their moment runs out the second the firefighter lets them know that their baby is perfectly healthy and gently places him stomach down, wailing at the top of his lungs, on Amy’s still heaving chest. Alongside this the two freshly baked parents stare in disbelief: they created this little and so very wanted human who’s now finally, after 9 months of pregnancy and even longer time spent wanting and trying, screaming into the soft fabric of Amy’s hoodie.

Amy’s hand are immediately drawn in, rushing to cup the tiny being in her hands, one supporting his bottom meanwhile the other his head. It’s all so much: the soft surface of his skin, the vibration coming from his screaming, and more importantly healthy, lungs resonate against hers making everything that more and finally completely real. Every ultrasound scanning, all the fluttering kicks from inside her womb and even the contractions: this kind of real beats everything prior to this moment. Her son is really here, in flesh and blood, resting against her chest instead of bundled up inside her womb.

“He’s amazing,” she lets out with a sob as she attempts to study Mac’s every feature.

“He sure is,” Jake is quick to chime in placing a hand on his son’s back before leaning in to kiss the tiny head tenderly, of course keeping in mind the fragility of a newborn’s skull, something all the baby books have told him about. He then looks backs to his wife and kisses her lips.

Her crying almost sabotages her ability to kiss him back, but she stables herself just enough by moving a hand to rest on her husband’s cheek and then it hits her like never before that she’s currently, right then and there, holding her entire world in her hands: Jake in one and their son in the other.

McClane Santiago-Peralta. Mac.

He’s a perfect 9 pounds and 21 inches, they’re later told at the hospital; he’s soft, pink and brand new; he’s here and he’s their son.

Caught up in what feels like her life’s biggest whirlwind of a moment, kissing her husband and holding her screaming newborn, she faintly make out Rosa and the firefighter telling them they’re going to leave them alone for a while to go meet the incoming ambulance and and actual EMTs.

Jake and Amy pull apart as the door closes and encapsulates their new little family of three in the interrogation room.

“I love you so much, Jake,” she smiles both with her lips and deep brown eyes which radiate so much joy through the tears that it makes Jake shed a tear too when he tell her “I love you too. So much.”

Their attention shifts back to Mac quietly whimpering for attention having only been partly soothed by his mother’s hold and is still very much upset with the fact he’s been thrown right into such a big, bright world without warning.

“And I love you too, my baby Mac,” she coos in addition to her declaration of love as she lets go of Jake’s face to hold her still naked, probably very hungry and cold son even closer.

Although Amy without a doubt had the birthing suite Hitchcock and Scully had built her to thank for making the birth surmountable, it wasn’t exactly destined to do what it was doing right now meaning that a lack of heat was noticeable.

“Shhh, yes, I know,” she strokes the top of his head in an attempt to comfort the whimpering bundle, “it’s all so big and scary out here, but we’ll make sure you’re okay. We got you.”

Mac’s cries have definitely quieted down, lost momentum, since first appearing in their world just minutes ago but he’s still very clearly voicing discontent and Amy can feel her brand new mom-heart bleed. She mentally turns over every page of every baby book she’s ever read furiously trying to find a solution to her son’s crying and discomfort.

“Your mom’s right, bud. No need to cry. We’re here with you,” Jake bends over the gap between him and the stretcher, down to his son’s eye level as if it’ll convince him to calm down only to comprehend that a newborn probably doesn’t care about his father’s promises. Mac is a man of actions not words.

“Jake,” Amy whimpers hit by realisation, so suddenly set on one thing and one thing only and it of course immediately gains her her husband’s full attention. “Help me put him on my chest.”

A look of confusion dawns on Jake as they share a look, Amy’s eyes pleading for him to understand.

“But Ames, that’s where he already is?”

“No, like on my actual chest. Skin to skin-contact, Jake.”

It comes out matter of factly and memories of many textbook pictures of cute, tiny babies lying against their mother’s bare chest right after birth come rushing back to Jake instantly replacing his confusion.

“Oh yes, that, right! Of course.”

She briefly pauses to think although its hard when her train of thoughts is very much controlled by the worry growing within her every time Mac lets out another loud whine or cry. At least he’s on top of something soft, she thinks in an attempt to reassure herself when looking down at him and her now very messy, gooey NYPD-hoodie and then, all out of the blue, it hits her: the messy but soft and warm NYPD-hoodie. Beneath it she’s only wearing her maternity bra (she’d started wearing them already months ago once her boobs had grown too big for her regulars once: also they were way more comfortable) so surely her idea was worth the try.

“He could probably fit into my hoodie,” she wonders or rather declares out loud. Her son needs somewhere warm and safe, so, regular procedure be damned.

“I mean,” Jake studies the features of the grey piece of clothing, “it’s quite big and if you just tug down the neck whole he could probably fit in there with you.”

So they give it a try.

While Jake momentarily takes possession of his son, immediately tearing up again at the very surreal feeling of holding life, which he’s created, for the first time, Amy unclasps and removes her soft bra. In terms of the last step she tugs open, as wide as physically possible, the neck hole of her hoodie to welcome her son. It’s not pretty nor graceful but the hoodie is indeed really big (especially now that Mac is no longer in her womb) and together they manage to carefully place him to rest against his mother’s skin and under the soft material of the hoodie, only his head, under Amy’s, emerging from the neck hole. They hold their breaths for a second, both internally begging for their invention to be enough to soothe their son completely.

Amy instantly feels better knowing she’s sharing her bodily heat with her son, and, even more rewarding is the fact that it also seems to pay off: after a few more whimpers, slowly fading into barely audible sniffles, a silence lastly settles over them.

From where he’s resting chest to chest, skin to skin, with his mother, Mac finally, for the first time in his life, seems fully content and settles for dozing off as the easiest way to handle being completely knocked out by the intensity of being born.

Jake and Amy exchange a surprised, having feared the worst outcome since today already had followed a certain chaotic discourse, but ecstatic look as all there is left to be heard is the sound of approaching ambulance sirens.

“This feels incredible,” she speaks quietly in an attempt to not disrupt her son’s newfound state of peace, checking on him once more to make sure he’s not being squished by her chin, and although this time there’s fabric creating a barrier between her palms and his skin, she allows her fingers to fall into a sweeping motion across the tiny frame.

“It looks incredible,” Jake whispers back not believing his own eyes because the scene currently playing out in front of him sure can’t be real. It’s too good, something he years ago wouldn’t even dare to dream of, and although he doesn’t want to be that person, he wants to live in the present, Jake can’t fight the urge to grab his phone and snap a picture, just one that he can make his lock screen picture the second he has a minute to do so. For now he figures it’s enough and puts his phone back into his pocket allowing him to lean in and join his wife in caressing their son.

“Always told you you look crazy good in hoodies,” he smirks knowingly thinking of all the times he’s told her this only to be met by disagreement and dismissive comments before pecking her temple tasting small beads of sweat, salt, on his lips.

“Even now covered in placenta?” her exhausted eyes manage to throw him a teasing look ahead of redirecting to admiring Mac’s beautiful, finally peaceful being. Jake’s eyes trail behind, staying on her with the most loving look when he utters, “especially now covered in placenta,” before following her lead and looking at Mac.

The sirens from before have faded, disappeared, letting the new parents know that the ambulance must’ve reached the precinct. Despite this fact, they forget and enjoy the quiet before the storm, their first peaceful moment as a family.

All in all Mac seems pleased with his new favorite spot on his mom’s chest. Even as she holds him a bit tighter, securing him to her chest when she’s wheeled out of the integration room by a newly arrived EMT, Jake right beside her to make sure they’re alright every step of the way, Mac doesn’t budge; even in the ambulance when one of her hands leaves his back to hold Jake’s while the sirens make an encore, Mac stays quiet.

This might not be his mother’s womb but he knows he’s home.

84 notes · View notes

wincore · 5 years

Text

talk | kim dongyoung

pairing: prince!doyoung x princess!reader

words: 8k

prompt: anonymous sent: For the Valentines day request may I request one w nct Doyoung? (also if you can, an au where he's a prince and reader's a princess?)

genre: royalty!au, arranged marriage!au, fluff, hurt/comfort

warning(s): a tad suggestive?

gif credit

You’re not exactly someone to bow your head and agree to a command. You weren’t raised with a lot of freedom, but you sought it anyway, and the mere taste of it never let you live the way you should be.

Princesses aren’t supposed to be like you—they’re supposed to be prim and proper, smell like roses and all things rich and wonderful, they’re supposed to smile and laugh with the princes, hold their head up with dignity but bow when they’re ordered to. They’re not supposed to sneak out at midnight to stargaze, or get their knees scraped climbing trees, they’re not supposed to scowl or make ugly faces at any advances from the opposite gender, and they certainly aren’t supposed to keep disappearing, especially during important dinners.

The news had your insides crumbling when you heard it, when your mother notified you with a look of disdain, scolding you for being absent from the palace almost all the time. Her words only seem to reproach your actions, conveniently missing the point that maybe, just maybe you aren’t at fault at times. To be robbed of freedom, to be married to a man you’ve hardly glanced at, to be treated as if you aren’t a person at all—it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth at best.

You’re often told you have a lot of independence. It doesn’t make any sense to you, just how anyone could have the audacity to tell you that. They’re not the ones caged by societal rules, rules that require the binding of your soul and the full capabilities of your body. You can’t count the number of times you’ve physically restricted yourself from screaming, or just punching someone in the face (you wish you knew how to without damaging your knuckles, but you’ve been denied that lesson several times). You’re not purely hot-headed, or impulsive, but you’re allowed to at least have these thoughts, right? Or are you supposed to keep a check on your thoughts, too?

When you see Kim Dongyoung in his navy blue suit, the golden twigs and leaves etched across the shoulders and the sleeves, you hear your mother sigh beside you. You sigh too, but for a different reason altogether. The princesses across the entire continent would love to take your place; you know your friends would, after they gasped and laughed in joy, congratulating you after you told them, missing the point like everyone else. But they make some sense, of course. He’s handsome, ethereally so, and he’s rich. Moreover, he’s known for his failproof war strategies that men of ordinary intelligence don’t usually come up with. But that’s all you know of him. You don’t know if he has any passions, or if he��s a puppet like you and other people in your position. You don’t know if he’s kind to the poor, or if he likes walks through gardens. You don’t know if he likes to read, or if he has a favourite smell, favourite food, favourite colour. All you know is an image other people have painted of him, and you’re meant to spend your life with this hollow shell of a man you don’t know, who you now won’t let yourself know, purely out of spite.

You sit at the wooden bench in the royal garden, awkwardly playing with your hands. You’re left with Doyoung, as he prefers to be called, and you’re meant to talk to him. It’s a freedom your families have given to you, to get to know each other before your lives are intertwined forever. Sunlight streams in, and the browns of his eyes vaguely remind you of the woods on a spring afternoon.

“You probably hate this as much as I do, ” he says, cutting the thick silence, no sign of humour in his tone. In fact, his lips are pursed into a grim expression quite possibly reflecting yours.

“Probably more,” you grumble. As a lady, you’ve been taught to never use that tone. But as you, you can’t care less, now that you know he feels the same.

Doyoung scoffs. “More?”

He turns to look at you, the expression on his face more begrudging than anything. His shoulders are tense, or maybe he’s been taught to sit with them straight. Either way, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying his time with you.

“What?” you laugh. “You want to turn this into a competition to see who hates it more?”

You think Doyoung might have cracked a smile from the way his lips twitch, but he maintains his mildly annoyed expression, refusing to continue the conversation. The seconds drip slowly, and every time you hear a rustling from behind the entrance pillars, Doyoung reluctantly inches closer or you start giggling as though he’d said a really funny joke. The dishonest atmosphere of friendliness you delicately put up with your words and actions might as well have brought you closer—after all, you’re on the same boat, doing the same thing—but at the end of it, the prince of the north leaves with an empty smile, and you do the same.

You lie to your mother about how wonderful a man your fiancé is, and how you’re glad she’s chosen such a fitting suitor for you. You feel a little sick uttering the words but you don’t show any signs of discomfort, as your mother’s face brightens. You don’t lie very often, but the nervous crack in your mother’s voice and her shaking eyes tell you that you should be a good daughter for once.

When you enter your bedroom, you think you’ll cry. You’ve never been very fond of this room, always comparing them to a prison but now that you’re aware you might not see it again, you feel some sort of indescribable regret in your chest. Were the walls always this shade of green? Weren’t they blue once? Is your new bedroom going to have the same shade? Will you even be able to sleep there? There are so many questions you have, and none of them have a hint of optimism in their essence. It’s just a spiral of terrifying thoughts only someone who’s been drowning can understand, someone who’s been stolen from, someone with too much on their mind.

You meet Doyoung once more, three weeks before your scheduled wedding and you end up arguing, much to the horror of your mother. It wasn’t necessarily your fault, but when is an argument ever the fault of only one? Doyoung and his sharp words leave you annoyed and you shoot back with words equally prickling, and the entire situation turns messier than ever. You don’t even remember what it was that set you off; maybe Doyoung was picking a fight on purpose as a last attempt to refuse this marriage. Either way, it ticked you off and you’re more unwilling than ever to partake in the sacred bonds of marriage with this man, this entitled prince, this smartass who thinks he knows everything.

In a way, you’re glad your differences come into light so early—maybe your parents will call it off, maybe they’ll realize it’s not wise to marry you off to a foreign land. But of course, when the entire country is at stake, what does the life of a little princess matter? No, the marriage is still to take place in three weeks, and it needs to be for the sake of peace between nations, even if it is at the price of yours.

It’s strange to be the centre of attention at a wedding. You would have almost forgotten it’s your own were it not for the several congratulatory messages you keep receiving, and Doyoung’s arm placed gingerly on your waist. His tight-lipped smile at the guests, the one you know is not real, unnerves you because you display the exact same one. The irony is high, as the day celebrating love and joy is taking away yours completely.

The atmosphere is meant to be bright and cheerful, with the gold chandeliers and painted glass that impresses everyone entering the hall. The musicians play a soft, but festive melody and you would doze off if it weren’t for Doyoung’s tight grip over your hand. You glare at him every time his hold gets too strong, or after he makes someone you hardly care about introduce themselves to you. So you’re more comfortable in your new home. How laughable. Maybe he likes the way your temper flares red and shows up across your cheeks. Hopefully you’ll be able to ignore it with time, his meaningless jabs. You cringe when the thought flashes through your mind, how you’ve already started planning your days after, how you’ll spend it with the man beside you. It brings you dread and you try to ignore it best as you can, for at least this day.

Doyoung leads you to the middle of the hall, one hand on the small of your back and the other intertwined with yours. Having to dance under the prying eyes of an audience adds to the painted blush of your cheeks, and the only way you can calm is by looking at Doyoung’s face. You almost step on his foot once or twice, but you’re glad no one notices the prince’s mild winces. You think Doyoung is probably going to scold you afterwards, and you let yourself frown a little. You aren’t a child, but well, this isn’t exactly what you had prepared for; dancing has never been your area of expertise, especially with a partner, and you find yourself counting the seconds till this is over.

“Why are we doing this?” you whisper to Doyoung.

“It’s called a waltz,” he replies, nonchalantly.

“I know that,” you glare at him. Seriously, you can’t be that bad. But you’re relieved when it’s over.

The sunlight streams in and forms perfect patterns on Doyoung’s face, the pretty curve of his lips or the sharp bridge of his nose highlighted for you, and all others to see. Some glare at you or sigh as if wishing they were in your place. You could almost laugh. You wish you were in theirs. It’s no doubt Doyoung looks better than most princes, but the resulting grudge of being enforced to do something blinds you to it. You’d never admit it at this point—after all, will it give you your freedom, your happiness? So you shut your mouth and smile every time a lady passes by to compliment him, or tell the two of you how sweet a pair you make.

You cry to sleep your first night after getting married, sleeping as far as possible from the man you’re bound to. You think Doyoung might have heard your whimpers, but you don’t care. If you’re going to be miserable either way, what’s the point in hiding it? The pillows wet with your tears and the cold prickles your cheek, and you flip it over for a warmer, dryer part to rest on. This exchange goes on till you tire of crying, till your eyes run out of tears. You don’t think you’ve cried this much in quite a while, but the feeling doesn’t reduce with time. Tiredness might just be the only thing to lull you to sleep.

Doyoung had probably fallen asleep far before you realize; you don’t feel him shift or move and the only sound coming from him are soft, steady breaths. You fall asleep to Doyoung’s breathing, the only thing to ease the grasping feeling in your chest.

You might have felt a ghost of a touch across your cheek in the morning, but you refuse to believe it was Doyoung’s or any attempt at comforting you on his part.

It’s freezing in the mornings and at night—curse the Winter Palace to be perched atop a hill; the clouds occasionally kiss the palace towers, its icy breath shrouding the area. Doyoung tells you it’s one of the warmer regions of the north, and you’d find the harbour further south. The prince of the north knows how to handle cold, and you’ll have to learn too. In fact, you have a lot to learn. You know the kingdom ends at the ice wastelands at the north and the harbour at the south, but you hardly remember the rest of its geography despite your old tutor’s best efforts. So even if you were to try sneaking away to be with yourself, somewhere far for even a little while, you wouldn’t know where to go. You’re too embarrassed to ask Doyoung, and he doesn’t seem like he’d be willing to answer you without some snide remark.

Homesickness comes in waves, and leaves you a little nauseous, a little in despair. It shows on your features, the circles under your eyes, your parched lips, the hollowness in your eyes, or the slowing of your pace. Sometimes you take aimless walks in the evening, sometimes you struggle to breathe at night. The glances from Doyoung don’t scream worry to you, but they aren’t completely at peace either. Perhaps he feels sorry for you. Whatever it is, you don’t need his pity—you’re not a child nor a slave, and you’d rather he look at you as an equal, capable of the same things he is. It is perhaps your work that keeps you sane during these terrible bouts of homesickness—the planning for the trade between kingdoms, the right policy to adopt for the people, how to enhance the economy. You have a say in all of these, and you’d claim to be even better than Doyoung if you hadn’t seen him at work, his thinking sharp and detailed.

If there’s anything you love about the Winter Palace, it’s the view from your room. You can see the far ocean between the two rising pieces of land, the small hills always reminding you of the flower fields in your kingdom. The hills are coated in various hues, and it’s a marvellous sight during different times of day, with the changing moods of the sun. Doyoung occasionally stands beside you to admire the sunsets, but you barely exchange any words, before any one of you goes inside. Sometimes he looks as though he wants to say something, but the silence stays, only broken by the call of the birds or a particularly strong breeze.

The Winter Palace, ironically, faces the mildest of the northern winter. The ones further north aren’t as lucky as you, to survive winter with just a few thick coats and warm boots, and you’re almost glad the capital is here. It could have been closer to the harbour, in your opinion, but that made it vulnerable to spies and attacks from foreign countries. You still hate the stupid weather.

Doyoung might as well represent the climate with the cold words that come out of his mouth. He doesn’t like to appear soft or sweet or helpless in any way, and it irks you. He speaks too bold, too loud even, and he likes making his disapproval obvious. You’ve had arguments with him before on how one should behave in a public setting, so you let it go occasionally but sometimes it just blows out of proportion, how he can get away with whatever he wants. You know it’s not completely true, but the thoughts cross your mind anyway.

As the days leap forward, it seems as though Doyoung and you have made a silent pact to stay at least half a metre away from each other. His touch would be too foreign, and a kiss even more alien, even if it is to prove your sham of a marriage as true. The last time you felt the fleeting touch of his fingers was perhaps at the wedding. You hear rumours now; the people don’t believe in your ‘love’, or the treaty, and if it progresses into further unease between the nations, you’re done for. After several arguments, you adopt a policy with Doyoung of at least linking arms in your monthly strolls through the city.

The war might have died, but there’s still a long time to go before the people accept each other. Doyoung and you still struggle to deal with the aftermath of your grandparents’ actions, and the progress occasionally gets delayed. But Doyoung and you were trained better than this, and you might even come to pride yourself on what you’ve achieved so far. Doyoung still holds his frown during council meetings, but you’ve seen at least a ghost of a smile across his features at your unorderly remarks.

“I don’t understand why the princess must be present during these meetings,” the head of the treasury had once commented.

“It’s Queen for you,” you had retorted, “and if the presence of a woman makes you so uncomfortable, I think you’re underqualified to be in this position.”

Some had snickered at the treasury head’s red face, some had solemnly agreed with you. But Doyoung maintained that neutral expression of his, urging the council to move with matters more pressing, and you still think you had imagined the corners of lips curving upwards. It doesn’t make sense to you how that thought actually gives you a strange flickering hope. The thought of making him smile makes you strangely excited, and a little happy even.

“You don’t like them?” you ask Doyoung, nervously glancing at the palace guard dogs.

“What? They’re alright,” he says, looking the other way.

“You’re scared of dogs?” you ask, amused.

“No,” he presses, his eyebrows knit together. “I’m not afraid of dogs.”

“Whatever you say,” you smile, and make your way towards the dogs, one hand raised to let them know you’re no enemy.

The dogs love you, and the whole palace knows it by now. They sprint across the garden and into your arms, and you’re almost knocked over by the force they arrive with. You scratch the back of their ears and brush your fingers through their fur. Doyoung looks at you, confused but approaches carefully.

“You know they’re trained to kill, right?” he tells you.

“And we’re trained to be fake, but that doesn’t sound too fun, does it?” you reply, not taking your eyes off the dogs.

Doyoung crouches beside you, still beware of the dogs and looks at them. Maybe you’re imagining things again but Kim Dongyoung actually smiles, his gums showing and a little laugh escapes his mouth. It sounds wonderful to you, and you let your smile grow into a wider one.

“That one has funny ears,” he comments.

“Well that one actually chewed off a man’s arm last week,” you inform.

“Oh,” Doyoung retreats his hand that was about to pet the dog.

The two of you laugh and the dogs join in with their little howls, and it’s the first time you feel as if the world isn’t against you.

Months pass by and it is enough to discern rumour from truth for the man you call your husband, the first being his cold-bloodedness. Even you might have thought that of him at the very beginning, but heartless? Doyoung is anything but heartless—you’ve seen the way he treats his subordinates, the council members, his people, even the way he offers a sliver of kindness to prisoners who do not deserve it. He might have been cold towards you but it’s only the ice that forms naturally in a forced relationship. He talks a lot to his subordinates—he talks a lot in fact, but not to you. Well, he does but it’s not enough. He usually initiates small talk in an attempt to make you feel comfortable; you know it’s only for your sake and you are grateful, but it doesn’t feel enough, doesn’t feel whole. Do you expect more from him simply because he’s your husband? You probably don’t deserve it when you haven’t shown him kindness of the same.

Doyoung’s habits worm their way into your subconscious near the end of a year, and you don’t feel any change adjusting yourself to him. It’s a thing you never thought you’d be able to do—to leave the comforts of home and find a new one in a man you barely knew. But now you recognize him through the tone of his voice, the twitch of his lips and the light in his eyes. He hates walking all the way to the courtroom every day, and he especially hates running or any other form of physical exertion. (“Because sweating is disgusting.”) He prefers studying in the library to fencing out in the fields, yet he is still an above average combatant. He can never handle spicy food and it had taken quite a while to cure his hiccups after trying the gifts from the southern prince. Doyoung likes his sleep, and he prefers finishing work early to go back to your bedroom and rest. At least there’s one thing you have in common, and it’s your love for sleep.

Doyoung can’t sleep without a pillow. The first night you’d wedged a pillow between the two of you and he’d narrowed his eyes at you for taking his pillow. The discomfort had only lasted a while before he’d brought in an armful of pillows to place all of them around him. Every day since, you sleep in a castle of pillows, Doyoung’s touch never within your reach. It’s the way you’ve both managed to build your own walls that makes you realize that maybe you should’ve walked out when you had the chance. That maybe you could have found a life elsewhere, somewhere in the midst of freedom and not trapped within your own walls. Studying Doyoung is a thing that tells you how he acts or what he’s about to do, but there’s only so much you can understand when you don’t even know what he’s thinking.

The second winter brings about illness and you are not spared. It’s the first time you see Doyoung worried and a little panicked maybe, but you shake off the idea that it’s because he has any feelings whatsoever for you. If you died, he’d probably have to take a new wife and it’s another hassle all over again. The thought makes you uneasy; just when you’re getting used to the place, you might have to leave again, even if the leave holds freedom.

“Do you always have to move your arms in your sleep?” Doyoung asks, irritably. “You almost toppled over your breakfast.

“Ugh,” you grunt, flipping over to turn your back to him.

“Are you not going to eat?”

“Stop nagging me,” you say. You forgot formalities somewhere in the middle of summer.

“I am not nagging you,” he complains, “You sleep too much.”

“Are you really complaining about someone who’s dying?” you snort.

“You’re not dying,” he replies quietly.

You maintain silence for a few moments, and you think he’s walked out, even if you didn’t hear footsteps. You turn to find warm eyes staring at your form under the blankets, and it’s the first time you see the ice melting.

“Why are you here anyway?” you cough out.

“I just thought I’d stay with my wife,” he mumbles. You hear him clearly, but you don’t know why the blood rushes to your cheeks, for you’re sure he’s referring to what you’d look like to the palace workers and the people. You’re glad he sees the red in your cheeks as sickness, and you hug the blankets closer.

“Are you cold?” he asks, standing up.

“No!” you rush, “don’t come any closer- you’ll get sick!”

“Of course not. I’m not stupid like you.”

“That’s no way to talk to the queen,” you grumble.

“You don’t exactly speak the way you’re supposed to speak to the king either.”

“Touché.”

Doyoung’s gestures grow increasingly warm, and perhaps they had always been warm but you were too busy looking for the cold. Yet you still refuse to give in—it’s a dangerous thing to be the one with feelings in a doomed relationship. Doyoung takes care of you almost better than the nurses; he mostly stays by your side, and makes sure your recovery is the priority. He has your prescription memorized, and he’s faster at providing you with your medicine than your caretakers. Doyoung prefers you stick to the herbal products, and although the taste makes you gag, you have it anyway for fear of the reappearance of Doyoung’s rants. He nags you to no end anyway—apparently anything you do is too dangerous to him. You once called him mother as a result and his annoyed face was funnier than anything that comes out of his mouth (“I’m offended you would think that.” “You’re not as funny as you think you are. No one in the council thinks you’re funny.” “They have no sense of humour, and neither do you, it seems.”). He laughs and jokes with you as a friend and it doesn’t help the warmth blooming in your chest. Marriages like yours aren’t meant to carry love.

“Read to me,” you tell Doyoung, when you watch him trace the edge of the papers of the book he’s reading. The candlelight barely allows you to see his face, but he keeps it posted on a stand beside him to read.

“You’d find it boring,” he says, not moving.

“There you go with assuming again,” you click your tongue.

“Fine,” he says, “It’s about kings and queens.”

“You’re right. It is boring.”

You hear Doyoung’s exasperated sigh and smile to yourself. Why do you love to get on his nerves so much? It doesn’t really matter though; you’d just like to relish in the moment.

“I can tell you a story though,” Doyoung says, cutting the silence. There’s a strange uncertainty in his voice and your ears perk up faster than usual. “It’s a story the villagers like to tell their children—about the time the god of mischief got into trouble for his pranks.”

It’s the first time you realize that you really like Doyoung’s voice. He can sing too as you’ve heard him do in the evenings when he thinks no one is around. His voice, as warm as honey, gives you a taste of hot chocolate on your tongue, or the essence of sunset and the peace of sleep. It’s like the feeling of air filling your lungs and you’re glad you have a reason to breathe. Doyoung’s voice is charming and pacifying at the same time, and strangely home, and you rest easier knowing he’s with you.

You think you should owe your life to Doyoung. It’s quite definitely because of him that Death withdrew his hands from around you, and even in the worst of nights, it was Doyoung that really brought you back. You return from sickness a little kinder to your husband, if not entirely. You speak easier to him, without overflowing jabs at each other and it’s honestly refreshing to be husband and wife for once. Well, not exactly. It’s refreshing to not treat each other as enemies for once, to be friends perhaps.

Doyoung still won’t touch you though, even a gentle caress or a pat on the back, and it’s not like you expect him to. It’s still too foreign, too strange but it gets frustrating at times when you feel your heart in your mouth. You try to shake it off, try to ignore it, bury it, anything, but the cursed feelings gnaw at your chest and soul. Maybe you’ve grown too used to his worried glances, or the care in his voice. Did you miss being taken care of, being a little pampered? Or perhaps, despite your best judgement, had you fallen for the prince of the north? Sometimes you wish Doyoung hadn’t been so kind to you that month.

“Are you not going to bed?” Doyoung asks you, dressed in your night gown, staring ruefully from the balcony. He’s just arrived from the negotiations with the neighbouring kingdom, as you can tell from his full suit and the glimmering crown atop his head that looks like a structure sculpted out of crystals of ice, a thing only the finest of sculptors could do. He stares at you with round eyes, like it’s really you he finds special, and not as if you’re the one that probably ruined his life. You don’t blame him for yours turning out this way, but then again, who knows what he’s thinking?

“Do you want me on the bed with you that bad?” you joke, but Doyoung turns red. Maybe your innuendos really do get to him.

“I just thought you’d be sleeping,” he grumbles, “That’s what you usually do.”

He walks inside, and sets his crown atop the dresser. He’s never treated it as a prized possession, or like its worth; it’s just something he has, but doesn’t particularly want.

You hug yourself when a particularly strong breeze blows your way. Spring never seems to show its face in this kingdom, but you bear it just to look at the stars. They bring you peace, a certain harmony in their existence. Maybe it’s the fact that when you’re gone, when your kingdoms no longer exist, when there are kings and queens no longer, the stars will still be there. And whoever you are, no matter what life you’re having, you can still look at them, still wonder.

Doyoung appears to drape his coat around you, and it startles you, jumping at the sudden contact. Your movement startles Doyoung too as he raises his arms in defence.

“Sorry,” you apologize at the same time.

Doyoung is the first one to smile, and the flutters reappear in your chest.

“Guess the habits don’t go away,” he says, turning his head to look up at the sky.

You shrug and pull the coat closer as subtly as possible. It smells like rich perfume, roses and jasmines, but there’s also another scent, a scent that’s completely Doyoung. You would never admit how calming that smell is, or how you wish you had more of it.

“Do you have a favourite?” Doyoung asks. It’s surprising to see him ask questions again months after he’d given up trying to pry answers out of you.

“Not really,” you tell him. It’s true. You’ve never really thought about it, if you could pick a favourite star. They’re all lovely and bright in their own ways.

“Me neither,” he shrugs.

You stand there with him till the silence becomes unbearable and the air too cold. That night, there are less pillows between the two of you, and your cheeks heat up at the embarrassing thoughts that inevitably cross your mind, the touches that could be.

The few days of spring are celebrated with a ball, the grandest gathering of the entire north. The other northern princes partake in organizing, and the entire lands come to celebrate. It’s not the first time you’re visiting, but it is the first time you’re hosting. Last year, spring had decided to not show up, and the ball had been cancelled altogether, much to your dismay and Doyoung’s relief. (“It’s not very fun when you’re hosting it.” “Maybe you just don’t know how to host.”)

Now that you think about it, hosting is pretty difficult. Although the work has been divided among several managers, you and Doyoung have to oversee all of it, and you think you’ll break your back by the time spring is over. Everything needs to be perfect, from the music and performances to last minute details like the colour of the curtains in the ballroom, or the intensity of light coming from the chandeliers. The fireworks for the last day have to be perfectly timed, and the science staff’s new colours have to be tested. The security needs to be tightened around the entrance, and guards have to be posted at every watchtower. Royalty makes enemies, and it’s never too much to be sure.

The first celebrations take place on the hilltop, the one you can see from your bedroom, full of golden calendulas. There’s an open hall at the centre, and the first day must be celebrated there with a prayer to the gods. The southern gods are different, but everyone tags along nonetheless to watch the ice sculptures and water-dancers that are infamous across the entire land. The dancers appeal to the gods, while the musicians sing hymns and prayers in ancient tongue, in front of the intricately carved block of stone. It’s the ancestral stone of the royal family, and every major event, every inauguration takes place with a flurry of prayers to ancestors and gods. You wonder if Doyoung had to send his prayers too at some point, when he was crowned prince.

Doyoung now can’t care less about the holy rituals and prayers, but he has responsibility to maintain. He stands at the back of the crowd, not really paying attention, although people stop to stare at him occasionally. He wears his navy blue suit with the golden leaves again, with the sparkling diamond crown perched atop is head, and he looks uncomfortable at best. The problem is that he looks dashing, the handsome prince he’s rumoured to be, and the ladies staring at him make you more annoyed than you’d like to admit.

Before you can approach him, he’s pulled by the arm by his brother and they sneak into a room when no one’s looking. Curiosity hasn’t been your most rewarding quality, and you follow, feet nimble and fast.

“You’re okay with this?” Gongmyung whispers when he’s sure they’re out of earshot.

“What?”

“This? The marriage, and everything?”

“I think you’re over a year late,” Doyoung says drily.

“If you haven’t adjusted in over a year, that’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“Not what I meant. Are you really asking me how I feel about something I was forced to do?” Doyoung’s voice raises slightly. “And this long after it’s already happened? You were barely there at the wedding too!”

“Not everything you’re forced to do has to be bad,” Gongmyung says, “And I couldn’t have stopped it even if I were there.”

“Well, you’re wrong and everything is terrible. I never wanted this.”

You feel a pang of hurt in your chest. You thought he was warming up to you, when in reality, he’s probably been hating every second he’s with you. Hell, he probably blames you for the marriage like you blamed him in the beginning. You start walking away, careful as to not alert them, and Gongmyung’s chiding fades away as quick as possible.

Well, if Doyoung really doesn’t care, why should you? You take a seat in the middle of the audience, hopefully blended in and replay all your interactions with Doyoung, anger bubbling in your chest. Was he pretending to be nice for your sake? Does he think of you as some poor creature that needs pity? Or does he hate you so much that he wants to hurt you, take your heart and burn it?

A gentle tap on your shoulder snaps you out of it, and you’re met with the last person you want to see. You honestly thought your outfit was inconspicuous enough.

“Why are you here?” Doyoung asks. “You’re supposed to sit at the royal table.”

“I don’t want to,” you scowl.

Doyoung seems to be a little taken aback by your sour mood, but he retaliates nonetheless.

“You’re being childish!” he accuses. “What’s got you so upset?”

You.

“Is that what you think of me? A child?” you grumble.

“You’re certainly acting like one,” Doyoung says, his lips curled into a frown.

“I don’t care, I don’t even want to be here,” you say, getting up to leave.

Doyoung grabs your arm, and even through the silk gloves, his touch is as cold as ice.

“Let me go,” you says, your voice low, and Doyoung complies with a nervous gulp.

You don’t speak to him the rest of the day, and go to bed early just to avoid him.

Doyoung spends the next few days wondering what went wrong, why you’re either avoiding him or getting into more and more arguments with him. He hates it, the way he loses his temper with you, how you’re the one seeing this side of him that no one has seen with the exception of his brother. He hates this part of himself, and you’re the last person he wants to be seeing that.

The morning starts with yet another argument, and Doyoung sighs internally. Sometimes he wishes he could shut your pretty little mouth with a kiss, but the thought itself is weirdly embarrassing to Doyoung, and his face gets too hot when he thinks of it. Will he ever be able to tell you? That he’s fallen for you despite his best efforts, despite fate being against the two of you?

Why had he? Is it because he felt like a boy, not a prince, with you? Or is it because how easy it’s become to talk to you? Maybe the fact that you’re almost as good as him at pulling up strategies, and coming up with efficient design plans. Whatever it is, the blooming feeling in his chest cares for none of that, only seeking to be with you. This isn’t the kind of falling in love he thought he’d experience as a child—in fact, he didn’t even think he’d have time for it. The princes in the storybooks were hardly like him; they were strong and stupidly brave, extremely impulsive much to Doyoung’s distaste. He just assumed that’s the kind of men that women liked, and he directed his attention towards more pressing matters, like learning war strategies and how to rule. It’s not like he had a choice, but he can’t lie that he didn’t enjoy those classes.

“I don’t…I don’t feel good enough,” you say, and Doyoung snaps out of his thoughts.

He sighs. “You keep giving excuses. Tonight’s the main event, with the fireworks and all, you know?”

“I just don’t want to go,” you say, crossing your arms.

“You act like such a child sometimes,” Doyoung complains, at the end of his wits.

“You don’t even understand me,” you say, your voice low. “I have my reasons and you keep treating them like rubbish, like they don’t really matter.”

“Well, you’ve never told me them,” Doyoung says, rising to his full height. He loves the way you have to look up at him, your lips slightly parted, and oh, how he wishes you had met under different circumstances, had different feelings for each other, anything. Mostly, he wishes you would see him the way he sees you.

“You’re just picking fights on purpose,” Doyoung whispers, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Wouldn’t that make it easier?” you ask.

“Make what easier?”

“Us.”

Doyoung doesn’t respond—he still doesn’t understand, why are you looking at him so cold? Was he misunderstood, did he do something wrong? He hates the uncertainty of unspoken words, usually preferring to talk things out. But you definitely didn’t want to face him, so he let you go, the feeling in his chest weighing him down.

Doyoung admits that you look pretty in the royal dresses, but you look prettier in your nightgown gazing at the stars. Stars are too romanticized in his opinion, but they feel important when you look at them like that. The night is as majestic as it was planned to be and Doyoung sighs in relief when one by one all the events turn out to be a success. The only blemish on the perfect nights seems to be the fact that you are still ignoring Doyoung, darting from corner to corner, always out of his grasp. His frown deepens, watching you talk and laugh with almost everyone; your old friends are there too and he can’t help the jealousy sprouting in his chest. He doesn’t feel like the High Prince of the North, Kim Dongyoung, but more like a little boy, who’s losing his patience and maturity by the minute.

The last shred of Doyoung’s self-control vanishes when one of the southern princes wraps an arm around you. He strides over to your group, flashing the sweetest smile that sickens even him and excuses the two of you. He holds your hand tender but firm and pulls you out of the celebratory hall.

You know you’ve probably gone too far with your temper tantrums when Doyoung pulls you outside the hall. Yes, you’re being a little childish maybe, but at the end, you don’t want to be the one with a broken heart, forced to be with the one who broke it. If you told him, would he laugh at you? Or would he tell you he’s sorry? Would you be forced to live with the shame, the rejection, the strangling feelings? It’s better to distance yourself from the beginning, let the fights warm you with their fire if love won’t.

Doyoung’s grip on your hand is slightly uncomfortable—he’s wearing those cursed gloves again and not even the silk ones. You know he likes his hands at a comfortable temperature but it’s ridiculous how he never seems to part with them.

“Do-doyoung,” you say, pulling at his hand so he stops and turns to face you. He looks dishevelled, a slight anger in his eyes and lips pursed.

“My hand,” you say.

“Sorry,” he chokes out, retreating his hand. He looks as though he’s fighting several thoughts, deciding what to do. He bites the inside the inside of his cheek, and you smile at how he looks like a rabbit, like a mountain hare you’ve seen around here to be precise.

“What’s so funny?” Doyoung asks, furrowing his brows.

“You,” you laugh.

“Oh really now?” He raises an eyebrow. “Last time I remember, you said I’m not very funny.”

“Your face is funny.”

Doyoung scowls, but seems to regain composure.

“Are you going to tell me now?” he asks, his expression back to determined. “What did I do?”

“What did you do? You did nothing.” Exactly. You did nothing.

“Do you blame me?” he asks, stepping closer. “For the marriage?”

“Not any more than you blame me,” you tell him.

There’s a long silence before Doyoung responds, his voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t blame you.”

“Then I don’t blame you,” you say, truthfully. You never have blamed him.

Doyoung runs his fingers through his hair, a sudden but small smile gracing his lips. He steps closer once again, and clears his throat as if he’s about to say something. He looks a little nervous, like what he’s about to say carries weight, like it’s a secret others can’t know. He glances down at your lips and your heart catches in your throat. Despite everything, you still find your voice, still gather enough wits to joke.

“What? You want to kiss me? Hm?” you tease, the sarcasm dripping. Your voice goes down a notch as you grin. “Place your mouth over mine in the dark corridors where no one is looking?”

“Don’t provoke me,” he responds, the vein in his neck appearing to aid the strain in his voice. The sudden seriousness surprises you, and you find yourself face to face with a rather pissed off Doyoung. It’s never nice when his voice drops lower than usual.

“It’s just a stupid show to you, isn’t it?” he starts, the anger obvious in his voice. “You’re okay with just pretending- it doesn’t really matter to you, right?”

You don’t say anything and he continues, “Do you even know how hard it is? To be the one in love in a one-sided relationship? Do you even care?”

You stare at him in stunned silence. “It’s awful, you know? I tried, I tried my best, but do you know how hard it is to not touch you? To not hold you, to just throw my feelings away? Of course not. You don’t know how scary it is- I feel like I’ll burn at your touch.”

“There you go with assuming again,” you grumble, before raising your voice to a proper volume. “You really think I don’t know the feeling? When all I’ve been wanting is for you to kiss me this entire goddamn party?”

Doyoung purses his lips. It’s not a regular sight, him being speechless. He unconsciously moves forward, and you press a hand against his burning cheeks.

“Doyoung,” you whisper, sudden boldness coursing through you, “Kiss me.”

Doyoung doesn’t waste a moment, cupping your face and leaning in. The feeling is exquisite, far more than anything you’ve tasted, or smelt, even if Doyoung bumped his nose against yours a little too hard at first. He takes his time kissing you, the repressed feelings pouring out as though this is his only chance at redeeming them. The pressure against your lips is the warmest thing you’ve felt in the northern kingdoms, and you smile against Doyoung’s lips. He pushes you against the wall for better support, and you find your arms moving to wrap around him, subjecting yourself to him and his touch as much as you can. He tastes sweet, like the wine he had tasted earlier and the kiss is slow, fulfilling and perfect.

“Please get rid of those stupid gloves,” you murmur against his lips.

Doyoung removes them wordlessly, and discards them into some corner, before pressing his thumb against your cheek. His hands are warmer than you remember, and you take them in yours to kiss his knuckles. If he wasn’t red enough already from the kiss, he turns redder and you feel your ego swell some more. You lean back in, and your lips press gently against his this time, and he hums in satisfaction. You kiss in the dark corridors where no one can see you, but it’s the kind of kiss that is supposed to be spoken of only between two.

“You’re very stupid,” Doyoung tells you in the morning, eyes still sleepy.

“I was expecting a ‘good morning, love of my life!’ but okay,” you glare at him. It’s the first time the pillows aren’t there between you, but Doyoung’s touch is as good and soft as any.

“You made me so worried the past few days,” he says, a frown making its way onto his face.

“You didn’t look very worried when your tongue was in my mouth.”

“Do you have to be this way?” Doyoung says, his face and ears a brilliant red.

“I was kidding but I couldn’t resist the idea of your blushy face,” you say, smugly.

“I don’t think that’s a word, and I swear I’ll get back at you one of these days,” he says, glaring.

You smile and place your fingers on Doyoung’s cheek. You’re glad to find them still warm from the sudden rush of blood. Doyoung smiles back, his lips stretching into his adorable gummy smile, and the mushy feeling comes back at the sight.

“I didn’t know it would turn out this way,” you say.

“Me neither,” he breathes out.

You move closer to Doyoung and rest your head against his chest. His heartbeat, the rise and fall of his chest, all of them give you a feeling you didn’t think you’d be able to feel after getting married, after handing over your freedom. The touch of a lover, kisses pressed against your mouth, they were all stories made to charm little princesses. And although you know they came at a cost, you wouldn’t take it back. You don’t regret it, not at all now. Doyoung gives you peace, a different kind of freedom altogether and you wouldn’t ever let that go.

Doyoung rubs his thumb in circles at the small of your back, humming a familiar tune. You cherish the moments now, for you never know what the future is hiding. You know you’ll be throwing a lot less tantrums from now on—Doyoung likes talking it out, and for once, you’ll admit it’s the better way to sort problems. It’s the way the little things mesh to bind your lives that makes you see clearly. You’re lucky—you really are, to have fallen in love with the man you were supposed to. But you’re blessed to have fallen in love with a man who fell in love with you, who you wouldn’t regret spending the end of your days with.

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commander-solko · 4 years

Text

A Place to Rest

F! Charr Commander, Gorrik

(Because Gorrik doesnt get nearly enough love. Also idk how to write autistic characters but I did my best to try to do Gorrik some justice since it's canon that he's somewhere on the spectrum. Lmk if there's anything I can do to improve.)

[from Gorrik's POV of the instance that sparked a friendship between him and the Commander. A little bit of fluffy cuteness, but more of a look into the bare bones beginning of their dynamic. These things take time.]

Sun's Refuge was a haven for Gorrik. A safe place from the brandstom, people, society, and more people. A place to rest away from curios or judging eyes, to work in the joys of peace and solitude. His makeshift lab was nothing like the one he had when in the hands of the Inquest, but he would make do as he always did. It wasn't too bad down there after all, if one didn't think about the lingering spiders and the tremors from an Elder Dragon's ire that shifted the dust. If he was the nostalgic sort, he'd have likened the feeling of being there as natural and ancient. It had been so long since he'd truly worked underground, as his ancestors did, that it managed to offset the annoyance of having to build a makeshift lab. The light illuminating his countertop flickers as he adjusts the cable box, shoving the rusty door closed to make way for a crate filled with precious scarab beetle that he carefully slid over to sit flush with the workspace. He pushed up his glasses and whined with the strain of hoisting Blish's box up and onto his table. Blish, his brother. Or what was left of him, anyways.

He shook his head with a grimace as thoughts of his brother, of a battered and bloody Commander returning from the mists with pieces of him sparking in her arms, came unbidden and seeped anger into his veins. It wasn't that he hated the Commander, per se, but sometimes he couldn't help the hellfire that would grip his heart and beckon him to spill venomous words. It made him want to spill curses and pray to Grenth that he'd take the Commander in place of Blish, that she would face the pain and suffering she inflicted on him by failing to save Blish. It wanted him to blame her and hate her, hurt her and worse. It filled him with an unholy rage, and planted a dark strain of thought wondering if he could change the beetles beneath his skin to have a taste for Charr.

But heavy emotions were never his strong suit, and neither was irrationality (he knew it was irrational, he did, but that still didn't stop it from coming), and he fought off the feeling almost as quick as it came. He couldn't blame the Commander for what happened, nor her hallow, blank stare she had fixed him when laying down the remnants of his brother. He'd heard tales of the heartless Commander who never shed a tear for a lost teammate. A cold Commander who could only mutter pretty words of empty substance in the face of people who'd lost their loved ones. But he'd known the look in her eyes, because it was the same one in his. He'd never understood things such as pity, and barely comprehend things such as empathy, and could not describe the bitterness that filled him when people would come to offer their condolences for Blish. He'd try to smile and nod, and thank them for their words, but every sympathy scraped his bones and every gratitude from his mouth curdled his tongue. Only that look, that hollow, mirrored reflection of himself that would meet his eyes from across the room would understand. It brought him comfort; a peace nothing else brought in the wake of the death of his entire world. The death of Blish. Her understanding, a simple yet profound word of loss that the tongue has no means of describing, was solace. A place to rest, and to forget.

He was never particularly close to the Commander, but he felt that she was the only person on earth who actually understood him. The first since Blish. But that doesn't mean that the understanding went both ways, no, Gorrik often found himself mystified by the Commander. People were like quantum physics; complex but comprehensible if given the correct formula and numbers. What they wanted, what their goals were, even their emotions were all predictable if Gorrik decided to discover them. Painfully easy to decipher. But the Commander was different. Blank, chili-red eyes that never changed. A voice as steady and grounded as the earth, a face notorious for its stony smoothness, and lips sealed tighter than an Inquest vault. And yet, in the moments where she caught his eyes, and memories of Blish resurfaced, it was as if she knew. And those hard, intimidating eyes with grey pupils would somehow soften, and that indescribable understanding would surface again. He thought he had a read on her; thought he knew the mechanics to her brain and the gears that kept her moving.

But as she stumbles into his lab from the refuge's entry, red painting the bright metal of her armor and a sickly sweet odor tainting the air around her, Gorrik becomes uncertain if he ever understood her at all.

"By the Eternal Alchemy, Commander! Just what are you thinking, walking in here like that?! You'll contaminate the lab!" He cries, shock crashing over him in waves when she unbuckled her Herald's Pauldron from her shoulder, letting the heavy metal crash onto the ground and drip blood onto the floor beside her footprints. She doesn't respond, just grunts as she tosses aside her backpack and trudges past him. Her body lands with a heavy thud as she slumps against the crumbling wall, long nails scratching the skin beneath her fur with the vigor she uses when ripping off her blindfold. Gorrik sighs, distress painting his face as he stares at the bloodstains now painting his lab.

"Sorry," the Commander murmurs in a voice so weary and tired that it sends alarm rushing through Gorrik the moment the sound gets past his ears. "I'll clean it up later."

Gorrik pauses, feeling the questions come up like algorithms in his head as he tries to discern how to react to this situation. Even slumped like this, the Commander doesn't seem vulnerable– she never does– but there's something about her attitude that doesn't make sense, rings all the illogical warning bells in his head, and drives him to say something though his tongue lays dead in his mouth. It feels like that moment they shared in the aftermath of Blish's death, but it induces a sort of panic he never felt before; not for anyone but Blish himself. What would Blish do? What would he say?

"... No, don't worry about it. This place is filthy anyways, and the red adds some character to this dreary place," he says, only pausing to mentally smack himself because blood isnt something people would consider as an acceptable interior decoration, but when he glances over his shoulder, surprise freezes his heart to see a grim but amused smirk tugging at the corners of the Commander's muzzle. It falls as briefly as it rose, and the Commander grunts a reply he can't hear before she closes her eyes. Exhaustion is something he's never seen on the Commander, never so much as this. His Commander is stalwart, ever strong, ever awake. His Commander doesn't rest nor does she have a desire to, or so he'd thought. First it was with Blish, and now with some unknown catalyst, he finds himself reevaluating his view of the Commander. It feels unbidden, unforeseeably intimate to glimpse her like this, and a sudden strong desire to hide her from others like this hits him like a tidal wave. He glances to and fro, searching for any prying eyes, but all refugees have long since retired to their barracks, and the lone guard has long abandoned his post in favor of a nap. Relief leaves him in the form of a sigh, and he rubs his eyes at the tiredness that hits him from all of these emotions crashing into him all at once and all too soon. He turns back to see the Commander lying on her stomach, brows drawn at the discomfort of her armor digging into her flesh as she lies on the floor, but her limbs tossed in resigned defeat to the call of sleep.

"Commander," he says with a heavy tone, "what are you doing here?" He asks her, plodding over to fold his arms and stare down at her with a quirked brow. It feels a bit strange to be staring down at someone who towers over him, and even stranger that the paranoid Commander would collapse in front of him in such an open place. He would expect it from someone more laid back or rude, but the Commander is neither and it sends his head spinning.

"Commander, you cannot sleep here." His voice becomes more demanding and insistent when she does not respond, choosing instead to grumble and adjust her head to rest on her forearm. He sighs and shakes his head, knowing when he's not going to get anywhere with his demands. He feels like he's been tossed back into the days when he and Blish first joined the Inquest, when Blish would come to him after the higher-ups would force him into a questionable experiment, or when he'd curl up against Blish when the other scientists would insult him for his peculiar personality.

"... bad day?" He asks, internally debating whether it was safe of suicidal to crash against the Commander, but the memory of Blish and the safety he feels when he sees her and remembers him encourages him to sit and lean against her, so he does. He eyes the way the Commander's eye peers open to stare at him when she feels his back press against her side, calculating and unreadable to him as though he were staring into the eyes of a predator as he second guesses his action. But the eye softens again in that way that causes all of the knots in his muscles to unwind, and a small hum rumbles against his spine from her chest, and somehow, he understands.

"I figured as much," he says, breaking the eye contact and letting his head slump back. He mutters an ow beneath his breath when his skull hits hard metal, and he wonders just how tired she must be to sleep in the thing. Staring up at the ceiling into nothing discomforts him quickly, so he raises his head to stare at his feet as he waves them side to side. The Commander's ears twitch as though they can hear the almost imperceptible scratching of his shoes against the ground, or perhaps she can hear the buzzing of the beetles beneath his skin. He feels watched and scrutinized despite her closed eyes, and the urge to speak in new and peculiar in his mouth.

"This is pretty weird for you, you know," he says, kicking his feet a little and watching as a stray beetle flies around the specks of blood dribbled on the floor. "I've never seen you sleep. Or relax. You know the soldiers have a running bet on you questioning whether you ever sleep at all?"

"Gorrik."

"I used to talk like this to Blish, you know, asking him if he was okay. Well I didn't ask if you were okay but that was the meaning along the lines of a bad day—"

"Gorrik."

"Point is– and I don't know why, mind you– but I'm worried about you, and why are you even here—"

The Commander groans and the sound rattled his bones against her rib cage and he yelps when her arm snaps out to grab him from her side, yanking him from his position. She shoved him beneath her neck, his back pressed against her chest, his shoulder fitting into the hollow junction between her neck and clavicle. He squirms, caught off guard and panicked at the realization that air is becoming a bit hard to obtain until he squirms enough for his head to pop out from the fluff of her mane. The back of his head rests against her arm as he breathes in a large amount of air, dizzied by the suddenness of her actions.

"I was looking for a place to rest," she says, the words rumbling against his shoulder. "And a place to sleep."

A thousand questions and statements rise in his mind, and he opens his mouth to speak them, but the words die in his throat at the slow rumble of sleep-heavy breaths rising and falling in her lungs. He whines when he realizes, after a bit of struggle, that there's no way he's going to be able to lift her head enough to wiggle out. So, he settles in, trying to ignore how pleasantly soft her fur is, or how the warmth she emanates reminds him of Blish as it keeps the underground's chill out of his bones. There were so many people she could go to, people she knew better than him, to go to for rest. Places she could go alone, as he knows she prefers solitude as he does, places safer than in his lab in the middle of Sun's Refuge. Places perhaps more appropriate to visit when covered in unidentifiable blood- and oh, gross, some got on his lab jacket- and so tired that someone as paranoid and secretive as her could go that would not draw prying eyes come daylight. But still, she came to him. Gorrik, who she hardly knew and who hardly knew her. But perhaps that's not really the case.

A place to rest, she calls it, being here with him. Perhaps she doesn't mean it in one of those deep, peculiar ways that Blish was off to speak in, but perhaps it's something simple. Or maybe, just maybe, it is a bit of both. And maybe, just maybe, it is the way he feels now, tucked beneath her broad shoulders, safe and hidden from the world. Maybe it's in how she needs no words to speak, and he needn't waste time nor energy to understand because he simply does. Perhaps Blish would have a complicated or romanticized word for it, or perhaps he would have considered it something bizarre. But whatever it is, he feels it too, and no words can describe what he's come to feel suddenly caught by her like this. Safe, warm, comfortable. Something he felt with Blish, but softer, gentler, more powerful. A small sigh escapes him as the rising and falling of the Commander's chest lulls him to sleep, and darkness makes his eyelids grow heavy. He will have time to discover what this is, what it will become, and what it means. But for now, between he and the Commander, they will simply have to call their company a place to rest.

#guild wars 2 #gw2 #charr #gorrik

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artclusters · 4 years

Text

just a trans essay i wrote in a dark time of my life i guess.

You are an Arab trans man in your twenties. You meet a young trans boy. He is pre-puberty. He still has relative freedom to express himself in terms of clothing and behavior, chalked up as “child’s phase”, and is confused yet oddly optimistic (or in denial) about the future. He keeps his feelings a secret, yet he has not yet learned to hate himself. He has not yet been battered by reality. Like you at his age, he does not have a map or an image for people like him in the near or far future. He is asking, waiting for you to help him, to tell him anything. He dreads becoming like his older sister, though he does not fully understand what that makes him. What should he do from here onward? When can he begin to live as himself? When can he feel safe?

You would have to tell him that there is no healthcare for youth like him here – not now, not later, not ever. You will not be able to take puberty blockers, or even meet someone who listens to you and understand. You will have to endure puberty for years, watch your body helplessly change day by day to something you don’t recognize. Into something that will make you utterly miserable. Everybody around you will change as well, treating you in relation to what you have and don’t have, what is visible and what is not. You will desperately try to regain a sense of control over your body. You might starve yourself in a stupid attempt to reduce the form of your curves, to curb their invasion. You might cut yourself, as a way to punish your body for not listening to your needs. Sometimes, you will be impressed by the terrible ways in which you can damage yourself. Your old clothes will stop fitting, and instead all you can see is a bulging, foreign chest and protruding hips. You will stretch them and tear them out in frustration. You will be embarrassed even by your own shadow. This is all but a prelude to the bleeding, the one that will brand you the most feminine of women, a symbol of no going back. Everybody will celebrate your dreaded fertility and supposed officiation into womanhood, while you think of wanting to die. You will have to learn to accommodate a bodily function that is all but useless to you. You will have to announce it to your family every month to explain why you’re not praying (with a suffocating izdal no less) or fasting or holding a Quran, because you are declared impure by their God. Maybe you will be forced to wear a hijab, to further keep you confined in your assigned gender boundary and emphasize the so-called inherent sexuality and sinfulness of bodies labelled as “female”, or maybe you will be one of the lucky ones who maintains little autonomy over your own appearance. Your growth will accelerate. You will be reprimanded for hunching your back, for not walking up straight, a futile attempt from you to conceal your hideous chest. You will put off wearing a bra, as if wearing one would be an admission and resignation of your chest’s existence and permanence. Your skin feels like sandpaper, only you can't peel it off. Your movements are robotic, running on the wrong batteries.Your parents will buy you feminine deodorant and underwear and you will hate them, yet you can’t request alternatives and you don’t have your own money yet. You will wear several layers of clothing in 40 degrees heat and refuse anything that shows even a hint of your bodily form. Your parents call you a picky nuisance for your clothing choices, and for any discomfort or gender-crossing behavior that you dare exhibit. Your parents won’t love you anymore. Your family won't love you anymore.

You will suddenly lose the ability to create or maintain friendships and relationships. You will not only be estranged yourself, but from everyone else as well. You will experience an astounding loss of intimacy; the word “connection” will no longer make sense to you – just an absurd notion. Dissonance and disconnection is where you will reside. You are in hell. You love girls, but you also hate them. They remind you too much of yourself. You don't want to be reminded. You don't want to exist. Boys your age are changing, changing into something beautiful, something beyond your reach. You love boys, but you also hate them. Being around them is enough to burn you. You don’t understand why you’re so in love with them, where to draw the line between consuming envy and invalidating attraction. Thin mustaches, cracking voices, excessive acne, awkward boners, terrible smells, visible veins, shoulders broadening, arms thickening, faces sharpening, apples forming, hair sprouting, patchy beards, low pitches, growing stronger, taller, leaner, flatter – you want it all. You want it all. You dream of it every day – it doesn’t matter if you’re awake or asleep. It is all you think about. You dream of running away. You dream of starting over. You dream of dying. Your grades drop. You don't play sports. You don't run. You don't laugh. You don't talk. You bargain with God. You plead with God. You beg to God. You cry to God. You still believe in him, until you can’t.

You will hear yourself being called a cursed imitator, a perverse deviant, a sign of judgement day, a harbinger of doom, a freak, too many things to name them all – even from people who claim to love and care about you. You are but a lonely child in the center of a relentless behemoth, a behemoth so daunting you can’t discern its beginning, middle or end, armored by immovable notions of what is true that poison every aspect of your life. Thus, you will come to understand it as a fact of life, drilled into the very essence of your being - hating yourself will be the only thing that you know, the only thing that you feel. You are unable to find the freeing word – that one word for who you are - underneath all this hate. You feel like a metal detector surrounded by nothing but plastic. You try to look. You are stumbling. Maybe you find it, or you find something pointing to it - but you lose it, no, you forsake it. You feel ashamed. You try to bury it, choke it, kill it - anything! You pretend you didn’t see. You pretend that nothing clicked. You stop looking…you don’t stop looking.

Perhaps the worst of all, is that through all of this, you will have to find the strength to keep going, and to stay sane. It is a demand that is too big to ask, I know. If you somehow manage not to be crushed under this ceaseless agony, that constant weight plaguing you with an indescribable heaviness, you will still have to spend the rest of your life unlearning and re-educating yourself and those around you, in a tremendous effort of healing, only to have the scabs on your wounds inevitably torn apart every day of your life.

In a kind world, you would not have to endure all of this- maybe even any of this. I am sorry. I wish I can tell you that it will get better, but I do not know. Even if it does get better, at what cost? The formative years of your youth (maybe even your adulthood) will be long gone, drenched in a relentless blur of depression, violence, and unfulfilled desires. Pathetic desires which mostly consisted of simply being able to wear a t-shirt - without feeling anything. Maybe you will learn to make peace with that, maybe it will always haunt you; sometimes you will feel so sorry for yourself it’s hard to breathe...just a gasping husk formed of everlasting regrets and longings and sorrow. You don't even know if you will ever be fit for a genuine human relationship anymore. It has taken too much out of you; you don't know if you lost more that you've gained, maybe you'll never know. How much of who you are now - who you were - is even here? Did anything matter? Does anything matter?

I can offer you a kindling of hope, perhaps you will be able to meet people like yourself, within our community, that share your despair and help keep you afloat amidst a society that will not spare you. People with whom you can experience fleeting, yet powerful moments of joy, respite and understanding, until you ultimately must leave this space and continue to take part in your facade over, and over, and over again. Well…until you don’t.

#mygd

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 6 years

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Life Story 113

Following that strange night with Josh was a series of other strange nights, where we would talk quietly to one another and stare down each other's eyes until the room became dim and strange. It didn't feel like there was anything else that existed besides us in that room on those dark lonely nights. I would spend long hours washing dishes in the dish pit at Zany's with the backdrop of a busy restaurant and then the eventual dying down which lead to men talking about their sex lives and their favorite video games (generally a sad set of affairs). I felt like I was living two lives a lot of times, one life was kind of simple and individualistic and lonely. I was friendly with everyone but had no real friends. I would joke around with the kitchen men, sometimes have moments of sadness and longing that I no longer felt connected with my sister, brother or Sarah – but then there was always Josh who was my second life, who would generally pick me up after work – and he was always there for me and open with me – even when he wasn't all that good about letting me be open. He didn't seem capable of resenting me the way the others had – there was this sense that if I did something terrible Josh would understand me and know why. He might even have predicted my doing it. There was a strange and unique comfort in that.

Of course I knew he would destroy me. I had started to realize this as the weeks drew on into months. I would look myself in the mirror and I could see it even if nobody else could. I could feel something in me being destabilized by him, but it was a price I thought was worth paying for this new life. I had come so far in life to get to be the person I was standing in front of my mirror. I was too invested to back out now. If I tried to draw away from Josh now, I would only be more mangled than I was now, and quite likely I wouldn't be able to escape anyway. It was better for me that I just let go. The relationship I had felt real. It felt realer than anything else I had ever done or felt up to that point.

On the outset to most people, I probably didn't seem like I had a big life – and indeed I did not. Nobody knew how deprived I had been as a teenager, or how my father had prevented me from having a life till I was twenty-two, or how hard I had to work to stay remotely thin, or to just be able to talk to people. It was a hard balance for me. My equilibrium was always in jeopardy. But to most people I was just a simple small town girl, a little strange. I was just a dishwasher and after work I smelled like greasy kitchen water, I didn't own a vehicle – I walked everywhere. There might have been a small bit of mystery to me that would wash over people every here and again, but I gave very little away, I had no idea what people would want from me.

I had no prospects for the future – I made only as much as I could manage to live on, buying apples and eggs and the occasional discount dress I managed to find. My artwork was so-so – I was not very prolific anymore and it wasn't professional or marketable exactly – and it seemed the older I got my aesthetic became more and more discomforting and niche. I didn't even seem to have friends or family – and we all know the story there. Nobody wanted to know me, even while I often was complimented by people in stores about how beautiful I was, sometimes multiple times a day in both respectful and not so respectful manners. At times I suspected there was something wrong with me socially or physically that pushed people away. I was coming to realize fully how hard it was to really connect to people out in the world. It didn't just seem to be happening to me. How do you go about making real friends? I had always imagined that I would find 'my people' so to speak when I got out in the world and started working, that they would find me like a magnet. But it didn't seem to be happening, and it could very well have been because Lewiston was/is such a small place – but there had to be people sort of worth knowing who weren't Josh surely. So where were they?

. Despite these things though that might have made me seem dull, nothing could be further from the truth. It was the first time in my life where my life seemed more my own. My existence had taken on this vibrancy and color and depth that might not be explainable in words, but in feelings and vibrations that are hard to place. I was finally living within this beautiful cloak of love that I had always longed for since I was young enough to contemplate that sense of longing and emptiness people have and had up till then, had always been denied. I felt some kind of wild little flicker of something in my thoughts, something that felt familiar from times when I was too young to know anything else. I was beginning to actually feel this sense of calm joy and happiness. It wasn't that I hadn't been happy ever throughout my early years, adolescence and young adult life. I had to some degree. But I never felt like I could let go, or let myself transform and if I did so it felt both too profound and like I had to do it with some level of secrecy. So much of who I was built around my social structure. Josh to some degree replaced everyone else, but he took a convenient little amount of interest in how I lived my life day to day and for this reason I was able to live two lives that played off one another and complimented one another quite well.

And love I guess, it was and is very important to me. I can and definitely have lived a life without it, but I prefer not to – it comes out in other forms if I cannot place it on a person. Perhaps at a very early age, perhaps in retrospect, the love I had once had for Zack all those years ago, it burned a hole through me that forever needs to be filled – long after he came and went there would always have to be something seemingly as grand as he had once seemed to me when I was young and naive. I will always have a private duty to elevate my existence to compensate for that gaping hole in my heart. I will never be complete. I have learned to accept my incompleteness as completeness and I experience most days with this in mind. Once you have been filled with that beautiful and pure light as a feather love and connection with someone, it takes a lot to fill that space – it changes your DNA. It's possible to fill that emptiness with passions or good habits, I am not saying it's not – I have done it for years. The world is a big place, there are a lot of ways to fill the void, with good films, books and conversations with people. The world of people is one meant to be connected with, and if you look for outstretched ideas and emotions, you will surely find them. You can learn to become someone who wants to make a difference in the world, you can make art, music, or you can write – there is so much out there to fill that void that love burns out of you. Some of it isn't even positive. You can be destructive, manipulative. You can become addicted to drugs or whathaveyou. But even with all that awaits us out in the world, we can rarely find the real thing. We all want that indescribably beautiful and perfect place, it is what we are all looking for, in one another and in ourselves. And most everywhere you go, you see the residual trail of love – like it is there, or will be, the hints that it was here, but you have just missed it or came too soon. You have to keep looking – and days become dull and life becomes pointless. You find ways to validate yourself just waiting for that perfect something. I suppose a great deal of people never find it. They never fill that void. Maybe due to fear and or misfortune. You just get used to reminding yourself that love is just around the corner, regardless if it is or isn't. It's a crazy thought, but it keeps you going.

But wherever I went now. I didn't need to worry about that anymore. I had Josh now. He filled that void within me.

About four days after Josh asked me to sleep with him and I wisely refused, I came home after working my night shift as the dishwasher, showered and dressed, and then joined Josh upstairs for another session of intimate conversation and eye contact and whatever else we did together those strange nights in 2012. He was sitting and watching the television that night. He didn't seem to be taking in much of what he was seeing. When I came upstairs and sat down, he didn't look at me, but he paused the television and then he looked at me lovingly. It was disarming. He got up to do something in the kitchen, and as he did so he passed me. When he walked back into the living room, he looked down caringly at me as I looked up at him standing above me. My hair was drying from the shower, and I have naturally curly hair. He had a softness in his eyes as he looked down at me with my bangs drying in my eyes. I felt loved. He reached down and tucked one of my bangs behind me ear. It might have been the most intimate thing anyone ever did to me. I almost choked. I could barely believe that just happened. I sat there shocked.

Josh walked back over to the couch. He looked at me in the eyes, and he began to essentially tell me that he was a dangerous person for people to be around. That he would destroy me. Not a single girl had ever come and went through his life that he had not psychologically wrecked in some fashion. He explained to me in full that he ruins people. It was what he does. He could not help it. He looked me in the eyes, as to relay a clear message. 'Renee, I would be a bad boyfriend. I would hurt you. I will ruin you. People like you should be with nicer people who won't drag you into something dark and empty'. There was more than one emotion running through him at that moment, and more than one running through me. On one hand, he seemed sad, but he also seemed amused. I was disappointed and intrigued. It was very sudden, and it took me off guard. I didn't like hearing it, but at the same time he had such a soft expression of love for me in his eyes. Did that look not say more than his words? Was this what I wanted? I had never asked him to be my boyfriend. But then again, it was what I wanted wasn't it?

I didn't say a word. I just listened to him talk about how he was a broken person, how he was comfortable with the way he was, that nobody could fix him, that he didn't want to get better. He was telling me he would be a bad boyfriend to save me the grief I imagine. But he also didn't intend on changing the dynamic that was imerging between us either. So what was with all this talk if he was going to keep the dynamic the same? If we kept crawling together at this rate, sooner or later we would be a couple. It was his most earnest and honest attempt to let me know what I kind of grave I was digging for myself by being in love with him, and that I needed to somehow find a way to get away from him for my own sake – was what he told me with his words, but with his eyes he was fond of me and never wanted me to leave him, and maybe this warning was as close as it got to a selfless act of loving me – which didn't that in and of itself only represent the kind of love that would endear me to stay?

He was trying to tell me the truth. A part of him wished he could be my boyfriend, he said. Had Josh not been so complicated I am sure he would have dated me. I could see it in his eyes. I realized that him tucking my hair behind my ear was him saying goodbye to a strange small story that was never to be between him and I – or maybe it was meant to give me hope? It didn't make a lot of sense. It made me sad. It didn't seem very fucking natural either. If he loved me, and I loved him, then why not give it a try? Life was inevitably going to be filled with pain anyway. It seems a well established truth that at times there could be no right decisions. Why ruin something special simply because it may ruin itself later on? It was the price of living a life of meaning. Surely Josh understood that I wasn't interested in anyone else but him too, I mean? I couldn't imagine another person taking his place. Josh was forever to me. I suppose I knew on some intellectual and base way that life could proceed without him – there seemed to be a very vacant voice in the back of my mind that new that there would be a before and after to this whole thing, but it would be meaningless and passionless to give up on what I loved. I wasn't just going to go about the business of 'finding someone else'. I had found that someone. I knew it. I had never been so certain in my entire life. And he knew it – he was in denial but he felt connected to me as well – I was making Whitney obsolete, someone he had wanted to die on behalf of that he had spent the last seven years with. I hadn't known Josh that long and already I was more important than she ever was. We both felt it. So why was I being rejected? Why reject what could be such a wonderful thing?

I just listened though. I nodded, but my eyes intently disagreed. I wasn't going to give up at this point. I could see that he loved me. Why couldn't that be enough for him? What else did he want? I felt somewhat rejected. I wondered that maybe I wasn't pretty enough or awesome or strong or surprising enough. Perhaps there was something fundamental in the way I walked or talked that was causing him to have misgivings. Him just telling me these things was justification enough for me to know he loved me enough to where he would warn me about the realities of who he was and, if he could let himself be vulnerable and let himself open up to me, we could be a couple – and it didn't matter what he was trying to say now. He was just trying to feel like he was in control. If he meant not to be a couple with me, he wouldn't spend nights like this with me. He was just afraid. I realized that he probably felt more comfortable with the idea of dating someone he either couldn't have, or someone he knew was diminished in such a way he never would have to feel bad about being the heel in the relationship, like Whitney had been. What we potentially had together might have been too good for him – likely too he may have felt a little frustrated with my inexperience, with me jumping in with my heart in my sleeve, and very naive about the consequences. Josh was older than me, and if you thought about it, at twenty-two I was as naive as a teenager in areas of love and romance. What prior real life experience did I have to go by? But that didn't seem fair that I couldn't be lead by my heart – why should I have to feel jaded and bitter and uncertain of myself simply to fit his whims? It was how I lived. How could he simply expect me to give up? Why should my inexperience make me less worthy of being loved?

Josh then started speaking on behalf of me personally. He told me that he could see me in a way that nobody else could. He didn't see the one dimensional character that most people knew me as – I was in fact underestimated and overlooked and quite a bit more special than most people realized. I was a challenge. In many respects, I was a different person to everyone I knew, he had watched me transform accordingly to whomever I was around, so he knew I was to some degree, and by second nature, acting. But Josh knew who I was behind the vale. I had been overlooked my entire life, and he knew things about me that other people had never bothered to see. In his eyes, I had always been ahead of everyone else, just a little bit. I was born just a tad bit smarter than the rest of my family and friends. It was second nature for me, he assumed. I was born into a world that didn't admire my character or my intelligence or my output. He actually saw it, even if nobody else did, or ever would. He could relate to me in a lot of ways, he told me. It was a lonely existence, and it's hard to explain just how, being the types of people we were. But we had each other didn't we?

I went down to my basement room once again, once again not knowing how to feel about what we had talked about that night. It was beginning to be a bit of a routine, feeling wounded and perplexed and enchanted all at once as I went to bed alone on my mattress laid out in the corner on the floor. I tried to sum it up the best I could, and I did this by writing letters to Sarah, more in my head than in reality any more. Though I occasionally sent emails to Sarah here and again more often then not she wouldn't answer them, and it made me upset. But I wasn't allowed to be upset with her anymore. Sarah in real life had failed me in so many regards, but the version of her in my mind was still very much alive and well – clear minded, ready to listen. Sarah would have been there for me if she could have. I tried to remind myself whenever I felt betrayed or neglected. As shitty as she had been, I knew that she had dug herself in so deep that she couldn't simply go back on it now. And if she had been thinking clearly she would still be there. I still tried to explain things to Sarah to myself. Explaining the connection I felt with Josh was simply something she could not understand. It was confusing for her for one. Sarah's relationships didn't revolve around psychoanalyzing someone to the wee hours of the morn. It was hard to know if it was very healthy or not. Was her way of connecting with men the healthy way? Or was mine? What had I gotten myself into?

I chose not to accept Josh telling me he would make a bad boyfriend in the end. Labels were relative I figured. I was completely invested and there was no turning back, even against better judgment, and even against whimsy at this point I could find nothing better in my life to be whimsical about. At that point, had I wanted to leave the situation I knew I couldn't – this was apparently where the universe had placed me, for whatever reason or lackthereof. If I had money or a new city maybe I could get away, but it wasn't in the cards at that moment. And if I woke up the next morning completely out of love with Josh for some inexplicable reason, I knew for a fact he would fight to keep me anyway. He wouldn't want me running away. He would be mad if I found someone else. He didn't want to date me, but he still wanted me there for him just the same. I figured this meant that on some level he did want to be my boyfriend. I just had to wait around till he figured it out. He still looked forward to seeing me everyday after work. He still loved me. Wasn't that enough? I knew where I belonged.

If I left out into the cold indifferent world outside of the madhouse, I would fail. I had no real family, friends or resources to turn to. I wasn't pretty enough to get by on looks alone, I was not demanding enough or certain enough to get my way in life. There were so many obstacles and personal flaws on my own behalf that made the out-outside world a fearsome place. If I marched out of that house and decided to make a new life for myself elsewhere, I knew I would only get myself broken – I wouldn't be able to pay my rent or get a job in a new city. I wouldn't have much success impressing people. I had to face the facts that I was not a strong person in some ways – at least when it came to common sense and survival. And then if I fell to pieces, who would come to my rescue? Josh would of course be there to pick up the pieces. I needed him as much as I wanted him with me. There was, granted, a side to me that resented that fact. I felt weak and pathetic. I didn't know what else to do. Josh often times told me that I was weak too. He was very much on board with me being highly aware of my inadequacies with the outside world. The whole Zack fiasco had really broken me up. What would have become of me had Josh not stepped into my life? I might have been dead.

And as for Josh's resolve. He hadn't said he wouldn't be my boyfriend. He essentially said it was a bad idea and that in some way he couldn't. Wouldn't and couldn't are very different. They imply different things. Wouldn't implies that he would cross the street on his own accord. Couldn't implies that crossing that street is impossible even if he wished to cross it. Should the intent not be taken into account here? What if the obstacle was removed? I knew better than anyone too, that we don't always know ourselves well enough to know what we truly want. Josh was probably afraid, and after everything in his own life, who could blame him. I really loved him. Josh had once told me that we accept the love we think we deserve. He probably got that from a Tony Robbins video on youtube, but it was nonetheless true. Josh's low self worth might have clashed with my adoration of him. Perhaps we just needed more time together. It had taken a very long time to get to this point with Josh. Six months ago he was behaving as though he didn't even like me as a person, and look where we were now. If momentum continued, all would be well. When I felt weakened and sad by the things that prevented us from being together, I reminded myself of this. It would be well regardless if I fretted about it, or I let it go. There wasn't a step we could take or not take that wouldn't strengthen the chains between us that held us together, resistance would be pointless, as would be forcing a feast. It wasn't decided by us, I reasoned. I figured that fate had brought us together. Because it was so obvious to me how well we fit. I couldn't see it any other way. Best react to the whole thing with elegance.

Sarah came up to me about a week later while we were both at work. Her belly was beginning to look quite round. We were passing one another in the bathroom hallway. I had just left the bathrooms, she was just walking in. She smiled at me in this peculiar knowing Sarah way, and asked me out of the blue, no hellos or anything, 'Did you and Josh have sex?'

I was taken aback, and I jumped a little bit and denied it. I wanted to know why she had asked. Because it felt connected to the vibes and tension in the room when I was around Josh, and how things had changed between us over the course of those weeks. It felt like we had, even though we hadn't. But Sarah hadn't been around Josh or me for some time. So how could she know??? Sarah's dreams always seemed to mean something. I had told her next to nothing after all. She wasn't around him and I at all, outside of seeing me washing dishes in the dish pit. She probably hadn't seen him and I together in the same room for several months.

I asked her to explain her dream. I was very curious. She proceeded to explain the dream. She had walked into the madhouse, and Josh was there, as well as me. She somehow knew that we had been sleeping together. It was just the feeling in the room I guess, the walls seemed to give it away. The essence of every shared space in the house. I guess the details of the dream and the meaning was intrinsic with Sarah's personal psyche and her interpretation of emotional symbolism in her personal dream land so explaining how she knew is somewhat pointless because it was of course, her dream. I guess she just knew. In her dream though, she explained that we had had sex – she saw it both in Josh's eyes and in my own, but then in her dream I eventually left Josh. I don't know how that came to pass. She must have just switched in her dreams to a new individualized conversation with me in Sarah-dream-world. In the dream, I explained to her that I left him because he was unnatural and was separating me from nature. So I left Josh to go live and be close to trees. I don't remember all the details concerning that. I stood there in the hallway and listened to her explain this. It felt very viscerally real to me, and hearing it from my fallen but still smiling with fully dimpled knowingness that could only be Sarah and very much pregnant former best friend was pretty weird.

I guess what got me was this feeling she explained about wanting to go to something natural and pure. I felt that pull towards nature. At this point I could ignore it. I would not let it come out and destroy what my life was, but would it someday raise it's head in my life and cause me to walk away from all this? A part of what drew me to Josh was the very things I often found unpleasant about him, and explaining that is difficult. There was something that undeniably upset me about Josh. I felt at times like by nature he was very far removed from something natural about being a human being. In so many ways, he seemed honest but everything he did also seemed very shame based. It was hard to say if it was a push towards personal growth on my own behalf or no, but since I had moved in with him, I felt this sense that I couldn't simply be myself. I had to play a game. I was at once more myself then I ever had been, true, and I had been playing a game or course my whole life. But Josh made me feel unnatural when I got to close to him. The connection I had with my own spirit seemed tampered with.

It made him beautiful I guess. It made him horrible. I saw it in certain respects as a rebellion against tribal small mindedness. I saw Josh as innovative and his perspective as very postmodern and fresh if not a little eccentric. Maybe I was just more of a hippie than he was. Josh resented hippies, partly because he was jealous of them, partly because he found them illogical. But even as well as he seemed to know me, sometimes I knew that he didn't know me. He had no appreciation for so much of what I was about. I could tell myself these things didn't matter, but someday, maybe they would. For one, it was and had always been very important to me to be alone around nature and to take walks – it was important for me to have dreams and to decipher their meaning. I liked to sometimes look at big spaces, miles of open land and just drop all thought and stare at the desolate aspects of everything, seeing that same desolation within myself. It was very much integrated with my imagination and my ability to be an artist. I let my mind go and I just let myself feel the world around me without thought – and things came from that. It was in that place that the seeds of who I would become and what I would do next would occur so in many respects my whole life was based on being 'one' with the world so to speak. This meant very little to Josh. Josh only cared about me in terms of my relationship to him. He saw these elements of my personality to be fraudulent and in some small way, an assault to him.

He didn't really care that I had lost weight either. I guess I couldn't imagine being around someone and knowing they had lost seventy pounds on their own accord, their personal drive, and not felt impressed. Josh simply didn't care – he had no motive to do that himself and since he naturally didn't put on weight like my body did he really wasn't interested in what I did. Josh spent his spare time sitting in front of his television. He would judge me if he didn't think I looked good of course, but the amount of work I put into looking trim didn't affect him at all. There was something kind of dehumanizing about it. I wasn't looking for a pat on the back, but the indifference he could sometimes show towards someone's hard work, well, it came off as piggish. He didn't see it as an accomplishment of mine – and the few times he did talk to me about it he tried to tell me that I didn't know anything about losing weight and he did, even though I had lost seventy pounds, much of that before having known him. He just didn't respect it. If he could have taken credit for my weight loss he would have. But since it was my accomplishment and not his, he was insulted by it.

There was something so fundamentally dishonest about him too when it came to his assumptions about women. He came by it 'honestly' and I don't mean to imply that Josh was not so removed from nature as to be some kind of cyborg or something alien to how he saw people. It's just that Josh seemed very disconnected from something primal and honest. At the time it seemed like an asset. He wasn't as doggish as I knew men could be, particularly after having closed a kitchen with a group of them for most nights at the restaurant as I overheard them talk. He was curious about things other men were not and this often times drew women to him. They felt recognized in some way their oafish cap wearing boyfriends had not. He couldn't seem to let go of his ego at any moment though. It seemed edgy at times, and entertaining. He seemed highly aware of himself and it gave him this very witty perceptive sense of humor sometimes, but the notion of letting go of his ego held no interest for him either. In fact, the more and more I was around him, the more I realized that, while he knew me well, I was an extension of his ego – and he could only know me through his own ego. He didn't want me to have a mind of my own. At first that seemed flattering. I was still flattered to some degree. And every blue moon he would take in what I had said or suggested. It livened up our friendship, and it might have been what I saw as most challenging between us. But could I live with that forever?

He couldn't appreciate me outside of the framework of himself. When I went out for a walk, to him I might as well not exist for those hours away – he didn't want to know what I had seen on my walk, he didn't want to know what my favorite music was, or who I talked to at work. He had no curiosity about how my day went when I wasn't around him. It was very bizarre. And he would I am sure argue that it was my ego at work for being bothered by this. How egotistical of me was it to secretly wish someone wanted to know these minuscule and egotistical trinket facts about me that were more or less of no consequence. Josh would argue that he saw me as a piece of art in the making in some deeper way, and these little fragments and ideas I had about myself and my aesthetic were mindless and indulgences of my own ego that bore little resemblance to who I actually was underneath it all. And maybe he was right. But he almost seemed annoyed when he was at times reminded that I liked things he didn't – like The Smiths, Neil Young, or American Psycho or that I loved Smoked Oysters. He was amused that I had these differences in theory, but he seemed to actively never want to be reminded that I had passions or interests that went outside of his box he had made for me. He didn't care if I liked them so long as it was out of his sight. He wasn't interested in controlling me. But by default I couldn't really express my love for other things around him, so in that way, it did become somewhat controlling.

It made me feel funny at times about having a life outside of the madhouse. I didn't feel shamed or anything about taking walks. I didn't let Josh stop me from connecting to the outside world in that way, but it did make a big difference in my ability to make friends. And I felt like that same indifference about me was connected to the indifference he felt about connecting to the world around him. So in order to connect with Josh, I had to disconnect from other people. Josh only cared about himself and his own domain. I happened to adore Josh for who he was and didn't mind his domain so much, but suppose he was someone else that I was not in love with? It was not a positive personality trait to have.

Also, while Josh wanted me in his life, very closely, he also would always resent or push away some other part of me. Did he fully accept me for what I was? If I truly felt that way, then why did I spend hours on my make up everyday? Sure I loved looking good, but I was driven also by this frantic insecurity and fear that Josh would notice me and realize I was flawed. It was creating this strange self hatred within me that was beginning to spiral out of control. I tried to remember myself from two years ago. I had been broken and unhappy. I never wore make up. I was pretty heavy. I was very flawed, and nobody looked at me with the exception of maybe Sarah, and saw a beautiful person. But that girl that I was – the one that never got the love she needed but had to pull herself up from her bootstraps was probably the coolest version of me. Her resolve and clarity of thought were the reason I had lost the weight to begin with, she was the one that made art, the one that decided to escape her father's house. And who was I but some broken sad girl hiding behind a man who most likely wouldn't even save her in the end? Compared to my old self, I was a joke. I probably needed to look back and love that girl more – find her again. She was the one that had fought for a better life, the one with the vision and clarity. But that girl was incompatible with Josh, and the big world. I was the result of making compromises with reality, and in the complexity of life's downfalls I had become quite lost. I was in love with a hiding spot. The version of me that I was becoming was intriguing and exciting. But did she actually have a basis for existing?

Sarah's dream had it right. It could be summed up with my love of being balanced with nature. Deep down, was my relationship with Josh balanced? For the moment it seemed to be balancing fine and I found a great thrill with the imbalance – and maybe there was a sense of balance in that there was chaos in me that needed feeding and Josh could provide a certain level of stable chaos that wouldn't result in yelling that I could live with. But would I always feel this way? And would Josh like me so much if I did something willful for myself without expressing apology to him for having done so? For instance, he didn't seem to like it when other people chose music to listen to. He especially would get mad if I chose to listen to music It went unsaid, but he would get angry and passive aggressive if I took any kind initiative. Sometimes he would get mad if I put my food in a certain place in the fridge. He never yelled, but he would toss things around and you could practically see the steam coming off his head. I tried to console myself with the fact that this was just how people learn about one another. I blamed myself. I promised to myself to take up less space in his life, or in anyone's life. I would become lighter, more compact, more self sufficient. I didn't want to make Josh upset. If Josh came downstairs to do his laundry and he overheard me listening to music in my own room, I quickly shut it off. Things like that would even annoy him. For some reason, I didn't think this was weird and instead I just adapted myself to please him.

When he got this way, I would immediately feel insecure about myself. I would take the smaller piece of the pie, or flat out let him have the whole pie when something upset him. I already felt embarrassed and half ashamed when I expressed myself fully sometimes – which would be impulsive and would happen by accident. But Josh made it really easy for this insecurity of mine to fully develop into full neurosis. I hid how it made me feel, so he never knew he was inconveniencing my self worth – that would by extension inconvenience him of course which I was unable to do. Sometimes I would be walking down the sidewalk even alone and guilt would wash over me, that I didn't even deserve to be there taking up space in the world at all. It didn't matter where I went or what I did, how much weight I lost. I was a piece of meat that had no rhyme or reason to be there. I felt like I was too much when I tried to express myself. So it was a full time job holding it in. I felt strange moments of disconnectedness at times, like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. And everything that Sarah and Allison and David had rejected me for, it all made sense. I was bad. Josh was merely nice enough to point out what they hadn't been able to do. And I was lucky to have him there. Because if he didn't accept me for how awful I was, then I wasn't going to get it anywhere else.

This of course created a deep seated insecurity in me. What if I lost Josh somehow? What if he got bored of me, or decided to focus on some other girl? Allison, Whitney and Sarah had gotten out of the way – but suppose one or all three came back. Josh might toss my aside. He would and could do it, and it would make me look crazy. Because he could easily say I was just his obsessive roommate. That he had no hand in being close to me, and I had wanted a relationship and he had let me know there wouldn't be one, even though he was also stringing me along – nobody saw that or really got what that was about. And without Josh I was nothing. It would be like someone tore my skin off. I would be absolutely vulnerable to any and everything. I felt this scary insecure sense that if I didn't have Josh, I would lose all sense of myself and I would go into something dark that would take me years to come out of. It fed into some deep dark fear that was hard to articulate. Like willingly letting myself fall off a high rise. By instinct, my life's objective was to not let that happen.

The next day after Josh had talked to me about not being my boyfriend and whathaveyou, he came in on his break. He was feeling chipper, his eyes dilated and blue behind his spectacles, he had a glow to him. He danced about the room a bit, as he often did odd and sometimes funny things when he got off work for a time. He went into this abstract thing where he said that even though he wasn't going to let himself get into any relationships – a hint towards our previous conversation the night before, he was going to accept all the love that was given to him. Essentially, he wanted me to continue loving him. He wanted me to throw myself into this thing with my heart on my sleeve like we were making wedding vows. He didn't think he had to reciprocate of course – at least not in the sense that he wanted to commit to anything per say, but he would gladly accept all love that was given to him. He made it sound so healthy – Buddhist even. He made statements implying that he had such a great well of love within him for me, that it transcended anything that a relationship could ever do for me, that some meaningless label could ever do. And we could be close, and intimate but as long as we never touched he was committed to nothing with me. And he was gleeful about this. I tried to be gleeful with him. Maybe I was. It's hard to say. I was crazy back then.

PART 112 - https://tinyurl.com/ycwx7be7

PART 111 - https://tinyurl.com/yc2sc37j

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-110 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-110

#text #life story #long text #writing

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bellatrixobsessed1 · 6 years

Text

I’ll Meet You At The Bottom (Part 20)

“I’m sorry, Sokka.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She pressed her cheek into the pillow.

“You should apologize to yourself, not me.” He replied, rubbing circles over her back, when that failed to soother her, he tried trailing his fingers through Azula’s locks. She seemed to get more comfort out of that so he kept it up.

“I had to do it.” She muttered. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Were it not tucked under her pillow, he would have taken her hand. “Maybe you should just focus on one thing first. You haven’t thought about cactus juice in a while.”

“That sounds nice right now.” She replied. Her head was still beating. The only thing the intake of tears seemed to do for her was ease the tremors. At least for a few hours, they were back and worse than before. She found herself lapsing in and out of periods of confusion, periods where she couldn’t remember what she had said or done.

Nights and days blended together. Three or four may have passed, but she couldn’t say for sure. It didn’t really matter how many had gone by, things didn’t seem to get any easier. She felt queasy and sore all the time. Her eyes burned and watered and her chest constantly constrained. The only thing that kept her going were the days she allowed herself a pinch of the tears—every other day, just enough to her a lift. Today was one such day. Combined with the cactus juice withdrawal, she knew she was in for another restless night. But she sprinkled some of the reddish powder onto the dresser regardless. She tired to get Sokka to step out for a moment, she could never seem to inhale the tears when he was in the room. It brought her a sense of discomfort to have someone watching her ruin herself. This time Sokka didn’t step out, instead he reclined in her armchair.

“Not this time.” He replied. “I know what you’re doing, I don’t see what difference it makes to send me away.”

“You said you paint?” Azula asked.

He crinkled his brows, “what does that have to do with anything?”

“Do you like people watching you paint?”

“No, but…”

“They know that you’re painting, so why does it matter.” Azula mumbled, pushing the powder around with her finger.

“It just feels weird and uncomfortable.” He replied. “I feel like I’m being judged.

“Exactly.” Azula agreed as she pulled him to his feet. With what remained of her energy, she tugged him across the room and heaved him into the hallway.

“I won’t judge you.” He tried as she started to shut her door.

“How about this, you show me that painting you keep talking about, and I’ll let you stay.” She offered.

“Ya know what, I think I like it out here. This hallway is pretty nice.” He smiled. “That is one lovely vase.” His false interest was lightly amusing, she almost stayed to listen to him ramble on, but the tears called. Whatever he was painting he was protective over it. She decided that it must be truly mortifying if he would rather yield and let her inhale the tears in peace. Frankly, it peaked her curiosity—one day, when she was better, she would search out this mysterious painting. She stashed the pouch back to where she had retrieved it from and beckoned Sokka back inside. She sat herself down upon her bed and with her last minutes of coherence, switched out the dressings on her foot. It was taking a while, much longer than usual to recover from her infection and even from the trivial scrapes and bruises. It was becoming a nuisance, one she hoped would vanish when she finally found the strength to separate from the Ruby Tears once and for all. She fell back onto the bed and waited for her perception to alter. For a brief period she thought about what it must be like for Sokka to watch her stumble around and babble nonsensically. She ought to be embarrassed. She, for the first time, considered how odd it was that she was more uncomfortable with Sokka watching her take the tears than to witness her on them. The musings slowly muffled until they became no more, replaced by wispy and light music in pitches and melodies she’d never heard before. It was like spirit music, soft, lulling spirit music. She could have been humming along, she thinks that she was.

.oOo.

Azula is again lost in her own world. At least these past few times, her world hasn’t been petrifying, it seemed to make her happy. He just wished that her happiness wasn’t so artificial. She helped him realize that he’d rather be miserable and angry than engrossed in some kind of mock joy. For once she was rather mellow, she lie on the bed staring at something he couldn’t see; something that made her smile, that made her laugh. If only he could manage to do that, maybe then she wouldn’t have taken the tears.

Perhaps, he pondered, he should try it. His humor had ruined a lot of things, had pushed a lot of people away. But those people already had laugher. Maybe he could give his jokes to someone who could use them. Though he didn’t think his sense of humor was the same as Azula’s. It couldn’t hurt to try. If she took well to his jests, he might be able to tell them without fear.

He sighed to himself, he was placing a lot on Azula whether she knew it or not. He felt guilty all over again. He was placing his wellbeing on her and she didn’t even know it. He was placing his peace of mind and happiness on someone who was struggling to maintain her own. Deep down he felt like he was using her more than he was supporting her. Not for the first time he speculated that he was helping her only to meet his own ends. Would he stick around if he found himself in a more stable place? Would it matter if he didn’t? She was always one to assist people when it would suit her needs, why should he care?

“Hey, socks?” Her voice was soft. Innocent almost.

“Sokka.” He corrected.

She gave him a dismissive hand flap. “Thanks for staying with me.” She reached her hand out and snatched at something he couldn’t see, with a whispered, ‘caught it’, before she turned her focus back to him. “I’m happy you stayed.”

In those four words he decided that it did matter if he used her. In those for words he knew that he would stick around even if he found that he didn’t need her anymore. And in those four words he realized that he couldn’t possibly be using her, he cared for her. As truly infuriating as she could be, he had told her the truth when she asked him if he did. Still, that didn’t change that he was placing a heavy burden on unsuspecting shoulders.

Her look was very far away but she spoke again. “No one has ever stayed with me before. I’m glad you stayed.” She was on her feet and moving about as if seeking something or someone out. “I like you, Sokka.” She made off as though she were plucking something from the wall. She stroked whatever it was before pulling his arm out. In his palm she placed something she clearly thought was beautiful. Fleetingly, he wished he could see it too.

She folded her arms around him and nestled her cheek against his chest. Against what might have been his better judgment, he returned the first gesture and let her coo kind things to him as she tapped her finger on his torso. Mostly about how he was helpful but with a sprinkle of comments on his abs and the like. He had to admit it has been some time since anyone has given him praise or acknowledgement. Coming from her, it seemed somehow more flattering.

He didn’t know how much of it was the drugs talking and how much of it was the princess herself. It didn’t matter, it felt good to be praised. Maybe just this once, he would accept a possibly false sense of joy.

He hoped that she would remember the moment.

He would.

.oOo.

Azula woke feeling dizzy and feverish, she didn’t know that she could even call what she had done waking up. It had become the norm for her to feel surreal sensations. Ambiances that she, even with all of the extravagant literacy she’d acquired, couldn’t describe. But the feeling that came over her was particularly indescribable. Whenever she thought she’d picked out a word for the feeling, it left her mind. It alarmed her, usually the trips didn’t last so long. She couldn’t recall a time where they lingered into the next morning. Something was different, she couldn’t place it.

She remained in such a state for hours, slowly detaching from herself in a way she never had before. She couldn’t seem to feel her weight, couldn’t feel her body at all. She would move her arm, left and right, slowly and then quickly. Azula could see the motion, she knew she was moving, but she couldn’t feel it. It was like watching someone else’s hand.

“Azula are you alright?” Sokka asked. “What are you doing with your hand over there.” He cracked a smile.

And when she answered, the words didn’t seem to come from her own lips, “I’m fine, my hand just fell asleep.” She didn’t think that, that was a lie, but she didn’t know that it was the truth either.

She let him return to his book.

When sensation did return, there was a fuzzy sort of electric feeling in her hand. Though she wasn’t working with her bending. The tingling continued. There was a peculiar taste in her mouth like copper maybe, mixed with salt. Azula ran her finger over her lips and on the inside of her cheek, they came up free of blood. Nothing explained the metallic taste. “Can you get me something to eat?” She asked, she wasn’t especially hungry but she would do just about anything to rid herself of the taste.

“Sure, what do you have in mind?” He asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Just no duck meat, I don’t like duck.”

“I think I can manage that.” He replied.

She rolled onto her side, waiting for the tingling to subside.

.oOo.

Sokka never knew what to expect when leaving Azula. He loathed leaving her on her own because she always seemed to have a surprise for him when he returned. He was growing weary of surprises. He greeted Toph first. “Long time no see.”

“Long time, never saw.” Toph rose her eyes. “It’s good to talk to you again Sokka.”

“How is Azula?” Aang asked. “Katara said she seemed better.”

“I guess in some ways she is.” Sokka replied.

“Does she need another waterbending session?” Katara asked.

Sokka was hit with another pang of guilt. Lately all he’d been doing was coming downstairs to ask Katara to pacify Azula. “No, she needs something to eat. How have you been, Katara?”

“I’d be better if you came down more often.” He could hear some resentment in her voice and he didn’t blame her for it. He would ask her to visit but Azula still didn’t take well to guests. She still had too many secrets to guard.

“I’ll try to.” Sokka replied. He meant it, with any luck he could get Azula in a comfy enough state to leave her room for a few minutes. It would do her well to talk to other people. “I’ll see if I can get Azula to tag along.”

“Good luck with that.” Toph grumbled.

“I think that sounds great.” Aang smiled.

He turned back to Katara as he prepared a meal for he and Azula. “Anything interesting happen down here.”

“Zuko and Appa got into a fight,” Katara replied, “that was pretty interesting.”

“He lost.” Toph added.

“What was it over.” Sokka asked.

“I parked him to close to where his palanquin is usually parked.” Aang explained. “He threatened to give me a fine.”

“I think Zuko’s getting bored. He hasn’t had many problems lately so he’s trying to make some.” Katara rolled her eyes. “It’s very like him to do that.”

Sokka laughed, he forgot how much he missed his crew. The price of caring for Azula was becoming apparent. He let himself dwell on it a bit more. Was he coddling her? She was doing well enough staying away from the cactus juice, it might not hurt to leave her by herself for a little while. He could go for some fresh air. “Maybe we can go have a picnic in the palace garden?” Sokka offered. “After I give Azula her food.”

“That sounds wonderful, Sokka.”

It struck him then that he hadn’t had a picnic since the one with Suki, suddenly his own suggestion lost its appeal.

“You’re still alive!” Zuko laughed. “I didn’t know if I was going to see you again.”

“Yeah.” He said rubbing his head. “I’m still around.”

“Azula isn’t’ giving you a hard time, is she?” He asked.

“Maybe a little.” It was and understatement. “She’s alright though.” Even as he spoke, he couldn’t help but think of what surprise she might have in store for him when he came back to her. Of all of the scenarios that played out in his mind—from her complaining about his cooking and refusing to eat it to her downing a bottle of cactus juice—he didn’t imagine the scene she actually had prepared for him.

He thought he would give her a surprise of her own. Zuko was rather insistent on checking on her. So long as she was still in bed, she probably couldn’t get too angry. As always, she was one step ahead of him.

He found her on the ground, her body twitching and spasming, a light froth bubbling between her lips.

She must have hit her head on the way down, a steady flow of read trickled between her eyes. His platter collided with the floor. When he looked to his left Zuko was gone, likely to fetch Katara. Once again Azula would have the palace in turmoil. He snatched up a pillow and put it beneath her head. Agni knew how many times it had already knocked against the floor.

Her eyes met his for a second before flickering away. She was in a perilous state and he couldn’t do anything for her. He clenched his teeth. He was going to lose it again. He couldn’t, not yet. He didn’t know if he said it more to convince himself or to convince her, “it’s going to be alright, you’re going to be just fine.” Sokka didn’t even know if she could hear him. But he took her hand and held it until the jerking came to a stop.

He wiped her mouth and stroked the back of her hand. Her awareness waned, he was cradling a limp body in his arms. “You just got back.” He mumbled, “you can’t leave me too.”

Just like that he was gone again, thrown right back into the past when he held sea-logged Suki’s body for the first time. She was wet and cold and didn’t feel human. Her lips a sickly blue, skin unnaturally puffy. It didn’t matter that Azula’s body was still very warm nor that her skin still had patches of color. In that moment there was no separation between she and Suki.

“You have to let go of her, Sokka.” Katara tried gently as she worked to pry his hands away.

He wouldn’t let her do it, he wouldn’t let her take Suki from him again.

“If you don’t let go of her, we can’t help her.” Katara tried once more.

He clutched Azula closer. He wouldn’t let them burry Suki again. In retrospect, Sokka couldn’t hold it against Zuko. As harsh as knocking him out was, they probably wouldn’t have been able to take Azula in any other way. The firebender came to before he did. From the sound of it she was still dizzy and disoriented. Her voice sounding hazy and puzzled.

Zuko left him with little time to regain his bearings. He could see the temper, so characteristic of his family, flaring in his eyes. As soon as Sokka sat up, the Fire Lord had him pulled to the side. “Sokka, what’s wrong with her?” He demanded quite roughly. “I want the truth this time.”

Part of Sokka wanted to throw it back at him and ask when he started to care. Wanted to ask, where he has been this whole time. He didn’t have the energy for a fight, even if he did, he didn’t want a fight. But he didn’t want to sever the little trust he had acquired with Azula.

“We can’t really help her if we don’t know what’s wrong.” Katara added. “Please, tell us what’s going on.”

Azula was going to be pissed, very much so. With as much dejection as he felt he answered, “she’s on drugs.”

#Sokkla #Azula #Sokka #Toph #Aang #katara #Zuko #Avatar #Fanfiction

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ihavethatthingwithlies · 6 years

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Five (5). Times. Kissed.

send me the words for the thing

THE FIRST TIME john young kisses emma swan, it isn’t in any romantic setting, it isn’t borne of desire or hunger —though it does convey a kind of NEED.

they haven’t been in the same home for very long, weeks maybe, but they’ve already formed the kind of bond that can’t be broken —the kind of connection that kids think will last forever. they’re the oldest, and it makes them the caretakers — in a sense — since their actual caretaker doesn’t do much taking care of any of them, but neither of them had been prepared for the way the younger kids would come to rely on them.

it’s late when she wakes up; middle of the night but she has no way to tell the actual hour without walking out to the hallway, and she wouldn’t DARE do that at this time of night. stubborn as she may be, emma doesn’t want to provoke the man anymore than she already seemed to just by EXISTING.

the sound that had brought her from her slumber reaches her ears once more, and she realizes it’s john, restless and murmuring something in his sleep. without hesitation — though had she given it more thought, emma might have stopped herself from invading his space and privacy in such away — she climbs out of her own bed and into his, curling up beside him and placing her hands along either side of his face. he freezes, then relaxes almost immediately as if he can feel that its her before he even opens his eyes. when he DOES, her name is a question on his lips and she just smiles.

‘ it’s okay, i’m here. ’

he’d been there for her so many times already, it seemed only fair that she return the favor when he seemed to need the comfort — even if she doesn’t know the reason for his restlessness.

she pulls him down to her, not to kiss him, but to rest his forehead against hers ( as he’s done for her, to calm her, in the past ) and sighs, breathing him in, repeating her reassurances.

when he kisses her — on the tip of her nose, her cheek, her forehead — it’s a silent thank you plus so much more emotion that she doesn’t quite understand yet.

THEY’RE A LITTLE OLDER THE SECOND TIME — and they’ve been inseparable for long enough that the feelings that develop aren’t a surprise to anyone around them. but there’s a noticeable shift when holding hands isn’t just something they do because they’re friends, the only family each of them has ever had, and their closeness is almost a necessity.

it’s spring, and winter hasn’t quite relinquished its grasp on the small town in which they live — warm enough to forego the mittens, cold enough that her hands are FREEZING. he notices ( he always notices her discomfort, no matter how brief or how minimal ) and pulls her close, taking her hands in his. it’s the first time she feels that SPARK that everyone talks about — in stupid movies and the romance novels that always sit on the end-cap at the grocery store. all of a sudden it isn’t so stupid, and there’s a fluttering feeling in her chest that makes her eyes widen when she looks at him.

he notices, she thinks, as they huddle there in such close proximity, clouds of cold condensation clinging to their breaths as they hover between them. there’s something different about the way he looks at her — something different about the way she FEELS when he does ——it’s the only thought she has before he leans down and presses his lips to hers, and every cliche first kiss story she’s ever heard, read, or seen replays in an instant in her mind because she feels every single one of those SPARKS.

when they pull apart he wears that stupid crooked cocky grin on his face — as if he hadn’t be just as surprised as her, as if he had done it on purpose. she knows better, but for a moment she wonders if she’s just a bad kisser — it HAD been her first kiss, and her brow furrows before he says nothing more than “well, then..” and leans in to kiss her again.

SHE’S WASTED. utterly, sloppily, and incoherently wasted. there’s no other way to slice it. at this point, she doesn’t remember whose idea it had been to sneak into the UMASS party ( though all signs point to the 15 year old girl sloshing beer out of her red solo cup and barely standing ).

she’d lost john a while ago, but something tells her he’s around somewhere — close enough to keep an eye on her, just like he always does. she doesn’t remember exactly what had caused her to start pounding cups of beer in the first place ( though tomorrow she’ll remember the pretty brunette who was all legs fawning over john, she’ll remember how her own personal response had been to make a FOOL of herself and how she’d subsequently retreated into the kitchen where the keg sat waiting for her, seemingly with open arms ).

she’s heading that way now, and oops the floor is a little uneven with its pesky wobbly-ness, and she would have ended up face down on the floor if not for a pair of strong hands — one at her elbow and the other wrapping around her waist. assuming — incorrectly — that it’s john, she leans her head back against a muscular chest and mumbles something that sounds like my hero.

emma realizes her mistake moments later when she’s pulled away from the stranger’s embrace and watches in a BLUR as the real john — her john — delivers a hard right hook to the guy’s jaw.

clarity ( definitely not sobriety ) hits her when he turns and tells her that they have to go, and somehow unsteady legs become strong enough to RUN. they’re all but flying out of the frat house, running as though their lives depend on it. it isn’t until they stop, on the bridge over the freeway that she realizes she’s laughing almost uncontrollably.

he’s not, he’s mad — she can see it in his eyes as he looks at her, then away, then grips the railing, his jaw clenching as though he’s trying to keep something in that wants to be blurted out. she hovers toward him, hand moving to his shoulder and tugging insistently.

' hey, what’s your deal ? ’

in one fluid motion he turns and pulls her into his arms, and when he kisses her THIS time it’s possessive and needy and for a moment she’s sure she can read his thoughts — or maybe hers are mimicking them — because there’s an echoing voice in the back of her head whispering mine mine mine.

too soon he pulls away full of apologies and seems no less angry than before, she’s left with fingertips ghosting over her lips as though trying to determine if it had been REAL. “we’re going home,” he grumbles at her, and she doesn’t want to go anywhere, she just wants him to kiss her like THAT again.

SHE LOVES HIM ——it’s the first time the word has ever meant anything to her, and she finds it in the most unusual of places. they’re not stealing stolen kisses in the dark, or holding hands as they walk through town. he’s in the yard, kicking a ball around with some of the younger kids and she’s just sitting on the porch steps WATCHING them as she doodles in her notebook.

he’s laughing as they play — a rare moment of joy in a place filled with such dread and pain — and the way it lights up his face strikes her as one of the most amazing sights emma has ever seen. something warm and indescribable blooms in her chest and its so strong it kind of TERRIFIES her when she realizes what it is.

a small voice reminds her that everyone in her life that was supposed to love her had LEFT, but she pushes it aside. john would never leave her, they were put there together for a reason — fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it, she believes ( now, more than ever ) that whatever force had brought them together had done it for a REASON.

with a patience befitting someone much more mature than a teenage girl, emma waits until the rest of the kids go inside to find a snack, she waits until he picks up any remnants of playtime that remain in the yard and deposits them in the shed, she waits until he plops down beside her on the steps — a sweaty mess that he thinks will somehow ANNOY her when he wraps his arms around her and pulls her closer.

it doesn’t.

she giggles — not unheard of but somewhat uncommon and nuzzles into his shoulder for a bit before pressing her lips against his neck right below his ear and murmuring her revelation.

' you know —— i love you. ’

the words are muffled against his skin, but he hears them — she knows it by the way he pulls back with this grin that’s so wide she doesn’t think she’s ever seen it. he kisses her then — and its soft and sweet until in true john form, he begins to TICKLE her. she’s all peals of laughter and yelling his name, curling up against him and halfheartedly hitting his shoulder, but he’s laughing too — demanding she say it again and again.

by the time he relents she’s laying back on the porch laugh-yelling i love you i love you i love you! before he’s kissing her again, and she doesn’t want him to ever stop.

there’s a lot of history between them — but also a decade of time that’s passed since she’s SEEN him. so far, since his arrival in storybrooke there’s been nothing but teasing and harmless flirtation between emma and john.

they’d been watching a movie with henry — emma had attempted to cook something resembling an edible dinner, and it had turned out surprisingly well. she’d just gotten the kid to go to bed when she sat down next to john on the couch, giving him a small smile.

' this was almost some sort of normal, huh ? ’

there’s laughter wrapping around her words, and she kind of leans into him a bit and the air around them shifts. it’s not as though they haven’t TOUCHED since their reunion — not in any way that meant anything beyond casual brushes of hands in normal circumstances — but that’s what this had been, too. she FEELS something there, that spark — almost forgotten by TIME and while she’s processing that, and everything it means, her gaze is caught and held momentarily captive by his lips.

hesitation exists for mere seconds before she leans up to kiss him — impulsively — and then pulls away, thinking perhaps it’s a bad idea, and shaking her head with an apology on her lips. the apology seems out of place, though, and she looks at him one more time with another bout of laughter before throwing the rest of her hesitation to the wind and kissing him again.

there’s little to no hesitation in response — for his part — his arms wrapping around her to tug her into his lap, and she’s missed this more than she’d realized until it was tangible again. a flawless transition between being some sort of ex-something until in the blink of an eye nothing had ever changed. as if there hadn’t been ten years separating them plus a whole lot of nonsense.

when he kisses her back its so normal that she wonders why they’ve waited so long — she should have known it would be nothing less than perfect, it had ALWAYS been perfect.

#anaxpraetor #s.❥ & i was a heavy heart to carry; but you never let me down 「 &john 」#hello here i am to deliver all of the feels and let me tell you #i have ALL OF THE FEELS LINDS #ALL OF THEM #I MISSED THESE TWO DORKS SO MUCH I CANNOT BELIEVE #it's so fucking long lmao

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amycathryn · 7 years

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Empathy 101

Mantis is My Hero

Caveat: Long read. It's less of a blog and more of an empathy course...

Not gonna lie. Mantis is da bomb.com. She is the first superhero on the big screen to have empathy as an actual superpower. If you don't know who Mantis is, and aren't as nerdy as I am, she's a prevalent character in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I'm genuinely excited about her character for 2 reasons:

She has all of the abilities an advanced empath would have.

Her character is an inspiration for empaths.

As someone who's been empathic as long as I can remember, it's refreshing to see this ability interpreted as a superpower more than a curse. I myself have traversed the interwebs only to find articles mostly on how to tell if you're an empath, or how to cope with it—not really any on how to harness it or increase it.

Another reason I'm writing this is because clients and friends alike keep asking me how to deal with their empathy on an overwhelming scale. So, I'll not only go into detail on what empathy is, why we have it and the signs of empathy (along with external links), but also the pros, cons and empathic hygiene. I also fully intend to come out with an Empathy 201 blog/course at a later date that goes into more detail.

Ok. So What is Empathy?

Well, from my research there are two definitions. One is used by psychologists, while the other is more prevalent amongst spiritualists.

The psychological definition of empathy defines it in regards to emotional intelligence—The ability to understand what others are feeling within their own frame of reference. It's the ability to gauge the emotions of others and "step into their shoes" so to speak.

The spiritual definition of empathy is having the ability to sense other people's energy and take on the feelings of others as their own. An empath is often times energetically influenced by people around them (even if they can't see the person). They can take on another person's dreams, emotions, physical pains and even mood swings.

The difference between the two terms is their origins. The psychological term relates to how well one person can psychologically understand another on an emotional scale (which can be a learned trait), while the spiritualist term is more energetically-based (and is an inherent gift that manifests both naturally and with discipline). In this blog we'll go into detail on the spiritualist meaning of empathy.

Signs You're an Empath

Here's a list of the traits that most empaths have in common. If you find yourself saying "that sounds like me" to a majority of items on this list—then chances are, you're an empath too!

Caveat: I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist or doctor. Some traits may also be signs of potential psychological issues. I leave that to your best judgement—so if you feel you may need help, then please seek out a professional.

You can feel the emotions of others regardless to proximity. They can be the person in the cubicle next to you or a good friend in another state.

You always have an uncanny way of telling how others really feel, even if they put on a mask. You can know how they're feeling even if you don't see them or hear them at all. You just know.

Being highly sensitive either physically, emotionally or both. This can include foods, music and having emotions that run deep. You may bruise easily or have odd skin allergies. You may have even been called "too sensitive" because of these feelings.

You love nature. Nature energizes you and you feel at home when out in nature—whether it's camping, walking in the park or simply just being outside.

Crowds drain you. Especially after being around people for a period of time.

You're introvert or lean introvert. This one is huge amongst empaths that I've seen. Usually the stronger the empath, the more introvert they are.

You crave solitude. Being alone recharges you and helps you focus both mentally and emotionally.

Animals love you and are drawn to you (because they can sense empaths).

People say you're a great listener and find it easy to talk to you.

You are drawn to help people through teaching, counseling or healing.

It pains you or discomforts you to come into physical contact with others.

You always know how the people closest to you feel.

You can tell when someone is lying to you.

You can tell if someone likes you or has feelings for you—and maybe even how much.

You get reliable gut "feelings" about people—you know good people from bad people when you see them.

Perfect strangers walk up to you and start talking to you about their personal problems.

You get odd mood swings when you're in crowds more so than when you're at home.

You get odd physical pains (such as headaches or cramps) in crowds more so than when you're at home.

You get stressed or anxious when you have to go to the grocery store or places where large groups of people congregate.

Anxiety attacks happen primarily around groups of people (versus when you're by yourself).

You drink or use other drugs because it "numbs" you—you know it "helps" you deal with being around people for extended periods of time. Caveat: Imbibing to cope with empathy is never the best solution. Please read the empathic hygiene section on healthier ways to do so.

You loathe liars. You can not only tell a liar when you see one, but you have a very low tolerance for them.

You actively remove yourself from drama and drama queens—because they drain you. You can tell a drama queen from a mile away and they always leave you feeling drained after you've been around them for any period of time.

You have weight issues. Many empaths have weight gain or weight problems because they're subconsciously creating a physical shield against others due to their hypersensitivity.

You're a people pleaser. It's hard to say "no" when you know it will bring someone else joy—even if it hurts you.

You have an unshakable drive to help/serve others.

When you're having a conversation with someone, especially if it is emotional or deep, you have a hard time discerning where your emotions stop and the other person's emotions begin.

You can always see both sides of the argument—which can even make arguing difficult because you forget your emotional position!

You're creative and a creative thinker.

People find it easy to tell you deep, personal stuff.

You make friends VERY easily, but don't feel close to a majority of them as it tends to mostly be the friend talking and you listening.

Music, inspiring quotes, movies and other creative outlets have a tendency to provoke deep emotions within you.

When you touch someone, you can feel their emotions with a deep and almost indescribable understanding.

You dislike horror movies or movies with excessive yelling or violence.

You tend to be drawn to people who are suffering. It's not uncommon to find empaths in a toxic or enabling relationship.

You avoid being "in the way" of others or asking for help because you're afraid you will be a burden to them.

What Being an Empath is Like

It's easy to forget the energetic aspect of life when you're in "work mode" or doing daily chores—but the empathy never really stops. Even I forget that sometimes. Touching people is difficult, and sometimes even painful—so big crowds (regardless of the amount of shielding I do) can be a challenge. I usually have to mentally prepare myself before going into a grocery store.

Perhaps the biggest issue in overcoming being an empath (for me at least) is finding friends that are energizing. Those are the people you can have deep, meaningful conversations with that spark your drive (versus the people who just want to talk about their problems). There are plenty of people out there who want the empath to be their friend—but only so the empath is there to listen more so than have a mutual relationship. Discovering friends with a deep zest for life that actually listen can be an absolute treasure of a find.

On the same token, it's a privilege to see the humanity in every individual I encounter. Just about everyone feels and has some goodness in their hearts. Being able to see that is a gift and a blessing. Helping people foster this spark through empathy is also a privilege. Touching someone and allowing that deep, emotional connection to establish with them, sometimes just for a moment, is also a gift—even if it's painful sometimes. The best way I can describe it is it restores my faith in humanity—being able to feel the humanity in another. Being momentarily a part of the humanity in another.

Pros & Cons

Pros of Being an Empath:

Here's a list of the positive attributes of being an empath. Please don't abuse your gifts. Karma can (and will) be a real bitch if you use them for selfish reasons. Always ask for a sign from God to use your empathic gifts with others, and if you are going to do heavy empathic work on an individual, their verbal consent is mandatory. Always remember: just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

Automatically knowing the emotional mood of a crowd (and have the ability to sway it).

You can easily gain the trust of people .

The ability to sense the types of connections people have with the the ones they're close to (both good and bad).

You can change the emotions of another person .

You can tell when someone is lying.

The ability to see into another person's emotional memories—what their memories are (especially the emotionally charged ones).

The ability to see into another person's home.

The ability to see into another person's soul—you can see the good, the bad and the potential in their hearts.

The ability to sense other psychics, intuitives, psionics and basically anyone who knows and is aware of energy on one level or another. More advanced empaths can sense the degree in which the abilities others have, and possibly even latent abilities.

The ability to change the emotional state of a crowd.

The ability to alleviate the pain in others by taking it on as your own (but don't do this—just send it into the ground).

Cons of Being an Empath:

Here's a list of the negative attributes of being an empath. I put these out there as a sort-of caveat for those wishing to increase their empathic gifts. Be prepared to deal with these issues on a higher level if you intend to increase your spiritual gifts.

Intimacy can be difficult—touching others is something an empath may subconsciously or actively try to avoid.

Feeling drained after being in a group for a long period of time.

Getting headaches, emotions or pains out of the blue that aren't the empath's own.

Being drained around certain individuals (usually energy vampires or bad people in general)

Going weeks without being alone for an extended period of time can increase anxiety, fatigue, mood swings and even depression in some highly sensitive empaths.

Knowing things about others that you don't want to know because they touched you (i.e., that they like you, hate you, or a bad childhood memory).

Having difficulty focusing in large crowds.

You get fed up with your lower-vibrating (energy) friends. Fast. This happens a lot with people who experienced an empathic "boost" later in life. You become much less tolerant to those around you that aren't your "true" friends.

A subconscious tendency to take on the moods of others. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on the circumstances. I put it under "cons" because if you're not consciously guarding yourself empathically, you can subconsciously be emotionally swayed by others very easily.

Empathic Hygiene

Just like brushing your teeth or putting on deodorant, empathy requires hygiene too. We try to remember to use deodorant and brush our teeth every day—so should that mentality flow into taking care of our energetic selves and our empathic gifts. To not only increase your abilities, but also be a healthy empath, you must know and practice these three things: Cutting Cords, Grounding, and Shielding.

Cutting Cords

Cutting cords is probably the most important thing any empath should know regarding their gifts. This is because cords are what make up empathy. Every time you come into contact with someone on any level, you are connecting to them via an invisible energetic tether. You do this (subconsciously) with everyone you are near, touch or even make eye contact with every day (to one degree or another). You will also tend to have very strong cord connections with the people you're closest to.

Cutting these cords is necessary for the well-being of every empath—otherwise, we'll be continuously bogged down with the emotional energy of all the people we have ever come into contact with. Often times we can have both good and bad cords connected to the same person—so it's helpful to understand the difference between the types of cords before cutting them (don't throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak).

An exercise I like to do on a daily basis is what I like to call the "guillotine" method. I imagine a guillotine "slicing away" at the negative cords I have with others. Works like a charm every time. Other methods include praying for Archangel Michael to clear the energy away, the "plucking" method (where you "pluck" the cord out of you), and just plain standing with your back to a tree. Trees are amazing about taking our negative energy and grounding it.

The trick is visualization. Visualization is key to understanding and utilizing energy—and empathy.

Grounding

Grounding is necessary to stay focused and also a great way to remove toxic energy from the body. It helps us center ourselves here in the physical world. I ground all the time—especially before and after every reading I do. Many religions and even some forms of martial arts (such as qigong exercises in Tai Chi) incorporate grounding into their practices.

Grounding, in summary, is connecting to Mother Earth—putting your energy in the earth, so to speak. Grounding is an excellent way to reduce stress, anxiety and helps bring balance to your body's energy. I'll often times recommend grounding to a client that I see is unfocused, afraid or "fuzzy brained". There are a number of ways to ground, but my favorite method is what I call the "roots" method.

The roots method goes like this: You can be sitting or standing—it doesn't matter. Just begin to imagine roots growing out of your feet and into the ground. You can be 30 stories high—just imagine your feet growing roots that sink into the ground. It may take time, especially if this is your first try, but you'll feel a "shift" when you've successfully grounded your energy.

Then imagine all of the negative energy in your body just falling into the ground. The earth can take whatever energy you throw at her—and she transmutes it into good energy.

Stones can also be an excellent method for grounding. Sometimes I'll recommend darker stones to clients who need assistance with grounding. Good stones for grounding include smokey quartz, black tourmaline, hematite, nuumite, shungite and obsidian. Darker brown/black stones in general tend to be great for grounding, protection, and even transmuting negative energy into positive energy. If you're interested in using stones to assist in grounding, I would recommend going to your local metaphysical shop and picking up a few of the aforementioned stones and see what resonates with you. One of them will just "feel right" when you hold it.

And finally, another excellent way to ground is to take a salt bath. Salt baths rock and can become highly addictive! I recommend this to a majority of my empathic clients. It's excellent for extracting toxic energy and calming the mind. I do this probably about twice a month. It's a great way to "reset" the energetic body if you're feeling tired or drained. Not to mention, it helps with softening the skin and muscle aches if you use epsom salts. The only down side is you'll probably need to clean out your bathtub first.

Shielding

Shielding, simply put, is an energetic term for blocking the energy of others. It's a great way to protect yourself, much like you protect your feet by wearing shoes when you go outside. It acts as a barrier against the "raw" emotions of others.

There are probably a thousand methods to shield—ranging from simple to advanced. For the sake of this blog/course (being a "101" blog/course) I'll keep it simple. I may write on the more advanced ways to shield at a later date.

Shielding, as with other ways to harness energy (empathic or otherwise) requires "feeling" and visualization. A great method of shielding I recommend for clients is the "Glenda the Good Witch" bubble. If you've seen the Wizard of Oz, you probably remember the scene where Glenda the Good Witch in all of her splendor floated down to the good citizens of Munchkin Land in a beautiful rainbow bubble.

Well, like Glenda, imagine yourself in this beautiful rainbow bubble—filled with light and peace. Imagine it surrounding you from front to back, head to toe. Visualize it growing a thick, impermeable shell—and tell it to last all day. I recommend shielding every day–especially if you will be around other people. This shield will help keep you from establishing unnecessary or unwanted empathic cords with others and vice versa.

When you shield (and do so often) you'll notice an improvement in your energy and ability to be around others for longer periods of time without growing tired quickly.

Increasing Your Empathy

So after all that reading you still want to increase your empathy, eh?

Well, there are several methods to do so. The first being meditation. Yeah, I know. None of us really have the time for that. But we make time for the things we want, and meditation is the best way to increase your abilities overall. This is because meditation helps you become more aware of your energy and sense it better because it forces you to inflect.

Porcupines.

Yes, porcupines. I see empathy and the empathic abilities of others as porcupines. It's like a thousand tendrils spilling out of a person—with many of them connecting to the tendrils of another. Visualize your tendrils—your porcupine needles—growing. If that is difficult, inflect on your relationships with others. watch how that shifts your mentality and thought patterns. This is what empathy feels like. It's that shift because you're "honing" in on that person. You can even practice with a friend that's interested in increasing their empathy as well. Focus on connecting to each other and notice the shift. That's the energetic shift of empathy. Just be sure to always cut the cord after you're done with the exercise.

Another method is to work with a friend and guess how they're feeling without looking at their face or body language. Try standing with your back to them and feel what their emotions are. Then turn around and see. Take turns putting yourself into different emotional states (with your backs turned) and get a feel for their emotions.

In Conclusion

The key to increasing empathy isn't power or energy per se—it's discernment. It's the ability to keenly understand the energy around you, and how it works.

Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility. I strongly recommend reading my previous blog post on the ethics of being psychic.

Please use your superpowers for good. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me.

Good Luck!

#empathy #empathic #blog #spirituality #psychic #intuition #spiritual

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healthandfitnessrecipes-blog · 6 years

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The Importance of Community in Fitness

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=7786

While your fitness pursuits can certainly be a solo affair, there’s one aspect that can be a determining factor when it comes to the consistency with which you move your body, and the longevity of your endeavors: finding a sense of community.

Beyond fitness goals, community allows us to find a sense of belonging. It’s what can support us through some difficult moments — in or out of the gym — help inject a sense of fun in our day, and remind us of something essential: we’re all in this together.

But what does community look like? How is is created? How is it fostered?

To get a better sense of how communities come about in the fitness world, I’ve asked four coaches to share their experience. They are: Polly Hawver, owner of Big Fun Fitness, which offers empowering, fat-positive, queer-centered strength and life coaching in Olympia, WA; Rachel Black-Graves, owner of Bloomfield Fit Body Bootcamp in Bloomfield, CT, which goes by the motto Powerful Community, Powerful Results; Melanie Stride, owner of Stride Active, which offers Nordic walking, outdoor fitness and strength training in London, UK; and Kara Stewart-Agostino, owner of KSA Personal Training in Toronto, ON, which focuses on one-on-one and small group personal training with a focus on developing strength and confidence in movement.

What measures have you put in place to create community in your fitness practice?

Kara: My small group classes are capped at 8 to 10 people, which allows me to give each person some individual attention but it also allows the group to get to know each other. In each group class we have individual stations so that folks can work at their own pace as well as group circuits when they can develop some camaraderie through challenging exercises. When we’re doing partner circuits, I match people up based on similar modifications they may need or long-time members with new members.

“We’re all each other’s workout buddies — not just the friend you drove to class with.” — Kara Stewart-Agostino

On Sundays, I host a drop-in group class where some of my personal training clients as well as some of my group class members come out for a workout and coffee. There’s a real camaraderie that’s been developed in that group, mostly from the opportunity to sit around after class to talk to the people alongside whom you’ve been sweating. It becomes a social experience as well as a workout.

Polly: Our community has sort of formed unintentionally — I have done various events for fun like outdoor workouts and a hiking group. I think our community has formed as a result of the emphasis we place on absolute positive affirmation of each other. We specifically emphasize movement for fun and offer a plethora of options so workouts can be as intense as you want them to be — folks often participate for the community aspect.

Melanie: More recently, I have been interested in and focused on creating a shared, living community that isn’t reliant solely on the leadership of the fitness professional. In my community, this looks like continuing with active introductions and events, but also encouraging, empowering and facilitating members to organize their own community-building networks and activities.

Rachel: We use inclusive marketing that accurately reflects the diversity of our community — every size, shape, age, color, fitness level, etc. Our core values, that share what we’re about and how we expect others to move in our space, are clearly defined and very visible. Our team also receives constant education on living our values, understanding the communities we serve, and modifying the language we use.

Furthermore, we’ve created mindful collaborations via community workshops on topics our people want to learn more about, as well as purposeful giving to charities and organizations serving marginalized groups. Any time we collaborate, we do our best to work with a female- or minority-owned business in order to support and elevate those voices.

What influence does it have on the folks who work with you?

Melanie: There is a sense of shared ownership of the community and a spirit of independence that really allows folks to flourish in whatever community roles suit them. This could be anything from organizing a fancy dress walk to being in charge of dividing up the cake at the cafe after a walk. It also gives members access to a greater range of fun and bonding activities, because people have varied ideas and skills when it comes to growing and participating in a community.

Not everything has to be mediated through a leader, so people can be more creative, doing things together that are unrelated to the activity that brought them together.

“Giving people shared ownership and independence forges a much stronger bond and community spirit than anything I could offer alone.” — Melanie Stride

Kara: Folks see familiar faces class after class and start to encourage each other and cheer each other on through challenging circuits or when they see someone accomplish something they’ve been working towards for a long time. They build connections with people with similar interests that are completely unexpected. I’ve seen folks become running partners, lend camping equipment to each other, get their families together for outings, partner with each other for business projects, etc.

Every spring a large group of us run a 10K in support for a camp for children with cancer because one of the families has a child with leukemia — this year we’ve raised over $18,000! The connections they’ve built with each other are phenomenal.

Rachel: At the very least, folks are exposed to new ideas, new conversations, and new expectations of how to move in the world. Many shock themselves not only in what they’re able to accomplish with us from a physical standpoint, but also in the ways our space challenges them to reframe or completely throw out old biases and instead take radical responsibility in who they want to be and how they want to show up in every area of their lives.

We’re constantly being thanked for the growth opportunities, and “ah ha moments” we help to facilitate. We hear “I didn’t get ____________ till I came here” through happy tears on a weekly basis.

What effects does this community have on you, as a leader?

Melanie: Taking this approach to community is a double-edged sword. It’s anxiety-inducing at times to allow give up the ability to monitor and control interactions between members of our communities. Will problems arise in relationships? Will they realize they don’t need me at all?

But the pay-off for this discomfort is a community of invested members who show up often, show up enthusiastic and show up for the long-term. Plus, these communities have a chance of outliving out involvement, which is a valuable legacy for any fit pro truly concerned with affecting and facilitating lasting change in people’s movement habits.

Kara: How can I describe the amount of love and devotion I have towards these people? I have so much pride for how they encourage each other and grow individually and as a group. I am always wanting to improve as a coach to do right by them. I am excited to go to work everyday because I’m not just training a group of people who happen to be my clients, I’m training my friends.

Polly: The community we’ve created certainly makes me very conscious of the messages that I put out into the universe. It inspires me, brings me indescribable joy. I ultimately feel like the luckiest person in the world to get to work with people who are the strongest, kindest, funniest people I’ve met. Everyday is an honor to be with them — and this is my job!

Rachel: This community saved me in many ways. They’ve helped me grow into the leader I am. They constantly challenge me to level up. To show up more. To show up stronger. To always use my voice. They remind me that there is still so much work to be done. They restore my faith in humans day after day in the way they choose to show up for one another. They make me so incredibly proud, and they’ll never know how grateful I am for each and every one of them.

Fitness is great, and we’re really really good at that piece… but we’re in the people business. We want to develop exceptional human beings (that just so happen to have exceptional squat and push up form) that can go out and change the world by using some of the changes they’ve made within our walls. Fitness is just a happy byproduct of what we do.

This community allows me to make a bigger impact than I ever dreamed I could.

Which piece of advice could you give to someone who’s getting started on their fitness journey, about community?

Melanie: Look for a space that reflects you. Ask what that organization stands for. Don’t settle, because community makes all the difference in the world. Your community is what will make or break your consistency with your fitness journey (and beyond) on the tough days. Find your people.

Polly: Shop around, honestly. There are so many options for places to exercise — and now with remote coaching groups your options are endless and I wouldn’t settle on a studio or exercise community. I know there’s a tendency to feel out of place/out of shape/like you need to tolerate intolerable behavior because “it’s just the way it is” but that’s not true anymore.

“You don’t need to settle for a place that doesn’t feel right to you. — Polly Hawver”

That’s not the way it is — you don’t have to participate in “transformation challenges” or even go to a gym that offers that garbage. You can find your people. We exist. We’re here. And we’re waiting for you. There are tons of people just like you who can’t wait to meet you. Keep looking until you find them!

Coaches’ Corner

Are you looking for advice in how you, as a coach, can create community in your fitness practice? Here’s what our expert coaches have to say:

Polly: Creating community is absolutely essential to a healthy and thriving business — and I would argue a happy and thriving you. I would be miserable without it. It’s the connection that I share with my participants and their connection with each other that really fills me. I also want to go on a limb and say I think it’s a radical revolutionary act. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve coached someone in a major life moment and connected them with another participant because I knew they would connect and be able to support each other. We’re not in this alone and it’s revolutionary to reach out and ask for help.

Kara: Be authentic and true to who you are. If you create projects that are interesting to you — that you would want to be part of — you can pretty much guarantee that there will be others who will be excited by them as well. That’s how you create a community of like-minded people. I started my Back-Alley Fitness project because I wanted to work out on Sunday mornings in a way that would work within my family routine. I invited neighbors and clients to join me and we’re now in our third year and it keeps growing and getting better and better. Whole families come out. Sometimes the kids join in and sometimes they just play in my backyard. My kids look forward to the workout and hanging out with other kids every Sunday morning. These classes are not just about the workout — they’re about the community of people who come out and the connections we’ve made with each other. For this community, fitness is not a chore or a punishment or something they “have” to do. It’s something that we want to do together — week after week.

Rachel: Make sure your space reflects what your community needs. Make sure you speak their language. Make sure they feel seen and supported. This goes way beyond knowing your clients’ names. Make them feel served. Make sure your marketing reflects it. Make sure your staff reflects it. Make sure the sizing of your merch reflects it. Make sure your paperwork reflects it. All the way down to what you stock in your restrooms/locker rooms. It all matters. Create a space where they can thrive.

“Articulate your values clearly and fearlessly.” — Rachel Black-Graves

Melanie: Once you have a burgeoning community, don’t be too attached to your position as leader of that community. Communities are about fellowship and togetherness. When opportunities arise for others to take on formal or informal roles in the community, think about how you might foster and facilitate that in a way that fits with your personal boundaries and liabilities. Don’t assume you have to keep control of everything yourself.

Polly: Be thoughtful and loving — if you care about people and create a structure for folks to participate, they will follow your lead. Be aware of your attitude on a daily basis, and be aware of what you’re saying — this is what is generating your community and if you want to foster a positive environment, you’ve got to start with yourself. Are you complaining about traffic or how tired you are? Are you commenting on your thick thighs in a negative way? Stop it. I’m not saying you can’t be human but be mindful that every word you speak and every action you take is being internalized by your constituents. You will get back what you put out. Focus on them. Be curious. Remember their stories (I take notes) and follow up with them. And then invite them all to a BBQ or a hike or a walk and they will show up.

Your business will grow and your participants will be happy and full. So will you.

The post The Importance of Community in Fitness appeared first on Girls Gone Strong.

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netmaddy-blog · 7 years

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Abundant Life on the Other Side

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/abundant-life-on-the-other-side/

Abundant Life on the Other Side

Many years ago I experienced something incredible, bordering on mind-boggling. I glimpsed and felt what it was like to die and cross over to the other side. In essence, I experienced what mirrored a near death experience (NDE) without any of the trauma or crisis that typically accompanies such an adventure. In a trance state, I literally found myself moving through the tunnel that separates life as we know it from ‘death’, or more accurately, the ‘other side’.

Thanks to the urging of dear friends and interested clients, I am sharing what I recall from that extraordinary experience, amplified by years of channeling beautiful souls who have left the earth plane through the natural death process and are now in spirit.

Life on the other side is beautiful and easy going, characterized by indescribable feelings of freedom and lightness. There is no illness, discomfort, despair, animosity, scarcity or hopelessness. Abundance and upliftment are transcendent themes – delightful feelings abound, goodness is everywhere, love is pervasive. And the light, colors and vibrant experience of aliveness are nothing short of breathtaking. Some of the most positive and picturesque scenes from the film, What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams, resemble personal experiences I’ve been privileged to have on the other side.

In describing what it’s like on the other side, it’s important to touch upon the time, since this is one of many things that is very different over there. Time, as we know it on this side of the ‘veil’, runs in a linear fashion, from left to right. The past is sometimes envisioned on the left side of a straight continuum, where the present, or now, is in front of us in the center of the line, and the future is off to the right. Time tends to be a measure of how fast or slow things happen. A week feels a lot longer than an hour, and a year or two can feel like an eternity, depending on what we’re going through on the earth plane.

As I’ve come to understand it, time doesn’t exist on the other side, at least not the way we’ve come to know or experience time here. What feels like a few minutes to a soul there may, in fact, be several months, or even years here. This has been confirmed over and over again by individuals who have crossed over and are having a conversation with their loved ones who are still alive on this side.

Take, for example, a loving mother, Jayne, who was grieving the loss of her five-year-old daughter, Melissa, three years after her daughter’s untimely death from leukemia. When making contact with her daughter on the other side, Jayne asked Melissa what she had been doing all this time, while her mom had been thinking of her and doing her best to deal with the pain of her loss.

Much to Jayne’s surprise, Melissa appeared to have matured into a teenager, as if magically transformed overnight. And her daughter was alive with information and updates on what she’d been doing. Melissa talked of having met with relatives who died years earlier and were there to welcome her when she crossed over. She mentioned having attended some classes on the other side, and that she had the main teacher who guided her and was there to comfort her when she first ‘arrived’. Melissa also talked about having made friends with other young people who had recently crossed over – not just from the USA, but from different parts of the world – and reiterated that she was enjoying ‘life’.

But to Melissa, it did not feel like a long time since she’d crossed over. In fact, it felt like only a few weeks to her, in earth time. While her mother, Jayne, had languished for years, feeling sadness and deep regret over the passing of her daughter, Melissa tried to comfort her mom by sharing what had happened in the last few ‘months’ over there, where months to Melissa equated to years on our earth calendar. The blink of an eye on the other side may be weeks or months of time on this side.

Another telling point is that Melissa had apparently grown far more than three earth years since she had crossed over, at least it seemed that way to her mother. At the age of eight, which her daughter would have been had she not died, Melissa revealed herself as a budding young woman who was growing by leaps and bounds on the other side. In fact, depending on who contacted Melissa at any given time, Melissa showed herself to be of varying ages – a teenager to her mother, a 20-something woman to her uncle who was an esteemed professor at a prestigious university, and a young girl to her grandmother who fondly recalled her as a sweet, young kindergartner.

I have experienced this phenomenon countless times. Individuals who have crossed over are able to choose any age or life stage they wish to portray themselves, at any given time. Their physical or ‘body’ appearance often morphs from one conversation to the next, and sometimes alters within a single conversation – from younger to older or vice versa.

For example, one time – when making contact and facilitating a connection between a middle-aged client of mine, Diego, and his elderly mom, Maria, on the other side – at the start of the conversation his mother showed herself to be in her late 70s, just as Diego remembered her before she died. Maria demurely showed her gray hair neatly pulled back in a bun and made sure to show me that she was wearing a simple cotton housedress that fell conservatively below her knees, as was befitting her age and station in life. Maria’s well-worn outfit was finished off with a pair of sensible (old fashioned) shoes that Diego fondly remembered.

But as the conversation progressed, Diego’s adoring mom recalled a heart-warming experience she had had in the 1950s with her beloved husband. As she described that memorable evening at a nightclub in Madrid, Maria rejuvenated before my (inner) eyes, becoming the youthfully attractive woman she was in her late 20s, passionately in love with her new husband, Alonso. As Maria merged into a younger version of herself, so did her clothing. Her housedress transformed into a tasteful, ruby red cocktail dress that was cinched at the waist to show off her slim, stylish figure, with a hemline that showed off her shapely legs.

Diego confirmed that his mother had taken pride in her appearance and that over the years she and his father had enjoyed ballroom dancing in Spain. Both images that Maria showed me of herself turned out to be accurate. Diego shed tears of joy reminiscing about his mom’s most recent life – from the beautiful young woman who loved to dance, to a mature mother and grandmother whose primary focus was making her home warm and welcoming to all.

Another important theme that comes through from individuals on the other side is an openness, receptivity, and forgiveness, especially when it comes to relationships. On occasion, a client will ask to connect with a close friend or loved one who has recently crossed over but is reticent about having a conversation with that person because of an unresolved issue or situation from the past that still weighs heavily on them.

The good news is that I have rarely come across a soul on the other side who is hard to reach, much less someone who holds a grudge after he or she has crossed over. For individuals who had a rocky relationship with someone on this side, making contact with that same person on the other side almost always feels liberating, if not peaceful and joyful. In part, this noticeable improvement in the relationship can be traced to the individual’s personality or human side either evaporating or expanding in a divine way after crossing over. What is dominant for souls on the other side is their essence self, not their personality self.

People who were characteristically cold, greedy or uncommunicative when alive on this side are often warm, agreeable, generous in spirit and open to talking on the other side – sometimes surprisingly so. Clients’ apprehension about making contact with someone with whom they had personal difficulties quickly dissolves into acceptance once the conversation gets underway – the healing changes that have taken place in their friends or loved one’s demeanor on the other side are not only obvious but also soothing to experience.

So, there is no need to be apprehensive about reaching out and making contact with someone on the other side, despite past experiences that may have been less than ideal. Love is the overarching energy that heals just about all wounds.

Several people have asked me if there is hell, and, if so, what it’s like. I’m more than delighted to report that in over 14 years of making contact with individuals who have crossed over, I have never seen or experienced anything that even remotely resembles hell there. In fact, it is quite the opposite. More than a few individuals who have crossed over refer to the 3D earth plane – here – as the real hell. One true story captures this very well.

About 30 years ago, a client’s father, Karl, died of stomach perforation after one year on heavy doses of antibiotics at the young age of 54. But before permanently crossing over, Karl experienced two bona fide NDEs. In the early 1970s, and in Germany, this was far from a well-known phenomenon, much less something you would discuss with anyone, lest they think you had lost your mind. But Karl, a prominent architect, and devout Catholic felt compelled to share the miraculous experience he had with his wife and teenage sons.

Upon coming back into his ailing body from the NDE, Karl clearly described what had happened, as best he could. He explained how light and free he felt when he floated above his physical body and went into the tunnel of light. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Karl was pain-free, felt truly alive and was joyful again. But as he approached the other side, Karl understood that it was not yet his time to fully cross over. Disappointed, he came zooming back into his body, back onto the hospital bed. The agony of returning was devastating to him.

As clearly and articulately as he could, Karl described how beautiful and loving it was on the other side, and asked his family to feel at peace when the time did come for him to fully cross over because, in his words, “there’s no hell over there; being back in this ailing body is the real hell.” Coming from a religious man who was convinced that hell did exist and expected to see or sense it, even from afar, this perspective was, and is, very significant, confirming hundreds of experiences I’ve had with souls who have crossed over.

On the flip side, many ask, is there a heaven? In none of the many readings that I’ve conducted with individuals who have crossed over have I ever ‘seen’ anything that resembles the storybook portrayal of heaven. No puffy clouds creating a ‘floaty’ environment, no pearly gates, no winged angels – although there is an abundance of angels…they simply look like loving individuals without the telltale wings.

Time and again souls on the other side tell us how ‘heavenly’ it is over there, but they mean this in a delightful, blissful, amazing, dreamlike way that includes instant manifestation of wondrous things. In other words, ask and it is given.

If life on the other side is seemingly so joyful and free of problems, then why do souls request to come back to this side, fondly referred to as Earth school? The answer is clear. As souls, when we come into human embodiment, we’re presented with significant opportunities to learn important lessons here in ways that are not as easy, or even possible to do on the other side. The challenges and adversity that we face on this side are unmatched anywhere in the solar system, or so it’s said. As souls, we grow expansively and at an accelerated rate here as compared to other realms of existence.

The analogy to college life is a good one – living on planet earth, on this side of the veil, is likened to an ivy league college with tough entrance requirements and a full course load, whereas being on other side is more like attending a ‘party’ school. The rewards for achieving our educational goals here are enormous. Thankfully, we get to ease back and continue to grow, albeit at a calmer, slower, easier pace, when we cross over. The other good news is that there is nothing to fear on the other side, making our lifelong lesson and journey here a full-fledged adventure to be experienced to the max.

Lily holds a Ph.D. in psychology and has enjoyed a long, successful career as a consultant to several Fortune 500 companies. She has been sought after by individuals around the globe for her strength in bridging across dimensions and communicating with loved ones on the other side, as well as for the clarity and accuracy of her channeled insights. Lily is also respected for her astute intuitive guidance as clients navigate through transformative shifts in their lives and career paths.

Other areas in which Lily has special expertise include communication with the higher self, ancestral healing, identification and removal of entities, walk-in experiences, past life regression and animal communication.

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