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newwavesailor · 2 months

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HAPPY 40TH TO THE CARS' HEARTBEAT CITY!

Hey all, just to put it out there, I will go back to posting about KOSA soon. I just wanted to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite albums, which is turning the big four-zero this year.

Everybody has that album. You know the one. The one that resonates with you, really hits you in a special place and makes you want to re-experience it over and over again.

For me, The Cars' 1984 offering Heartbeat City is that album.

The Cars are certainly a favorite of mine. In fact, they're probably my favorite full stop. Much of my look is based on that of Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr. That is, if I can dress like them, and more often than not I just pull what's clean.

Growing up with my mother's taste in music, I was exposed to a lot of 70's and 80's new wave music, and I loved it. (I think it's part of my username?) However, in a weird twist of events, I originally hated the Cars. I thought the song "My Best Friend's Girl" was one of the most annoying songs ever written. However, as time went on, and as I started actively listening to them, I grew to appreciate them immensely. My mom had a similar experience with Duran Duran.

One day at the record store, my dad (who knew I loved the Cars) plucked a scuffed-up copy of Heartbeat City from the racks. Though I was a little turned off by the rather risque-looking album cover (I wouldn't even touch a copy of Candy-O at the time) I eventually bit the bullet and bought it, as my first Cars album.

Yes, you read that correctly. While I had heard stand-alone songs from them in the past, including some from Heartbeat, this was my first full-length drive. And I was in love.

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Being a synth pop fan, I swooned over this album. If I didn't know what album to listen to, I put this one on, and it always calmed my nerves. "Magic" was akin to a fairy-tale to me; listening to it felt like being whisked away to a magical place, a pool-party in the skies.

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"You Might Think" was already a familiar to me, and was the album's big single. But not the biggest one -- That goes to "Drive", the album's signature ballad, and probably the second-most popular Cars song behind "Just What I Needed"

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In a way, this album was just what I needed. It was what really kicked off my fascination with the Cars. People love to talk about their 1978 self-titled album like it was the stuff of legends, but in my personal opinion, Heartbeat City was a magnum opus that nothing afterwards could possibly measure up to.

Happy fortieth to Heartbeat, and happy twentieth to me real soon.

#the cars #new wave music #heartbeat city #ric ocasek #benjamin orr #1984 #albums #1980's music #Youtube

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taizi · 1 year

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Feel free to ignore this ask if it's overstepping, but whenever I have to do something stressful involving my mental health I channel/process those feelings by writing fanfic of my blorbos doing the same thing. So, any thoughts about rise Leo going to his first therapy session post-movie in the Hidden City? Could even take place in the City Lights verse.

Mikey is kicking the heel of his foot against the waiting room chair over and over, full of a restless sort of worry.

It was an uphill battle getting Leo to agree to this in the first place. God, Mikey would almost rather fight the Shredder again then relive that first conversation about it. Being stubborn is a Hamato trait but Leo takes it to a whole new level.

Thankfully, he is and always has been a daddy’s boy.

“I have not always been a good father to you,” Splinter finally says, interrupting the beginning stages of Donatello Losing His Absolute Shit Out Of Love. He pats Leo’s cheek gently. “But I am putting my foot down this time, Blue.”

“You’re the medic,” Raph points out. “You wouldn’t let one of us walk around with a broken bone, would you?”

For all that he’s spent the last two years in a state of constant anxiety and frustration, he never lost that softness that makes him their Raph. He still carries it around with him, and hands it out freely where it’s needed, and right now he’s wrapping it around Leo as deftly as a blanket.

And for all that Leo has this stupid idea lately that he’s supposed to be perfect and self-reliant and never burden his family with anything he could handle on his own, he’s still their Leo. He buckles under genuine affection like a house of cards.

He puts up one last token protest. “That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing,” Donnie says, just barely not a snap. “You have literally bullied me into telehealth sessions before.”

He’s not angry, not really. He just cares so much and he can’t get the words to come out right and he wants Leo to do what is best for Leo without arguing about it, even though they all know that’s just flat-out impossible.

“It’s different,” Leo stresses, well and truly at his emotional threshold. “You deserve—”

He cuts himself off but the damage is done. Everyone knows what he was going to say, what he meant. The tension in the room ratchets up to a solid fifteen on a max ten scale. Donnie starts flapping his hands. Casey looks pale and haunted. Mikey bites down on the wounded sound he wants to make, but Raph’s arms tighten around him like he heard it anyway.

“Yeah,” April says in a tone that lets all of her little brothers know not to mess around, “you’re going to therapy, Leon.”

Splinter grips Leo’s chin before he can sink into his shell. There’s an ocean of grief in the rat’s eyes that Mikey is worried he might drown in. But there’s love, too. Mountains of it, rising out of turbulent water, steady and immovable and forever.

“Don’t hide yourself away,” Splinter says. Maybe it’s something he would have liked someone to say to him, once upon a time. “We love who you are, even if who you are is someone who is struggling right now. Lean on us, Leonardo. You are not alone.”

So here they are. The latest in a string of failures. Mikey keeps bumping his foot into the chair leg, trying not to stare at the clock.

This is the longest an intake session has lasted. The first one was about ten minutes, but none of them expected the first one to go well. Leo joked about the whole thing and wouldn’t answer anyone’s questions directly. But he went straight to his room afterwards and didn’t come out until he was extracted for dinner, which said plenty.

The session after that went on for half an hour, but Splinter—and Draxum, who had come along that time and sat in with Leo’s permission—agreed it wasn’t the right fit. The session after that was another no-go, and then the disastrous fourth session almost shut the whole operation down entirely. It lasted all of twenty minutes and ended in property damage. Whatever was said in that office caused Splinter to go full Lou Jitsu and break the desk, a chair, and the door on their way out. Leo was glassy-eyed and unresponsive in a way that caused actual murder to flash through Donnie’s eyes.

Leo crawled directly into Raph’s open arms and stayed there, cheek pressed to plastron, to better hear the comforting rumble that started up in his brother’s chest. When Mikey crawled in next to him, his hands opened so Mikey could hold them, but otherwise he just blinked slowly and didn’t speak and it was the worst thing ever and Mikey very heroically managed not to burst into tears but it was close.

They were kind of expecting him to cite The Fourth Session as a reason why they should pack this whole idea up and mail it far away from them to the next bunch of jokers but he didn’t. He just heaved himself off the sofa without a whine or a joke or anything and shuffled after Splinter out the door.

It made Mikey feel like a bully. It was for Leo’s own good, but it was clearly taking a toll. Opening himself up again and again for a complete stranger, only to have that trust totally unrewarded and sometimes even thrown back in his face. For someone like Leo, whose guard is constant and unwavering even when the only people he has to guard against are his own family, it must be grueling. It must be awful.

But if they could just find the right fit, Mikey thinks desperately. If they could just find the right person…

“Hey,” Raph says, nudging Mikey’s arm, jolting him out of his thoughts. “He’ll be okay. Pops isn’t gonna let it get as far as it did the last time. He promised.”

“At worst, we’ll be accessories to murder,” Donnie says without looking up from his phone. He sounds like the idea doesn’t bother him at all, and also like it’s much preferable to anyone making his twin even the smallest bit upset for any reason. “In which case I suggest swinging back around to Session Four’s office and tying up loose ends.”

Raph closes his eyes briefly, looking as though he’s actively making plans to wrestle Donnie into therapy next, and then continues as if the softshell hadn’t spoken at all. “Leo’s perfectly safe.”

“No I know,” Mikey says quickly. In part because he knows Raph is trying to make him feel better, also in part because it sounds like maybe Raph is trying to make himself feel better, too. “I just—we’re running out of names in the Hidden City white pages, you know?”

“I can’t believe they still use the white pages here,” Donnie mutters.

“There’s still a lot of options left for us to try,” Raph says patiently. “And when we run out of options, we’ll come up with another plan. Don’t borrow trouble just yet, okay?”

Mikey leans on him, trying to absorb some of that steadfastness for himself, and Raph puts an arm around him, drawing him and his whole chair closer with a short shriek of plastic on linoleum.

A sudden high-pitched, frantic beeping fills the lobby. A few heads in the waiting room turn, but the yokai behind the desk don’t even blink.

“Is that the fire alarm?” Raph asks in a polite, I’m-not-freaking-out-but-I’m-about-to tone.

“Oh, honey, it’s okay,” one of the receptionists reassures him at once. She’s been nice to them since they got here and her teal face is lined from a long life of smiling. “This happens all the time. We have wards to prevent fire, but they don’t stop smoke.”

“Um, okay,” Mikey says. “But why is there smoke? In a clinic?”

The door leading to the offices opens and Leo steps out looking slightly scorched and a little bemused. Splinter is nudging him along, looking like he’s aged ten years in the last sixty minutes, and a beetle yokai shuffles after them sheepishly.

It’s the beetle yokai who introduced himself as Cricket, the clinical psychologist with licenses from both yokai and human institutions who passed Donatello’s extremely invasive vetting process, and the first doctor to somehow last the full hour with Mikey’s most stubborn brother. He’s five foot nothing and his exoskeleton is a pretty coral color.

“What did you set on fire this time?” one of the employees says in a long-suffering tone.

“You don’t know for certain that it was me,” Cricket replies with a nervous little yank at his wrinkled button-down shirt.

“Like the entire lounge,” Leo answers immediately after. “It’s amazing, I’ve never seen anyone fail at cookies that hard before in my life, and I live with Donatello.”

“Offended scoff,” Donnie says loudly.

“It’s a nice gesture!” Cricket says. “I was making a nice gesture!”

“Whoever left their lunch on the counter in there, I have bad news,” Leo goes on. One of the yokai tapping away at a computer stops, puts her head in her hand, and sighs. Splinter draws Leo down far enough to pat him on the cheek and then heads toward the reception area to do paperwork things. Leo and Cricket bicker their way across the waiting room.

Mikey feels something buoyant and bubbly happening in his chest, like someone shook a can of soda up in there. This is the most Leo-like Leo has been after a session, in all his playful, sarcastic glory. He glances up and sees the way Mikey is vibrating in his chair and laughs.

“Jeez, Michael, if you needed to go outside and run around the block I would have understood.”

“I’m saving all my energy for giving you the biggest, proudest, love-you-est hug of my entire career,” Mikey says very seriously.

Leo’s golden eyes get very bright, which is how Mikey can tell that his heart is smiling even if his face folds into something theatrical and performative. “Am I gonna need to clear my calendar?”

“The WHOLE day, baby!”

Cricket is smiling at the picture the four of them make, mandibles clicking idly. Splinter is watching too, his eyes impossibly soft and full of the same pride Mikey’s feeling in spades.

“What do you say, Leo?” Cricket says. “Same time next week?”

Leo tugs at the sleeve of the purple hoodie he borrowed from Donnie that morning. He glances sidelong at Splinter, who gazes back fondly but doesn’t answer for him. Mikey’s on pins and needles, waiting to hear what he’ll say with his heart in his throat. He thinks he can feel Raph holding his breath.

“Yeah, I guess,” Leo says after a moment. “Maybe we can burn your office down next time.”

Cricket lets out an affronted little clicking noise but he clearly doesn’t mean it, because he sends the clan off with warm goodbyes. The second they’re out the door, Mikey flings himself at Leo bodily, barely remembering at the last second to be gentle. Donnie has his arm linked through Leo’s good one, and Splinter is hanging back to make a quiet, exhaustively relieved phone call to April and Casey, and Mikey keeps saying how proud he is. He can’t stop. Leo’s the bravest person he knows, the best person, and he has to keep saying it or he’s going to explode.

“Alright, alright,” Raph says, gently disentangling Leo from the bramble of clingy brothers and lifting him up onto his shoulders instead. “Take us home, Fearless.”

There’s a smile on Leo’s face that’s almost familiar. It’s not the one Mikey knows, but it’s one he’s getting to know. The fact that his brother is here to smile at all is more of a miracle than most people get in a whole lifetime.

Even if Leo never makes it all the way back to that shining boy he used to be, Mikey can think of at least a billion things to love about the person he is right now.

#rottmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #hamato michelangelo #hamato leonardo #portal duo #my writing #tmnt fic #prompt #anonymous #these bright blue city lights #i have had cricket for exactly 1 hour and i would die for him in a heartbeat

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