#i mean i also thought the clots were the period

[thatmartiangirl]

Today on people need to be clearer when talking about menstrual health:

The definition of "Heavy Bleeding" needs to be more descriptive. Every place I've seen it talked about only defines it with how frequently you soak your pad/tampon

For the first time today I saw blood clot size referenced and hey if you are having blood clots larger than like a grape you probably also have heavy bleeding! Congratz!

#martian ramblings #menstruation #menstrual health #endometriosis #back before i was on meds to stop it I would have multiple large clots that never made it to my pad #because they would be stuck in my vagina until I could make it to a toilet #and since my periods were primarily clots my pads would only have to be changed like a couple times a day #so i didn't think I had heavy bleeding #i mean i also thought the clots were the period #i was like 'oh ok the bloods solid i wasn't expecting that but they also said it was related to our eggs and this looks like a yolk' #my prescription for the drugs that stop my period is up to i need to talk to my gynecologist again #so i'm arming myself with knowledge because every doctor seems to be dismissing my health concerns #despite my periods being debilitating in pretty much every possible way #back in college there were brief moments i genuinely wished for death for the pain to stop #and the meds are working #like these are miracle drugs #but i'm concerned we're just putting a rug over a problem and hoping it goes away

[d0youc0py]

Could you do any 141 member (I don’t really care I love them all) comforting civilian!reader while she’s on her period? Like the cramps, nausea, mood swings?

Thanks!

He winced as another pained groan left your lips.

“Pain killers didn’t help?” He frowned. He laid down behind you tucking you against him. He pressed a kiss to the back of your head, his hands pressing down on the heating pad against your stomach. The pressure made you feel better and you softly grabbed his hand and put it under the heating pad, silently asking him to massage your stomach. “I got you.” He pressed another kiss to your shoulder.

“Are you done with your paperwork yet?” You whined.

“Ya, Sweetheart.” He lied. The thought of leaving you alone to suffer on the couch made his stomach turn. “You rest up, now and I’ll fix us some dinner later, yeah?”

“Don’t leave till I fall asleep please.” You requested, scooting closer to him.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He’s literally the dream partner when it comes to this stuff

He has always been a very nurturing person

He has your special week marked on his calendar so he’s never caught off guard if you snip at him or you wake up and need to change the sheets

When he can’t be with you he always ships a care package to your house with all the things you could possibly need (snacks, pads/tampons, medicine, a card saying how much he loves you)

He’s the best honestly

“Kid, open the door!” The door handle jiggled. You splashed cold water over your face trying to calm down, but no matter how hard you tried sobs wracked your body. You blamed the hormones. You and Simon were new in your relationship, about five months in, and you had just recently started spending the night at his place. You always had a plan for what to do if you got your period during the night but you didn’t plan for it to come almost a week early. You woke up feeling a familiar wetness and practically ripped yourself out of Simon’s arms. To make matters worse he had his thigh resting between your legs, meaning- you didn’t even want to say it. You shook the thoughts out of your head.

“Sweetheart, c’mon.” Simon sighed from the other side of the door. “You know what I do for a living, yeah? You think a little blood is gonna scare me off? I find that a bit offensive if I’m being honest.”

“It’s disgusting and embarrassing!” You shouted through your sobs.

“It’s not disgusting.” He shot back. “Whoever made you feel that way is a cunt. And it might seem embarrassing now, but I promise you in a week it’ll make you laugh. Out you come.” He shook the door handle again. He did make you feel better. “There she is.” He whispered. You looked him over, happy he had changed his sleep shorts. A clunky thumb wiped away a few remaining tears.

The man is completely unbothered

You can throw a whole hissy fit and he’ll just ask if you’ve eaten anything today

Bodily fluids don’t faze him at all- you could bleed, vomit and cry all over him and he’d just pat you on the back

He’s still doesn’t always understand how to take care of other people, so if you want/need him to do something all you have to do is ask

He never ever makes you feel bad/embarrassed about anything

“Si, you aren’t going to believe the blood clot that just came out of me.” “I’m proud of you Sweetheart.”

“I just can’t believe he did that to her!” You sobbed, wiping your eyes on your husbands shirt.

“What a bastard.” He growled, wiping a tear from his own eye. He wrapped an arm tighter around you, throwing a few pieces of popcorn into your mouth.

“Get off the screen!” You shouted, throwing a few pieces of popcorn at the TV.

“Ya, fuck off!” Johnny yelled after you tossing a few pieces as well. You both looked at each other before bursting into a giggle fit.

Every time you on your period it seems like Johnny also goes on his

You would think both of you being so emotional would cause problems, but it really makes you feel less alone

He definitely steals higher grade pain meds from the base to help you (Price caught him and started doing it for his own partner)

Absolutely loves to take warm showers with you

This man is also unfazed by bodily fluids ;)

Whenever you feel sick he is on the other side of the door cheering you on

You hated when you got your period and he wasn’t here. It always reminded you of how sucky life was before him and how much spoiled you are now. You pressed yourself deeper into his pillow, inhaling his scent. Your muscles relaxed slightly- but it was nothing compared to the real thing. The pain killers had yet to kick in and your body felt so hot and uncomfortable. Your ears piqued up when you heard the door open.

“Babe?”

“Ky!” You screeched. The ache in your stomach couldn’t stop you from running through the flat to greet him. “What are you doing here? Your not suppose to be home for another two weeks?” You questioned between both of you pressing kisses against each other.

“I can just stay for two days.” He sighed, scooping you up. “I told Cap you weren’t feeling well- and let’s just say being the favorite has its perks.”

If you thought Price was good wait till you meet Kyle He definitely learned it from Price

Total Princess treatment to the max

“Ky, I can tie my shoes.” “Don’t worry bout it love.”

He shows love through acts of service so this is his time to shine ✨

Has a stash of all your favorite snacks/drinks for when the time comes

He usually puts you between his legs and the two of you play video games for the next eight hours- distraction helps take you mind off of the pain

#cod #cod men #d0youc0py #doyoucopy #cod mw2 #cod mwf2 #cod x reader #fluff #sfw #simon ghost riley #johnny soap mactavish #cod captain price #kyle gaz garrick #ghost x reader #soap x reader #captain price x reader #gaz x reader #female reader

[blysse-and-blunder]

 in lieu of a commonplace book

10pm sunday, jan 29, 2023

your gentle blogger has entered her next decade of life, thank you to @dying-suffering-french-stalkers and @redstar-winterorbit for the good birthday wishes last week!

reading not a ton if i'm honest, i've been deluged with gift books and library loans while at the same time crashing back into the semester, and the overall effect has been, uh, to freeze my recreational reading a bit. stuck trying to finish things like my audiobook of through the whispering door and ebook of maybe you should talk to somebody (have i talked about this one? it's a memoir of a therapist and reading it is like reading an episode of the gossip podcast, but i can also tell it's giving me occasional useful ideas and perspective on things to think about or ask for in therapy. but i can only take so much of it at once). the gift book i'm most into right now it lindsey ellis' axiom's end, which is a first-contact, aliens are real and the government has been hiding them scifi-- it's quick and readable, lindsey does a great job for a first novel, and i'm loving the alternate-history flavor of it being set in the Bush era and the southern california details i actually appreciate now. also the way the aliens are described, i love the design of them. beautiful and terrifying. but i haven't made progress in a few days.

through the whispering door is perplexing me right now, in that the gentle romance has developed pleasingly (predictably), but there's been a lot of talk about the main character 'having changed' and 'not being the same as he was when he arrived' and i can't actually. point to why or where that happened. this is part of the problem with me and audiobooks, i think, because i don't care enough to go back and re-listen to the parts where i tuned out.... there's been a new heightening of the stakes now that there's a time-limit, and i always like the flavor of an eldritch stag character.

EDIT: finished the monster baru cormorant, still recovering, immediately checked the third one out of the library though the psychic damage this series does to me without warning (dear seth: i'm taking away the word 'clotted' from your lexicon for a bit. also ‘lobotomy’.) is hard to rectify with how smart and good some of the new narrative details are. the introduction of ‘trim’ and its associated reliance on / trust in other people, to a story where the main character's stated weakness is thinking about things from others' perspectives? or anticipating others' reactions? chef's kiss. and the navy full of rugged, determined, salt-weathered women is just very good to me, personally. aminata my incredibly violent beloved. the end of this book was- devastating. not in the same way as the last one: this time i have the kind of fascinated-horrified-sickened-fixated feeling that i get about horror stuff sometimes, and i’d say body horror is what i expect from book three.

watching i got unlucky with weather-based flight cancellations last week, and spending a night in a random detroit hotel room created a great opportunity to check out my university's criterion collection access. for some reason i decided that this was the right moment to experience wong kar wai's in the mood for love (2000), which i have since finished in slightly calmer circumstances. despite knowing that tony leung and maggie cheung were both active in the 90s i somehow totally thought that this movie was like. actually a historic film and not a period piece? probably because of how much the visuals / how it’s shot and colored / the overall design feels so classic, feels like old school film in the best possible way. having now read the wikipedia page for this film i can tell i missed a lot of the actual plot, or rather, thought that there was more experimental / nonlinear story-telling going on than there might actually have been-- but that’s okay, it just means i’ll have to watch it again.

listening i don’t remember when this song first popped up in my spot ify, possibly on a discover weekly playlist a while ago? but it landed for me last week, somehow brand new and meaningful as i was contemplating the musical direction of my next playlist. listening to it with better headphones revealed lots of nice layers, depth and harmony, i like that bass throb under the chorus, it’s produced well and rewards paying attention to the extra stuff-- the contrary motion of the background vocal line in the opening to the chorus is nice.

something something i will get up regardless. currently repeating to myself, all you gotta do now is walk.

playing had the pleasure of hanging out with my Dnd friends on my birthday last week and playing a whole new style of game with them! Y introduced us to gloom, which is very Edward Gorey-core and therefore was delightful, and got our game-design nerds all excited about the cards themselves, and then K skunked us all at anomia. the adrenaline in this one is addictive? it is somehow so fun and yet so infuriating, and I have yet to regret suggesting it to a group or party.

making cleaned my room finally (somewhat) and have a stack of mail to send and cards to answer, now with the help of the beautiful fountain pen my roommates gave me for my birthday! It’s one of these, and while I can try to promise not to become a fountain pen nerd, time will tell…

working on this award letter for a prof is somehow the hardest thing to just fucking finish. I think because I want it to be better than just okay, and am worried that it’ll counteract its own message if it’s not? But also—I have palaeography homework now! and the abstract of a talk to finish, and that talk + associated chapter to outline! not to mention finishing reading and commenting on a friend’s chapters! taking it slow last week was nice and probably needed, but fuck.

#in lieu of a commonplace book #ilcb #weekly roundup

[chroniconic]

I took dienogest 2mg for 4 months for endometriosis and it basically erased any pelvic pain I had, the knitting needle pain through my right ovary, the butt lightning pain, the pain I felt upon pressure alone that felt like my organs are exploding, and it stopped my period

but the side effects? progressively suicidal thoughts. a new form of migraine I never experienced before: hemiplegic migraine where half of my body went completely numb for hours, a new type of visual symptom where I had black spots covering my field of vision, pain that feels like a sudden jolt through my head, and pain that feels like a bubble of pressure is moving from the center of my head, inside my head, to my forehead. these migraines would be non-stop. I developed constant double vision and also had a constant pounding headache in addition to the migraine. And I also had daily joint pain that felt like my joints were on fire and I wanted to scream, and by the end I started getting really bad hot flushes. I even developed some dark sun spots despite wearing sunscreen religiously (it’s an old skincare habit already) and not leaving my apartment.

Guess what? My estrogen levels are basically zero. Also progesterone levels though, but no one interpreted this for me yet so I don’t know what it means. I’m only 29 and I don’t think I could be in actual menopause yet.

Eventually I was unable to do anything.

My doctor said to continue dienogest regardless, because there is no other option. I had to stop dienogest, and now I’ve been on NuvaRing continously since March and I’m looking for another doctor.

The continuous usage allows me to skip my period and potentially avoid the worst symptoms then, but I know that unless I am in a semi-menopausal state like with dienogest, it will probably come back?

I had the NuvaRing prescribed as “acne medication” and my neurologist confirmed that it could be tried in my case, because it seems like I am sensitive to estrogen withdrawal, although normally COCs are not recommended when you have migraine with aura. I’m monitored for blood clotting issues (this will be a separate post).

Some of my endometriosis pain has returned on NuvaRing, but the constant throbbing headache and suicidal thoughts are gone. I still have double vision and migraines though. I had migraines before dienogest, they just turned into daily and relentless ones on it.

#actually chronically ill #endometriosis #chronic migraine #chronic pain #spoonie #dienogest #visanne #visannette #nuva ring

[hjellacott]

Letters to the girls #01

A/N: So I realised that now I'm "old" in Tumblr years and there's this whole new generation of teenagers here, some without Mums or females they can trust and talk about girls stuff, and so I thought I'd start a series of "Letters to the girls" talking about female things, particularly in adolescence and young adulthood, to have a space for feminine conversations, where you girls (and hey, why not boys? perhaps you've got questions too!) can ask ANYTHING. My messages are also open for you girls to tell me whatever you want to talk about, and I'll listen.

Today's topic is... MENSTRUATION AND THE FEMALE BODY PARTS!!! (you know where your clit is?)

I remember vividly when I first got my period. I must've been around twelve and I'm pretty sure I was the last one in my group of friends to get her period.

For some reason, I had no idea I was supposed to be expecting it. I suppose it could be your case, too? You study it in school. You know it happens. But somehow, you don't necessarily connect the dots and realise that yes, it's about to happen TO YOU. I got the scare of MY LIFE, let me tell you.

I remember going to the loo, as one does, and when I looked at the toiler paper, it was soaked in deep red blood. SOAKED. Now, of course, I laugh, but back then I freaked the hell out. I mean, imagine the fucking shock when you're just a kid and you just wanna pee and get on with your life and then you're fucking bleeding out. And I'm a hypochondriac, so you bet I only needed 5 seconds to think I was about to die. Right there sitting on the toilet. What a way to go!

I began shouting for my Mum in the worst panic of my life. I didn't even have time to think "hold on maybe we don't scare Mum". So of course she barged in, and I was borderline crying like "Mummy I'M BLEEDING! WHAT'S WRONG?!"

What makes me laugh harder now is remembering just how fucking chill and calm my mum was. She went from 100% panic to looking at me, the toilet paper soaked in blood in my hand, and then she was fully relaxed, probably thinking "fucking kid nearly killed me and is just her period". My poor mum.

That was the time that my mother, very patiently, explained to me that I had my period (which of course THEN began to make perfect sense, and I know you're probably thinking, how the fuck was this girl so oblivious? but remember this was before social media was a thing amongst teens, you guys feel adult much sooner now) and she proceeded to explain me about tampons and pads. About a decade later, the situation amusingly reverted and I sat with her explaining her how period cups are just INFINITELY better.

I then remember exiting the loo, once I was all ready, still probably looking white and mortified and feeling like my whole life was ruined, and my wonderful late father smiled this big ass smile at me and was like "you're a woman!" and gave me a super hug. Now, this might seem weird to you, but my father was chronically ill, so he was probably just happy he'd lived to see that moment.

Here's the thing about girls. I can't speak for boys, I'm not a boy. But us girls, we have frighteningly fantastic adaptation skills. So you get your period and at first I thought yeah, this sucks and life is horrible, and how am I ever going to get the hang of this? And then you just... do. Somehow life goes on and you adapt and it becomes one more boring part of your life, a monthly reminder that yes you're still not pregnant and your uterus is a little disappointed in you.

And here's a thing I only learned in my late teens. Each period is unique. Just like breasts are unique, nipples, vaginas... In my teens, I had a phase where I began to obsess about whether my period was normal, because for years it didn't hurt at all, whether other girls also got little blood clots, whether my vaginal lips were too big, my pubis too hairy, my breasts too small... All these things. When you're a teen, you just keep comparing and wondering, and many of my friends would talk about their bodies and all in school, but I'd always feel too self-conscious to join in. So now I can tell you that relax, however your body looks, it is normal. So long as your gyn doesn't say otherwise, you're fine.

Nipples come in different colours and sizes, aureolas are not always of a different colour than your skin, and can be browner, pinkier, even whiter, and yes, it's fine to have some hairs there. It's also fine to have little hairs around your chest and belly, we all, I promise you, have them. It's got to do with genetics, production of hormones, and race. Some girls might tell you "ew, I have no hair in my torso!" LIE. It's just that for many girls, those hairs are like the hairs many girls have in their cheeks or jawlines, very fine, very small, hard to see blonde hairs, like the fine hair that covers babies. And for others, like me, we might have them darker. I can tell you that I for one have some darker, perfectly visible hairs in my breasts and belly, hairs that I might pluck or ignore depending on my general feelings in the moment, and others that are so fine, I only notice they're there if the sun glows on them.

And breasts are all so different. It's also perfectly normal for your breasts to not be identical left and right, for one to be bigger or rounder or saggier, and nipples might be super tiny or round and bigger. And belly? it's fine to have a belly. If your belly is bigger than your chest, that's fine! give your body time to change. Oh, and when your trousers begin to feel tight, relax, you're not fat! It's just that in your teens, your hips begin to really develop. Mine widened a lot, so even though I've always been very thin, suddenly I was in like, two sizes more of trousers just because of it, and it's normal. Also your teens are a big time for hormonal readjustments, so don't panic if your weight is shifting a lot or out of control... Just make sure to do exercise and eat healthy, and you've got this.

And your pubis? Girl, everything that's down there is unique to YOU. Some girls have lots of hair, like, absolute bushes, the envy of lions, others don't. And it might be black, brown, blonde, sandy, gingery, curly, silky, rougher... Some girls like to trim it, some girls like to "keep it neat and tidy", some girls plait it (and I'm not fucking kidding you), some girls fully shave it. And yes, your skin will always look a little pale underneath. Your clitoris is that thing at the top of the lips that feels sorta like a hard yet soft ball of skin and cartilage, it might be bigger or smaller, pinkier or darker, and is covered by a hood of skin. And when you feel horny, the clit will get hard and come out a bit, like a tiny erection, and depending on how big yours is, you might notice it more or less, but all sizes are normal.

Also, that's just the outer part of your clit. It then goes inside, and forms like a "c", which is one of the reasons why sex done right will be pleasurable even without touching from outside. Then there's your lips. In biology, they call them labia majora and minora, and it comes from Latin, basically meaning major lips or minor lips. The major lips are in the outside sides of the minor lips, and the minor lips part revealing the most intimate area of your body, that'll always be wet (because female bodies create different amounts and types of fluids, without you needing to be turned-on, just for your overall health) and that in the lower part, has the vaginal entrance.

But don't let the names of those lips deceive you: the major lips aren't always the bigger ones, and the minor lips aren't always tiny. Sometimes, it's the whole other way around. And labia minora can also be quite dark even if you're white and pale so if that happens, don't freak out!

Just, overall, don't freak out. Come and ask. Let's talk about you!

#Letters To The Girls #women #womanhood #girls #feminism #women's rights #lgb #menstruation #teenagers #adolescence #body #body image

[obeymehasinfluncedmythoughts]

KINDA GROSS BUT ANYONE WITH A UTERUS HAS TO DEAL WITH IT SO FUCK IT

MC having the monster of all periods and all the boys or in the middle of it. And when I say the monster of all I mean it. Everything is happening. Clots, bloating, zits/pimples, PAIN, nausea, heat, anger, emotions going crazy, fatigue, headaches, back pain, insomnia, BLOOD, anxiety, aggression, food cravings, irritability, muscle pains and all the other gross and painful shit we have to deal with every month. How do they survive/react

This personally hits home for me 😔.

Before I was on my birth control, I had periods 24/7, all year. I know it's gross, but at my worst I went through 7 of those overnight pads in an hour. I had to go to the hospital for it (And then proceeded to get called a drama queen by a doctor). My cramps were horrible, and man, I still have bad periods but not nearly as bad as that. This is going to be a bit "gross" (Because despite how comfortable we can be discussing them, and how natural the process is, you can still be a bit grossed out by it. I mean blood by itself isn't bad, but sometimes it's like you give birth to placenta and that's pretty gross) but it's also hella fluffy.

Lucifer.

Very unbothered by periods. Out of any natural body process, it's probably the one that bothers him the least.

He pretty much treats it the same as any other basic need. Every bathroom has toiletries that he's got placed in some neat little box and their medications in any available cabinet.

But that's pretty much all he thought was needed.

When he realizes just how bad your periods are, he's a little under prepared. The household isn't exactly equipped to handle this situation, so he, and a few of his brothers (particularly Asmodeus and Mammon), scramble to gather whatever items might be needed from the various corners of the house.

Lucifer grabs you towels for your bed, in case you're the type to bleed through during the night. He finds you a heating pad, rub-on muscle relief creams, and a multitude of pain meds that exceed the typical Midol relief.

He can get a little peeved about your attitude, but knows that you can't really help it. So he'll grin and bare it, and accepts the fact that you're going to be a bit different until this is done.

Mammon

He's not extremely well-versed in the topic of menstruation.

However, I think this is one of those topics that despite not understanding, he automatically is incredibly accommodating.

There's lots of cuddles, lots of playing with your hair, and a lot of nonsensicle rambling that is mostly comforting (but sometimes headache inducing).

He is a little weird about bleeding through though. Not in a bad "You're disgusting" way, but more of a "I'm extremely confused as to what I'm supposed to do in this situation" way.

Thankfully he becomes pretty quick at just wrapping his jacket around you in public if you do start to leak.

He does think a cold wet rag is the secret to everything lmao.

At least it takes away from the hot flashes!

Leviathan

He might be a little embarrassed when there are obvious signs of a period (like blood or toiletries), but otherwise he handles it normally.

Levi doesn't point out your acne. He doesn't mention when you leak onto his sheets during the night. He won't call you out for being a bit more aggressive then usual (or even crying, because sometimes that's just all you can do).

All he does is just be a silent support. It's a nice break from the others tbh.

Like when you're in the bathroom, turn between feeling like you're going to throw up because your contraction-like cramps are wrecking havoc on your entire body, he'll be beside you. Stroking your back, holding up your hair incase you do vomit, and running around for whatever you need.

Definitely the type who, when you ask him to pick up pad/tampons, grabs every size and brand, puts them in the cart as discreetly as possible, then rushes home in a frenzy.

Satan

Satan is just as irritable during your period as you are lmao.

He's absolutely understanding, sure, but I think he feeds off of anger. So the minute you start getting pissy, he does too.

It's like a sympathy period thing, but uh, more linked to his sin then anything else.

Everyone is absolutely tired of you two squabbling by the end of your cycle.

Someone probably tries to lock one of you away tbh. You two are just extremely annoying.

It's even worse that after every fight you guys just cuddle. Like nothing ever happened. And everyone else is just kinda left there tense as hell because you two were arguing over fucking fruit for no reason.

Asmodeus

He's kinda like a big sister in this situation.

Asmodeus will give you acne treatments, run baths for you (always makes sure you don't worry about cleaning out the tub!), and gives you massages that sometimes get a bit spicy (But he always makes sure you're okay to handle it).

Yeah, I'll say it, Asmodeus isn't scared of period sex.

This is like the one time of the month he actually breaks his "strict" diet and junks out with you.

Cue lots of food photos! And a few that he sneaks of you for his personal folder. Expect to see your rather bloated self as a part of his aesthetically set up phone background. He thinks it's cute!!

A lot of body worship and praise is going down. Between him and Beel it's enough to make your head spin.

Beelzebub

This is like prime Beel time.

Cuddles, food, and massages are his speciality.

(Also not opposed to period sex but tbh he's like, extremely concerned about your well being the entire time.)

He's like, always kneading your muscles and thighs. Whenever you get self-conscious about your pre-period or period body, he'll always be ready to lay down a thick layer of praises that seem almost too good to be true.

Always let's you finish the snacks ❤

He gets you heat and cold packs. Well, tries. Somewhere along the line he gets distracted and tends to come back with cold peas instead of a ice pack. Works the same way, just, uh, food driven.

Beel is extremely calm during this whole thing. He rarely ever gets offended by your emotions or aggression either. Probably just pats your head and walks away when you're getting a bit too much for him to handle.

Belphegor

He is like, the biggest fucking asshole, but like in the funniest way.

Genieunly doesn't care about toiletries or whatever, but he's so blunt about it

(What size pussy kinda guy)

Oh you leaked and bled onto his sheets? Go back bed. Throw a towel over it. He'll sleep on that side if you want.

Absolutely no help to your insomnia btw, unless he's like blessed with magic sleeping powers, you're going to need to stay up with someone else.

Honestly though... he's not the best with handling periods but I think he's extremely casual about it. He doesn't look down on you, or your cycle, an does whatever you ask.

Extremely passive lmao.

#obey me #obey me! #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me satan #obey me leviathan #obey me luficer #obey me mammon #obey me x mc #obey me x reader

[theelvenhaven]

Elves Reacting To Your Periods

Gondolin

Turgon

Oh boy, when you first menstruate around Turgon, the poor King of Gondolin is thoroughly worried and panicking about why you are bleeding from your nethers! He asks if you are okay? What’s the matter? Why are you bleeding? Do you need to see a Healer?

And when you tell him that’s normal, he blushes deeply, trying not to look so undignified (further). Explaining to him that it’s menstruation and what the purpose of it only serves to make him blush embarrassedly. He’s not embarrassed by you, it’s just a conversation about the reproductive system of a menstruating human most certainly catches him off guard.

Turgon doesn’t ask anymore questions, nor does he really talk to you about it. He will try really hard to listen to your period complaints, but they only serve to make him blush and uncomfortable. I cannot promise that he will be making any kind of eye contact of any kind. Unintentionally making you uncomfortable, it takes some time for him to warm up to it, but he does eventually!

Turgon does ask what it is he can do to... make you comfortable. He has a healer ready at your disposal should you need it, gives you plenty of time to rest and definitely tries to work in time to spend with you to be a little more affectionate should you need or ask that of him!

Glorfindel

This warm ball of sunshine isn’t entirely clueless about humans and their menstruation cycles. He has spent little of his time around it or reading about it. While logically he knows you menstruate, it surprises Glorfindel the first time he encounters it with you. Glorfindel is worried he has hurt you somehow or another, even if the placing of blood on your clothes and sheets show that he couldn’t possibly have hurt you.

Glorfindel is quick to try to get you to a healer or a healer to you, wanting to make sure you are in fact okay. Though when you explain to him that partially, you are okay and that the bleeding is normal; he is quick to simmer down. The ease with which you speak of it is what brings him to trust you on it, and he attentively listens to you. Glorfindel also asks you a lot of questions about it, as it is human men he is used to being around, so his knowledge about your reproductive health is not extensive. He is also quick to help you clean up any sheets or clothes that need to be taken care of, or take over gathering the items while you clean and situate yourself.

Glorfindel will do what he can to take some time off during your worst days of menstruation and is unfortunately not exactly tactful about it at first. You will have to tell him if it bothers you, in the event you find it embarrassing, as he has no shame in announcing it. Because he will straightforwardly tell them “Y/N is menstruating I am afraid I am unavailable until further notice.”. Once you tell him, Glorfindel will keep that talk between you, him and the Healers if need be. When he can’t be there with you, he instead sends a healer in to check on you and bring you the things you need.

Ecthelion

Ecthelion is very methodical, so when you menstruate for the first time around him, his first thought is to figure out why and to clean up. Once the notion of normalcy about this has been made, Ecthelion is quick to strip the bed and have the sheets sent off to be cleaned.

In the meantime, he quickly and calmly directs you to clean up while he works on getting tea sent up to the room. When you are finished, he sits you down and asks what you mean by that it’s normal. He listens attentively and only asks what he feels are the important questions- 1. Is this normal? 2. How often does it happen? 3. What all do you need for this occurrence?

Ecthelion will make sure from then on out that your periods are handled like clockwork, as he remembers every little detail about you. So your period will run smoothly without a single kink in the plan. During these times he trusts that if you do need him, that you will tell him you need him or come see him to do so. Ecthelion doesn’t mind your company while he is working if you need him.

Anticipate for him to not be exactly the most receptive about your period complaints that might be extremely detailed. You want to complain about your cramps and how painful they are? He’s happy to listen to it. As for you description of your clots? Ecthelion is completely content never knowing what that may look like. His affection levels stay about the same, though if you seek him out for them, he won’t deny you in the slightest, just preferring things are more privately done. 

Rog

When you first menstruate around Rog and have an accident, when Rog sees the stain he’s a little concern but you are human, so literal bloody mysteries aren’t entirely uncommon. Like the first time you got a nosebleed, so he’s prepared for literal bloody mysteries. 

Rog is also unsure what you need him to do while you are getting up to go get changed and cleaned up. Does he need to send for a healer? Should he take the sheets to be cleaned? Do you need help? Should he clean the sheets himself? He’s going to need a little direction the first go around that this happens, Rog’s a quick learner so don’t worry about this being a constant thing.

Rog is also the type of ellon to talk about your period. While he won’t go running around detailing every bit about it (like Penlod might.) he will still bring it up in conversation or if someone asks why you are so moody today. So if it is something that bothers you, you will have to tell him not to disclose it and he’s happy not too!

Rog will also shower and dote you in extra affection seeing how this is not exactly a pleasant time for you. Sex, cuddles, kisses, embraces and even fun thrown in there. If he sees that you need a hug even while sweaty from being in the forges, he will chase you around to hug you. Rog just wants to try and make your times with him enjoyable especially during such an uncomfortable time.

Penlod

You are in for a whirlwind of questions all day when Penlod discovers that you menstruate. From the time the stain is discovered is when the questions begin. They do start out with him being concerned; “There’s blood in the bed. Are you alright?” And when you tell him why, oh Eru. 

“You menstruate? What is that? Do all humans menstruate? Why do you menstruate? Why do you need it to reproduce? Why is it blood? Is it always blood? This can happen once a month? You can skip months? You can have more than one in a month? You cramp? What does that feel like? You bleed heavily? Lightly? Does it gush? Is it slow? There are clots?” ANYTHING about your period, you are being asked it by Penlod. Even if you don’t know the answer, he’s still going to ask it.

He has absolutely no shame in who overhears it, and he absolutely wants to write every single bit of it down to be stored in the library. Penlod also asks you many questions about your care for your period and how you handle the pains of period cramps. Noting every remedy he can out of you and adding it to the book. It's an extremely comprehensive book on the menstruating humans reproductive cycle. 

The first few periods you have, you will just have to let Penlod burn himself out of questions as there is no stopping him. He’s determined and eager to learn about you. Afterwards, though, he’s far more considerate to your emotional and physical needs, trying to be more doting on you than full of endless questions.

Galdor

Galdor is the most laid back elf that there is, and there are absolutely no exceptions when you start your period. He is very go with the flow and relaxed, so when there is a stain- sheet or clothes- involved. Galdor is just attentive and ready to do what needs to be done to assist in cleanup.

He figures, if it were life threatening you would’ve told him by now so he makes no push on anything. Galdor just waits for you to explain, happy to take your laundry to get it cleaned, even if he has to do it himself. He does it really with no questions asked. 

Galdor will also listen to any and all of your period complaints completely unphased by what you are saying. No matter how graphic the details might be and he does what he can to console you if you need it. Galdor is really gentle and will take care of not just your physical needs but your mental and emotional ones.

His presence is just so peaceful and safe and his affections are too. Galdor lets you take time off as you need, or lets you even come sit with him even if he’s working (as long as it isn’t a meeting). He just wants to do what he can to try to make you feel better. 

Maeglin

When you start to menstruate, Maeglin absolutely panics about you suddenly bleeding! And you’ve bled enough to stain your clothes and/or sheets of the bed!? He is utterly worried and gets irritable trying to figure out how this could happen to you! Did he do it? Did someone else do it? Did you get hurt?

It takes a bit of calming him down before he finally relents to be able to listen to you talk about what is going on with you. Catching him entirely off guard when you tell him that this is a normal and natural occurrence. You will have to very literally sit him down to calm down while you clean yourself up. In the meantime, it allows him to think about what you said.

When you’ve come back out, he’s blushing as he thinks about the entire ordeal and how he reacted. Ready to ask and listen to questions, he does nervously stammering and trying to think of things sheepishly to ask you about it. Maeglin takes his time wanting to make sure he understands what is going on with you and that you really are okay.

Once he is confident that this new to him thing is safe and you are okay, he relaxes. But is concerned about you and asks you multiple times a day if you are okay or if you need anything? To make sure you really are okay. He doles out even more gentle affections to you, feeling like he needs to treat you so delicately in the process.

* * * 

tags:

@saviorsong​ @lilmelily​ @dicksoutformtl​ @fandomhoe101​ @icarus-fell-in-spring​ @iwenttomordor​ @red-riding​ @miriel-estelwen​​

#Turgon #Glorfindel #Ecthelion #Rog #Penlod #Maeglin #Galdor #jrr tolkien #tolkien #The Fall of Gondolin #the silm #the silmarillion #silm #silmarillion #writing #fanfic #fanfiction #imagines #imagine #one shot #one shots #headcanon #headcanons

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)

Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!

Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Word count: ~30k Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period) Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary) Relationships: Jon/Martin Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake. Excerpt:

“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.” “Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?” Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice. “Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him. “Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.” “Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.” Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.

If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!

Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.

“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.

He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.

“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”

“I don’t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.

(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)

“What are you looking for?”

“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”

“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.

“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”

A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”

Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”

“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”

“Oh come on.”

“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”

“Do you know that?”

“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”

“Did you check for cobwebs?”

“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”

“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.

Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”

“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”

“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”

“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”

“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”

Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”

“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”

God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.

Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.

But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.

On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.

Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”

“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”

“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”

“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”

“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.

“I don’t!”

“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”

Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.

But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.

“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”

Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”

“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”

“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”

“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”

“Mm.”

“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”

“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.

Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”

“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.

“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”

And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.

“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”

“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”

“Hm? Oh—no.”

“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”

“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”

Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”

“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”

“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”

Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.

“Excuse me.”

Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”

“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”

The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:

“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”

“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”

“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”

He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:

“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.

Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?

Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?

He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.

“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”

“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”

“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.

As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”

Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”

Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”

God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.

“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.

“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”

Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”

“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”

“We might, though.”

Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”

“Not hungry.”

“A statement, I meant.”

“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”

So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.

When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”

Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”

“You hate sitting on the floor.”

“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.

“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”

There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.

“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”

“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.

Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”

Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”

“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”

“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”

“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”

“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”

Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”

“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.

“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”

“Oh.”

Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,

“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”

“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:

“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,

“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh! I blinked!”

“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”

Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.

“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”

Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.

“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”

“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”

“Oh. Yeah, good point.”

Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.

A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.

That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.

He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.

Drowning in debt? We can help!

How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—

Right. Nope, never mind.

He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.

After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.

It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.

Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.

Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.

“Jon? Are you awake?”

“Hm? Oh. Yes.”

“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”

“How to put the doorknob back on?”

“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”

“Er…”

“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”

“Still, I’m sorry about—”

“No, it’s—it’s fine?”

On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.

When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.

“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”

“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”

“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”

He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."

Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”

Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,

“No, sorry, not all the way off—”

And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”

“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”

“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”

“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.

“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”

Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?

“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”

“Oh come on.”

“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”

And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.

“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”

“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”

“Oh? Great!—”

“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.

“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”

Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”

“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”

“Y…eah.”

“Any idea where to look?”

They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.

Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”

“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,

“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”

“Oh.”

Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.

“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.

“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.

Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.

Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”

“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”

Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”

“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”

“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”

Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”

“I said that once,” Jon protested.

No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”

“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.

“No arguments here.”

“Where to next?”

“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”

“Except for the screws.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”

Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”

“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”

“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”

Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”

“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”

“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”

“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”

Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.

“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.

“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”

“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”

Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”

Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”

“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”

“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.

“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”

“Sure.”

“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”

“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.

“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”

Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”

“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”

“But if we can fix it without his help—?”

“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”

“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”

Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”

“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”

“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I mean—I was, but—”

“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”

“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.

“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”

“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”

“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”

“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”

“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”

Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”

Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”

“Sort of?”

“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”

“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.

“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”

“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.

“I—what?”

“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”

Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”

“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know, look?”

“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”

“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.

It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.

“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”

Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?

Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.

So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?

They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.

“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.

Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”

“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.

Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.

Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.

“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.

The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”

Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.

“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.

“If you’re sure.”

Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”

“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.

“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”

“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,

“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”

They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.

“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”

“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.

But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?

”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”

A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.

“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.

“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”

Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”

Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”

“Right.”

Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.

Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”

“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”

“What fell? Are you okay?”

“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”

“Oh.”

He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.

From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.

Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.

“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”

“Do I have to?”

“Humor me.”

When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”

Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”

Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”

“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”

He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”

“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”

With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”

He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.

While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”

“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”

“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”

Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”

“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”

“You—?”

His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.

“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”

“Well that’s obviously not true.”

“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”

“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”

“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.”

Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”

“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”

“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”

Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.

“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”

“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”

He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.

“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”

And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good night, Jon.”

“Good night. I still need the light, for.”

“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”

“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.

Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.

“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”

Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.

“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”

She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.

“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”

“She’s already gone, Martin.”

“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”

“Shhh!”

“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”

Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”

“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”

“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.

Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”

“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”

“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”

“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”

“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”

“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”

“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”

“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”

It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.

Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”

“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.

But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”

“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”

“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”

“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.

And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”

“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.

“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”

“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”

Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”

But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.

“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”

“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”

“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”

“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.

“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”

As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.

“You alright?”

“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”

“Ha.”

After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”

Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”

“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”

“Right—the spider, yes.”

“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”

Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.

All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.

“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”

Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”

“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”

“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”

“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”

“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”

“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”

“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”

Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”

“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”

“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”

“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”

And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.

“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”

Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”

“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”

“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”

Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”

“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.

“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”

“I mean, she is physically more human here.”

“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.

“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”

A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”

“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn’t necessarily mean she still has any power.”

“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”

“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”

“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”

“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”

“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”

“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”

Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”

Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”

“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—

“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—

“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”

“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”

“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”

“Not this again—”

“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”

Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.

“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”

“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”

That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”

His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”

With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.

“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?

“How did you—?”

“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”

“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”

Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.

Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.

“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”

“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”

“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.

“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.

He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”

“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”

“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”

Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?

“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”

On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.

That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.

“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.

“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.

“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”

“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”

Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”

“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”

“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”

“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”

Big sigh. “Fine.”

In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.

Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”

Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”

“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”

Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.

And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.

“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,

“Huh?”

“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”

“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”

“I’ll try and be better about….”

Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”

“I mean, I am—”

“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”

“I do. I should’ve told you.”

“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”

“No—it’s fine?”

“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”

Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”

“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”

“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.

That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”

So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.

“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.

How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?

“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”

Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.

“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”

Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”

Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”

“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”

“And do you know which screw that is?”

She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.

“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”

Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”

“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.

Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.

“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.�� Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”

“Don’t know what else you expected.”

Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.

“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”

“I mean—”

“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”

“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”

“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”

“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”

“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.

“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.

“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”

“I… I think so, yes.”

Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”

“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.

“Food didn’t help?”

His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”

“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”

Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”

In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.

Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”

“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”

He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”

“Right.”

They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.

All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.

“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”

“Mrrr.”

“…Jon, are you asleep?”

He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”

Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”

“Mmrrrrrrr.”

“My arm’s asleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.

“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.

“Do you want me to go look without you?”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mhm.”

Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.

“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”

“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.

“Here.”

Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”

“Probably not.”

“Hm.”

“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”

“Okay.”

In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.

“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”

“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.

Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.

They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.

Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.

Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”

“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”

He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.

“I let him go off alone.”

Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—

Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.

Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.

After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.

“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.

“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”

“So they just let you out for this.”

Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”

“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”

“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”

“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.

Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.

“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.

Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”

“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.

They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”

“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”

Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”

“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”

“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”

He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.

Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”

“Except rum and raisin?”

“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”

“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”

So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.

“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”

“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”

“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”

“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.

“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”

“Didn’t I?”

At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”

“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”

“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”

Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.

“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”

“But you never used it.”

“No—surely, I—”

“Not once before Prentiss.”

Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.

“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”

Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”

“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”

From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.

“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.

“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”

“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”

“Sorry?”

“No—it’s.”

This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.

He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.

In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never…

Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.

Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.

Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.

Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?

“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”

“How could I?”

He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”

“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”

“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”

“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”

“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”

“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”

After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.

“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”

“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”

Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”

“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”

“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.

But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I just thought.”

“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”

Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”

“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”

Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.

“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”

“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”

Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”

“Either—both—first one, then the other.”

“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”

This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?

But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.

“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”

“Oh.”

“Sorr—”

“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”

“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”

“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”

Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”

“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.

“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”

Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”

“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”

“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”

“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”

“Y—eah. Sure.”

“Is that…?”

“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”

“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”

“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”

“Fair enough.”

“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”

Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.

“Martin?”

“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.

“You found the screwdriver.”

“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”

Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”

“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”

Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”

“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”

Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.

“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”

“Least our wallpaper’s better.”

“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”

Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”

“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.

(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)

“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”

“Uhhh.”

“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”

Jon smiled. “Sure.”

As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.

Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the

“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.

Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”

“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”

He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.

“Statement time?”

“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”

“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you hated statements.”

Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”

“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.

“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”

That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.

He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]

It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.

Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.

Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.

He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.

Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?

No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I

Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—

“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”

He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.

“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”

“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”

“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”

Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?

The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.

“Thank you,” he said.

The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.

“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”

“I don’t think they work here.”

“What?”

“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”

“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”

That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.

Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.

After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.

“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”

“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”

“Tim did.”

“No, he didn’t—”

“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”

“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”

“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”

“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.

“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”

“You’re right.”

Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were—and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.

In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to

“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”

“Not great?”

“Yeah.”

“I… I feel human, here.”

“Oh wow. That’s—”

Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”

“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”

Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”

At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”

“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”

“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”

“Not great.”

“Right.”

“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.

Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”

“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”

“No, of course not; I just meant—”

“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”

“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”

“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”

“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.

“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”

In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”

“Really? You don’t seem like it—”

“Not today, maybe—”

“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”

“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”

“Oh, god, of course you were—”

Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”

“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”

“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”

“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”

“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”

Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.

“Yes.”

“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”

“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”

The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”

Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”

“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”

“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”

“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.

“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”

“I do—I hate it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”

“Yes.”

“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”

Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”

“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”

This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”

“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”

With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”

“I suppose we do.”

As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.

“What?”

“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”

“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”

“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”

“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”

“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”

After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”

“Even though Annabelle was there?”

“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”

“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”

With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”

“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”

“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”

Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”

“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”

“She had four arms?”

“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”

“Er….”

“So that’s a no, then.”

“Sorry.”

Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”

“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”

“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”

“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”

“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.

Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.

“O…kay. And was that… true?”

“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”

Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”

“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”

“And you… didn’t find any?”

“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”

“Right. Doorway, yes.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”

“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”

Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?

“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”

“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.

“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”

“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”

“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”

“So not the part about the doorway.”

“Nope.”

“Pity.”

#tma fic #the magnus archives #rqbb2021 #rusty quill big bang 2021 #jonmartin #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #suddenly a tma blog #scri wrote something

[nsomniacsdream]

The Sentinel System had been built long before I was born, but superior engineering and paranoid budgets made for a long lived weapons platform. Created and launched by the United States military in the late 2000s, it was a series of satellites with unbelievably powerful plasma arc cannons in stationary orbit with overlapping fields of fire to cover any point in the globe with at least 2 cannons capable of obliterating a cubic mile of the earth per shot. No residual fallout, just neatly erasing any problem that might crop up. The interesting thing about the system was that each satellite had two cannons, one facing earth, one facing out. The rationale at the time was that in the event of a cannon failure, the satellite could be rotated to bring the other to bear, thus doubling the operational life of the system without the work of flying up to make repairs. Functionally, they were holding a gun to every head on the planet.. and pointing some pretty heavy firepower out as well.

When the signals first arrived, there was the predictable panic. "Alien invaders". "Who knows what they want." "How can we trust them?" But in time, we came to.. accept these Others. We had never met, it was strictly a long distance relationship. Their ships could travel here, but they were still a little ways out, so we all began to prepare. Rivers were cleaned. Forests replanted. Like a long time bachelor, we wanted to put our best foot forward. But plans were also made, deep inside several governments, on the off chance the encounter didn't go as planned.

My wife and I were chosen, by a combination of aptitude tests and patriotism scores, to man The Dead Switch. A couple was chosen since it was believed that our desire to protect eachother would be an even stronger motivator. We were to be put into deep stasis for a period of 5 years. The Others were expected within a month, and this would be our insurance policy. In our communications, we had directed them to stay outside the orbit of the moon, just at the edge of the Sentinels range. If first contact went screwy or their intentions turned out to be malicious, the Sentinel would be activated by the US military. But there was also a daily code that had to be put in, that kept the stasis system we were to be plugged into operating. If the code couldn't be put in, we would be awakened. And we were supposed to enable the Sentinel.

It felt like the worst hangover I'd ever had, but the blaring klaxon gave me no choice but to try to get out of my bed. I looked to my wife, hands across her chest and from the looks of it, only now regaining her movement. The pounding in my head was very nearly blinding, but I managed to silence the alarm and turn back to the stasis beds that had been placed directly next to eachother. My breaths were ragged, which I expected. Stasis Lung was like jet lag, when the fields that inhibited cell function faded, inner tissues sometimes took a little while to get back up to speed. Expected, never enjoyed.

I squeezed my hands together, trying to work out a twinge in my left hand, as my wife, the lovely Sara, pushed herself away from the bed and towards a bank of monitors that were flashing and scrolling with data.

"There's a terrestrial problem?" She muttered to herself.

"On planet? What?" I crossed to her to see the monitors myself.

"The Pacific Alliance. According to the data, after the Sentinels controls were transferred to the outer cannons, Perth took a chance and launched on Washington. Nothing was available to intercept. Washington is gone. New York. Central Territories. All of it." A series of trajectories and a wide smear of red were displayed.

"And that means the switch was activated. No one else knew about us, they must have thought if they could get off the right shot, they wouldn't have to worry about retaliation. Sweet Blorbo, all those people. All those Americans."

The twinge in my hand was getting stronger. Micro clots sometimes happened after stasis. I'd have to run a scan soon.

"John, we still have access to Sentinel. We have to respond. It's protocol. If we move quickly, we can transfer control to the inner cannons, dust every one of those wet bastards and get the outer cannons back up before the Others could notice. From the specs they sent us, their sensors aren't that much different from ours, and I don't think they can read us from here." Their technology had been odd, not enough controls and seemingly not meant for manual use, but the principles were similar.

I took a deep breath. Another. "Let's do it. As fast as we can. We are the only ones who can."

We took our places at the central terminal: a pillar that rose floor to ceiling in the center of the bunker. Our consoles were about 2 feet apart, mini screens showing the same information we had already been over with the addition of a numeric pad below the command display.

"First, the synchro code." A quickly entered 8 digit code linked the terminals and prepped the system for entry.

There was a sudden flash on one of the side screens. The data was different, but it went back to normal too fast to register what it was saying. "Did you see that?" I asked, the throbbing in my fingers getting stronger.

"Faulty sensor? It almost looked like a full normal reading?" Her eyes found mine, still full of determination, but just ever so slightly pleading.

I shook my head. "That doesn't make sense. There are hundreds of sensors around the world, taking a reading every half second and coordinating and double checking with every other sensor in the grid. A bad sensor would be cut off before it made its second bad reading."

"Second step." Her voice was firm. "Enter identification code."

A second 8 digit number, one designed to be completely removed from the first, so cracking one gave you no clues to the second. My fingers were starting to lose feeling as I swiftly keyed my sequence.

"SYSTEM IN LOCK STATUS. ENTER FINAL CONFIRM KEY TO PROCEED," flashed from the command screen. We had gotten this far our last day together, just before being put into stasis. Her eyes had flashed with pride and duty, her smile as infectious as ever. The final code had never been spoken, never written down or shared. We each had a separate code. Sara had never told me her code, never even hinted at it. And she never in a million years would have guessed mine. Because she didn't remember the day we first met, she thought we were meeting for the first time all those months later. "Excuse me." My code was the first words she had said to me, as we passed each other a little too closely outside my office. She made more of an impression than I made on her, obviously.

Just for a second, the alarm lights went out, replaced with the soft glow of the main lights, before the crimson flooded the room again. Alarm flashed across her face, her mouth slightly open. "This isn't supposed to be possible." The systems had been tested, redundancies on every connection, back ups for the back ups. False readings or system glitches were impossible. It was demonstrated for us mathematically, over and over again in the training.

It was like a vice was slowly closing on my hand as I spoke thru gritted teeth. "We don't have time, we have to start the counterstrike and get the cannons back online on the outer side."

"But what is going on? I checked each of these scanners by hand before we went down. 3 times! Every test came back green, with the self diagnostics agreeing each time. This. Can't. Be. Happening."

The pain in my hand continued to increase, probably cell death from a clot somewhere in my hand. "Afterwards. After we finish the cycle and reposition, we can figure it out."

"John.. this doesn't feel right."

Moments stretched out. The same look in her eyes I always saw when she needed me to reassure her that she was doing the right thing.

Sara suddenly snapped her attention up, back straight and eyes ahead, just like in boot camp. She turned with a quick surge of movement and typed quickly. "KEY ONE ENTERED. SYSTEM STILL IN LOCK. ENTER SECOND CONFIRM CODE." She stared at the screen, her breathing shallow. Her eyes flicked to me a split second before her head turned. "Put in your code, John. We have to finish this." Her voice flat, resigned.

My hand stopped hurting. All at once, the pressure was gone. "Probably not a good thing", I thought. There might be a chunk of hardened blood shooting through my veins, heading for my brain.

"John. Put in your code."

Still staring, somehow looking through me. I thought of her laugh, when I had told her not to let the bedbugs bite in the stasis canopy. Our last kiss. The hissing and the blackness.

"We have to finish this, John."

Her hair had been sprawled out around her face on her pillow. She always looked like an angel to me.

"John, finish put in your code. We have to."

Looking down, I remembered the last thing she had done before the tingling energy of the stasis field had hit us.

"John." Flat. Her eyes were blank.

She had laced her fingers thru mine, so we could stay together through the long night.

[yourdeepestfathoms]

so are we just not going to address that Sue didn’t even TRY to save Carrie

like, this drives my anatomy-nerd self up the wall, so i’m going to evaluate a lot of the different Carrie: The Musical death scenes and see if they would actually be as fatal as they were shown to be and if Sue could have saved Carrie if she hadn’t been a bumbling idiot

(i’m not doing the movies because in 1976 she dies from the house collapsing, in 2002 she’s actually saved, and in 2013 Sue couldn’t really do anything with Carrie using her powers on her)

also i’m not saying any of this is completely accurate. i’m not a med student, i just did a lot of research and am in an anatomy class. i could be wrong BUT here’s my shot at it

Broadway Kids

okay, so, at first glance, this one looks like it could be very much fatal. you can see that Carrie gets stabbed near her spine, on the (if i did my directions correctly) left side, which is where the heart is located. HOWEVER, she is stabbed in the upper part of the back instead of the center, so it would have missed her heart.

in return, the uppermost part of the left trapezius would have sustained the most damage. the trapezius’ main function is to support the weight of the arm and control the movement of the scapulae, so a puncture wound would have most likely caused it to seize up in the reaction to the pain, resulting in the inability to lift the left arm above the shoulder. a stab to the upper part of the back would also most likely puncture the left dorsal scapular nerve, which provides motor innervation to muscles, allowing them to move the scapula.

additionally, underneath all that muscle and tissue, we come to the skeleton.

depending on exact location, Carrie most likely would have been hit around the second to fifth rib. these upper ribs are incredibly tough. to cause actual damage to the organs they protect, you would need to go between the ribs. however, you can see that Margaret stabs vertically, not horizontally, so the knife would not go in all the way. that bone is going to do its job and protect the lungs and heart by blocking it from entry. the most that could have happened is that maybe the tip got through and nicked one of the lungs, but not nearly enough to be fatal. damage would lie mainly in the flesh, muscle, and tissue.

for example:

i don’t think Carrie would be able to prop herself up on her arms like that. all her weight is going onto that injury and causing it to bleed even more, which could have been the thing that actually killed her, but not as quickly as it did.

and then we see here that she shifts all of her weight onto that injured side, which would only deepen her pain. though it is more realistic than her using the left arm to stop Margaret, as she most likely would have not been able to lift it with her injury.

BK Carrie should have survived, but dumbass Sue didn’t think to do ANYTHING, even though Carrie TELLS HER she’s hurt.

like the most she’s doing, MAYBE, is that with the way Carrie is positioned, Sue’s leg may be pressing against the wound, which would help stem the bleeding, but that’s a huge “maybe.”

but yeah, Carrie should have survived this wound.

Seattle!

it’s a little hard to see because it’s so dark, but Carrie is stabbed in the center of her back on what looks like the left side. furthermore, and what makes this version more lethal than BK, is that Margaret stabs Carrie horizontally, meaning the blade would have gone between the ribs and punctured her lung or maybe even her heart. but realistically, it would have been the lung, and this would result in something called a “sucking wound”, which is when holes are opened up in the wall of the lung and cause air to leak into the thoracic cavity instead of the lungs. despite this, they are actually rarely life-threatening. while there may be blood leaking into her lung, Carrie still has another lung to keep her breathing.

unfortunately, it’s most likely her reaction that made the stab so lethal.

i don’t know if it was done on purpose or completely on accident, but the way Carrie doesn’t scream is very much accurate to what it’s like to be stabbed. a lot of times, you aren’t going to feel the knife going in. that rush of adrenaline is going to completely numb your body for several moments. what she is going to feel, however, is her punctured lung beginning to fill with blood and her body grasping for air as breathing is reduced. this causes her to gasp, wheeze, and make strangled noises instead of an actual scream or anything verbal.

whether or not she would be able to prop herself up like that is debatable, as her trapezius was also stabbed and we’ve learned that that restricts arm movement, but it’s that panic that really does a number on her. her heart is going to start beating faster and faster, which is going to increase blood flow. so while her platelets are trying to form a clot over the wound to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible, the blood is just going to keep gushing out and disrupt that process. and to make things worse, she’s breathing very rapidly. that’s going to put a strain on the lung trying to make up for the loss of the other, while also straining that injured lung filling with blood. it’s also just harder to get air when you’re panicking, so she’s not getting nearly as much oxygen as she needs, especially when she direly needs it.

here we see a loss of limb control from the way she lies down, most likely from shock, but also potentially from the crushing pain of her lung collapsing on itself. because while a sucking wound isn’t as lethal as it may seem, panicking is going to increase that level of danger. shock will be actively working against her, but if she kept herself calm, she would be able to stay awake longer. but because she’s panicking, she’s not getting enough air to her brain, thus causing her to begin to lose control of her body.

another big “maybe” if she would be able to life the arm on the side she got stabbed in, but i’ll let it slide.

now, i think Carrie could have survived this wound, even with her panic. the thing that killed her? fucking Sue.

there’s so many things wrong about the way Sue reacted. i mean, they always react badly, but this one especially.

first of all, punctured lung. i know that Sue can’t tell that Carrie’s lung is damaged, but she should have guessed something was wrong with the way Carrie was breathing abnormally. like, the girl could barely even speak without sounding choked up.

and speaking of choking! one of her lungs is bleeding! laying her down is going to make it easier for her to inhale that blood and begin to choke. and just in general, she shouldn’t be laying down. maybe it’s more comfortable for her, but laying down is only going to decrease the room in her chest for her lungs to expand and get air. she should be sitting up.

but most of all,  Sue should have APPLIED PRESSURE TO THE FUCKING WOUND. SHE SHOULD HAVE CALLED FOR HELP. she can’t expect the victim of the injury to do all that for her- she should be smart enough to know to stop the bleeding instead of just sitting there like a useless idiot.

you wanna know what i think? i don’t think Carrie died. not in that moment. i think she just passed out from the shock, but Sue thought she had died and left her there to suffocate, even though she could have been saved.

2012 Revival

really shitty quality because the boot sucks and Marin stabs FAST, but Carrie is stabbed in the lower back, close to her waist, on what i believe is her left side because it looks like the knife is pulled out from the area closest to the audience.

so, Carrie is going to get stabbed somewhere in the left latissimus dorsi, specifically in the middle-to-lower area if i’m correct, but it’s kinda hard to tell exactly in the video. the latissimus dorsi controls several different movements for the upper body and the arms, so being stabbed in that area will most likely cause those muscles to seize up in reaction. it’s probably going to be hard for Carrie to sit up, move her arms, and even potentially move her legs.

in terms of lethality, i think this may be the most fatal blow so far if i tracked the projection of the knife correctly because i’m pretty sure it went straight into where her kidney would be. and the kidneys are essentially blood sponges.

have you ever had a kidney stone before? women who have given birth and had kidney stones say that the stones hurt worse. the first time i had one, it put me on the floor, weeping like a little baby until my mom took me to the ER at one in the morning. they’re even worse than period cramps. so if these tiny, grain-of-sand-sized chunks can cause this much pain, imagine what a knife to the kidneys could do.

the kidneys are full of nerve endings and have a lot of blood flow throughout them. they are also highly sensitive to pain. if you’ve ever been punched in the kidney before, it feels like getting the wind knocked out of you, except it’s not your lungs, it’s your whole body. and if Carrie had been stabbed here, she’s not getting up from it. certainly not as easily as she does in the show.

a shot to the kidney is going to put Carrie into immediate shock. i don’t think she would be able to scream they was she does because a blow to such a sensitive place is going to wind her. the pain would completely render her stunned for several moments. nor do i think she would be able to crawl away as she also does in the show. she should have crumpled straight to the ground after taking the hit and her body probably would have seized up for a moment because of how much pain she would be in.

the way she sits up after killing Margaret isn’t very realistic, either. she wouldn’t be able to get up after taking a knife to her kidney- not that quickly. i don’t think she would have even been able to kill Margaret in the first place. the pain had to be excruciating.

even though Sue still should have called 911 and tried to stop the bleeding, really the only thing she could do for Carrie at that point was make her comfortable. Carrie was bleeding out. so i do think this stab was realistic in how fatal it was, they just need to teach Molly how to properly act with a punctured kidney.

Branching Out!

also hard to see because of the angling, but Carrie does grab at the wound

and it looks like she had been stabbed somewhere in the center of her middle back, close to her spine and sort of where her ribs end, which means it probably struck a kidney. but not only that- the average kitchen knife tends to be eight inches in length. so that’s eight inches down to the handle going into this girl’s back, not only piercing her kidney, but also potentially a part of her large intestines and even maybe her small intestines. the result would be extremely painful, so much so that it would probably send her into shock instantly, as it should have done for 2012. but instead she screams and crawls away, which would not have been possible with such a lethal wound. the more realistic thing would be for her to crumple to the floor and open her mouth to scream and cry, but not actually be able to make any noise.

once again, Sue should have done more to save her life, but the wound was really bad. Carrie was rapidly bleeding out. it was nice that Sue soothed her, but she could have at least TRIED. like, CARRIE is the only putting the pressure on the wound. Sue should be doing that, not the victim.

Off-West End

you can’t see the knife because Margaret actually slashes Carrie’s throat instead of stabbing her, but this actually has to be the most realistic version of Carrie’s death, even though you would think neck wounds would be complicated.

so, Carrie gets her throat slit. the simplest damage she’s going to sustain is injury to her platysma, which serves to produce different facial expressions such as surprise, sadness, and horror, and also helps open the mouth from where it’s attached to the mandible. this would most likely make it painful for her to speak.

even further than her platysma, there’s damage to her sternocleidomastoid, which connects the sternum and clavicle to the skull. this is the muscle that allows the head to turn and nod, so when that gets cut through, she’s going to have some problems turning her head, if she is even capable of doing so in the first place.

and then even deeper and more severe than that are all of the organs in her neck. the most at risk are her larynx and trachea. but most importantly are the two major vessels in her throat: the jugular and the cartoid.

upon getting her throat slashed, Carrie immediately begins to sputter and cough as her jugular was most likely cut through and her lungs begin to fill with blood. despite this, she would actually be able to still talk, as there are many stories of people talking even after they got their throat slashed.

props to them for the realism in making Carrie HOLD THE DAMN WOUND SHUT. when it comes to something that is bleeding or just spilling in general, especially a throat wound, your first instinct is to COVER IT UP and STOP THE FLOW.

even further: THEY HAVE SUE HOLD THE WOUND.

FINALLY.

not only is Sue’s hand over it, but Carrie’s is, too, meaning even more pressure on that wound. this is a good thing because not only will the jugular and cartoid bleed a ton, they will also spray blood like a high pressure hose. of course, this isn’t possible onstage, so i’ll let them slide, but MAJOR points on not having Sue be completely useless. she still should have called an ambulance, especially for a slit throat, but i can give her a pass because she is having to hold the wound shut and hold Carrie’s body up.

speaking of: that’s a good position she’s in. Carrie is slouched at an angle with her head downwards, meaning the blood will fall out of her mouth instead of going back in if she were to cough it up. lying her down or cradling her on her back with her head tipped up will only make it easier for her to choke.

as the scene goes on, we hear Carrie start to gasp and wheeze as she drowns in her blood. very realistic. that’s going to cause a panic, but she probably doesn’t have the energy or blood to even do that.

despite all of these injuries, i don’t think Carrie would have died from them if Sue had just done something more to help her.

here’s my running theory: Sue let Carrie die. she knew she could have done something, she just chose not to. there was a chance for Carrie to live, but she didn’t let that happen. perhaps out of revenge for the massacre? maybe Sue was darker than we all thought...

extreme tldr: Miss Gardener should have gone to Carrie’s house instead of Sue because she would have actually done something

#yes i KNOW this is a show about a girl with telekinesis #but that doesn't mean the wounds have to be depicted in inaccurate ways #i took this post way too far but i had Fun #carrie #carrie the musical #broadway kids carrie #seattle carrie #carrie 2012 #branching out carrie #off west end carrie #carrie white #sue snell #tw: wounds #tw: blood

[atlafan]

My Everything - Part Thirteen

A Take it Slow Sequel

What happens with Harry and Y/N after he proposes? How will the two navigate the engaged life while also continuing to juggle their jobs, friends, and families? Let’s find out.

Warnings: Fluff and Smut! 7K

Masterpost

You and Harry had gotten into the habit of singing Jack to sleep at night, and he seemed to really like it. It was something nice for the two of you to do together. Your hormones were starting to level back out too, which was great. Having Anne around was a huge help too. Gemma had come to visit for a couple of weeks, but she couldn’t stay much longer than that.

Nannie had come up around Father’s Day, so your mom had a big cookout for everyone, even your dad came so you could all be together. You had just missed the mark for Mother’s Day, of course, but you were happy to celebrate Harry. He needed the reassurance since he was putting so much pressure on himself.

“Oy! Look at those cheeks!” Nannie says as she holds Jack. She gives him a nice big kiss. “Now that is delicious, absolutely delicious.”

Tons of pictures are taken to show the four generations of people there. Harry was happy Anne was there too. Not that he didn’t like your family, but it was always nice to have a buffer. Plus he enjoyed seeing her interact with everyone.

“You look so good, honey.” Nannie says to you.

“Oh, thanks, yeah, I’m not where I want to be, but getting there.”

“Your body will never look the way it did.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” You laugh.

“All I’m saying is, you’re healthy right?”

“Yeah.”

“So don’t stress too much.” She gives you a reassuring smile.

//

You were passed the six week mark, and you were more than cleared to have sex again, but you were extremely nervous. You weren’t sure if you wanted to go back on the pill or not, maybe use an IUD for a bit until you were ready for another kid. There was a lot to consider. It didn’t help either when you got your first real period for the first time in eleven months. You were raging, and Harry did his best to stay out of your way, but the summer heat wasn’t exactly helping either.

“Are you okay?!” You looked paler than a ghost when you came back out to join him on the couch with Jack.

“Yeah.” You sit back down and sigh. “I just threw up.”

“Why?!”

“Because…I can’t even begin to describe the clot of blood that just came out of me, dude. Like, never in my life have I been so disgusted by my own bodily function.” You look at him.

“Here, uh, take him. I’m gonna get you a big glass of ice water.” He hands the baby to you and he gets up. You take the glass of water from him as he sits back down, and takes Jack back.

“Harry, we should talk about birth control. I have a doctor’s appointment coming up.”

“Alright, what do you feel like doin’?”

“I have zero idea. I could go back on the pill, but that means readjusting to new hormone shit. I mean any form could mean that. I was thinking of maybe an IUD, but those are risky. I truthfully can’t see us using condoms all the time, and if we slip up that could mean another baby, and I’d sort of like to stick with one for a while if that’s alright with you.”

“Yeah, of course. Let’s see how things go with him first.” He smiles. “Maybe the pill is the best option then? You know what you’re like when you’ve been on it.”

“But I’m scared that if I go on it again now that when we do want another one we’ll have issues like before. Ugh, I have no idea what to do.”

“See what Dr. Johnson thinks, I mean, she deals with this stuff all the time. She might know what’s best.”

“I miss having sex with you, I’ll get it figured out soon.”

“I miss it too, but I also want you to take care of yourself. You’ve put your body through enough already because of me.”

“See, when you say stuff like that, it makes me want to have sex with you.” You groan.

“So, you want me to be less nice to you?” He laughs.

“No, you’re pretty sexy when you’re rude too.” You smirk.

“Think that’s just your hormones talkin’, love.”

“Maybe.” You shrug. “I’m also a little nervous to have sex again…what if it, like, really hurts?”

“We’re not exactly strangers to taking things slow in that department. We can start out doing little things. I could just eat you out.” He grins.

“Aw, it’ll be like when we first started dating.” You giggle. “How romantic.” You roll your eyes.

“Last thing I wanna do is hurt you, so we’ll just take it easy, small steps.”

//

“Everything has healed up nicely, Y/N.” Dr. Johnson tells you. “You can sit up now.”

“Thanks.”

“Any discomfort going to the bathroom?”

“Not so much anymore…but I had my first period, and it was disgusting.”

“That can happen.” She nods. “Your body’s still letting a lot of things out, you know?”

“Right. Um, I had some questions about sex and stuff.”

“Oh, you’ve been cleared-“

“No, I know, I guess I was just wondering about birth control. I know Harry and I are gonna want another kid at some point, and it took us longer than I thought to get pregnant with Jack. I’m scared that if I go on some form of it that we’ll run into trouble again, but I also really don’t wanna use condoms all the time.” You sigh. “But I don’t wanna accidentally get pregnant again right away.”

“I think an IUD might be best then. It’s less hormonally invasive, and when you take it out you can try for baby.”

“Aren’t there more risks? Harry, uh, well, he can get in pretty, um, deep.” You blush. “It could get jostled.”

“If your husband is ramming into your uterus, then I think we have bigger problems.” She laughs. “It goes in through an opening in your cervix and into the uterus. Sex can’t jostle it. We wouldn’t use them if it did.”

“Oh, I guess that was kind of stupid then.”

“It’s alright. No stupid questions.” She looks at you. “There’s a copper one that doesn’t have any hormones. It essentially works like spermicide. There are strings on the end of it that you can sort of feel to make sure it’s in place. But Harry shouldn’t be able to feel it during sex. You can still us tampons. I could do it for you today if you want, the procedure doesn’t take long.”

“What if he’s fingering me? We do a lot of that…” You blush again.

“If you’re doing that he may feel the strings, but-“

“Or what if he’s going down on me?”

“Y/N.” She sighs. “You don’t have to decide today. It’s a hormone free option though, and the copper one actually works right away. You just need to wait twenty-four hours after it’s inserted. A lot of people use them. If you try it and don’t like it we can always take it out.”

“And you can do it today?”

“Sure! I just gave you an exam, I know what size you’d need. It’ll be a little uncomfortable while it’s going in. Sort of feels like when you’re getting a pap.”

“Alright, let’s just do it. If I don’t like it, I’ll come back.”

“Okay, after I put it in, I’m gonna use a mirror to show you what to look for. You should be able to feel the strings to make sure it’s in the right place.”

You nod and wait for her to go get a nurse.

//

Later, when you come home, Harry’s sitting with Jack on the floor, just playing with him. It was an incredibly sweet sight.

“Jack look, it’s mummy.”

“Do you think he’ll have an accent?” You come over and sit on the floor with them.

“You know, technically, to me, you have an accent. So he could have yours, or a mix of both.” He kisses you and hands him over. You snuggle him close to you. “How was your appointment?”

“Good, everything’s really good. I had her put a non-hormonal IUD in to try. If I don’t like it she can take it out. It was really fucking uncomfortable though, so hopefully I’ll like it.”

“How’s it feel now?”

“Fine, can’t even really tell it’s up in there. Although, you maybe be able to feel the strings on the end of it with your fingers…sorry.”

“Not a problem, you’re not the first girl I…” You give him a warning look. “Um, it’s no big deal is all I mean.”

“Mhm.” You give Jack kisses on his chubby cheeks. “How was lunch with your mum?”

“Oh it was good! It was good for her to spend time with him.”

“How much longer is she staying here?”

“Only another week or so. I’m kinda sad, it’s been nice to call her and have her be right there, you know?”

“I know, I’m sorry.” You frown. “At least we can spend a little longer there for the holidays, right? Since my winter break is so long, we can go for two weeks instead of one.”

“Very true, and I can always pick up some freelance while I’m out there. Do you think once you’re back on campus you’ll bring him with you?”

“Probably. I think I’ll go to campus quite a bit even though I’m teaching online. I like my office. I was looking into it, and they do have a daycare on campus. The babies need to be at least six months, I think to make sure they have all their shots, but I can put my name in the pool.”

“Must be expensive, no?”

“It’s a little pricey, but it would get him socialized with kids his own age, and at least it would be a formal daycare, and I’d be right there if he needed me.”

“Yeah, I like the idea of that. I suppose comin’ to work with me all the time probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“It’s one thing to bring Buster, but your staff are not babysitters.”

“Obviously.” He looks over at Buster and pets him. “These two have become quite the little buddies. I think he likes the way Jack smells.” He chuckles.

“Still got that new baby smell somehow.”

“His acne’s gotten better.”

“You’ll never believe what I did to get it to go away.”

“What?”

“I read that you should rub your nipple over the baby’s face, so I just started doing that when I’d feed him.”

“Are you serious?” He laughs.

“Yeah! Worked great, didn’t it, Jack?” You hold him up to look at him and he giggles slightly. “God, he’s so cute. We got the world’s cutest baby.”

“We really do.”

//

At some point in July, you got your family photos taken. Mariah did them for you at the studio. It was lovely. It was nice to finally be feeling better about yourself. You and Harry hadn’t quite dived into the sex stuff yet. You had started giving him blow jobs and things of that nature, but you hadn’t let him touch you.

“Harry, I’m not ready to leave him for the night.” You pout.

“Y/N.” He sighs. “My mum is gonna be with him all night. It’s your twenty-eighth birthday, we’re going away for the night like we planned.”  

“Why do we always need a getaway? What’s wrong with staying in? It’s not even a big birthday. Now your birthday later this year, that’s a big birthday, but mine-“

“If we don’t do this now, we’ll never be able to leave him. He’s in good hands.”

“I never said he wasn’t! I just…” You start to tear up. “What if he needs me? What if he can’t sleep without us?” You hear the buzzer for the door.

“That’s my mum. We only have her here another few days, and that’s because she extended her stay another month for us. Please, let her have this last little sleepover, and let us have some alone time.” He huffs, and opens the door.

You didn’t like being put in your place like that, but you knew he was right. You both thank Anne and say goodbye to Jack before heading out. You were quiet on the ride to the hotel. You knew it was good to get away, but you were sad nonetheless.

“It’s by the beach. I thought tomorrow we could go out, lay outside like you like?”

“Sure.”

“Honey…” He puts his hand over yours. “I’ll miss him too, but this’ll be good for us. We haven’t been alone in a long time.”

“We have plenty of alone time.”

“You’re always afraid we’re gonna wake him up or something. Think of how nice it’ll be to shower without worrying if he’s gonna cry or not.”

“I know.” You sigh. “You’re right about all of it. I’m just not happy about it. I feel like I’m so old already.”

“Old?! What does that make me? You’re not the one that’s six months away to bein’ thirty.” He scoffs.

“I know, it’s silly.” You shake your head at yourself.

Many thoughts left your head as soon as the wine at dinner hit your lips. You’d have to pump and dump, but you didn’t care. You and Harry enjoyed a really nice meal that was long overdue. For the first time in a long time, you were on a date with your husband. For the first time in a long time, the main focus of conversation wasn’t about your son. It was like you were getting to know each other all over again, and it felt good.

“Babe?” You say to him as you get back up to the hotel room.

“Yeah?”

“Will you make love to me?”

He pouts at you and gives you those eyes that look like a puppy’s. He thought he was going to melt into a puddle.

“Of course I will, angel.” He comes over to you and cups your cheeks in his hands. “S’not why I brought you here, I hope you know that.” He kisses your forehead.

“I do.”

He tilts your chin up so you can look at him before he kisses you. You wrap your arms around his neck and pull him closer to you. You can’t remember the last time you two really kissed like this, which was kind of sad. You feel tears prick at the back of your eyes, and you try to blink them away.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just…we’ve really put us on the back burner, huh?” You wipe under your eyes.

“Little bit…” He brings you over to the bed and you both sit down. “I haven’t wanted to say much because I didn’t want you to feel pressured. I know you’ve been nervous. I’ve appreciated you takin’ care of me, but you know I much prefer doing it to you.”

“Remember when we used to be able to take our time for everything? I mean, when was the last time we even got to do anal? Your ass must be so tight by now.”

“Y/N.” Harry laughs, and puts his hand on your shoulder. “One step at a time, yeah?” He leans in to kiss you again. “Let’s just take advantage of this time. We can take all the time in the world.”

“Okay…I know it’ll be fine, I just can’t help but feel nervous.”

“S’just me, love. Nothin’ to be nervous about.”

You nod and stand up. You go to take your shirt off and you grab your breast pump.

“Let me just, uh, take care of this first.” You take everything into the bathroom so you can pump and dump.

Harry gets some music playing and tries to make the atmosphere a little more romantic. You come back out with your arms crossed. He had gotten undressed other than his boxers.

“Come here, sweet girl.”

You walk over to him, only in your underwear and let him hold you close. His hands slide down your sides and then to your breasts. He kisses down your neck and then your chest.

“Harry, wait.”

“What?”

“Don’t…suck on my nipples…”

“Why not? You love that.” He frowns.

“Not when I’m still producing milk!” His hand moves up to grip your throat and your eyes widen.

“Alright, but I’m sucking wherever else I want. That okay?” You nod your head slowly. “Good, now get on the bed.”

He lets you go so you can crawl on the bed. He gets on and hovers over you. He kisses you and works his way to your neck, sinking his teeth in and sucking harshly. You gasp and clutch at his shoulders. He works his way down your body, sucking where he pleases. He pays special attention to your tummy, kissing on your stretch marks that he loved so much. He hooks his fingers into your panties and drags them down your legs. You instinctively clamp your thighs together. Harry puts his hands on your knees and looks at you.

“Would you open up f’me, please, my love?” He asks ever so softly. You take a deep breath and open up for him. He looks down and smiles. “Look, at that. How’s my old friend doin’?”

“Harry.” You giggle.

“M’just sayin’, it’s been a minute. She looks real good, even better than I remember, honestly.” He kisses from your knee down your thigh, stopping to suck on your skin right near your center. He looks up at you and you nod. He licks a flat stripe up from your center to your clit. “Mm, oh my god.” He groans and continues to lap at you.

You lean back on your elbows as things start to feel good. You couldn’t help but get wet from the sounds Harry was making against you. You grip at his hair as he starts to suck on your clit. You grit your teeth when you feel a finger slip inside you.

“Shit.” You moan out.

“That feel oka-“ You don’t let him finish his sentence, you just push his head back down.

“Fuck, Harry, that’s it!” It all becomes too much and you end up coming on his finger. He continues to suck on you as you ride it out. He sits up to look at you afterwards.

“Yeh taste so fucking good.”

“I do?”

“You have no idea.” He leans in to kiss you quick.

“I didn’t know if anything would happen, but I packed some lube just in case. Might be good to use some.”

“Good idea.” He smiles and gets off the bed to grab it from your bag. He slides his boxers off, and get some lube on his hard cock. He spreads some around you as well. “Ready f’me, doll face?”

“Mhm, want you so bad.”

“If it doesn’t feel good make sure to let me know.”

“I will.”

You grip his biceps as he slowly pushes inside you. His eyes flutter closed at the feeling. Once he’s all the way in, he looks down at you. You were gritting your teeth and your eyes were squeezed shut.

“Y/N.” He grunts. Your eyes open slightly to look at him. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” He frowns.

“No! It doesn’t, I’m just getting used to it. I’m really sensitive. How’s it feel for you? Loose, right?” He smirks at you and shakes his head.

“You feel amazing, and I’m not just sayin’ that. Can’t even tell you pushed Jack’s big head outta there.” You both giggle and you relax a little.

“Okay, you can move.”

“Are yeh sure?”

“Yeah, come on, Daddy, fuck me.” Harry’s face completely drops and you burst out laughing.

“That’s not funny.”

“Oh come on, I’ve been dying to say that to you since he was born.” You wipe some tears away. “It was funny.”

“Yeah, you’re a real comedian, babe.” He rolls his eyes. His hand slides to grip your throat again. “Don’t say it again unless you mean it, understand?”

“Okay, okay.” He move his hand away so you can speak. “How about, fuck me, Harry?”

“I like that better.”

He starts to rock in and out of you slowly. Your hands drag down his back, your nails definitely leaving marks. You both were panting against each other. One of his hands snakes between the two of you so he can rub your clit.

“Oh, fuck.” Your head rolls back into the pillows, and you wrap your legs around his waist.

“Fuckin’ love you so much.”

“Love you too, shit, love you so much.”

“I get to have this forever?”

“All yours, forever.”

He groans and picks up the pace. He loses it as he watches your full breasts bounce up and down, and you come from the way he rubs your clit. You gasp at the way his come feels as it fills you up. He collapses on top of you as he tries to catch his breath.

After you both use the bathroom, you get into bed and rest your head on his chest. He rubs your back as you trace shapes on his stomach.

“That was amazing.” You say, looking up at him.

“Yeah? Felt really good for you?”

“Mhm, it was perfect. I’m sorry I was so nervous before.”

“You were just bein’ cautious, I get it.”

“And I really felt good?”

“You felt incredible, I swear. Thought I was nearly going to come when I just got the tip in.” You giggle and snuggle in closer. He looks over and sees it’s past midnight. “Happy birthday, angel.” He kisses the top of your head.

“Thank you.”

//

A couple days a week you’d hold office hours at school, and bring Jack with you. He was so good and barely fussed while you worked, and your students loved seeing him. It was nice to be back on campus after being home with him all summer. He was just about five months old, and was actually starting to look like a person.

Sometimes you’d take Jack to visit Harry on his lunch breaks and it always made Harry happy to see the two of you walk into the studio. You really had a routine down.

“Harry, we got on the list for the daycare at school for next semester, isn’t that great?” You tell him one night at dinner. “There were a couple of open spots. It’ll only be a few days a week since I’m only teaching Monday, Wednesday, Friday.”

“You are?”

“Yeah, we had a meeting today about what days certain classes are gonna be offered. I’m still teaching the same amount, just more on fewer days.”

“You’re okay with that?”

“Yeah! I can go in for office hours on Tuesdays, and then be home on Thursdays. It’ll cost less if he’s a part timer too.”

“Alright, sounds good to me.” He shrugs. “I wanna run somethin’ by you.”

“Okay.” You put your fork down to look at him. Before Harry can speak you hear the baby monitor. “Oh shit, he must’ve pooped.” You sigh. “Sorry, one second.”

Harry cleans up the dishes while you go to change Jack. You come back into the kitchen and wash your hands.

“He go back to sleep?”

“Mhm, barely woke up while I changed him.” You laugh. “So, what’s on your mind?”

“We got this place because it was a decent halfway point between Mark It and Plant Geo, and because Niall was across the street. None of those things matter anymore, do they?”

“I suppose not.”

“I was thinking…I love this place, really I do. It’s been such a great home for us for almost five years.”

“What are you saying, you wanna move?”

“I just thought maybe it would be nice to find a place with a yard. Somewhere Buster could run around, Jack could play outside without us havin’ to pack a bunch of shit to go to the park when he gets older.”

“You wanna be suburbs people?”

“Not necessarily, I mean, we could look for a detached townhouse or something. My business is in the city, and so it your work, so it wouldn’t make sense to move super far away and add a longer commute. But I know there’s neighborhoods around here we could look into.”

“Do we even have enough for a down payment? Homes in Mass are so expensive. Remember what Niall and Sarah had to deal with?”

“My step-father owned some real-estate. When he passed away my mum sold the building. Instead of giving Gem and I the money right away, she put it into an account for us. I have the money for a down payment, I just have to ask my mum. It’s what she’s been savin’ it for anyways.”

“Oh my god. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I honestly forgot about it. I’ve been talkin’ to my mum about all this, and she reminded me. What do you think? Do you wanna look for a house or something?”

“I mean…sure, I suppose we’re starting to outgrow this place. We don’t exactly have a functional guest room anymore. I don’t know where we’d look.”

“In all honesty, I think it would be nice to look in the Milton area. It’s just outside the city, we could hop on the T if we didn’t feel like driving in.”

“The traffic in the morning would be unbearable…”

“Like I said, I could hop on the T. Niall and Sarah seem to manage just fine. Or I was thinking Quincy.”

“Quincy is nice…and we’d be even closer to my family. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to look, right?”

“I think we should look in like November. A lot of people won’t wanna deal with a move in the winter time so we’d have less competition.”

“You’ve really thought this through.” You smirk.

“It’s definitely been on my mind. Plus…I could always move the business. I lease the space, it’s not like I own it. I could always find another spot if it got annoying for me. It’s you I’d be more concerned about. Like we wouldn’t be able to just run home if we needed something, or visit each other as often.” He sighs. “I definitely don’t wanna go Northshore.”

“God, no.” You cringe. “I think if we could find a neighborhood that has easy access to the T, that should be fine. And you make your own schedule, it’s not like you need to be there at 8AM every day. And I’m allowed to say when I want to teach and what times. None of my classes start before ten next semester.”

“You don’t have any at night right?”

“Nope. Need to stick to Jack’s schedule.”

“That daycare’ll come in so handy if we move.”

“Imagine if we found something in Niall and Sarah’s neighborhood? Niall takes the T to his work a lot, he says he doesn’t mind it. Sarah drives in, and she said as long as you leave early enough the traffic isn’t too bad. It’s more so coming home when it gets bogged down. But we get stuck in that just as bad in the city now.”

“So…we can start house hunting?”

“Yeah.” You smile. “I think it’s a great idea.”

//

You and Harry had found a home down the street from Niall and Sarah, and it was better than perfect. It had four bedrooms and three baths, a nice big basement that could be finished if you wanted it to be, a garage, and a decent sized yard, room for a pool in the future, perhaps. You only had to compete with one other offer, but ultimately, yours was accepted. You bought it just after Thanksgiving. As you walked around your empty apartment, a few tears came to your eyes. There were so many good memories had at this place.

“Ready, love?” Harry asks, Jack on his hip, and Buster at his side. “Think we’ve got everything we need.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Your friends and family were able to help you move, thank God. There wasn’t much work that needed to be done to the house either. You were able to get whatever painting and small things done before moving in. Harry would be able to catch the train with Niall most mornings and afternoons if he felt like it, and your commute wouldn’t be that bad either. Only about ten minutes longer than usual. It felt good to own a house. Jack would have a real neighborhood to grow up in. Your yard was fenced in for Buster, not that he could really use it at the moment what with snow starting to come.

You and Harry spent two and half weeks in London for the holidays. He got some freelancing done while he was there just to make some extra cash. His business was thriving, but expenses tended to add up from time to time now that you had a baby to worry about. He was always putting away for a rainy day, which was smart. Louis and Eleanor got to spend time with you all, and it was cute to watch Eliza May interact with Jack. Overall, it was a great trip and you were thankful that some things didn’t need to change.

He wasn’t expecting much for his thirtieth birthday since you had just bought a house and were still settling in. Maybe just a simple dinner with friends. He had the week from hell with people at work. Him and Mariah had this big sale going on from the New Year, so naturally a ton of people were coming in. It was worth it for the extra money, but they both were exhausted.

“What are you doing for your birthday, Harry?” Isaac asks at the end of the day Friday.

“I have no idea. I told Y/N I didn’t want anything big, so I think she’s just gonna have dinner ready for me when I get home and we’re just gonna chill this weekend.” He shrugs.

“Sounds nice.” He grins. “Thirty’s a big deal, you know? It’s like you’re officially an adult.”

“Oh, so the wife and child didn’t make me an adult?” He smirks.

“Nope, now it’s really real.”

Harry takes the T home, as he did every day. For some reason Niall said not to wait for him at their meet up spot. He didn’t really think much of it. He was on autopilot as well when he drove home from the train station, so he didn’t notice the street littered with cars. What he did noticed when he pulled into the driveway was his house had no lights on.

“What the…?” He pulls into the garage. “Her car’s here…don’t even fuckin’ tell me the power went out.” He groans.

Harry gets out of the car and goes into the house. He kicks his shoes off in the basement mudroom area you had set up, and he hangs his coat up. He flicks the light on to go up the stairs to the kitchen. As he reaches the top of the stairs, more lights flick on-

“Surprise!” A ton of people pop out and yell.

“Jesus Christ!” He clutches at his chest since his heart had started pounding.

You walk over to him giggling, and kiss him on the cheek. You hand him Jack, who had been waiting to see his Daddy all day.

“Happy birthday, honey, are you surprised?” You beam at him.

“Very…I…I had no idea.” He smiles and kisses your temple.

“That’s the whole point.” You laugh. Harry’s jaw drops when he sees Issac and Mariah standing around.

“How the fuck did you get here before me?”

“We may have gone over the speed limit a bit.” Mariah says. “Happy birthday.”

“You knew all this time she was plannin’ a bloody party and you didn’t tell me?” He scolds Isaac.

“We were sworn to secrecy. I’m far more scared of her than you, H, sorry.”

The party was a lot of fun, tons of friends, a few family members, and Harry could have as much to drink as he wanted since he didn’t need to drive anywhere.

“Lemme take him, it’s time for bed.” You say. “Say night night, Jack.” Harry gives his son a kiss before he hands him to you.

“Yeh did good, Y/N.” Niall says, as he helps you put Jack down. “Harry really had no idea.”

“It helped that he’s been too busy to notice me putting the plans together. Perfect way to have a little house warming too, don’t you think?”

“You’re always thinkin’.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“You and Sarah have been married a few months now, been together a few years…do you think you two will grow your family in any way, or are you not so into the baby thing?”

“I want whatever she wants, and she doesn’t seem to want kids.” He shrugs. “She’s always sayin’ her kids at school are enough. We might get a dog soon though.”

“That’s nice.” You smile. “Not that she needs to have kids or anything, I was just wondering is all.”

“My brother’s got a couple, I’m honestly happy just bein’ an uncle, and I think she likes bein’ an auntie to Jack.”

“Whatever works, right? Besides, I’m grateful to have you both so close by again. Jack will really get to know his auntie and uncle.”

“Exactly, and then when he’s older I can teach him how to properly play soccer because honestly Harry is shit at soccer.”

You burst out laughing, and clasp a hand over your mouth to not wake up the baby boy you just got to rest. You both sneak out of the room, and head back downstairs. Harry was chatting with Seth about something, and they were both laughing over whatever it was.

Around 11PM, everyone disperses. People were tired from the work week, after all. You say goodnight to everyone, and collect the cards and gifts people had left for Harry.

“You can open these tomorrow.” You yawn. “Let’s go to bed.” He grabs you and pulls you into him. He kisses you all over your face and you giggle. “Someone had fun.” You push away from him and go upstairs to your bedroom.

“Loads.” He pinches your bum and you have to stop yourself from squealing. You put a finger up to your lips to signal he needed to be quiet.

“If he wakes up, you can put him back to sleep.” You unzip your jeans and throw them in the hamper.

“Well, now you’re just not playin’ fair.” He closes the door behind him. Buster had gotten into the habit of sleeping in Jack’s room. He liked being near him at night.

“What, what am I doing?” You take your sweater off next and throw it in the hamper as well.

“You’re givin’ me a little strip tease.” He sits down on the edge of bed, practically bouncing on it.

“Am not.” You smirk. “I always get undressed like this.” You reach behind yourself and unclasp your bra before going into the bathroom to do your nightly routine. When you come back out Harry was still sitting there with a dumb smile on his face. You were completely naked now. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, actually.” He looks down at his crotch and then back to you.

“Ohhhh, I see. It’s your birthday, so you want to have sex, is that it?”

“Well, I always want to have sex, but sure, yeah, that’s it.”

You stand in front of his parted legs and rest your hands on his shoulders. You run one of your hands through his hair and get a good fistful to bring his head back slightly. You plant kisses down his neck while he grips your hips to pull you into his lap. You straddle him while you suck on the available skin. One of his hands moves up to grip your throat.

“Get comfortable while I get undressed.” He says to you before letting you go.

“Now who’s giving the strip tease?” You cock an eyebrow as you sit up against the headboard. “And who said you were in charge tonight?”

“It’s my birthday.” He scoffs. “Can’t I have it how I want it?” He gets all of his clothes off and walks back over to the bed.

“And how exactly do you want it? I was planning to get that cock down my throat, but if that’s not something you want-“

Harry gets on the bed and sits next to you, spreading his legs apart.

“Be my fuckin’ guest.”

You giggle and get between his legs. You start by suckling his tip. He closes his eyes as his body starts to relax. You take him further in your mouth, hollowing your cheeks as you suck on him. His hands run through your hair, making a ponytail with his fist to hold it back for you.

“Ah, fuck.” He breathes as his head rolls back.

You cradle his balls as you bob your head up and down. You groan against him when you taste his precum. This causes him to buck his hips up and you gag slightly on him. He pulls you off of him and you gasp for air.

“I wasn’t done.” You pout.

“Yeah, well, I wanna fuck my wife now, that alright?”

You smile at him as a blush graces your cheeks. He pulls you close to him by the back of your neck and his lips connect with yours. His hands move down to your breasts so he can knead them. Before you know it, you’re being pinned down, your head on the pillows, and Harry’s fingers plunging inside of you.

“Oh, god.” You moan softly.

He sucks your bottom lip into his mouth while his fingers do their work inside you. He brings you extremely close to the edge before pulling them out of you.

“I really fucking hate when you do that.” You groan.

“It’s my birthday remember?” You look over to the clock.

“Only for twenty more minutes, smart mouth.”

“Guess I better make it count then, huh?”

He spreads you apart and pushes inside you without much warning. You bite your bottom lip to stifle the moan you desperately wanted to let out. Even though Jack’s room was down the hall, you still didn’t want to risk being too loud. You also had neighbors that you didn’t want to think Harry was beating you from the way he would make you scream sometimes.

His tip brushes against your g-spot and you grind your hips up towards his. He thrusts in and out and it feels so good you think you might cry. It’s not that you two weren’t intimate, you normally just had to keep it quick, or sometimes you were just too tired to put a lot of effort in. Right when you think you’re going to come to your release he pulls out all the way.

“Harry, I swear to god, I-“

He grabs your hips and flips you over. He slides back in and swoops his hand to the front of your throat to pull you back to him, back flush with his chest.

“I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna fuck yeh really hard right now.” He was making slow circular motions with his pelvis while he was talking. You could barely concentrate. “And your face is gonna go right into that nice pillow, so you can scream out all yeh want. How’s that sound?”

“S, sounds good.”

You gasp when he pushes you back down, and starts ramming into you. You grasp at the pillow and keep your face shoved in it to muffle your noises. His balls were slapping against you in the perfect way, and you can’t help but rub your clit while he continues to pound into you the way you were so desperate for. You turn your face to the side to catch some air.

“Harry.” You moan. “Please, I need to come.”

That was all he wanted to hear. Just to have you beg him, at least once, it was always music to his ears.

“Go ahead, angel.” He coos as he gives you more hard thrusts.

You feel his come shoot inside you and you lose it at that. You moan loudly into your pillow as his thrusts slow. He pulls you of you and helps you flip back over. He hovers over you and gives you a soft kiss before getting up to use the bathroom. You use it again after him and climb into bed.

You both face each other and get your legs tangled together. He tucks your hair behind your ear and smiles.

“Thanks for throwin’ me such a great party, babe. I love you so much.”

“You’re more than welcome, and I love you too. You’re thirty.” You giggle.

“I’m thirty.” He sighs. “Little weird.”

“Age is just a number.”

“Tell me.” He rolls onto his back. “Am I still the sexy young thing you fell in love with?” He looks down at his stomach and then to you. “Or am I like Dad bod central?”

“Oh my goodness, Harry.” You can’t help but laugh. You move to straddle him again, removing the covers. “Your stomach is as flat as the day I met you, and even if it wasn’t I’d love you just the same. Besides,” you pinch at his love handles, that he’s always had, “what are you always saying to me? More to love, right?” You lean down and kiss him. “Still plenty sexy, and still plenty young.”

“Thanks, you know how I know I’m still plenty young?”

“How?”

“Because I could fuck you again right now if yeh let me.” He smirks.

“Yeah? Wanna take me for another ride?” You roll your hips down on him.

“I do.” He starts rubbing circles on your sensitive clit.

“Fuck.” You breathe. “I think I could go for a second round. You only turn thirty once, after all.”

#my everything #take it slow sequel #harry styles #harry styles imagine #harry styles fic #harry styles x reader #harry styles x y/n #harry styles y/n #harry styles fluff #harry styles fluff fic #harry styles smut #harry styles smut fic #pls tag if you reblog #SO MUCH IS HAPPENING OMFG

[cafedanslanuit]

Home || Jumin x MC - One shot

genre: angst, some fluff.

summary: You are staying at Jaehee’s after Jumin did something that made you really angry. While staying there, you start feeling sick and end up at the hospital. What you first thought was nothing to worry about, quickly turns into a nighmare that could change your relationship.

warnings: not graphic, but the story discusses blood and miscarriage

You weren’t really broken up.

Not really. Your things were still at the penthouse and you really weren’t planning on picking them up, but you were still mad at him. Until you could work those feelings out, the best way to avoid your boyfriend for a while. Thankfully, Jaehee had been kind enough to let you crash on her couch. It wasn’t really uncomfortable, but it smelt funny. You thought it was because of Jaehee’s habit of snacking while watching Zen’s musicals. Maybe there were some crumbles between the pillows, because every time you woke up, you were so disgusted by the smell it made your head twirl.

You loved Jumin. You really did, but you couldn’t help being so angry with him. You wanted you go to the penthouse, talk to him about what happened and fix things up, but you knew you couldn’t do this if you were still as angry and resentful as you were. You needed a couple of days away to melt down your rage and also to teach Jumin the weight of his actions.

That day, you were having breakfast on the kitchen table as you read some news on your Twitter feed. Jaehee had already gone to C&R, asking you if you wanted to send Jumin a message. You knew it wasn’t she didn’t want you there, but she had mentioned Jumin looked restless, more irritated and didn’t have the capacity to focus as much as he did before. You told her, yet again, you didn’t have anything to tell him. She nodded, pursing her lips and went to work.

When you finished eating breakfast, you decided to help a little by cleaning the house. You put on your headphones and started sweeping the living room. Just as you were almost done with it, a known song started playing, making you stop your movements to listen to it. Obviously Je Te Veux by Erik Satie had to come up on your playlist while you were trying your best at being mad with the man who had presented that song to you. 

“Fuck you, Jumin Han” you muttered as you started sweeping more angrily than before.

You knew he hadn’t meant to hurt you, but he had. You knew it was part of his work, but maybe it shouldn’t be anymore. Or maybe… maybe you could adapt to it? You didn’t know what was the right answer. And when you knew it, you would return to Jumin’s apartment, if he’d still have you. A knot formed on your throat. Yeah, he would take you back. You were sure.

Almost sure.

As you were done with sweeping, you started cleaning the bathroom. That was when you first felt wetness between your legs. You checked the date and realized it was your period. Thankfully, Jaehee’s bathroom was equipped with pads, so you had no problem with washing your panties and putting a pad on a fresh pair. You kept doing the cleaning, thankfully not having any cramps yet. Half an hour later, you went to the kitchen, where you started washing all the dishes and putting everything in its place. You went to the bathroom again and realized there was a medium sized blood clot resting on your pad. You furrowed your eyebrows. You hadn’t experienced anything like that before, well, at least not a clot that big. It was probably the size of your thumb. You changed pads again, also noticing you were having a heavier period than usual.

You went back to cleaning, but an hour after that, you went to the bathroom again to find yourself in the same situation. This time, you knew something was wrong. But you didn’t like the idea of going to a hospital. Yes, your period was definitely heavier than usual but that didn’t mean it was worth a hospital visit. You changed pads, trying not to notice the clot was bigger this time.

Half an hour later, your pad was fully damped again. You felt like calling Jaehee, but that would mean Jumin would have to know about her hospital visit and you didn’t feel like seeing him in that moment. Especially not in this vulnerable moment. You changed your pad again and stuffed some more in your purse. As you were leaving Jaehee’s apartment, you took out your phone and sent a voice message to Zen, avoiding using the RFA messenger app.

“Hey, I’m… I’m okay but I’m going to the hospital. I’m a little scared?” you laughed nervously, hopping on the elevator. “Uhm, I’m having… how should I put this?”

You forgot how awkward it was for you to talk about your period with someone else. And a part of you thought maybe Zen wasn’t the right person after all. He was, after all, someone who wanted to present himself like a knight in shining armor, waiting to rescue their princess. And princesses didn’t talk about period or blood clots.

But fuck it.

“I’m bleeding a lot heavier than usual. Like, a lot. And I’m scared, so I’m going to the emergency room. Just… please tell me everything’s fine?” you added in a small voice.

You sent the message and hopped on a cab. A few minutes later, you received a text that simply read: “Which hospital?”

----------

“I hate to say this, but maybe you should have gone to that clinic that is a partner of C&R” Zen muttered, letting out a sigh. “They would have called you earlier”

“I hate you for saying that as well” you replied, shifting on your seat.

It had been an hour and a half and you were still on the waiting room and of course, you were still bleeding. It wasn’t the best hospital in town, but you didn’t want to cause a scene in a hospital or clinic C&R had a relationship with. You didn’t want to take the chance of having someone call Jumin and let him know you were there. But you had already gone through two changes already and you were afraid you were going to stain your clothes. 

No, not really. The reason you were starting to freak out was because you knew what could be a cause of heavy bleeding. You didn’t want to think it was an option, but you knew there was a possibility it was a miscarriage. You swallowed thick, not wanting to entertain that option. You were young, even younger than Jumin, it didn’t make sense you were suddenly having a miscarriage. You weren’t even sure you had been pregnant. You couldn’t be-- your period wasn’t even late and you weren’t showing any symptoms of pregnancy, you would have noticed if you--

Suddenly, the memory of waking up to a smelly couch made you tense up. What if it really wasn't smelly? What if it was some sort of mild morning sickness? And maybe your bleeding was not actually your period, just an horrid coincidence on that day your body had decided to have a miscarriage. You felt your knee going up and down, not being able to do anything about it.

“MC” Zen insisted. “I can���t take this anymore, we need to go to St. Claire’s. I know it’s owned by C&R but there’s a reason the trust-fund kid always goes there, they treat him like royalty. And you’re whiter than when we first got here. I don’t know what’s going on with you but please, at least let a doctor see you. We need to get out of here” he insisted.

“No. They’re gonna call me any moment now”

“Fuck, MC…” Zen sighed, a hand going through his hair. “I don’t know what happened between you and Jumin, but this is your health that’s at stake. So, listen to me”.

Would Jumin take you back now that you were probably having a miscarriage? Would he blame her? Of course it-- it wasn’t her fault if that was the case but… how would he take it? Would he close himself, not letting her be a part of the grieving? Would he send her back, not wanting to be reminded of having lost his unborn child every time he looked at her?

You realized you were crying when you felt Zen taking your hand into his. You quickly wiped your face with the back of your hand, trying to hide how scared you actually were.

“Jumin, I’m with MC at the hospital downtown” you turned your head quickly at Zen’s voice and shook your head, trying to make him stop. “We’ve been waiting too long for a doctor, but…” you unsuccessfully tried to take away his phone. “Stop” Zen warned you. He went back to his phone call, “We’re going to St. Claire’s, tell them MC is on the way and she needs a doctor right now”.

Zen made a pause while you hid your face on your hands, hating how the situation had gone out of control. “Yes, send an ambulance. She’s not critical but she’s too weak for me to take her on my motorcycle”. Zen hung up his phone and helped her stand up, leaving the emergency room and heading towards the hospital entrance.

“Why would you do that?” you complained, taking your arm away from Zen, but still walking alongside him. “I told you I didn’t want him involved in this!”

“Look, babe, sorry but I wished you could look at yourself. You’re really pale, you’re losing more and more blood and while I hate that Jumin practically bought a clinic just so he didn’t have to wait, I don’t care if it means you’re getting that treatment too”.

You sighed and nodded, defeated. You were surprised you hadn’t felt dizzy or felt any sort of pain since all this nightmare had started. You just felt anxious about the possible miscarriage you could be having. 

Ten minutes later, an ambulance from St. Claire’s clinic arrived at the front of the hospital. You reluctantly entered the ambulance, the paramedics asking you thousand of questions and already connecting you to some machines to see how you were doing. Zen told you he was going to follow the ambulance with his motorcycle, only obtaining a nod as an answer from you.

You explained your situation to the paramedics, who asked you to lay down so you could rest until you arrived to the clinic. There was a woman who had the softest voice and assured you you were doing just fine, but they could see what was exactly the problem once you arrived to the clinic. She kept trying to engage in conversation with you, trying to ease your mind about everything.

“Is it… a miscarriage?” you asked in a soft voice. The woman pursed her lips and you felt yourself breaking a little.

“We don’t know yet. We’ll know once we get there, don’t worry” she said.

She kept talking, trying to ease you but you couldn’t listen anything further than they didn’t know if you was losing your child or not. You didn’t care about anything else.

Before you thought, the ambulance came to a stop and when they opened the doors, you recognized the two tall men standing in front on the ambulance, one with black hair the the other one with silver hair.

You escaped from Jumin’s gaze, but perfectly heard him questioning the paramedics what was wrong with you. You didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying, but you did get to hear “gynecorrhagia”. What a wonderful way to put a name to something just so they didn’t have to say they didn’t know what caused it.

The paramedics helped you sit on a wheelchair and you were rushed into the clinic. Not even a minute later, you were in front of the gynecologist office. You heard the nurse explain to Zen and Jumin that he was the head of the Gynecology Department, and that they were prepping the room for you. You heard your boyfriend make further questions but even though his tone was firm and stern, you could tell how his voice wavered just a bit on the end of his sentences. He was scared. Maybe because he also knew what it could mean?

“The doctor’s ready for you” you head the nurse say to you, making you snap your head to her direction, startled. You nodded and you felt her wheeling you to the office. You looked around, seeing you were in a small hall rather than an office. You were helped out of your chair and once again, you felt yourself completely wet with blood. The nurse guided you to a small bathroom and gave you a hospital robe, instructing you to change into it.

Once in the bathroom, you took the chance of cleaning yourself up before changing into the robe. You looked at yourself in the mirror and realized Zen was right: you were in fact very pale. You washed your hands thoroughly and got out of the bathroom, where the nurse was waiting for you.

“I’m scared of staining these” you confessed, following the nurse to another door, presumably the actual doctor’s office.

“Don’t be, please. You’re going through a hard time, don’t think about that. Besides, those are disposable” she explained with a soft smile. You smiled back. “Do you wish anyone to accompany you inside the office?” she asked, before opening the door.

In that situation, honestly you couldn’t think why it was even an option. There was only one person you wanted by your side in that moment.

When you entered the office, the doctor smiled warmly at you and showed you to the examination gurney. She started asking you questions about everything, her soothing voice calming your nerves. You heard a knock on the door and then the nurse’s voice announcing Jumin was there. Thanking the gurney was not in front of the door and you were covered from shoulders to knees, you turned your head towards the door, looking at an awkward Jumin standing there, waiting for an indication.

“Hey” you muttered softly. Jumin looked at you, and for the first time, you could see how scared he was. He was doing his best at trying to hide it, but the way his legs were shifting his weight and how he was incessantly twisting his own fingers gave him away. “Come here” you said, holding out a hand for him. He walked to you, standing on your side while the doctor turned on one of her machines and put on a pair of gloves. Jumin took your hand and you squeezed it, trying to calm both of you.

The doctor warned you, but you still felt some discomfort when you felt the head of the ultrasound scanner entering you. You saw some incomprehensible black and white figures on the screen, wondering if you were supposed to see something.

“Well, I don’t see anything” she commented, making you heart sink.

“I lost it?” you quickly asked, your voice breaking down. Your hold on Jumin’s hand tightened and so did his, but you couldn’t bear to look at him in the eye yet.

“Lost? No, don’t worry. You didn’t have a miscarriage. The blood they took from you on the ambulance shows you weren’t pregnant at all” she explained. You felt your soul return to your body and pulled Jumin’s hand in front of your mouth, pressing light kisses to the back of his hand, whispering soft nothings, almost like a thankful prayer.

“So why did she…?” Jumin asked, his voice more neutral now.

“It was probably an hormonal imbalance” the doctor said, removing carefully the scanner. “Right now I’m going to ask for some IV for her so the bleeding stops. Then we’re going to do an exam on her hormonal levels so we can recommend some medicine in case she needs it”.

“Just like that? She’s… okay? She’s been bleeding all morning” Jumin interfered. You knew he did it out of worry, like a part of him wanted to be entirely sure you were healthy.

“The woman’s body is full or mysteries, Mr. Han” the doctor commented. “I’ve seen this before. In most women’s, is a once in a lifetime scenario, and they never present that problem again. Some may not even need medicine on the long run, but I’m still going to order every exam I can think of so we make sure she’s completely fine” she assured him.

You turned around and looked at Jumin, who still didn’t look convinced.

“Jumin” you said, his eyes looking right into yours. “I’m okay. You can rest now”. He pressed a kiss on the top of your forehead while you kissed his hand again. You felt incredibly happy to have him by your side, knowing you hadn’t lost anything and neither of you were going through that kind of pain.

The doctor excused herself, leaving the room as she gave the nurse some instructions you thought were about the IV she had mentioned.

“When the IV’s done… I want to come back to the penthouse” you said softly, looking at Jumin’s hand. You felt him chuckle and softly moved your chin so you could look at him. God, why did he have to look so handsome?

“Yes, of course. We’ll return home after this”

You felt your cheeks heating at the thought of the penthouse being ‘home’ for both of them.

“But…” you started. You smile on Jumin’s face wavered a little, but still let you continue. “I still don’t like when those women flirt at you. I know it’s part of your job and I know it’s not like you flirt with them, but it still hurt when I saw that woman with her hand on your arm, trying to gain something”

“I used to do that. A lot, I… I always let women invested in the corporate world to flirt with me when there was something for C&R to gain. I would, at best, use some gentleman mannerisms to keep that going. But I don’t think that’s something I want to keep doing” Jumin stated. He brought closer both of your hands and kissed the back of your hand, making you smile. “I’ve already told you I want to marry you. I agreed to your request about waiting at least a year before I officially ask you, but I can’t see how I would change my mind. With each day that goes by, I am only reassured with my desire to make you my wife. But I didn’t take your feelings into consideration with the way I used to run deals. I like to believe I’ve made my work known in C&R enough to stop using antique ways to make deals go through instead of trusting my negotiating abilities. MC, I can promise I won’t do that again”.

“Thank you” you smiled. “Now, please kiss me”

Jumin didn’t wait long before bending down and kissing you softly on the lips. Not being able to kiss that man for almost two weeks was definitely torture, not something you’d ever want to be without again. You were five months into the year you had asked Jumin to wait, but if he kept being such an extraordinary man like this, you were seriously thinking about cutting that time in half.

Once he stood up again, you noticed a playful smile on his lips.

“Now that you mention it, you called Zen before calling me?” he asked, arching one eyebrow.

“Hey, want me to go back to Jaehee’s?” you threatened playfully, making him chuckle.

The nurse returned to the room and helped you stand up, giving you a fresh robe for you to change.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better” you admitted. You looked back at Jumin and smiled. “But right now I just want to go home”.

#mystic messenger #jumin han #jumin x mc #jumin x reader #jumin x you #mysme jumin #mm jumin #mystic messenger imagines

[booitislife]

Let’s Talk About Periods

My period is horrible. I have heard people who don’t get periods say: “It can’t be that bad.” Yes, yes it can. Some studies suggest that cramps can be a worse pain for women than a heart attack. My period technically starts a few days before bleeding. I get a period flu. A period flu is a few days of unexplained illness and flu-like symptoms (low grade fever, chills, etc) a few days before your period starts. I didn’t used to get this, but my body decided I needed this. The first time I got it, my doctor put me on antibiotics thinking I had a sinus infection. (She is proactive about fevers because I am a transplant patient).

My minor symptoms are bloating, diarrhea, lethargy, sometimes headaches, I get irritable, my breasts hurt for a few days, and some other lesser inconveniences. However - my biggest two issues? Pain and bleeding.

Bleeding - I bleed for eight to ten days every month. Usually the first one and last two of the cycle are light. I tend to have one or two very heavy days, depending on the month, and when I say heavy - I mean clots. Lots of them. I will soak through a ten hour pad in less than two hours. I have lost so many pairs of underwear. I now have “period underwear” that is darker or just old so I don’t care if it gets stained. The rest of the days are moderate.

Pain - This is the worst part of my period. I start cramping on day one and I usually don’t stop until the second to last day of my period. When I say it’s bad - I mean excruciating. I was once taken to the hospital by my mom because I couldn’t breathe right during cramps. The doctors rushed me in, thinking I was having a miscarriage, a burst cyst, or maybe appendicitis. They did lab work and ultrasounds. While I was waiting they gave me fentanyl, which is 80-100x stronger than morphine. I could still feel the pain. It dulled it, but didn’t negate it. The doctor came back in shock - there was nothing wrong. No miscarriage, no cysts, and my appendix looked great. These were just the cramps I was going to have to live with. I was given pain meds for every month - 20 - to deal with that I’m going through.

I have a few period journal entries that I would like to post. If you don’t want to read, please scroll down past the blue writing. Sadly, these are only four of dozens of examples.

September 17, 2020 - Day 5 of my period.

Woke up with horrible cramps that were so bad I was shaking. Slept on the couch again because I was tossing and turning so much from the pain. Didn’t fall asleep until nearly 4. Passed a clot which, usually by day 5, will alleviate some of the pain, but it didn’t. The exhaustion took over and I fell asleep until about 11:30, but when I woke up I was so tired I could barely move.

November 16, 2020 - Day 4 of my period.

I could not sleep last night. The pain is intense and comes in waves. The bleeding started to get heavy a little after 7AM. It’s a little after 8:30 when I’m writing this and I have passed 2 large clots and probably 5-6 smaller ones. I soaked through 1 pad already. I’m going back to bed and hopefully sleep for a few hours. Woke up with horrible cramps. Haven’t been able to get out of bed. Managed to get some food down to take my antibiotic, but that’s it. I am exhausted and the pain is radiating to my knees.

February 9, 2021 - Day 3 of my period.

I finally fell asleep around three, but I woke up a little after five with searing cramps. They went down my legs and around my back. I could barely think straight. I took meds, tried meditation, used a heating pad. Nothing helped, I finally passed a big clot and the pain subsided. I moved to the couch and was almost asleep when the pain started again around 9. I did everything the same - meds, meditation, heat. I’m going to try to get some more sleep.

April 14, 2021 - Day 2 of my period.

Having trouble getting to sleep. After taking pain meds and using pain cream on my back, the pain is just getting worse. I almost fell asleep, but woke up in pain. It’s 1:30 AM, and I am heading downstairs to lay on the couch with my heating pad. I can’t get comfortable and the pain is getting worse. It’s 5AM. I still can’t sleep. The pain is very bad. I just want to sleep through it and I can’t. Couldn’t sleep. The pain has somehow gotten worse over the afternoon. As of right now, I have pain meds in my system, pain cream on my back and abdomen, I took a very hot bath, and I am now laying with a heating pad. I am still in searing pain. I can’t do this much longer. I burst into tears a few minutes ago. Why won’t someone help me?

I have asked doctors, so many times, to have a hysterectomy. At first I was told I was too young. Then? I was told my husband would need to sign off on such a procedure. My husband was more than ready. If anything, he was just overtly appalled that he would have to do that, or that any doctor worth there degree would ask that. He asked what it would take for him to get a vasectomy. They said just call a urologist. “Would she have to sign off?” He asked indicating me, and when he was told no he said: “This is a ridiculous double standard. booitislife can make her own choices.”

I have seen 6 OBGYN’s in the last 8 years. The first told me I was too young. She offered a procedure called an Endometrial ablation. It does greatly reduce the bleeding issues. However, I wasn’t really worried about the bleeding - I was worried about the pain. She told me it wouldn’t really do anything for the pain, so I said no. I have to be careful with my transplanted kidney and any kind of anesthesia can be dangerous.

The second OBGYN was a man in the same office who was also conducting a cervical biopsy on me. I’ll never forgot the intense flash of pain and how I nearly yelled, but I did start to cry. According to my husband there was blood spray on the floor as the doctor looked up at me and said in a condescending voice - “That doesn’t hurt! Come on!” And then he laughed. He wouldn’t even discuss a hysterectomy. From that biopsy I learned I have pre-cancer on my cervix and underwent a LEEP procedure. They use a hoop wire heated by electric current to scrape off the parts that could become dangerous.

The third was about a half an hour away at a bigger hospital. He was the guy who did an endometrial biopsy on me. Different than the cervical biopsy, this was just a precaution after something looked off. He wasn’t as condescending as the others, and that biopsy came back normal. However, he wouldn’t do the hysterectomy either. He said I should go to a doctor in a hospital that has a transplant team - seemed reasonable.

Between the 3rd and 4th doctores I had been doing my research. I went to my nephrologist that was keeping track of my transplanted kidney, and told him about my struggles. He said he saw no issue with me getting a hysterectomy and, in fact, I should. He even confirmed with the current head of transplant from the hospital I had my transplant surgery in. So, I was off - feeling more confident. This new OBGYN was a doctor at my transplant hospital.

The fourth OBGYN - or as I call him “The Biggest Mother Fucker I had the displeasure to meet”. He dismissed a lot of my concerns quickly, and talked to me as if I didn’t know anything. Then, he asked if I wanted to try an IUD. Now, I have nothing against anyone who gets an IUD. If that is for you, and it’s working - awesome. I know my brain. I know my brain would focus on everything bad an IUD could do. I politely explained this to my doctor. This wasn’t an option for me. My panic would go crazy. He wrote some things down and told me he wanted to to a procedure just to check for any cancer cells that could be hiding, but (and oh yes, there was a big but) he would only do the procedure if I signed yes to getting a Mirana IUD. I had to sign a consent form before he would even schedule the procedure. So, I did. Then I canceled my procedure and never went to see him again. Oh, also, this asshole handed me pro-life pamphlets on my way out.

The fifth OBGYN - more trusting, no results. At this point I was exhausted. I was tired of trying and being let down, fighting to get an appointment. This OBGYN was a woman and she worked in the same office as the second guy I went to. I laid it all out for her. I told her what the previous doctor did. I told her about the pain, about not being able to barely move. I poured out my heart and soul to her. She empathized, then told me she did not feel comfortable doing my hysterectomy. Because the uterus is close to the transplanted kidney, she thought I needed a specialist. A type of doctor called an OBGYN oncologist. As luck would have it, there was one on staff at my transplant hospital. I waited and waited for an appointment. I waited for over a year. Finally they called and said they were just too booked. They had one doctor who did it, and it was most dire cases first. I understand that. So, I wasn’t angry or frustrated this time. The office at the hospital asked me if I would like to see another OBGYN on staff. I said as long as it wasn’t OBGYN Biggest Mother Fucker I had the Displeasure to Meet. I asked if it could be a woman and we set it up.

Okay, the last one for now. The OBGYN they set me up with was a resident. She seemed nice at first. We sat and talked about my pain, the exhaustion. She wanted to talk birth control options. Great. Her advice to me was to stay away from the shot and the implant. She agreed about the IUD not being right for me. So, she said she wanted me to start talking the pill. I stopped her. I had been on the pill twice. Once when I was 16, another time when I was 24. Two different kinds. Both times I had side effects. The most prominent was this intense stomach cramp. I would get headaches, nausea, extreme weight gain. I couldn’t live my life. I told this doctor that and she didn’t even look at me in the eye when she said...... “Well, I won’t even consider a hysterectomy until you’re on six full months of birth control.” It didn’t matter what other symptoms I had. It didn’t matter what I was and wasn’t comfortable with, not really. So, here I am, looking for lucky number 7 when it comes to OBGYN’s.

As I sit here tonight, losing a lot of blood through clots, being so tired I can’t think, but in too much pain to sleep. I found myself so angry. About an hour before I started writing this I had a pretty big panic attack. I haven’t had one of those in a long time. But - Tuesday night I slept for three hours. Last night I slept about five. Tonight it is almost 3 AM and I’m still awake. The pain is exhausting, but also keeps me awake. It also makes me tense. So, parts of my body started tingling. Instead of my logical side taking over and saying, “Yeah, you have been clenching for four days. You’re gonna feel odd things.” I convinced myself I was dying and had to take medicine. I am so tired on a deep level. I don’t want to have to go through this anymore, and I don’t know if that makes me sound selfish... I just.., I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS ANYMORE.

So, here we are. If you experience cramps like I do, I am so truly sorry. You don’t deserve them, and if I could do something to help you - I would in a heartbeat. People should not have to live like this. Doctors should listen to us and hear when we say that something like this is, genuinely, detrimental to our lives. If we want permanent birth control whether it be our tubes tied, an ablation, or a hysterectomy - it’s our body. We should decide what we can do with it. Please don’t stop fighting. Please don’t stop advocating for yourself. If you ever need to talk, I’m here. Have a good night, anyone who reads this. Thank you for reading this long-winded rant. Take care of yourself.

#periods #period cramps #personal #period help #panic attack #exhaustion #doctors

[damnusillygoose]

Jerza fanfiction(fluff)

title: Periods

summary: Erza and Jellal spend an evening together in bed discussing the marvels of a female body aka periods!

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13787058/1/Periods

Disclaimer: These characters are owned by Hiro Mashima.

PERIODS

‘You okay, cupcake?’

‘yep’

‘Okay, there you go’, Jellal stepped in her bedroom completely and handled over the sweets she requested him to buy.

‘Thank you! ’Erza squealed, like a baby, at the sight of her favorite strawberry sponge cake.

‘I am sorry though, we had to cancel our date abruptly. I swear I don’t get cramps on my periods usually, I- ‘

‘it’s okay Erza. You really don’t have to apologize for that. I don’t mind staying in bed and snuggling with you. Its cold outside anyways.’

‘You are so sweet’, Erza replied bashfully and sincerely smiled at him. She proceeded to divert her attention towards the package in her hand, eyeing it ravenously. Jellal chuckled at her excitement and went to the kitchen counter to fetch her a plate and a fork.

‘There’, he said as he handed her the supplies and lifted the warm quilt to make some room for himself, settling beside her.

‘ah, Erza! Your feet are so cold!’, he exclaimed when she deliberately touched her cold feet with his warm ones.

‘Mhm, you really are warm Jellal’, she snorted unapologetically, tucking herself cheekily to his side.

‘How’s the pain?’, he asked curiously.

‘its fine now. Most of it has subdued. Just a slight pain remains in my lower back.’

‘Are period cramps always this hurtful? I remember seeing Meredy cry from them. She couldn’t get up for 3 days at least.  It was painful to watch her like that.’

‘Mhm, That’s pretty subjective actually. Some women have it worse. Some don’t. I, for example, don’t experience much pain except for my lower back. And sometimes in my lower abdomen as well. However, their occurrence is extremely intermittent.’

‘I see. If I remember correctly, Ultear didn’t experience much pain during her periods as well, she was mostly fine.’

Erza looked at him intently. Reminiscing about Ultear was a sensitive topic for him and Meredy. She knew he missed his friend, whom he spent seven years with, even if he wasn’t vocal about that. Ultear and Meredy were like his support unit in those years when she was absent. Erza would be eternally grateful to Ultear for that. However, she was pleased to know that Jellal felt comfortable enough to talk about Ultear in her presence.

‘She sure was a strong woman’, Erza remarked.

‘Indeed, she was.’ Jellal responded with a sad smile as he nuzzled his nose against her crown. ‘Though I am ashamed, I must admit.’

‘Why?’, she inquired as her eyebrows knitted themselves into a slight frown.

‘I am ashamed of the fact that I may have spent seven years in the accompany of two women, my knowledge regarding periods is extremely limited. Would… you tell me about it in detail, I mean I do have an idea about its mechanism but I just want to be sure, if you are okay with it?’, Jellal asked tentatively.

Erza was taken back from his proposition. She never expected him to ask her regarding periods. She was of the notion that boys generally strayed away from this topic altogether. Ah, but Jellal wasn’t exactly a boy, right? He was a man. A mature man. Who knew how to treat a woman with chivalry.

‘I don’t have a problem in telling you about periods but I am curious. Why do you want to know about them all of a sudden?’

‘So, I can treat you even better, I guess? I heard woman want to cuddle and eat chocolates during this time of the month. If you yearn for sweets, I’ll be happy to bring you some. If you experience cramps, I’ll help you apply some heat pads. Or bring you tampons if you run out of them. I mean… I just want to take care of you’, he replied timidly with a light blush on his face. She was his queen after all and he was determined to treat her like one.

Can this guy get any better? She pondered. She definitely found herself a keeper, she mused as her heart swelled with love. She leaned forward and gave him a passionate kiss exhibiting her gratefulness, cupping his face in her hands tenderly.

‘Alright but may I ask if you have any previous knowledge about periods?’, Erza asked, brimming with absolute affection for her beau.

‘mhmm, all I know is periods are painful for women.’, he answered as he curled the end of her scarlet locks within his fingers reverently.

‘uh-huh’

‘They occur once a month and are necessary for pregnancy. Women get cravings and want cuddles during this time, I guess?’

‘Well, who wouldn’t want snuggles when someone like you is offering them?’, Erza smirked as she laced her hand with his.

‘I’ll provide you all the snuggles you want’, he whispered, inclining towards her to gently touch his forehead with hers.

‘You’re so sappy’, She grinned.

She leaned back and thought pensively for a moment. She adjusted her peach-colored quilt ,adorned with some floral patterns ,around herself before replying, ‘You are correct actually, let me elaborate further.’

‘Please do’

‘Well, Every…. woman, basically experiences periods every month or every 21-35 days. Okay?’

‘Okay’

‘Woman have two ovaries and one of them releases an egg every month and this process is called ovulation.’ She explained slowly so that her words would imbibe in his mind easily. ‘Now listen closely. The uterus, in its preparation for pregnancy, forms a thickened lining, where the fertilized egg would further develop into a baby.’

‘that would be a womb, right?’, he asked.

‘Yes. That’s the womb.’ She continued, ‘When the egg fails to fertilize with sperm, the entire lining sheds, accompanied by bleeding, mucus, blood clots, etc., causing a period. That’s how this process would revolve in a female body.’

Jellal listened each of her word keenly. ‘I have a question’

‘Go ahead’

‘How long do they exactly last?’

‘Varies, it can range between 3-8 days for a normal healthy woman’

‘What about you?’

‘mhm, 4 days, I guess. 5 maximum,’

‘Do they occur at the same time in each month?’

‘No. They occur around the same date they happened during last month. They can occur a day or two before their previous date or a few days after. Timing can differ slightly.’

‘I see’

There was an imperturbable silence that followed. Neither of them spoke a word for a while as they snuggled next to each other under the warm quilt. The rain pellets that fell against her bedroom window roused her from her thoughts. Her eyes searched his. He appeared completely inscrutable. Did she creep him out with her meticulous narration?

‘Do you find it gross?’, she asked quietly.

‘What? No. Why would you say that?’

‘So, you don’t find periods gross?’

‘No. Why would someone find it gross in the first place?’

‘I heard some guys do’

‘Well, I don’t.’ he smiled in a reassuring manner. ‘You women basically harbor the ability to nurture a new life within yourself and bring them into this world, I think that’s beautiful.’

She paused for a moment to take his words in.

‘You know, women are exceptionally horny during this time, if you continue to spill such sweet words, I’ll have to jump upon you myself’

Jellal erupted into a hearty laugh as he swung his arm around her shoulders to bring her closer to his chest. He placed his chin carefully upon her fussy head and nuzzled his nose in her soft scarlet tresses. ‘I won’t mind if you do’, he whispered softly.

 A/N: I apologize if anyone from the readers found this unsettling but I think every healthy couple should have an open communication with each other and talking about periods shouldn’t be considered a taboo. Also, Jellal is a total gentleman which is thoroughly depicted in the manga. Do you want me to make a part 2 version of it? Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thank you for reading!

#fairy tail #fairy tail 100 yq #jerza #jerza fanfiction #Jellal Fernandes #erza scarlet #ultear milkovich #Meredy #crime sorciere

[imagination-theory]

Not trying to start shit but just gonna pour some tea on my opinions 🍵

I think the way big mouth handeled Natalie is good. I mean Natalie being a portrait of bad trans representations because she was grossed out by periods. Are you telling me the first time you got your period you weren’t grossed out by all that blood and clots of uterine lining coming out. It’s fucking gross and I think it’s perfectly acceptable to be grossed out especially if your trans and it’s your first time seeing it. This isn’t me saying that periods are gross and should be shamed it’s natural, it happens, and it’s a damn lie saying it comes out like skittles, but like...come on be real. The first time you see that shit it’s kinda gross...and the subsequently it becomes fascinating and every time after that it just becomes a pain in the ass until you start having sex where it becomes a relief.

Alsssooo you’re saying it’s wrong that Natalie has a male hormon monster. Ok well here’s another hot take but Natalie said she didn’t realize she was trans until she started going through puberty and started becoming aware of herself. Natalie didn’t know her own gender identity because up until this point she had never thought about her identity as a man or a woman. Up until puberty they were just them. And I think Natalie having a male hormone monster is a nice way of explaining the type of Dysphoria many trans kids go through when their body starts going through changes they don’t particularly like. Even in the show we see Natalie tell her hormone monster that she doesn’t like what he’s doing to her. it’s this dislike that pushes her to do some research, discover what it means to be trans, and get herself on some hormone blockers.

We also have to remember that yes we have seen kids have hormone monsters of the opposite sex but we also have to remember that Nick literally had two male hormone monsters before he got Connie. Also because Connie told nick he was her first male child it can be assumed that having a hormone monster of the opposite sex is uncommon and maybe the way they’re assigning these monsters out to children is based on their biological sex and not their gender identity. We have also seen that some kids just don’t have a hormone monster like jay and Lola, we haven’t seen them with a monster so maybe not every kid needs one and only those who are going through a difficult time during puberty get a monster. Either way I don’t think it’s wrong they gave Natalie an over masculine hormone monster because ultimately that wasn’t her and by blocking him out she was taking control over her own body and identity.

I have to respectfully disagree with your criticism on the portrayal of Natalie because I think they did it very well. But I do have to agree that it is wrong to gaslight someone and call them transphobic because they don’t want to fuck you. As someone who very much likes woman I don’t believe it’s transphobic for me to not be attracted to a penis even if it does belong to a trans woman. I can like a trans woman for who she is but I shouldn’t be shamed for not being attracted to her penis because that’s anatomy just doesn’t do it for me, however I think the situation portrayed in the show is a little different. They only kissed and Seth claims it was the best kiss of his life. He really does like Natalie and he doesn’t care that she’s trans he cares about the opinions of others. He’s worried that is if he is seen with her it will ruin his reputation and that’s what makes the whole situation transphobic.

#I have to disclaimer and say that I am not trans but I am still figuring out my gender identity #I am Afab #I recogonize my sex purely on a biological status #but I do not feel like a woman #I do not perform woman hood and the though of because an old woman terrifies me #I want my uterus ripped out #but also I don’t see myself fully transitioning to a male #my gender identity feel like the middle ground of a masculine woman and a feminine man #and I teeter in between the two but I never really settle into one side or the other #so I don’t know what the fuck I am #non-binary? gender fluid? #idk #so maybe I have no right to give my perspective on trans gender issues #but as someone on the lgbt spectrum and has been questioning their gender identity since puberty #I look at a character like Natalie and I just think they’re handeled so well #this isn’t me starting drama #but rather giving an opposing view on the whole situation #big mouth #sorry #this is long

[scripttorture]

1/? I have a character who has been caught up in a war between planets ever since he was a child. He was out into hiding from the age of 10 to 16, before watching his younger brother killed by the person prosecuting them and elder sister sell her planet (she's heir basically) to save his life and swore herself loyal to the person to save herself.

2/? (She isn't loyal, but she'd be killed otherwise.) The character is then sent to grow up on a different planet, with his mother who figureheads a resistance against the people who took the characters sister and killed his brother. That's basic backstory continuing the character eventually gets captured again, and it taken to a prison. The character is tortured in the prison bc he killed several very important people and cut off the hands of another. 3/? Its seen (by the torturers i suppose, or at least the woman ordering them to do so) as rightful punishment. I havnt quite hashed out exactly what the torture is other than he definitely by the end has rather severe nerve damage in his hands from the shackles and chronic pain/weakness in one of his legs from something or another. Anyway the characters sister was put in charge of this prison, 4/5 and has no choice but to stand by and watch as the character is tortured. She does her best to make sure he isn't killed and the character knows she has no choice but to let them hurt her bc she is just as much of a prisoner as him, albeit in an entirely seperate way. She could stop the torture, and she could get him out, but she would be killed for it and he knows it. Im just wondering if he would blame her, 5/5 because she is in charge and could stop it. But she would be killed and it would likely end with them both dead. She cares for him when she can which isn't often bc she isn't exactly allowed too. Would he blame her I suppose? She has never hurt him, but lets it happen.

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Alright I understand what you’re going for here.

 It’s not the kind of situation that’s common enough for there to be systematic studies. Most of the time torturers and their victims don’t have a close relationship. It’s much more common to find cases where they were strangers or acquaintances prior to torture then close family or friends.

 This doesn’t make this a bad idea. It just means that there aren’t definitive answers. I’m working from a handful of anecdotes and extrapolating from other things.

 Even if this was a more common situation I don’t think you’d find many definite answers because individual variation would probably play a huge role.

 Torture changes things for survivors in a lot of unpredictable ways. While we know the possible symptoms what any individual ends up experiencing is unpredictable. And how well people cope with mental health problems, and how that in turn impacts their relationships is dependant on the person. Someone’s personal experience, friends, support network, work, general knowledge and a host of other things can effect these sorts of outcomes.

 Having that person also be tangentially involved in the survivor’s torture complicates things even further.

 What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of plausible outcomes here and I think that makes this a writing question rather then a realism question. So the real focus is: what works best with the character?

 Blame is definitely possible in the scenario you’ve created but it doesn’t have to be straight-forward or simple.

 For instance the character might blame her while knowing logically that there’s nothing else she could do without putting both of them in more danger. And that could make him feel conflicted about blaming her, possibly feeding into self-blame as well. He could openly blame her, or he could hide his feelings for a variety of reasons.

 He might feel angry, that she’s ‘safer’ or that she can’t protect him. Or just because she ‘stands by’ and watches him at his worst. He might even come to hate her.

 But it’s also possible that he wouldn’t associate her with the torturers or guards and would view her more as a fellow (though perhaps favoured) prisoner. He might pity her. He might feel sympathetic towards her plight.

 He could plausibly have no strong feelings towards her at all.

 Whatever emotional response you think is best it’s important to tie it to what’s come before in the story.

 However you look at things he’s been away from his sister for a long time. It’s not clear to me how much time they spent together growing up (they could have been apart since he was 10 from the sounds of things).

 If they spent a lot of their childhood apart they may not have a close relationship to begin with. I don’t think that would make a particular response more likely but it could mean he has a less intense response to her presence generally. If they weren’t close before then he might not feel her presence is particular significant.

 If they were close then I think it’s a good idea to look back over the story. Read their interactions again and try to get a clear picture in your mind of what their relationship was before.

 Whatever happens you’re writing the process of how that relationship changes. And it’s really helpful to have a clear idea of where you’re starting from first. I personally find it helpful to have a clear idea of where I want to end up as well but some people prefer a more exploratory style where they find out where the characters end up as they write.

 It doesn’t matter which approach works better for you, what matters is that the intervening steps, the process of the relationship changing, are clear and understandable to your readers. And preferably pack a heavy emotional punch as well.

 So if blame is the result you want (if it isn’t use this as an example and apply the same process to the emotional response you want) think about what aspects of their relationship could feed into that.

 If they had a competitive or slightly antagonistic relationship then it might feel natural for him to place some blame on her. After all it’s probably an established pattern from their relationship. If he saw her as a protector and relied on her to keep him safe then this might feel like a huge betrayal.

 If they had a really loving, tender relationship then you might want to lean in to the illogical nature of the response. It might even be a good idea to have the character acknowledge (internally or verbally) that this isn’t a sensible response. And yet this does not make the feeling go away.

 With a more distant relationship did he feel like she betrayed her people or her family by ‘giving up’, regardless of how desperate the situation was? Or did he (as a kid raised in the rebellion) mostly view her as a prisoner?

 If he saw her as a prisoner and felt pity for her would that vanish as she stands by while he suffers? Or would it seem to confirm what he already thought; that she’s helpless, powerless.

 Find some part of their previous relationship that you can tie to this new set of feelings. Or acknowledge that it’s not a sensible response and have the character deal with more complex feelings as a result.

 Mostly try to resist the idea that there’s a ‘right’ response for your character to have.

 Try not to suggest in the story that there is one ‘proper’ response for a survivor to have. Because they are a varied bunch. People can live through more or less the same thing and come out with very different attitudes or perspectives as well as symptoms.

 The response you write should be the one that works best with your characters and the story you want to tell. Don’t feel you must use blame. Instead think about whether it adds to your story: does it create interesting character moments, obstacles for the characters or feed into the plot?

 You’re the person who knows what’s best for the story and what will work best with the characters. Be open to multiple options. Take your time and think through what works best.

 For the character himself it’s possible (may be likely) that he’d already have some trauma symptoms before he’s captured.

 I get the impression you’ve probably already seen the Masterpost on common trauma symptoms, but here it is for the new readers. :)

 For the physical injury pattern you’ve got multiple options.

 I think that really severe nerve damage suggests something more then shackles. Unless something went wrong.

 The easiest way to get both injuries in your character would be a suspension torture that was more common historically. Victims had their hands tied together in front of them, were hoisted anywhere between a few feet and two meters in the air and then dropped.

 This causes nerve damage in both hands and could cause breaks or fractures in the legs. Either could lead to chronic pain.

 Suspension without the drop would still cause nerve damage in about 15-20 minutes.

 Nerve damage is less common with restraints but it is still possible. Ratcheting cuffs that can tighten are more likely to cause nerve damage, especially if they’re applied too tightly over a long period.

 Other dangerous things that can happen with those sorts of restraints being too tight- Broken wrists and reduced circulation leading to painful swelling in the hands (look up ‘finger milking’ in my tags for more information).

 Over longer periods (multiple hours with the cuffs tight enough to cause swelling in the hands) blood clots might form and that uh… really dangerous. Basically if large blood clots start forming in a limb due to reduced circulation then they either block the blood vessels (which kills the limb and leads to amputation) or the clot gets swept back into the body when the restraints are removed. The clot usually then lodges in the brain or the heart causing a stroke or a heart attack respectively.

 I’d say suspension probably works better for your purposes.

 Standing stress positions can lead to chronic pain in the legs. But it often also effects the back and usually effects both legs.

 Falaka might work. It’s beating the soles of the feet with an implement. Depending on the implement it can be clean, scarring or even lethal. With a harder implement like a wooden stick it can lead to fractured or broken bones in the feet.

 But even when falaka is performed in a ‘clean’ manner it can lead to chronic pain. It causes a thickening of the tendons in the soles and also causes tiny bone fragments to detach inside the feet. It’s unclear how long these bone fragments stick around but they’re detectable by MRI for a few months with the right method.

 You could also just go with the idea of the leg injury being the result of a specific attack or accident. A broken knee perhaps, after a beating or a fall. Not all injuries in torture scenarios are ‘deliberate’, in the sense that they weren’t necessarily intentional. Because torturers are not as in control of the situation as they’d like people to believe.

 I think I’ll leave it at that for now, but if you have any further questions don’t hesitate to come by when the askbox is open. :)

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