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painted-crow · 3 years

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Secondary Toast Revolving Door, Part 1

I guess I should start with a little about me, since that’s easier than making you pick through previous asks for information and some of you guys are new here. This one’s going to be heavily personal, so you can skip it if you want.

I’m a double Bird. My Bird primary system is heavily Badger influenced, and I also use Lion to support it by telling me when I should investigate something more closely. If we can dip into primary territory for a moment, I guess you can say I understand the world through systems that model things around me. But not all of those systems are things I’ve consciously examined, or fully investigated.

My understanding of how historical people dressed is pretty limited, for example, because I haven’t studied it in depth to get all the information—but I consciously understand what I do know about it. You could say this system piece is tiny but clear; I could expand it if I chose to find out more.

My understanding of how someone I’m not close to thinks might have more data to work with, but I haven’t consciously processed it; that’s the kind of thing where my Lion primary model will tell me to look closer if that person starts acting weird. This system piece might be described as huge but fuzzy; I could clarify it if I sat down and thought about it. I probably have more of these than I realize, but Lion basically takes care of monitoring those. I don’t have to investigate everything.

But some of my systems are both large and fairly clear, because I’ve taken the time both to gather data on them and to examine it. My understanding of myself is… well, I won’t say it’s terribly clear, because I’m in my early twenties and I’m still constantly getting new information, plus someone keeps changing the environment and mucking with my data (that would be me). But I have to examine it, because my brain is like a notoriously buggy piece of software and I’m the poor schmuck saddled with tech support duties.

Basically, the reason I’m good at playing therapist with other people is that I’m constantly doing exactly that thing with myself. (This probably makes me a very annoying patient for actual therapists.)

About that buggy brain, then.

I have major depression. That was professionally diagnosed when I was a teenager and it’s probably genetic. I take medication for it, when I remember to. It especially flares up in the winter or when I’m under stress. I probably have some kind of anxiety disorder too.

I’m almost certainly autistic, which I’ve never brought up with a professional—the first person to figure it out was the system I’m now best friends with, because they’re autistic and they knew I was within two weeks of talking to me. It took me two years to catch up with them and figure it out myself.

In my defense, I thought executive dysfunction, sensory overwhelm, dissociation, and hyperempathy were like… secret menu items for depression, because those only really bug me during depressive episodes. My current theory is that they’re related to autistic burnout instead.

I mask a lot, subconsciously—it’s actually really hard to turn that off normally—and I just can’t do that as much when depressed. If I do, my tolerance for everything else goes way down and I’ll go into overwhelm and start having shutdowns and dissociating. I recover pretty quickly (hours, not days), but if you’ve never spent 15 minutes standing in a Walmart aisle trying to decide whether you want a jar of peanut butter, but you can’t make decisions because you can’t access your emotions and you don’t really feel like you’re “here” but you kind of just want to go home… well, be glad I guess.

Of course, I have other autistic traits that show up when I’m not under stress, but they’re seldom associated with autism because most people don’t know what autis are like when we’re actually happy. Like, hyperlexia? That’s not even an “official” word, the auti community just uses it because “official” literature hasn’t caught up. I taught myself to read at age three (according to my mom; she says I was reading news headlines and stuff, not just books I’d memorized) and wrote a 35k word novella when I was ten, with no external prompting. My audio processing used to be terrible, but I routinely tested at college age reading levels as a kid.

I also might have ADHD? If so, it’s also mostly just noticeable if I’m under stress, and then it’s hard to tell if that’s the issue or if it’s just autism/depression again.

You might be getting a clearer picture of how my secondary and its model end up burnt so often!

(Resisting a very strong urge to cut stuff from this post.)

In short, I was a Gifted Kid. I spent a lot of my teen years biting off more than I could chew, honestly. I felt that I should be able to do more, and I wanted to be taken seriously, but I had basically no idea how to take care of myself because my needs are different from everyone else’s. I’m still figuring those out.

I’m kind of like an orchid plant: incredibly picky about conditions, wants a different “soil” and watering schedule, gets stressed if stuff changes too quickly, but when everything is just right and it does bloom, it goes all out.

I’m not kidding when I say that I have odd needs. One of them is the need for creative work, which seems to be hardwired into me. When I say that art or writing keeps me sane, I often hear back “oh yeah! I’ve heard that can be very therapeutic,” which is an innocuous reply, but it’s always bugged me, and I think I’ve figured out why.

First, because that’s not the reason I make things… I just… have to. Second, I can’t “make up” not doing creative work with some other kind of therapy. Third and most importantly, I’d much rather think of “artist” as my ground state, and depression as a condition that happens when my needs aren’t being met, rather than thinking of depression as the default that I’m just using art to escape from. That seems to me a healthier way of thinking, and probably a more accurate one, but I’m probably the only one who can see that distinction.

If life gets in the way and I can’t make space for creative work, it will actively make my depression worse. I know this because, multiple times, I’ve been unable to pinpoint why I’m feeling shitty, and then I go back to my easel or my writing or (ukulele, cooking, even just taking care of houseplants) and realize I haven’t done anything creative in like a month and thaaaat’s the problem.

I crack open a bottle of gesso to prep some canvases and it smells like… well, I don’t think you can get high off gesso? But it’s not like when you’re out of it on painkillers or cold medicine or whatever. It’s incredibly grounding, like the world snaps back into focus but it’s also oddly euphoric. Or I write ten thousand words in a couple days and it just… I don’t know what that does. I’ve never run across a word for it.

The writer of Smile at Strangers (a really good memoir centered around women, anxiety, and karate) describes a similar feeling in relation to her martial arts practice.

It’s also a bit like when all the snow melts after winter and you step outside and there’s the smell of wet soil under sunlight and I’m not sure if this fully translates for people who don’t have seasonal depression. Sorry.

Dammit, I want to paint… I haven’t had space to set up for like eight months. I’ve been nose-deep in writing projects since last summer for a reason, but right now my friggin Ravenclaw secondary is off angsting about something because of Life Stress Bullshit, and I don’t have the focus to work on any of my writing projects. Apart from this one. But it’s not really what I want in terms of creative work.

*velociraptor screech*

Oh, yeah. I guess I could mention this is why my nickname is Paint. Not sure if that was obvious before. The header image (which is more visible in the app for some reason) is one of my paintings. It’s a tiny one and it’s not one of my favorites, but I had the photo on my phone and the colors work well enough for what I needed.

(restrains self from negging my own painting ability)

This is starting to get into spoiler territory for what burned Ravenclaw secondary looks like, huh? It’s peaced out for a couple weeks at this point. I’m trying to write about what made it take off, but my ability to think of words and form a coherent sentence kinda flew out the window when I approached it directly.

Let’s just say that around the start of the month, someone I was talking to online (if you’re reading this, it’s definitely not you) kindaaaa hit a nasty depression trigger of mine. Not their fault—it’s very specific to me, and I struggle to explain why I can’t really talk about it. Basically, I spent years studying programming and web design, and due to several different but related issues during that experience, it’s now a trigger for me. I very much want it not to be, but trying to train that out of myself has induced more than one panic attack and I’m stuck between giving up on it or figuring out a way to go back to it that doesn’t totally shut my brain down.

That paragraph took forever to write, by the way.

I think I have to end this here. I… am going to go take out the trash, and water my plants, and make my bed, and file some paperwork, and maybe I’ll even mix up some bread dough or do some laundry. Spoiler alert for what it looks like when my Hufflepuff model takes over, I guess.

Oh. And I should maybe probably eat something. I almost forgot about that... again.

#sortinghatchats #time to overshare on the internet i guess #secondary toast revolving door #mental health #burned ravenclaw secondary #hufflepuff secondary model #ravenclaw primary #paint speaks

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littlemisswolfie · 3 years

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Hope That You Fall In Love (And It Hurts So Bad) Part II

<Part I

Here’s part two! There was actually a much larger gap between these updates on ao3 since I just now remembered to post part one here today, so don’t expect part three to come any time too soon. Hope y’all enjoy!

If you have sensitive triggers, follow the ao3 link and read the end notes. I wasn’t personally triggered by anything I wrote, but I have no idea what triggers my readers, and your safety is paramount, so I may have over-warned.

AO3

Langa doesn’t feel anything about moving back to Japan.

He doesn’t feel anything in general, anymore. He knows he should feel something. This is the country he was created in, where he was tortured and trained before he could speak, where he met his mom for the first time in the hospital ward of his prison. But Japan isn’t really anything to him. It’s not a nightmare, because Okinawa, with its sun and warmth, is nothing like Teiko’s stale, cold walls, but it’s not home, because home is Canada, is mountains and snow and Canada Day fireworks and his dad.

He puts the letter his dad wrote him—still unopened—in the back of his sock drawer.

Okinawa isn’t anything.

Langa isn’t anything.

“Do you want to meet them?” his mom asks, a few days after they move into their small apartment.

She doesn’t have to clarify who “them” are. “No,” he says. “I never knew them well. They probably don’t remember me.”

The Miracles are all adults. They have families, lovers, jobs and friends and lives. Langa doesn't have anything to say to people he hasn’t seen in ten years, and they wouldn’t benefit from knowing he’s alive, so he doesn’t care.

High school isn’t compulsory in Japan, but he attends anyway, because he knows it will make his mom happy. She has enough on her plate, with a new job and having to make new friends, so he has to make this transition as easy as possible for her.

She’s given up enough for him already.

Sitting at his new desk at his new school with his classmates all pretending not to stare at him, he decides to get a part time job.

He’s on edge the entire time he’s sitting across from Sakurayashiki. He knows, logically, that a lot of people in Japan have started dying their hair to support the Miracles, so this grown man who has an affinity for technology having pink hair doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a Pink Two, especially since Pink Twos were predominantly designed female and his eyes are gold instead of pink, but he still hates the idea.

He’s not GI-B423 anymore. He doesn’t want to be associated with Teiko.

When Sakurayashiki rejects his job application, he’s kind of relieved.

He leaves the calligraphy studio and meets Kyan Reki.

Reki is everything Langa isn’t. He’s bright and happy and loud.

Back in Canada, people like this used to annoy Langa. Too noisy, too close, too much. But Reki is never overwhelming. He’s excited, like a puppy, and he’s genuine. Langa can’t help but be drawn into his orbit, like he’s a planet and Reki is the sun.

Ah, he thinks, in that part of his mind that never really left Teiko. He’s mine.

He lets Reki chatter in his ear about skateboarding and watches him work in his workshop and is—not happy, but content, for the first time since his dad got sick.

Skateboarding at S isn’t exactly what awakens that thrill Langa has always craved. It’s similar enough to snowboarding that Langa can let his body take over for a majority of the beef, so that certainly helps, but it’s not the thing.

The thing is the unpredictability.

He should probably feel concerned about that, about how the danger makes his heart race, how Shadow’s aggressiveness thrills him to his bones. It’s a Teiko thing, so he shouldn’t enjoy it, but he does.

“How did you do that?” Reki asks him later as he helps Langa peel the duct tape from his feet. “That was crazy, man!” His eyes are shining, and Langa thinks, I did that.

“I used to snowboard,” he says, instead of I was genetically engineered and trained for the first five years of my life to be an assassin but I never developed my powers.

Reki grins. “This is gonna be so awesome.”

Langa learns how to skateboard fast.

When Reki comments on how quick he’s learning, he gives his teaching all the credit, even though he knows it’s not exactly true. His mom doesn’t tell him much about how Teiko designed him, but he can read between the lines. He’s never had to work as hard to learn new things as the kids around him, particularly if they had a physical element. He’s more observant than usual, and it’s harder to scare him than it should be.

He could easily make up some other excuse, like his past in snowboarding, but the way Reki’s face lights up when Langa compliments him is too good to pass up.

His mother has never been good at hiding her emotions, which Langa finds more than a little ironic, considering she came to be his mom by working in a secret lab.

After the absolute roller coaster of emotions he sees on her face when she brings up the scrapes he’s been getting from skating, he takes pity on her and tells her what he’s been getting up to. The smile she gives him in response is one he hasn’t seen on her in a long time.

“Oh, baby,” she says, actual tears in the corners of her eyes, “I’m glad you found such a good friend.”

Reki’s friendship isn’t limited to skating.

Langa, privately, would have been content even if it were. It would only mean he spent more time skating than he usually would. But Reki seems to genuinely enjoy spending time with him. He gets Langa to do his English homework for him in return for writing out Langa’s notes and homework in his neater handwriting, they spend their lunches together on the rooftop, Reki gets him a job at Dope Sketch, and, well…

They’re just always together.

Even better, Reki is a very touchy person. It’s unconscious, most of the time, like he can’t help it. A brush against his arm here, a nudge at his side there, an arm thrown around his shoulders while they walk together.

The contact makes him feel alive.

He beats Miya, but only just barely. Miya has years more experience than him, and it’s only due to his unconventional skating that he gets the upper hand. The idea of losing… it’s just—unacceptable. Because losing means scrapping. Losing means death.

The way Miya reacts to the loss reminds him of Teiko, so he says, “I had fun. Let’s skate again,” to make that terrified expression disappear. And then Reki starts messing with him, teasing him like an affectionate older brother, and, for a moment, it seems like the night will end there, without any additional fuss.

But then Adam shows up.

Adam, even with his blue hair and eyes hidden behind a mask, reminds Langa of a Red Zero. He’s obviously a man used to getting his own way, and that silky smooth tone in his voice when he make innocuous little statements belies the ugly nature underneath. He’s a sociopath. The only reason he knows he’s not a Red Zero with dyed hair is that he feels no compulsion to do what he says. In fact, he feels nothing—

Until he insults Reki and Miya.

“Hey,” Reki says, sounding angry, which Langa has never heard before, “take what you said back.”

Adam, who was about to touch Langa’s leg, straightens, a dangerous smile on his lips. “And what if I said I wouldn’t?”

If Langa were better with his words, he would warn Reki. No, he would say, he’s too dangerous, it’s too risky for you, but he can’t find his voice to say it, so Reki kicks up his board and challenges Adam to a beef.

“Sorry about that,” Reki says, later, as they skate home from Crazy Rock. “Betting you, I mean.”

“It’s fine,” says Langa, because he can’t say that means I’m yours to bet without making this whole situation even more strange than it already is.

They run into Joe at a ramen shop the next day. His green hair sets Langa off a little again, but Joe is nothing like a Green Seven, so he forces himself to relax a little and listen to the older man’s advice.

“When did you start dyeing your hair?” Langa asks when Joe stands up to leave.

Reki and Joe both startle a little at the question, like they hadn’t expected him to say anything about it. “Well, me and Cherry were in high school when that Special Diet happened, so we dyed our hair out of support, and I guess the colors just kinda stuck.”

“Man,” Reki says, leaning forward onto the counter after Joe leaves. “It’s so weird to think about the Miracles as adults, y’know? They’re not in the news very much anymore.”

“The Yellow is,” Langa says.

“‘Yellow?’” Reki looks confused.

“Oh, sorry, ‘yellow.’ I used the English word on accident.”

“Oh, cool. Sometimes I think about your shitty handwriting and forget you’re bilingual.” Reki gives him a friendly poke in the side. “But, yeah, that yellow one’s a model, right? Of course he’d be in the news every once in a while. Oh, plus the red one’s adopted father has been petitioning for same-sex marriage to be legalized in Japan for a while now, so I guess you hear about him sometimes, huh? When did you start dyeing your hair?”

“I’ve never dyed it,” Langa says, looking down at the empty bowl in front of him. “My hair has always been this color.”

“Huh. Weird.” Reki shrugs and reaches into his pocket to pull his wallet out. “Joe was trying to be nice, but we still gotta pay.”

Langa’s grateful for the end of the conversation. He knows he’ll have to tell Reki someday, if they remain friends, but the longer he can put it off, the better.

Miya drags them and Shadow out to Crazy Rock for some practical training. It hurts to see Reki so frustrated with his own abilities when Langa knows how good he is. Reki shouldn’t be measuring himself up against people like him, who have superhuman gifts, or Miya, who trains as much as he’s in school to make the national team, or Shadow and Joe and Cherry, who are all adults and have been skating for so much longer than he has.

Someday, Reki, Langa thinks, someday you’ll realize how special you are.

Langa skates down a little further to grab Reki’s board when it gets away from him to let Reki rest a little, and tries to do the Love Hug Miya mentioned. Reki is quick to reassure him that there’s no way to actually go uphill, but Langa still feels uneasy.

He knows there’s a way. There has to be. He just hasn’t figured it out yet.

At least he gets to go to A&W afterwards. He’s been missing poutine.

Langa wishes there was something he could say that would help Reki when he picks him up for the beef.

Your worth isn’t determined by skateboarding.

Don’t be discouraged if you lose.

Please be careful.

But none of those things would be helpful. Not really. Even if he could say them in Japanese the way he wants to in English, they would still sound condescending, like Langa didn’t believe in him.

So he says nothing.

Adam does the Love Hug.

Reki goes flying.

Langa sees red.

“I can finally skate with you,” Adam says, sounding enthralled, almost orgasmic, and the only thing Langa can think about is how easy it would be to kill him for what he did to Reki. It wouldn’t take much. Just enough pressure on the throat. A fall off Crazy Rock. A sharp stone to the jugular or the temple. Langa could make it look like an accident, he’s sure. He got more than enough training to do that much on a small scale like this. And even if he did get caught, hey, at least he would have had revenge for injuring Reki.

But Reki is still alive. Reki needs a hospital more than he needs Langa to kill Adam.

He’ll get his revenge in a beef.

“Please,” Reki says, over and over again. “Don’t race against Adam.”

“I’m going to do it, Reki,” Langa says, just this side of a snap. “Stop trying to convince me otherwise.”

“Look, I appreciate it if you’re pissed about my injury—” And oh, he is, he hates seeing Reki’s arm in that cast, he hates that he had to wait in a hospital again when he last time he had to do that his dad was dying— “but Adam’s really on a whole ‘nother level. You’re crazy good, dude, but he’s just crazy.”

“I’m doing it.” He takes a large bite out of his sandwich, and it must be aggressive enough, because Reki backs off, at least for now.

“Mom?” Langa says over dinner that night, one of her few nights off from the hospital.

She’s at attention immediately, which Langa feels a little guilty about. He knows he really shut her out after his dad died, and now every time he speaks, she acts like she’s never heard his voice before. “Yes, honey? What is it?”

“What—” He takes a deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “What all did Teiko give me?”

Her eyes harden in a way they so rarely do that it catches Langa off guard. “Nothing,” she says, vicious. “They didn’t give you anything, baby. They gave you nightmares and trauma, and that’s it.”

“There were files!” Langa says, voice raising. He didn’t mean to do that, but it’s happening now, so he has to let it go. “There must have been! And you were a nurse, so you had to have seen them!”

His mom slams her hands down on the table. “That is enough,” she says. “I’ve had a long day, and I’m not talking about this right now.” She stands up, clears her plate, and stomps into her room, closing the door behind her.

Langa groans, pushes his hair out of his face, and grabs his skateboard.

He, Reki, Shadow, Miya, and Cherry take over Joe’s Italian restaurant later that night, and as Langa watches Cherry demonstrate how the Love Hug works, something clicks in his brain.

I can do this, he thinks. I can beat the Love Hug.

“I’m beggin’ ya,” Reki says, one final time, “don’t skate against Adam.”

“Even if I get injured, I won’t quit skateboarding,” Langa says, but what he wants to say is, I won’t leave your side.

He feels Reki’s fist against his chest the whole ride home.

Skating against Adam is—

Langa hates to admit it, but it’s that adrenaline rush he’s been craving. Adam defies logic in every way possible when he skates, and it keeps Langa on his toes. Skating with Reki brings that easy warmth he got on the bunny slopes with his parents as a child, but Adam is electric, dangerous, and everything that Teiko side relishes in.

“It seems that you’re the same type of person as myself,” Adam says, wonder in his voice, and Langa hates himself for not being able to deny it.

And then he jumps over the Love Hug, and his heart soars, and he thinks Reki, did you see that?

“What happened to the promise that you wouldn’t be reckless?” Reki asks after they evade the cops, out by the water. He sounds… he’s not angry, or scared, or worried. His tone of voice is resigned, like he never should have expected Langa to be careful.

“Sorry,” Langa says, but he’s not, and he knows Reki can hear it.

He knows he can’t ask his mom for permission to go on this trip without making up with her first, so a few nights after his beef with Adam, he knocks on her bedroom door. “Can I come in?”

He hears the sheets rustle, hears her sigh, and then she says, “Come in.”

He sits on the side of her bed, his back brushing against her legs. “I’m sorry I upset you the other night,” he says, his words halting. Even in English, he can never express himself the way he wants to. “It’s just—things have been getting intense, where Reki and I skate, and I was wondering how much of that was because of Teiko.”

She sighs again, and puts her hand on his shoulder. “No, I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you,” she says. “You have every right to wonder. I just hate talking about that place. You’re not what they made you to be, baby.”

“‘Cause I never developed my powers.” He’s sour about that, and he shouldn’t be. It’s easier, pretending to be human when you don’t have superpowers, but he heard all about the Miracle Black Four during the Special Diet, about how he used his powers for years to orchestrate their escape, and he’s jealous. He was engineered to do exactly what Kuroko Tetsuya did, and his stupid body never figured it out.

“Black Fours were doomed from the start.” His mom is trying to be reassuring, he knows, but that’s not really helpful. “GM-B452 was an outlier. In the eight generations between him and you, the scientists were no closer to getting true invisibility to manifest. Infinity was the last generation they were going to produce Black Fours, anyway.”

He’d never heard that before. “Really?”

His mom nods. “Really. They were just going to add the power to the Silvers, instead.”

“What else did my files say?” he asks.

She looks uncomfortable. “Langa, a lot of this stuff—it’s not good, honey. Reading your files when I started made me sick. They knew exactly how tall you were going to be, your projected adult weight, they—” She breaks off, wiping welling wetness from her eyes. “If you weren’t a Failure, and you survived to adulthood, they were going to breed you, baby, with the Pink Two, and the White Ten, if she survived. They predicted which Projects you would find sexual gratification with.”

Langa feels sick, just like his mom said he would. He was—he was a baby, barely a toddler when he and his mom left Japan. These scientists were thinking about his sex life before he knew what sex was. “Why?” he croaks.

“They didn’t see you as human, baby. None of you. You were lab rats with rocket launchers, for all they cared. Only as useful as they money they could make off of you.” Her eyes sharpen. “You said things were getting ‘intense’ with skating. How?”

“Reki was injured during a race,” Langa says, because he figures that all her honesty deserves some honesty out of him. “And I—the guy he was racing against, I wanted to hurt him. I thought of all the ways I could make it look like an accident. But then, a few nights ago, I raced him, and I felt…” He trails off. How can he describe that feeling to his mom without making it seem sexual? “It was like I was flying,” he settles on. “Like, nothing could touch me. I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. Even though I knew he could hurt me, really, really badly, even though we were going sixty kilometers per hour down his track with no fences to keep us from toppling over the edge, even though he kept touching me…” Thinking back on it now, he feels a little sick to his stomach again, especially when he sees the look on his mom’s face.

“This guy,” his mom says, voice serious, “is he a teenager? Or is he an adult?”

“An adult.”

“Langa, baby, I know I can’t stop you from sneaking out at night and doing these races,” she says, hands clasping his, “because I know you can always find another way of getting out if I try to stop you, but if this man ever touches you again without your consent, or if he touches any of the other kids you hang out with without their consent, I want you to tell me, okay? It’s not right.”

“Okay,” Langa says, and he knows this is a promise he’ll have to keep. “But—the adrenaline thing, is that—”

“Teiko designed that, yes,” his mom nods. “They didn’t want any of you cracking under pressure, so they modified your brain to send out more adrenaline.” She smiles, a tad sad. “You were always the biggest adrenaline junkie, though. You tried to do everything dangerous you saw the other Projects do during training, even though you weren’t made for full-on combat. It got you in a lot of trouble.”

Langa rubs at his wrists as the phantom pains flare up again. “That I remember.” Then, remembering the whole reason he came in here in the first place, he says, “A friend of mine and Reki’s says hot springs are a good, natural healing thing, so he got us tickets to Miyakojima this weekend. Is it okay with you if I go?”

“As long as you have an adult with you,” she says, and Langa perks up, because he knows just the adult.

Reki wants to drag him out shopping, because “I can’t believe you don’t have a swimsuit, man, we’re going to the beach, you need a swimsuit.”

“Reki,” he says, panicking a little, because if his trunks ride up everyone will see, see the brand on his thigh, they’ll know he’s GI-B423— “Reki, I can’t swim.”

Reki gives him an incredulous look. “You’re seventeen and you don’t know how to swim?”

“I lived near the mountains my whole life,” Langa retorts, and, yes, this is good, he can needle back and forth with Reki all day long.

Reki groans. “Fine, then,” he huffs, though Langa knows he doesn’t mean it. “But it’ll be hot, so make sure you dress for the weather, okay?”

“Yes, Mom,” Langa teases, just to see Reki’s face heat up.

There’s a girl, on the ferry.

She’s pretty, in a distant kind of way. She’s not movie-star beautiful, but her hair is long and silky, and her dress compliments her figure. There is, all in all, nothing off about her.

But.

Reki is staring at her.

Langa feels something ugly twisting in his gut. It reminds him of how he felt when Adam hurt Reki, this overwhelming urge to eliminate, to take Reki away from this threat—

Wait, threat? This girl is normal. Nothing about her conveys any sort of physical advantage or ulterior motive. She’s just a girl, on vacation.

But Reki is staring at her. He’s blushing.

This girl could take Reki away from him.

It’s a relief when she brushes right by them. If she did try to take Reki, Langa couldn’t guarantee her safety.

Reki would forgive him.

Probably.

The beach is beautiful, Langa decides, laying under the umbrella while the others play in the sea. He wishes he could be out there with them, but he knows better; his secret is more important than a little bit of fun.

Someday, he promises himself, letting his hands linger a little too long on Reki’s shoulders while they’re teasing Shadow. Someday I’ll tell them.

Just not today.

Sitting around the fancy inn Cherry’s staying at, and thinking about his conversation with his mom, Langa sneaks out of the large room where they ate dinner while the adults bicker. He finds a small courtyard with patrons milling around, settles himself on the deck, and tries to picture himself becoming invisible.

It’s risky, he knows; Teiko Projects glow when they use their powers, so if he is successful, someone could notice. But he’s not actually expecting to be successful, at least not in the psychic capacity. He never was before.

Langa knows he stands out in a crowd. He’s tall for Japan, and his hair and eyes always make people assume he’s a Miracle. It doesn’t take long for people to start glancing at him out of the corner of their eyes, and Langa picks one, an old man wearing a green patterned yukata, leaning heavily against a wooden cane and not even trying to pretend he’s not staring at him, and focuses on not being visible.

How the fuck do I not be visible?

He sighs, running a hand through his hair. What was it the Black Miracle said during the Special Diet? I can only make someone temporarily forget my own presence. Is that the key? It’s less invisibility and more induced amnesia? God, the other Projects in his Generation used to make it look so easy. One second they’d be standing still, and the next they were glowing all sorts of bright colors and doing what they were made to do.

He doesn’t think about the other members of his Generation often, so the thought comes as a surprise to him. For just a moment, he lets himself imagine what they would be like, if they’d also been freed like Langa was.

The moment is brief. Dwelling on those things only made Langa’s heart ache.

He crosses his arms across his knees, digging his blunt nails into the skin by his elbows, and thinks of the man he picked earlier. Don’t look at me, he thinks, screwing his eyes shut. You don’t see me. I’m not here.

Then, after a moment, he lifts his eyes, and he bites back a gasp, because the forearm in front of his face is surrounded by a faint black outline. It’s not a brilliant glow, like a Yellow or and Orange, but it’s there. His eyes dart back up to the old man with the cane, and he looks dazed, almost confused, like he’s wondering what he was looking at.

He’s doing it. He’s doing it!

In his excitement, he loses focus, and the faint outline fades, but it was there. He isn’t useless like he always thought.

He’s a success. A little bit, at least.

He has to try again. He picks another person, a mother cradling her baby, and tries to recall that feeling, the one right before he noticed the outline. It was almost like… desperation. He was desperate to manifest the powers he was designed with. Desperate to prove himself worthy of…

Of what? The approval of Teiko, a company that doesn’t exist anymore? The approval of the scientists, who didn’t see him as human and thought about his future sex life when he was a baby? The respect of his fellow Projects, most of whom are dead?

The approval of himself?

The desire to try it out again fades. God, what is he doing? He’s never felt inclined to use his powers before, so why now? He should be glad he never developed them. Living in human society is hard enough with his hair and eyes; living in Japan is hard enough with his height and his terrible handwriting and his Canadian habits that contradict Japanese ones. Not having powers, not standing out even more than he already does, should be a blessing.

He thinks about the letter his dad wrote him, still unsealed, in his bedside drawer.

He stands up, brushes his pants off, and wanders back to the group. They’re probably wondering where he is, by now, and he doubts he can use the bathroom excuse again.

Langa knows pretty much right away that the things chasing him and Reki are just normal people covered in mud. Even the overpowering stench of the muck can’t hide that from his senses. But he doesn’t really have any concrete way of expressing this to Reki without hinting at what he is, so he goes along with it, and runs with Reki.

It’s the same kind of rush, skating away from an opponent on a rough course like this, only now, he has Reki with him. Reki’s right next to him, keeping up to him even when Langa’s being serious about the whole ordeal, and keeping a level head when Langa turns around to admire their pursuer’s skateboarding skills.

Then the thing starts poking Reki’s leg with his stick, and Langa sees red. How dare this worthless human touch Reki like that? How dare they try to knock him off his skateboard, when he last time he bailed, he ended up in the emergency room? He’d like to knock them right off Shadow’s skateboard, but this time, he’s close enough to catch Reki when he falls, so he does.

The weight of Reki in his arms feels right. It feels inevitable, like he was built to hold him. He can feel Reki’s quick breathing, can practically hear his heart beating in his chest, and it makes him think about other activities that could cause that—

But this is no time for that. Not when they’re being chased, not when Langa doesn’t even know if Reki likes boys the way he likes girls.

“How did you two manage to not get covered in mud yesterday?” Shadow asks them the next morning on the ferry back to Okinawa. He, Cherry, and Joe are all still complaining about the smell they couldn’t wash off last night.

Joe sniffs at his hand and winces. “Did that ghost thing not chase you?”

Reki goes as stiff as a board next to Langa. “That wasn’t a ghost!”

“Well, what was it, then?” Shadow asks.

Langa eyes a poster about a festival about covering people in mud to protect them from evil spirits out of the corner of his eye and says, “Who knows?” If none of the adults can figure it out, that’s on them. He’ll tell Reki about it later.

“Mom?” Langa asks when he gets home after dropping Reki off at his house.

His mom looks up from the movie she’s watching on the couch. “Oh! Welcome home, baby. Did you have a fun trip?”

But he’s not in the mood for pleasantries. “Did Teiko make me gay?” The word falls from his lips and it burns, like he’s said something shameful. Being gay isn’t a big deal in Canada, at least not anymore, and Langa has always absently supported LGTBQ rights in a distant way that made him think he was probably straight after all and just hadn’t found a girl he liked, but this trip…

“Oh, sweetie.” His mom opens her arms and he falls into them like a child. “Before I answer, what brought this on?”

“I just—you said they had a breeding plan, so I know I’m not sterile, but I’ve never been interested in girls.”

“Is that all?”

Langa presses his face further into her shoulder and says nothing.

“Langa, do you remember what I told you when I took you from Teiko?”

“You—you said you were my mom, and that meant you would love me and take care of me for the rest of your life.”

She hums affirmatively, stroking his hair with her gentle fingers. “That love is unconditional. No matter what you do, I’ll love you just the same. That’s how moms work, honey. So, if there’s anything else you want to tell me, you don’t have to be scared.”

Langa opens his mouth. Closes it. Licks his lips and tries again. “I love him, Mom,” he says, the words soft, like a whisper, like a secret. “I love Reki.”

Her smile is in her voice when she says, “Thank you for trusting me with that, honey. I can tell he makes you really happy.”

“We’re not—together,” Langa interjects. “He—he likes girls, and I don’t know if he likes boys, too. He doesn’t know how I feel.”

“You’ll never know if you don’t take that risk.”

“But it’s a big risk. If he doesn’t like me, I might lose him forever.” The mere thought of not having Reki in his life anymore makes tears gather in his eyes. “I couldn’t do it.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and asks again. “Did Teiko make me gay?”

“Yes,” his mom says, simply. “They knew you would eventually interact with humans, and they didn’t want undesirable offspring. But, Langa,” she continues, cupping his chin and raising his head so their eyes would meet. “They didn’t design you to fall in love with Reki. They didn’t think you could love. You loving Reki is all you, baby. Never doubt that.”

“Do you think— Would Dad—?”

“Your father would have adored Reki,” she says, and the weight that falls from his chest makes him gasp. “Reki sounds so much like him, in the best possible ways. They’re cut from the same cloth. And he would have loved you just the same way as always.”

Langa falls asleep like that, in the same clothes he traveled in, curled up in his mother’s lap like a child. His last thought before he drifts off is that letter he still hasn’t opened.

One day, he says. I don’t want to say goodbye yet.

#designation:miracle #sk8: the infinity #langa hasegawa #nanako hasegawa #reki kyan #kojiro nanjo #kaoru sakurayashiki #sk8 hiromi #miya chinen #renga #ao3fic #my writing #my post #mine

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ofhvney · 5 years

Photo

he’s been here before. he’ll be here again, he’s sure, at some point in his lifetime. you can take the boy out of the mob, but you can’t take the mob out of the boy, or something like that. either way, his shoes tread the same path they have plenty of times before, skipping stairs on the way up to the police department door. he’s ten minutes late, iced coffee in hand, and he nods to the secretary at the front desk like they’re old friends. “ let ‘em know i’m here ? ” he requests, flashing her a smile, and she picks up the phone. elaine grant and michael forrester emerge not long after, greeted by the sight of a murder suspect draped haphazardly over three chairs in the waiting room.

“ alright, ” he sighs dramatically, sitting up and snagging his coffee off the table next to him. he glances between the two officers, as if they need his approval to carry this charade out. “ let’s get this show on the road. ”

A MESS, FEATURING: @the-great-and-wonderful-oz, @bclthczcros, @ofcelesticls, @figurchead, @rosaliamorais.

part one ( you )

do you have any criminal history ? anything big or small that you want to make us aware of ?

“ y’all have a file. can’t you read ? ” he’s off to a great start, petulant look on his face as he waits for an answer. the only thing he gets in response is a prompt to answer the question, cooperate, blah blah blah. boring. he’d liked it better when he’d been able to drunkenly joke around with the beat cops back in the holding cell.

“ public drunkenness, drunk & disorderly, and assault. ” he offers them a grin, then, all sharp white teeth, the wolf greeting little red riding hood. “ but all charges have been dropped. so do with that what you will. elaine, go ahead and jot it down, i know you want to. ” he leans forward, tipping his chin as if trying to spy on her notepad. “ say, would you mind using a sharpie or something ? that pen’s too light for me to see. i kinda felt like this could be a group project, you know ? collaboration. ” he purses his lips at the silence he gets in response, then sits back once more. “ damn, never mind. solo it is. ”

how have you spent the few weeks back at college ? what have they been like ?

“ does this question ever go over well ? this feels like the kind of question that doesn’t go over well. ” he rolls his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. “ it’s been shitty. i was minding my own business, trying to start my senior year off, actually attempting to go to class for once. but daisey rutherford just had to go and get herself killed. now we’re all huddled up in our rooms from dusk ‘til dawn, trying our very best not to put targets on our foreheads. ” he raised one brow. “ ain’t college a dream ? ”

part two ( daisey )

how did you know miss. rutherford ? what was the nature of your relationship ?

“ not good, which i’m sure is why you dragged my ass in here. ” he sighs, tipping his chair back on its two back legs. “ she stole from me freshman year. some... really important documents, things that weren’t the type of thing i’d appreciate anyone touching, much less someone i barely knew. i was pissed, obviously, since she stole from me. classic rich girl move, you know ? she’s got all the fucking money in the world— stop looking at me like that, we’re all adults here, i can fucking curse. anyway. sorry, she had all the money in the world, and she still decided to poke around and pilfer my shit. i was rightfully angry, and we’ve never gotten along since. i generally tried to avoid her, but this campus is small, so i’d still see her sometimes. i mostly just talked shit if i ever ran into her. ” honey watches elaine’s pen move across her notepad, and he can practically see MOTIVE flashing across the paper like a neon sign. which, he feels, is catastrophically unfair. even in death, daisey’s making his life harder.

do you remember where you were the night daisey went missing ? if so, where were you ? what were you doing ? who were you with ?

honey sucks his teeth for a moment, knowing the answer but not quite wanting to admit to it. his eyes dart between the two officers, their eyebrows raised expectantly, and he lets out a sigh. “ well, i sure hope this is a no-judgement zone, ” he says dryly, folding his hands in front of him on the table. “ i was at oz lamar’s party, same as i’m sure most people were. i spent the beginning of the night chatting with some classmates, playing some drinking games, that sort of thing. i then went to the upstairs bathroom and hooked up with my boyfriend — well, he wasn’t my boyfriend at the time, but anyway — zar ros. balthazar. we came back downstairs separately, and a little while later i headed back upstairs with my best friend, kiki kibler. kiera. ”

their gazes continue to bore into him, as if to say and what did you do up there ?

“ i hooked up with her, too, alright ? jeez. can’t a guy get laid in peace ? ” honey rolled his eyes, leaning back in his chair once more. “ we came back down about an hour later, and i spent the rest of the night with kiki. i left at around 2:30. ”

did you notice anything strange about daisey’s behavior the night she went missing ? did you notice anything suspicious about anyone else you ran into that night ?

he’s about to answer, say some bullshit about what am i, her keeper ? when he remembers the interaction they’d had that night. though it’s been a while since the party, he can recall the look on her face as clear as day. “ yeah, actually. she was being all... paranoid and weird, ” honey says, frowning. “ i don’t know why, i mean— like i told you, we sure as hell weren’t friends. but she seemed super freaked out about something. she even asked me to switch jackets with her, which was... so fucking weird. obviously her shit didn’t fit me, so i just tied it around my waist. i looked like a fucking dork, but whatever. i didn’t even think to say no, you know ? i was kind of caught off guard by the fact that she seemed so different than usual. even when i’d talk shit to her face, she was usually pretty composed. kind of a bitch. but that night she seemed... freaked out. like she was looking over her shoulder for something. so... that was definitely strange. ” he thinks for another moment, searching his brain. “ other than that, not really. daisey was the only one i saw acting odd. ”

where were you the night daisey’s body was recovered ?

“ at home, high as a fucking kite. my roommate was probably around somewhere. otto ballantyne ? ” he stares at them for a long moment, as if he’s playing some strange game of chicken. honey’s the one to break first, laughing loudly in the small room. it echoes off the walls. “ i’m joking. jesus, can you imagine ? i don’t do drugs, officers, ” he says sweetly, and it’s clear that he’s lying, but what does he care ? “ i was at home, though. i got pizza delivered. meat lovers. you can double check me on that. ” a jab at zar, for ignoring him the entire day after he’d left that voicemail. it feels stupid, now.

how familiar are you with the ashmont woods ? have you been there often ? have you recently ventured out here ? if so, why ?

“ familiar enough. ” he shrugs, as if the answer is obvious. until nate’s body had been found there, it’d been as innocuous a place as any to him. “ i mean, they’re right there. there’s some nice paths to take a walk or run on, if you’re into that sort of thing. i go there sometimes to clear my head, but i haven’t been there recently — other than to participate in the search party. ”

part three ( the investigation )

do you have feelings towards the investigation ? any comments ?

he shrugs again, indifference clear in the lines of his expression. “ no offense, but i don’t really care, ” he answers, reaching out for his coffee. he takes a long, slow sip, pushing the limits of the officers’ annoyance just for the sake of annoying them. “ like, i’m glad you’ve got something exciting to do for once, but i just want to, like, live my fucking life. not being able to go out past 7 makes me feel like a goddamn mormon or something. and they’re extinct. ” he shakes his head, seemingly indifferent to the matching, confused looks on their faces. “ i hope you catch the dude or whatever, but do it quick. i’m tired of this already. ”

do you have any people you feel the police should look into ? please, let us know who and why.

his first thought is: the boyfriend usually did it, but his own fucking roommate is— was— daisey’s fiancé. he doesn’t think otto’s capable of this, not even for the drama of it all. “ i have no idea, ” he says, and it rings true. “ i’d say maybe an ex of some kind, but... beyond being antagonistic toward each other, i didn’t really know daisey. i don’t want to point fingers at people in her life without really knowing what was going on. ”

part four ( weekly events — search party )

were you part of the search party in the woods on october 15th to 17th ? if yes, what did you find ?

“ i was. ” that answer is simple. the next, not so much. what did you find. honey loses focus for a moment, his mind blurring the lines between every time he’s found something like he did that day in the woods. he snatches at wisps of bodies, some more battered than others, some more... unrecognizable than others. finally, his mind catches on the feeling of his hand on alice’s shoulder, warm and solid, and he startles back to the present. “ nate ballantyne, ” he answers, clearing his throat. “ i found nate ballantyne’s dead fucking body. i already answered questions about that. look at your goddamn file if you want more details. ”

in the week that the four students were missing, did anyone’s behaviour strike you as odd or suspicious?

he settles them with a look, impatient now that his iced coffee is gone. “ i’ve been too busy being locked up in my apartment for half the day to really interact with my classmates all that much. i didn’t notice anything amiss, but i wasn’t really spending a lot of time out and about. i was mostly at home with my boyfriend. ”

what is your connection to the four missing students ?

their faces flash through his mind: libby’s, danny’s, nate’s... one of them dead. his thoughts only stop once they reach rosa, picturing the way she rolls her eyes at him, goodnatured and usually followed by an exasperated smile. he can’t help the selfish flash of gratitude that she came out of this ordeal alive. “ i’m good friends with rosa morais. rosalia. but the other three... ” he trails off, shaking his head. “ i didn’t know them well. acquaintances at best. ”

do you know of anyone ( or anything ) that could lend to the motive of the person who killed nathaniel ballantyne?

“ no, ” he says, and it’s the truth. daisey had much more obvious answers — she had plenty of enemies, himself included. but nate ? sure, he’d been... kind of pretentious, but honey had never gotten the impression that anyone truly disliked or hated him for it. “ sorry, i didn’t know him too well. that’s probably a better question for oz lamar. they were close. ”

his eyes dart back and forth between them, and he waits for another question that never comes. elaine is still writing on her damn notepad.

“ are we done here ? ” he says, breaking the silence. “ i think we’re done here. ” he pushes back his chair abruptly and turns to leave, abandoning his coffee cup. they can clean up after him, for all he cares. all he wants right now is to go the fuck home.

#shoutout 2 my boo saoirse for this bomb ass graphic #veritasinterrogation #— task.#honey: how do i make sure they know i'm gay?#honey: rolls up ten minutes late with iced coffee and drapes himself across waiting room chairs #death tw #kidnapping tw

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

Text

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

#quill's swill #quill's swill 2018 #worst of the year #review #opinion

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cinnaminsvga · 6 years

Text

Cop-a-Feel Preview | Robot!Jungkook AU (M)

→ summary: When you find a JK300 android lying in a pool of its own blood while on your way home from a 20-hour shift at CyberLife labs, you surmised that your life might have gone significantly awry.

{or alternatively: “alexa, what do you do when you fall in love with a robot?”}

→ genre: robot/dbh!au, smut, fluff, angst, humor/crack → warnings: none for this preview, but expect dom/sub!jungkook, mild voyeurism/exhibitionism, sex toy usage, food play (?), and some violence → words: 1.3K → a/n: welcome to the shitty preview of the fic that murdered all my brain cells!! don’t ask me when i’m going to post the entirety of this thing, because i don’t know either!! i’m anticipating around 10K for this, and this is technically my first try at smut... and of course my intellectual self decided to do roboporn. enjoy?

Just when you thought you finally had the entire apartment to yourself, you hear someone cough behind you. You whirl around in shock, bringing a hand to your heart at the sudden noise. The anxiety of getting caught has caused you to become even jumpier than usual, and the nerves only get worse when you see who it was who caught you in the act.

“J-Jungkook? You’re back so soon?” You fake a laugh, but by the unimpressed look he sends you, you can tell that he is suspicious.

(Not to say that Jungkook has ever been impressed by you, but you have managed to distinguish his varying unimpressed expressions over time and you can safely say that this one means he knows something is up.)

“Miss? I have finished picking up the groceries like you had requested,” he says, his eyes clearly flicking from your face to the monitor. You pray to every god in existence that you had managed to erase your search terms before Jungkook had surprised you.

“Er, thank you Jungkook, but I already told you that you didn’t need to do my chores for me. You’re my guest after all, and not my helper—“

“That does not mean I cannot choose to help, isn’t that right?” He smiles gently, before closing the remaining distance between you and him with two long strides. He bends his head down slightly, too tall for your computer monitor, and his large form almost completely envelops you with his scent. No longer did he smell like android blood and gun powder; now he just smelled like—

“What were you searching for?” He asks, cutting to the chase like usual. That was one of the things you immediately noticed when you had taken him into your home. Despite having renounced his identity as a robot officer, he continues to keep the same strict and serious personality that he was programmed to have.

Not that it was of any help right now.

“It’s… it’s nothing. I was just looking for a gift for a friend.” You lie, your words sounding weak even to your ears. You watch as Jungkook shamelessly clicks on your search history, his quick eyes scanning your most recent activity until they finally land on what he was looking for.

“Sex toys? Really, miss?” He chuckles, and the pleasant sound brings a soft buzz through your body. You don’t think you’ve ever heard the android laugh before, and if the circumstances had been different, you would have liked to make him do it again.

“Listen,” you begin, cheeks hot. “I don’t have much of an option, okay? I work almost 20 hours a day with absolutely no time to find a proper boyfriend, much less any time to date prospective boyfriends, and my fingers haven’t been doing it for me lately, so excuse me for having to compromise a little okay? And wipe that grin on your face, you look stupid.” You grumble, causing the android’s grin only to widen.

“I’m not judging you for your after-work activities, miss. I was simply thinking that you had not actually run through all your options, since you are clearly forgetting your easiest way out.” He says, his smug expression unfaltering.

You raise a brow, both annoyed and confused. “Oh? Prithee, Jungkook, tell me exactly what I’ve been missing out on.”

In lieu of an answer, Jungkook raises his brow in return, his eyes glancing downwards at his pants until the answer finally clicks in your brain. Oh hell no—

“Are you… implying what I think you’re implying?”

“Only if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, I suppose.” He returns easily, the LED ring by his temple glowing almost white from how amused he is.

“Oh my god. You can’t be serious.” You stammer, but your treacherous eyes deceive you when you feel your gaze lowers in tandem with his as you both stared at what hidden treasures lied beyond Jungkook’s ratty oversized sweatpants.

“I am 100% serious, miss. In fact, I’ve never been more serious in my life,” he says, even though you were sure he has never been anything but serious throughout his entire existence. Which, of course, made his words even more grimly sincere.

“Although, I must admit that I was never… equipped with the correct modifications due to the fact that those parts were never required in my line of work. That does not mean I cannot be equipped with aforementioned modifications, however.” He nudges your hand away from the cursor as he clicks the search bar at the top of your computer screen. With deft fingers, he quickly types in “android sexual modifications” and suddenly, the entire situation felt oddly too real for you to handle.

“Jungkook, I don’t think this is necessary—“

“What’s your budget for me, miss?” He continues on as if you had said nothing, even going far as to hum a soft tune in order to silence your protests. Understanding now that you had no other say in the matter, you slump tiredly into your chair. “I don’t fucking know… One grand?”

“You’re spending all that money on lil ol’ me? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t want me to be little, to be more precise.” He jokes, sending you a quick teasing smile before continuing to scroll through the search results.

Finding something that must have looked promising, he clicks on one of them and your retinas are immediately assaulted with pictures and descriptions of android modifications that you would not dare utter in the daytime.

“Here,” he hands you back the mouse and takes a step back. “Just scroll through the mods offered for JK models and you should be fine. I’ve never tried any of these, so forgive me for being a bit excited to try these on.”

Hold up. Did this bastard just say he was excited to try whatever the fuck these things were? Because you are sure no human could fit any of these contraptions into their bodies, especially not with Daddy Michael’s Monster Cock 3000 or the 13-inch Love Machine With An All-New Ribbed Silicone Design.

“Are you sure these are alright? What other mods do you have?” You question nervously, your gaze trailing the website screen with some horror. A few of them looked innocuous enough, with many of the products boasting of their almost human-like proportions. (Human? In what universe did men walk around with double-headed dicks? Or was your dry spell really that bad?) You stop scrolling abruptly, however, when your eyes finally fall on the one dick that could potentially ruin you (for better or for worse).

“Oh? Are you interested in that one?” Jungkook asks, his face looking blasé at best. He does not even flinch at the size nor girth of the… object. (You refuse to call that thing a dick; not on this planet will it ever fit in anyone’s hole.)

“Dragon dick dildo for men and women? Comes with artificial semen and vibration options?” You ask more than state, trying to keep your heavy breathing to yourself. You could already feel your perineum tearing.

“Hmm… 5-inch diameter, and requires model JK400 and higher for compatibility,” Jungkook leans in closer to read the description beside you, his artificial heat warming your skin. Despite his unnatural hotness (both literally and figuratively), you feel yourself shiver at his proximity.

“I’m afraid to say that I’m a JK300 model, so I wouldn’t be able to wear that modification model for you,” he says, and—do your ears deceive you—he sounds almost disappointed. You feel a weird tingling all over your body at this discovery. “Although, it says that they do have older models in stock, so we could ask—“

“Per…perhaps it would be for the best anyway. I don’t think I could have handled it,” you interject quickly, shutting him down before he can get any ideas.

Maybe it’s your imagination, but you swear you see a smirk on his face from the corner of your eye.

“Understood. Shall we keep looking, then?”

#BangtanWriters-Net #btswriters #jungkook smut #bts smut #bts scenarios #bts #bts imagines #jungkook scenarios #jungkook imagines #jeon jungkook #jungkook #my robo tag #YES I FUCKING HATE MYSELF LMAO #WHY CANT I STOP WRITING ABOUT ROBOPORN #MY FUCKING ASS IS GOING TO HELL GOODBYE

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missandrogyny · 6 years

Text

The invitation arrives on Louis’ desk one Monday morning, innocuously placed on top of some tax forms and a bunch of papers Louis needs to look over. It’s quite large, made of thick, fancy, scented paper, with a little red bow wrapped around it, and the instant Louis spots it, he knows exactly what it is.

So he does the logical thing to do. He drops a stack of papers on top of it and promptly ignores its existence.

---

Of course, like all logical plans, this one fails, simply because of Louis’ failure to consider external things. Or in this case, the presence of one, rather annoying best-mate-slash-office-mate.

“Did you see it?” Liam demands as he enters the room at lunch, no pretenses whatsoever. “I made sure to personally leave it on your table.”

“Why hello, Liam,” Louis replies, all faux-brightness and cheer. “It’s so nice to see you on this wonderful day. How are you? I, myself, am doing well—I had a really good sleep last night, and look,” he says, gesturing to the succulent on his table. “Katniss bloomed a flower.”

Liam stops. “I thought its name was ‘Protractus’.”

“Well, I decided that ‘it’ was a ‘she’, and that she was a strong independent woman who didn’t need no man.” Louis declares, touching the flower lightly. “Or a Peeta, for that matter.”

Liam looks confused. “Whatever,” he says. “But did you see it?”

“You mean did I see your handsome face today? Yes, I did, thank you for stopping by.”

“No,” Liam says, crossing his arms. “Although…thanks. But no, I was talking about the invitation.”

Louis plays dumb. “What invitation? Wait, are you finally going to stop wearing that weird chain? Are you inviting me to your place for a ‘Farewell, Liam Payne’s Chain’ party?”

Liam rolls his eyes. “Stop changing the subject.” He marches over to Louis’ desk, and starts ruffling through the papers on there. “I know I put it here somewhere.”

“Oi, Payno,” Louis snaps, trying to shove Liam away. “That is my work you’re disturbing, and as you know I take my work very seriously—”

“—Aha!” Liam says, pulling out the invitation from under Louis’ work forms. “Here it is! You put all your stupid shit on top of it!”

“I did not,” Louis snipes, gathering up all his paper. “I thought it was a tax form.”

“What an incredibly fancy tax form,” Liam deadpans. It’s actually quite a good deadpan; Louis would be proud if it was in any other situation. “Here.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Open it, Louis.”

“I said, no.” The words come out much more emotionally than Louis intended them to, and he clamps his mouth shut, shakes his head. “I mean, I don’t need to, Liam, I already know what’s in it. Wedding invitations all say the same thing.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t just any wedding invitation,” Liam says. “This is Zayn’s.”

“All the more reason not to open it, don’t you think?”

“Louis,” Liam says, his voice taking on a gentle tone. “You promised you wouldn’t be bitter about this. You promised you would go.”

And yeah, Louis did. But that was a promise he made at a shitty time in his life, under shitty circumstances. He was sad. And sad people make stupid promises, especially to people they’re in love with.

“Open it,” Liam urges, handing the envelope to Louis. Louis takes a moment to look at the calligraphy of Mr. L. Tomlinson at the back, takes in the thick, fancy, iridescent envelope and the big red ribbon around it.

He hates it immediately.

Still, he opens it, simply because Liam is still there and watching him. The stupid ribbon falls off easily, and the inside is exactly as he expected.

We are cordially inviting you to the wedding of Jelena Noura Hadid and Zayn Javaad Malik on Sunday, March twenty-fifth, ten o’clock in the morning.

And on the right, a little post-it note stuck on the stupid, scented paper.

See you there, best man! – Zayn

The thing is, distantly, he knew that. He knew that Zayn’s getting married, knew that he was going to be Zayn’s best man. But seeing it on paper just made it more real, more permanent. It’s too much, all at once. Louis wants to burn the invitation and crawl into a hole and never come out.

Still, he forces himself to stay calm, to tear his eyes away from the invitation, enough to smile at Liam. “There,” he says, and even he can hear the sudden shakiness in his voice. “I opened it. Happy, now?”

Liam, however, isn’t looking at him. “No,” he says his eyes stuck on the post-it note. “Fuck, I told him not to push through with you being his best man. It’s not fair to you.”

“It’s fine, Liam,” Louis says, even though it is really, decidedly not. “I mean, I did promise.”

“But it’s not fair to you,” Liam repeats, growing heated. “Fuck, I’m going to call him right now and tell him—”

“No, Liam, it’s fine,” Louis insists. “Really. I promised I’d be his best man, and I am. Or at least, I will be.”

Liam pins him with a look. “Even with all the shit?”

Louis blows out a breath. No, he wants to say, but it’s been three years, and he’s moved on by now. Or at least, he should have moved on by now. “Well I promised I’d do it, and I will. How I feel doesn’t matter here.”

“But it should matter,” Liam says. “Fuck, just last week, you got piss drunk and were still crying about—”

“I know, Liam, I know,” Louis interrupts. “But it is what it is. I mean, you were the one going on and on about how I promised I’d go to the wedding.”

“As a guest,” Liam emphasizes. “I didn’t know he would really go and make you his best man.”

“Well, he did.” Louis shrugs. “It’s not his fault, though. I really did promise.”

“You know you don’t have to keep promises like that if it’s detrimental to your well-being, right?”

“I’m aware, Liam.” Louis deadpans. “But I’m also aware that I promised, and, well. I don’t want to break Zayn’s trust in me.”

It’s stupid—stupid and shitty and ridiculous of him, but. He thinks he’s just cursed to be this way, forever weak for a boy who is now getting married to someone else, that he can’t even break a stupid promise he’s made while drunk and crying.

And Louis knows that Liam knows this all this; Liam was there for the entire thing, for the downfall and the crying and the desperation and the begging and the final, quiet acceptance. He’s been there since the beginning and he’s still here now, even though it’s been three years and any normal, sane person would’ve moved on. But Liam, annoying as he is most of the time, is also incredibly perceptive, and right now he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t put into words what he’s thinking.

“You know if you let yourself, you’ll find someone else eventually,” he just says.

“I don’t need anyone,” Louis insists stubbornly. He strokes the Katniss’ flower with a finger. “I’m a strong, independent person and I don’t need to find anyone else.”

---

See, here’s a few things people should know about Louis and Zayn’s relationship:

One, Louis has known (well, known of) Zayn since the beginning of sixth form, when he was going about playing football and trying to get a good education. He’d always been intrigued by the dark-haired, middle-eastern boy who liked to lean against the old brick walls of their school and smoke cigarettes, while still being able to get good grades in all of his classes. The two of them had first exchanged words in their final year of sixth form, immediately hitting it off—so much so that when they found out they’d be going to the same uni, Zayn had automatically asked if Louis wanted to be his roommate.

Two, Louis and Zayn dated for two years. It had started off as an accident—a kiss when they had both been drunk and high, during a party in their last year of uni. They hadn’t spoke of it after, but it just kept happening again and again, that one day, in their shared flat, Zayn had said, “fuck it”, and turned to ask Louis if he wanted to go out on a date. Louis, not knowing what possessed him, had said “yes”, and, well. The rest was history.

And three, Louis is still pathetically, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with Zayn. Even though it’s been three years since their break up. Even though they remained friends, best mates even. Even though one night, when he was smashed, Zayn pulled him aside, eyes sparkling, and said “Fuck, Lou, she’s perfect. I think I’m going to ask her to marry me. Will you be my best man?”

And Louis, who had been just as smashed as Zayn was, and was willing to do anything Zayn asked him, teared up and said, “Yeah, of course!”

Which is why he’s here now, stuck in this predicament.

Louis is aware, of course, that all this makes him sound like a Twilight novel, but it’s just. It’s been three years, that’s all. Three years and not once does Louis think that he’s moved on, not once has he met someone who made him feel how Zayn did. Who made his heart race with excitement, with euphoria. Who made him feel high without drugs, like he was walking around on a cloud. Who made Louis feel everything—all the highs and the lows—with startling, vivid clarity.

Which means that there must be some merit to his feelings, considering that it’s been three years and they’ve just consistently been…there. Unchanging. Unwavering.

And whereas before he could ignore them, pretend they weren’t there, he can’t now because Zayn’s getting fucking married. He’s getting hitched. He’s entering into a lifelong commitment with another person, one that’s going to kill all of Louis’ hopes with Zayn and probably his last, only shot at love.

So there really is no choice. Louis has to stop the wedding, confess to Zayn, and ultimately win Zayn back.

---

Of course, sometime during the next day, it occurs to Louis that in order to get his plan to work, he’s going to need some back-up. Someone who’ll support him throughout this crazy, hare-brained plan. Someone who’ll have his back. Someone who’ll be there for him at the end, just in case things don’t work out as planned.

And it can’t be Liam, because Liam being the stickler that he is, will probably not allow Louis to try and stop the wedding. He’ll just end up telling Louis that he’s sorry and that he should move on and other weird shit like if you love him, let him go, which he probably got from those hipster Tumblr photos. And it can’t be Niall either, because no matter how easygoing he is, the whole debacle of Louis and Zayn is a sensitive issue for him, and he’ll probably go running to Liam about it the instant Louis tells him about his plan. No, for this, Liam and Niall are definitely out.

The problem, though, is that aside from them, Louis hasn’t really got anyone else. Sure, he’s got work friends, but Liam will immediately be suspicious if Louis takes one of them to the wedding, as he’s been trying to set him up with the people in the company to no avail. He could take his sister, but Lottie would probably just judge him for his pathetic-ness, and he doesn’t want her thinking that he’s pathetic. He could ask a random stranger on the street, but he might be slapped or punched for that.

Unless.

He’s reaching for his phone before he even realizes it, opening the contacts app and scrolling all the way down. It takes a second for him to spot the name he’s looking for, and although they’ve kept in touch these past few years—texting almost every day and engaging in random conversation—it’s really kind of a crazy idea. Louis has no idea if he’s busy at work, or if they’re at that level of friendship, or if he’s even willing to fly all the way to London.

But he’s all Louis’ got, and, well. It can’t hurt to try, can it?

The phone rings once, twice, thrice, before someone picks it up. “Hello?” A deep, raspy, familiar voice says, on the other end of the line, and Louis steels himself, takes a deep breath.

“Harry?” He says. “Hi, um. I was wondering if you’d do me a favour.”

#heyyyyyyyy #guess who's back #not me bc idk if im sustaining this #i just ran out of things to do so i started randomly writing #and uh #im actually liking it so far so i wanted to share but #idk!#i dont wanna pressure myself to finish things but ya #i like it #my writing

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deathishauntedbyhumans · 6 years

Text

Coping

Evan explains the letter to a Connor that just wants to... go home. A fix-it RP with a really good RPer on omegle I did a while ago.

You: A blind panic had dusted itself over Evan when Connor had glanced down at the letter and begun to read the line that had caught his eye. It had only escalated as Connor turned roughly away, voice shredded and torn, and he found himself lunging after him, his breathing coming heavy as he forced himself to grab onto Connor's arm with his good hand. "I need that back. Please. Can you just- can you please give it back? I can explain, I swear, just-- just, /please/." He held on just a little tighter as Connor tried to pull away. His hands, he was sure, would be shaking if he held them up to look at them properly, but the only thing he could think of in the moment was getting the letter back, and explaining to the only person who had bothered to give him the time of day thus far that he hadn't meant to upset him.

Stranger: To be honest, Connor wasn't sure who he was angrier with - his mom for standing in the way of his plans to just evade school altogether, or himself for thinking even for half a second that anything would be any less shitty than always. If losing his shit at Evan for the other's innocuous exhale wasn't bad enough, he'd tried to... what...? Connect with him, and it wound up with this. He shouldn't have expected more from someone who hung out with Kleinman, though, so it was really probably his own fault. All he knew was that he wanted to be away from where he was. Far away. Executing a plan that he had intended on initially, before letting his mom talk him into school but before he could make it through the door, fingers gripped his wrist. He wasn't entire sure who was trembling in the moment. He tried to tug away but this kid had a good grip and so he turned to him, glaring. That usually got people off his back but somehow he got the impression that he wasn't getting away fast. "Fine," he answered through gritted teeth. "Explain."

You: Quailing slightly under the look Connor was giving him, Evan swallowed hard before forcing himself to take a deep breath. He couldn't do the counting exercise because it was more important to be present and in the moment, but he wished that he had a second, because if anything, the one deep breath only made him feel worse. "Okay okay, first of all I'm really sorry but I do need the letter back because it's a letter that I have to write for an assignment and I can't go to my appointment empty handed because people will be disappointed in me and I really don't like disappointing people--" Another breath. In, out. Still didn't help. Connor was still glaring and Evan talked faster. "AndIdidn'twriteaboutZoebecauseyouwerehere! I didn't know you were in here I thought it was empty because, y'know, people have friends and stuff they hang out with! Not that you don't have friends but anyways I, um, I wrote about Zoe because she's, y'know? Really nice? Yeah she's um, she's nice to me and stuff and she helped me today when you pushed me but! Idon'tblameyouforpushingme I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and um, okay I've been talking too much I'm sorry I just really don't want you to be mad at me Ididn'tmeantoupsetyou."

Stranger: Evan was legitimately intimidated. Evan was /scared/ of him right now. Just like Zoe, hidden away in her room probably looked as he lost it at home, the way his mom looked at him while his dad maintained composure and tried to get him under control again, but never offering any long term relief. He stared back and he was both angry because Evan was afraid of him but it also kind of hurt his feelings, despite giving the kid every fucking reason TO be afraid of him. He was angry that he could relate to parts of what Evan was saying, and he felt vulnerable and disgusting and wanted to get away even more than before. On some subconscious level, he was getting the reaction from Evan that he actually wanted - because whether he was conscious of it or not, he felt that at least Evan would hate him because he'd pushed him to and not just because. It was kind of in his control, that way. Subconsciously. He stayed quiet as the other boy spoke, listened carefully but held a stony expression. He got it, he really did. He didn't want to admit that, though, because that was admitting defeat and vulnerability. He sighed and lifted the hand with the letter, shoving it back towards Evan, all the while yanking his other arm away like a wild animal might if you were to touch its paw. What even was he gonna benefit by standing there, scaring the shit out of somebody? Somebody who just looked at his sister in the way that he, himself had kinda looked at Evan. For a second. But whatever, he had more important things to do, now. He backed away a little. "Yeah, well, she's not as fucking wonderful as you think," he said before he could consider the potential consequences.

You: There were a lot of things that fell under the massive category of 'terrifying.' Answering the door, talking to people on the phone, giving class presentations when he hadn't prepared for them for at least half a school year prior. /People/ were terrifying, in general. But Evan didn't know if he was really, truly /scared/ in the moment as Connor shoved his letter back at him. He was anxious as hell, but he was... pretty much always anxious as hell if there were other people around, so that wasn't anything special in itself. Despite Connor's obvious upset, Evan hadn't once considered that Connor was actually angry with /him/. At the letter, and the fact that he thought that Evan had done something to piss him off? Of course. But even as he stumbled back a little and clutched his newly-reacquired letter to his chest, he found himself frowning in confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked, the words coming out too fast and narrowly avoiding sounding like a rushed, smushed-together mess. He smoothed the creases in the paper he was holding absently, staring at Connor with eyes wide with both curiosity and the fear that he could never seem to rid himself of. "She, um, she seems nice? I don't really know her that well because, um--" He coughed, face flushing. "Butanyways I don't know you're her brother and you probably know her better than me? Oh god sorry okay I'll shut up now."

Stranger: By the time he'd said it, Connor already regretted saying the thing about Zoe despite kind of believing it. Like, he was pretty sure she was that fucking wonderful - at least to most people - but that was the thing that pissed him off about her, the thing that made her, to him, so awful to have to deal with. Things were easy for Zoe. That was his perception. She had friends and people liked her. People like Evan. People that could've liked him instead. He couldn't exactly just run off and not answer the question but that would look pretty bad, probably so he just shrugged and tried to feign a sort of nonchalance as he answered. "She's just a fucking bitch, I don't know what her problem is. She's got this stupid fucking diary, you know? She writes all this mean shit in it, and then acts all nice to people's faces. She's probably just being nice to you because she thinks being, uh, genetically similar to me gives her a bad reputation. That's the kinda shit she writes in there," he realized that he hadn't really dug himself out of the hole he'd gotten himself into so he added, "I don't care if you have a creepy crush on my sister or whatever, I guess. Just like, I think it's bullshit, you know? How everyone adores her and kisses her ass. It's fucking annoying," he decided.

You: "I don't know if I actually have a, like, a crush on her?" Evan spoke before thinking, and he just /knew/ his face was beet-red. Still, he'd let the words escape, and he was going to go with it, because it was the truth. He'd been thinking about it for a long time because the way that Jared talked about girls and the way he thought about Zoe? He /liked/ her and she was /nice/, and he would probably even like to kiss her! But beyond that? He honestly hadn't thought anything through, which was a big part of the reason he hadn't been able to talk to her in the first place, because if he'd just had a PLAN, it might have been at least a little bit easier. "And I don't, um, I don't think I kiss her, um, ass? I just think it wouldbenicetohaveafriend y'know? I didn't know she writes stuff like that." Evan shook his head. Now that Connor had calmed down a little, Evan found himself glancing down at his own arm, the one with that cast. The one that now had Connor's name written across it like a beacon. His handwriting was nice, he thought distractedly. Blocky, but not messy. It was weirdly confident handwriting, for someone who seemed just as bad at interacting with other human beings as he was. Because that was what Evan had gotten from his anger. They were both bad at people, just... in different ways. "Being, um, genetically similar to you isn't a bad thing?" he added as an afterthought, staring at the cast as he spoke and then glancing up after the words had left his mouth. He curled his fingers around the paper he was still holding, consciously stopping himself from continuing to smooth it out. "Sorry, that was... You probably know that. That was dumb, sorry." He shook his head again. He didn't know /why/ he couldn't go two seconds without putting his foot in his mouth, but here was was. Putting his foot in his mouth. Constantly. As always.

Stranger: Living in Connor's head could be difficult because some of the time, he felt like ...why wouldn't everyone like Zoe more than they like him but other times he felt like people should just give him a chance to be nice to them instead of assuming he's gonna be a dick which then, in turn, causes him to act like an asshole because it made him angry. The worst is when he felt both of these conflicting emotions at one time. It happened more than he'd like to admit. He focused on Evan's speaking instead of on whatever bullshit he was thinking or feeling about Zoe, but that just made him tense all over again; the way he could relate and how uncomfortable that made him but how it also made him think maybe... but no, that was stupid. Evan wouldn't want to be his friend now, not after how he'd acted to him that whole day. He pushed the thought out of his mind, at least for the time being. He had to focus here. On getting away from this whole interaction and following through on what he'd promised himself he'd do earlier. Dead or alive, he'd still be a burden to his family - but at least the former allowed him to not face the consequences of it but before he could think of a good escape tactic, he was letting out a snort at the mere concept of being genetically similar to him not being a terrible thing when it also meant that you'd be genetically similar to Larry Murphy which was, as far as he was concerned, the worst thing you could be. Besides, his family was all kinds of fucked up beneath the traditional family veneer that thinly veiled the reality of things. "No, trust me, being genetically similar to me sucks.. She's not wrong. Just. Fuck, man, I don't know..." he hadn't really said anything, but he felt like he'd said too much so he deflected - "You apologize a lot."

You: Evan realised that he was breathing again, more normally than hyperventilation. It wasn't perfect, but it was a lot calmer than it had been when Connor had first gotten angry, so he would take it. It didn't seem like Connor was upset anymore, but there was a bitterness just below the surface, one that he recognised from their previous interaction. It was strange and contradictory, and Evan wanted to know more despite the fact that wanting to know more made him nervous. "Y-Yeah..." Evan gave a nervous little laugh and then cleared his throat immediately afterwards. "I don't know. I just feel like I have a lot to apologise for? It's, um, easy to apologise and stuff, so that nobody ever gets upset or anything, y'know?" He moved his hand as he talked, the unbroken one, and winced a little as the paper flopped around in his hand. "I'm gonna, um..." He gestured to the table next to the computer where his bag was still sitting, and made his way over to place the letter safely down so that it wouldn't be a casualty of his social awkwardness any longer. "I, um? Don't really think that's right, though," he told him, looking up from his letter. "The, um, geneticallysimilarthing?" Slow down. Breathe. Talk like a normal person, Evan, come on. "You're not a bad person? Neitherisshe, because--" Breath. "Um, because writing bad things might just be a coping mechanism? Sometimes, y'know, people have those and it's not always the best but it happens." He shrugged, bit at his lip. He'd been rambling again. "Sorry."

Stranger: Despite the way that his demeanor was cooler than it had been initially, there was still a monster that controlled him lurking beneath the surface of his now cool exterior. It was always there and ready to snap and he didn't have any control over it at all, quite the opposite of that, really. He nodded a few times, despite the fact that he couldn't even recall the last time he'd said sorry at all, let alone actually experiencing remorse when he said it. Probably on some level, it was because whenever he'd done anything wrong, he'd been told to apologize and now he didn't like doing it. Especially not when he felt that he was owed an apology, too, which was... well. A lot of the time. He watched as Evan moved back to his things and he pushed the crappy feeling out of his head that came from antagonizing this poor kid since that morning. Connor probably should've been more understanding about unhealthy coping mechanisms, he had a few of his own but he could justify his own and as far as he was concerned, Zoe's reasons for feeling how she felt were shitty and selfish and that made him feel angry, and made his hands tense into fists but he tried to maintain the calmness that he had fallen into. "I guess," he said because it was the best thing he could come up with without just spilling his guts. And Evan really, really didn't need that. Neither did he. Not when he was going to do what he was going to do once he left. "It's just like, that's the shit that makes me cynical about everyone else, you know? Like, fuck. I shoved you. I shoved you cause I thought you were laughing and you weren't even fucking laughing, cause I have that fake bullshit to deal with. With her. Makes me doubt everyone," he said. It was almost an apology, right?

You: He was nodding enthusiastically to everything Connor was saying, and it was probably stupid, and he was pretty sure he should /stop nodding/ but everything that Connor was saying made sense so why shouldn't he nod? Evan caught himself after a few moments, feeling too much like a bobblehead for his own good. "I mean, yeah, that makes sense." He didn't blame Connor for shoving him; he'd meant what he said about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "And it's okay, about, um, earlier? With the shoving? I know that you were, um, already upset and stuff. Jared isn't very--" Evan winced, rubbing at the back of his neck with his good hand. "Jared's not really nice sometimes, but I think it's 'cus he doesn't know that what he's saying is as mean as it is? His brain doesn't always connect to his mouth, or at least, that's what my mom says." Oh, great. He'd literally gone and mentioned his /mother/. How utterly useless in conversation could one person be? Backtrack backtrack backtrack. "Anyways, I'm not trying to excuse it or anything because what he said was pretty bad and not true at all? Your hair isn't, um... bad. It's long, which is cool, because not a lot of people have super long hair? Not a lot of guys, I mean." Oh, god. Kill him now. "Anyways!!" He said it too loud and winced again. "Sorry. Um, I just--" What was he saying? "It makes sense. That you would doubt people because she's fake like that. You shouldn't have to, um... feel bad about it, y'know?" He found himself playing with the paper on the desk and stopped himself abruptly, placing his hand firmly and awkwardly on top of his cast to stop himself from fidgeting.

#tree bros #tree bros rp #evonner #evonner rp #fandom rp #fandom roleplay #omegling #omegle rp #omegle roleplay #deh #deh rp #my rp #my roleplay

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motorcyclegirlfriends · 7 years

Note

Alex reminds me so much of my sister. I don’t get to see her that often. But I like to think that she and her girlfriend are happy together. Which is why I ship Sanvers. And just like Alex my sister also wants to have kids. Now with these new spoilers, I’m seeing the term “baby crazed lesbian” being thrown around. Is there suddenly something wrong with wanting to be gay and a mom? I know procreation isn’t for everyone, but I can’t help but find this offensive to women like my sister.

It is offensive.

But I think some of the most offensive ideas coming out in response to this news (and other fandom news) is a result of people wrongfully perceiving offense in the source material initially, and then responding with condemnation of things that are innocuous.

For one, I think some people have a habit of confusing a single female character wanting something traditionally feminine with it being antifeminist.

I saw this with people being so angry when Melissa said she didn’t want to change the supersuit, saying that she was terrible for not wanting to change it to a suit with pants. (When the skirt?? Is perfect for Kara’s character???)

And maybe you don’t headcanon Alex as the type of character who would want children. That’s fine, and you can be annoyed that they made a decision you don’t personally think is character-accurate.

But it’s not an ideologically faulty choice, especially when the reason they’re breaking up is because another woman isn’t into having children. If anything, they’re sending the message that not all women want children and that’s okay, and that some women do want children and that’s just as valid.

But I mean, I’ve seen a lot of weird logic about this whole thing. Some people are pissed at the idea that Alex might want children in the future, some people are pissed that Maggie wouldn’t, some people are suggesting that they should just stay together anyway because people change their minds (which—“all women want children eventually!” much? And just… not a healthy way to conceptualize relationships in general, guys.)

I think what’s mostly happening is that people are copy/pasting the rhetoric from other discourses onto situations that don’t quite fit, and they end up being out of touch with what’s really happening (and in these cases, implying some pretty shitty things in the meantime).

Criticizing a comic book artist for giving a female character a short skirt when it would be inconvenient in reality is not the same as criticizing an actress for wanting to wear a short skirt. One is an accusation that some guy is sexualizing a female character, the other is like… pretty much slut shaming? Or just straight up being sexist, if it’s about how girly it is?

Criticizing a writer for making the sole female main character in a film full of men suddenly lament not being able to have children in the middle of an action-filled superhero film is not the same as criticizing a writer for just… having a female character that wants to have children some day within a context that makes a reasonable amount of sense.

(And “baby crazed lesbian” is just??? She just wants a kid? There’s nothing crazy about that.)

I’ve seen the same tendency extend to queerbaiting a hundred times.

The 100 pr team using guerilla marketing and specifically going into and targeting queer online spaces to get wlw to watch their show by making promises about their wlw couple—knowing that they were going to kill off half that couple—was queerbaiting.

But somehow that’s translated to “any tv show that includes a gay couple in their promotional material that doesn’t plan to have them be endgame is queerbaiting.”

The actors of Rizzoli and Isles reportedly deliberately playing into the gay subtext and then turning around and asserting that their characters are 100% heterosexual is queerbaiting. (Which like… I have more to say about re: how bad this kind queerbaiting actually is, tangibly, when many of us live and breathe subtext as transformative fan-creators. But that’s for a different discussion.)

But somehow that’s translated to any show that has a non-canon gay ship being accused of queerbaiting before the actors and writers have even had time to process that the ship exists (for which I think poor media literacy also plays a big part— fans being unable to tell the difference between when subtext is being purposefully played to and when it’s accidental).

What’s happening is that people get upset about something, and because it’s in some ways similar to events that have already been widely determined to be ideologically wrong within this community, they assume that it’s the same case.

They hear “female character wants kids,” realize that they don’t feel good about it, and then they mistake their normal (if more painful because of a lack of positive representation in the first place) disgruntled fan feelings for feelings of social injustice.

“Female character wants kids” sounds like “the only female character has baby-centered storyline while male characters get more interesting and relevant storylines” or “female character wants to leave her career to have children, writing her out of the action of the story and effectively dialing her agency way back” or “female character wants to have kids in one of the other dozens of shitty ways female characters are made to want/have kids in media.”

And to the casual observer or the also-angry fan, it looks familiar. Looks right.

It leads to comments like “baby crazed lesbian” because in so many other instances, the character randomly, irrationally gives up so much to have a baby right there, right then. (And maybe there are lesbian-specific tropes I’m not aware of?)

But this time, it’s simply, “establishing that not all women want kids, a single female character out of many decides that she will, one day, want a kid.”

But my point is that these people probably don’t actually think having children or wearing skirts is wrong—they aren’t really criticizing people like your sister for wanting children—they’re just fumbling with discourse in a way that actually ends up turning it around making it offensive in and of itself.

Which is frustrating but also… incredibly, hilariously ironic.

#supergirl #alex danvers #Anonymous #fandom wank

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brynne-lagaao · 7 years

Text

(Fanfic) Set in Stone - Chapter Three

Title: Set in Stone

Pairing: Sarumi

Chapter: 3/18

Rating: M

Mirrors: AO3 | Website

Summary: Yata wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he performed a summon on his own in a fit of drunken loneliness. It definitely wasn’t some asshole demon with a bad attitude, even if that demon happened to be frustratingly hot. But breaking their contract was going to mean working together, and he wasn’t sure how much of that he could take before he snapped… one way or another.

Note: Thank you to @dropletons for being my beta and to @chromekins for helping with the magic aspect. This fic is not entirely accurate in terms of modern magic and the demon lore was basically made up to suit the story, but I tried to keep somewhat of an authentic feel, so hopefully that succeeded.

It was cloudy outside, which wasn’t unusual, and there was a mid-Spring chill in the air still. Yata threw a hoodie on over his T-shirt before they left the apartment, but Fushimi seemed more or less indifferent to the weather.

“Aren’t you cold like that?” Yata asked him as they turned off the walkway leading from the apartment complex onto the sidewalk.

“I don’t have the same body temperature as a human,” Fushimi responded blandly. He was walking with slightly hunched shoulders, hands in his pockets. It made him look even more like a regular person, which made the previous night feel even more like some kind of weird dream and not an actual thing that had happened and potentially fucked up Yata’s life. “Or a changeling, apparently.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Yata glanced around just to be sure, but nobody seemed to be paying them the slightest attention. Not that they’d be taken seriously even if someone heard… “I’m not that much different from a regular human. Just the aging thing and – ” He stopped there, abruptly unsure how much he wanted to give away.

Fushimi gave him a sidelong look. “And…?”

“Never mind.” Yata shook his head slightly. Better not to reveal all his secrets. If they had to stay together long enough, he’d find out pretty quick, but that didn’t mean there was any reason to tell him now. “I’m not that different, s’all.” He managed a bit of a smirk. “I don’t have horns or anything.”

The typical click of Fushimi’s tongue answered him. “I could fix that for you pretty easily.”

“Hah! No thanks.” Yata shook his head, smirk widening as he turned back. “Y’know, I’m not totally ignorant about this summoning business. I’m the one who summoned you, right? I know you can’t do anything to me that I don’t want.”

The expression on Fushimi’s face turned sour; Yata couldn’t help but huff out a laugh. “You don’t like losing much, do ya?”

“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Fushimi muttered back. “Nobody enjoys losing.”

Yata’s spirits were buoyed enough by the small victory that he let that one pass. “Anyway, we got a few blocks to go to get to the station. Usually I’d use my skateboard or – ” He caught himself in time, and cleared his throat instead of continuing. “Well, you’re slowing me down, but whatever.”

Fushimi raised an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “Would you rather I followed you from the air?”

That… actually wouldn’t have been a bad idea, if it wasn’t shitty timing. “We’re in public, dumbass!” Yata reached up to scratch the back of his head, annoyed that he hadn’t thought of it sooner. “Look, if you’re still around later, I’ll find some place to cast invisibility and – wait.” He squinted at Fushimi, realizing belatedly that he really had no idea how demon magic worked. “Can you make yourself invisible?”

“No. Unfortunately.” The answer came with another almost petulant click of Fushimi’s tongue; he frowned. “If I could, I’d have done it already and not have to deal with navigating your world in the first place.”

“Right, right.” Made sense; no point doing things the hard way if you didn’t have to. “Anyway, I can do it for you later and then you can race me if you really want.” He couldn’t help a smirk at that. “I’m pretty fast, though – just sayin’.”

Almost reluctantly, the corners of Fushimi’s mouth edged up in response. There was a flicker of something like interest in his eyes. “Is that so?”

“Better believe it is!”

“Hm.” Without losing the tiny smirk, Fushimi shut his eyes, letting out a small, amused huff. “We’ll see.”

The exchange was oddly enjoyable – and the prospect of a challenge had Yata feeling fired up. “All right!” He folded one hand into a fist, raising it with enthusiasm. “Let’s get this shit done and I’ll show you!”

“So noisy,” Fushimi muttered, but it lacked most of the frustration of earlier.

They walked in silence for a bit. It was an uneasy silence – like a temporary truce had been called – but it wasn’t horribly uncomfortable. Yata wasn’t sure if it was more of a relief not to have to defend himself from constant verbal attacks or… kind of a disappointment. For all he’d been an asshole, Fushimi was strangely fascinating. Or maybe not so strangely. He was a demon, after all – that was kinda cool, and it was something Yata didn’t know a heck of a lot about. If they’d been on better terms, he might’ve asked about what that was like.

Where did Fushimi live when he wasn’t being summoned? What did he do all the time? Did he have a family? Friends? Hobbies?

Yata stole a glance sideways at the man walking next to him. He looked perfectly normal – well-structured features, yeah, but not a vision of perfection by any stretch. His clothing, posture, habits, and general appearance were all that of any regular guy. He didn’t seem phased by the apartment or city. Did that mean he lived somewhere like this? Was the place demons lived another whole plane of existence, like the fae that Homra dealt with?

Fushimi seemed to notice he was being scrutinized, because he tilted his head slightly and met Yata’s gaze. “What?”

“Huh?” Yata blinked, caught off-guard, and shifted his eyes forward instead, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck awkwardly. “Oh. Nothing. My bad.”

He could almost hear the frown in Fushimi’s response. “If you say so.”

The feeling of eyes on him made his skin prickle in a way that wasn’t… totally unpleasant. Yata made an attempt to shrug it off, letting his hand drop and deliberately increasing his pace. “S’not much farther. C’mon.”

The subway station was crowded as usual – it wasn’t too bad with it being past noon on a weekday, but rush hour would start in an hour or so, and if they weren’t quick, it might be hell coming back. At the moment, the traffic was just a steady stream, which meant there’d be more than enough standing space in the trains, but having to pack in like sardines wasn’t fun, even if he could be sure Fushimi wouldn’t do anything if he got annoyed enough.

Yata frowned, considering it. I might end up having to show him after all…

“Are we going in?” Fushimi’s voice cut into his thoughts. He’d slowed to a stop when Yata had, and was studying him with that inscrutable expression.

“Uh – yeah.” Except… tickets. Which was no problem for Yata, since he had a transit pass, but… “Shit. I forgot I’ll have to buy you a ticket.” He pulled out his wallet, checking the meager supply of cash he kept on him.

Fushimi clicked his tongue. “Don’t bother.” Before Yata could react to that, he turned, stepping into the path of a random man. “Hey. You.”

What the hell is he doing? Yata stared after him, momentarily stunned into inaction.

The man who’d just been accosted blinked, openly startled. “Uh… me?”

“That’s right.” Fushimi indicated to the paper in his hand. “Did you just buy that ticket?”

“Uh…” The man lifted the ticket and looked at it, as if needing to confirm, and then squinting dubiously at Fushimi. “Yes?”

“Good. Which way is the ticket station?”

“Oh!” The more innocuous question seemed to relieve the man, who turned with much more confidence to wave in the direction he’d come from. “Just back there – you can’t miss ’em!”

“Thanks.” Stepping around the man – who seemed happy enough to scurry off without a backward glance, Fushimi made his way back towards Yata.

“What the hell was that ab – ?” The protest died in his throat as he watched Fushimi hold his hand in front of his body, fingers curling as a small square of paper appeared from thin air within them.

“Let’s go then,” Fushimi drawled, deftly turning the paper to reveal the ticket information printed on it.

Yata gaped at him, unable to help. “You – hold up – how’d you do that?”

Fushimi’s answering look was flat. “Magic.”

“I never saw magic like that.” He was used to components – incantations – runes – channeling… Not just making things appear out of thin air. Who did that?

Well, okay, demons – but still!

Fushimi sighed, sounding long-suffering. “You’re going to be tiresome about it, huh?” He held the ticket between two fingers and slid them apart slowly. The paper dissipated between them, leaving no trace behind. “It’s illusion. The ticket isn’t really here.” He brought his fingers back together, and the ticket manifested again between them. “Demonic magic is all about fooling the senses. Starting with mine and ending with everyone else around me.”

“Really?” It sounded so simple. Yata reached out automatically towards the ticket, and felt his fingers brush the paper. It felt real. “I can touch it, though.”

“I said your senses, not just your sight.” Fushimi clicked his tongue, withdrawing his hand. “Shouldn’t we go? We’re going to look suspicious just standing around here.”

That was true – a glance around showed a few people giving them curious looks. Yata frowned back at them, and they quickly looked away. “Yeah, yeah, fine,” he gave in grudgingly, tearing his eyes from the ticket in Fushimi’s hand to pull his pass out. “Let’s go.”

There was a small line-up at the ticket gate, so Yata took the opportunity to continue his line of inquiry in an undertone. “Hey. So why’d you have to stop that guy back there?”

“I needed to see what a ticket looked like.” Fushimi’s voice was almost a mumble – barely audible over the chatter around them. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to make one, would I?”

“Huh.” That kind of brought up an alarming thought, though. “Wait, you didn’t just copy his ticket, did you? Because – ”

“Keep your voice down, will you?” Fushimi cut him off sharply. He frowned. “Of course I didn’t – I’m not an idiot. The barcode is based on a time stamp.” His tone was flat and matter-of-fact. “Once I saw what his looked like, I calculated mine based on a different time stamp.” He reached up to push his glasses higher on his nose. “It’s unlikely that anyone here will have an exact duplicate, but even if that happens, I can pretend it didn’t scan properly and change it to a different one.”

Yata stared at him, astonished. “You figured that out in your head?”

Fushimi shrugged. “It’s not that hard.”

“Seriously? It’s fucking amazing!” The grin spreading on his face was almost involuntary. Damn, this was actually cool. Fushimi was a damn genius. “All you did was glance at his ticket, and you figured that all out in like – what – thirty seconds? Not even!” It was impressive as hell; he couldn’t help the admiration flooding through him. “That’s awesome!”

For a moment, Fushimi just blinked at him, clearly taken off-guard. It was almost charming. He recovered quickly, though, clicking his tongue and turning his gaze to the side. “Don’t be so loud,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, right.” Yata shrugged that off, stepping forward again as the line advanced. He eyed the gate. “Even if it’s an illusion, it’ll still go through okay, right?”

“If I can fool a person, I should be able to fool a machine,” Fushimi responded drily.

He ended up being right about that – the ticket scanned with no problems, allowing them to pass through to the platform and then the train without incident. Yata bit back the storm of questions raging around inside his brain while they boarded and rode the subway, waiting impatiently for them to be in the open where there was less chance of being overheard.

Unfortunately, the aisle where they stood side-by-side on the train car had them facing a group of four girls who looked like they should’ve been in school at that time of day. Yata did his best not to look at them, growing increasingly uncomfortable. Every time he happened to glance down at where they were sitting, at least one of them quickly averted her eyes and the whole group giggled nervously. It was a stressful experience.

“You’re not very good with women, are you?” Fushimi commented blandly as they – finally – stepped off the train.

“Shut up,” Yata grumbled in response, trying to shrug off the tension that had collected in that cramped space. He’d never managed to figure out where that discomfort came from – it was just something to do with the way it felt when women were looking at him. Like they could see through him, in a way that men couldn’t somehow. He was old enough now to know it was irrational, and he seriously was getting better at dealing with it, but his feelings didn’t always cooperate. “What’s it to you?”

The question was ignored. “Is that why you prefer men, maybe?”

“Not so loud!” Yata glanced around furtively as they pushed through the doors leading out of the station, but it didn’t seem like their conversation had attracted any attention. Good. He wasn’t particularly ashamed of his preferences – not any more, anyway – but it pissed him off when people gave him those judgy looks. It was none of their fucking business.

Actually, it wasn’t Fushimi’s business either, but hell if he was gonna let that stupid misconception go. “I like guys because I like guys. That’s it.” Automatically, he reached up to scratch at the back of his head, letting out a frustrated breath. “Dunno if I’d be bi or something if it wasn’t for the… women thing, but that’s how it is.”

He could feel Fushimi’s eyes on him. It was unnerving, like his thoughts were being read right through his skull. The part he hadn’t admitted – and wasn’t going to admit – was that there were things he’d found he liked in bed that he wasn’t likely to get from a woman, at least not without having to bring it up in a really awkward way. Things he didn’t really feel like doing without, honestly. It made any speculation on that subject moot, more or less; he could safely consider himself exclusively gay.

That was going way too personal for a conversation with someone he barely knew and didn’t even particularly like that much. Yata hastily changed the subject, picking up his pace just enough to lead them in the right direction onto the sidewalk outside. “Anyway, you said demon magic was illusions, right? Can you put illusions on anything? Like, make things look like something else, and all?”

“More or less.” Thankfully, Fushimi picked up the new topic without any fuss. “There are rules, though. I can only make things seem like they’ve changed – or that they exist in the first place, when they don’t already.” He held up the ticket again between his index and middle finger before giving them a wriggle and brushing off the illusion as if it were dust. “I can’t make things disappear if they exist in reality. But you know…” At that he smirked a little, glancing sideways at Yata again. “The things I make are real enough. An illusionary knife will still cut.”

Yata frowned back at him, shaking off the involuntary shudder that came with the statement. “You’re creepy as hell, y’know that?”

“Demon,” Fushimi drawled in response, without losing an inch of the smirk.

“Yeah, yeah,” Yata grumbled, vaguely annoyed by the tone. “If your magic is all illusion, doesn’t that mean you could just make yourself look like a bird or something instead of going invisible when you fly?”

“I can’t use illusions on myself.” At that, the smirk did lessen, shifting toward a frown. “It’s awkward, but sometimes you can work around it. External things like clothing work, for example.”

“Huh.” The word was barely out of his mouth before an outrageous possibility entered his head. Yata turned to stare, vaguely alarmed. “Hey, wait – does that mean – those clothes you’re wearing now – ?”

Fushimi clicked his tongue. “I don’t exactly bring a wardrobe with me when I respond to a summon.”

Yata tripped over his own feet and just about fell, stumbling a few steps as he stared at Fushimi incredulously. “The hell? Doesn’t that mean you’re walking around” – He felt his cheeks flare up as outrage mounted within him, and lowered his voice, glancing around furtively for any possible eavesdroppers – “naked?”

“Would you like me to?” That smirk was edging up on Fushimi’s face again, slow and wicked. “It seemed like you were trying not to attract attention earlier, but it makes no difference to me.” His voice had shifted back to a mocking drawl, but there was an undercurrent of interest in the lazy gaze he shot Yata’s way. “By the way… that’s an awfully strong reaction for someone who can’t tell the difference. What are you imagining?”

The blurred image of a pale-skinned bare torso flashed to the front of Yata’s mind, and he nearly choked, the warmth on his face intensifying. “I-I’m not imagining anything!” Setting his mouth into a scowl to cover his embarrassment, he deliberately increased his pace to put a little space between them. “It’s weird to think about, okay? That’s all!”

“Is it?” The response was light and unaffected. “Because your emotions say otherwise.”

That was irritating enough that Yata shot him a glare over his shoulder. “Shut up, asshole,” he gritted out, before turning back deliberately. “Can’t wait to get you out of my head and out of my life already!”

Fushimi clicked his tongue again, the drawl giving way to irritation. “You’re not the only one.”

There was no point justifying that with a response. Yata distracted himself by turning his attention to his surroundings, despite having come this way often enough to more or less know the place by heart. This was part of the city’s business district, so they were surrounded by high rise buildings. The streets were wide and well-kept, crowded with cars even at this hour, and the sidewalks were mostly occupied by professionally dressed men and women. There was a feeling of cool efficiency in the way that people moved briskly about, both the steady traffic of the road and the confident pace of the pedestrians on the walkways.

At one point he’d been uncomfortable coming to this part of town, but he was more or less used to it by now. Barely anyone gave him more than a half-interested glance, too absorbed in their own business to pay attention to random punks. The attitude used to piss him off when he figured they were all looking down on him, but a certain amount of experience made it pretty clear that most people just didn’t pay attention to anyone; it wasn’t really anything personal.

Hell, sometimes it made things easier for him. He couldn’t complain.

“Here.” Yata paused at the ramp leading up to their destination so that Fushimi could cross the couple of steps worth of distance between them. The building they were in front of was sandwiched between two high-rises, which made it look a bit odd, considering that it was a fairly modest height compared to some of the others in the area. The design was sleek and symmetrical, the majority of the exterior made up of thick-paned one-sided glass. There were two thin marble planters on either side of the double doors that the ramp led up to, with neatly cut plants growing in an elegant arrangement.

As usual, it was sickeningly perfect. “Let’s go.”

The inside of the building was no less orderly than the outside, the cleanly tiled floor shining in the light that poured in through the windows from all sides. There was a large crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling that scattered tiny refractions across the room. On the wall opposite the entrance was an elevator and a listing of the floors and offices in the building – nothing particularly unusual.

Yata pressed the ‘up’ button without bothering to look, tucking his hands into his pockets and watching the elevator door idly as he waited.

“Is this really an office building?” Fushimi asked him; when Yata glanced at him, he was looking around the room, eyes lingering on the ornate light fixture above them.

“No idea.” Yata shrugged, turning away as the elevator pinged at them. “I only ever go to one place here.”

“Hm.” Fushimi didn’t appear satisfied with that answer, but he let the matter drop without comment and followed Yata onto the elevator.

Once the doors closed, Yata hit the emergency stop button, paused for a second to make sure the lighting on the numbers changed from white to red, and then hit a few of them in the sequence that Kusanagi had painstakingly drilled into his head. The panel beneath the number pad popped open and a thin keypad slid out, which he dutifully typed his personal access code onto.

There was a click, and the lighting changed from red to green. The keypad receded.

Into the following silence, Fushimi commented blandly, “’Yatagarasu’?”

Goddamn, he was good at catching things. Yata shot him a frown. “Nickname with my coven.” The reminder had his frown shifting even further into a scowl. “Dunno how this guy figured that out, but – ”

He was cut off as the elevator whirred to life, and the ground abruptly seemed to drop from beneath them as it began its rapid descent.

Even though he’d done this countless times already, it was still jarring. Yata grit his teeth, holding steady as the disorientation passed. Sometimes it felt like that pause between entering the code and the elevator starting to move was just for the building owner’s amusement value. Seriously wouldn’t put it past that guy…

Fushimi clicked his tongue; when Yata glanced at him, he looked irritated. “What is this, an amusement park attraction?”

Yata couldn't help but snort in response. “You’re telling me. I have to come here almost every day for this asshole. It’s not something you get used to.”

There was no real chance for a response, even if Fushimi would have offered it; the elevator slowed and came to a halt almost as jarringly as it had started up, sounding off an obnoxious ‘ding’ as it did. The doors slid open.

The hall they revealed was similar in elegance to the lobby above, but the decor was not as plain. The ceiling was vaulted, and both it and the walls were ornately carved with delicate lines and simple patterns, soft off-white with little traces of silver and gold. The floor was slick, polished grey, and the lighting, cool and faintly tinted with blue, seemed to reflect off of it and cause a myriad of colors to echo through the room.

Yata let out a soft ‘ch’, already a little irritated just from the sight of it. Show off. He started out from the elevator, deliberately letting his sneakers skid on the spotless floor.

At the end of the hall was a familiar set of double doors, large and black with golden handles and an elaborate knocker with the Roman numeral “four” engraved on its surface. Yata ignored the knocker, reaching for the handle without hesitance or ceremony – the guy behind the door knew they were there already, so why bother?

Behind him, Fushimi let out a strangely resigned-sounding sigh. “The fourth, huh? I thought so.”

Yata paused with his hand on the handle, turning to frown at him. “Huh?”

“Never mind.” Fushimi shook his head. “Let’s just go in.”

For a moment, Yata squinted suspiciously at him – but hell, he wasn't going to get answers by standing there arguing with this guy. “Yeah, yeah.” He pressed down on the handle and opened the door, stepping in without waiting.

“Oh?” A deeper-toned voice greeted him with mildly. The man it belonged to sat opposite the door behind a broad wooden desk, which was surprisingly bare in contrast to the overdone ornate decor on the walls and flooring. The structure of the hall extended into this room as well, but somehow the light within felt like daylight seeping through open windows. Which was stupid, considering they were underground, but there it was. Several display stands with various items – most of which were probably rare, and way more than he could afford anyway – flanked the desk. On the surface in front of the man, a half-finished puzzle was laid out.

This was Yata’s current employer, a man he knew very little about beyond his name – Munakata – and the vague nature of his underground business. Which was... something to do with providing rare and valuable components for some of the more extensive spells Kusanagi cast on the Homra bar to keep their doings under wraps. Whatever. As long as Kusanagi vouched for him, Yata was fine with it too. And since he was getting paid well enough, the rest wasn’t too important.

The smile offered up in response to his entry held the usual annoying mix of knowing and amused. “How unusual that you would return today, Yatagarasu-kun.” Munakata rested his elbows on the desk, creating a bridge with his hands and somehow managing to avoid brushing aside the tiny puzzle pieces with his heavy, ceremonial black robes. “I seem to recall being informed that your intent was to have the day ‘off’.”

“Yeah, well, shit happened.” Yata scowled at him in response, even more irritated than usual by the formal speech. “And quit calling me that! It’s not my real name, goddamnit!”

“My apologies.” There wasn’t a trace of real apology in the statement. “I admit to being quite charmed by the fitting nature of the nickname. But that aside...” His gaze shifted away from Yata. “You appear to have gained a most interesting companion.”

“What ‘gain’?” Yata muttered, glancing back.

Fushimi clicked his tongue, cutting off any further complaint. His was looking past Yata to where Munakata sat, gaze wary. “What are you doing here, Captain?”

“Eh?” For a moment, Yata was too stunned to do more than look back and forth between them, caught completely off-guard. “Wait – what do you – ?”

Munakata leaned back in his seat, leaving his fingers interlaced in front of him. “This is merely a side venture, Fushimi-kun,” he responded, without acknowledging Yata's stuttered attempts at questioning them. “Please rest assured that I have no intention of neglecting my more pressing duties.”

Fushimi frowned at him. “And what do you call giving out a collection of our summoning circles to a civilian?”

“Yata-kun is a most competent witch – not to mention an exceptionally strong being.” Munakata's gaze flickered very briefly to Yata, and his smile widened marginally. “I had every confidence that he would not misuse such a gift.”

That earned another click of Fushimi’s tongue. “Your confidence is misplaced, then. This guy performed a summoning while drunk, and didn’t bother to include a timeframe.”

“Is that so?” Munakata leaned forward again, keen interest lighting in his gaze. “And you responded even so.” He tilted his head. “How very unlike you, Fushimi-kun.”

Fushimi caught his breath sharply; when Yata looked over at him, he caught only a brief glimpse of those blue-grey eyes widening before their owner was turning his gaze aside, scowling. “You didn’t have to say that much...”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Yata demanded – and then abruptly remembered there were more pressing questions. “And – wait – how the hell do you guys know each other? What are you even talking about, anyway?”

“Haven’t you guessed yet?” Fushimi muttered, sounding out of sorts. “This guy is my boss.”

“Huh?” Yata gaped at him for a moment, then spun around again. “Wait, wait, wait…” He thrust a finger in front of him, pointing directly at Munakata. “You’re telling me this guy’s a fucking demon? Like, a demon lord, even?”

“Lord of the fourth region of hell’s influence.” Fushimi's tone was drawling, almost bored. “Not that it means as much as you'd think.” He looked up again to fix Munakata with a steady gaze, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “But he does have jurisdiction over any contracts formed in my sector.”

The word ‘contracts’ somehow managed to snap him out of his shock. Yata lowered his finger, directing his own glare at Munakata, who smiled pleasantly in return. “So you’re the guy who can get us out of this.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re the fucker who got me into this, so you’d better fix it!”

“A most unjust accusation, Yata-kun.” Munakata seemed unbothered by the attention. “I merely gifted you with the book – there was no coercion on my part regarding how you chose to make use of it.” He tipped his head towards his interlaced fingers, glasses catching the light in a way that made them seem to glitter. “However, if you are in need of my assistance, I can certainly provide it – in exchange for an appropriate price, of course.”

This fucking guy... Yata’s hands curled into fists at his side, scowl deepening. “‘Appropriate price’, my ass, you – !”

“What price?” Fushimi cut him off, voice sharp and dripping with suspicion.

Munakata made a small noise of approval. “How practical of you to ask, Fushimi-kun.” He finally unclasped his hands, reaching down to open one of the drawers of his desk. “As it happens, I do have a task that will suitably employee both of your unique talents.” When he straightened again, the hand he extended toward them held two small stones.

They looked like ordinary stones, Yata noted, squinting suspiciously at them. Both were small and oval-shaped with smooth surfaces. One was orange and crystaline, with sharp angles and tiny specs of contrasting shades within, like ashes rising from a flame. The other was soft blue with splintering white highlights, looking as though a blizzard had been frozen and contained within.

“Sunstone and moonstone,” Munakata identified them without being asked. “In reality, two different offshoots of a mineral known as feldspar. Their potency for use in magic is almost entirely dependent on the amount and quality of sunlight or moonlight they have absorbed.” He paused very briefly, and then added, “At present, that potency rests at zero.”

“So? You want us to charge ’em?” That didn't sound difficult. Yata frowned in response. “Gotta be more to it than that...”

“Most perceptive of you, Yata-kun.” Munakata set the stones delicately on his desk in front of the half-finished puzzle. “In point of fact, an ordinary charge would not be sufficient for the purpose I intend to turn these to.”

Fushimi let out a short sigh. “Is it necessary to be so cryptic?”

“My apologies. The intended purpose need not concern you.” Munakata leaned back in his seat, this time crossing his legs and clasping his hands in front of him. “Yata-kun, your aspect is the sun – and Fushimi-kun’s, the moon. That makes the two of you ideal for this... unusual venture.” Without waiting for comments or questions, he went on. “In this instance, I need to have the moonstone charged with sunlight and the sunstone charged with moonlight.” He studied them both intently. “Further, the charges need to be exceptionally strong – and completed within a lunar cycle of one another.”

“Huh?” Yata blurted, even as he heard Fushimi’s flat, “What,” from beside him. He stared at his employer, flabbergasted.

To charge the stones in the opposite element... What the hell’s the point? Also, because of the incompatibility, it was going to be hard to get a decent charge – much less an ‘exceptionally strong’ one. And how were those charges going to last long enough to be of any goddamn use? The stones wouldn’t hold them for all that long.

In short, none of it made any damn sense at all.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Fushimi echoed his thought out loud, an edge of thinly contained impatience in his voice. He frowned suspiciously at Munakata. “What are you up to, Captain?”

Munakata returned the frown with an untroubled smile. “Have faith, Fushimi-kun – my actions will surely line up with the logical order in time, as always.” He glanced at Yata, and made a small, self-satisfied hum. “It would be wise if Yata-kun were to take charge of the moonstone and you the sunstone, for now. I can sense the presence of twelve points in the city ideal for the collection of either moonlight or sunlight – if you can endeavor to locate each one and determine its properties, I have confidence in your ability to collect a full charge in each stone before long.” His gaze lingered almost uncomfortably. “Yata-kun has an uncanny knack for determining precisely when exposure would hinder rather than help; I suggest you make use of that.”

The unexpected compliment brought an odd blend of disgruntled acknowledgement and reluctant pride; Yata stared back at him, nonplussed and not sure how to respond. “Yeah, right,” he muttered, reaching up to scratch at the back of his head awkwardly.

Instinct, again – he’d always been good at finding just the right quantity and quality of what he needed, without bothering with measurements or anything. Kusanagi had gotten him to charge things in the past, though Yata more often made use of that talent in the kitchen where he did most of his casting.

It was something that rarely failed him – except when it came to his love life. And demon summoning circles, apparently.

The reminder fired up his determination. Yata reached out and snatched the blue stone from the table, letting out a frustrated ‘ch’ as he did. “Whatever. I’ll do what it takes to get this asshole out of my goddamn life. The sooner the better!”

Fushimi clicked his tongue as well, extending his hand to pluck the orange stone with far less enthusiasm. “What a troublesome job.”

Munakata chucked. “I have every confidence in you both.”

That wasn’t even worth answering. Yata snorted, pocketing his stone and turning to head for the door. “This doesn't change the fact that I’m off today,” he said irritably, reaching for the handle. “I’m not doing any deliveries until tomorrow.”

“Of course.” Munakata's response was perfectly calm and even. “I had no intention of allowing these... unusual circumstances... to interfere with our regular business arrangement.”

Naturally he wouldn't. Yata huffed a frustrated breath, swinging the door open with force and stalking through it, leaving Fushimi to close it behind them.

“Take care,” Munakata's voice followed them, and then the door shut firmly, cutting off any remaining connection.

#k #sarumi #yata misaki #fushimi saruhiko #fanfic #fanfic:mine

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thezoequinn · 7 years

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“Triggered”

Today I heard the last shitty joke in passing I can handle about my mental illness without speaking up. Not about the people making the joke, or even the joke itself, but about the illness - it’s extremely poorly understood, partially due to media presentation of it, and partly thanks to the internet hijacking the terminology of one of the symptoms and extrapolating it so far from it’s original, highly specific meaning that most people have no idea what they’re referencing.

I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t know the first thing about PTSD, because I didn’t know what PTSD was until I was diagnosed with it. Not really, anyway. I had the same pop culture version of the illness most people have - it was something soldiers had, and flashbacks were hallucinatory caricatures about as accurate as most portrayals of what taking LSD is like in pop culture - with the character and the writer equally divorced from reality.

When my doctor handed me the preliminary screening inventory sheet to fill out while I was mid-sentence during our first meeting, it seemed so obvious. So many things that I’d chocked up to having depression and going through a… significant amount of stress, but that weren’t getting better and seemed to just kind of linger unwanted in my head, ready to flare up and shit all over whatever I was doing made sense. He explained to me what flashbacks actually are, that it wasn’t simply a hallucination and more a spiral down a memory well of horrible shit you’ve gone through, of feeling like you’re mentally and emotionally “unplugging” in response to something bringing all that up, and the feeling that everything is just as fragile and fight-or-flight as it was when you were actually in danger. He explained that the most common sufferers of PTSD aren’t soldiers, but survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, and were more often women than men. He even explained the changes to my body that had occurred, that the acrid, metallic taste that would pop up in the back of my throat was *adrenaline* - that I was physically tasting the flood of “oh shit” that my brain was producing because parts of my body had a hair trigger for locking into survival mode.

I scored a 73 out of 100 on the inventory, and later my doctor would categorize my ptsd as “severe”, but told me with trauma-specific treatment I could hope to see that number lower into the teens. It’s been over a year since then and it’s taken *so much work*, but he was right. I’m a lot better than I was several years ago, especially before I knew what the hell was going on with me.

I’m a comedian and can find so much to joke about in my mental illness. When my doctor added a C for “complex” onto the PTSD I felt that combined with my ADHD, I had started collecting an alphabet. My doctor laughed when he prescribed me the medication that would take my extremely vivid, constant nightmares away and told me that it would also take my regular dreams with it, and I responded with “I’m sorry doctor I’m an artist you can’t just phrase things that way without spawning a million insufferable conceptual pieces”. Anything can be joked about - being a dick about it is more related to how you do it.

I make jokes because comedy can take the sting out of having a nasty knot of pain lodged inside my skull that my ex planted there when I took away his ability to hurt me himself. If I didn’t have the jokes, all I’d have is the anger and violation I feel at being someone who can go from joking with friends in a UPS store to a crying mess because someone grabbed my arm and spoke to me in the same place, the same way, as that ex the last time I saw him, before I had a friend stay with me for a while because I was so afraid he’d come back. I hate that I’m like this, and that even with all the work I put in and the therapy I do, there are still these little, extremely specific things that cause that familiar ember in my brain to ignite and immediately need to be dealt with. It’s a nightmare to feel like there’s any part of you that seems so frail where it was once strong, to be someone who has to be tough enough to put up with an enormous amount of shit but still have these things out there that can immediately pierce any armor you have, like the shittiest version of magic words. The sheer irrationality and the sense of lost control is such a deep and frustrating violation, it’s hard to write about without seeming too melodramatic.

There aren’t many things that will send me down that rabbit hole anymore, or make me taste adrenaline and feel the same fear that everything I have is about to be destroyed again. But they exist. They’re extremely specific, innocuous to everyone else but poison to my peace of mind. I’ve calloused over a lot of the minor ones, but there are two or three big ones that feel like a crack across my skull and immediately knock me on my ass seemingly no matter what I do.

You’d think the specificity of these things would make them easy to avoid or to tell people in my life about, but it’s kind of the opposite. I largely don’t bother, because the language around it has been so completely and utterly demolished and politicized in a way that makes it nearly impossible for me to use in a productive way without having to take on the additional, exhausting work of explaining my illness to people.

I’m talking about “triggers”. It used to be that only anime nazi assholes used it as a joke, but then “trigger warnings” became a cultural battlefield over imaginary “political correctness” and a ton of other shit I don’t remotely want to get into. I don’t want to talk about other peoples’ experiences when it comes to triggers, and I know triggers aren’t limited to PTSD - but speaking for myself, as the Discourse evolved, I felt completely left behind. My mental illness doesn’t have any political affiliation, it just exists. Now I see obnoxious “trigger” jokes just about everywhere, even people who are just parroting a “meme” 20 steps removed from the anime nazi assholes who send me the corresponding Junkrat UI image along with their misguided efforts to actually trigger me. It’s to the point where even nice people say shitty things without realizing it.

And that fucking sucks, man. Having a very real aspect of your mental health made into a meme and a joke that has seemingly worked its way into nerd culture at large helps make it feel impossible to actually talk about my mental health, especially when it’s an illness that pop culture constantly misrepresents. The last thing anyone needs when they’re trying to speak up and identify something to someone as being bad for them is to be made fun of. It’s like showing someone a knife in your back and asking them to pull it out for you, only to have them kick it a little to see if it’s real or not first.

Hearing “triggered” jokes is grating and tiresome, especially since bringing up what being triggered actually feels like makes you a huge no-fun killjoy (not to mention the inevitable backlash of people with underdeveloped empathy glands actively trying to trigger me after saying this), but here we are all the same. If it sounds annoying, trust me, I am *way* more annoyed that I have a mental illness than you are. I’m tired. I want to be able to explain to people what is going on with me without the baggage of other people misusing a word for cheap jokes with hidden costs, simply so I don’t have to do all the heavy lifting of educating people just so I can get them to understand that a specific thing messes with me. I’m not about to tell anyone what to say, and I largely feel that plenty of otherwise well-meaning people legitimately just don’t know any better (I know the people who want to continue being little shits will continue to be little shits, water is wet, don’t @ me about it). I want you, dear reader, to know all this so you know what you’re actually making fun of.

I want you to know all this so you know why I’m not laughing with you - it’s because you’re laughing at me.

(in b4 bland peepants hacks respond with lazy “triggered” jokes)

#ptsd #mental health #triggers #trigger warnings

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idiottantrum-blog · 5 years

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RV's Are The Fu$*ing Worst.

I was having some trouble deciding how I was going to start this post; a bit of writers block if you will. The introduction for a post really sets the tone for how the rest of it will read, you know? I tried a couple of different variations on opening paragraphs and ended up scrapping them as they just didn’t really capture the essence, the feel of what I’m going for. It got to the point where I even considered starting this post the same way a class president begins his graduation speech, before waxing poetic about the monumental accomplishment of passing 12th grade without getting pregnant or maid of honor opens her toast, before proceeding to ugly crying through a story about the summer she and the bride spent discovering themselves in Spain; by quoting Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.

Yes. I know. I’m the worst.

However, as I wallowed in a puddle of my own self loathing whilst typing ‘Recreational Vehicle’ into the search bar at the top of merriam-webster.com and considered throwing myself into a reservoir, I was saved at the last moment. I was saved, not because Messrs. George and Charles Merriam and Noah Webster had anything particularly enlightening to provide on the matter; they define recreational vehicle simply as “a vehicle designed for recreational use (as in camping)”, which is exactly as boring and shitty as expected.

No, the gem proffered up by merriam-webster.com came not in the form of their definition, but from the ‘Recent Examples on the Web’ section by way of this headline:

There it is. That’s what I was struggling to capture in my introductory paragraphs. The thing that exactly captures the true essence of RVs and sets the proper tone that I want this post to follow; A news article from Texas about a drug felon stabbing a police dog in the face.

If you were somehow unclear on my feelings about RV’s up to this point we aught to be on the same page by now.

But just to be really, totally sure I’ve been clear enough: RV’s are stupid and suck, there is literally no reason you should ever consider taking a trip in one. If you are thinking about renting an RV to take a road trip in. Don’t. You would be much better served doing an activity that has at least an outside possibility of a positive or enjoyable outcome; such as performing unnecessary abdominal surgery on yourself with dirty kitchen utensils.

I didn’t have a benevolent and wise blog writer to warn me before I made the mistake of taking an RV trip, but you do. Listen to my tale and live a fulfilled remainder of your life not going in an RV.

My tale begins in the long ago year of 2018. A simpler time. A time of innocent wonder and unspoiled joy. My wife and I decided we- actually hold on.

This is bothering me so lets sort something out here; I went back and read that article. The police dog that the drug lady stabbed is fine. Turns out the stabbing was done with some sort of a plastic handled eyebrow trimmer. Officer McBarker (my name for him, not theirs) was treated for minor injuries and returned to duty the following day. Frankly I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate for the rest of this story without knowing if the dog was alright.

Right, now that we’ve covered that, back to my story.

For our summer vacation in 2018, my wife was fretting a lot about spending too much money on a trip plus having to make arrangements for our dogs while we were away. My cousin who lives in Florida was going to be getting married in July, so we figured we would combine our vacation with that. Originally we were looking at Universal Studios in Orlando, since they’ve got that Harry Potter world and f*#k you if you don’t think waving wands at stuff and going to Diagon Alley the best way to spend your week off if you are a 30 year old man. Because of the aforementioned cost and dog separation anxiety however, we were getting nowhere fast with making any firm plans.

That is, until I had the idea that will haunt me to my grave. Fresh off our previous year’s camping extravaganza which you can read about in I Pooped in the Woods, I thought perhaps we could do something new and different for our vacation this year. It is at this point that I would really have appreciated the sage advice of some a#@hole on the internet to tell me and my ideas to f*#k right off. I didn’t get that though, which is why I proposed the idea of renting an RV and road tripping it down the east coast and back for our vacation.

It’ll be more inexpensive than dealing with airfare, hotels, resorts and boarding the dogs I thought. It’ll be a cool opportunity to see some of the country I thought. It won’t be the living embodiment of my worst nightmare set to the score of five hundred podcasts in a row, all while a tiny horned devil stabs me over and over again in the bank account, I thought.

As clearly neither of us is a sane person who can recognize a sh*t-turd of an idea when it’s dancing in front of us in an unbuttoned trench coat with it’s shriveled d*ck waving in the breeze, my wife was all about the RV idea.

We found a site that works kind of like Air BnB for Recreational vehicles in that people that own them can rent them out to vacationers. You pay a security deposit, then you pay a cost per-night to rent the RV and take it around camping and whatnot. Seemed simple enough, and most of the ones available were pet friendly, which meant we could take the dogs with us no problem.

Enter the harbinger of my doom. The 2009 Coachman Prism.

This is the RV we ended up renting from a private owner, lets call him Charles. We’ll call him that because that’s his name. Things started out innocuously enough, all of the preliminary things you might expect went without incident. We had a meetup with Charles to do a walkthrough of the RV so we’d know how everything worked and so he could explain the various ins-and outs of our rental agreement with us. Nothing out of the orinary: (x) amount of miles per rental day are included and anything over that is a few cents per mile, bring it back clean, bring it back with the sewage and grey water tanks empty to avoid extra fees, you have comprehensive insurance through the rental agreement and complimentary roadside assistance, so on and so forth.

Before the appointed trip we plotted a course that looked roughly like this, booking stays in RV campgrounds down the East Coast:

We rented the RV near our home, but we would start the actual road-trip out in York PA after attending a wedding we had out that way on the front end of the vacation. Two weddings, one on either end of our vacation? Yep. we’re at that annoying age where everyone we f&ing know is getting married and for some reason expects anyone else to give a sh!t about it.

(If you are one of the people who’s wedding I attended at some point in the recent past I of course don’t mean you. Your wedding was magical and unique and is the exception to the rule. It wasn’t a huge inconvenient chore and I didn’t hate every second of having to shout over the f*#^ing music in order to make small talk with a table full of strangers for three hours. Your wedding was a treasure.)

Our first official stop was Shenandoah National Forest, then we would make our way south visiting Virginia Beach, followed by a place in the middle of some insignificant woods in a town called Moncure North Carolina because it split the travel time up on the way to the next stop and North Carolina contains nothing of value to society. Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Another State Park near the Georgia/Florida border, and then the gulf coast of Florida for the wedding to finish the trip south and a straight shot back home to round out the vacation.

Guess where we made it to on that blue trip outline before things turned to sh*t?

The first day of our trip just happened to be the hottest day of the summer and apparently in all of recorded spacetime history because it was 110 degrees outside from about 9:30 am on.

By the time we pulled in to our campsite around 4:30 in the afternoon we had been out of range of any cell service for at least 40 minutes and it was so hot we were concerned there was a real possibility of the dogs getting heat stroke. We plugged in, hooked up and connected all of the do-dads for the RV and tried to get the AC going to cool it off. After about an hour of the AC running full tilt the inside of the RV had gotten down to about a cool and comfortable 185 degrees Fahrenheit which led us to become become convinced that in our infinite stupidity we must have been doing something wrong that the vehicle wouldn’t cool down. Since it was just as hot outside as it was in the vehicle, our concern for the dogs continued to grow until we packed all the sh!t back into the RV and drove towards civilization until we could get cell reception to call Charles to figure out what we were doing wrong.

Charles’ response was to comfort us with the fact that “it’s just like that” and to get the RV to cool down all you have to do is wait for it to not be so hot outside. Well f*#$ing thanks, Charles. Glad we' drove an additional hour and a half for the sage advice that we should just stew in our own taint sweat until the sun goes away so it won’t be quite so hot.

Maybe my expectations for the level of comfort in an RV were not set appropriately, and that’s on me. Maybe I was expecting to hang out in a comfy 71 degrees indoors even if it was roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface outside and that was unreasonable; but the casual nature with which Charles informed me that if it was hot outside it was just going to be sh!tty and hot in the RV when my wife was fretting over a pair of dogs so overheated they looked like partly deflated beach balls sort of pisses me off.

By the time we got finished with traveling, setting up and then disassembling the RV, driving back to cell service and turning around to go back to the campground we had exactly enough time to cook dinner in the fire pit and turn in for the night. In other words, day one of the RV road trip and things were shaping up to be a real party.

We had just enough time the following morning explore the campground and take a roughly 30 minute hike along the river. The campsite was nice, if sunburnt older folks with their shirts off, unleashed dogs and combination clothesline/satellite-dish/barbecue grill with underpants hanging all over them is your aesthetic. We lasted that 30 minutes before the heat and approximately 1,294,234,121,853,000.2 bug bites from mosquitoes forced us to pack it up and head on to the the next campsite.

On day two we traveled to our second stop, a state park near Virginia Beach. Upon arrival at the campground while I was going to check in to our spot at the ranger station, another couple of RVers checking in informed me the muffler on our vehicle was hanging kind of low. After we parked I called Charles and sent him a picture of the muffler and he confirmed that it didn’t look right and that I should call the roadside assistance that comes with our rental.

It was at this point I discovered that what they mean in all the information they give you about your “total coverage” and “free roadside assistance” is that you are totally covered and completely free to call their hotline and have a lovely conversation with someone about your broken down RV. If you want someone to actually f*#@ing DO something about it you are responsible for covering that out of pocket.

After about an hour on the phone convincing the people that, no, I could not make a service appointment at a local garage and bring it in to look at because I was on vacation in a rented RV and was supposed to be travelling five hours to North Carolina the following morning they agreed to send a service truck out to deal with the issue. We made an appointment for 10 A.M the the next day for them to come out since we were scheduled to be out of the campsite by 11 sharp and on our way.

At 11:30 the next day the service person called me to tell me they were fifteen minutes away. I told them I’d meet them in the parking lot outside the visitors center since we needed to vacate our campsite. This was when we started the RV up and one of the tire pressure gauges informed us one of our tires was mostly flat… F*#k. At least we already had a service truck on the way.

One hour and 80 dollars later we pulled out of that parking lot with both issues solved. Sort of.

First, apparently the muffler had been replaced fairly recently, but not done properly. Basically, it was suspended from the bottom of the vehicle by nothing more than a metal peg, rubber grommet and wishful thinking. the peg didn’t even fit all the way into the rubber grommet anyway so it was double sh*t. Here is a diagram:

Since he couldn’t actually do anything to properly fix a muffler installed by an incompetent donkey while in the parking lot of a campground, he just took a bunch of mechanic’s wire and strapped it on there to keep it in place for the duration of our trip.

As for the tire, he was pretty sure it was probably not punctured anywhere. He pointed out to me that there is a cover called a wheel simulator that goes over where the lug nuts are on the wheel. Its just a hubcap looking thing that protects the wheel. The one on the tire that was low on air was missing. This, he said, allowed the stem valve to wobble a bit and the cap to come loose, letting air out of the tire. He put air in it and sent us on our way.

Remember the bit here about this mechanic telling me that the wheel simulator was missing. Remember it forever. Burn it into your memory so that when you close your eyes and lay down to sleep tonight the last thought you have before drifting into the sweet embrace of unconsciousness is that in the summer of 2018 in the parking lot of a national park near Virginia Beach a mechanic pointed out that the cover was missing from one of the wheels of the RV that I rented from a man named Charles.

Here’s that map again, just so we’re all on the same page about the progress we’ve made on our adventure so far:

Any wild guesses as to how far we made it before we had problems again?

Go on, guess. I’ll wait.

By the time we got to our next campsite and gave the tires a chance to cool down, the tire pressure had dropped by about 10 lb from where it had been that morning after the mechanic inflated it.

So now we’ve confirmed for sure there is for sure something wrong with one of the tires and I’ve got to start the process over of making the 100% Free™ phone call for our comprehensive coverage roadside assistance team so that they can do us the huge favor of calling a local mechanic for us who we are then responsible for paying to fix someone else’s RV. I don’t know what portion of the fee that this RV rental site takes goes towards paying the salary of a person who’s job is to type “roadside mechanic” followed by a zip code into google maps; but it’s too f*@#ing much, I can tell you that.

Oh, and did I mention that on this, our second breakdown in two days, by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9 pm on July goddamn 3rd? Because by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9pm on July goddamn 3rd.

A mechanic got there at about 10:30 and determined that the stem valve for that tire was old and dry rotted, causing it to crack which was letting air out of the tire.

He then proceeded to fire up an air compressor that was roughly the same decibel volume as a medium sized aircraft taking off and use the worlds loudest pneumatic impact drill to remove our tire, take everything apart, install a new stem valve and replace everything over the course of about an hour during which time apparently every other resident of the RV park called management to complain that someone was doing their best impression of constructing a fly by night carnival in the dark.

Despite the fact that the entire process disturbed an entire campground of people by being so loud that we had to peel out of there at 6 am the next morning rather than face any of the other residents, that mechanic deserves a f@&ing medal for coming out that late on the eve of the Holiday, being super cool and then proceeding to charge me $35 for the whole thing. 30 bucks for the trip out, 5 bucks for the valve he replaced. In addition to his fee, I gave him a 6 pack of beer because I couldn’t risk giving him any more actual cash in case I needed it to keep paying mechanics for fixing this six wheeled recreational sh$t wagon.

I did some extensive googleing to weight the pros and cons of a few options we had at this point. It turned out to be too cost ineffective to just turn around and drive home, then buy a plane ticket to fly to my cousin’s wedding. The other option was to put a brick on the accelerator and drive the RV into a ravine. I figured it would at least be cathartic to see how well the comprehensive full total insurance policy that came with our rental handled the RV being destroyed and in a ravine. It seemed risky though; the available data suggested they would likely just call a place that sells RVs and offer to give them my credit card and social security number to help me out in purchasing the replacement.

It seemed the only option was forward.

The next four days passed without incident, and I mean that in both the sense that the f*#@ing RV at least didn’t break down again for those four days, but also in the sense that as it turns out an RV road trip just consists of Driving an RV for several hours a day and then being in a place with nothing to do except be in an RV for the rest of them

We made it to Florida and attended my cousin’s wedding, spending one night in a a pet friendly hotel since we couldn’t leave the dogs in the RV while we were at the event. It was, perhaps the single bright spot amidst the otherwise desolate hellscape of sh*t that was the rest of the trip.

Our return trip was to be a single shot straight up the coast and back home, with the option of breaking somewhere for the night if we determined it was too much to do all together. It should have taken us 17 hours to make the trip. It took 25.

Apparently when you’re in a turd bus that gets 12 miles to the gallon and have to fill up every fifteen minutes you don’t make great time.

By about hour 16 it was one in the morning and we were somewhere in one of the Carolinas. I had sent Emily to bed, insisting I would settle in for the long haul through the better part of the night. Fueled by rage, energy drinks and downloaded podcast episodes I was plugging my way north when a car comes speeding up behind us, pulls up alongside me and starts flashing their lights and honking.

Guess what didn’t hold up until we made it home? If your guess was THE F*$#ING MUFFLER AGAIN, YOU WIN!

I was not waiting at one in the morning on the side of a highway for someone to come a deal with this godforsaken disappointment on wheels one more time. I drove that f*$#ing RV five miles an hour in the shoulder for 1/4 of a mile to the nearest exit dragging the muffler on the ground until I could get into the parking lot of a closed down gas station where I proceeded to crawl around under the RV on my back and reattach the stupid mechanics wire to get the muffler back in place. I then drove in silence through the night and into the day for another nine hours listening for the sound of a muffler falling off and hitting the ground.

By that point, If I had seen even a slightly steep wash out on the side of the road that had aspirations of being ravine-like I’d have driven that b#tch right into it and ended it all. I did not though, so we arrived back at our house at about 10:30 the day after we left un-ravined.

One would have thought that the endless nightmare of the RV trip would be over once we finally got it home. Not so. We had to bring the vehicle back to Charles to fill out all the paperwork and do an inspection.

Charles, who not only did not show the slightest sign of empathy, or acknowledgement that he rented us an RV with bits literally falling off it. Charles, who agreed to deduct the costs of the roadside repairs I had to make to his improperly maintained vehicle from our bill as if he were doing us a huge favor. Charles, who hit us with every additional fee possible, several of which were incurred exclusively because we had to alter our itinerary because of the breakdowns.

Charles. Charles, who walked around to the tire that I’d had to have looked at twice and replaced at 11 at night on July 3rd and asked what happened to the wheel simulator and then insisted one of the mechanics had removed it and forgotten to put it back on and I had not corrected this mistake. The stupid cap that the first guy had specifically told me was missing. The cap that was pretty clearly missing in a picture we took of that side of the vehicle before the trip. The cap that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my natural life. That cap. He held our security deposit and then billed us $200 for a new one.

So yea. Charles.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself “We’ll, alright. You rented an RV that turned out to have a bunch of problems. Thats not indicative of the RV experience in general.”

Fair point, reader. Here are the other highlights of our RV trip with the breakdowns excluded:

Stopping for gas every 2 hours

Not being able to use any of the appliances because they trip the breakers in the RV.

Eating 80% uncooked potatoes for diner because you spent one of the nights in a place that doesn’t allow fires and as previously mentioned, the electrical system can’t run any of the appliances.

Hitting your elbows 400 times a day when trying to shower in a coffin with the water pressure of a dehydrated pervert trying to spit on you.

Sweating even while indoors.

Silence because your wife is asleep, since being unconscious is better than the living hell that is driving this f*@#ing RV and you can’t both sleep, so at least someone should get some reprieve from the suffering.

Camping, except shitty because instead of actually camping your in shitty RV surrounded by 400 other people who are either late middle aged couples with an aversion to shirts and a love of turquoise jewlery and not showering or families with twelve children under the age of 6 forcing you to question whether or not its biologically possible for a woman to have two euteri.

Road-tripping except shitty because your driving a bus sized living room that runs on diesel and tops out at about 60 and instead of something cool your destination is an RV park.

Touching a literal sh*t tube every day or so so that you can insert it into a hole in the ground that 1,235,243,676 other people’s sh*t tubes have touched since the last time anything resembling sanitation was conducted.

Sleeping on a pull out bed so bad it’t literally convex at a 45 degree angle in the center

Being ten feet from a toilet which is little more than a plastic covering over an open pipe to a sewage tank that you can smell from anywhere in the vehicle at any point in time.

Campfires

Even if the RV hadn’t broken down a bunch of times on us. An RV is nothing more than a combination of camping and staying in a hotel where you make a big pro and con list of both things, throw out all the pros, mash all the cons together and then take a sh*tty trip where everything is a worse version of the regular version.

Camp or don’t. There is no acceptable inbetween and anyone who tells you differently is wrong and should feel bad about their dumb incorrect opinion.

If you were ever considering taking an RV trip, you’ve now been adequately educated. You’re Welcome.

P.S

Charles came after us for a 4 dollar toll that apparently the EZ pass had missed about a month after we had settled all of our bills. And then just charged our credit card without waiting for me to respond to his message about the toll.

That’s how I found out from the review section of his rental page that a person who had rented the RV the weekend after us posted a low star review and commented, warning people to take pictures of everything on the outside of the vehicle before their rental, and wishing they had thought to do so.

Now, I’m not saying that’s proof that Charles knew full well about that wheel cover and is scamming people, who don’t notice it’s missing ahead of time and keeping party of their security deposit. But he’s definitely doing that and I hope someone drives his RV into a Ravine.

#RV #Recreational Vehicle #RVs are the worst #Camping

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canaryatlaw · 7 years

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Well, if yesterday was heartening today was tiring and stressful. I am not doing well, guys. I had a full day but I feel so unbelievably tired from it I've legit felt like I was half asleep for the last 6 hours, including through class where I actually stumbled over spelling my own last name. And my brain is just constantly racing. I know this is all bad, I just really don't want to go to a doctor, or at least a physical one, because that would mean really acknowledging something is wrong and I'm very scared for what they might say. I don't have a great track record with doctors, and they're normally pretty shitty at actually figuring out what's wrong with me (see: the shitshow that was my junior year of college). And there's the whole mono thing. Doctors are shitty at interpreting mono tests so if I go in and get tested because I've had it a bunch of times before it will show up in some form on the test even though it's not actually active, and doctors who don't know what they're doing will take that to mean it's active and it'll just generally fuck things up, because I really cannot afford to have mono right now. I just can't. Everything is going so well. I'm actually happy, for once, with just about everything in my life, and I'm making such awesome progress towards my goals, I can't just give up on that. Like it's just not a plausible option. So I don't know what to do. Today just affirmed that this next week is gonna be insanely busy for me and I feel annoy even just thinking about all of it. Maybe after it's all over though things will get better? I can at least keep telling myself that for now. Sigh. Anyway, I should actually talk about my day. Alarm went off at 7, and I convinced myself to get out of bed like the good little solider that I am. Got ready, went to work, and spent a little while editing my legal writing assignment because I didn't have anything else to do (I emailed a copy of it to myself so I could work on it on my work computer) and managed to write the conclusion and other necessary paragraphs I had to add, as well as shifting things around a bit. I did feel like I was going more with what I thought made sense than specifically what the prof might want, but I'm not gonna turn in an assignment that doesn't make any damn sense to me. It's all small potatoes anyway, so I'm not very concerned. From here I would just have to make any final edits on it, and then actually write the damn motion. This was making my anxious for most of the day, because I somehow got into my mind the word limit for the motion was 2,000 words when it in fact doesn't have a limit. I just have about a 3 hour span tomorrow in which I can actually write this thing, and it's not impossible but it's not gonna be pleasant. Sigh. I did get some work then that was "trial prep" which ended up being fairly boring as it was just going through a giant stack of documents, most of them fairly innocuous, and summarize each one. Meh, whatever. Did that until lunch, then after lunch I went down to court because I had been told there was a good trial going on, and boy was that the case. The GAL on the case gave me the fact pattern to read so I could know what was going on and at first I was confused because they kept switching from words like "natural father" to "uncle" and I was like ??? But then I figured out that the abuse had been perpetrated against the baby cousin of this family who was temporarily living with them, and this case is now regarding the two sons. It was a rough one, and the dad is awaiting trial on multiple charges of aggravated battery of a child and the baby has almost no neurological functioning from it. What made this all interesting was that the parents had retained a private attorney which is exceedingly rare in abuse/neglect court, and even if we do get one they're generally a bar attorney who consistently work with the system. But truly private attorneys that wind up here never have any idea wha they're doing, and that was apparent here. He's apparently also the dad's criminal attorney, so I guess he figured he could just handle this too....not so much. His argument was like "well the kid's mom said once he sometimes has head banging behaviors and another child relative of theirs had seizures so he could've had one of those, and shaken baby syndrome is controversial right now" as if that counters all the medical testimony the state presented. He is correct in saying shaken baby syndrome is somewhat controversial in the legal community and has been challenged in a number of cases, but here there was ample evidence to support it. The lawyer also managed to refer to the baby victim as an "it" multiple times, as well as calling him "a ticking time bomb the would rip their family apart" which you could tell the judge was like, lol no. Then he was also like "so the kids are a little overweight, so what?" except that's not exactly the case when your 3 year old weighs 90 FUCKING POUNDS. My sister weighed 30 pounds until she was like 6, and still probably doesn't weigh 90 points 9 years later. That is a morbidly obese child, lol. So that was entertaining, then the father had an outburst at the end and tried to storm out on the judge and it did NOT go well for him haha it was kind of great. Went back upstairs after that, and hashed out the argument I would make for my contested motion that's up next week as I'll be heading to DC on Thursday and won't be in the office. My supervisor informed me that the state was opposing us on this motion for whatever reason, which means a 4 other parties are opposing me on my first contested motion. Lovely, lol. I know it's a judgment call on the part of the judge though and I'm telling myself not to get my hopes up, and I know that if it doesn't get granted it will probably have to do more with how the judge views the law than how I argued it. So that took up the rest of my day at work. When I went to check my app to see when the bus was coming, I was informed it wasn't coming for another half hour (which is the second time that has happened to me on two totally separate bus routes in the last 3 days) and I needed to be in class in 50 minutes, so that clearly wasn't an option. Thankfully it was nice out and it's not a very long walk to the train station, so I made it there in a reasonable amount of time. Class was boring, and as I said I was like falling asleep so that didn't help. My cross went well though, so that's good. We got out around 7:45, so I headed home. Wheelchair homeless guy, who I'm going to start calling Louis now that I know his name is Louis, was at the train station again, so I stopped and spoke with him for a little while. He asked again when I was gonna come visit him, and I promised I would as soon as my life calms down a little bit and I'm not so insanely busy, and I fully intent on making good on that promise when I'm able to. Got home and turned on legends from the start as the actual episode was finishing up. Solid episode, didn't like it quite as much as last week's but still definitely enjoyable. The setting and premise were interesting, I'm confused as o when in time Rip enlisted the help of the JSA to help hide the pieces of the spear of destiny, and if he came to them in 1956 wouldn't Stargirl look a hell of a lot older? This episode didn't contain enough Stargirl IMO, and no other episode probably will now. The Ray plot struck me as kind of odd, but it was fine. I saw the whole Stein/Mick thing coming it it was still immensely satisfying to watch that backfire on Stein so fantastically. Guinevere was amazing, and her interactions with Sara (including the kiss at the end) were perfection. King Arthur himself was find, though he didn't get to do much other than be mind controlled. And of course evil Rip is here and gonna cause all sorts of trouble next week which I'm looking forward to. So yeah, good episode. I turned on the flash afterwards as it was still fairly early, and it was pretty good as well. I of course adored all the Wally/Jessie interactions because they were just gold. I fully expected Grodd to have concocted this whole plan just to get Caitlin to come to him, lol, but of course it was more complicated than that and that will continue next week, which should be interesting. Okay, that's it and did I mention I'm tired? Sleep now. Goodnight dolls. Stay awesome.

#daily journal #February 2017

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