#it's just a very frustrating process to suspect something so badly to the point your doctors agree

[wheelie-sick]

ILY people who are continually wrong about their self diagnoses

being right about self diagnosis isn't what makes self diagnosis okay. it's a process, and you're learning. it takes time to find answers and just like doctors can be wrong in their suspicions so can you.

figuring out what condition you have is hard and I'm proud of you for taking steps towards finding the right answers. being wrong is okay and is even a valuable part of the process of ruling things out. sometimes it's not a horse, sometimes you're just a zebra, and you can't know you're a zebra without making sure you're not a horse first.

#this is about the diagnosis process for rare diseases but idc if other people relate to it #it's just a very frustrating process to suspect something so badly to the point your doctors agree #just for it to never be what you suspect #chronic illness #chronically ill #cripple punk #physical disability #physically disabled #cripplepunk

[writing-in-april]

Helping Hands

Spencer Reid x Gender Neutral Reader

Summary: After a bad case Spencer needs help shaving after getting injured, he gets help from the least likely person to help in his life.

A/N: Day two of my 750 follower celebration is here! This was totally supposed to be a blurb and ended up being so much long lol. Thank you @imagining-in-the-margins for this idea and letting me write it! And thanks to @spencers-dria for helping me out as always! This fic wasn’t originally going to be Gender Neutral I just ended up writing it that way on accident which is cool, I want my blog to be as inclusive as possible! I’ve had someone check it over for pronoun mistakes but please let me know if you spot any! This is also my first time writing in second person for Spencer!

Warnings: 18+, Enemies to lovers, Knife kink (use of a straight razor), Dry fucking, Humiliation, ONE slight nick to the skin- there’s just a very small bit of blood

Main Masterlist Word count: 1.68k

Your friendship with Spencer was shaky at best, the truth was you two were barely able to work together without biting each other’s heads off. It’s not that you wanted to butt heads with him almost every day, but when he picked apart everything you said constantly you always felt the need to bite back.

Emily just had to put you as roommates for this case so you guys could ‘work out your issues.’ Of course the case then ended up becoming one of your longest cases all year. The tension between you and Spencer ran high throughout the entire case, the petty arguments grew in rate as the team got less and less sleep each day. The case combined with the sleeping arrangements was definitely making you feel miserable.

Unfortunately these hellish two weeks didn’t even end with a completely good outcome. We had caught the unsub, but not before one of your own had ended up injured. Spencer had been securing the perimeter around the suspect’s house when the suspect (who ended up being the unsub) attacked him. Luckily, you hadn’t been that far away from him and were able to help him apprehend the man. You may butt heads with him almost every working day, but he was still a part of your team. You would never want him to be seriously hurt or worse. His knuckles ended up getting bruised and bloodied from his unexpected scuffle with the unsub today although he insisted he was fine.

The sight you were looking at now directly contradicted his words. His fingers were shaking badly as he tried to move his straight razor along his jaw that was coated in shaving cream. When he let out a frustrated grunt when he couldn’t get the right angle you decided to try and lend a helping hand. He seemed to get even angrier when you walked into the hotel’s bathroom, this wasn’t new however, he always seemed to get more agitated when he sensed your presence.

“Let me help you.” You snapped while reaching forward to grab the razor, your movements were in stark contrast to your words, only doing that softly as to not cut the both of you.

“Why do you want to help me?” He snapped back with just as much bite in his tone and jerked his hand away so you could not reach the razor.

“Does it matter? You need help and I’m offering to help. So sit down and let me help.”  The real reason that you wanted to help didn’t have to be known by Spencer, he didn’t have to know that you felt guilty. His injuries were from no fault of your own however, you could not help a little bit of guilt pool in the bottom of your stomach. You may not like him very much, but again you did not want to see him hurt.

He finally acquiesced to your request sitting down on the edge of the tub that just had enough of a ledge so he could sit rather comfortably. You reached out and gestured towards the razor letting out a little sigh of relief when he handed it to you, glad that he was finally letting you help.

The handle of the razor was simple in design with no ornaments adorning it and it was made of a dark wood, perhaps mahogany. The simple design of the handle and blade did not mean that it was inexpensive, the weight in your hand alone was a testament of how finely made it probably was. You suspected it might have been one of the only things Spencer splurged his money on.

Soaping up his cheeks again, you then straddled his thighs so you could get as close as possible to him. He squeaked a little in surprise at your sudden willingness to be close to him. In all honesty, you didn’t really want to be that close to him, but you had promised to help him, this just was the only way you could get the correct angles.

Besides the initial squeak the fell from his lips Spencer had become strangely quiet as you got to work shaving off his stubble.

His silence was then replaced by something else, the inability to sit still. Each time you started to scrap the razor against his jaw his hips shuffled under you, making it extremely difficult to get a close enough shave.

“Stop squirming.” He of course felt the need to again not listen to you and he continued to squirm underneath you. You ran your fingers through his hair then tugging on the stands to crane his neck backwards so you could get full access to the underside of his jaw. He defiantly squirmed again, causing you to falter with the razor again, this time accidentally nicking the underside of his jaw.

Instead of hissing and pulling away from you would expect; Spencer threw you for a loop when he let out a loud moan while jutting his hips up into your own. A look of mortification came over Spencer’s face at his actions, he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else, but with your body straddling him he couldn’t quite escape your grasp so easily.

You weren’t going to lie, Spencer was an attractive man, your favorite part of his looks being his fluffy locks and the scruff he left behind after shaving. You weren’t going to pass up the opportunity of having an attractive man underneath you and begging. Experimentally you reached up with your free hand to brush up against the small nick that had only let out just a little drop of blood. Pushing down slightly on it you then rolled your hips to grind against his hardening cock in his slacks. His response to your actions pleased you, his slacks becoming more strained and another moan left his lips, this one much more high pitched.

“Are you ok with this? I won’t be gentle.”

“Yes, please do whatever you want.” You were pleasantly surprised how quickly a plea fell from his lips. It was going to be so easy to ruin him.

“Tell me if you want me to stop. You may infuriate me, but I do not want to make you uncomfortable.” He nodded quickly in understanding before tentatively moving his hands to rest on your hips lightly to make sure you were ok with his touch and so that his hands didn’t suffer from any unnecessary pain.

You were right, it was extremely easy to ruin him. It only took a few short minutes of grinding your hips into his own before you could tell he was getting a little close to his release.

“Is this all it takes for you to get off? That’s a little pathetic.” The humiliating words only made Spencer’s moans louder though at this point they had devolved into high pitched pitiful whimpers. You were glad he was keen on the idea of some light humiliation and decided to continue with some more harsh words, “I haven’t even gotten a chance to use it anywhere near any more exciting places yet. You’re so needy, Spencer.” The evil smirk that made its way onto your face at the thought of getting to use the razor in more, exhilarating places, made Spencer visibly gulp hard.

You shifted a little forward which brought more pleasure to you, enough to push you to teeter on the edge. As you felt your release begin to wash over you surged forward to mark up Spencer’s neck with a hickey to go along with the other slight mark you had left. The rocking of your hips sped up as you worked yourself through your blissful release. Spencer may have been one of the most infuriating people you knew, but you couldn’t deny that even with a few swirls of your hips together he gave you a stronger orgasm then most men ever had. After a few gasps of your breath into his neck after your release you began to focus on his own. You could just leave him hanging and force him to take a cold shower to alleviate the straining in his pants, though you couldn’t deny how good he had been for you.

“Beg me. Beg me to let you finish.” Carding your fingers through his hair once more you yanked hard so you could get to catch a glimpse of his gorgeous neck again. You brought the razor up to rest at the underside of his jaw close to the previous cut you had accidentally given him.

“Please!” Even though his begging was only one word, you were satisfied with how desperate he sounded for you. You had completely ruined him without even taking off a single article of clothing.

“Cum for me Spencer.” As soon as the words of permission fell from your lips, his hips started to meet yours with more vigor. His groans came impossibly louder as he neared his finish, so you surged forward to capture his lips with your own for the first time. Immediately you slipped your tongue into the cavern of his mouth, swallowing all of the noises that tried to escape. He rocked his hips forward once, twice, three times before feeling the front of his slacks dampen with his own release.

When you had both calmed down and slightly processed what you had both indulged in you separated from him to help clean up the nick on his jaw and to grab him a pair of sweatpants to change into. You returned to help him finish shaving making sure to leave the little bit of scruff you liked. As you finished he moved to rub slight circles into your hip, you didn’t let him do it for very long until you made sure that it wasn’t hurting his hands too much. You were both extremely content with your current position. Maybe he wasn’t as infuriating as you once thought. In any case you had enjoyed lending him your helping hands, maybe you could help him again if he was willing.

——

Tag list (message me if you want to be added):

Spencer Reid/CM taglist- @calm-and-doctor @destiny-tsukino @safertokiss

Sub!Spencer taglist- @thatsonezesty13- tags are not working for you for some reason!!

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid smut #spencer reid fanfic #criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds smut #matthew gray gubler #matthew gray gubler x reader #matthew gray gubler smut #750 follower celebration #750 followers

[scripttorture]

Hi! I realize that this probably isn't the sort of thing you usually get asked, but I am a beginner game master planning my first tabletop rpg campaign. And depending on how things play out, it may be that at some point or another, the players might want to try to get information from a character unwilling to give that information to them. Now, as I'm sure you're well aware, it's not exactly a rare thing for heroes in action movies and stuff to beat people up (or threaten to do so) to get them to reveal what information without the story framing it as torture or a bad thing at all, and since this is such a widespread trope in mainstream fiction, I'm worried my players might think to do the same in our game.

So, do you have any suggestions on how to steer them away from resorting to torture and direct them towards proper interrogation in the game, without having to make it an explicit house rule that torture won't get you anything useful? I could technically make that a house rule, but I'd really rather not since we're all pretty inexperienced and it's gonna be confusing enough navigating the official system written down in the rulebook, without keeping track of additional made-up rules that exist because I say so.

Session Zero. You need a session zero.

 This is basically a pre-game session where everyone gets together and discusses what they want from the game, players and GM. You talk about expectations, the kind of game you want to play and the comfort levels of everyone around the (virtual) table. Players usually talk about the characters they want to play and it’s a good chance to decide if any of the player characters knew each other before the adventure. It can also be used to get a little bit of roleplay in to help the players get a feel for their characters and the GM to get a feel for the setting.

  And these are generally useful things to have sorted before the first game. But you can also use the time to figure out if there were subjects or themes players wanted to avoid completely and if there were any subjects or themes they want warnings about.

 Make notes about what your players say and do. I made the rooky error of not doing that my first time (you can always ask again and correct these mistakes.)

 If you don’t want to make a hard rule about torture my advice is to bring it up during session zero and discuss it with the players up front.

 You can say outright ‘I know torture doesn’t work in reality and I’m uncomfortable with tropes showing it positively in the game. I want to have fun in the game too.’

 To be honest I think that kind of direct approach is better for everyone because speaking in euphemisms or trying to hint at something can be genuinely misunderstood. And then people get frustrated with each other.

 In game it’s important to reward the behaviour you want to see. Give players XP for good roleplay and for interviewing and investigating things. Give them items.

 I know it probably sounds obvious but rewarding players for roleplay instead of just combat encourages them to roleplay. Rewarding them for creative non-violent solutions encourages them to think outside the box. If they use their skills to avoid a fight give them the XP as if they won it. Apply the same process to investigations.

 It’s also really important to give players multiple options and have a back up plan for if rolls go badly.

 The first area my players got to was a spooky abandoned town and they were looking for the people. They rolled high and found a trail going into the forest. But if they’d rolled low the NPCs they arrived with would have directed them to the next town over and they’d have been told to investigate the forest, some rumours about something coming out of the forest and the general direction the missing people probably went.

 Making sure you’ve got multiple ways players can get information should help. Because unless you’ve got a table of people who just want to kill stuff (no judgement on that but it doesn’t sound like the kind of game you want) players are looking at all the options.

 Having NPCs around to point out options players didn’t consider can help too.

 My players just completed a murder-mystery style investigation and they did an incredible job. They interviewed loads of NPCs, collated notes on who had seen what and went through the luggage of a suspect confiscating spell components before the show down.

 Because the party didn’t have anyone with a high degree of magical knowledge (or knowledge of the culture they were in) I gave them a helpful NPC with that knowledge. And I used him to prompt them occasionally. For instance at one point they were interviewing a suspicious ‘wizard’ and the conversation was going in circles. They were rolling high so they knew the ‘wizard’ wasn’t lying but they also didn’t trust his answers.

 I had the NPC ask if they could see the ‘wizard’s’ spell book. The players passed it around until it got to a player who could read the language it was written in. The player found it was full of poetry, no spells at all. Between that and casting spells to detect magic and the like they figured the ‘wizard’ wasn’t lying, he was just… deluded.

 Remember that a maximum roll doesn’t mean success; it means the best possible outcome. That does not always have to be what the player wants. Rolling a 20 to persuade a guard the character just attacked to let them go and give them back their weapons probably shouldn’t work. Unless there’s something else going on. If the prison is being attacked by zombies may be things should go differently.

 Don’t be afraid to say ‘no’ sometimes. Not everything players want is a good idea for the game. As GM you’re responsible for creating a good time for everyone. Which includes you. Refusing things that would cause you distress, or just more stress to figure out in-game, is perfectly valid.

 Really talk to your players about the kind of game they’d enjoy and the kind of game you’d enjoy. Work out if those things are compatible.

 Sometimes they won’t be. I have plenty of friends who I wouldn’t want GMing for me, because what they like in a game and what I do are very different. And that is OK.

 Don’t feel pressured into including elements you’re uncomfortable with. The game is for everyone at the table. You can always say ‘I’m uncomfortable with where this is going, can we tone it down?’

 Good friends, good players, will listen.

Edit: I would strongly recommend not limiting player alignment or race choices as a GM. Instead talk to your players about the kind of characters they want to make and how those characters would act. Decide amongst yourselves what fits the game you all want to play instead of assuming you know what a player’s character is like better then they do. 

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #rpg games #table top roleplay games #torture apologia #torture as interrogation #I DM now and it was a struggle not to gush about my players through all this

[pkg4mumtown]

Signs of Attachment - Ch. 1

Summary: Having an auditory processing disorder never slowed you down, but it mean you were confined to the Temple when the Clone Wars started. Will the frustration of not understanding people at times make for a rather lonely existence?

Pairing: Obi-Wan/Reader (Gender Neutral)

Rating: G (for now)

Warnings: Hard of Hearing Reader, Fluff, Gender Neutral Reader

A/N: Hi everyone! This is my first Star Wars fic, so have mercy on me. This request was for my friend, Jaime, who gave me all sorts of information and I’m forever indebted to them for it. The timeline is probably very off, but…oh well!

To clarify before we start:

“Text.” Means someone is speaking.

“Text.” Means someone is speaking and signing.

Text, Means someone is signing.

Chapter 1 - Effort

I slid the last tool into place and closed its drawer, the Halls of Healing finally back in order after the last rush of injured Jedi passed through. I thought bitterly about the war that I was barred from, except for the occasional medic deployment to forward operating bases. My saber hung uselessly at my side despite every test I passed to prove my worthiness to the Council.  It’s not that they didn’t have faith in me, they just saw me as a liability, which is probably just as bad. Despite how hard I tried to explain it, they were convinced that I could never be focused enough to be on the front lines. Yet, I passed every test while purposely being fully deafened and even being both deafened and blinded, which was somehow easier than the former.

Being assigned to the Halls of Healing seemed almost harder than combat, considering I had been far better at fighting than healing throughout my entire knighthood. Semi-dangerous solo missions before the wars? The Council saw no problems. A full scale war with plenty of droids as target practice? A big problem, apparently.

I was so consumed in my thoughts that I had barely registered someone, no two someones, or rather their force signatures, entering the Halls.

Swoosh

I didn’t even have a chance to decipher any of what they were saying as their words and voices started to blend together immediately due to their arguing.

“Sop.”

“Yaioyu satowep beeineg doifficultat.”

“Lletat muoe gaorn.”

“No."

“Atnakin, ei doon'tat noeead tolorn beoe heneroe.”

I glanced over at my Droid for help, but its signing was a mess as both voices talked over each other. I eventually stopped looking at it and took a deep, calming breath. I tried to pick apart the voices and focus on one but both faded in and out, making it nearly impossible.

Shove. Scuffle.

“You do…”

“Eeim f—ine”

Slap.

“Yu figelol otan muoe.”

“Ei tolrippead.”

“Muaster, poleasoe tolelol heniem.”

Silence.

“Muaster?”

More silence.

“Muaster…?”

Oh. The closeness of the strongest signature was behind me now, poised and ready to—

Tap.

I turned and faced the two, rather loud, intruders to this calming place. My Droid wasn’t yet in place behind them, so I couldn’t quite get everything but I got enough. I had never gotten quite good at lip reading with Master Plo as a teacher, so he had learned Basic Sign Language to help supplement what was missed in speaking. I relied on my droid to sign to me quite heavily when dealing with patients to understand what was wrong with them, but it was only helpful if one person was speaking at a time. Definitely not whatever this train wreck of a duo was.

“Master?” the spikey-haired Padawan asked, staring straight at me.

“Forgive my Padawan, he toakess atfteer muwy Muasteer,” the older Jedi rolled his eyes, noticeably leaning on his Padawan and clutching his side.

“I do not.”

Feeling another round of arguing bubbling up, I held my palm up, “Both of you stop, please, and start from the top.” My Droid finally stepped in place behind them so I could see the signs over their shoulders.

“We just landed back at the temple, everything was fine—"

“Things are fine,” the Master snapped.

“—and he just collapsed on me. He wouldn’t let me check over him—," the Padawan continued.

“There’s nothing to check, Anakin.”

Ah, yes, the infamous Master Kenobi and his Padawan, Anakin.

“Obviously theroe iss.”

“Eim fignoe.”

“Stop,” I sighed and closed my eyes and opened them after centering myself. “Padawan Skywalker, please leave us.”

“B—”

“Now, please,” I urged, not bothering to give him an explanation. Not that I needed to give him one.

The Padawan made a face of displeasure before bowing to both of us and leaving the room.

“—overreacting—,” Kenobi sighed.

I blinked at him, then glanced at my droid, who filled me in on the whole sentence.

Anakin is overreacting, really.

“Master Kenobi, please sit and take off your tunics and tabards,” I ask and look away, not that it was going to matter because I was going to see him shirtless regardless.

I tried to ignore the broad expanse of his chest, littered with scars and copper hair. My eyes lingered a little too long while raking over and looking for injuries. I was just being thorough.

When I saw the wound that caused this whole ordeal I sucked in a breath quickly. The skin on his side was badly burned and the wound was at least a few days old, so naturally it had infected because he neglected to take care of it.

“It’s infected,” I shook my head almost hurriedly grabbed the large tub of bacta we kept on hand.

“It’s not that bad, is it?” He brushed off my comment, obediently lifting his arm when I nudged it.

“Have you looked at it recently?” I scoffed as I further inspected the wound.

He was silent for a moment, making me look at my droid confused as if I had missed something but the Droid confirmed that I hadn’t.

“Master Kenobi?”

“The less I acknowledged it, the easier it was to manage the pain,” he grumbled back. “And surely, you can call me Obi-Wan, we were in the crèche together.”

“That hardly constitutes a first name basis,” I squinted at him. “I don’t even recall speaking to you. They were troubling times for me, it was easier to keep to myself. Less to…process.”

“Oh, believe me, that message was loud and clear,” Obi-Wan chuckled, making me roll my eyes in an attempt to not focus on the way it lit his face up or brightened his eyes. “I also seem to remember that you were one of the best saber wielders out of all us.”

“A lot of good that did me,” I gestured to the sterile room.

“You still have the honor of humiliating an advanced saber instructor in class while being completely shut off to auditory and optical input.”

A blush rose to my cheeks, “Ho—”

“Every Padawan in the temple knew about it…”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that impressive if it wasn’t enough for the frontlines,” I slipped bitterly.

“They’re not all fun, unfortunately,” he murmured.

“I’m a guardian trapped as a healer, Obi-Wan, anything is better than this.” I took a deep breath, “Anyway, you might feel some discomfort.”

I closed my eyes and hovered my hand over the wound and focused on purging the infection first, feeling it attacking the cells around it as I finally attuned with said infection. I pulled the infection away from his body, pleased when there was no resistance and it begun to trickle away. I tilted my head as I sensed another pain but in his leg, so I investigated without breaking the healing I was already doing. The pain visualized as five red dots, the cause hard to place while my mind was otherwise occupied.

Then, it dawned on me that he was gripping his own leg so tightly as a distraction to the pain in his side that even I could feel it. Blindly, I found his knee and then his hand clenching his thigh. His hand relaxed slightly as mine touched his, allowing my hand to worm under his for him to squeeze instead. With the infection released into the force, I focused on knitting the wound back together. In response, Obi-Wan’s hand squeezed mine even tighter. If I could have sent something calming to him, I would have, but didn’t want to break my concentration when I was almost done. Instead, I let my thumb brush back and forth over his knuckles.

Finally, the wound was completely covered with new skin so I let the force healing trickle away. I blinked my eyes open, a little woozy but nothing I wasn’t used to, especially after a long day of healing.

“—that—pleasant,” I vaguely heard through the humming in my ears. It always took a while for the force to stop thrumming in my head after force healing, only amplified by my condition.

I knitted my brows at him, knowing it was anything but pleasant and then looked over at my droid.

Stars, that was not very pleasant.

“Oh, well, yes I suspect the day it becomes pleasant will be the day that Jedi actually seek out treatment, rather than avoid it,” I stressed the end just for him.

“Sorry, I should have waited until you opened your eyes.”

“It’s fine,” and really it was, I was used to it by now.

“I’m sure it gets tiring having to have a conversation with someone over their shoulder,” I didn’t get to appreciate the sincerity in his eyes because I had to glance at my droid again, only proving his point.

“Well, it was a little hard to learn to lip read growing up with Master Plo…,” my mouth turned up into a smirk, clearly trying not to laugh.

Obi-Wan, on the other hand, didn’t hold back and snorted; laughing immediately after, “Sorry, sorry…”

“But, he did learn and teach me BSL, so at least I have something. Even if no one else here knows it, the droid helps. Though, in the field I don’t bring it, so I just tell everyone to shut up at let me work.”

“That’s…unfortunate.”

“It gets taxing, if only because I don’t always catch everything so conversations are hard to carry without the droid. Especially if someone starts talking to me without getting my attention first.”

Obi-Wan tilted his head like he was deep in thought, “Maker knows we learn enough languages here, they should teach BSL, too,” Obi-Wan squeezed my hand, making me realize I’d never actually let go of his hand. Though, with his hand now squeezing mine, I’d have to rip my hand away and to be honest? I didn’t want to.

“I don’t think we have anyone fluent enough to teach besides myself and Master Plo…”

“Hmm, I’d still like to present it to the Council. Someone has to be able to teach it,” he smiled gently.

I had no words to express how grateful even the thought of presenting it to the Council meant to me. So I didn’t speak. Instead, I sent my feelings of gratitude through the force and our joined hands. I took the time to read the genuine twinkle in his eyes as I hadn’t been able to this whole time, and the subtle way his eyebrows relaxed as he realized what I was doing. My eyes drifted lower to the way the corners of his eyes and cheek wrinkled just slightly with the upturn of the corner of his mouth, a subtle smile for me. Lower still, to the coppery mustache and beard on his face, with flecks of gray from the war. Or his Padawan…probably his Padawan. I let my eyes drift over the endearing way his mullet curled just behind his ears and rested against his shoulders.

He was right about one thing; I had taken for granted just looking someone in the eyes as they spoke to me. It was something that was necessary for BSL, and while Master Plo didn’t have the most expressive face, it gave me back a semblance of normalcy to be able to carry on a conversation face to face. It helped bridge the gaps between any words I had missed and ensured I had the whole picture, even going so far as to express words or ideas I was having trouble expressing with speech.

I cleared my throat, realizing I was staring far longer than I should have been, “Sorry, um, here…”

I reluctantly untangled our hands and grabbed the container of bacta, scooping a generous amount on to my fingers. I applied the cool gel to the new, pink, raw skin, which looked far better than the angry, red and purple open wound he had come in with. He jumped at the first contact, whether it was because of the cold or not, I didn’t know, but his sigh of relief after was a good sign.

I wiped my hand of and grabbed a new travel bottle of bacta for him, before pausing and grabbing two more, “Here, try not to lose these…”

He took them gratefully, knowing we normally didn’t give that much to just one Jedi, “Thank you, I—I didn’t lose mine. I gave it to my men, they needed it more.”

His men, his clones, whose health he put above his own.

“I’m not surprised,” I shook my head, “but do try to take care of yourself. They need you to lead them as much as you need them to succeed.”

“Of course, Y/N.”

My brain halted for a moment, my eyes widening slightly. This was the first real conversation I’d had with him and yet he knew my first name without hesitation.

“You shouldn’t be all the surprised, our masters were good friends after all. Master Koon, talked about you a lot with Master Jinn. He just never brought you along, I suppose,” Obi-Wan shrugged.

I hummed, “He was quite protective of me and tried to overwhelm me as little as possible…”

“I wish he had brought you, though. You would have gotten along well with Qui-Gon,” Obi-Wan had a far away look in his eyes that I almost missed.

“I’m sorry, about…”

“Nonsense,” Obi-Wan shook his head and smiled. “Now, I should get out of your hair lest my Padawan get into trouble.”

I stepped back to allow him to stand and handed him his discarded clothes from earlier, before turning and giving him privacy.

“Thank you,” he murmured, casually watching the droid out of the corner of his eye as it automatically translated into sign language.

When I turned back around, he was fully dressed again and stowing away the bacta in his belt, “Have a good rest of your day, Obi-Wan.” I bowed my head slightly to him.

“And you, Y/N,” he smiled, waiting for me to meet his eyes.

Thank you, he signed with a small smile adorning his face.

He bowed his head and took a a couple steps backwards and exited the room, offering a wave just before the doors closed behind him. My stomach flipped as I replayed the scene over in my head, realizing he had mimicked the droid in order to sign.

Thanks for reading!

Chapter 2

#Obi wan x reader #obi wan x y/n #obi wan x you #obi wan kenobi #gender neutral y/n #gn!reader #gn!mc #hard of hearing reader

[bibliosophist]

Soft as Bread, Sweet as Honey, Chapter... Idk, 4?

Hi folx! I guess there is more to this story. I’m working on what will be chapter 4 on here, and chapter 2 on AO3. You can read it below the break if you want to, or you can hop on over there and just read the whole thing properly. Beelzebub x Female Reader

Cooking duty is one of the chores at the House of Lamentation that you mind the least. You’ll certainly take it over cleaning the common room. It never ceases to amaze you how much of a mess fully grown men- demons- whatever- can make. Like all chores in the house, everyone takes turns cooking. Unlike other chores, people usually double up on cooking duty on account of there being so many mouths to feed-- especially when one of those mouths belongs to Beelzebub. Your cooking partner this semester is Levi, and though he does more talking than cooking, you’re generally fine with that. His constant stream of anime and game related chatter puts you at ease as you cook.

It had taken some time for you to get familiar with some of the more exotic Devildom ingredients, but you had found many that bore a close resemblance to food you were familiar with from the human world, and whatever you were unfamiliar with you were pretty good at researching on your DDD. You’d found a few Devildom dishes that you were comfortable cooking, but most often you ended up making food inspired by things you’d loved eating in the human world. Tonight you have decided to make okonomiyaki, a personal favourite. It would be easy enough to prepare a large quantity of, and allowed for enough customization of toppings that everyone would end up happy. Plus, you figured, Levi probably wouldn’t mind actually helping-- his fondness for everything Japanese outweighing his innate laziness.

When you enter the spacious kitchen, Levi is nowhere in sight. No matter, you think. You’ll start without him. You busy yourself washing vegetables and preparing a large pan of Covetous Cod fillets to bake. The mild fish, you think, will pair well with the tangy sauce.

You’ve almost finished peeling a pile of yams when you hear a voice behind you.

“Uh, hi.”

That is most certainly not Levi’s voice. Slowly you turn around, meeting Beel’s eyes from where he stands, large frame taking up most of the doorway.

“Hi,” you say back, your stomach fluttering.

This is the first time you’ve been alone together since the incident in the alleyway a few days ago. Between your project with Sibyl and his brothers’ constant presence, you haven’t been able to say two words to each other in private, and thanks to another one of Mammon’s pranks backfiring, the brothers’ texting privileges have once again been temporarily revoked. You briefly considered texting him anyway, but shuddered at the thought of Lucifer finding out and reading your messages. Though you haven’t had any alone time, it hasn’t stopped him from holding your hand under the table when nobody's looking, or smiling at you in the halls.

“Sorry I’m a little late.” A rosy tinge crept into his cheeks. “I got Levi to switch with me, but, uh, I got hungry on the way home and stopped for a few doughnuts.”

You can feel a grin spreading over your face. “You got Levi to switch. How did you manage that?”

“It wasn’t hard. He doesn’t like making anything more complicated than instant noodles.”

You laugh, running the peeler over the yam you’re holding. “So I’ve come to realize. But why did you ask him in the first place? Isn’t this just more work for you? Are you that tired of Ruri-chan Ramen?”

“Instant ramen is good, but I like variety in my meals. I get a little bit bored with just one flavor. Not,” he says, panic on his face, “that your cooking is boring. I like your cooking very much...” he trails off, cheeks on fire.

Your grin widens and you turn back to your task, beginning to grate the yam into fine strips. “I agree. It’s better when there are different, complimenting flavours.” If he doesn’t have a problem with your cooking, could he have come here just to see you? Your heart beats a little bit faster.

“Are you okay with my plan of making okonomiyaki? It’s a human world dish, but it’s really versatile. I think it will work well with the ingredients we have here.”

“Ah, yeah, I’ve had that before when I visited up there,” he says, pointing at the ceiling.

“Is it really “up” from here? Like, if I sprouted wings and flew straight up, would I get to the human world eventually?”

“I’m not sure,” he laughs, “I don’t know if anyone has ever tried getting there without using a portal.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” you say, gathering the grated yam into a bowl and beginning to thinly slice cabbage. “The cod is already baking. It should be done in a few minutes. Do you want to start on the batter for the pancakes?”

He nods, coming to stand beside you at the counter. “I can do that. Can you tell me how?”

“I actually wrote the instructions out over here,” you say, gesturing to a piece of paper.

“So...” you trail off, keenly aware of how close he’s standing to you. “What kinds of things do you like cooking?”

“Oh, um. I don’t think anybody has ever asked me that before. Usually they only ask me what I want to eat,” he says. When you glance over at him, he’s got a finger in his mouth. You suspect he’s just dipped it in the flour. You can’t help the smile that pulls at your lips again, or the memory of how his skin tasted. Thankfully you don’t think he’s noticed you peering at him, because he keeps talking. “I guess I like grilling best. It’s pretty quick, and you get to watch the whole thing. It’s not like baking. That’s frustrating.”

“I don’t have the patience for baking either,” you say, resting your hip against the island as you watch Beel begin to crack eggs into his bowl. “One wrong measurement and the whole thing is ruined. Oh, hang on, you’ve got an eggshell in your batter.” You reach over, plucking the tiny fragment of shell out and wiping it on a teatowel.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“It’s completely fine, it happens. That looks good, now just stir it all together.”

“Is it supposed to be kind of... runny?”

“Sure,” you say, carrying over the bowls of vegetables, “if it’s too thick, it won’t cook through properly. Here,” you reach into the bowl, transferring handfuls of cabbage and yam into the batter. “Make sure the vegetables get well coated. I’m going to take the fish out.”

“Thank you for letting me help,” he says.

“What do you mean?” you ask, sliding protective mitts over your hands before opening the oven. It smells incredible, and your stomach rumbles. Normally you’d cut off a big chunk and snack on it while you finished cooking-- Levi had usually wandered off by this point in the process-- but you’re acutely aware that it’s not Levi standing behind you.

“Well, usually my cooking partner is Lucifer. He likes things the way he likes them. And...” he trails off, bringing the batter over to the stove. He looks a little dazed, eyes locked on the pan of cod. “That smells incredible.”

“Thanks. I hope it tastes as good as it smells. Wait- no!” Your warning comes too late, he’s already reached out to pinch off a corner of the flakey flesh. He hisses in pain, pulling his fingers back, shaking them vigorously.

“That’s another reason he doesn’t like me in the kitchen with him,” he says bashfully.

“Come here,” you say, taking his other hand and leading him across the room to the faucet. You turn the cold tap on and test it with your own hand before taking his injured one and running it under the chilly water. “Is that better?”

“Yeah, thanks,” he mumbles, cheeks pinker than his fingers. “I have a hard time controlling myself. It’s like I know better, but I forget when there’s food around.”

You chuckle, rotating his hand under the stream. “I get that. Normally I snack while I cook. I don’t like waiting either. Then I end up eating way more than I should.”

He nods along with your words. “I do the same thing. There’s this one soup that Belphie really loves, but every time I try to make it for him, I end up eating it all before it’s ready and have to start all over again.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” you say, turning the tap off. You gently dab his hand dry with a clean teatowel. “I’m going to go get the first aid kit from my bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

“No, wait,” he says, catching your arm as you turn away from him. “Stay here with me.”

“But your fingers-”

“Already feel much better,” he says, drawing you back to him. Now his eyes are glazed with something other than hunger. He cuts off your protest with a kiss. His lips are so soft and warm; you melt right into him. When your lips move against his he scoops you up in his arms, sitting you on the counter, bringing your face level with his. “I missed you,” he whispers, pulling back to kiss your nose.

“I missed you too,” you whisper back, resting one leg on either side of his hips. You wrap your arms around his neck and your mouth back to his. His hands find your waist and he holds you tight as your tongues explore each other’s mouths. You hadn’t realized how badly you’d wanted to touch him these past few days, and now that you are you can’t get enough. Your hands find their way under the collar of his jacket, fingers running over his broad shoulders. You’re in the process of sliding his jacket down his arms when a familiar voice cuts through your haze.

“- getting hungry, do you need any help in- oh.” Breaking apart, you look to the source of the interruption to find Satan standing in the doorway, one hand on his hip and a smirk on his face. “So dinner will be quite late, then.” he says.

“Beel burned his finger,” you blurt.

“Uh-huh,” Satan nods. “And to sooth it he had to stick his tongue down your thro-”

“Get out,” Beel yells, seizing a nearby piece of fruit and throwing it in his brother’s general direction.

Satan steps to the side, smoothly avoiding it. He chuckles. “I’ll tell the others dinner will be a bit late.”

Face absolutely on fire, you hop off of the counter and cross back to the stove. “I’ll just heat up some oil,” you say.

Beel follows after a moment, resting his hands on your hips as you begin cooking the pancakes. “Can we finish that kiss after dinner?” he asks

It takes all your willpower to continue spooning batter in the pan. You don’t trust your voice, so you just nod.

#Obey Me #Shall We Date: Obey Me #om! beel #om! beelzebub

[thegreatobsesso]

A longer bit feat.: Callie and Simon angst. :)

Talking with @drippingmoon got me thinking of some cornerstone scenes in the enemies-to-friends slow-burn I do with these two idiots and this one, I think, stands out as the dead-center point, so I’m gonna not second-guess myself and just post it. 🥴

Tagging @thelaughingstag too! (I remembered!)

Context: Callie broke into Delaney to steal an ancient magical artifact and, believing she meant nothing but harm, Simon stopped her. But while waiting for the cops to come and drag her back to prison, Simon asks her to just tell him the truth, once and for all. Callie agrees to let him read her mind all the way back to the beginning, thinking she’s got nothing left to live for. Simon gets hit with a truckload of tragic backstory he wasn’t prepared for and is asked to follow them back to Downing Bay, the prison she’s being held in.

They’re still mentally connected, even after Simon has let go. He can hear her, and she can hear him too, which definitely isn’t normal.

Word count: 3,200

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

failure. failure. failure

She wasn’t even doing this on purpose and it wasn’t just the word reverberating through his skull.

More like a full-bodied feeling flooding his consciousness as he left Delaney, a steady stream of self-hatred punctuated only by expletives.

Stop, he begged her.

i can’t, you stop listening

I can’t.

She laughed, out loud in her cell. He heard it and felt it, over the miles that separated them, the ocean and metal and glass.

He’d overextended; that’s what caused this. It took him awhile to put it together because he’d been so upset - maybe even been in a mild state of shock, in retrospect - and he spent a lifetime being so careful with his powers that he’d never done it before to know what it was like.

And so that was bad, yes, but come on. How much longer could it last?

He was stepping onto the boat to Downing Bay when the pain started - hers, and not the torrent of existential agony he was struggling to adjust to but pain, physical and substantial.

What’s happening? he tried to ask, but it got lost - she could barely think, suddenly, let alone focus on sending him mental telegrams.

The cluster of metal buildings hovered threateningly on the horizon, and as they got closer, minds inside got louder, almost drowning Callie out. He wanted to tell them to turn around and take him away; the claustrophobia was overwhelming, the collective sense of being trapped.

The boat brought them underneath the smallest building; a scorched sign read Diagnostics in block letters with an arrow pointing up. What might’ve once been a loading dock was sectioned off with caution tape and hanging sadly down into the water, barely still attached to the rest of the infrastructure. They laid a make-shift bridge between the boat and platform to walk across.

Once inside, they asked him to empty his pockets and leave all his belongings in a small box.

“This stays with me,” he said, holding his Headmaster’s key, bronze and solid, in the palm of his hand.

“No, sir,” said the tired corrections officer, unaware of who he was. “All belongings.” She shook the plastic container for emphasis, rattling the rest of his stuff around.

“I’m the headmaster of Delaney of School for Magicians,” he said. “This is a master key and it doesn’t leave my neck. If you need to call your superiors about it, please do it, but I won’t leave it here.”

A few minutes later, he put the chain back around his neck, dropped the key down inside his shirt, and was escorted inside.

“No one’s suppressed me yet,” he said to one of prison officers. He waited until the last second; surely they knew their own duties better than he did. He didn’t wanna insult anyone, but they hadn’t done it and they were bringing him though thick, reinforced doors to the warden’s office and if not now, when?

“We’ve not been asked to, sir. This way.”

The warden smiled when Simon entered his office, waved everyone else away. He introduced himself as Warden Prescott and extended his hand - it was thin and cold when Simon shook it, despite the muggy warmth.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” he said. “How fares your school?”

“It’s seen worse. It looks like she hit this place harder, to be honest.”

The warden smiled, and Simon caught an image of a collection, varying people with differing characteristics on display in tiny boxes, one of them out of place. “Yes, she put on quite a show on her way out. Destroyed all our boats and did a significant amount of superficial damage, but nothing structural, thankfully.”

Of course not - living her memories alongside her showed him she made sure she didn’t hurt anyone, only crippled their ability to pursue her.

It was too warm in here and he wondered how the warden could be so buttoned up in thick polyester when he had to unbutton his own light jacket.

“A hearing will take place tomorrow morning and your presence will be required,” he began. “I suspect I know at least  part of the reason why. News reached my ears that you behaved quite badly.” He made a tsk-tsk sound and shook his head at Simon like he was a naughty child.

“I did what I did,” he said flatly. “I shouldn’t have read her mind, and I accept the consequences for it, whatever they’ll be.”

“Oh, I meant absolutely no disrespect,” the warden said. “The opposite, in fact. I daresay if I had your powers, I’d like nothing more than to take a stroll through that mind of hers. She’s an interesting one. The fact that you did so might work to our advantage, in fact. You see, we’re in a bit of a bind with all this. May I speak plainly?”

“I wish you would,” he said. The warden was carrying his collection of dolls in his mind, all unique and valuable and distinctly dehumanized, and Callie’s thoughts were still flowing like a steady IV drip, making him feel irritable and short.

“Well, Mister Bennett, the facts are as such: we’ve got a limited testimony from you that the authorities will need expanded upon, that says you’ve seen the original crime in the first person, and your account differs wildly from the one she’s given. There are additional crimes stacked up past that - her escape from prison and attempted theft of an undisclosed item from your school. And the world wants to know how an infamous killer managed to become the first person in history to escape Downing Bay.”

“It’s a valid question for them to ask.”

“With an undesirable answer. But I think you’re in pain, Mister Bennett. Do you need a doctor?”

He was, but it wasn’t his own injuries that made wince.

“It’s her,” he groaned. “You’re hurting her, what are you doing?”

The warden sighed. “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

He took Simon down the hall, into a sterile room filled with recording equipment and a solid wall of glass. On the other side of the it, Callie. She sat a bare table in prison scrubs, hands cuffed to its surface. IVs were inserted in both her arms, the needles taped down, liquid flowing from bags hanging behind her. The metal collar around her neck flashed blips of red, yellow and green, reminding him absurdly of a Christmas tree.

She bit her lip and shuffled restlessly, an involuntary response to the pain she was trying to ignore.

“You’ve got to stop this,” he said.

“To be fair, this isn’t what diagnostics usually looks like,” the warden said while he swallowed down a wave of sickness. “Typically, we focus on finding a long-term suppressive solution that both nullifies abilities and has minimal side effects for the prisoner. We are, unfortunately, in disaster minimization mode rather than long-term maintenance with your friend here.”

This was the strain being put on her body - the combination of every drug known to medicine that could hold back the expression of magic for any amount of time at all. “She’s not my friend,” he muttered. “Isn’t this unethical?”

“Should we allow all her power to rush back in so she can kill my people and escape again?”

“She’s not killing anyone,” Simon said with certainty.

“That’s not what she said a few hours ago,” the warden recalled. “We had no less than five guards trying to process her and she threatened their lives.”

Dammit. “What we you doing to her?”

“Attempting to place her segregation.”

He resisted the urge to groan in frustration, to punch the glass in front of him. “She didn’t mean it,” he muttered, not relishing the job of being her translator. “She’s terrified of solitary confinement, she just didn’t wanna go.”

“That’s unfortunate, given that we can’t very well place her back into general population. This is all that’s left, a quarantine unit, meant for contagious disease.”

On the other side of the glass, Callie squeezed her eyes shut and dropped her head. A fresh wave of pain ran over him too.

how much longer, how much more?

“How long can you keep this up, these stop-gap measures? Surely they won’t work forever.”

Warden Prescott raised his eyebrows. “These measures aren’t even working very well, Mister Bennett. I daresay if she wanted to, she could be gone before nightfall. I’m afraid she’s only here at her pleasure.”

Pleasure? He looked back at her in the next room, her face contorted. “You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was,” Warden Prescott said, with a small smile. “We’re in the dark here, fumbling through uncharted territory without a map. She’s got my best techs feeling like children when they try to interpret the results of all this treatment. She’s a thing that isn’t supposed to exist: a hybrid. Focused magic and Eclectic, all at once.”

The implications of the warden’s words began to stack up in his already overtaxed mind and part of him thought, ridiculously, of a vacation. Of sitting on a beach with a book getting a suntan, drinking something with a slice of pineapple on the rim, smoking a cigarette or two or fifty - of not having a care in the world, for just a little while.

A hybrid, then. Focused and Eclectic.

He’d walked through her life with her and even she didn’t understand that, not really, not in such terms. She, and everyone else who knew what she’d done to Peter, had thought of it like an acquisition of new powers; not a fundamental genetic change.

Did Riley know this? Riley, who gathered Callie’s DNA and did extensive testing on it, who still had it?

“Has anybody been in touch with the family?” he asked, unwilling to explain why he was asking.

“I know someone’s reached out,” the warden said. “I don’t believe there was any reply.”

No, he supposed not. Riley would want nothing to do with any of this. Still, she had to be sweating, didn’t she? How could she know Callie still held up her end of their deal?

“I wonder,” Warden Prescott drawled, “if your trip through her mind was quite so extensive that if she were back inside your school, right now, you’d trust her not to hurt anyone.”

“It was,” he said. “And I would.”

He couldn’t imagine this would be easy for anyone else to swallow. He certainly wouldn’t believe it himself without first-hand insight. “I want to talk to her.”

The warden nodded his assent at the guards lining the wall.

“As I said, everyone wants to know how she managed to escape,” he said, walking Simon around to the entrance of the adjacent room that held Callie. “The thing I’m most curious about it why she even waited so long to do it. Is that something you know, from your jaunt through her mind?”

“Yes.”

“Are you inclined to share?”

He decided earlier, definitively, that he didn’t like the warden: the way he looked at his inmates like specimens, pinned inside a case. “No,” he said.

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “Although you might be asked tomorrow, by someone more powerful than me, in a much more formal capacity. We’ll be leaning on your expertise considerably to entangle that mind of hers.” He shook his head in admiration. “The unsuppressable Callie Ray.”

“I wouldn’t toss that around,” he muttered.

“Why not?”

The guard undid a stack of locks on the quarantine room door. “I don’t want her hearing it,” he said as they pushed the door open. “She’ll like it too much.”

—

Little black cameras dotted the corners of the room; he knew the warden would be listening on the other side of the glass where’d they’d just come from, and he was certain they were being recorded too.

She lifted her head, smirked at the sight of him. “I’d say hello,” she said, her voice scratchy. “But it’s like I never left you, isn’t it?”

She looked awful. Her red-rimmed eyes matched her hair; one was still swollen, decorated in bruises. “I am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for this.” He gestured between his head and hers.

he just says it, just like that

“Did you get a good spanking for it? I’m sure nobody expected that from their golden boy.”

Her words were hollow to him now; they washed over him uselessly and left him thoroughly unimpressed. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite her at the steel table, mirroring her position with his hands folded in front of him, except for the absence of cuffs, obviously.

We could talk like this, he said, if you don’t want them to listen.

A jumbled negative reply came across their connection. He nodded.

“There’s a whole team of people on the other side of the door, trying to figure out the best ways to keep your magic suppressed on a minute-to-minute basis,” he said.

“Can you believe it?” She tried for a smile, but it was poorly constructed. “All this for little old me.”

“Well, you’ve convinced the world you’re a dangerous monster and now you’re being treated like one. You did this to yourself.”

“Did you hear me complaining?”

Another wave of gnawing pain; she was sweating, her jumpsuit damp in the armpits. It hit him too, surely just a fraction of what it felt like for her, and he’d already had enough.

“Just tell them,” he said. “Tell them what I know, that it was an accident from the start and you don’t wanna hurt anyone else, and they might let up.”

“I don’t want them to,” she said, voice strained, hanging onto composure by a thread. “I like the pain.”

if I’m in pain I’m getting what I deserve I don’t have to feel guilty

He’d never felt a mind twisted up into knots like this, how did it get this way?

“Is that why you’re still here?” he asked. He looked toward the glass where he knew Warden Prescott was still standing, watching and listening. “They know you’re letting this happen. That if you wanted to, you could stop it.”

She blinked; a powerful emptiness surged up inside her. “Where else am I supposed to go?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question - she was interested in an answer if he had one, but he didn’t. He lived her life alongside her in a compressed whirlwind of tightly-packed failures and she had no family to take her in, Delaney certainly wouldn’t have her, there were no relationships, no friends…

He pulled back; it hurt to be near.

“Just because you say you’re not gonna try to escape again…” He fumbled, trying to lay out the mess. “They still can’t hold you on your word, Callie. You’ve got the public frightened that Downing Bay can’t hold you and the authorities are scared you’re gonna prove it.”

She nodded and winced; something crossed her mind too quickly for him to get a good look. “What are they gonna do to me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they do either.”

“Why don’t they just kill me?”

The way she said these things - it was infuriating. “They can’t just execute someone because they don’t know what else to do with them.” He narrowed his eyes like it might help him see her clearer. “Is that what you want? To die?”

She rolled it around in her head. “Not really,” she shrugged. “But I don’t really wanna live either.”

Hopelessness emanated from her; he felt her future the way she saw it, a vast, meaningless chasm of nothing. It made him want to scream.

“Don’t,” she snarled, her awareness of their connection snapping to life. “Don’t you feel sorry for me, you jackass. I don’t want your pity, I’d rather you spit in my eye.”

“I can’t help it,” he groaned. “You sit there acting like this while… it’s, it’s like two different radio stations blasting into each of my ears, I can’t think.”

She swallowed thickly, like she was nauseous. “Do you wanna know exactly how much sympathy I have for you right now?”

“No.”

“Zero,” she said anyway. “Nobody made you drill yourself your own personal pipeline into my brain.”

“That’s not what I was trying to do.”

“Oh, so sad,” she pouted, turning her bottom lip out. “You made your first mistake. Feels like shit, doesn’t it?”

he’ll tell everybody, then everyone will know how stupid, how useless, how embarrassing, and he’s listening to you RIGHT NOW, he knows it all, i wish i WAS dead so i didn’t have to, would be easier than this-

“You let me think you did it on purpose,” he bit out, too overwhelmed to hold it back. “You let me think the absolute worst of you.”

“The worst of me is the truth, the shit you know now.”

“No, it’s not. What you are is not worse than a cold-blooded killer, a, a liar, somebody I could spend the rest of my life feeling like a fool for letting in, how do you justify doing that to me?”

She shrugged, blinked slowly, helplessly, like she couldn’t believe she had to put words to something so simple. “I… the damage was done.”

He scoffed - he couldn’t help it. “It wasn’t. There was a lot more damage left to do, and you did it. You did it all.”

Anger, fresh and bitter, burned through their connection.

i was trying to fix it if you would’ve just walked away none of this would be happening i could have made it go away-

“At what cost?” he asked. It would sound like a non sequitur to everyone listening but he didn’t care. “Even if the orblex could do what you were planning, you can’t possibly predict how it would’ve worked. Did you think it would just drop you off on Christmas twelve years ago and let you start again? No one knows how Time magic works and you wanted to just unleash it. For all you know you could have ripped the world apart.”

Disbelief. how could he say something like that?

“Wouldn’t you?” she asked. A crack in her voice - a tear springing from her eye that hadn’t been there a moment before, rolling down her cheek. “You wouldn’t take that risk, Bennett? To bring him back?”

He wanted to say no, but it got stuck in his throat. She still grieved for him, as hard as he ever did, and it annihilated the space between them, blurred the final lines.

He pushed his chair back and got up - he needed a second. Not to be looking at her, not to be sharing feelings.

“Where are you going?”

are you leaving? don’t leave

He clasped his hands behind his head, breathed in and out, shut his eyes.

say something say something say something say something-

“There’s gonna be a hearing tomorrow,” he said, cutting off the flood of her thoughts she couldn’t control. “Or, not a hearing. A discussion, I guess.”

He turned to face her again; she was listening with rapt attention. She hadn’t been told yet.

“They’re gonna talk about whether there’s any kind of precedent they can fall back on for this, anything at all. I don’t know if they want me there as a witness or a human lie detector, but they asked me to stay for it and I’m staying. After that, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll see you again, maybe I won’t. I have to think this-”

He gestured to the space between their heads again, at a loss for what to call it. “This’ll fade with time and distance. It’ll have to. It can’t stay forever.”

It couldn’t, could it?

#tw: suicidal ideation #tw: swears #tw: prison #writing #writing snippet #writing excerpt #original novel #my wip #oc: callie #oc: simon

[scammydoesstuff]

So about that 'Blue Bloods' episode…

I recently saw something come across my dash regarding Alex Brightman’s guest appearance on the season 11 episode of 'Blue Bloods' (The Common Good) and it reignited the vehement response I had to the episode as a whole. And, since I have this blog now, I figured…fuck it. I need to rant about it.

So that's what this is.

Take what I say with a grain of salt, of course. This show is so clearly not for me and I acknowledge that, but I went to school for and got my degree in creative writing and so much of this episode pissed me off from a narrative perspective and I just really need to talk about it. Putting it under a Read More, though, so you can ignore me if you’d like while I rage to no one in particular. Apologies in advance if you choose to read on. I'm super long-winded. Luckily I don't have pictures and this is more of just a lot of text, so…it could be longer?

So, to begin, I’ll freely admit that I’d never seen an episode of 'Blue Bloods' before this and I’ve not watched it since. I mean, if the rest of the episodes are as badly written as this one, I have no interest to either, but I digress.

Overall my main problem with the episode was how desperately it avoided ‘showing’ over ‘telling’ and, as a visual medium, that’s kind’ve a big deal. We were told pretty much every detail that was presented to us. These people love to hear themselves talk, but do little to actually show things as they happen and I believe a part of that has to do with the focus of the show itself, which is definitely unique to this brand of television. By that, I just mean that it’s not the format I might’ve expected from a show like this. Most cop shows give a lot of focus to the cases, and the intrigue you get with the characters is how they apply their own skills and knowledge to solve them, with the hi-jinks they get into along the way being more of a bonus.

This is not that kind of show.

No, 'Blue Bloods' as a show is way more interested in the cops and their familial ties than it is about the actual job that they’re doing, as shown prominently with the political plot of this episode which was also very focused on the relationship between Tom Selleck’s character and his daughter and the wholly unrelated dinner scene where they talk about lent for 2 and a half minutes and acknowledge nothing else that happened in the episode. This show doesn’t care about the job of being a cop so much as it cares about the cops themselves.

Which would be fine if I gave a shit about cops, but I don’t.

You could argue that the mentor plot is the exception to that, but that entire situation had no real consequences for the cop in question, Jamie, abusing his power. It was entirely focused on how the situation affected him and how it was fine that he’d nudged this kid to get information which ultimately led to the arrest of Dion's brother, and Dion quitting the program. Hell, if Jamie had, in his final scene with Dion, owned up to his abuse of power and left the program — to then urge Dion to rejoin so that he can have that positive outlet in his life without him there — I would’ve been way more okay with it, but Jamie faces no consequences past ‘I don’t wanna see you anymore’, which I was never convinced he actually cared about in the slightest. There's nothing cathartic about it, it's just shitty and left me feeling frustrated at the lack of consequences for the cop.

But hey, you prolly don’t wanna read me going on and on about those parts. You prolly wanna know why I hate it despite Alex’s plot — which I fully expected to love because he’s perfect and gorgeous even when he’s playing a bad guy and he was just so adorable in his lil suit and they let him keep the scruff this time, and he was all handsome an— I need to stop. That could go on forever.

Anyway, to put it simply; it was bad, but I'll definitely explain why.

Now, I don’t think any of the guests in this episode necessarily did a bad job. They still acted well enough for what they were given. I just think they had a shit script that wasn’t interested in that story line. I mentioned at the top of this that this show cared more about telling than showing and that’s a huge problem when you want me to buy a character being the culprit in your murder plot. I need evidence, not anecdotes. Cuz, yeah, by the end of the episode, I didn’t buy for even a second that Ralph did it. And it’s not because he was played by Alex who is just charisma incarnate. I can believe him playing a bad guy. I also watched his 'Law & Order SVU' episode where he scared the shit outta me. He can play a creepy and violent character very well, he just wasn’t convincing to me as a bad guy in this show.

And here’s why!

First of all, he confessed at knife point. That confession would be thrown away IRL. It’s the same problem with using torture to get information. If a person’s life is threatened or they're being harmed in some way, they’ll usually say whatever it takes to get you to stop threatening them/causing them pain. Same deal here. You can’t convince me with a confession like that.

But they didn't seem to be interested in convincing anyone as far as I could tell. They just expected you to believe it because, ‘no, didn’t you hear? He said he did it, so he did it.’ They had so many opportunities to portray this character as the shitbag that we’re told he is. Hell, great way to really implicate him? Give him a female assistant that Donnie Wahlberg and his partner overhear / walk in on him berating for something small like getting him the wrong coffee or something. Then have them talk to that assistant later on and her mention some weird behavior from him on the night of Andrea’s death. It's cliché, but it's more than what we got.

Or you could have him talk to Meghan in a super condescending voice when he approaches her after her interview later on. Or, hell, have him refer to the murder victim in a condescending way even as he talks about her death. But no. The most we get out of him is that he's maybe a little snarky and smug when talking to the cops, but that’s not enough to convince me he’s a bad dude. Frankly, his producer buddy came off as more of an asshole, if I'm being honest. Just cuz (we’re told) his character did shitty things to her in the past doesn’t mean he’s still shitty. Show me he’s still shitty. I wanna see it and I know Alex is capable of a performance like that.

Second, it’s also just…obvious to make him the culprit if we're to believe everything we're told about him. He and Andrea are described as having had beef a little while before the murder with him being abusive mentally and physically. He’s known in the community to be a misogynist and an abusive person overall. He’s the obvious suspect, but if there’s anything that Scooby-Doo taught me, it’s that it’s never the most obvious person. Like, once in a blue moon, sure — but it’s rare.

So yeah, I don’t believe that Ralph did it. You wanna know who I do think did it?

Meghan.

Alright, so bear with me. This'll prolly sound a little conspiratorial, but hear me out:

She had the motive. She confirms in the beginning of the episode that she’s also a female gamer like the victim, but that she was ‘no Andrea’. Andrea was her competition. They were (supposedly) friends and stuck together as female gamers, but Andrea was still competition. With her out of the way, Meghan’s able to rise in the ranks, if even a little bit.

She had a scapegoat in Ralph — again, the obvious suspect given his tumultuous relationship with Andrea sometime prior — and an obvious grudge against men in their community in general. And, don’t get me wrong, men in gaming can and often are hella toxic — I’m not, in any way, denying that — but she got way more emotional when talking about the men in their community than when she was talking about her supposed friend lying dead in the adjoining room.

Speaking of the adjoining room, how did she not hear the murder happening? It couldn’t have been when she was down in the bar, cuz we see Ralph there too in the crappy CCTV footage that was supposed to show him being an asshole, I think (hard to really see). Was she just fucking around somewhere else when it happened? She doesn’t mention as much that I recall (correct me if I'm wrong on that, of course). And Andrea was strangled to death. I would assume that there would’ve been a struggle with that. Are you seriously telling me she wouldn’t hear that in her adjoining hotel room? Those walls aren’t that thick. I find that kinda hard to believe. And that she wouldn’t have found her till the next morning after that, also strikes me as a little odd.

Going off on some previous points, she shows very little grief over her friend’s death. Not just in the intro scene, either, but later on as well. (Side bar: that intro scene itself was very misleading. Don’t lead with a murder plot if it only takes up less than 10 minutes of the overall runtime, kay?) The show did a pretty bad job at indicating the passage of time, but it’s implied that the convention is still happening when Meghan gets the confession out of Ralph, so it would’ve had to have been the same weekend, or possibly the same week (though most conventions I’m aware of don’t last that long — it’s usually a weekend thing, at most Thursday-Sunday — but it could be similar to AGDQ, which seems to last about a week). So, if this is only a day or so later, why would someone who is supposedly grieving over their dead friend do interviews like nothing is wrong? Wouldn't you, like, reschedule or just politely decline and say you need time to process the shock? Like, when we cut to ol’ Donnie Wahlberg calling her after her interview, she doesn’t look upset — as I imagine she might if they’d likely asked her questions about Andrea / her feelings about the murder — and she seems cool as a cucumber when she asks Ralph to go somewhere private. In fact, the look on her face indicates pretty clearly that she’s planning to do something. Specifically, not that she's scared, that she's angry.

Finally, she’s the one who’s attacking Ralph when Donnie Wahlberg and company arrive on the scene. She doesn’t seem to have any marks on her indicating that he made any move to harm her (again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember seeing her with any marks / cuts), but he’s got a clear, bleeding cut on his face. She attacked him first and was going in for the kill.

Or…was she? Cuz right before Donnie Wahlberg pulls her into that bear hug to stop her from the attack, she doesn’t do a great job of actually trying to kill Ralph. She was close enough that a quick dart at him would’ve probably been enough to at least injure him pretty significantly — maybe even fatally — and would’ve surely led the cops to pull them apart to secure him, but she kinda just hops around a bit and screams before lunging for him. That’s a really weird way to attack when you actually want to kill someone.

But, then again, I don’t necessarily think she did want to kill him. I’m convinced she wanted that confession, but that she also wanted him in jail and was playing the part of the super sad and hysterical victim who was just so overcome with her grief that she wasn’t in her right mind. I think that’s what they were going for in regards to her character in general, but it came across as less sincere in the performance and more like the character was putting on an act. They then cart Ralph off while comforting her — despite the fact that she disobeyed a direct order from police, which should lead to her being detained as well! — and that plot ends.

So, she gets what she wants in the end. A person she despises is now in police custody, her competition is out of the way, and the publicity she might get for bringing that ‘murderer’ to justice might eventually lead to her own career getting a nice boost. I dunno, it just strikes me as her having a great reason to have initiated this over Ralph just being a misogynist who 'was really trying to kill Meghan and just got the wrong girl'.

So yeah, with what the show presented to us, I believe Meghan’s the real killer. Again, if they’d done more to show me that Ralph was a bad dude or that she was more affected by her supposed friend’s death, or if they'd just given that plot more room to breathe to show those things, I might’ve been more inclined to buy the narrative they were pushing but…as is, I don’t believe it.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to say on the matter. I had a lot of issues with the domestic abuse plot line too, but they barely gave that 5 minutes of the overall runtime, so does it really matter in the long run? This is just…my thought process of the only part of the episode I watched for and how disappointing it was for me. And yes, I timed each section of the episode to figure out how much time was given to each of the 4 plots, plus the dinner scene at the end, but not counting the intro theme, and the murder plot got just over 8 minutes, of which Alex was on screen for half of that time. He got less than 5 minutes of screen time. It was definitely worth it just because he’s wonderful and I just like seeing him on these shows, but from a narrative standpoint, it felt pointless.

Okay, I’m done. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Unless y’all wanna talk about this some more, cuz I’m so down for that.

#scammy talks too much #scammy rants #blue bloods #the common good #alex brightman #long post is long #I'm long-winded as fuck #obviously I'm not an authority on what makes good tv #this is just all how I felt after watching the episode #It was just so disappointing after the INCREDIBLE performance on Law & Order SVU #if you like it that's cool #I'm not here to tell you you're wrong #or that I'm right about this #like whatcha like #sometimes I just gotta rant and get it outta my brain

[thefanficmonster]

My Warrior

Daniel x Taylor (The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope)

Warnings: !Spoilers!, Swearing

Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff

Summary: They have all made it out of there. They’re safe from the real horrors, but the scenes that have been imbedded into their minds keep haunting them. They are left with scars to their subconscious as well as scars on their skin. Marks to remind them of what they went through. What they survived. Taylor can’t stand them - the burn marks on her skin and the scars that night left on her. She’s struggling way more than she’d like to admit. But there’s someone who sees through her toughness.

Requested by @chairtiger Hello there my chaotic co-cult leader! Sorry to be posting your request so late 👉👈 hope you understand and forgive me for the long wait. I had a blast writing the fic and I hope you enjoy reading it. Anyway...SHIP DAYLOR FOR CLEAR SKIN EVERYONE...Love, Vy ❤

“Fucking hell, this is torture.“ Taylor groans as she runs a make-up wipe over her foundation-covered, bruised skin. Underneath all those layers of foundations are the marks she’s been so desperate to hide - the reminders of that night. That monstrosity that wanted her dead and wasn’t gonna stop at anything to make that happen.

But it didn’t happen She tells herself, I’m here, aren’t I?

She’s happy to have gotten out of there with her life as well as all her friends, but the feeling of the constant presence of that night’s memories weighing on her mind, and thanks to the marks on her skin as well, she has a hard time accepting that she was indeed lucky. Some fucking luck. If she were lucky she wouldn’t have even ended up in that predicament. But she did and it has taken a bite out of her sanity and will haunt her for good, physically and mentally. No doubt about it.

The first place they all went to after their return was a hospital. Scrapes and bruises and some open wounds along with Andrew’s concussion were the main of the physical injuries. No broken bones or anything permanent, thank God. 

Well, almost nothing permanent. 

Taylor had seen the looks the nurses and the doctor gave her when they saw the state of her skin - much like the others she had bruises and scratches here and there, the most serious of which still had dried blood on them. However, unlike the rest of the group, she’d be left with the burn marks for as long as the memories - forever. Of course, that’s not what the doctor told her, not directly, at least. He said to give them time and some treatment that wasn’t completely sure to work. She knew what that meant - “Be ready to spend the rest of your life like this or in covering it up.”

It’s been one month since that horrible night. One month of treatment for her skin. Lotions, creams, cleansers, foundation. Nothing has worked. She spends an hour going through the process of covering the marks up and an hour taking all that foundation off. No one has commented on them which may be either because she covers them well enough or they simply don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. She doesn’t care what others think of them, people’s opinions never bother her on any ground. The war she has with these burn marks is personal and has all to do with an event she wants to let go of and move on from. As if her nightmares aren’t enough, she also has to deal with flashbacks every time she looks in the mirror.

She hasn’t expressed her frustration to anyone. She has managed to hide it as well as the bruises themselves. It’s Taylor after all, she’s good at putting on an act so no one can read her. But, because it is indeed her, she’s not used to keeping her anger in. She feels like a ticking timed bomb. A bubble with tender, delicate walls that could burst at any moment. And God help the person who she bursts in front of. She’s never held her composure this long, she doesn’t know what will even happen if she lets go.

Now, looking in the mirror, about to take off her foundation and apply the new lotion the doctor prescribed her, she feels as fragile as ever. She’s feeling the lack of sleep more than ever as well as the pain of her tensed muscles that never seem to relax anymore. She doesn’t feel mentally prepared to go through the process of taking off the cover-up. She never feels ready, it always takes a toll on her on mentally, emotionally and even physically. She always feels so tired afterwards, so drained. Maybe because she always expects to see a difference when the foundation comes off. There never is, nothing but disappointment.

Today has been extra hard for her. Her mind has never been hazier from the lack of sleep. Her thoughts are all over the place, none of them clear. Her body’s almost shutting down. She feels like a ghost of herself. Like the real her is in a different location. Probably still stuck in Little Hope.

The foundation’s off, the same sight meets her, mocking her from the mirror. And that’s the snapping point she’s been dreading for a month now. She reaches for the new lotion she picked up on her way home.

“Useless piece of shit!“ she chucks it to the other end of the bathroom. The bottle is unharmed, it just hits the tiled floor with a loud thud. She however is in pieces, also dropping on the ground, her back against the wall, her knees tucked close to her chest, hiding her face between them, sobbing her heart out. It’s certainly a freeing feeling, but it only exhausts her more.

“Hey T...Taylor, what’s wrong?“ She hears the familiar voice and goes silent but does not dare lift her head, especially not now that her cover-up is off her, the burn marks on display. She remains sitting on the ground, face hidden from his sight.

Daniel feels her heart sink at the sight of the most important person in his life being at a low point like this one. He feels guilty for not taking action sooner. He saw the signs, the red flags in the form of fake empty smile, lack of sarcasm, colorless cheeks, eyebags, red eyes. Lack of Taylor, she was nowhere to be seen. She was far from the person he’s used to knowing and seeing every day. Knowing her, he expected prying to be a bad move but now he wishes he’d done it sooner. On time. Before she could crash like this.

“Do you know how to knock?” Her weak attempt at putting her tough act back on slips through the cracks in her voice.

Daniel is by her side asap, kneeling on the ground in front of her. “T, come on, don’t do this. Look at me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

She knows better than to hide from Daniel. He know her too well. She trusts him too much. So, despite her previous determination not to let him in on the fact that she’s now a product of that night, she raises her head, resting her chin on her knee, still avoiding his gaze though. He doesn’t bat an eye though. 

Can he really not see what’s bothering me? It’s very fucking obvious

“I- I just feel like I can’t do this, you know. I can’t be fine like the rest of you. You’ve all moved on. And here I am with nightmares like a preschooler and these ugly things all over my skin. That night will permanently hold onto me, Daniel. I can never let it go if I’m reminded of it every time I look in the mirror.“ Her gaze travels to the lotion bottle on the an arm’s reach away. “I can empty as many of these bottles as I feel like, they never help. The doctor says they maybe would, big emphasis on the ‘maybe’ but, spoiler alert: they never do. I wish they’d stop stringing me along, every failed attempt is a hard-to-swallow disappointment.“ She chuckles humorlessly when Daniel takes the bottle from her, “And then there’s always the casually mentioned risk of it making them worse rather than better. You know, casually. Like, yeah this will either help you or fuck you up even worse.“ She ends the rant with a sigh, almost feeling like herself again.

Daniel sees it too, the fire in her eyes is fighting to light again. She’s so angry and yet she can’t express it to anyone. Anyone by him apparently. 

“So, you’re not gonna give it a shot?“ She shakes her head, “But what if it helps?“

“What if it makes it worse?“ She automatically replies, hugging her knees closer

“Let it be your last go. If it doesn’t do anything, or God forbid makes things worse, it’s on me. I owe you whatever you want. I know that’s nothing in comparison to what you’ll be dealing with, but...“ Sensing a speech is on its way, Taylor holds her hand up, shaking her head.

“Alright, spare me Mr. I-Don’t-Take-Medicine-Unless-I’m-On-My-Death-Bed. Give me the lotion.“

He shakes his head, stands up and takes hold of the hand she has outstretched instead. “Nah-ah, let me help.” The skeptical and downright humoring look she gives him when she stands to her feet almost makes him frown. “What? I’m not clueless, T. I know a think or two about skin care. You think this all came naturally?” He motions at himself cockily, stealing a genuine laugh from her.

“I knew nature couldn’t fuck up that badly. I suspected you had something to do with it.“ She narrows her eyes, meeting his also narrow-eyed gaze, both in on the fact that the other is messing around.

“Your skin is at my mercy. I wouldn’t talk smack if I were you.“ He playfully warns her, waving the lotion bottle in front of her.

She rolls her eyes, “Yeah whatever you say, tough guy.“ She opens a drawer under the sink and throws him a box of cotton pads.

Not wasting any time in fear she might change her mind, Daniel takes one pad out and puts a few drops of the lotion on it. He hesitantly brings it closer to the skin on the side of her neck while she stands as still as a statue, not breathing either. Despite all the bold talk, he’s still nervous. He really hopes this miracle liquid of chemicals works, solely because it will make Taylor happy. And to him, her happiness is all that matters.

She shudders when the cold, damp cotton pad makes contact with her skin and he immediately feels the need to apologize. Instead, however, he goes on to tell her exactly what’s on his mind, cause he knows there’ll never be a better time.

“What you call a reminder of that night, the horrors we endured, I see it differently...“ he trails off, looking at her reflection in the mirror out of the corner of his eye. “I see it as proof that we’re stronger than we know. And you, T...are the strongest of us all. Any of these scars could have been a lethal would but here you are, alive. And no, I’m not trying to say you’re lucky. None of us are. Lord knows what kind of fucked up luck we posses, but it ain’t right. No, you are brave. You went through it and fought to leave the battle with scars instead of dropping to the ground with a wound that is irredeemable. You’re a warrior, Taylor.” He pauses for a second and so do the movements of his hand. He hesitantly inhales before saying the last sentence he’s been holding back, “My warrior.” 

Taylor tilts her head to look at him, genuine surprise and warmth in her eyes. She’s baffled. Pleasantly caught off-guard by words she never thought she’d hear, let alone trust. She covers all this up with a smirk. Classic Taylor. “You weren’t really a pansy back there either, Dan.” She gently bumps his shoulder with hers.

His eyes narrow again. “I hate that nickn-“ It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t get to finish his sentence cause her lips are already on his, preventing him from ranting about...whatever he was about to go off about.

You know what they say: If you don’t finish saying it, it was never meant to be said in the first place. 

@artlovingbre  @megandaisy9  @sparrow-gg​

#the dark pictures #the dark pictures little hope #the dark pictures house of ashes #the dark pictures man of medan #the dark pictures anthology #dark pictures anthology #dark pictures little hope #little hope #the dark pictures anthology little hope #man of medan #until dawn #supermassive games #supermassive #video game #video games #video game fanfic #little hope daniel #little hope taylor #little hope andrew #little hope john #little hope angela #daniel x taylor #taniel #daylor #andrew #john #taylor #daniel #angela #love

[themisadventuresofmomtiri]

Children of the Cosmos, Chapter 3

Hey, lookie what it is! An update! Finally! You can also read it on Ao3. Enjoy!

There is no lamp to give them light. The only light in the wagon is the irregular pulsing of Varian’s hair, faint and patchy and a far, far cry from its normal vibrancy. Thin threads of gold have started to appear, glowing and fading in uneven flickers. The magic he’d accidentally taken from Rapunzel was shining through, slowly burning him from the inside out.

Her child, her only son, is fading before her very eyes.

Fae should never have children.

“Rowena?”

She looks up, pulled out of her thoughts and grounded back in reality. Quirin is on the other side of the wagon, mere feet from her with only their fading son between them. She can see clearly how the last few days have aged him. Perhaps she shows it just as clearly, despite her immortality. They have many more years to live in the next few minutes, and the only thing standing between Varian and death is how long they’re able to bear it.

She takes a deep breath, offers him a small smile, and straightens her back.

“Hand me a few pieces of quartz and we’ll get started.”

Rapunzel jolted awake, heart pounding and a soundless scream already dying in her throat. Pascal let out a small noise of surprise as her sudden movement caused him to tumble. She glanced around, the lingering terror inciting paranoia until her mind was finally able to process that she was right where she’d been last night: in her sleeping sack, set up around the dying embers of last night’s fire. Kiera and Catalina had cuddled up to her over the course of the night, and both were disturbed by Rapunzel’s sudden awakening.

Catalina slurred out something incomprehensible, and Rapunzel shushed her.

“It’s okay, go back to sleep.”

Neither girl was apparently willing to argue, and Catalina dropped right off without so much as another sound. Kiera snuggled into her sleeping sack, but thankfully fell back asleep. Rapunzel took a deep breath of morning air and carefully shifted into a slightly more comfortable seated position. The world had already started to take on the gray hue of pre-dawn. Everything was quiet and still. Not even the birds had started singing yet.

The nightmare that had woken her was already obscured in her memory, just faint impressions of dread and terror and a blank, all consuming darkness. She’s suffered regular nightmares for nearly a year when she was little, and they’d been so severe that Mom had taken to lacing every scrap of fabric Rapunzel owned with dried lavender and slipping bits of amethyst carved with protective runes into her pillows. Which had done the trick, and over the next year and a half Mom had slowly removed the amethyst pieces and de-laced the lavender until Rapunzel could sleep through the night free of nightmares without magical assistance. Varian had been too young then help her, but she suspected that the reason her nightmares had made themselves scarce was because he was old enough and his magic strong enough to reach out while they slept.

Thinking of Varian brought back the memory of what she’d heard last night. Rapunzel shivered, though the chill of the early morning had nothing to do with it. The wagon was suspiciously still---and suspiciously dark. Not even one of the small lamps was lit, and Rapunzel couldn’t see any sign of Varian’s glow. Something horrid and leaden formed in her stomach; what if something went wrong? Mom had said binding someone’s magic was dangerous, maybe even life-threatening. What if Varian didn’t---

No. No, she wasn’t going to think like that. Varian was going to be fine. Whatever Mom and Dad had done last night, it was going to work and Varian was going recover. Everything was going to go back to normal and in time this whole thing will just be a bad memory.

A creak of wood caught her attention, and Rapunzel looked up to see her father stepping out of the wagon. He looked completely wrecked, as if he hadn’t slept a wink at all last night. Who knows, he probably hadn’t. Rapunzel stood up, mindful of her still-sleeping sisters.

“Dad,” she whispered, hesitant as she wrung her hands.

“He’s okay,” Dad replied, and it was a strange mix of dread and relief that washed over her. “The fever just broke, and both he and your mother are resting.”

She navigated out of the sleeping pile, steps becoming quicker the second she was clear of her sisters. “Did you have to…is he?”

Dad’s shoulders dropped as he took a deep breath. “We had to bind his magic, yes. He pulled through, thank god.”

“It’s not…permanent, is it?”

Dad hesitated, as if the answer was something he had to decide Rapunzel had a right to know.

“No binding is permanent, Rapunzel. But…they can be difficult to undo. And sometimes even more dangerous then.”

“So it might as well be?”

Dad sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying. Your mother and I plan to undo the binding once Varian is strong enough to handle it. The only sticking point is that we need a certain couple of tools to make sure the resulting surge of power doesn’t end up hurting him. The Moon’s never done things by halves.”

“What do you need?”

“Let your mother and I worry about that,” he advised, resting a hand on her shoulder and offering her a small smile that was meant to reassure. “For now, let’s focus on getting ready for the day. I doubt either Varian or Rowena will be awake for breakfast, but they may be hungry come lunch.”

“Da’,” a sleepy voice broke through the morning air. They turned to see Catalina and Kiera in the process of waking up, blinking and rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

“’s’som’in’wron’,” Kiera asked before a yawn split her face.

“Varian’s fever broke over the night,” Dad announced, and after a second, both girls were suddenly wide awake.

“Does that mean he’s gonna be okay,” Catalina asked, already jumping up from her sleeping sack and running over to them, Kiera hot on her heels.

“With some rest, yes.”

“Can we see him,” Kiera asked.

“When he wakes up, if your mother agrees,” he replied. “For now, let’s do her a favor and get the morning chores handled.”

Not even Kiera groaned at the idea of doing chores; ordinarily, she tended to do everything she possibly could to weasel her way out of them. Catalina didn’t seem to mind the work much, and Rapunzel honestly just loved any excuse to be active in some way. Varian was the only one who could convince Kiera to do her chores without complaining, and that was because he hated doing them, too. Any chores involving Philippa, the absolutely massive draft horse who had been pulling their wagon for as long as Rapunzel could remember, were his least favorite. Varian swore up and down the mare had it out for him, though Philippa had never done anything more than some teasing nips and a few well-timed swats to the face with her tail.

Rapunzel never thought she’d ever want to hear them complaining about scrubbing the wagon’s floorboards, or picking up the dungpiles left by Phillippa so Dad could sell them to farmers as fertilizer as badly as she did now. Anything resembling normal would be a blessing.

The fact that Varian’s fever had finally broken had drastically improved Catalina and Kiera’s attitude, even though they didn’t know about the binding. Throughout the morning, they chattered about pretty much anything and nothing at all, making stupid jokes and actually laughing again. And, true to his word,the sun was already high in the sky by the time the wagon’s door creaked open. Mom only looked marginally less wrecked than Dad had, though her usual bun was an absolute disaster the likes of which Rapunzel had never seen.

“Mom,” Kiera shouted, scrambling up to her feet from where she’d been sitting while helping Dad untangle a particularly knotted section of fishing line. “Is Varian awake? Can we see ‘im?”

Rowena chuckled as Kiera all but slammed into her, managing to mitigated the worst of the collision. “Good morning to you, too, darling.”

“Dad said he’s gonna be okay, so can we see him?”

“He’s still asleep, cygnet,” Rowena replied. “Your poor brother had a rough go of things last night; he needs to rest.”

Kiera stamped a foot and huffed in frustration, but didn’t utter any more complaints. After the momentary frustration faded, Kiera bit her lip.

“He…he really is gonna be okay, right?”

Rowena sighed, a knowing smile on her face. “Yes, sweetheart. His fever’s broken, and his breathing is almost entirely back to normal.”

“Did you have to do that binding thing?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she replied after a beat, guiding Kiera back to the campfire. “Took every ounce of quartz at my disposal, admittedly, but that was expected.

“So Varian can’t do magic anymore,” Catalina asked

“Not until we’re able to reverse the binding.”

“How long’s that gonna take?”

Rowena exhaled, sharing a look with Quirin. A look Rapunzel didn’t like one bit. Anytime that particular look came around, it always meant something bad. Or, at the very least, something they weren’t going to like much. The last time she’d seen that look, they spent three months in a magical museum/archive with a high-strung archivist who apparently owed Mom an awful lot while Mom and Dad had been busy negotiating a series of purchases and trades with people they apparently deemed too dangerous to risk bringing their kids along. Calliope had been an…interesting babysitter. And maybe Rapunzel could have made the whole ordeal a little easier on her, but she’d been fourteen and totally convinced that she didn’t need a babysitter.

“With some rest, Varian should be back to full health in a few weeks,” Rowena began, the ‘but’ heavy in her tone.

“But…?”

“But, in order to undo the binding without hurting him, your father and I are going to need a couple of items we don’t have right now.”

“So where do we find ‘em,” Kiera asked.

“We, as in your father and I, will be locating them,” Rowena replied. “You four will be staying with the innkeeper and his wife while we’re gone.”

“What?!”

“This is not a matter which is up for discussion,” she added, both her tone and her expression offering no room for debate. “These items are dangerous to get a hold of, and I refuse to place you four in harm’s way if there is another option.”

“But we wanna help,” Kiera retorted.

“You can help by staying together and keeping an eye on Varian,” Quirin cut in. “This will only take a few weeks, if all goes well.”

“And if it doesn’t,” Catalina asked. “You said it’ll be dangerous…”

“We’ll manage,” he assured her, gently ruffling Catalina’s hair. “Just as we always have.”

Kiera slumped back into her seat, arms folded across her chest and the absolute picture of petulance. She’d been part of the family long enough to know when she’d been beat.

“Where will you guys be going, then,” Rapunzel asked.

The pair shared a look before Quirin replied.

“Rowena will be traveling to the Unknown, and I’ll be making the trek back to the ruins of Lumeria.”

“Wait, you’re not sticking together?”

Quirin shrugged. “Rowena is the only one who can reach the Unknown. I don’t have any Fae blood; the gates would never open for me.”

“And I’m sure Hector has yet to abandon the ruins,�� Rowena added. “He might let Quirin explain before attacking; me, he’d fight immediately on principle.”

“Hector,” Catalina asked, tilting her head in confusion.

“Another former member of the Brotherhood,” Quirin explained. “We trained together when we were young.”

“How come we’ve never met ‘im,” Kiera asked.

“Because his vows to Lumeria were poorly worded, and as a result he’s been unable to tear himself away from the old kingdom,” Rowena replied. “There’s a reason I’ve always warned you four to be mindful of your words. Fae can’t break their promises.”

“Why would a friend of Dad’s fight you on principle,” Rapunzel asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Mom?”

The weak, but so very familiar, voice cut off any response Rowena might have otherwise given, and every head turned to see Varian, shaky but standing in the doorway of the wagon. Rapunzel inhaled sharply; while Varian certainly looked like he was on the mend from a serious illness, it was immediately obvious what exactly had to be done in order to get him there. His hair was no longer moon-white, the strands now a stark black save for the streak of teal that replaced the former moon-gray shade. He still looked pale and sickly, but he looked…more human? Like every trace of magic he’d had since birth had been systematically removed from every fibre of his body. He almost looked like a completely different person.

Catalina had reacted a bit louder, her gasp sharp and audible and followed by the sound of her hands covering her mouth in shock. Kiera’s reaction was even less subtle.

 “Why is his hair black?”

“M’ hair’s wha’,” Varian asked, rubbing at his eyes.

Rowena helped him down from the wagon, and Varian leaned into her as she guided him over to the fire.

“A side-effect of the binding,” Quirin explained, grabbing a spare blanket from the laundry and draping it over Varian’s shoulders.

He took a seat next to his son, and Varian leaned into him, shivering under the blanket despite the growing heat of the day. Ruddiger perched himself next to Varian, offering sympathetic pats to the boy’s arm. Catalina got up from her seat and made her way across the circle, sitting down on the other side of her brother. She hesitantly placed a hand on his shoulder.

“How are you feeling, Varian?”

“Better,” he admitted. “A lot weaker than normal, though.”

“Your fever broke last night, thankfully,” Quirin added, pressing the back of his hand to Varian’s forehead as if he wasn’t entirely certain the fever hadn’t re-asserted itself. “But between the illness and the absence of your magic, I’m not surprised you’ve noticed some weakness. You should still be in bed.”

“I’ve been in bed for over a week, Dad,” he protested. “And isn’t fresh air supposed to help people get better?”

Quirin glanced over at his wife, who merely shrugged. He sighed.

“I expect you to listen to Uriah and Hermione while your mother and I are away. No sneaking out of bed, no matter how well you feel.”

Varian blinked, looking up at his father. “You and Mom are leaving? Why?”

“We need a few things to undo the binding once you’re well enough,” Rowena explained. “It will only take a few weeks at the most, by which time you should be recovered enough to handle it.”

“Oh. When are you leaving?”

“Either tomorrow or the day after, depending on how well you are to make to the trip to the inn.”

“Do we really need a babysitter,” he whined. “Can’t we just stay here and promise to listen to Rapunzel?”

Quirin chuckled. “It wouldn’t be fair to put all of the responsibility on your sister’s shoulders. Besides, you four will be safer at the inn than on your own. Bandits and highwaymen are becoming more active the warmer the weather gets. It’s for our own peace of mind as much as it is for your safety.”

“Then won’t you and Mom be in danger, too,” Kiera asked.

“Your father and I can handle ourselves,” Rowena assured her, taking a seat next to Kiera and giving her a small side hug.

“So can we!”

“Ordinarily I’d agree, but your brother needs to rest. Better safe than sorry.”

Kiera huffed, but didn’t issue any more protests. At least at the inn, they’d be more or less left to their own devices so long as they didn’t bother any of the patrons. It would be a few weeks of being bored out of their minds while their parents went on their epic quests. How bad could it really be?

#tangled siblings au #children of the cosmos #rta rapunzel #rta varian #moon varian

[nikyri-art]

After so long the first “chapter” is finally here! :’D This will hopefuly be a short illustrated novel series. The story takes place before the events of Borderlands 3. I would never be able to make this without the help of my sweet friend @border-spam who provided my with so much support, great ideas, inspiration and with her help to rewrite this. Actually it’s kind of colaboration of me, my man and her. Since my man helped with rewriting too. Huge Thanks to them because without them editing it, I would never post it. <3  . . . Usually, this would have been resolved in just a few minutes. Having a team of his own technicians to take care of streaming issues was surely one of his greatest ideas. He still has to check up on them directly every so often, mostly for his own assurance that everything is running smoothly, but today, what should have been a quick check in was taking longer because some idiot meat sack follower had damaged some streaming equipment. Because of that dumbass, Troy has been left trying to get this tech repaired and the stream online before Tyreen loses her patience with the delay. Luckily, one of his most trusted editors was around to help him with cable replacement.

Troy sits in front of the monitor array, nervous as time ticks on, bouncing his leg while impatiently watching the little symbol on the monitor in front of him, waiting for it to signal the connection is back ON. His ECHO’s screen next to him updates with new pings so quickly it’s constantly lit, that’s how often his Godly sister is messaging him, and each new blip and ping from the echo makes him even more frustrated.. but he tries his absolute best to keep it inside, and not to aim his inner anger at the girl that has offered him help.

She’s the one currently sat under the desk beneath him, expertly fixing the cables running under it. A hugely welcome help, considering he’d never be able to fit under it to try himself.

Tinkers are best for these kind of repairs, smaller hands able to quickly handle finicky tech, able to get into places he can’t because of his height. His editor isn’t exactly a Tink, but you could easily mistake her as one due to her small size.

Just as he feels himself ready to snap, Tyreen’s constant pings and the delay on the stream causing his frustration to reach boiling point, a victorious laugh erupts from her under the desk. “AH-HA! YESSS!”

The symbol on the monitor finally turns green, and his scowl shifts into a genuine smile. “Helllll yeah, we are live baby!” His left arm quickly works the keyboard, testing the stream tech and getting it set up, until a gentle tap on his knee breaks his concentration.

“Umm, it’s not like I don’t enjoy the fabulous view from between your legs… but could you please let me out?” Her soft voice pleads from under the table.

He smirks, and pushes his chair back just enough to make her think she is free, but instead hunches down, looking under at her with his trademark shit-eating grin.

“I don’t know Ari, can I? Honestly, I really like you being down the-” he is interrupted as his face is gently pushed away by a really small hand. As soon as he shifts backwards, she crawls out and dusts off her jeans while giving her God a playful smile.

Any other cultist would pay with their life for daring to touch the God King like this, but she’s somehow special to him. Maybe it could even be called a friendship of some kind. Or at least, that’s how he sees their whole relationship. They’ve worked together almost every day for three years, and as the years passed he’s found himself talking to her, enjoying her company, choosing to be around her..  but Troy is too busy running the cult to have time for real friendships, and the only people he spends any time with besides his sister are the people in his editing team.

It’s a rare thing for him to find someone like her, someone who isn’t just a bloodthirsty idiot screeching psychotically. Someone who actually has enough brain cells to have a real conversation. That what drew him to his little friend over time. She does, of course, respect him as a God, but she does treat him.. differently. Something that feels almost like those fleeting nice moments he shares with Tyreen sometimes, facades forgotten every once in a while. His God King persona really dislikes that this woman dares to treat him like anything less than a deity, but the lonely man inside of him secretly wishes she’d do it more. It’s a kind of closeness he craves desperately.

He returns the grin and stands up, ready to leave. “Nice! Now we can finally start the stream!”. His Echo lights up one more showing Tyreen’s name again, and he curses under his breath and picks it up, bracing himself to answer the onslaught of messages. While he begins to text his sister, he notices his friend silently standing to his side, staring. Staring at his chest, to be exact. Staring so intensively she’s paused in her tracks and not left yet.

Many people stare at Troy, and for many reasons. Cultists stare in adoration and respect, the “civilised” assholes he spends unwanted time around stare in disgust, but she’s staring in a different way, and that’s why it’s sparked so much curiosity in him.

She doesn’t notice he’s completely aware of her awe as he breaks the silence. “Heh, I know it’s really hard not to get a good eyeful sweetie, but don’t forget to blink every once in a while.” he purrs.

Again, just as before, his attempt to fluster her doesn’t work. Maybe that is why he enjoys being near her so much, she isn’t as easily controlled as everyone else, and he’s noticed over time that she actually does have a couple of similar tricks as his up her sleeves as well.

She looks up at him and he’s almost insulted by her perfectly controlled expression, feigning complete boredom, like his last line hadn’t even landed. “I wasn’t staring, I was wondering.”

“Where.. did you even get those tattoos?”

Now she really has his attention. “The guys who tattoo the psychos are really terrible at it, but yours look actually, well, professional.” His ECHO keeps beeping and flickering, frantically alerting him that he should have left and been on stream, but this little rascal just hit a real sweet spot, and there is no way he’s going to leave right now.

The urge to smile was too strong, and he lets out a soft laugh as she continues to look up at him, so confident and relaxed in his presence despite being barely taller than his navel. Even without realising it, she just appreciated his work. He’s the artist behind the iconic Calypso tattoo on his chest. It was a long process he’d taken his time with after coming to loath the shitty arm tattoos he got from some jackhole years ago. He’d stopped trusting others to tattoo him and taken up the craft himself. The skull on his shoulder was the only older one that looked at remotely decent even before the siren tattoos burned right through it, and he was grateful the rest had been burned through badly over time.

He puts his hand around his hip and pushes his coat aside, leaning back to stretch the taught lines of muscle across his inked abdomen and chest to give her a better look.

“Well that’s because they were done by a professional, not some scumfuck idiot. Why so curious about it anyway, sweets?” He croons, enjoying the way she shifts on her feet slightly.  “You fancy on gracing that little body with some art yourself? Maybe something to honor and please your God?”

Using this moment to her advantage, she dares to take a step nearer to him to get a better look at the tattoos. From a closer look, it’s clear that it’s been a while since he’d gotten them, the ink slightly faded against his warm coffee toned skin. The most interesting design is of course the skull that’s hidden behind the hanging chains around his neck, and she wants a better look at it.

Pushing her boundaries yet again, she slowly reaches towards them and carefully shifts them out of the way, gently brushing her fingers against his skin in the process. It would be easy to miss how his breath hitches a little when she touched him, or how goosebumps blossom across his chest, but she was way to close to not notice. He glares intensely at the top of her head, glare burning right through her, and even though she doesn’t look at him, she feels it.

When she finally lifts her head to look into his sapphire eyes, she swears she notices a hint of blush on his cheeks above the wolfish grin. Against her will, the corners of her mouth turn up into a smile. God King Calypso is a very interesting mess of a man once you start to see past the act he plays for most people. Though he is extremely confident and intimidating on the outside, she’s started to suspect that inside hides a shy little boy. Even still, regardless of those slightly red cheeks, he never loses that aura of danger, and she’s nervously aware that she is playing with fire right now..

Why is he so proud of this tattoo? She’s only seen him act like this around something he’s responsible for. Maybe it’s the skull and the rest of the design… He is the creator of almost all of the propaganda art the COV uses, so it wouldn’t really be surprising if he had designed his own tattoos, would it? She crosses her arms in front of her chest and perks an eyebrow as she considers how to respond.

“Yeah… I would love to get some nice tattoos as well, but I don’t trust any of those psychotic bastards to get remotely close to me, let alone touch me…”

“Maaaybe the artist that tattooed you could give me a hand and help me out with mine?“

It’s not a secret that the God King despises bandits. They are below him, and many of the bastards had been killed just for getting too close to his liking. The only reason her and the Tinkers aren’t ever reduced to steaming piles of viscera for daring to interact with him is because they are useful, smart. Of course he wouldn’t let any of those bandit idiots do this tattoo… which means the person tattooing him has to be someone at least modestly sane, someone she could trust. Thats exactly what she’s looking for, since avoiding bandits in general is the best decision regardless.

She notices how much her last question has pleased him… His smug smile grows unnaturally wide, the amount of teeth starting to show is giving her a bad feeling in her guts, and she swallows nervously before be finally replies.

“You want the artist to help out with yours? Oh surrrre I can.” he rumbles triumphantly, and she feels her stomach drop as she realises what’s just happened.

“Finding the right canvas for my art is never easy, but I’m very interested in working on yours.” Her eyes widen further as he leans down to her so that predatory grin fills her vision, just so he can enjoy her surprise from up close.

Now she finally understands why he was so pleased. So eager to discuss this. So happy to play along. Not only did he design his tattoos, he tattooed them as well.

This wasn’t what she wanted at all. It was fine to chat with him about some tech or shared interested when he was in a good mood, but the God King was still a power she did not want to play with. She could get burned, badly, even when she knows he doesn’t hurt anyone from his team as long as they are obedient and respectful.

She desperately tries to get out of this fast. “Ah.. um.. well.. I didn’t really decide on any design yet, I really need to get that right first!” Convincing as that sounds, he navigates around it instantly, too clever to let her slip out of his grasp so easily.

“Oh no problem, I can design something great for you, that wouldn’t be a problem at all.” She swears his eyes are burning through her as her cheeks redden. “Oh, um, I was actually thinking about getting a piercing first, for a start?” his smile grows wider. “After all these years spent here, I don’t even have my ears pierced. The holes grew back together, maybe that would be a good start..”

This is exactly why she doesn’t like being alone with him. He’s so good with words, twisting situations to his own benefit. A sly snake, he does anything he can to get what he wants, and he always gets what he wants…

The ECHO in his hand beeps again, giving her a moment of hope, but he ignores it completely, all attention on the shaking woman he’s got trapped in his coils.

“Well lucky you! I’m really experienced with both tattoos AND piercings!” Now it really is too late, he has her trapped, cornered by her own words. He’d picked up on her twisting and changing her opinions just to try and get out of this, and made sure he was a step ahead of her each time.

“Come to my workshop tomorrow morning the same time you normally start work, we can… hmm…  map out some ideas together.”

“See you later Ari.”

A cocky wink later and he finally leaves the room, leaving the poor girl standing there hopeless….

#troy calypso #borderlands 3 #borderlands fanart #Borderlands OC #fanfiction #(kinda) #borderlands fanfiction #Ari #fanfic #oc #original character #bl3 #short story #au #borderlands #Ariana-Serino

[missorgana]

interrupt me

pairing: finn/poe dameron

fandom: star wars (sequel trilogy)

rating: teen and up

word count: 2502

warning: swearing

summary: Finn wants Poe to be his boyfriend, so badly, it's sort of unbelievable he hasn't asked him already. But he doesn't know how. (high school AU)

(finnpoe week 2020 is here yall!!! so excited for my baby event tbh. annddd here’s my first fic for it, i chose high school au bcus well im cheesy ok. if u want to enter finnpoe week with me you can check out the event blog and my post here!! hope you enjoy this fluffy mess!)

read on ao3

“So?”

When Finn realises this is the only greeting he’s getting from his best friend, he gives her a semi-awkward chuckle, as he always does when he can’t quite figure out what she’s on about.

Very much not the first time.

“So… what?”

And she raises her eyebrows in an offended look.

Offended in the only way Rey can be, because she’s never seriously been mad at him, mind you.

“I can’t believe you.” she simply tells him, opening her locker in the process.

Okay, maybe Finn has an idea of what’s frustrating her. After all, she texted him about it last night. A text he was keen to avoid at that time.

“I got your text, I swear-”

“And you didn’t respond because of the reason I suspect?”

Man, Rey really should be a psychic or something. Kind of freaky how she’s always two steps ahead of him.

Her annoyance did fade slightly when Finn let his defeat show.

“I know, I promised you.” and he tells her while shoving the chemistry book down in his bag, the bell interrupting before he continues, “But, I, uh. It just wasn’t the right time, okay?”

Rey’s shoulders are still tense, she huffs, but ultimately shrugs.

“You also said that after your last three dates, you know.”

He does know. Yes, he knows too well.

Long story short, Finn’s been going out with Poe for nearly three months now. Exactly, pretty Poe, the prettiest person ever in the entire world, probably.

The boy who asked him out after many history lessons of looking at each other in secret, and talks of doing homework together that only resulted in giggling and gushing about Hozier.

Well, Rey thinks it’s about time they became official. Like, officially a couple.

She does this because she loves Finn, and she loves them, and yes, he wants Poe to be his boyfriend, so badly, it’s sort of unbelievable he hasn’t asked him already.

But see, he doesn’t know how.

Or of course, he knows the words, but it’s like, whenever he’s with Poe, his mind implodes and revels in whatever they’re doing, and at the end of the day, he’s none the wiser.

They’re on the way to class, and they’re gonna be late either way, so Finn asks his best friend, “I know. But, you know, what if… I mean, what if he doesn’t want to?”

Rey still looks at him in all her stubbornness, but rubs her shoulder, clearly sensing his worry.

His worry goes deep, because yes, they’ve been going out for three months, but, you know, Poe’s like the star of this school. Star of the student council, if anything.

Finn just can’t help doubting himself. Wondering, Poe’s too good for him, or maybe, Poe hasn’t asked him because what they have, what made him ask out Finn isn’t there for him anymore.

He hopes none of that is the case. But he’s always had a habit of overthinking.

“I love you.” she tells him, a certainty in her voice, tugging on his arm just a bit so they won’t be in real trouble with Ms. Holdo, “And he’s so lost in you. I know it’s scary, but he isn’t asking, and if you don’t ask, nothing’s gonna happen.”

She’s right. So right.

So he links their arms and runs down the hall, figuring it speaks louder than words.

…

Finn finds himself thinking a lot.

This isn’t exactly unusual, but, you know, sometimes he overthinks.

Seriously, he knows he needs to ask Poe already.

But his concerns aren’t crazy, okay?

He’s actually already met Poe’s mom, last month, albeit it wasn’t planned. It was maybe too fast. They’re going fast. Or what?

Rey’s assured him enough times now that three months is a perfectly healthy time to become an item, or whatever you call it.

It’s not like they’re popular. Poe’s got a bit of hype, but he’s not at the top of the food chain.

And you know, reputation isn’t all that matters.

Or he tries to tell himself that, because what if it is to Poe?

Before his best friend made him promise to make the move, as she calls it, she was visibly upset, perhaps more than himself, when the other boy hadn’t asked him first.

Maybe he’s just as nervous as Finn. Like, it’s valid, right?

But also, Poe’s been in a couple of relationships before, and yes, that might not sound like much, but Finn’s never been serious with anyone prior to this.

And he didn’t really think it would bother him until now, where Finn ponders his inexperience, and might be edging towards a mental breakdown in the middle of the history lesson, when said boy on his mind touches his hand under the table.

Yes, Rey was only bitter for a few days when the boys started sitting together, “leaving her behind”, as she called it. But she doesn’t really mind now that Rose transferred, he’s sure.

Finn always thinks Poe wants to borrow a pencil when he touches his hand, or has a question, or something mundane.

But he might be getting used to Poe reaching out just for the sake of the touch, sooner or later.

Only the other boy whispers when Ms. Holdo has her back turned, “You okay?”

Oh, so he can tell. That’s great.

No, really, it’s great, because this boy’s so empathetic, when he’s not fiercely protective, or sarcastically defensive.

Finn wonders if he’s thinking of the same thing.

He actually got started on a question last time, some form of it, anyway, but they were not so generously interrupted by some of Poe’s friends, Jess and Snap, he’s pretty sure. That scared him off. Embarrassing, he knows.

Besides, it was like, ten minutes, and Poe seemed just as embarrassed, and they more or less cheered them on. Lovebirds, they called them.

“Ignore them, please.” the other boy told him, like, a million times. He was so cute blushing like that.

If only Finn hadn’t abruptly chickened out when he tried to get the question, instead distracting Poe with whatever he saw first, which, very fitting, was ice cream.

Man, the other boy eats so much ice cream, he has to admit he’s slightly worried about his health.

He’s got a lot of things to worry about, huh.

“Of course I am.” he whispers back, and fuck, he’s just barely caught when Ms. Holdo turns around, and he’s got this feeling like Poe doesn’t believe him, but the conversation’s over like that.

The boy’s smile is a reassurance. A little bit, at least.

…

Is he avoiding Poe? Or is Poe avoiding him?

Finn doesn’t really know, to be honest.

They haven’t seen each other in, what, four days now, because he’s letting his head get the best of him, and he declined the boy’s offer to accompany him for the football game, instead having another nerve wracking conversation, filled with possible ways his crush could call them off.

Rey probably thinks he’s overdramatic, but she doesn’t say, and spends a good two hours calming him down, because she’s lovely.

It isn’t just a crush anymore, Finn realises.

God, he likes him, so much.

And on their last date, it started raining, like in every cheesy teen movie ever, and when he couldn’t hide that he was freezing, Poe, of course, gave him his jacket.

It’s just too much.

Not long after his phone call with Rey, his roommate returns from the game, and Rose tells him that Poe missed him.

Does that make him feel good or bad?

They text a lot.

Like, late into the night a lot, to a point where his sleep schedule might’ve gone for the worse. He’ll restore it sooner or later.

Anyway, Poe seemed like he had something on his mind yesterday. At least, he was taking a while to answer, and usually, his texts keep flying almost a second after Finn’s replied.

But whatever he felt coming never came. The other boy had to go, that is, and Finn thought, maybe this time, he’ll ask.

Or maybe he was looking for a sensitive way to break up. Shit. He wouldn’t break up with him via text, though, surely? Poe’s respectable. He’s got manners.

Or maybe the world just doesn’t want them to communicate anymore, ever, and will just continue to interrupt them, which is rude and totally unfair.

Even at the library this guy, honestly, he can’t remember the name for his life, but this guy had some issue with a suggestion of Poe’s in the council, which he apparently felt the need to bring up then.

The curly haired boy in front of him gave an, “I’m kind of busy, right now.” three times before the other student, finally, minded his own business.

Maybe Poe thinks Finn doesn’t want him around him anymore after avoiding him. Why does he do this?

He hates conflict. It can die in a pit.

Even though it isn’t a conflict, like his best friend so wisely told him, maybe he’s just a bit stupid, or maybe his worst nightmare is true and Poe doesn’t want anything serious.

His head feels like it might explode.

The girl discarding her shoes shoots him a weird look.

Of course, she can tell he’s nervous, just as much as Rey, or probably anyone else, at this point, but Rose has developed a sense of knowing when Finn needs to be left alone.

So, she brews them both tea and lays down with her headphones on, but not before handing him something cold and metal, which turns out to be a pin.

It’s a tiny yellow sun.

Finn doesn’t have to ask who it’s from, or who he’s hoping it’s from, anyway, because the boy is so utterly cheesy that he’s compared him to sunshine on more than one occasion.

Even more cheesy that Poe got him a gift relating to a stupid nickname. But also, he loves it. Loves it a little too much.

It’s ridiculous.

So he’ll opt to sleep now, tugging Poe’s jacket a bit tighter around him.

…

Poe’s suggested to skip school today, and Rey swears she’ll nag Finn to no end if he doesn’t go along, so here he is.

Of course this boy wants to get ice cream.

And of course he knows a perfect place, as he says, which, surprisingly, is a junkyard filled with old cars, which Finn sees little wrong with.

He’s pretty sure the rich people in this stupid town probably discard these for the newest model. Poe laughs and agrees when he voices his thought.

When they’re side by side on a blue Corvette hood, ice cream and marshmallows long gone, it’s silent, except the other boy’s humming.

Maybe this is the right time. Or the worst time. Wait, he can’t think like that, he should listen to Rey.

Finn might as well get it over with, if the worst case scenario is really gonna happen, right?

And so he decides to open his mouth with his thought along with him, only Poe does the same, and there’s a small cluster of “Hey-”s and “Oh-”s and “Sorry”s.

So maybe the boy has decided to end it on a good note, like a goodbye date.

Could be worse, right?

“I was thinking, uh…” Poe begins, but it doesn’t seem to end, and Finn nods him along, and sits up straighter, maybe it’ll be easier to bite the emotion in him like that.

“Yeah?”

The boy chuckles at himself.

It’s like he doesn’t want to look at him, cause he’s keeping his eyes on his lap, but then, gaze turning towards Finn again and biting his lip.

“Do you want to be my boyfriend?”

And Finn’s ready to deflect, to shrug off the hurt, get up and leave, when, holy shit, what did he just say?

Exactly the thing he wants him to say? Exactly the thing he wants to say? Unbelievable.

He’s got to have a few seconds to process that. Which is probably what makes Poe freak out, because he’s suddenly, almost, taking the words back, “If you think it’s too fast I understand, I-”

“No!” he exclaims. A bit louder than he wanted, alright, good thing this yard’s practically abandoned.

“No, Poe, I really want that. Like, oh my god.”

“Really?”

The nods are eager, and Poe’s smiling so much brighter now. Finn can barely hold himself from copying it.

“But seriously, I thought you’d break up, or I mean, stop our dates or something.”

Now that offended look is familiar, has Poe been spending time with Rey? Could fool him, at least.

He almost gasps, which reminds Finn how truly ridiculous he is, when he’s not keeping up his status in debate.

“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?” he asks, and yes, is the answer, and Finn can’t help feeling bad, so he tries to make it better by touching his hand, the same way the other boy’s got the habit to in class.

“Yeah, I mean, I thought maybe I wasn’t good enough.”

Now Poe looks distraught, like Finn told him a puppy died or something, and Finn wants to shrug it off, but the boy meets his lips before he gets the chance.

Okay, he would call this a rude interruption, if he didn’t like this so much. He’ll let it slide, just this once.

“Who put that idea into your head?” Poe says, like he’s already out of breath, it’s adorable, “You’re, like, God. Too good to be true.”

And instead of answering Finn continues this cycle of kissing his boyfriend’s lips and cheek and neck, really, they’re a lot better at this than talking.

It’s so much nicer than talking too, but Poe has to finish his sentence, he assumes, “I would’ve asked sooner, you know. But I feel like everyone keeps interrupting us lately.”

It’s like their minds are one, Finn’s sure Rey’s gonna roll her eyes at them after this.

He almost can’t speak when they’re both laughing, and Poe’s touching his face, now, that’s what’ll take up his mind, “Me too.”

Honestly, Finn would let the boy say more, if he wasn’t his boyfriend now, right, so when Poe is starting on a rant of those exact problems, there’s really no other choice than direct him away from the negativity and back to kissing him again, because he loves his voice, but that’s just about enough talking now, he thinks.

“Boyfriend?” and of course, Poe laughs again at that, tipping his head back, but quick to turn his gaze back, because every quirk just makes him even more pretty.

“Yes?”

And he replies, “Can I interrupt you, though?”, not even waiting for an answer before he’s pulling him in for the millionth kiss, it seems, cupping his neck and tugging on his hair.

It’s impossible that Poe can smile even wider, surely, but he does.

“I guess I’ll allow it.”

#mine #my writing #swedit #finnpoeweek20 #stormpilot #swcreators #queernet #eloquencenet #star wars #finnpoeedit #usernessa #sabrinasfamily #meghansfamily #fanfiction #sw fanfiction #mlm #tw: swearing #fluff #getting together #implied rey x rose #pov finn #teen and up #usersari #usersthea #<333

[necrowriter]

monday thing: april 27th (the myriad challenges of growing)

it is the last Monday in April, warm and sunny today after a cool, wet weekend. many of the trees in the back woods were hit badly by a late, hard frost, which has made the view outside my window look oddly like early hot autumn. there are so many young green leaves gone brown and dead. the poplar tree in particular is all over brown and I worry about it. but today there is a lot of green out there glowing soft in the sun, so I will take that as a good sign.

it seems like a good day to think about gardening.

for a lot of my life I have thought of myself as having a black thumb, unable to grow anything. I kept plants in my dorm rooms all throughout college, lined up on sunny windowsills and carefully packed back and forth at the end of every semester. some of them lasted longer than others, but they all died in the end. I still remember bemoaning the loss of a mint plant to a friend and getting the incredulous response how did you kill mint?

during my last semester I had a labor position at the college greenhouses. for reasons too lengthy and bothersome to go into here, I had to stay on an extra semester in the fall and graduated in December. also for entirely different reasons too lengthy and bothersome to go into here, I was determined to not spend that semester working in the same place I'd been in for the last several semesters. the greenhouses weren't my first choice, but it was the first one that was willing to accept someone coming in new for only one semester.

bit of a misnomer, that: the 'greenhouses' were one glass greenhouse, several plastic hoop houses, and a few assorted small fields, along with a processing and packing building; a small shed-like building with a bathroom, an office, a sink and a fridge where we kept water bottles and a pitcher of gatorade; and a clearing in the woods that was home to a truly enormous amount of compost-in-progress. they grew produce and herbs, which were either sold locally or used by the college cafeteria.

working there left an impression on me, I think.

it was hard work, and I'm not a very physically sturdy kind of person. I also have no tolerance for heat, and more of that semester was hot than it wasn't; it was worst at the beginning, in late August, where I often found myself out working in the mid-90s, a temperature range I can barely abide sitting still in. even when the hottest days were past, that tail-end of summer clung on tight for a long time afterward. days warm enough to need a cold wet bandanna tied around my head popped up well into November.

it brought out a fear in me that is rarely far away: of falling behind, being lazy, not being up to the task. I was sure that I would find myself getting told off for not working hard enough, or accused of shirking. but it didn't happen.

"it is pretty hot out here," my supervisor said when I started getting sick on one of my first days on the job, out picking tomatoes with her in one of the fields. "you better go sit in the truck for a bit and drink some water. don't pass out on me."

I sat in the truck and drank some water, and did not pass out. we finished picking the tomatoes, and went back and sat outside the office-shed and drank cold gatorade. never in my life had gatorade tasted so good.

the other thing I discovered was that I liked gardening.

it seems a bit of a cliche but I was surprised to find how much satisfaction I got from watching seeds that I had planted start to sprout, or helping harvest enough butternut squash to fill up the back of the pickup truck. I worked through podcasts and audio books while weeding plots in the hoop houses or washing and boxing sweet potatoes alone in the packing house on a cold Saturday morning. I helped plant things, and water things, and pick things. it was hard sometimes, but I was able to do it.

then I graduated, packed up the houseplants from my dorm room windowsill, and went home, and watched them die.

well, I suppose a part of it's this: when you're having a hard enough time looking after yourself, it's perhaps not surprising to find yourself struggling to look after anything else as well.

sometimes it's easier. sometimes you need to look after something else; sometimes watching something else grow gives you what you just don't get from the care and keeping of your own self. but sometimes it just becomes another task on a list that already feels too long to bear.

but there have been other obstacles, and it's only in looking back now that I'm starting to piece together what they were.

so let's talk about ADHD and houseplants.

it wasn't something I knew I was dealing with while I cried over homework and watched my plants die on the windowsill in college. depression and anxiety, sure. I figured that much out well before I was ever actually diagnosed with either one. but ADHD was not a consideration at the time. sometimes I would look at a list of symptoms and think could it be...? but then I would shake my head, close the tab, and admonish myself that surely having ADHD did not look like getting straight As and showing up to all your classes on time, no matter how many anxiety spirals you went down at one in the morning.

so if I didn't realize ADHD was a problem there, you can bet I didn't realize it might have anything to do with the plants. I just kept admonishing myself over and over: come on, just remember to water them. is that really so hard? surely you can do it if you try.

when I finally got my diagnosis I started thinking: well. hm. maybe that explains something.

memory is the most obvious thing that comes to mind. remember to water them, or remember that you did water them so don't do it again now or they'll drown. remember to put this one out in the sun, and take that one away. did you repot that one like you were going to? no, you didn't, and it's been a week. have you ever fertilized any of these? lord! I'll do it when I've finished this paper. it's half past midnight. I'm going to bed.

etc.

but--like most things that have to do with ADHD, as I've been perpetually discovering the past two years--it's a bit more complicated than that.

you get a plant. you saw it at Lowe's, or Wal-Mart, or Trader Joe's, or the nursery while your mom was buying tomatoes, and you knew you probably shouldn't have, but you couldn't resist. you want to try again. you always want to try again. so now you have a plant, and you don't know much about gardening but you at least know that the tight little plastic pot it came in is probably not optimal growing conditions for anything, so you'd better do something about that.

only, you don't know what this particular plant needs and you don't have anyone on hand to ask. so you have to look it up. you google it. (if you're lucky enough to know what it is--if not, you have to find out, setting you back even further.) you find several websites with information about this plant. you open one. you stare at it. you go back and look at another one. you stare at that one for a while too. the information is not entering your brain. all of these websites seem to have slightly different information. you try to coalesce this mix of information into a series of steps you can follow and fail utterly. at this point you probably close your laptop and, now too frustrated to think about this anymore, decide you'll get back to this later.

(you probably will not.)

ADHD makes it hard to do anything that requires a series of steps. on bad days, this includes things like making lunch or taking a shower. you sit there thinking about how many different things you have to do to make a sandwich (get the bread out, get the peanut butter out, get a knife, get a plate, put the peanut butter on the bread, god, it never ends) and each step feels like its own task entirely and it's just too damn much to even think about so you sit there and scroll tumblr endlessly while getting progressively hungrier and crankier.

that difficulty increases tenfold if the steps required aren't clear to you. if you have to actually work out what they are yourself? and then go do them?

forget it!

and then--and then!--you have to retain that information. you have to remember for each plant: this is what it needs, and this is what I need to do and this is when I need to do it. the plant is not much help in this regard. the plant will not shout at you in the morning like a hungry cat, nor will it pop up a handy notification telling you when it is too dry or too wet or has had too much sun or not enough. certainly there are some indications it will give you--but you have to know how to read those, too, which brings us back to the first problem.

the amount of information you need to be able to keep in your head about a plant may not seem like very much. certainly it apparently isn't to many people, or we wouldn't have gardens in the first place. but ADHD doesn't tend to give you a choice about what knowledge you're going to be able to hold onto well enough for any of it to be useful. sometimes you can read up on something and then the moment you look away from the page, it's gone. sometimes you can take in the information, but will only be able to recall it at erratic times, which will almost never be when you actually need to do so. and sometimes you will absorb an astounding amount of information, but this will almost always be about something like Pokemon which has fairly limited applications for everyday life. if I could remember and reliably access as much information about my plants as I can about the making of the Lord of the Rings movies, I'd never be in this mess in the first place.

suffice to say, while remembering to water the dang things was a significant problem, it certainly wasn't the only one.

and that, I eventually realized, was why I could garden just fine at the college greenhouses, but couldn't seem to do so on my own. it wasn't--as I'd started to suspect--that I had some foul curse on me that killed everything I touched. I didn't radiate something that killed off any plants in my radius. and I wasn't incapable of doing the tasks required, or of understanding what those tasks were and why they were important. it was figuring it all out for myself, and then remembering it, that was getting in my way. when I showed up to work at the greenhouses, I was told what I needed to do that day, and if I didn't know how to do it, I'd be told that. and, barring the occasional problem of heat sickness or sensory overload while dumping food waste in the compost piles, I could go do the job just fine.

when I look back at that semester, I realize it didn't only teach me that I could do gardening, and get enjoyment out of it. one thing I will tell you about why I left my previous labor position: part of why I was miserable there is that I often wasn't given clear instructions--sometimes not any instructions--and thus spent a lot of time feeling miserably incompetent and behind everyone else. I'd have to choose between asking for clarification on something I seemed to be expected to know how to do, or risk doing it wrong and getting told off for it.

god bless my supervisor at the greenhouse! before giving me any new task she'd check to make sure I knew and fully understood what to do. she made it clear that I could ask questions, and if I did misunderstand something she didn't take me to task for it, just explained what I'd done wrong and how to do it right. it has become a valuable experience to have had as I am still trying to work out what I need to do things without so much pain and anguish over it.

when it comes to gardening, I don't have much in the way of answers yet. I don't know the secret key to dealing with all of these problems well enough to keep my houseplants alive and healthy. I'm still working on that. I'm sure there is an answer. I suspect it may involve a lot of writing things down, and possibly a lot of sticky notes with "WATER ME" written on them.

but I think--for all that I have tried and failed at this many times by now--

I think I'd like to try again.

so maybe I will plant some flowers this week.

and we will see what happens.

#nonfiction #monday thing #monday thing april 27

[paintedrecs]

For the fandom talk meme thingy: C (not trying to start drama I swear), I, K, R, and X. =D

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will.

Hmmm, there are a few ways of answering this. One is by listing all my NOTPs, which would be excessively long and ultimately boring because it essentially boils down to “anyone else with either member of my OTP.” I monoship my primary pairings, so I’m pretty strict on what I do and do not like. 

(With the way fandom is now, I should clarify that NOTP means that I personally do not like a ship and I therefore go out of my way to avoid it - by muting terms, carefully filtering tags and search results, curating my own space, etc. It doesn’t mean I think the ship is badwrong or that anyone else should stop shipping it. It just means I do not ever want to see it.)

This feels a little less specific on that front, though, maybe more just: people like this and I’m meh about it?

So Allydia comes to mind. I don’t hate it, and if the Sterek’s good enough I’ll still read a fic with them as a background pairing, but I don’t ever like it as a romantic ship. While I ship Lydia with lots of different characters, including Cora, I’ve always seen Allison as straight, so I suppose that’s part of it? And I love Lydia & Allison as bffs - I see them as entirely platonic, like Scott & Stiles, so introducing romance just doesn’t work for me.

Another one is Sheriff Stilinski/Peter Hale. I...I don’t understand it. Unlike the last answer, this background pairing will prevent me from reading a Sterek-central fic.

I - Has Tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

This turned into a complicated and kind of roundabout answer, so I’m putting the rest of the questions under a long-post cut!

I stopped frequenting tumblr for two main reasons:

that whole weird purge thing that made me think everyone was leaving, so I just gave up, which might’ve been premature cause it seems like folks are still going strong on here

the emergence of antis, specifically within the Voltron fandom (although they’re everywhere at this point)

There’s a saying in fandom now: 

“Why is the younger fandom generation like this?!??” “Tumblr raised them.”

For me, for years, tumblr was a really wonderful space where I had a lot of great conversations and read very thoughtful threads that helped me to learn some important things about myself, other people, and a world much wider than my own.

But I was an adult when I joined this site, and it really does seem like there’s a whole new crop of kids who have no actual context for ideas like social justice, the need for canonical representation in our media, and a lot of other things that eventually got folded into a big ball of disconnected rhetoric that they now fling as hard as they can at the heads of fandom creators who are committing the ultimate sin of creating content for ships they don’t like.

It’s late, and I don’t feel like getting into a whole Essay Rant about all that.

So on an entirely personal level, I quit running appreciatejack (my Check Please/zimbits/Jack Zimmermann blog) because someone sent me really vile hate for daring to ship Shiro/Keith from Voltron (two unrelated adults in a cartoon). It’s why I turned my ask boxes/anon/chats off on most of my blogs, and then eventually just...got tired of running them.

When I started up appreciatederek, I got a couple asks from people who wanted to know if it was going to be multiship or just Sterek, and when I said it was Sterek, they presumably went off to find other things they were into, because I never heard from them again. Y’know, the reasonable reaction. And then the rest of it was wonderful: finding content for it, and getting responses from people who enjoyed that content.

I thought appreciateshiro would be similar, but it was all so messy from the very start. The Sheith tag was FULL of hate. I was initially checking it every day, trying to find artists and writers and gif-makers to reblog and encourage and support, like I’d done in Sterek fandom, but instead I’d spend literal hours blocking people who came into that tag just to talk about how much they hated the ship.

Every day, I’d look for content for my OTP, and every day I’d come away from it angry and sad and frustrated. I never seemed to run out of people to block. And they never, ever seemed to run out of hate.

It was exhausting. It made me reluctant to go on tumblr at all. And eventually I just...sorta stopped.

So the answer to this question is more, I guess, “fandom made me stop liking tumblr, and in the process I stopped liking most fandoms.”

I’m sure you can kinda tell from the fandoms I’m currently the most invested in.

I love Sterek, and I will always love Sterek. Part of that’s the ship itself, of course, and part is because I had an incredible fandom experience with it. People within this fandom are still really great - always so welcoming and super excited about new content, even so many years on.

Otherwise, my current fandoms are kiiiiinda tiny:

Xanatowen (Gargoyles), which currently consists of exactly 2 people and 12 fics (3 of which are mine).

Trevorcard (Castlevania), which only has ~200 fics on AO3.

Taibani (Tiger & Bunny), which is an oldish fandom with only ~600 fics on AO3.

Remember, I came from a fandom that has SIXTY THOUSAND fics.

So while I feel very lonely and very sad about the low content levels in these fandoms, they’ve also given me the space to let go of some of my fandom hurt & anger and remember what it’s like to just...peacefully love something. I really miss just loving things and talking about loving those things and searching for other people who also love those things without running into....thousands upon thousands of people who HATE that you love that thing.

(Until I wrote all that out just now, I actually hadn’t realized how much this had still been hanging over me, or why I was so hesitant to come back to “reclaim” a space I’d once been super active and happy in. Essay over! Next questions.)

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

Answered here!

R - Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

Answered here! 

X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Found family. This is probably a big part of why Sterek was my first real fandom, because the idea of Pack makes it incredibly natural to build out relationships beyond just the central romantic pairing. 

It doesn’t have to be a werewolf thing, though. I’m honestly not hugely fond of the whole puppy piles concept - I’m less interested in “biological urges make characters literally physically all snuggle up together in bed” than I am in the actual build of the friendships, and the concept of choosing people who will become the family you’ve been missing for whatever reason.

Maybe it’s reconnecting with biological family, or maybe it’s discovering that your friends have been filling that space for you all along, without you even fully realizing it. (The concept of “home” is another big one for me. Home is where your heart is etc etc.)

And hey! Now I can pull back in another question from earlier: about “pairings” that I might not have initially considered. As I suspected, I do have more! Mostly platonic.

For instance: Derek and Sheriff Stilinski becoming bffs. I thiiiink I can probably tie my ABSOLUTE LOVE of this concept back to HalfFizzbin’s can't be hateful, gotta be grateful. And then Cupboard Love really has to be the source of ALL my alive!Hales feels, which also includes folding Stiles into their family.

Fic is largely responsible for building out Derek’s relationship with Boyd, Erica, Isaac, his sisters...making them into an actual pack and friends and family in the way the show never bothered. And frankly while I don’t like canon!Scott at all at this point, I love his friendship with Stiles in fics, and I absolutely believe Stiles and Lydia would be amazing friends once he got past his crush on her. I’d point to another fic here, owlpostagain’s will to follow through, as the ultimate source for major Team Human feels.

So yeah. I’m always going to be drawn to stories about family, in whatever form that takes, particularly if it’s one that’s a little bit off the normal white-picket-fence path.

In Tiger & Bunny, it’s Barnaby joining the Kaburagi family, and learning how to be a dad and a friend to his new husband’s daughter.

In Gargoyles, I’m completely obsessed with the (canonical!) idea of a family that consists of a man, his wife, their son, and the chaotically loyal fae babysitter/tutor/third parent. It is not a stretch to tweak this the tiiiiiiniest bit to turn it into a nontraditional family structure of a man, his wife, his son, and his fae boyfriend. Honestly.

In Castlevania, the fic that made me sob my eyes out at one point does something the show would absolutely never. It gives Alucard the time to rebuild his physical home while befriending the people in the little town that crops up around it. It’s about Trevor and Alucard falling in love, but it’s also about them making a place for themselves in a world where that kind of comfort and stability and friendship is so badly needed.

I think we all kinda need that in our world right now. So I love being able to find it in fic, for the characters who’ve grown to mean something to me.

#meme #fandom talk #long post #littlerosetrove #did tumblr seriously break my read more and stick it up in the ask section #i don't even know #thanks tumblr

[glorious-blackout]

Summary of Junior Doctor Life during a Pandemic - Part Three(ish):

We have new junior doctors! Their roles are rather limited - they can’t prescribe, can only do 8-hour shifts with no overtime, and are banned from working in COVID wards - but they’re keen beans and eager to help whenever a set of bloods or cannula needs doing. It’s similar to the ‘Preparation for Practice’ block I did at the end of Uni, only unlike me they’re actually getting paid AND don’t need to get lots of stuff signed off by supervisors 😂 

We prepared for the worst and it thankfully hasn’t happened. Our Red Ward is no longer a Red Ward - our area for suspected COVID patients has been moved and is now shared with Ortho and ENT - and despite some tweaks, we’re slowly returning to normal duties. Given that there was once talk of our department hosting a palliative ward for COVID patients too unwell for ITU, I’ve never been more grateful for an anticlimax.

That’s not to say we’re out of the woods though. Our ITU and specialised Red Wards are still seeing their fair share of cases. On top of that, while ITU staff have access to the WHO approved PPE, staff in the Red wards have the same PPE we do, i.e. a plastic apron, surgical mask (not fitted) and gloves. As a result, apparently as many as seventeen nurses have either contracted the virus or had to self isolate for another reason. One of my FY1 colleagues contracted COVID-19 from dealing with a sick positive patient during a night-shift, as did all other members of her team despite wearing PPE. I’ll admit that a lot of this is hearsay and we’re prone to jumping on the rumour-mill, but considering similar stories are being told across the country, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Most patients are nice and understanding when you need to put in a cannula, but there’s always one who calls you a bitch repeatedly and tries to punch your arm when you’re trying to put a needle in theirs. C’est La Vie.

A Cardiac Arrest in the Midst of a Pandemic:

My first experience of a cardiac arrest during the pandemic occurred during a night-shift and was about as horrible as you can imagine. The patient had tested negative and had no symptoms, but the guidelines now are to treat all patients as though they could have COVID-19 regardless. The gentleman had been complaining of pain for the past hour, and barely five minutes after I arrived on the ward to look through his notes, his nurse called for help because he appeared ‘vacant’. He was startlingly pale by the time I arrived and his hands were freezing, and though he had a pulse he was completely unresponsive when we tried to rouse him. One of the nurses ran to call for the arrest team while I went to page my senior, and by the time the team arrived there was no pulse. 

Our new guidelines dictate that only a small number of people can be in the room with the patient and they all need to be in full PPE - including gown and fitted masks - so there was a mad rush for essential staff to don this while the rest of us were chased away and forced to watch from the corridor. I stayed there to offer what little information I knew from reading his notes - I hadn’t met him before so that’s all I had - and eventually had to run to A+E to process a blood sample, but for the most part I was useless. The list of likely causes quickly dwindled and any attempts at treatment failed. Despite ten cycles of CPR, there was ultimately no response and time of death was called after an agonising twenty minutes.

Dealing with an expected death or someone who is clearly unwell from the start is one thing, but when someone deteriorates that quickly with a bad outcome, the aftermath can leave you in a daze. The patient’s nurse was shaking and we had to convince her to sit down and have a cup of tea because she was beating herself up over what she could have done differently (the answer to that was nothing - she was amazing). Even I fell into that trap - I had been paged about the man half an hour earlier for a pain review, but had been called to see another patient with breathlessness first and had deemed that the priority. Logically I know that me being there half an hour earlier would have made absolutely no difference - hell, he’d been sitting up and chatting to the nurse five minutes prior to his collapse - but those are the thoughts that nag at you in situations like this. 

For our student nurse, it was her first ever experience of a cardiac arrest. It was my first in a while - most of the deaths I’ve dealt with in surgery have been patients too unwell for CPR. Even the senior leading the arrest team admitted at the end that it was the first time he’d ever had to call ‘time of death’. But perhaps the worst thing of all was the fact that when the patient’s family came to see him and were visibly distraught, the nurse who accompanied them was unable to offer comfort because of the need for full PPE. She admitted to us afterwards that she’d felt terrible and could only say, “I’m so sorry, I wish I could give you a hug.” It went against all her natural instincts to be so distant. 

The surreal reality of living in a pandemic became clearer in the aftermath. Despite the patient’s negative result, the fact that aerosol generating procedures (e.g. attempts at intubation) had been performed meant his bay had to be deep cleaned by staff in full PPE and left unoccupied for up to an hour. In a panic, one nurse had brought the full arrest trolley into the bay (apparently the guideline now is to leave it in the corridor and only bring essential equipment like the defibrillator inside when needed) so it too needed to be sterilised and was out of commission for an hour, leaving us all very paranoid about the health of the rest of our patients. The patient’s loved ones were thankfully able to see him once the area had been cleaned, though they too needed to go through the rigmarole of donning PPE beforehand. Even during the arrest, one of the registrars was constantly forced to run to the door to ask for more supplies/background information, when only months ago she would have been able to delegate those tasks from the patient’s bedside. The fact that we’re all so unused to these new rules meant we were floundering more than usual, though thankfully the doctor in charge was direct enough to keep everyone right (something he later apologised for, though in all honestly we’d needed the kick up the arse).

With all the talk of lifting the lockdown and returning to ‘normal’, I can’t help imagining how much worse this situation would have been if the patient was positive. How much slower our initial response would have been because of the need to don full PPE before even going in to assess him. The risk to staff members in the vicinity associated with aerosol generating procedures during resuscitation. The horrible likelihood that his family would not even be able to say goodbye after he passed away. For many people this isn’t a ‘What-if’ - this is what is happening every day. People are dying alone by the thousands while their families anxiously wait for a phone-call to bring them news, rather than sitting by their loved ones as they should be. That knowledge makes the protests over the lockdown or talk of lifting it prematurely feel all the more ridiculous to me. You only need to log on to Twitter to see footage of people already gathering in crowds or breaking lockdown rules during VE day, and while I understand the frustration with lockdown, I really wish more people appreciated just how badly we need it. 

I know nobody following me needs to hear this, but *please* follow the official guidance closely and try to remain as safe as you can in the coming weeks and months. And in light of the official guidance getting vaguer by the day (with Westminster recently changing their slogan to ‘Stay Alert’ rather than ‘Stay Home’), please assume that it’s much safer to stay at home, rather than risk going out regularly under the assumption that everything’s better now. A second wave shouldn’t be made inevitable because of government incompetence.

....Aaaanyway, lecture over 😉 Hopefully the next installment (whenever that may be) will be a return to the usual shenanigans - I much prefer keeping these posts relatively lighthearted. And as it’s worth pointing out: things really are improving, slowly but surely. It’ll just take a concerted effort on everyone’s part to keep it that way.

#medicine #covid-19 #it's worth pointing out that when I say things are getting better - that is very much from a scottish perspective #and I still fully agree with the decision to extend the lockdown here #we're still at the point where a second wave could hit if we aren't careful and the first one was bad enough #also most of this was written before Westminster decided that 'Stay Alert' was somehow more definitive advice than 'Stay Home' #to which I'll say - follow our girl Nicola Sturgeon's advice and stick to the latter if you can #junior doctor shenanigans #long post

[lettersofwrittencollective]

The Pull (32/?)

Summary: The Ragnulf’s are one of the oldest lines of werewolves known. A gift from ancient times was given to the line. Though not all of the line will experience it. There are some who will experience a Pull. This Pull leads them to their true mate, a soulmate. The problem is, just because the wolf finds their true mate does not mean that they are the same for that person.

Author: @lettersofwrittencollective 

 Pairing: Stiles x Hale!Cousin OC (Reader)

Word count: 2795

Warnings: Angst, threatening an adult? (I still have no idea how to do warnings, so if you feel any need to be added please let me know) 

A/N: Feel free to let me know your thoughts!   😘

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Sighing, you put your phone back in your pocket. 

“What’s wrong?” Allison asks as she comes up to you and puts an arm around you. 

Leaning your head on her shoulder you close your eyes for a moment before responding, “Derek hasn’t found Stiles or even any leads and Peters not answering. Something just doesn’t feel right.”

“Is it like the other night?” your friend asks and when you don’t answer, she clarifies, “With Stiles being missing. You had said you didn’t feel right all day long.”

Remembering that you had, in fact, had that conversation with her, you smile at the fact that she remembered. With everything going on, you had forgotten about it yourself. 

“Nah, it’s not that same. There was a sense of something coming then. This feels like - like… something’s terribly wrong.”

“Well Stiles is being controlled by a Nogitsune,” she reminds you softly and you pull back, adjusting your body so that you can look at her. 

“That’s just it though Alli, there’s this feeling like,” you pause and shake your head trying to come up with the words, “It’s like - there’s a push and a pull. Like heaven and hell themselves are pulling at me and I don’t know what it means…”

“Well, you’re definitely struggling with something,” she pointed out and tugs you to sit with her, “Your eyes have been flashing to purple and back quite a bit today. Do you wanna go look for him?”

You want to, Odin knows that you want to but- “Isaac needs me here.”

Ally puts her arm around your shoulds and pulls you into a hug, “Stiles needs you out there. I don’t know what it is but he means something to you.”

“Isaac does too,” you try to explain. It’s not that you don’t want to be there for Stiles it’s that if you go, there’s no one that can take the pain from Isaac again. Scotts gone ahead to school but you had stayed behind. 

“True, but if something else happens to Stiles, I suspect you’ll handle it much worse than what you’re handling with Isaac,” her voice is soft and reassuring, telling you that it’s okay. 

You go to argue with her but she puts up her hand, “It’s okay Tasha. You can go, any changes I’ll make sure you’re my first call.”

Sighing, you nod your head, “Alright but first, I need to get back in there for just a moment.” 

You watch as her face transforms from confusion before understanding. “You can’t,” she rushes out. 

“I can and I will. I’ll take on whatever I can so he can rest easier. It should also help with the healing process.”

Before she can argue further with you, you get up and move to find Melissa. It doesn’t take you very long to find her. Thankfully, you’ve caught her just before the end of her shift and she agrees to let you in to see Isaac. 

Taking a deep breath, you steel yourself for a moment before heading into the room. It doesn’t take you very long to take more of Isaacs pain and once you do, you have to force yourself to stay upright. It takes your body a little bit longer to adjust to the pain as you were still feeling the aches from the Pull and the pain from earlier. Taking a few deep breaths in and out, you allow it to dissipate slightly before making your way back into the waiting room with Allison and Mrs. McCall. 

Before you walk in you school your features and 

“So where are you gonna start?” Ally questions. 

Smiling at her, you run your tongue across your canines, “The nogitsune is a fox. I think it’s time to go visit another fox.”

“Kira?” 

Nodding your head you ask Melissa if she can give you a ride to the power station where you had left your bike yesterday. Once you get your bike yo make your way to the school.

Thankfully, you arrive during a passing period and are able to find Kira in the halls. She’s walking with Scott down a set of stairs. Calling out to them, you get both their attention and they make their way over towards you. 

Scott nods his head at you and you focus in on the words. Kira’s the one talking, “...Kitsune are tricksters. They’re mischievous. They don’t really get caught up in right or wrong or even understand it.”

“What’s that mean?” Scott questions, “It’s just doing this for the hell of it?”

“No,” Kira shakes her head, “That’s just it. Something else I found. If you somehow offend a kitsune it can react pretty badly.”

By this time they’ve reached you and you ask, “So how do you offend a Nogitsune?”

Kira shakes her head, “I don’t know. But if it’s doing something this bad, someone really, really offended it.”

The bell rings and students make their way to classes.

There is someone that would know about Kitsune, your Wolf speaks up. 

It takes a moment but you realize exactly who she’s  talking about. Telling Scott and Kira that you’ll catch up to them later, you turn down a hallway and make your way back around the school towards the classroom you’re looking for. By some stroke of luck, it seems that this is Mr. Yukimura’s free period. 

Taking a breath you reach within, Think you can remain calm enough to be with me in this?

We won’t kill him. 

Chuckling you agree to the hand. Allowing your Wolf to step closer to the forefront you open the door and walk into the empty classroom. 

“Natasha,” he says, surprise in his voice. “What can I do for you?”

“How does one offend a Nogitsune?” you ask without preamble. 

He’s silent for a moment and you hear his heartbeat slow to an almost stop before he says,  “I’m sorry, Ms. Ragnulf, but-”

“See I would believe you but the thing is I saw what Kira did. She picked up that electrical wire and stopped it with her bare hands,” you continue as you stalk towards his desk. “Now I may be wrong but from what I remember there’s not many creatures that can do that. In fact, I don’t think there’s any outside of a Kasai and Sanda Kitsune’s.” 

“Yes, I believe those are popular Japanese myths,” he says with a placating smile. 

“Look Mr. Yukimura, you seem like a nice guy, the problem is that your wife is hiding something,” you point out to him, getting frustrated with the conversation at hand. “I heard her tell Kira, that now’s not the time for anyone to see.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says calmly and you would almost believe him if you hadn’t heard his heart slow for just a moment. 

You flash your eyes at him and, unsurprisingly, he has no reaction. 

“You know,” you begin, “a heartbeat changes rhythm when you’re lying. But it can also change right before a lie.  When you know you have to control the heartbeat. If Stiles gets hurt anymore because of your lies I promise you, there isn’t a hole dark enough you can hide your fox in.” 

“Are you threatening me?” he asks as he pushes himself up to stand. 

You smile, “So you do know something...”

“I think it’s time you leave. We never had this conversation.”

Flashing your canines, you chuckle and nod your head, before walking towards the door. Opening it, you step outside before saying, “Sure we did. You promised to help me save my friends.”

The closing of the door behind you is cut off by a high pitched sound. It takes you a moment but you realize that it’s an ultra-sonic emitter hunters use. Following the sound down, you reach the basement before you see the twins running. 

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Scotts run after them and you see that one of the twins has Stiles pushed against a locker. You let out a roar and launch yourself after him, he turns to growl at you but you snarl back and watch as Aiden recoils in fear, letting go of Stiles. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you see someone turn to Stiles. Placing yourself in front of him and turning, you come face to face with Scott. You give him a warning growl and he looks surprised for a moment. He takes a step back and moves to get something and you growl again. 

He snarls at you, and you can feel him pushing his Alpha behind the snarl. Before he’s had a chance to blink, you’ve reached your hand out towards his neck, and are returning the snarl. Your Wolf, who has been hanging on by a thread, is pissed and you can feel her asking for blood. 

Scott’s not responding to your grip and so you begin to apply more pressure. 

“Natasha…” you hear Stiles, “Let him go.” 

You shake your head, “He’s trying to hurt you.”

“No… He was trying to get Ethan and Aiden off me. It’s okay.”

You don’t let go at first but Stiles continues to repeat that it’s okay and eventually you let go of Scott. He takes a gasping breath of air before he rubs his neck and looks at you, asking if you’re okay you nod your head, “Bitches tend to be a bit more protective is all.”

Scott slowly looks towards the twins for confirmation and they give a minute nod before the room falls into silence. 

You take slow deliberate breaths, trying to control your breathing as Scott and tells Stiles that it’s really him. 

“I don’t know where I’ve been the last two days or what I’ve been doing but this is me. I promise,” he reassures. 

“You know what happened at the hospital?” Aiden asks, accusation lacing his words and before you can rip out his throat Stiles is responding. 

He’s crossed to a duffle bag and pulled something out.

“You see this?” he asks as he holds up the paper. When no one says anything, he begins to unfold the paper and continues, “It’s a blueprint of the hospitals electrical wiring.”

Once the paper is unfolded, he presses it down, “You see all these markings in red? That’s my handwriting.”

You, Scott and the twins move closer to Stiles to take a better look at the blueprints. 

“I know I did this. I caused the accident,” he sounds calm about it and you and Scott share a look with each other. 

Somethings not right. 

“Everything in this bag,” Stiles grabs Scott's attention, as he puts away the blueprint. “It’s all stuff that could be  part of something bigger.”

You look in the bag and start to dig through it. There are chains and wires and electrical tools that you don’t recognize. 

Aiden lifts something that looks like an electrical saw to you that’s been broken in half. 

“What the hell have you been up to?” He asks Siles. 

You look at the electric saw and then at Stiles, who is silent. Calling his name, he looks at you then Aiden, “I think something worse. A lot worse.” 

Moving together, the group of you start to unpack the bag. 

Finding rope, wire, arrows, chain lengths and electrical bits that you don’t really know or understand.

You notice that Stiles isn’t with your group for a moment and start to panic before turning and seeing him pacing not too far. 

Walking over to him, you place a hand on his arm, “Stiles?”

He turns to look at you and you but won’t meet your eyes. You reach out to cup his face, in an attempt to turn his gaze towards you but he quickly shuffles out of your arms reach, almost falling in the process. 

This isn’t right, your instincts snarl. 

“Stiles?” you call again, but before you can ask anything else, Aiden's voice breaks in. 

“What the hell where you doing? Building a Terminator?”  You turn to see that he has chainlink, rope and a few other odds and ends on the table in front of him. 

“Thank you for that,” comes Stiles’ sarcastic answer and you have to try not to chuckle. 

“Guys, this is a map,” Scott says as he pulls out another piece of folded paper. 

You see that it is, in fact, an old school paper map. The kind you get from travel agencies. Stepping to the table, you take a closer look at the map and you see there’s a red line.

“Hey guys,” you point out and trace the red line. 

“Isn’t that the cross country trail?” Aiden asks.

“The what?” 

“No,” Scott clarifies, “That’s the Tate car. Where Maila Tate’s family died.”

“You mean that’s where her father put the steel-jawed traps,” he points out. He’s careful to keep his hosts features more worried than excited. 

The girl can tell something is wrong. Well, the wolf in her can at least and it’s not time for them to be aware of just what it is he has planned. His host is still bound but it won’t take long for him to fight free and when he does, he’s going to make sure it isn’t without cost. 

Though the fact that the Wolf would protect his host's body from threats, real or perceived, was going to make the game much more interesting. 

“Guys, we need to get everyone off that trail.”

He watches as the group of teenagers nod their heads and immediately move out of the basement room they’re in. 

You’re making your way towards the parking lot when you hear your name being called. Turning, you see Lydia rushing towards you. 

“Natasha,” Ethan catches your attention, “we really need to go.”

Lydia ‘s eyes land on the brunette next to you and you watch as she launches herself at him “Stiles! Oh, thank God you’re safe!”

Letting go of him, she pulls back and cups his head as she looks him over, “Where have you been? What have you been doing? Are you okay? Do you know what’s going on?” she fires off without letting him answer. 

You watch as he takes his hands in hers and brings them to his chest before kissing her knuckles. You can feel your Wolfs hackles rise, Relax. She’s just happy to see him. I think we all are. She’s not trying to hurt him. 

You’ve seen how much her rejection hurts him. She should stay away. 

Drop it, you warn,  this is his friend and they’ve been through a lot. 

Your Wolf forces a growl past your lips and suddenly everyone around you stops and looks at you. Confusion and questions look back at you and you can feel yourself warm at what you had just done.

“Sorry,” you mumble, “We just need to get to the cross country trail.”

“Right,” Stiles agrees with a nod of his head. He apologizes to Lydia, “We need to get going. I promise we’ll talk later.”  

He, Scott, and the twins continue towards the parking lot and you’re about to follow when Lydia calls your name again like she just remembered you were there, to begin with. 

“Go, I’ll catch up,” you tell the boys when they turn back towards you. Locking eyes with Scott he seems to hesitate for half a second before he nods his head and they’re gone. 

“What’s up Lyds?” you ask the Banshee.

Banshee.

Shit.

You can feel your eyes widen and you take hold of both her arms, “You’re not hearing anything are you?” you demand of her. 

“What? No,” she shook her head, “I was gonna ask you why Peter’s talking to my mom.”  

“I’m sorry what?” 

“Peter. Talking to my mom.” Lydia repeats the main points and you shake your head, Peter hadn’t told you he was back in town. 

“Lydia, I didn’t even know he was back.”

“Where was he?”

“Looking for an exorcist. Or John. Someone who could help with this Nogitsune thing,” you pull out your phone to check and there are no messages from Peter. 

“Look Lyds, I’m sure it was nothing. But if you’re worried about it, I’m sure he’s at the loft. But I need to go help Stiles with this thing and steel-jaw traps.”

She opens her mouth and you’re sure that she’s going to argue with you but then she closes it and looks at you. Giving her your best pleading look, begging her to understand, she nods her head. 

“Alright. Go help them save the day.”

Thanking her you give her a quick hug, which she returns before you make your way out of the school to your bike.

-

-

-

<<Prev || Masterlist || Next>>

tag list: @nicole-lynne @fandom-princess-forevermore @capandbuck @biles-bilinski-24 @stiles-o-dylan24 @fiveisadorable  @falling-stars-never-cry  @blueraindrops @its-livelovelife @screamxqueenx94 @ceceliaking-18 @jasmineshwayze1994 @dear-vista @fangirlbitch02 @riseandshinelittleblossom @jessicakimba @truthdaze @seninjakitey @kateeee0817 @squadkyoya @lucifersnipnips @niawoods​ @pansexualbitchesofhell​ @bloodrose-scythe​ @fox-in-a-mousetrap-8​ @findingmyselfinthismessedupworld​ @shantayok​ @yougottalovefandoms​  @that-idiot125​ @booklover240​ @southsiderepresent​ @walkingdeadfan25​ @cutiepiemimi13​ @luckyfriess​ @all-will-be-well-love​ @marauderskeeper​  @peachyinparis @-thatgirloverthere-​  @softpeteparker​ @Readingkate17 @humbledarkness​ @xceafh​ 

Was unable to tag the bolded ones. 

Do not copy and paste my writing anywhere without my consent. This work is the property of lettersofwrittencollective . Associated characters belong to MTV and are being borrowed for this work, all OC’s are the property of lettersofwrittencollective. These works contain material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of these works may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

Posted 04 July 2019

#Stiles #Stiles x reader #stiles stilinski #stiles stilinski x reader #Stiles imagine #stiles imagines #reader insert #stiles stilinski imagine #stiles stilinski imagines #teen wolf #teen wolf insert #teen wolf rewrite #teen wolf x reader #stiles teen wolf #teen wolf fanfiction #teen wolf imagine #teen wolf imagines #The Pull #series #my writing

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

ANYWAY the other weird thing about this is that like... ok so you know how the severity of both chronic illness itself and the degree to which it upsets you fluctuates from day to day, but geeeenerally on any given day the severity of the first one engenders that of the second? and how this means that sometimes after several good days in a row you'll get sort of emotionally deconditioned to the toll it takes, and then it'll smack you in the face.

and you'll spend a day (or a week) moping, not just because you lack the energy to do anything else but also because your mental horizons are too narrow and fuzzy to want to think about much else. and the only consolation you can think of is the company of others in your situaiton--but you don't have any actual friends with eds or pots so you make do with lurking. you watch some youtube videos by people with the same illness as you; you scavenge from the piles of tumblr accounts by people who mostly just reblog each other (so you've seen most of the memes even before the binge begins) and deliver occasional harrowing health and personal-life updates; if you've hit a really low point, you google "[current most frustrating symptom]+[diagnosis you have and know/suspect is behind it]" and end up on the inspire forums, where you read threads and threads of thirdhand advice badly explained by other people's doctors, until they start to sound like conspiracy theories by which point you know it's time to close the tab--but anyway.

anyway, when you start to feel better enough to want to do things again, but not quite well enough for your efforts to stick to the wall, you think, "i should do something about this. i deserve to feel better." so instead of memes and health updates you scroll the more respectable front-facing community blogs and open like six tabs of msaterposts of Resources. the most interesting links are usually broken, but the few that still work lead to medium listicles: 17 kinds of icepack people with EDS swear by. nine brands of compression stocking, six of which you haven't tried yet. 14 braces that actually work (asterisk). 25 off-label medications. seven new ways to try cbd. but also, most importantly for this post, stuff like, 11 ways to make showering easier with a chronic illness. four of the suggestions cater to complaints that don't apply to you; three more you adopted five years ago, and seem so obvious now that it takes some effort to remember they're not condescending--just appealing to a less-seasoned reader. two of them you've tried and rejected, as adding an extra step to the showering process does not make things easier, thank you very much. and the other two are... products.

(fucking post-length limit. TO BE CONTINUED i guess, like a fucking twitter thread.)

#existential fart chart