Steve watched Eddie's van turn the corner and shut the front door, closing himself away from the outside world so none of his neighbors could see him as he rested his forehead against the painted wood.
"I'm not going to cry," he told himself.
He said it even as his eyes began to burn and his face began to twist, teeth grinding and throat closing. He wiped quickly at his face, again and again, as he stumbled to the couch to sit, drying each tear as it rolled down his cheeks, clinging to his jaw.
"I'm not going to fucking cry," Steve choked, and then doubled over into himself, arms around his thighs, and he began to sob.
So what if he was twenty-two, living in his parent's house alone, working the same dead-end job with a sixteen year old manager. So what if all his friends and family were in college, spread out from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. So what if his boyfriend was moving to Seattle for his band and they broke up, because Steve was never going to be his parents, resenting and being resented for keeping his partner from his dreams. So what if he was too scared to ask Eddie to stay, to ask Eddie if Steve could go with him. So what if everyone moved on and Steve couldn't?
Steve grew up lonely. He could get used to it again.
He didn't realize how hard he was crying until the front door burst back open and Eddie hurled himself at Steve's feet, long limbed and clumsy and babbling.
"Baby, oh fuck, I'm sorry," he said, already untangling Steve from himself, tying all his loose ends back up together with his until they were a knot of their own. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Stevie. I never should have— I wanted to—"
"I'm sorry," Steve sobbed back. He gasped and swallowed it all back down. Eddie had already gotten them raveled up again, it would take forever to pick it back apart. Steve knew it would hurt worse this time. "Fuck, Ed, you didn't have to— I'll be okay, I don't want to hold you back—"
"Come with me," Eddie burst.
And Steve couldn't help himself, and began to sob again.
"Please," Eddie begged over Steve's crying, his voice shaking and his face wet enough to match Steve's. "Please, sweetheart, honey, please just come with me?"
Steve took a shaky breath, embarrassed and now too full of hope and fear. "You sure?" he whispered. He pressed his face into Eddie's neck, breathing him in again for what might be the last time, again. "Eddie, don't—"
"I'm so sure," Eddie said. "I'm so fucking sure, Steve, please."
"Okay," Steve breathed. Eddie had always been the braver of the two of them, especially when it counted. Steve leaned back so he could look at him, red faced and watery eyes. He tried to give Eddie a smile, but he knew it was wobbly and weak. "Okay."
All of Steve's fears meant nothing as he watched the happiness break like dawn over Eddie's face.
3K notes
·
View notes
[ID: Digtal fanart of a fan story featuring Reigen Arataka and Serizawa Katsuya, as well as some other Mob Psycho 100 characters. The 1st drawing has Reigen kneeling atop a work desk, background bathed in grey static as small objects such as paper and cigarettes surround him. Corded phone in hand, he's glancing up desperately. Above him, Serizawa's figure is tinted blue while he also holds a phone up to his ear, back turned as a flow of color connects his heart to Reigens. The vague outlines of Kageyama "Mob" Shigeo, Kuratara Tome, Kageyama Ritsu, and Suzuki Shou float at the top, all appearing anxious or upset. The words "Dream Dial" covers Hanazawa Teruki and Dimple amongst the group, though the words are removed in the cropped copy shown in the last image. A related illustration under features Reigen, sitting in a dark, eerie office cubicle as he flips through a small notebook, glancing at a corded phone on his desk that glows from its small screen. On said screen, the word "Unknown" is spelt out. The other cubicles are empty, only occupied by people with water coolers for heads, and the words "Dream Dial" again appear in the corner. The last two images are cropped close-ups of the first drawing. End ID]
Had to draw some fanart of my favorite MP100 fic, Dream Dial by Alakazamboni!! It's yet to be finished but still totally worth the read if u like MP100 and Serirei
You can check it out -> here <- :]
202 notes
·
View notes
so. my laptop is Deceased, which means I don’t have half of my pdf library (because I wasn’t able to back it all up yet. weeping and wailing), and THAT means that I have a much smaller pool of texts to work off with and cite, so. this is a much more direct glimpse into my thoughts when I’m reading ancient sources and don’t have the poetry of scholars to direct my imagination
anyway, the tris homines alliance is also an informal club for people that had weird but formative relationships with sulla. like. a real Make Them Worse situation happened there. crassus becomes someone who is half shadowy rumor behind every dealing in the eyes of others, pompey and caesar drag rome back into civil war, sulla says that caesar resembles marius but it’s sulla’s playbook that caesar later runs. everyone dies in places where they do not expect to die.
Plutarch, Caesar
Plutarch, Pompey
Plutarch, Crassus
Rome, Blood & Power, Gareth C Sampson
Sulla: The Last Republican, Arthur Keaveney
The Defeat of Rome: Crassus, Carrhae and the Invasion of the East, Gareth C. Sampson
520 notes
·
View notes
if we should protect children because they are vunerable, this means you would protect cruel children who bullies people who different than them then. the children who responsible to trauma for someone else's entire years
You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.
"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.
You don't protect kids so they can get a free pass for bullying or tormenting another child. You protect them because kids are impulsive, emotionally reactive, and profoundly social (which means deeply impressionable) human beings who are still learning & processing insane amounts of information every day about what it means to be alive, to be alive as yourself, to be alive as yourself with other people. Protecting them is realising that you can't isolate the responsibility of a 10 year old from the bigger responsibility of the literal grown adults around them, adults who are in charge of teaching them about the world and how to behave in it. Whether you have children of your own in the future or not is completely irrelevant to this; we all become those adults eventually--no matter what happened to us as kids.
157 notes
·
View notes