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harmonyindark245 · 1 year

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One Last Time [Chapter 7]

Summary - Elain and Azriel have known each other since they were 11 and had never been separated. But when their view for their future no longer matches, things break apart between them, causing a rift which had never been fixed. Elain goes on to become a neurosurgeon, while Azriel works for the deadlier part of the community. Ten years later, their lives get entangled as they cross paths, this time stakes much greater than just their hearts.

An: All characters belong to Sarah J. Maas

Warnings: Mature language, violence, alcohol consumption, smoking, drugs

Hope you all enjoy!

Masterlist

Songs:

Lose You To Love Me - Selena Gomez Perfect - Selena Gomez Ghost of You - Selena Gomez & the Scene

Azriel woke up in immense pain.

He looked around and found himself in his own bed, a sling around his left hand and a bandage wrapped around his waist. He groaned, not remembering anything after he stumbled on top of Elain.

The door opened and he found Elain standing there, with a glass of water. She paused when she saw him, and she instantly moved towards him.

“How are you feeling? Are you feeling any pain?” Elain questioned, placing the glass of water on his bedside, and checking the IV stand beside him.

“How long have I been unconscious?” He questioned, his throat parched.

Elain handed him the glass along with a tablet, which he took without a fight. “It’s only been a day. You lost a lot of blood, and we weren’t in an exactly sterilized condition, so I thought you might have died from sepsis.”

Azriel frowned at her. “I thought you were a doctor.” He breathed out.

She looked at him angrily. “Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t operated on someone in their dining room with no proper equipment and alcohol!”

He just closed his eyes and let go of her hand. “Well, apparently your dream college wasn’t that helpful.”

She stilled. “That’s a low blow.”

He huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, and I had a god damned bullet in my arm, so kill me for being fucking pissed at you for leaving me.”

She slammed her hand down onto the bed in anger. “You’re really gonna blame me?! I wasn’t the one who cheated with some cheap slut! That was all you!” And then, she stomped her foot. She couldn’t believe she actually did that.

“Elain-”

“No. I loved you with everything I had. More than I ever loved anyone in my entire life, only to find you sleeping with some girl whose name you probably wouldn’t even remember 10 years later. I gave birth to your child and it almost killed me in the process! Do you have any idea how much it hurt to look at him and see the face of the boy who literally broke me?”

“El-”

“Oh and let’s not forget how you crashed my fiancé’s ball and kidnapped me along with my child and have kept me here for an entire week!”

“El!”

She glanced at his expression filled with pain. She then realized she was squeezing his injured arm. She grabbed her hand back and distanced herself from him. Az rubbed his arm, hoping to relieve the pain slightly.

“I’ll ask someone to bring you some food, then I’ll get your medicines. You should rest.” She walked out of the room, leaving him alone once again.

~~~~~

Elain was sitting at the dining table, scrubbing a spot on the table that was stained with blood. Apparently, blood stains were relatively difficult to get rid of. The entire house was bustling with men, Rhys and Cassian opting to stay the entire time. Daemon had gotten up early as usual and had been slightly unsettled by the newcomers. He had then questioned about Azriel. Elain had just informed him that Azriel had been injured and was resting. After that Daemon just asked permission to stay in his room and to be informed of when his father awakened.

That itself had unsettled Elain further.

However, she had told Daemon that Azriel had been up in the evening and since then Daemon had stayed by Azriel. It slightly stung that her son would rather stay with Azriel than her, but she didn’t blame him. They had ten years to make up for.

“Ellie,” A hand grasped her own wrist, pausing her scrubbing motion. She glanced up to find Cassian looking at her with slight worry. “I think it’s clean enough. I’m pretty sure even Az’s snobby ass won’t mind.”

Elain just nodded and made to get up when Cassian placed both his hands on her shoulders. “I think you should rest. Let the others handle things, okay? It’s not our first rodeo, you know?”

Elain’s face crumpled at the thought of this happening before and Cassian instantly engulfed her in a hug. “It’s okay. He’s safe. You saved him, Ellie.” He hummed softly.

Elain just clung to him harder. “He was so close to dying. I was so scared, Cass.” Elain sobbed into his shoulder and he just held her, rubbing her back soothingly.

~~~~~

Azriel woke up with a groan.

This time, not feeling pain, but immensely stiff.

He turned his head to see Daemon engrossed on the iPad Azriel had given him. He tried moving his hand, only to find it in a sling. He sat up, ignoring the pain, and cleared his throat.

“Good morning,” Daemon said softly, looking at him carefully. Azriel smiled at him.

“Mom’s with Uncle Lucien. And she left medicine for you.” He pointed at the side table, which had 3 orange pill bottles along with a water bottle. “If you need any help I can call one of the men that are downstairs. They’ve been here for the past two days. Uncle Cassian and Rhys were also here, but they usually come in late.”

Azriel got up on his own and went to his bathroom. He looked in the mirror and slightly winced at his condition. He looked like he had been run over by a truck. He freshened up and returned, to find Daemon still engrossed in his iPad. He wondered if a kid should be allowed that much screen time.

“Hey Daemon, um, want to play a game?” He asked unsteadily. Daemon looked at him, his eyes bright with happiness.

“Sure! What should we play?” He turned the tv off and looked at Azriel expectantly.

“Um, how about, we ask each other a question and we have to answer it truthfully?” Daemon looked at him with furrowed brows but then nodded happily.

“Okay, so I’ll go first. What’s the best gift you’ve ever got?” Azriel questioned.

He thought about it for a minute and then smiled. “Ooh, I know! On my fourth birthday, mom gave me a blue bunny. She said she had one just like that when she was little. Also, the same one that kind of exploded in your room.” He frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t like that anymore.”

Azriel withheld a sigh. “Don’t think about that, okay? You and your mother are safe and that is all that matters. Your turn buddy. Ask me anything.” He told him with a smile.

“Where were you all these years?” He asked with an innocent face. His question blew Azriel away and he blinked twice.

Azriel fidgeted with his sling and looked everywhere thinking of an answer. He turned and saw Daemon still looking at him waiting for an answer.

“There were some things that kept me away from you. But trust me, if I had the chance, I wouldn’t have left your side for a moment.” Az told him sincerely. Daemon nodded at him and then said, “Your turn.”

“What was it like? Living with your mom and everything.”

“It was nice. Momma would always come home from work and play with me. We’d go out every weekend. She even took me to Disneyland along with Uncle Lucien!”

“How about Graysen?” Azriel wanted to know how that man had treated his son.

Daemon’s bright face fell into a frown. “Graysen was not that good. He usually never came to our house. But whenever he did, he would be really mean and would always shout at momma.” Azriel clenched his fists at the thought of someone shouting at Elain. “And whenever momma wasn’t there he would always say mean stuff to me.”

“What kind of mean stuff?” Az asked with a hoarse voice.

Daemon shook his head and glanced down. Azriel looked at him carefully and spoke up. “My dad wasn’t a nice person.” Daemon snapped his head up at him. “He would hurt me and my mother. When I was 9 years old, he hurt my mother really badly and he hurt- he hurt me too.” He involuntarily gazed down at his own hands.

“Did he do that?” Daemon asked softly. He nodded, his gaze not shifting from his scarred hands. Azriel heard a rustling noise and footsteps and then suddenly Daemon was beside me.

He took Azriel’s hand in his own and gave it a soft kiss. “Mom says that a kiss fixes things.” Azriel held back the tears that pooled in his eyes. Daemon then pointed to a small scar on his forehead. “I got hurt when Graysen pushed me into his desk. It was bleeding, but he got it fixed. He told me to tell mom that I fell on my own.” Azriel looked at him with furrowed eyebrows. He felt anger raging inside him, the thought of someone hurting his son made him homicidal.

“Promise you won’t tell her? I don’t want her to feel bad.” Daemon held up his pinky. Azriel reluctantly interlaced it with his.

“I promise.”

Daemon smiled and sat back when the door opened and Lucien walked in with a man and Elain behind him.

“Oh look Elain, he’s awake! You didn’t kill him!” Lucien exclaimed and Elain punched him on the shoulder, her face turning red.

“Shut up Lucien. I already knew that.” She muttered.

The man behind him cleared his throat and Azriel instantly recognized him as Lucien’s father, Helion. “Azriel, nice to meet you. Unfortunately, it’s in these circumstances.” Azriel nodded in greeting.

“Gramps!” Daemon got up from his seat beside Azriel and ran towards Helion who spread his arms and lifted Daemon as he neared him. “Dae! It’s been so long!”

“Um, Helion, why don’t you do what you are here for?” Elain said uneasily.

Azriel narrowed his eyes at Lucien who smirked. “Elain here believes her attempt at saving your life was subpar. So, to assure her that she did not damage your body, we brought in a specialist.”

“He’s a trauma surgeon.” Elain pointed out. “He has better knowledge than I do and well, I haven’t even completed my residency, so.” She shrugged and Azriel groaned, not liking that he would have to go through a whole checkup.

~~~~

After completing his checkup, Elain led Helion out of the house, thanking him for taking the time to look at Azriel.

Helion hugged her before whispering in her ear, “You need to talk to him and put both of yourselves out of your misery.” Elain just nodded in response. Lucien also left soon, claiming to return the next day.

After dinner, Daemon also moved upstairs to his room, preparing for bed, which left Elain alone with Azriel. He was working on his laptop, frowning at something on the screen. She cleared her throat before questioning, “How are you feeling?”

Azriel looked up from his laptop and gave her a soft smile. “I’m feeling good.” She smiled back at him. “I don’t think I’ve thanked you for saving me. Thank you.”

Elain shook her hand, waving her hand as well. “No need. I had no other option but to help you. The Hippocratic Oath and all.” Azriel frowned slightly. “I didn’t exactly save you, I just-”

“You saved me. I would’ve died if you hadn’t done what you did.”

She averted her eyes. “I just didn’t want Daemon to lose his father.” She got up and busied herself with taking out his medicine, placing them in a paper cup, and handing them to him along with a glass of water.

“Nesta wants you and Daemon to come to her daughter’s birthday party” He suddenly said.

“Her daughter?”

“Tootsie?” He said, probably wondering if I knew who that was.

“I know her name. It’s just, I didn’t expect Nesta to invite me over for anything.” Elain answered softly.

“Yeah, well she called me and said that she would really appreciate it if both of you were there. Will you go?” He asked softly.

She widened her eyes. “Of course, I will. I’d love to go!” Then she looked down. “But, I would need to buy her a gift and everything and I don’t know if I have clothes to wear to a party-”

“Elain. It’s okay. I’ve gotten her a gift card, it’s all Nesta wants anyway.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off. “And regarding the clothes, I thought Feyre and Nesta brought a few over?”

“Yeah, they did.” She said meekly.

“Good. Wear those.”

She nodded but didn’t look at him.

He sighed and placed his laptop down on the table. “Elain, we need to talk.”

~~~~

She had just nodded and left, saying that she had to change. So even Azriel had gone up to his room and had managed to get into my sweatpants and a black t-shirt. By the time he reached downstairs, she was already sitting on the couch wearing a set of dark blue PJs.

He cleared his throat and sat on the couch opposite her. She had an entire bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand while Azriel just had a small bottle of water in front of him.

“You know how my dream was to go to Adriata and then live our lives there?” He asked her and she scoffed.

“Of course, I remember. It was my dream too.”

Azriel inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. “I didn’t get in.”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “What do you mean you didn’t get in? Your GPA was better than mine and then you even had football.”

“I don’t know, but I wasn’t accepted. And there you were, so excited that you had gotten accepted. I knew that if I told you that I hadn’t been accepted, you would have agreed to stay with me and go to Velaris University.”

“Of course, I would’ve. It wasn’t that important.” She said stubbornly.

“But it was. I didn't want to be the guy who would hold you back. I couldn’t be that guy whom you would resent.”

“I wouldn’t have resented you then. But what you did, made me resent you much more than normal.” She said softly causing him to inwardly groan.

“I didn’t know how to tell you and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to break it off with you, so I-”

“Cheated?” She asked mockingly. “Hurt me? Made me feel bad about myself?”

He shook his head ruefully. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

“But you did Az! How else would I feel when I find my future husband sleeping with someone else?!” Her breathing fastened.

“I never slept with her.”

There was silence for a moment and then she started laughing hysterically.

“You really expect me to believe that?” She said in the middle of her laugh.

“Yes, I do.” He said carefully because god only knew what was going on in Elain’s mind.

She took a gulp from the bottle in her hand and wiped her mouth before she started laughing again.

“Elain, I’m serious. Stop making a fucking joke out of this.”

She instantly stopped and glared at him, hatred filling her eyes. “You just told me that you didn’t sleep with the girl whom I found in bed with you. That it was all just a ploy to make me stay away from you so that you won’t crush my dreams.” A single tear ran down her face. “Azriel, you’re the one who made it a fucking joke ten years ago.”

Azriel’s eyes softened and all he wanted was to sit beside her and hold her once again. “Elain, I was only a kid. I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. I did what I thought was best. And there is nothing else that I regret more than that.”

“What about the girl?” She asked softly, her gaze averted.

“She worked for Rhysand’s father and agreed to help me fake it.” Elain bit her lip and looked at him with sad eyes. “I didn’t even touch her, I couldn’t.” He added.

She shook her head as if she were trying to process everything. Azriel expected her to yell at him, maybe even cry. But he never expected what she would say next.

“I was so pissed off that day. A night before your birthday. Probably, the first birthday I had spent without you in years. I had every intention of getting drunk and spending the entire day in my room. But fate had something else planned.” She smiled sadly as she wiped a few tears. “Around 1 in the night, I felt this - this immense pain from my stomach. Lucien thought it must have been alcohol poisoning. But I knew it was more. It was something much more.” She let out a hollow laugh. “I thought I was dying. Something I was willing to accept. I had already left my heart and soul in Velaris. I was as good as dead.” Azriel looked down at the floor, unable to meet her eyes.

“Lucien took me to the ER and guess what they told me? I’m going into fucking labor.” She shook her head and took another drink from her bottle. “They took me inside, all alone in the pain, and three hours later I was holding my son in my hand.” She sniffed and wiped her tears again, her eyes red-rimmed. “He was so small and weak. The only thing I could think of was how I failed as a mother even before my child was born. How I was a failure as a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, and even as a mother.” Her voice cracked and all Azriel wanted to do was go to her and hold her. Tell her that she didn’t fail as a mother. That she wasn’t a failure. That he still loved her. But he didn’t. He knew he didn’t deserve her forgiveness. The last thing she needed was for him, the man who ruined her life, to be near her. “Then, he opened his eyes.” She smiled sadly. “He had your eyes.” She whispered as she hung her head down, tears falling freely. “I was so scared Az. I was so scared and I needed you.”

“But I wasn’t there.” He answered, his voice hoarse.

She nodded solemnly. “You weren’t. And I should hate you for it. But I can’t.” Her voice broke again and she started sobbing. Az got up from his seat and sat beside her, holding her with one arm, and allowing her to rest her head on his chest. She gripped the front of his shirt as she continued sobbing. He ran his hand through her hair soothingly and soon the sobs stopped as her breathing became even. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he picked her up and took her to her room.

After dropping Elain off, Azriel laid down on his own bed after taking his medicine and fall asleep, imagining a life where he had chosen to stay with Elain the entire time.

~~~~~

Elain and Azriel had come to a sort of truce.

They did not discuss the night prior when they had all sat down for breakfast in the morning. The silence had been filled with Daemon’s chattering and small replies from both of them.

Elain knew Azriel was right when he believed that she would’ve dropped the idea of Adriata University in a heartbeat if he had told her the truth. But she knew that it wouldn’t help anyone now. All they could do was look forward.

That evening, Elain, Daemon, and Azriel stood in front of Nesta and Cassian’s house for their daughter’s birthday. Their house was like a large-sized traditional white picket fence house.

Az got out of the car and helped Daemon. “So, what do you think?” He asked as he came around and stood next to her.

She looked at him properly, for the first time since he came out of his room looking like a greek god in a nice outfit. Albeit it was just normal black denim jeans with a black button down which fit him perfectly along with black converse, he still looked mesmerizing.

And apparently, she was staring.

She cleared her throat. “It’s nice. Not something I would expect Cass to live in.”

Az scoffed. “It’s a fucking barbie dreamhouse replica.”

Elain pursed her lips. “Actually, I think yours is the dreamhouse. This one is just a normal doll house.” Az sent a glare in her direction and she just giggled.

They walked to the front door which Az opened without knocking. Inside, the house was mesmerizing. There were balloons everywhere, soft yellow light brightening the room. A huge portrait of Cassian, Nesta, and a little baby in their hands hung above the fireplace. All along the walls, there were shelves decorated with books, photo frames and decorative knives. At least Elain thought they were for decoration purposes.

“Elain, you came!” Nesta exclaimed from the corner of the room. She had a little girl with dark hair, much like Cassian’s, however, her eyes were stormy blue-grey just like Nesta’s. “This is Tootsie. Don’t ask, Cassian named her.” Nesta said with an eye roll. “And Tootsie, this is Auntie Elain and your cousin Daemon.” Tootsie looked at Elain with wide eyes and then down at Daemon, who himself looked at her with wide eyes.

“Hi! Happy birthday!” Daemon exclaimed as he held his hand out toward her. Tootsie looked at him and also extended her hand in such a way that she almost falls out of Nesta’s hold.

“Birthday!” Tootsie exclaimed and Nesta placed her on the floor. She took hold of Daemon’s hand and dragged him further into the house. Daemon looked back at Elain who nodded encouragingly.

“Nice house.” Elain greeted and Nesta narrowed her eyes at her and smiled. “Glad you made it. I thought Azhole wouldn’t have been able to convince you.”

“You still call him Azhole?” Elain asked. Nesta had taken to calling Az by that name when Elain and Azriel had first started dating.

“I’ll stop calling him that when he stops acting like one.” She replied and both of them giggled, while Azriel let out a sigh.

Cassian called Nesta and she excused herself. Elain busied herself looking at the various photos. There was one of them from high school. She was in her cheer outfit, all three of the boys in their football uniform, while Nesta and Feryre were wearing jeans and sweaters. Elain also had a letterman jacket around her, which was obviously Az’s. She smiled to herself as she remembered the day that photo had been taken.

“That was just before I told you that I love you.” A voice stated from behind her. Elain whirled around and found Az standing with his hands tucked in his pockets, giving a thoughtful look at the photo. “It comes in my list of top ten days.”

She raised her brows. “Top ten?”

He nodded and moved towards her, picking up the frame in his hand. “Definitely in the top ten.”

“What other days are a part of that list?” She asked as he placed the frame back in its place.

He looked at her for a moment and then shrugged. “You were there for all of them.”

Elain was not sure if she was breathing or not. She gazed into his deep hazel eyes and knew there was no wall, no shield. He had completely opened himself to her.

And that scared her.

~~~~~

Elain was enjoying herself. She had missed her sisters and had forgotten how much fun it had been to be with them. It reminded her of her teenage years, when she was just another carefree person, with the whole world ahead of her.

Both the sisters had tried to catch up with Elain with events of the past decade.

Elain learned that Cassian and Nesta had gotten married three years ago, four months before Tootsie had been born. Feyre and Rhysand had an impromptu marriage because they had not been sure if they would survive the next day or not.

“It was really sweet actually,” Feyre stated. “Well as sweet as a wedding can get when arranged within half an hour.” She added.

“The only thing that ever mattered was that you were there with me,” Rhys said as he came up behind Feyre and hugged her with one arm.

Cassian flopped down beside Nesta. “I actually enjoyed it. I was the one who officiated it.” Then he smiled wolfishly. “Batman here was the flower boy.”

Elain glanced toward Azriel, who was standing behind her. He glared at Cassian and flipped him off.

“Why was he the flower boy?” She asked.

Rhys grinned widely. “Our dear Az had a small infatuation with flowers at the time. Oh, there wasn’t anyone else, so.”

Azriel blushed slightly and turned his glare toward Rhys. “I was the best flower boy you could’ve ever had.”

Feyre snorted and Nesta sighed impatiently. “Can we stop talking about this and focus on the birthday girl? Because I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard from her in the last ten minutes and that is extremely frightening.”

All three men widened their eyes and straightened. “Cassian, I think we should go look for her.” Rhys nudged him with his shoulder and they both swiftly moved away. Azriel just smirked at the three ladies.

“What are you smirking for, pretty boy?” Nesta questioned with her eyes narrowed at him.

He just shrugged slightly. “I just know that she’s already asleep. Both her and Daemon are.” He directed this towards Elain, who frowned as she realized she had not worried about Daemon for quite a while.

“Elain, I think that kid is addicted to TV. He watches it an ungodly amount.” He pointed out, taking a seat right beside Elain.

Elain just shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “It’s fine, we just need to monitor his screen time.” She then glanced towards the staircase where Rhys and Cassian had gone up. “Why are they terrified of a three-year-old?”

Feyre snorted out a laugh. “She once managed to get into Cassian’s liquor cabinet and broke three bottles. We’re just lucky she didn’t get a hold of his gun.”

Elain sat in silence, stunned at the nonchalant way Feyre said that. Nesta clicked her tongue at Feyre. “She has no tact. I was terrified and didn’t let Tootsie out of sight for a whole month.”

Azriel placed his hand on her shoulder. “It’s not normal for us.” She glanced at him to see his earnest expression. “Hell, none of us know what a normal kid does. But we try our best.” He runs his hand through his hair. “El, I don’t know what a child wants, but I can assure you that Daemon will never come near anything like that.”

Elain believed him.

~~~~~

It was late when they returned home. Azriel had offered to take a sleeping Daemon up to his room but Elain strictly forbid him from him.

“I won’t always stitch you up, you know.” She claimed and moved to wake Daemon up. Azriel stood behind and observed it with a smile. He opened the front door for both of them and followed them, locking all systems and checking it once again.

He took a seat at his dining table and let out a large sigh. Elain returned a moment later and sat beside him.

“Daemon’s all set up. Although he refused to change his clothes or brush his teeth, so we’ll cross that bridge tomorrow.” She glanced up at him. “How are you feeling? Did you take your medicines? I got so caught up in everything I forgot to check on you.”

Azriel laughed slightly. “I’m fine. What about you? Did you have fun?”

Elain nodded slightly. “I forgot how much fun we all used to have. I’ve spent the past ten years so busy and alert, I had forgotten how it felt to let loose.”

Azriel took a chance and slid his left hand around Elain’s shoulders pulling her tightly into him. She instantly melted into his touch and he heard a sniffle come from her. He bent his head and rested it on top of her head.

They stayed that way for a while.

------

AN: It actually hurts that I could correlate this chapter with so many Selena Gomez songs.

Next Chapter on 24th Feb

#elriel #elriel fic #one last time #elain archeron #azriel #elain x azriel #azriel x elain #gangster au #acotar au #acotar #acomaf #acowar #acofas #feyre archeron #rhysand #nesta archeron #cassian

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veliseraptor · 1 year

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2022 Fanfiction Round-Up

Total Year-Long Wordcount: 388,095 words written, though obviously not all of those ended up getting posted, since a lot of them were in WIPs that continue to be WIPs.

This year I wrote and posted: 36 fics, apparently. Which is more than I thought it was going to be! I feel sort of like this was a year where I was more chugging along with things than spinning them out into complete projects but I guess that wasn’t wholly accurate.

Overall Thoughts

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?

Less, I think, but also…I feel like I wrote a pretty good amount, all things considered. More than last year, which is nice, since last year was…real rough, writing-wise. Though also an especially crazy year for me so that does make sense.

What’s your own favorite story of the year?

I waffled on this for a bit but ultimately I think the story that I’m proudest of from this year is our love would live a half-life on the surface. It wasn’t the story I expected to write when I started writing it in 2021 as my Big Bang fic for that year (and then ended up going a different direction because I didn’t think I had enough material to make up the length), but it ended up being stronger for the change (namely, the one where I realized that I’d been trying to write a fix-it proper and that wasn’t what I was writing at all).

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Hmm. Unfortunately I feel like I have to say that I don’t think I did. Which kind of troubles me (am I stagnating as a writer?) but I’m going to try not to fret about it.

From my past year of writing, what was….

My most popular story of this year: In terms of kudos, somewhere between the heart and the vein by a fair margin (812); interestingly enough 4 out of 5 of the most popular fics by that metric this year were Kinnporsche fics, though I guess that makes sense given shiny new active fandom.

Most fun story to write: It’s sometimes hard to think back and remember what was fun to write at the time, but I feel like I have to go with the reluctant shishi for this one, because that was a fic that just flowed out of me very quickly and easily and I enjoyed pretty much the entire experience of writing, which is so rare.

Story with the single sexiest moment: I apparently wrote a shockingly minimal amount of smut this year, it turns out! Startling and appalling, what was I thinking. (I’m joking. Mostly.) I’m also in kind of a weird place with respect to my smut right now where I don’t feel like any of it is actually hot, so that’s making answering this sort of difficult. So I’m just going to leave that alone before I get too in my feelings about it.

Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: It’s not really the one I actually feel this way about but I do still feel kinda funny about The Hand That Feeds, not so much that I wrote it (I’ve definitely written worse) but that I posted it. I didn’t write a whole lot of badwrong fic this year, though, apparently. In some ways I think our love would live a half-life on the surface might be the one that best fits this, though it’s less wrong and more just…more nakedly messed up than a lot of other things I wrote this year.

Huh. I feel like I’m losing my touch.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: I wouldn’t say it shifted my perception, exactly, but writing the rest of this world is gonna break your heart definitely got me thinking more about Jiang Yanli than I have most of my time in this fandom.

Hardest story to write: But so many of them are hard in different ways, how am I supposed to choose one! I feel like I might have to go with the fair and the brave and the good must die because (a) it’s the first and closest thing to an actual Wangxian fic that I’ve written (or probably will write, ever), so I was working with characters I haven’t spent as much time thinking about and (b) I’ve been writing it for about three years (off and on) so clearly it was giving me many fits.

Biggest Disappointment: I continue to be frustrated with the fact that I can’t make myself be happy with Liability and continue to feel vaguely bad about it as a work. Same with on a narrow road, actually. I don’t know what it is about some works that just leaves me with a weird feeling of “this isn’t what I wanted it to be/this isn’t up to my standards” but…there you go.

Biggest Surprise: There are always several of these because of my habit of planning absolutely nothing, but I feel like special mention has to go to heel, stay for initially being a fic that was just “put Xue Yang in a muzzle” and ended up being over 20,000 words of relationship negotiation featuring ace Song Lan. Didn’t see that coming!

Most Unintentionally Telling Story: I don’t know that I’d call it unintentionally telling unless I’m making it that by answering this question, but I’m going to say that writing like a trigger (get me ready to shoot) was deeply therapeutic to me.

Favorite Opening Line(s):

Once he reached a certain age, Xue Yang learned that mostly people didn’t touch you unless they wanted to hurt you. (how bright you glow)

Vegas remembered the first time his dad hit him, but he didn’t remember why. (the edge of thorns)

Within thirty seconds of seeing Xiao Xingchen Xue Yang knew he wanted to fuck him. (spin me right round)

It was six months after the life Vegas had always expected to have was eviscerated like livestock in a slaughterhouse, and things were…fine. That really was the right word. Not good, not awful. Just…fine. (walking shadows)

The sun was starting to poke weakly through the heavy mist by the time Xue Yang stopped working. (our love would live a half-life on the surface)

Favorite Line(s) from Anywhere:

1. "You only want to stick around because I fucked with your head enough to make you think you love me,” Vegas said ruthlessly.

Pete punched him. (walking shadows)

2. He didn’t remember putting a collar on his own neck and handing the leash to Xiao Xingchen but he could feel it there now. Not like he was being pulled anywhere, or anything, just that there was the weight and the pressure and Xiao Xingchen held the leash so, so lightly that it was almost like he wasn’t holding on at all. (it hurts at first (but it ain’t that bad))

3. People looked at Vegas all the time. He wanted them to. He liked that they did. He’d made himself a lure for people like one of those deep sea fish using a light to draw in their prey, dazzling them before devouring them. Pete saw the gaping jaws full of teeth first and chased the light anyway. (like a trigger (get me ready to shoot))

4. He held still, but he didn’t look away, either. Just watched as Xue Yang shattered and shattered in the jaws of an emotion too big for his ruined soul to hold. (nurture the tiger)

5. He was his father’s hands and his father’s knife. Vegas the weapon, Vegas the monster, Vegas the attack dog, turned loose and brought to heel. Hands and a knife, or sparking wires, or pliers, a drill, shards of glass. (Finders Keepers)

6. He wished he didn’t know. He’d been happier not knowing. He’d rather be marked as disposable, he’d realized, than erased as invisible. There was something bitter about realizing that he’d been both. (Once You Are Real)

7. On bad days Vegas wished they’d just gone with a nice, clean execution. It made him feel a little better that Kinn probably felt that way too, so by still being alive Vegas could ruin that for him. (cuddle you in the undertow)

8. He had years of ingrained loyalty and training that dictated that the bodies of the family – main and minor – were sacrosanct, to be protected. And now there were bruises on Vegas’s face and a gunshot graze on his arm and Pete had put them there. (somewhere between the heart and the vein)

9. She dreamed about it that night. Dreamed that she stood at Lotus Pier, looking out at the water, and she could feel her brothers at her sides – a-Xian on the left and a-Cheng on the right. But she didn’t want to turn her head and look. A-Xian took her hand with skeletal fingers, bone worn smooth. Welcome home, shijie, he said, in a voice like a terrible cold wind. But she wasn’t afraid. (this world is gonna break your heart)

10. Xiao Xingchen. Boundless compassion and kindness and generosity, heart full of open doors Xue Yang had snuck through like a robber into an unguarded house. But not for Xue Yang. (our love would live a half-life on the surface)

Top 5 Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:

The bit from nurture the tiger that’s just a (thoroughly battered, one-armed) Xue Yang sitting with a (fierce corpse) Song Lan outside and having a full-on emotional breakdown.

Ghost Wei Wuxian being really fucking mean to Lan Wangji from the fair and the brave and the good must die, actually. I think that one would be fun to see visually rendered.

Pretty much anything from this world is gonna break your heart with Jiang Yanli and Xue Yang, though maybe especially the scene where he first sneaks up on her while she’s practicing her demonic cultivation skills.

I can think of several from (you give me) fever that would be fun to see but maybe at the top of that list is sick, semi-delirious Vegas in a blanket cape.

Honestly anything from the Vegas/Pete smut I’ve written the latter half of this year. I miss smut art. That’s not the only reason this one’s on here but it is part of it, while I’m fantasizing about imaginary art of my fic.

Fic-writing goals for 2023:

I have a whole collection of fics I really want to finish, but at the top of that list I think are: the concussed Xiao Xingchen fic (been in the works for forever), the Xue-Yang-haunting-Song-Lan fic (also been in the works for almost as long), and making at least a significant amount of progress on both Redux and Walking Far From Home, if not finishing one (or both).

Finish et ipsi sunt jacula. I’m parsing this one out separately because I think it’s been on this list for at least two years now and I would really like to just fucking. Finish the damn thing.

Last thing on here I wanna say…write something really fucked up. Don’t care what it is or for what fandom. Just make it fucked, Lise. Go for it.

#fanfiction round up #confessions of a frustrated writer

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alarawriting · 1 year

Text

52 Project #51: Dex

This story is highly autobiographical in a way that's actually kind of painful and embarrassing, and you'll all know why after you read it. And you'll also know why it has taken me two and a half years to write one year's worth of stories and I'm still not done.

BTW I hope like fuck none of the Reddit handles in here are real, but I didn't have a chance to check them all.

***

Jason had promised his boss he’d have a debugged version of the code checked in by morning.

He’d been tracking down a bug when he’d gotten sidetracked reading Stack Overflow. Dammit. He’d just lost an hour, and he still had no idea why his code wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, and it was 10 pm. Teresa was expecting a new version to be checked in by 9 am and she was expecting that it would run.

This was a job for more Coca-Cola. Jason got up, went downstairs and got himself a slice of pizza and a cold Coke.

His mom, also burning the late night oil at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, said, “How is it going? You think you’ll have what your boss is expecting by tomorrow?”

No. “Yes,” Jason said. “I just need a few more hours to track this down.”

“Well, you’re running out of them. You’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep, then waking up fresh in the morning early enough to work on it then.”

Mom was 57 and had apparently forgotten everything she had ever known about how night owls worked, despite having spent her younger years routinely staying up until 2 am. “Is that what you’re doing?” Jason couldn’t help saying.

“I’ve got a house showing tomorrow, I just have to make sure that I have my talking points memorized.”

“Why? Does the house really suck?”

“It doesn’t really suck. It’s a good house, really. Great bones, a nice big yard. But I’m gonna have to redirect the prospective owner’s attention away from how ugly the carpet is and things like that, because the seller? Whoo-ee. There’s people who have no taste, and there’s people who never fix anything, and there’s people who own dogs, and then there’s my seller, who is all three.” She sighed. “I tried to get them to rip the carpet out and install hardwood flooring before putting the house on the market, but the market is hot right now; I don’t blame them for wanting to charge forward. I just think they’d get more if their house didn’t smell like dog and look like water damage had a horrible transporter accident with the 1970’s.”

“That bad, huh?” He leaned up against the fridge, sipping his Coke. “You wanna go over your spiel with me, Mom? Some late night practice before you go to bed?”

“Yeah, actually, that sounds good.”

So Mom talked enthusiastically, if hoarsely, about the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the recently modernized kitchen and how great the neighborhood was, and Jason listened, because he wasn’t contributing nearly as much to the mortgage as his mom was and she was also paying most of the utilities, so her career was important, not to mention what stress did to her heart.

When he got back to his computer it was 11:30 and he’d finished his Coke and pizza. He thought about getting ice cream, but best not to do that until Mom went to bed, if he didn’t want to get sucked into another conversation. Not that conversations with Mom were bad; they were much more entertaining than debugging code, which was the problem.

He opened up his coding window, stared at it for thirty seconds while doing nothing, and then convinced himself that maybe Reddit would have an answer to his question.

It didn’t. It did have answers to how to solve a particularly difficult problem in his current favorite game, a number of people who wanted to know if they were the asshole, some great reviews of movies on streaming that he hadn’t had a chance to watch yet, political rants, and some really entertainingly stupid coding mistakes that people had posted.

It was 12:30 am. Teresa was expecting this at 9 and she was expecting it to work.

His eyes glazed. The act of reviewing the code for the tenth time, looking for the bug he hadn’t yet been able to find despite knowing the general area it had to be in, was almost physically painful. He checked his brackets, again. The error didn’t look like a missing close bracket, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had a dollar for every time the error didn’t look like a missing close bracket but turned out to be one, he’d have maybe twenty dollars, which wasn’t a lot in terms of actual money but was a lot of times for the same stupid thing to happen in his code.

The software was supposed to warn him when there was an unclosed bracket, but half the time, if the code was particularly complex, it didn’t. It just re-interpreted the bracket locations and then his code broke.

One more time. Stepping through. Why the fuck was it stopping there? There was nothing there that could account for the error.

Time to go get ice cream. Maybe some sugar would help him stay awake and focused enough to get this done. Another Coke, possibly, too.

When he sat back down, he had Discord messages, so he needed to check them. And messages on Slack, which he could be checking in the morning, and probably should be, but maybe one of his co-workers had found an answer to his problem. They hadn’t, but Priyal had a different question and that one, he thought he could quickly get an answer to, so he fired up Google, dug in, and got her answer for her, which he sent. She’d have it in the morning. Unlike Teresa, who probably would not have what she was expecting.

It was 2 am. Stupid of him to get sidetracked with Priyal’s problem when he was having such difficulty with his own. He flicked over to Reddit again because this was unbearably boring and if he didn’t give himself a break from it, he’d fall asleep.

But he had to go back to debugging the code. Or to sleep. He could handle Teresa being pissed off in the morning a lot better if he got some sleep.

Third page of the subreddit he was on. Four. Man, he needed to keep up with this stuff, there was so much here he hadn’t read yet.

Fifth page of the subreddit. He really, really needed to get back to work. It was 2:30.

A screenshot of something really stupid from Cicada. Damn, someone actually posted something that stupid? Over to Cicada to see if there was context that explained it. There wasn’t, but there was a lengthy thread of people absolutely shredding the OP. Including someone he followed, and he should probably catch up with that.

No, he should get off Cicada and go back to coding. Or bed. His eyes were burning. Bed was probably a better idea. Give up on finishing the debug, tell Teresa he hadn’t found it yet and would need another day.

That was an interesting news article, though. He had to check that out.

No, he didn’t. He needed to go to bed.

Jason’s mouse clicked the link to the article. His eyes read the page, despite burning with exhaustion. Some frantic voice in his head was yelling, screaming, get up, put the computer down, you need to be awake to deal with Teresa in the morning, it’s late, you’re doing nothing useful, get up.

Back to Reddit.

Stop this. Get up. Go to bed. You need to go to bed.

3:30 am. He could barely keep his eyes open, but they were still riveted to the computer, his butt still glued to his chair.

Get up get up get up and go to bed, go to bed, turn the monitor off, you need to go to sleep so you can deal with Teresa tomorrow, get up, go to bed, go to bed

4 am. Look, there was his Firefox home tab, with articles from Pocket. A few of those looked interesting.

Don’t read them, you need to sleep, you need to sleep

Right, right, he didn’t have time to read them right now. He just needed to open them all so they would be there for him tomorrow. If he didn’t do that, Pocket would refresh and he’d lose all of them.

Wow, did they really find carbon deposits on the moon? He had to check that out.

Stop it, stop it, you have to stop it, you need to sleep, stop it

5 am. There was no way he’d be up at 9 to deal with Teresa.

Email. “Hey, I’ve been up all night bashing my head against this thing and I’ve made progress—” This was a lie. “—but it’s still not running. I’m gonna have to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. I’ll be logging in around 11 am.” This was also a lie, it would probably be closer to noon. But since he worked from home, all he needed to do was drag ass out of bed around 10:30 to send everyone a status update, tell them he was diving into the code and probably wouldn’t see incoming notifications until he came up for air, and then dive back into his bed instead.

Set an alarm for 9:30 am. Set an alarm for 10 am. He’d blow through them both, of course, but they’d wake him up enough to actually wake up when the 10:30 alarm went off, and then he’d convince himself to get up and send the status message by promising himself he’d return to bed.

Check out that article about a different way to manage your ADHD?

No. Go to sleep. Off the computer. Sleep.

Right, but obviously, he needed to put on his Spotify for music to fall asleep to, and adjust the volume because he couldn’t let it be too loud or it would wake Mom up, calm and peaceful or not.

Pop over to Reddit one last time.

5:30 am. Sleep!

The panic finally overwhelmed the inertia and he managed to drag himself off his chair, turn the monitor off, and stumble to bed. Now to get some sleep.

Oh, except now, he couldn’t sleep because he was overwhelmed by his anxiety and fear about not getting enough sleep to deal with Teresa even if he slept until noon because she was going to be seriously pissed off with him because this was the third time he’d blown the deadline.

It was another hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and he knew that because the sun had risen.

***

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm.

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm, he’d blown through 9:30 and 10 just like he’d planned, but he’d never turned on the 10:30 alarm, so it was half past noon and he’d never sent that status message, so everyone would know he overslept way past the point Teresa would be okay with after an all nighter, and there was a meeting at 1 pm and he had to shower and shave because it was going to be a meeting with video so he couldn’t look like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

Or maybe he could. He sent Teresa a message on Slack. I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore, and I’ve got a migraine. And I don’t have the program working anyway, so there’s really nothing to show anyone. Can we postpone until tomorrow?

The response was almost immediate. You need to figure out how to manage your time better. You’re sick because you stayed up all night.

Yeah, but I was trying to solve the bug.

If you can’t get something fixed by 11 pm, it’s not going to get fixed. You should have gone to bed.

I know, but I wanted to try. I was getting close. This was a lie. I thought I could get it done before morning.

Yes, and instead you made yourself sick and the program still doesn’t work. ☹ I’ll postpone the meeting this time, Jason, but we need results before tomorrow. Sorry that you’re sick but you know as well as I do it’s because you didn’t get any sleep.

Yeah, I know. I’ll pull myself together, have some coffee, and get back to work. I’ll try to have it done before 5. This was a lie. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to get it done by 5, not when he was this tired.

Do you want me to have Jorge review it? Maybe he can see something you missed?

No, that would be the worst possible thing, because then Jorge would know that he’d made basically no progress last night. I don’t want to add to his workload, but if I’m running into trouble later today I’ll pass it over to him, see if adding some eyeballs might help.

All right, I’ll let him know.

And now Jason was awake, the imminent terror of Jorge finding out that he had done basically nothing last night flooding him with enough adrenaline that he could focus enough to turn on his monitor and get back to work.

***

He had to stop living like this.

Sooner or later he was going to get caught, and he was going to get fired. He couldn’t stay focused on his work when it was boring, which debugging generally was; he enjoyed the act of creating code, making things happen, but when it wouldn’t work, it was an exercise in frustration and soul-crushing despair. He couldn’t keep up with his own documentation, he missed emails and chat messages because he was obsessed with something else when they came through, and he wasn’t even spending his time doing things that were fun; endlessly surfing Reddit and checking the news and articles wasn’t something he did because it was incredibly fun. It was just more bearable than focusing on work, sometimes.

It wasn’t like there would ever be a programming job where you never needed to debug, or never needed to polish off the last few functions that you’d kept skipping because of how tedious they were. He knew that. He’d gone into the profession knowing that. But when he was younger, his meds had worked better. Or maybe he’d just been better at being able to go without sleep. Or not as acclimated to the panic. It was the panic that got him moving, that made it so he could do the boring jobs. He had to be terrified of the consequences of failure before the fear and anxiety could override the whatever-it-was that kept him sitting in his chair, playing video games or surfing the Internet, rather than doing the boring parts of his job.

It had gotten worse since he started working from home. In the past, he’d had the fear that his boss might come by and see him goofing off. So he’d still goofed off, but carefully, always prepared to jump back into his work at a moment’s notice. Sometimes he’d pushed himself, polished off what was normally three or four days’ work in one afternoon, and then goofed off for the next three days. Because he could. Because when he was on, he was magic. The insights were lightning, his speed was legendary, his accuracy was amazing. When he was on.

He was off most of the time. And more and more often, nowadays.

Medication didn’t work anymore. It just made him jittery and irritable, so he’d stopped taking it. Overdosing on caffeine did the same but somehow felt more palatable, and he’d grown to associate the feeling of being competent with the tastes of coffee and Coke, so he used those instead. Then he couldn’t get to sleep. On the nights when he actually managed to get a satisfying amount of work done, he might have a beer or two to unwind and let himself relax and sleep, but that was impossible to do when it was late and he wasn’t done. Which was most nights, nowadays.

He couldn’t keep living like this. He couldn’t depend on a state of fear to enable him to work. Sooner or later he’d slip up, he’d be caught, and he’d get fired. And then he’d have to admit to his mother that he got fired. That terrified him far more than the thought of having to get another job. Jobs weren’t that hard to come by, but his mother’s disappointment and sorrow was utterly horrible.

Jason had spent his childhood alternately disappointing her and making her proud. She thought he was stable now, that the problems that had plagued his childhood – the inability to do homework, the losing it when he had done it, the dishes he didn’t wash, the laundry he didn’t do, the leaves he didn’t rake – were gone. And it was true, nowadays he could get the laundry done, because he’d figured out how. Pile it up in front of his door, and as soon as it got too irritating to open his bedroom door, he could gather up the laundry in his arms and dump it in the wash. It helped that he’d finally figured out that he didn’t need to sort anything if he washed everything in cold water and never bought anything that was white.

He didn’t know any way to pile up a debugging project in front of a web browser. He’d tried using software that blocked him from doing anything that wasn’t work related, but the trouble was, Reddit was a legitimate source of information on how to fix issues he’d never encountered before, and Stack Overflow and other sites and forums dedicated to development problem solving were enticing time sinks of entertaining information. There was no way to solve this programmatically, because no AI was capable of telling the difference between “this is useful stuff you need to solve this problem right now” and “you’re just reading about all these other problems other people have had so you don’t have to work on your own problem.”

And even if there was…

Jason was one of the best programmers at the company. He was only 29, but he’d been doing this since he was 12. So people came to him with their problems, and he was usually able to solve those. Most problems people had were something he’d encountered so often he could fix them when asleep, which had actually sort of happened a couple of times – he had once or twice found that he’d sent an email at 3 am that he had no memory of sending, when he’d been pulling an all-nighter, that elegantly and correctly solved a co-worker’s problem.

Their problems were easy, and the feedback was immediate and gratifying. People thanked him profusely, told him he was a genius, sometimes gave him homemade cookies or delicious ethnic lunches (this was the thing he missed most about working in the office, but too many of his coworkers were also working from home; he’d gone in once or twice after lockdown was over, but it had never been the same again.) Everyone had nothing but great things to say about Jason’s willingness to help a coworker out and ability to solve their issues. His own problems, not so much. But he got a lot of leeway for being the genius who could fix everyone else’s issue.

When he was stuck, it was rare that anyone else could help him with it. And it was rarer that he was willing to let them. The humiliation of needing help, of what if it was a simple, stupid thing and it destroyed his wunderkind reputation that he’d missed it, made it so he never wanted help, not with the big problems he couldn’t solve himself. If your whole life was based on your skill at swimming, how close did you have to be to drowning before you were willing to call for help?

Jason managed to get the code working a little before 3 pm, after ignoring three messages from Teresa that maybe now it was time to bring Jorge in, and one from Jorge asking if there was anything he could do to help out. He then gratefully handed it over to Jorge. It’s working, but I could use some more thorough testing than I’ve been able to do. (I have done minimal testing because testing is so boring it makes me want to spork my eyeballs out, but I’ve made sure that it runs start to finish in the most basic scenarios and that the more complex functions kick in when given at least one example of data that should make them kick in.) The QA department would beat the crap out of it later, but the programmers didn’t hand over code to them until it at least ran, most of the time. Well, some of the time. Well, at least the one time they tried it.

He needed a nap, badly, but he was too wired to get one, and it wasn’t a good idea. If Jorge did find something in testing, he needed to at least look responsive. So he started reading the article tabs he’d opened last night, when he’d promised himself he’d just open them so they’d be available for him today.

Oh, and there was the article about a new treatment for ADHD. That was timely.

***

“The newest ADHD treatment on the market isn’t a pill, and it isn’t an app. Dex™ is an implant, that promises to revolutionize treatments for the long-forgotten invisible victims of ADHD… the ones who grew up.”

Oh, that was definitely promising. It had long been a source of deep irritation to Jason, and pretty much everyone else he knew with similar issues, that ADHD was treated as a disorder of childhood. Once you were grown up and out of the educational system, you were an adult and you could adult like an adult, because you were an adult! Right? It was a blind spot in the entire system. The go-to medications for kids could have long-term effects that got more and more unpleasant as you got older… such as developing high blood pressure. Or desensitizing to it, as Jason had. (His doctor had claimed that was not possible, but tolerance was a thing for pretty much every other drug, including allergy pills, so Jason thought that was bullshit. He was planning on changing doctors. As soon as he got around to picking a new one.)

But… implant?

“By utilizing dopamine, the natural chemical made by the body that promotes motivation, Dex™ enables adults with ADHD to stay focused on the important things in life. Their work. Their family. Their loved ones.”

Aaand it was off and running into marketing bullshit. Jason scrolled through the article, but it was pretty obviously pay-for-play.

Another article was more promising. “The idea behind Dex sounds frankly somewhat terrifying. A brain implant that uses AI learning algorithms to dose you with chemicals that make you want to do things? It sounds straight out of a science fiction dystopia. But in fact, the science behind Dex is rigorous.

“One of the biggest problems people with ADHD face is that they can’t motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. This has long led to sufferers of the disorder being told they are ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’, or worse things. But it turns out that this is a genuine medical condition. Science has identified the neurotransmitter in the brain that gives us motivation. It’s called dopamine, and people with ADHD don’t produce enough of it.

“By jolting the brain with a dose of dopamine every time the Dex user is doing something they need to do, it helps them stay focused and on task, even with the boring tasks that most ADHDers are famous for being unable to do. Wash the dishes. Remember to take out the trash. Finish that essay.

“Some have concerns because Dex is manufactured by Ulysses… the newest medical/pharmaceutical company to place its wares on the market. Ulysses’ focus has been on combining artificial intelligence with low-dose, just-in-time medication, such as the anti-anaphylactic implant Destiel or the—”

Wait. Wait. Did this company seriously name a medication Destiel? Who was that for, people who had never been in their teens on the Internet while a certain TV show had been airing?

“—or the virus-fighting Ajaxon, but—”

Too late, Jason couldn’t take a company seriously that named their product something like that. He flipped away to read about a nonprofit who would paint your roof with super-reflective white paint for free, to help fight climate change.

***

Jorge didn’t find any critical bugs, and Jason managed to take a nap after hours, which was good, because anxiety about the meeting that had been postponed started to creep in around 10 pm, and despite the fact that he knew he needed to be well-rested for the meeting, which had been moved to 1 tomorrow, he had to get online and play a video game to relax.

It was 3 am before the need to go to the bathroom forced him to get off the computer. He gratefully accepted the out his bladder had given him, and as soon as he was out, he went straight to bed. The light from the monitor was irritating, but if he got up and went over to the computer to turn off the monitor, he might succumb to the temptation of just checking one thing, and then who knew when he’d get to bed? It would go to sleep eventually, and in the meantime, he could use a sleep mask.

He hadn’t forgotten the alarms, this time. 9:30 am was probably too early to wake up when he’d hit bed at 3 am, but after yesterday, he knew he had to be online and responsive from early on to make up for his fuckup. Didn’t mean he had to actually work. As three cups of coffee made their way down his throat, he browsed online comics, read email, skimmed articles, answered Slack messages, pretended to be contributing to the discussion about the strategy for the meeting, and finally ended up at r/AMA, because when he googled Dex, he found that one of the people who’d developed it had done an AMA on it.

“I’m one of the lead scientists on the development of the new ADHD treatment, Dex. AMA”

He read over her initial post. Her name was Suzanne Burke and she worked for Ulysses, which was a subsidiary of the online retail-and-cloud-computing giant Jupiter.com. This was troubling. Jupiter was known for its forays into AI, having gotten its start with neural networks that recommended books to people, and was now well known for its near-ubiquitous AI household assistant, Ray-Ray. Mom had gotten one of those for Christmas last year, but Jason hadn’t let her hook it up. His specialty wasn’t cloud security, but he’d been working in IT long enough that he had no trust whatsoever in an appliance made by a giant corporation that could turn your furnace off and on and was probably sending all your data back to the mothership. On the other hand, he was guessing that Ulysses had been bought out by Jupiter, because naming a medical device after a fan fantasy of a gay relationship between a monster hunter and an angel from a TV show that had ended a few years ago did not seem like the kind of stupid mistake Jupiter would make.

[u/ineedcheese: How does it work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Diving in the deep end I see! OK, for any of this to make sense, I have to give you guys a simplified run-down of how ADHD itself works, because it isn’t “ooh! Shiny!” It’s a serious medical condition.

[Firstly, ADHD is described as Attention Deficit Disorder because from the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like. A person with ADHD can’t pay attention. Unless they’re really interested, and then they can’t stop paying attention. But that’s really more of a symptom. What it should be called is Executive Function Deficit Disorder or maybe Executive Dysfunction Disorder.

[You can think of a brain as having multiple multi-threaded tasks, like a computer. One of those tasks is consciousness, of course, but the rest of them run in the background and you are rarely aware of them. Until they break. Executive function is the manager, the dispatcher that takes commands from consciousness – or other parts of the brain, I’ll get to that – and, generally, informs consciousness of what it should be doing. It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is. It remembers where you put your keys. It allocates your attention to speech, to reading, to tasks.

[A lot of this is performed by stimulating the brain to release dopamine. Now, if you’ve ever sought out help for depression, you’ve probably heard of neurotransmitters. There’s tons of them, but the ones you hear about most are serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Very very roughly, and with the caveat that some recent evidence calls some of this into question, we can describe serotonin as the happiness chemical, dopamine as the motivation chemical, and norepinephrine as the excitement, fight-or-flight chemical. Very roughly.

[Basically everything a person does, is done because it feels good to do it – in some way – or, being smart animals, we know that not doing it has a bad result. If we don’t wash the dishes we get roaches – brr! If we don’t do our homework, we get a bad grade and Mom and Dad yell at us. In a normal brain, small amounts of motivational dopamine are released when we set ourselves to a task that will prevent a bad thing, but that we don’t inherently like. Or, sometimes, to a task that we enjoy, but maybe it’s hard and we’re not always feeling it. Wash the dishes, get a tiny amount of dopamine because yay, you have successfully fought off the roach apocalypse for another day.

[People with ADHD don’t get that. The small amounts of encouragement dopamine aren’t there. We don’t wash the dishes because we enjoy it, and it turns out, we don’t do it because we are afraid of the roaches. We do it because our executive function has decided that roaches are bad, and it will reward us with some dopamine for doing things to keep the roaches away. Everything we voluntarily do, we do because it gives us at least a little dopamine.

[I want you to think about the mythical Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a rock up a hill, because he’s been told he can be free of Hades if he gets it to the top – a thing he wants, a lot. What if someone tells him, the deal’s off? You’re never getting out of Hades, no matter what you do? Well, he probably wouldn’t keep pushing the rock, because what’s his motivation?

[That’s what washing the dishes is like if you have ADHD. It takes time, it’s not pleasant, and it doesn’t reward you with that little bitty bit of dopamine. So what’s your motivation to push the rock up the hill? You can intellectually know that washing the dishes is a good idea and that not doing it exposes you to disease, yucky tastes, and maybe roaches, but you don’t do the smart thing because it’s the smart thing. Or at least, most of us do not. We do the smart thing because executive function rewards us for doing it. And people with ADHD do not get that reward.”]

[u/beepityboopbop: “It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is.” Unless your name is Karen and you’ve called for technical support, in which case five minutes is an hour]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: Suzanne Burke you seem to have a serious fixation with roaches]

[u/semicolonbang: Yeah did the roaches eat your baby?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: They ate my last relationship. My girlfriend and I broke up because of roaches.]

[u/semicolonbang: that sounds like an interesting story]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it is but it’s got nothing to do with Dex so maybe I’ll answer it in a few days if I feel like it]

[u/ineedcheese: that’s a lot of stuff about how ADHD works but how does Dex work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Getting to that. People with ADHD gravitate toward things that overstimulate the dopamine reward system, because it’s the only way they get any. Playing video games generally gives you lots and lots of small rewards along the way. Endlessly bingeing Netflix feels good while you’re doing it because television is created to entertain and reward you.

[Now, being smart animals like the rest of humanity, ADHDers really do not want to spend their entire lives playing video games and bingeing Netflix. They want the same things anyone does – to do work that’s rewarding, to have satisfying relationships, to get along with family and make friends. But to accomplish those broad tasks, usually you have to do a lot of small tasks that aren’t inherently rewarding themselves. It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.

[So stimulants enter the picture. Adderal, Ritalin, and the most powerful and oldest stimulant of all: norepinephrine. Excitement, fear, anger, sexual desire, they all release norepinephrine, which tells the body to rev up. Charge up with energy. It’s time to run away from that tiger! Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl! Or ride your horse, which is terrifying and exciting because you’re moving faster than a human can, on top of an animal who is perfectly capable of doing whatever it wants instead of what you want.

[People with ADHD procrastinate, because the fear of the consequences of not doing the task eventually becomes high enough that that provides the motivation. If you can’t have dopamine, you can at least have some norepi. I don’t want to write that paper, so I pretend it’s not happening… and my executive function is so bad at keeping track of time, it’s easy for me to pretend, until the night before I have to turn it in, and my professor has reminded all of us to do it. Now I’m terrified. I’ve done exactly nothing on this paper, I’m gonna fail my class, my mom and dad will be disappointed, my asshole ex will laugh at me, I’ll suffer shame and disgrace for generations to come. Now I’m scared enough, flooded with enough norepinephrine, that I can do the thing. And maybe I will even get a dopamine reward when I’m done, because “congrats on getting us away from that tiger, buddy!” is a thing that even most ADHDers get.]

[u/semicolonbang: “It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.” Personal experience much?]

[u/estesrocketsarenottoys: “Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl!” not exactly feminist]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: “not exactly feminist” maybe not, but try being a lesbian with a beautiful girlfriend who all the guys are hitting on and she is really weirded out and upset by it and she just wants to be left alone, are you going to tell me you would not want to punch them in their sexist faces?]

[u/semicolonbang: your life story seems very interesting Suzanne Burke]

[u/ineedcheese: I still don’t know how Dex works]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Dex works by releasing small amounts of dopamine when you do a task you know you have to do, even if you don’t want to.

[We’ve used sophisticated AI to analyze the brain states of thousands of volunteers who recorded a moment by moment diary of what they were doing for a week and how they felt about it, and from that we’ve figured out how to distinguish the brain state of “I really, really hate doing this and there is no good reason to” – Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill after Hades has told him, the deal’s off buddy – and “I hate doing this, but it’s a step toward getting what I want.” When you make yourself do the thing you don’t want to do, but you know it will be good for you to do it, Dex rewards you with a little dopamine. Just like your own executive function would have, if you had one that worked.

[Dex can also tell when you’re caught in that paralysis loop – “I really should be working on my paper, but instead I am reading Reddit” – how many of you are in that place right now?]

Jason blinked. Wow, that was a little on the nose. This was posted a week ago, though, so she wasn’t talking about him. Specifically.

[If you’re doing a thing, but you feel guilty about doing the thing because there’s something you should be doing instead… Dex can uptake your existing dopamine. Basically, Reddit bores you! So you go looking for some other source of entertainment. Well, if you take that moment and use it to write your paper, or wash the dishes, Dex will make you feel good about doing it.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How good?]

[u/peterporkerthesuperbspiderham: Yeah, doesn’t like heroin or morphine also give you dopamine?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Not that good, and not exactly, but we’re not going to get into that. Dex isn’t addictive. Video games are a lot more addictive than Dex. Not that I ever blew a few hundred dollars on DLC, or anything.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How do you know?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Because we’ve tested it. There have been years of clinical trials at this point. There are a lot of people who were very, very upset at the thought of ever losing Dex… but we drilled down on that, and they were more like, wheelchair users upset at the thought of losing their wheelchair than addicts upset at losing their fix. They described how Dex made it possible for them to focus, to get things done that they’d always wanted to be able to do. Not that it made them feel good. Because it doesn’t. Tiny jolts of dopamine for washing the dishes doesn’t feel good. It just feels like it makes washing the dishes tolerable.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Should we be concerned about Jupiter’s involvement in this project?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Jupiter didn’t buy Ulysses until we were already in clinical trials, so no. They’ve been very hands off, actually.]

[u/ineedcheese: how does this fix me forgetting my appointments?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it doesn’t. But if you’re like most ADHDers you’ve been told, “Oh, just program a reminder on your phone!” And then the reminder to take out the garbage comes through, but you don’t feel like taking out the garbage, so you ignore it. Or you forget to add the reminder about the doctor’s appointment because that just seemed like a lot of work and you didn’t feel like it. What Dex will do is allow you to use those tools to manage the parts of ADHD that it doesn’t directly fix. You won’t remember the doctor’s appointment, but you will feel like putting a reminder into your phone about it was a worthwhile thing to do, when you made the appointment, and you will feel like getting up and going to that appointment is more worthwhile than checking Facebook, again.]

[u/stephaniestick: no one uses Facebook anymore]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Or Cicada, or Instagram, or Tumblr, or whatever.]

[u/ineedcheese: so it’s not as good as medication.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: In what way?]

[u/ineedcheese: medication helped me remember things I was supposed to do.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If medication works best for you, that’s a fine thing, and we’d advise you to stick with it. But a lot of adults can’t take the medication, or it doesn’t work for them.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Or they won’t prescribe it for you. I was diagnosed as an adult and my doctor told me, basically, no one will prescribe amphetamines for someone my age.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: also true.]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: you said it makes things unrewarding to do if you feel guilty about doing them. What if you feel guilty about everything?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: you absolutely should not use Dex if you have a scrupulosity complex, or in any other regard feel a lot of guilt over things you really shouldn’t feel guilty about.]

[u/beepityboopbop: so no Catholics, got it]

[u/mushroommushroom: A lot of people feel guilt over having sex, even if it’s healthy consensual sex.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, so it turns out that the human sex drive is so powerful, Dex can’t do anything with it. We tried. We recruited a few volunteers who wanted Dex to reduce their interest in sex, because they were trying to not cheat on their spouses, or they wanted to get more done… or whatever. We didn’t probe very deeply. It didn’t work for any of them. It can help with more traditional addictions, alcohol or smoking, but it does not actually seem to reduce sex drive even in people who feel guilty about having sex and want to have less of it.]

[u/supermansshorts: But you can use it to stop smoking?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If you feel bad about smoking, yes. If you know you shouldn’t smoke, and you would like to quit, but you are compelled to smoke anyway, having Dex will make smoking feel a lot less fun, which will help you quit. But you still have to do the hard work.

[Dex doesn’t magically solve all your problems. I’m pretty sure there is no implant that could do that. What it does is it gives you the tools you need to solve your own. When you have work to do, and you don’t want to do it, but you want to want to do it because you need to do it… Dex isn’t smart enough to know to reward you for that the first time you make yourself do it. It has to read your brain state while you’re doing it to know that this is a thing you should be doing that you don’t want to. You have to summon the willpower to do it the first time, yourself.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Because willpower and ADHD are so well known to be found together.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I actually think people with ADHD have enormous willpower, because they don’t get rewards for doing the useful things they have to do to stay alive and healthy. Other people aren’t really using willpower alone, they’re using the fact that it feels good to do a thing you need to do. People with ADHD have literally no emotional motivation at all, no brain chemical telling them to do the thing, but often they manage to force themselves to do it occasionally anyway. I think that takes a lot more willpower than doing a thing that rewards you with a little dopamine.]

[u/mushroommushroom: How do you get it?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Currently, only a psychiatrist can prescribe Dex.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Not a regular doctor?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: No, and actually, we recommend that you be in therapy while working with Dex. Among other things, there’s a phenomenon called spin doctoring that you might need a therapist to help you recognize and work through.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: You obviously want us to ask what spin doctoring is.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Haha, yes! OK, so you’re all familiar, I hope, with the fact that the brain has two lobes. They have a lot of overlap in function, though in a lot of people only the left side controls speech. But you are not two people, because there’s an entire wall of connecting neurons, the corpus callosum, between the two.

[Well, back in the old days, one treatment for really severe, life-threatening epilepsy was to sever the corpus callosum. So in a sense, patients became two people, but only one of them could talk. They did an experiment with those people. Sat them in front of a viewer where each eye could be shown a different image, and while they were doing tests, they sent a message to the right eye, go get a Coke. The right eye connects to the right lobe, which doesn’t usually have the ability to talk.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: Doesn’t the right brain control the left side and so on?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yep, but the crossover happens below the head. So the eyes, being in the head, are still connected to the lobe on the same side. Anyway, so they’d tell the right brain, go get a Coke. So the right brain would get the body up and head for the Coke machine. Now, keep in mind, the left brain has not seen this message, and without the corpus callosum, and given that the right brain can’t talk, the left brain has no way of knowing why the body is heading for the Coke machine.

[You would think this would be terrifying. Your body is doing something and you never told it to! Aaahh! Horror movie! But when they asked people, what are you doing? They got answers like, “I was thirsty”, or “I wanted to stretch my legs a bit.” None of them expressed any fear or uncertainty about why they were doing this, and also, none of them knew they’d been told to go get a Coke.

[So the theory goes, consciousness is not actually where all of your decisions come from! Maybe not even most of them! A lot of stuff is being done by deep processes in the brain that are black boxes, that consciousness has no insight into. But when those processes decide that the entire collection of stuff that is you needs to do something, consciousness often smoothly and easily rationalizes why you are doing the thing, without any recognition that that’s what you’re doing. It feels to you like you got up to stretch your legs, and while you’re at it, why not get a Coke? When the real reason is, the right side of your brain, which your left side can no longer hear, was told to do it.]

[u/supermansshorts: Is the right side of the brain, like, vulnerable to mind control?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, no, no. These were volunteers who’d agreed to do the experiment and follow the instructions. It’s not like the right side of your brain is a completely different person from the left side. Even if you sever the corpus callosum, both sides are still you, near-identical copies who think and feel much the same way about everything. So if the left side signed the papers and spoke the agreement, it’s likely that the right side also agreed, for the same reasons. The right side wouldn’t have done something like “jump out a window”, it’s just as capable of making rational decisions as the left side is. But it agreed to follow instructions the same as the left side did, because if the left side was the kind of person who’d volunteer to follow the experimenters’ instructions, then so was the right side.

[Anyway, so spin doctoring. Consciousness is so good at coming up with rationalizations for why you are doing a thing that some deeper process said to do, it doesn’t even know it’s doing it. So a lot of the time, we make decisions based not on anything rational, or even an emotion we understand and recognize, but something deep down that we’re not even aware of.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Like Freud’s ego and id.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Similar, yeah, but it’s more like, there’s all these different processes happening, and consciousness isn’t actually aware of any of them, just their outputs. And when the body as a whole acts on one of those outputs without going through consciousness first, consciousness comes up with a reason why they wanted to do that.]

[u/ineedcheese: But I do things all the time that I literally have no idea why I did it, like one time I poked a cake my mom had just iced and when she asked me why I did that, I didn’t even know.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, spin doctoring doesn’t always work, particularly since the ADHD brain is particularly vulnerable to processes just totally bypassing consciousness and doing a thing. That’s called “poor impulse control.”

[But the point is, we do things for reasons we don’t even know, and then our consciousness comes up with a reason why we did that thing, and then it enters our database of “reasons to do or not do things.” Like… if I found it very hard to do a thing, I might, for the sake of my pride, come up with “I really hate doing that thing” or “I think it’s stupid” or “That thing is completely unnecessary.” But maybe the only reason it was hard was I wasn’t getting any dopamine from it, and maybe Dex could fix that for me… if I was willing to try to do it, but the spin doctor might have already convinced me, doing that thing is dumb and why should I?

[One of the roles a therapist or psychiatrist can play with a patient trying Dex is to work through the spin doctor’s bullshit. Help you try out things you have already written off, or break patterns you think are just the best way to do things when maybe they’re not.]

[u/ineedcheese: Like what kind of thing?]

[u/snowflakespecialaisle10: Writing documentation if you’re a programmer.]

Ouch. That one especially hit home.

[u/semicolonbang: How is the implant done? Like do they drill through your skull?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: It’s a laparoscopic surgery done up through the nose. Outpatient surgery, you go home the same day.]

[u/supermansshorts: And that doesn’t fuck up your nose?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, your nose hurts like a bitch for about a week. When I did it, it drove me a little nuts because I have allergies, but blowing my nose would cause giant nosebleeds. Now, we give people a cocktail of antihistamine, numbing solution, and decongestant in a nasal spray, and apparently that works a lot better.]

[u/semicolonbang: You did it yourself?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I told you that I lost my girlfriend because I never washed dishes and then we got a roach infestation and she blamed me, and you think I wouldn’t be signing up for the clinical trial the moment we opened it to human trials?]

[u/mushroommushroom: To be fair, the roaches probably came in on your groceries or from the next door neighbor or something. Not washing the dishes just gave them a source of food and water to breed from.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I mentioned that. Turned out that was not a helpful argument.]

At this point, a Slack message popped up, and Jason had to turn his attention to that. It was from Teresa.

Jason, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours. Are you going to be ready for this meeting?

Ready, eager and waiting, he typed back. Shit, the meeting was in ten minutes. And look, there was the Outlook reminder he had reflexively shut off the moment it popped up, popping up again. Good thing Teresa had decided to poke him.

***

The meeting went well. Great, in fact. Jason was able to demo his code, and nothing went wrong. There were a couple of features he hadn’t implemented that the upper-level managers were concerned about, but Teresa backed him up, because he’d told her a month ago that those features would have to come in a later version. She politely reminded the upper-level managers that she’d informed them in email a month ago that those features wouldn’t be in this version. “Controlling scope is a very important part of controlling costs,” she said, and they couldn’t disagree.

Afterward there was a second, internal meeting of the team, which didn’t go quite as well because Teresa was banging the documentation drum. “If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, no one here would know how to support your code,” she said.

“Good thing I never go anywhere. No bus injuries in my future,” he said, and everyone laughed.

“But you know, they say that most accidents happen close to home,” Adrian said. “Seriously, Jason, I know doc’ing sucks, but you gotta get it done.”

Adrian extensively documented his own code, and got it done approximately 20% as quickly as Jason when he was on. And probably only 75% as quickly when you factored in how much time Jason wasted. “I know,” Jason said.

Stacy, the business analyst charged with writing user manuals, said, “It makes my job a lot easier when there are docs.”

“I’ll take a few days and go back through and do that.”

Then they talked about next steps, and the QA team revving up to test. Duane tried to get Jason’s help with a different problem he was working on, but Teresa deflected it, unfortunately. “Jason’s focus has to be on fixing his documentation,” she said. “Jorge, maybe you could team with Duane, see if the two of you could get any traction on this?”

“Sure,” Jorge said, dashing what small hopes Jason had of being able to find an acceptable task to work on that was not documentation.

When the meeting was over, he opened up his code, stared at it for three minutes trying to figure out where to even begin documenting. Due to the lack of documentation, he wasn’t even 100% sure he knew what all these functions did.

Fuck it.

He jumped over to Reddit, where he still had the Dex AMA open, which reminded him that he’d wanted to google Suzanne Burke’s claims and generally the whole thing, because the idea of a brain implant that could help you control your own behavior wasn’t real far off from conspiracy theorists’ paranoid fantasies of the CIA putting mind control devices in your brain.

Three hours later he’d learned some things:

All the bad reviews of Dex came from people who had obviously never used it or didn’t even really know what it was, people who were complaining about absurd things (“I wanted it to help me stop eating snack chips so I filled my room with snack chips to test it and it didn’t work, I still ate snack chips”) or things no one had never claimed it could fix (“I still keep losing my keys”), or people who had gotten one of the earlier versions at the start of clinical trials. Most of the most recent reviews either raved about it or said something like, “It’s a lot of hard work to re-engineer your whole life even with Dex, but with Dex I can actually do that work without getting in my own way”, or “It’s an adjustment and you’ll find there are things you are used to wanting to do that you don’t even really want to anymore, and that can be bothersome, but they’re usually things you wanted to stop wanting to do”. Most of the complaints that remained after the positive reviews and factoring out the old and/or stupid ones were about the surgery – “They said my nose would hurt for about three weeks but it’s been six weeks and it still hurts when I blow it”. One person had a bad allergic reaction and they had to take it out.

There were many complaints from friends and family members of someone using Dex. “He never has time to hang out anymore”, “We used to spend hours chatting on Discord and now she blows me off after like half an hour”, “He’s like some kind of zombie drone where it’s all about work, work, work” (this was troubling, but when Jason drilled into that, it turned out to be a boyfriend who was annoyed that his paramour didn’t want to spend hours a day canoodling, because he had work to do.)

There were a lot of conspiracy theories about how Jupiter was using Dex to mind control people on behalf of the government, the New World Order, the Jews, the reptilians, the liberal left, fascism, or corporations. These were all presented with tremendous hysteria and very little actual evidence. One persistent theory was that the founder and CEO of Jupiter, who’d expressed an interest in space colonization, was going to use Dex to mind-control a sizable workforce into going into space to build his space colonies. Another one seemed to think that Dex had been created by the infamous tech billionaire who’d managed to destroy Twitter, as if all tech billionaires were the same guy, or had some kind of hive mind agenda.

One credible theory claimed that the device had a wireless component to receive updates, and that therefore it could be used in the future to send ads to people, somehow. The wireless component turned out to actually exist, and it really was sending brain scans back to Ulysses for analysis, and Ulysses really was sending out software updates. Ulysses claimed this was fully anonymized, that the analysis was necessary in order to improve the software that ran Dex, and that the software itself was so unusual and proprietary that it would be literally impossible to infect it with malware. Jason was suspicious. All of that sounded very plausible and also something a corporation could decide to throw out and do something evil with the moment the board of directors decided they could get away with it. He couldn’t figure out exactly how it could possibly send ads, but he was sure it could be nefariously used for something.

In the end, there were two factors that decided him on not bothering to look any further into Dex. The existence of the wireless connection to Ulysses’ servers, and the fact that he’d have to find a psychiatrist if he wanted to be prescribed it. Finding a psychiatrist sounded easy enough, but given that Jason had had “change doctors” on his to-do list for two and a half years, and hadn’t been to a dentist in longer than that because he just never got around to making an appointment, he had no illusions.

But without researching Dex as an excuse to himself, he had no good reason not to work on his documentation. Just the usual reasons. It was boring, he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t make himself do it without a stunning amount of caffeine in his system.

Well. Time for early evening Coca Cola, then.

Jason had a system. Complex carbs, he thought, slowed him down and made him sleepy. Simple carbs, sugar, were a quick shot in the arm of energy, but there’d be a crash afterward. Greasy protein was even worse than the complex carbs, so pizza was absolutely terrible for focus. (This did not stop him from eating it when it was available.) The secret was lean protein, cold vegetables (because warmth made him sleepy), and sugar. So grilled chicken or salmon on a salad, and Coke. It was a pain in the ass to make this for himself; salad, in particular, was annoying because you had to wash it and then somehow you had to dry it, or wait hours for it to dry on its own, or your croutons would get soggy. He put in an online order at a local place, and then turned to video games.

The good thing about ordering food online was that, when it showed up, it would automatically disrupt whatever he was doing, so it was a great way to break free from something he probably shouldn’t be doing to switch to something he should. The bad thing about ordering food online was that it resulted in multiple interruptions while he was trying to relax with the game, because they called to confirm the order, and then they called to find his house, and then they called to tell him they were on the porch downstairs. And then Mom called up to tell him his food was here, and why hadn’t he asked her if she wanted anything?

But now he had his food, and his Coke, so it was time to focus on this thing.

This boring thing.

This thing he would rather do almost anything than be doing.

He slogged through it, incredibly slowly. He’d add a comment, scroll down, pop over to Reddit or a newsfeed or Youtube or literally anything other than this documentation, do that for several minutes – he had no idea how many – and then abruptly remember he was supposed to be doing his documentation and go back to it. As the night wore on, he became less and less efficient, more time spent not documenting, less time unraveling his own code to figure out what he did and write it down. But he couldn’t just go to bed; he had to make enough progress that he looked like he was making progress. But he couldn’t stay up all night, because then he would oversleep tomorrow and he would look bad.

The two balanced each other at 3 am, and he was finally able to go to bed, the documentation close to sort of done. Not to sleep, though, because he’d had way too much Coke and he was much too worried about what Teresa would think. Was this enough to show due diligence, or would she be angry that it wasn’t complete?

***

It took four days.

Four days of Teresa pestering him about whether the documentation was finished, four days of having nothing required of him that he actually wanted to work on. Four days of dodging the documentation as much as he could by helping everyone else out. Including helping with their documentation, because as annoying as documentation in general was, it was much better when he was getting the warm fuzzies for helping someone else, directly.

There was a weekend in the middle of those four days. Jason promised himself he’d work on the docs over the weekend and then didn’t even open the file. Then he promised himself he’d get up early on Monday to do some work on it, and instead woke up at 10, having missed a 9:30 scrum.

At 2 pm on Tuesday, he was finally able to report being finished with documenting his code. He checked the final version in, breathed a sigh of relief, and got himself a beer. He’d finished the slog. Time to unwind. He didn’t officially clock out, because frankly he’d been working so ridiculously late each night that if he weren’t salaried, they’d owe him a whole extra paycheck, so it was only fair. While he didn’t log off Slack or close his email, he did dive into a video game that occupied the full screen and wouldn’t let him see if messages came through. He told himself he’d pop out periodically and check.

Six hours later, when he finally checked, he had a Slack message from Teresa to come into the office tomorrow. It was much too late by now to ask her why.

***

“You’re letting me go?”

He stared at Teresa, a feeling of cold and heat at once sweeping through his veins. “You know I’m the best programmer in the department, right?”

“No one disputes that,” Teresa said, conciliatory. “But it takes you too long to get your work done, because you’re always in late, or leaving early.”

“I’ve been working until 3 am for a week now! And I only left early yesterday because I’d finished my documentation, and I needed a break.”

“Right. Jason, other programmers do not take four days to finish documenting their code. They document it as they write it. If you’d been hit by a bus over the weekend, we wouldn’t have had any idea how the code works, and I’d have to put someone on tracing it back and figuring it all out.”

He realized, then, that she’d just been waiting for him to finish it before she fired him. “I’m always helping out everyone else in the department, that’s why I’m slow sometimes.”

“You’re a great help, and you’ll be missed, but we need programmers who can work standard hours and hit their deadlines. I’m sorry, Jason, but it’s out of my hands. Upper management looked at your metrics and told me you’ve gotta go.” She shook her head. “I know you have personal effects here at the office, so you can go get those. Charlie here will escort you.”

Charlie wasn’t dressed any differently than anyone else at the company, but he was probably security. Certainly Jason didn’t recognize him, so he wasn’t in IT. “Fine,” he snapped.

“We’ll need the work laptop back,” she reminded him. The one he had never taken out of the box, because the box had the specs on it and he’d realized that it wasn’t nearly powerful enough for his needs, so he’d been doing all his work on his personal desktop.

“I’ll drop it off.”

He knew that by now he’d already been locked out of all the computer systems, so he wouldn’t have a copy of any of his Slack messages, or the code he’d just finished. If he wanted his email he’d have to find a way to convert his Outlook OST to an archive without actually opening it, because if he opened it, it would probably ask for a password and then just endlessly prompt him for a login until he closed it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to keep his email that badly.

What a dick thing, to make him come into the office just to fire him. But then, it would also have been a dick thing to fire him by Slack message or voice call or email, and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to get his very minimal amount of stuff, which included a few cartoons he’d pinned to his cubicle wall and a family picture he’d photoshopped to completely remove Dad, so it just had him and Mom. Not that he couldn’t print out another copy of that, but the frame had come from a college friend he wasn’t in touch with much anymore, and he had sentimental attachment to it.

***

Mom was home, in the kitchen, on her laptop, as he came in, because of course she was. “Honey? You okay?”

For a moment he contemplated saying “Fine,” and stomping off to his room like he was still 17, but Mom would get it out of him sooner or later. Better bite the bullet now. “I got fired.”

“Oh. Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry. Anything I can do to help?”

Not tell me about how it’s my fault, I hope. “Not really, but thanks for the offer.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve got savings and I’ve got health insurance until the end of the month, and more if I take COBRA. I want to see a psychiatrist about these problems I’ve been having.”

Mom nodded. “That might be a good idea. Maybe there’s a new medication you could try.”

“There’s this thing I was looking into, called Dex. It’s like an implant that helps you train your brain to focus? I’m thinking maybe I need to take it more seriously.”

“That might be a good idea. Do you need help with finding a psychiatrist?”

He was about to say no, it’s fine, I’ve got it handled Mom… and then thought better of it, because that kind of thing was the strategy that just got him fired. “Yeah. I need you to keep reminding me I need to do it. Even if I get bitchy about it.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Mom said, amused. “Also, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get your COBRA paperwork to you, but you need to get on that immediately. Check the mail every day—”

“I’d think they’d email it.”

“They might, but probably they’ve turned off your email? Do they have a personal email address for you?”

A good question. “I think they have my Gmail…”

“Check that every day. Including the spam boxes. And check the regular mail every day. There’s some time limit they’re under for how quickly they have to provide you that, but I don’t remember what it is. And it’s to their advantage if they wait a few days so maybe you’ll forget. You need to be on that. You could try to go through the marketplace, since losing your job is a qualifying event, but that’s likely to be much more disruptive, and COBRA is probably cheaper than that.”

Jason nodded. “Keep me honest?”

“I sure will.”

“Gonna hit up Dice and Linkedin, maybe Monster, see how quick I can land a new job.”

“Good luck.”

***

But he had savings, and it seemed like a dumb idea to take a new job and then get brain surgery. Sure, the AMA had said it was outpatient surgery, but what if there were complications and he had to take time off? It might be a better idea to find out if he was getting Dex or not before he got a job.

He found a psychiatrist who didn’t take his, or anyone’s, insurance, which was expensive, but living with your mom for several years and paying only a third of the mortgage and half the utilities, while holding a good job, had enabled him to save up a fairly large nest egg. She was the kind of psychiatrist who never actually told you what she thought, but spent all her time asking you what you thought about things. She presented options and made suggestions and offered to help by writing prescriptions for whatever she had suggested that you had decided to go ahead with.

The company had given him one boon; they hadn’t told the state they’d fired him for cause, even though doing so would have saved on their unemployment insurance. Unemployment was less than a third of what he’d been making, but on the other hand, he didn’t have to order food out nearly so much when he wasn’t breaking his neck for the company that had just fired him. He could actually cook. He could help his mom when she cooked, and learn how to make some shit he didn’t already know.

Jason tried three non-stimulant medications over the course of eight weeks. One of them made him horny as hell, which was unfortunate as he didn’t have a significant other, and he felt like jerking off three times a day was a waste of his time. One did nothing. One made him overwhelmingly sleepy. He tried stimulant medication, again, a slightly different formulation, but still felt like it made him jittery and his heart raced and he got headaches and was irritable. A lower dose of stimulant medication gave him the same symptoms, just a little less of them, and lower than that didn’t actually work at all to help him focus.

This wasn’t the first job he’d been fired from for not being able to keep to a schedule or make deadlines, and if he didn’t do something, it wouldn’t be the last.

In the end, he talked himself into asking his doctor about Dex, just like the commercial said.

***

Outpatient surgery, it turned out, was still surgery… it just didn’t involve a lengthy stay in the hospital. When his mother came to pick him up, because he wasn’t allowed to drive after surgery, his nose was starting to hurt like a motherfucker. They’d given him a nasal spray that would keep the area sterile, promote clotting, and relieve pain, and they’d given him decongestants because it was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, according to the aftercare nurse and the directions he was given on paper, that he not sneeze or blow his nose. If his nose started to run, they’d given him a second nasal spray that was a direct decongestant and antihistamine, and he was supposed to use that instead. If he had a nosebleed, he was to use his spray and lay down immediately until the bleed went away. Yes, his nose would clog up, because there was a healing wound and the spray was promoting clotting; he would just have to breathe through the other nostril. And this was supposed to go on for up to two weeks.

Joy.

They also gave him regular painkillers, which he quit taking about four days later because seriously, how do people get addicted to the sensation of having a fuzzy head? He had enough issues with being half-brained from exhaustion, he didn’t really want to add opioids to the mix. Tylenol and the nasal spray would do.

It was at that point that he decided to engage in the difficult task of trying to get a new job. He’d already updated his resume, but he hadn’t uploaded it; he’d already done some initial keyword searches for jobs, but hadn’t actually applied to anything.

He opened the job search site, logged into his profile, and began the laborious task of adding his newer skills from the job he was just fired from, and updating the length of experience he had with the other ones. It was nightmarishly boring, just like it had been every other time, so he popped over to Reddit. Just for a little while, just to do something more entertaining for a few minutes.

Except Reddit wasn’t entertaining.

He browsed around for a while, looking for something to catch his attention, but frankly nothing was as compelling as the idea of getting the goddamn resume done and out there, so he could get a job, get health insurance he didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, and stop making his mom anxious. So he went back to the job search site, and this time, managed to get the entire task done without interrupting himself. It wasn’t fun, but it was something he wanted out of the way, and he was able to power through it, and then finish doing the same thing with two other job search sites.

It wasn’t until after he was finished that he realized.

Holy shit. This thing works!

***

After that, Jason went a little nuts, self-admittedly, with his new superpowers of actually being able to focus and get shit done.

The AMA had been correct. He wasn’t any better able to remember where he put his keys than he had ever been. But he was able to order a bunch of devices that could be hung on key rings or slipped into wallets, that he would be able to use an app to find, and then get them set up and put them on the devices they needed to be attached to. He got “Find my Droid” configured for all the times he lost his phone, and a bunch of chargers he could plug in all over the house, including QI chargers, that he could leave the phone attached to whenever he didn’t want to deal with carrying it around, so now it wouldn’t die out of his custody.

He wasn’t any better at remembering that he had appointments. But he was able to focus enough to put in sufficient reminders, that would catch him at enough points in time, that he wouldn’t be blindsided… and enough to actually check the reminders when they showed up, rather than just absent-mindedly dismissing them. After he next saw his psychiatrist, he actually put his upcoming appointment on his calendar, so he didn’t have to run around like crazy trying to find the little appointment card when he finally remembered that there was an appointment.

He remembered to wash his clothes three days before a job interview, so he had options. (It was virtual anyway, but it did require his camera, so he wanted to look good.) He showered and shaved that morning, rather than forgetting and then racing to try to get it done before the interview. He actually ate breakfast, not just coffee, because he paid attention when his alarm went off, didn’t just snooze it, and managed to drag himself out of bed early enough that his mom was still home and making herself eggs and bacon, which she shared with him. He used Linkedin and Google to read up on the companies he was being interviewed for before the interview, so he actually knew who some of the people were and had some familiarity with what they did.

And in the meanwhile, he kept the dishes clean, the trash taken out, the kitchen floor swept, the toilet paper on the roll and the empty rolls in the trash can, the soda cans in the recycling bin, and he even got around to fixing the bathroom shelf above the toilet and taking his mom’s car to the mechanic for her, because a 30-year-old guy was a lot less likely to get scammed by a mechanic than a nearly 60-year-old woman.

This was fucking awesome.

He wrote a few of the personal programs he’d always wanted to get around to, like the one that helped him use his phone to take an inventory of his and his mom’s shit, so if there was ever a fire, they could back up their claims of what was lost… and then he actually went around taking the photographs, labeling them, and using the program to push them into the database he’d set up. He remembered, finally, after about twelve increasingly upset emails from Teresa, to bring in that work laptop and drop it off. He returned his library books, paid his fines, and checked some more out, and then returned them on time. He set up a blog and started writing about programming challenges he’d encountered in his career. He put a Pi Hole on his mom’s wifi network to block ads at the router so none of the computers had to work at that. He bought a cheap laptop and set it up with Linux like he’d always planned, and actually did the experimenting he’d always wanted to do.

His time on Reddit plummeted, and was mostly confined to subreddits about the games he was into, where he knew people and had stuff to say that he cared about, rather than endlessly surfing sites like r/AmITheAsshole and r/TodayIFuckedUp. He still gamed, in the evenings, for a reasonable amount of time that didn’t interfere with his sleep schedule, and felt no guilt about it because he was getting his important shit done, so he had every right to relax as hard as he worked. When he wasn’t doing job interviews or searching for jobs, during the day in what would be working hours, he was reading up on new technologies and actively teaching himself new skills.

Jason’s mom cried when she told him how proud she was of him for taking this step and getting his life turned around. He himself wanted to cry, sometimes, when he realized that he’d wasted 30 years of his life without this, and that ordinary people, people without ADHD, just lived like this. Out of the box. Without having to have a foreign object shoved up their nose and into their craniums.

The day he got the new job, he happily updated his LinkedIn, after making connections with old co-workers so they could see he’d landed on his feet and he wasn’t a total fuckup. A couple of them contacted him, asking if he could help out with some problems they were having. He asked them to go back to Teresa and get authorization to pay him as a contractor. They didn’t ask again after that.

He even went and updated his profile on some dating sites. Now that he had a job again, and now that he no longer felt constant guilt over what he wasn’t getting done at his job, it was time to try to get back into that game. He hadn’t had a partner since shortly before the first lockdown… that was a long time to go without.

And then his first paycheck arrived, and he grinned to himself. He’d been good… at least since getting the Dex implant. He hadn’t bought anything unless he needed it or it would help him improve skills and be more marketable. No new games, no new DVDs, no books, no new phone, no new speakers for his PC, no replacement pump and filter for the fish tank that had no fish in it and was at this point just an algae-growing experiment, no cast iron skillet because Mom had sold hers at a yard sale due to her hands being too arthritic to hold something so heavy while cooking, nothing.

It was spending spree time! He’d been promising himself this since he got Dex. Save his money while he didn’t have a job, keep spending as tight as he could, and he’d go on a spree as soon as he got a paycheck.

He went to Jupiter.com first, because that was where he could get most of everything he wanted, maybe even everything he wanted. Two new games he’d been jonesing for. Several graphic novels, a science fiction novel, and a memoir. A box set for a TV show he loved, because relying on streaming had gotten more and more erratic as fights over licensing continued. PC speakers with surround sound that were two generations better than what he had, and an upgraded graphics card. Fish tank supplies – maybe he was finally going to be responsible enough to keep fish alive. A hat, because it looked cool, even though he couldn’t imagine a circumstance where he’d actually wear it.

For clothes, though, and the cast iron frying pan, it was better to shop local, where he didn’t have to pay shipping, and he could immediately return anything that had an unpleasant texture. So he went over to Target’s web site, and was immediately bored out of his mind.

He tried to convince himself that the search tools for clothes were more specialized here, and he was more likely to be able to find one thing that fit and then six other things like it in slightly different cuts or colors. No go. It was like looking at the red color scheme and the font was draining the life out of him.

Which was ridiculous. He forced himself to look for the cast iron frying pan. That should be simple and easy.

But they had multiple options, and it seemed like just such an enormous amount of work to sort through them.

He went back to Jupiter.com. The fonts seemed cleaner, the pictures more inviting. The cost of shipping was challenging, though. But he could fix that. Just click the button for only free shipping, and look at that! He could even get three of different sizes. He added it to his cart without thinking about it much.

Clothes continued to be a challenge. It was kind of fun to go hunting, but his frustration was building, because there were so many items coming up in his searches that weren’t what he searched for at all. And no way to tell the texture of anything just from pictures, whereas with a local store he could go there and check things out.

So he tried going over to Walmart, which was disgusting, and JC Penney’s, which was overwhelming, and some of the sites for fancy mall stores, which just seemed to not have any kind of selection. He was used to buying from Target. They had good search filters for men’s clothes, that rarely pulled back complete bullshit. He should go there.

Except when he went there, everything looked overwhelmingly hard and chaotic and he just didn’t want to. All the fun of clothes shopping drained away.

And then he went cold.

Jason tried going to Barnes and Noble’s web site for a specific book. It was too hard to use the site. He’d used it before, but somehow it seemed really inferior now. He tried going to a PC online retailer to look for the video card he had already bought from Jupiter. The filters were too unresponsive. He went to Swappa to find a used phone to replace the one he had, and almost immediately gave up because none of the products looked good and he was feeling a general sense of unease about the idea of buying a used phone from a shady online store… even though he’d gotten his last three phones there and had been satisfied.

Shit. Shit.

He had to post about this. If this was happening to him… he couldn’t be the only one. He opened up Reddit and found the thread about Dex, clicked the new post button…

…and lost all enthusiasm for the task. Jesus, did he really have to write a post about this bullshit? Who cared? Probably everyone would jump his shit. It wasn’t like he had any scientific proof. And the idea of having to explain, in detail, what was happening? Humiliating.

No. No. That was more of it. He had to write this post. He started typing, grimly, using the same fortitude he’d used when he’d spent four days documenting his code so his boss could fire him.

“I really loved Dex at first, but”

“but some disturb”

“but I found”

“but there’s one thing”

Nothing looked right. The documentation, at least, had been right when he’d written it. Everything he was writing now just looked terrible and whiny and like there was no point to saying anything.

But he had to do this. He had to write this post. The thing in his head had to be making him not want to do this, not want to say this, but he’d gone for 30 years forcing himself to do things he really, really didn’t want to do.

“I really loved Dex at first, but its changing what I want, its bad, you shouldn’t”

No. Fuck. What was that? That was utter shit. Couldn’t he even be bothered to capitalize and use punctuation?

“I really loved Dex at first, but it won’t let me write this post about what it’s doing to me”

Fuck this, go read r/AITA.

Go read his video game subreddits.

Check Microsoft Teams, which his new company used instead of Slack. Maybe someone had a late-night request for help? Or something he was supposed to do tomorrow that he could get started on tonight instead?

No!

“I really loved Dex at first, but it makes me”

An hour of reading the news.

“makes me feel bored with shopping”

Just one round of his video game. Just one.

Six rounds later.

“shopping anywhere but Jupi”

This dog growled at the baby sitter, you’ll be shocked when you find out why!

25 screens later of a story he had predicted the end of when he’d started reading it.

“Jupiter. I go to tar”

Had anyone online ever posted that stupid ditty where they sang “shop at tar-jay” like the word Target was French? Go check.

“target or any other site”

Wow, it was late, shouldn’t he go to bed? Bed sounded really great. He really shouldn’t disrupt his sleep schedule for this now that he’d gotten a new job and finally established a good sleep schedule, right?

Focus.

“site and it makes me feel like it’s boring, or too complicated, or just bad”

How about his favorite TV show? Was there going to be another season of that?

“just bad, until I go to Jupiter, and then shopping feels fun”

Yeah. That was it. That was the message. He didn’t need to keep doing this. He could stop and post it here. Actually he should spell check first, right? And it was late, maybe he wanted to hold off on posting until tomorrow, when he could look at it with fresh eyes.

“feels fun. And it wont let me”

1 am. This was ridiculous. He had work in the morning. He couldn’t lose this job just because of something stupid like this.

Another half hour of reading the news.

“let me write this to warn you.”

Right! Wrap it up, turn off the monitor, go to bed! He’d done his part. The message was out there!

Jason absent-mindedly turned his computer off, and only then, wondered if he had ever actually hit post.

Well. He could check on it in the morning.

After work. And his chores. And he was supposed to game with his friends tomorrow, so after that, too.

Oh, fuck this. He'd spent his life struggling against things his brain didn't want him to do, and it was awful and it had traumatized him and he never wanted to go through that bullshit again. If he'd forgotten to hit post, oh well. Let someone else do it. Jason was done beating his head against the wall of things he really didn't want to do, that he thought he should do, forever.

#52 project #science fiction #adhd #near future #i made up jupiter so amazon wouldn't sue me #just so you know

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not-a-space-alien · 2 years

Text

Savage Sunset Chapter 4S

In this chapter: Valen turns out to be one of those dogs who only like women and growls at men

Story masterpost

Here is the corresponding chapter in the complementary story.

Content/content warnings for this chapter: Nonconsensual bondage/restraint/being trapped, gag/muzzle, broken bones/broken nose

Note for this chapter: I want to be sensitive with regard to the way mentally ill villains are often portrayed in horror (with a villain being scary because of their mental illness.) The character in this story in question does not have a real life mental illness or any equivalent, so I believe this does not contribute to the stigmatization of real people and real disorders. This character also has other motivations that neurotypical people could also have. I just want to encourage my readers to be cognizant of this as an ongoing issue in the horror genre, and use some critical thinking. And of course if you think I've done something wrong in my portrayal, I'd love to hear some advice on how to do better in the future. Thanks for reading! Onto the story! :)

***

“Fuck!!”

The exclamation came accompanied by an unsettling crunching as the medic set Lex’s broken nose back into place. She let out a groan, scrabbling for the offered painkillers as Gabriel snapped his gloves off and went to wash his hands. “That should do ya.”

“Uhh–that’s it?” said Lex.

“Yep. You’re lucky that vamp didn’t kill ya. Most of ‘em are strong enough to just crush your nose right up into your brain.”

He’s also lucky he didn’t kill me, Lex thought. Because if he had, Ari wouldn’t have been as nice as she was to him. She still held the bloody tissue to her nose. “I’ll be sure to thank him, then,” she said wryly.

Gabriel slipped a full bottle of Tylenol out of the drawer. “No hunting for a few weeks, okay?”

“Won’t be able to till Ari’s leg is fixed, anyway.”

“Sure. Just take it easy. Take painkillers when you feel like you need them, but not more than 8 every 24 hours. Oh, and try to make yourself look a little less tasty, if what I heard about our newest guest is to be believed.”

Gabriel had already heard that they’d brought a vampire home. Of course he would have, everyone would be abuzz about it. No one had managed it before. They were very hard to handle live because of their ability of persuasion.

“Well, if what you say is true, apparently he has such delicate, gentle kicks that I don’t need to worry,” said Lex, tossing the bloodied tissue into the bin. “Thanks for the Tylenol. And the excuse to sit on my ass for a few weeks.” It would probably be a little difficult to squeak by on their savings for a while, since they would have to go without winning any bounties for a while until they could hunt again, but they could probably manage….Especially since the prize for bringing home a live catch had been pretty generous. And it would be nice to have some time to just focus on recovering.

“Sure,” said Gabriel. “Oh, and…if I were you, I would steer clear of the director for a bit. He’s not gonna be happy about this.”

***

Lex saw the other hunters gathered around the coffin when she came back out. They parted slightly to let her through, and she couldn’t help feeling a little upset when she saw the vampire had blood on his face.

This was what she was afraid of. There was no reason to hurt him when he was already all trussed up. Some hunters could be vindictive as hell, though. It was needless cruelty. Still…She didn’t want to be the one sticking her neck out to tell off her colleagues for their treatment of a vampire, of all things. She shook her head. “Where’s Nick?”

“He’s on the phone with the director,” said Jerome.

“Oh boy,” said Ari. “I bet he’s just thrilled with this new development.”

“I thought he gave Nick the OK to do this?” said Bailey, puzzled. “He authorized Nick to put a bounty on bringing a live vampire back.”

The other hunters laughed.

“Yeah,” said Jerome wryly. “To get him to shut up. He didn’t think anyone would actually do it.”

“The director was bluffing,” said Ari. “Because vampires are so damn hard to catch live because of persuasion, he thought none of us could do it. He doesn’t actually want a vampire in the building.”

Lex came over and put a foot up on the coffin, like she was posing with a hunting trophy. “Hah! That’ll show him. And he’s contractually obligated to pay out the bounty.”

One of the other hunters experimentally copied Lex, putting a hand on the coffin, and the vampire inside went ballistic, slamming his skull up and narrowly missing crushing a finger on the offending hand.

The hunter jerked his hand away, grimacing. “Yeesh…Well, Nick can have him.”

“Speaking of,” said Ari, and Nick appeared in the doorway.

His eyes sparkled. “You did it. Thank you! Thank you!”

He sounded like a kid at Christmas. Lex had always been a little bit creeped out by Nick. In fact, most of the hunters weren’t thrilled with Nick on a day-to-day-basis.

Nick seemed…like he wasn’t quite all there. They all knew why of course–Nick had been imprisoned in the vampire’s blood farms for an alarmingly long time before he’d gotten away. And anyone who spent too long in the blood farms eventually turned into a mindless husk as their brain melted from being under the thrall of vampire persuasion for so long.

Nick had apparently been…part of the way there when he’d gotten out. Part of his behavior was because of trauma, but part of it was because his brain had been supernaturally tampered with…

…and some of it was also just the sheer bitterness and hatred stemming from what he’d gone through. Looking at him now, at how excited he was to be presented with a vampire gift-wrapped, Lex felt unease crawling up her spine.

“Come on, Ari,” said Lex, tugging at Ari’s hand. “You have to get your leg seen to.”

“Wait, ladies, I have to give you the bounty for your hard work!” He clapped his hands together. “And, everyone, after some…heated discussion…with the director, he has simply given me the guidelines that, for safety, we can only open the coffin when at least two people are present. So who wants to be the lucky volunteer and help me take this specimen downstairs?”

“I will,” Lex volunteered instantly, and then felt embarrassed about the speed at which she’d done so.

“I see how it is,” said Ari. “Rather spend time playing with Nick in the basement than helping your poor, hurt girlfriend to the nurse.”

Lex blushed. “We can–We can do that together and then go help Nick right afterwards.”

Nick looked around. “Well, I don’t hear any other volunteers, so…” He beamed. “I’ll wait right here for you to get back!”

***

Tag list <3

@annablogsposts

@oddsconvert

@pumpkin-spice-whump

@soursagas

@whumpsday

#hurt/comfort #angst #vampires #whump #vampire whumpee #whumpblr #I have a long weekend okay maybe i can waste a LITTLE a time writing abt vamps

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pikkish · 1 year

Text

@dwellerinroots videogame exchange list for you! A handful of my favorite open world/open world adjacent games.

Hollow Knight - 2D metroidvania platformer. Metroidvanias are like, basically open world games, right? right? It’s still centered on exploration, so I’m gonna say it counts. Anyway, Hollow Knight is a very special game in that it is one of two games where, partway through, I stopped and thought, “I did not pay nearly enough for this game.” You play as a strange little bug creature known only as the knight or the little ghost, and explore the ruins of a forgotten underground city that long fell to a mysterious disease. Very little lore is directly given to you, and not much of that given to you makes sense until much later, but the game is an excellent example, and should be a role model, of “show, don’t tell” and environmental storytelling. Beautiful art, haunting soundtrack, compelling characters, a huge map to explore, tons of secrets to find, a lore rich story, and a fast and tight combat system. It does have a reputation for being very difficult, both for combat and platforming, but less “this is a poorly designed game” and more it just has a steep learning curve. Well worth the challenge, though; the game will rip out your heart in the best way possible. I cried about at least two of the endings.

Subnautica - probably one of the crown jewels of open world exploration, tbh. Your ship crashes on an aquatic planet, and you have to survive, find out what crashed your ship, and build a rocket to escape. The world is beautifully alien, vibrantly alive, and the entire thing being underwater lends map design a unique sense of verticality that most normal-landscape open world games don’t have. There are, iirc, two timed events that happen, but otherwise you are free to ignore everything plot-related and explore as you please. I’d recommend playing in a dark room with good headphones for the full atmospheric effect. *(Due note though that Subnautica is... a little broken in some places. Reviews say it’s partially a horror game, but the scariest thing that happened to me was when one of the giant fish that wants to eat you pulled a Bethesda on me and clipped straight through a mountain to come get me. It’s a bit unpolished in areas, some mechanics don’t work quite as well as they were intended, and I suspect some areas might’ve been a victim of scope creep. There’s apparently been an update recently that supposedly fixed a lot of these, but based on my experience, it doesn’t quite feel like a complete game, and I’d definitely wait for it to go on sale before buying.)

Dying Light - This one is a bit more populated and quest heavy, but it has neat maps and fun gameplay. There’s been an outbreak of a zombie virus, and you’re a secret agent dropped into the quarantine zone to find some research on a cure. You must work with the survivors set up in the quarantined city both to accomplish your goal, and just to stay alive. The core gameplay is parkouring across the city to escape the zombie hordes, some of which are just as good at climbing as you are. Said parkour mechanics are very fast and fluid, and running around the city, chased by zombies, on a quest, or just for fun, is downright exhilarating. I did have some stuttering issues I couldn’t quite figure out how to fix, which is... a little bit of a problem when the gameplay is all about how fast and smooth you can move, but otherwise a great experience.

Rain World - ‘nother metroidvania platformer. I actually didn’t get too far in this one on account of the controls being a bit more -heh- sluggish, but that’s more of a personal preference thing than an actual problem with gameplay. You play as a little creature known as a slugcat. Separated from your family and stuck within the decaying corpse of an ancient machine, you must scavenge food to fill your belly, avoid other creatures that very much want to fill their bellies with you, and seek shelter at the end of each cycle to avoid drowning in each night’s torrential downpours. Very large map, wonderfully designed environments, and an achingly melancholic feel to the entire thing. I know there’s some pretty deep lore from watching a friend who was far better at the game play it, but if my own experiences are anything to go by, you are entirely able to scurry around and do your own thing for hours without paying the slightest bit of attention to lore.

Noita - This one’s a roguelike, but I feel like it deserves an honorable mention as an open world game, just for how dang big it is, both in actual map size, and in how much content there is crammed into that map. It’s apparently very heavily based in Finnish folklore, but it doesn’t really tell you any of that, it just kinda goes “Here’s how you move, here’s how you shoot, ok have fun!! :)” and then just throws you into the game. Its combat system centers about building your own magic wands with different spells on them, and combining spells in different ways can have wildly different results.For as deep as the wand mechanics are, though, the real selling point is the world simulation: every individual pixel is simulated, and everything interacts with everything else. You can burn things, break things, crumble things, shatter things, melt things, freeze things, and probably do a whole lot of other things I don’t even know about. Expect to die a lot, and expect to accidentally kill yourself a lot.

#pikspeak #bideogaem rambling :)#hope at least one of these catches your attention!#def let me know if u pick one up and what u think of it #may or may not add on to this list later with more- albeit unrelated- games #some of these descriptions got a little longer than anticipated haha #love talking about my favorite games :)

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alarajrogers · 1 year

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upcoming WIP

This is the first part of the next 52 Story and I wanted to share it with you guys because I cannot think of another place where this would be as profoundly relatable.

This isn't autobiographical at all. I don't even use Slack. :-)

The following is a description of ADHD hell (not literally hell, this guy is supposed to be alive) and may be triggering to, well, probably all of us.