#this is what turning non binary does to a motherfucker

[zlo-sovs-lifeboat]

Unsorted works from this month.

Also i Decided to remove gender from myself, i wasn't using it anyway.

#i have been busy #blender #blender 3d #fashion #animation #this is what turning non binary does to a motherfucker

[lizajane2]

I’m gonna pretend that I didn’t just read a post about how the Last of Us pushes the narrative of oppressing the LGBTQ+ community. Cause I’m gonna point out that Ellie is a lesbian. Their main fucking character loves women. And I’m also gonna point out that Bill is gay. Motherfucker spent his whole life in the closet up until he met Frank, they lived a full life together, those two bitches even got married. And same sex marriage wasn't even legal in 2003. and Bill didn’t see the need to live without the love of his life anymore. This show revolves around love, about having a purpose.

Also, Sarah’s death is senseless because she’s black in the show? That it pushes the agenda of sacrificing the black character for the white male lead? Okay, if we’re gonna add race into the mix then I'm gonna say this with my whole fucking chest that Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel, isn’t white. He’s not Caucasian. He was born in Chile. That man is Hispanic through and through. And Sarah dying would’ve happened regardless; wouldn't have mattered if she was white, Latina, Asian or lesbian, or fucking identified as non-binary. It would’ve happened. Sarah’s death reflects in every personal connection that is formed throughout Part One, which includes Joel and Ellie. Sam and Henry. Joel and Tommy. Tess and Joel. Bill and Frank. They all have one thing in common. Those connections give them a purpose to live, to survive. Because you bet your ass if Joel didn’t have Tess, Tommy or Ellie that man would’ve opted out years ago.

Henry and Sam dying had nothing to do with Joel and Ellie. Not a damn thing. The only thing that Joel gained from that whole situation was the realization that he does in fact fear losing Ellie. You can also see it when he's sniping Clicker's left and right to make sure she is safe. You can see it when Sam attacks her too. And Joel being the man that he's been for the last TWENTY-YEARS, before he ever met Henry and Sam, Joel is gonna protect Ellie. He's gonna make sure that NOTHING happens to Ellie so HE doesn't have to experience the pain of losing another CHILD. And this comes right back around to losing Sarah.

Henry shooting Sam and then turning the gun on himself, had more to do with their relationship, their bond. Henry didn't just lose a brother; he lost a son. And that was his first time killing someone ever. He couldn't handle the heartbreak, the remorse. He killed the one person that was his reason for living, for breathing and he didn't see a reason to go on. You lose that, what purpose do you have that world? "well, it wouldn't have happened if Joel and Ellie hadn't been there." You sure about that? It would've happened eventually. One of them would've gotten bit or died.

Now I’m not saying this shit doesn’t happen with other media cause I sure as shit agree with that. But tell me you don’t understand the actual narrative of The Last of Us without telling me you don’t understand.

#the last of us #the last of us hbo #tlou hbo #joel miller #pedro pascal #ellie williams #sam and henry #tess servopoulos #bella ramsey #sarah miller #nico parker #bill and frank #nick offerman #murray bartlett #lamar johnson #keivonn woodard #gabriel luna #tommy miller

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

JYSK, the op of that 'I'd much rather see pups at pride then...' (orpheuslament) really singles out pansexuality in a lot of their posts and subscribes to the idea that it's an inherently transphobic identity. Also while I agree with the problem of sanitasation and commercialisation of pride, I do think it's a false equivalence to pit (annoyong, wrong, even harmful) individual tiktok users on the same scale as the oppressive systemic force of cops and corporations

That's fair but when I heard annoying TikTok users I thought of the whole no kink at pride debate and how it was really at terminally online debate and I figured that was probably what they were talking about. And I do think the kink at pride motherfuckers are sort of a systemic issue. They're trying to drive other people out of pride. I suppose that assumption was wrong but that's why I reblogged the post. I don't go check every person I reblog from what op is doing unless I follow op is between them and their god most of the time lol.

Additionally I'm sort of a centrist on this issue, I guess. I used to identify as pansexual and I'm not a panphobe. I think the cats out of the bag on that and people should identify however they want. I get wanting a more spacific label or whatever and I hear a lot of people define it as being attracted to people without their gender coming into play when that is definitely not how all bisexual people experience attraction, so fair enough if you want to be specific about being perfectly in the center of the Kinsey scale and not being turned on or off by gendered presentation I'm cool with that. But the origins of the sexuality are somewhat problematic because it was essentially billed as a way to make bisexuality more exclusive. Like bisexuality never meant just men and women no non-binary people historically. There's a purple goddamn stripe on the flag. And then pansexuality popped up in like 2013 and was like "actually bisexuality means 2 genders" which just wasn't true. I don't necessarily disagree with people who are critical of it either. And that does sort of sound like "we're attracted to men women and transgendereds" which would be transphobic. I don't think that most pansexuals think like that anymore but there was a time back in it's early days where that was the vibe. I just don't think that it's a particularly useful debate a decade later. Can't put the genie back in the bottle the pansexuals are here now and most of them claim the label interchangeably with bisexual so, moot if valid point that I'm not gonna block someone for unless they start harassing individual pansexuals.

[spirit-pyrite]

This is what listening to exurb1a videos does to a motherfucker. I’m just… what if aliens want to meet us and like us and think we are cool and are just as flawed and real and mortal as we are? I want us to be in love, I want us to not be alone, to finally have someone else. I want them to not be alone either. Im so the feels. Hhhhhhhh

________________________________________

The Aanarn were, collectively, a bit obsessed. They had been since the very first word. When they were just starting out in space, barely past Yultova, their second moon, was when they got the first broadcast. When a clan of excited scientists announced that they had picked up on a radio broadcast, some strange anomaly, that they had no way to explain yet. It remained in the scientific interest only so long as it took them to discover that it wasn’t just a new unexplained natural phenomenon, it was new and unexplainable. Then, it became a global interest.

Scientists: astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, then linguists, anthropologists, and xenobiologists (a whole new field). Thousands of non sanctioned individuals or clans, scrabbling and excited. What was it? It took all of Motra (their home planet) collectively, the fascination of billions of Aanarn, a decade before they finally cracked it. Binary, code, ten base number system, color, transcribe, and there it was. The first love letter, signed in a language they still couldn’t quite read, and sent blindly into the universe. It was beautiful. And the planet was lost. Infatuated.

They nearly unanimously, unspokenly, turned towards the stars. Suddenly, the study of space was much more prevalent. The literature, art, and philosophy shifted to look upwards. The efforts for interstellar exploration vastly more important. They found more. More transmissions, scattered amongst the stars. They learned quickly, every one of those notes consumed and interpreted. The first language, then the second, then the third. Some transmissions were long, others short. Some seemed official, well planed and professional, others seemed less so: personal, individual, hopeful. Many were introductions, and they learned how to say hello in a hundred thousand different ways, each more fond than the last.

Mathematicians finally got their fill. With so many messages, they finally had a place to look, too. Triangulations, distances, interferences, all to point there. That place they’re heard so much about. Just as little, and brilliant, and blue. Now all they needed was a thousand light years less distance.

Faster than light, wormholes, a million different possibilities. The shipyard orbiting Pltach became the testing ground for every dreamed up deliverance. Meanwhile, armatures still set out, now with a trajectory in mind, to find all the messages hidden amongst the vast black.

Why didn’t they respond? I don’t think they could tell you. Their messages wouldn’t make sense, it would take just as long for a letter to get there as a ship, it would take longer for them, Earth, to decode it, to interpret it. Like they did, that first time. And there were so many obstacles in the way, what if it never made it there? They wouldn’t know for forever, and then all the rest (that they would surely send) would be out of context, scrambled, tripping over words. What they really were was nervous. What else could the be?

The general population was somewhat outraged, when, despite finally having the technology to make the jump, the leaders of the time wanted to wait even a second longer. The first message that Earth had sent, they said, was important. They needed to reach that one first, truly assess what they were walking into. What if they were hostile? Or scared? What if they didn’t want visitors? Would they be upset at their arrival? The unspoken question, that lingered in a Aanarn’s mind, that, begrudgingly, permitted the pit stop: “What if they don’t like us?”

The first message collected. The planet held their breath as the strategists conferred. What they decided was this: they would be angry. They would be scared. They would be confused, overwhelmed. And some, many, would be joyous. Weren’t they just the same? When they discovered that they weren’t alone? It was worth it. It was worth the risk.

What would they say?

The broadcasts, the messages, the letters. They were introductions, and explanations, and hopes. But above all, bellow it all, they were questions. “Hello? Are you out there? Can you hear me?”

“Am I alone?”

There was no perfect way to say hello. For all the million different ways they knew, there was no perfect way to explain. To explain the decades they had spent, collectively, falling in love. Looking, searching, decoding, translating. Interpreting and extrapolating and hypothesizing all the million different ways this would go, could go. It was the impossible question. It was a impossible question. There were so many. Death, and time, and origin, and meaning. Purpose. What is the purpose of all this? What did it all mean? What did they mean, what were they thinking, when they made that first careful, careless, infinite message? They didn’t know. They didn’t have the answer. In the end, they weren’t enough. The humans had turned towards the stars looking for answers to impossible questions, and they didn’t know the answers either.

So when they first appeared, just past Pluto, when they sent their first transmission, to the people they had come to love from afar, it was an apology. They said “Hello” in their own tongue, and then, one by one, “Hello” in all the hundred million different ways they had been taught. They introduced themselves, said they came in peace. That they had heard all of it, every radio wave. That they had finally come to meet. Then that they were sorry. That it took them so long, that they hadn’t written back. That they had shown up so suddenly, if they were interrupting anything important. Their final apology: “We are sorry, we don’t know the meaning of life yet”

And the response:

“It’s ok. Neither do we”

#humans are space orcs #scifi #hopeful #writing #fiction #overdramatic #but I am so feels #I want…. #alien human species wide friendship…. #I’m looking at all the media that portrays super scary and tense first contacts #and saying #but what if... #we just loved each other?? #shoutout to exub1a #one of my favorite feelings #fool's writing

[yeahyoucanmurder]

The Lost Boys x Reader On Their Period

Idk just a short little something. I’m on my period, saw the vampire shenanigans @bloodybrahms was up to, and just went “…well I gotta.” NSFW below cut.

(Psst, I also tried to make this as gender neutral as possible for all my trans and non-binary peeps).

David

As soon as he smells blood it’s OVER for you.

If you’re in the cave when your flow starts the boys have about .5 seconds to evacuate because that’s how long David’s giving you to remove your pants before he just rips them off, and if they catch a peek he’s gonna be pissed.

If you’re in public he’s going to become the biggest tease you’ve ever met. And like, don’t get me wrong, he’s always a fucking tease, but he’s gonna dial that shit up to eleven. You got an hour, max, before he calls the night to an end and drags you back to the cave.

Yes, he’s one of those guys that takes pride in performing oral on his partner. “You don’t eat out? Fucking weak.” Being one of those guys, his head is going to be periodically (heh) found between your thighs when shark week rolls around.

Aside from sex though, he is actually pretty caring. This motherfucker will buy (read: steal) whatever you need. Pads or tampons? You got it. Chocolate? No problem. The skulls of your enemies? You probably didn’t ask for that but he’s happy to provide if it’ll bring you out of a mood swing.

If you’re in a lot of pain he’s going to wrap you up in a hug and wait until the pain is over. He’s not a very touchy guy so that’s probably going to be the extent of your cuddles. *shrug* Whatcha gonna do?

Dwayne

Prepare To Be Pampered

Seriously, smelling your blood just riles him up in every which way possible. The man’s a caretaker at heart though so the result is pretty fucking sweet for you.

He is on you like white on rice. A hand tucked in your back pocket while on the boardwalk, you in his lap at the cave. He is an excellent cuddler and you can’t change my mind.

The sex? Is not sex, it’s making love. He’s so gentle with you at first cause he knows you’re kinda in pain, but if you’re one of those people whose cramps actually get better with sex? Buckle up babe.

He’s not just going to eat you out, you’re going to have to ask him to stop. His head’s between your thighs about 80% of the time. Even if he’s not performing oral he’ll hang out there until the next round. He just loves the intimacy.

One of the boys knocks on the wall just around the corner to see if you want to come to the boardwalk and Dwayne snarls at them “fuck off”.

Paul

Hope you like public sex! Cause if you start bleeding in a crowd he’s dragging you into an alley and throwing your leg over his shoulder so fast it’s a wonder you don’t get whiplash.

Definitely the type to rip your underwear off and say “Thanks for the snack” before eating you out.

Boy will not just turn you into a snack but a whole damn meal. Soon as you cum he’s gonna turn his head and bite your inner thigh. He has no self control and does this when you’re not on your period too sometimes, but it’s a 100% forecast of vampire love bites that week.

And not just on your thigh! Even if you’re just making out the smell of your blood is gonna excite him so much he’s leaving hickies (and a little something more) all over you.

Goes way fucking overboard on caring for you. Anything you ask him for, he gets ten of them from the store. And like, you didn’t really need ten tubs of ice cream, but you aren’t going to say no.

He is all over the cuddles. He loves affection and is willing to return it at any time, any way. Might just spend the whole night in bed with you.

Marko

It’s like you gave him a red bull, this dude is bouncing off the walls. He is HYPED for your period. Smell of your blood has him firing on all cylinders.

He’s not a fan of you being in pain or the mood swings or nausea or any of that other shit. But he is totally pumped at the chance to be able to drink your blood without having to hurt you!

(He is completely aware of his poor self control and doesn’t want to risk hurting you, so he pretty much never feeds from you. Period blood tests him, but not having to sink his fangs into you helps.)

Will kiss all up and down your body after eating you out, leaving bloody smudges all over you. Thinks it’s really fucking hot. Hey, did I mention he loves blood?

Really good at taking care of you. You tell him once and he’ll remember until the end of time what temperature you like your heating pad at and your preferred brand of pads or tampons.

He is also hyped for! CUDDLES! Give him all the cuddles! He just wants to make you feel better!

Tl;dr—They’re vampires, did you really think they wouldn’t want period sex?

#the lost boys #the lost boys 1987 #the lost boys x reader #my writing #reader imagine #david the lost boys x reader #dwayne the lost boys x reader #paul the lost boys x reader #marko the lost boys x reader #slasher community #david the lost boys #dwayne the lost boys #paul the lost boys #marko lost boys #the lost boys imagine

[voxofthevoid]

Taking It Up The Ass Isn’t Character Growth - A Rant

So, in response to an ask a while back, I said I had a rant brewing on fandom and sex positions, and well, a lot of you wanted to see it, so here you go. You literally asked for it.

Disclaimer: This is going to talk a lot about top/bottom roles in slash fic and fandom attitude towards them and is heavily filtered through the lens of my own tastes and experiences with fandom. I’d also like to be upfront that I am 100% in favor of people writing whatever fictional content they want, and it’s not what fandom does with characters that bothers me but rather how that translates into attitudes towards real, live people. Also, this is the essay version of a slow burn AU because I regurgitate my entire fandom history before getting to the point. Beware.

I discovered fan-fiction around a decade ago, had no clue what the hell it was, got hooked and dived deeper. I started participating in fandom circa 2013, and I was fairly young and also completely inexperienced both sexually and romantically. The fandom in question was Hannibal and my ship of choice was Hannibal/Will. It was/is a very chill fandom in general, but we had our drama. And chief among the contentious topics was—you guessed it—the top/bottom debate. I can’t actually remember any other topic that was discussed and argued for so ardently in that fandom, at least in those days. Even after I drifted away, I came across a few posts on the matter.

Generally, you had two camps—people who supported strict roles and those who were in favor of switching*. And because we’re a society plagued by illogical assumptions, the strict role camp mostly had people who thought Mr. Big Bad Cannibal in the Fancy Suits wouldn’t take it up the ass because he’s older, more experienced, more mentally stable, and of course, more ‘dominant’ in personality. Yes, that sentence is chock full of problematic shit. I am aware. Lots of people were aware and argued strongly against attributing top/bottom roles to personality. I don’t remember anyone arguing as enthusiastically for Top Will, but those voices were also there. But the general idea was that assigning strict top/bottom roles to a male/male couple was casting them in a heterosexual mold and thus, the progressive option was to make them switch. Strict roles also garnered comparisons to “yaoi” and uke/seme stereotypes, which was of course bad and fetishizing and we, the Western media fans, of course had to do better. Stealth racism is fun to untangle.

Anyway, I lapped up the woke juice. Partly because I was a baby queer from Buttfuck Nowhere, Asia, who had zero exposure to LGBT+ communities and what queer folks did with each other. Partly because it was the stance taken by most of my favorite writers so it seemed like a good position to emulate.

Emulate it I did. Most discussions I had about this happened in private with the handful of close friends I had in fandom. Where it really showed was in my writing. I made sure to write switching—maybe not in every fic, but then I alternated between fics. Thing is though, I did have a preference. I liked Top Will. I created and consumed a ton of Top Hannibal, and sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was not, but I couldn’t pinpoint why it made me uncomfortable. Back then, I thought I was a cis questioning/bi girl and once again, the impression I got was that not being MLM, having a preference was automatic fetishization. So I tried my best to justify my preferences, to my friends at least. I think what I said was that fandom was skewed towards Top Hannibal, and I liked the opposite because I’m a contrary fuck. Which I am, to be fair, but this was just me desperately trying to figure shit out without being offensive.

That’s the line I touted all the way until 2018, which was when I fucked off to grad school in A City, finally freed of Buttfuck Nowhere and able to actually date. At this point, I was settled in my sexuality (girls only) and questioning my gender (non-binary or trans guy). I had also tentatively figured out during undergrad that I’m an exclusive top and a Dom. Actual attempts at dating cemented that, yes, those are my preferences, about as flexible as a steel rod. Cue motherfucking epiphany over my fanfic tastes.

And see, over these years, I was engaging intermittently with fandom. I dutifully wrote switch couples. I also continued to have rigid tastes and continued to explain it away as being a contrary fuck—to be fair, until Steve/Bucky, my preference did seem to be the opposite of the larger fandom preference. But correlation, as we know, isn’t causation. Until Steve/Bucky, I continued to write versatile couples because I honestly didn’t have the guts to just say I liked it just one way. I do now but even then, I feel compelled to add that it’s because I want to see my own taste reflected in fic, so I write/read the character I relate to as a top, it's not that deep etc. Would I be as forthright if I didn’t have that reason? Would I have such strict preferences in fic if I didn’t have strict preferences IRL? The latter’s a mystery, but the former isn’t—I wouldn’t be because fandom is still entrenched in the same ideas that got me to this point to begin with.

In every fandom I’ve been in, I’ve seen some version of this debate go around. Sometimes, it’s one party saying “why would you write Character X as a bottom, he’s so Reason A” and a reblog chain that insults the OP and/or extols the virtues of switching. Sometimes, it’s a general-ish message that says they don’t understand why people have strict preferences when we all know real gay couples switch. Sometimes, it’s blanket statements that accuse anyone with preferences of fetishizing. Sometimes, it’s the same reasoning that gets you “Character Y is a top because of Reason B” transposed on versatile couples except this takes the form of “they switch because they’re equals.”

Ya’ll, I’m fucking tired.

I have long since lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen where an exclusive top learning bottom and liking it is character growth. Where a character who prefers to bottom taking a turn on top is empowering.

Isolated, these are fine. But I’ve seen enough of such stories that it’s distinctly discomfiting and a major squick. Sometimes a trigger, if I'm too immersed in the story. I’m not going to try and burn an author at the stake because they pissed me off. I am just going to close that window and quietly handle my shit. People can write whatever they want. But this one theme hits too close to home, as you can see from this 1.6k rant.

My friend (also my ex-girlfriend) and I had an all-out bitching session about this the other day. Both of us are kinky fuckers who have rigid, complementary roles we prefer and we have both had our grueling days of struggling to reconcile our sexual tastes with our ideologies precisely because of how these things are frowned upon in conservative and progressive circles. Seeing that in fandom, of all places, is both insulting and exhausting. Topping and bottoming aren’t personality traits. Neither is D/s. It’s sexual preference and power play. It really does not have to be that deep. I am not exorcising childhood trauma using the bodies of women. My partners, former and current, have not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We will not become better, more complete individuals once I magically stop being a stone top and my partners embrace the joys of a strap-on.

I have, with my own two eyes, seen someone say that in a really committed relationship, of course the couple will switch.

Bullshit.

It’s transparent bullshit. This does not get attributed to cisgender M/F couples. Even when the automatic assumptions of woman = bottom and man = top get addressed, switching isn't presented as the default. No one’s saying “oh, if you really love your husband, you’ll peg him”. I do know butch/femme sapphic couples get their own share of shit. Because it’s all heteronormativity, right? Can’t have any other reason for top/bottom roles.

You have two extremes with “so who’s the woman” on one end and “it’s woke only if they switch” on the other, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re equally damaging. There shouldn’t be a pressure, however subtle, to conform your taste in fiction to some arbitrary idea of progressiveness. People are going to like whatever they want anyway; all this does is create an atmosphere where those likes can’t always be freely expressed without a lot of mental gymnastics. We’re seeing so many versions of this in the pushback against so-called problematic content, but smaller, subtler versions exist too.

Fictional characters aren’t real. They can be whatever you want them to be. And yes, other people will often want them to be the exact opposite of your ideas, but that’s just how things work. Meanwhile, the people behind these usernames? They’re real. No one should be throwing real people under the bus to ‘protect’ characters that don’t exist. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t care whether he gets fucked or dismembered in Author B’s fanfiction, but the discourse that surrounds the dick up his ass? That does affect flesh and blood people.

I am not claiming that this is the only attitude in fandom. Middlegrounds do exist. Plenty of people abide by fic and let fic and there are folks who pipe up to say not every RL queer couple switches. But it’s often the extremes that reach most people. That was certainly my experience, and I’m not the only one.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It is 100% a rant and one that’s been building up for a while. Bottom line is that people’s sexual behavior varies wildly and whenever you attack sexual tastes in fanfic by saying it’s unrealistic - or worse because let’s be real, that’s a very tame word choice - please remember that there’s likely someone out there who practices it.

* I’m using switch and versatile synonymously in this post. It’s mostly concerned with top/bottom debates. A lot of what I’m saying is also echoed in portrayals of and discussions surrounding D/s dynamics, but I’m not addressing that as much for now.  

#fandom #top bottom discourse #wow that's a tag #here it is the rant i promised #because i don't quite trust tumblr i feel compelled to add that this is ofc not some kind of attack on actual people who switch either #you do you man #live your best life #vox has opinions

[popculturebuffet]

New X-Men Xtrospective Part 3: Imperial (NXM #121-126)

To me all you happy people! And welcome back to my X-Citing look at Morrison’s Masterwork on Marvel’s Merry Mutants!  Part One is HERE, Part Two is HERE if you feel like it. 

If not... to catch you up on last time....

All Caught up? Good. Join me under the cut as our heroes head into this old woman’s hedd to see what’s wrong and fight off an alien army while horribly ill. 

Silent, Psychic Rescue in Process:

So we pick up not long after we left off: Thanks to Beast waking up from his bat induced coma, the X-Men now know Charles is trapped in Cassandra’s body and she pulled a Freaky Friday on him, with marginally less bullets. 

And thus we get this issue. This one was part of Nuff Said, an incredibly clever theme month by Marvel and one I wish they’d try and do again at some point in some form. 

The gimmick was simple but amazing: Every issue would be mostly silent, with at most some dialouge at the start and finish to bookend it. So far i’ve only read two issues of this, this one and the X-Statix one, but it is a genuinely great idea. I do think forcing it on the entire line was a bit much, but as I said I do wish they’d do this again just make it optional: have some books opt in or do some annuals with the theme. It’s just a fun break from the usual and with this issue resulted in one of the best single issues of x-men period. 

Naturally given the name, which is cleverly displayed on a sign the x-men have because of course they do, it’s exaclty that: Emma and Jean after readying themselves (Jean kisses Scott goodbye and Emma downs a bottle of jack because why not do an alchol before doing delecate mental surgery), head in. 

Inside they find horrific old lady head doors, stone ol dlady heads around a tower that shoot lasers, and said doors also bite and puke weird goop because it’s Grant Morrison. This is his chance to just go full balls out weird.. and given last time involved skin flake golemns.. and this isn’t even the weirdest he’s done. As mentioned last time he once had a supervillian run for president using a super LSD Bike that made everyone high. 

And just to prove he can reach that level of weirndess we find charles alone, naked and with an overenlarged brain.. before he transitions Jean to a field of sperm. 

Yeah... but this DOES have a point.. as it turns out it’s a meaphorical transition into his gestation as a baby.. and how he had a twin. Yeah turns out Cassandra was not lying he did try to kill her.. but as you can probably tell by the fact she’s a genocidal sociopath, she lied by omission to screw with Hank: In the womb she tried strangling Charles to death with his own umbilical cord..only for him to use baby’s first psonic blast to send her reeling and his mom tumbling down the stairs and well.. you can probably guess the rest. Yeah.. Cassandra’s entire origin story is concentrated 

And I love it. The sheer audacity is nice and everything but what makes it really work for me is the simple concept: An evil version of charles, one almost born at the same time whose every bit as evil as he is good.. granted there’s a TON of Morally Grey in Charles Xavier ESPECIALLY post decimation and even more so now with Krakoa. But he’s sitll at his heart a well meaning person, while Cassandra at her heart is a racist genocidal nightmare. She is pure evil, with enough personality to not make her boring.. and more importanlty all the power charles has but NONE of his restraint. Part of what makes Charles noble is he only uses his powers when necessary. Cassandra.. has no such restraint and will happily mentally snap necks all day. 

So with this our heroine’s leave and we end on the iconic line “Professor Xavier killed his twin sister in the womb. We Really ought to talk. 

This issue is an utter classic. It finally explains Cassandra a bit while still leaving a ton of questions, Frank Quitely is at his best here, and he and morrison are incrediby good at non verbal storyteling. The result is surreal, unsettling and awesome. Check it out. Seriously seek this one out it’s worth the trip. It’s so famous it was homaged with a spirtual sequel in the recent Giant Size X-Men one shots. It’s excellent stuff

Imperial:

So with our first issue we open with things going terrible on that flag ship Cassandra took off on with Lilandra, empress of the Shiar and Xavier’s space wife. She’s revealed herself, is ravaging the ship and mind rapes a the helmsman into crashing it, so with no other options Lilandra sends Smasher, not the one from the avengers run earlier version, to earth to send a warning to the X-Men. 

At the School things are actually going well for a second. In an intresting move the school is changing things up with no officla timetable.. which I think means there’s no rigid class schedule and you can just do them as you please or as necessary for your power. The plan’s the same, they just want to learn from each other in building mutant society and the future. It’s ideas like this that are the bedrock of the current run and were sadly never fully realized here.. but I don’t blame this run for that. Morrison had 2-3 years and it was cut short early, leading to a rather disapointing ending we’ll get to. They never had a chance to really dig in because they were kicked out by morons and then their whole grand design was undone until Hickman un-undid it in 2019. And even then some of this like the idea of mutant culture and what not hasn’t been picked up on yet. I do mean YET, as given the sheer NUMBER of x books touching on all sorts of subjects, it’s only a matter of if not when. 

As for who’s behind this it’s a combination of Jean and Charles: Jean is using charles notes and is going at full tilt. Scott is concerned though.. both about her since she went Phoenix and Logan told him about it and because these plans may alarm the humans. ON the former Jean just brushes him off which is not right.. given what happened with the phoenix force copy of jean, which granted had her personality, memories and powers and Jean later got a set of her memories so it might as well of been and only MAYBE the genocide is something Jean wouldn’t of done under the same circumstances, he’s understandably concerned. He lost her to it last time and it did weird shit to poor Rachel, who hif you don’t know is their daughter from an alternate timeline... because the Summer’s family tree is a WAKING NIGHTMARE. Thankfully I don’t have to untangle it because there’s a handy chart right here to do it for me that was recently released in X-Men Legends, a new series featuring legendary x creators telling stories in the cracks... and given we’re getitng storys by the simosons and peter motherfucking david, yeah good stuff.

And why yes there are more than one clone in this tree and several alternate timelines. , not to mention several clones and a sexy cat lady, it’s complicated is understnading it and i’m not sure what properly states it honestly. Also if your wondering about Adam there he’s the genetic son of Cyclops mom and the ma Shiar empreror who killed her for not sleeping with him through. Again it’s complicate REALLY feels like understatement. 

Point is he DOES have a right to be worried about the thing that lead to her being cocooned for a while and left their daughter in the future at the time of this... just in case you needed a reminder after that wonderful clusterfuck of a chart up above athe x-men are really fucking weird. 

So Jean brushing that off is not okay. She does however call him out on the second one and rightfully so: This isn’t some dominate the humans manifesto: this is simply changing the course of the future and how they teach their students to create a better one instead of adhering to human norms to try and appease “the republicans’, as jean puts it.. which has only gotten MORE RELEVANT, 20 years on: Attempts to appease the norms of society and things “just because that’s how it’s been” have never been a good thing. It’s why the very writer of this comic took several decades to properly identify themselves as non binary because people were too stuck int heir ways to try and see if there really were just two genders. Fighting against the grain, finding new ways to express things that have always been there... it’s what humanity needs to do and certainly what comes after us would need to do. i’ts how we get better as a race. If something’s not working we change it, quickly or slowly. And given Scott’s huge amount of emotoinal repression lately.. I can see why she’d see the former complaint as just him being a dick as opposed to the genuine concern it is. 

Short Version: Jean Grey is fucking awesome and while he’d be the last to write her for decades, no one did it better than Grant and no one has since.  Hopefully Gerry Duggan can clear that bar. 

After this fight we get a fuller verson of what happened both at the end of issue 120 and in the big reveal last issue: Turns out Hank awoke because Charles piloted his body like a truck and needed it revealed fast. Hank’s regained control of his body and facilities by now, but in a twist of irony he helpfully points out, had Cassandra not gone a needlessly cruel and sociopathic tangent and had Beak beat Beast into a coma, Charles wouldn’t of had a body. 

As for Charles in cass’ body he’s now in a tub of goo created by it. 

It acts as a shield as well as melding him with Cerebra so he can talk to jean telepathically as his thoughts are very weak.

Thanks to this and her psychic Jaunt, Jean now knows just what the hell cassandra is: She really is Charles twin sister. As for how the hell she surivied outside of the womb and how Charles never knew, she created herself a clone body using his cells and didn’t fully manifest till now. And while she has plenty of intellegence, at an emotional level she’s fully convinced, much like an infant that only she and charles are real and thus destroying him means gaining domance over her world. So in short she’s both utterly insane and now has an interstellar empire at her fingertips. 

And the news SOMEHOW get sworse: She booby trapped her body and charles only has days before he’s vegatable, having put every psychological disease possible in there, and she’s probably responsible for their colds and the u-men. So in short their pretty scrwed but at the very least Charles plans to try to flip things, use the fact their now public (a clear tactic to weaken them) to share his manefesto, his last will and testiment if you would. 

Scott meanwhile figures since their sick a healer might be a good idea and goes solo to fetch Xorn... who just sorta disappeared after the annual and didn’t return till his arc. 

We get an utterly touching scene after this: With Logan staying on his hobbit like toes in case of another attack, Jean goes to talk to hank. Hank is still throughly traumatized from the attack, fearing Cassandra is right and he’ll just keep devlovling until he ends up in a metamoprhisis type situation. I mean it’s not ALL bad hank,.. I mean going through that guarantees a musical about you. 

But Jean reassures him: It’s okay to be afraid of her, they all are.. but as she puts it...

It’s a really powerful inspiring scene... and really afirms how well Morrison writes Jean from the previous arc onward. She’s confident, powerful.. but also caring and compassionate. Here hank’s at his lowest, disparing that this might get worse.. and she reaffirms that htis evolution is an upgrade.. he may not be the same.. but that’s okay. He’s better. It really speaks to the core message of the X-Men as a whole and why they’ve stuck around all this time: It’s not just okay your diffrent.. it’s WONDERFUL. Your wonderful for being you. Whatever meataphor you read into it, it’s at it’s core a message that no matter who hunts you or trys to shame you for what you are, they are wrong and you are wonderful. And you are not alone... your people are out there.. and they will go through hell to protect you. It’s moments like this that remind me despite the bad parts, the accidnetal transphobic metaphor last time, a subplot with Hank coming up, the affair storyline and Planet X, just.. Planet X.. this run is special to me for a reason. It has heart, character and truly gets how the x-men should work, what makes them great... while making something NEW AND FRESH from it’s bones. Pushing envelopes, chanigng things for good and shaking things the hell up after far too much stagnation. It’s just pure good comicy goodness and i’m proud to finally be talking about it after having always wanted to. 

So as we end the issue Scott grabs Xorn, whose been at a budist temple all this time, and Smasher arrives to warn earth... but his warning missed his intended target. 

Well at least he got to Hellcow’s coven.. maybe she can call in Man Eating Cow and the Chick Fill A Super Cows.. thought hey might not help. Their parent company IS pretty homophobic.. I doubt their high on mutants either. 

Testament Emma and Jean talk over things how i’ts going etc, with Emma unsuprisingly annoyed with most of the students and Jean optimsitc.

But Emma soon has bigger issues to deal with: TEEN ANGST!

Yeah 4/5 of the Cuckoos are upset Esme has a boyfriend. Their concerns in part are because without her their apparently powerless.. which given one will die and another will leave and they’ll be left with three is just factually not true, and either Morrison changed his mind later, or more likely their simply exagerating like teens do. Emma points out it’s pointless to fight this...

So... their in a domestically abusive relationship rife with sexual tension? Are you sure your not htinking of Sam and Diane, Ross and Rachel, Garfiled and Odie perhaps?

Meanwhile Angel’s sulking in a tree talking about how all the kids are stupid and she dosen’t fit in. That sort of thing. Wolverine naturally has a tactful and understandable response to this:

It’s here Angel goes from understandable, a bit hard edged and obnoxious becuase of a very rough life.. and just becomes annoying.  I do get what Grant was trying to do: he was trying to play with Wolverine’s habit of taking sassy teens under his wing by giving him a more hardscrabble one with a harder life pre-xaviers.. not that Jubilee’s was easy, but I get what he was going for.. he just dosen’t succeed. Instead of a realistic version of a teen sidekick she just comes off as an obnoxious brat whose rude to everyone including her one friend Logan and her later boyfriend.  It dosen’t help that ONCE AGAIN, Morrison flew directly into unfortunate implications without meaning to, by having the only major POC character (Bishop guest stars later and there are two significant characters during the Riot at Xaviers arc but both aren’t relevant before or after), be an abused teen with gross fly based powers and a teen pregnancy subplot. Seriously this isn’t even the LAST time Morrison shoves their foot in their mouth like this in this run. While I do like this run a lot, it’s still 20 years old and it’s still going to have a bunch of bits that have aged like harvarti left on a sidewalk, and handing out unfortnuate implications like their candy is tied for the biggest with their handling of Magneto when he finally shows up in person. It’s THAT bad a take on the character that it’s up there with accidental racisim and transphobia. 

So moving on from.. that we get Jean comforting the professor before meeting the press, giving a throughly lovely speech about how Charles got his powers 30 years ago and despite seeing the worst in humanity, used his telepathy to allow him to see past it and see deep down just how scared and alone we all felt. So she takes them into a psychic conference room and we get a very interesting exchange. 

It’s an interesting parallel to how real world disinfranchised groups, how it takes time.. but soon being a POC or LBGTQ+ goes from unrightfully perscuted to celebrated. How a group starts with hates whipsers on the fringe of things but grows to be accepted, like it always SHOULD have been. Take representation of Trans people in the media. It started with Trans people being almost entirely punchlines and sources of fucking horendous “DID DEY USED TO BE A MAN.” storylines and hurtful jabs at people who had transitioned, treating them as a sideshow instead of you know as fucking human beings. But now coming out as what you always were ont he inside is celebrated. Sure the right are dicks about it but they always will be: but most media gladly celebrates when someone comes out as trans. Same with being gay, or bi or pan or polamorus or nonbinary.  Hell I admire grant for showing i’ts not even 100% perfect once you are popular: you still have to grapple both with people wanting to copot your culture and those who still don’t understand you trying to speak for you. 

She also gets the standard question calling the X-Men an army, shoots it down with the normal global peacekeeping operation stuff.. then we get this bitch. 

Who quickly realizes she’s outclassed by Emma Frost, professional that bitch. And while Jean is understandbly going to have to erase that.. I can’t blame her for snapping her.

Just to tear this shit down.: The privacy thing is not something she’s doing. All she’s doing is spcyhic teleconfrencing, you harpy. They fight greek gods and monsters to protect your sorry ass and the last one.. just makes me absolutely livid and feels so much like a real world comment i’m suprised there isn’t a fox news logo next to her bigoted head. 

Trouble follows them everywhere they go.. because their mutants. They can’t help it. A LOT of shit like the demons, aliens, and gods and what not, I do not know if they actually did fight the greek gods but i’m not going to say for sure they did not, the norse gods defintely, not sure on greek. But the point is allt his stuff HAPPENS TO THEM half the time, or is a consequence of trying to PROTECT PEOPLE. I’m so nettled by this because this is how the marvel unvierse acts all the fucking time towards ALL super powered peoples. Mutants esepcailly but they blame the heroes and what not for being chased and harassed by guys in costumes or alien invasions or all the stuff they FIGHT. Sure sometimes they caused it but it’s either because of a monsterous person with a grudge or just because their powerful and some douche took an intrest. I’m just.. so fucking tired of asshole civlians in comics. It’s realisitc I know but it’s just hard to stomach after so many have turned their back on so many for such DUMB reasons. 

Jean recovers well pointing out the genocide and how 16 million people, 16 million possible einsteinss or mozarts are just GONE, and that their trying to focus on the future. She also brings up autistic savants who can talk to atoms and while I don’t like the use of the savant thing, as it brings to mind stuff like rainman I very badly want to see this autistic kid who can talk to atoms as someone on the spectrum myself. Also I just want the crew of HIckma’ns books in general to pour over this because there are a lot of intresting powers and personalities only MENTIONED we never saw proper that could be great characters. Just saying. 

Jean cocludes her speech to the world, including Logan whose wisely getting hammered at anearbye bar.. while Hank finds out what’s going on with their sickness.. nanonscopic sentnels in the blood. 

But while the press confrence ends well with Jean having won over the press.. things go sideways as not only is it clear Esme’s boyfriend is in fact something sinister.. but Jean falls over due to the nano snetinels, and senses Scott being taken in tibet, taken down by a group of the Shiar’s imperial guard.. picutre the legion of superheroes but blindly loyal to the goverment and far more likely to get killed. And the rest are preparing to attacking including Gladiator who if you don’t know him, has all the powers of superman as long as he retains his confidence. 

And it turns out Esme’s boyfriend is an advanced Scout, the shapeshifting amoeba blob thing Stuff, a new addition by morrison and good on him. And the Imperial Guard are here but with one goal

 Superdestroyer

On the Ship we find out both wha’ts going on with Scott and Xorn, they’ve been taken and why the shiar are attempting mutant genocide: Cassandra is puppeting ALL of them, has convinced them the mutants are infected and since Lilandra is a puppet, Scott’s words fall on deaf ears. 

Meanwhile Wolverine ambushes one of the squads, kiling one named Dinosaurer via claw to the brain, while Emma has had a dome thing put over her head and isn’t transforming into diamond to counter it because...

But the Cuckoos fight back, taking out oracle before easily handling stuff since his brain is fairly simple.. and given he’s racist against solid people and unlike the others reveling in the genocide just a tad.. yeah what he deserves. So now with a living weapon the Cuckoos make peace with Angel as they need all the help they can get. 

Jean ushers the press into the panic room, not happy about it but not having anothe roption for their saftey. Hank tells her to self distruct crebra if cassandra get sclose and goes off to join the fight and let off some steam over the situation. Hank easily routes two of them, and one , Manta tries to just fly right ot jtean wince their TK proof. How does that go?

Jean gets to saftey after that, not that she needs it and hank is quickly taken down by a batch of Superguardians.. only for Wolverine to arrive in the Sknitt of time and chop them up.. oh and as one of the puts it...

Bad. Ass. I also like the addition of the flight patch, a nod to the Legion, who the Imperial Guard were based on as those kids used flight rings. 

But while Logan and Hank easily tag team these assholes...

The SHiar call in the big guns.. Gladiator.. and I wasn’t kidding abotu the superman thing. While Logan TRIES to talk him out of it, the murders only confirm Cassandra’s bullshit and Gladiator breaks into the panic room throwing hank and wolverin’e before them having utterly decimated them off panel. I mean Wolvie is a badass.. but even he has limits. I also like recontecullizing the guard as a whole here.. showing just how TERRIFYING they SHOULD be as enimies to the x-men. Yes our heroes did win.. but barely and only till Gladiator showed up. In most cases thier clearly holding back out of affection but here hteir just at errifying unstoppable force, and also apparently used to doing genocides like this. It takes what was a cheesy shout out to David Cockrums other big artistic work, and makes it horrifying and it is AWESOME. I admit to not having liked this arc as much for the longest time but this reread, the sheer teror and hopleessness as an interstellar superman easily cuts through our mighty mutants like tissue... it’s awesome. 

Thankfully one of the Guard found smasher.. and thus the truth comes out so our heroes are given a stay of execution with Gladiator clearly horrified at what he almost did and our heroes now so sick they can barely move and Hank can’t think them out of this. 

Thankfully he dosen’t has to as back in space, Cyclops tires of it and points out something Xorn, not being as experinced nor having delt with the guard ahd thought of: G-Type, the glowly guy about to execute them, is made of solar energy.. and xorn can manipulate that thanks to his star brain. He does, they take out the rest.. and prepare to go save the day.

Losers: PIcking up shortly before where we left off we see Cassandra murder Lilandra’s advisor who figured out what she was just as our heroes escape.. and as Cassandra is having Lilnadra order all of the shiar ships to immolate themselves. 

WIth Lilandra not being any use, Cass tries to psychically force her to commit sucidie but jumping off a space ledge but Xorn saves her. Cass tries another turn at mentally breaking an x-man, pointing out all scott’s recent flaws, his increased repression his faling marriage and while it gets him to stop it dosen’t quite work as well as it did on hank, likely because at his heart Hank is simply a more emotive person. Though his REAL reason for stalling is he can’t kill charles.. which he muses just as the ship blows up real good. 

Meanwhile back at Campus the kids initaiate their plan, having Angel break in and take a dna sample. She also finds beak naked in a tank and decides eh why not and brings him with her. This ends up paying off as Beak suggests the obvious to get emma free.. just force the space guy they have over in the corner to do it. They do and it works

Back in the mansion our heroes prepare for Casssandra... but Jean and Logan object to saving her body, pointing out that getting hank to repair it is exactly what she wants, and that Jean feels she can save charles without uit, with Hank being understandably doubtful given their current condition.. but Jean’s real plan is to put charles in her head and it’s already too far in actoin to stop now: she’s been saving his memories as they flaked off and if she dosen’t do this now there will be no charles left. 

Hank evacuates the civlians to teh danger room, and has an encounter with trish who tries to apologize and get him back.. only for him to rightfully regjecter her..a and then goes a step further by capping it off with:

Yeah on it’s own it’s not TERRIBLE. Still very dated to claim your gay just to spite someone, but for the time it was acceptable and compared to some of Morrison’s other gaffes in the run it’s minor at best. But it leads into a rather annoying subplot we’ll naturally get to that’s a much bigger issue, so i’ll save talking about it in full for when it comes up again. 

Jean manages to shove Chuck into her head, but is naturally leaking a bit and barely holding it or him together and may of overestimated herself just a tad.. while on the lawn Cassandra easily takes out the guards. That said the scene of Jean taking Chuck into her head is REALLY damn awesome. Jean is the arc MVP by a mile and Hank is pretty dang good competition. 

All Hell: We open the final issue of the arc with Scott and Xorn escaping the spaceship using some teleport tubes taking Arakai and Lilandra with them. 

We open with Cassadra utterly humilating gladiator while the kid team prepares to fight her despite you know, the 8 billion to 1 odds against them. 

Jean, despite hte discknes and trying to keep an old man in her brain marches out , prepared to fight, for the kids sake. For the world’s sake. But Logan’s easily taken out and with Jean barely holding it together.. the kids prepare to fight.. likely being slaughtered even if they mean well.. onlyf or help to finally arrive with Scott and Xorn glowy porting in. We get a really sweet , short moment with scott and jean...

Scott not knowing the situation tries to have Xorn heal charles first but since Cassandra’s body is dead and unoccupied that’s a no go.. he’s still usefult hough, curing Jean of her nanosentital sickness and moving on to Scott and Hank while there’s still time. 

We find out more about cassandra: She’s a murrmadi, a bodyless parasite.. eseetinally the dark first test a person faces... she just stuck around because she was one for a telepath.. the world’s STRONGEST telepath. But really other than that part the rest just feels like stuff we alreayd heard LAST TIME, mildly repaackaged and seems enitrley like filler to pad the issue out. 

So while Jean takes cerebra, both to keep it away from Cassandra’s plans of mutant genocide and for whatever she has planned, Scott, Hank and Xorn prepare to hold the line.. and as Jean mentions.. emma’s still out in the wild. 

So we get our climactic showdown.. logan, hank and xorn veruss cassandra, with Cassandra trying to do eveyrthing she can, tear them down mentally, throw out the students with our heroes fighting back best they can. It’s good stuff.  

Eventaully Cassandra gets to Jean.. but she’s already inacted her plan, putting a piece of Xavier’s mind in EVERY mutant, and giving Cassandra one ohell ofa reason you suck speech. 

It’s an incapsulation of what i said earlier and what the runs about: alone we are weak but together.. we just might make it. More on that as we go. But thanks to Cass naturally going fo rcerberba.. she accidently restores charles and is left bodyless.

Emma finishes the fight with her own brilliant gambit, presending cassandra her body.. but it’s actually stuff , reprogrammed into a sentient brain for her to inhabit and leaving her trapped, with Charles hoping t teach the now mentally reset Cassandra.  So Cassandra is beat, the virus is stopped, and our heroes have one.. but naturally for this run.. there’s one last suprise in store. 

Charles can walk again.. and going forward will be a far more active member of the team. The team is complete, Cassandra is beaten, and the future.. is bright. 

Final Thoughts:

This arc is a mixed bag.. it has really good scenes with the first and last issues being the standouts, with the former being an utter classic with an intresting gimick and the latter being a rousing climax with tons of awesome moments, with some good mometns scattered throughout.

But that’s the arc’s issue.. it has good moments and ideas.. but they don’t quite work togehter. The idea of teh Shiar Imperial Guard nearly doing a genocide is good, but the Shiar are such flat characters.. it’s really hard to care. They just don’t have enough connection to the x-men to really have the betryal sting but aren’t callous enough for genocide protocols to maeks sense. It’s a good idea, I still support it being terrifying.. but not enough is done with it and it feels liek Grant is more concerned with throwing weirdos at the x-men than actually saying something. 

The biggest issue however is the art. While inconsitant art is an issue as they’d rotate artists.. but in previous arcs it was usually pretty evenly split but here it’s sloppy: Quitely does the first issue, van Sciver the second.. and the worst of the three Igor Kordey does most of the art. I gave him the beinfit of the doubt last time.. but this time not so much. His art is muddy and tries to be stylized but comes off confusing,ugly and not great. He’s probably a lovely guy but given he’s up against two legendary artists, his lack of style comapred to both shows badly.  And given the arc is alreayd a bit overly complicated, it makes things WORSE by giving us muddled art in a very complex storyline. The flip flopping art makes a fairly intricate story very hard to follow. It’s easily why this arc didn’t grab me in the past and even seeing some better moments, it’s not the series best. It’s not the worst either, Planet X easily takes that ground despite having far better art. It’s an incredibly muddled incredibly long feeling arc and really needed to be compressed by one or two issues but instead is just hard to get through. It’s owrth it for the rest of the runa nd the good moments within but all in all easily one of the weakest points in the series. 

Next Month on New X-Men:The X-Men soak in the new world order, and we meet fantomex, dust and the last surivivors of genosha. 

Next on this blog:Green Eggs and Ham is back!

If you enjoyed this review PLEASE join my patreon. The end of hte month is coming and I need eveyr cent I can get so join at patreon.com/popculturebuffet and i’ll see you at the next rainbow. 

#new x-men #x-men #grant morrison #wolverine #logan howlett #cyclops #scott summers #jean grey #emma frost #beast #henry mccoy #cassandra nova #charles xavier #gladiator #lilandra neramani #the shi'ar imperial guard #smasher #kubark #xorn #shen xorn

[how-gross]

6 - 3 - 20

So I talked to my mother about Undertale today while I was with her at her job.

She seemed pretty interested, but I know she’ll loose her interest soon once I tell her about the Alphyne ship and the ship between Guard 02 and 01.

She doesn’t admit it, but I know she’s homophobic. Every time I bring up anything that has anything slightly related to a romantic relationship between the same gender, she goes awol. Talking about how God made us to birth and reproduce and populate the Earth.

At this point, I don’t even know if I’m gonna come out to her. I’ve already said once that I’m asexual, and that was from an argument about the crush I had on my female/male friend (he/she are genderfluid). She must have forgotten about it, because when I tried sending a picture to the same friend - we’re still friends it’s just a little bit awkward, plus I still have a crush on her - she asked what the flags were about. My friend had a Bisexual Flag and a Genderfluid pin, but gladly my mom couldn’t see the pin otherwise she would be questioning things and a whole new string of problems would come to light. I had an asexual flag (I’m still questioning my sexuality, but my approach on sex is not sex-repulsed but not too comfortable with having sex either) and a pin that meant Non-binary. She thankfully didn’t see my flag either.

She started asking more and more questions about what asexuality was and why would I think I’m asexual when YOU LITERALLY TOLD ME THAT WHEN I SAID WAS NOT A FAN OF SEX YOU SAID I COULD BE ASEXUAL YOU LITERALLY OFFERED TO ME THAT I CAN BE ASEXUAL AND I ACCEPTED AND NOW YOU’RE GONNA ACT LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ASEXUALITY IS?! IF YOU DIDNT KNOW YOU WOULDNT HAVE OFFERED IT TO ME?! WAS IT JUSF ANOTHER LIE TO GET ME NOT TO LIKE THE SAME GENDER?! JUST LIKE THE LAST TIME WHERE TOU SAID THAT YOU SUPPORT THE LGBT COMMUNITY AND YOU ALLOWED ME TO SUPPORT TI TO- BUT THEN JUST YELL AT ME AGAIN WHEN I SAVE AND POST POSITIVE LGBT STUFF! YOU’RE JUST A BIG LIAR AT THIS POINT!! NOTHING YOU SAY IS TRUE!! AND YOU SAY YOU CAN TTRUST ME!

Then she starts again with new bullshit like “You’ve never had sex before, you don’t know what’s like”, or “soon you’ll have a boyfriend in either high school or college. He’ll want to take things to the next level if you were to get married. Are you just not gonna have a relationship?” LIKE BITCH THAT’S AROMANTIC NOT ASEXUAL AND ASEXUALS COULD HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITHOUT IT INVOLVING SEX SEX DOES NTO HAVE TO BE A CURRENT THEME IN A RELATIONSHIP WHEN I ADMITTED MY FEELINFS TO MY FRIEND AND ADMITTED I WAS ACE SHE DIDN TJUDGE ME AF ALL SHE JUST SAID THAT IT WAS FINE I WAS ACE AND THAT SHE STILL LIKED ME NTO EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SEX NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT REPRODUCTION SHUT UP!!

I’m not sex-repulsed - I just get uncomfortable during sex scenes in a movie - but now she’s making me so upset about this whole thing. She lies about everything and judges me for everything and then starts asking me why I can’t have normal conversations with her. Oh, did I mention That? We had another argument

It was about her asking me a lot of questions about high school and shit and how many friends I’m gonna make and how my relationship with my friends are right now. I was about to get my hair washed and didn’t feel like being bothered, and even if I was comfortable I still don’t talk that much so even if I was a in a good mood I would have answered with short question. Plus the questions themselves were too personal for my liking and I didn’t feel too comfortable with answering them right then and theee, probably when my hair was washed and I could lay down without soaking the sheets with my wet hair.

Then SHE STARTS SAYING STUFF LIKE “why do you always answer me like that?” AND “why can’t you just answer normally” AND “you weren’t like this before. What happened? You used to be so social and talk to me about everything.” THAT’S THE MOTHERFUCKINF REASON CAUSE YOU QUESITONNLITERLALY EVERYTHING!! IF I DONT ANSWER A QUESFION CORRECTLY OR IF I DONT ANSWER IT THE WAY YOUD LIKE YOULL ASK ME STUFF LIKE “why’d you answer it like that” AND “why’d you answer it so weirdly” IF YOU AANT A REASON TO WHY I DONT TALK TO YOU THAT WHY YOU DONT TAKE ME SERIOUSLY YOU QUESTION EVERYTHING I DO AND YOU JXUGE LITERALLY EVERY FUCKING THING EVEN THOUGH LIE ABOUT NOT JUDGING ME.

THEN SHE STARTS PRESSURING ME ASKING ME “why are you not gonna talk to anyone?” AND “you’re not gonna have any friends if you don’t speak up. Stop talking so low.” AND “so you’re just gonna keep two friends?” LIKE BITCH IF I DONT WANT TO TLSK IN SCHOOL TO OTHERS I DONT HAVE TO FUCKIGN TALK BESIDES THE LAST TIME I TALKED OUT LOUD TO ANYONE I WAS MOCKED AT AND CALLED WEIRD AND NEEDY AND ANNOYING AND SHIT. I WAS LITERALLY BULLIED FOR BEING TOO LOUD, THATS WHY I BECAME QUIET. II DONT HAVE TO TALK IF I DONT WANT TO ITS MY MOTHERFUCKING MOUTH.

BESIDES ITS OKYA TO HAVE TWO FRIENDS YOU ACT LIKE I HAVE TO HAVE A WHOLE GROUP OF FRIENDS ADOUND ME AND BE POPULAR AND SHIT WHEN LITERALLY PEOPLE WHO BECOME POPUALR GET TOO INTO IT AND START PEER PRESSURING OFHERS

then she starts lying about “I just don’t want you to fall into the wrong path” like being asexual is wrong and that being apart of the lgbt community is wrong. “I don’t want you to follow others just because you think it’s alright”. Nothing is wrong about the LGBT community and asexuals. Anyone could be who they are. Plus you don’t have to have sex all the time to be in a committed relationship. “You probably thought you were gay (first of all I said I was Bi, not gay. I like both girls and boys.) because your friend was nice to you.” So basically you just called me naive. I mean I admit i am stupid sometimes, but I’ve haven’t fallen in love with someone because they were nice to me. I fell in love with a boy one time because I thought he was cool, and he didn’t even talk to me once. He basically used me and asked me to do all his work for him, and I didn it because I wanted him to like me but turns out he was a jerk and an asshat.

My other friends are nice to me, and I have best friends that are really nice to me, but I haven’t fallen in love with them. So how does that make sense? How does one of my friends with me having a crush on them equal up to them being nice to me and me naively falling for it? Doesn’t add up.

I didn’t argue with her anymore. I didn’t even talk. I just nodded my head to everything until she started saying “stop nodding and talk to me. I don’t even know if you’re listening to what I have to say.”. Oh and the whole talking thing? She gets upset with that too. If I don’t answer Her in a certain way, or if I’m just nodding, or if I’m just staring off into space she thinks what she says is going through one ear and out the others.

I admit the me looking into space thing might come off as not listening, but the other stuff like nodding and and answering a certain way doesn’t make sense. Me answering in a certain way is me giving my opinion. If you don’t agree with that than I can’t share my thoughts with you. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about my thoughts because I think you won’t agree with what to have to say and that it’s better if I just shut up.

And me nodding could come off as not listening - If I wasn’t looking into your eyes. When I look into your eyes, I know what you’re talking about, I’m listening to you. You have my attention.

But that’s all. I have no energy left in me to rant anymore. This is all just mindless thoughts that have been stuck in my mind for a while and I had to let it out.

#vent #mother knows best #acephobia #homophobia

[phcking-detective]

1. Caught Dead with a Beretta

Fic Title: First Blood

Rating: E

Length: 1/33 chapters, ~128k

Tags: Slow Burn, Idiots to Lovers, Trans Character (gavin), Autistic / Asexual / Non-binary Character (nines), BDSM, learning to use good etiquette and safe words, Dom Nines / Sub Gavin, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Chapter Tags: suicide, death / murder, verbal hazing

Link on AO3

***

Gavin's sick of working suicides—they're depressing as hell and aren't going to do anything for his promotion. He's just got to the crime scene already wants to go home. It's fucking ass'o'clock in the morning, and he hasn't slept worth shit, so of course Nines texted to let him know about the scene the second he'd finally dozed off. 

The elevator ride up to the two thousand square foot loft gives him enough time to get hit with shit, did I take my meds before I left home? Fuck. Maybe? 

Goddammit. Maybe he should switch to those patches and gels instead of a weekly injection. Taking his T is the one thing he never, ever forgets, so if he switched to something he could do daily and took his meds for the BPD and ADHD at the same time … 

The elevator doors ding open, ruining his train of thought. Nines is here already because he doesn't fucking sleep, apparently. That hot fuckboy he sucked off once—and the beat cop for this side of town—Brayden, is in there too, but Gavin's most recent bout of soul-crippling insomnia has actually worn him down too much to be horny. 

Well, too much to put forth the effort for flirting, at least. 

"—huh, Nine Thousand?" Brayden says as Gavin walks up. 

Nines doesn't respond. 

"He's RK nine hundred," Gavin says. "Not like the meme. Super disappointing." 

Brayden grins. "Yeah, but I mean like, the movie." 

"Nine thousand?" 

Gavin frowns, trying to force his stupid idiot brain to think. All he can come up with is 300. Maybe it's a movie based off of that one book? The like, underwater … and submarines. Something-number thousand leagues under the sea? No fuck, that's not nine thousand. 

"Two thousand," Brayden says. "And one." 

Shit, is that the number of leagues or the title of the movie? 

"Man, I am way too fucking tired." Gavin waves him off. "I'm not even into that film shit. I just like action movies." 

Brayden heaves a deep sigh. "I've seen your file, Gavin. You're too smart to willingly lump yourself in with the uneducated masses." 

"May we proceed with the crime scene, detective?" Nines asks before Gavin can reply. 

Brayden flinches a little. The only reason Gavin doesn't get scared himself is because he's gotten used to Nines not breathing or moving—until he suddenly does. Makes people jumpy as shit to realize they forgot about the giant fucking android just standing there.  

Not blinking. Or breathing. 

"Go ahead," Brayden says with a sweep of his hand, like he didn't just jump half a foot. 

"May we proceed with the crime scene, detective?" Nines asks instead of complying. 

"Yeah, sure," Gavin grants permission. 

Nines proceeds. Gavin tries to hold back a smirk. Brayden's the pretentious kind of asshole who loves explaining shit no one cares about, but he's pretty hot too, and Gavin's not quite ready to burn that bridge to Terra-dick-bia by pissing him off. No, that sounds terrible. The bridge to … mm, dick. 

Damn, he's tired. 

He follows after Nines, a little worried he might wander off in his sleep-deprived state and get lost in all this square footage of prime fucking real estate. Even saints would have to work to feel sorry for dead people as rich as this. 

Finally, he stumbles into a section of the open floor plan that seems to function as the living room. There's a flat screen tv nearly as big as the wall it's mounted on, a coffee table made from a whole chunk of mahogany with a half-full tumbler, and a dead guy sitting in a chair with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. 

The TV still blares out the news, and the vic's own face flashes out at them. 

"This the Ponzi scheme guy?" Gavin asks. 

"Maverick Russell, age forty-seven." Nines shoves a finger inside the vic's mouth with no shame or preamble. "Blood alcohol level point-oh-nine-seven. The entry wound in his head appears to be consistent with a nine millimeter Beretta." 

He takes a small packet out of his Cyberlife jacket pocket and somehow has the coordination to open it one-handed. Gavin wrinkles his nose at the antiseptic smell as Nines sanitizes both hands with the wipe, even though he only touched the vic with one finger. Then he lifts that same finger to the victim's head. 

"Hey!" Gavin barks. "What have I told you about that shit?" 

Nines stares back at him with that unblinking, lizard-eye look. He touches his finger to the entry wound but doesn't push it in. Just brushes it back and forth, which is somehow way freakier. 

"The entry wound in his head is consistent with a nine millimeter Beretta," Nines says. 

"Great." 

Gavin walks a perimeter around the designated living room space. At first it's just to keep himself awake, but by the second circle, he's got one of those gut feelings. Something about this scene is off. Fuck if he can tell what though, 'cause the victim was drunk, watching his own demise on the news, and has a bullet in his head from the gun in his hand. 

"You feel that?" He asks. 

Nines cocks his head to the side. "The circulating air temperature is seventy--" 

"No." Gavin huffs and starts on another circle. "Do you like … you feel what I’m feeling?" 

"Your question is incomprehensible." 

Gavin sighs and grinds the heels of his palms against his eyes. He bites back a comment about this being why androids can't make good cops. Fuck knows why he's bothering to be nice now. He just wants to get this shit done and go home. 

When he opens his eyes, everything swirls with black spots in front of him. What's bugging him about this? The guy is dead, the gun is in his hand, the news says—

Gavin blinks the spots away and stands in front of the vic. Fake tan, but high enough quality that it'd look real if he didn't live in fucking Detroit. Decently fit, and the open kitchen on the other side of the room has one of those blenders that cost more than his car. The loft's decorated in masculine colors, all brown and navy and black leather. 

"Go check out the kitchen," Gavin tells Nines. "Tell me what's in the fridge." 

Nines does as he's told, but only after considering it. Gavin takes back the lizard comparisons. He's like a cat. One of those big jungle cats that's smart enough to eat the humans hunting them. 

"Dannon Oikos triple blended greek nonfat yogurt, coffee, four pack, five-point-three ounce cups," Nines says. "Dannon Oikos trippled blended greek nonfat yogurt, peanut butter banana, four—" 

Gavin rolls his eyes. "Just say yogurt. What else does he got?" 

"Yogurt. Eggs. Milk. Sparkling water. Chicken breast. Mayonnaise. Sliced ham. Apples. Protein shakes." Nines opens the freezer. "Chicken breast. Chicken breast. Chicken breast. Chi—" 

Gavin starts giggling. He can't help it. Nines turns around and glares at him, deliberately flashing his LED red for a second. 

"OK, fuck off, it's late," he says. "I'm like, super tired. Just analyze that shit or whatever and tell me if his food matches any of the latest high protein fad diets." 

"Yes," Nines replies so instantly Gavin wonders if he actually even looked it up at all. "The victim's food intake matches the Eight Step Enligh—" 

Gavin waves him off. "Yeah, yeah. Cool. Does the bar have gin, vodka, and vermouth?" 

Maverick Russell, definitely confirmed for one of those ultra-rich masculine gym types. Not like, an actual gym rat, just that generic rich person level of fitness achieved through liposuction, personal fitness trainers, and the latest fad diet. 

"Yes, along with seven other distinct liqueurs." Nines finishes checking the bar and returns to the living room. "How is this information relevant, detective?" 

"This drink and that gun don't match," Gavin says when Nines returns. 

Nines cocks his head again. "Match." 

"Yeah. I don't see any Bond memorabilia in here." Gavin takes another quick glance around, but the entertainment center doesn't display any vintage DVDs, and rich film buffs are not subtle about displaying their collections. "He ever purchased anything like that?" 

Nines's LED spins yellow for about half a second this time before he replies. "No. There are no significant purchases of memorabilia relating to the James Bond books or movies present in Maverick Russell's finances." 

"OK, then why the fuck does he have a Beretta?" Gavin asks. 

Nines looks at the victim, and then back at him. "That is what he shot himself with." 

"Yeah, but why," he stresses. "Would this guy—this self-obsessed, rich guy masc, desperate-to-be-cool motherfucker—have a Beretta?" 

"It is the tool he used to complete suicide." Nines frowns. "Is there a reason he would not have a Beretta?" 

"Because it's a ladies' handgun," Gavin says. "This guy's got three different TV remotes, a flat screen covering an entire wall, jesus, how old is that scotch?" 

Nines sticks his finger in it, because of course he does. "One hundred and twenty-three years old, consistent with—" 

"Shit, I would've thought this guy was trying too hard when I was twenty and desperate to be cis," Gavin mutters. "Look, I fucking promise you, this particular man literally wouldn't be caught dead with a Beretta—unless he's a James Bond fan. Even then … hey, Brayden!" 

"His input is unnecessary, detective." Nines cleans his hands with another sanitary wipe. "If you would be more clear—" 

His jaw shuts with a click as Brayden jogs over. 

"Hey, you like the Bond movies?" Gavin asks. 

Brayden heaves a tortured sigh. "I really prefer foreign movies, but for an American—" 

"All right, sure. Would you ever kick it with a Beretta?" 

Brayden bites the inside of his cheek, opens his mouth, then closes it with a frown as he thinks about it. 

"What if you were like, a super fan?" 

"Why?" Brayden glances around the loft with an interested look. "This guy have some collector's memorabilia?" 

Gavin shakes his head. "Nah. But why else he's got a fucking Beretta?" 

"Well that's not the drink for it," Brayden says immediately, then scoffs. "A scotch?" 

"Yeah, and he had the shit to make a martini too." 

"Weird. You thinking …" Brayden trails off, then winces. "Ah, shit. We uh, we got a guy a floor down. Said he heard the shot that, you know. But he said it was two bangs. And you know how shit witnesses are about getting anything right, and the TV was on and—" 

"That's shit I need to know," Gavin snaps. "Doesn't matter how stupid you think it is, you're the first officer on the scene, you report every-fucking-thing to the responding detective." 

"Yeah." Brayden clears his throat. "My bad." 

Gavin lets it slide only because now he has something to go on. "Whatever. Check me on the precon for this, RK." 

"Preconstruction running, detective." 

"So we got two shots." Gavin backs up so he's approaching the living room from twenty feet away. "So we should have two guns. The perp, coming in here, gets shot 'cause the vic's only got the one entry wound, but—" 

Nines touches the victim's hand, and then his cellphone buzzes. 

The distribution of gunshot residue on Maverick Russell's right hand is not consistent with a Beretta. The gun he fired has a longer muzzle and larger caliber. My preliminary preconstruction matches it to a .500 S&W Magnum. The victim has four registered in his name.

Gavin closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose. Would it fucking kill him to send that in five separate texts like a normal person? Now he's going to look dumb as fuck staring at the screen for five minutes trying to read one paragraph. 

OK, he’s got the fifty caliber Magnum, that's easy to read. Longer muzzle, larger caliber, right. 

"So the vic has a fifty caliber Magnum instead of a dinky Beretta, makes a lot more sense." 

Nines doesn't correct him, so that must have been the gist of the message. 

"The perp gets shot—" 

"Where's the blood though?" Brayden asks. 

Gavin glares at him. "Can you let me fucking work?" 

Shit, he's doing it again and this is why no one wants to work with him because they fuck up--everyone fucks up, he knows this, he fucking knows this--and then he just can't let it go but why the hell does Brayden think he's allowed to speak right now when—

He's not in trouble. He's not in trouble, it's just the loft, being in another rich empty room again. None of them are children and he's not in trouble. 

His cellphone buzzes. 

The floor has been scrubbed clean throughout the loft. I did not realize that was relevant information. I will give you full reports of my analysis moving forward.

That's not too bad to read, and concentrating on making the letters stay still actually helps him cool off a bit for once. Gives him something to look at other than Brayden's pretty, hurt face or the perfect fucking interior design that still feels like when he was thirteen and— 

Gavin shoves those memories aside and starts typing out a reply. 

just text me that shit

I'll prolly yell if u try telling me about the floors at every crime scene

"Am I dismissed then?" Brayden asks. 

Gavin looks up from his phone and can't force out any sort of apology. He never can. And anyway, fuck him. If Brayden wants to get pissy about getting snapped at twice after a legitimate fuck up and interrupting a senior detective mid-sentence, then sure. He can fuck right off. 

"Go get the maid," Gavin tells him. 

"The … android?" Brayden asks. 

"No, the roomba. Yes, the fucking android maid. Someone scrubbed the floors clean." 

And the side table.

Gavin doesn't bother with texting back this time. "That where the blood splatter would have hit?" 

"Yes, detective," Nines answers out loud. 

Gavin turns back to Brayden. "So there's your answer. Get the maid, 'cause I doubt the perp stuck around himself to clean the entire two-thousand square foot floor." 

Brayden hesitates. 

"She's still here," Gavin asks. "Right, Officer Burton?" 

Brayden gives a curt nod, but he breaks into a run as he leaves. 

AP700 #480 913 876 is located in the foyer of the building, along with Officers Miller and Abrahamson. I have sent alerts to their cellphones that the AP model is needed for questioning.

Gavin starts to ask how Nines knows that but … isn't this what he was literally designed to do? 

"She's not a suspect yet," he says instead. "So cool it, Terminator. And don't hack peoples' phones. That's what the officers have walkie talkies for." 

Nines makes a face like Gavin just suggested they all start using smoke signals. He's not exactly the type to go all buddy-buddy on witnesses himself, but they're definitely not going to get anywhere with Nines scaring the thirium out of their one lead. 

Gavin takes a moment to wallow in how much he hates this before he calls Hank. At least if he has to be up before dawn, so will that motherfucker. 

"We do not need assistance from Lieutenant Anderson," Nines says, his expression souring even further. "Or my predecessor. I recognize that I did not meet the necessary level of efficiency when I neglected to—" 

"Hey, this isn't a punishment," Gavin says, tilting the phone down away from his mouth. "I fucking hate Connor too, and when we have an android suspect, I get that's your thing. But right now we have an android witness, and that's his." 

"Ahh, fuck," Hank's voice comes out of the phone. "Sun's not even fucking—goddammit, Reed." 

"We will be at your location in twenty minutes, Detective Reed," Connor's voice says next. 

Gavin stares out into space as what's left of his soul collapses in on itself at the confirmation that those two really are fucking. Not even just fucking, they're sleeping together. In bed, for literal sleep. 

"Nines, tell them they're disgusting," Gavin orders. "You can put way more hate into it than me." 

 "Disgusting," Nines says with a sneer that would put Gavin's mother to shame. 

Gavin hangs up before Hank can reply. "I know you lack the capacity and all that shit, but if it makes you not-feel any better, I bet you five bucks the perp's android." 

"Based off of what evidence?" Nines asks. 

"Took a bullet and kept going." Gavin steps back into place where the perp probably walked in. "He's got the Beretta, but it's just a gun to him. He grabs the vic's gun, maybe disarms him, maybe doesn't even have to after the first shot." 

"The blood vessels on the victim's wrist have not been damaged." Nines starts cleaning his hands again even though he hasn't even touched anything this time. "Why would the human stop shooting?" 

"TV's on, he's drinking, has a gun out already." Gavin shrugs. "Might have been a suicide interrupted by a murder. Might've fired the first shot just being scared, y'know, gut instinct." 

Nines just looks at him. 

"Or you don't know, whatever." Gavin rolls his eyes. "But once he realizes what's happening—maybe he couldn't pull the trigger himself, but now here's someone gonna do it for him. Maybe he just sits back down. That still work with your preconstruction?" 

"Yes," Nines says. "Along with two thousand, one hundred and fifty-eight other scenarios." 

"Whatever. And just like, for the record, don't ask Hank about how this suicidal shit works," Gavin tells him. "Hank might not care, but those are fighting words with Connor." 

Nines doesn't move a single centimeter as he stares silently at him. 

"And don't fucking fight with Connor, we don't have time for it. Anyway, if anyone gets to pick a fight at a murder scene, it's me. So." Gavin walks up to the chair with his hand pointed like a gun. "The perp gets him back down, shoots him in the side of the head, then switches the guns so the ballistics will match." 

"He could have taken the victim's gun." Nines's LED spins a few yellow cycles. "It is registered in his name. The suicide would have looked more authentic." 

"And that's why I'm thinking our guy's an android," Gavin replies. "Someone who hasn't ever seen a movie before in his whole life. Thinks a gun is a gun is a gun. I mean, you didn't know why the Beretta was weird, and if you made A Plan to kill a guy with this gun, would you switch it up in the middle?" 

Nines's LED immediately hits blue, but it's that fake-blue that means he's really covering up a red. Gavin almost kind of … has a feeling about it? 

But then the elevator doors open with Brayden and the android maid inside. Gavin's got a burned bridge, a possible eye witness, and an a murder to deal with. Worrying about his partner's not-feelings will have to wait. 

***

***

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 / 31 / 32 / 33

This fic is also available on my Patreon! $1 tier gets you each chapter a week early, so you could be reading chapter two right now~

$2 tier gets you deleted scenes and bonus content--this week, it’s extra scenes about how Nines was found at Cyberlife and how he gets his first apartment

$3 tier gets you access to the first chapters of two new AUs I’m currently writing--an A/B/O universe in which Gavin is a bitter omega and Nines is his android partner determined to help him during his heat; and a Reverse AU where GV200 “Gavin” is assigned as Detective Richard Stern’s sobriety companion

#reed900 #gavin reed #dbh #reed900 fic #dbh fic #ch 1 #uglytrashgoblin

[yellowshibe]

people in the notes of that post (and any post about people in the trans community denying nonbinary people their community and transhood) are fucking wack lmfao. "fuck you for saying/posting this i'm ALLOWED to hate nonbinary people, deny them community/care/respect, ignore their struggles, stand against them in their OWN community and tell them they're not trans even if they decide to transition medically"....like oh my god? what the fuck? how can people sit there and be like "you make me so mad standing up for people in our shared community bc i'm an asshole".....like don't they realize how fucking dumb that is. from a historical perspective nonbinary people have always been in the community (as shown in the original and only trans flag, in numerous documentation on people who don't subscribe to gender ideals/roles/binary expression ACROSS the lgbt community like that's heavily documented...in other cultures and histories of the past, and more but i can't source rn) and it's just like why suddenly are all you kalvin harral motherfuckers coming out of the woodwork trying to tell all nonbinary people their experiences are the same (which you complain we say/do? 🤔) in that we aren't trans, we don't have dysphoria, we don't face struggle or oppression, we don't transition medically, and we can't relate to this Ultimate Trans Struggle...do you! does anyone! everyone trans person is different including binary people. fuck off with this bullshit of "oh you're all just girls who wanna be quirky🤪". no, fuck you, i want to be me, i want community of people who are like minded and i want to navigate my dysphoria how I want to. all trans people should have the autonomy to transition how they want to no matter how much or how little and other trans people KNOOOOW how shitty it is to feel forced to pass in a certain way (hyperfemininty? anyone?) so stop pushing that shit on us, we already get that bullshit from cis people 24/7. and lastly you all think nonbinary means vaguely masculine and it shows. the whole thing...about being nonbinary....is not being one or the other? so any expression a non binary person has COULD seem "wrong" to someone. foh with that, again we get that enough from cis people. this ramble turned into a rant but. yeah. stop pushing away and hurting nonbinary people bc of your own internalized bullshit, thanks

#blah blah blah #DONT REBLOG. #transphobia mention/ #this isnt that well worded sorry its just a vent

[dead-thorin]

everything im gonna write is gonna be concerning but it be like that and its really not concerning

for like months now i haven’t been ok. And like it’s gotten worse with the holidays and ive been so fucking angry and tired lol. like at first i was like its fine its ok, then i was like its the hormones it happens, then its the stress of finals and work but like its really not like i legit just dont want to be alive anymore im really tired of it. Like idk how to convey just how much i dont care anymore to be alive

1) I feel so fucking isolated here like i have friends but a majority of them are cis. And like the trans people i know? most of them on T are non binary which like valid, but they dont get the full extent. And like their families support them lmao and theres one person i could talk to but he doesnt seem to want to socialize much so i always feel awful thinking about hitting him up

and like i feel like my friends dont like me and i know thats not the case but also maybe it is!!! who fucking knows anymore!!!! i dont have time to talk to them bc im so busy at work and then i get home and immediately have to do more work and by the time im free this week theyll be home for break so like!!! fuck i guess!!! i saw one of my friends who i havent been able to see all semester and she said shed hit me up today and she hasnt and i know its cause she and another friend have to study and theyve been busy but in my mind its still “she fucking hates u!!! doesnt matter that she was so excited to see u and would definitely have no qualms in telling u to fuck off she hates u!!!”

2) no one listens to me lol like people listen to me when i rant, which is really helpful and i really appreciate and love that they do that bc emotional labor, but like in groups? i talk and people interrupt or dont hear what i say or disregard it and im like k. OR THEY THINK IM FUCKING JOKING LIKE THIS LEGIT IS SUCH A PROBLEM AND IVE HAD IT HAPPEN WITH SEVERAL PPL AND IDK WHAT TO DO. Like i physically say “im really not joking dont do that” AND THEY STILL THINK IM JOKING

and whenever i talk to people and they give me advice or just listen they do at least one thing. They either mention medicine, which again, valid, but i dont want to go back on medicine right now. But then they fucking push that shit and demand reasons why i dont want to like fuck u i dont have to explain shit to u i just dont want to. And/or it turns into me educating them and im just like great! i managed to do labor in this trying time! nice!

3) I cant talk to my therapist bc shell become concerned lol. i told her how i went to the labor looking for a book about the pros and cons of committing suicide and researched it and i had to talk for 10 minutes afterwards about the steps i was taking to help combat it but like i was legit scared to tell her in case she made me go into inpatient care lmao and this brings me to pt 4

4) theres like nothing here LMAOOOOOOO like no books at either library about stopping suicidal thoughts or helping depression or about family estrangement. I had to order books from different libraries to get something and theres a few that i got from the Libby app but like wtf lmao and theres no events during christmas and every volunteer thing? either i gotta fill out an application and do training which who knows how long thatll take or i need a car. Like there legit isnt anything here i did so much looking lmao like i have my hobbies but that wont make me leave the house

i talked to a professor about this shit too and he understands and stuff and told me to hit him up during break if i feel isolated but like I FEEL SO FUCKING GUILTY FOR EVEN BREATHING LMAO LIKE WHAT hes got shit to do too and i know he has research going on so like doubt it

5) im gonna die alone at this pt and i know thats mad dramatic and also probably false but im like so conflicted about everything i feel with my gender and dating

like every time i like a man im like wow if i was a girl, this wouldnt be a problem and like being cis has more privileges than being trans but i know last time i dated in the closet it wasnt a good time SO

and every time i like a girl, im like she prob wont see me as a man or will be disappointed in my body or transition

and like no matter who im interested in, the same thought is always “they prob dont see me as a man and will misgender me, even unintentionally” like i know people who dont even know my birth name and have known my pronouns as he/him AND THEY STILL GET IT WRONG LIKE WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO EVEN DO ANYMORE TATTOO IT ON MY FUCKING FOREHEAD 

theres a guy i currently like, whos so sweet like theres one incident that happened that i had me thinking damn.... hope hes into guys and single..... and like its kept me up thinking “oh man hes definitely str8 this fucking sucks if i was a girl i would probably have a shot” but like every time i toy with the idea of detransitioning (not in a serious way, but just like casually thinking of a scenario) my mind physically rejects it and is like “motherfucking do u wanna go back to THOSE shitty feelings??? really??? it was worse before!!” and i will definitely get over this crush, like im just lonely and its cuffing season, but it fucking sucks in the meantime like i feel like i cant date because im too nervous and scared to!!! im so scared they wont think im a man and i know thats not every person but like Jesus its enough that its a good possibility

6) this part is sad but i think i have to stop talking to my sister or at least give her limited info bc shes having her parents contact me through her and im not giving them shit so...

like she just texted asking when id be home and for the millionth time (BC NO ONE LISTENS TO ME) i said i wasnt going home, im never going home, stop asking and i know that its them asking her to ask me and they can honestly fuck themselves

like these are all problems that have solutions and i know the solutions but like im so tired of it lol im tired of having to deal with my family situation, im tired of being ignored and interrupted and not taken serious and having to explain my boundaries over and over and over again, im tired of not being able to talk to people for fear of getting hospitalized or interrupted or pushed onto meds, im tired of not having resources, im so tired of it all. Im so sick of being suicidal and not even being able to get out of bed and having to deal with being depressed and anxious and chronically ill fuck all of it

legitimately had to make a list of shit i could do over break so that i feel like i cant hurt myself until i finish it bc thats how my shit brain works. like i dont want to die but i also just dont want to deal with this anymore and i know itll get better in time but jesus fucking christ its been 8 damn years when does it actually get fully fucking good? its gotten better but more shit keeps coming up like yea i started hormones but now i dont have a fucking family anymore. 

Even if i didnt have this list i wouldnt do it bc 1) i dont want to do that to my closest friend and 2) im helping someone get out of an abusive situation. She has like no support, just one cousin whos there for her, but he doesnt have resources for her. Ive been listening to her and validating her and making sure she knows that a) this is the type of shit abusers do and b) shes not fucking crazy for thinking certain things!!! she really isnt and i get it so much so ive been gently giving her contacts from the beginning to help her and she finally left and is in a really delicate place. So like not exactly the best thing for me to suddenly be gone and id feel terrible if she had no one there for her

anyway this was a long post that can basically be summed up as i really want to fucking kill myself but i wont but also im suffering a lot

#post from the blogger

[theinvisiblespoon]

WHAT HAPPENED?!!1!?

If you’d like to see the full event: https://discord.gg/XwWVKWb Everything is open, but you can only talk in the voice and general chat.

Over the weekend (starting about Friday) I made a discord server. This was my first one. I had only made my (first) account a couple of days previous– but I had an idea.

The server was called “Everything is Fine”. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know this is a phrase you should be highly suspicious of.

While I was setting up, I introduced two new characters: Adam Nesling and Ector Elm. I chose their last names for a very specific reason.

Then, the big day came!!! You all were invited. About 20 people came. (AHHHH????) Every guest was given a nickname. The people who participated are as follows:

The Traveler @splatoon-jim wasn’t there, but she helped me figure out how to Discord and for that many thanks 

The Photographer: @pain-in-my-aesthetic (Edit: I’M SORRY I HAD YOU HERE I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED)

The Librarian The Singer The Stupid Siren @mltcp

The Veteran @ironwoman359

The Enchanter @flower-non

The Musician @littleteenblog

The Warrior @readeatfightlove13

The Adventurer @the-editor-is-bored

The Detective @princessbelix

The Exorcist @the-real-bubblegum-bitch

The Insane @sam-moss

The Healer @nikkyshows

The Magician @the-asexual-reaper

The Hunter @virgil-loves-princey

The Poet @poem-jim

The Soldier @forgottenbehindtheinternet

and of course…

The Helpless @theinvisiblespoon

The Host played by @theinvisiblespoon (but technically a separate entity.)

For almost the entire time, everyone playing was in voice chat. I’ll try to relay what I remember. I’ll also star (*) my favorite moments.

*Warrior, Spy, and Host are the first ones in the chat. Spy does not appreciate the Host’s bullshit.

Multiple people start to join, and everyone is conversing and bitching about the Host.

People notice that the Host is in the Beware role and the Helpless is in the Safe…¿ role. They also begin to piece together the available information. Everyone discusses code.

FINE is an acronym for F-ellow I-tzel N-esling E-lm.

*People suspect the Observer.

People are confused by their given nicknames.

Cool people that I never expected to join actually jOIN and I’m trying not to freak out because I’m playing a part.

*What I really loved about this whole thing is that it brought a bunch of people together in hating a common enemy. Everyone had a good time, and everyone was closer because of it.

*Veteran, Musician, Spy, Enchanter, Warrior, and Librarian all appreciate me ahhhhhh

The Host says that this will be a game of wits more then strength.

People vote Veteran to be group leader so nobody chokes to death. Everyone appreciated Veteran for that.

A theory arises that the Host is the Host, a character that Mark plays.

Veteran knows from experience that the Host is a dic not gracious.

People notice that the Host has full control of the environment, and are very anxious.

Voice chat begins.

*The Librarian becomes the Singer (per your requests)

The Helpless speaks!!!! “I have not been me for a long time”

The Singer sings!!! (It was beautiful)

Viz’s Tumblr heading and description changes. (It is still there.)

People notice this list from a day or so before.

*/zoom kitchen

*Anytime the Host types, everybody is like “oH GOD EVERYONE RUN”

Singer gives the Host the idea of Morse code.

…—…

The Helpless communicates for a bit through the Host (and Morse code), but the Host discovers them.

Binary: “Shut up, Detective.” (I may be paraphrasing)

At some point, the Singer becomes the Stupid Siren.

I sing Birds, and soon… We begin.

*The Spy comes back for a bit, and people are suspicious, but let it go.

The Photographer becomes a mod.

Someone: I’ll stab you with a spoon. The Host: only if the spoon is invisible. (This got multiple middle fingers)

Entrance hall: (voice chat is basically WTF VIZ)

Dining room: The Host is a creep. Nobody likes it. The Host is casually impatient.

The Host mentions that you are being led straight to your deaths.

I should mention that people have “roles” in this game. Guests (blue) Not Safe (red) Beware (orange) and Safe…¿ (black). Prior to this, the Host was orange, the Helpless was black, and everyone playing was blue.

*The Veteran speaks out of turn, and her name goes red. (Lots of screaming and panicking in the voice chat)

The Host mentions that you should move as one, or die.

The Host is impatient af

Kitchen: Everyone ransacks the kitchen.

Aleah goes back to the dining room to glare at the Host.

*Everyone in the kitchen begins to choke. (There is so much screaming and panicking lol)

Dining room: Everyone hates the Host with a burning passion.

The Host asks everyone to be quiet, but nobody is. Suddenly, no one is able to type in the chat. (So much fear in the voice chat, everyone.)

The Host is a sassy motherfucker.

Servant 1: There is a riddle! Stupid Siren is a smarty pants and checks if there are laundry machines. Number four has the key.

Servant 2: There were other people here before?!?! gasps in Spanish

*Magician tries to cheat the system, and begins to choke. She stops after she drops the Bobby pin, but half the people ran into the next room so eVERONE IS CHOKING AGAIN (the voice chat was, again, just_ screaming_.)

Storage room: People try to go into the secret trapdoor but tHEN THEY WILL BE STUCK THERE SO I DISTRACT THEM WITH THE HOST

The Host: “The only way to get out of the Not Safe role is to kill someone else.”

Theater: The Host is watching an old movie and is also a cocky asshole

*Magician wants to know if the Host can die. The Host mutes everyone (screaming) except Magician so she has the opportunity. Magician doesn’t take it, though. (Which is nice for me, cause I would probably die. Of course, it knew that.)

Enchanter becomes red. The Host can do what it wants.

Magician is annoying and begins to choke.

The Healer takes the Magician’s pain on to herself.

Hallway 2: The Host is not happy Healer did that. Healer turns red.

Everyone begins fighting amongst themselves, which the Host finds interesting.

Music: A piano tune riddle that coincidentally happens to be the bass line for the opening of WKM. (This wasn’t intentional I swear)

Library: The out of place books are an anagram for “PICK AND CHOOSE”. The meaning of this was not resolved.

*(“There is an open tab on the catalog computer.” “Is it pornhub?”)

Hallway 1: The Host “This will be interesting.” _It eyes Aleah. _Aleah is not too friendly with the upcoming characters.

The unlocked doors are bedroom F and bedroom I. (Fine is an acronym.)

*Everyone in voice chat is like “holy shit are we going to see 0229 and Itzel?!?!”

Bedroom F: 0229 attacks them. They also are in the corner.

0229 doesn’t have a sister. The Host lies.

There is a broken mirror in the bathroom. No one is choking when people are in multiple rooms. The Host is mysteriously absent.

Bedroom I: 0229 and Dr. Itzel are happy to see each other. They hug and cry. Then, they vanish.

Zedekiel I and II neutralized.

Aleah really wants to kill/maim Itzel and 0229.

Everyone is confused. The tumblr heading: “_The first were torn apart.” _

A mirror is broken in the bathroom.

Hallway 3: People are cautious. As they should be.

Bedroom N: Adam is unconscious. He wakes up and immediately aims a gun at everyone.

Everyone’s like “jESUS CHRIST Adam calm tf down”

Metatron neutralized.

Adam leaves and some people take weapons. You should’ve used those.

People figure out they don’t choke when they are in multiple rooms. _The Host lies _is mentioned for that fact.

A mirror is broken in the bathroom.

Hallway 3: People waltz into that hallway.

*Bedroom E: Ector Elm is immediately everyone’s favorite.

He has a lisp.

*Veteran’s burning hand trick does not work on him.

*Ector: “Love ya! The Librarian The Singer The Stupid Siren (everyone bursts out laughing)

They realize this entire game was a test.

On a single page– The Host Lies.

********The door slams shut and locks all of them in. The Spy stands outside the door. (Actual terrified screaming at this point– you guys almost took out my ears)

*Oh yeah, I should probably mention that the Spy was also played by me. If you didn’t figure it out already.

****The Spy’s role changes from Guest to Beware.

I (as the Spy) told everyone repeatedly in the beginning that I was a spy, you idiots.

The door stays closed for days. The group finally leaves the building, and when they do, they wake up in their beds, gasping and panting for air. It wasn’t a dream however. But they are all alive. And isn’t that what really matters?

At this point, I received many middle fingers.

*All of their names turn red. (lots of OH GOD NONONO)

Stupid Siren: “I’m not a rat.” Veteran: “We are to them.” Good point.

Photographer suggests “The Ruined Manor Gang” and everyone agrees.

*PEOPLE GOT INSPIRED BY MY TORTURE FEST WOWOWOW

Thank you so much for being a part of this! Watch your backs, gang…there’s a target on them now.

#summary #masterpost #masterlist #everything is f.i.n.e. #Not Safe #the host oc #the helpless #viz #0229 #dr. vin itzel #adam nesling #ector elm #ruined manor gang

[cwnerd12]

You’ll Be Given Love

“You’ll Be Given Love” The Bros stand on a stage, arranged by age. Arthur, “Uh, hi, I’m Arthur Shepherd.” They each introduce themselves in order: Sean, Ethan, Robert, and James. Arthur, “And we’re here tonight because tomorrow, our baby brother, David, is getting married.” (“LGBT” CupcakKe) Cut to: the greatest Pride party Gilboa has ever witnessed. Somehow, David has lost his shirt, but it clearly doesn’t bother him. In a very full club, he dances like an idiot with his brothers, AFG members, and random colorful partiers. A drag queen pours champagne into his open mouth. Male, female, and gender-indeterminate strippers dance and get money thrown at them. Shots after shots get served. David vogues like a motherfucker and lands a flawless death drop. He scream-sings along to “Cut to the Feeling.” Cut to: David sits in the sunroof of his limo, chugging from a bottle of champagne while his brothers hang out other windows. The whole city has come to cheer for him: people wave AFG and pride flags and dance in the streets.

Morning, David lays passed out on a sofa while the bros lay around also passed out, liquor bottles still strewn around. Michelle, clearly not pleased, shakes David’s shoulder. He struggles to open his eyes and groans, “Oh, fuck.” Michelle, “You are marrying my brother in four hours.” David, “Shit. Okay.” He tries to sit up, and rubs his head. Michelle, “Jesus fuck, how hung-over are you?” David, “Very.” Behind him, Ethan stirs, “Oh, fuck.” Michelle, “You completely embarrassed yourself last night, and now there’s footage of you grinding with some nameless stripper all over the internet.” David, “Was it male or female?” Michelle, “I’m gonna say non-binary.” David, “That’s valid. I had fun. I think the last time I properly had fun was our Royal Hotel blowout in Ashdod.” Michelle, “That’s no way for a king to behave! You embarrassed the whole country last night!” David, “Since when did you turn into Rose?” Michelle, “Since when did you turn into a dumb slut?!” David, “Oh, I should have known this was about Beth.” Michelle, “This is about you being an idiot!” David rubs his face, “Can I at least eat something while you scream at me?” he turns to the bros, “Who wants eggs?” Five miserable groans. David gets up and heads for the kitchen. Michelle follows him, “You embarrassed Jack last night!” David, “I did not.” Michelle, “Yes, you did!” David, “Did he tell you that I embarrassed him?” He gets a carton of eggs out of the fridge and sets to making  shitload of scrambled eggs. Michelle, “You embarrassed me last night!” David, “You’re gonna be my sister-in-law. How exactly does that qualify as someone who gets embarrassed by my behavior?” Michelle, “You’re a fucking king, David! You have to act like one!” David, “Does that mean that I don’t get to cerebrate the fact that I’m gonna marry the love of my life?” Michelle, “It means you have to act with dignity! What the fuck happened to your shirt?!” David, “Uh…. it kind of disappeared.” Michelle, dismayed, “Oh my god.” David, “Hey, I remember seeing pictures of Jack doing that kind of shit all the time.” Michelle, “Because he was fucking miserable and lashing out at our parents!” David, “So, can I say that I, too, am lashing out at Silas?” Michelle, “No.” David, “Where is Jack, anyway?” Michelle, “He’s upstairs with Mom.” David, “Did he sleep last night?” Michelle, “Yes.” David, “Good. Then we have nothing to worry about today.” Michelle, “Except for your hungover ass vomiting during your vows.” David, “You’re a medic, give me some anti-nausea medicine, then!” Michelle rolls her eyes and mutters, “You should drink something with electrolytes in it, get re-hydrated.” David, “Okay, I will.” Michelle, “Lucky for you, I’ve nursed Jack through a few hangovers. If I can get him looking well enough that Dad doesn’t notice that he’s seriously hungover, I can get you to look decent in your wedding pictures.” David, “You’re amazing, Michelle.” Michelle, “I’m doing this for Jack. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that I’ve forgiven you in any form.” David, “Are you ever going to forgive me?” Michelle, “Probably not.” David, “Oh, come on, we’re gonna be family! And because of me, you and Abby got married, too!” Michelle, sarcastic, “Call the Vatican, you’re eligible for sainthood.” David, “If you can get me through a hangover for Jack’s sake, you can forgive me for Jack’s sake.” Michelle, “I’m fucking talking to you for Jack’s sake.” David, “Look, I really fucked up with Beth. I admit that, I own that. But this doesn’t make me the same as Silas.” Michelle, “Say that again and I will slam your face into that hot pan of eggs.” David, “Well, what am I supposed to say?” Michelle, “Nothing! I’d be fine with you never speaking to me again!” David, “I’m not gonna do that.” Michelle, “Then just accept the fact that I can hold a fucking grudge, okay?”

In Rose’s apartment, Jack and Rose argue. Rose, “I am not wearing that. I’m still in mourning for your father. I can’t be seen wearing something like that.” Jack, “No black!” Rose, “There’s black in this dress!” Jack shoots her a look that says you know what I mean. Rose simpers down at the dress, “You know I wouldn’t be caught dead in Versace.” Jack, “Exactly.” Rose, “After David’s antics last night, I won’t be able to look any of the other queens in the face. I can’t imagine what they’re saying right now.” Jack, “David can party.” He picks the dress up and pushes it towards Rose, “Wear it!” Rose, “Can I at least wear a blazer over it?” Jack, “No!” Michelle enters. Rose, “How is David?” Michelle, “He’s a dumb, hungover thot, but I’m going to have him ready and looking good for the wedding, even if I have to sign a deal with Satan to do it.” Jack, “Tell Mom.” Michelle, “Tell her what?” Jack points at the dress, “Wear this.” Michelle looks at it, “You should wear it, Mom. You can’t wear all black to a wedding.” Rose, “I never imagined this would be what I’d wear to Jack’s wedding.” Jack, hopefully, “Wear it?!” Rose, “I might as well. Nothing else is going to be like what I imagined.” Michelle, sharply, “What did you imagine, Mom?” Rose, “A nice ceremony befitting a royal family. Something visible to the public, not just a small, private ceremony.” Jack and Michelle exchange looks. Jack, frustrated, “I don’t… talking.” Rose, “I know, I know. This is much easier for you, and you shouldn’t have to worry at your wedding. But you do have to grant me the right to be unhappy about the name change. I named you Jonathan Benjamin thinking you’s stay Jonathan Benjamin.” Michelle, “Dad didn’t even like Jonathan.” Rose, “It’s a family name!” Jack, “Jack Shepherd,” he concentrates hard and slowly says, “My name is Jack Shepherd.” Michelle, quietly, “He’s been practicing that all week.” Rose looks sadly down at Jack, swallows hard, and then says, “I just never once thought I’d be doing all this without your father. All he ever wanted was for you two to be happy.” Michelle, bitterly sarcastic, “I’m sure that’s exactly what was on his mind when he forced us to watch David get bombs dropped on him.” Rose, “Don’t bring that up! Not today!” Michelle, “You’re the one who brought it up!” Jack, loudly, “Stop!” He gives them both a dirty look. Rose, resigned, “I’ll wear the dress.” She pauses, and then looks at Michelle, “Is David still downstairs?” Michelle, “I think so?” Rose, “I’m going to give him his gift.”

Back in David’s kitchen, David and the bros eat scrambled eggs and chug gatorade. Rose enters, David sees her, “Hi, Rose.” The bros all make sounds somewhat like greetings. Rose, “I trust you boys enjoyed yourselves last night.” David, “Yes, we did.” Rose, “I’m giving you your gift early.” She pulls a key out of her pocket and hands it to David. He looks at it. Rose, “There’s a cabin up in the mountains, in a beautiful wooded area. It’s miles away from anywhere else. There’s a nearby stream for fishing, land for hunting, and a garden for the summer. It’s been set up for you and Jack to spend your honeymoon, and it’s yours to visit any time you wish.” David, “Wow, thanks, Rose!” Ethan, “I want a cabin.” Arthur, “Stage a coup and you can get one.” Ethan goes up behind David and grabs him, making a chokehold, “Easy.” David drops his eggs with a spectacular clatter and tries to wrestle Ethan away. The other bros hoot and yell. David breaks free of Ethan’s grip and then pins him to the counter, “Not today!” The bros applaud. David, “I bested Silas and Amal, you really think you can beat me?” Ethan sputters, “You’re my fucking baby brother, man! You’re just lucky I’m hungover!” David lets Ethan go, “And you’re lucky I’m a merciful king!” Rose struggles to maintain her composure, “Perhaps you boys should get ready.” David, still laughing, “Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll be ready.”

Rose and Jessie sit in the back of a limo, Rose wearing a colorful Versace dress that looks good on her but she’d still never wear. Jessie, “Now that’s a fun dress.” Rose, “Jack is forcing me to wear it.” Jessie, “Used to be the only time I ever wore a dress was at weddings: when I got married, when Arthur got married, and when Sean got married. I never in my life thought I’d even wear as many dresses as I have now. Life sure changes in funny ways, doesn’t it?” Rose, “That it does.” Rose, “Oh, I just know I’m gonna cry the whole time. I might even start crying now. But these are the good kind of tears! Usually when I’m crying over David, it’s the bad kind of tears.” Rose looks out her window without saying anything. Jessie goes on, “And I thought I was proud of him when he graduated high school!” she sighs, “It’s hard doing it all without John.” Rose turns her head, “When did he die?” Jessie, “Oh, it’s been about ten years, now. David was fifteen. John always knew David was destined for something big, but I don’t know if he ever imagined David would be king. I’m giving David a framed picture of me and John at our wedding for a gift. It’s not quite a cabin, but, I think he’ll love it. I know he misses John. He hardly spoke for about a year after he died.” Rose, “It’s hard to imagine David not talking.” Jessie, “Even harder to live with.” Rose, “I watch Jack struggle to just get a few words out, to think that someone would just choose not to talk…” Jessie, “It wasn’t a choice. He was just trying to deal with losing his father in the best way he knew how.”

Outside the national cathedral, massive crowds gather to cheer and wave flags. Inside, people happily gather. Michelle and Abby giddily show off their rings. Helen approaches them, and Michelle gives her a big hug. Jessie cries and laughs with the Bros. Rose sits by herself, detached from those around her. She looks down at her wedding ring and spins it around on her finger. Her lip trembles subtly and tears fill her eyes. She wipes them away. David and Jack recite their vows and exchange rings. Flashback: masculine hands place a ring on the finger of a feminine hand. Young Silas, in his army uniform, smiles proudly at young Rose, their wedding. Young Rose, pregnant and in a cheap dress, smiles brilliantly and kisses him. In the present time, Rose claps and tries her best to smile for Jack and David, who kiss happily.

At a reception at the palace, David opens the gift Jessie gives him. He sees the picture of his parents and tears up, “Oh my god, Mom!” Jessie, “It’s so hard to know what to get for you now that you’re king!” David, “It’s wonderful. This is going in my office, where everyone who meets with me will see it.” Jessie, “Oh, i’m glad you like it.” David hugs her gratefully. Rose looks on, and then kneels beside Jack to speak to him, “I’m not feeling the best right now. I’m going to go upstairs and rest.” Jack, “Leaving?” Rose, “I don’t feel well.” Jack, “Okay.” Rose, “Jack, I want you to know… I’m very proud of you, and I’m very happy for you. And I think your father would feel the same way.” Jack, “Really?” Rose, “Yes. He loved you, Jack. He truly loved you. And I love you, too.” Jack, “I love you, Mom.” Rose cries happily, “You go on your honeymoon and enjoy your time with David. You deserve to be happy.” Jack hugs her, and she hugs him back.

Rose, carrying a bottle of wine, walks through the palace lobby, still under construction. She gets in an elevator and goes up into her apartment. She kicker her heels off and goes into the living room. She goes over to the bar and digs around in a drawer for a wine bottle opener. She finds one, and opens the bottle of wine with a loud pop. She takes a chug straight from the bottle. She mutters to herself, “At least they chose good wine.” She takes another swig, goes over to the sofa, sits down, and sprawls out. She takes a long chug, and then looks forlornly up at Silas’s portrait, “Our children are MARRIED, Silas, can you believe it?” She takes another swig, “You know, there was once a time when I would have been thrilled to hear that our children had married the likes of David Shepherd and Abigail Hatch, just not in the current arrangement,” she takes another swig and grimaces, “That was a long time ago.” She drinks again, “Maybe that’s the mistake we made. We should have just let David date Michelle. They would have been happy together. We’d still have him as a son-in-law, but it would be worth the trade-off.” She goes quiet and contemplates for a moment, “When the doctor said we were having a boy and a girl, I couldn’t help but start imagining two weddings. I dreamt of finding the perfect dress for the girl, and then watching you walk her down the aisle,” she sniffs, “Do you know what she chose to get married in? Something to show off her tattoos. Those were her exact words. And then she went and got another tattoo, while still wearing the dress.” She takes a long chug. The door opens, and Michelle enters followed by Abby. Michelle, “Hey, Mom, Jack and David just left. Jack said you were up here. Are you okay?” Rose makes an attempt to sit up, “I’m doing as well as I can be.” Michelle looks disapprovingly down at the bottle of wine, “Yeah, nothing that can be handled with a bottle of wine, right?” Rose, “Oh, don’t be so judgmental. Today has been difficult for me.” Michelle, sarcastic, “Yeah, because watching your son marry the love of his life is just so awful, isn’t it?” Rose, “Don’t be cross with me, Michelle.” Michelle, “Why are you so miserable? Weddings are supposed to make people happy!” Rose, “I just wish the circumstances could be a bit different, is all.” Michelle, “Different how?” Rose, “I should have told Silas to let you date David. Then you would be the one marrying him, and things would be better.” Michelle, “And where the fuck does that leave Jack?” Rose, “He could have married Abby.” Abby, “I was already married to Norman. I was forced into it, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, even being kidnapped by the Amalekites. I would never, ever wish forced marriage on anyone, especially not Jack.” Michelle, “You just can’t stand to see Jack happy, can you?!” Rose, “I want him to be happy, just as much as you do.” Michelle, “Then why aren’t you happy for him now?” Rose, “I just wish your father were here.” Michelle, “Dad would rather shoot himself again than watch Jack marry David.” Rose, “Stop it! You’re just being cruel!” Michelle, “You have no room to talk to me about being cruel.”  Rose, “There are things that I still can’t forgive David for.” Michelle, “Please tell me you’re talking about the girl.” Rose, “What? No. David ruined my life.” Michelle, “You were one half of the coup that made him king!” Rose, “Linus was going to destroy Gilboa. Just because I recognized that David was the better king doesn’t mean I don’t wish it was still your father.” Michelle, “Dad was a terrible fucking king.” Rose, “Don’t say that!” Michelle, “David couldn’t build an army just by smiling and being charming. People wanted to see Dad gone, and Dad couldn’t let go. That’s why David’s king now!” Rose, “I miss my husband! Is that a crime?” she cries, “I wish you would forgive him.” Michelle, “What did Dad ever do to earn forgiveness?”  Rose, “You want to forgive him.” Michelle glares at her, and says in a low, deadly voice, “Don’t tell me what I want.” Rose, “I know you do!” Michelle, voice shaking, eyes full of tears. “He lied to me, and cheated on you!” Rose, “He loved you so much.” Michelle, disgusted, “He tried to torture Jack until he became another person. That’s not love. I don’t know what the hell you think love is, but Dad never loved us.” She turns around and heads for the door. Abby follows. Rose, “Michelle!” Rose watches them leave, and then sits for a moment, stunned. She looks back up at the portrait of Silas.

In their apartment, Abby, wearing her comfortable pajamas, sits on the sofa, drinking a glass of wine and watching the news. Michelle comes out into the living room wearing a silky, lacy cami and shorts lingerie set. Abby looks her up and down, “Well, damn. I definitely picked the right wife.” Michelle laughs and goes over and sits down. Abby turns the TV off, and Michelle curls up to her. Michelle, “Do you ever think you’ll forgive your father?” Abby, “Nope. I never intend to forgive my father, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I’ve made sure Frankie and Mom know it, too. Frankie gets it, but Mom won’t accept it. One of the reasons I wanted a courthouse wedding was because then I wouldn’t have to deal with her.” Michelle lays her head on Abby’s shoulder, “I still haven’t forgiven David over the mess with the girl.” Abby, “Beth?” Michelle, “Did you ever meet her?” Abby, “I saw her around, from time to time. Never really talked to her.” Michelle, “What was she like?” Abby, “Pretty… and honestly kind of dumb.” Michelle, “Not unlike David.” Abby laughs, “Yeah…” she drifts off for a moment, “For as stupid a decision as sleeping with Beth was, I can’t stay mad at David. He saved me from Norman, and… when we were with the Amalekites, I was never scared because I knew David would save us. I trusted him that much. I still trust him that much.” Michelle, quietly, “Jack forgives him. He forgives both of them, David and Dad… but he’s always been like that. He’d rather just put things in the past and move on. I’m the one who can’t let things go. Dad and I have that in common.” Abby, “I gave David the slap of his life when I figured out what he’d done. Did it twice.” Michelle, “Wish I coulda been there.” She sits silently. Wordless flashback: Silas gives a speech, while child Jack and Michelle stand beside him, on either side of Rose. Michelle looks at the faces in the crowd, all of which are entranced and moved by her powerful father. Michelle gazes proudly at Silas. He pauses his speech, looks over at her, and smiles with pride and adoration. Back in the present time, Michelle still sits with her head on Abby’s shoulder, “I know David regrets what he did. I know I should just forgive him and get over it, but, I can’t. And I can’t figure out who it is I’m not forgiving: David, or Dad.” Abby puts her finger underneath Michelle’s chin, and gently raises her face so she can kiss her. They kiss slowly and passionately. On the table, a phone dings. Michelle looks at it, “And that’ll be the newlyweds.” Abby, “Do you want to get it?” Michelle reaches for the phone. On the screen, a ridiculously cute selfie of David and Jack, both smiling and laughing. Caption, “Jack hasn’t stopped smiling since we got here.” Abby, “Well, you have to give it to them, they are a cute couple.” Michelle sniffs and wipes away a tear, “Jack deserves this. He really does. David loves him so much.”

In their cabin, Jack curls up happily on David’s lap. David, “You know, five years ago, I thought I’d finish my tour in the army, go back to Bethlehem, and work on the family farm. Maybe once I had enough money, I’d buy my own. That was my wildest, most ambitious dream. I thought Prince Jack was just some douchebag I’d never, ever have anything to do with,” he grins, and Jack grins back, “I thought maybe I’d meet someone, get married, if it was a girl. I never thought I could be this happy. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” He caresses the side of Jack’s face, and kisses him tenderly. Jack rests his head on David’s shoulder, and thinks for a moment. Slowly, he says, “Marriage, before… drowning. Felt like drowning.” David grows serious. Jack pauses to think, “Nine years old… family vacation. Beach.” flashback, nine-year-old Jack chases Michelle down a rocky, forested beach, while Silas and Rose look on in the background. In another shot, Jack swims through murky green water. Jack, “My foot, seaweed, caught,” his legs kick in a patch of seaweed, ams flail, “Can’t swim, can’t breathe,” his mouth opens, “Water, in my mouth… try to breathe, in my lungs…” his arms begin to lose their strength, but then something pulls Jack up. Silas drags a coughing, gasping Jack ashore, and sets him on the ground while he struggles to breathe. “Dad grabbed me…” Silas looks down at Jack, eyes full of worry, but the rest of him guarded, fearful of showing too much emotion. Back in real time, Jack goes on, “Marriage, Katrina, Lucinda… drowning,” He looks up at David, “I’m not drowning.” David kisses him adoringly. He looks Jack in the eye, “Jack, no one is going to hurt you, ever again. I swear, I won’t let anyone…” Jack gives him a long, lingering kiss.

(“All Is Full of Love (Voltaic Version)” Björk) David and Jack make passionate love. In their bedroom, Abby and Michelle make love. Michelle arches her back, grabs the pillows, and curls her toes as Abby pleasures her. Jack smiles blissfully as David kisses his neck. In the bed she used to share with Silas, Rose lays alone. Jack digs his fingernails into David’s back and grabs his ass. Michelle cries out with intense delight. Rose forlornly looks at the picture on her nightstand, young, handsome Silas, still in the army. Beyond that, the family portrait from Silas’s coronation. Rose looks at them in bewilderment, wondering where it all went wrong, and tears run down her face. Jack lays in David’s arms, and the two laugh happily. Michelle curls up with Abby, who kisses her forehead lovingly. Rose turns away from the pictures, and weeps.

#Kings

[exothermic-filth]

First Shot’s Mine pt. II

Ya boi’s back with a continuation of this Junker!Reader x Junkrat fic :) Non-binary reader, SFW (violence and swearing warning!)

Thank you for the support, y’alls! Especially to @motherfucking-breadcrumbs for the kind words <3 Hope I did your expectations justice! 

Finale (Pt. III)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It’s been a few days since Dusty came into work. You didn’t blame the young man: he drank enough liquor to happily satiate three grizzled Junkers. The hangover must be killing him right now. Deep down, you knew he was avoiding you: tussling with the internal conflict of turning in Junkrat. 

You straighten up, hearing your back crack. You’d been cleaning for three days straight to remedy the mess of Founder’s Day. The place looked… alright? 

You tut and take mental stock of things that needed to be replaced: you needed probably 4-5 new chairs, 2 new tables, countless mugs and glasses… 

You shake your head and walk behind the counter, thinking about everything at once is too much. You mind races back to Dusty. He’s a good kid. Hard-working kid and big dreamer. Unlike most Junkers whose aspirations started and ended at the Scrap Yard’s betting booths, Dusty wanted to see the outside world. 

On the flip side, he had a quick temper and often gave in to short-term indulgence without much thought for the consequences. The shotgun gleams in front of you, hanging patiently on its hooks. Maybe if…The passing thought makes you sick to your stomach: Dusty’s the age Jamison was when you two met. 

You purse your lips and bite them absentmindedly. Junkrat purposefully didn’t tell you his plan. You reasonably and realistically knew nothing. Dozens of other Junkers saw him in your bar, another Junker tipping off the Queen wouldn’t do much. And yet, the thought gnawed at your inside, making your skin crawl.

You give a sharp, annoyed sigh (though you’re the only one in the bar) and grab your shotgun off the wall. 

~ ~ ~ ~ 

After a quick trip to the market, you’re making your way through Junkertown’s lower east end. It’s a series of cobbled together apartments made up of the old inner workings of omnium. Crafty junkers from who knows when had split it up and boarded up walls into makeshift living spaces. 

You’ve carried Dusty home many times before. This, this was the first time you were visiting him. Your grip tightens on the sack you’re carrying, feeling the shotgun burn into your back. It was a hot day. 

You clear your throat and knock, “Hey, Dusty, it’s me, *your name.*”

You hear a bit of rustling and a thump, the sound of cans being scattered about and a bit of swearing. 

He opens the door, looking extremely worst for wear, “Oh, hey boss! I… I wasn’t expecting guests.”

“It’s fine, I probably should’ve given you a heads-up that I was coming,”

Dusty shuffles a bit in the doorway then sighs and pulls the door wide open, gesturing you to come in, “Well, no need for formalities. You’ve seen my place. Dragged my drunk ass back here plenty of times.”

You step into the apartment and close the door, “You alright?”

Dusty flashes a smile, “Never better.” 

“You’re.. you’re missing a tooth,” you grimace, setting the sack on the kitchen counter. And by kitchen counter, one means the shelf against the wall with a single hotplate on it. Unplugged. 

He laughs a bit, “Yeah, I lost it at the betting cages last night.” 

You purse your lips, “I brought you some food. Well, mostly hangover remedies.” 

Dusty turns on his heel and heads for the sack, patting your shoulder, “Aw, thanks! Make yourself at home!” 

While he rummages through the sack, you take a seat on the mattress in the corner, as it is the only “seat” in the entire room. Dusty has not a single chair to his name. The nightstand/dining table/desk (aka an upturned wooden crate purloined from the bar’s stock room) is crowded with empty liquor bottles and beer cans. 

“No, way! How’d you get this?” Dusty admires the glass bottle of orange soda in the sunlight. 

“I have friends,” you smile, “Also, said friends smashed half my bar, so the least they could do is sell me their goods at half price.”

Dusty whistles, “Still a pretty penny.”

“It’s going towards something good,” you shrug. 

He smiles for a bit, but stops. He sets the bottle back on the shelf and turns to you, “We.. we should talk.” 

You blink, “Uh, yeah, sure. What is it?”

“I.. I, uhm..” Dusty coughs, “I want to quit.” 

You feel the oppressive heat all at once, “Quit? Why?”

“I’ve been doing something thinking, *your name* and I want to leave. I want to leave Junkertown.”

You can feel the tightness in your chest relax, “That’s really admirable, Dusty. But do you have the funds? The resources?” 

“I’ve saved up quite a bit, made a nice fat stack last night at the betting booths,” he points at the missing tooth. “So, with your uh, permission… I’m quitting.”

You chuckle, “Dusty, you don’t need my permission to do anything.”

“I do for at least one thing in this world,” he looks at you with sad, sad eyes. 

Your breath catches in your throat, “I’m sorry, Dusty.”

“Nothing to be sorry, about, *your name,* it’s just.. I hope this is really what you want.” 

You bite your lip, “Yeah.”

He walks over and sits next to you on the mattress, “How’d you meet him?”

You feel the heat rise in your cheek, “You really wanna’ hear the story?”

He nudges you with his elbow, “I figure I should know who beat me to the punch.”

You roll your eyes but smile, “He had a five year head start on you.”

Dusty scoffs, “*Your name,* I was too drunk to make this point a few nights ago, but you’re literally three years older than me.”

“Fair enough.” 

“When… when did you meet him?”

You look up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks with your eyes, “I was eighteen and he was twenty. I was doing a delivery run for Mick, my first real, paying job, and my motorcycle broke down right in front of Junkertown gates.”

Dusty rolls his eyes, “Fuck, *your name*, didn’t think you were the type to swoon for a man if he fixed your bike.”

You rib him sharply, “I didn’t finish, idiot. Also he didn’t fix my bike, he tried to steal my cargo.” 

Dusty pulls a face. 

You continue, “Idiot damn near blew my arm off. But he didn’t carry his grenade launcher back then, hadn’t made it yet. Just strapped on as many bombs as he could to his body.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or just fucking with me,” your barback shakes his head. 

You give a small chuckle and continue, “The idiot ended up hurting himself. Didn’t predict shrapnel trajectory when he threw a mine at me. Ended up ripping up his arm reaalll bad.”

“This story is clearly romantic as shit.”

“I could’ve left him there for the dogs. But, I don’t know… Mick had just taken a huge risk and gave me a job. Trusted me out of the blue. Junker’s don’t do that. So, I… I helped Junkrat,” you laugh, a bit cynically, “It’s fucking funny that the first time I was inspired to be selfless was for that prick.” 

Dusty shakes his head, “So you’re telling me, I lost on out on you because Mick was a decent person?”

“It’s… more complicated than that. I mean, don’t you want to be more than just a Junker, Dusty?” You ask.

His head hangs a bit, “More than anything.”

“Junkers are merciless. We steal, cheat, and murder. We run businesses for the sake of normality and slight order, but deep down… it’s everyone for themselves,” you stare at the dust motes, floating lazily through the air, “If I had killed Junkrat that day, or left him for dead… I think I wouldn’t be the person I am now.”

“So, showing mercy changed you?”

“Showing compassion changed me,” you nod, “It’s just so happened that it was Junkrat.”

“So what after?”

“Carried him and the cargo into Junkertown. Delivered it. Found him a medic.”

“And what? He just fell head over heels for you.”

“Nah, he hated me for a while. Thought I was making fun of him,” you smile wistfully, trying to snatch a golden mote out of the air, “You know, like I let him live to prove a point. I think he tried to kill me that same week.” 

“Christ, you know how to pick ‘em don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” you chuckle, “After a few weeks of trying to kill me, he finally confronted me. Got real emotional and angry and defensive about it.”

“I… I can see that,” Dusty nods. 

“Going on and on about how I wounded his pride by letting him live and insulted him by having the nerve of getting him help. I was pretty annoyed by then too. He was making me late for every delivery I got assigned and Mick was getting annoyed too.”

“As one does.”

“So, I just told him, ‘I saved your life because I was trying to be a decent person.’“

“That must’ve set him off,” your barback snorts. 

“Oh, Dusty, you should’ve seen him,” you laugh. “He nearly fucking self-imploded. I told him if he didn’t believe me, then he should just leave me alone.”

“He didn’t, did he?”

“The man literally goes and finds my boss and goes off about how I’m the worst, most cruel person on earth. And how I should be fired immediately from my job for lack of professionalism.”

“…when are you going to tell me how you fell in love with him?”

“Patience, patience,” you pat his knee, “Anywho, Mick isn’t an idiot so he got him locked up for attempted theft of his goods. This was back when Mick was a good friend of the Queen and was in her good favor.”

“Oh, wow, huh, never would’ve thought that was possible,” Dusty looks slightly impressed and surprised.

“Yeah, I went and talked to Mick. Explained the whole ordeal, and Mick ends up laughing so hard he nearly threw him up his lunch. Let Junkrat go with a warning, an official one from the Queen. Would’ve fined him too but Mick convinced her that fining a penniless Junker wasn’t going to result in much.”

“An official warning… they roughed him up?” Dusty pulls a face. The Queen had a thing for making examples of people. 

“Roughed him up, pretty good,” you shake your head, “So much fucking’ blood.” 

“That how he lost his arm and leg?” Dusty asks softly. 

“Nah, those were… separate occasions. I dragged his sorry ass to the medic and this time around, he was incapacitated enough he couldn’t try and kill me.” 

“Ah, played nurse and he fell right into your arms,” Dusty swoons dramatically. 

You allow yourself a small laugh, “Not quite. While he was bedridden, I got to have an actual conversation with him. Managed to convince him that I really wasn’t making fun of him or insulting him. I was just… just trying to be something else. Something different.” 

“He fall for you then?”

“Every time we talk about it, he says that while I was talking, something ticked inside of him. Like he was seeing ‘life for what it could be’ for the first time,” you say, then laugh, “But I’m almost certain it was the drugs. He was high off his ass.” 

“No, no, I can see what he’s talking about,” Dusty pulls his knees to his chest. 

“And… I guess that’s that. He started hanging around the gate more and I’d stop after my delivery routes to talk to him.” 

“Huh,” Dusty muses. 

“I know, I know, it’s a bit of a lame story.”

“Still haven’t told me why you love him.”

You take a deep breath and get, pacing the small room, “He… he’s wild, reckless, but adventurous and brave. He’s courageous and resilient in the face of absolute defeat. He never gave a shit about the Queen’s rules and honestly, out here that means something.”

“I thought you and the Queen were chummy, like mates and all,” Dusty frowns.

You take another deep breath and lift your shirt up, revealing the jagged, snargling scar stretching across your stomach and up your side. 

Dusty leaps up and is immediately at your side. 

You look at him, “She made an example of me ages ago. She’s only kind to me now because I bend my knee like the little pet I am. Just another loyal follower.” 

Dusty tentatively reaches out to touch you, but he stops himself, “I’m sorry, *your name.* You should’ve told me.”

You smile, “It’s not your problem. I can handle myself.” 

“Is he really worth all this? If the Queen finds out, she’ll do worst than make an example of you,” his voice rises in panic.

You cup his face with your hands, “I’m fine, Dusty. I don’t know anything. You saw it yourself. I was just as surprised as all of Junkertown when he showed up.” 

He leans into your hands, nudging them gently with his cheek, “I… I don’t want you to get hurt. Especially since you’re with… with him.” 

You speak softly, quietly as though the walls could hear, “The Queen is not who she appears. She’s cruel. Manipulative. And a liar. No one here knows much about the outside world and she sings the same old song about revolution and war to keep us content with isolating ourselves. Don’t do that to yourself, Dusty. Leave here if you can.”

He gulps and embraces you, his voice cracks, “I will. I just wish you’d come with me.”

“My job isn’t finished here,” you smile, parting from him. 

“He’s… he’s fucking lucky to have you,” he says, starting at the corner of the room rather ruefully. 

“I think so too,” you try a small joke but he doesn’t laugh, “I’m gonna’ get going, Dusty.”

“Oh yeah, right,” he clears his throat. 

You begin to turn to leave. 

“Uh, *your name*, your gun,” he hands you the weapon, a distinct waver in his voice as he did. 

“Oh, yeah, thank you, Dusty,” you take the gun back. 

“Well, thanks for stopping by boss. And thanks for the snacks.. and..” his voice trails off as he suddenly grabs your hands, “Thank you. Truly, for everything. And thinking I can be better than all of this.” 

You can feel your eyes growing wetter. You clear your throat, “Of course Dusty. If you need anything, just let me know.”

“I’ll make you proud,” he nods his head firmly, “And maybe I can help you too, some day.” 

He smiles and closes the door. 

You walk a couple steps down the long apartment hall, before stopping and leaning against the wall. You choke back some tears and chastise yourself for even bringing the gun. Dusty is no fool. He knew why you brought the gun. 

You finally compose yourself enough to complete the walk out of the building. You thank the heavens and stars for not having to use it. And you wish with all your heart that he have safe passage across the Outback and away from this hell hole. 

~ ~ ~

The next morning felt strange. Quiet. Usually when you came into bar, Dusty would already be there. He’d hit you with a smart-ass comment and you’d banter back. The place felt different. Colder without him. 

You set to start the third round of cleaning when two armed Junkers walked through the door. 

“I’m sorry, friends, bar’s closed until-” You note the their armbands. “Ah, the Royal Guard, what can I do for you?”

The Junker closest to you gives you a brief nod as a greeting, “The Queen heard that Junkrat was in your bar a few nights ago.”

“That he was,” you nod. 

“She’s pulling in any Junker who saw him and asking questions, but so far-”

You give a friendly smile, “They’ve all been drunks. I get it. Give me a second, let me pack up shop.” 

“Thank you for cooperating,” the guard grins back. “Queen’s really got it out for this wily fuck.” 

You keep smiling, “Anything for an old friend.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

The guards escort you to the Queen’s palace. It’s been years since you visited the Scrap Yard. The distinct smell of rust and cheap booze sting your nostrils. Past the mech battle grounds stands her throne. An impressive long weapon rests against it.

You’re admiring the large open throne room when your eyes land on the Royal Guard standing adjacent to the throne.

You knit your brows in confusion, “Dusty?” 

He meets your eyes and he looks so… sad. So guilty. 

“What’s going on?” You ask, but you already knew. You could feel it in the air. 

“Glad you, could join us *your name*,” a very familiar voice greets you.

You drop immediately to your knees, placing an arm across your chest in salute, “Your highness.” 

“*Your name*, darling please, no need for formalities, we’re all friends here,” she gently pulls you up. “Now, I heard a little rumor that Junkrat was back in town? In your bar?”

“Rumor’s right. He burst right in during peak business hours. A full fucking brawl broke out and ruined my bar,” you scowl. 

“Didn’t think to tell me?” She pouts a bit. 

You put up your hands disarmingly, “I apologize, my Queen. I honestly thought you’d hear about it your own guard. They were drinking there that night as well, and well… I have my business to worry about it. But you’re right, I should’ve also notified you as a citizen of Junkertown.”

“Ah, no worries, no harm done really, besides to your poor bar.” 

“Is this all, my Queen?”

“Not quite,” she sits back on her throne and toys with her gun, “Lovely, ain’t it?”

“Exceptionally,” you nod.

“Now, tell me *your name* how does Jamison plan on ‘getting back’ at me this time?”

You feel your heart skip a beat, “Excuse me?”

She smiles, “I know you’re his lover and thus his weakest link.” 

Your eyes flit towards Dusty. He doesn’t meet your eye and you clench every muscle in your body.

The Queen gets up, with her terrifying gun in hand, “No use running, love. I have you surrounded. But back to the point… Darling, I adore you. You’re not like the other Junkers in town. You’re smart, decisive, and above all else, compassionate.”

“Uhm, thank you?”

“You know why I love compassionate people? They’re predictable. They care. Once they care, they have a weakness that can be exploited.”

You gulp quietly.

“Jamison never had a weakness. The man was wild, reckless, a total nuisance since he came to this town,” she practically snarled while thinking about him, “But you, you made him weak. You gave him a weakness.” 

She’s standing inches away from you, smiling. Smiling that awful shit-eating grin of hers. 

She continues grinning, “How do you do it *your name*? All of these weaknesses, so easy to exploit. You even gave your poor barback a weakness.”

You turn to Dusty, feeling your heart drop, “Dusty. Why?”

He balls his fists up, “You can’t be stupid enough to think things will go well if you stay with him, *your name*.”

The Queen nods, pulling a sympathetic face, “Listen to the cute barback, *your name*, he only wants the best for you.” 

Dusty walks up to you and clasps your hands, “Please. The Queen is willing to fully pardon you of harboring a fugitive, if you just give him up.” 

You shake your head, the horror and disgust welling up inside you, “Give him up?”

He holds your hands tightly in his, you can see tears forming as he chokes them back, “You don’t have to love me *your name* but I can’t fucking stand by and watch you throw away your life because of him.”

You break free from his grip, the anger in your voice is biting, “What about quitting? About leaving Junkertown? About wanting MORE? Or was that just a fucking lie, Dusty?” 

He doesn’t say anything. A single tear rolls down his cheek. 

The Queen walks up next to Dusty and pats his shoulder, “Young Dusty here was offered a position last night. Usually, there’d be a test but he offered some tantalizing information about Junkrat. And Junkrat’s apparent weakness… He’s a smart young man. He knew if he left then there’s a good chance his one love would be hung right next to the criminal. So Dusty valiantly gave up the criminal to save you.” 

You take in a deep breath, the reality of the situation hitting you. There’s no escape. 

“I wouldn’t have pegged him as your type. You’re too sweet,” she steps towards you, “Too… good for him.”

You take a deep breath, “You know nothing.”

She grins, but you can feel like something has cracked beneath the surface, “Know nothing about him? I know he is a worthless, conniving, rotten piece of shit who doesn’t know the front end of a fucking missile if it was hitting him balls first.” 

“…I don’t know what beef you have with him-”

The Queen laughs, an unsettling cackle, “Darling, you have no idea.” 

“I don’t,” you say flatly, “I really don’t know anything.”

She growls, “Liar.” 

“I. Don’t. Know,” you huff. 

She looks like she could strangle you. But the look suddenly passes and she’s back to her smarmy, shit-eating grin, “Oh no, oh darling. Can’t you see what’s happening?”

You knit your eyebrows together. 

“He doesn’t trust you,” she tuts. “He cares more about his plan than you… that he rather not have a liability.”

“You’re wrong,” you interject firmly, a bit too indignantly for your liking. 

“My dear, this man has successfully left Junkertown and trekked across the entire fucking world on his mad crime spree. And now he’s back. He could’ve gone back for you, but no. He’s back for me,” her smile is maddening. 

You take in another deep breath, “It’s clearly important to him.”

“Is this really the man you love? His thirst for revenge outweighing the desire to be with you?” The Queen shakes her head. “For someone this smart, you sure are stupid when it comes to men.”

With steely calm and composure, you look at her, “I know what you did to him.”

Her smile fades and she eyes you coolly.

You keep talking, “And I respect what he has to do.” 

The Queen growls and moves towards you in a blur, “You think this is a game?!”

“No, I do not,” you snarl. 

She grabs you by the neck. She’s terrifyingly strong, “What. is. he. planning?”

“Fuck you,” you wheeze.

Her face contorts into the ugliest, angriest expression you’ve ever seen.  

You barely knit your eyebrows in confusion when it hits you.  

You feel searing pain in your left knee and suddenly you’re on the ground, the sound of a gunshot ringing in your ears. Your head slams into the dirty, sooty ground and your vision ripples, blurring. Everything moves so slow, the air feels so thick. And your leg. Your fucking leg is alight with fiery pain. You try to prop yourself up but there is no energy in your limbs. 

“YOU PROMISED YOU WOULD’NT HURT *your name*!!!” You hear Dusty scream… his voice sounds so far away. 

You feel your eyes grow so, so heavy. You blink just in time to see the Queen walk towards you. She stoops down and gives you the sweetest smile, caressing your cheek with the back her hand. She looks up at him, “I lied.” 

#ugh #i changed writing styles for this part lol #i apologize for the discrepancy if it doesn't flow over well from part one #junkrat #jamison fawkes #reader x jamison fawkes #reader x junkrat #reader insert #i promise part three is coming haha

[zenosanalytic]

Discovery: What’s Past is Prologue

That was GREAT! This is Long :| :| :|

Ok, so this episode managed to be both a mile-a-minute, actioned-packed THRILLAGANZA and a This-is-why-we-love-Trek Federation Lovefest, which is Quite A Feat owo

For any new Dear, Dear Readers thinking about venturing below the Cut: Over time I’ve found that writing conventional reviews for fan-media usually leads to me producing 10k word dissertations on them, so I do bullet-point reviews instead, sticking to core-reactions. This is STILL almost 3k words though, so, just be aware: when I say something is Long I ain’t kidding :| :| Also my reaction to stuff like Trek tends to be much more Ecstatic that my TSoW review, so expect... Informality o_o o__o o___o

Ok, so Discovery’s Landry was Fed!Landry afterall.

Looks like the Terrans have some sort of Holographic camouflage? Maybe it’s just something Stamets worked out on his own, tho, given how the Terran Empire works.

So Lorca got to the Fediverse the same way Kirk originally arrived in the Mirrorverse! I wonder if that means Fed!Lorca was transported to the Mirrorverse and died? Lorca’s ultimate Mirrorverse-fate was never explained so it’s difficult to say.

This ep’s mutiny/innership fight easily ranks up there with the best from DS9 and Voyager(the only two series with genuinely interesting/exciting examples). The battle over this city-sized planet-killing spacewarpalace is well-paced, tense, and both tactically and emotionally satisfying ouo

It also makes good use of the Terrans. We get to see some examples of their more aggression-oriented tech(like interior defense turrets and the like), examples of how powerful individuals hoard tech to themselves ala Mirror!Kirk’s Tantalus Field(Georgiou’s secret emergency transport, her bracelet, and the Stamets-designed fungal-tech integrated into the ship. Though I kept hoping she’d deploy that murderdisk from last ep again; no joy :T), and some examples of major philosophies within their society(a warrior-ethic in Georgiou’s appreciation for Burnham’s plan and fighting-ability, and her willingness to die fighting to buy Burnham time and display the ideals of her social station near the end, and Lorca’s “Man of Destiny” nonsense throughout).

“...he preyed on my Sentiment, my Weakness for your Face; It will NOT happen again.” Mirror!Georgiou is just so deliciously campy uwu uwu I like how the showrunners chose to make melodrama one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Mirrorverse :> :> :>

...Was that a The Fountain pan when Stamets walked into the Mycelial garden? It LOOKED like a The Fountain pan.

Saru is such a good captain u_u

“...The Terrans are egotistical enough to believe they can replenish this resource before it collapses.” HMMMMM WHERE COULD THESE MIRRORVERSIAN HUMANS POSSIBLY HAVE GOTTEN THAT TRAIT FROM???? Tho, as far as they go, this is probably one of the subtler Global Warming/Carbon Economy analogies to ever pop up in SFF media.

“Make the Empire Glorious Again!” We all, of course, See What You Did There :| :| Though again: much less hamfisted that the usual “Make America Great Again” references media’s filled up with over the last year.

Anyone else notice the gigantic gold frieze of Georgiou over the Imperial Throne??

Saru: “I will Not Consider leaving you Behind.” SARU IS SUCH A GOOD CAPTAIN }:| }:|

It’s a small thing, but Lorca’s continued and varied use of psychology as a weapon and tool of manipulation, something which goes back to the beginning of the series and his use of that distress signal to “motivate” Discovery’s crew, continues to impress me with the showrunners concern for consistent characterization, and their understanding of how complex characters and stories can be built from reiterating simple concepts and character notes in different situations.

Destiny’s not a thing, of course, it’s a fallacy of ego to believe that 1)occurrences involving you are about you and 2)that, because they involve you, they were meant to happen and play out as they did. Fundamentally, it’s self-narration; a recontextualization that, simultaneously, places oneself as the author of one’s life(since you are deciding what it means) and apotheosizes one’s life(and thus oneself) by declaring that narrative the product of divine will. That Lorca’s primary dislike for Stamets seems to arise not from his betrayal but from his rationalist rejection of Fatalism tells you a lot about his narcissism, and how central it is to his worldview.

There’s an interesting metacommentary about how “grittiness” is treated as serious, masculine, and realistic while optimism is treated as frivolous, feminine, and fantastical begged by Lorca’s conversation with Burnham here, and his assertions that the Mirrorverse is “the real world” and the Fed a “failed social experiment”. It’s also a good reminder of his nature as a scientist, and says much of how he thinks and justifies his behavior, that he would choose scientific metaphor for denying the reality of the Fediverse(though obvsl he’d need SOME way to do it to keep himself motivated to return, given that he’s way too egotistical, and too chauvinistically Terran, to just accept that both are equally real).

It also reveals that he REALLY doesn’t understand Burnham at all. She’s a culturally Vulcan Human, for Pete’s Sake; how deluded do you have to be to think that this sort of essentialist argument about biological “Superiority” and sociogenetic Eugenical(“Social Darwinism” in common parlance but, given this thinking predated Darwin and his theory, and other things, I don’t like the term) rhapsodizing would appeal to her, when her whole existence disproves it?

“...that’s why we have duty to lead”? That seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but I couldn’t get captions to work on this ep so I can’t say for sure that this is what he said. If it is, that’s a really twisted conception of “Duty”, to cast it as the driving concept behind species-segregation and Eugenic Hierarchy. Also, he really doesn’t understand why she did what she did at the battle of the binary stars, or what that fight was about. He seems to think 1)she caused the fight, and 2)it was a conflict about preserving Federation “cultural purity” from some kind of Klingon “corruption”.

Lorca’s comment about Burnham’s “gifts”… taken in hand with the last ep’s “someone better came along, you know how it is” comment, suggest Lorca is incapable of conceiving of people in non-instrumental terms, especially in a romantic context.

Burnham’s explication of the existentialism and affirmation at the heart of the Federation is Pure and Good u_u

Stamets: “We’ll have to use all our Spores. We won’t be able to jump back home” Ensign Rhys: “We’ll need to be close to make that shot |:T” The Federation! ^u^

Ensign Detmer: “I don’t think we can avoid the blast”, Cadet Tilly: “our shields can’t repel the blast and we’ll all die” Saru: shakes head and clicks: *Inspiring Motherfucking Shakespearean Goddamn Speech*[1] THE FEDERATION! THE FEDERAAATION!!!! PEOPLE LOOK IT IS THE FEH-EH-EHDERAH-AH-AH-TIONNN!!!!!!!! :’D :’‘D :’‘‘D

But Seriously, THIS is probably one of, if not The, best Star Trek Captain’s speech ever.

The speech, the action, the at-turns practical, sappy, and optimistic Fed dialogue, the explication of Federation ideals in the face of true danger, challenge, and Doubt: THIS ep is just such a summation of everything that makes people Love Star Trek.

That their writing staff is aware enough to give Burnham the line, “But know this: I’m offering you my Mind; nothing more.” when making her faux-offer to sacrifice herself for her crew is one of the many reason I love this series uwu uwu

As always, Science and Tilly saves the days! I like how simple the solution is, though it’d have been more believably Physicist of Stamets to say not “but not just an explosion” but rather, “but an explosion is a Shockwave!” Also: Trek ships do Quite a Bit of cosmic surfing, don’t they? This sort of thing’s been the solution to dire situations rather frequently o.o

The warp bubble technobabble is equally simple(as opposed to TNG’s frequent reliance on nonsensical verbiage), but I don’t like the solution they went with. A Warp Bubble Warps space. The Mycelial shockwave produces an energetic wave(an explosion) in space, but it also ripples through levels of subspace(including the mycelial network). So theoretically, the Warp Bubble could be attuned in such a way as to interact with these subspace waves in a fashion which would allow Discovery to “ride” them into and through the Network. That’s how I’d have written it, at least.

I’d also like to reiterate, yet again, how well Discovery has integrated respect for Tilly, a mere Cadet, into the Federation ethos. They’ve handled this way better than TNG did with Wesley.

Lorca: “I truly admire you all. You proved such Excellent Clay for my genius leadership” Like I said “Instrumental” >:T Such good, consistent characterization!

Also: Lorca: *Melodramatic Villain Speech* Saru: “Whatever, Napoleon, show me my crewman!” SUCH A GOOD CAPTAIN.

Also Also: Federation pragmatic optimism vs the gothic egotism of Terra

Saru yelling “FIRE!” was SOOOOOO Satisfying owo

Shit Fuck-Uping Commences

Trek-talk will inevitably focus on things other than combat because, philosophically, that’s not really what the show’s about or what draws most fans to it(see above), but Discovery really does have, hands down, the Best fight choreography I’ve ever seen in a Trek series, and most of the movies too. It probably helps that they have Actresses and Actors, like Michelle Yeoh and Jason Issacs, with substantive experience in stage-fighting, but everyone’s performance in these melees is just so excellent, and the flow of them is so fluid and sure, that it HAS to be their fight crew. Also: have I ever seen a mace and its use portrayed with reasonable accuracy in a screen fight before? No; but here’s Burnham, just absolutely TRASHING people with that scepter like a Goddamn Boss :> :> :>

Though there’s an obvs level of unreality to this: you clock someone anywhere around the head, neck, or shoulders with a steel mace and they ain’t keeping fighting you. They’re going Down; they’re DONE

Georgiou’s fighting here is just so brutal and clean. The way she just turns around and slashes that guy’s throat. Her meaty-stabs to that other guy’s gut. Her throw into Lorca’s shoulder. Her KICKING HER OWN KNIFE OUT OF THE AIR WHEN LORCA THROWS IT BACK!!! Magnificent u_u Beautiful u_u u_u Majestic u_u u_u u_u

Lorca Egotism Watch: Unceremoniously Cuts down Landry for having the gall to fight Burnham. Yup |:T |:T She just can’t catch a break, but that’s what you get for loyalty to a person who only sees other people as means to an end.

One particular thing I like about the choreography is how they allow Yeoh to use her smaller size and stabler center of gravity to her advantage. Having her roll, dodge, duck under Lorca’s slashes, use throws and grab, attack Lorca’s feet; such excellent choices, especially given industry standard which is to ignore physical differences and have everyone fight like they’re a 6ft+ muscular man.

The mutual face-punch was a nice injection of comedy into this fight sequence(always a good idea, I think, to give the audience a bit of release from tension). Looks like Lorca gets in one of the trophic Star Trek double-fist hammer strikes in at the end. An utterly useless attack irl, but it’s Star Trek and the Forms must be Honored u_u

Lorca: “Don’t make me have to kill you!” Burnham: “You Won’t.” Bad. ASS. Badass. It is a natural byproduct of Vulcan Logic that their dialogue be the Tightest Shit at all times u_u u_u

Burnham’s fight with Lorca is Astounding, but I don’t know enough about fight choreography to really talk about it. Wow it’s cool to watch, though.

“We would have helped you get home, if you had asked” THE FEDERATION!!!!!!!! And more than that; hell, without the war, they’d have probably helped you kick the crap out of the Terran Empire.

Georgiou running Lorca through was Extreme Satisfying owo owo

Looks like my theory of TylerVoq undermining Lorca’s plans is nixed. I’m not upset though, as there’s something satisfying in allowing plots to be separate, rather than tying them all together in one big resolution.

Burnham running out of cover to telesnatch Mirror!Georgiou out of the fight as she energizes THE FEDERATION! THE FEDERATI- Ok, you know my reaction to this stuf. THE IDEALS! THE IDEALS!! This raw concentration of Ideals and Sentiment will Physically Killing me isttg u_u u_u u_u

They tied the science part of the escape to the action of the shipboard fight so seamlessly, and continue the tension of those scenes into the escape so excellently! 

Another Little Thing that’s actually a Big Thing which I’m only now just noticing, probably because Oladejo(Ensign Owosekun) gets so much more screentime in this ep, is how good a job Discovery does at lighting and filming non-white skin and particularly dark skin, even when not a main character. I’m thinking of it particular in comparison to Agents of SHIELD which is absolutely atrocious on this point. At no point, even when they are in a dark area, or in red light, do Martin or Oladejo or any of the Black cast look washed out or obscured, as Henry Simmons almost always does as Mac even in some well-lit scenes. Just really excellent.

I REALLY HOPE that “Thanks Hugh” and aria isn’t the last of Culber. I continue to wish they’ll rez him, somehow. That was an objectively Romantic scene, though u_u

The ending revelation that they’re 9 months in the future and the Klingons have won the war is certainly surprising, but none of that’s official Fed history, so I’m pretty confident we’ll be seeing some time travel in the final eps. I’m a bit trepidation as to what Mirror!Discovery’s been up to since they’ve been gone <:[

[1]My Fast&Furious rendition of said speech: “Look I’m a coward from a species of cowards and I’m gonna tell you right now: I Ain’t Afraid. I might not know shit about shit, but I know this: you guys are Ride or Die. You’re the Best Motherfucking Crew of Motherfuckers a Motherfucker could ever Fuck Beside, and that’s For Real. That’s from the Heart. Lorca’s a POS, and he used the Power of our Shining Youthful Hearts to do some messed up bs, but we’re Family Y’all and this Ship: she’s OUR big metal space mama -Not his!- and today we’re gonna fly her like we just popped straight out her glowy anti-matter womb with a brace of .45s, a pack of Seagrams, and a surly temper. We got Shit to get Done, and we just ain’t goin down to his Triflin’-Ass Nonsense! So let’s fuck shit up! You have your Orders u_u”

#Star Trek #ST: Discovery #ST: Disc s1 e13 #What's Past is Prologue(Episode) #Discovery Spoilers #Gr8 Art #zA's Outside Viewing #TV Reviews #Reaction Posts #The Fast and the Furious

[chevasvandel]

Your fists were made for fighting.

“If I knew what I knew in the past, I would’ve been blacked out on your ass.”

-Kanye West

I have had a lot of dirty motherfuckers be a part of my life. To be fair, I haven’t always been as understanding of my value when I was a younger person, but what I understand now is that just because I wasn’t exceptional doesn't mean I wasn’t deserving of respect. I have to express the ways in which young black children have to be exceptional in all fields they attempt otherwise they won’t even be considered good enough. And depending on how we perform then people will think that we don’t need to be treated with respect or dignity as a part of that. There have been too many times when people pushed me aside, talked to me like I was an imbecile, and showed me no love. In hindsight I should have raged. I should have been violent. I should have done everything I could have to bust out of the confines that other people continuously wanted to put me in. I should’ve broken windows and cursed people out, because what I know now as a result of years of allowing people to treat however they wanted to, that nothing is worth being a punching bag. People will punch and knock you down just for the sport of it. People will oppress you just for the sport of it. People will marginalize you just for the sport of it. My self-respect, dignity, and heart were effectively beaten out of me by the age of 23.

By the time I turned twenty-four I had had enough. My best friend at the time was Nick Jamero. Me and Nick had met during our freshman year when we were both living in the dorms on Fresno State campus. We would later grow closer during our time in Phi Mu Alpha and participate in the music department of Fresno State. I leaned on Nick for a lot. It was a spotting for a meal here and there and rides. In my mind it was just us being friends, but what I didn’t realize was that Nick was taking inventory of everything he was doing for me. Each ride and each time he was buying me meals it was a token that he would exchange in treating me horribly. Had I known that people who do something for you do it under the pretense that now they have some sort of power over you then I would have never allowed it. Especially from white people. Especially from straight people. I don’t ask for help anymore, especially for financial help. I will die penniless on the street before I ask someone for financial help if it means I get to keep my personal dignity. If you help someone out then do so from the kindness of your heart. But doing things for other people doesn’t enable you to treat them like they are on a leash and you hold the power to belittle them and make them the butt of the joke. Or maybe it does… Either way I am not down for that shit anymore.

I wonder and I think to myself how much of the way the world treats me is due to the fact that I am black and feminine and male-presenting. Through various media we have been taught to laugh at black femininity when it is housed in a male form. It’s okay when Martin Lawrence, Tyler Perry, or Eddie Murphy wears a dress because the purpose of that male figure adorning femininity was to entertain, but for male presenting figures that house or express femininity we are subject to being the butt of the joke even without our own permission. I think through the media a lot of us have been taught to laugh at people like me. The non-binary. The genderqueer. The femme gay boy. What hurts even worse is the fact that I know if I were lighter-skinned then I would not be viewed as much of a dissonant creature than I am. Femininity in all its forms is more heavily policed than masculinity. Masculinity can be whatever it wants to be, but Femininity has so many hoops it has to fit through in order to be taken seriously or viewed as valuable.

Growing up, my family, to be quite honest, treated me fairly horrible. I think in their minds they were doing what was expected of them; that is they were doing “right” by not raising their child to be gay. I felt like I was constantly being attacked for no reason, but the reason was my sexuality. My queerness was always evident and a part of who I am. My femininity was always evident and a part of who I am. Even at the age of 7, I knew I was gay, I knew I was feminine, and I know I was powerful. So when my family continuously tried to beat or attack my queerness then I took that personally as an attack not just to the expression of who I am but to my spirit. I walked around through a large part of my adult life thinking that that was what love was and meant: the people in my life treat me like absolute shit and I still give them my best because its my fault for choosing to be gay and feminine. The sickest part of it all is that I don’t think a majority of my family or past friends think they did anything wrong. It was treated just like a fact: we treat Chevas like shit. He expects it. He allows it. He believes that that is what he deserves.

Nothing I do will ever make up for those moments. I can never go back in time and hug my fifteen year old self and let him know not to change and to fight for himself as hard as possible. Fight for yourself even if that means everyone thinks you are crazy. Even if it means that you are alone. Even if you have no friends. Even if you have to eat lunch alone every single day of highschool. You can not allow disrespect. You can not hang out with friends that continuously make you the butt of the joke. You can not allow anyone, not even your mother or uncle or brother to treat you in a way that is disrespectful and counter to the value and the worth that you know that you have. I have been very reckless a lot of times in my adult life because of the recklessness I should have had in terms of attaining respect for myself. I was trading my respect for anything that seemed like love, but I wasn’t loving myself enough to know that overall what I should have been demanding from these niggas was resepct. I don’t care how you feel about my dark-complexion or my femininity or my poverty or my intellect: you are still going to respect me or you are going to get your teeth knocked in. The lesson that every young person needs to learn before they reach adulthood is how to be themselves and see the power in their authentic selves regardless of what their respective environment is telling them.

I wish I could go back and just fight for myself so much harder than I knew how to at 15. I was so afraid and felt so small. I felt so ugly and horrible and stupid and undeserving of love. No one knows what it felt like to be me or how my lack of dignity or self-respect manifested in so many (so many) horrible moments in my life. Had I known how not fighting for myself would lead to a twenty-something era of abusive relationships and friendships and work environments then I would have spazzed the fuck out sooner. Like the old saying goes, “never let someone get comfortable disrespecting you.” I am willing to sacrifice being loved if it means being respected.

If I could go back and tell my fifteen year old self anything it would be to be louder. It would be to prioritize his goals and his intellectuality. I would tell him to read a million books and practice the guitar for a million hours because those are the things that will bring you closer to your real self. I would tell him to curse his mother and uncle and his brother out: it is better to command respect than to allow disrespect. It is your right as a human being on this earth to make every effort to progress yourself. I would tell him to be out and loud and proud even obnoxiously so. Let the blood hit the pavement. Like the wounds burn. Let the glass break. You are stronger than you think you are. You are more durable than you think you are. Being alone is a superpower that not many people can handle. Be brave and be yourself. Your fists were made for fighting.