#we were the backwards christians. and by the time i got to middle and high school i was losing that a lot but. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

writingwithcolor · 3 years

Text

Being an Agender, 1st-Gen Indian-American

I’m a first-generation immigrant, with both my parents being Indian immigrants. My mom immigrated to Canada before she came to America (when she was in her late twenties), and is a Canadian citizen. She was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city in Gujarat. My dad moved to India when he was in his early twenties. He moved from Ahmedabad to Mumbai in his fifth standard, and moved from a Gujarati-medium school to an English-medium one.

My dad is more fluent in English than my mom, though they both are fluent and speak mostly without an accent. I speak Gujarati more-or-less fluently, since that’s what we spoke at home, but I can barely even write my name. I’m Hindu, as is my family, and a strict vegetarian. I’m agender, but I use she/her and they/them pronouns.

Beauty Standards

One of the biggest issues in the Indian-American community is the issue of body hair. I’m AFAB, so I was expected to have smooth, hairless legs and arms. The reality was rather different. Since the age of ten, I had more body hair than the boys in my class. I was mocked and called by the name of a TV animal character, whose name was a mispronunciation of my own. No one ever did anything about it. I was eight. My mother, though she meant well, pushed me into waxing and threading and other forms of hair removal since the day I turned eleven. Even now, as a fully-grown adult with my own apartment and my own life, I can’t bring myself to wear shorts or capris without having spent hours making sure my legs are smooth. Body hair is a huge issue that needs to be addressed more, and not just as a few wisps of blonde hair in the armpit region.

Food

It’s complicated. Growing up, we had thaalis (with roti, rice, sweet dal, and shaak [which is a mix of vegetables and spices]) for dinner almost every night. When we didn’t, it was supplemented with foods like pasta, veggie burgers, and khichdi. We made different types of khichdi each time, based off of different familial recipes that were all named after the family member who introduced them. My mom had to make milder food for my sister, and while my sister loves spicy foods now, I’m still not a big fan. A side effect of growing up in a non-white, vegetarian family is that no one in my family has any idea of what white non-vegetarians eat. Like, at all. It’s kind of funny, to be honest.

Holidays/Religion

My mom is a Vaishnav, and my dad is a Brahmin, so the way they both worship is very different. My dad’s family places a huge emphasis on chanting and prayer, as well as meditation. They mostly pray to capital-G G-d, as the metaphysical embodiment of Grace. My mom’s family, however, places emphasis on– I don’t want to say “idol worship" because of the negative connotations that has– but they worship to murtis, statues that represent our gods. My mom’s favored god to pray to is Krishna, and we have murtis in our home that she performs sevato every day.

We celebrate Janmashtmi, Holi, Diwali, Ganesha Puja, Lakshmi Puja– too many to count, really. We don’t always go all-out, especially on most of the smaller celebrations, but we do try and attend the temple lectures on those days, or host our own. We also celebrate Christmas and Easter secularly. I didn’t even know Christmas was a Christian holiday until I was in elementary school, and Easter until I was in high school.

Micro-Aggressions

Whooo, boy. Where do I start?

When my sister was in first grade, she had a friend. I’ll call her Mary. Mary, upon learning that my sister was not, in fact, Christian, brought an entire Bible to school and forced my sister to read it during recess, saying that otherwise, she wouldn’t be her friend anymore. Mary kept telling my sister that she would go to hell if she didn’t repent, and that our entire family was a group of “ugly sinners.” When my sister came to me for advice, I told her that Mary wasn’t her friend, that Mary wasn’t being nice, and that my sister wasn’t going to go to hell, and that we don’t even believe in hell. When my sister finally stood up to Mary and told her that she wasn’t going to listen to her anymore, Mary got angry and dumped a mini-carton of chocolate milk on her and told her that “now she looks like what she is– a dirty [the Roma slur term].” Not only was that inaccurate, it was extremely racist, and Mary was only reprimanded for the milk-spilling, not the racist remark that came with it.

On top of that, since I have long hair, I’m always getting asked if so-and-so can touch it, or what I do to get it so long, or why I allow myself to be “shaped by such backwards ideals of women.” My name is never pronounced correctly, and I’ve been asked to give people my “American name” to be called by instead of my actual name. I’ve been called a terrorist, asked why I wasn’t wearing a hijab (by white people btw), and mocked for my food. I’ve been told that I wasn’t “really Indian” because I didn’t have a dot on my forehead. I’ve been told I wasn’t “really Hindu” because I had milk on my plate, by a white boy whose mom was a leader of a local choir.

I grew up in a town where only 4-5% of the population was South Asian, and there were a total of five South Asians in my grade level. The school administration consistently and intentionally placed us in different classes, and I never made a friend that was South Asian until 7th grade. When I came to the school, I was placed in ESOL without even being tested, while also being in the Advanced Readers class. The school didn’t even care to look at my school records before placing me into ESOL based on the color of my skin.

Things I’d Like to See Less/More Of

I’d like to see less of the “nerd” stereotype, of the “weak, nonathletic” stereotype. I’d like to see less of the “prude” stereotype, of the “I hate my culture/feel I don’t belong” stereotype. I’d like to see less of the “rebellion” stereotype, of the “my parents are so strict and I hate them” stereotype. I never want to see the “unwanted arranged marriage” trope. Ever.

I want to see bulky, tall Indian characters. I’d like to see Indian characters confident in their sexuality, whether that’s not having sex (for LEGITIMATE reasons like risk of STDs, general awkwardness before and after The Deed, and wanting to wait, not “oh my parents said so and also I’m sheltered and innocent”), or having a new sexual partner every night.

I want Indian characters (especially children/teens!!!) proud of their culture and their heritage and their religion, whether that’s Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, or anything else. I want to see supportive Indian parents, I want to see more than chiding Indian grandmothers and strict Indian fathers. I want to see healthy arranged marriages, or healthy mixed-marriages. I want to see mixed Indian-POC couples, I want to see queer Indian couples.

I want to see body hair on female-presenting characters, I want to see more of India that isn’t “bustling market with the scent of spices in the air” and “poor slums rampant with disease” and “Taj Mahal”. I want to see casual mentions of prayer and Hinduism and Indian culture (a short “My mom’s at the temple, she can’t come pick us up” or a “what is it? i’m in the middle of a holi fight! eep! ugh, gulaab in my mouth” over a phone call, or a “she won’t answer until 12– she’s in her Bharatnatyam class/Gurukul class/doing seva/at the temple” would suffice). I want to see more Indian languages represented than just Hindi. There’s Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali, and Kashmiri, just off the top of my head. The language your character speaks depends on the place they come from in India, and they might not even speak Hindi! (I don’t!)

I hate that Indian culture is reduced to “oppressive, strict, and prudish” when it's so much more than that. I hate that Indians are stereotyped to the point where it is a norm, and the companies reinforcing these stereotypes don’t take responsibility for their actions and don’t change. I hate the appropriation of Indian culture (like yoga, pronounced “yogh”, not “yo-gaaa” fyi, the Om symbol, meditation, and Shri Ganapathidada) and how normalized it is in Western society.

This ended up a lot longer than I had expected, but I hope it helps! Good luck with your writing :)

Read more POC profiles here

Submit your own

1K notes · View notes

avelera · 4 years

Text

One thing that has me excited about the Amnesiac!Nicky fic is it’s my first stab at the old “person from the past gets ‘brought’ to the future” “omg what is a toaster?!” trope, because for a long time I have had MANY Opinions™ about how others have handled this trope.

- One thing I want to get away from is the idea that certain household appliances would be SHOCKING to a historical person, rather than simply neat. To many people throughout history, a refrigerator would just be a cold storage cellar in a smaller form, nifty in how small it is and how it works above ground, but not inherently a difficult concept to process. Ovens have existed throughout history, as has toasted bread, so the joke about a toaster freaking out a historic person to the point where they faint seems implausible to me, it’s just a tiny oven. That said, a microwave actually would seem pretty damn magical (as it was for people in the last few decades, even those otherwise familiar with modern amenities.)

- Now, I’m writing someone from the 11th c. Mediterranean coming to the future from a bustling coastal trade port. Obviously you could pick someone from a really remote time and place and shock the hell out of them with just about anything. But then, you don’t actually have to make up a fictional event here. Plenty of non-industrialized societies have had encounters with industrialized societies, but many were not impressed. This is important to note since so much “person from the past in the future” fiction tends to give off a strong whiff of self-congratulation, an almost desperate self-reassurance by modern city dwellers that their way of life really is so much better.

- A lot of what people think of as “modern” ideas aren’t that modern at all. Ancient Roman men shaved their legs and the women wore silk imported from China. They had curbside fast food, public fountains and bath houses with running water, as well as seven story tall buildings, which is about as tall as modern cities got until quite recently with the invention of the elevator to allow buildings to grow beyond what is comfortable for a human to climb on foot. Myths of the lack of bathing in the Middle Ages are greatly exaggerated, bath houses were quite common then as they are in many cities today where space in an apartment for a full bath is limited.

- A few things that I think would be shocking? Just to name a few that I rarely see in fiction utilizing this trope:

1) Fully stocked supermarkets. We can go back as recently as the Cold War to see that this modern invention is shocking even to contemporaries. Descriptions of a magical paradise in Medieval Europe were often less about elves and fairies and more about a place where food is bountiful and endless.

2) Speed is a big one, I’m actually digging right now for accounts of the first reactions to high speed travel because there was a lot of anxiety about humans going over 30mph/50kph. The sight of cars, trains, and airplanes carrying people at high speeds and even through the sky would be genuinely mind-blowing.

3) Painkillers and functioning (non-superstitious) medical care would be huge (the guy who invented ibuprofen just died). The rarity of people on the street not being visibly scarred by childhood diseases or cancer, and social services that reduce (tragically, not eliminate) the number of elderly or vulnerable people dying on the street without assistance would be a major change from historic urban norms. Receiving medical care based on a scientific understanding of the human body, undiluted by pervasive myths, was a rare privilege throughout human history and its visible effects on the health of the wider population would be an enormous shift.

4) Kindness to animals - the reduction of animals to do labor like horses to draw carts, the fact that farming is now a largely centralized industry outside the view of most members of the population, instead of something the vast majority partake in, has massively reduced our exposure to animal cruelty or even the daily necessities of killing the food we eat. Our sensitivity to animal suffering would be mind blowing to a historical time traveler. Not that kindness to animals didn’t exist, or horror at cruelty to a dog or a cat, but it was usually the exception, not the rule.

- But I also as a final thought exercise like to ask this: what would be horrifying today to historic eyes? Not just crowds and bustle and speed, or egalitarianism or cleanliness or medicine, things we like to congratulate ourselves for. What would a historic person actually see as a huge step backwards?

My answer to that tends to be: atheism. Religion is still a big part of may people’s lives but it’s not central to the functioning of daily life in industrialized countries the way it once was. Prayer was more than about moral cleanliness in many ancient societies, it was what kept the world functioning. A leader who did not meet their religious requirements could be violently deposed for failing to protect their people. Religious rites kept misfortune at bay and maintained social cohesion. Go back even 100 years and interview your own ancestors, and while they may be happy that you have access to an education, food, and medicine, you may not have to go back very far to find out just how horrified they, and most of your ancestors throughout history, would be to learn that even devout Christians (my own frame of reference, as I cannot speak to others) often only go to Church once a week or worse, only a couple times a year, when once prayer was multiple times per day.

So often this trope is only about modern people congratulating themselves for the accident of being born into modern times. There’s definitely a lot of stuff I haven’t thought of or included in this already pretty long essay. There’s a lot of stuff that’s my own conjecture, but I hope when writing my own take on the ‘historic time traveller’ trope that I break from some of the bigger cliches of the genre in favor of a more historically-informed take.

#writing #history #tog fic #maggie's writing progress #maggie rambles #long post #i can only speak to my own Christian US centric if travelled perspective here #obviously others may have different experiences or thoughts on what would be shocking #but I can't speak to those from an informed position

45 notes · View notes

honestlyhufflepuff · 4 years

Text

Here are 20 reasons I am leaving the caregiver job with the client I've had since 2008: a list of unprofessional behavior and abuse by my client's guardian.

1. She said I wasn't Christian anymore, and said I was disrespecting my mother, for leaving the church I was raised in.

2. During the first year of employment, she would yell at me multiple times a week over things like leaving a lamp on (this is while I was caring for her medically fragile, high needs adult daughter). She would accuse me of being incompetent or trying to get fired for unemployment.

3. She told me I was not approved off for my honeymoon, less than a month beforehand, when I gave her over 5 months notice with consistent reminders. She harassed me over several texts while I was on my honeymoon saying I would be fired if I did not return a week earlier than I was supposed to.

4. She told me I still had to come in when I was sick and vomiting because she did not believe me. I became dehydrated and was vomiting so much that I had uncontrollable dry heaving and was unable to drive home. She refused to come home early when I told her of my symptoms, and when she did come home to see me retching into her trash can, she started handing me cleaning supplies to disinfect the trash can and the entire bathroom before I went to the emergency room...

5. ...there was no apology or ownership in forcing a sick employee to work to the point of needing to be hospitalized. She would not accept that I could not come into work for the next 3 days until my husband delivered the doctor's note.

6. I worked there throughout college, and would present my new school schedule each semester. For one class, I made the mistake of scheduling it after work. She said the schedule worked with her, but then consistently got home 30 min to and hour late. I missed so many classes that I had to withdraw.

7. Even after the hospitalization mentioned in #3, she would continue to be skeptical of any time I called in sick over the years (which wasn't often). I had no PTO or sick leave to use even when I was full time, so when I took off I didn't get paid. I was never approved to take off for any reason, and when I did take off it was accompanied by a massive guilt trip about how I was putting her family in a bind. It did not matter if it was a vacation, an illness, a doctor's appointment, or a family emergency. It also did not matter how much or little notice I gave; the guilt trips and emotional manipulation still accompanied any time I needed off. To this day, with every job I've had, I am always incredibly anxious about asking off, but it's never been a problem anywhere else I've worked.

8. Emotionally manipulative things she has said to get me to stay:

-"We don't have anyone else. I have to go to my job in order to care for [client's name]. You would be jeopardizing my job by leaving, and her well being." (If pressed she eventually admits to not looking for anyone else)

-"[Client's name] loves you like a sister, and her quality of life would go down significantly without you..." continues to tell me that if I don't do what she wants then I don't love or care for the client, even if it is because I need a job with higher pay and benefits to support my own family.

-"I thought the two of us were friends. This is very selfish of you." (Any time I don't do what she wants, like continuing to go to school full time).

-"God has put her in your life for a reason. You are called as spiritual sisters. It's your responsibility to care for her."

-"In the real world-the business world- other people won't be ok with you just taking off without approval. It's insubordinate and unprofessional." I was only 18 when she told me this, and young enough to believe her. Once again, I've literally never had a problem taking off with any other client or job because I often had PTO, and was always able to obtain leave approval easily. Even when it meant the client parent had to take off from work, they understood that the onus was on them to find the needed staff to account for people needing sick days and vacation.

9. She puts me in the middle of personal drama, constantly bad-mouthing the client's father and other attendants (who all inevitably leave after a year or two at most).

10. Told me, after a decade of infertility, that God told her I would become pregnant and have a son I was to name Amos. She said it would only become true if I prayed about it, so now when I most likely don't become pregnant, I feel it will be blamed on my lack of faith- or the fact that I am a different faith from her. I feel this instance was truly out of good intention, but ultimately unprofessional and something I would have preferred she keep to herself.

11. For years, she never got home when she said she would. I could never make plans after work because she would agree to come home at 7 and sometimes not make it home until 8:30. She always blamed traffic, needing to run an errand, or her boss keeping her. Then, when I had my own child I had to pick up from an after school program, she consitently got home on time. This showed me that she did have the executive functioning skills to be on time, but did not respect my personal time or work with other clients enough to do so before I was a parent.

12. I bent over backwards trying to help her. I scheduled less time with higher paying clients that were lower need. I sometimes worked 60 hour weeks while I was also in school. It never felt like it was enough. Even for the time I was working there 6 hours a week it was always "Why can't you stay later? Where do you have to be?" The more I gave, the more was expected, and then I was guilted for not meeting that higher expectation.

13. She refused to take the time to have team meetings with other service providers and caregivers, despite the fact all my other client families do this, and keep staff much more consistently as a result. Because of this, information and instructions were always inconsistent. With the client being significantly behaviorally challenged and medically fragile, this was at everyone's detriment.

14. Over the years, I referred 3 friends to work for her because she insisted she could not find caregivers on her own. All 3 of them lasted less than a year due to her behavior. She would then blame them and trash talk them to me, despite knowing I was still friends with them.

15. She expected caregivers to also deep clean the house. We are talking hours worth of work, that there just was not time for within the shift while also meeting the needs of the client.

16. She is openly homophobic, xenophobic, and although she thinks of herself as "not racist," she was extremely weird towards my besf friend's African fiancé. She refused to shake his hand and told me she didn't think he was with her for the "right reasons." Maybe thought he was in it for a green card? She seemed skeptical when I told her that he became a citizen 2 years prior, and that they'd been dating 6 years.

17. She has systematically isolated my adult client more and more over the years. We used to share many interests in things like Harry Potter, early 2000's pop, anime, Harajuku fashion, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, etc. One by one, everything we bonded over was off limits, due to being a "bad influence" or "demonic." She is no longer allowed to engage in any age-expected media unless it is explicitly Christian, and it breaks my heart to see how sad she gets about that.

18. When I was in college, and completely broke after just paying for books and classes, she said that she wanted me to go to the water park with her and the client. Admission was $50. I assumed she was paying since I was being required to go for work, and this was always what was done in the past. In the car, I asked if I could ride a roller coaster that the client wouldn't be able to go on while they ate ice cream. She said "Sure! You can ride whatever you like!"

So, I start getting excited. We're chatting pleasantly until the moment when she says "OK, when we get out of the car, you can go pay for your ticket first, and then I will bring..."

My stomach dropped. I told her there was a misunderstanding, and that I could not afford my ticket. She acted like it wasn't right that she should have to pay for mine. I told her that if she didn't want to, then I could study at the Starbucks across the street while they attended the park. She said no, because obviously she still wanted my help with her daughter. She paid for my ticket, making passive aggressive comments the whole time about everything I did, from how I pushed the wheelchair to how long I took to go to the bathroom despite the line.

I was no longer permitted to go ride the roller coaster, and I sat in silence while they ate their ice cream.

19. Recently, due to Covid, I do not have child care for my own daughter on Fridays. I have been bringing her to work with me, which my client's mom was supportive of. Then the client had drastic behavioral changes that I won't detail, but that O can say was significantly stressful on my daughter, and made it stressful for me to manage both of them at the same time. I told the mother, 2 weeks in advance, that I could not come in on Fridays until the behavior was consistently resolved. I do not want to get a sitter outside of maybe my aunt, due to covid, and I wouldn't expect her to do that every week. My client's mom was very understanding of this at first, seeing as we both now have special needs children, but the night before the next Friday I was scheduled to come in she berated me for not finding babysitting to the point that I started to panic. I firmly told her that I gave her plenty of notice, and then blocked her number up until the day I was scheduled to come back in.

20. When she is home at the same time I am helping her daughter, she micromanages everything. I think she is incapable of just letting me do the same work I've been doing for over a decade without standing over my shoulder and looking for something wrong.

Some background info:

I wanted to write this, first of all, to document all the reasons that I am justified in leaving, so that I can refer back to it no matter how hard she tries to get me to stay. This is like my anonymous way of getting it off my chest since no one who follows me on here knows me irl. Second of all, I want all the young professionals on here to know that, if they are treated like this in the work place, it is ok to leave!

I started working for this family when I was 18, and I am now 31. I have worked as many as 60 hour weeks, and as little as twice a month when I was full time with the state, but I have always cared for her in some capacity since 2008. I am currently working 15-20 hours a week with her.

You may wonder why I've stayed so long, and in regards to that I will say first of all that abusive relationships are hard to leave. The abuser may convince you that you are bad and won't find anywhere else good enough to take you. This can pertain to any type of relationship, be it romantic, professional, parental, or friends.

Another factor is that I love my client deeply, and my employer takes advantage of that. We grew up childhood friends, which is one reason maintaining professional boundaries with this family has been so hard.

The last reason I have stayed may be the hardest to explain, but I will try.

Sometimes she is good. My employer has made improvements over the years. Most of the worst things on here happened when I was in college. I don't know if her improvement is due to a genuine change in heart, or because she knows deep down that her behavior is why all the other caregivers left.

Whatever the reason, we do actually care for each other. We do actually connect and have a good time. She is kind to my husband and my daughter. She often tells me that I am a godsend to her family, a loyal and talented caregiver, and the best friend her daughter has ever had (although she will contradict this the moment I am not doing what she wants).

What I want people in similar situations to know is that the good moments do not erase the trauma of the bad ones. It is not my responsibility to "get over it" because she is trying to do better. A lot of the stuff she has said and done run too deep, and when she lapses into her old ways, I find myself reacting in a panic-driven, irritable way that's not really me. It's a reaction to trauma. I am not required to continue to stay at an underpaid job with an environment that evokes such emotions.

So please, if you are being treated like this in your job, then leave. You will find something else. For me, I intend to have another job lined up before leaving, but I'm on my way. For the first time in years, I've revamped my resumé, and it felt so empowering to work on a document that highlights my strengths!

For anyone in a similar position, you've got this. There are a lot of great jobs out there. There are a lot of humane employers. If you are treated like this, then label it for what it is. It is abuse. It is unhealthy. It is not ok. It is not erased by the times they are nice. And you deserve better.

#knowyourworth #employer #abuse #personal #lizzy speaks #personal vent #long post #text post #not su related #sorry for all the grammar errors i wrote this on mobile

58 notes · View notes

purplesurveys · 3 years

Text

1172

survey by pandaphant

Who's your favorite comedian? Sindhu Vee, probably. But that’s only counting the fact that I’ve only seen two of her skits. Out of all the acts I’ve seen, she’s the one who’s made me laugh the loudest so far, though.

Aren't you sick of all the *Are We Alike?* surveys? I’m not sick of them. I just think they’re too easy and fast to take so I like elaborating my answers so that I can still get a little ~reflective~ while taking that kind of survey.

Do you think there's anything you did better, when you were younger? Physical activities. I had a better stamina for jump roping and running when I was younger, and I was also a lot more flexible; I used to be able to bend all the way backwards and also have my toes reach my head while on my stomach.

Would you take the advice you give others? I usually don’t. I find that I’m better at giving advice than actually following through with them.

What did you have for lunch yesterday? I just had my leftover sushi. I didn’t want to eat all 24 that I ordered from the other night in one go, so I saved a little more than half of it for yesterday.

What's one thing that you would change about yourself physically? I’d go for the obvious and have my front teeth straightened, so I can finally stop feeling conscious about it.

What song has made you cry? Life Goes On by BTS.

How would you define success? Accomplishment of something for which I could be proud of myself.

Who was the craziest teacher you've ever had? Ironically, it was my Christianity teacher in grade school. Crazy old man who flipped out and humiliated students who didn’t bring their own box of crayons to school, and he also made me feel sexually violated when I encountered him shortly after my high school graduation.

Do you think the Earth will face an apocalypse one day? I don’t think so.

What's the last thing you got paid to do? Work.

What's the one thing you could eat everyday? Sushi.

What do you hate about yourself? How frugal I can be, especially towards myself. Buy yourself nice things sometimes, @robyn hahahaha

What's your favorite alcoholic drink? Long Island Iced Tea. Or tequila.

Are you hyper today? No, but I was yesterday for Bang Bang Con haha. It was my first BTS event as a new fan and I had so much fun :(

Does Bzoink need an upgrade? I don’t mind what it looks like now. I don’t think they ever changed it ever since I first started visiting the site in 2009 anyway, and I’ve already gotten used to the layout. It’s easy enough to navigate.

Do you have a Millsberry account? No. I’m not sure I even know what that is.

Do you have a Neopets account? I didn’t, but I had an offline Neopets game on one of my old phones that I liked to play as a kid.

What's your life philosophy? I don’t really follow a specific one and let it serve as a guide all my actions. I just do whatever I think is right and what would help both me and the people around me.

What was the last thing you talked to your friends about? Angela and I were just talking about BTS lol. She was the one who reeled me in :((

If you are interested in going out with someone, what do you do? I simply like staying physically close to them and doing nice things for them. I’m not very expressive when it comes to this; I just let my actions speak for themselves.

Do you ever go to the beach? Yeah, of course. I love the beach. I’ve been aching for a trip for well over a year.

Would you rather have a cup of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate? Coffee.

How's your hair looking right now? I washed it last night, so it looks okay.

What's something your mother always says? Well these days, she always reminds us to spray alcohol and disinfectant spray every time a delivery for someone in the family arrives. Which is an understandable thing to nag us about.

What's something your dad always says? He doesn’t really have a catchphrase, though these days he does like sharing about the funny or educational videos he’s been seeing on TikTok.

What's your favorite thing to wear? Tank tops or airy oversized shirts.

Have you ever had a near-death experience? Nope.

What do you order at Starbucks? Grande iced caramel macchiato + whatever pastry they have that I happen to be in the mood for.

What kind of exercise do you enjoy? Taking a walk with my dogs.

What's the worst injury you've ever had, and what was it from? The infection/wound I got from when I went snorkeling without flippers and ended up grazing my left foot against coral reefs one too many times.

Do you still have any of your childhood toys? If so, what? Nope, my mom threw them all out as I grew up and when we moved in to our current house.

Did you have a Precious Moments colouring book? No, I’m also not sure what that is.

Don't you miss being 13? No, puberty wasn’t exactly a fun time as there was a lot of emotional turmoil happening.

How'd you react to receiving your very first pimple? I didn’t keep a journal entry or anything from that day but I would imagine I was surprised and horrified.

Are you spoiled? Only when it’s deserved. My parents have stopped buying things for me since I now earn for myself, but back when I was younger I will say I was the most pampered out of us siblings. That said, I still made sure I worked hard for whatever it is I was asking from them, like promising them straight As for a quarter or semester in class.

What's your favorite day of the week? Friday.

What room of your house do you spend the most time in? My own. I’m back to working there again since I’ve started to find the dining room noisy.

Do you believe in the death penalty? Only for extreme offenses.

Do you have MSN, Yahoo, or Skype? I don’t have accounts on any of these.

What is your biggest turn-on? Continued from...sometime last weekend? I think? Thighs or fingers.

If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be? I’d rather be in a not-stuck-in-a-pandemic world altogether, to be honest.

Do you ever have any problems just *moving on*? At first, because I hate change and try to resist it as much as I can. Assessing myself in the last few months though, it looks like I’m much better at moving on with my life as I thought.

Do you collect anything? I collect BTS merch now...my collection is gradually getting bigger hahaha. I currently have all 7 of their Cold Brew Lattes, then I recently placed an order for their most recent album. Once I finish all the coffee I’ll move on to the Hot Brew ones, then I plan to buy 1-2 albums per month until I complete my collection, then move on to the DVDs, magazines, and other novelty merch. ZERO REGRETS

If you saw a shooting star, what would you wish on it? Sustained happiness.

Do you like rollercoasters? I’ve never ridden one and I don’t plan to.

What's the most romantic thing you've ever done for someone else? Get them a customized locket/necklace. Either that or make a video compiling greetings and photos with friends when I had no clue how to edit videos and had to learn from scratch.

How do you celebrate Halloween? I don’t strictly observe it, but when I do it’s usually because someone else organizes a party for it. Last year my company had a Halloween party, then the year before that Rita’s sister invited us to their college party, etc.

Who is your favorite villain? Gus Fring from Breaking Bad.

Do you have a favorite coloring book artist? I have a couple of Steve McDonald coloring books; I like his works because they’re gigantic and yet super detailed. Keeps me occupied (if I ever do color) :)

How many pairs of shoes do you own? Idk, I think around 10 would be a safe guess.

Have you ever wanted to model? I did, back in middle school. That was when VSFS was still a thing and I had wanted to be like those girls lol.

When you want to unwind, how do you relax? Light up a scented candle, take surveys, and, lately, watch whatever BTS content I feel like consuming hehe.

How do you react when someone you know's having a freak out? Try to calm them down as best as I can and make sure they aren’t hurting themselves.

Have you ever seen someone have a seizure? No.

Do you have a phobia? Cockroaches and any sharp points.

Who is your hero? I don’t have one.

If you were to commit a crime, what would it be? No thanks.

Have you ever used drugs? Nothing beyond caffeine, nicotine, pills I take for headaches.

How would you define what you want out of life? Self-satisfaction, I guess.

What's your favorite car? A Mini Countryman.

#survey #surveys

3 notes · View notes

chilling-seavey · 4 years

Text

Amoureux (c.s./d.s.) - Chapter Fourteen

A/N Song for this chapter is Slow Dancing in the Dark by Joji. The lyrics are too real for this story and the vibes are immaculate.

A/N2 This is a bit spicy...proceed with caution...

The ballroom was set up with long tables dressed with white linens and the most expensive china for the dinner party the following afternoon, the butlers spending the entire day preparing the event to be perfect. Daniel was kept out of the palace as everyone knew he would some how cause havoc on the preparations for his own enjoyment – or at least that’s what they expected him to do. Recently, Daniel was too preoccupied to even think about his usual little pranks on the palace workers, too hung up on a certain French princess and how to get his brother gone.

Jonah was supervising the youngest two children by the pond, annoyed that his formal duties now seemed to be down to simply being a babysitter. He was surly not impressed with it. Even still, he sat and read as Anna played pretend among the trees, trying to get Daniel to join who was too busy daydreaming as he stared across the pond to where Christian and Louisa were riding the horses.

“Jonah.” Daniel finally spoke, trying to push his little sister away who was tugging at his arm.

“Yes, Your Royal Highness?” Jonah answered without looking up.

“What would happen if Christian didn’t want to marry Louisa anymore?”

“That is not an option.” Jonah said.

“But what if he said I could marry her instead?”

The older man finally looked up from his book with raised eyebrows and he titled his glasses down his nose to peer over at the boy.

“Dani, please!” Anna whined, smacking her hands against his shoulder.

“Go away, Anna. I’m having a conversation.” Daniel gave her a small shove and she fell backwards onto the grass. She simply glared at him and got up with a huff before stomping off.

“Did he say something to you?” Jonah asked.

“No, no. Just wondering.” Daniel shrugged. “Would I be King then?”

“No. You would not. And Louisa would no longer be on her path to becoming Queen. You would be Duke and Duchess.”

Daniel hummed in response, picking at the grass under his feet.

“You would only be King if Christian abdicated the throne or passed away. You would be next in line to the throne.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be King.” Daniel shook his head as he glanced back over at Jonah. “I’m not stuck up enough for that role.”

“Stuck up? I would not say that one would have to be-“

“Christian would be a good King.” Daniel continued, glancing over at the couple far across the grounds. “I guess.”

“May I ask what is with the sudden inquiries, sir?”

“Nothing in particular. Just wondering.”

“You will be assigned a bride when you turn twenty as well, Your Royal Highness. Do not fret. Your time will come.”

Daniel frowned.

“Daniel!” Anna wrapped her arms around his neck. “Please play with me!”

“Alright, alright.” Daniel grumbled and got himself up from the grass, letting his little sister pull him into the trees to be bossed around to her crazy rules in the newest game she just made up.

Louisa cleaned up from horseback riding in plenty of time for the dinner party, Mary helping her into a dark blue down with a deep neckline and puffed sleeves that sat off the shoulder, her hair set in its usual curls down her back and her bangs tied back from her face with a matching blue ribbon. The Royal Family was led into the ballroom together, standing to welcome each guest to their event before everyone took their seats, Louisa tucked securely on Christian’s arm. At the table, Christian was across from Louisa as usual, sharing his gentle smiles to her as often as he could. Daniel was still on Louisa’s right, just like in the dining room set up, and he had to smother his smug smirk into his glass at the luck of it all, a smug smirk that no one would have caught onto anyway but the secrecy of it all was thrilling.

After his little escapade with the letter, Daniel had expected her to turn him in but her nearly eager response was pleasantly surprising. They found themselves slipping letters under each other’s bedroom doors before supper which was the perfect time to not be caught, giving them something a little daring to read before bed. Daniel and Louisa were both young at only sixteen, both sheltered and unsure of the realities of adulthood, but to them, their few arguable love letters were more than enough to keep the risk of their little ‘relationship’ heightened to the point of exhilarating.

The dinner party was the last place either of them wanted to be really. Christian was head of conversation as his father, the two of them leading a discussion of recent parliamentary goings on, especially regarding America’s Revolution which they were still feeling ripple effects from. Louisa simply focussed on her meal, trying not to let her mind wander too far. It was difficult, however, with Daniel sat beside her, close enough that she could smell his cologne and nearly feel his warmth, wanting to sneak off from the table in the middle of the meal. She could only hope that Christian would turn the attention to her to get her mind out of where it truly didn’t belong.

Her wish was granted as everyone turned to look at her, Christian’s beaming smile making her hesitate mid-bite of her meal.

She glanced around shyly, “I am sorry. What was the question?”

“Are you looking forward to the wedding?” Christian repeated one of the guest’s questions.

“Oh, yes, very much indeed.” Louisa grinned, straightening up in her chair a bit more. Christian smiled at her. “It is hard to believe that the day is almost upon us.”

“Only three more weeks.” The Queen added. The table filled with excited exclamation, all of the guests to be present on the wedding day itself.

Louisa nearly startled at the hand on her thigh and she resisted the urge to look at Daniel in fear of giving him away. The weight of his hand on her lap was comforting and agonizing all in the same and she dropped her right hand under the table to slide her fingers into his. The conversation continued; Christian, as usual, taking the lead as she sat back and simply listened. Daniel kept his hand in hers as they continued eating, Louisa thankful for being left-handed at a time like that as to not be found out by something as minuscule as suddenly switching hands mid meal. She kept her focus on Christian across from her as Daniel’s thumb rubbed soft patterns over her skin. She glanced at Daniel casually, meeting his cheeky smile for a brief second before looking away again.

He gave her hand a squeeze before sliding his fingers out of hers to set back on the table. Louisa couldn’t deny she wished he didn’t move away and it took a lot to keep herself from reaching back over to take his hand again.

The night was long and terribly boring after a while, Louisa and Daniel sitting beside each other in silence, Daniel’s usual remarks too used up to even be funny anymore and they just stared at the wall blankly, offering polite responses and smiles when they were spoken to. When the dinner concluded, the guests were ushered outside to their carriages with formal goodbyes from the Royal Family who saw them off.

Christian and Louisa said their private goodnights to the family once they were back inside and he set his hand on her back as he led her upstairs to bed after the long evening festivities. They stopped outside her bedroom door and he took her hands in his.

“I wish we could have spent more time together tonight.” he whispered to avoid his voice carrying across the hallways and down the grand staircase they were stood nearly right beside. They didn’t notice Daniel watching them from the landing, tucked behind the banister.

“Me too.” Louisa smiled gently, giving his hands a small squeeze.

“You looked absolutely breathtaking tonight.”

“Thank you.” Louisa blushed, welcoming his lingering kiss to her lips. He pulled back just as quickly and she dropped her gaze to the carpet.

“Sleep well.” Christian said, letting his hands fall out of hers as he headed across the palace to his own bedroom.

Louisa sighed deeply and ran a hand through her hair, her expression nothing but uncertainty and a bit of heartache that Daniel caught from his hiding spot. He watched her head into her room and close the door quietly behind her.

Mary was already in Louisa’s room with the fireplace lit and the wash basin and everything prepared for her to get ready for bed. The lady in waiting helped untie the princess’ hair and brush it out in front of the mirror and helped her out of her gown and hung it up as Louisa got into her white nightgown. The women spoke softly about their days and what happened, Louisa talking about her ride with Christian around the grounds and how she was getting more comfortable on horseback and even bit him in a bit of a race although she was sure he let her win. She didn’t feel quite ready to go past a steady trot yet.

When she was washed and changed and ready for bed, Mary said her goodnights and left the princess alone for the night. Louisa glanced around the room for a new letter but found none so she carried her single candle over to her night table and set it down as she got into bed for the night.

She hadn’t even had time to blow out her light before her door was opening slowly. Louisa stayed silent in slight fear as she held the candle out in front of her to try and see through the dark room to who was coming in.

“Just me.” Daniel whispered, shutting the door behind him and rushed over to the foot of her bed.

“Dani, what are you doing here?” Louisa asked softly, pulling the sheets higher over her as she sat in her nightgown. Men were definitely not allowed to see women in their nightwear, and she found herself quite embarrassed as he stood at the foot of her bed with his own candle, staring at her.

“I missed you.” Daniel climbed carefully onto her bed, kneeling on the end with the burning flame held in his hand.

“You should have come earlier. I am in my nightgown.”

“I am too.” Daniel giggled, looking down at himself dressed in his own white bedclothes.

He shuffled up closer and leaned over her to set his candlestick holder next to hers on the bed side table before sitting down next to her against the pillows. The candlelight flickered warm dancing shapes over his soft features and Louisa couldn’t help but let her gaze drift over his face, how his hair was a bit of a mess and falling over his forehead, light eyes wide and full of thrill from the secrecy of his little adventure to get to her, and his lips just as perfect and pink and alluring as always. Louisa took a deep breath and looked forward again, twisting the diamond ring around her finger nervously.

“Are you staying here tonight?” she asked softly.

“If I am permitted by you.” Daniel answered.

Louisa licked her lips as she looked back to him, feeling him close to her as he was curled up facing her on top of her bedsheets. She nodded, biting back a cheeky smile as he grinned at her and shuffled under the blankets with her. A strange feeling was burning in her chest, her eyes drifting past him to her desk drawer that housed his few letters, the words feeling more than a bit of a youthful and silly fantasy now. She felt more drawn to him than ever, shuffling closer to push her lips against his before she could even second guess it.

Daniel raised his hand to her cheek to keep her close, smiling into it as she kissed him strongly, her hand setting against the mattress beside him to keep her upright as she was leaned in towards him. They stayed like that a while, hung up on each others lips like always, until Daniel was slowly sliding an arm around her waist and rolling them over. Louisa fell back softly against the fluffy white bedsheets and down filled pillows, staring up at him with slight uncertainty but still nothing but desire in her face.

“This okay?” Daniel whispered.

She nodded, breathing out a soft, “yes” as she pulled him down to kiss her again.

The feeling of him on top of her was strangely comforting, her arms wrapping themselves around his body to hold him close as he kissed her like his life depended on it. The dark, candlelit room was filled with the sounds of their deep kisses and the ruffle of sheets as they slowly and carefully stripped out of their nightwear.

It was a mess of kisses and soft apologies and awkward shifting and plenty of blissful giggles, the two sixteen-year-olds too wrapped up in their reckless love and thrilling secrecy to even worry about the awkwardness of it all. Their eye contact was nearly unbreakable, their noses touching lightly in close proximity and soft kisses shared when their lips would brush. The candlelight flickered off the diamond ring still on Louisa’s hand that was tangled in Daniel’s dark hair, sending small stripes of warm light across the bedroom walls.

His name falling from her lips was Daniel’s favourite sound, more than any piece by Mozart or Bach or even Boccherini; if only he could have her and her beautiful soft voice, it would be the only music he would need for the rest of time.

Louisa was never one to truly live in the moment, always hung up on one thing or another in the back of her mind, but in that very moment she was only focussed on Daniel and how she wanted nothing else but him.

When the candles burnt out and the sheets and pillows were a mess on the bed, the two young lovers were laid side by side curled up, breathless, in each others’ arms. They shared small kisses and gentle touches, as if they couldn’t still get enough of each other, before finally drifting to sleep.

43 notes · View notes

cucullas · 4 years

Text

Mudarra González: a mixed medieval hero

I’m apparently doing a series on Spanish Romances (Spain medieval and renaissance anonymous folk ballads), usually my favorites ones are about love, family or everyday life. I’m not very much into the epics of killing infidels, El Cid and The Song of Roland got it covered. That’s why I initially was not attracted to the Song of the Seven Princes of Lara.

I was so so SO wrong. This story has it all, petty family squabbles, completly disproportinionate reaction and my mixed bastard main boy: Mudarra Gonzalez. On the realm of medieval fiction where the main concern is how many infidels The Heroic Christian Knight can kill, Mudarra is a Moor, he is the Heroe That Was Promised and he is out for revenge.

The petty story: family drama and no Mudarra yet

Before I start a little bit of story, as you might know the Iberian Peninsula, was partially controlled by Arab and Berber Muslims rulers. From mighty cultured caliphates to dying city-kingdoms, this period called Al-Andalus went from 700 to 1492. During this time Christian kingdoms of Spain had to live with their Muslim neighbours and very often enemies.

In these context our story starts, a Christian Knight, Gonzalo Gustios is the ruler of Salas, he is vasall of the Count Garcia Fernandes and is marries to Doña Sancha. He had a good life and is a not getting any younger but that’s ok cause he got 7 valiant sons to suceed him. They all have names of prowesses... but that’s not that important cause they all die.

Yeah, because you see they had a fight with their aunt Doña Lambra (wife of their mom’s brother Rodrigo de Lara): honor was insulted... A pepper filled with blood was trown and someone menaced to cut a skirt above the knee and those are clearly irreparables offenses so Gonzalo Gonzalez the younger Prince killed a man over the pepper and Doña Lambra promised to revenge.

Rodrigo, Doña Lambra husband them betrayed his nephews giving the enemy information about their battle plans. They all die. His father is captured but pardoned by Almanzor. While in captivity Gonzalo is asked to recognize the heads of some important Christian the Moor army just killed... its of course his 7 kids and he mad with grief. Long story short he sleeps with Almanzor sister, she gets pregnant, he is later release and goes back to his wife.

All the Spanish medieval gore we deserve

Saddly he is too old for revenge and Doña Lambra is a close family member to the ruling Count. In many version Gonzalo is later disable and very weak by pain or captivity/war. Who could save us now?

Mudarra, bastard extraordinaire

Now let’s talk about Mudarra the first time we see him he is showed playing chess a stereotypical oriental game and talking with the also Muslim king of Segura. He has a great position in court but when he is insulted as “hijo de nadie/ Nobody son” he decides to go search for his father.

Antonio Tempesta, a Renaissance Italian illsutrator doing his best to represent a Moor medieval armyhe went from pseudo-Turkish clearly (Mudarra taking leave of his mother)

From Mudarra POV it’s like leaving idk Camelot/King’s Landing/a US middle class family to go and meet your dad a disable owner of a rundown farm in a backwards land. But that’s ok, Mudarra does his best is like

“Nice to met you Sir Gonzales, I’m your son”

“I’ve literally never seen this kid. No way it’s mine”

And this fools no one specially not his wife Doña Sancha because A) Mudarra looks exactly like Gonzalo Gonzalez his late bro and B) In some version Gonzalo Gustios actually gave Mudarra mother a ring.

Gustios is afraid his wife will be mad but Doña Sancha is no mad at all. Specially when Mudarra promise to avenge his late older brothers. She acts as the coolest step-mom and they even do a ceremony so Mudarra becomes his father legitimate heir.

Personally I like Mudarra a lot, he is much more measured that his brothers: he takes time to explain he is without getting mad, ask for justice to the Count (in some version) and is even courteous to his enemy. I bet he wouldn’t kill an unharmed servant over a pepper but that’s speculation on my part.

Yes, he also has a manly revenge speech at the end:

“Tú los vendistes, traidor, en el val de Araviana / mas, si Dios a mí me ayuda, aquí dejarás el alma / vengare a mis hermanos, los siete infantes de Lara [...] Morirás aquí traidor / a las maños de Mudarra”

“You sold them you traitor, in the Araviana valley / with God’s help here you will lay your soul / I will avenge my brothers, the Seven Princes of Lara. [...] You die here traitor, at the hands of Mudarra”

Then of he goes to kill Rodrigo de Lara. He suceeds, because he is our hero but also because Rodrigo won’t be able to pact with the Moors like he did the 1st time because they won’t risk getting into Mudarra and Almanzor bad side. Doña Lambra in some version is burnt but in most “her punishement was left to God” because as we said she was family with the count.

After the revenge we don’t know a lot about Mudarra which is a shame. He is said to have been an excellent knight though.

A place said to be the tomb of Mudarra with 0 reasons, it’s pretty too

Mudarra, raised as a Moor is our triumphant here, and it was not done only for the exoticism value, him being a Royal Moor is a big deal. Here is why.

A Royal Bastard

Gonzalo Gustias leaving to go back to his land is not seem as an offense to Almanzor sister (called Aisha sometimes, she is a fictional character). She doesn’t seem to have problems with it and Mudarra growns up on King Almanzor court as his heir, he knights him and give his squires to serve him.

But you might ask who is Almanzor? Is he fictional? Well, no, he is no King but he absolutely existed.

Bust of Almanzor in the Castillan city of Catalañazor were Spanish say he suffer a great defeat by Christian troops... it’s probably not true.

He is The big deal. His name is Abu Amir Muhammad but the is nicknames Al Mansur, the Victorious. You see at the time from 950 to 1000 the main kingdom of the are is the Caliphate of Cordoba, the King is Hisam II but his minister and de facto ruler is Almanzor. An incredible capable military leader and politician.

Almanzor embodies the mighty caliphate of Cordoba. Almanzor with an inteligent politic of alliances and a lot of Berber mercenaries he kept the peace and prosterity of the caliphate of Cordoba. Almanzor will have two son, after their rule the Caliphate desintegrate in taifas, he is also the embodiement of the a glorious period. A high king.

A king more important than Count Garcia Fernandes, the Christian ruler of this story. In other countries Roland is the nephew of Charlemagne. The French lineage of Lusignan descend from a fae and everyone descends from Alexander the Great. But in this Castille the best thing we have is Almanzor, descending from a King gives Mudarra the power of an army his father doesnt have and also a symbolic power to change stablishment.

Roof of the former mosque now Catedral of Cordoba

Oh and also I have this theory that Almanzor life could have also inspired the story, mostly his second son who was also the de facto ruler: Abd al-Raḥmān called ibn Sanchul or Sanchuelo this nickname came because he apparently really looked like his granpa...the King of Plamplona Sancho Garces II. Almanzor attacked his kingdom and as the Christian king could not possibly win he came himself as an ambassador asking for protection and bringing incredible gifts. Almanzor accepted and even took Urraca Garces, Sancho daughter as wife.

In Burgos they take their legend seriously

While romances, written later in time show a black and white version of the Al-Andalus and Reconquista that was in truth extremely complexe.Mudarra story is an exception. Authors like the great Irene Zaderenko have even called his romance “maurophilo”. I agree, I love the Moors I love Mudarra and I love this soap opera of a Romance. that has tragically the name of the Princes and is not called “El Romance de Mudarra” as it should.

If i convinced me with my Mudarra propaganda you can: Read the first incomplete version of the story (ESP) the romance of the Complaint of Doña Lambra (ESP) and the song of The Revenge of Mudarra (ESP).. thanks for your attention

#romancero viejo #los siete infantes de lara #spanish literature #spanish music #medieval romances #mudarra gonzalez

29 notes · View notes

jimlingss · 4 years

Note

How about a story with Jimin or Namjoon where there's an enchanted mirror that connects to an alternate universe? The mc is able to see through the mirror and vise versa.

I took creative liberties with this one. I hope you don’t mind.

↳ The Mirrored Passageway

3.9k words || 50% Fluff, 50% Smut || Park Jimin

Warnings: Some religious themes and depiction of an all-girl christian school. Please do not read if you will be offended. Viewer discretion is advised

It’s a single file line.

You stay quiet, listening to the way everyone’s shoes tap in a single beat, each person making sure to walk down the hall in an orderly fashion. But your eyes stray away from the back of Lisa’s head to out the glass windows. It’s bright out today, the sunshine gleaming with clouds swirling the sky. You wish you could go outside to play — but then you’d get dirty and Sister Tam would be mad, and if mama hears, she’d never let you go home again.

“Suzy, close your legs!”

The nun leading the entire group barks at the older girl seated on the bench.

The student closes her legs, but she glares. Your eyes flicker to Sister Tam. She probably doesn’t like it. The last time Tiffany looked at her like that, she got hit. “Sit up and properly like a lady!”

“Sorry, Sister Tam.”

The nun leaves with a “hmph”. Lucky. Looks like Suzy’s not gonna get hit today.

Everyone continues walking down the hall towards the church. It’s afternoon mass for your grade and you find Sister Mae waiting at the doors. She opens them and welcomes each girl in. She’s much nicer than Sister Tam. “Come along children. Nice and quietly. Irene, go up to where Sister Kim is. Yes.”

She walks in, but the girl in front of you is stopped by Sister Tam. “Lisa, where are your knee high socks? Why are these black? Where are your white ones?”

“I…” The girl in front of you trembles. You feel bad, but there’s nothing you can do. “I got them dirty, Sister Tam, so I used these ones my mama got me.”

“Our dress code requires white knee high socks.” Her spit goes flying, and you flinch back. “And look at that — your skirt doesn’t go past your knees! Fix it.”

“S-sorry, Sister Tam.”

“If I catch you one more time not following the dress code, then you will be having detention with me and writing out the entire dress code by hand, young lady. Go along now.”

She nods and walks off. It’s your turn — you hope she’ll just let you in quietly, and with that wish, you shut your eyes. But you’re stopped with a firm hand on your shoulder. “Y/N, did you not brush your hair this morning, dear? It’s terribly sloppy.”

“S-sorry, Sister Tam.” Both your palms try to brush it down, but to no avail.

“Tie it if you must.” The nun dismisses you with a wave of her hand, and you shuffle to the front, sitting on the wooden bench and preparing to pray. At least she wasn’t so mean this time.

The moon is high in the sky in the middle of the night. It pierces the glass windows right onto your face, casted right on your eyes so that your entire form is bathing in the moonlight. You sigh, lashes fluttering, eyes still open even when it’s past midnight. All the kids around you are snoring away, rolling in their beds.

But you can’t sleep. You miss home.

You sit up in your bed, looking around. You really shouldn’t…..but you can’t go to bed. Maybe, just maybe, you can go outside for a little while. You’re sure the wind would be nice, and it’s been a long time since you’ve got to go and play.

It’s the thrill of an adventure that quells away the fear of being caught by a sister.

You hop down, toes tapping against the cold floor, white dress fluttering as you slip into the shadows, shuffling past your sleeping classmates. The corridors are dark at this time, kind of scary, but there’s no monster scarier than Sister Tam.

You’re alone in the hallways, walking through the twisted path when you suddenly hear footsteps behind you. They come closer and closer. Booming in the darkness. A single candle light seen from afar.

You spin around with a gasp.

“Did you hear that, Father Sam?”

The priest looks around. He shakes his head to the nun. “It must be the wind.”

“Right. I was saying, we need to be stricter on the children and enforce the rules before they run wild in our academy. Just today, I saw….” her voice fades off until you can’t hear it anymore.

You peek out from the adjacent hallway, right behind the stone pillar, and you take a sigh of relief, breathing again as they pass. But as you lean backwards, the wall doesn’t catch your fall.

You nearly shriek. The wall pushes back as if it were a curtain. You fall on your butt. And from the momentum, the door automatically swings shut again. The wall becoming whole once again. Sealed. As if it could never separate.

It’s silent and you turn around, eyes wide. You didn’t know there was a secret closet here. The square space is small enough to fit perhaps two people only, but there’s another door on the other side. You grab the knob and push it open, too enchanted by these hidden spaces.

“Woah.”

Your breath is stolen away from you. The dungeon is quiet enough to hear your accelerating heartbeat thundering in your ears. It’s empty, stone floors and walls, but there’s a mirror taking the entire space of the wall opposite to the door. You approach it.

It’s peculiar — you can’t see your reflection.

Instead, you see a brunette boy the same height as you, staring.

“Who are you?”

You’re mesmerized, spellbound, approaching closer.

He has a round face, puffy cheeks and lips, brown eyes, short hair….

You haven’t seen a boy in years.

Your arm extends and you step up right to the mirror on the tips of your toes. Your finger is pointed and the stranger is as fascinated as you are. He brings out his own finger, tapping the pad of his index with yours. The touch startles you, and you fall forward. Instead of the silver surface catching you, you go right through it.

“Oof!”

You tumble, and when you come to, you’re sitting right on top of him, on his stomach, legs on either side. Automatically, your eyes look around, finding yourself in a small bedroom. There’s a single bed with bear bedsheets, a desk, bookshelves, toy trains, the window open with the white curtains flying in the wind.

“This isn’t the academy!” you shriek.

The boy’s eyes widen and he slaps his hand over your mouth. “Shh! My parents might come in. I’m supposed to be asleep.”

“Sorry,” you mumble against his palm. He sits up and you move off of him, turning around to find a full length mirror on his wall with a brown frame. “Where am I?”

“My room,” he says, still staring at you like he can’t believe it. He blinks. The moonlight illuminates the tiny space, casted on the profiles of your face. “Who are you?”

“I’m Y/N. I’m eight.” You show him on your fingers.

“I’m Jimin. I’m eight too,” he introduces himself, relaxing when he realizes you’re no monster. In fact, you’re just like him. “How’d you get here, Y/N?”

“I don’t know,” you say honestly. “I just found a room with a mirror and then I fell through and now I’m here. Gosh, I hope I can get back. I’m so gonna get in trouble with Sister Tam now.” You groan, imagining it already. You’re going to get the detention for the rest of your life for breaking the rules and especially for talking to a boy.

Jimin blinks. “Who’s Sister Tam?”

“The meanest nun in the world.” You pout, both of you still on Jimin’s floor in a disoriented mess. “She yells at us a lot and sometimes she hits us.”

Jimin comes closer and you realize he’s dressed in blue pajamas with koalas all over them. “Mom and dad says no one’s allowed to hit me. Why won’t you tell on her?”

“I can’t. I don’t get to talk to mom and dad a lot.” You shrug and your eyes catch something else. With a gasp, you hobble over. “This is such a cute teddy bear!”

You grab it from his desk and cuddle it to your chest. Jimin walks over and smiles. “You can have it if you want.”

“I can’t. We’re not allowed toys.” Your eyes stray and you find a bin of other toys. Opening up the lid, it’s as if you discovered a treasure chest. “You have so many!” You pull something out from the bin, struggling, and a plane accidentally comes crashing down onto the floor.

Jimin’s eyes are wide. “Oh my god. My mom and dad are gonna wake up!” he whispers harshly, but you point at him in shock. “What?”

“You just said the lord’s vain in name!”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes,” you emphasize. “You could get in trouble.”

“But mom says it all the time. She doesn’t get in trouble.”

It goes silent as you think. “Maybe cause she’s an adult.”

All of a sudden, the lights in the hallway flicker on. It leaks into Jimin’s room. Footsteps are heard coming down and the boy whirls his head around at you, eyes big. The door swings open. “Park Jimin! Are you playing—?”

The bed is a lump.

The woman’s voice tapers off into a sigh. You hold your breath, listening to the noise of the stranger cleaning up the toys that fell on the ground and placing the bear back on the desk. There are some footsteps and the door shuts quietly again.

Jimin and you are underneath the covers, faces right next to each other, legs tangled. “Do you think it’s safe?” you whisper.

“Yeah.” he murmurs back and throws the blanket off of you two.

“Sorry about that.”

“It’s ‘kay. Just try to be quieter. I don’t wanna get in trouble,” he says and you nod. The two of you roll to face each other. “Where’d you come from, Y/N?”

“Oh, I go to an academy with a bunch of nuns who are my teachers. It’s called something like preparatory, all-girls, boarding, whatchamacallit. I don’t really remember. It’s a long name.”

“Is that why you don’t talk to your parents much?”

“Yeah. They live far away. I only see them sometimes on holiday.”

“Why’d they send you away?”

“They didn’t send me away.” You pout. “Dad died in the war and mama got married to someone else. I got a baby brother, and mama told me they needed my room for him. So now I’m going to school far away.”

“Oh.” Jimin frowns, lips lopsided. “Why didn’t they get you a new room?”

“I don’t know.” You never considered it. “My new dad’s house is big, but it’s scary at night. Maybe that’s why they brought me here. It’s not as scary.”

“Hmm…” He starts toying with the lace collar of your nightgown. He retracts his hand after he feels the soft material.

“Where do you go to school, Jimin?”

“I go to the one down the street. Yeonmi Elementary School. It’s fun. I get to play soccer during recess and draw after lunch.”

“That sounds fun,” you tell him. “I have to do maths.”

“Oh, we have to do maths too. I don’t like it much but dad tells me I gotta do it or I get no ice cream after dinner.”

You gasp, sitting up and hovering over him. “You get ice cream?!”

He cups your mouth when you realize how loud you’re being and you look at Jimin’s door. Luckily, his mom doesn’t come back. He grins. “You want some? I can get a stool and go get some for us.”

“No…” You pout. As much as you want to, you’ve been here kinda long. “I should go.”

The eight year old boy watches you climb off his bed. He sits up, messy hair flopping to one side and he pats the spot beside him. “You could sleep here if you want. My bed’s comfy.”

You really want to, but you’re not allowed. “I don’t wanna get you in trouble.”

“Will you come back then?” he asks frantically before you can leave, eyes rounded and imploring.

“Course.” You give a cheesy grin to him. “You’re my friend, Jimin. Right?”

“Yeah.” He returns your grin, giggling happily.

And for every other night following, you sneak out to see Jimin. You travel across the land in an instant to meet your new friend, and he lets you play with his toys. He steals ice-cream for you to eat, and you two even go outside where you get to feel the grass in between your toes.

You tell him about school, the nuns and priests, all the other girls and what they’re like. He tells you about his own school and classmates, playing soccer, how he fishes with his dad and helps his mom with baking and hangs out with his grandma. And you always listen in envy.

Sometimes, he even comes to the other side and walks around for the academy for a bit. But it’s your little secret — you don’t dare tell anyone else, not your friends, not the sisters, in case you get in trouble and never see him again.

The routine goes on for years. It’s fun to leave school, to talk to someone different, to hang out with your best friend. But a little down the line, things begin to change and alter.

He’s the only boy that you know and talk to — and you don’t understand why all the sisters in school tell you not to touch boys until marriage. Jimin doesn’t seem that dirty or bad. In fact, you like him a whole lot.

It’s this confusion that leads to curiosity. The denial and repression that makes you want to prove them wrong. You want to know what’s so different about him that makes everyone so scared of him. So you ask at age thirteen, and he lets you.

Over time, it escalates. Innocent peeks to touches to Jimin touching you, reciprocating actions and exchanging knowledge, underneath his covers in the middle of the night.

And at age seventeen…..you’re rubbing your thighs underneath your desk, tapping your fingers incessantly and waiting for the damn nun to shut the hell up.

After class, you race down the hall.

“Y/N!” Irene calls out, stopping you and making you spin around. “Are you not gonna join us for lunch?”

“I got some homework I gotta finish.” You hitch your thumb over your shoulder, unable to stop the excited smile on your face.

Your friend thinks it’s a friendly gesture and grins. “Oh, sucks. I’ll see you later then.”

You walk down the corridor, through the twisting hallways and slipping into the empty one. Once the coast is clear, you move behind the pillar and push a small part of the wall. The door is shoved open, shut, and you sprint through the mirror like it’s just air.

Arms catch you on the other side, bubbling giggles greeting you.

“Are you trying to run me over?”

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Your palms press against his cheek and you kiss him, mouths smacking on one another. He tilts his head to deepen it, pressing his body onto yours and pushing his tongue past the seam of your lips to swallow your whimper. When the pair of you part from one another, the string of saliva breaks. “God, Sister Tam would not shut up about the gospel. I thought I was going to die of boredom.”

He laughs, watching as you frantically peel off your uniform blazer and abandon it on his floor. “Eager, aren’t you?”

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t get to see you last night and ended up having to touch myself in the shower. I thought one of the sisters could hear me. God, it was so embarrassing.”

“What a dirty girl.” His eyes darken. “What were you thinking about?”

“That time I almost choked to death sucking your dick. C’mon, hurry up.” You tug on his wrist with a whine, falling back onto his small bed and letting your legs drape off the edge. You quickly shove your skirt up.

Jimin laughs and you pout at him, pulling him in by the collar of his shirt for yet another sloppy kiss. You taste his tongue, wrap your legs around him, getting your body hot before you pull away. “Are your parents home?”

“No. They’re at work.” Jimin pulls his sweatpants down in one swoop and drags your cotton panties down your legs. “I’m skipping class for this, you know.”

“Oh, poor you.” You bat your lashes. “How will I ever make it up to you?”

“Spread your legs wider,” he tells and grins at your automatic obedience. “You listen so well, hmm?” But Jimin still tests your patience in spite of your rush. His hand presses into the meat of your thigh and his other two fingers sink into you without warning.

Your back arches and he watches in interest, blatantly staring and making you more embarrassed. “How does it feel?”

“F-Fuck, so good.”

Jimin curls his knuckles into you, listening to your groan. It’s one of the few times you can be this loud and he doesn’t have to cup your mouth with his palm or watch you smother yourself with his pillow. So Jimin takes the time to relish in the way he calls your name so desperately.

“Tell me about your day.”

You open your eyes again. “Seriously?”

His fingers stop and his smile falls. “Do it.”

“Fine.” You sigh. “I had bible study first thing—” Jimin grabs his cock in his other hand and lines it up at your dripping entrance. “—and that bitch Lisa would not shut up. God, she’s probably fucking Father Sam, I swear—ah!” Jimin jerks his hips forward. Your cunt is warm and wet, and he loves it when your voice breaks the like that. “J-Jimin! Oh…my god.”

“Shouldn’t say the lord’s name in vain,” he teases.

“S-shut up.”

God, you’re so hot and cute. Jimin grabs a hold of your hips eagerly and begins to fuck you into his mattress, stretching out your tight hole. You’re right in your little school uniform, and he’s enjoying the fact that he’s ruining your innocent exterior.

Your eyes are watery, arms reaching out to him, whining his name as he defiles you. Before Jimin can finish in you, he leans in and keeps himself still deep inside you for a moment. He kisses you again, tilting his head and breathing in your scent. He missed you as much as you missed him. He wishes he could keep you here forever.

His plush lips trails off onto your neck and you automatically tilt to give him more room. He sucks at the sensitive spots and your cunt tightens around his cock. “Wait. Don’t leave marks, Jimin. Jimin!”

He makes a disgruntled noise at the back of his throat and moves to tug on the buttons of your white blouse. He sucks spots into your skin, leaving blotches of red right on top of your breasts. “No one’ll see if I leave them here.”

Jimin tugs your bra down, playing with your nipples as your arms wrap around the back of his neck. He remembers when he was thirteen and it was the first time his hand went up your nightgown and he felt you up — back when he didn’t know what he knows now.

“Jimin…”

He’s mesmerized, spellbound, and leans in close, bending your leg to your chest to get at a deeper angle. You throw your head back, shutting your eyes and he muses how pretty you are. Jimin thrusts his cock into you, watching how the sheets are wrinkled, how you’re making them smell like you and he’ll be able to get himself off tonight when he remembers this.

Jimin sweats at his hairline. “I-I’m gonna work hard. And get enough money to rescue you from that d-damn school.”

“Or you could just get me pregnant.” You open your eyes and he pins your down harder, swallowing. “They kicked Tiffany out when she came back from s-summer break pregnant.”

“Hmm, doesn’t sound like a bad idea.” He pounds into you and all conversations cease.

The bed creaks under your weight and Jimin’s greedy force. On any usual night, you’d both cringe at the noise and the way the headboard knocks against the wall for potentially bringing his parents into the room, but for now the sound is welcome with your laboured breathing and moans.

The two of you chase after the feeling, chest falling and rising, sobs of his name leaving your mouth. You jerk your own hips up to meet his pelvis, singing curses that would lead you both to damnation. And it’s a high pitched moan with a rub of your clit from the pad of his thumb that leads your toes to curl and pushes you off the edge.

You tighten around him and he presses his nose to your neck.

You have half a mind as you come down from your high. “Jimin, j-just cum inside.”

“A-are you sure?”

“If you stain my skirt, I’ll—”

He shoves himself deep into your pussy and cums. Jimin thrusts shallowly, ropes of white leaving his cock and he finishes inside of you. He collapses after he’s spent and used your pussy to his heart’s content and only rolls off of you after your soft whines of how heavy he is.

With the sunlight pouring into his childhood bedroom, he stares at you, your lashes, lips…and god, he’s so fucking in love with you, it hurts.

Without asking, he leans in and kisses you. You reciprocate lazily, feeling his soft lips that you daydream about often. The pair of you embrace each other for a second as cum runs down your thigh, but after a peek at his clock, you gasp and sit straight. “Oh my god! I’m going to be late for class!”

You wobble to your feet, pulling your skirt down, trying to pat down your hair, grabbing your blazer off his floor. Jimin eyes you and has a shit-eating grin. “Wait, shouldn’t you clean yourself off?”

You snag a tissue from off his desk, doing a haphazard job of rubbing your thigh. But you’re too frantic to notice that there’s still some of his cum dripping out of your sopping cunt. He won’t remind you that he still has your stained underwear. “I gotta go. If they give me detention again and me write out the entire Exodus chapter, I’m seriously going to kill someone.”

“Okay.” Jimin laughs, but he can’t resist you. His arm extends without him realizing and his hand encircles your wrist before you can run away. The boy pulls you back and gives a chaste peck on your lips.

You smile against it.

“You’ll come back soon?”

“I’ll come back soon,” you promise.

And just like that, you jump through his mirror.

Jimin watches your reflection running on the other side and another stupid smile plasters onto his face, irresistible. Seeing you is always better than looking at his own reflection.

#Requests 2019 #bts smut #bts fanfic #jimin smut #jimin fanfic #trying my hand at smut again #it was kind of fun to write ngl #this is one of my longest drabbles #borderline oneshot I know #the seventh of my twelve requests #Jimlings #Anonymous

247 notes · View notes

alarawriting · 4 years

Text

Inktober 2020 #1: Fish

To say I wasn’t expecting an attack would be an understatement.

I was in my van, driving my oldest daughter to soccer practice. (Why yes, I am a soccer mom. I’m big enough to admit it.) Natalie was supposed to be putting on her shin guards, but instead she was playing the Nintendo 3DS Arista had brought, on the grounds that technically it was her 3DS. I believe Arista’s was out of battery, although it was the kind of detail I try not to pay too much attention to. Arista, of course, had whined about this for ten minutes straight. “It’s not fair! I brought that 3DS! You said you’d let me play! Mommm, Natalie won’t let me play!” And so on. This was partially, though not fully, drowned out by the sound of Theo singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” loudly, enthusiastically, off-key and with half the words made up, for what may well have been the tenth time in a row.

“Mom! Make Theo be quiet. I can’t concentrate!”

“Just give me back the 3DS! You aren’t even supposed to be playing it!”

“—itsy bitsy spider, gob up the stop again, itsy bitsy spider went on the bo bo bot, so wong go the dwain and it quash the spider out—“

“That isn’t even how it goes, Theo. It goes ‘Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout—'“

“If you’re just gonna sing to Theo you can give me back the game. Mommm, she isn’t even playing it and she won’t give it back!”

“I’m sing it, Natwee! I’m sing it my way!”

“Yeah, well your way is wrong, cause you’re a baby.”

“ITSY BITSY NATWEE, CAN’T SING THE SPIDER SONG, CAUSE THEO IS SING IT LA DA DOO DOO LA LA—“

“Come on! Let me play!”

With all this going on, I had no hope of getting back enough of my own concentration to change lanes, so I had been stuck behind a car carrier lugging SUVs for the past ten minutes. I hated being behind large trucks; they block my view of the rest of the road. And here I was with nothing in the CD player but Gary’s smooth jazz, when plainly I needed death metal to drown this out. I’d have given my pinky finger to be able to put on the radio, but radio and I did not get along.

As if to underscore this, a sudden burst of static cut through the horn solo. I frowned, wondering if I’d gotten mixed up and this was the radio after all.

“Hey, cool!” Arista said, having apparently found something worthy of distracting her from her quest to recover the 3DS. “My mood ring is red. Mom, what’s it mean when your mood ring goes red?”

I went cold, and glanced at my own left hand on the steering wheel. The stone in my ring, normally opal, had turned obsidian black.

I glanced back up to see the top SUV on the car carrier starting to slide.

“Aspída!” I shouted, having no time to do anything more complex than that. Then I spun the wheel and swerved wildly onto the right shoulder, scraping the jersey wall, as the SUV slid off the carrier’s ramp and came careening down at us.

Distantly I was aware of my kids screaming, but all my attention was on surviving this. The SUV slammed into the shield I had just cast and bounced into traffic, making the car shudder. The small truck that had been behind me struck the SUV, sending it spinning across the road. Meanwhile I’d slammed hard on my brakes, coming to a full stop about twenty feet away from where the SUV ending up crashing into the jersey wall ahead of me. The small truck pulled over, in front of the SUV. The car carrier continued blithely on into the distance.

At least they hadn’t all fallen. That would have been a lot harder to deal with. I could have done it, but I would not have liked to explain it to the kids.

“Mom! Mom! What was that? What happened?” Natalie screamed. Theo was crying hysterically, and Arista was gasping, hyperventilating.

I turned around in my seat. “Arista! Inhaler, now! Natalie, help her grab it!” I wanted to unbuckle, to go take Theo into my arms and calm him, to grab Arista’s inhaler and give it to her, but I didn’t dare. My ring was still black; Arista and Natalie’s rings were still both red.

The guy who’d been driving the small truck was coming toward me, walking along the shoulder, and he looked furious. Of course, from any reasonable human being’s perspective, I’d had nothing to do with the SUV that had fallen off the car carrier and smashed into his car, but with my ring black I didn’t dare assume he was a reasonable human being. I’d read enough about road rage incidents in the paper; I had to assume he had a gun.

I threw the car into reverse and drove backward as quickly as I dared, which was a lot slower than the cars zipping past me on the highway were going, but a lot faster than one dude walking on the shoulder. He began running toward me. “Katev̱odó̱no̱,” I whispered, shoved the gearshift into drive, and pulled out onto the highway, lurching from 0 to 60 in three seconds and slamming myself and my children back against our seats. The car behind me laid on the horn – I’d cut it off. “Sorry,” I said, more to myself than to the driver who obviously couldn’t hear me, but now I was back up to full highway speed, weaving in and out of traffic so that neither the guy I’d just cut off nor the driver of the small truck could catch up with me.

I pulled off the highway at the first exit that came up, watching as my ring dulled to a grayish opalescent color. We weren’t safe, but we weren’t in deadly danger either.

Arista’s breathing was normal again. Theo was still crying. “Mom, where are we going?” Natalie asked. “Don’t I have to get to practice?”

“You’re skipping practice today, Nally.” She used to call herself that. She couldn’t get the middle syllable of her own name, so she was Nally. Nowadays she usually rolls her eyes when I call her that, but this time, she didn’t. I could see her face in my rear view mirror; she was pale and shaken.

“Because we just had an accident?”

“We didn’t have an accident,” Arista said. “We almost had an accident.”

“Right,” I said. “We’re going home, and we’re going to eat ice cream and we’re going to relax.”

“Ice cream?” Theo asked, his sobs becoming weaker and less pronounced.

“Yep! Who wants an ice cream soda, who wants a milkshake and who wants a sundae?”

Kids are sometimes very easy to bribe. Though I suspected that Natalie was letting herself be bribed rather than challenging me. She knew something weird had just happened, but she didn’t want to ask me what, or perhaps didn’t want to acknowledge it.

Another old terror raised its head. What if she was like me? What if all of them were? What if they could use magic?

I shook my head to banish the thought. No one had found us. No one had sent either of them an invitation to school. Natalie was 12, Arista was 10… they were old enough that they could have gotten invitations by now. I’d gotten mine when I was 9, though my parents hadn’t been persuaded to send me to a boarding school until I was 13.

I’d wanted to go. I’d begged for it. I’d wanted to learn magic so, so badly.

I couldn’t even remember how that had felt, now.

***

When we got home, I put the girls in charge of getting the ice cream, the Coke, the sundae fixings, the milk and the blender out, and Theo in charge of washing his hands, going to the bathroom, changing his clothes and washing up. He’d been potty trained for nearly a year, but I’d nearly peed myself during the almost-accident; I could hardly hold it against a little boy that he’d wet his pants. Theo was obviously very embarrassed by it, though, so I didn’t acknowledge that he’d done so, just gave him the opportunity to wash himself up and change to save face.

I went straight downstairs to my fish tanks in the basement.

The filters didn’t hum. The tank lights weren’t on. The room smelled like ozone and smoke. At least one of the surge suppressors that ran my tank filters and lights was blackened. And every single fish in all four of my tanks was floating on top of their water, dead.

The opal on my ring was still dark grey.

In Homeric Greek – the language I cast spells in, though this wasn’t a spell – I said softly, “Brave heroes, I commend your souls to the Elysian Fields. The gods will honor you.” I didn’t actually think the ancient Greeks had believed fish would go to the Elysian Fields, but then, I also didn’t actually believe in the Elysian Fields, or the later Christian version, Heaven. If humans had souls – and they might, I’d seen Jason so many times I found it hard to believe that all of him could literally be gone, forever – then fish could as well, maybe. These fish hadn’t exactly volunteered to die to save my family, but they’d been feeder goldfish, destined for the belly of a pet predator or an agonizing, choking death due to high ammonia levels and lack of oxygen from the overcrowding in the feeder tanks. I’d given them a better, longer life than they could otherwise have hoped for.

Whatever had killed them, I hoped it had been fast. It looked like some kind of electrical short, maybe. A month ago one of those had taken out all the fish in tank four; I’d replaced the filter, and the surge protector, and the GFCI outlet the surge protector was plugged into, but when magic is targeting you, all of the sane and reasonable precautions you can take may end up coming to nothing. The fish had died because I’d bound them to my family and enchanted them to take on our bad luck. Most of the time, that meant fish died one by one over a period of months, as all of the normal bad luck that might occur to a family just failed to happen – my kids never got scraped knees, our cars never broke down, Gary made it through every round of layoffs at his company, none of us ever got sick.

When the fish started dying fairly rapidly last month, starting with the electrical short, the stone in my ring had been purple – not white opal, not the gray it was right now, not the black it had turned on the highway. I’d put more fish into service and it had faded to white. The fish had been doing reasonably well; I’d thought the danger was over.

But today all of them were dead. And I didn’t dare go out and get more; whatever malevolent spell had targeted me and my family would work a lot more effectively outside the shields I had around the house. Petco would ship me fancy fish, but not feeders. Which meant firstly that it would cost a lot more money to put more fish into service, secondly that I wouldn’t be able to leave the house again until tomorrow when the fish arrived (and what would I do about the girls going to school? They couldn’t leave either, and I couldn’t explain to them or to Gary why not.) And thirdly, that the girls, and Gary, would see the change, think I was taking Gary’s advice about getting nicer fish who could actually serve as pets, and they’d be horribly disappointed when the fish died.

Maybe I could have two layers of fish, I thought. Pet fish upstairs and feeders down here. Order neon tetras and a tank for overnight delivery, set them up, go out and buy more feeders as soon as I had the neons in service.

The thought flickered through my mind that I could buy feeder mice instead. Mammals are stronger and have more life force, and more resistance to malevolent magic. Feeder mice were in the same position as feeder goldfish – they were destined to die. I’d just be giving them a good life before it happened.

But my children would get attached to the mice. Would give them names. Would cry when they died.

I closed my eyes. I needed more power to protect the family than I had at the moment. I’d given up so much of it for my anonymity and my family’s safety, back before I’d even met Gary, when the only family I’d had to protect were my parents.

To get it back, to protect them now, I’d have to break some old compacts. But those old compacts weren’t working well enough anyway, obviously, if someone was targeting me.

“Moommm! We’re ready!” Arista yelled down the stairs.

“I’m coming,” I said, and headed up. I’d deal with the magic later. Right now, I’d promised my kids ice cream, to distract them from near-death and any weirdness they’d observed, and as both a magus and a mother, I’d learned to keep my promises.

***

This is a piece from a WIP “Not Even Past”, about a former child mage student who had to save the world with her group of friends, all of whom died except her. She left the world of magic behind and became a soccer mom. But now the world of magic is coming back for her.

#inktober 2020 #not even past #amanda walker #alara's october 2020 prompt fics

6 notes · View notes

dailyaudiobible · 3 years

Text

01/07/2021 DAB Transcript

Genesis 16:1-18:15, Matthew 6:1-24, Psalms 7:1-17, Proverbs 2:1-5

Today is the 7th day of January welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I'm Brian it's great to be here with you today. This is day seven of the New Year. So, we've technically we are…or we are technically accomplishing our first week together in the Scriptures, even though we’re kind of in the middle of the first full week of this year. And look at how much ground we have covered in that amount of time. You see…you see now the Bible…the Bible is very relevant when we start looking behind the stories behind the customs behind the clothes that they were wearing behind how the world was thousands of years ago. When we look behind that we realize the human hearts longs for God and we have been longing for God and reaching for God and we have this chronicling of God over time, revealing Himself to us and that is timeless. We long for the same sense of union with our Creator and a context for what this life is all about just as our ancestors did over the last thousands of years. And the Bible is timeless as it deals with and pokes and prods and comforts and nourishes and cares for our hearts. So, congratulations…even though we’re in the middle of the week…congratulations on making it through a week of this new year. And let’s dive in. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. Genesis chapter 16 verse 1 through 18 verse 15.

Commentary:

Okay. So, in our reading from the book of Genesis today we have this situation where Abraham now does have a son. His name is Ishmael it’s just not by his wife Sarah. And it was Sarah and Abraham who were given the promise of offspring. And, so, there's obvious tensions that have arisen inside the family and those tensions…those tensions still exist in the world until this very day. And, so, Abraham's waiting and he’s 99 years old. So, the Lord comes and reaffirms the promise, “this time next year your wife is going to be holding a baby boy.” And she's laughing at that because although it may be a promise from God it is also impossible. It's an impossible promise. She has moved beyond the age of bearing children, well beyond the age of bearing children. Abraham’s 99 years old. So, yeah, it doesn't look like that's a promise that can be fulfilled. And, so, she's, you know, maybe just to protect her own heart and her own hope just kind of dismissing it. And yet God won't let it be dismissed and he presses in on it and confronts the laughter and essentially asks a very very important question for all of us, “is anything impossible for the Lord?” That question might seem like, “well…we would all…of course we would answer ‘no, nothing is impossible for the Lord. The Lord can do whatever he wants’”. But we don't really functionally live as if He will, and we certainly don't function and live as if He will for us on our behalf. And, so, it might as well just to be impossible, right? his is where the mirror comes up. This is what we were talking about a few minutes ago. This is where we look behind the story of the Bible and realize this is a hard issue, as are all of these stories. Where is my faith? Do I believe that? Because that's what we’re supposed to wrestle with. We’re looking at Abraham and Sarah. And believe me when I tell you this, had they chosen differently there would be no Bible. There may be some kind of Bible it might be called something different, but it would be full of completely different people. Right now Abraham and Sarah, we’re looking at them and going, yeah they’re famous Old Testament characters”, but I'm telling you they…they color everything that happens from here. And this trust, this faith that we are seeing come from Abraham toward God, that is fundamental, foundational Christian theology that will be unpacked very meticulously when we find our way into the letters of Paul.

We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves because we’re in the Gospels and we’re sitting at the feet of Jesus and we want to do that, we want to do that as long as we can this year and just listen to what He is saying. And what we see Him saying is a continuation that we’re living a backward life. We’re living a life that is not going to lead to life. And what He says today is it…it…it is largely about prayer and largely about caring for the less fortunate and the most vulnerable in our cultures. And yes, indeed we are supposed to step into that and be a part of the solution. But Jesus is saying, “the thing is just do it. Don't do it so that you will be praised. Do it because it's right. Do it because it's in your heart to do. Do it because it's what God would have you do not so that you can be seen doing it otherwise you have your reward. You did it to achieve praise and to continue to construct this image that you are presenting to the world called your personality. You did it to embellish that construct that you are presenting to the world.” So, you got what you wanted. People clapped their hands and praised you and thought you were super spiritual and awesome. There is no other reward. You got your reward. But if you want to do this true, if you want to stop living false wearing a mask feeling naked and ashamed and hiding then you have to live true. Do it because it's what God would have you do. It's in your heart to do. Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, then you're doing it for the right and true reasons.” But Jesus also said something today that is so profound and so black-and-white and so completely ignored that if we would pay attention and it would finally lock into place then so much of the rest of our lives would make sense. Jesus said, “if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well. But if you don't forgive others your Father will not forgive your offenses”, right? And that's coming right on the heels of the Lord's prayer, “forgive us our debts or our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In other words, the Lord's prayer is asking God to forgive us as we forgive others. I know we’re just getting going, we’re just getting unpacked on this voyage, we’re just moving in, we’re just getting our bearings and then this comes along and it’s like, “wait. What? I never really…what? I have to forgive in order to find forgiveness?” That's the way of God's kingdom according to Jesus, who is God made flesh. And it's really easy. We’ve just come through the holiday season. Maybe there's brand-new offenses that we’re licking our wounds over. But maybe there’s this long-running stuff in our lives. Everybody...everybody has been broken at some point. We have been the offender many times and have had our hearts broken but we have been the offender as well. Like we are broken people who break things. And the thing that we break the best is other people. And it's not true and it's not right. And it's not God's kingdom. And, so, here's Jesus inserting this idea, this truth into our lives, “forgive and you will be forgiven.” And we can just be like, “that's not fair. The things that have happened to me I can't even hardly…I can’t even say out loud.” And we can confront it with things like this, we’re in the Bible, we’re like, “gosh…I just don’t like that. I just don't…I don’t even know how to move in that direction, like the direction of forgiveness, which is so booby-trapped and so complicated, and so full of so many moving parts. We can become frustrated and feel as if what God is trying to do is box us in with a bunch of rules that are really really difficult sometimes to live into. That's not the goal here. Like, that…that…that's not the God of the Bible. Like that's not what's happening here. There are plenty of directives and rules and commandments in the Bible. Things that we are to obey, things that we are to be, and things that we are to live. Indeed, that's true. Is the point because the Almighty sovereign God, the most-high God who not only created this lush and beautiful planet that we live on that…but has created the universe as far as we can know and as far as we can know is only the beginning. You think he’s so uptight that He needs to just keep creating rules for humanity on this little spec, this little ball in the middle of his creation? He just needs to jack with us all the time to show us that were failures? I think probably He's more-high than we can possibly comprehend, more powerful than we could ever know, well beyond what we could ever think. And yet He still loves us and still came in person to show us how to be true and how to actually live life as it was intended to be lived in union, in covenant with God. And we’re seeing this covenantal language begin to materialize in the Old Testament. It will carry its way forward all the way to the end of the Bible. God's goal is our restoration so that we might be who we were created to be. Living in unforgiveness makes that impossible. All things are possible with God. But when we shut it down and say this is my will and then God is a gentleman and says, “you can have what you want but it's not going to go anywhere and it's not going to lead you to life.” Forgiveness is essential in God's kingdom because forgiveness then removes things, entanglements between us and other people. And imagine for a moment what it might be like to live with nothing between you and anyone else, right? There are no offenses. You are true and you are disentangled. But the only way for that to happen is to live in forgiveness, rapid forgiveness, which obviously isn't easy, which obviously is a practice, something that we practice, something that we master over time. And, so, we begin by just opening our hands and releasing things to God understanding that forgiveness isn't…isn't affirming anybody's actions. By us letting somebody go, by us setting someone free, by us for giving we’re not saying it was okay, we’re not denying that it happened, we’re just saying I'm not staying in these chains anymore, I’m not staying chained to that person anymore, they’re not even in my life and yet I'm still chained to them because I won’t…because I won't let it go…because I won't let go. When we let go, we release these people and these events to God. God is the judge. We release them to God so that we don't have to carry it around anymore. So, what Jesus is doing is perhaps telling us something very difficult but He is telling us something essential if we actually want to live, to live free and true.

Prayer:

Jesus, we enter into that. It is a tricky difficult subject. It is also a topic that will be a recurring theme in the Bible because we cannot let this go. You didn’t just mention it one time and think that we wouldn't forget. This is something constant. It's something that You modeled with Your very life when You said Father forgive them because they don't know what they're doing as You were being killed. So, Holy Spirit, come and let that sink in. We are to follow the path of the Savior. We are to become Christ like by being like Christ. Help us with that Lord. That's not…that’s not possible in our own strength. This is one of these situations where we do have to open our hands and surrender to You so the impossible becomes possible. Help us learn how to forgive. It starts right here. Seven days in the year. Now we can start practicing this because by the end of the year we will be a master at this if we continue to press in to what might be like to be true, to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to be the Jesus with skin on in this world, to be Your ambassadors, to be Your representatives in this world. We can’t do that without forgiveness. So, come Holy Spirit teach us how to forgive we pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Song:

Matthew West - Forgiveness

2 notes · View notes

sirsapling · 4 years

Text

MORE TAGGED POSTS

I got tagged in a bunch more things I didn't respond to fast enough, so UNDER THE CUT THEY GO.

I have too many things to respond to, so I won't be tagging, but consider yourself tagged if you want to do any.

IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

Tagged by the wonderful @bardingbeedle

Pass the happy!🌻🌿 When you receive this, list 5 things that make you happy and send this to 10 of the last people in your notifications!

Lying in warm blankets in an cold room. Bonus points for snow outside.

A fresh Buzz cut

Talking to @bardingbeedle

Having long, passionate rambles about the Marvel Ultimates

Hashbrowns, bacon, maple syrup, maybe a pancake, and a sausage too.

Tagged by the chaotic @s-hylor

top 3 cities you want to visit: Toronto, again. Colorado (I know its a state not a city I just want to visit ashes AND GET SNOW). And I would like to go back to Italy again. (I also want to visit, just, all of my fandom friends but I don't want to drop all their locations lol)

favorite marvel character: Ults!Steve Rogers and then Ults!Tony Stark. Not counting stony, Anthony the brain tumor, and not counting clones, Gregory Stark.

white chocolate - yay or nay?: Love it, love it, love it.

favourite board game: God Save The Queens- A board game about Bees I invented with 3 other people at University last year for a project.

how many countries have you been to: 10, I have been very luckily graced with the ability to travel to Europe with school a lot.

(Wales, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, America [Florida, Boston, New York], Spain, Portugal, Italy, and finally Canada.)

favorite thing to do on a rainy day: Anything indoors I might usually feel guilty about doing when its sunny. Tv or games particularly

favorite holiday: Christmas. I am a Christmas slut, call me festive sapling I LOVE Christmas.

pen or pencil: Pen. I once bought 7 in lisbon at the same time bc they were perfect and I didn't want to run out.

favourite kind of soup: Cupasoup Chicken noodle, I don't really like soups tbh, I like broths, and gravy type things I make too much of and eat like a soup (like golden Currys or korma sauces)

your typical order at a cafe or coffee shop: Caramel Frappucino or an iced Mocha. If I'm gonna pay a fuck tonne for coffee I'm gonna get a drinkable dessert.

favorite ride at an amusement park: Any slow rides that show you shit, like spaceship earth at EPCOT. I’m not really a speed dude.

the color of your sneakers: RED, red shoes are the shit folks, a good pair of red converse goes with everything.

favorite pbs show (or little kids show if you didn’t have pbs): Uh I used to watch pokemon then winnie the pooh every single night. But little little kids show I used to watch a show called 64 zoo lane with my grandma so I have fond memories

Rules: name your favorite female characters from 10 different fandoms, then tag 10 people.

Tagged by the wonderful @ashes0909

Natasha Romanov - Marvel Cinematic Universe

Carol Danvers - Marvel 616

Janet Van Dyne - Marvel Ultimates

Izumi Curtis - Full Metal Alchemist

Martha Jones - Doctor Who

Garnet - Steven Universe (if she doesn't count bc, space rock, Connie)

Rosa Diaz - Brooklyn 99

Ann Perkins - Parks and Rec

Princess Caroline - Bojack Horseman

Pam Poovey - Archer

LOOK I know there was a lot of cheating here, but I don't have non marvel fandoms really, and I have a hard time remembering a lot of the TV I enjoyed.

Rules: Share your top 10 AO3 additional tags. Tagged by the mysterious @nigmuff

look I don't know if I have enough tags to make this a justified representation, but the ones shown are v much on brand.

Fanfic trope meme

I was tagged by the delightful @capnstars and @crownofstardustandbone

slowburn or love at first sight // fake dating or !!!secret dating!!! // enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers // oh no there’s only one bed or long-distance correspondence // hurt/comfort or amnesia // fantasy au or modern au // mutual pining or domestic bliss // smut AND fluff // canon-compliant or fix-it // reincarnation or character death // one-shot or multi-chapter // kid fic or road trip fic // arranged marriage or accidental marriage // high school romance or !!!!middle-aged romance!!! // time travel or isolated together // neighbours or roommates // sci-fi or magic au // body swap or genderbend // angst or crack // apocalyptic or mundane

Look guys, I’m boring. I like domestic 30-40 year olds in secret relationships. We knew this.

And now buckle the fuck down folks because I'm about to answer 50 questions about me no one is gonna stick around and read.

tagged by @bardingbeedle the only person who would put up with reading this much about me.

What is the colour of your hairbrush?

I have a buzz cut, I don't have a hair brush anymore.

Are you typically too warm or too cold?

Too warm. I have been warmer than most people my whole life, and I often need to sleep with a fan on.

What were you doing 45 minutes ago?

Working on a sketch for an MTH fill (update from the end of this: I have spent an hour doing this fuckin thing)

What is your favourite candy bar?

Bounty. My favourite candy is Reese’s Pieces but I like a bounty. Or like, and chocolate without fruit in it tbh.

Have you ever been to a professional sports event?

Yes, one of my parents referees Championship Football here in the UK. I have been to a few of his games. I also went to the London 2012 Paralympic closing ceremony, if that counts.

What is the last thing you said out loud?

‘Oh, this will last me a few days’ I was talking to my mother about 1/2 a can of pringles, I was lying.

What is your favourite ice cream?

Vanilla. I am boring. But the best ice cream i’ve had was a cream/milk flavoured gelato in Florence, that shit slapped. I also like cheap strawberry ice cream when no one is trying to put strawberry bits in it.

What was the last thing you had to drink?

Dinner. A spinach, banana, summer fruits and coconut yoghurt smoothie (with extra raspberries). Its my nightly dinner to cheat more veg into my body.

Do you like your wallet?

Very much. It’s about 7-8 years old, it is faded to hell but it has spiderman and a pony ride stony pin

What was the last thing you ate?

See above smoothie comment, but if that doesn't count, a sugar free mint polo.

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend?

Nope. I don't buy as many clothes as I want to, bc mens clothes in larger sizes are hard to find or expensive here.

The last sporting event you watched?

F1, I don't keep up but I watch a little with my dad every now and then.

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn?

BUTTER. They don't really have it here, and I don't go to movies much when in the states. But @festiveferret introduced me to it when we saw Ant-man and the Wasp, and much like poutine and Tim Hortons, I still crave it.

Who is the last person you sent a text message to?

My dad.

Ever go camping?

Yes, I was a Scout. I have done enough camping to not want to do more, it was fun when I wasn't organising it.

Do you take vitamins?

Yes, but not as often as I should, and as much as my mother bothers me too.

Do you go to church every Sunday?

Nope, not even when I considered myself christian. I go only go to church for other peoples events, and I’m an agnostic now.

Do you have a tan?

I cannot tan. I just can't, I burn lobster red in 5 minutes outside without literal sun cream for BABIES

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza?

Chinese food, It was easily what taught me to like more foods also, I don't eat tomato so I can't have most pizza. I love a good garlic base/bechamel, but you can't really get that here easily (yes yes I could make my own but that ruins half the point of pizza)

Do you drink your soda with a straw?

I don't drink carbonated drinks, because its like drinking pain. The fuck is wrong with all of you.

What colour socks do you usually wear?

Various colours, but I consider red on the left, blue on the right, my lucky socks. No I don't know why, but I take all exams and interviews wearing them. It’s just a thing.

Do you ever drive above the speed limit?

I don't drive, but if I did, No. Theres a lot of questionable laws out there but Traffic laws aren't one of them.

What terrifies you?

Pfft, most things from spiders to rollercoasters. But more seriously, Being shouted at. Shout at me and I start hyperventilating, its a thing. Also not knowing if someone is mad at me. I’m not good at reading people,

Look to your left, what do you see?

The wallet shown earlier, and the sugar free polos mentioned after that.

What chore do you hate?

Vacuuming. It makes everything in my body hurt. I would rather clean toilets.

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent?

@s-hylor

What’s your favourite soda?

See above. I do not like your pain liquid. Apple juice for life.

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thrus?

Either delivery or kiosk, I don't like talking to people where possible, I often need tweaks I don't want to have to remember to repeat.

Who’s the last person you talked to?

@downeyhills

Favourite cut of beef?

I don't generally eat beef, lamb, or most red meats. I love crispy chilly beef, but as anyone can point out its bc your generally don't feel the texture of the beef.

Last song you listened to?

Everybody Wants to Rule the World | Tears for Fears | Pomplamoose

I’m on a Pomplamoose kick, and I also just love this song anyway.

Last book you read?

Understanding Comics (The invisible Art) - Scott McCloud

Favourite day of the week?

Friday nights. The weekend is ahead and @loraneldin and I take to wrangling our beloved usual suspects through another week of Ults Book Club.

Can you say the alphabet backwards?

I can barely say it forwards.

How do you like your coffee?

With milk and sugar, or ultimately, in a Caramel Frappuccino bc I'm a bitch like that.

Favourite pair of shoes?

I have walking boots that don't make my flat ass feet feel like they’re dying. OR my black and green crocs (Fight me, they’re useful).

The time you normally go to sleep?

9-10 is what I'm working on, but I fluctuate depending on if I'm working on something or not.

The time you normally get up?

5-6 If I have a choice in the matter, but often 7-8 if I didn't get to bed at the right time. I’m more about getting the right hours in for my diet than time specifically.

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets?

Sunset is the prettiest, but I like to be awake to see the sun rise.

How many blankets on your bed?

One big thick comforter, because that's the uk standard, and I get too hot otherwise.

Describe your kitchen plates

Two types, big wide white ones with a navy blue rim. They are so large I never use them, and little Navy saucer plates I use a lot.

Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage?

I don't drink, so no. I drink apple juice or Shirley temples when I'm in pubs/bars

Do you play cards?

Sometimes, I like to teach people to play Old Maid. It’s the monopoly of card games.

What colour is your car?

Again, I do not drive.

Can you change a tire?

I am aware I just said I don't have a car, but I do know how to change a tire. Everyone should go learn its pretty simple.

Favourite job you’ve ever had?

I have only had one job really and two job experience jobs. I did experience in a school library for a week and that was v fun and chill. I did all the jobs they had prepared for me in 2 days so I alphabetically reorganised their fiction section for the rest of the week. I LIKE ORDERING.

How did you get your biggest scar?

I no longer have a gallbladder, so I have 3 scars across my torso from that, the biggest right in the middle of my ribs. Non surgical wise I have matching scars on my knees from ripping holes in them when tripping. I have weak ankles and also I got both of those at different times.

What did you do today that made someone else happy?

I gave my spare animal crossing Iguanodon skull to a wicked artist I follow on twitter so he could complete his dino park.

#text post #tagged in #wow long post #wow x2 #tag memes

9 notes · View notes

eerythingisshaka · 5 years

Text

Quit Playin

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II x Reader

Word Count: 3.5K

Warnings: Smut that makes you go huh?

This is my submission to @sonofnjobu WIP Fic Fest. It’s been sitting in my drafts for a little over a minute and I just hope it comes across as entertaining for you! Its setup is Yahya having the game from his Black Mirror episode and the things that occur because of it.

"It's not like that, i swear!" Yahya exclaims with a laugh he tries but cannot mask..

"Then what is it like!” You screech at him, wiping your face of the stray tear you hate. You aren’t gonna cry about this shit, you swear. But stress makes you teary regardless. “Cuz it seems like you don’t wanna be bothered with a damn thing about me!”

Yahya stares at you for a beat, leaning against the countertop in his relaxed olive green collared shirt tucked into his dark khaki slacks. With his little TWA, he looks like a vintage ad for Fridgaire appliances, square in the middle of a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

“I don’t NOT want you…” He says slowly with too much emphasis on the ‘not’. This revs you up more.

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean? You out here doing shoots and shit all day everyday, no you’re back it’s like you on a whole other planet! Is it Nicole Beharie? Cuz I don’t blame you, I would even go after that but fucking tell me!”

Yahya purses his lips together, silently cupping his hands in front of them. He stands up straight and meanders over to you, kissing the top of your forehead.

Your palms smack his biceps, pushing him back off of you. “You not about to distract me, I’m serious!”

Yahya scoffs, rubbing his tender arms. “I see, ok! What else are you planning on doing to me to get my attention?”

You let out an exasperated yell. “Oh, nigga if you only knew what the fuck was going on in my head, you wouldn’t be tempting me.”

Yayha claps his hands twice, firmly planting his feet where he stands and bends over so his torso is almost parallel to the ground, facing you with his arms behind his back.

“Go ahead.”

You put your hands on your hips, pacing the floor. “Don’t fuck with me right now.”

“You have my full and undivided attention. And a face free for you to smack, and you talking yourself down? That’s disappointing, I gotta say.”

“But to what extent do I gotta go to get you here? How long have I asked you for this time? And now I’m angry, so this time is fucking worthless to me. I wanna chill with you, see shit, do new shit, not sit and the house and argue over you and your video games! Fucking hate whoever let you take that from the set.”

Yahya straightens up again, giving his lower back a little rub. “You wanna play me?”

You turn on him quicker than a blink. “You know I don’t give a damn about video games! If I wanted to play a game, I’d say ‘Yah, lemme play real quick. They got 2 player?’ But I haven’t! You know why? Cuz they dumb, repetitive and too complicated for me to find time learning worth it!”

Yayha walks down to the living room, like you haven’t said anything, toward the TV cabinet. “Oh, I see the problem.”

Walking over to the plush sectional, you plop down feeling imminent defeat. “You’re not listening to me at all, I can’t understand you.”

Yahya pulls out a small box, closing the cabinet and turning on the TV. “You just have to see me play, one time.”

He sits next to you, pulling out two clear dots from their container. “Here.”

He holds one in each of his hands out in front of him, eyes wide in expectation of you. If he was wearing black glasses and a trench coat, you’d think he was practicing for a Matrix reboot. You stare from his long hands to him, and back again, feeling yourself begin to soften. Maybe you could try bonding his way, just this one time.

You snatch one out his hands. “Gimme this shit. You stick em on your forehead or what?”

Yahya chuckles as you gets his pair out and puts them on. “You know I don’t have a damn dot on my forehead when I do this. Put it on the side of your face, in line with your eye kind of.”

Once you have the dot placed he takes his controller and pushes a few buttons to navigate to the Start screen.

“Now when I hit Start, we bout to be in the game for real.” Yahya looks over at you all wide eyed like he’s teaching a toddler how to hold their breath underwater.

“...nigga just push the damn button. I don’t get why you makin such a hu-”

You don’t get to finish you sentence before your mind begins to be sucked into a vortex that leaves you catatonic, body falling limply backward against the couch alongside of Yahya’s.

Before you know it, your eyes become accustomed to your surroundings. Looking around, you see many trees, vibrantly green and full of cherry blossoms blowing in the wind. The nearby waterfall fills your ears as your mind races to make sense of things.

“What th-”

“Hey! Whatchu think?!” A voice behind you yells. Your head whips around to see a woman in a blonde wig and an outfit that looked cute but avant garde enough to make you question your safety regarding their mental state.

You swallow hard. “I-I don’t know, I’m just tryna find my man.”

She huffs, working her hands in a circle creating a ball of energy before squatting in a fighting stance. “You’re the only man I see around here.”

You scoff. “I am NOT a man, girl, get your eyes corrected.” You go to do a hair flip for emphasis and find none on your shoulder. You feel the top of your head, expecting to find your wig gone, but you feel neither cap nor curl, only some bone straight short cut you have never had. When your hand shoots to your mouth in shock, the color makes you snatch it back again as it was not your shade of skin. Your hand looked meaty and was wrapped in tape. Your eyes travel to look down at your biceps, hulking and veiny. Strips of cloth hang of your broad shoulders and where titties once were, are now ample pectorals.

“Wh-what the fuck?? Who am I??”

The woman in front of you laughs. “You should see what you look like right now. Scared of your own body...when you should be scared of me.”

Without warning, she sails her energy orb at you, making you put your hands up without thinking. The force of her blow pushes you back making your feet slide against the rocky walkway you stand on. Your eyes slowly open as your heart pounds from the excitement.

The woman laughs, placing her hand on her hip in casual amazement. “Huh! I thought you didn’t pay attention when I played this game.”

You furrow your brow in confusion. “Wait…”

She nods, holding her arms out in a flourish. “Isn’t this cool!? We in the game baby! You see why I can’t stay out of it?”

She smiles widely, running towards you, quicker than humanly possible and takes your hand. “We can walk around and everything. Check this water out. It’s wet AND cold.” She dips down to wave her fingers in the nearby resevoir.

You still standby in amazement, slowly becoming accustomed to the situation. “Yahya?”

She looks back at you giving a nod that despite the racial and gendered differences, really reminded you of him. “It’s me baby. Come feel this water, ain’t it nice?”

You put your hands up. “No way. This is some Harry Potter/Neo bullshit that my Christian ass ain’t here for. Put me back in real life right now!”

Yahya’s character stands up, wiping their hands off on their costume before popping their knuckles. “What if this was my plan all along? Get you in here, and just...stay? Forever?”

You tighten your jaw, balling up your fists. “No way in hell would you do that.”

Yahya looks at you stone faced and still. “Well…”

“YAHYA!” You shout at him, losing every ounce of patience.

Finally they laugh, holding their stomach for emphasis. Another Yahya-ism. “I’m playing babe, you cute when you mad but it’s ridiculous as a dude. We not stuck here forever, I promise. You just gotta say the magic words and we out. Simple.”

You nod fiercely. “Ok, and? What are they?”

Biting their lip, Yahya says, “I’ll tell you...but you gotta fight me for it.”

“Pssh, boy come on and quit playing I’m ready to be done and here you go. I ain’t fighting.”

“You sure?” They shrug, walking towards you to poke your arm. “I mean, you could probably beat me easily. You a big strong dude. I’m the female here, so you got advantage.”

You swipe at them. “I’m not falling for that. You know how to play this game, that’s the problem!”

They reach out to ruffle up your hair. “You beat my ass mashing buttons before, just do that.”

You whip your head back, stepping away with your hands up defensively. “Aight, I’m sick of you pissing me off lately anyway. Come on with it, BITCH.”

The venom in your curse makes Yahya character smile as their hands swirl in a creating an energy orb. You run up on them, sailing through the air with a kick that travels their torso to their face, causing them to stumble.

You feel pretty good until you hear that damn laugh.

“Go off, baby! That was cute!” Yahya bites their lip, stomping the ground that loosens a rock in the pavement right under your feet, knocking you off balance. As you fall through the air, Yahya, sends fists and feet under your back 3, 4, 5, and 6 times until you fall down, clutching your back in pain.

“Fuck! What the hell you do all that for? I knew your bitch ass wouldn’t fight fair.” You curse as the pain begins to subside.

Yahya walks over shaking their head as the blonde hair falls on their face. “It doesn’t last, the pain. I could literally break all your shit, and never have to worry cuz it mends in like three seconds.” They hold their hand out to you to help you up. “You oughta feel fine now. I’ll leave you be if you done though, my bad.”

You sit up and take a deep breath. Just like he said, you feel brand new before you even exhale. You look up at them in their outfit: waist snatched, thighs strong and wrapped in elaborate garters, titties sitting high in their corset leather one piece.

“So now you kicking my ass, and you pick a character finer than me?”

They chuckle, squatting over you. “No way in hell do any fake shit come close to you baby. For all it’s worth, I’m glad I got you here to experience this with me. Complaining be damned.”

Having caught your breath, you feel this pull inside of you that brings your heart to a racing pace. A tug from within you never felt before but it made you ravenous for mischief. As you grabbed their hand, you in turn flipped into a somersault carrying them through the air onto the stone path beneath you both. Yahya gasps, having the wind knocked out of them but you don’t ease up. Before Yahya could get to standing, you straddle them using your newly acquired man weight to pin them down and send a fury of fists into their face. You feel like you’re watching a movie instead of experiencing it firsthand, but the comical pace of blows as Yahya’s character head bops back and forth like a speed bag made this whole experience worth it. That is until a pair of knees hit your back.

As you fly forward, you land face first and before their strong thighs come around your waist and an arm around your neck.

You feel your consciousness beginning to fade. “Yah….”

They breathe heavy in your ear. “Say Uncle.”

You raise your hand off the ground but it feels like a 100 lb weight. “I can’t-”

“Nah actually, say Daddy.” Even as a woman, his chuckle rang true, making you livid. You gather as much strength as you can muster to bring yourself to all fours, in a kind of parasitic piggyback ride. Their grip tightens as you move, but suddenly a force fills you. You grip the ground underneath you, clawing your nails into the stone as the energy boils.

“Come on, say-” Before Yahya could answer your back arches as a howl comes from deep within and your eyesight turns white. You hear a wretched thud behind you and use it to follow your prey. Yahya’s character sits limply against a boulder as you bound toward them lifting their head to make room for your hand against their throat. They feel weightless in your hand as you raise them up higher and higher as their feet hovers above the ground. Yahya’s character opens their eyes and you step closer to them, nose to nose as you grip their neck.

“How’s that feel now, Daddy?” You say, hearing yourself with a manly tone of voice sent shivers down your spine as you held control. Your muscles flex under your authoritative hold, arousing your interest at its highest point since you got in the game

Yahya’s hands grip your bicep as they wrap their legs around your waist tightly. “It feels...alright,” he chokes out with a small grin.

You snort as you study the face of his character: cheekbones riper than autumn apples, flush from the fight. They keep licking their lips and stroking your bicep before you notice the slow grind against your pelvis.

Yahya continues. “You wanna beat me up some more?”

Your grip weakens when a new sensation crops up between you two. It’s not like anything you’ve known before. Your mind kept getting distracted from the task at hand.

“Is the fight...over? Did you hit pause or- something?” You stutter as your hips move before your can think about it, making a gasp slip from your mouth. The soft warmth that rubbed against your groin was so tempting.

Your hand comes off their neck and rests against the rock you had Yahya’s character pinned against.

“It ain’t over until we say it is.” The character’s voice is raspier, breathy. You run your nose and lips across their clavicle. Their hand reaches for the sash keeping your pants up.

You wince as the fabric feels tighter in front. “I don’t feel so good. It’s like I’m cramping up or something.”

Yahya’s character bites their lip, shaking their head. “You ok, that’s just how it is for guys. Getting hard is fucking torture til you find something to do with it.”

As their hand reaches for it, you feel a sharp shock to your nerve endings, making you seize up and grip their thighs hard.

“Ohhh shit, why’d you do that?” You wail.

Their grip tightens as their hand runs the length of your shaft. “It’s ok, I swear it’s gonna feel nice.”

“It’s not that, I just...I don’t wanna wait no more.” You growl primitively as you find the garments between their legs and rip it apart, exposing herself to you.

“Fuck, babe, slow down!” Yahya’s character exclaims, grabbing onto your shoulder in surprise.

The whole lead up is a blur. You couldn’t think about what you were doing as a guy figure about to manhandle a woman who also happens to be your boyfriend because nothing would satisfy you more than diving into that pussy at that moment. You pull you character’s dick out with ease, lining up your head to their opening.

“Shit, Yahya. You better breathe bitch.” You scoff holding onto your member to ready yourself. Yahya’s characters breathing and moans in anticipation stoked your fire, making you way less patient for foreplay. Soon as you felt wetness, X marked the spot.

When you began to enter them, you swore your mind just went to another dimension besides the one you currently were in. You felt like you just flew into the center of a hot honey butter roll on Thanksgiving night while sopping up the leftover gravy. The warmth around you followed by the heartbeat of the pussy around your dick sent your knees to buckle.

“Fuuuck.” Yahya’s character exclaims as you push into them every inch you can must before hitting a barrier, making Yahya’s character tense up.

“It’s ok, go ahead.” He reassures you, kissing your neck and jaw while rubbing your back.

You needed no other encouragement as you pulled your hips back and began to swim. The sounds of you churning them out became your applause, goading you.

“You feel...like a fucking payday...a day early…” You gasp as your senses reach their peak. It felt so good, but you still didn’t feel peace. If anything, the more you stroked, the more erratic you became. You searched the rock for a grippable surface and when none was found you turned to their character instead. You wrapped your arms around their back, putting them into a bear hug as you bounced them off your thighs, gaining deeper access.

Yahya’s character is a blubbering mess, beggin you to go harder, deeper, faster, and that was a challenge you refused to back away from. You wanted them to feel you entirely, smacking their ass when they got too quiet, pulling their hair when they seemed too tired, picking up the pace when they were becoming too dominant. Nothing was going to keep you from waxing the whole level with their ass.

As any superhero, you began to grow weary. The ferocity that consumed you began to falter as a wave of pressure built in you, making you nervous.

“Yah, I’m feeling something different.” You moan as your stomach tightens up, feeling a throbbing pressure.

Character hair in disarray, Yahya pushes it back, speaking between gasps. “You about to cum, babe?”

You shake your head. “I don’t know, I don’t usually feel like this when I do.”

“It’s different as a guy....don’t fight it. That will hurt, promise you.”

You nod as you close your eyes, feeling them tighten around you even more.

“You feel so good in me baby, let me have all of you. I want it all baby, fill my pussy up baby.” Yahya kept giving you erotic Hallmark message to let you know just how they needed it. The pressure became overwhelming and like a lightning striking a tree, the roll of thunder barreling from your balls up your shaft and out left you stiff as a board. Your toes curled as you felt yourself being pumped dry as Yahya’s character squealed in satisfaction, hugging you tightly. You felt yourself move, but no more than a snail’s pace, out of fear you may fall over from weakness. Your sensitivity heightened you didn’t dare try to continue, opting to pull out once you felt yourself finish, putting Yahya’s character down before falling to your knees. Yahya’s character laid out right next to you, smiling joyfully.

“And THAT’s why I can’t get enough of this game. You experience shit you can’t in the real world. I never thought I’d get you to do that.”

You huff looking over at them. “That was so damn different...YOu never let me lead like that before...And you were so….vocal.”

They shrug. “I can’t help it when I’m like this. Female orgasms are damn drugs. My whole body lights up, and I don’t feel like vampire just took my soul after. Without a doubt good shit.”

You put your stuff back in your pants in awe of what just happened. “And I never knew I could take over you like that. Like...I was you just now. And you were me.”

Yahya smirks. “Exit game,” disappearing.

You look around in a panic. “Uh, EXIT GAME!”

Your body lurches forward as you catch your breath, feeling Yahya rubbing you back.

“You alright? It’s over I promise.” He says with concern. “I didn’t mean to shake you up like that.”

You feel relief hearing his real voice turning to give him a big hug, almost knocking him backwards.

Yahya’s laughs muffle into your shoulder. “Damn baby. Some of the game ain’t left you.”

You lean back and peer into his face. “I don’t want that part to leave me just yet.”

Yahya blinks in amazement as he grips your waist. “That didn’t turn you off from me? With the characters and me being a girl in there and-”

You shake your head. “It just showed me how much I can do to you and how good you can make me feel in a way I could’ve never asked you to show me.”

He licks his lips nodding slowly. “No limits to that.”

You smile, fitting yourself over his lap. “So we can fall off a mountain while I fuck falling to the ground? Or fuck you thru a glass window and roll you over in the shards and-”

Yahya quirks an eyebrow up. “I’m returning that thing tomorrow!”

#yahya abdul mateen ii #fic #black mirror #its my first fic posting in four months. be kind lo #wip fic fest #shakafic

123 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 4 years

Note

Are there any worldbuilding/conworlding blogs, resources, etc. that you read regularly, or any that you particularly recommend? (I know you like Planetocopia and the Language Construction Kit, and I'm aware of/have read them.)

The Index Diachronica and Describing Morphosyntax, are two super useful resources for conlanging, if you have missed them; the ZBB used to have a great language & linguistics archive, but I think most of it got lost when they moved servers a while back.

I think the best resource for conworlding is reading history, lots of it, of the periods that interest you, making sure you get a good mix of, like, discussions of technology and material culture, plus politics, plus major social trends, plus military history. I think the best way to understand how different societies fit together, about why some empires endure for multiple dynasties over centuries and some collapse immediately or soon after their founder dies, or why Europe has a habit of being settled/invaded by rolling waves of steppe nomads every few centuries, or why some religions rapidly expand to a billion-odd followers (Christianity, Islam) and some never grow much beyond their home region (Sikhism, Zoroastrianism) is to just consume a lot of data, and let it simmer in the back of your brain. Obviously, if what you’re interested is conworlds dominated by pseudomedieval societies you should emphasize medieval history, and if you’re interested in conworlding dominated by early-modern-like societies, you should read early modern history, etc., etc., and broad historical surveys that try to break down why various social and demographic and political forces arrayed themselves the way they did are going to be useful; but so are intimate, close-up histories of particular persons and particular moments and particular states, because history and the important underlying principles which affect it, is fractally complex.

Reading widely in world mythology is also good. For one, it’s fun! And if you like fantasy, I think it helps to get out of the modern High Fantasy mindset, which privileges Magic Systems and other very modern takes on what “magic” is, really reducing it to a branch of invented physics. The weirder, more incomprehensible otherworlds and other-beings of different mythological and legendary traditions are a nice reminder that magic used to be basically fundamentally mysterious and incomprehensible (because the world was basically fundamentally mysterious and incomprehensible). But also, good translations of the original texts will give you a better sense of the cultural concerns and worldview of ancient societies than the reprocessed-through-pop-culture versions that make us think we know (for instance) what the Norse cared about, verus what was actually important to them. I think reading a society’s fiction or poetry or mythology is great for understanding how different the concerns of different historical societies can be, which helps you avoid falling into the trap of everybody in your setting having basically the same worldview/morality as either a modern westerner, or a modern westerner’s caricature of what “ye olde tymes” were like. Like, if you just take up the culturally-ambient narrative of social progress and extrapolate it backward in time you might assume that everybody in the Early Middle Ages was virulently racist, extremely homophobic, terrified of witches, and a true believer in the divine right of kings--when in actual fact almost every one of those worldviews was a later innovation (those are Enlightenment, on-and-off throughout history but not at its peak in the Early Middle Ages, Early Modern, and Early modern concerns respectively).

For geology/climate/biology, I haven’t found a good comprehensive resource, unfortunately. I suspect the answer for the natural sciences aspect is the same as for the sociological and linguistic aspects--”read widely, and voraciously”--but I think most conworlders tend to approach things from the linguistic/social side, and there aren’t many good digests out there like the LCK for the natural science side.

9 notes · View notes

tuanyiems · 5 years

Text

Grounded

Grounded Taehyung x Jimin Genre: Angst Words: 1k [Masterlist] Plot: Jimin regrets a lot of things in life, but most of all he regrets what became of his friendship with Taehyung.

a/n – All I write is angst. I don’t know what fluff is anymore.

I was glad to hear that Taehyung had fallen off the roof. I mean, he was bound to die one way or another, and what better way to die than by flying? Okay, tryingto fly. But hey, he still ended up finding the sky, right?

I remember when we were in high school; Taehyung would always say the same thing over and over.

“Jimin, when I grow up I’m gonna be a pilot!”

Taehyung stood up from where he was lying on my bed, his arms stretched out as if he was an airplane.

“When you grow up? Dude, you pretty much are.”

Even if he didn’t act like it.

“Man, don’t be so youall the time,”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

I did.

“But come on, let’s be realistic. Do you love planes enough to spend all that time and money to train? The last time I saw you focus on anything was that summer in middle school. The camp, you remember?”

“How could I forget? That was my best summer yet!”

“Oh really? But do you remember how obsessed you were with that girl?”

“Annabelle?”

“Wow, you still remember her name.” I scoffed.

Taehyung gave me a skeptical look. “Don’t pretend like you didn’t. You act like you hate her now but you still hung out with us.”

“More like you forced me.”

“You could’ve said no.”

I didn’t want to.

“Annabelle was nice,” Taehyung let out with an air of finality.

That was true. But I did hate Annabelle. Annabelle was your typical girl with blue eyes, deep dimpled cheeks, strawberry blonde hair in braids across both sides of her face. Her cheeks were splattered with freckles from summers of youth camps. And she thought she was so cute.

Sometimes I’d see her faking smiles just so her dimples would show. Or she’d rub her nose so we’d look at her freckles as if they weren’t already blinking like hot red stop signs across her face.

But what got to me the most was how Taehyung never noticed this. The two were inseparable that summer. He thought she was so amazing. He even brought her to his house after the summer.

“Man, did my mom love Annabelle!” Taehyung laughed, as if he knew what I was thinking.

“Yeah, she was your good ol’ Christian girl.”

Taehyung settled back down into bed. “Good ol’ Christian girl.”

There was a quiet pause. Taehyung was doing that thing again—staring at my nose, and then my lips. His long eyelashes concealing his intentions. Without warning his eyes looked up, straight into mines.

“But Annabelle was nice,” he said, almost whispering now. I sat up, shrugging my shoulders. “You know, she’s actually the one who inspired my dream to be a pilot.”

“What, did she want to be a stewardess or something? She seems like the type.”

Taehyung ignored my attitude and went on in his quiet tone. It was weird to see Taehyung this serious—or serious for this long anyways. He should’ve been jumping off the bed by now, or annoying me with lame jokes or something. Instead he just stared at my small TV set across the room, the one that didn’t work but Taehyung had convinced me to keep for memory’s sake. It was a discomforting silence.

“You ever just want to hide sometimes, Jimin?” he finally spoke. He didn’t look for my nod. “I always want to hide. Why do you think I went to all those summer camps?”

He laughed. It made me shiver.

“You know my folks, Jimin. I could never get away from them. Not far enough. When I brought Annabelle to my house you know what my mom said to me? She said ‘You did good, Taehyung.’ For once, I did something good.”

“Taehyung,” I whispered.

“And so I brought Annabelle to my house almost every damn day. So much that my whole family was convinced we were dating!”

Taehyung laughed again, his eyes were back on me now, bright and brown, and waiting.

“You weren’t?” I finally asked. He sighed.

There was that unsettling silence again. The one where Taehyung would look at me with his gentle, brown eyes knowingly as if he knew. And I would hold my breath, feeling uncomfortably hot inside, staring at the little whiskers under his nose. Then he’d lick his lips casually, slowly, and break into a smile.

“No, Jimin, we weren’t. Annabelle was more of a therapist if anything.”

I felt a wave of guilt and relief rush through me.

“And she told me that the best way to hide is in the sky.” Taehyung chuckled, “Pretty deep for a fourteen-year-old, right?”

“Sounds impossible.”

“You’re doing it again Jimin.”

“We’re getting old, Taehyung. It’s time to ground ourselves. Be realistic.”

It was quiet. I had nothing else to say and Taehyung just looked at my hands in contemplation. And then his fingers felt for mines. Soft and barely there at first, then roughly, he intertwined his fingers between the empty spaces of mines. His hands were colder than I had thought. Harder than they looked.

Then he continued the conversation as if he wasn’t burning up as hot as me. “Doesn’t that sound great though? Living in the sky? I wanna be a pilot so I can hide in the clouds.”

Letting my fingers relax, I brushed my thumb against his. “That’s a lonely thing to want though.”

Taehyung said nothing.

Taehyung never did become a pilot.

I stared at the stark white lines against the speckled greyness of cement. Sometimes I wonder how Taehyung fell. Face first, staring at reality? I shook my head. Probably not.

“You jumped off backwards didn’t you? So you could hide inside the clouds once last time.”

I squinted, trying to find a glint of gentle brown in the concrete.

Nothing.

“All that effort to find the sky but you sure are grounded now, Taehyung.”

Another uncomfortable silence.

#bts reactions #bts imagines #bta scenarios #kim taehyung #park jimin #angst fanfic

9 notes · View notes

philipsrose-blog · 4 years

Text

Crazy 8 (Part 2)

When you reach the point where you slam the crazy fucking 8 life gets dark in a real hurry. It's like everything and one become subjects and suspects of insanity, mind fucking at its best.

Christian and I seemed to hit it off pretty good. We both slammed right away and got busy. I remember he couldn't fucking believe that I could slam a fucking crazy 8 and he wanted to try it but I made him wait, promising that I would admin him a ball that night or the next morning. What a fucking nightmare of a mother fucker that turned out to be. But we had some really great fun too.

It was Christian that worked that first colossal toy into me. But first I finally got to fist someone and it was beyond kinky amazing. God! when I was elbow deep and I twisted my arm he clamped up around me and we both shot all over the place.

But that night when I kept my promise he got totally psycho and I had to summon Philip to remove the problem and smash his equipment. I mean, there were pieces of it flying all over the fucking place. And you know, I actually felt bad for him until I found an ounce of Philip's private stock in his hoody. I mean, oh my God! That's fucking ghetto. You're invited over to party with an endless supply and you try to steal the host's private stock? Who the fuck does that? Needless to say, he was no longer a member of the grand Slammerz gang.

Now, there was a guy Philip had chatted on line witb. Joe Conway. Philip texts me that he had paid one of his best customers, this Joe Conway is outside and that I should just unlock the door and let him in because he wanted to party with me. I was so fucking sure it was gonna be some fat bastard, like Red. So I got dressed and started watching porn on my computer, ignoring the fat fuck. But then I looked up and the fucking Leo Biggie the twink fucking porn God was in our fucking living room. I could not believe is and quickly clicked on one of his videos I had downloaded. And oh my fucking God it was him.

When I jumped up to go in the living room he was standing there watching me with his classic grin.

A few minutes later he was admining me a huge slam. I have to tell you, that guy fucked me like I ain't never been fucked before. He showed me positions that my Philip and I would enjoy for a long time. He understood what no one else could when I opened up to him. And when Philip finally arrived it was one of the few times we had an actual threesome in our own bed.

To this day Leo Biggie and I still speak at least once a week. He turned out to be a friend that I could reach out to under the worst of circumstances, just to vent to.

But looking back the memories sometimes hurt. Philip and I began to argue. We were drifting apart.

I was going through almost 2 ounces a week between myself and my hookups and Philip was worried. I was out of fucking control. My mental health was in ruins and I was down to 129 pounds. I was dying right in front of him and it was killing him. The breaking point came when I was slamming 8 balls 3 times a day.. I had been awake for 11 days.

Lying on the bed expecting a slam I suddenly felt tired. "I just gave you 2 milagrams of adivan." Jesus fucking Christ! He had called my mother who in turn called the paramedics.Then suddenly I was asleep. And when I woke up 4 days later Philip was there with the nurse in the hospital holding me. He had cleaned me as I went to the bathroom in my sleep and had even awakened me to hydrate and feed me. I had no recollection of it at all. But I could see how worried he was. Then he asked me the unimaginable. "Will you marry me?" I was in total shock and I was screaming yes in my heart. But I knew I was using way too much to make a presentable bride for my Philip. He said he really wanted me to cut back. So, I agreed to slow down.

I still slammed it by the ball. But I cut back from every day to 3 times a week. And I did because, as they say, nothing lasts forever. But that didn't last for long because, again, as they say, nothing fucking lasts forever.

There was this one stray that I invited over, Sippie. He was another one that I hit it off with. And surprisingly he had no desire to do a crazy 8 with me. "Hell no! That would kill my pretty ass!" God I was glad to hear that. Finally someone who had a little common sense. Not that I didn't have any.

But after a while Sippie asked me if I could rinse off in the shower. It was so fucking embarrassing. I jumped up and headed straight in, not even letting the water get warm. Then, a few minutes later I heard it, the front door closing. I knew he'd left and I just rinsed off and dried myself off. But then, when I got out of the fucking bathroom I couldn't believe it. Philip's bottom draw was a little open and the brick he was selling that night was fucking gone. Immediately I jumped on the computer and shot a message to Sippie warning him who's product he had stolen.

"Yeah right! You're insane! What fucking guy would fuck your ugly ass, you nasty mother fucker!" His words wounded my soul. They cut deep like a fucking knife. And when I got up and looked at myself in the mirror,I knew it was the truth.

I ended up having to summon Philip and let him know exactly what had happened. He kept telling not to cry about it. He would find the guy and get his shit back. But then I told him that I wasn't gonna marry him and that I knew I was too ugly and way too fat for him and I hung up the phone and threw myself on the bed to have one of those epic cries that you never forget and soon after I fell asleep.

"Babe, what the fuck is happening? Don't you know what you mean to me?" I rolled over to see Philip. His eyes were beet red and his face was soaked with tears. But I was already convinced. I rolled over and told him what Sippie had told me and suddenly he was gone.

A few hours later he was back, looking as if something happened. But, most importantly, he was holding the fucking brick. "I wanna show you something." He held his cell phone in front of me and began playing a video. It was Sippie and Philip. A third person was holding the camera. Sippie was sitting on one of those redwood picnic benches in a wooded area with fucking duct tape over eyes. My Philip was standing in front of him in his underwear with an aluminum bat in his right hand.

"That's my fiance! Who the fuck do you think you are? I happen to love him and now he doesn't wanna marry me!"

Suddenly,the bat came crashing down on Sippie's head and he fell backwards letting out this blood curdling scream. And when Philip jumped over the fucking bench and hit him again he screamed again. Then, after like a minute of hitting Sippie with the bat the voice from behind the camera says "Uh. Bro you can stop. He's dead." And Philip turned to his right, looked at the camera, put the bloody bat on his shoulder and smiled.

My life is over. I fucking know it. Based on what events take place today tomorrow night not cone. I'm not going to appear in court on October 9th. I'm going to let Iv

an win. The son of a bitch beat me, my only crime being that I loved him and he never loved me. In the end you'll ass know what plays out. I'm no longer the only one involved on my end.

Oh my God you look great! I've never seen this side of you. "Well, I'm afraid to let people see me like this." But , what's wrong? Why are you crying? " I Burst out uncontrollably and he wrapped his arms around me? "Rose, where's Sally Pickles? What happened to Sally Pickles? " My knees buckled and he helped me to a bench.

Sitting there in High Bridge Park, I poured out my pain and he listened and wiped my tears away. And then he laid my head in his lap and I fell asleep.

Can you walk on the outside please as we walked along the trail. I'm safe when you're with me, like when you walk the outside I know you care. The other guy didn't care. Yeah, that fuckin guy kept saying, "Hey, I have no problem doing this for you. And any time you wanna come over and earn some of this I'd love to have ya. His name was Stephen and he was beautiful.

We had met at a Crystal Meth Anonymous meeting. A kind friend who can sometimes be incredibly tough, but with a kind heart had bought him there. From the beginning we were very attracted to each other.

We ended up sharing the night, an amazing night.

When I began to sob again he darted behind me and covered my eyes with his beautiful hands. "Trust me" he whispered in my ear and kissed it softy. Then he stopped me and turned me to my right. Telling me, "I want you to find strength and hope in this. Open your eyes."

It was fucking amazing! We were standing in the middle of High Bridge looking at the Manhattan skyline, lit up in all its glory. Nothing any person has ever done has meant so much to me!

And I won't lie and say that we we went back to his apartment to make love. Plain and simple, we went there to fuck, to fuck hard! And I have to say, It was the best sex I had had in fucking years! He slammed a gram and then slammed me a gram. "Surprise!" Oh my! It was a crazy fucking 8!

With every thrust waves of insanity and pleasure poured over me to the point where it was almost frightening! And I put on quite the show for him!

A week later the bitch, Tina, she took him. She's taking everything and everyone from me. I'm in fucking ruins!

My life is over. I fucking know it. Based on what events take place today, tomorrow I'm not going to appear in court I'm going to let Ivan win.

The son of a bitch beat me, my only crime being that I loved him and forbade him from knowing the bitch, Tina. But he never loved and left me that he might be with her, the bitch, Tina. In the end you'll know what plays out. I'm no longer the only one involved on my end.

It's almost queer how those that Ivan loathed, especially the social worker from The Door now run his life. Of a truth, I honestly believe that mother fucker was the same guy Ivan told me he made movies having sex with under aged boys with!

It's as though enemies, demons of the bitch, Tina, are working behind sober side of reality to pull me closer to her, closer to my end, closer to my Philip. It's all a clear blur in the night.

I'm the pitch, Ivan is Philip and he Ivan. All has become Ivan and I have become consumed to the point of my end in him.

I loved him and he took my life.

I have always been more of a believer in Old Testament rather than new.

With that in mind I may murder a man who seems to have disappeared with my shit, today, the shit I was going to use to fucking kill myself to escape this fucking torture!

This clueless dick head better come up with my shit or he is going to catch a beating today. I swear to mother fucking God I will hurt this mother fucker. I can't take this fucking pain Terry. Please come through with my shit! You mother fucker! Even my own fucking mother is not trying to stop me!

I have a mother unlike any mother ever to walk the earth. Knowing how I suffer she has agreed to let me go, the absolutely fucking hardest sacrifice a mother can make. Thus it should be known; For she loves me so that she has taken on the insufferable, that I might find peace in the sky with my Philip, his final words to me penned when we are together again we will dance across the sky with the clouds beneath our feet.

I don't really want to fucking die. But by the time this is read it may be in the best interests of many, rather than my personal need to be gone. "The needs of the many outweighing the need of this one." And don't think me very fucking noble about that! I have never had the fucking stomach for the violence that I know that I'm fucking capable of. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ I know how to build bombs, PIES so well you would be looking at them swearing they're not real.

But I have only one thing left in this life, my word. I took an oath on August 29th, 2002, never to use the tools this government taught me against this country. And for four reasons I will not break the oath 1, though he may hate me, an oath is before God, almighty, 2, my mother, 3, my dad, 4, I just don't have it in me to hurt people.

In closing this chapter:

My dearest Ivan

I truly and unconditionally love you and I am sorry that you could not love me. I take full responsibility for that.

I want you to know that what I enjoyed most about being your wife was serving you breakfast in bed and your love for blueberry pancakes. I wish I would have made them for you every fucking day.

I'm not sure if Philip will be waiting for me. If he is not I will wait for you and serve you breakfast in bed for all eternity if you want.

I never meant for you to be hurt. But the morning you answered your phone and said "Fuck off sicko" I knew you had found someone else and I began to die again, just as I did the day I watched you walk away from our meeting with Gustavo.

I knew in my heart you had given up on our love. I knew I would die that night and I did. For 2 minutes and 11 seconds I had peace away from the worst pain I have ever had to endure.

When they revived me the trauma doctor told me to find something more than what I was hurting over to fight for. I fought to stay alive for you because the moment you looked in my eyes at the alter I knew that I could never love anyone other than you again.

I knew you had given up on our love. But less than a week ago I found out that you never actually loved me.

Miss Gomez told me. She told me how the day you spoke with her and her supervisor privately you told them that you didn't love me and only needed benefits. She told me how you asked if you could get benefits on your own when you leave me.

You never planned on staying. But I still love and forgive you. And I want you to know something that may teach you a lesson in compassion and forgiveness. Sally Pickles has been stolen.

Because you could not turn the other cheek and have mercy on me the way I did when you showed up at my shelter I got arrested and the church where Tony used to work stole my Sally Pickles!

This is why I am taking my life. She was the only light left in my word but now she is gone, the light is gone, my hope is gone.

I want to let you know that I treated myself to a trip to The West Side Club and that I was so sad to hear that fored been there and that you were so high they almost had to dial 911

Please Ivan! I love you! Get help! Oh my God,I van! Don't be me! Don't become me!

In closing, thank you for the time we had. I shall remain faithful to only you.

I am and shall forever be your Rose

It's hard when you love someone and wanna fucking spend eternity with them as loathing mother fuckers do any and every God fucking dammed thing they can to ruin what they wish they had! At times realty can be just as evil of a mother fucker!

Lying there alone I begged God to find a way, And then, after a night of doubt, my Philip spoke

Do I wanna be with you forever? No one yes. I mean, you're slamming 8 balls all day and it scares me. It scares the fucking shit outta me. I've never seen any shit like this! You're driving me deeper behind the mask.

You know you're my Rose Petals and I love you and yes I wanna be you. But I need you to prove that I'm not your party ticket."

To prove his point in an almost cruel way, Philip his himself from me that afternoon. He left no note. He did not say goodbye. He left only 1 brick and then he was just gone.

Dear Vincent.

There comes a time in every woman's life when she must act for herself.

Joey has ruined out little family so I am taking your sister, Nina and abandoning you guys. I know you will go on to college and be fine. And I hope your father finally figures out what to do with your brother.

I have left you your bank book so you have a little nest egg

Love always your mom.

I was the one who found the note.

3 years later my boyfriend Brian took his life without saying goodbye.

5 years after that my boyfriend Stephen was shot in the head and killed. I never got to say goodbye.

15 years later my boyfriend John moved out while I was at work, never saying goodbye.

My dad was murdered by my stepmother years later. There was no goodbye.

Now Philip is gone, taken away from me .

After that I began slamming a even more crazy 8s a day.But then the eviction notice came. So I moved back to New York City.

Philip and I rekindled our love in September of 2018. And he actually asked me to marry him. But I said no, afraid of losing him and knowing that pain again. But eventually I said yes, on February 14th of 2019. But he took his life after learning that he had been indicted on February 19th.

Now I have lost Ivan and Sally Pickles. It's just too fucking much. I can't take this fucking pain.

My plan was to do a suicide slam this past Monday night. But this dirt bag mother fucking Terry stole my shit. So now I will have to rob a fucking bank so I can carry out my plan.

My friends are all telling me that has God hasn't turned his fucking back on me. Are they fucking blind?

I will keep writhing and may even film my suicide slam. It'll be an amazing show. I put on quite the show. Or at least I hope I still can.

If not I hope to at least make it interesting enough to captivate at least a few. I mean, hey, I used to put on a good show, quite a show!

1 note · View note

candyclan · 5 years

Text

Coming out letter to my mom. (FTM) At the start of my transition, I wanted to go by a name that started with an “A”because my birthname did. All the rest of it is basically the same.

THE TRUTH:

I didn’t scream “I am a boy” at my parents. Honestly, my mother (specifically) controlled a lot of what I did, who I hung out with, and what I wore as a child. I believe she has/had an idea about what she wanted out of a daughter since I was born, and really just lived through me. I think she eventually had to give me room to make my own decisions, later in life. I didn’t come out until I was 16, although I had spent 6 months prior to even coming out thinking about my gender identity. I was extremely sheltered. I want you guys to know that I didn’t know what being transgender was until I was a freshman in high school and met my best friend (who is STILL MY BEST FRIEND TODAY) who identified as Non-binary gender fluid. I had never really met someone AFAB that lived to be anything other than female. With that came the knowledge that sometimes, men don’t necessarily have to have penises and I can wear whatever I’m comfortable with. I used to be religious in middle school (raised Christian) but I never found god. It never made sense to me how so many people can put their faith in other people’s ideas of what god is (the Bible) but not listen when their real CHILD comes to them and tells them that they feel uncomfortable in their gender identity. I also came out as bisexual in middle school, after meeting a girl I had a fancy for. To which my mother sobbed and cried and asked how she had failed as a parent. I remember loving pink, it was my favorite color. Pink, purple, blue. My top 3. Now it’s blue, pink, purple but basically the same. I had a pink room, loved hello kitty, let my mom curl my hair with little curlers at night so I could wake up and be somebody different the next day. My brother played with carebears and my Barbie dolls more than I did as a child. I remember a toy gun and handcuffs. I was fairly experimental as a child, I did: Girl Scouts, swimming, piano, soccer, ballet, cheerleading, and more honestly. I always got “boy” toys at McDonald’s (I mean cmon they’re cooler) I just was kinda everywhere. I feel like that’s easier for someone AFAB to be. My brother was harassed by my family for liking girly things but I was never shown that I couldn’t like stereotypical “boy things” by extended family. My mother however in the line at McDonalds I could never forget, turned and looked at me (baseball cap backwards tank top and shorts)and said “So, what?” “Are you batting for the other team” implying that because of the clothes I liked to wear I would be a lesbian. My mother (like I said, kinda controlling and extremely narcissistic) when I was allowed to cut my hair super short for the first time I was 16. Afterwards she has said things like: “but you’re so pretty how could you have cut your hair” “you looked so nice with long hair” I never felt akin to femininity. I was actually VERY uncomfortable with it. I hated being the “weaker” gender. I never wanted my nails painted. It was torture. I acted like makeup and and nail polish was torture, the hairbrush was my enemy. I used to just put my hair up in a low ponytail every day as I got older. I knew she’d never let me cut it all off. Basically, other than wanting to grow up strong and tough and not liking to be treated like a female, I was female. There were parts of being female I didn’t really have a problem with, and honestly that’s why I didn’t come out for so long. I wasn’t in a house or raised by people I knew would accept anything other than me being their “little girl” I was a daddies girl. So between my lack of understanding of where my feelings towards my gender roles were coming from, being encouraged by my family to be girly, not being exposed to gender diversity (or anything queer), and my controlling mother, I remained in the dark about who I was.

TRIGGER WARNING:::(abuse)::::: I was never close with my mother, and actually hated her growing up. To this day she is the most judge mental, self-centered woman I know. My father was funny, charismatic, and lost his shit sometimes. I like to say, 90% of the time he was amazing. We made jokes and could literally finish each other’s sentences. But honestly my father, 10% of the time was abusive. Most of my abuse in my life was covert (narcissistic abuse from my mother) and verbal/emotional/barely physical abuse from my father. He’s 6”3’ 350 lbs and very loud and scary, especially to a young child. He punched a hole in my wall, he threw a remote at a wall and shattered it to pieces, he threatened to kill my dog with a baseball bat in front of me. Which I swear to god he would have done if I wasn’t holding my dog, protecting him. These moments were few and far between, but they were riddled with insults and almost always left me with less than I started with. My father did spank my brother and I, and one time he clapped my brother so well that he left a purple hand mark on his butt. My mother told my father she’d take us away if that happened again. My father never left marks. He never had to, he was so big and would just get up in my face and scream at me. He made me feel helpless. Because he was invading my space I felt physically threatened, and he never actually had to touch me and leave bruises because that threat was already implied by invading my space. I was so young, but I always knew my family wasn’t right. Finally at 16, I stood up to my father for the first time. I didn’t care if he was bigger than me, I didn’t care if I would lose, I was willing to fight for me. Anyway, long story short the police were called because we were screaming at each other in front of his apartment building. I’m not going to say I didn’t fuck up as a teenager, but I never deserved the pressure and the abuse he was dishing out and had dished out my whole life. I knew that. I cut him out of my life just after turning 16, by then I had been questioning my identity. It became easier after leaving my father to fall into who I was. My father is FAIRLY religious and my mother claims to be but she never talks about god, she never prays, and now that my father and her are divorced I don’t think she’s been inside a church since. Losing my father was a lot, despite his abuse he and I were really close and had really similar personalities. The reality of abuse isn’t “well, now I see them as an abuser so now none of that good stuff is left it’s all tainted” I had to struggle with losing someone very important in my life at a young age, for myself.

Arguments against me being trans:

My family has been a bit divided in responding to me coming out. By now, it’s been about 4 years.

My mother and her side of the family are in denial. They don’t understand how I can’t be a “lesbian that just likes boy things”. They don’t use my name or pronouns.

My father, what little communication I have with him now, is bewildered. He and I had a discussion this past Christmas where I brought up what his abuse did to me mentally and he apologized but then tried to say “well what about your part in all of this” and said that I was hanging out with crazy depressed people, cutting myself, doing drugs, (I was smoking weed and I’ve tried acid like once piss off) and was sneaking out. Yeah. I did do all of that BUT GUESS WHAT. IM 20. I go where I wanna go. I fuck who I wanna fuck. I smoke what I want and guess what? It’s not any different from when I was 16 except now I don’t have parents up my ass telling me what to do. His argument basically was that I need to own up to what I did too and that fucking angered me. You don’t apologize and then go “well what about you” that’s not an apology. That’s deflection and honestly I don’t think I need to apologize because my parents were super controlling. I was just trying to do what I wanted and they didn’t like it. He and I have talked about me being trans and he pretty much thinks I’m certifiable. Doesn’t use my name or pronouns.

My brother: Ethan, my brother and I have always been close. He’s 17 now, and he had a different reaction to me being trans. Of all of my family he was the most receptive to my pleas of gender dysphoria and he suffers with anxiety so he gets stuff. But alas, after asking him if he’d call me by my name and pronouns (after 4 years of being out) he thinks that I am the one that has an issue with society. I told him I was starting T soon and he said: “Hrt won’t lessen all the things that come with being transgender. If you feel like doing hormones is the best for you then do it, but from a logical standpoint I think there just needs to be more thickening of skin” he claimes that if I try hard enough I could be fine living as female. Doesn’t use my name or pronouns.

None of my family supports me. None of my family understands. And none of them ever will. I have been out for four fucking years. I can’t tell you how frustrating family rejection can be. I have cried so much at the idea of not having a supportive family. I feel like I was ripped away from a beautiful life somewhere and thrust into this mess.

Honestly though, it doesn’t matter, the world keeps spinning and I keep finding people who love and accept me for who I truly am. I have made peace with my family’s lack of acceptance. It’s made me stronger and more compassionate towards others. Made me want to be better than them. I am actually going to start hormones soon, and on top of other fears I have, will be cutting my family out of my life. I can’t be 25 with a full beard and getting misgendered by my family. I can’t do it. They may feel like I’m going too far, that I don’t have to do this, but I do. I’m not doing this because I didn’t get too much attention as a kid or my mom favored my brother over me, I’m not doing this because it’s cool, I’m not doing this because I’m bored, I’m not doing this because I hate myself or anyone else. This is AFFIRMATION. Sometimes, cutting people who can’t see you for who your really are out of your life is affirming too.

Guys, girls, people, keep your head up. Things get better, I know. I thought life was never going to get better so I know that’s what it can feel like. But it does. Never ever let someone control your life or who you are. You’re beautiful/handsome/amazing! You deserve to be comfortable in your own skin and to love who you are. I am getting there, we all are.

Love,

Tanner M.

15 notes · View notes