chapter 24 of surrender on no sides, in which there is some kind of conclusion. you can click here to read it on ao3, or just read below the cut. your pick.
The only way to end this is somewhat obnoxiously. Sorry about that. It’s not what I had planned; it’s just the way the cookie crumbled. So actors, exit stage left. Tech crew, start dissembling this set. Don't burn anything, but take everything apart to its smallest pieces. Burning would be a bad idea. After all, you know how it is with manuscripts and burning, right? Or maybe not. Don't worry. If you don't know, you'll learn soon enough. Oh, and while I'm talking to you, come on. Follow me. We're heading out of the theater; we should have a real conversation.
I normally don't do fourth wall breaks. Or acknowledge the damn thing at all, unless I'm writing something for Pathologic. But here, it's come to this. If you know me, you might not be surprised. If you don’t, I know you’re surprised. If you know me very well, I think you might be flabbergasted. It's just the nature of this kind of thing.
A quick introduction for the uninitiated: Hello. I'm Delaney. Nice to meet you. This is a story I started writing when I was 18, during my senior year of high school. Now I'm 23, and I have a degree and a full-time job and a place all my own, which is to say that things have changed quite substantially since chapter one. I've changed. You've changed. Even the setting's changed. Look at this, we're no longer in a theater at all! We’re in a cute little lunch room in an office complex. It's empty except for the two of us. We've got lots of windows to look out of, but it's a gray, drab sort of day. It rained, is raining, and is going to rain—all three are true at once. Wanna sit down?
I want to sit down. My feet are killing me. I'm in my favorite spot, the booth in the back left corner. I’m the sort of person who likes having their back to a wall. You can sit next to me, across from me, on the table, wherever. If you're not a fan of booths, there are plenty of other tables to choose from. I'll move. And hey, you know, you don't even have to sit at all! You can walk around, make yourself something in the kitchen, whatever you'd like. If you're hungry but don’t feel like cooking, I have food I'm willing to share. Not a drink, though. You can get whatever you want in the kitchen, but this peach passion fruit refresher is mine. I paid a very honorable $3 for it.
Once you're comfortable, let's get back to the point. This story has problems. You've likely noticed several if you've made it to this point. If you're a fellow author, you've likely noticed several dozen. If you're me, you've got a number of mistakes that's not quite infinite, but far too high to count. To fix what needs to be fixed, this story would need to be broken down until it's no longer itself. There are too many problems for it to go forward on its own power, and too much to say to leave it as it is. Thus, it's come down to me ending things like this, in a way that's unfashionably direct. The story is over. The ending isn’t something I can string into an order that makes sense, but I know one thing about it for sure. Ready?
This story ends happily.
Because you see, there was this thing I was trying to communicate when I started writing it. Sure, it came off an intellectual branch, a split from canon and some extrapolating how things would change if I switched out one Kageyama brother with the other, but this story had a heart to it. When I first started writing, I truly believed that love was possible no matter what. That no matter how bad things got, the situation could be endured and that you would be loved and cared about. I was very earnest in this belief and determined to prove it by showing it to you. Love as not just possible, but permanent. Always within reach. Romantic, platonic, familial—it could all be there. It would all be there. Love existed.
Now, let me be honest: that's not entirely true. Not all wrong, mind you, but not all right. You can be genuinely unloved—funny that I didn't know it then because by that point, I had survived it, but I didn't. I was oblivious; I'm still oblivious now, but less than I was. So I can say for sure that there may be a time in your life where no one loves you at all, or worse, where no one loves you in a way that matters. They'll love you, but not enough for it do you any good.
I'm going to tell you that situation is survivable. Not just survivable, but worth living through. And I'm also here to tell you that love is coming down the pike, no matter which way you look at it. To be human is to love, no matter what form that love takes, and so no one can avoid it for very long. You’re going to love someone some day—chances are that you already do. Somebody's going to love you, too. Pinkie promise. I know it's true because I do, but someone else will. It'll be great.
And I can tell you that life is worth living. No matter what. I haven’t believed in that the entire span of time between chapter one and now, but I believed it at the start and I’m here believing it at the end. Even when it feels too difficult to bear, life can be survived and enjoyed. It's worth it to stick things out and see life through. It's too interesting to give it up. Even the unloved life is worth living. And don't get me wrong, it's very preferable to be cared about, but there's a certain kind of independence that comes from surviving something wretched all on your own, the sort of situation where anyone who can help you doesn't want to and anyone who wants to help you can't. There's a freedom that comes from that. You don't even have to love yourself to feel it, and to carry it with you when love comes around again. Personally, I always keep it with me. I just didn't know I had it until I was rummaging through my pockets. It was hiding between a stick of bubblegum and my chapstick.
So, this is the end of it. Life is worth living. Love exists. All things can be survived, and not just survived, but worth surviving. Even if the story is ending like this, I'll say that I don't regret writing it: every failure here has taught me more lessons than ten successes somewhere else. Considering all the ways I've failed in this, I can now consider myself quite an educated woman.
And I'll always be here, if you need me. Sitting in this spot on this overcast day, with food to share and words to say. You can stop in at any time. Hell, I might need to come in once or twice, just to remind myself that what I'm saying is true. But I'm here. I'm always here. I love you. I hope it does you some good.
If you don't want to, you don't have to love me back.
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If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)
At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.
Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.
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i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers
you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.
AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character
see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.
mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.
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