cherryblossomshadow

[cherryblossomshadow]

I’ve shared this bit of advice before, but it’s worth sharing again.

I am almost 8 years on HRT and before I even started taking estrogen, spiro, or progesterone, my doctor looked me in the eyes and asked a very important question…

She asked: “Do you want big boobs?”

I said yes, I wanted something that matched my frame.

She immediately told me: “Then do not go on a diet, maintain your fat, because your body will be using that and whatever you’re eating to build up your breasts and other features.”

And bless her because I’m rocking an H Cup these days.

So my trans girlies who are just starting out, I offer that bit of advice to you as well.

[cherryblossomshadow]

What patriarchy does to masculinity and femininity is the equivalent of what humanity did to those dogs with the faces so flat they can't breathe: it contorts them both over long periods of time to fit a standard it invented while causing indescribable amounts of pain and suffering.

[cherryblossomshadow]

i do think we have to stop calling it the civil war and bring back calling it the slaveholders’ rebellion. that rebrand was perhaps the most culturally consequential of a foolhardy attempt to reach across the aisle

[cherryblossomshadow]

so, i live on  the fourth floor of an apartment building that faces a fairly busy street; it’s on a hill so car noises are pretty regular over the course of the day. because i’m high above the street, you obviously can’t see the cars unless you look out the window, right? but sometimes the sun reflects off the car roofs or whatever, and so there’ll be a light on my ceiling as a car passes by.

so my cat? whenever he hears a loud engine, day or night, he looks at my ceiling. even if there is no refraction going on. to him, those are the sounds of light on the ceiling. sometimes the light appears and there is a loud noise. it’s 8pm and a truck just passed and he watched the ceiling as the car moved past my windows – no reflection this time of night, but trucks are ceiling creatures and i just think that’s such a like – it’s a good correlation, buddy!! you figured it out!! you’re wrong but you’re so smart!!

[cherryblossomshadow]

the more i try to explain gender to cis people the more i understand plato's allegory of a cave

[cherryblossomshadow]

wild geese

Mary Oliver

University of New Mexico | Reddit

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

I don’t know if I’ve spelled it out on tumblr yet, but I want to talk about The Mammal List. 

The Mammal List is something I came up with when I was in a mental health intensive outpatient program four(!!) years ago. The premise is that we are at our core animals, and if I consider myself the way I’d consider a pet cat, I’m much more likely to practice good self-care:

1. Mammals need food. Eat something! If the Hellbeast doesn’t pass judgment on a piece of cheese, neither should you. (She also eats anything small enough to fit in her mouth, so be judicious in that respect. Food is good. Lint is not.)

2. Mammals need hydration. Drink something! It doesn’t have to be water. It could be delicious tuna juice. You’re a discerning creature. I trust you. 

3. Mammals need sleep. Make a soft nest and let yourself enjoy it. Knead it until it’s comfortable. Let yourself rest as long as you need. Just existing is hard. You’ve earned a break. 

4. Mammals need movement. Take your precious body and do something. Don’t hurt yourself. Be kind.

5. Mammals need stimulation. Treat yourself to a new jingle ball or mousie toy. Get a bird feeder and stare at it. Let yourself really enjoy it. Play is in your nature.

6. Mammals need socialization. I know this one is particularly difficult these days, but if you don’t keep reaching out, you’re going to forget yourself and start biting people. 

7. Mammals need cleanliness. Nobody likes scooping the litterbox, but it has to be done. Don’t forget your own body. Make your fur shine. Treat yourself as the luminous creature you are. 

And most important of all: don’t feel guilty. This isn’t about deserving (although you do deserve it). You’re an animal and you need these things to survive, and I very much want you to survive. 

[cherryblossomshadow]

@levymcgarden55

That first one is wild geese by Mary Oliver. The whole poem is definitely worth a read.

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University of New Mexico | Reddit

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

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Apparently, "the best way out is always through," is from Robert Frost's poem, "A Servant to Servants."

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Image descriptions below the cut:

[Image 1 ID: Excerpt from the poem, "wild geese" by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

/end ID]

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[Image 2 ID: Picture of barefeet barely submerged in a puddle/lakeshore with flowers floating on the water. Text reads:

The Best Way OuT iS Always Through iT No Matter How Hard iT is

/end ID]

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[Image 3 ID: A comment left by robin that reads:

it gets better, i think. maybe just for a day. maybe just for a song. but there's something there to hold on to.

/end ID]

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[Image 4 ID: Picture of worn brown shoes. Text reads:

fuck nihilism all my homies confront the meaninglessness of life as an opportunity for something wonderful and believe in the beauty of creating meaning yourself through relationships and sticking your hands in the dirt

/end ID]

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[Image 5 ID and source: Screenshot of tumblr post by @noonwalkdiary reading:

i was so fucking sad when i was 14 and now when i fold my laundry or see a pool of moonlight on the floor of my bedroom i know that miracles exist. i see love in everything. love sees everything in me too

/end ID]

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[Image 6 ID: Screenshot of a WhatsApp message. Someone texted the user a sunset photo of a coast. Beneath, text reads:

Did u get my vibes man? im thinking we are all going to be okay

/end ID]

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[Image 7 ID and source: Screenshot of a tumblr post from @wuntrum reading:

pioneering something called "gritted teeth optimism" where everything is gonna turn out okay even if i have to bite and claw and gnash my way through it

/end ID]

Did u get my vibes man?

[cherryblossomshadow]

i was so fucking sad when i was 14 and now when i fold my laundry or see a pool of moonlight on the floor of my bedroom i know that miracles exist. i see love in everything. love sees everything in me too

[cherryblossomshadow]

You Are Not Evil

hankschannel

TL;DW

Humans are not evil.

We solve problems.

And when we do, we create new problems

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Transcript excerpts below the cut:

I would like to talk really quick about this image. It's a sad Earth, covered in storm clouds … covered in cut-down trees and standing in a puddle of refuse … the Earth is sad. It is crying, and it says, “No intelligent species would destroy their own environment.”

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Hannah Ritchie’s very excellent book, “Not the End of the World,” has a subtitle … “how can we be the first generation to build a sustainable planet”

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The argument she makes is that sustainability in her definition includes things like “children not dying in infancy.” And when I look at images like this, what I see is a complete disregard for the accomplishments of humans

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In the United States in 1895, a quarter of people born could expect to not live to five. And that was lower than it used to be. And I have to emphasize this as much as I can: The biggest problem that our planet faces is that there are so many humans, and that the humans in question want to provide a very high standard of living for themselves and their children

So the reason why the environment is fucked … and I know that there's a group of people who will not believe me when I say this. And they will say, “No, it's the fossil fuel companies.”

And look, the fossil fuel companies have made this much worse and have slowed down our transition. They are not the only problem, but they are a huge problem

But the biggest reason why we have a problem is love. It's that we want to have children, and we want them to survive.

And so now there are 8 billion of us … and we want all 8 billion of those people to have pretty good lives

And I, sitting here in my heated office in short sleeves in December, I cannot tell a bunch of people in China or India or Ghana that they can't have what I have

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Here's my point: our intelligence for the vast majority of history of life on Earth has been oriented toward survival. And that has resulted in a huge amount of survival. And now we are in a situation where there can be a good life that has a great deal of survival and thriving in it, that does not require the amount of impact on the environment that we are having

But an unintelligent species that did what we have done … this has happened before. Trees, for example, caused a mass extinction when they arrived on land. They absorbed so much carbon dioxide that there was no longer very much carbon dioxide in the air, the water became less acidic, and many things died on the planet because of trees. And they didn't know that they were doing it. but also you can't blame them because they're trees. And so of course, they couldn't see it coming

But here's a story that I think we miss: When we as a species encounter local environmental problems, we tend to fix them. It was not long ago that London could be so clogged with coal smoke that you had to clean it off the windows every day, and that is no longer the case. You now never think of London as a place that has like got a coal smoke problem. In fact, the United Kingdom recently stopped burning coal entirely, which is very weird historically, considering they were where the coal started

But it was also very recently … that Beijing had this problem, and now Beijing has this problem much less. It still has an air pollution problem, just like Los Angeles does, but much less. When rivers catch on fire, we actually change our policies. When the rain becomes acidic, we change our policies

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The problem with global warming is twofold

It's invisible. There are cold days and hot days, like there always were. There will always be  cold days and hot days. You can't see the river catch on fire, you can't see the trees on the hilltop dying, because the soil has become so acidic, because the coal-fired power plants have been putting sulfur into the atmosphere. You can't see it

We only know about global warming because we are an intelligent species. If we were not smart, we would be trundling down this path completely oblivious, sometimes wondering why it got so hot.

Which, I have to point out was a thing that happened in the past. There were times when it just got cold or hot, and we didn't know why. And then the crops would fail, and a bunch of people would starve, and it was because there was a freaking volcano halfway across the world. We only know the problem exists, because we're smart. We only have the tools to deal with it, because we're smart. We are only implementing those tools, because we are smart

2. And the other problem with global warming is, another reason why we are too slow at this is because carbon dioxide is the goal gas. I feel like this is not understood by people but with acid rain, we didn't want the sulfur or the nitrogen to get released into the atmosphere. That was just a side effect of burning coal. With the hole in the ozone layer, we didn't want those molecules being released into the atmosphere. That was just a side effect of how it worked

Like what we wanted was cooling. And cooling, by the way, has saved so many lives. And we are going to have to have more of it to continue to save those lives. And that's going to be energetically expensive. (But it won't be expensive when it comes to the hole in the ozone layer, because we have we have better solutions now)

But energy is what so much of our thriving is based on, and we do not want to give up that thriving. And the way that we have created that energy for the most part has been burning fossil fuels. And the goal gas, the gas that you inevitably get out of burning fossil fuels if you burn them as cleanly as possible, all you get is carbon dioxide and water vapor

We built our society on it, we built our thriving on it. Because we are smart, and because we want to provide a good life for ourselves and our children. This is a Smart Species Activity

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My son has stared to come home from school with ideas like this in his head, where he's like, “We need to stop cutting down all the trees, Dad.” And I'm like, “Yeah absolutely, like what we need is for there to be lots of forests that are left to their own. But also remember that the house that we live in is built out of wood.”

And like the gears crank in his head, where he starts to ask himself if he's part of the problem. Which is why we need to have the definition of sustainability include the opportunity for human freedom and agency

I'm not saying that I shouldn't be responsible for more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, absolutely I shouldn’t … I should be wearing a hoodie right now, I should not have had the heater on all night in here

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But I think if we have this simplistic idea of humans or certain humans … a lot of the responses I saw to this [meme] were like, “No one ever said a Republican was an intelligent species.” And I'm like, “Oh my God, you people are so caught up in a current discourse and the current moment that you can't see how hard our all of our ancestors worked to provide us with a world that has plenty of food.” That's the biggest thing, plenty of food, but also climate-controlled shelter and pretty easy transportation to anywhere within what 400 miles? And then expensive, but still accessible transportation to the whole world. And also bananas which I love, and we're not going to grow in Montana. And if we did, it would be more energy expensive than shipping them from South America, where they're supposed to grow

Humans are remarkable. We are very powerful. Give any species this level of power, and they will provide opportunities for thriving for themselves and their children. They will try and prevent their children from dying. They will … walk through fire to make sure that their children don't die. They will destroy the Earth to make sure their children won't die. But I'm glad that we have enough intelligence both to provide those opportunities for our children to not die but also to start to uncover the impacts that we have, hopefully some time to self-correct some amount. We're at this point going to experience significant negative impacts from the warming of the planet. We did not move fast enough. I think that there's all kinds of like … not valid, but like understandable reasons, why we haven't moved fast enough

This is hard. People are greedy. People suck. People will tell stories to make themselves believe that the things that they want to do are in fact the right things to do. We all do that

But I don't want my son growing up, thinking that the species he is a part of is in some way evil. And I feel like that's like the root of a lot of sort of armchair environmentalism. I want him thinking humans are problem solvers, and solving problems creates new problems. And that's a little bit more of a complicated idea, but it is so true. I have solved so many problems, and never have I solved a problem that didn't create a new problem. I think we're absolutely at a place where increasing the amount of access to energy that I have as an individual will not make my life any better. But that is not the case for the majority of people on Earth. More access to medicine, refrigerators, ways to cook food that don't involve fires … (which we honestly in the US could also do a better job of, for Christ's sake. We have to stop having natural gas stoves. This is so stupid. I made a video about that once. I'll put that video at the end of this video)

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But when we solve the global warming problem, we will have created new problems. And we're doing it right now. In the background, there's like a land use fight. Renewable Technologies use way more land. Solar panels take up a lot of space, wind turbines take up a lot of space, you have to make a road between each win turbine, and those roads take up a lot of space. They impact the environment by being there

I think in the future, we will uninstall a bunch of those things, because we'll have other technologies that are better. We'll have maybe like advanced geothermal or we'll have more fission or we'll have fusion or whatever it is. But we're going to need energy

And the people of the future will be mad at us for the work that we did, and that's fine. Just like we're kind of mad at all the people who made the world a better place by burning a bunch of coal, so that we could all have refrigerators, which nobody thinks about as a perk anymore! They just think that's normal! A 100 years ago, more than half of Americans didn't have a refrigerator. It wasn't that long ago

And that's the situation in India now. Less than half of households in India have a refrigerator, and in the next 100 years, that number had better be 100% or we’re going to be pissed off at us

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I know this video could have been a lot shorter it could have just been one sentence it could have been:

Humans are not evil. We solve problems. And when we do, we create new problems

And I think that is like universally probably going to be a pretty normal story of intelligent species. Like if we found another, I bet they'd have a lot of stories about how they created Problems by solving problems

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And the speed at which we solve the problems … I think there's absolutely some shame we should experience here. I admit it's a hard one, but oh my God, the extent to which we will not accept any inconvenience in exchange for making the world more livable for people in other places in the world and also our own children in the future is stupid

I will say, this is an amount of foresight that is unusual and requires a great deal of intelligence. There aren't a lot of other species out there trying to figure out how to make the world work for the next generation. Like that's not how they think. Because most species don't think about the future. They don't have a conception of the future. Like dogs don't have a conception of the future. So like, it's remarkable that we're able to do it at all. I do think we could have been better at this, and I am frustrated the extent to which we have spent a lot of time arguing instead of acting, and we could have acted faster, and that would have mattered

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18:20

I'm going to stick the video about stoves and why we shouldn't use for both health reasons and environmental reasons why we should no longer use gas stoves okay enjoy that goodbye

(link to gas stove)

[cherryblossomshadow]

You Don't Want a Gas Stovetop

vlogbrothers, Hank Green

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Transcript (emphasis mine):

Good morning, John. I've had a half a cup of coffee, and I'm going to do something I almost never do I'm going to make an unscripted video about a thing that I care very passionately about

You watching this video need to not want a gas stove

Why? Because they suck!

Here's the thing that you are right about. The curlicue heating element stoves, they are the worst. They're hard to clean, they're extremely hard to control, like you cannot turn them on and off quickly. They take forever to heat up, they take forever to cool down

Now what happened is the stove top and natural gas industry made it so that what takes the place of that in your brain is a natural gas stove that has like the little blue flames – they're so beautiful – that like Gordon Ramsay used. But what you're doing when you have a natural gas stove is burning stuff in your home! Which results in, get this, decreased indoor air quality. How you can get around this by like having your fume hood like going full blast and certainly never have a natural gas stove that doesn't have a hood. Or get this?! You can have an induction stovetop that has more power and is easier to control than natural gas!

Chances are, there are three pipes connected to your house. There's the one that brings you water, that one's important. The one that takes the water away, we also want that. And the one that brings you methane. What century is this?!

It would be like having the gas station bring the gasoline directly to your car. Like this is a bad idea!

Now I know what you're thinking, “Hank. There is no way that cooking my hellofresh is significantly adding to climate change.” And you're right

But here's the thing, household natural gas use is a big contributor to climate change, it's just not mostly the stove top. However when natural gas companies ask people how they feel about switching their furnace from gas to electric or their water heater from gas to electric, they're like, “I don't care, whichever is better, I don't know.” Because you currently have a really efficient way to get power into your home that isn't a pipe full of methane! It's a power line! And there are great electric water heaters, and there are great electric furnaces and heat pumps, but people say, “I want my natural gas stove.” But that's a tiny percentage of the methane that is actually being sold by the gas company. Almost all of it is used in furnaces and water heaters. But as long as people are like, “I want to keep my gas stove, it's harder to clean, it makes the air inside my house dirty, but House Hunters says that it's a top tier product,” people will keep having the natural gas companies build and replace this extremely expensive infrastructure to pipe gas into our homes!

And gas companies are freaking out about this. They're doing all these campaigns about how great gas ranges are, even though they are objectively worse. Because if they can keep that toehold, they can make it make sense to keep giving you gas for those other things that electric could easily replace. But look electric could also easily replace your stove, because induction stove tops are better than gas!

And so one of the most important things that you can do as a person who's concerned about climate change is take the little thing out of your brain that says, “gas stoves are the best kind of stove,” and look at it and be like, “you're a freaking idiot.” Then you throw it onto your induction stove top and nothing happens, because that's not how it works. It induces the heat in the pan. The stove top itself doesn't get hot cuz they're amazing. So you have to put it into a pan, put that on the stove top, fry it up, and have it with butter … This is why I script. That right there, is why I script, so that doesn't happen!

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It's not important that you replace your gas stove right now. In fact, it's probably best that you don't. It's important that you don't think it's better than induction because it's not. Because at some point in the future, someone's going to knock on your door and say, “This area is about to have its natural gas pipes replaced, and we have to decide whether or not to replace them with infrastructure that will last 60 to 80 years.” And if a bunch of people in your neighborhood say, “Well, I would, but I really like my gas stove top,” it's not going to happen, and we're going to keep burning methane in people's houses for 80 years! I would be sympathetic if gas were better but it's not!

[cherryblossomshadow]

"Hey, what do you want for Ch-"

I don't know, as soon as you started the question, I somehow momentarily was struck with such a lack of desire for any material goods that there's now a school of thought in Buddhism who reveres my ADHD riddled brain as a potential speedrun to enlightment.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Ostracizers Are Evil

Friends Accept Me As I Am

Friendship Before All

Friendship Is Transitive

Friends Do Everything Together

There's a situation I was hoping to ask for advice for.

In a small server we run, sometimes we go into voice chat. The mood's always great until one person joins. They immediately go on tangents, talk in meme speak, repeat their jokes (which take an entire minute to say and are spoken in a very slurred way) 3-5 times in the span of ten minutes when they weren't that funny, and generally tend to go off-topic and talk to us, not with us. They will just ramble and ramble and take up over 50% of the total time spoken.

When they join, the mood goes down. People go quiet, start leaving, they don't wanna be alone with this person when others start going away so the VC quickly ends. When it keeps going, they take the spotlight. We can't get a word between their ramblings. As the server owner, I've talked to them about this multiple times, but they usually last ten minutes before they crack again.

My issue is that they are very clearly someone neurodivergent who has probably lost a lot of things and people due to being ND and who is likely an outcast at school. We're already all outcasts, being in fandom, and if I were to mute them in VC (because I can assure you that asking them to be mindful did NOT work) or shut them out of them, it feels like we're just further casting them out. I don't wanna hurt this person. But our group is having a worse experience due to this, making VCs nearly impossible and tense for us to do. They do it in chat too, but it's easier to ignore there.

Any ideas as to how I can solve this in a strategic way, or is there no avoiding hurting their feelings?

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Your options are to let them trample people while ruining the space for everyone else or to prioritize everyone else while hurting this one person.

We nerds are way too prone to seeing only the one outcast and ignoring the needs of the group.

What about everyone who's doing 5% better and for whom these voice chats are a lifeline in a daily life where they're the awkward one who can't fit in? Maybe there isn't actually anyone who's only 5% better, but you know what I mean: every other group member also has needs, and these needs also matter.

If they cannot help it, there's not much you can do. It's kind to give them some chances, but you've done that. They either won't shape up without a more aggressively enforced boundary or—more likely—simply cannot. Maybe an in-person coach who works with ND people could help. Maybe a couple more decades of experience could. It's not your job as some rando they know online to fix their life.

It is a painful realization that we have to put our own oxygen masks on first as someone commented here recently.

The Geek Social Fallacies are evergreen.

[cherryblossomshadow]

I'm not actually inherently against the idea of prison labour in the sense that I am not against fairly compensated, voluntary jobs for prisoners. If there was a well-regulated program in place to give prisoners jobs with the same paycheque anyone else in that field gets, with training, work experience, job skills, etc when they got out I'd be all for it. That way they'd have a proper resume and demonstrated skills to fall back on and could find work and rejoin society again on their own independence, like how rehabilitation is supposed to work. Actually, add some financial literacy and life skills education on top of that while they're serving their sentence, and you're setting them up for success rather than re-incarceration when they get out again. What I'm against is slave labour forced upon prisoners for pennies on the dollar, if they get anything at all.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Lady and the Tramp

Summary:

“Tradition dictates that foreign assassins must be publicly executed." The council member turned to the Captain and ordered, “Set it up for tomorrow at noon and take that mongrel to the dungeon. Lock the lady in her room.” Temari twisted her head to watch as the guards dragged Shikamaru away, holding herself tense until he was out of sight. This better work, she thought.

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ShikaTemaWeek2024, day 1: The Lady and the Tramp fandom: Naruto | ship: Shikamaru x Temari | trigger warnings: canon-typical violence | content: Shikamaru faces execution for killing a Suna Council member, oh no! | word count: 1204

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Helpful link to AO3

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Written for Day 1 of ShikaTema Week 2024 -The Lady and the Tramp! Inspired by the climactic scene of Lady and Tramp saving the day, but immediately getting misunderstood. Lady was locked up, and Tramp was sent to the pound (sent to his death, essentially). That was my initial idea, but oh my god they would not stop trying to think themselves out of the situation 😂 Any characters you don’t recognize were inspired by Gaara Hiden: A Sandstorm Mirage, which I have not read (also I made Maizuru a real boy 🤥)

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Yura crumpled, sliding smoothly off of Shikamaru’s kunai onto the moonlit sand. Shikamaru reached out to stabilize himself against the wall, but his leg suddenly gave out on him. Temari caught him, as he knew she would, and she guided him to a seated position, propped against the armory wall. They took a moment to take each other in, trying to catalogue the other's injuries as the adrenaline drained away. Shikamaru was relieved to see that she was much less wounded than him and Yura. She had a few lacerations on her arms, a gash on her leg, and one puncture wound, all bleeding sluggishly. Injuries she only received when covering his position. 

Temari straightened, glancing around warily. They hadn’t exactly been quiet during the fight to keep the Suna Council traitor from tipping off Sasori. "You can't walk," she stated.

Shikamaru shook his head. “You should go.” Whether to hide or to catch up to Kankuro, it would be better for her to leave him behind.

Temari pursed red lips. “They’ll execute you when they find you here,” she reminded him.

Just Shikamaru, not her. He wasn’t exactly thrilled to die, but he was glad that Temari's status as a Lady of Suna protected her from the same fate. If she were to stay, she would only be detained, not executed.

Shikamaru thought back to Suna’s favored methods of execution. He shifted slightly, fingers itching to move into their customary position. “Publicly?”

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Black Antling sprang from the ground, enclosing Shikamaru inside. Temari pounded fruitlessly on its metal body. "Shikamaru!"

"Enough of that, Lady Temari." Lord Tojuro swept into the room with a full complement of guards. “Don't get yourself into more trouble.”

“Don’t fight,” Shikamaru weakly implored her from inside the puppet. “I’ll be reunited with my brother soon.” Temari caught his meaning and fought to keep the air of a panicked Lady. Stupid self-sacrificing Konoha nincompoop, she internally fumed.

“Yes, don’t embarrass yourself further." The senior council member sneered. “Guards, restrain her.” Maizuru, Captain of the Guard in Kankuro’s absence, motioned at two of his men, and they grabbed her by the arms, pulling her away from Shikamaru’s current prison.

"Wait, Lord Tojuro, please!" Temari pleaded, every cloying word tasting like ash inside her mouth. "This isn't what it looks like!"

"Oh, so you didn't conspire with an envoy from Konoha to murder a Council member?" Lord Tojuro tutted. "My mistake, my lady."

"Yura was a traitor to Suna!" Temari argued, despite knowing it would fall on deaf ears. "Please don't execute him!"

"But he did assassinate Lord Yura?"

Temari forced herself to hang her head in a mockery of defeat. "Yes, he did," she admitted.

"Then as you yourself have pointed out,” Lord Tojuro pointed out, satisfaction dripping from every word. “Tradition dictates that foreign assassins must be publicly executed." The council member turned to Maizuru and ordered, “Set it up for tomorrow at noon and take that mongrel to the dungeon. Lock the lady in her room.”

Temari twisted her head to watch as the guards dragged Shikamaru away, holding herself tense until he was out of sight. This better work, she thought.

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The sun glared high overhead. Civilians and ninja alike gathered on the tiered walls outside the village. Temari fingered her handcuffs as she watched the guards drag Shikamaru out of the village gate. After a final push, they retreated, leaving him to limp further into the desert.

The wind slowly picked up, sand obscuring him from view as it gained in intensity. Temari clenched her fists in front of her, trying to maintain her outward appearance of calm. Please let him be okay, she chanted helplessly.

Lord Tojuro nodded to Maizuru, and the Captain rang the gong, though it was barely audible over the roar of the sandstorm. Temari raised her cuffed hands to shield her eyes from the abrasive particles. Maizuru rang the gong again.

Suddenly, the entire desert went still. The roar of the storm suddenly ceased, leaving only the echo of the second gong ringing across the desert. The dust cleared, revealing three figures in the far distance. Gaara began striding confidently towards the village gates. Kankuro followed behind, seemingly unharmed. Shikamaru limped slightly behind them. Temari nearly collapsed in relief. The gambit had paid off!

Temari had barely been able to sleep, worrying over a thousand what-ifs. What if Shikamaru’s injuries kill him before noon? What if Kankuro’s Suna-Konoha team doesn’t make it in time to rescue Gaara? What if they lose to Sasori, even with the element of surprise that they had killed Yura to keep?

Temari studied their movements closely, trying to pick out any injuries on the three of them. Gaara seemed entirely unharmed, Kankuro only tired, and Shikamaru with no more injuries than he had had the last time she saw him. The whispers around her grew louder in volume, the closer they approached. They finally dissolved into cheers when the villagers realized their Kazekage had returned to them.

Gaara stopped just a few feet away from the wall. He held up a hand to quiet the crowd.

Lord Tojuro took the opportunity to exclaim, “Gaara! Where have you been?”

“Yura betrayed Suna and handed me over to Sasori of the Red Sand, in league with the Akatsuki.” Gaara's steady voice projected across the calm desert. You could hear a reed crack. “We are henceforth cutting all ties with the Akatsuki.”

Gaara motioned, and Kankuro stepped forward to lay Sasori's corpse on the sand.

“Lord Tojuro, as Kazekage, I call you to account for your actions!" Gaara proclaimed. Temari smiled as she watched Lord Tojuro’s face turn redder than a heatstroke. "You have not been acting in Suna’s best interests. Striking deals with organizations like the Akatsuki and now picking fights with Konoha?"

“How dare you, boy!” Lord Tojuro yelled, spittle flying everywhere. “Everything I do is in Suna’s best interest! I was killing for Suna long before your father was even born! You are not fit to be Kazekage!”

“On the contrary, you, Lord Tojuro, are not fit to be an elder on the Suna Council,” Gaara calmly responded. “I hereby strip you of your title and responsibilities. Please remand yourself to custody immediately.”

Lord Tojuro was so mad he was shaking. Temari stepped up beside him, cheekily announcing, “Here, I have some handcuffs.”

.

So excited to be contributing to ShikaTema week again <3 I hope you enjoyed this! Please let me know what you thought! (pls be kind T.T)

[cherryblossomshadow]

ao3 down? 🥺

[cherryblossomshadow]

canceled problematic babysitter for rolling eyes at the "Remember to respect the parents complete ownership and control over every aspect of the lives of these humans!" parts of "how to work with kids" advices

[cherryblossomshadow]

hey guys i'm going to the store can u make sure nothing happens to my chocolate milk