#<— not sure if its fully anti psych but whatever | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

phykios · 4 years ago

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people on ao3 were thirsty for this fic so... here you go, tumblr ❤

put on the red light M, sex work au, modern royalty au, no powers au [read on ao3]

🌊🌊🌊

Sometimes, she really regrets being best friends with Piper.

Said best friend still gapes at her from across the table, jaw practically on the floor. “Never?”

Annabeth rolls her eyes. “Never.”

“Not even, like, at school?”

“When I would have had the time?” she asks. “I was attempting a five-year program in four years, and then… well, you know.” And she does know, all about the very exciting drama that went down in Annabeth’s senior year.

Piper is still flabbergasted. “Not even high school?”

Annabeth takes a sip of her drink. “I wasn’t exactly a hot commodity in high school.” She’d been passively pretty all her life, but she hadn’t exactly been what some might call Girlfriend material, capital G. She’d stuck to her fifteen year plan to the letter, eschewing most social contact, working herself into the ground to overcome ADHD by sheer force of will and get into Harvard, a plan which allowed approximately zero time for a boyfriend. Not that there were even boys that she had really liked at the time.

The only boy she had ever considered liking in that way, well. She had lost contact with him a while ago.

“I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it or not, Ripley, it’s true. I’ve never had sex. You happy?”

“I mean, if you don’t mind me asking, are you ace?” Piper asks. “Because that’s totally cool, of course.”

She shakes her head. “Definitely not ace.” She has a minor collection of personal massagers and insertable devices should she ever need to take care of an urge, and plenty of fantasies she can call on whenever the need arises--a system which has worked just fine for years.

“I just…” Piper stares, unconvincingly. “How?”

Shrugging, she takes another sip of coffee. “Just never got around to it, I guess.”

It’s not something she’s proud of, but by the same token, it’s not something that brings her shame, either. It is what it is; Annabeth, a notable workaholic, has never had sex with another person in her life. In some ways, it sucks, sure, but in other ways, it’s been a blessing in disguise. After all, no previous partners means that there’s no one to spread any dirt on the newly minted Princess Anja Elisabet of Sweden.

But Piper isn’t having it.

“Do you… want to have sex?” she asks. “Like, ever?”

As the daughter of one of the biggest movie stars in the world, she knows that Piper has had her fair share of high profile relationships, something that earned her a little bit of a nasty (and, quite frankly, racist) reputation among the paparazzi, which is ridiculous, since Piper is one of the most effortlessly gracious and classy people Annabeth knows. Piper does not go slinging herself and her partners around in the media like some of her contemporaries; instead, she likes to keep her personal details a bit closer to the chest, sharing them only with trusted confidants, like Annabeth, who knows full well how much Piper enjoys the act of sex. Sex for Piper isn’t dirty or taboo, it’s fun and it’s being close with other people, it’s liberating and exciting and intimate, and she extols its virtues whenever asked to give her opinion.

She makes sex sound really good, but never in a way that makes Annabeth feel ashamed for never having done it. Until now, of course. “Well… yeah,” says Annabeth. “I’d like to. I mean, I think it’d be kind of nice, you know, to do it at least once.”

“But then you’d have to start dating,” Piper surmises.

“Yeah,” says Annabeth, glumly.

Dating is a notorious problem for people in her line of work. Royalty, not architects, that is. Dating for architects is easy; just find someone who doesn’t mind the type A personalities and the obsession with work. Dating for royals is… significantly harder, and not really something she wants to engage with right now. She’s only been a royal for a few years, after all—she still feels like it’s a big cosmic joke, that someone is going to unearth some old documents or reveal a couple of forgeries that will bring the whole thing crashing down, and she doesn’t want to bring an outsider into all that drama, let alone deal with it herself.

Piper takes a sip of her drink, thoughtful, then lays out her next question carefully. “Have you ever considered a one-night stand?”

Annabeth stares. “You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not! People do it.”

“Yeah,” she scoffs, “people. Not me.”

“It’s really not hard,” Piper says, “I’ve done it plenty of times.”

“What, you want me to make a tinder?”

She laughs. “God, wouldn’t that be a riot. But no, I mean, there have to be other single royals or celebs around. Why not one of them?”

“Because they’re all insufferable social-climbing jackasses that make me want to rip my skull out of my face every time I’m forced to listen to them at a state dinner.”

“Okay, then.” Never one to be deterred, Piper pulls out her phone, then waits until Annabeth has taken a sip of her drink, presumably to keep her from immediately disagreeing, before dropping the bomb to end all bombs. “Let’s get you an escort.”

Annabeth snorts iced coffee directly out of her nose.

“Shit! Sorry!” Piper shoves a handful of napkins at her. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, do you need water?”

Wheezing, Annabeth shakes her head. “Give me a sec,” she coughs, fingers covering her mouth.

Thank God she’s got her trusty, anti-pap hat on. If anyone took a picture of her like this, her uncle would probably disown her.

“What the hell, Piper?” she rasps when she can finally breathe again.

“I’m so sorry, I should have timed that better.”

“No, I mean—” she coughs again. “The other thing.”

She raises an eyebrow. “The escort?”

“Keep your voice down!” On instinct, she glances around the London cafe, looking for any stray microphones. Satisfied that no one is listening for the moment, she turns back to her insane best friend. “Yes, the… that thing.”

“It’s not that crazy,” says Piper, turning back to her phone. “We’ll find you a really nice one, someone super high class and discreet, draw up an NDA, and then you can cross it off your bucket list. Man or woman?”

“Man, but—" she sputters. “I—I can’t see a prostitute! Can you imagine the scandal if it got out?”

Forget the iced coffee thing. The princess of Sweden, caught with a hooker… Annabeth is nauseous just thinking about the media circus.

“Not a prostitute,” Piper corrects. “An escort.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Same umbrella, but no.” She types away, faster than Annabeth can keep track of. “Pimping is illegal here, but escorts usually have managers.”

“Be that as it may,” because Piper seems to have forgotten the key part of this conversation, “I can’t have sex with an escort.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” The million and a half legitimate reasons not to go through with it all fly through her mind, getting lost somewhere on the way to her mouth. “Because!”

Piper just smiles at her. “I’ll get you a really nice one, promise. Think of it as a late birthday present.”

“It’s September.”

“Early Christmas, then.” And she grins, full of teeth. “Just trust me, okay? Let me take care of it.”

Famous last words, she thinks, popping a bit of scone in her mouth.

***

7PM, the Dorchester Hotel. Dinner first, then… whatever, later.

Annabeth can’t help but arrive early. She’d never been a punctual person before, but apparently now it’s been beaten into her with all the rest of her princess training.

Five-star hotels are still something of a novelty for her, even though she’s stayed in quite a few by now. Thankfully she’s never stayed here before; she’d be too worried someone on staff would recognize her.

She had thought that she’d show up early, psych herself up a little, get emotionally prepared, or at least have a little time to calm her racing heart before her… date… showed up.

Unfortunately, as punctual as she is, apparently, he’s beaten her to the punch.

He’s exactly where he said he’d be, wearing exactly what he said he’d be wearing; black suit, blue tie, gold watch. Her heart is beating so loudly, she’s sure he can hear it from across the room. “Um, excuse me,” she asks, a little more timid than she’d like, sidling up to the man. “Paris?”

At his name--well, she assumes it’s his name, but it’s probably a pseudonym now that she thinks about it--he lifts his head up, his lips already quirking up in a smile that she can only describe as troublemaking. “Bethany?”

Right. She used a pseudonym as well. A second pseudonym—one other than Anja. “Yeah,” she smiles in return, her shakiness easing.

“Hey!” He stands up from his seat in the lounge, leaning in and kissing her on the cheek. “It’s so nice to meet you!”

“You too.” She realizes with a pang; he is so tall. He’s tall, with broad shoulders and a trim waist, startlingly green eyes and thick, curly black hair. And… “You’re American?”

“I am,” he says, unashamed. “The accent gave me away, huh? Hope you weren’t looking for something else.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she assures him. “I just wasn’t expecting it. It’s fine!"

He grins, crookedly, and she feels her heart skip a beat. “I’ll take it. Shall we head to dinner, then?”

***

Dinner was amazing, of course. The food, the atmosphere, and the company, she fully admits—all exceptional. Paris is an amazing conversationalist, she discovers, smart and funny and attentive, even gently teasing her a little. “You’re American, too, you know,” he’d said, sipping on his glass of wine, “so you can’t give me any grief over my lack of an accent.”

“I don’t live here,” she’d retorted, pointing her fork at him, “unlike some people I could mention.”

“Where do you live?”

“Ah, well—” Covering up her hesitation by taking a bite of chicken, she’d thought quickly. “Grew up in the States, but recently I moved to, um, Sweden, to be closer to my family.”

He’d nodded. “Expat, huh?”

“Something like that.”

He’d listened to her, really listened, chimed in at appropriate moments, made surprisingly insightful comments about her job and her life, and, well, he’s kind of perfect. If he weren’t an escort, he’d make an amazing boyfriend. She tells him as much, in the elevator on the way up to his room.

“Aw, thank you!” He smiles at her, a single dimple popping out under his strong cheekbones. “That’s very kind of you to say.”

“Why do you do this, anyway?” she asks. “I mean,” oh God, that question is some kind of faux pas isn’t it, Christ what the hell happened to all her etiquette training, “you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to—”

“No, it’s okay,” he says as the elevator door opens. They’re up on a high floor, where the higher high rollers like to stay, and she follows him as he walks confidently down the hallway. “It’s not an offensive question.”

Still, she feels pretty shitty for asking. “I’m sure you get asked that all the time.”

“Most clients honestly aren’t all that interested,” he admits, shrugging a shoulder. “They need something, I can provide it. It can be a little transactional at times, but I’ve met a lot of really cool people, so it all balances out in the end.” Arriving at their door, Paris swipes his keycard, holding it open for her like some kind of butler. “After you.”

The room is enormous, even for a five-star hotel. It is a full-on suite, with a seating area and separate bedroom, a large wooden desk off to one wall, a gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling window that looks onto Hyde Park, full of lights dotted about like mini constellations. “Wow,” she breathes, “look at that view.”

“I never get tired of it,” Paris says, coming up behind her. “No matter how many times I come here.”

“You come here a lot?” she asks. She almost follows it up with a question on how he can afford it, but she ruthlessly quashes that down.

“My clients like it,” is all he says.

“I’m not surprised, all that 1930s deco in the lobby. The façade is a little plain, though, in my opinion.”

“Oh yeah? How would you do it better, Miss Architect?” She gets the sense that he’s teasing her. It feels oddly intimate for the situation—he’s not a friend, or a boyfriend, or even a date. He’s an escort. Providing a service, as he put it. He shouldn’t be so friendly with her.

And yet. “Well, I love Neoclassical, but honestly, I’m not super into hotels.”

“What are you into, then?” Casually, he undoes his tie, sliding it off his neck. She swallows.

“Um.” Focus, girl. “Office buildings, monuments. I dunno. I just want to… I just want to build something good, you know? Something permanent. Proof that I was here, you know?”

“Something permanent, huh?” He speaks softly, a respectable distance away, but she’s drawn in anyway, by his open shirt collar and his easy demeanor and his stupid sea green eyes that remind her so much of— “That sounds really nice.”

Then he steps up to her. His hand, warm and big, draws up her arm, fingers tracing lightly over her skin, and she shivers. He cups her neck, fingering the hair at the base of her scalp, and leans in, his lips parted. He smells like salt, like the perfume of the wine they shared, like the sea on a sunny morning.

“Wait,” she murmurs against his lips.

Immediately, he pulls back. “Is something wrong?” he asks, concerned.

“No, no, it’s fine, I just—” She swallows, her heart racing. “I just need a minute.”

“Of course.” He takes a step back, and she has to stop herself from pulling him in further. “Do you need anything? Water, champagne? They always stock the minifridge.”

She shakes her head. “No, I’m fine. It’s just, I’ve never… done this before.”

“What, hire an escort?” He grins, rakish. “I can tell.”

“Not that—I mean, yes, that too, but I mean—I’ve never—” She huffs, annoyed she has to have this conversation twice in one week. “I’ve never had sex before, okay?”

That shocks him a little. His eyes widen, taken aback. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Chuckling weakly, she rubs a hand on her arm, looking out the window. “So… yeah.”

“So, don’t take this the wrong way,” says Paris, “but, there are easier ways to get laid than by using a professional. I mean, I’m grateful for the business and all, but, well, look at you.” He looks her up and down, somehow simultaneously respectful and entirely indecent. “I don’t think you’d have a problem getting a date.”

“It’s… complicated.” Understatement of the fucking millennium. “My friend thought this would be the easiest way to… go about it.”

Paris laughs. “You don’t agree.”

“I don’t… not agree,” she says. “I’m just. A little nervous.”

He nods. “I’d bet.” Chewing his lip, he looks towards the bedroom suite, and Annabeth tries not to think about how those teeth would feel on her mouth instead. “How about this; why don’t you take a shower? It might help calm you down a bit.”

“Won’t you be lonely?” she quips, a moment of reckless bravery.

“I have a few calls I can make,” says Paris, eyes dancing. “Go on. Make yourself comfortable.”

***

She has to hand it to the five-star hotels; the shower is always outstanding. Amazing pressure, amazing heat, it definitely rivals the plumbing in some of the castles she’s stayed at. And the robes, always so soft and warm, though a little on the small side. This one just barely covers her ass, which she figures isn’t a huge problem for tonight, but still.

When she steps out of the bathroom, she can hear Paris talking. “Uh huh,” he says. “Yeah. No, it’s going great. Professor Kleio said she’d write me a recommendation. She was really impressed with the last build. Yeah.” She runs her fingers through her wet hair, pushing it back from her face. “No, the conference is next month. Probably. Pretty sure I can get Tyson to help, but I don’t think it’ll get that far before the end of the week. Uh huh.”

Paris had taken off his suit jacket at some point; she can see it hung up in the closet on a hanger, perfectly pressed. He’s still in his shirt, but he’s unbuttoned it, the sleeves rolled up around his forearms. It is effortlessly attractive, even from the back. She coughs lightly, unwilling to startle him, and he turns, giving her another up-and-down, this one decidedly less respectful than the first.

“Hey, I gotta go, I’ll call you tomorrow. Say hi to Estelle for me. Love you.” And he hangs up.

“Your girlfriend?” she asks.

He smiles, all soft. “My mom.”

Something in her melts at his tone. “Aw,” she coos. “Is she back in America?”

“Yeah. I don’t get to see her all that often, so I try to call her every day.”

It is so unfathomably sweet, sweet and… humanizing, as weird as that sounds. He’s not just an unbelievably handsome man with a jaw cut like a diamond and a five-star rating, according to Piper, he’s a person with a whole other life that she knows nothing about. It’s liberating, in its own way. She can make mistakes with him, and he’ll understand. He won’t judge her, not against his other clients, or even his other partners.

Swallowing, she slides the robe off her shoulders, slowly, achingly. Maybe he turned the heat up while she wasn’t looking, because all of a sudden, she feels hot all over, from her cheeks to her chest and down, and down. Maybe it’s all coming from him, from the heat of his gaze on her, his pink tongue coming out to wet his lips. She wants it, wants them, wants him, on her and in her and all over her.

But he stays on his side of the room, waiting for her to take the plunge.

She steps up to him, close but not touching, breathing in the heady, strong scent of him, raking her eyes up his body for a change. Even through his shirt, she can tell he’s fit, the exposed skin of his arms tanned a deep brown, thick, coarse, dark hair running up to his wrists. On his right arm, there is a black trident long and straight, crossed by an old, white scar. “What happened here?” she asks, lifting her hand to trace it, leaving visible goosebumps in its wake.

“Sailing accident,” he whispers. “Long time ago.”

There’d been a kid at her summer camp for troubled teens who’d gotten thrown off his boat and hurt like that, once. She remembered so vividly, because she’d been on infirmary duty that day, and all she could think about while wrapping up his arm was how fucking stupid he'd been, how he could have gotten himself really hurt, how badly she’d wanted to kiss him.

She'd moved across the country before she'd gotten the chance, though, and no one else had ever made her feel like that since. Until now. “Got any other ink to show me?”

But instead of answering, he leans down, and he kisses her.

She’s been kissed before. She’s never had sex, but she’s done some kissing in her life. It’s usually pretty awkward, in her experience, too much of one thing and never enough of another.

Nope, not Paris. Of course, he’s also a phenomenal kisser. Why she expected anything else, she’s not sure.

His hands come up to circle her neck again, his thumbs running against her cheekbones. He kisses her, pouring passion and intent into her, his mouth soft and sweet against hers. And then he slips her some tongue, and it’s a whole different ballgame.

“Take off your shirt,” she whispers into his mouth.

He does, effortlessly, without detaching himself from her. It’s a smooth, easy motion, and she is delighted to discover that he is as firm as she suspected he was, the muscles jumping under her touch.

Almost without her realizing it, he backs her up towards the bed, her knees hitting the edge of the mattress. He lays her out against the sheets, his bare chest hot against hers. “Before we go any further,” he says, and she can feel the vibrations of his voice all throughout her body, “tell me—have you ever made yourself come?”

She flushes at his words, the dirty talk which should sound stupid but instead comes out all sultry and sexy. “Yes,” she says, breath hitching as he nips at her neck. “Yes, I have.”

“Good.” He smiles into the skin of her collarbone, traveling down, and down, and down. “I want you to show me how.”

“Isn’t that,” she pants, “your job?”

“Hmm, you’re right.” He pushes her thighs apart with his shoulders, bright eyes staring up at her as he licks his lips. “Let me get to work, then.”

Breathing heavily, she curls her fingers into the ten thousand count sheets, eyes fixed on the ceiling pattern. She can’t look at the dark head between her legs, can only breathe in through her nose as he kisses up the skin of her thigh, higher and higher and higher until…

Jesus fucking lord almighty.

***

“I found the perfect guy for you.”

“Piper, come on.” Theses brunch dates of theirs were starting to get a little repetitive. “I let you set me up with a professional, but I draw the line at a blind date.”

“Have I steered you wrong yet, your highness?” Piper asks, knowing grin firmly on her face.

Annabeth blushes. So what if that night with Paris was the most incredible experience she’d ever had? Doesn’t mean she’s ready for a full-on relationship, yet. “No,” she says, rubbing her temples.

“Great!” Then she does something that Annabeth doesn’t expect—she starts packing up. “So he’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” she smiles, so bright it borders on painful, her nose scrunching up. “I invited him to brunch. But he’s really, really nice, I promise.”

“Does he know about—”

“No, he doesn’t, but if you wanted to spill, he’s a fantastic secret keeper.”

“How do you even know—”

Piper glances over Annabeth’s shoulder, eyes lighting up, waving a hand. “Friend of a friend of Jason, he’s a grad student at Cambridge, he’s doing his dissertation on naval history, so you know the king will love him.”

“Piper!” Annabeth half-calls, half-hisses at her friend as she stands up “Piper, you can’t just—”

“Hey,” says a voice behind her. A very familiar voice. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was joining us.” She turns around. Slowly. “Nice to meet you, I’m… Percy…” he trails off, sea green eyes widening behind a pair of thick, black glasses, beneath dark, curly hair. On his arm, a black trident stood out against his skin, straight and proud.

“Percy, meet Annabeth,” Piper says. “Annabeth, meet Percy. Okay, have fun you two!”

And she waltzes out of there, completely unaware of the absolute shitstorm she left in her wake.

#my fic #pjo #percabeth #the rivalry ends here #percy jackson #annabeth chase

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liberalfartsdegree · 4 years ago

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seeing a number of people here and elsewhere talk about NBC’s H*annibal series in terms of trans politics with largely 2 main sub-themes: 1. that the relationship between the two central characters “feels” t4t and 2. that the story captures something “trans” in the way that it deals with social ostracism, violence, and (ostensibly) the relationship between creation and destruction.

To the first, I’ll say that I too am not immune to pointing at characters on TV and saying “that’s trans” for fun, and it can be fun to look at villains for that moment because its satisfying or whatever.

But to the second, and the way in which it connects to the first, I’m profoundly sad about the way that it sounds like people are connecting to it. The article I’ve seen a lot of people float is about “creation through destruction” focalized through the writer’s experience of their top surgery and DIY piercing/tattooing experiences. I guess I’m struggling with the contiguity that’s established between those practices, and the kind of “self-making” (which isn’t always non-violent) that trans people often go through with the kind of violence on that show. Full disclaimer, I had to turn it off--I couldn’t bear to “read around” the way that psychological abuse and cruelty was the only way to express needs and desires, not to mention the unmitigated gore of the show I found very challenging.

It reminds me of my experience of reading Nietzsche--which the show references explicitly. The afterlife of Nietzsche has a weird multivalent presence. On face, Nietzsche is a violent racist, misogynist, anti-semite, white-supremacist, etc. and his philosophy explicitly and repeatedly invokes violence in every manifestation as a means of accessing and reinforcing power. However, in reading Nietzsche, ESPECIALLY in “enlightened” contexts with other readers (who I respect and trust! I’m talking about smart people doing good faith readings) there is an explicit desire to recover Nietzsche--to say “well, but his method” or “yes, and his structure of thinking is still useful.” I can’t fully reject this approach either! If nothing else Nietzsche developed a genealogical method that was instrumental in the kinds of reading that I care about. But The real task is’t to stop there, it can’t be to stop there, because we have to hold in our mind the fact that these meanings we can read in the text are co-constituted by the most repugnant and violent imaginings possible.

Looking at the moment that hannibal is having, my first thought was a question--why are so many people who I would like to consider myself in community with (young AFAB trans people) finding solace in this show that I can’t bear to look at? The article (which I’m not linking deliberately because I am reflecting, not trying to start discourse) seems to be in good faith--I fully believe the writer finds immense power in what they called the “creation from destruction” they read in the text. There was a slip in the discussion though--the writer saw the cutting into of their own body reflected more in the psyches of Hannibal and Will Graham instead of the actual destroyed bodies depicted on screen. I think that’s super interesting if deeply sad: the body was externalized to the dead bodies on the show, while the mind was transposed into the cerebral lead characters.

I don’t care to psychoanalyze that too much. Like, is it because AFAB trans people I’ve seen tend to connect with stories about the externality of bodies as a way to process dysphoria and lived experiences of misogyny etc? Sure maybe, but I think that kind of symptomatic reading strikes me as almost self-indulgent (that old tumblr meme about ‘some people need murder to cope’ comes to mind).

I guess I’m just seeing a confluence of something here--and I don’t know how to name it without spending more time on this than I need to--which comes down to a sense that the body is a vehicle for psychological distress and that modification (”creation out of destruction”) of the body is reparative, held at the same time that the body is only ever external to the mind, and seeing violence done to bodies is ok as long as it creates something for the mind seeing it.

And that’s just not true!!!! I mean like, everyone’s reading and life experience is different and there’s no one way to “be” trans and I’m not trying to prescribe a way of being for anybody. But like reading Nietzsche, taking that message out of that show seems to ignore the horrific, repugnant violence which is its precondition. I think it’s essential to see the elision between the violently dismembered bodies in the show and the creation/destruction of Will Graham (and I’m not even getting into the psychological violence Hannibal does against him which is nightmare-inducing). Transposing that onto the self seems to miss that key slippage in the show between “bodies that matter” (thanks judy) and the ones that don’t. Taken in real life, either the person’s own body becomes the site of this violence (as happened in the article) or the violence becomes externalized to an Other who matters even less than the person doing this reading (wherever abjection settles itself--from t*kt*k it seems like these readers are nb AFAB people who are trying to negotiate their own expressions of gender within their attachment to femininity who often direct this need for violence against “masculine women” whatever that means)

ive spent way too long on this idk just like what would it be like to experience your dysphoria as contiguous with your experience of yourself and with your embodied experience and recognize the urge to violence as predicated on a construction of something abject, and to instead reject that and start over from a place of care

(and im not subposting at you @ keneinahora if you see this--of course I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to share them, but this isn’t intended as a weird passive-aggressive callout. I hope that it’s clear from writing this that I’m not addressing any single individual and the value that media has on an individual scale).

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pollyannisms · 4 years ago

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DISCORD HEADCANON DUMP

Ángela falls strictly into the Iceberg category, where promotion is off the table entirely because she is too valuable for the foundation where she is. Unless another version of her comes along, they would never find another person to do what she does with the same efficiency and fearlessness. It's like, how many forensic pathologists would be happy and willing to climb into the giant decomposing chest cavity of a potentially dangerous anomaly to get an insight on what it was that put them down? Not many besides Ángela, that's for sure!

Okay, this is more of a general headcanon than one which applies to a Ángela alone. Still, I'm of the firm opinion that any researcher/doctor/security officer/etc. Who fits the profile of a 'team-leader (i.e. has assistant workers, trains future workers as a part of an apprenticeship program, etc.) has the additional duty of monitoring the workers under them, in addition to whatever job they are expected to perform, and reporting any concerning/dissenting/anti-social/overly-cruel or generally problem behaviour to the Ethical Enforcers before it becomes a more significant issue for the foundation at large. And it's from these reports that things like mandatory psych evaluations, increased surveillance, etc., are often borne.

So, for example, let's say one of the forensic assistants under Ángela began vocally experiencing a higher degree of humanization of the individuals and anomalies they autopsy and expressing a great amount of guilt over it. Ángela would be obligated by her duty to report this to the ethics team, and they from there would schedule a psych evaluation for the individual in question, and advise Ángela to keep herself open if they need support in the mean time. From there though the ethics team and psych team would evaluate whether the employee was fit to continue their work or posed a danger to themselves, others or the foundation as a whole and consider taking steps from there.

A lot of the time when people in the foundation talk about O5 having ‘eyes’ everywhere, it’s in reference to these sorts of mandatory reporters.

Ángela is in charge of choosing her team members (aka. forensic assistants to help her move bodies around, take measurements, etc.), and I think she is VERY VERY picky about who she takes and doesn’t.

Though this is because she does a lot of the grosser, more gruesome and dangerous aspects of the job that no one else wants to do (and therefore gets pushed off onto her), and she doesn’t want to have anyone go with her, who she can’t rely on in a pinch and who can’t bear the emotional burden of her job. iii

Prompt: For researchers; What was their favorite SCP assigned to them and why? Do any stick out in their memory? Why? What did they do and what were they?

Ángela’s favourite SCP and also most heartbreaking assignment was SCP-8699 or The Living Dead. They were a humanoid anomaly that was inanimate most of the time but became animate during instances of a full moon. Which weird as it is, wasn’t their anomalous trait. It was the fact that they could not be killed by brute force, but could not regenerate themselves, actively decayed like a corpse but remained alive during full-moon periods, felt no pain and seemed to know nothing about itself other than that it existed, but seemed incapable of understanding that it should’ve been dead.

They were given to Ángela during an entirely separate SCP investigation and were undergoing an examination to create a link between said aforementioned SCP and themselves - but regained animation and sentience on the exam table. Causing Ángela’s crew to evacuate the lab and Ángela to retreat into the observation room to trigger the breach in progress alarm. Though, to Ángela’s surprise, rather than attempting to break into the observation room to try and kill her, they ripped off their EKG and hid under the exam table and seemed terrified, crying and shaking and trying to cover themselves.

Ángela, being Ángela and seeing this, turned on the speakers in the lab from the observation room and did her best to comfort the SCP, and directed them to some extra lab coats she kept in case of emergencies and talked with them, and between the jigs and the reels, managed to calm them down, explained they weren’t in trouble and that there had been a mistake, and played four games of tic-tac-toe before the security team finally got to the lab and secured 8699 and rescued Ángela.

Though on their way to move 8699, dawn broke, and they reverted to an inanimate corpse once again. Ángela, with backing from her superiors, decided warranted further observation, and thus the pattern was detected, and they were classified!

Sadly though, Ángela and her team had to classify them as Khonsu, and due to their natural decay, 8699 was fully neutralized within two years of their discovery. Much to the heartbreak of the time assigned to them, as they were lovable in their way. Like, they were this 2.3 metre tall emaciated, rotting corpse that wouldn’t look out of place in a horror movie, with the mental maturity of a child and this sunshiny disposition and an apparent inability to understand the situation they were in entirely. I mean, how can you not love a shy, gentle giant that tries to hide behind its researcher that’s half its size.

What Ángela remembers about them the most though was when she was ordered to carry out a complete autopsy of them during one of their periods on apparent inactivity, as they were functionally dead and therefore able to be conducted without the possibility of excessive pain or cruelty. Before the dissection, though, Ángela, with backing from the Ethics committee, chose to have a meeting with 8699 and told them everything she was going to have to do and stressed that they were allowed to say no to anything ‘too invasive’ and the ethics committee would make sure she wouldn’t have to do it. But they didn’t care, they just shook their head and shrugged it off, saying ‘No, it’s fine, I won’t feel it anyways and I trust you, you’ll put me back together again,’ to which Ángela was like

Something unintentionally uncovered by the 8699, though, was that Ángela seems to have anosmia because, even when 8699 was falling into goo and bones and ��reeked to the high heavens,’ so much so that they had to give it an airtight containment chamber. Ángela was able to remain in close contact with them and even eat in their presence.

Prompt: What was the scariest or most traumatic moment that your character has had to live through and how did they respond to the trauma in that moment?

For Ángela, there are four options for this question. There was the moment she found her older brother’s dead body bloated and disfigured and unrecognizable as him if it wasn’t for the crucifix necklace he always wore, which left her, well, non-functioning. She disconnected from her peers and family, developed depression, mentally regressed in terms of maturity, and developed muteness for the better part of 3 years following. In her defense, what she saw was horrifying for a child, and she wasn’t given trauma or therapy in the aftermath to help her cope.

- there was the incident that triggered her abduction hiring by the Foundation, which left her incredibly rattled and nervous about resuming her work for months following (though, with help from available counselling and therapy, she moved past that trauma and was able to return to work)- there was the first-ever containment breach she was a part of

- where one of the patients she and her team were working on suddenly returned to life and sunk its teeth into her coworker’s throat—causing him to bleed out. She and her team members to have to leave him to it, which was the reason for her first promotion and was the incident that made it sink in that she wasn’t working for the government anymore and that the SCP Foundation was much more dangerous than she could have ever prepared for. Sometimes she still has nightmares about that assistant grasping at his neck desperately and trying to claw his way to the door to escape with them, only to be dragged back into the lab by the anomaly-infected corpse and the sound he made, oh god, the sound. Something between a wet rattle and a wheeze as he tried to cry for help despite his open wound.

And there was the lead up to 8699’s neutralization. See, before it’s death, it had requested Ángela visited them in the Foundation’s equivalent of a hospice center in Site 17, and she went. She used her vacation days and headed over, and things were going great! 8699 remembered Ángela and has perked up the moment it recognized her, and they chatted, about her team, the non-classified information about the site, how the flowers looked. The birds were coming home for spring, and things seemed, well, great, despite the ever-present vibe of forthcoming death.

Then something happened- she couldn’t tell you what, but something clicked in 8699, like the gravity of the situation finally dawned on them, and they asked her to get closer. Given their history of non-violence and friendliness, was obliged by Ángela, and they spilled everything they knew about themselves and how they came to be what they were, which took Ángela by surprise and left her shocked. Never before had they lied. They were forthright, almost childishly so, so it seemed so strange. Then they said they had to give her something and began hacking and coughing violently. They seized and sputtered and Ángela, being a smart cookie, tried backing up.

At this point, she was terrified. 8699 wasn’t acting like themselves. They didn’t seem like themselves, they were more erratic, agitated, and she didn’t know if they were going to try and attack her or not. But 8699, despite retching like it was trying to heave it’s organs through its mouth, grabbed her wrist and held her with a strength she couldn’t get out of. At that moment, her entire life flashed before her eyes. It was like every mistake she had ever made fit into one jigsaw puzzle, and she understood that she was going to die here with this SCP she underestimated. But, instead of attacking her, 8699 just produced this group of 6 polished gems and shoved them into her hand before letting go, and Ángie just fell to the ground.

She was in such a state of shock that it wasn’t until the security team put her into a quarantine that she understood what the fuck had even happened. Shortly after that, this apparent attack 8699 entered inactivity for the final time and never returned to an animated state.

Prompt: What is your character’s opinion on the armed guards buzzing around the facility? Are they intimidated by them? Do they enjoy them? Know them by name? Or do they pity them?

Regarding the guards, Ángela has divided emotions. On the one hand, she fears their guns but pities them as people. They’re often so young and unequipped to deal with these situations, promised this exciting, lucrative career, only to be treated as d-class with guns.

She, in equal measures, wants to hug them and tell them to run for the hills and mutter under their breath about their foolishness. But this is more so directed at what she sees in them that reminds her of her. In practice, she’s kind and a bit maternal to many of them - popping her head into the guard breakroom at the beginning of her shifts to say hi, before scampering off to do her thing and always remembering their names and birthdays.

EXCEPT in the case of the guards assigned to her. Those guys, good lord, she hates those guys. They always respond to her breach in progress alarms like five minutes late, they make scathing comments and insults, they think she can’t hear when she works late, take smoke breaks every ten minutes, even though she knows neither smoke. She loathes them, but she would never give them the satisfaction of knowing that, no, she chooses to kill them with kindness as ineffective as that is!

Prompt: What’re your character’s opinions on anomalies? Most notably sentient, however can apply to all. Broad, but here’s something’s to detail: - Are they evil? Are they “out to get us”? - Should they be contained, or let free, or neutralised? Where’s the line between “possible staff”, “must be contained”, and “must be neutralised”? - Should they have the same rights as standard humans? - What’re their opinions on free-roaming passive SCPs, or anomalous personnel? - Where did they come from? Was it a “someone” or “something” that created them all? Do they simply just exist? - Do they believe any SCP-001 proposals? If they do, which? If they don’t, why not?

-Ángela subscribes to the Gears school of thought regarding anomalies, their nature and their inherent maliciousness. In that, she doesn’t believe they’re a part of some ‘conspiracy’ against humanity, some pawn in an unfathomable being’s game of chess, etc. Ángela is of the opinion that they simply are. In the same way, animals simply are. They exist because they exist, and their nature is what it is.

She doesn’t believe that anomalies can choose to be the way they are and feels that expecting them to be different and conform to a human morality, behaviour, or culture is a waste of time applying human morality, behaviour, and culture to them.

- Ángela feels they (the anomalies) should be contained for both the safety of humanity AND the anomaly themselves in equal measure. See, the world is harsh, and humanity can be cruel, and while many anomalies can defend themselves against this fact of life, or at least blend in well enough with civilization to go unnoticed. Many can’t and need the protection, stability, steady supply of sustenance, etc. The facilities provide them.

Regarding the lines of neutralization, containment and staff treatment- it’s hard to say generally, as Ángie feels it should be handled on a case by case basis, which factors in all perspectives about the situation. From risk vs reward, the financial aspect, the human cost, the opinions and desires of the anomaly in question and whether or not it would cause undue suffering in the anomaly.

By and large, though, she thinks a lot more sentient, low-security risk anomalies (i.e. 073) should be given the option to seek a profession within the foundation and be allowed to strive for a semi-normal life with privileges such as forming relationships, having friendships, hanging out, taking sick/lazy days, etc. Because, while they are objects, they’re also people - and their anomaly shouldn’t invalidate their personhood. At least, not as far as she’s concerned.

- This is another case-by-case type of question. For humanoid and or sentient SCPs that have proven themselves to be the most baseline, minimal threat in Foundation Security and Staff safety - then yes. She feels they should be given civil liberties and human rights like any other person in the foundation. For anything beyond that, though? Hard pass. Though they should still be acknowledged as people, they should not be handed rights and liberties - ESPECIALLY In the case of entities that have proven themselves to be manipulative, repeat breachers, violent, etc. It’s playing with fire and, while certainly morally questionable, is a necessary evil.

- Ángela honestly doesn’t care that much. In some cases, it can take her back a bit (like coming into contact with a humanoid pigeon that is at least a head taller than her), but she’ll get used to it. This all being said, though, there are some free-range SCP’s Ángela can’t help but feel nervous in the presence of. She tries to bite back the feeling and deny its existence, but it does exist. Have faith that it does.

- In short, yes. To elaborate, though, Ángela believes every anomaly is made by something. Though whether that thing is another entity, nature itself, the universe, a paradox, rip in space-time, etc. Is all a matter of debate and a case by case basis.

- Ángela has an SCP-001 proposal of her own, and I’ll leave it at that! Haha

#headcanon tbt #~lore~

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breakingsomething · 5 years ago

Text

third year

basic summary: chase hates his birthday, but maybe someone can help him change that.

trigger warnings: mentions of past suicide attempts

"good morning, bastard."

chase groans, pausing before yanking his blankets off his head. he rolls over his bed to see henrik standing at his door, looking amused. "the fuck do you want?" he mumbles, already feeling the morning chill on his bare arms.

henrik smiles softly. "happy birthday."

oh. it's his birthday, isn't it.

two years since he made his attempt. a year since he was wrongly arrested for kidnapping. a year since his kids went missing.

"shit," he says. then he pulls his blankets back over his head.

there's a moment of silence. "come on, bruder, get up. we have a surprise for you today."

"i'm sure you fucking do," chase mutters from beneath his covers. his eyes still burn from crying so much last night. he can't even remember what he was crying about, really. "is it worth getting up for?"

"it is," henrik says. chase listens to the door squeaking as henrik holds it open, waiting for a response. when chase doesn't give one, he sighs. "get up when you're ready, ok? don't spend all day doing the sulks. you will not feel better that way, i promise."

chase doesn't move as the door closes. he waits a minute before looking up to see henrik is, in fact, gone.

good. he didn't want him to stay anyway.

he thinks he goes back to sleep. when he wakes again, the room is considerably brighter, and he wonders if he should bother getting up. but he's extremely hungry - if he's remembering right, he hasn't eaten since yesterday morning - so after a few moments of psyching himself up, he pushes himself into a sitting position and swings his legs off the bed. even that simple motion is enough to make his head pound. he really wished he hadn't cried so much last night. too lazy to go to his drawers and grab a pair of socks, he patters from the room barefoot, wincing at the cold floor beneath his feet.

the house is very, very quiet. chase checks each room on his way downstairs, and eventually realises that everyone must be out. "i take it you're all planning a surprise party for me, huh?" he says aloud. of course, there's no response. chase chuckles silently, before setting about making toast. the clock on the wall tells him it's half twelve. damn, he really did sleep in. the silence is unnerving him - he really hopes anti isn't involved in this somehow.

after he's eaten, he goes to take a shower. he figures that while he's awake, maybe he'll go for a walk, get some fresh air to maybe help get rid of this headache. his hands brush over his bullet scar on the side of his head, and he winces. it doesn't hurt, but the memories of what he was doing two years ago today certainly do.

once he's dried his hair, he pulls a cap and beanie over his head and tries not to think about it.

he locks the door and sets out, walking aimlessly away from the house. he wanders through the city, listening to the sounds and watching the people go by. he's suddenly very aware of how all the other people he's seeing have real lives, and that he's not the only one with problems - there's probably someone here who has it even worse than him. the thought makes him feel odd, so he tries to focus on other things instead, like shop windows and passing conversations. a few people catch him looking and he quickly glances away as he goes by, keeping his eyes to the floor.

he stops for lunch around two. the man who serves him in gregg's smiles and comments on how good chase's hair looks, and his face burns. he fumbles with his change as he pays and races out as quickly as he can. marvin would be ashamed of him.

he walks along the shorefront and eats his sausage roll. he should probably think about going home - he's sure his brothers are wondering where he is - but he really doesn't want to think about it being his birthday.

technically speaking, this isn't even his real birthday. just the one jack assigned him; he'd rather celebrate his birthday now anyway, given that all his brothers birthdays are so close together. well. he'd really rather not celebrate his birthday at all, to be honest.

is that why he's not going home? is that why he's alone, waving off seagulls from his cheap lunch instead of with his brothers, eating cake and playing mario kart?

it's getting cold. he's not wearing a jacket, just a thin pink hoodie, and he can feel goosebumps appearing on his arms. he decides he might as well go home and get this all over with, if only so that the goddamn seagulls leave him alone.

he tosses the rest of his sausage roll to the floor and watches the birds go wild over it. probably a dumb idea, but whatever. he starts off in the direction of home, still feeling completely miserable.

there's still no one there when he gets home.

chase peeks cautiously around each doorway, fear bubbling in his chest. "hello?" he called nervously. "hen? jackie? marv?"

the floorboards creak under his footsteps. there's no response.

chase hugs himself tightly and sits down on the couch, trembling slightly. please don't let him have gotten them. please, please, don't let him have gotten them.

he only waits for half an hour before he hears keys in the lock.

immediately he springs to his feet, racing to the kitchen and pulling out the largest kitchen knife he can find. if that glitch has taken his brothers, if he's coming to kill him, he's not gonna make it easy.

"hey, chase! sorry we were gone so long, we got sidetracked and - woah, woah, dude! put that thing down, it's just us!"

chase just stares at the man in the doorway. reddish hair, round glasses over dark blue eyes - he looks like jackie, but what if he's not? what if he's - what if -

jackie takes his hand and gently uncurls his fingers from the knife handle. chase can see henrik and marvin in the background, clutching a big box covered with a blanket between them, looking shocked. he's breathing very quickly. jackie takes the blade and puts it back into its drawer, slowly turning back to chase so as not to startle him.

"hey man, it's just us, ok?" jackie says, hands up. chase stares at his feet, trembling.

"thought you were - thought you were him," he mumbles, embarrassed. "you were all gone, no note or anything, i got scared."

"we left a note!" henrik says. he pushes the box into marvin's hands and comes to stand beside his brother. "didn't we? marvin, you left a note, right?"

"uh," marvin says. he struggles with the box in his hands. "i, uh, may have forgotten?"

henrik rolls his eyes. "we're sorry, chase. you were asleep and we didn't want to wake you."

chase was fixated on marvin."what's in the box?"

marvin grins, and sets the box down on the kitchen table. "ah, but take a look!" he announces in his best performer's voice. he leaps on top of a chair and spreads his hands out. "step right up, and admire the beauty, the majesty, the magnificence of -"

he lifts his arms, blue sparks trailing from his fingertips as he uses his magic to levitate the blanket from the box. he's gotten a lot better at controlling his magic again since his return, and he's absolutely showing it off. jackie and henrik both grab chase's hands as the blanket moves to reveal -

it's a black cat carrier. chase just stares at it, open mouthed, until he hears a small mewling from inside.

he claps his hands over his mouth and feels his eyes well up with tears.

"go see her!" jackie says, unable to contain himself any longer.

"yes, please do, i can't hold up this blanket all day," marvin laughs. he snatches the blanket from the air and looks down at chase, who's covered his face with his hands and is sobbing quietly.

"hey, hey!" henrik soothes, patting his arm gently. "what's wrong?"

chase wipes his face, giggling. "you guys!" he beamed, scrubbing away his tears. "did you really -"

"come see!" marvin says, and steps down from his chair to open the door of the carrier. "chase, come here and let her see you!"

chase peeks inside the carrier and sees a pair of bright blue eyes staring back at him. his breath catches, and he lets out a gasp. the kitten mewls again, taking a cautious step towards chase.

"we've been keeping her secret for weeks!" jackie grins, coming up behind chase. "she's from the shelter on the high street, she's six months old, her previous family couldn't care for her or her siblings so we decided to take her!"

"she's already been - what is the word? we had the spaying done for her." henrik explains. "we were going to take her home last week, but we decided to wait." he clicks his tongue, trying to get the kitten to come forward. she does so, hesitantly padding half out of the carrier onto the table. she cowers back slightly at all the people around her, and jackie, henrik and marvin step back to give chase and the kitten a bit of space.

chase removes a hand from his mouth and slowly, carefully, stretches it out for the kitten to sniff. she looks at him, then fully leaves her carrier and smells chase's hand. he admires her, a huge smile spreading across his face as she purrs quietly. her fur is fully black, and she's very small, her tail swishing around and batting chase's hand. he laughs, feeling more tears fall from his eyes.

"do you have any name ideas?" marvin asks.

chase nods. "jaffa cake."

jackie and marvin immediately burst into peals of laughter, while henrik just looks confused. "what - why jaffa cake?" he asked. "i mean, it is of course your choice, but -"

"jaffa cake." chase says firmly, and he grins widely. he gently strokes the kitten's head, and she allows it, purring softly. "i love her so, so much, guys, thank you so much! i - i don't even know what to say!"

jackie rushes forwards and throws his arms around chase, much to his surprise. "happy, happy, happy birthday!" he cheers.

marvin comes round to his side and ruffles his hair underneath his hats. "happy birthday, asshole." he chuckles.

henrik smiles awkwardly at the ground for a second before pulling chase into a huge hug. "ich liebe dich, chase brody," he beams, burying his face in his brother's shoulder.

and chase just breathes, trying not to cry any more as he swells with love, only held up by the three sets of arms wrapped around him. he sniffles, closing his eyes. "i love you guys so fucking much!" he sobs, and the four of them fall into a heap on the floor, giggling and holding on to each other like they were all that was keeping each other afloat.

#jacksepticeye #boop writes #chase brody #marvin the magnificent #henrik von schneeplestein #jackieboy man #arc three: righting wrongs

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mlmdarkfiction · 5 years ago

Text

Long Lasting Solitude

For @pickingpixel

Fandom: Fire Emblem Three Houses

Pairing: Dmitri/M!Reader

Summary: That voice.You know that voice.It’s the voice you’ve had haunting your dreams for the past five years.Despite yourself and the pain your eyes snap open.“Dmitri?”

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Being afraid of people is nothing new for you. This fear has existed in you for as long as you can remember, and with seemingly no cause. It’s a lonesome existence, the life you lead, and you dread the loneliness just as much as you dread the thought of interacting with others.

It’s one of the things that causes you to eventually agree to go from the seclusion of your home to Garreg Mach Monastery. Though it had less to do with your own wants and desires, but those of your parents. You, their only son, bearer of Crest Macuil, have quite the future ahead of you if you played your cards correctly. As your parents, they want what is best for you, and what it is they want is for you to have a real chance in Noble society one day.

Adjusting to school was hard to do thanks to your fears. Everyday since you first arrived it felt as if your heart was going to escape your chest from just how hard it was beating. Living your whole childhood as a shut-in meant despite the closeness of other Noble houses, you’d never actually met any of the other students you were now studying aside. Still…Your fellow Blue Lion’s tried to be courteous to you in return.

And yet at every turn it seemed as if you just ruined things.

Your fears.

Your anxiety.

Even now when surrounded by others your own age you still can’t connect.

It’s lonely.

It’s embarrassing .

The more days go on, the more your thoughts turn from fear of others to anger at yourself.

Of course, they would never want to speak with you, befriend you, you’re a pathetic lowly thing.

You end up isolating yourself even more.

When you aren’t in class, or eating, you’re training.

All your energy and focus go into your Dark Magic.

You want to prove yourself, prove your worth. You’ve seen what the other students in your class can do, and none of them have dedicated themselves to the dark arts like you have.

Despite your shortcomings, at least in that regard, you are the best.

The other students have noticed your odd behavior of course. Some have simply brushed you off as not wanting company, while others are worried, and an even selector few (Felix) have decided that whatever is wrong with you is not their business.

And of course, Dmitri, Head of House, Prince of Faerghus, had noticed your odd behavior. Not only had he noticed, but he’d taken it to heart, somehow overlooking the fact you were just as skittish and shy around everyone.

He began to believe he had…slighted you in some way, and so he made a plan to make it up to you. He would not only apologize to you for his wrongdoing, but by the end of it all he was sure the two of you would be fast friends.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Unlike Dmitri, Dedue was more than aware that your behaviors extended to everyone, and not just the crowned prince. He had even gone as far as to try and relay this message to Dmitri, who just seemed incapable of understanding.

And so, when the time came, and the prince inevitably asked for help in ‘Operation Become Friends With ____’ he didn’t object.

Still he was a bit worried about cornering someone as jumpy as you.

He’d done as he was told though, waiting until he was sure you’d settled down in the training grounds by yourself before informing Dmitri of your location.

For all it was worth cornering you was easy.

All Dedue really had to do to find you was to figure out where everyone else wasn’t. And the chances are if you weren’t in the least populated area of the monastery then you were in your room.

“Of course, it’s a good idea Dedue!”

The Prince doesn’t seem to recognize the concern at all as he makes his way to the training area, in his arms a small basket with all the supplies to make a makeshift picnic. An apology of the highest degree.

Still he quiets down the closer he gets to the training grounds. He knows he can scare you off if he isn’t careful. He’s done it before, but not this time!

This time was to be perfect.

When he arrives, he takes a moment to watch you, he’s transfixed.

Normally your face is one filled with fear, or at the very least unbridled anxiety but now in the moment, thinking you’re completely alone focusing on nothing but the target in front of you and the magic at your fingertips you look determined.

Dmitri may not notice the rush of colors coming to his cheeks, but Dedue does.

He gives a nudge to Dmitri, urging him to action and almost tripping the prince in turn.

“___!” He calls out excitedly taking a step into the center of the room.

Your reaction is impossible to miss.

It’s pure reflex, the way your body seizes in fear, as your heart begins to pound in your ears, it’s the heart of a trapped rabbit moments before the predator's teeth sink into its supple flesh.

Your stiff movements cause the spell you were working on to go flying, far off from the target you had been focusing on and to instead scorch into the stone wall.

If it were anyone else, perhaps you would feel silly to be afraid, but it’s not just anyone. It’s Dmitri.

He seems kind enough. As kind as anyone else, you suppose, but you’ve seen what he can do when he doesn’t mean to. That’s what being quiet affords you, perception. You’ve seen the way expertly forged weapons can crack and break under his simple grip.

It terrifies you.

The thought of what he could do to you if he touched you terrifies you.

“___, I saw you were here, I thought perhaps we could train together, I know we’ve never gotten to in the past, I even packed you something to eat, it’s late and I never see you in the dining hall and-“

He’s talking quickly. He can see your fear. It’s clear as day it would be impossible not to notice and he simply doesn’t understand. It frustrates him but he keeps it hidden behind his friendly demeanor as he tries desperately to show you there’s nothing to be afraid of.

When you start to shake, he acts without thinking, reaching out to place a hand on your shoulder, but that was a mistake.

You squeak, a pathetic sound, and then your eyes roll into the back of your head.

Dmitri simply yells in panic and confusion when your body begins to fall.

You fainted.

The Prince of Faerghus, simply spoke to you, and you fainted.

More than that though, you’re alone. You recognize the infirmary at least, that keeps your panic at bay. It’s not the first time, nor will it come to be the last you’re here. Battle injuries, training injuries, and seeing Manuela often landed you hear.

Although this is the first time you’ve fainted.

It’s surprising though for the teacher not to be here.

You shed the blanket from your body standing with ease. You don’t hurt like you thought you would after fainting, but then you remember, right before you’d blacked out…

Dmitri had caught you.

The realization forces a blush to your cheeks in both embarrassment and humiliation.

Even if you were afraid...Dmitri hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

“God...I’m such an idiot.”

It’s said allowed for no one’s benefit but your own, anxious hands reaching up to cover your face.

As much as you don’t want to, you know you owe the Prince an apology.

The realization causes you to groan into your hands.

Dmitri had wanted to stay with you after taking you to the infirmary, but Dedue had pointed out that maybe it was for the best if he left you alone for now.

After all it was him who’d caused you to faint in the first place.

“I just don’t understand…”

He says softly, the frustration and desperation clear.

“He looked at me as if seeing a ghost.”

“Is it really that weird your highness?”

Sylvain comes to explain.

“I mean...when was the last time you saw ____ talk to anyone?” He asks. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him speak to anyone other than a teacher if he didn’t have to. He’s seriously anti-social!”

Dmitri sighs. Even if that’s the case he imagines it must be lonely. It’s because of that he can’t simply give up and leave you alone.

Not until you tell him yourself, in your own words, that you want him to leave you alone to your solitude.

The next few days are filled with even rarer glimpses of you than usual. Dmitri’s starting to believe that maybe he did really offend you if you’re going so clearly out of your way to avoid him.

However in reality the opposite could not be more than true.

Although you’re heavily fighting with your depression, and thoughts of self hatred you think that maybe...maybe this apology will be good for you.

Maybe after apologizing to the prince the two of you will become friends.

It would be nice…

It’s a nice thought.

Even if you, even if someone like you, doesn’t feel as if you deserve it.

So it’s not that you’ve been ignoring Dmitri. You’ve just been busy. Busy planning an apology, and trying to psych yourself up.

Even with the day of the apology finally being here you’re anxious. Your anxiety is so overwhelming that you almost back out entirely, but you’ve come too far to give up now.

To avoid having to see Dmitri face to face you leave him a note, slipped under the door to his room.It’s a simple note, simply asking the Prince to meet you at the gazebo come nighttime.

That’s easier. If it’s night time well...you won’t have to deal with anyone else seeing you.

And Dmitri finds the note, after finally returning to his room. He had spent a majority of his day with Byleth, teaching swordsman ship to the various orphans who lived in the monastery, and after he and the professor had gotten a very late dinner.

By the time he reads the note he fears you won’t be waiting on him anymore. After all, it's twenty minutes from when you’d asked to meet him.

It doesn’t stop the prince though, he doesn’t hesitate to drop everything,not even bothering to close the door to his bedroom as he takes off for the gazebo.

He fully expects to find you asleep, or simply not there at all. And he wouldn't have blamed you.

In fact more than anything else he’s surprised to find you seated there in the dark, the only light beneath the gazebo the single candle you had brought with you.

Dmitri does take note of how tired you look though. He imagines you must have been waiting even long before the note had asked to meet.

You’re dozing, half asleep, but far from actually losing consciousness. Fear keeps you awake.

Fear of someone finding you.

Fear of being exposed.

Fear of-

You wonder if Dmitri’s actually going to show up.

The thought of simply leaving had already occurred to you. Just because you’d left him a note didn’t mean Dmitri would come, it didn’t mean he’d actually want to see you.

To think even for a moment that he would-

Maybe you really are nothing more than a fool.

The self deprecating line of thoughts don’t continue, they don’t get a chance to.

Because there the prince is before you, in all his sweaty glory. A single hand is raised to greet you before going to join his other on his knees as he doubles over from the exertion of his run here.

He must have , you realize, ran from his room on the other end of the monastery all the way here.

For once you find yourself unafraid of the prince. To your own confusion. In the moment you are bemused but relieved and happy all at once to see he actually decided to show himself.

That night was what led to your eventual coming out of your shell, even if only slightly. Instead of spending all of your time alone you spent a large chunk of your time with the Prince now, which in turn, led to you spending a lot of time with your fellow Blue Lions. You were still afraid at times, you still felt undeserving of their friendships.

But unlike before you didn’t find yourself hiding away when you were afraid. No, now you hid behind Dmitri.

It caused mixed emotions in the young man.

On one hand something about the way you relied on him made him incredibly happy, to know that you trusted him enough to hide away from the rest of the world, relying on him for protection...It made his heart swell with pride.

You trusted him!

But on the other hand, as always, your fears only led to confuse and worry him. Sometimes they just made no sense to him at all. Dmitri could understand, maybe, being frightened of Felix and his hostile demeanor, but Flayn?

He can’t imagine anyone being afraid of the young girl, and yet there you were, cowering behind him as if she were a threat to your very life.

More than anything though, he was...somewhat saddened.

Dmitri had long ago reserved himself to the fact that his life was not his own. That he had goals for which he would risk his very life, and those goals left little room for close attachments.

The kind of close attachment the two of you shared.

In a way, it was Dmitri who began to fear you. After all, how could one person make him consider wavering in his convictions?

Still...He decides to make the best of the time he does have with you.

Surely one day you’ll understand.

After all, the world he wants, a world where those who cause tragedies would be brought to justice, would result in a world in which you no longer have anything to be afraid of.

Until then, until he’s King, and his time is focused on his overarching goal, he decides to savor the moments he has with you.

So while Dmitri is confused, flustered, and flattered when you ask him to go as your date to the dance that accompanies the White Heron Cup, he finds himself agreeing cheeks burning red.

He wonders what this means for him.

For you.

For the both of you.

To say you weren’t surprised at the situation, yourself, your actions, it would all be a lie.

Though you’re far more surprised at your own courage to ask Dmitri to accompany you to the dance was the fact that he had actually said yes.

You don’t know what you were expecting, really.

The doubtful, mean part of your mind tries to tell you that Dmitri simply pities you. That his yes was simply the result of that pity, but for once you don’t care.

You are far too related to allow yourself to ruin such happiness.

It was something Dmitri had been telling you for a while now, something you were trying to believe yourself;

The simple fact that you do deserve to be happy.

Happiness is never meant to last.

In the future, that’s the thought that will come to mind when you think of the events that take place.

The ending of not just your own personal happiness, but the happiness of all of Fodlan.

The end of happiness, the start of a war.

“I will take the head from your shoulders...and I will hang it from the gates of Enbarr!”

For the first time in a long time fear grips you at the mere sight of Dmitri.

His anger- although justified in your mind- was so unhinged, so unlike him.

You find yourself unable to move, frozen alongside the professor as you watch the man you had found yourself falling for brutally crush the skull of an imperial soldier in his hands as if it were nothing.

Petrified does not begin to describe how you feel.

But when Byleth moves so do you, taking up arms.

There is no time for fear, not here, not now, not after everything the Flame Emperor- no, not after everything Edelgard has done.

It has been five years. Five years since the war started. Five years since you had last stepped foot in Garegg Mach. Five years since you had last seen Dmitri, the Professor, or any of the others you had grown to call your friends.

And five years is, in the span of a war, no small amount of time at all. Yet, in the span of a human life it is, and although your past five years have been filled with grieving for the past, you’ve found yourself changed very little.

You may not have changed, but the world around you has. Fodlan continues to constantly move and change under the unyielding hands of time.

The lands that had once belonged to you and your noble family have been taken under the control of the Empire, or to phrase more accurately, they were seized by the she-witch Cornelia and given to the Empire.

Of course your family opposed the takeover, still there’s little to nothing you can do. Any attempt at stopping it would simply put your own lives on the line.

Although you’re a noble family, you have no tropes, and you no crest to rely on.

There’s no point in fighting a fight that would only result in you being killed, not even as a martyr.

But you’ve been biding your time, waiting to keep your part of the promise you and everyone else made so long ago.

Your parents were confused, rightfully so, when you told them that you were going to return to Garreg Mach Monastery.

On your own you’d prepared everything, a horse, rations, and enough tomes to get you there safely come Imperial Soldiers, or bandits.

Returning is something you simply have to do.

Even if the Professor and Dmitri are both-

No .

You won’t allow yourself to think such sad things, not now.

And if they are gone, truly gone, there is no better way to honor both their memories than by showing up, just like you had promised.

The monastery is absolutely swarming with Imperial Soldiers, but you knew this might be the case.

With a hard swallow you make yourself known, blasting through one of the already crumbling monastery walls, cringing as the screams of the crushed soldiers reaches your ears.

Killing was...a sad reality of war.

At the very least, the violence had cleared your path way and-

“____? Is that you?”

A familiar face and voice.

Never before had you been so relieved to see another human person before.

“Ashe!”

Hope swells in your chest. The others came. They really came back.

It’s more than you could have imagined.

An arrow goes whizzing past your head, ending the reunion for now.

You’ll fight.

You’ll win back the monastery, and then you’ll be able to see all of your friends again and maybe…

“Your highness!”

Gilbert’s voice bellowing across the battlefield gets your attention, and distracts you. Surely he doesn’t mean Dmitri. He’s dead.

You’d heard the news ages ago everyone had.

But maybe-

Your eyes scan the battlefield in a blind panic, trying to catch sight of the man you loved, and you find him.

He’s tearing through soldiers like they’re nothing.

Each man that tries to oppose him falls under his spear, cut through entirely.

It’s scary.

He scares you.

The look on his face is so similar to the one he’d had long ago when the Flame Emperor had been unmasked.

It turns your stomach.

Your guard is down. So focused on Dmitri, the feelings of horror mixed with utter relief that he’s even alive, that you don’t notice the approaching soldier behind you.

At least not until the blade of their axe digs into your shoulder.

All thoughts of Dmitri fade as you focus on the pain.

The blade rips itself from your flesh and you find yourself falling to the ground, knees buckling under you from the weight of it all.

Your warm blood soaks through your armor, in a weird way comforting you from the cold night air.

“This isn’t…”

This isn’t how this was supposed to happen.

But your words are spoken for no one. No one is close enough to hear, to see, they’re all too busy fighting for their own lives.

“Dmitri?...”

Blood loss and pain, you’re far too out of it to realize what you’re seeing now is real.

That Dmitri himself is there, cutting down the berserker who’d slain you with his axe, and anyone who follows after him.

It’s only because you lose consciousness that you don’t hear the wailed howl of a main who thinks he’s lost yet another person important to him.

“He’s stable but-”

Dmitri doesn't stop to hear the rest, he’s picking up your unconscious body with intent to move. You’ll be safer inside the monastery, a bed, the warmth of a fire, anything’s better than outside.

“Dmitri!” Mercedes gasps when he refuses to listen. “You have to be careful not to reopen-”

“There’s no point in trying to reason with a Boar, Mercedes.”

Felix says eyes narrowed as they follow the path of the man as he hides deeper within the monastery.

The constant roaring in Dmitri’s head doesn’t stop as he carries you to the makeshift infirmary. Other wounded are being brought in, laid on the makeshift cots and beds.

He remains quiet, placing your unconscious form among them in the nicest looking spot he can find.

Although you seem to be fine now, he knows no rest from torment.

The voices in his head torment him, reminding him that (truthfully or no) your injuries are ultimately his fault.

Just like everything else, it’s his fault.

He should have tried harder.

He should have been there.

Worse of all is the simple fact, if it wasn’t for him you would have never returned to the monastery in the first place.

He shouldn’t stay.

The last thing Dmitri wants is to get your hopes up for something that can never be.

In the past five years, since the last time he’s seen you, he’s become little more than a monster.

And a monster doesn’t deserve any semblance of happiness.

Dmitri knows he should leave.

But he just can’t force himself to go. Not before he knows you’re okay.

As soon as you’re awake, then he’ll leave.

Hours are spent in the makeshift infirmary, Dmitri staring at your unmoving body, steadily watching the slow rise and fall of your chest, ready to call for a healer the moment anything seems to be out of the ordinary.

Byleth tries to get him to leave, or get some sleep, but there’s no hiding the bitterness in Dmitri’s voice as he tells them;

“Even if I were to leave...I wouldn’t get any sleep. So please, just leave me be, Professor.”

They do.

There’s no point in trying to reason with Dmitri, not when he’s like this, unable to see or respond to reason.

Night passes, and still you do not wake from your deep slumber.

You’re unaware of the fact you’re being watched. A constant companion for you in your dreamless slumber.

When you do finally wake the first thing you notice is the pain. You don’t open your eyes, in fact you keep them clenched in an attempt to hide away from the pain wracking your being.

The shifting at your side catches your attention, and although you try to open your eyes you still can’t bring yourself to actually manage it. “Are you finally awake, ____?”

That voice.

You know that voice.

It’s the voice you’ve had haunting your dreams for the past five years.

Despite yourself and the pain your eyes snap open. “Dmitri?”

“Good.” He wants to tell you he’s glad you’re okay.

Wants to tell you to be more careful, because he isn’t sure if he can take you of all people dying too, but instead he simply nods, rising to his feet.

“Be more careful next time.”

You aren’t able to stop his leave, forced to listen to the heavy sound of his footsteps as the trail away from you.

Even if you could stop him, you aren’t sure what you would say.

Those eyes…

He’s the same man, surely, but those eyes seem so unfamiliar to you now.

What would you have told him if he’d stayed?

You don’t even know.

But god you wish he had stayed.

The moment you try to move, maybe to go after him, maybe to simply sit up, pain shocks your core and you cry out, getting the attention of Mercie.

“Don’t- Don’t move too much.” She says softly gently laying you back

“Dmitri,” You start to ask her. “What happened to him?”

Mercedes expected the questions. Everyone had been wondering, and what little explanation they’d gotten from the Professor, and Gilbert were hardly comforting.

And even then it was mostly hearsay with no words from Dmitri himself to confirm or deny.

You hadn’t heard any of it, having been unconscious here in the infirmary.

She does her best to relay it all to you.

“We thought...We’d all heard that he’d been executed.”

You nod. This wasn’t news to you.

They had framed Dmitri, put him to death.

“But...he survived?”

Mercedes nods.

“We think that Dedue-”

She doesn’t finish, but you know what it is she was going to say. It’s easy to tell from her choked voice, downcast eyes.

You forcibly swallow the lump in your own throat.

“I see.”

In a way it’s something you should have suspected from the start. Dedue was always loyal to Dmitri, and you were sure that one day he would die to protect the man.

The thought surely occured to the others as well, but surely none of you imagined that day to come so soon.

“And after?...”

The bandages on your shoulder are removed, and Mercede’s quickly gets to work disinfecting what of your wound she can. You almost gag, catching sight of the bloody wound from the corner of your eyes, and so you take to squeezing them shut instead.

“Well you’ve heard...haven’t you?” Each word is spoken quietly, and when you don’t respond she continues.

“You haven’t heard? There’s been talk of an unkillable war machine going through the Kingdom, killing Imperial soldiers and bandits alike.”

“And you think that Dmitri?...” You don’t need her response.

It fits.

It sounds fitting given what you’d seen on the battlefield.

“I need to see him.”

She hasn’t finished cleaning your wound, your sudden movements cause yourself pain, and Mercede’s panic.

“You can’t ____!” She says softly trying to once again ease you into bed, but she’s being far too careful, afraid to hurt you. This makes it easy for you to ignore her attempts and stand, wobbling, on your feet.

“If you aren’t careful you’ll reopen that wound! You could bleed out!”

“Sorry Mercie,” Although you apologize you don’t stop, continuing out of the infirmary.

Every step is painful, and in retrospect you probably should have let her bandage it back up, or found a shirt to wear, but you don’t stop now.

You have to find Dmitri.

Everything about the Monastery has changed since it’s prime five years ago. Nowhere has been left unscathed by the waves of time.

You wonder what type of people would be so willing to desecrate a religious site.

Were they vindictive Imperial soldiers sent by the Empress herself? Looking for Rhea, looking to destroy any semblance of power the church held?

Or were they bandits? Uncaring about the importance of the holy lands they walked upon, destroying for the sake of destruction.

Maybe they were thieves. People that had no choice but to fight and ransake any building no matter how holy in an attempt to just survive another day.

The fallen stone is cool against your palm.

If even a place as mighty and holy as this has fallen, what are the chances for all of you?

Eventually your mindless wandering of the Monastery pays off, you find Dmitri, and you find him somewhere you wouldn't have imagined.

Kneeled below the crumbled goddess statue.

There’s no one else there, likely all having abandoned the cathedral when Dmitri made his presence there known.

You’d gone through all this trouble to find him, your aching shoulder proof of the strain it’s taken on your injured body, and yet you find yourself speechless before him.

He looks like something out of a painting, facing away from you, blonde hair cascading over his face, as rays of the setting sun filter in from the holes in the Cathedral roof.

He’s ethereal.

He hasn’t noticed you yet, at least that’s what you’re led to believe, he doesn’t move or stir even as the steady sound of your footsteps on the stone floor come closer.

“Professor,”

Dmitri speaks, and your heart sinks.

Of course he wasn’t expecting you. He was expecting Byleth.

“I find myself at a loss for what to do,”

His voice sounds...broken and torn.

You find yourself wanting to reach out, or...at the very least let him know you’re not the professor, but...you find yourself remaining silent instead as he continues on.

“To have something, or...someone to fight for in the here and now...Something other than the voices from beyond constantly asking for me to avenge them….Do I deserve that?”

The words you considered saying died on your tongue with each and every word he says. Anytime you think you’re ready to respond, he says something that makes you hesitate.

“____ is here, and very much alive...F-For now.” His voice falters just a little as he thinks of you, in the infirmary, deep wound bandaged on your shoulder.

“And although I would love to act as if nothing has happened, if nothing has changed, it has. I’m not the same man he once knew.”

Oh.

He was thinking about you.

“Even if...It’s not fair to him, is it professor?”

He turns then, likely to gauge Byleth’s reaction, as they are ever the quiet listener, hardly a replier, and instead of the professor he finds you there in their stead.

“____.” His eye widens, and he opens his mouth to say something. His face goes through a clear trial of emotion; confused, shocked, and embarrassed before finally settling on a mask of nothingness to hide it all.

“I’m sorry-”

The words quickly tumble out of your mouth before you can stop them.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to over hear, but Dmitri-”

Although he had only just been thinking, and discussing with what he thought to be the professor, what it is he would say to you if he allowed himself to, he’s still stricken silent by the mere sight of you.

But you don’t give him a chance to worry about speaking.

“Dmitri...More than anything, I’m simply glad that you’re alive. I thought that...We all had thought…”

You don’t finish that thought, quickly going onto the next, afraid the man will interrupt you before you’re able to get all of your thoughts out to him.

“If you’re a different man, truly, than who you were before, then...When the war is over, if we both make it, I’d like to get to know this new man.”

There’s no way for you to know for sure if he really is a different man, or if the war, the trauma of war, has made him feel as if he’s different. Maybe by the end of the war you’ll be an entirely different man too.

There’s no way to know for sure, not now.

The war inside Dmitri’s own head simply wages on. Such kindness, a second or third chance, it’s more than he deserves, and yet at the same time it brings him hope.

It’s exactly what he needed.

A hope to cling to outside of that of simply appeasing the neverending onslaught of the dead. Admittedly he had held no real plan of what to do after the war, if he had made it so far. He never stopped to think about what and if he survived.

There was never any reason to think of it.

Just when the time came, when Edelgard finally met her end at his blade, he would wander off somewhere, into the wilderness like a wounded animal to die in his solitude.

The relationship the two of you had shared five years prior, during your times as students of the very monastery you found yourself in now, was undeniably romantic.

Chaste, and innocent, but romantic.

Dmitri ends that now.

He’s a quiet, seething, hungry animal as he approaches you. There is no chance of reaction, no panic, or escape.

“Wha-”

Lips smash against your own effectively silencing you.

It’s not what you’d imagined finally kissing Dmitri to be like.

You had always imagined your first kiss to be romantic, that his lips would be soft, but it’s neither of those things.

His whole body encompases yours, a dangerously tight grip pulling your body to him as his rough lips assault your own.

No, it’s not what you had imagined, but...it’s better.

Both of you are desperate, needy, sloppy.

Neither of you are experienced with kissing, but you don’t have to be. The kiss itself is a representation of both of your years of unspoken words and yearning.

When the kiss ends, Dmitri is panting still. His face is flushed and he looks hesitant, surprised. Because he is surprised by himself.

Surprised by the sudden uncontrollable urge he’d had to kiss you.

“A-After the war,” He begins softly, still holding you against him, one hand going to rest on your cheek, the glove cold against your flushing face. “If we both live that long.”

Dmitri doesn’t know if he’s being truthful in promising you this.

More than anything he would like to be telling you the truth, but…

He knows no things are guaranteed in this world, and he’s already damaged goods.

What he doesn’t know is for which of you he’s making the unsure promise.

Is it to shield your fragile heart from the real possibility of heartbreak?

Or is it for himself? Is it some attempt to keep his humanity, a hope that if he has just one thing to cling and claw at that he won’t allow himself to slip any further into depravity.

And then there’s you.

Unaware of Dmitri’s internal dialogue, but knowing him so well even now to know he may be lying to you.

It’s clear in the trembling of his bottom lip, the tears pooling in his eyes but refusing to fall.

You make your choice.

And that choice is to believe in Dmitri.

To believe that something waits for you both at the end of all this violence and bloodshed.

So you’ll believe him.

Until the end of the war.

Until the very end.

“Right...After the war,” You nod in agreement, but don’t move away.

Still so close to him you can feel every rise and fall of his chest, even with his armor.

Neither of you moves for a long time. Just remaining in one anothers embrace, knowing that eventually you’ll have to part again, knowing that eventually you will both (even with your injuries) will have to return to the battlefield.

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goose-books · 4 years ago

Note

Ok first of all your Darkling magic post was fantastic and I can't get enough but now I MUST know...what kind of magic do the Stayer sisters have and how does it manifest??? (Also if you want to share more about Jasper's I will take it because I can't get enough of this bastard)

first of all: i apologize for the length of time between my posting of the worldbuilding post and the posting of this ask... i had almost finished writing you a response and then my computer shut down and the ask did not save! so that was a blow directly to my head! i also apologize for... the length of this!

second of all: [cups my hands and offers you this]

They say Cressida Stayer was nine years old when she turned her hair to gold. They laid her down in bed blonde, and the next morning, the waves cascading down her shoulders were solid metal, glinting harshly in the sunlight, weighing her down, creating that odd head-cocked expression she still wears now. Nine years old. Two or three years before most people develop enough magic skills to dye a single curl. Much less transfigure their hair into precious metal.

People also say Leovald Stayer’s immediate reaction was to hack it off her head and melt it down for cash. But generally they say that part a lot quieter.

— darkling, segment iv: control

so: the stayer sisters and magic.

if we charted the stayer sisters on the passive-to-active scale, it would look like this!

(left to right: ruby, cressida, and gracen.)

that said, they’re all leovald stayer’s kids, and leovald is pretty well known as one of the most magical people in dovermorry, if not in general. so he fully expected his children to have large amounts of raw magical energy as well. and they didn’t disappoint. cressida is the one well-known as a Magical Prodigy ™, but gracen and ruby are also notably powerful and notably in-control of their magic, especially for their ages! (21, 19, and 16, in descending order.) most people don’t get really, really good at controlling their magic until well into adulthood. technically you can join the guild at 17 or older, but the median age on the Mage’s Guild’s high council is, like, sixty. (when leovald is the young guy in the group, there’s an issue.)

interestingly, cressida is about two months from turning 17. but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. in descending order:

gracen’s entire thing is control. gracen stayer has a lot of power inside of her that would very much like to be outside of her, and gracen would very much like to prevent it from getting loose. she deals with this by being so hyperaware of her magic that it cannot possibly Do Things On Its Own, because she keeps it on an extremely tight leash. (this is a pretty good metaphor for how gracen deals with things in general.)

gracen... runs the stayer household. by which i mean she does everything from cleaning up after Mandatory Family Dinner to helping cressida with her calc homework to making sure ruby comes home before curfew (as not to get yelled at) to organizing leovald’s paperwork and making sure he doesn’t say something stupid on TV. gracen does most of leovald’s grunt work, actually. does she hate this? yes. but she’s also pretty sure that training the most powerful man in dovermorry into instinctively relying on her for everything is… a good long-term move, pragmatically speaking.

so gracen has a lot to do! and a lot of magic that she absolutely will not allow to build up inside of her. and she deals with this by using her magic for everything. she parcels small bits of magic out for every small task - doing the dishes, summoning a pencil from the other side of the room, making paperwork organize itself. if someone spills their drink on the carpet, gracen will draw the drink back out of the fibers, drop by drop, into the cup. by twitching one finger. understandably, this takes a lot of practiced focus and control; magic is very much something you can study and gracen very much studies it the way feral high schoolers study for the ACT. it almost doesn’t matter how active her magic is, because her magic NEVER takes any kind of natural form - she wrings out every drop in a very deliberate way. (i say almost because she can still feel it. she deliberately keeps it calm. it is harder than it looks. pretty much everything i’ve just said about gracen’s magic is a FANTASTIC metaphor for [gestures] the everything about gracen.)

and then there’s ruby, who is exactly the opposite. quelle surprise.

look, ruby is fully aware that no matter how much she practices, she is never going to be as good at controlling her magic as gracen. so she just… doesn’t. she just doesn’t! she doesn’t control it and she doesn’t use it. magic isn’t her best skill - her skillset lies in writing, in thinking, in persuading, in befriending, in provoking. why on earth would ruby magically whisk her laundry off the floor when she can just pick it up? and why would she pick it up when she can probably convince someone else to do it for her?

“but max,” you are thinking, “doesn’t her magic build up like you’ve been saying?” yes and she likes it. to be fair, she has comparatively more passive energy than her sisters; it’s easier for ruby to deal with this buildup than it would be for gracen. or for jasper, for that matter. when jasper’s magic gets to be Too Much, it’s a physical palpable thing; he gets itchy and shaky and tense and sometimes sick until he can twist off the metaphorical cap and let off some steam. for ruby, it’s more like an adrenaline rush - pounding heart, shaky limbs, heightened senses and emotions, without the risk of Making A Mess in public. she likes to let her magic build and build and build and build and then pull it back and release it into something deliberate at the very last minute. she finds this thrilling. which isn’t to say she doesn’t care! that honestly takes as much control and focus as gracen’s strategy does.

at her high school graduation, ruby “accidentally” “lost control” and set off magical fireworks over her head as she crossed the stage. loudly and vividly. leovald in the audience was so psyched he shouted. gracen would have slammed her head into the wall, except she had to comfort cressida, who reacts to loud noises like this:

as much as gracen and ruby differ in their ways of handling their magic, they’re… very similar at the core. what looks effortless is actually a lot of concentrated effort behind the scenes. and then there’s cressida, who just… does not have that.

some people (leovald) think of magic as a thing to flaunt. some people (jasper) are constantly fighting it. cressida just… does not care all that much? she just does not care. magic comes very naturally to her because it is first and foremost a way she copes with being trans and autistic in a world that is not made for her. she used to turn the lights out when rooms got too bright (and then sat back and let everyone else wonder what had happened). she’ll change fabrics to make them softer or smoother. the real story of her hair has nothing to do with gold - she was ten, not nine, and she grew her hair out to shoulder-length overnight, because she was sick of having short hair. and that was what made the rest of her family realize that maybe all that stuff about wanting to be a girl was, like… significant.

technically, yes, she is a Magical Prodigy ™! her magic settled very early and she has a LOT of it. and her magic, more than even her sisters’, is very similar to leovald’s. leovald lets his magic do WHATEVER the fuck, and the result is that he warps the world around him a LOT - fireplaces light when he walks into the room; lights flicker when he raises his voice; doors burst open in front of him even when they aren’t automatic; when his emotions are running high they affect the weather. cressida’s magic would like to be doing all of that. leovald would also like cressida’s magic to be doing all of that.

but cressida… kind of just doesn’t give a shit? she has a lot of untapped potential that she is fine with not tapping. she is perfectly content with living her life using her magic to, like, change the radio station from the backseat of the car (when you’re the youngest of three children, you NEVER get shotgun).

buuuuuut leovald is really psyched about having a freaky magical savant child. and most people see cressida - quiet, staring off into space, blank facial expression, not great at talking - and quietly assume that the magic thing is… like… all she has going for her. so she’s very much been pigeonholed into Magical Prodigy Zone, whether she likes that or not.

whoa this is a lot of text have an image

and then jasper is just… the anti-cressida. he has a thousand and one talents and gets perfect grades and charms everyone he meets and he is a walking biohazard when it comes to magic. and it drives him CRAZY, as much as he pretends not to care.

most people have their magic all figured out by the time they’re in high school. jasper is sixteen, almost seventeen, and something about it is… still just not working for him. even simple stuff (duplicating post-it notes! making flashcards shuffle themselves!) just… takes much more effort than it should. and because he hates being bad at it, he doesn’t use it, and then it builds up, and he ends up jittering like a live wire, and then if that goes too far things explode.

jasper has elected to blame his mother pretty much entirely for this, because vee has NONE of the same problems. (plenty of problems! but not related to magic.) …plus, you know. jasper’s had enough mishaps in public to know that his father ALSO blames jasper’s mother, pretty vocally, whenever he gets the chance.

on a conscious level, jasper is actually fine with having magic that just Does Not Fucking Work. because he has SO many nonmagical skills that it makes up the difference. at his boarding school, he sits atop a throne made of forged prescriptions, pay-per-page homework, and confessions of love from people who do not know him nearly enough to confess their love to him. on a subconscious level he has a whole complex about it but [gesturing] that’s a given, isn’t it

#suits-of-woe-main #THANK YOU BTW SERIOUSLY...#i adore your writing so your interest in this makes me 🥺🥺#so here i am writing an essay as per usual.#max.txt #darkling tag #leovald stayer #gracen stayer #ruby stayer #cressida stayer #jasper greenwood #all maxes know... is rewrite shakespeare... and respond to questions with a full page of text...#asks

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arcticdementor · 5 years ago

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Ok, I'll do my best to try, because reading some of the galaxy brained takes about China and the Chinese government have cemented in my head the agonizing fact that most people prefer simple narratives and have little understanding of history, let alone an understanding of how history affects the present.

This will be long and requires some groundwork on explaining the modern Chinese mindset as a whole. Disclaimer: I am currently in Hong Kong, I hold British citizenship by birth and frequently do business with Chinese companies.

1) Big China and Collective Society.

This is something most people really don't grasp the scale of. To assign shared characteristics to fully one quarter of the human race would be broad enough to make those descriptors basically meaningless. Dividing sections of China along any non-geographical lines, economic lines, socio-political lines, this is all incredibly difficult. Despite a massively homogenous Han Chinese population, just looking at Chinese food culture would tell you just how freakishly diverse and different each section is. There are different dialects, accents, lifestyles all across China. When people say "China" it is often completely unhelpful when it comes to pinning down what they mean. For the sake of this discussion, we're assuming that we're talking about the type of Chinese person that the central government has taken pains to portray to the world. Which is, the middle class, consumerist, worldly and tech-savvy Han Chinese. Native of a Tier 1 city (e.g. Shanghai or Beijing).

Most Chinese people are aware of just how big the country is and how difficult a task it is keeping it all together, on a scale I've seen very few people outside of China appreciate. There is a real ethos of "tianxia", or the concept depicted in the Jet Li movie Hero (criticized for being state propaganda at the time, it was largely missed that most Chinese understand, if not support, this thesis). Chinese see themselves as sharing in a common destiny and collective group ethos. This can be traced back to Confucianism - a young person can have said to have "come of age" when they have fully adapted to and understood their role within a harmonious society. This both gives the common Chinese a shared purpose and skin in the game. They literally feel a stake in the collective power and status of their own country. This is not the flag-waving nationalism that the western nations consider passe, but a belief that China must hold together as a shared country and people.

…

Chinese pride is young, and very damaged. There is a sense of grievance and hurt pride that has never been resolved, and this is occasionally glimpsed in everything from their foreign policy to their mass market serialized literature. The reasons behind this can be traced back to a century of colonialism and rampant opportunism by the world powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. Chinese histories and memories are very long, and despite happening a few centuries ago this is very fresh in people's minds. An old joke about China's view of history has the Chinese waiting to see if the French Revolution is still a good idea. China has never forgotten that despite a massive population and huge amounts of territory it fell from being one of the world's oldest civilizations to becoming the "weak man of Asia", and their modern politics has mostly been about resolving this pride. There is a shared belief, or a hidden form of mass psychosis, that China has been denied its destiny as the foremost world power, either through treachery, the work of foreign powers, or other means. Even worse is the proof that the old rival Japan, a similarly impoverished nation, had managed to drag itself onto the stage of the world powers in the late 19th/early 20th century. This has caused some real complexes in the Chinese psyche.

Adding to this is the understanding of recent history. Coupled with historical understanding that ruling China is an incredibly difficult job and only people like the legendary Emperor Qin were able to unify the country in the first place, China collectively remembers the much more recent history of the Communist revolution, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and more. The fact that China's current financial power and global status is largely a result of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms and liberalism is besides the point - the defining thing that most Chinese in the older generation take away is that revolution led to some truly fucking heinous shit and a death toll enacted on its population greater than any ever seen in the history of mankind, and as a result they have no taste for another revolution. The government stays in power largely because the older generation are aware of just how much death is involved with a changing of the guard. There is also no promise that whatever comes to replace the government will be in any way better than what came before it. Sure, the kuomintang government were corrupt as sin, but was that really preferable to having everyone starve because nobody knew how to farm land for years?

…

It is no surprise that the most radical nationalist pro-Chinese are the young students sent overseas to study in western universities. The Chinese attitude towards these western academies is not great; they attend for credentials and status, but these places of study have become cultural battlegrounds and ground zero for showing Chinese students that the Western societies and arguments are fractured and impotent. Students are given courses and humanities curriculum that demonize western civilization and its achievements, and emphasize the breaking down of existing power structures. Of course this would lead to nationalist students violently attacking pro-Hong Kong protesters and demonstrations, as both sides consider each other indoctrinated suckers (and one sees the other as trying to destroy the power structure of the country). An attack on China and Chinese identity is both a dangerous attack on national and societal cohesion and stinging Chinese pride. They have been handed something that can be easily interpreted as an attempt by foreign powers to fracture the unity of Chinese society, cause chaos in their country, and stop China from achieving its destiny of world #1 power and subjugator of other nations.

…

Many people have asked me why Chinese people put up with their government being totalitarian, so many human rights abuses, this and that. Social credit system, organ harvesting. No end of horrible things we hear about Chinese government. The corruption. The dark things the CCP has done to consolidate its power. Tiananmen.

Well, the unfortunate answer is that China, as a collectivized group, wants to fuck over people who looked down on them, even if it means causing itself grievous injuries in the process. It's painful to admit, but the regular Chinese is perfectly okay with the Uighur death camps, even if the government goes to some length to pretend they don't exist. After all, surely they must be doing something to destabilize and weaken Chinese society if the government is putting them in death camps. Don't you know Uighurs can be unpredictable, barbaric, and violent? And if Chinese society is destabilized and weak, the Chinese people won't achieve our common destiny of being the #1 world power.

Chinese people don't care that there is anti-Chinese sentiment internationally. In fact, it even helps. It plays into the narrative that people hate China now because China is strong.

Privately, Chinese people will celebrate the NBA and Blizzard backing down in fear, because they equate this with power and respect. It is perfectly natural for the NBA to apologize for offending the Chinese government, because this is a display of strength. How will you be able to tell that you are stronger than someone, if they are not underneath your boot heel?

…

China has gone from largely a nation of rice farmers to modern state with terrifying speed. They are now the world leader in 5G communications technology, technological integration into daily life, the world's biggest consumer market. By every single metric, logistics, travel, entertainment, living standards, Chinese life has gotten better. And they are completely aware of this. Twenty years. Thirty years?

…

So there is an unspoken pact between the government and the people. In exchange for getting rich, the people have willingly given up their freedoms. Because you can't eat freedom. Many of the social problems in China are rooted in this short-term manner of business thinking; tomorrow, there may be trouble. Maybe the country would be in trouble. I'll never see this customer or client again. Why bother maintaining anything? If I can get a benefit out of cheating, why wouldn't I do it?

Chinese, especially the older generation, understand existential failure on a level the western nations don't. They don't take anything for granted, including the attitude of the government (and this has in fact driven a lot of asset flow out of China into other nations). They remember the Cultural Revolution, the societal madness that took hold when roving gangs of diehard Communists went around lynching people who wore glasses or owned books. They understand that the possibility of that shit happening again, or coming for them, is non-zero. So the attitude is to use every trick in the book to make sure that they come out on top.

…

There is a recurring belief from Americans that most Chinese are brainwashed by their authoritarian government, and if they only understood democracy, knew about the atrocities of the CCP, or were exposed to the taste of an All-American cheeseburger, there would be a great awakening and China would truly "become free". While certain elements of brainwashing and information control are most certainly true, there is a certain level of arrogance in this method of thinking.

For one, this viewpoint has completely ignored the possibility that China already knows exactly how cheeseburgers taste, all about the atrocities of its own government, and about democracy.

…

China's political and social state project has openly stated its intent to utilize and take advantage of what worked before, while adapting it to fit their own situation. Throwing away what doesn't work, surgically excising elements they consider dangerous or don't like. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics'. 'China Dream'. These are adapted policies, methods, and ideals, refocused through the lens of the Party. Yes, they are stealing. They are also adapting.

Any good propagandist will tell you that the ideological battle is the first battle that must be won, and on this note America has failed utterly at defending democracy and personal freedom. This is not by Chinese design; rather, a combination of factors including financial inequality, changing demographics, chaotic governance, political point-scoring and media clickbait have done their best to demonstrate that American government is both unstable and spectacularly inept, and no longer believes in the values set down in the Declaration of Independence. America has considered the argument for democracy so thoroughly won that it has forgotten to defend it, or even the value of it. Into this void steps the Chinese government.

…

It is impossible not to watch. The US is the world's only really global power, and the current measuring stick by which all global powers are compared against. China wants what the US has, but is going to attempt to do so without the mistakes the Americans have made. After all, American empire is ending, or so everyone says. The bars are equalizing. America was a leader in space travel, so China will become a leader in space travel. America was a leader in world culture and entertainment, so China will become a leader in world culture and entertainment. America has a strong military, so China will have a strong military.

…

To leave with one last note, in the online kerfluffle surrounding Hong Kong's current situation, Chinese netizens think it's fair play to "support 9-11" and advocate for California seceding from the United States, as payback for a mistaken belief that the fight in Hong Kong is over independence. When confronted with the fact that edgy teenagers in America have been making 9-11 jokes barely a week after the tragedy and a non-zero amount of non-Californians in the US would also prefer it if California sunk into the ocean, they are legitimately surprised. The idea that this kind of independence would be preferred by both parties is almost completely alien to the Chinese, who wonder and are surprised at the fact that Americans apparently wish their country to be weaker.

#reddit #the motte #read the whole thing

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rigginsstreet · 6 years ago

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listen im not... interested in a redemption arc for gladys. because she doesnt need one, first of all. like ok she sold drugs. and? that doesnt make her an inherently bad person, especially when you look at her bum ass husband who quite literally gets away with murder (or... murder adjacent)

gladys is not a character meant for a cw show, is really what is comes down to. as with most of the adult characters, honestly. because on another network, with another fanbase, these characters would be treated as anti heroes and theyd get their own plots and theyd be fully dimensional and we would have better insight into their psyches and we could better explore how people are not black and white. theres a lot of grey morality.

but on riverdale its like you gotta be 100% pure otherwise youre trash (or in fps case you just gotta be moderately attractive and everyone forgives you)

and gladys.... is a criminal. we’ve clearly seen thats in her blood. its who she is. shes a hustler. she’ll do whatever it takes to make sure she and her family come out on top and if that means doing some illegal shit then so be it.

and it feels like now, if she does come back in season 4, she’s gotta either completely give up her ways to become suzie fucking homemaker, or the narrative is gonna treat her like a pariah because shes still doing what she knows best. and thats not fair.

like... ok, being a criminal is not an ideal life choice, i get that. but at the same time, this is all gladys knows. and shes good at it. and she clearly gets some enjoyment out of it. you can argue all day about whether or not its right but at the end of it, some people just be like that.

and yall can start screaming about how “shes a bad mother!” “fp and the kids dont deserve to be around that!” which... bullshit. cuz fp aint any better and jugheads hands aint clean either so yall can shut the fuck up. jellybean was never suffering. even at the end she WANTED to go with her mother. and gladys has never hid anything from jb. she was not kept in the dark.

so anyway i say all this to say that for personal reasons i dont want gladys coming back because i dont want to have to ever watch this show again, but also im not interested in her character being given a complete 180 in the name of keeping some bum ass husband who doesnt even deserve her. im not interested in watching yet another female character on this show be treated like a bad guy for simply owning her shit and living her best life.

like its amazing to me how penelope and gladys are the only two moms with screentime who really have full agency in their narratives and of course we’re meant to hate them. sorry. cant relate.

so thats... where im at

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renaroo · 7 years ago

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The Things That Wait (3/4)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: CHARACTER DEATH, Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Reverse Big Bang Entry] Tucker opens an unexpected email that ends up sending himself and all of the Reds and Blues toward a collision course with the unexpected and the completely deadly. In doing so, they face a beast familiar to many of them – the Meta – whose single minded efforts to complete himself with what remains of the Project Freelancer AIs could spell the death for more than a few of them..

A/N: Long time no see!! Sorry for the long wait, but in my defense, since I last updated I’ve now become a professor’s teaching assistant and graduate research assistant. So there’s a bit of a dip in my amount of freetime and, as you guys can imagine the chapters aren’t getting any shorter lol But we’re almost done! Just a few twists before we get to the end : )

And a very special thanks to @freelancerfeels, Yin, Prim_The_Amazing, xXxDeadEyesNekuxXx, Aryashi, SuperSaiyajin4Vegeta, NotSoHappyHufflepuff, and Dewsparkle! And, of course, my absolute WONDEROUS thanks to my partner in crime, @theeffar <3

Who Lives And Dies

Tucker’s vision did not come back in a blink or even a gradient wave. It came back in layers of color and lightening of shadows. It came back in turbulent storms that passed with throbs from his head. And that was the frightening part. The sickening way he didn’t know how the time was passed between the blurs of vision as he broke through the waters of consciousness again.

The last time he was back fully to consciousness, Tucker turned abruptly to his hands and knees and barely got his helmet off before vomiting until he was almost certain his stomach had turned inside out.

But the throbbing was gone, the electric shocks through his nerves lessened to a dull pulse.

And Church was finally silent.

“Church,” Tucker got out weakly, rocking himself to the side so that he could land safely away from his own mess. His eyes were sore and probably bloodshot, still wet from the strain. “Church, I can’t keep doing this. You’re fucking killing me.”

It wasn’t as if Tucker expected a response. It was more like the long nights adventuring with the alien shamans and Donut than it was like having his best friend sitting back and whispering through his very being. It was like talking to the Church who was the friend he missed and not the possessing presence that escaped the chain mail from hell into the back recesses of Tucker’s psyche.

Things were simpler before he was at his best friend’s mood swings’ mercy.

“You’re not the one I got killed.”

The response was unexpected, like getting a response out of the mirror.

Mostly, though, it was unexpected because it was coming through Tucker’s own teeth, using his tongue, the words tasted with his own mouth.

Shocked to the core by the invasiveness of the moment, Tucker sat up straight as a rod and felt his own lungs freeze up with slight horror. Did he make himself sit up? How much control did he have left? Was he just so exhausted and worn down that he had thought up the moment hysterically instead of it actually coming to pass? Tucker did’t know. He wasn’t even sure how much he cared, because everything about it was horrifying enough on its own accord. He didn’t need answers to make the way his sides squeezed and his hairs stood up to back up the already traumatic sense of losing absolute control of himself.

He might have been even further frozen by the moment if a small cooing noise hadn’t picked up from behind Tucker and drew his attention away from his own existential horror.

Recognizing the sound, Tucker looked everywhere in its direction for his son and, eventually, found Junior standing in the hallway that had brought them to Caboose’s lab to begin with. It was a fairly large distance, especially considering how close they usually kept to each other, but the more Tucker looked the more he understood why that was.

In Junior’s tiny hands was none other than the weird pulsating device which had caused everything wrong for the last however-long Tucker had been writhing on the floor.

And that distance felt like only just enough for Tucker to breathe easy without Church continuing to writhe and freak out inside of him.

“Hey, bud,” Tucker tried to say soothingly. His voice was croaky and strained from the bitter taste of vomit still, but he pushed through it for his son. “Daddy’s not feeling so hot—“

Almost like a whimper, Junior muttered “Bow chicka honk honk.”

It was enough to bring Tucker a somber smile. “Heh, yeah. But. I’m better now. Okay? I’m just. Wow I’m so fucking glad you’re okay.”

He was about to compliment his son for being so smart as to figure out how to rescue them from the turmoil of Caboose’s device but, the more Tucker looked, Junior seemed less concerned with the attack or even with the device he was holding.

Junior’s attention was actually fixated behind Tucker, and it was enough to make Tucker freeze up again just before turning to see for himself.

Tucker’s heart pounded with each centimeter he turned, but once he was completely around and just looking around Caboose’s workshop the less terrifying the moment felt. After all, he had just gone through a living hell and it at least got Church to shut up for a stretch. But beyond that, there didn’t even seem to be anything within the room. And Tucker was looking pretty hard for what had freaked his son out. But there was nothing.

And then it hit Tucker like a bag of bricks.

There was nothing.

No Caboose. No android body on the slab. Nothing.

There was nothing there but them. It was then that Tucker vaguely remembered Caboose declaring something about distracting or keeping away something.

And the words Church spoke through Tucker’s own mouth began to sourly taste on his tongue again.

You’re not the one I got killed.

“Fucking — Caboose!” Tucker shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

Horrified, Tucker looked around. The sudden rush to his feet had made him dizzy, but it wasn’t going to stop Tucker. Not at that moment anyway.

There was something seriously wrong with what was going on. And Tucker wasn’t going to feel any comfort until he saw evidence that everything was chill himself.

Without much more fanfare, and certainly without anything helpful from Church, Tucker extended his plasma sword and gave chase through the halls, only letting himself be bothered just enough by the device as he passed Junior to be reminded that Church was still somewhere deep within his own head.

As he ran down the halls, Tucker swiftly brought his helmet back to his head.

He was on the look out for Caboose.

And, however unfortunately, Tucker was quickly successful.

Then, for a second time, he felt a voice that was not entirely his own escape his throat. But it was more natural, something that was on the tip of Tucker’s tongue anyway.

“Caboose?”

His helmet was broken — crushed like a can on the floor. It laid closer to Tucker, like a grim warning at his feet, begging him to not look further in, to follow the red trail of carnage. But, of course, it was far too late for that.

Tucker’s vision was absorbed by the sight of gore that waited for them. There was such a stark contrast between the crimson blood still gushing and the bright, royal blue of Caboose’s armor. Just like the angle of Caboose’s head, how it tilted unnaturally, bruised and bulging beneath the skin, was absolutely no mistaking what Tucker was seeing. What it meant.

Or how that empty, lonely feeling of being alone again felt heavy on his chest as he stared at everything in the world halting and no longer making sense.

All he knew was that, as gunfire and shouting rang out from outside the base, that same emptiness and despair that still threatened to swallow him whole was staved off as it was filled by utter rage and anger.

The plasma sword pulsed at the touch of Tucker’s white knuckled grip.

Hiding Junior was the simple part. Even with the strange, pulsating device that Caboose had kept before, the combined raging in Tucker’s head of his own and of Church’s pierced through the static like uncomfortableness and pressed forward.

Junior protested in small, groggy yips but he didn’t follow them out once they left.

Tucker wasn’t in the mood for disobedience, and beyond that he wasn’t really himself anymore.

Faintly in the back of his mind, he could recognize the external urge twisting within his head, that pissed off, blow-hard temper that he had tested for years in Blood Gulch was suddenly racing through his own bloodstream. And while he had never necessarily known Church to do anything with that outrage… well, Tucker very much for the first time in his life felt like he had a lot more fight than love in him to give.

Outside of the base, sword drawn, Tucker scanned the valley. With an almost inhuman reflex, though, his senses honed in on the source of the activity closer to Red Base on the complete other side.

The plasma sword pulsed with his rage.

Simmons and Grif were behind the Warthog, as expected. It looked like the tire was blown out, and the closer Tucker got, the more he could see what was sprawled out on the other side of the vehicle — sparking and smoking. It wasn’t equipment, but familiar brown armor hollowed out at its center.

Lopez, Tucker thought momentarily before gritting his teeth and skidding behind the nearest rock for cover from whatever the source of the bullets was.

Fuck! This guy’s anti-robite, Church snarled between Tucker’s ears.

“You fucking talk in my head again I’m going to rip you out of this armor myself,” Tucker warned, squeezing his eyes shut as he tried to orient himself. “Jesus, Church, that hurts like fucking hell—“

“Oh, good, I was worried you were talking to me.”

Both Tucker and, in a sense, Church, squeaked out in surprise. But the momentary shock wore off and Tucker spun around on his heels with his sword out right at the throat of the speaker. Which, in hindsight of course, was a huge damn overreaction considering he was staring right in Donut’s visor.

“Donut, what the fuck?” Tucker hissed. “What’s going on? What happened to Lopez? Who’s attacking? And did they come from Blue Base?”

Donut hummed a bit and cocked his head to the side. “Uh. What order do you want those in?”

“Any!” Church screeched through she speaker of Tucker’s helmet It was almost enough to make the turquoise coated marine sigh with relief that Church was benevolent enough to spare Tucker’s vocal cords.

“Right, so, Lopez was on his way for the cremation apparently and this guy that Grif and Simmons knew followed him, and then he shot Lopez! And then when Grif tried to hit him with the Warthog he shot out the tire. So then I tried to say something and guns started going off, and—“

“Fuck okay, I get it!” Tucker cut him off as a bullet ricocheted off the other side of their rock. “The guy’s an anti-robite—“

“Hey hey hey! You can’t fucking make those jokes! I can make those jokes!” Church snapped at him angrily.

“Why? Because you’re a robot?” Donut asked innocently.

“What? No. Because I’m Jewish! Fuck you—“

“Everyone shut up, I’ve got a plan,” Tucker demanded, ignoring the throb of his head. “We need answers, I’ve got a feeling that this asshole, whoever the fuck he is, can give them.”

“Oh, speaking of answers, I didn’t give you all of them,” Donut tried to interject only to get a shushing from both Tucker and Church. “It’s weird when you guys are synched together like that.”

“No, we’re not,” they both answered at once.

Not leaving space for the irony to set in, Tucker slowly tilted out from around the rock, looking for the source of the gunfire. The arcs of the bullets were simple enough to trace, but it was all going too fast for Tucker alone. “Church,” he began to whisper, but it was without need.

“Got it,” Church answered and, suddenly, the HUD of Tucker’s helmet responded.

Deliriously, Tucker watched as the shots were traced in blue outlines, all meeting back at a point toward the wall leading into the valley. The Hud squared the area then, after blinking, enhanced and enlarged the space. It revealed an alcove where a gray armored body was perched, a battle rifle — which had a model read out on the HUD — aimed and firing.

“Holy shit, how’d you do that?” Tucker muttered.

“Wait until I show you the intercom function,” Church responded cheekily. He then had a heavy pause and low rumblings of curses entered Tucker’s head. “I know who that is — fucking goddamn bastard asshole cockroach son of a bitch—“

“Whoa,” Tucker uttered in confusion.

“We’re not in real trouble, this guy’s an asshole but he helped us out before. This is just a misunderstanding. We just… y’know, have to keep everyone from killing each other,” Church said confidently.

“Sounds simple enough,” Donut replied cheerfully.

“No it doesn’t, because Lopez is already dead,” Tucker pointed out. “And Caboose—“

“We’ll figure out the stuff with Caboose after we straighten this out, Tucker, keep up!” Church snapped.

Donut hesitated, clutching his gun a little tighter. “What happened with Caboose?”

A tight, hot knot twisted itself deep inside Tucker’s guts, but finally he could feel that it was completely his own and not some influence or electric tingle through his body. That sickness and unease, that… emotion he couldn’t deal with yet. That was all him. No doubt about it.

“Later,” Church insisted in a hiss. “First we’ve gotta stop the gun shit or someone actually will get hurt. And it’ll probably be someone actually important and not a stupid robot.”

“Now who’s the anti-robite?” Tucker huffed.

“Hey, what the fuck did I just say about those jokes?” Church snapped.

“Okay, jesus christ—“

“I just said I’m Jewish!”

“Church, what the fuck is your plan already!?” Tucker all but screamed.

The shooting momentarily stopped from the other side, and it was enough to make Tucker think, however momentarily, that things were about to cool down and they could get some answers, but to his horror instead the valley was filled with a different sound. One of honking and blarghing. And almost immediately, Tucker felt a pain wipe through him stronger than any shock Church had sent toward his spine.

“Junior! What the fuck!?” Tucker cried out, turning to see his son bounding over from the Blue Base with Caboose’s weird contraption in hand.

He just knew that the shooter saw Junior and had been stunned into inaction as well, though probably not for long.

Tucker’s first instinct was to throw himself toward his son, make sure there was no clear line of sight between the shooter and his halfling son. But he didn’t move on it. He stood flat footed, shocked with his own inaction, as a quiet, low, sense of self preservation grew louder than his fatherly intent.

And then, suddenly, Tucker felt sick with disgust at what he could only assume was Church’s deepest and ugliest intrusion into Tucker’s senses yet. Because no one — not even Church — had the right to override that sensibility he felt deep inside toward his son. How dare Church make it otherwise.

But for all that time had stopped, it suddenly, quickly, caught up once more all too quickly. Not with the sound of a bullet but with a motion of pink at Tucker’s side as Donut stepped out into the clearing nonchalantly.

“What the fuck are you doing!?” Church’s voice cracked.

“There’s a kid on the battlefield, no one would shoot with a kid on the battlefield. It’s totally against the rules,” Donut reasoned. “It’s like I tell Tucker all the time, there’s all kinds of fun things like filling other man’s holes with your bullets that you can’t do with children around, that’s just wrong. Besides, you said that we don’t have to worry about this guy—“

Tucker heard the words but he wished he hadn’t. It made the image too hard to even comprehend once it all came crashing down with that very sound of a shot that he had dreaded would end the time freeze before.

Donut’s body jerked uncomfortably at the sound of armor cracking and hollowing out under the pressure of artillery shells. A straight shot, aimed with sniper’s intent, right between the breast plates which had been far oversized for Donut’s frame anyway — loose enough to let the already questionable gap over their chests seem even more inviting.

In a blink, a red dust filled the air where Donut had been standing, and suddenly Donut was on the ground, flat on his back with his uncocked pistol laying out of his reach.

The blood was sprinkled over Donut’s armor plating, but the real horror of it was the way it bubbled out from the under armor links between the plates, how it filled the gaps like floodwaters, bubbling and hissing at the sudden and immense exposure to air.

Screaming was happening around Tucker — from the Reds, from his son — but Tucker couldn’t scream.

Tucker didn’t have control of his mouth to do so. And it wasn’t because of Church that time.

Sword drawn, his feet racing beneath him, Tucker was covering ground until, in what seemed like a moment’s notice, he was at the wall which this so-called Agent Washington had been barreled down in. He was standing, rifle still aimed in the direction of the others, like he somehow hadn’t seen or heard Tucker approaching from his flank. It was the epitome of coming across someone redhanded.

By the time Agent Washington was looking his way, Tucker was slicing through half of his rifle in one swoop. Then he sent his elbow into Washington’s helmet with another.

Off his footing, Washington stumbled back, but he used what was left of his gun to block another blow from Tucker’s sword. He seemed determined to use the action to disarm Tucker, letting the blade sink through the metal before twisting.

Tucker had a grip like none other on his sword, a thought that almost immediately made him think of Donut. And then it was followed by a pang of that hot writhing emotion he was avoiding again.

Stupid, Tucker thought just before Washington hit him with a barrage of fists and elbows, well placed to knock the wind out of Tucker and break his stance.

When Washington pulled out a bowie knife, however, Church had apparently had enough of being a passenger.

“Fuck this! HEY YOU ASSHOLE!” Church screamed from Tucker’s armor before lighting up in a bright flash of white right between them. “DID YOU FUCKING FORGET SOMETHING!?”

Genuinely shocked, Washington dropped his shoulders and stepped back in surprise. “Alpha— but… how—“

Seizing the opportunity, Tucker pivoted through Church’s image and hit Washington front on, connecting with the nose of his helmet and sending his head flying back into the cement wall.

And like that, Washington was out at Tucker’s feet, and Tucker’s heart was racing.

Not the least of which because of the sobbing he could hear meters away in the valley.

Church flickered a bit before disappearing, or whatever it was that he did to retreat back behind Tucker’s body and armor.

It didn’t matter f he could be seen or not, though, because Tucker was raging internally. He hated Church, how could he tell Donut that this fucker was safe? How could he not have known?

And that was just the hate that wasn’t from Tucker himself.

Pushing aside the complexities of sharing a headspace with Church, Tucker turned back, breathing hard and panted, and looked to where he could see Simmons and Grif gathered around. At where Donut had fallen.

“Fuck, oh my god, jesus, Donut…” Tucker wheezed.

Gulping down as much air as he could, Tucker raced out toward the others, trying to not selfishly think about how terrible it was for his son to have to witness another dead friend twice in the same day, and instead kept his mind on his friend. God, his friend — Donut was his friend, had become something like his best friend in their time in the desert and beyond. Everyone liked Donut. Everyone—

Grif was enraged. Tucker knew it as he approached because Grif wasn’t talking. He was standing beside Simmons as Simmons fretted over Donut’s chest wound. Simmons was talking, blabbering incoherently really, but Grif was coldly attentive to what was going on. He looked up at Tucker almost immediately.

“Did you kill him?”

“No,” Tucker said. “He’s unconscious. Is… Is Donut…”

“He got shot in the goddamn heart,” Grif snarled. “What do you think, Tucker? Show me where this backstabbing motherfucker is so I can kill him—“

“I… I think this is all a mistake,” Tucker said, though for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why.

“What’s a mistake?” Grif asked without a moment’s hesitation.

“Shooting Donut…” Tucker said. “It doesn’t make sense. He didn’t have reason to— I mean, he was entering the valley through the wall, right? Whoever killed the others was already here. This is all a mistake. When Washington was with us, he was a cold motherfucker, sure, but he trusted us for some reason, right?”

“Us…?” Grif repeated, his voice growing only harsher with each uttered syllable. “You weren’t there, Tucker. And neither was Donut. And now one of you is dead, and… fuck what am I saying, who am I even talking to? Why would you not kill Washington?”

Tucker felt strangely out of touch with his senses as he turned his head ever so slightly from Donut’s body and toward Grif’s angry, screaming face. He could hear a ringing in his ears, like there were still gunshots going off, but in his head rather than around him.

“Because I owe him,” Tucker didn’t say, though it came out of his mouth all the same.

Grif was furious. “Who the fuck are you?”

Blankly, hollowly, Tucker shook his head. “I… I don’t know.”

The device in Junior’s hands pulsed with an energy Tucker could feel more than he could see. And a headache intensified inside Tucker’s skull, seemingly tearing him in half from two different directions.

“Washington killed Donut in a firefight and we’ll get him for that,” Tucker didn’t say. “Believe me, I want it as bad as you. But we need answers and he’s about the only guy I can think of right now in this three ring circus who can give them. Because he did this, but we don’t know who did Sarge or who did Caboose.”

“Caboose is dead!?” Simmons all but shrieked. “What the fuck is happening!? Why the fuck is it happening!?”

Tucker reached up and gripped the side of his helmet, eyes squeezed shut. “Why the fuck did I open that chainmail?” he groaned through the throbbing.

“Is that supposed to be a fucking joke!? What the hell’s wrong with you?” Grif demanded.

“A lot right now,” Tucker answered, feeling sickly again. “A whole hell of a lot.”

Agent Washington was unconscious still as Grif and Simmons hovered nearby.

For precautions, the Freelancer’s weapons had been removed, as well as his helmet, gauntlets, and boots. Church seemed particularly insistent on those points since — according to him — Freelancers would have weapons hidden in every spot they could manage. And any questioning of that point earned a defiant who has the most experience with Freelancers from the ghost of a friend.

Tucker’s head felt like it was filled with cotton balls or else he would have had a feistier response to such a claim.

Grif was standing further away from the Freelancer, Tucker sitting next to where Washington was tied up in the brig. But he was still closer than Simmons, who seemed morose and almost ill with worry from his spot near the exit.

There was still a thick smell of iron in the air, be it from injuries of everyone in the room or lingering from the horrific sights they had been exposed to involving their once-friends. Tucker couldn’t tell anymore.

And Church seemed strangely fixated on Washington rather than the far more important things surrounding them.

Things only finally stepped back into motion when, beside them, Washington stirred again.

Immediately, everyone tensed — Grif cocking his rifle while Tucker got to his feet and activated the plasma sword from its hilt.

For a moment, after turning his body as much as he could in his restraints, Washington seemed to be processing things. His wrists twisted in their binds and his feet pressed against their ropes to separate at the ankles but all was to no avail. By the time his eyes opened, he was angered.

Which was fine by Church, who preferred when everyone met him at his level of anger.

Tucker was more reluctant to celebrate.

Washington’s eyes fell on Tucker first, flickering with unfamiliarity and confusion, before he glanced instead to the remaining Reds. His scowl regained its full judgment and he twisted and contorted himself as much as he could. “Let me go. Now,” he demanded.

“Fuck you, dude,” Grif snarled back.

“You fucking killed Donut,” Simmons’ voice cracked with emotion and anger like Tucker was unused to seeing from him.

“You betrayed me first!” Washington bellowed. Somehow, even restrained and on his side, Washington conveyed an unhingeness and rage that Tucker had never really felt from someone before. At least, not from anyone who meant it squarely for Tucker—

“Fuck you, dude! If anyone betrayed anyone, you betrayed me when you left me and Tex for dead! Fuck. You!” Tucker did not scream in a rage, did not nearly take a step forward with his sword aloft. But his body did all the same. And regaining his composure was all Tucker could do to grab onto his limbs and step his body back. “What the fuck, Church.”

Washington for a moment seemed genuinely alarmed, his eyes widening slightly as he looked Tucker’s way. Then he just looked confused. “Alpha?”

“I’m not a computer!”

Tucker reached up and held a hand to the helm of his helmet. He could feel the gazes of everyone around him, especially Grif and Simmons.

“Tucker, what the actual hell?” Grif demanded.

“I don’t know!” Tucker snapped through gritted teeth.

“There’s someone else in there!?” Washington yelled. “After all this, you still let Alpha implant on someone else? Haven’t you figured it out? DIdn’t you listen to anything I told you all before you stabbed me in the back!? The AI will fuck with people’s brains! Not to mention the Meta—“

“Stabbed you in the back? Fuck off! You killed us! After all we did for you!” Simmons screamed.

“I told you to give Epsilon to the UNSC after we destroyed the storage facility! I told Caboose that doing that would make sure all the people responsible for playing us like puppets would see the justice they deserved! And instead of doing that, instead of ending all of this fuckery, you abandoned me and then left me to be imprisoned to rot. So yes you stabbed me in the back, and I don’t give a fuck about anything we all did together before until I get Epsilon back from Caboose before the Meta fucking gets it!” Washington growled. “And what’s more, Alpha is still alive, and you left him to possess and overwrite the brain of some other unsuspecting idiot!”

“Liar!” Church roared.

“I’m not unsuspecting!” Tucker added, though he could barely process what it meant. “And only people who know me are allowed to call me an idiot.” Gaining more and more confidence in his own words again, Tucker stepped toward Wash. “And, by the by, Caboose is dead, and until we get some answers you can forget us answering any of your questions.”

For a moment, Washington seemed to freeze in place. His face drew back in shock and he looked at Tucker in slight horror. “Caboose… Caboose is dead?” he asked, almost solemn and regretful considering his earlier anger and bombast.

“He was… basically torn apart,” Tucker answered lowly. “And Sarge was beat up and strangled. There’s some… some kind of monster involved in all of this. But you still killed Donut — our friend — so until you can give us a clue as to what’s going on, forget us giving you any answers.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Washington tried to twist himself into an upright position. “Where’’s Epsilon?”

“Dude, did you not just hear what we fucking said?” Grif asked in disgust.

“You don’t understand,” Washington shook his head. “Free me, take me to Epsilon. Everything you just told me… the Meta is already here. He’s killing your friends—“

“The ones that you aren’t,” Simmons hissed.

“—and he’ll kill all of us to get to the remaining fragments,” Washington continued, glancing toward Tucker warily. “Including yours.”

“I’m no one’s fragment,” Church answered darkly.

“Wasn’t Epsilon with your kid?” Simmons suddenly spoke up.

Then, despite Church’s outrage and darkness, Tucker’s body was suddenly immensely feeling, and a tingling chill rode down through his spine and limbs.

“Junior,” he thought out loud — the first time he was allowed to really think of his own priorities since Church began to take over the the steering wheel.

Church… why weren’t you worried about Junior?

The thought was not voiced, but Tucker knew it didn’t have to be. Not with how strangely connected they were. Not with how shocks of pain proceeded movements and voices that were not his own.

He had been ignoring the itch of a thought about what was happening to him. No one wants to believe that they are being used as a meat sack for someone thy thought of as a friend.

But in that moment, as his fatherly instincts overrode any further dictation from Church himself, Tucker knew he couldn’t ignore the obvious any longer.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong with him. And Church was the source of it.

Not my thing to worry about, Church replied flatly. There was no denial, not even any feigned confusion about the fact that he was dictating so much of what they were doing all of the sudden.

And that was telling in its own way.

Have… Have you ever done this to someone before? Tucker dared to think.

He could almost feel the coldness from the man — the ghost, the computer, the whatever — that he had thought of as his best friend for so long.

I don’t remember. Not on purpose, Church admitted. It’s too familiar to be new. But I’m not… Tucker, I don’t want to…

What happened to people when you did this before? When you made their body do things and think things they didn’t want? Tucker pressed, knowing that any anger and upset he felt was naked and open for Church to infiltrate inside his brain like everything else.

I don’t know. I think… I think I’m just… me again. Eventually, he confessed.

“That’s not happening,” Tucker swore through his own tongue again. He was determined and pissed which almost made up for the betrayal and disgust.

Church wasn’t fighting back again, so Tucker just continued forward, sword unsheathed, looking desperately for his missing son. Something that Church probably could have helped with, but he wasn’t offering and Tucker sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.

And that was when they finally came across Junior.

The alien child was clutching the Epsilon unit close to his chest, terrified, as he should have been. There was something hardly visible, but still obscuring the area behind Junior.

“Fuck! Active camo!” Tucker cried out to the others behind him in warning. “Junior, duck!”

His son did as ordered which opened Tucker up to a leap through the air, sword barred as he swung down for the spot where he had noticed the obscuring shimmer. Sparks flew on contact with something metallic and angry. But, to Tucker’s surprise, it wasn’t the end of the moment.

As the active camouflage began to fail, the free arm of the perp flew up, grabbed Tucker by his shoulder, and proceeded to suplex him in a move that immediately made the aqua marine begin to see stars.

“What the fuck, no one said the Meta could do that!” Tucker whined, still trying to get his bearings as he pushed to sit up.

“As far as I know, he still can’t,” a familiar voice said lowly.

Church, for once, was utterly speechless.

Tucker turned over to his knees almost immediately, expecting a flash of black armor to go with that familiar sound. “Tex!?”

He didn’t receive what he thought, however, because it wasn’t that at all. Instead, there stood a massive armored body with a domed yellow helmet, and intimidating white glaring armor. Something about it, the bulk or the weapon or just the low rumble that escaped with every breath. But it was terrifying and it wasn’t Tex.

Not her body at least.

“Buenos días, cockbites,” her voice came from the armor. “Guess who’s back?”

#writing #rvb fic #RvB: The Things That Wait #Lavernius Tucker #Alpha Church #Tucker Junior #Agent Washington #Franklin Delano Donut #Dexter Grif #Dick Simmons

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jeffersoneverestcrawford · 4 years ago

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On catching glimpses...

.. this piece was published on Ultra Dogme...

https://ultradogme.com/2021/02/27/on-catching-glimpses/

Welcome to the future. We ride on the last of many train cars, which is the present, traveling forward through the past, or the future. In our daily life the past may as well be the future. As we move ahead we glance around, behind, parsing glimpses of what was, what is, and what might be. Neatly enough, each calendar year acts as a container for our progress - in particular, the ends and beginnings become moments to find our bearings within an otherwise endless stream of time. So I force myself into the present, stretch my arms out, steadying the flow, just for an instant. What I notice shocks me, invigorates me beyond belief. I catch glimpses of a ‘new’ new. Even faintly, I imagine I see a new cinema, a minor and marginal cinema.

I concluded last year with a reading of Jonas Mekas’ Movie Journals, which solidified my position on the precarious nature of ‘freedom’ in amateur or personal filmmaking. The truth is that amateur movie making has not been allowed to thrive. It has instead been conglomerated by the same institutions that once supported it. And yet there are moments in which I glimpse the future of the new. Moments in which clearly, institutions and checkpoints have as little value as money - which is the mark of real freedom.

I might be imagining it, but I feel as if I am catching hints of a return to freedom. This past year I have seen and enjoyed films by the freest of artists. These are artists working without institutional support, gathering online rather than in school or at a film society. These are artists casually restructuring networks of production and dissemination, who will soon radically restructure the use of the moviemaking apparatus itself. Which would cause a minor uproar, if anyone were there to notice. I’m sure these makers will continue on their paths, embracing their freedoms, and I will continue shouting about them, in the hopes that some heads will turn. When we turn our heads, we change how the future looks.

A quote from Jonas Mekas rings around my head, a refrain, as I think about these works, about the possibilities in them: "we need less perfect but more free films”. It appears on the first page of his Movie Journals. Mekas wrote that in 1962, and it appears again here, at the start of a new year, a new decade, a limitless horizon.

The free films, the really free films, are what I hope to talk about this year. Work that is minor and on the margins. Minor and yet major, marginal and yet central. These films are a respite amid the onslaught. Films that are poems, in which we may contemplate the momentary, the fleeting, the beautiful.

I shouldn’t pretend that the characteristics which knot these works together justify a movement, or some similar nonsense, but there are characteristics which seem to justify the apparent freedom and personal nature of the works, more than anything else.

There is a freedom in the obviousness of their making, in the ways reality is woven into them - a reality which takes on the tint of dreams, of visions. This obviousness comes from the clarity with which image and structure are used, an honesty which belies any apparent obscurity. No matter how altered, these works are realities - either on screen, or in the maker's vision. They encompass meaningful daily exchanges, or life - the true substance of reality.

There are the daily sort of images that one sees everyday: the trees one passes, or the river, or a goose. Images which become our actions, a walk, a drive - a walk or drive leading to soul-crunching existential horror. There is a rawness of emotion, often personal details are strewn throughout, references to friends, family, daily life. This diary-like quality, no matter how distorted, suggests honesty in the work. This is not only amateur but specifically personal filmmaking, on a mental, emotional and physical level. The brilliant (SYN/ANTI)THESIS challenges the viewer to enter into a mental state conducive of transformation, using manipulated diary-like materials alongside a careful attention to pacing and composition. I think it shows a rare mastery of these manipulations for such a personal and hand-made film.

The technique may be all about transformation. The films themselves are about transformation, even of transformation. One may find that they are less about something and more of something. Of feelings, of faces, friends, or of trees or buildings or times of the day. They are minor observations of the soul.

The films of Lucy Hanson show a mastery of observation, and an understanding that to observe is not only to grasp at the world through our senses but also to feel it through our moods. We are porous and fragile, as are these little films. This slight mastery is displayed in Hanson’s a road trip leading nowhere, which deposits us alone, staring into the dark, left to listen to a forlorn song. This work counters common films of observation in that it pulls us into a mood rather than into a view - in fact, the view is totally obscured by night. We are pulled along into a moment, made to feel stuffy and stranded for a glimpse, stuck listening and staring into the dark for an instant. Often this is what stuns me, how complex a little work might be with so few elements. These pieces are patterns, songs, memories - and they instantly evoke happenings, rememberings, dreams.

There is consistent emphasis placed on what these things have done to us, the impact they may have had on our psyches, our bodies, our minds and hearts, how they have shaped us, even in small ways - rather than how we shaped them. I find this again in Lucy Hanson’s work, such as gliding along the river, or a sudden change in seasons. I feel so lovely as I drift beyond this lonely shack, but also drifted, and lonely, and oddly changed. I am made to understand something new about myself. Even if a change is so miniscule as to be undetectable, it still changes us. The landscape changes in dips and whirls through Nature Symphony, a little film I found right at the start of this year. It is another song of change, that bleeds into the imperfections it encapsulates. Change is personified, albeit by a hauntingly mobile mannequin in Blank Slate, another short tune of nature, of living, of coming to terms with transformation, by a great young filmmaker, Jamie Jarvis-Stores. I also sense the bleeding heart of change in the work of Enrico Alchimim, whose materials feel as if they are pulled from experience itself, more raw than real. I feel this most about Esperando Siri (Waiting for Crab) and O Espaço Entre O Céu E A Pedra (The Space Between the Sky and the Rock). These films are as scratchy as the seaward facing rocks and as calming as a breeze.

Other senses are sometimes made more active in an amateur work, as if the haptics of its personal making can place us in that experience so fully that our taste or smell is awakened. It might be because the making seems so familiar, or that the way the images are framed is more natural, less technical, less mechanical and modern. But these works are modern, in that they represent modern ideas. Still, they reject modernity, or more precisely they reject modernization. They are human in a way which modernized things cannot be. This is what makes them “amateur,” in the full, Latin, sense of the word - amatorem, a lover, made for love.

I find these makers playing with form in such sophisticated and yet un-studied ways, with an ingenuity which might reveal itself to some as amateurism in the derogatory, unprofessional way. To these degradations the works are apparently nonplussed, as steadfast as anything made with love. These films are drastically untethered and personal, and demonstrate the roving eye, ‘unruled by laws of man,’ then 90% of avant-garde or ‘non-commercial work.’ Especially when seen together, or in context, it becomes clear that these minor works are more vibrant, with purer ideas than most work that graces the screens of whatever festivals, even ‘unconventional’ ones (nevermind that ‘unconventional’ festivals have become their own traditions).

The amateur and radical movie maker need not stop at minor on the way to marginal. In fact, of late these lovers seem to trend toward ambition, their films becoming longer and longer. Creating a feature film as an individual artist, releasing it on your own, on Youtube, is no small feat. Which is why Eden Poag’s Everywhere at the End of Time, which runs over 100 minutes, can be considered anything but minor. Poag’s work deals with dementia, and uses the album of the same name by The Caretaker, as its foundation. Regarding the film itself I can echo notes I made earlier, that the form is manipulated in very natural, but also sophisticated ways. On the strength of the penultimate section alone it is hard to believe that Poag is 13, and a completely independent artist, working for herself.

I recently basked in the sickly red glow of Cecil Selwyn’s new 50 minute film Centuries of Boredom. Selwyn films themself as the pasty stranger, who sings, giggles, transforms into several iterations of an awkward daemon - seemingly all but shitting themself and masking their pasty face in excrement. A metric for me moving into this new decade is to ask “who would play this movie 10, 15 years ago?” If Anthology film, or SF Cinematheque, or Ann Arbor FF or whomever else wouldn’t have screened this without some name recognition behind it then we might deduce it is either truly bad or exceptionally radical. Horrible and radical enough to not fit in at the very institutions that consummated the original sins of the underground cinema.

Form is malleable to the free artist. Conceptions of editing and composition become more like wind in the leaves than of the tree itself, grasped at as one grasps at beauty, with an eye for passion, rather than perfection. Freedom allows one to understand that perfection is only technical achievement rendered pure in the mind of the commercially driven. The free artist has no need for perfect expression, because expression is perfect.

There is the same radicality in (SYN/ANTI)THESIS, in which Kevin Ostrica, himself the maker and protagonist, undergoes a series of ambiguous transformations. The camera becomes the stage itself, a proscenium busy transferring the vision of the filmmaker to the perspective of the viewer. The camera acts in an almost unconscious manner to direct our mental processes. The way Ostrica frames his surroundings, the lakefront, the factory or refinery, the average-seeming intersection, beckons from us a mental transformation. It is a method at once totally simple and totally radical. It might seem that I attach too much import to such a basic practice, but that’s the point, that something as fundamental as framing a shot is all it takes to transform reality. This is in direct correspondence with a phrase by Maya Deren, a master of personal moviemaking, that cinematography is the “creative use of reality.” Which is what making art is: a use of reality, putting reality to use - rather than using reality, which is advertising. This will always be the constant, brilliantly destabilizing force of amateur creation, of creation for the sake of love, that the cynical dis-use of reality, in the name of commerce, needn’t heed - that instead, for once, love actually prevails in the realm of the real.

(SYN/ANTI)THESIS and Centuries of Boredom are the boldest new films I have seen, and both are long, bogglingly intricate, neatly crafted, sensuous works, especially as works made by individual artists. Transformations of the self are presented to us as transformation of the form - that is what art does.

Let us take the moment, even briefly, to grasp at this destabilizing of the moving image. These pieces, as utterly democratic in their production as they are broad in their subject matter, represent a shedding of heavy, theatrical pretense for the personal filmmaker. No longer must the purely amateur filmmaker either toil in obscurity or learn the proper techniques and conventions. Now, they demonstrate the full spectacle of their tiny, homespun brilliance for the world, without having it crowd sourced or focus grouped. This is a revolution for everyone! Freedom for the maker! Freedom for the audience! How tiring to be constantly wary of convention, prepared to jump out and catch the unwary charlatan in the act of “rule breaking.” Now, the audience can rest, relax into a slumber of pure vision, unfiltered vision - vision so palpable one might reach out and grasp it…

This is where I leave, and push off into narrow, beautiful waters; courses set for the margins. I will resurface and correspond as often as possible to throw some light on shadowy patches, to call forth some much-needed attention to the minor and marginal cinema. These works offered me much inspiration last year, and as I intend to seek them out more actively this year, and continue to revel in their micro-cosmic delights, I think the least I can do is attempt to point them out, and to document as honestly as I can my thoughts on them.

#Movie Journal

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unfolded73 · 7 years ago

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The Nonlinear Property of Time (4/4)

A Season 7 AU story with time travel. Rated Explicit. Warnings for pregnancy sex and fanservice-ilicious daddy!Killian in this last chapter.

This fic is dedicated to @allrightfine – you finally wore me down. Thanks to @j-philly-b for betaing. Thanks to @bleebug for your amazing artistic talent.

A few important notes:

1. I came up with this fic before 7x02 aired based on a lot of the speculation going on in fandom, and even after it was no longer consistent with canon, I couldn’t resist writing it. It just became more involved to fully describe the time travel scenario. Anyway, the point is Wish Hook isn’t in this. But that does not mean I’m anti-Wish Hook – surprisingly, I’m pretty psyched for that story now. So please don’t compliment this fic by slamming that character and his storyline, because I don’t really want to see that.

2. This story has a present-Killian/future-Killian/Emma threeway. If that’s not your thing, this fic might not be for you, and that’s okay!

3. This whole scenario turned out to be way more angsty than I anticipated going in. (No wonder the Doctor is such a big mope.) Which I love but also it makes me glad this isn’t what happened canon.

(Chapter 1) (Chapter 2) (Chapter 3) (NSFW Chapter 3 art)

Chapter 4

They gathered after breakfast in the clearing near Henry’s cottage.

Killian stood beside Regina, the brace for his hook propped on the pommel of his sword, watching from a distance as Henry and Emma said their goodbyes. He could tell that Emma was trying to put on a brave face, but the tears were starting to flow as she pulled her son into a hug. His older counterpart was keeping his distance from everyone, allowing time for all the farewells.

“You gonna be okay there, pirate?” Regina asked him.

He met her eyes briefly. “I was imagining what I would do if staying here to protect Henry meant that I would miss the birth of my child. That I really would miss all that time with Emma. And… if I knew that that was the only way to keep both Henry and my unborn child safe from whatever is coming…” He sighed. “I’d stay.”

She reached over and tentatively squeezed his hand. “Thank you.” Regina then let go and stepped back, her discomfort with even that brief moment of connection evident. “But that isn’t what you’re doing. You aren’t going to miss the birth of your child.”

“Then why do I hate this so much?” he asked, his jaw aching as he clenched it.

“Because living day to day without the person you love feels like torture sometimes,” Regina said. “There’s an ending in sight for you, though. Focus on that.”

Emma and Henry walked over and joined them, and Emma pulled a surprised Regina into a hug. “I’m pissed that you won’t be there when the baby comes,” she said.

Regina laughed, her voice the slightest bit watery. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of people willing to babysit.”

Emma scoffed as she let go of Regina. “Not to babysit, just… I don’t know. I figured you’d keep me sane when the baby is crying nonstop and my mother is being annoyingly optimistic about everything.”

Killian’s attention drifted from the two women to Henry, who had wandered over to the older Killian to say goodbye to him. It was such an odd thing, he thought. First, he had to endure a period of time without his wife, and then after that a period of time without his stepson. From the younger Killian’s perspective, at the start of this slow path through time, it felt like an eternity until they would all be reunited again. His older self might have kept mum on how long it would be, but Killian knew. The subtle signs of age on the other man’s body, the desperate way he had touched his wife, the sadness in his eyes as he said goodbye to Henry now. It would be years, not months.

“Hey,” Emma said, taking his hand.

Killian swallowed around a lump in his throat. “Hey, yourself.”

She put her arms around him. “Take good care of Henry.”

He chuckled. “He’ll probably need to take care of me. I’ll be useless without you.”

“No, you won’t.” She pulled him tighter, and he could feel the rounded bump of her abdomen, a little bit more pronounced every day.

“Look after yourself, love. Eat balanced meals, and take your vitamin—”

“Killian, don’t imagine it like my life is going on without you.” She pulled back and held his face in her hands. “Imagine that I’m frozen in a bubble. Nothing’s gonna happen without you there. I’ll eat healthy and take my prenatal vitamin because you’ll be there to remind me. Okay?”

“Okay.” He blinked, feeling tears spill over onto his cheeks, and kissed her. “Not a day will go by for me that I won’t think of you.”

Her resulting smile broke his heart. “Good.” She kissed him again. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.” He squeezed her hand, not wanting to let go, and brought it to his lips. “Always.”

She pulled away, and he finally had to drop her hand. Killian was barely holding himself together, knowing that breaking down into sobs right in front of everyone would just make all of this harder. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the magic bean, reluctantly handing it over to his other self. “Appreciate every single day,” he told himself.

“You know I will.”

Emma went over to Henry one last time, taking his face in her hands and kissing his forehead, just the way she’d done when he was little, when she had to lean over him to do so. Now he stood almost a head taller than her, his shoulders broad. When she seemed like she might linger indefinitely, the older Killian gently guided her away.

As Killian watched, his counterpart hurled the bean, and a portal opened in the clearing. Squinting, Killian could see the black pavement of Storybrooke’s main street in the middle of the glowing spiral hole, the clock tower in the background. He felt a swell of homesickness, not just for Emma, but for Granny and Snow, David and little Neal, Ashley and Alexandra and even Zelena, gods help him — all of the people who made his adopted hometown a home.

Emma looked back, her eyes filled with tears. The other Killian put his arm around her, and before he could take another breath, the two of them turned and ran through the portal. It closed behind them, the woods left unnaturally silent in its wake.

That night, as he fell asleep listening to the sounds of the nocturnal creatures of the forest, Killian mentally marked a single line on a tally sheet inside his mind. One day down without his wife; many, many more left to go.

~*~

Storybrooke, Years Ago

At least his time in Hyperion Heights meant he didn’t have to readjust to modern life. The way to brew a pot of coffee, or run the dishwasher, or drive a car — thanks to his cursed memories, all of those tasks were at his fingertips, so to speak. And thanks to his false memories of attending the Seattle Police Academy and studying to be a detective, he was now positively overqualified to be Sheriff’s deputy in a quiet Maine town where nothing remarkable ever happened.

The day they returned to Storybrooke, he took his prosthetic hand off and put it in a drawer. It reminded him too much of those lonely months as Detective Rogers, when he didn’t even know he had a wife to miss. When he didn’t know that Henry and Ella and Lucy and Regina were his family. If Emma had any opinion about him going back to the hook, she didn’t comment on it.

He could tell when Emma would start to talk to him about something like it had happened yesterday (because of course for her, it had), then would stop and check herself and gently back up and explain. He hated that she had to do that, that she had to be reminded of all the years he’d lived without her. He wanted her happiness to be pure, not adulterated with the knowledge of the time he’d spent away from her side.

On the plus side, the waning of Emma’s morning sickness as she started the second trimester of her pregnancy combined with his having missed her so desperately meant their sex life was electric — probably the best it had ever been, even compared to those first few months after their wedding. As they lay in bed in the soft afterglow, his hand on her growing belly, he would talk to her. He told of how the first time he saw the way Henry looked at Ella, Killian knew he was a goner. How he and Regina had witnessed their small wedding in the resistance camp in the forest. How Ella had gone into labor at the most inopportune of times, and that he had helped Tiana deliver the baby while Regina held off the forces of darkness with every spell in her arsenal.

He told her about Rogers, and how lonely he’d been, even if he hadn’t known why.

Emma combed her fingers through his hair and pressed her lips to his cheek and listened. In less time than he would have credited, it was like he’d never been away from her in the first place.

He marked the days, knowing that a time would come when he would need to let himself into the pawn shop for a particular magic wand and write out instructions and take them to Zelena so that the time loop would finally be closed.

~*~

Emma shut off the shower and slid the curtain back, pausing to squeeze the excess water out of her hair before stepping out.

“Swan?” Killian called, and she could hear his footsteps through the bedroom. “Do you need a hand?”

She rolled her eyes. “I can manage to get out of the shower without falling down, babe, I promise.”

He ignored her snark, walking over and holding out his elbow. “Nonetheless, I’m here, so you might as well hold onto me.”

She glared at him, but put her wet hand on his shirt sleeve and allowed him to take some of her weight as she maneuvered over the lip of the tub with her prodigious belly. Killian handed her a fresh, fluffy towel.

“Thanks,” she said, starting to dry herself off.

“Did the shower make you feel better?”

“My back is still killing me, so not really.” She grimaced down at her protruding belly button, now an outie, and observed once again that she couldn’t see her feet. “I’m ready for you to come out of there, little girl,” she said, patting her abdomen. As if she knew she were being spoken to, the baby kicked.

“Two more weeks, love.”

“Two more weeks ‘til the due date, but that means any time from now on would be considered full term,” she said as she toweled off her hair and followed him back into the bedroom.

“I’m sorry you’re uncomfortable,” he said. “What can I do to help?”

She sighed. “Can you rub my back?”

“Of course.”

Emma hung her towel up and pulled on a pair of clean underwear and lay down on the bed on her side, bringing her knees up so that her spine curved out. “I can’t even lie down on my stomach for a proper backrub.” Complaining felt good. “And my hips hurt, which is just stupid.”

Killian lay down behind her, his hand kneading into her lower back, and she moaned in appreciation. “Right there?” he asked her somewhat unnecessarily.

“God, yes, right there,” she gasped as his fingers dug in deeper.

He stifled a groan. “How it is that you can make me hard so quickly just with the sound of your voice? It’s witchcraft, Swan.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder to see this erection he was bragging about, and sure enough, she could see the hard outline of him through his jeans. Emma snorted and turned back around. “But then you look at me and it kills your boner just as quickly.”

“I can only assume, since I have told you a hundred times that I am aroused by the sight of your pregnant body, that you are fishing for reassurance. But that’s all right, darling, I’m happy to provide it.” His hand continued to work on her back as he talked. “You are beautiful and sexy, and when I look at you, I’m in awe of the fact that you’re carrying my child and at the same time I just want to fuck you.”

Emma shivered, smiling secretly to herself. “Okay.”

“I’m glad it’s okay with you that you drive me to distraction on a daily basis.”

“And here I thought you were afraid I was going to fall down in the tub; you just wanted an excuse to see me naked.”

He chuckled. “It can’t be both?”

Emma hummed to herself, dragging a thumb over her nipple. “We can have sex now if you want.”

Leaving off the deep tissue massage, Killian began trailing his fingers up and down her spine, making her shiver again. “What about your back and your hips and whatever else is paining you, darling?”

She shrugged. “My back is better, thanks to you, and now I’m kind of horny. Look, don’t question my rapidly shifting hormonal state. There’s no explaining it.”

Laughing, he curled his body against hers and reached around to stroke her over the thin cotton of her panties. She often felt a little swollen and sensitive down there these days, and his touch had her instantly gasping and grinding against his fingers.

It was clear that Killian wanted to take his time, as he gently rolled her over onto her back to spend some quality time kissing her. Which was nice, but what Emma really wanted right now was a quick fuck, not to be romanced. On the other hand, her husband was a wonderful kisser. Not only that, she could tell by the way he was stroking his hand up and down her body that he was trying to communicate to her through touch that he still appreciated her physically. The least she could do was lie back and enjoy it.

Killian pulled down her underwear and Emma helped him, kicking it off onto the floor. Before he could resume his attentions, the baby kicked hard enough to hurt, and Emma winced. Maybe lying back and enjoying it wasn’t in the cards for her either.

“I think she wants me to turn over,” Emma said, rolling away onto her side again.

She listened as her husband undressed, and then she felt him press against her back again. This time he was all skin and hair and hard cock, falling naturally against the crease of her ass as he nuzzled her neck.

Emma tangled their legs together, none too subtly spreading her thighs and angling her hips to accept him inside. Killian made some adjustments and used his hand to guide himself into her wetness, and she groaned with relief as he filled her.

It was a familiar rhythm for them, an all-too-familiar position, and Emma found herself longing for the day when she could feel Killian pressed against her chest again, could wrap her legs around his hips and lie back and let him fuck her into the mattress. She slid her hand down between her legs and clenched her thighs, her fingers kneading and pressing against her clit. Emma didn’t need his help with this part of it; in truth, preferred to take care of herself when Killian was fucking into her from behind, but he wrapped his arm around her and put his hand over hers and it was nice, like he just wanted to feel the way she pleasured herself, like it heightened his enjoyment to do so.

Emma tilted her head back and lost herself in the friction, the delicious pressure, and then her orgasm hit suddenly, making her moan low and loud in the quiet bedroom. After a handful of strokes, Killian followed, his teeth leaving impressions in the skin of her shoulder.

The lay together for several minutes, panting, breathing gradually slowing down and in no hurry to pull apart. When he finally slipped from her body and rolled to lie on his back, Emma turned over to cuddle against his side — as close as she could, anyway, given her current shape.

He put his hand on her belly and was soon rewarded with a flurry of motion from their daughter. Killian laughed. “There she is, right on schedule. Very indignant about the things we’ve been getting up to, isn’t she?”

Emma giggled and closed her eyes, enjoying the feel of his hand on her skin. “Should we tell her when she’s older? That we used to have sex when I was heavily pregnant and that she would always kick me afterward like she was taking a karate class?”

“Oh, aye. I’m sure we’ll scar her in a myriad of ways, Swan; what’s one more?”

~*~

“Killian?”

“Up here, David!” he called, holding the front part of the diaper down with the stump of his left wrist so that he could fold the tabs over with his hand. After two weeks, he almost had it mastered. Fastening the snaps of the little garment Emma called a ‘onesie’ with nimble fingers, he scooped up the crying, wiggling infant, putting his hand under her head and his wrist under her back. “Now now, Maureen, don’t fret. I’ve got you, sweet love.”

Turning, he looked at the disarray of the baby’s room and frowned. Not exactly the kind of thing that would impress his father-in-law. Maureen snuffled, rooting against his collarbone.

David ducked his head in and grinned. “There’s my granddaughter!” he said. He made a few silly faces at the baby before holding out his arms. “May I?”

“Of course,” Killian said, passing the baby over. “Did Emma tell you to check on me?”

David gave him a guilty glance as he led Killian out of the nursery. “She might’ve mentioned that she was going to run a few errands on her own this afternoon.” He bounced the baby in the practiced way of a man who had spent many an hour with his own, and Killian envied him his natural ease. “How are you?”

“Fine. Maureen was a little fussy earlier, but that miraculous pump Emma has allows me to feed her, so—”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of things in this realm that make taking care of baby easier,” David said as the two men went downstairs. “Not that I had the opportunity to take care of Emma, but… you know.”

“Aye. Can I get you anything?”

Little Maureen’s eyelids were drooping, seduced into sleep by the way David was gently swaying back and forth. “No, I’m fine. Just wanted to see this little one and check how you were doing.”

Killian scratched behind his ear. “I mean, I’m not as good as Emma at… anything, really. But it’s…” He looked at the way his daughter’s eyelashes fluttered, at her tiny, perfect nose and pink cheeks. “She makes it all worth it. I would endure every hardship ten times over for her.”

David brushed his lips across the top of the baby’s head. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

Killian decided to take advantage of not holding a baby for once and moved to start cleaning up the kitchen.

“So…” David said, still swaying back and forth. “I noticed you’re not wearing the hook.”

“Aye,” he said, filling the sink with hot soapy water. “Even though I don’t keep it sharpened, I was still worried I might hurt her.”

“Well, don’t you have a prosthetic hand? Emma told me you had one from when you were cursed in Seattle.”

Killian frowned, turning around. “She did?”

Another guilty expression from his father-in-law. “She might’ve mentioned it.”

Turning back to the sink, Killian concentrated on his task. “It belonged to my cursed persona there. I don’t… I don’t like the reminder.”

“Of being cursed? I can understand that.”

He winced. “I don’t mean a reminder for me. I mean for Emma.”

There was a pause. “Sorry, Killian, you lost me. Reminder for Emma of what, exactly?”

He dried off his hand, giving up on the dishes and leaning against the sink. “Of the fact that I’m so far removed in time from the man I was when she told me she was pregnant with that little life ruiner,” he said with a forced smile and a nod at his daughter, now slack and sound asleep in her grandfather’s arms. “I’ve been back for more than six months, and I think she’s almost forgotten.” He grimaced and shook his head. “Not forgotten, but she doesn’t think about it every day. She’s stopped constantly checking herself on whether she’s assuming I’ll remember something I might not remember anymore. I don’t want there to be a constant reminder for Emma of the fact that I had to live a segment of my remaining years without her, after how hard we fought to be together.”

“I’m not sure you’re giving my daughter enough credit. I mean, look, you should do what makes you comfortable. Wear a—” He glanced around the kitchen. “—spatula at the end of your wrist for all I care. But I just think if you have a device that would make it easier to take care of a newborn — not that you aren’t doing an amazing job already; clearly you are — why not use it?”

“Did Emma tell you to say that?”

“No.” David smirked. “Let’s just say I read between the lines.” The baby startled herself awake and wiggled in David’s arms. Shifting her position into the crook of his elbow, he looked down into her face and grinned widely. “I still think she kind of looks like me,” he said as he booped her gently on the nose.

Killian groaned. “Not this again.”

“Come on, she has my eyes!”

“I have blue eyes, mate.”

“Yeah, whatever, pirate.”

~*~

Storybrooke, Present Day

“They’re here! They’re here!” Maureen shouted from the front room, nearly knocking over her father’s telescope in her haste to get to the front door. “Mom! Dad! They’re here!”

She wrestled open the door a little bit too forcefully, and it banged against the doorstop as she ran onto the porch.

People were piling out of the nondescript dark blue car at the curb as Zelena’s green monster pulled up behind and she and Robyn got out. Maureen was almost distracted from the new arrivals by Robyn’s blue hair. She loved Robyn’s hair. She wanted blue hair too, but her parents said she wasn’t old enough yet.

Maureen hadn’t met any of the other people, but she knew who they were. Aunt Regina, she’d seen pictures of. Henry too, although most of the pictures of him were when he was a teenager, and he looked like a grownup now. The other lady must be his wife, she thought, and the girl was their daughter, Lucy. Maureen’s dad had told her lots of stories about Lucy.

There was a blur of blonde hair as her mom ran out of the house and down the stairs and collided with Henry, hugging him tightly. Then she felt her dad’s hand on her shoulder, and Maureen looked up to see him watching the reunion. He looked kind of like he was going to cry, which made Maureen’s stomach roll over.

Regina approached and held out her hand. “Hello, there. I’m Regina.”

Maureen shook Regina’s hand. “I’m Maureen.” Regina was pretty, with dark lipstick and dark hair, and Maureen felt nervous about what to say to her. She looked up at her dad again.

He smirked at Regina. “Do we hug?” he asked her.

“Absolutely not,” Regina replied, but then she hugged Maureen’s dad anyway, which was weird.

Maureen looked back at the lawn, where her mom was talking excitedly to Henry’s wife, her voice kind of high-pitched and fast. Lucy glanced over, and Maureen waved nervously at her.

With a smile, Lucy approached. “You’re my aunt, right?”

Maureen puffed up a little bit at that. She was someone’s aunt, and that meant she had responsibilities. “Yeah,” she said in a firm voice. “I can show you around if you want. Do you want to come see my room?”

“I delivered the package and the hook, exactly as instructed,” Zelena said. Maureen looked up out of curiosity. Zelena had delivered Dad's hook to someone? Why would she do that, Maureen wondered. For as long as she could remember, sometimes her dad had worn his hook and sometimes his mechanical hand, depending on what he needed to do. She’d asked him once why, and he had said that it took two hands to wash all the dirt off of her at the end of the day, but one hook to properly captain the Jolly Roger. She knew that last part wasn’t technically true, but after that one time a boy in her class had made fun of her dad for only having one hand, after she’d punched him and made his nose bleed, she’d decided that she didn’t really care why he wore the hook. It was pretty and she loved it.

~*~

Emma poured herself another glass of wine, smiling at the controlled chaos coming from the living room where everyone had gathered after dinner, her whole family under one roof, with kids and grandkids and great grandkids, even.

Zelena and Regina joined her in the kitchen, and she filled their empty wine glasses before they asked.

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Zelena said. “You two and Hook traveled by portal to Ella’s realm by magic bean — let’s call that Point A — Hook and Regina stayed there for several years, got cursed to live in Seattle, the curse was broken with true love’s kiss, I brought the Black Fairy’s wand to them there — let’s call that Point B — Hook traveled back in time to Point A, took you back to here to Storybrooke, you had Maureen and lived happily until a few weeks ago when Hook sent me to Point B to bring him the wand. Have I got all that?”

Emma sipped her wine. “That pretty much sums it up.”

“And so for a little while there were two versions of Hook in the same place,” Zelena went on.

“For about twelve hours or so.” Emma narrowed her eyes at Zelena. “I know what you want to ask me.”

“No, you don’t, because I am going to be a bigger person than that. I don’t always have to be the comic relief, asking inappropriate questions. I’m capable of some measure of decorum, you know. I’m capable—”

“I did have sex with both of them at the same time,” Emma said.

“There isn’t enough wine in the world for this conversation,” Regina said, taking a large drink from her glass as if she were testing that theory.

Zelena put her own wine glass down and gripped Emma’s upper arms, looking her dead in the eye. “Emma, I’ve never respected you more than I do at this moment,” Zelena said reverently. “This is the true fairy tale.”

“Yeah, well, let’s keep this one out of any storybooks, okay?” Emma replied with a giggle.

~*~

“Finally, Captain Hook is starting to look his age,” Henry said as he came out onto the back porch to join Killian. Dinner had been demolished hours ago, and the two excited girls were finally in bed asleep, and Killian had taken the opportunity to sneak outside for a breath of fresh air.

“What’s that?”

Henry pointed at his hair, where Killian knew there was a liberal smattering of grey amongst the brown.

“It’s weird. It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen you, but for you, it’s been years,” his stepson said, leaning against the porch railing. “I mean, we knew this day would come, but it’s one thing to know and another to know.”

“Aye.”

“I can tell you’re happy, though. You seem settled — in a good way.”

“I’m very happy.” He scratched behind his ear. “Your mother and I missed you terribly, but it’s been a wonderful adventure, raising Maureen.”

“She’s very… spirited,” Henry said diplomatically, and Killian laughed.

“You can say it — she’s a handful.”

“Okay, she’s a handful, but she wouldn’t be my sister if she weren’t.”

“Aye, I suppose that’s true.” They stood side-by-side in silence for a few minutes, staring out at the darkened sky. “How long do you think you’ll stay here in Storybrooke?”

Henry shrugged. “For a while. There’s certainly nothing for us back on the west coast, and I don’t think any of us are in any hurry to get back to Ella’s realm.”

“That’s good news.” He knew Emma wouldn't want to let him go anytime soon.

“How do you do it?” Henry asked.

“Do what, my boy?”

Henry exhaled. “Live a normal life. A life without danger, and monsters, and curses. I grew up with all that stuff, and then for a few years, it was all so quiet. And yeah, I left home to visit other realms so that I could find my own story, and obviously, I’m glad I did. But I wonder if I didn’t also do it because I missed all the drama and danger. Maybe I’m addicted to it, a little bit. So now I’ve got a chance at my own happily ever after, my own happy beginning, and I’m terrified I’m going to screw it up because I have no idea how to just live an ordinary life.”

Killian reached over and rested his hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Well, first of all, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ordinary life. There may not be monsters here anymore, but an interesting life doesn’t hinge on fighting monsters. It’s learning something new every day, or finding fulfillment in your work, or running through the forest pretending to be a wolf because your daughter insists you’re a wolf.”

Henry laughed. “You’re pretty wise, old man.”

“Aye, well, I’ve lived a lot of years. For example, I’ve lived the last ten years twice over, so I had plenty of time to soak up lots of extra wisdom to impart to my stepson.”

“Ugh, you’re going to be insufferable about that, aren’t you?”

Killian grinned. “You can count on it, my boy.”

END

#cs ff #captain swan ff #two killians fic #cw: pregnancy sex #daddy killian #captain charming brotp #hooked queen brotp #the nonlinear property of time fic #my fic #zelena x fourth wall

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bu11d0g-blog1 · 5 years ago

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Detox Yourself For A Healthier Life

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There are a lot of people who have all sorts of symptoms similar to lupus or auto immune diseases. But when the blood chemistry tests come in, they should be getting a clean health. Physically speaking, there's nothing wrong with them. But there they are, suffering. Feeling like they are at their ropes end. Ask yourself, “Am I sick?” There's nothing wrong with asking this question. There's no shame involving this. Remember, the worst thing that you can do is to pretend that you don't have a problem. How can you find the answer when you're fooling yourself into thinking that there's no problem?Rediscovering the “wholistic” person Since traditional definitions of sickness are too restricted to the physical and biochemical realms, it is not a surprise that a lot of modern people can't get the relief that they desire from psychopharmaceutical drugs and chemical based medicine in general. In fact when you look at the top 10 medications prescribed in the United States and Western Europe, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant and anti-hypertensive medications are almost always in the top 5 or top 10. You can bank on them being present year after year. There's something wrong here. Even though we have been bombarding these illnesses with a wide range of chemical cocktails over the years, we're still sicker and sicker and we pay more and more money and there seems to be no solution in sight. You are more than your physical parts A lot of this existential angst and its matching physical symptoms is due to the fact that people are more than their physical parts. They're not just a collection of blood pressure readings, blood sugar levels, uric acid tests scores and a wide range of biochemical indicators. All of these may come out clean and fall well within “normal range”. But that doesn't mean that people will stop feeling lousy, stressed and suffering from “brain fog”. This is due to the fact that if people want to get well and step away from just choosing to survive, but to actually live fully, they have to look at their complete being in “wholistic” terms. What does “wholistic” mean? Just as your mind is composed of more than your brain, your life and overall health is composed of more than just your body. We're not even talking about the additional dimensions of psychological and emotional health. We're also talking about how you get along with other people, how you look at yourself in the grand scheme of things, what your sense of personal meaning and purpose are, what you choose to eat, how you construct your day, what kind of environments you find yourself in. In other words, we go beyond the physical. We escape the narrow confines of the biochemical foundation of your life. While biochemistry and your physical body are absolutely important, they are not the complete picture. Far from it. Rediscovering the power of the whole person When we start looking at people as more that just what we can see, we will start making progress as to actual effective treatment. Whatever it is you are suffering from, whatever physical manifestations of stress or a lack of purpose may be hounding you, whatever aches and pains you may experience, all of these can be addressed with a wholistic approach.Reclaim parts of yourself that you have overlooked or forgotten about There are many different parts of the human psyche. There are many different faces that make up who we are. When you leave your home, you are different people to the different individuals you meet. You're somebody's brother or sister, then you are somebody's boss or somebody's employee or somebody's contractor. On and on it goes. We're different people to the people we find ourselves in different situations. We may be in the same place, but at different times, we're different people or we are different people at the same time, but at different places. In other words, we're different people in terms of times and space. What happens to these identities? It's as if you're wearing all these different masks with different angles on them. How do you reconcile all of this? Unfortunately, as I've mentioned, we live in a world of specialization. So we're forced to slice and dice and pick and choose. This does a big disservice to just the rich tapestry of all identities and capabilities. There is power in wholeness When you choose to live with full integrity, this means you reconnect with everything that defines you. In other words, integrity means you connect the potential with what is manifesting, you reconcile what you desire with what you are producing. This requires introspection and a whole lot of honesty. This means you reconnect with everything that defines you. There's the physical you, the biochemical you, the emotional you, the spiritual you, the psychological you, the cultural you, the relational you. I can go on and on. Unfortunately, a lot of us just focus on one thing and one thing alone. In fact, there's a lot of us who define ourselves as one dimensional human beings. If you need proof of this, go to a party and talk to people and the first thing out of most people's mouths is what they do for a living. They would say, “Hi! My name is Jerry. I'm an attorney.” or “Hello! My name is Mindy. I'm a doctor at the nearby hospital.” or “My name is Albert and I work for Microsoft.” People tend to define themselves in a one dimensional way. We always try to connect with some larger phenomena that somehow casts a shadow on our own identity. For example, when somebody introduces himself or herself as working for Facebook, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Facebook has a brand and there's a value judgment there that's very different from somebody stepping up to you and saying, “Hey! My name is Joe. I'm an executive at Starbucks.” In the case of Joe, there are 2 things going on. When he says hes an executive, that brings to mind certain ideas. And when they say “Starbucks”, that also brings a whole other set of issues. Unfortunately, a lot of us are just focused on one thing. We become one dimensional. It's as if we're walking cartoons. And the worst part to all of this is we don't even realize it. If we're lucky we get up to 2 or even 3 of these factors in terms of us defining ourselves. That doesn't even come close. By restricting ourselves to the kind of identity we have, we let go of a lot of our connections to the rest of the natural world. This is why we suffer. This is why we feel incomplete. This is why we feel so susceptible to stress, to changing to situations and to the vagaries of life. This is why we struggle.You are part of a larger picture The first step you could take to fully detoxify yourself is to step out of the binary divisions that you have used to define reality prior to this point. This is a mouthful. I admit this is pretty heavy duty stuff. It definitely requires a commitment. It is not something that you can take lightly. This is not something that you can casually screw around with. It's not like you can adopt all of this instantly with a full assurance that things will be okay. It takes a lot of work. Just as you have been programmed throughout the years to think of yourself within the universe in a certain way, it takes some time and consistent focus to unwind all of that programming. Here are just some basic ideas to think about as you seek to detoxify yourself on more than just a physical or biochemical level. Overcome the “either or” mindset Our modern mindset is all about division, as I've mentioned in the previous chapter. This mindset is all about finding some sort of primacy over one aspect at the expense of others. It's the whole idea of the male over the female, the rational over the intuitive, black over white, science over faith. The problem with this is that it's all about one thing over another. There's little space for a gray area. There's little space for intuition, hunches, nuance. While there's a lot to be said for the focus division and separation brings, a lot is also lost especially when a lot of our basic needs have already been taken care of. A sense of lack in a time of plenty One thing that always blows my mind is the prevalence of loneliness, isolation and desperation in parts of the world that can be truly called lands of plenty. Whether we're talking about Australian, New Zealand, Canada, western Europe, United States or all points in between, there are many areas in this world where physical needs I'm talking about having enough calories to make it from day to day have been more than taken care of. It won't be an exaggeration to say that many people in these places live on the lap of luxury. They have access to many things that even their ancestors would find truly amazing and stupendous. But here we are, with massive rates of disconnection, divorce, addiction, perhaps even crime or self harm. This is one of life's riches ironies. We live in a modern world where a lot of people feel that they have so little of what truly matters. Yet if they choose to look around them, they are surrounded by abundance. Diagnosing REAL poverty Did you know that millionaires kill themselves all the time? I'm not just talking about Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams or any other fairly well off celebrity that we've all heard of. I'm talking about relatively faceless, high net worth individuals who choose to pull the plug on their lives. They have everything to live for. But unfortunately, they have nothing to live from. There is no shortage of people who have 7 or even 8 figures in the bank killing themselves in many ways. I'm not just talking about suicide. I'm also talking about drug addiction. That's a form of suicide. There's a sickness going on. We're living in polluted times. A lot of this has to do with the mindset that we have. And unless you are going to see this for what it is, which is pollution, we will continue to be blind to it. unfortunately we'll continue to live with its effects. It doesn't feel good to think that you're just going around in circles that you put in all this time, effort and energy only to end up in the same place. It would be great to feel that there is a purpose for your life and that you are actually going somewhere. Unfortunately, as the years go by and as technology evolves, the more connected we become and the faster data processes our lives and our impulse, the more disconnected we feel. Back in the day, it was weird to feel lonely in a crowd. Now, you can see street scenes all over the place of people looking at their mobile devices all at once. They're all connected and disconnected at the same time. We're all living in our own little world. But that world is disjointed, private. We're, at the same time, collaborating through all this technology while at the same time stewing in our own personal mental prisons. A lot of this can be traced to the fact that we have let certain pollutants get the better of us.Be aware of your pollutants What pollutants hold you back and drag you down? What pollutants do you need to detoxify yourself of. This is where things get a little tricky because it's very easy to define “pollutant” in terms of biochemistry. Heavy metals are pollutants. Mercury is a nasty pollutant. Excess carbon dioxide in the air as well as methane are well known pollutants. It's very easy to think of pollutants in strictly physical or biochemical terms. Either we insist that we see it like in the form of sludge, oil spills or chemical contamination, or detect it in some way or other like in the form of escaping gas. But even if we were to define pollutants in these rather broad terms, they don't go far enough. You see, pollutants take many forms. And until and unless we can open our minds to the definition of these pollutants in terms of a wholistic perspective, we sell our self short. We unnecessarily restrict the problem and it should come as no surprise that our solutions also come up short. What follows is a wholistic definition of pollutants. Until and unless you can wrap your mind around these, the real solution won't come. You'll still feel stuck. You'll still feel that somethings missing in your life. You'll still have a tough time making sense of things because you constantly find yourself comparing yourself to others. You have to have a more expansive view of pollutants so you can go through a truly effective detox program. Limiting beliefs Limiting beliefs have done more harm for people than any kind of chemical or physical substance. Think about it. If you can see a sign that says “Biohazard” or you see a radiation warning sign or some sort of chemical spill danger sign, you'd back off. It's pretty straight forward. After all, these are physical pollutants. Not so with limiting beliefs. In fact, a lot of people think that their limiting beliefs are part of who they are. I can't even begin to tell you how many people I've come across who are extremely negative, caustic and toxic. When I talk to these individuals, they basically tell me, “This is who I am. This is all I could be. I was born this way.” This is a problem. Unlike physical pollutants, which you can easily see or physically detect through your 5 senses, mental and spiritual pollutants are more pernicious. They cling to you. Kind of like a bad case of BO. And just like BO, the longer you have it, the less you smell it. Your limiting beliefs, sooner or later, define you. Remember, your limiting beliefs is your personal filter for reality. It's like a pair of glasses you put on when you look at everything around you. Of course, depending on the color of your lenses, the appearance of your world can dramatically change. Before you know it, you assume that the world really looks like this. But it turns out that you can change those lenses. What makes limiting belief so dangerous? So what? We all have these “attitude sunglasses”. Isn't one just as valid as another? Isn't that part of the diversity of life? What's the big deal about limiting beliefs? Well, limiting beliefs are dangerous precisely because they trick you into thinking that they come from you. You are under the impression that your limiting belief is just restricted to you, that it's part of who you are, that it's the product of you living your life. We make all sorts of grand justifications and explanations about our limiting beliefs. It's kind of like being bound in handcuffs and you spend a lot of time decorating your handcuffs. Maybe you'd be better off realizing that you're wearing handcuffs no matter how beautiful those handcuffs are. Maybe the better approach would be to think about how to take off those handcuffs. But unfortunately, we reach our point with our limiting beliefs that we believe they're part of our identity and we simply can not let go of them. In fact, some people take this to the next level and say they will die without these beliefs. They draw neat, tidy lines of limitation around their complete life. Who they can be, the things they can do, the people they can hang out with and what their future could look like. The reality behind limiting beliefs What if I told you that your limiting beliefs are chosen. You don't have to keep saying to yourself that you are dumb or you don't have what it takes or that you have no money. You don't have to keep saying to yourself that you're unlucky or that you're ugly or too old to get married. Just as you are able to choose them in the first place, you can choose to let them go. At first, you took on a limiting belief casually. You kind of picked it up as you were moving along. But the more you lived your life and the more you believed in that belief and the more you chose it to filter your reality of the outside world, the stronger it became. It became harder and harder to let go. Celebrate your power of choice The key to detoxifying yourself from limiting beliefs and other forms of spiritual pollution is to rediscover your power of choice. I know you're going to have a tough time taking this in. But you have a choice. You may think that you're a victim. You may think that your life is already set. You may think that there's really not much you can do about your life. You're definitely welcome to think these things. But they are not reality. You have to understand that victims cannot choose. Life simply inflicts oppression on them. They have no choice in the matter. I'm happy to report that you are never a victim. You can always choose. Even if somebody's inflicting harm on you, you can choose how to respond. If and only if you accept this fact, then you will be on your way to becoming a victor. You know what a victor is? It is somebody who makes things happen instead of somebody who constantly asks in desperation and helplessness “What happened?” The good news is you can detoxify yourself from limiting beliefs and other spiritual pollutants. But you must take the first necessary step. You must first realize that you chose your life and you can choose another kind of life.From victim to victor: the detox path Are you a victim? You can be completely honest. I know that in our society, it's not exactly a good thing when people come out and say that they feel like they're victims. But if you want to fully detoxify from all the pollutants in your life, you have to come clean. You have to be authentic and true to yourself. If none of this makes sense, ask yourself the following questions. If you answer yes to at least 2 of these, then chances are high that you are a victim or, at least, you consider yourself one. Do you think you're entitled to life being fair? Does it seem like everybody misunderstands you? Does it seem like no matter how hard you try, things just don't work out because you're unlucky? Does it seem like people are conspiring against you or just don't like you? Does it appear that you don't have the skills you need to get ahead? Are other people to blame for your childhood? Are other people to blame because you're not happy today? Is your boss holding you down by paying you less than you are worth? Do people in your relationships have a tough time discovering “the real you”? If at least 2 of these questions ring true to you or apply to you, chances are you are a victim or you think you are a victim. Claim your victim status It's very hard to solve a problem if you believe you don't have one. For example, it's very hard to get an alcoholic to stop drinking if they don't think they're an alcoholic. If they have no problems with how much they drink and what they drink, then they're not going to get any better. There's no problem to solve. The same analysis applies to your self victimization. If you think you're like a victim, then now is the time to get to that moment of truth. You have to be clear with yourself. This means you have to be completely honest with yourself. At this point, you may be working with the assumption that you are some sort of victim. Ask yourself, “Am I really a victim or am I just acting like one? Do I think like one? Do I understand the world like a victim?” Please understand that this is not blame finding. I'm not trying to make you feel bad about yourself or put you on the spot. But until and unless you can accept the fact that you've been playing the victim game or whipping out the victim card at every opportunity, things are not going to change. Your life is definitely not going to change if you keep this up. Own up to this. Is this what you're doing? Do you see yourself as some sort of victim? Do you always see yourself as the underdog? Do you see yourself as the person that things are happening to instead of the person who is actively making things happen? You have to be completely clear here because if there's any kind of victimization, you have to look at it straight in the eye and accept that this is happening. If you are in any kind of state of denial, progress is impossible. How can there be progress when you deny that there's even a problem in the first place? You won't be able to fix what you need to fix. Detox step #1: Stop blaming other people in situations beyond your control When you blame other people, you're actually handing power over your life to those people. Think about that. This logically makes sense. Since you say that they caused your problem, then this automatically means they will have the solution. You've spent all this time blaming other people and unwittingly took all the power to change your circumstances from your hands and placed it in theirs. Obviously, this is not empowering. This is not helping things. This is only going to make your life worse and worse. Sure, it feels good because you have some sort of emotional release. Who doesn't feel good when the weight of responsibility is lifted off their shoulders? When you feel like you're a victim, you don't have to change. Other people have to change. Doesn't that feel good? But the problem is you pay a very big price for that sense of emotional release or even your sense of vindication. That sense of vindication you feel when you blame other people, like your father abusing you or your mother making you feel like garbage, comes at a very high price because you rob yourself of the power to make something out of yourself. Of course, most people don't phrase things this way. But in operational terms, psychologically, this is the effect. Here's the truth. The people you're constantly blaming? They're gone! Seriously! They're living their lives. Maybe they have new families. Perhaps they've moved on, as traumatic as that experience may have been for both of you. They're not, in any way, shape or form, feeling your anger, hate and resentment. The only person taking the brunt of all that emotional damage is you. Stop beating yourself up. Stop rehearsing that very painful image of a traumatic past. Nobody's being helped by this. Take ownership today Take ownership of your life. I know this is easier said than done. But you have to do it. Not your father who was emotionally absents, not your mother who may have been domineered, not your ex boyfriend who may have screwed with your head, not your girlfriend who may have betrayed you, but you. Say to yourself, “Yes. I've lived my life as a victim. For all this time, I've blamed other people. Now, I'm going to stop blaming others. Instead, I'm going to say it's my fault. It's my responsibility. I own this.” You have to make yourself say these and you have to mean it. Until you are able to say that you totally own your life and you made everything in it happen or you've let it happen, nothings going to change. Please understand that everything that happens to your life was either chosen by you or you let it happen. Why? Because you could always control how you respond. As you read this book, a bolt of lighting might hit you. Obviously, you didn't cause it. But I can guarantee you that you have total control about how you respond to that unfortunate circumstance. Retake that sense of ownership you have over your life because that power to choose is the only real power you have. Here's the good news. The power to choose is the fountain head of all possibility in your life. Reclaim that power and you can turn your life around. Unless it hurts, it's not real Quick warning: it's very easy to just go through some sort of intellectual laundry list of the things that you should own up to. Everything that I've said prior to this point is very easy to intellectually compartmentalize and treat like some sort of academic information. Many people do a good job of lying to themselves because they just go down the list of all their screw ups. At the end of the day, it doesn't change them. They intellectually accept these. But they don't develop a sense of emotional urgency. In other words, it doesn't cut close to home. Deep down inside, on an emotional level, there's still this hermetically sealed compartment in their mind about who truly is at fault. You can say to yourself that you allowed your father to harm you. You could say to yourself that you have allowed your mother run your life and make you feel miserable. You can repeat that in your head like a mantra. But the problem is until it reaches on a deep and emotional level where you completely own it, nothing will change. There are so many people out there who have gone through psychiatric counseling who know their issues. But they refuse to change because whatever revelations that they have come across remain lists in their head. These truths must burn. How bad? You have to make a fool out of yourself. You have to feel that you have let yourself down. You have to feel that you've really screwed yourself over. In other words, you have to stop running away from the impact of these emotions. Put simply, you have to do things that you have been fearing for all this time. The good news is once it hurts, then you know that this laundry list of realizations is true. If it doesn't hurt or it seems so glib or inconvenient, then you're just playing mind games with yourself. You're just wasting your time. There's absolutely no detoxification happening.The most important emotional detox you need to take Do an audit of all your beliefs and take ownership of them. Human lives are made up of beliefs. Our beliefs are not just these mental clouds that float through our minds with no effect. They're not just conversational notions that we talk about from time to time with absolutely no impact on our daily waking lives. No. Our beliefs define our lives. They are the cement that holds our lives together. Everything about you, from the way you wear your hair, your choice of clothing, the way you talk, even the condition of your skin are all products of what you choose to believe about yourself deep down inside. If you believe that you're a certain type of person, then this means that you believe that you are capable of certain things and not others. Don't think that these beliefs just stay in your head. They have an impact on what you choose to think about, how you interpret reality, the things you choose to perceive or even remember and what you feel about your interpretations of reality. In other words, they have a real impact on how you process reality. This manifests in the things that you say, the things you feel and the things that you do. In other words, they impact your choices. List these beliefs out. Please understand that it doesn't matter whether they're “good” or “bad”. This is no time to be judging them. Just list down all your beliefs. Do a mental purge. Write down the first thing that comes to mind and keep writing until you run out of ideas. Take your time. Work from where you are It's very easy to say that you should let go of limiting beliefs. It's very easy to view your life as a simple menu with certain disagreeable items on it. It is tempting to think that to improve your life, you just need to cut out the disagreeable items and you can move on. It doesn't work that way, sadly enough. Whatever garbage, poison or cancer you think your life may have is simply a matter of interpretation. As the old saying goes, one man's garbage is another man's treasure. It all depends on your point of view. That traumatic experience that you think robbed you of your childhood might actually be the cathartic experience somebody else needs to become a winner in life. Two completely different people who undergo the same traumatic experience often come out in two totally different ways. Understand that your interpretation of your reality is encapsulated in your belief. It's only as negative as your willingness to view it that way. You interpret your experiences as negative and guess what happens next. That's right! These experiences have a negative effect on how you feel and think about things. Ultimately, they have an effect on how you do things. There is a better way. Instead of simply just cutting all these out and letting go, there is a better approach. Let's get real here. It's almost impossible to cut out your past. It's as if you can take some sort of amnesia capsule. It doesn't work that way. You will always have your past. Those experiences happen. These are facts. They're not going to go away any time soon. The better approach would be to “rearrange your mental furniture”. Step #1: Reinterpret your beliefs Beliefs don't come out of nowhere. There are certain facts in your background or in your life and certain experiences that support those beliefs. It's as if they give oxygen to those beliefs and these facts maintain your beliefs. Indeed, these facts even make them grow. What if you can take whatever sustains your beliefs and interpret those facts differently? Instead of your belief grinding you down and making you feel like garbage, reinterpret these facts so they empower you and make you feel that life is possible once again. Choose to look at these facts from totally different perspectives and choose to believe that you don't have to live your life living in some sort of tightly defined, neat little box. Step #2: Detoxify your belief interpretation system Please remember that beliefs don't come out of nowhere. They are being sustained by external experiences. These are called facts. To pretend otherwise is to basically set yourself up for a massive let down. Whatever progress you achieve would be short lived. Sooner or later, your old habitual patterns will come back and you end up where you started. That's a dead end. Don't even try. For this detox step to work, you have to detoxify the way you interpret your personal reality. Ask yourself, is this the only way to interpret these facts? Is this the only reading? Or is there something more neutral or, better yet, something more positive? Follow these steps to detoxify your mindset Ask yourself the following questions, “What am I really perceiving?” When you ask yourself this question, you force yourself to be more objective. This means that you look at things both at face value and also in terms of alternatives. Next, ask yourself, “What do I normally assume about the things that I experience?” When you do this, you're basically asking yourself, “Is there any other way to interpret the things that I am perceiving aside from my habitual interpretations or responses?” You're giving yourself an out. You're giving yourself and alternative. Look for a neutral interpretation or, if you can do it, a positive read on the objective stimuli that you are observing from the real world. Identify an empowering interpretation and repeat it at every opportunity Practice makes perfect. It's very hard for many people to adopt a new habit precisely because they feel they don't have time. The way you think about the world and your place in it form a big part of your mental habits. A key part of mental detox is to let go of this through the repetition of a more empowering interpretation. The moment an image of your abusive father comes to mind, you can always try to override it by saying, “Well, my father was always working. When he came home, he was dead tired. He didn't have time to screw around with kids who did not appreciate him.” Try to put yourself in the shoes of your mother who you felt, throughout all this time, was domineering and controlling. Is there any other possible explanation why she behaved the way she did? Put yourself in the shoes of your ex girlfriend who stabbed you in the back by sleeping with your best friend. Is there a possible justification for that? I know that none of this is easy because a lot of this involves facts that you may have been trying to run away from for so long. But until and unless you confront them and, most importantly, look at alternative readings based out of compassion or empathy, nothings going to change. Your old mental interpretation of these triggers will keep feeding into your mental habits. Repeat it until it sets in Repeat your new interpretation until it sets in. Keep repeating it until it becomes habitual. How do you know it's habitual? When it becomes your automatic response. That mental image flashes, for example, your father leaving your family, and then the new interpretation comes in. When you can see daylight between how you reacted in the past, which is anger, resentment and self blame, to something more positive, then you're not trying hard enough. Keep repeating it until you see that distinction. This kind of thing is not going to happen over night. But the good news is that it does assume some form of momentum. Eventually, you start displacing your old mindset.Spiritual detox A lot of people struggle in life because they are so obsess about figuring out what to do, when to do it and who to do it with. They obsess about these questions so much and for so long that they've lost sight of the most important question. Believe it or not, there is a question that transcends all of these. The most important question is, was and always will be “Why?” Think about it. If you don't know why you're here, then all the technical knowledge in the world won't do you any good. You'll still feel empty, directionless and purposeless. It will all seem, at a certain stand point, empty, shallow and pointless. It often takes just one bad day for all of this to come crashing down around you. It is no surprise that a lot of people feel lonely in a crowd. It is not all that shocking to discover that a lot of people feel depressed. They deal with these issues in varying shades of socially acceptable ways. In our society, it's socially acceptable to cheat on your partner when you feel a deep and profound personal existential loneliness. You fill this hole in your soul with sex and you confuse physical intimacy with spiritual intimacy and fulfillment. The same goes with drinking and, to a certain degree, drugs. But let's get real here: they're all coping mechanisms. Few and far between are the people who see this issue for what it is. All these are a reflection of a spiritual lack. Due to spiritual pollution, we have lost our sense of purpose. Spiritual detox: Identify your purpose I know this sounds shocking. But everybody's got purpose. That's right. You've been put on this planet for a reason. You're not just a random collection of cells. You're not just a cluster of tissue. There is something to you that is intrinsically important. I know you feel small. I know you feel voiceless, powerless, inconsequential. But the truth is you have a purpose. The problem is most people refuse to own up to this. The truth is we all have a sense of purpose. Maybe sex is your sense of purpose. Maybe drugs gives you purpose. Maybe making more money is your purpose. But the fact that you are acting and setting goals and planning based on something you can not see right now means that you are capable of living in a purposeful way. It may not be the right one. It may not even be optimal. It may even lead to dead ends and further frustration and depression. Still, there is that power to operate from a sense of purpose. Ask yourself this question. “What is my purpose right here, right now?” Is it sex? Money? Drugs? People's validation? Living up to your parent's expectations? Trying to impress other people? What is it? Now for the key question Ask yourself this key question, “Now that I have a clear idea of the laundry list of purposes that I've given myself, does it make sense to me?” I want you to wrap your mind around this question and think about this deeply. You know what's operating. You know what's animating it. You have to be completely honest about it. But now you have to ask yourself, “Does it serve my purpose?” How do you know this? What kind of map or compass do you need? Well, it's very simple. You just have to ask a follow up question, “Do these purposes lead to the life that I want for myself and my family?” If your purpose is drugs, does it lead to the life that you want for you and the ones you love? If your purpose is sex, does it lead to those things? Be completely honest with yourself. Let me cut straight to the chase. If you're reading this book with any kind of honesty, the obvious answer is no! You're not happy. You're feeling stuck at some level or other. You feel like a liar, a hypocrite. You feel defective, flawed. Now we're making progress. Now you realize that something is missing. Identifying spiritual pollutants What are the spiritual toxins weighing you down? Do you constantly compare yourself to other people? Do you open Facebook and look at the timelines of your friends and compare your life to theirs? Do you feed your mind with all sorts of junk like celebrity gossip and political drama? Do you check out your Twitter feed with a sense of envy or dread in mind? Do you feel left behind when you look at other people's lives in social media? Do they seem so much richer, prettier and more alive than you? Does it seem like everybody else has a tremendous amount of freedom while you are feeling stuck, frustrated and desperate? Do you constantly compare what's missing in your life with other people's brightest and happiest moments? Do you find it hard to listen to people sharing pain in their lives without constantly butting in and sharing how you have suffered too? If any of these questions resonate with you, please understand that they are symptoms of spiritual pollution. You are suffering from them precisely because you feed yourself spiritual poison. Identify your personal list of spiritual toxins Any kind of detoxification must begin with the toxins you're trying to get out of your system. The same applies to spiritual detox. Here's the problem. I can't help you all that much in this area. Why? Everybody's list of spiritual toxins is different. Some people are driven by sex, power and prestige. Others are driven by social approval and living up to certain standards set by others around them. Others are driven by fear, pride, stubbornness. There's really no one size fits all solution here. So I'm not even going to try. We're all different people from all different backgrounds with all sorts of different experiences. I can go on and on about the things that separate us. Unfortunately, these areas of separation and distinction play a big role in how out spiritual toxins are shaked and positioned in our lives. What I can suggest to you I can, however, suggest to you that you reach deep down inside and ask yourself what your spiritual toxins are. Sometimes, you have to ask a question in many different ways to get to the truth. If you've ever gone to a police interrogation or you watched detective movies, you would notice that they would ask basically the same question intended to get the same answer in many different ways. They do that for 2 reasons. First, they know that people are often confused. They mean to say something, but they really can't quite say it in the right way. So they have to chip away at the different ways of phrasing something until they're clear that you actually mean certain things. The other reason is more obvious. They're looking for inconsistencies. In other words, they're looking for lies and deception. You should do the same with yourself. Ask yourself the same essential question but in many different ways. Here are some suggested questions. Ultimately, they're all about identifying your spiritual toxins. Ask the following, “What makes me stubborn? What makes me cling to an idea because of personal pride? What makes me afraid? What makes me feel small and limited? What makes me feel unloved? What do I have a tough time forgiving?” Believe it or not, we hang on to a lot of these things. I know it sounds counter-intuitive. I mean, after all, who wants to hang on to a brutal memory of a father that used to beat you all the time? Who wants to hang on to that image of your father slapping your mother around? Who wants that? But the problem is it's like a train wreck. You know you shouldn't look at it. But you can't turn away. You can't look away even if you tried. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to figure out that none of this is doing us any favors. They suck our spiritual life and instead of living life with a tremendous amount of adventure, possibility, purpose and curiosity, we retreat to the tried and proven. We shrink back to the familiar. It's very lonely in the shadows. So come up with your list. Deep down inside, you already know the answer. Step #3: Let go of your spiritual pollutants If your Facebook feed is causing you to continue thinking in a certain way that makes you feel small, spiteful or vindictive, you might want to sit up and pay attention. Please understand that what you're feeling has nothing to do with your friend in New Zealand, Great Britain or in the tropics. Instead, it has everything to do with you. Whatever negativity you are feeling comes from you. You are just reading into that stimuli. It could be somebody else. It could be somebody living in Iceland or Green Land and you will find something to be envious about because it reflects what you feel is missing in your life. Similarly, if the people you hang out with tend to bring out the gossip in you or tend to bring out the critique or hater, you might want to open your eyes to this reality. If the kind of books and music you consume always makes you wish that you were somebody else, living a better life, doing better things with your time, you might want to think twice. I want you to come up with a long laundry list of the things that you normally do that trigger negative mindsets or things that don't spiritually sit well with you. Step #4: Turn your back on spiritual junk food I've got some great news, spiritual detox does not involve cold turkey. If you've ever struggled with trying to quit smoking, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Let's get real here. It would be impossible for most people to quit the first time they tried. I'm not saying that cold turkey doesn't work. It does. It worked for me. But you have to try again and again. When it comes to spiritual junk food or toxins, the better approach is to incrementally, or in a step by step way, pull back from the things that normally trigger you and make you feel small, petty and resentful. Do you spend a lot of time checking other people's photos on Instagram and imagining yourself living their lives? You might want to cut back on that. Do you spend a lot of time comparing yourself to your friend's travel photos on Facebook or Flickr, you might want to give that a break. Please understand that you shouldn't go through a complete break where you let go of these immediately. I'm telling you, if you try to do that, it's just not going to happen. Instead, gradually realize that you're doing these things. Be aware of what you're doing. You're not making the envy, resentment and frustration go away. Instead, you're feeding it. And the more you realize that and the clearer everything becomes, you will find the strength to do what you need to do. This is how you feel empowered. The bottom line is you have to realize and say to yourself, “When I do these things, it brings out the worst in me.” Get your moment of truth Everybody who's ever gone through a life changing episode goes through a moment of truth. It is that time when the alcoholic wakes up in a pile of vomit at the bottom of a public toilet. It is that time when a drug addict wakes up in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room. It is that time when an unfaithful girlfriend has a gun drawn to her face by the partner of the guy she's messing with. Everybody's got a moment of truth. Imagine what your moment of truth would be like if you continue to suck up all that spiritual pollution. The good news it shouldn't take much imagination. After all, you're reading this book because you're unhappy. You're reading this book because at some point in your life, you're feeling stuck. Get your sense of urgency Now that you have blown up the emotional pain, fear, that sense of loss and regret of what you're doing in your life, use these to push you to make the necessary changes. Use them to push you to look at your life differently and the things that you choose to entertain yourself with, the people who you hang out with, the beliefs that you keep playing in the back of your head, get that push because nobody's going to push you. Everybody will always try to kiss your ass. In this context, friends are the worst. Why? They try to comfort you. That's their instinct. That’s what friends are for, right? But the problem is you don't need a friend right now. Instead, you need somebody to tell you the truth and nothing but the truth. You need somebody who would light the fire underneath your feet so you can get moving. Otherwise, it’s too easy to just fall for reassurance because, after all, there will be another day, right? The problem with tomorrow and getting things done tomorrow is that tomorrow never comes. You have to do it now.Holistic Detox I’ve focused on the most important stuff Have you noticed that up to this point I haven’t talked about physical detox? It's because physical detox is the least of your worries. The physical issues that you may have, the financial problems that you are struggling with, the sexual issues that you may be grappling with, all of these are just icing on the cake. This is the tip of the iceberg. I’m focused on what really matters, which is your mental, emotional, and spiritual state. Fix those and the tip of the iceberg changes dramatically. Fix what's inside and the outside will take care of itself. Whatever it is you're struggling and whatever bad habits you may have are just all emanations and manifestations of things going on deep down inside and this is why this detox system works from the inside out. I’m not saying that I will completely disregard the need for physical detox but it's just one part of the equation. Start with a mental detox Adopt meditation and mindfulness practices. Try these three. You can easily find guides on these meditation/mindfulness techniques online. I’ve listed these three since they are the most effective for me. 1: Count your breath 2: Present object observation or single object observation 3: Transcendental meditation Use your increased mental focus to separate your feelings from your external stimuli. You don't have to get upset when your girlfriend says you’re a loser. You don't have to immediately feel sad when you remember your mother abandoning your family for another man. You don't have to go off the deep end when that mental image of your boss verbally humiliating you in front of three hundred people flashes into your mind. Learn how to separate stimuli from habitual mental interpretation through mindfulness and meditation. Emotional detox Actively let go or neutralize negative emotions. When you see, hear, or detect something that the emotionally triggers you, consciously come up with an opposite reaction. For example, you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and you noticed that your ex-boyfriend now has a new girlfriend and she is a thousand times prettier than you. When you detect that spark of anger, resentment, and hate or envy because he’s moved on, quickly counteract it with feeling happy for him, feeling happy for her. Share their joy. In Buddhism, depression is almost impossible because one of the skills you learn as a Buddhist is to share other people's joy. Be grateful for them. Practice gratitude Be grateful for what you have. You may be on your deathbed in a hospital room with stage 4 cancer. Be thankful that you still can breathe. Be thankful that you can still have time even though it's very short. Be thankful that you have one final chance to put everything together so you go out with some sense of meaning and purpose. Whatever it is, be thankful. It's hard to find unhappy person who is also ungrateful. It’s almost impossible. Mentally detox by being in the moment Mentally and spiritually detox by being in the moment. Transcendental meditation is good for this because TM melts your thoughts. You're not agonizing about things that happened in the past. All that is pointless because you can't change the facts of the past. The past is the past. It already happened. By the same token, you're not beating yourself up unnecessarily about things that have yet to happen. Why worry? It hasn’t happened yet. Instead, you've trained yourself to focus on the moment. There's nobody to become. There's nothing to apologize for. There's nothing to be. There are no people to please. There's no need to be validated. You just are. Let that sink in. Tap the power of just being. There’s nothing to compare yourself to. There's nothing to live up to. There’s just the present moment. Let go of everything else. Unleash the Power of Fasting When it comes to physical detox, nothing beats fasting. Seriously. That’s the bottom line. Fasting Explained Fasting is essentially letting go of solid food. Whether you stop eating for one day or forty days, it's all about letting go of solid food. That’s the classic definition of fasting. I suggest that you adopt a fast. There are many different variations of this. Different variations of physical fasting You can do the classical fast, which is water only. You can do the juice fast. You can do the Daniel fast of the Hebrew Bible. Classic fast Classic fasting simply means you drink only water. However, don't think that you're not eating when you are fasting. You may not be eating physical food but you must eat spiritual food. This is why I suggest that you adopt a meditation practice, that you keep a journal, and that you watch what you feed your head while you're going through a fast. Feed your head inspirational things that push you to become a bigger and better person than who you think you are. Feed on things that break down your ego and crush your pride. Feed on things that destroy your ears and fill you with a tremendous sense of possibility. These are all mental and spiritual food. The great thing about fasting is that it enables you to hunger for this type of food so the sustenance that you get becomes more important than physical sustenance that preserves your bones, tissues and blood. - The juice fast There are many different variations of juice fasts. I suggest that you drink juice that is not all that sugary and satisfying. It should have some taste but that's all. The whole point here is not to get distracted by the syrupy goodness of your juice. Instead, it should have a little bit of flavor and a little bit of calories but not really all that different from water. Remember: when you're fasting, you are aligning your physical detoxification and letting go of physical toxins in your fat cells and blood with the detoxification happening in your mind and spirit. They have to line up and this is how you regain your sense of integrity and wholeness. The Daniel fast The Daniel fast is simply letting go of the most common foods that you eat and just eating only a specific type of food. The classic Daniel fast from the Hebrew Bible is eating only vegetables but you can use the keto version of the Daniel fast meaning you eat only eggs are high-fat foods and zero carbs. If you're looking to lose weight and also turbocharge detoxification, the keto modifications of the Daniel fast can do wonders. Time your fast right If you are doing any kind of fast that involves ingesting calories, I am, of course, talking about the juice fast or the Daniel fast, time your ingestion properly. One way to boost the effects that you get from holistic detoxification is to ingest calories only once a day. It's going to be very hard at first but when it kicks, it’s a beautiful thing because the discipline that you pick you up while you are fasting and going through detox will help you for the rest of your life. You become a more disciplined and focused person. Keep repeating your detox schedule. If you're able to pull off a one-day or two-day detox, keep repeating it. Practiced makes perfect. Repetition ensures that whatever insights and whatever freedom you have achieved will eventually start to kick in. Eventually, it will become permanent. The key is to keep going through this fasting and detox process. Scale up when it becomes comfortable Once you think that things have gotten easy regarding the type of fasting you're doing, scale it up in terms of intensity or kind. For example, you started out with the Daniel fast for three days, try to get to ten days then twenty-one days. Once you’ve mastered the Daniel fast, then move on to juice fast. Scale that up and then go to a classic fast. There's always room for improvement.If you are weighed down, frustrated, or feeling stuck, please understand that it's all an illusion. You're feeling stuck because you think you're stuck. You're feeling powerless because you imagine yourself to be lacking power. Do yourself a big favor and start making new choices, and the best choice that you can make is to detoxify your mind, spirit, and body. Follow the tips outlined in this book and scale up conscientiously and you'd be surprised as to how far you can go. You'd be surprised as to how capable you truly are as a human being. Read the full article

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