#“Get a little perspective” would be this blog's tag line if I thought that everyone would get the context

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

I want you all to know that - when I'm writing stuff for this blog - I am constantly thinking of this exchange from the Doctor Who episode The Girl in the Fireplace

I've never been able to find a gif of this exchange or I'd be using it all the time.

[Clip context: The Girl in the Fireplace is about a trio of time travelers landing on a spaceship in the distant future. They quickly discover that the ship is full of windows in time, all of them leading to different places in France in the 1700's. While the time travelers are wandering around the ship, one of them finds a horse and then rejoins his companions, leading to this exchange:

Micky: What's a horse doing on a spaceship?

Doctor: Mickey, what's pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective.]

Random Person: gets super angry about a specific issue or character

Me: *points to all of canon* I mean the horse IS concerning, but I think you may want to step back and take a moment to appreciate the presence of pre-revolutionary France. While it can be fun and worthwhile to talk about the horse, the horse should not be drawing your ire. Its very much a symptom, not the actual disease. It is not worth getting angry about the horse.

Be like the Doctor. Have fun with the horse. Give it a name. Ride it off into the sunset! (aka do stuff like drawing cute fan art or writing a fix it fic that focuses on the issues that bother you most or consuming art made by others that focuses on the stuff about canon that makes you happy. I've found it to be a much more positive outlet than stewing over horses.)

[neon-rhapsodies]

Looking back through this blog, all these posts from the past few years, and seeing how things have unraveled, it's disheartening. How I went from attending a graduate conference to going into teaching; from trying to start an online Classics community to shelving it, to joining a local one and another online one and doing badly in both; from being able to write about everything and anything, to having a mental breakdown and being unable to write about the things I actually want to write about; from considering wild ideas, like podcasting or a video PhD, to even being afraid of writing on my main blog -- my own blog. I remember reading a similar post of mine in which I was talking about how much growth I've gone through, but also how much more I've been holding back, and it pains me.

This side blog was supposed to be the place where I posted my writings about Classics. My hot takes, my crazy interpretations, my bold speculations about the field and authors and anything relevant. And now, it's like a graveyard of all these great things that could have been but weren't. The birth and death of my Classics community project broadcasted to the world, with this urge of having to perform, to play a part, to act like my entrepreneurial self and showcase my work. All bullshit.

I don't want to pretend anymore. I don't want to have to perform. I don't even want to put tags to this shit. I just want to draw a line, take a deep breath, and move on with my life. I prided myself on consistency, but the only thing that's been consistent is way of looking a things. My worldview, if you will. My values. Everything else -- directions, performance, outcomes -- has been inconsistent. Which is fair, because that's just the nature of human beings. But that's the issue. Being human, that is. I have limits. I am flawed. And I have to accept that. I have to accept that I can make mistakes and be wildly inconsistent. I don't want to. But I must.

So, here we are. Or rather, here I am. Announcing a new set of intentions. This blog, started as a place to post my Classics writing, then updates about my project, then about my life in general, is now set to go through its latest change and, rather simply, become my personal blog. Widening up its scope and freeing myself to pursue a seemingly infinite range of possibilities. Because throughout my whole life, the only constant has been me. Everyone and everything will go over time, and only I will be left. And, after a while, not even I will be left, but that will be okay, because by then, my consciousness will have left this world, and so it will be no big deal. But while I'm still here, I think I'd like to be a little selfish and give myself permission to exist. Unapologetically, that is.

Because, after all, everything is personal. That has always been my perspective. All interpretations about Classics, even academic ones, even though solidly backed by sound evidence etc, they all begin as personal. It's your view of the world that influences how you see things and how you interpret them. I know I am flawed. I know I have limits. But for all my human faults, my life has still value. My thoughts are worth writing about. My life is worth sharing. My failure and successes worth reflecting on. Even if just with myself.

In that old post of above, I also kept asking myself, "Is it worth it?". To write about things. To say what I think. To that version of me, I would like to reply: "I think so." I won't pretend that I know that for certain. But I will say that, from my recent experience, life is incredibly difficult when you don't speak up for yourself, even if it's just with yourself.

I think back to those values of mine, and I noticed that, at the bottom of the list, there is creativity. I always thought that creativity was a way to express yourself, to get out of yourself. But now, I wonder if creativity is also something that you can do within yourself. Can you create things in you? Can you generate new realities inside of you? Can you share with the other, and the other is you?

These are difficult questions. But they are welcome ones. Because while externally I may have limits, inside, I don't. This blog is a reflection of my inside. There, I don't have limits. So I won't here either.

[syncopation53]

Alright I’m just gonna get some personal thoughts out of the way in regards to the newest season week

To start off, I don’t have the season pass. I can’t listen to any of the post-PsiOps lines other than what’s available on YouTube, so there might be additional context that I’m missing that would be obvious to any other player who does actively play. I don’t engage with Destiny content every single week, I play for maybe half a day per week if I’m lucky just cause that’s how my adhd brain works plus real life takes precedence over fictional lives.

That being said, I was indeed angry about Crow’s decision and accidental murder of the Psion. I was looking at things from a certain one of my character’s perspective and saw the potential good being able to actually enter a Hive Lightbearer’s mind and see how exactly the Light affects it in that way, and maybe find out if Savathûn was more directly involved with raising the Lucent Brood than the Traveler/Ghosts are with the Guardians, even if they were kept in a perpetual state of not-dying. Watching previous weeks content, I realize Crow has a lot of empathy for them (hell I do too, I’d love nothing more than for us to have an alliance with the Lucent Brood as well), but I still mainly sided with Saladin in regards to the aftermath. It was a reckless decision that Crow made without anyone else’s knowledge that led to the death of an innocent person. He shouldn’t have done what he did even if it was out of misguided altruism and he now has blood on his hands in his second life.

I don’t know how well I can explain my thoughts or if this just seems like I’m trying to retroactively backtrack so I don’t get torn to pieces by bigger and more popular Destiny blogs on here, but I was never against Crow. I loved his character and arcs in all the seasons leading up to Risen. I still very much enjoy him as a character. I don’t think of him as Uldren, they’re two separate people in my mind, and I’m definitely not a Cayde stan who has advocated for Crow to be killed for the actions done in his past life that he (before Lost) couldn’t even remember. I act and feel a lot of the story through my characters, and Fireteam Phoenix would defend Crow from those kinds of people in a heartbeat. All of them, without question. Which is why it hurts to see phrases like “if you were angry at Crow this week get off my page” and “the people who are angry at Crow for this have always hated him from the beginning.” Not trying to point fingers or direct the blame onto anyone, I’m just saying that it hurt me personally to read those words in the tags after watching the cutscenes when I have always been a fan of Crow.

And I was indeed upset, not only at Crow’s decision but also at the writers for making yet another conflict that will split the already black-and-white reactionary fandom (though, thankfully, this season there’s no obvious strawman for everyone to direct all their hate towards). Personally I think the cutscene after the fact felt a little bit rushed and probably could’ve waited a week to let things fester a bit, but time will tell where this new plot will lead us and what Bungie has in store for everyone at the end of Risen and in the seasons beyond.

Here’s hoping that the writers can stick the landing with this one yet again.

[curious-kat]

hey, i saw the post you reblogged about 9/11 and just wanted to say: it's definitely true that 9/11 has been used on a national level to justify some really egregious shit, but. it's also true that my mother was working on wall street when the planes hit, and was traumatized by the experience in ways that forever affected our entire family. like, your bio says you're from iowa, so i get that something which happened in NYC decades ago probably feels pretty abstract, but... (1/2)

(2/2) locals who did in fact live through it can see your reblog, you know? and it's possible, and important, to refuse to accept the weird ways 9/11 has been used to justify american jingoism without characterizing real people's suffering and death (ongoing in the case of first responders) as "funny" -- ironic that the OP complains about the government's 'sociopathic disregard for human life' in a post that opens with such remarkable callousness! anyway, thanks for hearing me out on this.

This ask is in response to this post.

hey thanks for your thoughts! Obviously 9/11 is an immensely fraught topic, for everyone but especially for those in New York and the families of those from all over the country who were on the planes.

First of all, I apologize for having inadvertently brought up the topic out of the blue on you. I know it's not in line with the overall tone of my blog, which is why I did try to tag with a bunch of the tags I use for more serious content, like "us politics" as well as the "9/11" tag.

Now for my perspective on the issue at hand: I don't remember 9/11. I was just barely old enough to, but my mom deliberately kept me away from the news broadcasts. The date happens to be her birthday, in fact. I grew up with the hard-to-reconcile dichotomy of celebrating her birthday on September 11th and the reality that everyone older than me talked about "Nine Eleven" in the grimmest tones.

Contrast this with the pandemic. I work in healthcare, I have been exposed to the virus multiple times, I deal with covid deniers at work daily, while on the personal side friends and family members of mine have died of it, one just recently. I've witnessed the federal, and state, and local governments mismanage this crisis so egregiously that many more people have died than ever should have.

As many people as died on 9/11 are dying of covid in this country every day and have been for months, and my state governor quite obviously does not give a shit. Nor have there been meaningful memorials for those we’ve lost so far. In fact, when I tell people to wear masks, I often get a look like “what are you on about? that’s all over now, we’ve moved on!” So OP's post resonated with me more than a little bit.

That being said, if I'd been writing it I would probably have phrased some things differently, starting with not calling 9/11 funny. I don't think anything about it is funny, particularly. More weird, hypocritical in the worst way, tragedy twisted into a dark form of patriotism that's gone sour.

But for those who were directly affected? All these metaphorical representations of the event that the rest of us are dealing with don't apply to you, because for you it's a personal tragedy first.

thanks for sending me your thoughts! I hope this goes some way towards addressing them.

[diyeoracha]

fanfic recommendations

for @kittensocute bc i heard “atsukita” and “iwaoi” in reference to fanfiction and i am There

i took your “i love slow burn or slow build fics... so i like relatively shorter burn fics (20-30k). If its a 10k oneshot slow burn hELL SIGN ME UP” and absolutely ran with it.

i listed my fav iwaoi fics (17) with a longer word count (longest is 80k) that are all mostly either canon compliant or divergent with only two straight up AUs. none of them feature heavy nsfw content and most if not all are tagged as friends to lovers lmao. feel free to read the my thoughts or just go into them blind!! and they’re all in order of how much I absolutely adore them :^)

now atsukita is not a big ship *sobs* but here are some of my favorite fics (7) of them! a lot of them are shorter bc i guess that’s just. what happens when it’s a small ship LOL. 

the formatting in this is fucked if you open it from ur dash but if it’s on my actual blog it should be fine!

Iwaoi

the courtship ritual of the hercules beetle

Word count: 66k

thoughts: my absolute absolute absolute favorite iwaoi fic. the characterization, the fact that oikawa’s a bastard but because he and iwaizumi are older (late 20s i believe), it feels more realistic and sad rather than oikawa being a bitch for the sake of it. spoiler alert it’s slow burn and pining and mostly oikawa not realizing his feelings. this world building is pretty cool bc iwaizumi is the professional player while oikawa is an entomology professor! also i love non-linear narratives bc of This fic. there’s mutual pining in this fic but it’s really really really subtle to the point where you dont even know if oikawa likes iwa. this made me cry like twice.

sunset towns

Word count: 33k

Summary: In the summer of 2020, Oikawa Tooru returns home from his first successful stint as captain of Japan’s national volleyball team. In one hand, he holds the undisputed weight of an Olympic medal, and in the other, his unresolved feelings for a childhood best friend.

thoughts: the tone in this is So similar to the courtship ritual that I liken this as an alternate story even though it’s still oikawa’s pov. professional player oikawa and regular guy iwaizumi and oikawa is just. bumming around at iwaizumi’s place and naturally he messes up but things happen.

told before and told again

word count: 4k

thoughts: i looked through literally all the tags i could’ve thought of for this and nearly cried when i found it agian. outsider POV!!

In damp earth my body

Word count: 15k

Summary: Onscreen, the nation’s favorite setter has arranged himself so that he’s bowing, forehead pressed to the court, like he’s thanking everyone for their kindness thus far, like he’s asking for forgiveness. Hajime thinks: shit, it’s really happening

thoughts: oikawa retires and moves in with iwaizumi and they blur the line between roommates/best friends and being fwb. this is an iwaizumi pov and the pining is obvious on his end. as a iwa stan the tone made me feel weird bc it makes it seem like iwa cares more abt oikawa than he cares abt himself but. its a good fic

i grew up, you grew down

word count: 19k

thoughts: this is also SO funny bc basically oikawa retires and moves in with iwaizumi and becomes his stay at home wife and a bunch of shit happens like people think that oikawa is dating ushijima and oikawa basically loses it every time. here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Oikawa also bought a new ultra-strength vacuum cleaner he’d decided to name Ushiwaka out of sheer spite, because it sucked all the air right out of the room. Iwa-chan didn’t think the joke was that funny when Tooru told him, which was frankly very hurtful and insensitive.”

Mint

Word count: 19k

thoughts: iwaizumi is moving and oikawa planned a perfect last hangout and it goes to shit featuring matsuhana. oikawa pov where he pines more than iwa which is something i can get behind!! and this was written in 2015 and iwa’s moving bc of a sports medicine program so iwaizumi stans know and love him sm ;;

Almost a Stranger

Word count: 16k

thoughts: same premise as mint LOL except they’re on a trip together and there’s more non-linear narrative!! this one is a little more mature in tone than mint i would say (funny how people just like splitting them up and throwing them in different countries huh)

with every second that you could give

Word count: 9k

Summary: The journey of Iwaizumi and Oikawa going for gold.

Quote: He knows they’re too close. Iwaizumi knows it too, and they both decided to move in together anyway.

thoughts: iwaoi roommates and they’re both obviously and really pine-y for each other and everyone sees it but them. srsly. they’re sleeping in the same bed. like my god

Lost in Translation

Word count: 9k

Summary: Because misfortune come in threes, Iwaizumi Hajime starts his Thursday having a screaming fight with Shittykawa, spends his lunch break listening to the UCI women’s volleyball team gossiping about how Ushijima Wakatoshi had gone public about his longtime love affair with Oikawa Tooru, and closes out the day by drunkenly dropping his phone into a sewer grate.

thoughts: so funny. so sososoosso genuinely funny. the tone is so snappy and iwaizumi honestly just sounds like a confused teenager (which he is in this) and it gets extra points for including a lot of american culture that a lot of the other iwaoi college au ones don’t include for like. obvious reasons lol.

Something Borrowed

Word count: 16k

Summary: In which Oikawa and Iwaizumi have always been a foregone conclusion to everyone else, but a massive, unanswered question to one another.

thoughts: iwaoi roommates thats abo but it’s like. mentioned twice. whiny and possessive oikawa makes an appearance in this but it’s done really well

things that change, things that stay the same

Word count: 8k

Summary: Oikawa realizes he’s in love with his best friend; it sucks for a while. (But only for a little while.)

thoughts: high school getting together!! my second iwaoi fic ever and this one is just. so sweet. just an unsure oikawa realizing iwaizumi might be more than someone he wants as a best friend. this fic is honestly really really lovely.

galaxies, within you

Word count: 21k

Summary: Hajime and Tooru move in together at the start of university. Too bad they’re stuck with the two gremlins that haunt their apartment.

thoughts: ok this fic was so funny. theyre uni roommates and matsuhana just come fuck shit up and they all act like idiots together even though they go to different schools. and this really throws me back to university days.

Thirty Years and Change (the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad)

Word count: 19k

thoughts: pro! oikawa and iwaizumi haven’t been close for a while until oikawa invites iwaizumi to go to the games with him. there’s a lot of frustration and pining and actually talking about feelings (aka iwaizumi losing his mind and getting advice from people like akaashi)

when it starts to rain, they go inside

Word count: 33k

Summary: “Where?” starts Iwaizumi.“ My parent’s old lakehouse, silly, didn’t you hear me the first time?” OR: Oikawa takes Iwaizumi to his lakehouse for two weeks, post-graduation.

thoughts: this was actually my first iwaoi fic which is funny bc the author doesn’t even like oikawa much and i didnt even ship anything in haikyuu before i read this fic and now im in iwaoi hell. oikawa is really frustrating in this in that it’s basically a really good character analysis on how oikawa comes off as a Mean person all the time bc he’s manipulative and there’s some explicit content

shiver

Word count: 16k

Summary: Oikawa was always the brave one. Hajime just followed two paces behind.

thoughts: iwaoi roommates with oikawa admitting his feelings first back when they were in middle school and iwaizumi putting that thought on the backburner until. obviously. things happen.

Desperado

word count: 80k

thoughts: one of my favorite aus. it’s all from kyoutani’s perspective and it’s almost so au that they’re original characters (if that makes sense). basically iwaoi matsuhana are ex-grifters except iwaoi are estranged and daishou somehow brings everyone back together. excellent world building and reading the pov from someone not involved with the iwaoi drama was refreshing

sing with me a song of conquest and fate

word count: 26k

thoughts: a mythical kings au that’s just. so pretty. iwaizumi ends up becoming oikawa’s servant for some reason and the world building is a+ because you can feel the trust and frustration from both of them build

Atsukita

dreams of me and you

word count: 10k (incomplete)

my second atsukita fic that rly sent me down atskt hell ;; what is essentially post-break up when atsumu gets signed to msby and he’s just Pining and sad for the most part. but the established relationship pre-break up was written really nicely because it just fits my hc of them just being domestic and atsumu being blatantly head over heels

take me home

word count: 4k

i read this this morning and it wrecked me. domestic relationship atsukita?? sign me up

No time like the rest of my life

word count: 19k

mythology au with kita as a regular person and rest of inarizaki as fox spirits! it’s cute and the world building is absolutely lovely but it is an au so they might seem ooc but their core character values are still there

wild blue yonder

word count: 6k

literally full of similes and metaphors and it’s more of an abstract read i guess? but it’s so beautiful and soft and this is exactly how i imagine their relationship

reap and sow

word count: 8k

atsumu confesses and kita ignores him and it’s a couple years after the fact and it’s mostly just weirdly domestic almost roommate like except for the fact that atsumu makes it clear he likes kita LOL. they’re really in character for this!

weightless souls

word count: 2k

pillow talk before atsumu’s first game! the atsumu pov and voice is amazing

if we were both alone

word count: 7k

now this was actually my first atskt fic that sent me down this rare pair hell. it’s an explicit chat fic (both tropes i usually try to avoid) but atsumu types like me (except for the nsfw parts alksfjd) so i guess i like. feel appreciation LMAO.

if you do read like any of these fics pls let me know so we can discuss

♡＼(￣▽￣)／♡

[becca-e-barnes]

The "minors DNI" posts that I've been seeing crop up everywhere by fic writers are always so interesting to me.

First and foremost, I 100% support your decision to post a "minors DNI" for your safety and their safety. You're being responsible, doing your due diligence as a responsible adult, and trying to ensure that everyone enjoys what you put out there in a safe way.

And I know you specifically have not said this so this is not a slight on you by any means, but I think you'd be more open to the discourse of such an interesting topic like this—the problem I have with some fic writers is that is them saying they will block anyone who does not have their age posted in their blog.

This, I believe, is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set. On the one hand displaying your age if you are over 18 seems like a non-issue, right? Sure. But setting the precedent that people should display their age in their blog encourages minors to share their age on the internet which in turn can make them an easier target.

Personal preference for me—I'm a thirty-two year old lady (plz sing this appropriately) and do not share my age in my tumblr because, well I don't want to.

We're all technically violating TOS anyway, so it doesn't really matter if a minor interacts with your fic or not at this point—by interact I mean like/reblog/comment, not DMing you to talk about sexual stuff. That stuff you should absolutely block/delete for obvious legal and safety reasons.

And while I understand the legality thing, if you are not explicitly engaging with said minor, there's not a whole bunch that could hold up in court. How many lawsuits do you think E.L. James gets for 13 year olds waltzing into a bookstore or buying 50 shades of grey off amazon and reading it? There was actually an interesting article written about the "common sense" engagement with this book back in 2012.

Anywho, you are right to ask and set a boundary, and do what you feel is right to protect yourself and using the DNI minor blanket statement is ultimately a good thing, especially if it's a personal uncomfortableness with minors reading your work. However, even if a minor just decided to lie and say they were 21 and read your stuff anyway, unknowingly interacting with a minor is just as bad legally as knowingly doing so so at the end of the day, we're still just taking risks. The safest thing for all of us would probably be to not interact with anyone or ask everyone to use anon, but there's not fun or friendship in that. Your mutual who has stated they're 25 could still be 16 and you wouldn't know it.

My perspective may also just be entirely outdated as well because I grew up in the internet age of it being a lawless wasteland and everyone lied about everything, so I don't see the value in trying to police my work when people will just read it anyway and I don't have any control over that at the end of the day other than to tag appropriately and/or not post anything at all ever.

This was long and not necessary to answer, I'm just always fascinated by the rigor at which fanfic writers are so quick to banish people for not putting their age in their bios when I think it is inherently more dangerous for minors to do so because it puts a target on their back.

Before I start, I recognise that we’re of the same line of thought! I saw this long message and panicked thinking that someone had taken an issue with my stance on it and I’m glad that’s not the case 🙈 Anything I raise here is in the interest of discussion and I completely respect your point of view. 💗

This is really interesting actually and truth be told, I’ve avoided any discussion on this topic for a very long time for fear that I won’t adequately explain my stance on it. I feel like I’ve had a chance to do that and I hope it’s been taken up by everyone as I intended.

I will admit; as a minor, I read smut. Without going into detail, it entirely warped my perspective on how relationships should look. To provide a little context on my stance, at 14/15 (and younger), I had no business reading the things I was reading. Unfortunately, I was in a “relationship” at the time and I fully believed that I had to engage with my boyfriend in ways that mirrored what I was reading. I ended up in situations I didn’t want to be in. To me, it’s my responsibility as a writer and as someone who learned the hard way, to ensure that younger people don’t make the same mistakes I did.

I do fully agree, minors stating their real age on their blog raises all sorts of different issues, as you rightly said. You’re absolutely right, to a minor there are no advantages to displaying your real age on here. Fic writers will block you, creeps will be more likely to engage with you. So I fully understand that this might seem like a reason to lie or provide no age at all.

Leading on from that though, if a minor lies on their profile and claims to be over 18 and they interact with my smut, from a legal perspective, that is not going to have any repercussion on me. I have put my disclaimers up, I vet as many profiles as I can and I do everything I would be reasonably expected to do in the eyes of the law. (This isn’t an area of law I studied in significant depth but that standard of reasonable expectation would still apply). I do as much as I can to protect myself and them.

You brought up 50 Shades and I understand your point but the issue here is not just the fic itself. If anyone comments/ reblogs my fic, I like to send a little reply back! I love when people take the time to give me feedback and I want to thank them for it, as a lot of other writers do! The issue here being that if the blog commenting is a minor, the writer would be engaging in a conversation about sexual material with a minor. And that’s fucking messy. This is mainly where fics differ from a teenager buying a copy of 50 shades. In that situation, there’s no interaction there between the author and the underage fan so it loses that personal element.

On the issue of blogs with no age, I see where you’re coming from and I see that you both read and write fanfiction. But I also see it from the other perspective given that a lot of writers like to do as much as possible to protect themselves and potential minors.

I totally support that’s a boundary that you set and it’s your choice. In the same sense that it’s a fic writer’s choice to protect themselves by blocking you. It’s a matter of boundaries clashing at the end of the day. I really do see both sides here. I’m a really organised person so honestly, if anyone wanted to send me a private message just confirming they’re over 18, I’d put them all into a list to make sure I don’t accidentally block them for interacting. But of course, not every writer would be able to do that and I’m sure many readers would want to do that either! I just see it as the only way to compromise on that issue and keep everyone happy.

Thank you for sending me this! I hope I covered everything and if I haven’t been clear enough in some areas, feel free to come back to me! 🙈 And I really appreciate actually having a discussion on here! It’s so great to hear others’ points of view in a nice, respectful way. Tumblr loses that sometimes! Have a lovely evening 💗

[lambourngb]

re: your tags on that one post abt plotholes in rnm: what are the plotholes that make you lose the most sleep?

(this is my main btw, my rnm blog is @curlyguerin )

Hi! Okay... strap in, because there are a lot of little and big things that wiggle into my thoughts and makes me wonder ...am I the only one who couldn't follow that plotline?

In my opinion RNM suffers more from abandoned narratives and continuity errors than plot holes I guess, since we only have 2 seasons, with at least 2 more to go I guess I can hope they come back to these issues... but: [Under the cut plus some spoilers for season 3]

Things I would like explained :

1. What did Jesse Manes fund with family money in 1x08 ? I'm guessing it was surveillance of the town and the search for more aliens that could have escaped the military in 1947-1948. The idea that Jesse funded Caulfield is just laughable to me, along with how he was able to get his Army-assigned son moved from Germany to New Mexico for 5 years and no one noticed?? Caulfield has to be separate from whatever Jesse was doing in Roswell. Clearly there is still an ACTIVE military project focused on aliens because Flint isn't AWOL, Flint also takes Noah's body to Area 51, so where was Jesse in violation of his orders (Alex's threat to Jesse in 1x08 and then shipping him to Niger)? Surveilling citizens and setting up cameras all over town?

2. Did they ever build an Air Force base on the Fosters Homestead Ranch? (1x01-1x02) ...then it's never mentioned again.

3. I am aware I am the only one who cares about this little bit, but the show seemed to set up a narrative in season 1 about the spotlight Roswell shined white victims of crimes - like Katie and Jasmine, that the town of Roswell holds quite a lot of racism regarding justice- vilifying Rosa for over 10 years, ignoring the deaths of people around Ranchero Night, and then Noah kills Wyatt Long's best friend Hank Gibbons in 1x13. I dunno, I was expecting more from Wyatt in season 2 about this than picking a fight with Michael over Mimi's missing persons sheet and showing up with a crossbow in 2x04. And like, there was a theme of people going missing in season 2!! Mimi, Jenna, the weird twins from 2x06, Charlie -- but yet, no closer scrutiny by Sheriff Valenti other than her focus on Max Evans and the story about Mexico- Like this felt not like a plot hole, but a dropped narrative -- to wrap up the fate of Racist Hank in a missing persons sheet in 2x01. To treat him weirdly like all of Noah's other victims (who were women and men of color and poor), but for a few factors like he was white, he had actual lines in the show over a couple of episodes, and he's one of the few townspeople we learn his first and last name still sticks out in my mind as strange. The Doylist explanation is the actor wasn't available for season 2, but the Watson-perspective of this is just someone the in-show universe doesn't care about ...? Okay. I will keep that in mind, and try to ignore the fact that the town of Roswell swings wildly back to caring about white victims again in 2x13 with Jesse Manes.

4. The Alighting from 1x13 - just how far away was it from happening? Noah was ready to stick a sheriff's deputy, the town event planner and Michael (who probably would be been the only one to go missing without much fanfare, except maybe by Alex) into a pod...for how long? Months? Years? What was his endgame? how did he expect to go unnoticed by the town while he waited for his alien salvation/alien UBER to arrive? Could he just mindwarp everyone into forgetting about the pod squad? Since we didn't see any alien ships show up in the six months from 1x13 to 2x13, and no further follow up by any of our heroes about what Noah was babbling about... I'm going to say this should come back into play for season 3, otherwise it's the most egregious plot hole from season 1.

5. Why did Flint want to work with Helena? Jesse had this master plan that Helena knew all about apparently but she never shares the plan with Flint? Jesse never shares this plan with Flint either? Why? As far as I can tell from the plot of season 2, Jesse takes the console piece from Alex, he was going to kill Alex to keep him out of the way, use the console to blow up civilians, he created a paper trail that pointed the finger at Max, and then when everyone knew the truth about aliens, he was going to use HIS atomizer bomb to release the toxin that Charlie had already developed for Project Shepherd to kill all the aliens.... WHY would Flint want to stop that, especially since they fight in 2x11 over how slow Jesse was moving in his plans? Other than objecting to killing Alex, why would Flint turn Alex over to Helena to blackmail Michael into building a second atomizer bomb? He should have just kept Alex out of the way until it was all over and let Jesse proceed with his plans. Flint's desire to work with Helena Ortecho remains a plot hole to me, that is explained in the most flimsy way of he thinks his dad isn't serious about killing all the aliens even though he has the means? And if he takes Alex from Jesse's control so easily, why not steal the bomb Jesse had too?

6. These are more gripes about continuity, not really plot holes, but the fact we have this loose timeline of events but it doesn't match the weather of filming.... Like Heather Hemmens looked so gorgeous in that little silk outfit in 2x01, but she's wandering outside in Dec in Roswell New Mexico looking like that. I get that it was filmed in August/Sept of 2019 but come on... so my main frustration is I have no idea what season and month is supposed to be on screen. Universe timeline says Winter but filming schedule meant it was early fall with still having the heat of summer there...then the show ends in May/June in the universe, but we all know RNM wrapped in Dec 2019/Jan 2020 so they are all bundled up in winter again.

7. Also on continuity, small things like Rosa's birthday being wrong, the fact her astrological sign isn't Pieces for either date, openly letting Greg Manes see Rosa, not seeming to care that Liz's ex-fiance hears that Rosa is alive - like i'm sure her "dead" sister came up in conversation between Liz/Diego

- the show gives us this beautiful conversation with Michael sharing his background with Alex in 1x10, but then Alex completely forgets it in 2x04 by dropping some line like "this is what you do with family" when Michael expresses confusion about a height chart. Also, on the same note- the jabs about the Library being a dive bar, also felt like a drop in continuity because Alex knows that Michael just lost his mom (1x12) , the government IS studying aliens, and his brother is in a pod, so like, he has some very valid reasons to drink if that's what he wanted to do with in his life in early season 2!! but, also he knows Michael is a genius??

- Why Alex never mentions Rosa, Isobel's blackouts/why Michael gave up UNM, or even hint about what happened with his dad in the shed during his conversation with Maria in 2x05 is also beyond bizarre to me. It was an "information" dump conversation that Alex still doesn't share all the information he has about a situation and just ends up looking kind of judgmental in my opinion.

- the truck conversation in 2x06 between Maria and Alex, why Maria prompts a girl's name when Alex says he's never been in a real relationship INSTEAD of addressing the very real elephant in the room, Michael Guerin, that they had a conversation about in 2x05- also feels like a gap in continuity.

8. Science wise- the pathogen that Charlie developed? It was supposed to be so specific that it could kill a leader of Al Quada and all of their direct descendants but leave the rest of the population unharmed. [Which um, that's a war crime, but whatever!] How was Maria affected? the DNA they had at Caulfield to develop it - like, Maria was descended from Louise and Louise lived free. The only person that pathogen SHOULD have affected was Michael (if they used Nora to base it on) Unless you're telling me that there's some protein in "alien dna" that is so specific to aliens, that no other human shares it, but also so completely undetectable that Kyle couldn't find it in Maria's blood... ? I suppose it's possible. I hope we get more explanation about that in season 3. It makes me wonder why Caulfield/Project Shepherd ever let Patty Harris go after she volunteered for some study then, and remained content to just pay her medical bills through a fake insurance company? [But also didn't flag Mimi and all the doctors that Maria took her to???]

9. Michael's hand. I'm going to reserve judgment about this, because some of my salt on this is based on season 3 promo pictures, but I really thought that moment in 2x13 when he takes off his hat, while Alex is singing, you see him without the wrapping on his hand, that maybe he found some peace with Jesse dead and demolishing the shed with Alex. But then it looks like the hand-danna is all over season 3, right up until the finale of season 3, so... was that a mistake in wardrobe AND not a beautiful moment of character growth??? I wish I could extend some grace to RNM about that, but alas... see above for why I have trust issues.

10. Perhaps I wasn't watching season 1 closely, but I thought Noah's madness was brought on by the fact he was stuck in his pod? That it was "lower class travel accommodations" and Isobel's scream at 13 got his attention? I assumed that he stayed in the pod, possessing Isobel on and off, right up until he used her body to kill Rosa in 2008, absorbing enough power to break out. So how did Noah find Jim Valenti so quickly? If it was through Isobel's memories, then why did Jim not immediately have Noah, some random alien approaching him about his recently dead daughter, hauled off to Caulfield? Jim pays $1,000 for Rosa's body, putting her in a pod [Noah's broken pod??] and stores her, waiting for...something? An alien to come along to bring her back. So did Jim know about The Savior? Why would Jim work with Noah and vice versa? Again, I'm hoping we get more about this in season 3.

11. Was there a point of keeping Alex in the Air Force? He arranges a place for them to work on bringing Max back, but I feel like anyone could have done that? Like Isobel had money, she could have rented a storage facility. All of the equipment was borrowed from the hospital, not the military. The information about 1947-1948 was from the drives decoded from Caulfield or the AAR report left by Flint in the Project Shepherd bunker (which again was decommissioned, not an active military installation). I could support the decision if it had provided some richness to the plot or some conflict within the character, neither of which really happened. Alex hacking the government and going undercover in the Air Force to protect Michael is basically fanon. I love that fanon, but alas...

12. Finally, the time jump. What year are we jumping into? 2020? 2021? Why does it make me think none of those questions above will be answered.

[kittyprincessofcats]

RWBY Volume 8, Episode 14 - The Final Word

Thoughts on the final episode of RWBY Vol 8 under the cut.

Also, I will from now on reblog spoilers for Volume 8, which will be tagged with “RWBY v8 spoilers” if you want to blacklist them.

tw: Since the episode itself had the same content warning, I should mention that I will be discussing themes of suicide in this post.

Also, everything I’m about to say is *my* personal opinion. I’m not trying to tell anyone else that they’re supposed to feel the same way about anything in this episode. In turn, please don’t tell me how to feel about it either.

- I should start by bringing up what I said in my post about episode 13, because all of that is going to become relevant now:

So... that all aged... interestingly.

- Next, I should say that I actually did end up getting spoiled about Penny’s death. I was trying really hard and didn’t go into any tags, but literally one day before this episode was released to the public, Tumblr recommended me two blogs with the titles “Penny deserved better” and “Justice for Penny Polendina”… so I drew my conclusions from that. And while I think those blog titles are valid sentiments, I do wish people would wait a week before putting spoilers in a blog title. But then again, I was weirdly glad to get spoiled this time, because it meant I was more emotionally prepared.

- And now, on to my very controversial opinion about this finale: I… uhm… I actually liked it. There, I said it. I liked it. I’m seeing a lot of takes from people who hated it, and that’s totally fair, but personally, to my own surprise, I liked it. (It’s kind of interesting that last time I said it would be “awful writing” to kill Penny now, then it happened, now the whole fandom is complaining about it being awful writing… and I’m here going “actually… that wasn’t so bad”.) That’s not to say that I’m a fan of everything in this finale, especially re: Penny – but overall, the good outweighed the bad *for me*. (Stressing again that this is just how *I* feel.)

- I think the main reason I feel that way is because I honestly expected way worse. If you read that thing I wrote last week^, you see I expected multiple character deaths. I was incredibly nervous. And after I’d already spent a few minutes genuinely thinking Yang died (because of a badly worded episode 13 spoiler I accidently saw), I had to think about the kind of deaths that would be a dealbreaker for me and make me drop the show. (Let’s say it like this: If either of Bumbleby ever died for real, I would be done with this show immediately.) So, in short, I was terrified of the finale and expected it to be the kind of finale that ruins the show for me (which has happened in far too many fandoms so far) – and it wasn’t. I have mixed feelings about how they handled Penny’s story, too, but this finale didn’t ruin the show for me and I honestly felt way worse after the Volume 3 finale. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t prepared for it at the time, but this time I spent a whole week being super anxious, so when I’d actually finished the finale, I just felt overwhelming relief.

- Okay, so let’s talk Penny: Back in Episode 12, I already wasn’t a huge fan of the idea to make her human (if that even is what she was?), but I think I said I’d reserve judgment on it until we see where they go with it. Obviously, it feels unsatisfying to have the show just kill her off after everyone’s been trying to save her all volume. And of course, it’s never fun to see a favorite character of yours (and Penny is definitely a favorite of mine) get killed off. The way it happened (a character who’s been trying to sacrifice herself the whole volume finally doing so through assisted suicide, even though there could have been several potential ways to still save her) feels incredibly unsatisfying and depressing as well. The “heroic sacrifice” cliché isn’t new, but there’s still a difference between a sacrifice that feels necessary and like it really was the only way (Hazel, Vine) and one that feels more like a character being over-eager to sacrifice themselves even though there might have been alternatives (Penny). So really, I understand why people don’t like this, especially because the narrative, so far, seems to validate Penny’s choice by having her plan work. And that does send the opposite of the “fight for every life”, “no one is replaceable” message this volume had been going for until then.

- And this is why, I think Penny’s death is meant to be awful. Volume 9 might prove me wrong on this, but I think we haven’t seen the end of this storyline yet. For me personally, it’s too early to judge this plot-point by itself because it depends a lot on how they deal with it in the aftermath and how things go from here. (For instance: I hated Pyrrha’s death at first because going into a fight she knew she couldn’t win also felt like a needless heroic sacrifice to me. It was only how the aftermath of it was handled from there that made me be okay with it.) So basically, what I’m asking is: How will the other characters handle Penny’s death now? Will Ruby (or anyone else) get angry at Jaune for agreeing to kill her? How will Ruby grieve in general? And, most importantly: Will the narrative really treat Penny’s choice as the “right” one or will it challenge that view? (And was there maybe more going on that we know because I’ve been reading those “Penny is alive” theories and… oh boy.) So yeah – for me it depends on how it gets handled from here.

- Also, I just want to say that I really appreciate RT putting a suicide trigger warning in the beginning of the episode and I wish people wouldn’t twist that into a bad thing. (I’ve seen some takes along the lines of “If they had to put a warning, that means they were aware it’s a harmful message, so that makes it worse” and… please don’t do that. Content creators putting trigger warnings on things is a good thing. Also, this might be a controversial take, but I don’t think fiction always has to “send a good message and teach you a lesson.” The important thing is that RT were aware that this episode could be upsetting/distressing to people and that’s why they put a warning and the suicide hotline’s number in the description.)

- Anyway, I’ve been rambling for too long. My point is: I understand the criticisms and agree with some of them, but I hope the writers know what they’re doing here and I want to believe that they do. I also love all the theories about Penny coming back (in Winter’s mind, for example) and I think they’re not actually that unlikely. And if Penny doesn’t come back, then honestly, I’m okay with that, too. At the end of the day, she’s a fictional character. I can always go and read fanfictions where she’s alive and lives happily ever after with Ruby and nothing that happens in canon can ever take that away. Canon only has as much power as you want it to have. I can enjoy the canon show and the story they’re telling (even if Penny is dead for good this time), while still also enjoying my AUs where she’s fine. One doesn’t harm the other.

- (Also, let me take this moment to shamelessly promote my favorite cartoon show because I think this is relevant to the interests of anyone who hates the “person who’s been trying to sacrifice themselves the whole time ends up doing just that” story: The main character in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is self-sacrificial to the point of it being unhealthy, but the show explicitly doesn’t treat this as a good thing. When she tries to sacrifice herself for the greater good in the final arc and says it’s better that way, this is treated as a problem, and the lesson she ends up learning in the end is her life has value, too, and that she deserves to be happy. (The show’s also very gay.)

- I don’t know if brought any of this across properly. Basically… I’m not happy about where they went with Penny either, but I am okay with it. I still enjoyed the finale and will continue to enjoy the show. And I want to focus on the things that make me happy about RWBY and made me happy about the finale, so I’ll talk about the rest of the episode now (while rewatching it because I’ll forget stuff otherwise):

- Have I mentioned I really love the Volume 8 opening? Because I really do.

- That shot of the destroyed whale is still awesome.

- I love how the episode opens with all the fights we left off with (Winter vs. Ironwood, Penny vs. Cinder, Harriet vs. Qrow, Ruby vs. Neo) and cuts between them. Also, the music is amazing!

- Elm admitting that Harriet is their friend and that being what finally gets through to her was a nice conclusion to their little arc, I guess. Vine’s sacrifice and his admittance that they’re his friends and he’s doing this for them were touching. Honestly, Harriet is right to blame herself for his death. That said, while this volume made me strongly dislike her, I do hope she now gets an arc about actually dealing with her grief and changing. I think that would be way more interesting to see than still having her be bitter, especially after what happened in this episode.

- Qrow causing good luck to stop the bomb was a nice little moment and honestly makes sense. Good luck and bad luck are just a matter of perspective, after all. What’s bad luck for yourself will be good luck for your enemies and vice versa. So, maybe Qrow technically caused “bad luck” for the bomb? Either way, I like the idea of him realizing that his semblance is more than what he thought.

- Cinder breathing fire during the fight was awesome. I need GIFs of that.

- Blake was amazing in this episode! I love that she didn’t let her grief over Yang consume her, but got up and kept fighting, kicked Cinder in the face and told Weiss to get up. Good stuff!

- I wonder if Cinder’s “You should have never been born” line to Ruby was just a generic “I hate you” line or meant something more.

- Do people honestly think that Cinder betraying Neo was unexpected or like… super unreasonable for a villain? Neo did threaten her – most typical villains don’t react well to their underlings threatening them, so I really don’t see why some people are so shocked or downright offended about this (is it just because they like Neo?).

- Weiss being the last one standing and using Blake’s weapon in the fight was absolutely amazing.

- The tragedy of Jaune sending Nora to bring the Huntsmen and Huntresses back through the portal while not knowing the portal is a one-way deal…

- Cinder knowing that Salem is back because her Grimm arm started hurting was a super interesting moment. And Weiss’ shocked face in that moment was quite interesting, too.

- I wonder if Penny really meant dying when she said “Let me choose this one thing”. To me, it sounded more like she meant choosing the next Winter Maiden. Also, her “trust me” to Jaune is an interesting line. Between that and us not seeing how that conversation goes on, I wonder if there’s something we don’t know here. (*puts on my “Penny is alive” tinfoil hat*)

- I’m glad they at least didn’t graphically show Penny’s death – which is an interesting choice again, because this show doesn’t usually shy away from making deaths graphic and portraying them in all their brutality. So, the fact that we don’t see the act itself and then just cut to Penny’s conversation with Winter was interesting. (But I am glad about it because I didn’t want to see that.) It might honestly just be because of the nature of Penny’s death that they didn’t want to show it too much (and that’s fair).

- “You were my friend.” Gosh, this rewatch is making me cry now 😭. (I also think it’s interesting that Winter calls herself a machine and Penny is now the one who corrects her. It’s a nice callback to Ruby telling Penny she’s their friend and “not just a machine”.)

- I was also just reminded that Penny died thinking Ruby was dead… ouch. This possibly hurts me more than Penny’s death itself.

- People have also pointed out that when Penny transfers the powers to Winter, her aura looks yellow (like Jaune’s) with only some green sparks (like Penny’s). Hmm… I really wonder if there’s more going on here.

- “I won’t be gone. I’ll be part of you.” Who’s cutting onions in here?

- Honestly, the main reason I kind of forgave them for killing Penny was because THAT MOMENT of Winter opening her eyes with the powers while that epic music plays was just amazing to witness. And her fight with Cinder? EPIC. BREATHTAKING. BEAUTIFUL. I’m not even that into the idea of Winter as the Winter Maiden (I honestly thought Penny, the robot girl, becoming the Winter Maiden was a much more interesting plot), but the way it was done in this episode was great. I’m glad we’re finally getting that rivalry between Winter and Cinder, because their arcs parallel each other in so many ways. And I love the symbolism of Winter only getting the powers that Ironwood chose for her after she betrayed Ironwood. I like the idea that she only became worthy of them after turning on Ironwood (which does work well with her Volume 7 arc).

- Oh, by the way, I really hate the “Team RWBY will become the four maidens eventually” theory. Even if it didn’t require characters to die, I just think it would be cheap and way too obvious, and I think it’s boring to throw all the magic powers at the main characters. So, if they only made Winter the Winter Maiden so she can eventually die and pass it on to Weiss, I’ll be very annoyed. (But I hope that’s not where this is going.)

- I’m also just realizing that Cinder asking “How am I supposed to take her power if she’s dead?” about Penny a few episodes ago was foreshadowing… damn.

- Jaune’s sword breaking was a really cool and symbolic moment, too.

- Winter trying to save Weiss from falling and not reaching her in time really got to me. I’m mostly not that affected by any of Team RWBY falling into the void because… come on, we know they’ll be fine. But Winter thinking her little sister just died is… oof. Maybe it’s because I have two younger sisters, but stuff like that really gets to me.

- Also, Winter going through that portal and seeing her family after she just (as far as she knows) lost Weiss… ouch. They never got to all reunite with each other (yet).

- I absolutely LOVED that final scene between Salem and Cinder. They’re both such fascinating characters and I just live for their interactions. Cinder talking herself down (even though she got the relics, so she knows she succeeded at the most important part) was amazing on her part. She did learn from Salem! It’s also interesting that even though she got what Salem wanted, Cinder didn’t get what she herself wanted (the Maiden Powers). I feel like that’s eventually going to become important.

- I wonder if Salem believed Cinder’s lies or not. I’ve seen some interesting opinions in both directions here. (Also, again, I don’t get why some people are so shocked and offended about Cinder lying? I’ve seen so many “I hope she pays for her lies” takes and… really? That’s her biggest crime in your eyes? Lying to another villain?? I don’t think any of you villain-haters feel bad for Salem here, so why… oh. Oh, nevermind, I just understood. They’re not mad that Cinder lied, they’re mad because they wanted Salem to kill her. Gosh, that’s so dumb. Face it, people: That’s not going to happen because Salem still needs the Fall Maiden’s powers. She’s not going to kill Cinder anytime before Cinder opens the last vault.)

- Cinder killing Watts with the staff was kinda funny, tbh. Also Salem’s proud little smirk in that scene kills me.

- “And that’s checkmate.” THAT. Okay, THAT was the best line in the entire episode, I don’t make the rules. What an epic moment!! Gosh, have I mentioned I love Cinder to death? What a queen! This volume really completely changed my opinion on her. I’ve already said that she’s my standout character of the volume, and I stand by that. It was her volume in so many ways and it’s so fitting that she gets to say the last line. It’s also such an interesting line in so many ways: 1) Because this episode is called “The Final Word”, is the only episode in this volume that doesn’t have a one-word title, and the actual final word of the episode is “checkmate”, it implies that “Checkmate” is the real, hidden title of the episode. And that fits so well! They could have easily just named the episode “Checkmate”, but revealing it like this works even better. 2) I also love the chess symbolism in this volume in general. There was a really great analysis about it on here somewhere, but basically: Salem is the king, Cinder is the queen (the king can’t die and barely moves, the queen is out there getting rid of opposing player pieces). And the interesting thing about that here is that the king can’t actually checkmate anyone else, only other chess pieces can. So, it’s very fitting that Cinder is the one who says “checkmate”. Also, in a game of chess, you often have to sacrifice your own pieces to win, which is what Cinder did. 3) I also LOVE the realization on Ironwood’s face when he realizes that he’s been so paranoid about Salem, but he’s actually been playing Cinder all along. (Someone else on here pointed out that there’s something super poetic about Cinder, someone who was very much a victim of Atlas’ systemic problems, being the one to defeat Ironwood and destroy his kingdom. Ironwood was ready to sacrifice all the poor people from Mantle for his own goal, and a poor person who was hurt by people in Atlas is the one who destroyed him. Yeah, yeah, Cinder’s evil and all, but I love it! 4) It’s also really interesting to me that Salem said “This game is not yours to win, it’s mine” to Cinder in the first episode of this Volume, but in the end, Salem ended up being gone for the entire last part of the volume and Cinder is the one who got to say “checkmate.” IT’S JUST SO GOOD.

- And ngl, I’m super happy for Cinder. She really got it all. Yeah okay, she didn’t get the Maiden Powers (and I hope she never does, because one person being two maidens at once is lame), but she got the relics, got rid of her enemies and co-workers (or so she thinks), destroyed the kingdom that she was a slave to, got back into Salem’s good graces… good for her! And apparently one of the buildings that you see being flooded was the Glass Unicorn? Amazing. Love that.

- (Yes, I’m team “redemption for Cinder please”, but come on… it was never going to happen this volume. And if it never happens, that’s okay, too – I’m loving her as a villain as well!)

- Also, I hope that all the people who were specifically criticizing Cinder for not being a competent enough villain are very happy now. Because there you have the competent villain you said you wanted! I mean, I’m saying this as someone who used to criticize Cinder’s character for not being interesting/deep enough. I used to say that I’d like a backstory or something that makes her more interesting/compelling to me. But as soon as we got that backstory, I happily switched sides to team “I like Cinder now”. So, I better not hear any complaining from the “I just want her to be a more competent villain” faction now!

- Yeah, I admit I’m getting annoyed with the Cinder hate. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but it gets frustrating when you’re going through the tag of a character you like and half of the tag are people talking about how badly they want that character to die. (Maybe use a seperate tag for it?)

- (I’m just realizing that I said “Well, at least it was only one character death” earlier, but people like Ironwood and Watts actually did die… I just didn’t count those because I don’t care. Sorry not sorry.)

- We decimated Salem’s faction quite a bit this volume, didn’t we? There’s only Cinder, Tyrian, and Mercury left. I wonder if Salem will get some new people on her side.

- Overall, while I did like this episode, I feel like Volume 8 got weaker towards the end. Most Volumes were at their best towards the end, but I feel like episodes 8-11 were the strongest parts of Volume 8, while episodes 12-14 were still good, but not as good.

- My prediction is that Volume 9 will (of course) be Tearm RWBY’s way out of the void (or whatever that place where they ended up is called) – And I quite like the theory that we won’t see the other characters at all and it’ll be focused only on what’s happening in the void.

[veliseraptor]

top 5 Xue Yang quotes

I mean pretty much every time he opens his mouth I love it. But I guess if I had to pick single lines...I am going to put screencaps here. This is also all CQL because that’s what I’m more familiar with.

Under a read more because it got long. Surprising no one familiar with me and how this sort of thing goes. Featuring my new blog subtitle: A Whole Lotta Feelings About Xue Yang, and links to a bunch of my own older meta.

1. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved in other people’s business. Who’s right, who’s wrong? How much kindness, how many grudges. Can an outsider be clear about it? Maybe you shouldn’t have left the mountain.”

I wrote a whole meta post about this! I mean, I’ve written a whole lot of meta posts about Xue Yang generally, the amount of digital ink I’ve spilled over this character is, hm. Well. 

But I just find this line fascinating for the ways in which it is, like many of the things that Xue Yang says in this scene, such a blend of emotions: anger, frustration, misery, disappointment.

There’s the “how dare you judge me” of it all, the “you’re so goddamn clueless you just don’t get it” of it, and then also the thing that I talked about in the linked meta - the “you would’ve been better served staying away from this stupid world, where you would’ve been safe and where you would’ve been safe from me.” 

I have a lot of...thoughts, about the way that Xue Yang bounces back and forth between finding it hilarious that Xiao Xingchen is so nice to him while having no idea who he really is, finding it maddening that he is (he’s so stupid! how does he get away with being so stupid!), and finding it...something that he likes, and sort of wants him to keep (in a similar way, actually, to the way that I think Jin Guangyao wants Lan Xichen to keep his relative innocence). 

And also the arc words/recurring sentiment of those questions of right and wrong, black and white. And the idea that that’s not a question Xue Yang has historically concerned himself with, but perhaps right now it might actually matter.

And right now he wants Xiao Xingchen to be on the same page, and at least for a half a second genuinely thought he might be.

2. “The finger is mine, while the lives are theirs.”

Obviously this is like. Peak Xue Yang line: pure solipsism, pure self-centered self-interest: my finger is mine and therefore it’s worth more than the lives of other people.

And there’s a lot to be said about that as a manifesto for Xue Yang - on one level I do think it’s just about how he thinks and perceives others: they just aren’t quite real to him, not in the way he himself is. Like, yes! They exist! Nominally they have “feelings” and “wants” or whatever, but conceptualizing that in any concrete way, or internalizing it, is...hard. It doesn’t seem quite real to him. They don’t seem quite real, not in the way that he is, himself. 

And on the other hand I think there’s something about the way that Xue Yang weights his own value so heavily because he’s the only one who will. Nobody else is going to put any value on his hand or his finger. Xue Yang’s approach to life is very much “nobody’s going to give me anything, so I will get mine and fuck everyone else, if I don’t look out for me above all then it’s a short road to death.” And I think there’s elements of that here. 

Or maybe a question: why should their lives be worth more than my body? Why should they be more valuable than me? And the answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t. 

While I do think that Xue Yang has his insecurities and uncertainties, one thing that he refuses to doubt is that he has a right to exist and a right to get what’s his - even if that comes at the expense of others. 

And I think, too, on some level he figures this is how everyone works. They probably think their fingers are worth his life. They’re wrong, obviously, and the fact that he won proves that. But they still believed it.

3. “Cultivator friend, I’ll plead guilty. But to submit to punishment...that depends if you’re able to catch me.”

Flirting is playing murder tag with a cute boy!

This is a less serious one but I love it because it is just...it’s not his intro intro (see below) but it also sort of is, in another way. And it is definitely an intro to his relationship with Xiao Xingchen, and I love it for that - for the way he shows up, perching on a house over an enormous massacre, and is just having the time of his life. 

It’s so cheerfully playful, so bright, the way that he doesn’t even hesitate to be like “yes! I did kill all those people! what’re you gonna do about it :D”

(”does my gay little crime spree piss you off?”)

It sets up this dynamic between a Xiao Xingchen who is taking this all very seriously and a Xue Yang who is having a fantastic time and I just love it. New standard for your OTP meeting: if it doesn’t happen at the scene of a massacre for which one of them is responsible then what’s even the point.

4. “I don’t fear death, only boredom/living without a purpose.”

I wish!!! I knew whether this translation (”having no purpose in living” or the Netflix one (”boredom”) was more “””accurate””” - or if it doesn’t matter and the meaning is pretty close. If someone can tell me that’d be amazing. But either way - this is the moment where I was like “oh I’m screwed” when it came to adopting a new terrible character for my very own.

I have a huge glaring weak spot for characters who are very “death before boredom” about their lives - who look at their existence as sort of “here for a good time not a long time” and recognize that they’re not one for a long life but they’re going to make it one they can enjoy. That almost indifference to their own end weighed against the prospect of dullness - or, with the Viki translation, purposelessness. 

And it does fit with how I think of Xue Yang as someone who sort of needs to have a drive or a goal, most of the time; who needs to be engaged and is easily bored. (This is one of the things that I think he has in common with Wei Wuxian! Sorry, buddy, you’re more alike than you’d like to acknowledge.)

But it also demands such a contrast with the fact that he does, later on, settle down into domestic relative tranquility - into something that would look, to a lot of people, and maybe even to his past self, like boredom.

And yet it doesn’t bore him.

And I just. You know. Have a lot of feelings about that.

5. “Very well. Would I be afraid of people’s disgust? However, are you qualified to feel disgusted by me?”

tfw you see your great fake life starting to go to pieces and decide you’re going to detonate your nuclear weapon in it because hey, might as well take everyone down with you, right?

I love this because it’s one of those things where it’s true and it’s not - I do not think, generally, that Xue Yang really cares about people’s disgust. He sometimes even relishes it! I mean, I think a certain kind of dehumanization sets him off, but in general - yes, I’m’s horrible, yes, I’m disgusting, yes, sure, do I care? Nope. 

But it is pretty clear here, both in terms of facial expression and reactions, that Xiao Xingchen’s judgment does hit home. That his anger and dismissal of Xue Yang’s story, of his exposure of a vulnerability he doesn’t usually allow, hits pretty hard. From Xue Yang’s perspective, he’s taken a risk, and Xiao Xingchen answered it with a slap in the face. (Wrote a bunch about this here.)

And in that hurt he responds, immediately, by lashing out - by using the weapon he’s held in reserve. I’ve written before about how I think Xue Yang prior to this point was in sort of “the fierce corpses thing can stay between me and the fierce corpses now” mode about his extracurricular activities with Xiao Xingchen, but it’s still there, and he knows exactly what he’s doing here. After all, that revenge was always tailored: it was always about bringing Xiao Xingchen down to his level and proving that he’s no better, and never has been any better. 

But I will never get over the look on his face over that first line, where he’s saying “would I be afraid of people’s disgust” and while the words imply no his face is definitely saying yes, at least when it’s you.

BONUSES: 

Most of his conversation with Wei Wuxian but especially the bit about slowly and intimately doing experimental necromancy, but also Xue Yang inviting Song Lan in for lunch.

Come on, Song Lan! Just take the free meal! It’ll be fine.

[ketchs-mistress]

So @connieisland wrote a letter from Sy's perspective. It was a great letter! I and others thought it would make a great series if there was letters back and forth. So I approached her with the idea that someone write the responses. She asked me. I said yes! So my format is a little differnet from hers but I hope you guys like this. This is new to the both of us. Link to her first letter is below.

Oh Captain, My Captain,

   I knew what I was getting into when you asked me to be your girlfriend. Sure, some days are harder then others. But that doesn't stop how I feel about you. That doesn't stop my love. I'm not going anywhere. Even when everyone tells me I'm crazy. Even when the odds are stacked against us. You are everything to me. When the days are long and I miss you, I hold your shirt close to me. It's not the same, but it gets me through the nights and the days. Your scent fills my nose. It's the closest to having your arms around me. I imagine you on top of me. Your sweet words whispered in my ear. Hehe. Sorry, I'll stop. I know this isn't easy for you either. I know one day you'll be back home in my arms. And I count down those days. No matter how long. Just as long as you come home.

    And as I write this, I'm shopping for a care package. You deserve something nice while you protect me and our country. I know some people will never understand. But I do and I'm eternally grateful for your sacrifices. You and your men are doing the best. Just promise me you'll come home. And that when you are home you let me take care of you. I promised myself that I wouldn't cry, so for now I love you and be safe.

Your Bug

Tag List: Tagging some people from her list as well. Line through won't let me tag you.

@beck07990 @loverofallfandoms99 @its--fandom--darling @hoeforhenry @neganslucille1994 @warriorqueen1991 @inlovewithhisblueeyes @infinite-shite @madbaddic7ed @iloveyouyen @thiccgeralt @luclittlepond @demivampirew @hell1129-blog @daddys-littlewhitegirl @iloveyouwhiskey @cavillanche @cavillryarchive @foodieforthoughts @maizyistrash

Let me or @connieisland know if you want to be tagged.

[freebooter4ever]

i’ve seen the discussion going back and forth on boundaries and sexual objectification, and i don’t have much to add to the conversation other than to say everyone is allowed to determine their OWN ‘lines’ and just because we don’t vocalize them doesn’t make them any less valid. but here’s the limits i set for my blog if anyone feels it is important for them to know (<3):

personally I consider ‘characters’ fair game for anything goes, with ‘public personas’ a little more iffy. ‘RPF’ isn’t new - it just takes on a new more accessible/visible form nowadays. i remember reading my first fic about a ‘real person’ back in my LOTR fandom days - it was a story in first person perspective about the main character meeting orlando bloom on a plane before he was ‘famous’. like a lot of these types of stories, it wasnt so much about the person as it was about the meet cute. the actor was just a convenient placeholder with a handsome face and some personality quirks thrown in to make the romance/dialogue more specific. i personally dont read much xReader fic nowadays, but mostly only cause i’m an old fart who can’t relate to the ‘you’ format. i miss the good old days when people actually created OC’s and then inserted them into things LOL. but also LOL if you think i’ve gone an entire year of quarantine without some imagined personal fantasies of joe mazzello (or steve aoki in the years before)(ramilicious can attest to this. she can also attest to most of these fantasies ending in friendship rather than anything explicit cause that’s just how i roll these days lol). the line i draw is i would never post these types of fics in a place where the subject could accidentally find them - you have to go looking for this stuff on tumblr, most fics are given explicit ratings and under read-mores. with the blacklist tags it’s pretty easy to filter things out. its even easier to add filters to ao3 searches. i am NOT going to do something like message steve aoki and say ‘yeah i watched that movie Ibiza like five times, here is my 1k fic where you’re the dj and i’m the one night stand’. but obviously people still enjoy imagining scenarios like these otherwise movies like Ibiza wouldn’t exist?

for art, i consider anything already on display up for grabs, we all know a certain person’s ass is all over the place...all you have to do is google ‘need for speed’ and rami’s name. HOWEVER, in the case of actors i personally would not draw anything more explicit than what’s already there. i’m not gonna draw full frontal nudity for rami (unless he gifts us with it in a movie, i suppose) or anyone. this is 100% a personal choice for me. 

i was a sophomore or junior in college when i volunteered as a figure drawing monitor where i’d time the nude model’s poses and help them set up the stage and lighting and such. there was this one guy in his mid forties probably, a regular who came every week, and i always thought of him fondly till one day (the day after i ran into my Hot Programming TA during dinner and later sent him an email begging him to go on a date with me because i was desperate for kissing experience)(and Hot Programming TA emailed me back within minutes saying yes) this artist guy who i saw all the time and thought i knew fairly well, decided to draw me instead of the model. which would have been fine except he drew me naked. i was NOT naked at the time, i was wearing a shirt, and a bra, and a full prairie skirt with alternating calico and floral patterns. he drew what he imagined was underneath all that. he came up to me after the figure drawing session and showed me his drawings and told me i had been ‘glowing’ and my response was to laugh it off awkwardly and get the hell out of there as soon as i gave the model their pay check. but inwardly i was thinking a) i was NOT glowing for this creepy man twice my age and b) i did NOT give him consent to sexualize my body under my clothes and then SHOW me that objectification. i never said anything to him or anything else, i continued to be the monitor, and i continued to field off creepy advances from him including multiple job offers, but when i finally realized i could just...stop..and i passed the student volunteer monitor job on to my friend naeem, i also realized that what that older male artist did was NOT ok in my book. and it was probably not something he would do while naeem was monitoring.

nowadays im working in an industry that regularly objectifies female bodies. in the past year alone i have had to deal with requests to make breasts bigger, i have been given character rigs that in addition to the usual elbow, knee, and spine joints also have ‘nipple’ joints but ONLY for the women (to make them jiggle for animation), every time i send out a female pose i get it back with notes that push it further into the sexy type of body language reserved for women (twist the spine more! sway the back more! give it ‘energy!’), i have been told to erase wrinkles and fat and pores but ONLY for the women (men you ADD pores bc realism! and manliness!) and this is all me working for a company that is actually fairly progressive in terms of sexism compared to OTHER studios.

like it or not, sexual objectification is a huge part of specifically women’s lives and how we react to that is our business. for me, turning the tables and putting men on display feels like fair’s fair. i cant stop the men from doing it, so if i want to enjoy sexualizing male bodies, damn it im gonna! like dang it, boy do i want to send steve aoki a thank you note every time he posts a video of himself doing those ice baths during the sunset golden hour bc holy shit gorgeous or working out in his gym wearing VERY little clothes, but i dont because i know what its like when someone imposes their personal fantasies on the subject. or, god, there was that time i had to unfollow nicole’s insta for a while bc i had a very explicit dream about her and realized, shit, i need to take a break and get my emotions under control before i can refollow. and god some of the stuff i see dudes sending her during her live videos on mental illness/meditation is TOTALLY gross and not something they should be confronting her with. and she’s not even ‘famous’ famous. or how some fans send their idols explicit direct messages without consent. THAT feels inappropriate to me.

a part of me feels like i shouldn’t have to defend this. men don’t. they’re even encouraged in mass media to sexualize women. but i also recognize the importance of talking about consent. the importance of recognizing that a celebrity deserves to have their boundaries respected. these are my lines in fandom. other people have different lines they won’t cross, and that’s okay to me. i block or blacklist any blogs or tags i think go over the top.

heck, even in fandom-only spaces i still try to keep my own more sexual fantasies off this blog and only in private messages with my friends and mutuals, and i feel like that might come across as unintentionally prudish or judgmental sometimes. i’m not ‘horny on main’ very often. but like...every time i reblog that particular ‘washing machine’ gif of joe mazzello am i thinking about him naked and thinking about how he’s got very loooooong feet, and ‘gee i wonder if that means /other/ things are Too Big for my tastes’ but also ‘gosh wouldnt that make a pretty picture to draw’???? hell yeah.

i dont know who is gonna actually read this essay but yolo i guess :)

[ankhisms]

the always wonderful shelley @shanheling tagged me to do this thank u so much!! i think that everyone i wanted to tag has already been tagged to do this but if you feel like doing this feel free to consider urself tagged by me!! im putting this under a readmore bc its long and i ramble a lot

the piece i was tagged to explain my process on is this oc piece! unfortunately i have a habit of deleting my original clip studio file once ive finished my art and saved it as a new png file, so i dont have the file to show the sketch and different stages of this piece. but I still can go through my general process and talk about how i did that piece!

1. planning

honestly i think about the art that i want to do a lot, and in this last year or so ive thought about the art i want to do more than ive been able to actually create and finish that art that i want to do. for my planning i tend to do a lot of different thumbnail sketches for the art im thinking of

these are some examples of thumbnails, a lot of times ill do thumbnails just on pencil and paper and with some of these theyre done quickly with my fingers on my phone note function on a day where i was feeling too bad to get up and draw on paper but still wanted to get the thumbnail ideas down. two of these are for the same songxiao piece that i still havent finished and i have more thumbnails digitally on clip studio for the same piece, i do a lot more thumbnails when a piece isnt working the way i want it to and theres times where ill completely scratch a thumbnail or a sketch and start over in order to do more thumbnails because i dont feel happy with some aspect of it.

two of these are small gouche painting thumbnails for two pieces i did maybe a month or so ago, i did the thumbnails and then tried to expand on them digitally and im wanting to do more thumbnail paintings like this in the future because it was fun

for the piece of my oc trio it was based off a series of ask prompts i got for a few different outfit prompt memes i had reblogged, so i based their outfits on the ones in the meme. when im drawing figures i tend to try and get the movement down in the poses when im sketching, i do several rough sketches of the pose before beginning to start setting down lines (if im doing lineart at all because sometimes i dont like doing lineart and do a more lineless painting kind of style). i really try to get my art to convey some kind of emotion, in the oc piece i wanted it to feel fun and like youre seeing three best friends while theyre out on the town having a fun night

2. creating

this is the only real example i have of a piece in the middle of being filled in and created, this piece is one that im really not very happy with & have had lying around for a while and ill probably scrap it and try to come at it from a different perspective at some point. but anyway it still shows what i do, i lay down a kind of neutral gray color underneath my final sketch/lineart if im doing lineart in that piece and then i start picking out the colors that i want for the piece and kind of setting out a pallette for myself. i dont do this color pallette thing 100% of the time but i do it really often, especially if im working on a commission or a larger piece where i know theres going to be a lot of colors or if its a piece where im not sure exactly what color scheme i want so laying out the colors together helps me kind of decide what kind of scheme i want. i am sooooo picky about my colors in my art i am genuinely obsessed with colors in art and there are times where i really have to stop myself from working on something forever just constantly adding more colors or putting little tiny changes and gradients in the colors.

after ive got the colors i want down i tend to try and block out parts of the piece with the base color for that section, and then i start to paint with the colors that i want to go on top of that base color from there.

once im satisfied with the colors/shading/rendering and everything ill go back and look over things and will fix things that look off or sometimes completely redo segments if they dont look right to me. when i was younger and mainly doing digital art using my phone and my fingers i would use a lot of filters and overlays on top of my art once i was done, and honestly im glad to not be doing that anymore because i dont think it made my art look any better. i do color adjustments and sometimes will put on a color overlay or a layer to emphasize the shadows and the light in the piece, but i try to keep those layers to a minimum and like i said before i have a tendency to obsess over the colors and ill spend a good amount of time in the color adjustment tool of clip studio and then ill just decide "actually it looks fine as it is" so yeah!

3. posting

i feel like i dont have a lot to say here gbfm i mean i honestly have a lot of thoughts about the relationship between artists and social media and how social media changes our views on art including our own art and how we can feel like we constantly need to be posting new art and just become content machines churning out new stuff. but ill save that rant for another time. i used to be really concerned about how many notes my art would get when i was younger, and i dont at all blame anyone who still is very concerned about that bc it sucks when u work hard on something youve created and then you dont get a lot of recognition for it, but honestly within the last two years or so i feel like ive begun to have a lot healthier relationship with posting my art. i really just post my art on my art blog, reblog it to my main blog, and then thats that yknow! i do really appreciate any and all support people give me, it means the world to me, but for me having the mentality where i dont need to post all the art i make and i dont need to be posting every day or every week or every month even has been a lot healthier for me because then im not constantly asking myself why didnt this get notes is my art awful??? and yeah i just kind of post it and my brain goes okay were done with that art we gotta make more

ive honestly been struggling a lot with art thru the pandemic and if youre reading this and have been struggling with creating in any way recently or even before the pandemic, please know theres no shame in having trouble creating and it doesnt make you bad at whatever it is u create!

thank you for reading this, feel free to consider urself tagged by me again if u want to do this!! love u all

[thedreadvampy]

this is kind of a Hot Take (and rlly long) so don't feel pressured to post this

also no one cancel thedreadvampy over posting this ask if she does these are my beliefs and not necessarily hers kthx

I'm honestly really uncertain why people are so militant about aphobia on this site. like obviously aphobes are Not Nice People and it's good to be against their shitty beliefs. But I've been on this site for ~5 years and I have never, in my memory, seen an aphobe (with the few exception of like. literal nazis but their main label isn't aphobe). I have seen a lot of people who were then harassed/cancelled being called aphobes in addition to a lot of other things like (homophobic, racist, abusive, etc) but as far as I bothered to figure out, the label of aphobe came from one specific phrase they used or one post they reblogged (though I can't be bothered to Deep Research so I genuinely don't know on this one).

(I have seen casual acephobia in my own personal life. however, that is not Tumblr.)

I have seen scores of posts along the lines of "aphobes are bad" "aphobes dni" etc etc.

Maybe it's just who I follow, but it seems like there's a lot more anti-aphobe sentiment than aphobes. Which is good! It's the goal! However, I think it's possible that that anti-aphobe sentiment has not become "look how few aphobes there are! yay!" it's "there are hidden aphobes all around us and you have to interrogate everyone to know who to ostracize"

You're a fairly popular figure in the mechs/tma fandoms and the thing about Tumblr is that it hates popular figures. And more than that, you're visible, so a) people will see if you answer a bunch of questions about ace things, and b) you exist in everyone's brains more than little blogs.

to be clear. to be absolutely crystal 100% clear: I am not saying that people got together and went "let's interrogate all the popular blogs so we can pretend theyre acephobic and have fun bullying people," I'm saying it's possible that what was once a positive emotion, "we don't tolerate intolerant people" has possibly, in some people, morphed into a fear that intolerant people are hiding all around them. And frankly, that fear can be understandable (not right, not kind, but understandable), especially if they face hate irl and their only outlet for emotion is tumblr. shit, Tumblr is one of my emotional outlets.

I don't think it's bad to engage with these people in good faith, or to answer questions, but I think it's possible that some of them are coming from the "intolerant people are hiding all around us and must be ferreted out" kind of perspective instead of a "hey I wanna check that this person isn't an intolerant asshole before following/supporting them" or "I want to engage with a person who may be ignorant" (I'm not attempting to imply that you're ignorant). Im not saying "not answer their questions" this is just, like, my opinion. I'm not making a lot of actionable statements here.

that's my whole Hot Take, hopefully I made some kind of sense, I just honestly feel kind of mad on your behalf that you have to go thru an interrogation to be Not Tumblr Cancelled. If people were generally having a nuanced discussion then that would be fine but you've already stated several times that ace/aspec people are valid and deserve love and respect etc etc. which as an aspec person makes me feel that your blog is safe for me, and I don't feel the need to play 20 Questions Are You Sure You Aren't An Aphobe

I don't know how much of this I entirely agree with and I refuse to think

(not about this. just in general. today I refuse to think)

my main response to this is:

a) I think my confusion is I have less than 1500 followers I think I always assumed the You Are Now A Public Figure People Have Opinions On mark had to be higher than that but this appears to have been a totally incorrect assumption

b) I don't feel like. a threat of Cancellation except inasmuch as I don't want Kofi to eventually get any kind of kickback if I turn out to be or people understand me to be a shitty person. I didn't ask for a platform or do anything to deserve it, if I get distressed it's largely just that I don't want to be a shitty person! and I have a whole thing about. I don't ever feel secure in my ability to say I'm NOT being shitty so like if enough people start saying AH RUTH THEDREADVAMPY IS A GARBAGE PERSON I definitely do stay wondering if they're right even if I think my position is morally defensible. like I'm very easy to get into a spiral of I think that's highly defensible but maybe I'm just in denial/trying to cover my ass/self-justifying so I can avoid accountability/etc. like this is a thing and it's why I'm very uncomfortable with absolutism, a lot of my family in my experience have a phenomenal capacity for denial and for rewriting reality into something they Fully Believe despite all the evidence, and so I'm really conscious of the possibility that I'm doing that and I wouldn't. know about it. it's a really really powerful subconscious force and that's been like. a big fear point for me my whole life. that I could be being a cunt and be obviously being a cunt and be so deep in denial that it just doesn't register at all. this is like. the thing I fear most. So I DO want people to tell me if I'm being a dick because the only way I can 100% know I'm not just in denial is if I can trust people to call me in, but I really, really, really struggle with when people say I'm being a dick and I disagree, not because they're harassing me necessarily but just because it really sends me into a spiral of doubting my own ability to be sure about like, anything. at all. it's a whole unreality thing which is, uh, it's MINE to deal with, it's not something I would want to put on other people, but it very much does affect my responses and I didn't mean to write this but hey, no therapy last week and it shows.

oh also c) on reflection I don't agree that there's very little aphobia on Tumblr (although as I've said I'm not ace or aro so my opinion should hold little weight) but I do think that there's a lack of give and take, not just in aphobia stuff but also in general, in these kinds of conversations, like sometimes yeah people are actively hateful but I don't think there's any room for misunderstanding, poor phrasing, or questioning, and I understand that that's coming from a really genuine place of pain and devaluation of aro/ace experiences but I also think people jump straight to assuming active malice very fast, and often explicitly consider "actively not stating an opinion" to be an offence on the level of "actively staying a harmful opinion," which I think is unhelpful. like. we learn by listening, there are times in my life where I would have been lying at the time to agree unconditionally with something like "I think we should believe survivors" (I was a 2000s teen who hung out with 4channers) but I also was conscious of the harm that it would do to publicly debate from the perspective that No We Shouldn't Believe Survivors, so you know I waited and I listened and I thought about it and ultimately I came to a position I could say with my chest. but like. The online social more that you Have to have an opinion and I Have to hear it to prove that you have the Right opinion is. uncomfortable to me to say the least. I don't think it gives you much room to learn and improve, especially given that everything on the internet is permanent and often treated as if it forever reflects your current beliefs. like I have changed my opinions So Much since I was 16 and if someone went back through a tag on my blog to Prove My Bad Opinions they could paint pretty much any picture they wanted with 12 years of changing opinions.

anyway yeah like. no I don't fully agree with this ask but I appreciate the alternate perspective. I also did not mean to write another wall of text I'm just very much In A Brain Hole today and sometimes words Just Happen.

[elena-mayfair]

You’re allowed to have your opinions about whatever you want, but at your big age, I know you’re smart enough to know that your opinion was an uneducated one filled with assumptions and grand generalizations about people you don’t know. Many dark fics writers and readers are victims of assault themselves who feel that engaging in these fics gives them back a sense of control unlike in that particular situation(s) where they had none. Women who enjoy being submissive or in situations where they are submissive doesn’t equate to low self esteem. There’s literally no correlation. These fandoms are huge. There’s no shortage of writers who don’t write dark fics. You’re simply not looking for them because the dark fic community or whatever is relatively small. 1 in 3 women actually have rape fantasies. They’re very common. You just happen to come across those who write about it. Your post wasn’t about curiosity or questions and you know it. It was holier than thou and filled with judgement and your giddiness to look down on something you don’t understand nor have any intentions of understanding. It was filled with stuff you literally just pulled out of your head. No research. No actually reading up on why women fantasize about these things. Nothing. Just pure ignorance and vibes and you have the audacity to be shocked when people took offense to it. As an SA victim myself, I would never tell another how they should cope with their trauma. I could never even fix my mouth to do such a thing bc my experience is not everyone’s and anyone with common sense can understand that

I was very hesitant about replying to you and I wanna start by saying that I really really really don’t want to start the fight again. It wasn’t my intention in a first place, believe me or not. But there are few things that need to be clarify and I wanna take this opportunity to do that since the dust seems to settle on my post. So I’m sorry but it’s going to be long reply, partially to you partially to the people who commented under my OP, if they decide to read it.

Starting from a thing that annoys me the most, I never said anything about how people should cope with their trauma. What I said is that if someone gets turned on by reading about this kind of things, they should work on their self esteem, that is what I said (hold your hate, hide the torches, I’ll elaborate). I never said something on the line “if you find this helpful or healing you should work on your self esteem”. So please don’t twist my words. I know how difficult is dealing with trauma, and I’m not talking about rape trauma per say but trauma in general, so it would never even cross my mind.

Before you get angry, I wasn’t referring to the people who are into kink as general group. I wrote specifically that I “I get that people have different fantasies I do get that (...) I enjoy a bit of kink” - so no, I wasn’t condemning all people who are into all kinds of kink. I never expressed any hate towards people who are into it. Hate, pitchforks and torches came from the other side. Anyway, in my eyes there is a difference between kinky and straight disturbing. There is a difference between being submissive and being raped. People chose to read that as an personal attack on them and it is kinda obvious that I wasn’t referring to them, people who are into kink. You, they (I don’t know how to phrase this) you know how it works, what is a part of fantasy etc. something I personally know very little about because I’m not into it. Buuuuut, there are people out there who, like me, come across this type of content and upon discovering it are being shocked and horrified. And I’m sorry, you are aware that it’s coming from someone “outside of circle”, but I read some things which were truly horrifying. And again, I’m not referring to all of the kinky stuff, in my OP I was specifically referring to rape, degradation, breeding kink, non-con, forced pregnancy, very extreme things. I read through some truly horrifying things, rapes so violent that it makes Irreversible a rom-com. And comments under this kind of fiction weren’t about healing and helping but were indications of getting turned on, rounds of applause and appreciation for the author. And I’m sorry but for a life of my I don’t see how this might be helpful for an author or a reader who is a rape victim especially since the outcome of the rape rarely tackled. There is no aftermath, no repercussions for the abuser, no consequences for the abuser, nothing, just a plain violent act of rape. And yes, for someone who is “outside of the circle” it can look like normalization and erotization of a rape. But you know, it is an opinion if an ignorant.

Continuing, I’m sure you are aware that content can be read by people from “outside of circle” (and yes I will keep using that phrase from lack of better one). And believe it or not I wasn’t searching for it. Searching tag Steve Rogers x reader gave my only this type of fics for pages upon pages. Like I said before, perhaps Tumblr should work on their search engine. Going back to people “outside of the circle”, some will shake it off and move on, some will stay and maybe get into it more, and some well might take it on face value, in a very wrong way. Because you won’t convince me that art does not have impact on a real life, it does, it always did. And yes you are right, this is coming from my head, those are feelings and thoughts of a common folk. I’m sure you must be aware of potential danger of this kind of, let’s say themes, for someone who is “outside of the circle”. Let’s stretch our imagination for a sec: young girl come across this. She’s innocent, just discovering her sexuality, curiosity is the thing. And let’s be honest, forbidden fruit always tastes the best so of course she will ignore warnings. Around the same time she starts dating a guy, he’s not a very nice guy. They’re getting together and she’s not ready but we’ll he’s more than needing. So she thinks about all the things she read and maybe starts thinking that guys are into this, she doesn’t have much experience. So instead of running she becomes another rape victim. Or let’s look at this from the other perspective, a guys come across this kind of fiction and starts thinking that, hmm, maybe girls are into it. And next time he won’t take no for an answer, he will take this as an encouragement. Yeah, that is a possibility. And I don’t know how can I stress this enough, but it is only one of possible scenarios. That truly doesn’t mean that I’m hating or, damn this is ridiculous, kink-shaming people who are into kink. I’m simply presenting a scenario. Scenario from the point of view of a common folk, someone “outside of the circle”. And yes, yes, I read in the comments counter argument about violent games etc but we are not talking about this, and in my opinion it is just invalid argument. No one in their right mind will start killing people after playing a violent game. However sexuality is much more delicate subject, especially since power dynamics between man and a woman were always a difficult subject.

You saying that my post was filled with generalization, and yes you are absolutely right. It wasn’t targeted specifically toward people who are into kink, who am I to judge, I really really don’t give a flying fuck about what people do behind closed doors. It was about the sheer ridiculousness of the world we’re living in. That’s why I brought up subject of equal rights etc. Because we, society, as people, we are jumping from one opposite side of the extreme to another. On one hand women are fighting for equal rights, on the other hand we are taking all the power from women in the fiction, on one hand we are talking about toxic masculinity on the other we write about rape, on one hand women in some countries are fight for right to their bodies, on the other we are writing about forced impregnation. And I know, I know, one is a fiction an the other is a real life, it’s not for everyone, and so on. I get that. I’m painting a picture here. Picture of society which is swapping one extreme to another. And like I said before, this kind of fiction is being read not only by people who are into kink, but by common people, who know very little about it. And I’m sure you are aware, that common people can see it that way, and for common people rape fantasy is not normal, as in commonly accepted by society.

Anyways, this is longer than I wanted it to be. Like i said at the beginning, I have no intention in starting another fight. I never had intention like that in a first place believe it or not. For years I was a quiet Tumblr user, enjoying content that enjoy in my little part of the internet. You can check out my blog if you don’t believe me. So I won’t shit into your nest anymore, I’m going to crawl back to my little hole from which I crawled out. Enjoying content as I was before. And yes, I discovered filtering ;)

[commander-rahrah]

RESIDENCY: SECOND CHANCES (AN OPEN HEART FIC): PART TWO

Pairing: MC (Jordynne Holland) X Ethan Ramsey X Bryce Lahela; MC X Bryce; MC X Ethan. Please note that both pairings are present in this fan fiction — off & on, at the same times, and the relationships do ebb & flow. Please keep this in mind. Thank you.

Masterlist: Click Here

Chapter Rating: T (drinking, swearing)

Word Count: 5000+ (its a big one) 

Description: Bryce and Jordynne have time together to explore what everything happening between them means, since Ethan is away in the Amazon finding his own answers.

Disclaimer: Characters, storyline, and parts of the dialogue are taken from Pixelberry’s Choices. They fully own the characters, dialogue, backgrounds, etc. MC Jordynne’s background is my own creation, based loosely off of MC in-game’s personality and provided with more details.

Author’s Note: Well this took much longer than expected! With everything happening in the world, I found it harder and harder to take that personal time for myself to get away and write. But I eventually carved out time for it, and it felt nice to get back into the perspectives of Jordynne, Bryce and Ethan. This fic has a lot of little moments and memories from Book 1 (and fic 1) that can turn into big moments for these characters in the future <3

As always any likes, reblogs and comments are very appreciated. If you would like to be added/removed from the tag list please just let me know! I have always had issues with the tag list as well (people not receiving notifications) so if you do receive a notification if you could let me know that would be great! Or if you have any tips for why it wouldn’t be working? 

Taglist: @drakewalkerfantasy @owleyes374 @lahelable @mayar-mahdy @paisleylovergirl​ @nicquix @emilymay100 @octobereighth @llamasgrl @timmagicktoad @lilyofchoices @msjpuddleduck @mfackenthal @paulfwesley @ccolz88-blog @mindlessdreaminxo @jooous @lapisreviewsstuff @choicesarehard @themingdynasty @omgjasminesimone @hopelessly-shipper  @binny1985  @perriewinklenerdie  @jens-diamondchoices  @indiacater  @chasingrobbie  @writingsbymissy  @dimitriwife  @tacohead13  @amy-choices  @violinet​ 

Previous Updates: Residency — Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve Part Thirteen Part Fourteen Part Fifteen Part Sixteen Part Seventeen Part Eighteen Part Nineteen Part Twenty

Residency: Second Chances -- Part One

Chapter 2

The golden liquor coated her pink lips, turning them shiny. They pursed together, licking the excess off as she lowered the shot glass to the table with a loud bang.

The sound snapped Bryce back to reality — and he swallowed hard as she watched Jordynne throw her head back and laugh.

She was in full force tonight. Her big laugh echoing in the bar. Her perfect, wide smile drawing everyone in. Her wild, blonde hair being thrown over her shoulder.

Sometimes he wondered if she was really from this world.

“Let’s get more!” Her voice was much higher than usual — a good note that she was getting more and more intoxicated.

“C’mon Jordy, let’s pace ourselves.” He suggested, grabbing onto her wrist gently.

“Pace ourselves?! Do I look like a beginner to you? Come on!” She put out her bottom lip at him, looking up at him with giant puppy dog eyes.

It was like a punch to the gut — she could get whatever she wanted with that look. Dammit.

Before he could reply, Jackie came to the table with a tray of more shots and Jordynne greedily grabbed two of them.

“Whoa, Holland’s on a roll tonight,” Jackie said as she slid into the booth, passing out the remaining glasses.

“She’s on something.. that’s for sure,” Sienna said to them, a hand in front of her mouth.

At the sound of the next song coming on, she jumped onto her leather seat in the booth. “This song! This song!!”

He couldn’t even hear it over the crowd. But he couldn’t help but let out a chuckle at her excitement.

She crawled over Sienna and jumped out of the booth, landing with surprising dexterity for the amount of liquor she had consumed. “Come on dance with me.” She stretched her tan fingers over to him, “Please.”

“Okay,” He agreed — maybe a little too easily.

He grabbed onto her warm fingers, letting her pull him to the dance floor with surprising strength.  

He watched her jump up and down for a moment — her blonde hair flicking around wildly. He let out a laugh, before mimicking her movements — his tan arms raised above his head as they danced recklessly in the crowd.

She joined in with his laugh — flashing her white teeth at him in a brilliant smile. He gulped as she moved closer to him. He could still smell her, even in the old bar — orange blossoms, vanilla, and jasmine. He could get drunk off of that scent.

His heart fluttered as she grabbed onto him casually, pulling him into her to dance more closely. Bryce was suddenly overwhelmed being this close to her — he felt dizzy, and it wasn’t from the liquor.

Jordynne Holland was intoxicating. And addicting.

His dark eyes settled on her mouth, how much closer it was getting to his as she swayed in front of him.

“Jordy...” He breathed out, stepping away from her.

“What?” Her eyebrows furrowed slightly as she looked up at him — her green eyes fluttering. She stepped forward and carefully wrapped her arms around his neck. “I just wanna have some fun. You’re fun. You like fun. Remember fun?” Her pink lips stretched into a smile.

He felt his stomach twist and tug and flutter all at once.

Bryce so badly wanted to give in — to crash his lips onto hers, to hold her back. But he didn’t know where all of this was coming from. Things were still so messy — and right now, she was messy. There had to be something that caused it.

“I know — I just —,” He hesitantly put his hands on her waist, steadying her movements, “Are you sure, you’re okay?”

“I’ve never been better Bryce Lahela. Now dance with me.” She replied, tightening her hold on him as she pushed her body up against his.

_____________________________________________________________________

Ethan watched the light through his window dim as the plane flew into a series of clouds — the pages of his book in his lap suddenly becoming harder to read. 

Letting out a sigh, he put his head back on his headrest — leaning against it as he looked over his shoulder and out of the window.

He eyed the empty spot next to him — a placeholder for his leather bag this time. He tried hard to not go there — to think about the last time he was at the airport, on an airplane, who was with him. If he started down that road, it would make everything harder.

So he ignored the subtle reminder — repressing the memory and averting his eyes from the empty chair.

“Hi sir,” A brunette flight attendant pulled a cart up near his seat, “Due to the length of the flight you will be provided an in-flight meal. It will be arriving shortly. Would you like a beverage to go with it? Spirits? Wine?”   He gestured to the cart.

Ethan swallowed as he eyed it — the little bottles of alcohol clinking together as the flight attendant shifted the cart.

It was tempting. It could be another way to repress memories in the long flight. To calm any gears that started winding.

He cleared his throat, putting on a polite smile, “Can I actually just have a coffee?”

“Of course, sir.” He poured the hot beverage and carefully passed it to him. “I’ll be back with your meal.”

Ethan took a sip and grimaced slightly. It was terrible. And he had to force another thought down as he thought of who else would grin and bear it with him.

But it was just a coffee. He’ll get over this.

He can get over this. He could do this.

_____________________________________________________________________

The slightest crack of one of her eyes caused Jordynne to groan in pain. Her head was pounding — and even the little trickle of light coming through the blinds was killer.

Blinking over and over, she finally was able to open her green eyes fully. She was in her bedroom — how she got there? She wasn’t entirely sure.

The previous night was a blur. She remembered taking an uncertain amount of tequila shots and dancing. So much dancing — her feet were killing her.

Letting out another groan, she shifted onto her side but froze when she felt resistance next to her. Moving her head, her eyebrows raised as she saw Bryce laying next to her — sleeping soundly. He was still wearing his jeans and t-shirt — his arms folded around himself carefully as he slept on top of her white duvet.

Her eyebrows furrowed together — a deep line forming in her forehead. Now that she didn’t remember. Peaking under the duvet, she realized she was still wearing clothes — her boyfriend briefs and shirt were clinging to her body. Her mind started whirling as she attempted to connect the dots.

“Hey,” Bryce’s groggy voice whispered next to her, “You okay?”

She chewed on the inside of her cheek — praying that it was too dark in the room for him to see how embarrassed she looked, “I’m— I’m pretty rough.”

“I would imagine so. You consumed enough tequila to get you, me, and Sienna drunk.”

“Ugh.” She groaned.

“And I’m sure spending two hours on your bathroom floor probably didn’t help.” 

“Nooo...” Her face felt hot as it flushed with embarrassment.

He let out a quiet chuckle, “Oh yeah. Held your hair back and everything.”

She wasn’t sure if she had ever hated herself more then that moment. “Ugh, I’m so sorry Bryce.”

“Don’t be — I didn’t mind.” She gulped as she felt his practiced hand rub her shoulder.

“I’m sure that’s not what you signed up for when we decided to go out last night.”

“I mean, I went to hang out with you. And we did hang out..” His voice trailed off for a moment, “I just didn’t imagine it would be on your bathroom floor with your head hanging off your toilet.”

“Haha,” She hesitated for a moment, “Did we — Did I say anything? Or... I dunno, try anything?”

“Oh yeah,” He let out a little chuckle again, “Drunk Jordy is chaaaatty. And handsy.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t — we didn’t do anything. You just tried to kiss me a couple of times.” He mumbled a little.

“I’m sorry.” She apologized again.

“People have done crazier things then try to kiss someone while drunk on Tequila.” He reassured.

“I know, I— But we never—“

He interrupted her, “S’okay Jordy.”

“Thanks for staying with me.” She whispered. And she meant it. As complicated as it was, she was glad Bryce was there. He was always there for her.

She felt the bed shift as he turned on his side to face her, “What kind of doctor would I be if I didn’t take care of you?”

“I live in a house full of doctors.” She could feel how close his face was to hers.

“Ha — right.” She could see his sheepish smile in the dim light. “I just needed to know you were okay.”

There was a beat of silence before he spoke again. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, of course.” She lied — a little too easily.

“I just — I haven’t seen you like that before. You were drinking hard. Did something happen?”

She shook her head against the pillow, “I just wanted to let loose. Celebrate surviving my first week back. I just went a little bit too hard.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“Yeah.” She did her best to hide the lie, suppressing the memory of Ethan walking away in the parkade, “So what to do I gotta do to convince you to drag my ass out for some breakfast?”

“No convincing necessary.”

_______________________________________________________________________

 He fell into a routine a lot easier than he thought he would. The repetition was nice — satisfying after the continuous curve balls life had thrown at him over the past year.

There was still chaos here — it was still a medical crisis. But it wasn’t anything that Ethan couldn’t handle.

He spent most of his days in their temporary clinic — diagnosing cases. In the evenings he would spend time with other team leaders, discussing measurements and tactics for preventing further cases. During their free time, he would usually see himself to his room — avoiding the socialization hours around the campfire. He rarely spoke to his colleagues in Boston, why would he do it in the Amazon.

One of the local doctors had told him his Portuguese was improving. A compliment that Ethan heartily took as he was teaching himself from the little pocketbook in his messenger bag and repetition with the locals.

Most nights by the time his head hit the pillow he was too exhausted to think. For the gears to start winding. For memories and thoughts to resurface from the far depths of his mind. And if they did — he forced them away. Closing his eyes with knitted brows, until sleep overcame him. And then he would wake up to do it all over again.

_______________________________________________________________________

“Wow, it’s been a while since I was in here,” Jordynne smirked as she stepped into a familiar supply closet.

Bryce had texted her during her break — asking to meet her there. She didn’t have to ask which one he meant — she knew. The supply closet from the first day they met. From where she had dropped all of her usual guards and kissed a stranger.

The smirk fell off of her face when she saw Bryce’s expression. It was serious — his usual megawatt smile was nowhere in sight. “Wh—what’s going on?”

He took a steadying breath before he spoke, “Jordynne, when did you know?”

“Know what?” Her eyebrows furrowed.

“That Ethan was gone. That he was leaving again.”

Her mouth opened slightly, but nothing came out. She didn’t know what to say.

He let out a sigh — taking her silence as an answer. “Is that why you got like that? At Donahue’s? You literally drunk enough to make yourself sick.”

“I— I was upset.” She explained, stepping a little closer to him, “I didn’t know what else to do — I just didn’t want to deal with it.”

“Have you dealt with it?” He asked back, his voice sharp, “You lied to me. I asked you what was really going on. And you lied.” His brown eyes stared deeply into her green eyes — studying her.

“I— I can’t talk to you about him, Bryce.” She wrapped her arms around her torso, folding in on herself. “I know you tell me I can but I— I just can’t.” Her eyes dropped down to her shoes.

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t fair!” She raised her voice, her jaw clenched tightly, “Bryce, every time something bad happens with Ethan I run to you. When I didn’t want to admit to myself how I felt about him, I went to you. When he rejected me, when he quit, when he flew to a different continent literally just to get away from me. I keep boomeranging back to you Bryce. And it’s not fair.”

The small space of the supply closet turned quiet as they both thought.

Jordynne broke the silence as she finally looked back up at him, her voice croaking out, “So no I don’t want to talk to you about Ethan. Because it reminds me of what an atrocious person I am.”

“You’re not a bad person Jordynne.” Bryce shook his head at her, reaching a tan hand out and brushing a piece of her hair away.

She closed her eyes at his touch, doing her best to not lean into it, “I am Bryce. I have been to you.“

“I think... I think that you’re human. And things got complicated. And that I decided it was worth the complication — your feelings and relationship with Ramsey included.” He used a knuckle to raise her chin, putting her attention back on him, “But I need you, to be honest with me. Is there something between us? Or did I just invent that?”

“No.. of course there is Bryce. But I... but there’s something between Ethan and I too. Or there was.” She grabbed onto his hand, holding onto it as she took a deep breath. “You’re one of my best friends Bryce. And you’re more than that. And that’s why I need to say this. I think we should stop the “more” between us. For now. Until I — until I can figure how to stop complicating everything. And I can’t do that if we ...”

“Okay.” He said, interrupting her with his honey voice. He was nodding at her — his dark eyes focusing on her as he placed his steady hands on her shoulders.

She let out the breath she was holding, staring up at him in disbelief, “Okay? Just like that. Why are you so agreeable?”

“Puppy dog remember?” He gave her a half-smile, his long hair falling into his eyes as he looked down for a moment. “I’d thought you would’ve figured out by now I’m not going anywhere, Jordy.”

_____________________________________________________________________

Ethan hesitated for a moment — looking at the group of people sitting and chatting by the fire. He could join them — if he wanted.

Shaking his head, he plopped himself down on a stool on the edge of the campsite. Tucked away, and out of sight.

He pulled out the pocket-sized translation book from his chest pocket and started thumbing through it in the dim light from nearby lanterns.

“May I?” A voice asked from behind him.

Ethan stifled the sigh that almost escaped him. Straining his neck, he turned to see Dr. Adébáyọ̀ standing sheepishly, waiting for his response next to the empty stool beside him. He grunted in response, closing his book and slipping it back into his pocket.

The pair sat in silence for a moment, staring off at the distant campfire and taking sips of their drinks from their steel water bottles.

“Do you mind me asking why you came here, Dr. Ramsey?” The other doctor's voice broke the silence.

Ethan furrowed his brows, “Why?”

“I’m curious.” He shrugged, looking over to him.

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“But satisfaction brought it back.” The man retorted quickly. “Humor me.”

Ethan remained silent — keeping his eyes on the lid of his water bottle.

“Okay — I’ll go first. I came here to practice, of course. Help with research. But I came here for selfish reasons too.” Dr. Adébáyọ̀ settled into his seat as he spoke. “My family emigrated from Nigeria when I was 8. We lived in the UK, Canada, America. We traveled all over the world. But never South America. My father died last Spring. He always wanted to come here. So I signed up for him. It’s sentimental but — I’m glad I did.” He smiled up at the night sky that was glittering with white stars.

“I’m sorry about your father.” Ethan finally replied, looking over at his comrade.

“Me too,” He nodded, a sad smile on his face. “So are you going to tell me why the Ethan Ramsey left his fancy office in Edenbrook for tents in the Amazon?”

The Ethan Ramsey.

He hated that.

He hid his white-knuckled fists at his sides. “I am a diagnostician. I came to diagnose and treat Malaria and other ailments.” He used his practiced voice.

“And that’s it? You are a doctor and nothing else. What are you running from?”

Ethan remained silent for a long moment. He had been avoiding thinking about it this entire time. Why he had flown all the way out here. Abandoned his regular life to sit in a tent all day in the Amazon.

Out of sight, out of mind.

But he could feel his stomach twisting — a gnawing.

“Not what.”

“Hmm?” The other man was so shocked at him speaking, he barely heard him.

“Not what. Whom— whom I’m running from.” He let out a heavy sigh.

“I see. And this person... They are family?” Dr. Adébáyọ̀ asked with a raised brow.

He shook his head.

“Ah, I see. Matters of the heart.” He span around on his stool, so he was facing him more, “You are not together anymore?”

“We — we never got the chance to be together in the first place. Not really. She — we’re coworkers.” He admitted.

“That could be complicated.”

“And when I get back I’ll be her boss.”

“That’s more complicated.”

“Yes.” His voice was barely a whisper as he admitted this all out loud.

“What are you going to do? Coming here is doing what?” He questioned — his eyebrows furrowed as he studied Ramsey in the dim light.

“Delaying the inevitable.” He took a swig from his water bottle, gulping it down, “I’ll have to face her eventually.”

“And when you do?”

He avoided the question, “I just keep thinking to myself what if things were different. If she worked at a different hospital, if we met at a conference instead...”

“Do you want to hear something that was told to me? The universe sends us exactly what we need, right when we need it.”

Ethan let out a sad laugh, remembering Teresa saying the same words to him. “A patient told me the same thing once.”

“And is she? What you need, right when you needed it?”

Ethan thought to the past year. He couldn’t have handled Delores without her. She helped him process and navigate the Naveen situation. Hell, she saved the man too.

She grounded him — brought him back down to Earth. Yet had never had more ups and downs in his life before meeting Jordynne Holland.

He couldn’t have planned for any of it. But he wouldn’t take it back either.

“She — she’s everything I need that I never knew I wanted.“

“It sounds like you have an answer.”

“I don’t — because I’m not what she needs.” Ethan hung his head back for a moment, pursing his lips as he looked up at the inky black sky.

_______________________________________________________________________

She had forgotten how easy it was with Bryce Lahela.

How contagious his smile was. How infectious his laughter was. How easy it was to fall for him.

She was starting to remember why it had been so easy to make out with him in that closet after only knowing him for a few hours. What those early days were like — sneaking away together, watching movies in bed, remembering each other’s burger orders. Before she had made a mess of things.

The entire group was laid out on a couple spread out blankets at the park across the street from the apartment. They had packed some snacks and music — and were all basking in the sun, enjoying each other’s company.

Jordynne was sitting with her knees to her chest — smiling down at the blanket as she listened to Bryce’s warm chuckle reverberate through her. He was sprawled next to her, teasing Sienna about Danny.

Jackie, Elijah, and Aurora were in the blanket next to them — arguing over who has the best taste in music as they passed the speaker around.

She knew what she and Bryce had decided. And they had honored that over the past month. They were still friends — after everything the pair had gone through in the last year, she felt like she could always rely on that fact. They still hung out altogether, and a few times alone too. But sometimes she would catch herself staring at him a little too long, or laughing at his joke a little harder than anyone else.

The tune of an ice cream truck nearby snapped her back to reality as her friends buzzed with childlike excitement. “Ooo! Let’s get some for dessert!” Sienna jumped up, a wide smile on her face.

“Good idea,” Bryce stretched his arms behind him to push himself up, the hem of his shirt pulling up just enough that beginnings of his tan abs were revealed. Jordynne bit her lip as she watched him get up, “What does everyone want?”

“Chocolate!” Elijah said eagerly, his eyebrows raising up on his forehead.

“Gotta go classic — vanilla please Lahela.” Jackie gave him an unusually warm smile as she looked up at him.

“Got it. Mint chocolate chip Jordy?” He asked, looking down at her expectantly. 

“Um, yeah. Thanks.” She blinked in surprise at him knowing before a small smile spread across her face. Bryce Lahela knew her way too well.

Once they had returned with their frozen treats, the group sat together in a circle. Eating fast as the treats started melting over their fingers on the sunny summer day. Bryce had sat next to her again — his bare knee touching hers as they sat crossed legged. It was comforting. And maybe a little distracting.

Jordynne dared a glance at him, to only find him already looking at her. Her breath caught a little as he let out a little chuckle.

“Oh, you gotta little’,” He pointed his finger at his mouth, indicating she had something on her own, “Here I’ll get it.

He reached forward, his hand moving up to her face — his thumb gently swiped at the corner of her mouth, wiping away the melted ice cream. Jordynne unconsciously parted her lips as his thumb traced the curve of them. Their eyes finding each other during the few seconds — holding each other’s gaze.

Sienna coughed awkwardly — breaking the moment.

“You get it?” Jordynne asked, blinking herself back to reality.

He smiled sheepishly at her, “Yeah, I did.” Her eyes fell to the ground before his did, her face flushing a deep pink.

Sienna grabbed onto Jordynne’s shoulder, turning her attention, “Hey Jordynne, I need to wash my hands. Come with me?”

“Oh,” She tried to hide the surprise on her face, “Sure.” She followed Sienna’s quick march to the public restrooms across the park.

“Uhhh, so I thought you guys were gonna cool it?” She asked with one eyebrow raised as they entered the restrooms.

“What? We are — nothings happened.” She shrugged in reply as she headed to the sink.

“Suuuuuure,” The word dragged on with a tone of disbelief, “You looked like you were about two seconds away from sucking each other’s face.”

She shook her head, “We’re just friends right now Sienna.”

“Mhmmm.” Her friend sounded like she still didn’t believe her.  

“I mean it.”

She watched as Sienna turned on her heel and headed into one of the dark green stalls. “I’m just saying friends don’t look at each other like that.”

“You should talk. Aren’t you and Danny “just friends”?” She retorted. She grinned a little when she got no reply.

As she waited, Jordynne pulled out her phone from her back pocket. Her thumbs swiped over her keyboard quickly as she replied to the lengthy group chat between Kenzie, Carter and Jason. God, she missed them.

She started scrolling aimlessly through pictogram, liking photos of friends and scenery back home. Her homesickness was starting to become intolerable.

Her eyebrows furrowed as she scrolled passed a photo quickly — not quite believing what she saw. Scrolling back up, she felt a pang in her chest as she realized she saw it right.

It was Ethan.

The World Health Organization had posted it — whom she followed long before he volunteered with them and flown off to a different continent. He was in the corner of a white tent — his mouth pressed in a firm line as he listened to the slightly out of focus patient sat in front of him.

He looked more rugged — his stubble darker and longer than she had ever seen it. His skin had a golden tinge to it from spending time in the Brazilian sun. It was weird to see him out of his usual button-up shirt and jacket — he was wearing a soft henley instead, showing off the lines of his neck and shoulders.

She swallowed her feelings down as she realized the most important thing about the photo. He looked fine. His usual Ethan Ramsey self. He wasn’t torn up about leaving. He clearly didn’t look like he was having sleepless nights, worrying about what happened to them, what was going to happen to them.

Not that she was doing that anymore.

Well, not as often. She was trying.

Jordynne blinked away at the tears welling in her green eyes — staring up at the tacky fluorescent lighting in the public restroom.

“Hey — you okay?”

She felt Sienna’s warm fingers grab onto her wrist gently. Her coffee coloured eyes were filled with worry.

Jordynne mustered on a smile, squeezing her eyes shut to get rid of any lingering tears. “Oh, yeah yeah. I’m fine.” She reassured — sliding her phone back into her back pocket quickly, “Just my allergies with all the pollen.”

Sienna looked up at Jordynne, her eyebrows still meeting in the middle a bit from concern, “Okay.. you good to head back to the others?”

“Of course. Everything’s good.” She lied through her teeth, forcing a smile onto her face a lot easier then she thought she could.

_____________________________________________________________________

 A couple of days off in the nearby port town did Ethan a lot more good than he had expected.  Santarem was gorgeous — it had been a long time since he had been able to visit somewhere new as just that, a visitor. Not a doctor — he had no busy conferences or meetings or lectures to attend. And there were definitely no tents for taking RPDs for Malaria — thankfully he got to take a break from that.

He could barely remember the last time he had just gone somewhere to enjoy being there.

That’s why when he saw the sign for motorcycle rentals, he had marched straight towards the shop.

Now he was riding along the coastline — the wind wiping around him as the fine machine purred down the road. The green leather jacket he had purchased was still a little tight — it needed to be broken in. But he had liked the way he felt in. How he felt on the bike.

A little jolt of pain went through his face — and Ethan realized it was because he was smiling. So wide that it was hurting.

Pulling over on to the side of the road, he used the toe of his boot to put up the kickstand. Maneuvering around a few rocks he made his way to the shoreline.

He stood there for a moment — putting his hands into his jeans’ pockets and soaking in the Amazon river in all its glory.

Pulling out his phone he took a photo of the scenic view of the river. He hadn’t touched the device since he came to South America — airplane mode staying on constantly to stop any reminders of Boston to come creeping in. Then he twisted around and took a picture of his rented motorbike. The only photos of his trip so far — and they were moments he would want to remember.

Without the wind wiping around him, he felt hot in his leather jacket. Shrugging it off, he laid it out onto the sand and sat on it — his arms resting on his knees as he looked out at the water.

And then it hit him.

Miami.

Sitting on that beach with Jordynne — sharing the tiny space of his tuxedo jacket. Closing his eyes he could still remember the feeling and weight of her resting her head against his shoulder.  Or the way her green eyes had stared into his — trying so desperately to read him, to see if he was feeling the same things as her on that quiet beach.

Snapping his eyes open again, he let out a loud sigh — his eyebrows furrowing in anger with himself. He had been enjoying himself — finally, he had a moment of solace and he let that memory creep in to ruin it.

Why had it taken him so long to find that solace? Over a month of being here — away from all of it, Boston, the hospital, Naveen, her. And still, he was battling it. Constantly — every day.

His body twisted with want, and anguish and frustration.

It — they — she had so much power over him still. Even 3200 miles away in a different timezone, a different continent. And that’s what scared him the most. It terrified him. 

Ethan took a hard swallow, trying to stop the emotion that was climbing up his throat making it harder to breathe.

Part  3

[ziracona]

Not That Kind of Person Who

[My half of an art trade with @speckeltail , who requested a fic for the time Joey went to Lerry’s between trials and found Quentin there completely blitzed on morphine he’d taken accidentally, and helped him get back to the campfire that has been refferenced from Quentin’s pov in his lovely ask blog @badham-bedhead (Speck, I want you to know this pic of Joey you did on the blog is directly responsible for much of what you’re about to read >: D .)]

  This was always fun. Fucking with Herman.

A top twelve pastime, here in the fog. There was training, and bumming around with the gang, stealing shit from the Clown, spying on whoever was new, collecting cool new stuff for the lodge, but going to Lerry’s was up there. Honestly, it would have been higher if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d been caught doing it before, and while you got in some real trouble if you killed a survivor or another killer outside of trials, it uh, it sure as hell wasn’t enough to deter everyone from doing it. And Joey had been on the receiving end of that with Herman once.

Still, that was a long time ago, thought Joey, ducking under a fallen chunk of what had once been wall, and slipping deeper into the institute. Herman didn’t scare him.

A noise somewhere down the hall he was creeping along startled Joey, and he jumped on impulse, and then cursed himself silently, placing the noise as he watched a crow that had gotten in take flight far up ahead, and tried to slow his heart back down. …He doesn’t! I’m being “wary”—that’s just smart. I’m not fucking scared of him. If I was, I wouldn’t be here.

Herman was fun to annoy. Because he got angry over the weirdest shit, and had big reactions, and also because if he did catch you, it wasn’t pretty, so it always felt good to win one. And the institute was so big, it really wasn’t hard to get in and out unscathed, so long as you were quiet. If you were quiet, Herman would sometimes even ignore you when he knew you were there—especially if he was distracted doing shit, and had no reason to suspect you were there to ruin his stuff. Joey was sure that wouldn’t have been the case if he was actually allowed to keep anyone he caught, but he wasn’t. If he grabbed a trespasser and strapped them to a chair to see how the inside of their brain worked with barbs sticking out of it, the Entity would make him pay big time.

“Probably has made him pay,” whispered Joey to himself, following the hall and looking for a good place to do what he’d come to do. Library would be choice, but he’d heard what sounded like warning signs of the Doctor himself in that direction when he got here, so he was going to have to settle for somewhere else.

He was willing to bet Herman had grabbed someone back in the day and gotten in a lot of trouble over it. Actually, Joey felt pretty sure that that’s what it would have taken to get The Doctor to not be grabbing someone to experiment on every time he saw a trespasser now. And he was kind of thankful, because the time he’d been killed had been really fucking shitty, even though it had been pretty quick. Honestly, that was part of why he liked coming here so much and fucking with the guy’s stuff. Mini-revenge. That, and boredom. Between trials, there wasn’t so much to do sometimes, and since with…everything really, being the way it was, Joey wasn��t super into sitting down and thinking about how life was going. He needed to constantly be distracted, and if someone else wasn’t there to help, it meant finding something like this to do. Especially after a trial where he’d barely gotten one last-minute sacrifice and been given a pretty harrowing warning about not fucking up again next time. …Shit.

Yeah. It wasn’t great. He was going to be seriously in trouble if he didn’t do a lot better next trial. It was so fucking annoying, too! Stuff always worked out like this for him! He’d gotten Claudette hooked right near the trial’s start, and then literally tripped over her like fifteen seconds after someone had gotten her down, when he hadn’t even been looking for her, and he’d felt kind of bad, even though he knew how stupid that was to do, and how dangerous. They had to hunt, and suck it up, and the survivors would try to live, and if they failed, they failed, and that wasn’t his fault—it wasn’t like he’d asked to be here doing this. It was just how shit was, and it was rough for him too, and it wasn’t his job to feel bad for them. It was him or them. If they couldn’t hack it, and they died, then too bad—that was rough for them, but it wasn’t gonna be his problem. But. He’d been doing well in the trial so far, and feeling confident, and-a-and she had looked so sad—like not even just scared, but sad, because her luck had been so shitty probably, and so he’d been fucking stupid, and felt bad, and left her on the ground instead of sacrificing her, and chased off the person he’d been going for originally instead, and in return for answering that stupid impulse to show a little mercy, he’d lost her completely after that, gotten run around by Zarina, and then only barely managed to down and sacrifice the newest girl who he’d never heard anyone say the name of yet right by the gates at the last second, and now the Entity was pissed at him, and everything sucked.

That’s why he’d come to do this. To blow off steam. Bad day, friends tired and asleep, need to feel a little better? Go sneak into Herman’s place and deface some of his shit. It always made him feel better to do it.

Oh! Here we go, thought Joey, spotting a nicer section of lab up ahead, hospital beds, one of the storage rooms beyond. He took the can of black spraypaint he’d brought with him off his shoulder strap and primed it as he slipped along the hall towards an open doorway. This would be perfect. Far enough away to be safe and give him time, super noticeable, and a big fuckin’ annoyable to the Doctor when he was gone. Joey carefully cased the area inside, planning what he wanted to do, picked a center point on the floor, marked it, thought for a few more seconds, and then started spraying. It took a couple minutes to do, because he’d picked something a little bit fancy, but when he stepped back finally from his last line, he was surrounded by what looked like chaotic nothing. That was, until you stepped about five feet back right down the middle of the rows in the room to the spot he’d marked on the floor, and the pieces would all line up from that perspective to become a grinning skull. Nice, thought Joey, proud of himself because that kind of tagging was a little tricky to do and he really enjoyed doing it, it looked sick as hell, and also largely because he knew it would make Herman furious. “Okay, what now?” whispered Joey to himself, shaking the can again. He glanced over his image, considering.

“You should be saying something,” he decided, liking the idea very much. He picked out an insult in his head and started to form what would be a speech bubble, when the world’s loudest clang sounded from so close on his left that he almost jumped out of his skin and died with alarm, fucking up the line he’d meant to lay down and jerking back, then ducking and sliding beside one of the cots nervously, heart thudding. He ripped his hunting knife out of its sheath and held it clutched tight in his right hand.

Fuck! What was that? He left the library?

There was no electricity pulsing along the wall though. The Doctor was kind of a walking AOE, so you could at least generally sense him coming, and there was none of that.

Fuck, then, thought Joey, slowly standing up again, cautious but calming back down just a little as seconds went from two to nine and nothing appeared to cause him trouble, What was that just now?

It had been on his left, hadn’t it?

Carefully, Joey slipped out of the partially-tagged room and glanced up and down the hall on the left side. Nothing weird in sight. Just empty hall, debris, doors into other rooms. No movement, no more clangs. Nothing. The sound had seemed like it could have come from the next room over though, he thought, looking back, but that one was just one of the big, open, trashed ones—Joey had passed twenty just like it on his way down. Not nice enough to be worth tagging, because the dude might not even notice. What would have made a noise like that in one of those spots?

I guess…maybe part of the roof just caved in? Or something?

That was a weird thought kinda. In reality, for sure it would be an option—buildings broke and shit fell apart eventually. But he kind of didn’t think deterioration worked the same way here. There was one really annoying broken massive window panel in Lerry’s that was always hanging by a thread and banging against the wall in the wind every trial, and every trip out here, and it had never snapped and fallen to the ground like he wished it would. Nothing in Ormond had ever rotted through or something either, even though the lodge was super old and kind of falling apart. So. So maybe that was what it was, but Joey was kind of unconvinced.

Still, I can’t spend forever doing this, thought Joey, mildly frustrated, but hesitating. Whatever it had been, Herman might have heard it too, and uh, he did not want to be here when Herman showed up to find the fantastic work of tagging art he’d just done all over his hospital beds. He had a cool ‘fuck you’ to add to the skull before bouncing, and whatever it had been—

Thunk.

Okay, what the fuck, thought Joey, freezing again on instinct, and then turning his head very, very slowly to the right. It hadn’t been the big open room—it was the one just past it. He was sure this time. Whatever the noise was, it hadn’t been as loud this time, but it was definitely something. Something alive. That wasn’t the sound of a building breaking—that had been the sound of somebody dropping a kind of heavy object—he was like—was really close to 100% sure.

If he’s playing mind games to lure me into a trap because he saw me sneak in, I’m gonna be so pissed, thought Joey, mildly distressed by that hypothetical but sneaking over slowly anyway, curiosity too strong to be beaten down by paranoia now.

When he reached the room in question, he saw through the open doorway ahead that it was some kind of supply room. Small, and as decrepit as everything else, and Joey took it with a lot of caution, ears straining for sound. There was something in there for sure, he could hear it clearly now, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Feet on linoleum, for sure, and shuffling around—he heard things being moved too, and- Wait, was that a voice?

What the fuck? But no, he hadn’t imagined it—whoever was in there was talking to themselves, and not in a God I better be careful to be quiet whisper either. And it wasn’t Herman. It had to be another killer then, breaking in like he was, because whoever it was clearly wasn’t afraid of pissing off the Doc and getting their ass handed to them, but which one? One of the more powerful ones, had to be—it—

Sliding far enough into the furthest entrance from the noise to get a visual of the far end of the little room, Joey froze. And then just stared. Because it wasn’t a killer at all. It was a survivor. He recognized him instantly, but took a second to remember his name. One of the younger ones, one of the guys—Quentin—that’s right. The one who always came back to try to help a teammate even when it was ridiculously stupid, and was an easy kill. Although kind of an exhausting one at the same time, because he fought hard as fuck. It was him, though, plain as day, stumbling around the edge of the room with an armful of junk.

Wh. Joey watched the guy take a couple wobbly steps and bump against a wall he just didn’t seem to see in time with extreme confusion. Did he—did something hit him on the head? Whatever was up, the guy kept going on the other end of the room about fifteen feet away, muttering to himself and trying to pick up various scattered items from the floor and replace them in an open drawer in one of the medical cabinets. He was moving around super unsteadily, but he didn’t look worried about it at all—he was actually smiling to himself.

This is so fucking weird, thought Joey, too distracted by the sight to go back and finish his own work or to actually go over and find out what was up, and not sure he’d have wanted to.

“Okay, that’s the last one, right?” the guy asked himself quietly at the end of the room, but nothing like quietly enough for someone sneaking through Lerry’s and hoping to avoid the Doctor’s wrath, evidenced by the fact that Joey could hear him 100% fine from 15 feet away.

The guy held up a little bottle and blinked at it, then looked at the drawer by him. “No…there’s an empty space. Missed…one…somewhere.” He grimaced at the drawer and then looked around himself, turning in a little circle in the hopes of finding the last bottle, and then sighed exaggeratedly when he didn’t see it. “Where the fuck—” he started to ask himself, raising his hands in exasperation, and then he looked down at his hand again and the bottle still in it and said, “Oh,” sheepishly and set it down in the drawer.

The…hell?

“Okay, okay,” said the survivor to himself, drumming his fingers absently on the cabinet, “What else?” He started humming—of all the wild fucking things to do, humming to himself, and Joey just stayed where he was, staring and lost. The guy kept going through stuff, moving on to the next cabinet and swaying unsteadily as he did, still humming.

Okay, that’s just not normal. Is he…Wait, is he high?? thought Joey, watching the uncoordinated movements and completely out of it disregard for his own safety in the person across from him with something approaching wonder, Oh my God, I think he is. He—

“I took the blame,” came the survivor’s voice from across the room, and Joey’s head snapped up and all he could do was gape at the guy as he kept going. “Directionless so plain to see, a loaded gun won't set you free. So you say.”

Holy shit.

He was. He was fucking singing. Singing in Lerry’s Memorial Institute in the wreckage of torture chambers while rifling through drawers and making a huge fucking racket the owner of this little patch of hell might hear. Oh fuck. He’s gonna hear that for sure. This guy’s gonna die. The Doctor’s gonna come storming in, super pissed he’s being loud as hell while he’s trying to concentrate—I gotta go, or he’s gonna find us both—if he even sees me, he’ll know why I was here—I gotta—

He started to turn and book out the side door again, planning an escape route in his head, and then hesitated, and turned slowly, and looked back at Quentin again. Still humming to himself, between verses now, the teenager was opening a cabinet, and then, seeing nothing immediately promising inside, stooped to go throw open a drawer beneath it. It was so weird, watching that, and for a second he got lost just staring at the guy’s face, and forgot what he’d been going to do at all. He couldn’t look away. And for a moment he wasn’t sure why, and then Joey realized that it wasn’t just that this was such a stupidass place to be being loud that was making this whole moment surreal, it was also that he hadn’t actually ever seen a survivor look…happy, before. Like, okay, well, he’d seen them grin or be pleased or whatever if they won in a trial, or pulled off something smart in one, but like, carefree? Normal happy? Happy like this? Never. Not once. Not happy like they weren’t where they were. Like they weren’t going to die horribly in a couple minutes every day for the rest of their life. And the guy looked so…so happy for real, so chilled out and okay, but. He wasn’t. Something was wrong with him, and he only felt that way because how he felt was out of his control and he just didn’t know that yet, or how bad that was gonna be in a minute here when the Doctor heard him. He had no idea. And he wasn’t gonna. He was just humming and absently keeping time with his fingers to the beat of the song between verses, looking so fucking chill and at peace, and he was going to stay that way until the Doctor showed up and. …

Shit.

A few feet away, the survivor started to sing to himself again, nothing but happy in that little moment of being free from the reality of what was really going on in his life. “We’ll share a drink and—”

“Hey!” hissed Joey, listening to what he really wasn’t sure if was his better or worse judgement, and stepping back into the room.

The guy jolted and slammed his head into the cabinet door he’d left open, cursed in pain, stumbled backwards, tripped over his own medkit, which Joey hadn’t even seen on the floor, and slammed into the ground on his back with a muffled yelp.

“Whoa,” said Joey quietly, holding up a hand and stepping closer, “Are you—”

“-Shit!” said the guy, scrambling up to his elbows and looking for Joey, finding him almost instantly. “Legion?” He froze where he was, on one knee, staring at Joey with huge, unfocused eyes. “W. What are you…?” Something seemed to occur to him then, and his expression changed, and got frantic, and he snatched his medkit from the floor and stumbled to his feet and back two steps, clutching it in front of him like a blunt weapon, eyes fixed on Joey still, but wide with tension and mistrust now. “Look—just back off. I’ll fight you if I have to.”

“Relax,” said Joey, keeping his hand up and stepping cautiously a little closer, “Not here to fight.”

The guy looked surprised, and lowered the medkit a little, believing that way too fast for any remotely sober person.

Jesus, how much of whatever you took did you take? If he’d been close to sure before, he was certain as fuck now that the guy was high—and like, almost completely out of it kind of high too. He was already swaying a little, and his kept blinking and working to refocus his eyes like he was having a lot of trouble doing that. Movements just a little too slow, too off, too uncoordinated and loose to be anything but high.

“O-oh,” said the guy after a second, “Why then? You can’t…” He looked over his shoulder at the cabinet behind him, “Need. Medical supplies?”

“No,” agreed Joey, holding up his can of spraypaint, “I came here to tag. And then heard you sounding like a fucking elephant in here and came over to get you to quiet down.”

“What?” said Quentin, offended, “I’m not—”

“—Yes you are!” argued Joey, taking another step closer and lowering his hand, “You’re making a ton of noise. The Doctor’s gonna come and kill you if you keep it up, dumbass, and he’ll find both of us. Keep it down!”

Quentin stared at him for a second, and then looked to the side at nothing and blinked, thinking hard, then back at Joey. “I was making a lot of noise?”

Uh. Yes??? “You couldn’t tell?” asked Joey, exasperated on his behalf.

“I-“ started Quentin uncertainly.

“—You were singing, in here! Why were you singing?” hissed Joey. He’d gotten close enough that he was a quick lunge away from the survivor now. He wondered if it was weird that his mental units of distance now were all related to hunting people down for sport…

“I. ...It was stuck in my head,” defended Quentin a little uncertainly, looking confused, “Does it matter? Wait—were you watching me?” He took a half-step back, medkit gripped like a weapon again.

“No, you were just super fucking loud—I could hear you in the next room,” whispered Joey.

“…Really?” asked Quentin again, shoulders relaxing a little, thoroughly distracted and caught somewhere between being insulted and kind of worried or ashamed about being a nuisance.

Joey nodded.

“Oh,” said Quentin awkwardly, taking his word for it and pretty visibly out of it and having a pretty hard and disjointed time keeping up, but doing his best through whatever the fuck was in his system. “Uh. Sorry, I guess. I’ll stop. –And you’ll go, then?” He double-checked. “–We’re not gonna fight?”

“No,” assured Joey, relaxing a little.

“…Okay,” said Quentin after considering that for a second, and seeming to find it reasonable. Trusting that for the second time way too quickly for anyone with normal judgement, all things considered. If Joey had caught him stealing supplies from Ormond, he probably would have fucked with him a little before trying to scare him off. He didn’t look scared of him at all right now though, just kind of confused and unsteady. Waiting for Joey to say or do whatever he’d do next, or to leave maybe. When he didn’t make a move, the guy blinked a few times, and then just went back to trying to dig through supplies in the cabinet by him, movements shaky and uncoordinated. Like he had no depth perception or balance or focus at all, even though he was clearly trying really hard to focus. And getting back to his scavenging the guy just—just turned his back on him—on a killer, in a killer realm, in easy melee distance, like that wasn’t a stupid and dangerous thing to do, even if Joey genuinely did have no plans to bury a knife in his back. He couldn’t know that.

Shakily, the guy reached over and pulled open a drawer and started to sort through it, almost collapsing when he took a step to move to get a better view of the contents, and looking confused by the failure of his legs to do their job more than anything else as he righted himself, Joey all but forgotten the second he was out of sight.

God. It. It was super weird to watch this--to see Quentin this way. Why? It shouldn’t have felt so unsettling to him, right? Joey just—he’d never—well, okay, Joey had been around people high before, but this wasn’t even high, this was like, bordering on blitzed completely out of his mind, and usually even seeing someone at a party who had done way too much of whatever was just chill and kind of funny to be around, but here? It wasn’t that at all. It was like…

Joey stopped moving, lost in a memory he hadn’t seen in ages, and forgot everything else. Thinking about a bird in a little wooden pen.

Of all the stupid things to… He tried to stop, tried to re-focus on the present, but he couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t look away. And once he’d remembered that trip a lifetime ago at all, he couldn’t turn off the flood of old images in his head. They just came, and came, and he got lost in them. Once, a-a long, long time ago, there had been a trip he’d gone on, where he’d been driven on a long car ride to go see extended family off in the country away from Ormond, off in a different part of Alberta altogether. Very different. The cousins there were ones he hadn’t seen much before or after, but he’d been excited, he thought. To be doing something new. He’d been a kid at the time—really little, like five or something, and all the cousins out there were all older than him—teenagers, closer to his brother’s age, but he had followed them around everywhere out there just the same, wanting to be included, and they hadn’t forced him to go away so long as he could manage to keep up. It had been new, and exciting, and fun. And the second day he’d been there, they’d gone and met up with some friends, him trailing after, and headed off into someone’s house to play alone out in the backyard with a bunch of other kids they knew, and there had been a chicken. Just a dumb little bird, and Joey had never liked the things, because he was little back then, and chickens were mean, and they’d chase you, and try to peck you, so they’d kind of scared him.

One of the boys had gotten a chicken from somewhere though, and brought it over, and he’d given it something. A sedative maybe, Joey had never found out. But whatever it had been given, it had been disoriented, and confused, and moved slow, and loopy, and he’d watched it as a little boy, hugging the bottom rail of the wooden pen they’d set it in and in a way closer to the action to anyone else there, and seen it suffer. The older kids had gone into the pen and kicked it. They would chase it, and scream at it, and laugh, and sometimes drop stuff like bunches of tangled fishing line or stuff in its way so it would panic, and run from whatever had just scared it, and tangle itself up so bad it couldn’t get free. They had thought it was really funny, watching that stupid little animal try to escape and hurt itself and then forget it was even scared because of how fucked up it was on whatever it’d been given. It would bump into stuff on its own after a little bit—they didn’t even have to help it to get it hurt. Trip around and squak and pull itself up, then run into the same box again head-first. And it hadn’t been funny. He had laughed, before he’d known what was going on, and just thought the older kids were playing some game and gonna run around after one of the mean chickens to spook it, but when he’d figured out it was hurt, and thinking wrong, and never even had a chance, it hadn’t been funny at all.

Things had escalated, bit by bit, while he watched. Gotten worse.

Joey hadn’t done anything to try to save it. Just stood there at five, watching it with huge eyes in silence as it stumbled around in a loopy fashion, trying to avoid old nails the older kids had embedded all over the path ahead of it tip-up in the hope it would eventually step on one, or something else, or simply be betrayed by its own balance while running from them, and fall, and had rooted for it in silence to make it through. It hadn’t. It had made it about two feet.

He didn’t think the boys had been planning to kill it, but they had. And he hadn’t stopped them. Probably it hadn’t been too hurt to save after taking a couple nails through its side. Joey didn’t know—he’d never known—he didn’t know really anything at all about birds. But it had still been very alive when they’d been cursing in a panic and talking about what animal to pin the death on, and a boy had stepped on its head. He hadn’t thought about that day in years, after he’d finally been able to stop thinking about it at all, maybe a year later when the nightmares had finally gone away. He was fucking terrified of chickens. He would never tell anybody that, not ever, but he had been ever since. Which had to be like, the stupidest possible fear a person could have, and made no sense to him at all as a response to that even—he’d seen how dumb and easy to fuck with and little they were! Which should have made him anything but afraid! But. …But any time he saw one, he was always struck by this intense feeling that if he kept looking at it, it would be able to look up into his face with those tiny dead empty black eyes, and see in his own what he’d watched and that he’d just stood there, and that those awful little bead eyes with nothing past them seeing that truth inside him would mark him like a curse forever, and it would only be a matter of time before he met whatever awful punishment the universe laid out in wait for him to make him pay for the judgement it had passed, and as fucking stupid and irrational as that thought was he had never been able to shake it.

Joey hadn’t ever associated doing drugs with that sight from a lifetime ago, not once, but he was seeing it now, and he lost about seven seconds of time doing it, feeling that very specific, long-forgotten fear again, and then he heard a clang and was snapped back just in time to see a drawer the survivor had been using as a foothold to reach a high shelf in the same cabinet must have been pulled out too far to be stable anymore, because it had splintered under the guy’s weight, and as he watched, it ripped out of the cabinet and the survivor went pitching backwards on a collision course with the edge of the heavy desk four feet back with a surprised cry.

Snapped into action, Joey shouted something not very intelligible or useful like “Whoa!” and shot out on impulse to catch the guy and just made it. Knocked to his knees on impact, Joey wrapped his arms around the guy, ducked his head down to minimize damage, braced, and then slid to a stop just shy of the desk he’d expected to ram into breathing hard.

For a second, he held perfectly still like that, listening to things from the drawer go rolling around the floor, waiting for the sound of the Doctor coming to kill them, but the Institute slowly returned to silence. Nothing but the sound of two people breathing.

In his lap, the survivor kind of shakily held out his arms like he was testing his balance, and then tried to turn, and Joey let go so that he could. He moved back and onto his knees to face Joey and blinked, then squinted at him in confusion, like he’d forgotten who he was or that he was there.

“Uhm… Thanks,” offered Quentin. “…Are…?”

Joey didn’t have any idea what to say so he didn’t.

“Uhm…” said the guy, looking to the side and then back at him, kind of at a loss, “W. Where did you?”

‘Where’? Where what? Come from? Learn to do that? He couldn’t even tell if the guy was really recognizing him right now, from the look on his face. God your eyes look glazed over. That can’t be a good sign. How much of whatever had he taken?

Quentin raised a hand like he was going to gesture at something specific, and opened his mouth to speak, and then seemed to forget what he’d been going to say, looked a little troubled by that, and then blinked again and looked to the side, thinking hard, and then back at Joey. “I-I don’t. Uh.” He paused and looked up over his shoulder at the cabinet he’d just fallen from and took in the damage, then back at Joey. “I’m not…sure…why that happened,” he offered unsteadily, “I think—I think it. Broke. Are you okay?”

“Uh. Yeah,” said Joey, not sure how to respond to that at all. It was surreal, because for a moment, the guy looked so genuinely concerned about him, like he hadn’t been the one to almost get brained on a desk. And also because. It. Well. That just wasn’t a way survivors looked at you. Or…anyone did, really. Not in a…long time at least… “Are you?” he asked, trying to tell. The guy didn’t look hurt.

Quentin looked down at himself, and turned his palms over, checking them, and then nodded like that was sufficient to account for any injuries possible. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

He stood up shakily and almost fell again, and Joey half-shot to his feet before Quentin caught himself on the wall. The guy looked surprised his legs weren’t behaving normally, and glanced down at them in confusion, then back at Joey after a second when he remembered he was there, and offered him a hand. Not sure that was a good idea, but acting kind of on impulse, Joey took it and let the guy help him to his feet—which uh, was actually more like Joey standing up with way more leg-muscle-effort than usual so the guy could feel like he was helping him to his feet.

“Look, uhm,” said Joey as he straightened up, watching the guy with something close to concern at this point, “Did you maybe take something in here on accident?”

Quentin looked incredibly confused. “…Uh. No. Not on…accident. I-I told you I’m collecting supplies, right? Medicine stuff?”

“No—I mean, not take like ‘pack up’—take like, did you do any drugs,” corrected Joey, “Like, while you’ve been here in Lerry’s—did you use anything on yourself, or accidentally jab your hand on something—or maybe up, I don’t—inhale some fumes, or?”

“Uhm. Yeah. I. I guess,” he said, very confused.

Okay. Well. That sure track. “Do you know what it was?” asked Joey hopefully.

“Uh. I mean—there’s only two options. The bottle’s here somewhere though,” said Quentin.

“Okay,” said Joey, “what are the two—” WAIT. Oh my GOD. Th—You took it on purpose?! Why! How stupid are you! “-Hang on, are you saying you—you took something, like, you on purpose took a drug? Here, in Lerry’s?” asked Joey, and the guy stared back at him and the incredulity in his voice with such an open look of surprise that he knew for fucking certain without him even answering that he must have. “Oh my GOD you did! You dumbass! What the hell were you thinking! That’s crazy!” snapped Joey in disbelief, gesturing broadly, “Who would do that! Did you even read the bottle first?! No wonder you’re in here stumbling around like a blind rhinoceros. What’s wrong with you!”

“I—what? No—I—I’m not blind,” defended Quentin, confused and looking a little attacked, “—or a—Why are you angry? You said you didn’t need supplies. We do. It’s not like I use them all. I bring most of it back, just, I usually take one or something when I find them, especially if I’m—”

“—WHAT! You go get high in killer realms and do drugs all the time?” exploded Joey in a very angry hissed whisper, some of the sympathy or concern or whatever it had been he’d felt before turning into a surge of blind disbelief and irritation. What kind of fucking dumbass? “Why would you do that! You’re gonna get yourself killed!” he snapped, waving a finger and stepping forward. “You unbelievable dumbass! Do you just not care if that happens?!”

Quentin took a step back as he advanced, looking a little threatened by the sudden burst of anger along with confused now, and he glanced around for where he’d left his medkit, then back at Joey as he defended himself. “No! Of course I do—I do that because I don’t want to get killed out here!” He finally spotted the case back inside the cabinet he’d fallen from and started backing nervously towards it. “The only injectables ever in Lerry’s are adrenaline and hemorrhagics. And I always need both of those! I don’t take too much of them—I use one and take everything else back to the campfire. Or, maybe on a really bad day if I’m out a long time and need it, I use two. Usually if I’m—I’m out scavenging, I’ve been out for a while—and—”

“—And? Why the fuck would need to jam a hemmor—” started Joey, and then he stopped mid-sentence, only just then actually looking at Quentin for real. He’d noticed the blood on his jacket and shirt as soon as he came in, but. …Is…? Joey stopped and looked down at his own arms and hands, and his gloves and black sleeves were wet. He stared at them for a second, then back up at Quentin in confusion as the guy stared back at him with the same completely lost expression he must have had on.

“Are you bleeding?” asked Joey in a totally different tone of voice, stunned.

Quentin stared at him for a second, eyes big and sort of glazed over, but trying to stay trained on him and focus through that fog, and then he looked to the side for a moment, thinking and confused and a little nervous still, and then finally he looked back at Joey, and his expression was completely different when he did, like he was…wary suddenly, for some reason. “…Yeah,” he said really quietly, eyes on Joey’s.

“Why?” asked Joey, totally lost, “Did the Doctor see you on the way in?”

For a second, Quentin was silent again, just watching him, expression unchanging. Then the line of his mouth set a little and he glanced down and away. “I’m always bleeding,” said Quentin very quietly.

“W—you’re always wounded?” asked Joey. Had he been? He’d seen him in trials, and he did kinda always look like this, but he’d thought those were blood stains. Not still-bleeding wounds! Why the fuck would—? Didn’t they heal? He—he could have sworn that— “I thought you guys healed when you got killed and brought back?” said Joey.

“Yeah, but,” started Quentin, and then he stopped. He glanced down, and then up at Joey again and swallowed. “Uhm. Why?”

“Why?” echoed Joey, arms lowering at his sides now that the anger and irritation was gone, and feeling about as confused as Quentin looked, “Because you’re fucked up outside a trial apparently all the time, and that’s not really supposed to happen. Are you okay? Are you dying?”

“…Uh,” said Quentin, looking harried, “No. I just.” He thought for a second and looked out the nearby window at nothing past a far hallway wall, then back at Joey. “You know how…we—all of us, uhm, we go into a trial looking like we look, right? L-like we do naturally?”

“Yeah,” said Joey, nodding.

“Well, if we get hurt outside of a trial, we have to have time to heal right. And. If you die, you get reset to how you were before the trial began. And if you…” He stopped for a second and looked down, kind of sad, and quiet. “…Die. In almost all of your trials. Or all of them. Then…you lose a lot of. Of time. And things don’t. They don’t really have much chance to heal. Not at a normal rate, at least. Because you keep being…set back. So it might take—might take a whole month, to heal like a week should have done, back home. And…the Entity. It. The way it sees us, and ‘puts us back’ when we die. That can-can change, over time. You. You get a little older, in here. Eventually. If you start running between trials, you get better leg muscles—lift weights, better arm strength, that kind of stuff,” offered Quentin, glancing back up, “But other things change too. My uhm. I uh. I die a lot, in trials. And I…get hurt sometimes, out doing this. One time really bad. And. Somewhere along the line the Entity just decided I was, uhm, a little bit older than when I got here, and that I…” His shoulders lowered, and he looked away. “…Just. Spend all of my time. Kind of injured. Because I just kept being injured. All the time. From out here, and for way too long from that one time, and in trials, over and over in a lot of the same ways. More than is uhm.” He risked a glance at Joey’s face. “Is normal. In too many trials. So this uh.” He gestured vaguely at himself. “This is what it th…what it sees as my Default State, now. Hurt become more how it remembers me than…how I…was when I was okay. So. Now it’s how I heal back.”

What the fuck?

Joey gaped at him in a kind of slow building horror. “So…You’re just injured all the time now?”

Quentin considered for a second, and then nodded.

“Is—are all of you like this?” asked Joey.

“Nnnno,” said Quentin slowly, thinking about it, “Uh. Some of us are a little bit. Jake’s leg is always hurt. I think so is Laurie’s arm. Minor stuff. But uh. This whole,” he gestured at himself and gave Joey a kind of smile, like he was making a self-deprecating joke about this situation that Joey wasn’t really finding funny at all, “uh. Mess thing. With like—fifteen injuries and always about to pass out—that’s just me.” He grinned, and then when Joey didn’t smile back, the expression faded and went neutral, and then suddenly looked almost panicked.

What?

“Uh,” said Quentin nervously, suddenly seeming agitated and for the first time since Joey had walked in like he might have some small awareness suddenly that he wasn’t totally thinking straight and was concerned about that, “You’re not gonna use that, are you?”

“Use it?” echoed Joey, lost.

“I-I –I already die so much,” said Quentin, almost like he was appealing to Joey’s humanity or his honor or sense of decency or something. He brought his hand up to his left eye, which Joey had noticed for a long time had slash mark scars across it like he’d been raked by a claw, but was only just now realizing didn’t open all the way anymore too. “I’ve only got like 50% vision on my left side already—please don’t like, start fucking up my other one every trial to try to get it to stick too. I don’t know what I’m gonna do if I see even worse. It took me so long to get used to fucked up depth perception. And I just—I’m so tried, all the time, always, I-I—I know that you—”

“—No!” said Joey, kind of horrified and holding up a hand to stop him there, “I-I’m not gonna—fucking rip out one of your eyes every trial to try to get the Entity to make you go blind—why would you think that?”

Quentin looked at him for a long couple of seconds just a little sad, his deep blue eyes holding Joey’s brown ones, and not saying anything, and Joey felt a kind of sinking feeling in his stomach as he actually thought about the question he’d just asked the other person and the way their relationship—if you could even call butchering someone every time you crossed paths a relationship at all—had only ever been.

“I wouldn’t,” said Joey, lowering his arm when Quentin still didn’t answer, feeling shitty in ways he really wasn’t used to. “I’m not gonna do that. I’m…not that kind of person.”

For a second, Quentin watched him in silence, too unguarded under the influence of whatever he’d taken to be thought of exactly as ‘studying’ him in the way Joey was used to thinking of people trying to read you and sense sincerity, but he thought trying to tell if he meant that, and then he smiled at him. “Okay.”

That would have felt good. It started to, and then Joey remembered it was just the…LSD, or Opium, or whatever the fuck was in him talking.

“You’re not as murderous as I thought you’d be,” offered Quentin like a genuine friendly compliment, giving him another smile before turning back to the cabinet, and then looking down at all the scattered supplies on the floor blankly, lost and distracted immediately in figuring out what to do about them.

Yeah, thought Joey kind of sadly, watching him, Only. I don’t think you’d even be looking at me long enough to know which one of us I was if you were yourself. We’re only having a conversation at all because you’re too fucked up to remember you should be scared of me.

“Uh—you said you did take something though, right?” said Joey, clearing his throat and circling back, needing to say something, and that was kind of important to pin down.

“Huh?” said Quentin, glancing back at him. People looked weird when they were high. Had they always? Or was it just whatever he was on? It was…uncomfortable. Joey hadn’t noticed it before on other people he’d been around, the couple times people had done drugs at parties, or out behind the school late at night, and he’d been lucky enough to be invited to the event. But Quentin’s eyes were glassy, and he was looking at him, and not looking at him at the same time. It made him almost sad for some reason. Why the fuck do I even care? Why am I talking to him at all? I should get out, and fuck off, and let whatever happens happen. I’m not supposed to buddy up to a survivor. If he wasn’t blazed out of his mind, he’d run away from me, and hate me, and there is no way this could possibly go but badly! I don’t need to help him. He can help himself. I’m just gonna get myself in trouble and get nothing out of it if I stick around. It’s not like he’d help me if he found me tripping balls in here. He’d probably kick the shit out of me and steal my knife and maybe kill me like the Doctor did.

“Oh!” said Quentin, remembering and turning back to face him for real, still acting really friendly like he had been a second ago. Whatever had flipped the buddy switch in him seemed to have taken root and stayed. “Yeah—yeah, uh. I didn’t even look to see if it was adrenaline or a hemorrhagic. My shoulder’s always fucked up now, and if I inject adrenaline into the muscle there, it’s as good as anywhere else, so if I find a syringe to use, I just plunge it in half the time, because it’ll work for me either way, and I’m usually in a rush.” He glanced around the room like he was casing it and passing on some little-known information to Joey. “You don’t want to stay around Lerry’s too long. Or any of the killer realms. Gotta be fast and careful.”

Yeah, I know, dumbass, but you’re not being either.

“Do you still have what you took?” asked Joey, choosing to be nice this time because he was pretty sure he wouldn’t sound too smart that fucked up on drugs either.

“Uhh, yeah, I guess—I mean, I don’t have the stuff—I took it, but I saved the syringe. Even when they’re empty, they can be pretty useful sometimes—might need ‘em later,” offered Quentin. He took his medkit out of the cabinet and opened it and took from it a small cardboard package with an empty plastic syringe hastily jammed most of the way back into it from on top of a kind of depressing and meager supply of gauze and little boxes and bottles. It had been such a big medkit case, Joey had expected it to be full of stuff. I guess he brought it to fill up.

“Here,” said Quentin, handing him the syringe, and then as he watched him take it curiously, “What do you want it for?”

“Oh—I’ll give it back,” said Joey, glancing up at him and then turning the syringe in his hand, looking for a label, “I just want to know what you took.” It took him a second, but he found the old faded print on the tiny label, topped, squinted at the decayed words for a moment, and then succeeded and felt his eyes bug out. Ah geeze no wonder you’re a fucking mess. You stupid dumbass! It’s a wonder you’re still standing! 50mg/mL concentration?? Holy FUCK that’s high. Dad was on 10 after surgery! He’s right—the Entity’s fucking with him—goddamn. FIFTY. Jeeze! Poor guy. Damn that’s a lot of opium to take. He’s lucky it wasn’t worse. I’m amazed he’s still standing! –wait, I wonder if that just means it hasn’t really taken effect yet…

“What?” asked Quentin, interested, trying to read the label too, upside-down and from a distance.

Joey held it up for him. “It was morphine.”

“What?” asked Quentin, blinking like that might help him process the news. He took the syringe and cocked his head, studying it.

“You took morphine,” said Joey, “A shit ton of morphine.”

“…Oh,” said Quentin with a note of worry now, face falling. He stared at the syringe without moving for a few seconds reading it, and then exploded and swung a hand angrily at nothing. “Fuck!”

“I don’t think it’s gonna kill you,” offered Joey, trying to dial him back.

“No—it’s not that,” said Quentin, turning to him distressed, “It’s morphine! That’s what fuck’s about! It’s a painkiller. A great one! Do you have—have any fucking idea how rare those are? Finding a bottle of Advil is like scoring a fucking gold mine out. A-and I had a whole syringe worth of morphine and I just used it all? On me? B-because I was too rushed to read the fucking label?” He’d started pacing and gesturing compulsively as he talked, and when he backed up far enough he bumped into the wall by the cabinet, he just slid down against it all the way to the floor and put his arms up over his head and folded in towards his knees miserably. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I wasted that. I-I could have saved it. We should have been able to split it! Fuck! …fuck…”

Not sure what to do but feeling bad for him, Joey watched for a second, trying to think, and then walked over and slid down carefully beside him. When he got there, Quentin glanced over at him from beneath his arms.

“It’s not so bad,” tried Joey encouragingly, trying to think of what might be good to say.

“No, it is,” said Quentin, depressed, and with his voice muffled from his sleeve. He lowered his arms and folded them over his knees instead, then buried his chin and half his face in them. “Morphine’s such a … …. ….fuck!”

“What?” said Joey, confused.

“I can’t think of the word,” said Quentin, visibly distressed.

Yeah I’ll bet. I’m amazed you’re still kind of coherent at all, considered Joey, who thought better of saying that out loud and instead said, “…Important? Uh. Useful?”

“No,” said Quentin, hung up on this, “Not easy to find—like rare—OH! Fuck! Rare—that was the word.” He went right back to overwhelmingly depressed the second the word was found, like he’d flipped an internal light switch, and kept plowing straight ahead down the depression line, gesturing as he spoke and looking miserably over at Joey. “It’s such a rare find! I’ve never gotten morphine before. Or opium, or anything really good for pain. I could have saved it; we could have taken a little bit to make really bad days better when they hit—it should have been for all of us! Or saved for an emergency! I-I –fuck, a, a whole syringe full? A lot of us could have gotten enough to help at least once. But I fucked up. That’s all gone, and I’ll probably never find one again.” He stared forward for a second and then smiled sadly and leaned his head forward against the side of his arm and stared unfocusedly at nothing. “I wasted the whole thing on myself and, I don’t even feel good.”

Joey watched him and swallowed. He had no idea what to say. “…Maybe, since it left some once now, that means the Entity will put more morphine in the realm?” he suggested after a second.

Quentin looked over at him somewhere between a tiny bit hopeful and about ready to cry over how little he thought it was true.

“It might be,” said Joey encouragingly, hoping the one plus side to being absolutely wasted on morphine might be that he’d be easily swayed into avoiding a depression spiral. “You said you never found one before. The Entity adds stuff sometimes. I bet it’s just a sign you’ll find more now.”

For a second, Quentin watched him, expression unchanging, and then he smiled at him and looked a lot better. “You think?”

“Yeah, for sure,” lied Joey.

“…Yeah, maybe,” decided Quentin after a moment, cheering up. He glanced over at Joey and smiled at him again and then started to uncoordinatedly pull himself back up. “You’re right. I’m being stupid and just wasting time feeling bad for myself like an idiot—I should keep looking.”

“Uhhh---I don’t think that’s such a good idea!” said Joey quickly, hopping up after him.

Quentin gave him a confused look.

“You heard what I said, right? –Before the more morphine thing. You’re super fucked up,” said Joey, “You’re on like, a fuck ton of morphine and making a bunch of noise in the Doctor’s home base. If you don’t leave, he’s gonna come find you.”

Quentin waved the concern away with a hand and turned back to the mostly ransacked cabinet. “Nah—I’m fine. Just don’t feel pain right now.”

“Dude, you are not fine,” argued Joey, following after.

“I really am,” said Quentin in the voice of someone who was definitely not not 80% out of it on drugs. He turned around and put a hand on Joey’s chest, started at it for a second, and then moved it up to the shoulder he’d been trying to aim for and missed, and patted it reassuringly. “I’m good. Thanks though.”

Joey just stared at him as he turned back to the cabinet. Quentin looked down at the drawers and noticed the broken one and its scattered contents and blinked at it in surprise.

“Oh yeah,” he said to himself after a second, “I guess I should pick that up.”

He took a step forward, lost his footing, and rammed headlong into the cabinet. Joey winced as Quentin bounced off it and fell to his knee, and then looked at the big wooden thing in confusion. The guy held up his hands and watched them shake for a couple of seconds, and then, looking supremely lost by all of the things happening, made it to his feet again and tried to get his wobbly body to stay still, confused and clearly trying to remember or figure out something in silence as he did, and having a hard time doing it despite the absolutely complete focus he was giving to the task.

“See what I mean?” asked Joey.

At the sound of his voice, Quentin glanced over with a look on his face like he’d completely forgotten Joey was there.

“You’re not fine,” said Joey again.

“I’m good,” promised Quentin, not even really responding to what he’d said in a way that made complete sense. He looked even more fucked up now than he had when Joey had come in there. More than a couple seconds ago even. Shit, I was right about it having not totally set in before, I think.

Joey stared through the floor for a second, trying to guess how long he had before the Doctor had them both, and to figure out what to do. He felt something bump his chest and looked up.

“Hey, Joey, could you hold this?” asked Quentin, holding out the broken drawer.

How the…fuck? Where did-? I’ve never said my own name in a trial, so who did he hear it from?

“Uh. Why?” said Joey, taking it anyway because he didn’t think not to, still kind of stuck on the fact that apparently at some point Quentin had learned his name.

“I can’t get it to go back in, and I don’t know where else to put it,” said Quentin as if that made perfect sense.

“You want me to hold it forever?” asked Joey in disbelief.

“Can you?” asked Quentin, surprised, taking that for some reason as a 100% genuine and doable offer.

“No!” said Joey.

“Okay,” said Quentin, seeing the choked back urge to laugh on Joey’s face and grinning in return, even though he pretty clearly didn’t get what had been so funny to him, “Then just find somewhere good to put it, I guess.”

As soon as Quentin turned his back, Joey hocked it onto a nearby hospital bed to deafen the thump.

Over by the cabinet, Quentin opened the second-to-bottom drawer, and gave a tired sigh. Joey scooted a foot closer and saw it was completely empty. He watched as the survivor tried again with the last one, and got the same results.

“Is stuff usually empty?” asked Joey, genuinely curious. Other than stealing alcohol from the Deathslinger, he’d never like, actually really gone somewhere looking for supplies.

“Uh, kinda,” said Quentin, glancing up, “I mean. There’s always good stuff somewhere, but it can take a long time to find it.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” asked Joey, watching and then following as Quentin made it shakily to his feet and took several swaying paces over to a little desk about six feet to the right and started to go through its drawers too. “I mean—don’t people usually find you and…” He made a slashing motion over his throat, but Quentin turned away just as he started to do it and didn’t see, so he added, “uh—kill you? Or. I know we’re not really supposed to kill you if we find you out here, but. I’m sure some of them do. Or at least fuck you up.”

“Hmm?” said Quentin, auditory-processing on a delay, and then before Joey actually had a chance to repeat himself, “Oh. Yeah—they do.” He picked up what looked like an empty can of something and gave it the world’s most displeased look, then kept digging. “Uh, I mean, it’s risky. But if we don’t come get good supplies where it’s dangerous between trials, we’ll only have shitty ones in the trials to use when we get hurt. And I’m kind of a medic, so it’s my—” He paused, holding up a little package and turning it over a few times trying to figure out what it was, seemed to recognize the object that was completely foreign to Joey, opened his medkit on top of the desk, dropped whatever it was inside with the other meager supplies he’d collected so far, and went back to searching. “—Uh, my responsibility kind of, to have stuff to help people,” he finished, “Sometimes you die out here and lose everything, or you get hurt, and slowed down in trials for a bit because of it, but.” He shrugged. “The alternative is…”

“…Not great?” offered Joey, seeing him struggle to recall a word again.

Quentin glanced up at him and nodded, then flashed him a little smile and kept going.

It still felt so weird to get smiled at by a survivor. It…made him feel guilty, like he was tricking someone into doing what he wanted while they were fucked up. Which he didn’t—he wouldn’t have…

“Hey, gauze. Not great, but I’ll take it,” said Quentin to himself, taking a big roll of gauze from the last drawer on the desk and putting it in his still mostly empty medkit. He stood up and swayed, then caught himself on the wall, looking almost too blitzed to even be confused or surprised by that this time, and glanced over at Joey. “You see anything good on your way through here?”

“Uh—” he actually tried to remember. Had there been? I didn’t look in anything. I have no idea. “Dunno.”

“Okay, well, good luck tagging,” said Quentin, words friendly and a little slurred, coming in at the wrong cadences as he started to walk past him. “You know—Nea really likes that. I bet you two would have fun doing that sometime,” he offered, pausing to glance at Joey again. “You should ask her.” He stepped on past then, heading for the hall, and almost immediately his foot hit a little jut at the place the floor of the hall and the floor of the room met and didn’t quite connect right, and that was enough to take him down again, but Joey shot forward and caught him this time, saving him from crashing headlong into an old cart out in the hall.

“Whoa—” said Quentin, trying to get his balance back a little. And then, flashing him a smile, “Thanks.”

“Dude, you have to stop,” said Joey urgently with his voice hushed, “You’re gonna—”

“It’s okay, really,” said Quentin with great assurance, thumping him on the shoulder again as he tried to straighten back up. “I feel fine.”

“You are not fine, dumbass!” hissed back Joey.

“Wow. Rude. Seriously, though—I’m pretty sure I’m good,” said Quentin, not worried at all. He started to walk again, thoroughly nonplussed, and began humming to himself, a melody Joey had never heard, swaying a little as he walked, and seeming about the most happily contented Joey had seen somebody in years. Joey stayed frozen, gaping at him as did a few really bad what Joey was pretty sure had been dance steps crossing to the next room, and started singing, “Oh my God we’re back again. Brothers, sisters, everybody sing—gonna bring the flavor, show you how. Got a question for you, better answer nooow.”

He made it into the far room and started getting louder. He’s lost his mind! thought Joey in a panic, breaking out of his initial shock and sprinting after him.

When he made it through the doorway, the dude was still kind of uncoordinatedly bobbing while he turned in a circle and scanned the room for potential storage areas, blissfully carefree as fuck. “Am I original? Yeeeah. Am I the only one? Yeaah. Am I s—”

“—What the fuck are you doing!” hissed Joey, bolting in and catching the surprised teenager by the arm.

“Uhm. I—wait. Didn’t we have this conversation before?” asked Quentin, like he was genuinely trying to parse some surreal deja-vu.

“Yeah! And you said you’d stop singing!” said Joey.

“…Oh yeah,” said Quentin in surprise, remembering. “Huh.” He immediately started to sing again, eyes focused on nothing at all like he’d gotten so lost in his head in the 0.4 seconds since agreeing that singing was off the table that he’d forgotten Joey was even there. “Am I sexual, ye—"

“—No you’re not!” shot back Joey, and Quentin stopped singing and looked at him kind of betrayed.

“It’s—that wasn’t a question—it’s a Backstreet Boys song,” said Quentin, a little hurt.

“A what?” said Joey. No idea what the fuck he was talking about.

“What?” asked Quentin with a huge amount of intense incredulity in his slightly slurred tone. “Y. You don’t know them?”

Joey just have him a disbelieving look.

“Everybody? I Want it That Way? As Long as You Love Me?” When Joey said nothing, he tried, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart?” like it was the last bastion on earth and Joey would just have to know that one. Quentin waited a second for an answer that didn’t come and took in the completely lost look on Joey’s face. “Holy shit, really?”

Joey made a hopeless gesture, not even sure which part of this to respond to.

“Ah, that sucks!” said Quentin with incredibly genuine sympathy, “I wish I had an album. I guess it’s kinda fun though,” he added with a grin, like something amazing had just occurred to him, “because that means you get to hear them for the first time now.” He looked up at nothing, thinking. “They’re not really the kind of music I listen to, but Everybody and I Want it That Way are catchy, and I’ll give them that, and I wouldn’t usually tell people this, but I actually really like Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”

“Dude, you have to stop singing,” pleaded Joey.

“Well, I will now,” promised Quentin, “Sorry—didn’t know I was spoiling the song. I thought everybody’d heard it.”

“That’s not really the problem!” whispered Joey.

“It’s—that’s cool,” decided Quentin, not listening at all. He looked off at nothing and then back at Joey, smiled, and slung an arm over his shoulder. “I like people who want to hear songs for real the first time they hear it—man, music’s so fucking cool. I have a record player back home—there’s just nothing like hearing a vinyl for the first time. Really! It’s like, magical what a difference it makes! I wish I could show you—”

Joey pulled Quentin’s arm back from over his shoulder and moved back a half-step. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“W…” Quentin looked at his arm, and then Joey in confusion. “It’s a friendly gesture,” he offered. “You were nicer than I thought, and we were talking about music, so—”

“—Yeah, we’re not friends,” said Joey, crossing his arms and feeling a way intenser reaction to this than he’d expected. His heart was thudding. Why the hell did you just blow up at him? He doesn’t even know what he’s doing.

“… I know,” said Quentin, drawing back his arm slowly and smile fading, looking kind of genuinely hurt for a second, “I said ‘friendly’ gesture, not a friend one. Like. When you meet a nice classmate and you’re hanging out the first time. So people can tell you don’t want to stab them in the back.”

“What?” said Joey.

“Yeah well, maybe not at school,” said Quentin, following his own logic path, “But you know. Here people are…harder to be sure—because half of them are always trying to kill you. Well. If you’re one of us.”

I guess, thought Joey, saying nothing.

“You know,” said Quentin, glancing up at him and smiling again, earlier hurt forgotten, “I’m really relieved, actually. I thought when you showed up, I was gonna have to fight you off with my medkit and probably get killed again.”

“Does every killer you’ve ever met out here try to kill you, even though we’re not supposed to outside trials?” asked Joey, genuinely surprised, and un-crossing his arms.

“No,” said Quentin, thinking about that, “But I figured you would. You hate me.”

“What?” said Joey, taken aback, “No I don’t. Why would you think that?”

“W…because you always kill me,” said Quentin, confused, working hard to find the right answers through the fog in his head.

“Don’t all of us?” said Joey, almost insulted. I’m not worse than anyone else! I’m probably one of the nicer killers! I’m not super cruel, or—

“Yeah, I mean, none of you are really merciful or anything, you’re all kind of monsters,” answered Quentin very serious and sincerely, “But most of you let the last one go at least sometimes. All of Legion does. But you’ve never let me take the hatch. Julie lets me take hatch sometimes if I did well in the trial and she’s in a good mood. Susie lets me take it. Even Frank’s let me go before if I’m the last one. But you never have. Not even one time out of so many trials, so you must really hate me. I’ve never known why you do. …Did I do something? That I just don’t…remember? If I did something really bad to you to make you hate me, I’m sorry.”

“I—” Joey stared at him, kind of bowled over by a feeling it took him a second to realize was a mixture of distress and horror. “No. No, you—I don’t hate you—I. I do that because you’re so easy to catch,” he tried to explain, stepping a little closer. Quentin watched him take the step and didn’t back up, but he wasn’t looking at him like he had been before anymore either. Not at all. “That’s all. You come back in at the end in trials if anybody else is still in there—always, no matter how stupid it is, or how obviously it’s a trap. Even if you know you’ve got no chance of saving them, you’ll try. So when you’re there, even if I have a really bad trial, and no sacrifices at all by the time the gates are up, I always know I can get at least two kills if I can just manage to down even one person before you’re all out, because you’ll always come back for anybody I get, no matter how suicidal it is, and then I’ll be okay. Free kill. It’s like a safety net. I can always count on you to try to come sacrifice yourself to save someone, and I pretty much always get both of you, too. I don’t kill you all the time because I hate you, I just do it because it’s…easy.”

He lost steam on the last word, thinking for the first moment for real about what he was saying.

Even with the haze of drugs in his system, Quentin was working hard to listen, glassy eyes fixed on his, and Joey could tell that he’d heard it all and understood what he’d said, but the guy didn’t say anything at all. Just looked at him in silence. Looking kind of sad, or wounded, or some other emotion Joey didn’t even know the name of that was hurt and sad and lonely and a lot of other quiet, painful stuff all at the same time, and he just held Joey’s gaze with that emotion in his eyes and said nothing. Just looked at him.

Fuck. Fuck! I—

After a few long seconds, Quentin looked slowly away and nodded.

What did I say? I—shit. I. Joey had thought it would make him feel better—why the fuck did you think that? Fuck! Idiot! He wanted to say he was sorry, but there was no way he could. He didn’t even know if it was true. It—it was just practical, killing him. Joey was alright, but he wasn’t the best at hunts, and sometimes shit went south in trials. He liked getting Quentin in his trials, because that always made them easier. Even a worst-case scenario was pretty much always gonna be a 2-kill for him. But he-

“I’m gonna go back to searching,” said Quentin very quietly, finally glancing his way again for a moment, but he was barely looking at him anymore, “You can go back to tagging now. I’ll be quiet. …Thanks for…giving me a warning, instead of murdering me this time.”

“Quentin-“ started Joey as the survivor turned and began working towards the other end of the room unsteadily, using the back of a long bench for support, but he stopped, and let him go. What would he have said anyway? Joey looked at the ground for a second, not seeing the dirty carpet at all. Shit. Shit! Why-? I didn’t. It’s just—I-I don’t have a choice—I. Fuck! Why did I even follow him in here? Why did I talk to him at all! I should just go back, and finish up if I have time, and then get lost, or book if I hear him making noise again. If he wants to get found by the Doctor and tortured for a couple—

He stopped, mind flashing him images of a death he had been working hard to repress since the day it happened. That had been the first time Joey had ever died, and it had been awful. Usually he could just not think about it so much, and just be angry it had happened, but he was feeling electricity run up his backbone like a shiver, remembering the way that smelled, and burned. He had thought he knew what the sound of his own voice screaming sounded like before that, but he hadn’t. Not a real scream. He just hadn’t known how different the sound could be. Joey felt sick with the memory, seeing the Doctor’s grinning face in his head and shuddering involuntarily at the sight of it so close to his face in his mind’s eye, and then hating himself for doing that like a fucking coward—like the guy was better than him, or stronger, or anything. He’d just gotten lucky that last time—they were all strongest on their own turf. But, fuck. It—

Joey turned his head and looked for Quentin, and saw him easily, walking unsteadily towards the far end of the room. Something more off about the walk than before. He was moving…it was almost like he was nodding off on his feet or something. Quentin made it to the end of the bench, though, and behind a big secretarial area against the wall near it, and started to try and look through shelves, and Joey heard him start singing again, very quietly this time, words barely decipherable from where he was about fifteen feet off.

“…step outside. An angry voice and one who cried, ‘We'll give you…everything and more. The strain’s too much, can't take much…more.”

Oh come on, thought Joey desperately, You’re gonna go sing a sad song now? You’re doing this on purpose!

“…Oh I’ve…” Quentin stopped singing and took a couple deep breaths like he was short on it before he kept going again. “Oh, I've walked on water…run through fire. Can’t seem to…feel it. Anymore…”

Wait. Something was wrong.

“Can’t seem to feel it anymore,” whispered Quentin again, staring blankly at nothing, struggling to keep his eyes open. He looked down at his hands and held one of them up in confusion and tried to focus on it.

“Quentin?” asked Joey. He didn’t even glance up, just stayed staring at his hands. Joey didn’t think he was even aware he was still in the room with him anymore. Wait, were you sweating before? What the fuck? What was he looking at?

Quentin didn’t move at all. He just stayed standing there, breathing shakily, eyes fixed on his fingertips. Joey took two steps closer carefully and tried again.

“Quentin?”

He turned this time, surprised—no. Afraid. And found Joey, and his eyes—what the fuck? “Oh no,” whispered Joey. Gaping. Quentin’s pupils were so small he could barely see them at all, like they’d drowned in his huge blue eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever seen someone’s pupils that vanished. That was wrong—that was really, really wrong, especially from someone who was scared. Okay-okay—he was staring at his hands—why. Joey looked frantically and saw why immediately. His fingertips were blue.

Joey started to bolt forwards, and Quentin reacted with alarm, stumbling back from him and losing his balance immediately, falling against the back wall.

“S-Stay away from me!” managed Quentin frantically through desperate breathing Joey didn’t think had anything to do with fear. Joey didn’t stop. He vaulted the low wall sectioning off the secretarial area and landed inside it only a few feet back. Quentin tried to struggle up and get away from him, and collapsed halfway though the effort, arms giving out, and rolled onto his back and crawled back on his elbows instead, looking up at him with such intense panic and terror it was kind of sickening. It was like he wasn’t the same person he had been a minute ago at all.

Fuck—fuck—he’s really fucked up—this is really bad.

“Calm down,” tried Joey, starting to go towards him while holding up his hands, palm-out, “I’m just trying to help you.”

There wasn’t even a fraction of belief this time in the person opposite him. He just kept trying weakly and horribly to get away. “No you won’t!” he shot back desperately, pupils tiny pinpricks of black in vacant eyes as he tried to keep away from Joey without the ability to really do it anymore at all.

“I am—I am,” promised Joey, keeping his hands up, “Remember? We were just talking a minute ago—I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“You always do!” argued Quentin, hitting the side wall of the little secretarial area and, with nowhere else to go, desperately reaching blindly for a weapon and comping back with a pen leveled at him like a knife, “Don’t come near me!”

Fuck, he’s getting too loud! The Doctor’s gonna hear that! His impulse was to jump him and get a hand over his mouth to shut him the fuck up before it was too late—that pen wasn’t gonna do shit. But. But he could tell that was exactly what Quentin thought he was gonna do, and he had no fucking idea what morphine did to you if you overdosed, but what if he had a heart attack, and—

…and he’d just come back, wouldn’t he? Like he did any other time he died. So it wouldn’t really matter. Right? What was one more. What were any of the deaths. No, thought Joey, feeling overwhelmed and sick in a way he’d never felt before, remembering the one and only death he had experienced so far, No. What were all of them.

“Okay,” said Joey quietly, stopping about three feet from Quentin, crouched, hands still up. “Okay. I’m just trying to help. I know I’m a killer, but we met a few minutes ago, remember? We’re both in the Doctor’s realm, so we’ve got a kind of temporary alliance thing going. Both have to be quiet, or we’ll both get caught, and we’re both gonna die.”

The shaking teenager opposite him watched him in confusion, breathing raggedly, pen still leveled like he really thought that could protect him.

“W-what?” he asked, searching Joey’s face desperately, “I-I don’t—”

Right. Okay—okay maybe… He held up his right hand, and with his left, slowly pulled his mask off. Quentin stayed still, constricted pupils locked on his face, trying to find some sign of familiarity he wasn’t going to find, because he never had seen Joey’s face before, but at least it was a face.

“See?” said Joey calmingly, hand still up. “Remember me? Joey?”

“…Y-yeah,” said Quentin after a second, lowering the pen a little. He swallowed hard. God, he looked so bad. He couldn’t have been sweating for very long, but he’d sweated so much since it had started that he was soaked in it now, and disgusting. This is really, really bad.

“You need help,” said Joey, gesturing towards him, “Look at your fingers.”

Quentin did, and then looked confused and worried to find them blue again and shaking. “Sh-shit,” he managed. He looked up back up at Joey worriedly. “A-am I dying?”

“I-I don’t know,” said Joey, “You took morphine. I think you must have overdosed. Do you know if there’s a way to fix it? Do you—do you need to throw up or something?”

“Oh. Oh, that’s right,” said Quentin shakily, blinking, “I-I. No, I. I took it in a syringe. I can’t throw that up. It’s in my blood.”

“C-can I help you?” offered Joey, a horrible feeling in the pit of his gut. Fuck. Fuck—I’m gonna watch him die from an overdose. I don’t want to know what that looks like.

“I-I don’t. I don’t. I don’t….I don’t know,” said Quentin, voice deteriorating as he went, like he might cry.

Joey looked around, as if he might spot something that would miraculously help, but there was nothing—he wouldn’t have even known a cure if he’d seen one. He didn’t know what that was! He had no idea what to do.

Quentin was breathing more desperately now, and his arms went lax at his side, not fighting anymore at all. He looked up at Joey and he was scared. Really, really scared. “I,” he tried, struggling to talk through shallow, frantic breathing, “I can’t breathe right. I’m-I’m choking. I can’t. I can’t breathe. And. And I can barely see you at all.” He teared up, and Joey felt sick. “With either eye. Not just my left one. I’m-I’m…”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” promised Joey, moving close to him and putting his hands on his shoulders. He didn’t shudder or try to pull away, just kept trying desperately to breathe, and when he looked back at Joey, he was looking at him like a friend, and that just made everything so much more awful, and somehow he was glad for it at the same time as if felt like a knife in his gut. “You’re gonna be fine.”

Quentin shook his head.

“You don’t know anything about what to do?” asked Joey, desperate for the answer to change.

“I…” Quentin swallowed hard, thinking. “I’ve. W-we don’t ever get painkillers. It’s. It’s supposed to come with an antidote, m-morphine, in case you do what I did, b-but I don’t remember any when I got it.”

“Okay! Okay—Where did you get it?” asked Joey.

Quentin tried to point to something, and when he saw that his arm was shaking too badly to obey him, he said, “There’s a—another. Nother room. I…”

“The one I found you in first?” asked Joey.

Quentin shook his head.

Fuck! “Which one? What did it look like?” pressed Joey.

“…A hospital room,” said Quentin in a whisper, eyes filling up. Which had to mean he was too out of it to think right and remember, but still there enough to know that wouldn’t be enough for Joey to ever find it, and failing to remember meant there was no way he could be saved. Which was so fucking cruel.

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” tried Joey, taking his hand and closing his fingers around it, “Maybe it’s not a fatal dose.”

Quentin looked up at him for a few seconds, struggling and sick and shaking, and then looked slowly away at nothing past the floor. “…What does it matter,” he whispered, expression changing. Despairing. He grimaced then and choked back a sound of pain, wincing and pressing an arm to his stomach, and then looked up at Joey again with something between hope and desperation in his eyes. “Y-you have a knife?”

“Yeah,” said Joey, reaching for it, ready to try anything.

Quentin watched him for a second, breathing shakily, eyes becoming increasingly glossy and wincing at pain that hadn’t got bad enough yet that he had to vocalize it, then choked out, “Kill me?”

“What?” asked Joey, horrified, drawing the knife back like he thought Quentin would reach out and snatch it from him to do it himself.

“It. Please,” Quentin managed. So fucked up and out of it and lost. “It hurts so much. It’s getting worse. I. I can’t…I can’t see anything. It’s all blurry. I can’t breathe. I-“ He looked up and took a second to find Joey’s eyes, then held them, fingers digging into the hand Joey had given him to hold. “I’ve died before, but I. I don’t even feel like me. It’s all…It’s all wrong. I don’t—I don’t like feeling like this. I don’t wanna die like this. Please.”

“I-I. I can’t,” whispered Joey, sickened.

“Why not?” asked Quentin brokenly, “You have. But you—?” He looked so hurt and betrayed and hopeless, and Joey felt his grip on his hand slacken. “You won’t? The one time I. I want to…” He started breathing horribly then, like he couldn’t get his body to do it at all, and looked panicked, and started gasping, and then as fast as that had started, he was suddenly barely breathing at all, chest refusing to rise and fall like his brain was only getting the signal to breathe on a delay, picking up one-tenth of the signals he was trying to give it. It would be nothing for several seconds, and then a ragged shallow gasp, and he could see him trying to breathe through all of it, trying so fucking hard, and failing.

“Fuck! Fuck—I want to help!—Isn’t there something I can do?” Joey pleaded, grabbing his hand and trying to think, but Quentin couldn’t answer him anymore. His skin was changing color, and he was shuddering, struggling to keep his eyes open. FUCK! Fuck! Isn’t there something I can do? Anything? He was fine a minute ago! What the fuck!

Joey felt the fingers on the hand he was grabbing close around his, and looked down to see Quentin clutching it weakly. He looked at Quentin’s face and for a second they met eyes and the other guy looked so out of it he was barely there at all, but he was there enough—enough to be aware how wrong it was, and to be terrified.

“No-no, come on,” said Joey frantically, “You said there’s medicine to fix it—right? Just tell me what it’s called! I can—”

Wait! Wait—when he walked in the room—the first time he saw him today—Quentin had been looking for a bottle he was already holding, right? Maybe. No—but that was a pill bottle. No way it’s what he needs. Fuck! No—no wait, but—but he is remembering badly. And maybe if he’s remembering badly. He’s scavenging, right? H-he could have taken it—he would, right? He doesn’t think so, but he f-forgot the bottle, and he forgot me! It has to be there, right? He said he didn’t even check to see what he was taking was, because there’s only ever two kinds of drugs in syringes he finds here, and he keeps both, so it has to be there it has to be, right? He would keep it! Right? thought Joey desperately.

Moving urgently fast, he tore his hand away from Quentin and shot the two-feet over to where he’d left the medkit on one of the shelves in the secretarial area beside them. He felt him try to hang on to his hand when he ripped it away, and thought he tried to say something, but there was no time—he—

“Hang on, hang on,” called Joey without looking, ripping the case open, “I think—” Fuck—fuck. Syringes, pill bottle, gauze, band-aids, thread, thread, fuck! –there—package—no—bandaids again—shit! It would be near the top, it!

Desperate, he snatched the same container Quentin had taken the used syringe he’d given him earlier from, hoping for a miracle, and it had weight to it. Weight he thought might be beyond just the empty syringe Quentin had put back in there, and— Fuck! Yes! There! The top was ripped open, where he’d gotten the syringe out, but there was a partition about 2/3rds of the way though the case, and the last third was still sealed, and Joey ripped it open with a vengeance and snatched up the little syringe waiting inside—there—on the label. ‘Naloxone. 2mg.’ Fuck! Is that the right drug? He had no idea, but it had to be, right? What else would have been in there? There were no instructions on the stupid fucking box or the label or in the container at all, but it had to be, it had to. It is—I know it is.

“Okay,” said Joey, hurrying above Quentin again, ripping the cover off the needle tip and trying to figure out where the fuck to inject him. F-fuck, a vein, right? That’s where doctors do it—in your arm, right? Kinda by your elbow, or up by your wrist? He couldn’t see a fucking visible vein that wasn’t tiny in his wrist, so he grabbed Quentin’s left arm and tugged it straight and readied the needle, eyes on the thick blue vein there on the inside of his elbow, praying to God that he’d do this right. Not too deep not too shallow fuck fuck fuck come on, you can do it.

Below him, Quentin’s skin had gotten tinged with purple and blue, and he was choking but too weak not to be doing it frantically anymore, just weakly, and it was like watching someone drown, except it was so much fucking worse, because he couldn’t just pull him out of the water—there was no water—there was air, and he just couldn’t make his body take it. He was soaked in sweat and looking at Joey with pinpoint pupils and glossy eyes, and he tried to say something, but Joey couldn’t tell what it had been, only how distressed it was making him that he couldn’t.

“It’s okay,” promised Joey, sliding the needle slowly into his arm and trying to force his own hands to quit shaking, “I got the drug—you’re gonna be fine.” He pressed down on the plunger, and watched the liquid go in, desperately hoping for a miracle.

Beside him, Quentin stopped breathing.

Joey didn’t register it at first, because he’d been struggling so hard, and he was focused on getting in all of the drug, but when the tenth breath that should have finally gone through and given the teenager a gasp of air didn’t come, and then didn’t come on an eleventh, a twelfth, a thirteenth beat, Joey felt it. He turned his head and stared at Quentin in frozen shock, almost as still as the body beneath him had suddenly gone.

“No,” said Joey quietly, not ready to believe it, watching, waiting for him to breathe again. Fuck. What if it was. What if that’s another pain killer? What if he could have made it through that if I’d just helped him and done nothing. Fuck! I thought—I.

Slowly, he pulled the needle back out of his arm, feeling sick, eyes still on Quentin’s face, and then there was a motion—a—he hadn’t been looking, but he thought his hand had twitched. Wait—

“Are you not dead?” asked Joey desperately, feeling a tiny spark of hope. The body didn’t respond. But he— “No! No way! Fuck it!  I did everything right! I saved you!” argued Joey to the form beneath him he refused to believe was anything but unconscious, “You’re not dead!”

He’s just not breathing! If the drug works, it probably takes it a minute—I can keep him breathing for a minute. Fuck you! You’re not dying now—not after all of that! Come on!

Joey shoved Quentin’s jacket and necklace aside, wincing at the fresh claw marks still there, placed his palms over each other in the center of his chest like he’d learned in highschool, and started compressions.

“Come on come on come on,” he whispered, keeping time to a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, all the way up to 30. He hit thirty, moved an inch to the right, tipped back Quentin’s head and held his nose, then breathed into his mouth twice. Come on come on. Again. Back—1 through thirty. Mouth open, breathe for him, again. Again. He hit 120 and kept going. Again. 27, 28, 29, 30—breathe. Head back, mouth open, nose closed. Breathe. Take a deep breath, blow in. Breathe for him. Th—

He was halfway to ramming the full force of his palms against the guy’s ribcage, already mentally ticking off 1 in his head again, when he saw it was moving shakily up to meet him, and he stopped, staring. The chest lowered weakly, and rose again, and he looked over at Quentin’s face and saw the tiniest mist in the cold air of Lerry’s Memorial Institute as he exhaled.

Joey fell back onto the floor and sat still, watching, a huge smile spreading slowly across his face, and then he laughed, overcome with relief. He looked at Quentin’s still features and smiled at him. “You scared the shit out of me.”

For a few seconds, Quentin just kept breathing, and then he coughed weakly and groaned, and slowly opened his eyes to little cracks and blinked weakly, trying to make out the ceiling above.

“…Ow,” whispered Quentin to no one and nothing, still out of it.

Joey grinned.

“Hi.”

Quentin heard him this time, blinked again, and slowly turned his head and looked over at Joey. For a few seconds he just squinted, no recognition or emotion attached at all, no familiarity, or fear, or gladness, or hate, just trying to figure out who he was. Then he said, “…Lee.g…J..Joey…?”

“Yeah,” said Joey, smiling at him.

“Did you kick me?” asked Quentin hoarsely.

“What?” asked Joey, trying not to laugh because of the absurdity of that question to him.

“My ribs feel like shit,” groaned Quentin, turning his head and looking back up at the ceiling again.

“Yeah, well, you quit breathing,” said Joey, proud of himself, “Before the antidote kicked in. I had to give you CPR. It’s better to push too hard than too soft if you’re trying to get someone to breathe. Sorry it hurts—I don’t think I broke anything though.”

“…What?” asked Quentin, turning his head to look at him again.

Joey grinned and opened his mouth to echo himself, and then stopped, a sinking feeling stabbing him in the chest all of a sudden. Oh, Joey, you fucked up here. You should not have done this. This was bad.

What the fuck was he doing? And why? Why—I mean—okay, sure, they were supposed to not kill a survivor outside of a trial. Leaving him alone was fine, shutting him up so the Doctor wouldn’t come—totally normal. M-maybe even trying to warn him off—after all—they weren’t supposed to be friends, but like, that didn’t mean he had to like watching them die. Didn’t have to…to not let a guy so fucked up he didn’t even realize he was high know he was going to get electrocuted to death really slowly for making so much noise, right? Yeah. Yeah—that—that was fine. Anybody might have done that. But. But this? He’d been about to die, hadn’t he? Probably? He’d been unconscious, so if he’d just done nothing, Quentin would have just ended up dead on the floor here and gone back to his campfire again without his meager supply of medical shit he’d collected so far, and start over. No harm done. He hadn’t even been—been like, saving him from pain. The painful part had been over. He’d been out. Why did you do this? Why not let him die this time? What did it matter?

Right. …Right, Quentin had. He’d said that too, hadn’t he. Asked what it would matter if he died one more time.

Shit. … Shit! Was it—was it always like that, for—for all of them? He couldn’t…couldn’t imagine watching Frank get ripped up by a chainsaw, day after day—his best friend? While he—he couldn’t do anything, or knew he was about to be next? Trial after trial after trial? Could something like that happen so many times it didn’t even matter anymore? Could you get used to that? And if so, then why? Why do you always come back for the people I catch in trials, if it doesn’t matter if I get them one more time anyway? If death is just—just fucking nothing anymore. God, it couldn’t be nothing anymore, could it? He was scared of it, and he’d died—only once, but. But.

But you were too, thought Joey desperately, remembering the terror in the other teen’s face when he’d been choking to death. You were scared. You were so scared you wanted me to mercy kill you, because it would be quicker, even though you were scared of me killing you at all a few minutes ago. So it has to matter to you, doesn’t it?

But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it couldn’t. And he was suddenly, immensely, deeply afraid of that. Not all the deaths themselves. Joey felt like…like those could only matter. He’d only been killed one time so far, but he didn’t think he’d ever have be able to get used to the way that had felt—there were just some things in life you couldn’t—like getting punched. It didn’t matter if people fought you a lot, or you got picked on and beat up every day at school—maybe you got used to the idea of bullying, but you never got used to the way a fist stung against cheekbone or felt rammed into your gut. You just didn’t. Other things too… But. But maybe this didn’t—hadn’t—not at all. Maybe it couldn’t anymore. Maybe if you died so much, got cut down and carved up and electrocuted and drugged and burned and eaten and ripped to shreds one too many times, it stopped mattering at all if there was ever a time that you didn’t. Because why would it? Death would just be back for you the next hour. So it. It probably hadn’t even done anything at all. Except fucking made him all confused and angry and—fuck! He didn’t even know how he felt except bad. How could it not matter, he thought desperately, still saying nothing, and watching a semi-conscious guy his age who might have been a classmate or a friend or anything at all in another life blink back at him in confusion, still waiting for an answer he no longer knew how to give. How could it not matter that I saved you! It should! It should…

But fuck. It didn’t. And he got that now.

I never should have done this, thought Joey, feeling a little nauseous suddenly and like the room was swaying around him, I didn’t do anything at all for you, and I fucked up my head doing it. I should have just kept walking and let what happened happen. I should never have talked to you at all.

“Are you okay?” asked Quentin. He looked concerned now. Of all the possible stupid things. Concerned. Voice all cracked and dry and weak and scratchy from choking to death, and he was asking Joey if he was okay.

When you think I hate you, thought Joey hopelessly, I didn’t even think I was one of the mean ones, but I’ve been making you miserable for months, and didn’t even see it, because I didn’t have to care or to even know. I could just do anything I wanted, no repercussions, unless I fucked up killing people too much. What the fuck. And.

“What happened?” asked Quentin. Slightly more awake now. Still out of it, but pupils slightly larger than the tiny specks they’d been before, and struggling to focus on his expression. He tried to push himself up onto his elbows and grimaced and stopped only partway there and looked over at Joey again.

“You almost died,” said Joey barely audibly, because he couldn’t keep not answering him at all, and there was nothing else he knew to say.

Quentin looked confused by that, and thought for a second, looking at nothing, brow ridiculously furrowed. “…morphine?” he asked after a moment, glancing up at Joey very unsure.

“Yeah,” answered Joey, no energy in the word.

The survivor thought for another moment, trying to pick up pieces in his head, Joey thought, then met his gaze again. “…You found the antidote?”

“Nah,” said Joey quietly, not looking at his face, “It just wore off.”

For a second, Quentin was quiet. “But…you said you did,” he said after a moment, “You said you…gave me CPR.”

Joey stared at him, feeling cornered. Fuck—I thought you didn’t hear that all the way. Quentin was watching him in unfocused confusion. What am I supposed to say?

He didn’t know, so he didn’t say anything, and Quentin glanced at the ground around him after a few seconds with no response, and saw the syringe and the package where Joey had left it, and picked up the empty needle and shakily brought it towards his face to read the label. “Nal…Naloxone—you did,” said Quentin, glancing back at him.

Joey shrugged. For a moment, they just stared at each other in complete silence, Quentin still only half propped up, Joey maybe a half foot back, sitting above him on the ground. Joey didn’t really know what either of them was waiting for, but he was afraid to be the first one to speak, or move, so he didn’t.

“…Thank you,” said Quentin finally, and he smiled at him. Like he meant it. And Joey knew it was really the drugs that were still in there that meant it, and not the teenager at all, but the guy thought he meant it so much that it was hard not to smile back, and so he did for just a second before he could stop himself.

Quentin looked at the ground for a second then, blinking slowly, breathing more regularly now, but eyes still glassy and movements irregular and off, and Joey tried to guess from a distance how high he still was. Not dying at least. His skin isn’t blue anymore, so. That’s the big one. That and uh, breathing.

“Why did you do that?” asked Quentin, looking back up. Just curious. No accusation or suspicion, or anything in the tone but the desire to know. “-Save me?”

“…I don’t know,” said Joey quietly, because he didn’t, and he knew that another fifteen seconds of thinking before he answered later, he still wasn’t going to. And he didn’t want to lie. Not here, not to that question.

Quentin tilted his head and watched him for a few seconds curiously, and then laid back down on the dirty floor and smiled at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Well, thanks. I don’t remember all of it, but that seems really good of you,” he offered.

Joey didn’t say anything.

After a second, Quentin shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, then started mumbling something to himself, hummed a few bars of one of the songs he’d been singing earlier under his breath, and then sat up. He made it this time too, still a little unsteady, and he turned and glanced over at Joey and offered him a friendly smile and said, “Thanks again. I think I can get up now if I go slow, so I’m gonna go ahead and try to get back to searching,” then grabbed the side of the desk by him and started to attempt to pull himself up.

“WHAT?” exploded Joey in barely hissed indignation, shooting halfway to his feet because he expected the other guy to collapse in about 2.4 seconds at most.

“Supplies,” said Quentin, who had made it up to one foot and one knee with the help of the desk, wobbled a little with an arm out, and then glanced back at him once he got his balance, “I should look for some more before I go back to the campfire.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” hissed Joey, losing it, “You—you fucking unbelievably stupid dumbass! No! You’re still high, you just almost died, you’re already making too much noise again, and you’re gonna get caught if you stay! –And you want to keep going? You’re fucking insane!”

“I am not,” replied Quentin kind of indignantly, “I’m okay—you gave me an antidote, so my head will clear up—is clearing, and I’ll be good to keep going.” He started trying to make it all the way to his feet with a lot of arm strength and effort because his legs weren’t super dependable right then.

“Why!” asked Joey, “What’s wrong with you! Why are you so set on killing yourself to get stupid medical supplies! They won’t even help you much anyway!”

Quentin stopped. He turned his head and looked at Joey and he had a look on his face like a friend of his had just smacked him and he didn’t even know why. Shit—I shouldn’t have—

“They do help,” said Quentin quietly, like he was trying to make it more true just by the way he was saying it.

Joey thought about saying nothing, because he was pretty sure he’d sort of hurt his feelings before, but the stupid fucking dumbass survivor was going to stick around and get himself killed, and then come out again the next day and the next, and for what? It just—It wasn’t worth it! He was wrong!

“They don’t,” said Joey, shaking his head, “Not enough. You’re risking your life out here all the time for no reason.” He picked up the medkit from the floor, and Quentin watched him in what was almost alarm, and tried to reach out and grab it back, and just about lost his balance without both arms propping him against the desk, and had to stop to keep himself standing. Joey held up the case, watching the kind of frantic look on the other teenager’s face as he watched him, obviously afraid he was going to chuck it across the room or something, or break it. Like people looked at you if you had their paper and were holding it up above a running sink at school. Like he was going to take this one stupid flimsy fucking piece of nothing the other guy had and break it for no reason. And you would care. That would hurt you—it’d be so easy. Why the fuck do you care? You shouldn’t! God it’s—it’s nothing!

“Joey, please, I—” asked Quentin, eyes still on the case.

“—It’s not worth it,” cut in Joey, shaking his head again, “It’s not gonna help you. Coming out here all the time? It’s a waste. None of this is gonna be enough to really matter.”

Quentin stared at him.

“Come on, Quentin, think!” said Joey, “What’s one more roll of thread gonna let you do? Stitch up your leg a little bit better so it’s fresh for the next beartrap? Extend how long it takes you to bleed to death? That’s nothing! It’s fucking nothing! You could have gotten caught by the Doctor out here and tortured to death—it’s not worth the risk!”

“—It is!” said Quentin.

“Why?” shot back Joey, desperate for him to reassess the situation and just fucking go home. “How is this possibly worth it?”

“…Because… I don’t have anything else I can do,” said Quentin. He didn’t look great. His expression was hurt, and his voice was kind of…broken, when he spoke. “Y-you don’t understand,” he tried, still looking from Joey to the case like the worst possible thing in the world would be for him to take that shitty little piece of metal and crush it under his foot, or hock it out a window into somewhere he would never be able to get it back. “We. We go into trials every day, and you—you can’t get used to that. To being hurt. To-to dying. And it’s not fair—it’s stacked so we can never win against you, even when we try—even if all of us try—not in a fight. We can only live if we run away, and make it out in time, and even on a day all of us have a great trial and all four make it out alive, there is never gonna be a day where there’s a trial where you don’t end up hurt. You can’t save anybody. You can’t. Can’t kill, or hurt, or punish any of the things hurting them. You can’t really escape, or go home, or even have time to recuperate and heal enough for that to actually mean something—it’s hell.” He looked up into Joey’s face and held his eyes kind of desperately. “It’s. It’s not much but suffering, not ever. So I—I always go back in, because I might be able to save somebody, even if it’s a trap, and I go out here to get meds, even though y-you’re right, they won’t ever do much—It’s cause I have to. I have to. I have to try. If I’ve got tape and gauze and a needle and thread, I can find somebody hurt in a trial, and tell them we’re gonna make it out together, and I can help them—I know it’s nothing—I know it is, but I. I can try. I can say that, and I can sew up a wound, and let them know they’re not alone, and if I’ve got good supplies, I can make that a little less painful—I can stitch it up faster, I can—I can go more even, so it hurts less. I can stop the bleeding a little faster. I can give somebody hope, maybe—maybe that at least. I have to.” He was struggling to talk, and the look in his eyes and the way he sounded choked up made Joey feel sick in a way he hadn’t known before. “I have to do that, at least, because it’s all I can. I go back, because it might work this time—I might save them, I c-I can’t do anything else. I’ll attack any killer I see, and I’ll try to make them pay, and try to stop them, try to be the one who dies instead, but it’s never enough. I have to—have to try though. Because the second I stop. … The second I stop, none of it’s gonna matter anymore. And I c—” He couldn’t for a second, and he looked away, and swallowed, and tried again. Tried to look at Joey again. Pleading with him for the little box of rusted nothing in his hand. “I can’t…keep going, once it doesn’t. I need it to. We all need it too. Fuck, it—it’s the only thing we even have left. We can’t run, we can’t hide, we can’t fight, or win, or rest, or go home—if we can’t even matter anymore, we’re just.” That was too much, and some of the tears he’d been choking back spilled over and he stopped, broken down and angry and hopeless and ashamed at not having stopped himself from that in front of Joey, and he looked away again, breathing shakily, trying to pull the emotion back inside where it was livable again.

Joey didn’t look at him, because he could see Quentin didn’t want him to, and he would have felt the same way if he’d been the one crying, so he slowly lowered his arm and looked at the medkit instead. These things always looked the same, pretty much. Basic objects. A few different sizes, and shapes, but with little variance between them. But this one was different. He’d painted over the little Medic + that was always on the outside of these, and put a red heart there instead. Like that might somehow fucking matter too.

“Here,” said Joey quietly, holding the case out.

Quentin looked over at him in surprise, and then took it shakily. Once he had it securely, he glanced back over at Joey and took an unsteady breath and then smiled at him again. Like all of that shit that had just been said and the side of it he was on had just been forgotten. “Thank you.”

“Are you sure you can… Are you sure that the morphine wore off enough you can get it done, though?” asked Joey.

Quentin nodded.

“—Look, I understand you need it to matter, and why you think you have to do this,” said Joey kind of desperately, and he actually did, probably not the same way, probably not really at all, not like Quentin, not like any of the survivors—probably he couldn’t, but he’d at least understood it barely enough that just minutes ago he’d thought almost some of the exact same things he’d just heard Quentin say, and God, the alternative was too fucked to really even understand, but… “—but it really doesn’t have to be today. You’re kind of hurt, you should go home. Try again tomorrow instead.”

“I’m doing much better,” promised Quentin, appreciating the sentiment and trying to reassure him, “I’m thinking fine now; I’m sure.”

“How sure?” asked Joey nervously, watching him test his footing and prepare to take a step on his own again, “You know it-it won’t help you to find more supplies if you get killed on the way back.”

“I know, but I think I’m okay,” said Quentin sincerely, glancing back at him. “The antidote must be working really well, because I don’t think I’m high anymore at all.”

“Really?” asked Joey.

“Yeah,” assured Quentin, “I feel fine now.” He took a step and immediately slammed face-first into the floor on top of his medkit with a surprised cry, and Joey winced at the impact.

“Yeah, uh, you sure about that?” asked Joey, trying not to find that funny just a little bit, and failing somehow in spite of everything. His legs hadn’t even held his weight long enough to buckle.

“Uh,” came Quentin’s muffled voice from the floor.

He stayed there for a second. Joey cocked his head and watched him.

“…If you’re high, while you’re high,” asked Quentin, voice still muffled. “how can one tell?”

Joey rolled his eyes and smiled, then walked over beside him and crouched down. “Hey Quentin?”

Quentin turned his head to the side so he could see him and blew some of his curly brown hair out of his face, then sighed. “Yeah?”

“You’re still really fuckin’ blitzed,” said Joey.

“…Fun,” said Quentin miserably. He pressed his face against the floor again. Joey tried not to smile.

For a moment, he let him just deal there on the gross Institute floor, then tried again. “So uh, how about this,” offered Joey, “We go ahead and get you out of here before the Doctor comes and kills us. Huh?”

“But I barely got anything. All I did was waste a bunch of fucking morphine,” came annoyed Quentin’s muffled floor reply.

“Well, some is better than nothing,” offered Joey.

Quentin made an incredibly unhappy sound.

Joey considered that, thinking hard. “…Okay. What about this. We go back now, and on the way, anything good you see in a cabinet we pass or something, I’ll run and snag for you. Does that seem fair enough?”

“…Really?” asked Quentin, turning his head to see him again.

Joey nodded.

Quentin squinted at him for a second. “Why are you being so nice to me today? It’s weird. I mean. I. I appreciate it, and I don’t know if it’s normal me thinking normally doing it, or the morphine making me paranoid, but I’m also kind of…I don’t know. Expecting you to be pulling some big trick to make me think we were friends before you stab me in the back.”

“What?” said Joey, too many points in that sentence to hit at once and mostly just stuck on the last one. Smiling at the ridiculousness of doing that to him right now. “No.”

“We are then?” said Quentin, propping himself up a little on an arm and giving him a hopeful look when he saw Joey had smiled.

“Are?” echoed Joey.

“Friends,” said Quentin.

It felt like being punched in the stomach. Joey felt himself starting to lose the smile, and was suddenly afraid for some reason of how this fucked up on morphine stranger his age would act if he saw the smile go, and tried to keep it instead. Feeling sick. You are lying now if you say yes. You’re a monster. Don’t do that—I know it’s complicated. I know we can’t stop. But you can’t tell him we’re friends it’s too fucked up—you can’t.

“Yeah,” said Joey, managing to keep his smile.

And Quentin believed it. He smiled back, in a way that, fucked up on morphine or not, was so much more real than Joey’s was, and said, “…Wow. Good. I-I hoped so. Huh. I never thought I’d say that to a…well, a killer. Are you coming over to our side?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” managed Joey, struggle to freeze his smile and keep it there. He offered Quentin an arm, desperate to change the subject to anything else. “Come on—let’s get going before we’re in trouble.

Quentin took the arm and Joey pulled him up. “You should,” continued Quentin, unfortunately not having been distracted into missing a single beat, “I mean—you’re…weirdly cool, and, good, and it’s not like you can keep killing people and, uh,” he gestured to himself and the arm Joey was supporting him with, “This kind of stuff too.”

“…Yeah,” said Joey. He put one of Quentin’s arms over his shoulder to more easily help support his weight.

“I’d—” Quentin started to offer.

“—And uh, maybe actually keep it down a little this time, dumbass?” Joey cut him off, trying to sound jokey, but desperate to stop whatever he’d been about to say, because none of this was fun. It was fucking unbearable. “You do remember there’s a sadistic serial killer somewhere in here, right?”

“You mean another one, right?” grinned Quentin.

“Thanks,” said Joey sarcastically, giving him a look and pretending to be miffed. Losing that and smiling at the rib in spite of himself too then, because it had been kinda funny. He’d really walked into that. “Okay, let’s get you back to the campfire,” said Joey, in position to be ready to help him walk and ready to bear pretty much all of Quentin’s weight now if he had to. They took a first step and started off together then, and it was pretty easy. Quentin was bearing some of his weight fine this time, it felt like—just couldn’t steer on his own. He flashed Quentin a teasing look, “And do you think maybe you could stop ripping me apart at least while I’m being your volunteer taxi service?”

“Wow,” joked Quentin, grinning at him, “I didn’t know you had such thin skin.”

“At least I have the common sense not to jab myself in it with every single drug I trip over,” shot back Joey with a half-suppressed smile, “Unlike a certain local maximum dumbass I know.”

“Owww,” said Quentin, not really hurt at all, “In my defense, every time until now that I’ve done that, it’s worked out really well for me.”

“You’re such a fucking dumbass, you know that, right?” said Joey, shaking his head and grinning, “You’re really not gonna take the two seconds out of your life you would need to read a label, and just play God with your ability to be alive like that, then defend it?”

“Okay, okay,” said Quentin, smiling back at him and starting to get a little bit goofy-high, “I should not have done that. I will be more careful now that I have to, apparently. And I’m sorry for hurting your feelings—it’s not totally true anyway; you’re not sadistic.”

“That partial redaction’s not as nice as you think it is,” said Joey, amused and trying not to grin as he glanced over at him.

“I mean, I feel like all things considered I should get to tell a couple kind of mean jokes at your expense,” said Quentin, “You have killed me before.”

Joey snorted. They made it back into the hall and Joey began retracing his own steps, because Lerry’s was kind of a fucking maze, and going out the way he’d come in like an hour ago was the surest way to not get lost. “Okay, fine—but put a hard limit on the number.”

“…Thirty?” offered Quentin after a second.

Wow, kind of a low-ball if you think about it. “Yeah, okay, thirty,” agreed Joey.

“Thirty,” echoed Quentin quietly as they went through the far end of the room he’d first found the guy in, “…I better think of some really good ones to use that on, then. …Thirty starting now, or am I at twenty-nine?”

“Thirty starting now,” said Joey, not caring either way, “Be easier to remember.”

Back in the room he’d not quite finished tagging, Joey found the center isle between the hospital beds and started down it. At his side, Quentin hummed quietly and turned his head slowly to watch their surroundings go by.

“This is where you were spraypainting?” asked Quentin.

“Yeah,” said Joey, kind of surprised he was lucid enough to notice, the way his voice sounded all out of it and he was still blinking at everything and smiling contentedly the whole time like he was hanging out pretty close to blissfully high.

“What where you making?” asked Quentin, studying one of the squiggly lines on a bed with great fascination as they passed, “A bunch of chaos?”

Joey snorted again, insulted. “No. It’s a picture.”

“Of what?” asked Quentin, looking around them at the completely unintelligible back smudges and lines on things, “It just looks likes you came in here and were mad.”

RUDE. Well. I guess he’s not wrong, but he’s just not looking at it right. “That’s because it’s an anamorphosis,” said Joey.

“A what?” asked Quentin, gaping at him. “An animorph?”

“No!” said Joey, “Dumbass! I said ‘anamorphosis’—it’s an anamorphic picture—only viewable as what it is from like, one specific angle.”

“Oh—a perspective art thing,” said Quentin, excited at getting that, “Can I see it?”

“W—see the picture?” asked Joey, stopping.

“Yeah! I want to see,” said Quentin with incredible interest.

Really? Nobody was ever excited to see shit like that. It was fun to make, and Joey was good at it, and the things never lost their charm for him, but most people, they saw one once, they’d seen them all, or something—he didn’t get it, admittedly, but it was true. For whatever reason, for most people, anamorphic art seemed to be something they lost interest for pretty fast. At least, any of the times he’d made it. But then, I guess he hasn’t seen his one. Joey glanced over his shoulder, trying to tell how far back he’d have to go to be in the right spot again to see it right, and Quentin started to too, and Joey saw him going for it and reached over and covered his eyes with a hand. “Stop!—Don’t do that! It’s cooler if you walk into view from the side than the back,” said Joey.

“Uh. Okay,” said Quentin, “I can shut my eyes on my own, though.”

Joey moved his hand, and Quentin obliged and kept his eyes closed. Joey squinted at him suspiciously. “Yeah, but are you gonna peek, though?”

“Pff—what am I, four?” asked Quentin indignantly, “I don’t want to spoil the art for me either.”

Satisfied, Joey turned them around and walked back, found the perspective point easily since he’d marked it on the floor earlier, and then took a step to the right. “Okay, open.”

Quentin did, and blinked, then squinted at the almost comprehensible shape he was just out of line with. “Oh—you weren’t kidding,” he said, kind of excited, “They—is it a face? It’s almost like one.”

“You’re close,” said Joey, moving to the left again and stopping them so that Quentin was dead center.

“…Whoa,” said Quentin. He stared at the skull with his still morphine-influenced over-glossy eyes and too-constricted pupils, trying through that fog to take it in. He watched it for several seconds, absorbing the lines and detail, and then leaned as far as he could to the right, and then back to the center again, snapping the image in and out of perfect alignment. He turned and gazed at Joey in excited wonder. “Holy crap—I knew it would be cool, but that’s amazing.”

Joey felt his face get hot and looked at the skull picture too, to be looking away from Quentin. It wasn’t bad, for sure—he liked it. A nice skull. He’d never gotten to do the speech bubble though. It wasn’t even finished.

“No, really,” insisted Quentin with conviction, taking that reaction to mean he didn’t believe him, “How do you do that?”

“Uh, the—perspective?” asked Joey. The other teen was looking back at him with huge eyes and so much interest he didn’t know what to do but answer. “Uhm. Well, you pick an area first, and visualize what you want, and you’ve gotta be able to remember that image, and then move the image in your head kind of 3D so you know how to paint it when you look at it from another angle—or—if you can’t do that, you can draw pictures, starting with how you want the end result to go, and work from there. It’s kind of mental math stuff, I guess, but once you’ve done it a bunch, you can mostly sight-read what you need for stuff unless it’s super complicated.”

“That’s…incredible,” said Quentin really sincerely, kind of gaping in wonder at the skull, and looking from it to him with big eyes, and even though the guy was high enough his speech was still a bit slurred, and probably he wouldn’t have been so impressed sober, it felt pretty nice, and Joey smiled. Quentin gazed at the skull for a couple long seconds. “Wow,” he whispered finally. He turned his head back to Joey. “Could you teach me?”

“T—what, to do that?” asked Joey, stunned.

“Yeah! I mean—I’d probably be really bad at it,” said Quentin quickly, probably morphine-induced oversharing a little bit while trying to get to his point, “I did art before, like drawing—drawing type art—uh—took some classes, in high school—I was never super good at it, but I haven’t done nothing—like with art. I could try. I could—I bet I could at least do a shape! Like a triangle. Or a cross, or a circle—or—or like your little smiley face on your pin,” he suggested, tapping the pin on the belt Joey had thrown over his shoulder, “I mean—if—if I could learn,” added Quentin, still talking at break-neck speed, “I don’t know how hard it is, and I haven’t even really used spraypaint before, but I’d like to. It’d be cool to-“ He glanced back at the skull again and smiled at it. “-make something. You know. Something good. If you think you could teach me.”

“Yeah,” said Joey, excited and happy at the prospect, “I could—” He stopped. Fuck. Stupid—you-

Quentin glanced over at him, curious about the sudden pause.

“Sorry. Thought I heard something,” lied Joey, trying to make his voice sound urgent, “Doctor. We better go quick. Stay quiet, okay?”

“Oh,” said Quentin, lowering his voice drastically, super out of it and probably not actually feeling the fear through all that morphine, but doing his best to look and act urgent too and giving Joey a fervent nod. “Okay.”

They kept going, winding quickly back through the room the way Joey had come originally, passing hospital beds and cracked floors, blinking fluorescent lights, on their last leg. Quentin stayed quiet through that room and the next, but Joey also started to have a harder and harder time keeping him upright. Mostly he would do fine walking, but every so often he would just kind of forget to use his legs, or trip over nothing, or something, and they’d both almost go down, and they actually were getting a little closer to the last place he’d heard the Doctor on his way in, so he didn’t want to end up crashing into something. Well, it’s not far, anyway. Joey glanced over, trying to tell how coherent the other guy was. He looked like he was having trouble not falling asleep now—kept kind of slow blinking, and nodding off, then jerking his head back up and looking around.

“Not doing so hot?” asked Joey quietly.

“Mmm? Oh,” said Quentin, “Uh. I don’t know. I’m just tired.”

“You look…more high than a few minutes ago. Uhm. Does the stuff I gave you wear off?” asked Joey.

“For morphine? Yeah,” said Quentin with a thoroughly unworried look on his face, smiling sleepily over at Joey as they went, “It uh—it blocks your head receptors from absorbing the opium, but once it stops, if the opium is still there,” he made what Joey could only guess had been meant to be some kind of gun firing motion with his free arm and a matching Pshooo sound with it. “It comes back.”

“…” Joey stared straight ahead, low-key panicking. Fuck. So. In fifteen minutes or something he’s just gonna start to die again? “Uh. Okay. How long does the antidote last—and the morphine?”

“I dunno,” said Quentin, thoroughly unworried, watching the room they were going through with interest. “Oh—hey—cabinet! Bottles on the top shelf.”

“Bottles of what?” asked Joey, “—Something that’ll help?”

“No—what?—‘help’? I mean, I guess they’ll help somebody. You said you’d get stuff,” said Quentin. He waited a second, but Joey still didn’t get it. “On the way back? If I—”

“—Right, right, right, right,” said Joey, “Yeah—okay.” This might help anyway. He got Quentin against a wall with a windowsill for him to lean on and let go. “Uhm—about the morphine. Is there anything other than naa…naaa-whatever-it-was that I gave you that would help a morphine overdose—something that’d last longer?”

“Uhhh, I guess,” said Quentin, thinking hard, “There’s activated charcoal.”

“There’s charcoal?” asked Joey in disbelief, turning his head to gape back at him.

“No—activated charcoal,” said Quentin, giving him a look, “It’s not the same thing.”

“Then why the fuck do they call it that?” said Joey, going over towards the cabinet to fulfil his promise and check for useful shit, apparently hoping to find whatever the fuck ‘activated charcoal’ was too now. “That’s just confusing. Because charcoal is already a word. What is it, then?”

“Uh. It’s a powder. It’s super porous, and it stops toxins by like, sucking them up in it like a sponge if you swallow some,” said Quentin, struggling to remember, “You make it by burning stuff at a really high temperature—”

“-Wait,” said Joey, whirling on him and incensed at the scientific community at large, “So it is charcoal?”

“Uh. No, it’s—it’s burned way hotter and—” started Quentin.

“—It’s just fucking superheated charcoal?” said Joey, “Superheated fucking barbeque, campfire, burned wood shit?”

“…I. …I guess it is,” said Quentin after a second as if the most mind-boggling realization was dawning. He stared at nothing, and then grinned and looked at Joey like his discovery was the funniest thing in the world.

“Then why’d you look at me like I was a dumbass when I asked if it was charcoal?” said Joey, as he opened the cabinet and took things out to check.

“Because I didn’t think about it,” said Quentin, “I just. But you’re right. It’s just fucking superheated charcoal. I can’t believe it.”

Joey watched him for a second and then smiled too at the mind-blown look on the other dude’s face.

“Medical science in the modern era sure has advanced into wondrous new territory, huh?” said Quentin, grinning at him.

Joey snorted.

“Anything good in there?” asked Quentin, indicating the supplies.

“Uh. Package of medical tape, some old scissors, a bandage that’s super gross and I’m not bringing over to you, and three bottles. We got Aspirin,” said Joey, holding up a fairly large bottle, and he saw Quentin’s face light up and instantly felt guilty as shit because he hadn’t been trying to lead him on in the way he’d phrased the sentence he was saying but he super had, “—which is empty,” he added quickly, trying to indicate he was sorry about that in his tone.

The happy look on Quentin’s face instantly became a disappointed, tired one instead. “Bastard. I swear to God, the Entity does that shit all the time just for fun. Fucking hate finding empty bottles of good stuff.”

“Well—the other two have stuff in them,” said Joey hopefully.

“What are they?” asked Quentin.

“C… Cipro…floxacin?” tried Joey, “It’s a little bottle, and it’s only got two pills left in there, but it’s not empty.”

“Huh. I don’t know what that is,” said Quentin.

“You don’t know?” asked Joey, genuinely taken aback.

“Hey,” said Quentin, “I’m trying my best—I’m not a real doctor or anything. I’m figuring this out as I go. But yeah, I’ll take that—maybe Adam will know what it is.”

“Alright,” said Joey, filing that information away, “The last one says on the bottle that it’s burn ointment. It’s pretty full.”

“Oh—hey—that one’s actually a pretty good score,” said Quentin, cheered up a little, “Burns aren’t the most common wound, but it’s good to have just in case. I’ve only found one of those a few times. Usually if we need something like that, we just have to hope Claudette can make some with whatever plants she has on hand.”

“Cool,” said Joey, walking back over. “Give me the medkit.”

Quentin immediately looked concerned, and did not. “Why?”

“Look I’m—not gonna take it again,” promised Joey, “I’m just gonna put this stuff inside. You try to do it, and you’re gonna drop shit and make noise.”

Finding that believable, Quentin relaxed and handed him the medkit. Joey took it and set it open on the back of a bench and put stuff inside haphazardly, looking for the little box from before again. He found it immediately and picked it up, checking for anything he might have missed, like the package of activated charcoal he was hoping to miraculously find. Shit. Nothing this time.

He became suddenly aware of another presence very much in his personal space and looked to the left to see Quentin had leaned waaay over the kit from the other side and brought his head right night to Joey’s to try to see in too.

“What are you looking for?” asked Quentin turning his head to look over at him, and suddenly like half an inch from his face.

“Nothing!” said Joey on absolutely nothing but panic impulse, almost smacking his head on the windowsill behind him with the speed he jerked backwards away from Quentin and back into his own personal space again. His heartbeat was running a mile a minute. Oh—geeze, fuck—what? He—the. What had just-? He tried to swallow. Still over the medkit Quentin was watching him with surprise. “Uh—activated charcoal, I guess,” corrected Joey, regaining his ability to think and feeling his heartbeat calming down again.

Quentin blinked at him, trying to process that through the fog in his brain. How the fuck were his eyes so big?

“Oh. Right—you were asking about it,” said Quentin, “I don’t have any.”

…fuck.

There was just nothing, then. He would die anyway, and he’d have to do it twice now, because Joey had tried to help. Fuck. …I…

“Do you need some?” asked Quentin, seeing the distress on his face and looking confused and kind of worried about him.

You are so fucking stupid on morphine bro—like I appreciate it but you’re like the dumbest piece of shit when you’re high—you’re gonna get killed if I look in the other direction for six fucking seconds. How the fuck did this happen to me? Why was he so upset? “Yeah. I kinda do,” answered Joey, subdued.

“Well, I can get you some if you really need it,” said Quentin with concern.

“Wait, really?” asked Joey, hope blossoming again.

“Yeah—Adam has some,” said Quentin, nodding.

Ad—oh—the—okay. “You mean back at your campfire?” checked Joey.

Quentin nodded. “I’m sure he’d let you have some, though. If you need it.” He looked like he really thought that, too. Joey wondered if Adam would, if he’d needed it. If having done them one good turn would be enough for that kind of small favor. If Quentin would have even offered if he’d really been aware enough in there to know what was going on.

…Probably not.

Didn’t matter though. If he got fucked up on morphine again when stuff wore off because the antidote hadn’t been enough, or the overdose had just been too high for it, then his friends would be smart enough to give him the medicine he needed. So long as he got him back to the campfire, he’d be fine.

“Nah—I don’t need it,” said Joey, “I was just curious what it looked like.” That was the beset fucking lie you could come up with??

“Oh,” said Quentin, buying it completely. He smiled at him. “I can show you sometime.”

Joey closed the medkit and got his arm around Quentin again so they could keep moving.

“I could teach you how to patch up wounds too,” offered Quentin as they started off again, “Trade you, for lessons doing spraypaint.”

“Yeah,” said Joey, looking straight ahead, “That sounds nice.”

They were getting close to the edge of Lerry’s now—almost out of the danger zone at least—fucking blessing. Though then he’d have to navigate the fog all the way to the campfire. Or. However close to the campfire he could get. He hadn’t actually tried before. He had no idea how close he would be able to go. I wonder if I actually could go all the way up there? Nah, that was stupid, though. It had been a fun idea, but no way the Entity would make it so killers could get withing range to take a shot at survivors outside trials in their home base at all. And. Well. I am a killer. And I still will be in an hour, after I’ve dropped him off. ...

And then forever after that.

“There.”

Joey had been walking on auto pilot, but he came back out of his head at the sound of Quentin’s voice and glanced where he was pointing. “What?”

“Supplies,” said Quentin, pointing at the desk by the entry way they were coming up on.

Joey looked at the desk. “…Where?”

“There!” said Quentin. “By the—phone thing.”

There was nothing on the desk except the old phone and a Styrofoam cup and some old pens. “…The coffee cup??” asked Joey.

“No. What?” said Quentin, “The—needle….and the—the bottle…it’s…”

Uh. “There’s nothing on that desk but a coffee cup and some pens, man,” said Joey.

“Really?” asked Quentin, staring intently at the desk.

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure,” said Joey.

“No. But…I saw them. They were just there,” said Quentin, huge eyes fixed on the desk. “I know they were. I just saw them. They.” He looked up at Joey. “I saw it—I did. I’m so sure!”

“I mean…?” said Joey, relenting a little and walking them closer. Yup. Definitely nothing there. Beside him, Quentin turned his head from left to right, scanning the whole desk with intense, almost frantic scrutiny.

“...Where did they go?” he asked Joey with 100% sincerity, like the most insane thing in the world had just happened and some medical supplies had walked off.

“Okay,” said Joey, turning them back around and making a B-line for the exit, “That’s enough hanging out at Lerry’s for you. Hallucinating’s never a good sign. Its’s time to go.”

“No!” said Quentin quickly, “But I barely got anything on the way back! I-I forgot and I kept almost falling asleep, and talking to you, and not looking.”

“We’re not going back in,” said Joey, pausing in the doorway because Quentin had started trying to go back the other was and was pulling against him and suddenly making it really hard to walk.

“But I can’t go back with nothing,” pleaded Quentin, “I wanted to do a good job.”

“You got some stuff and you didn’t die—that’s a pretty good job,” contended Joey. That argument did not seem to do it for Quentin, who kept weakly struggling to tug Joey back into the terrifying old institute with its long hallways and flickering lights and horrifying owner somewhere deep in the bowels, but he was making about as much headway in that as he would have trying to drag a cement support column. God damn it, you have the tenacity of a bulldog, you know that! You’re really not gonna stop trying, are you? He was certainly showing no signs, despite the impossibility and complete lack of success he was having. Joey sighed. Okay, if he won’t stop, then it’s either find a way to get him what he wants so he’ll leave, or just pick him up and drag him off fighting, I guess. And Joey was pretty sure which of those two options he definitely did and did not want to do.

“—Okay, look. What would be a good enough find to leave?”

Quentin paused in his efforts to get Joey to move and looked at him hopefully. “Uh. I don’t know. Pain medication, a couple hemorrhagics, or some gel dressings? Something we don’t get much.”

Joey considered that, giving the institute past Quentin a dubious look, and then shook his head. “That would take forever.”

“Please?” said Quentin, looking at him with his huge fucking eyes. God, and he was giving him the world’s saddest, most sympathy inducing face too. How the hell was he doing that so well! That look was miserable! It made Joey want to die—he felt like he’d just accidentally kicked a dog—t-the only thing that had ever been able to give him a look as critically effective at pleading as this before had been a dog! This was pressure levels on par with his pet lab putting his head in his lap while he munched on a burger and somehow conveying in its big sad eyes the message that it hadn’t eaten in four years and if he would please just pass some of that burger on down here, even just a crumb, it might live and be eternally grateful, and would cry and sadly starve miserably to death in his lap if he didn’t.

Beside him Quentin was still just standing there, waiting for a response and looking at him like his heart was gonna be crushed to dust if Joey didn’t say yes. Fuck—come on! That’s not fair! How the fuck are your eyes so big? We can’t go back into Lerry’s—I’m not trying to be an asshole!

“You don’t understand,” said Quentin when Joey stayed quiet, fighting an intense internal battle to not be swayed by the most pitiful puppydog eyes he’d ever seen, “I need this stuff to be able to help people. It’s important.”

“—No, I get it,” managed Joey, clearing his throat and looking away because he finally couldn’t take the face any longer, “You explained it before.” He risked a glance back over again after a second, and Quentin still had the exact same expression and it was like getting suckerpunched in the ribcage by a bowling ball. FUCK! “Okay, okay—uh,” said Joey desperately, turning back to him, “Look. Uh.” Fuck fuck fuck—think. “We can’t go back in there—we’ll both die—but you just want supplies that make your people die less, right? And even if you don’t find much stuff, if you get even one or two super rare things that help your people really well, you did good, and you can go home.”

Quentin considered that, a little confused, huge eyes still on Joey’s face, and then nodded.

“Okay. Then how about this,” said Joey. He reached up with his free hand and unfastened the little smiley face pin on his shoulder strap that Quentin had tapped earlier and got it free after a bit of a struggle, then held it out.

At his side, Quentin blinked down at the object, then looked back up at him in confusion.

“It’s a token,” said Joey, “You take that, and then, any trial you choose to give it to me in, I’ll quit chasing whoever I’m on for two whole minutes. Seem fair?”

Quentin stared at him.

“—I-it’s a really good deal!” argued Joey, because it was, “Think about it! Two whole minutes? That’s a lot of immunity in a trial. What’s the best you’d get out of a hemorrhagic? Stop some bleeding faster? If you think about this as a health item, it’s better than a whole pile. You could prevent somebody the pain of a whole bunch of wounds entirely, instead of just fixing them faster.”

“O…okay,” said Quentin, following that slowly. He reached out and took it, cocked his head and looked at the button, and then tried and failed several times to clip it to his jacket, before finally getting it to stick, and Joey tried not to grin watching. Once he had it in place, he looked back at Joey and gave him a reassured smile.

“We can go?” asked Joey.

“Yeah. Let’s go home,” agreed Quentin.

Immensely relieved, Joey lead him out of Lerry’s and to the edge of the surrounding border, where the fog waited. Hmm. I haven’t gone to the campfire before, so it might take me a little while to navigate in the fog. The fog was tricky. It was how they navigated between mini-areas in the realm. Killer home bases, unused trial areas, the campfire. It was this murky patch of foggy woods that was at the border of everything, and it would just kind of, creep up and render in when you got closer to it, leaving somewhere else—like a video game. Once you went into the forest and started walking, you’d get wherever you meant to go eventually, but it was kinda complicated, and it was easier to go home than anywhere else. It was…sort of like swimming in an ocean, to get from realm to realm--if like, walking was swimming, and the fog was the ocean, and the realms were islands, except that ocean was a whirlpool that changed directions all the time and was confusing as fuck, so it took a little bit of work. The actual direction you went in the woods didn’t matter. Maybe if walking was swimming in that analogy, it would be accurate to say there were tethers in the whirlpool too, swirling around and past you, attaching to all the realms and each a little bit different in shape and size and feel, so you could learn to recognize which was which to help you where you wanted to go. Because if you focused on where you wanted to go, you would get there eventually, walking through the fog. Like you were pulling yourself hand over fist along a rope towards where you wanted to go, intent and experience making you get there faster. But it was always easier if you knew the place than if you just like, kinda knew of it. And how long it took you to travel tended to correlate pretty directly to how well you knew the place you were heading. Joey had never been to the campfire before, so he could definitely find it—he’d had to find everything but Ormond for the first time once—but it might take him like ten—fifteen minutes to navigate like that route on his own. I guess I could ask him to lead us. He looked over at his travel buddy. Quentin had his head bent over ridiculously far, trying to look at the pin again and not considering that moving his jacket collar to a different angle would have been the easier option as far as giving him a close up view, and he was humming that Backstreet Boys song from earlier again while he was at it. Yeah, no, that could only go terribly. Me it is.

“Alright, let’s get you home, dumbass” said Joey in the same friendly way he would have said it to Frank if he’d been helping him home sloshed after a wild night, and it felt nice, saying it and seeing Quentin glance over and smiled back in the same amicable way he’d been spoken to, and Joey stopped thinking this time before it could change, and feel rotten, and he stepped into the mist.

After only about three steps, Lerry’s was gone, de-loaded in like it had never been, and they were in deep woods. The massive, ancient kind of deep woods that was so big it was heavy with silence. So dark you couldn’t make out more than about three feet in any direction, and full of fog. It had kind of unsettled him the first time he walked it, but Joey was used to the Fog now, and really, he was just incredibly glad to be out of Lerry’s. This place was much more familiar, and less hostile.

Quentin went down hard with no warning, and Joey had been mid-step, so he lost his balance too and went with him, slamming forward into the hard ground with a cry, and not thinking to let go of the other guy in time to save himself. No idea what had just happened, but fairly unhurt at least, he dragged himself up to his arms as fast as he could.

“What the hell?” he asked the survivor laying on his chest next to him.

“Ow,” came Quentin’s muffled voice.

“What happened?” asked Joey, sitting up.

“Your pin is stabbing me,” came the reply.

“No, to your legs, dumbass—why’d you go dead-body on me?” said Joey, kind of relieved because the fall didn’t seem to have hurt him at all either.

“I don’t know,” said Quentin sadly with a sigh, turning his head and looking over at Joey.

“Like—you don’t know why you did that, or it wasn’t on purpose?” asked Joey.

“Not on purpose,” said Quentin, “They just stopped working. I have no idea why. –Sorry about that. Did I fall on you?”

“L—three seconds ago?” asked Joey, “You don’t remember? No—I—you haven’t moved yet–how could you have fallen on top of me when you’re on the ground?”

“I dunno,” came the muffled reply as Quentin put his face against the earth again, “Can we stop and take a nap maybe?”

“No!” said Joey. He reached over and got him by the shoulders and flipped him over, and Quentin squinted up at him and grimaced, then looked up at him for a couple of seconds with interest and got a goofy grin on his face. “What?” said Joey.

“I just like your face,” said Quentin happily, “It’s not scary at all. And it’s really funny, because nobody at the campfire’s gonna recognize you. They’re expecting a skull face.” He started shaking his head, still smiling contentedly up a Joey, “Not a guy.”

“Oh my God,” said Joey, feeling his face get hot and trying to power through, “Come on—we have to keep going!”

“But I’m super tired,” said Quentin, shutting his eyes, “I’m just gonna take a quick, like, three-hour nap.”

“No you’re not!” said Joey. He tried to pull him up by his arms, and Quentin didn’t stop him, but he was 110% dead weight now, and that was so much fucking harder to lift than anything else. “Come on!” said Joey, “Work with me a little.”

Quentin opened his eyes and looked back up at Joey and started to say something, then his brows furrowed. “…Wait.” Whatever he was thinking, it took some time to make the full circuit with it in his head, but he had sounded almost worried or something when he said ‘Wait,’ and still did when he spoke again—Joey thought even more than before. “Your button.”

“It’s still there,” assured Joey, “It didn’t come off.”

“No. You. Said you’ll leave somebody alone, if I give it to you,” said Quentin, his words spoken with even more difficulty and slurring on the ends than before, eyes still glazed over like and just as out of it as he’d been all day, but still working as hard as he could to connect dots.

“Yeah?” said Joey.

“…W…you’re still…doing trials?” Quentin asked. He looked up at Joey with those huge blue eyes, nothing but open confusion on his face, like he had just said something that just couldn’t make sense. Joey stopped moving.

Fuck.

“…No…” said Quentin after a second, looking away, thinking even harder. “…No, okay. Right. You said we were friends. For sure. We’re good friends now, and we’re gonna do painting stuff. And I’m supposed to show you how to stitch a cut up. So no.” He looked back up at Joey again then and smiled in a relieved way, like everything was fine. “Sorry. I guess I’m still kinda high.” Joey couldn’t say anything, so he hurried to add, “—not thinking right,” trying to explain his actions in case he’d hurt Joey’s feelings by saying the first thing, and looking up at him so clearly worried that he had.

“…It’s okay,” managed Joey after a few seconds, his voice barely audible.

And Quentin looked so relieved. And happy about that. And smiled up at him again. “Thanks.”

“Do you think you can walk?” said Joey, trying hard to keep his mind blank of any thoughts at all.

Quentin tried to sit up, and made it, then teetered, looked confused by that, and started to collapse sideways with 0 attempt to save himself, and Joey shot out his arms and caught him in the nick of time.

Quentin blinked down at his body in surprise, then looked up at Joey. “So that’s a maybe.”

“Okay,” said Joey, trying not to smile, “I’m carrying you.”

“Is that really—” started Quentin, and then Joey got the guy’s arm over his shoulder and hefted him up in a fireman carry, so that Quentin was held up across his back and shoulders, one arm keeping hold on Quentin’s right arm, his other around his legs, to keep him from slipping, and Quentin stopped talking as Joey stood up, using his leg strength to make it to his feet with the teenager slung over his back. “Oh. Okay,” said Quentin, and he gave up and just went ragdoll again on Joey’s shoulders. “Wow,” he observed in a slurred voice, “You’re really strong. Am I heavy?”

“Not compared to a lot of you,” said Joey, starting to walk again, and kind of proud of himself because of the compliment.

“Good. Don’t want to break your back,” said Quentin. He hummed to himself for a second and then said, “This isn’t super comfortable. Did you know that?” like he was sharing a genuine discovery.

“Uh—I’m not surprised,” offered Joey.

“Backsteet’s Back Alright!” sang Quentin loopily to no one, not even listening to the answer to the question he’d asked.

Joey grinned at what he could see of Quentin’s face. This was kinda familiar—like taking a buddy who’d got super plastered home after a party. The fun kind of fucked up—the kind he was used to seeing.

“—Hey—do the verse with me,” said Quentin.

“I don’t know the lyrics,” said Joey.

“It’s super easy,” insisted the thoroughly wasted teenager, “It’s uh—'brother sister everybody sing.’ Uh. ‘Something something, bring the flame’—no wait—‘oh my God we’re back again, brother sister everybody sing, gonna bring the flames and show you now, have a…have’—okay that’s most of a verse.”

“You go ahead,” said Joey.

“Come on,” pleaded Quentin, “It’s…ssuuper. Easy. ‘Brother sister’—no. ‘Oh my God, we’re back again.’” There was a very definitely Now You flavored pause.

Joey gave in. “Oh my God, we’re back again?”

“Yes!” said Quentin ecstatically with all the energy he had left, hanging limp over his shoulders, “Yes! Perfect! Okay, now it’s ‘brother-sister-everybody sing.’ But like sang so it—for rhyming reasons.”

“Yeah, I heard you doing it,” said Joey.

“K. You got it, or need to hear it again?” asked Quentin.

“I think I got it,” said Joey.

“Same time,” said Quentin.

“Brother-sister-everybody sing,” sang Joey with him at roughly the same time.

“Yes!” said Quentin excitedly halfway through the word ‘sing’, “Ah! You learned it so fast! Then just ‘Backstreet’s Back, Alright!’”

“That’s the whole song?” asked Joey.

Quentin thought about that for several seconds. “No. But we’re gonna go one verse at a time.

“Okay,” said Joey, trying not to laugh.

“Everybody sing,” repeated Quentin, setting them up, “Ready?”

“Yeah,” said Joey.

“Okay,” said Quentin, “Backstreet’s-“

“-Back, alright,” sang Joey with him, grinning.

“Yeah!” cheered Quentin happily over his shoulder, “Hell yeah! We’re awesome. Fucking nailed that! That was really good. You’re cool. Cool at…stuff. And singing.” He was losing coherence real fast now.

Joey would have started to feel worried about that, considering the OD had almost killed him earlier, but he had just spotted light up ahead in the distance, and that could only be the campfire. That meant they were close. Almost there. Maybe just a minute now. And with that worry gone, he just took in the compliment and grinned at it. “Thanks. You too,” said Joey.

“Thanks!” said Quentin, mumbling now, “Man. I never knew you were nice.”

“Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone,” joked Joey.

“I’m gonna tell everyone,” slurred Quentin happily in reply. After a second, he asked in the voice of someone who’d forgotten something they were supposed to know, “Why did you decide to walk me out of Lerry’s?”

“Because I thought you were gonna die,” said Joey, eyes on the light up ahead.

“Why?” said Quentin curiously.

“Because you’re super fucked up on morphine, dumbass,” said Joey, “Okay, we’re getting pretty close now. How close do you think I need to get for your friends to hear you if you call?”

“Uhm, I don’t know. Depends on how loud you yell,” said Quentin, smiling and shutting his eyes.

“Hey! Don’t fall asleep on my shoulder!” said Joey, trying not to smile, “Wake up and call your friends.”

“Right now?” asked Quentin, super confused and only half conscious, “Why?”

“To come get you,” said Joey.

“Why don’t you just walk up to the fire,” said Quentin, shutting his eyes again.

“Because I don’t think I—” Joey had been going to say can, but he smacked headfirst into an invisible barrier he hadn’t had any idea was there and pinged off so hard he went ass-over-tit backwards and slammed into the ground with the breath knocked out of him and the fear of God in his heart.

Holy SHIT—what the—oh my God. Ow. Fuck—oh!

“Quentin!” he called, sitting up, looking for where he’d dropped him. He didn’t see��Wait. Joey looked behind himself and saw Quentin laying in the dirt where he’d just landed and realized he’d slammed ass-over-tit hard into the cold unforgiving surface not of the ground but of Quentin. “Oh my God! I’m so sorry—are you okay?” He asked.

On the ground, Quentin let out a desperate wheezing sound, and Joey was horrified for a second thinking he was fighting to breathe again, and then he realized he was just trying to laugh with no air in his lungs. The dude barely had any air in there at all, after Joey slamming the shit out of his ribcage, but he just started wheeze-laughing uncontrollably anyway and didn’t stop for a good fifteen seconds, completely losing it down there in the dirt, and then he looked up at Joey with tears in his eyes from how hard he was laughing, and Joey started to laugh too.

“What!” said Joey with a grin.

Quentin tried, couldn’t get a word out, wheeze-laughed for another six seconds, and then tried, “How d—” He lost it again, and struggled to keep going, “—how did you do that?” He completely lost his ability to speak for another few seconds and couldn’t say anything, tears rolling down his face, then gasped out, “Did God just come out of nowhere and backhand you in the forehead? What the fuck! That was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!”

“No,” said Joey, grinning at the sight of absolute merriment on the other dude’s face, and relaxing a little and slumping to a more comfortable sitting position behind him. “I hit your stupid fucking campfire barrier—it’s just invisible. Apparently.”

“So you can’t go over there?” asked Quentin, finally choking back the laughs a bit.

“Yeah, you’re on your own,” said Joey, “Think you can walk it?”

“Uhm,” said Quentin, looking in the direction of the fire. He pushed himself up on to his arms and then started laughing again and collapsed. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry,” he managed after a second, “I can’t stop now. I’ll get up. Just give me a second.”

Joey waited, smiling. Quentin took a few deep breaths, then tried again, and again immediately started to laugh and collapsed. “Dude,” said Joey.

“I’m trying!” pleaded Quentin, managing to choke the laughter back again, laying on his side, “God—what did you say I took again?”

“Morphine,” said Joey.

“How do you know that?” asked Quentin with curiosity.

“I looked at the label,” said Joey, “You don’t remember?”

“No,” said Quentin thoughtfully, “I remember singing with you though.”

Joey stopped and looked over at him very carefully. Feeling a very, very intense emotion at painful levels that he had no idea how to describe. “…You. But you remember stuff before the singing too, right?”

Quentin took a deep breath and smiled and thought about that, staring up at the sky, and then back over at him. “You called me a ‘dumbass,’ a lot,” he offered in a friendly way. He watched Joey for a second and then smiled at him with those huge fucking blue eyes, all glossy, and not seeing anything, like Joey was realizing for the first time now they hadn’t been all night. “When did you take your mask off?”

Fuck.

“Don’t remember,” lied Joey, not sure he could say more the right way just that second.

“Oh. You too?” asked Quentin.

“No,” said Joey quietly, “Not like that. I remember the rest fine.”

“That’s good,” said Quentin, shutting his eyes. “Why did you help me?”

Joey didn’t answer.

After a few seconds, Quentin opened his eyes and looked up at him again.

Joey met his gaze and swallowed hard, then said very quietly, “I thought it mattered.”

Quentin just looked at him for a few seconds, then gave him a little smile, and said, “Thanks. It does to me.”

“You better get going,” said Joey, “Back to your campfire. Before you get yourself into even more trouble, dumbass.”

“Okay,” said Quentin in a friendly way, “You don’t have to be mean about it.”

Joey offered him a hand, and Quentin took it, and Joey pulled him to his feet. They went forward together again, Joey supporting Quentin with one arm and with his other hand out this time, very careful approaching the place he’d been taken the fuck out before, and when he found it, he stopped, and shoved Quentin gently across the barrier that was only there for him. The guy almost lost his balance when he did that, but managed to keep his footing this time, and glanced back at him in confusion.

“I can’t go any further,” explained Joey. He pointed to the light not far now, past Quentin. He could ear voices coming from there. People talking together. “Get going. It’s a straight shot.”

“You’re not coming?” asked Quentin, looking kind of surprised and hurt, and for a horrible second Joey was sure that he did remember, and he was painfully happy about it, even knowing how stupid that was, and how it didn’t matter, because remembered or not, the little fake friendship they had had tonight was over the second he was sober again. But then Quentin tilted his head and added, “I know you gotta go back to your place, but you could come chill out for a minute first, and I could give you a flashlight or something for walking me back,” and he knew that he didn’t.

“I told you,” said Joey, struggling to smile, and hoping to God Quentin was fucked up enough to see the look on his face and buy it for what it was pretending to be, “I can’t go past your invisible wall. It’s survivors only over there. Now get going, and don’t be a dumbass and get into trouble like that again! Or you’ll die of a morphine overdose or something. I don’t want to have to bail your stupid ass out of a bad trip again—I have my own stuff to get done. And I might not even be there next time! So don’t have one.”

“Okay—I’ll try,” said Quentin, still smiling a little. He gave him an unsteady wave. “Thanks again.” Goodbye said, the survivor turned to go and started staggering unsteadily towards the light waiting for him up ahead.

Joey watched him go for a second, then started to turn to head home himself and caught a flash of moonlight on something, and stopped. There in the dirt by his feet was the little smiley face pin he’d given Quentin as a bribe—it must have come off when they fell or something—must have rolled, and—

He opened his mouth to call out “Hey! You left your button” at the retreating figure ahead of him, and then stopped, and slowly closed it instead. It wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t even know what it was. Besides. It was probably better this way. Maybe definitely better. This way, he doesn’t know I lied to him. I’m still a killer and a monster, but at least I’m not somebody who betrayed him when he thought they were his friend.

Yeah. That was better. It would be better. Maybe things would be normal again. And he could forget about this. It had all been stupid to do anyway. He still didn’t know why he had—why he’d made bad decision after bad decision over and over tonight. Why he’d thought any of it would matter, in the end. The guy didn’t even remember it now. It was hard to think of anything that could matter less than that. You should go home. It’s been a long day.

He took a breath and turned to go, then paused, reconsidering, and reached down to retrieve his pin, and his hand hit the invisible wall he’d already forgotten the location of hard enough to sting. Shit. He took a knee, hoping maybe close the ground he’d have just enough space to reach it, but it had rolled maybe just six inches past where the realm would allow a thing like him to go, and it was stuck there now, just past his fingertips, out of reach, and where nobody would ever find it or use it or want it again, even if it was there, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Hey!” It had been Quentin’s voice, coming from ahead of him, towards the fire, and Joey looked up. The survivor had paused and glanced over his shoulder, still just in sight, and was looking at him. He sounded happy—almost excited. And even from a good twenty feet off in the darkness, Joey could see he was smiling at him like he would have a friend. “I’ll see you around, Joey.”

Joey watched as Quentin turned and headed for the campfire again, and then very slowly stood up, leaving the pin where he could never get it, and watched the survivor disappear until he was well and truly gone, lost to sight through the nearest line of trees, and then he turned back and headed towards his own home, off through the fog, back to the old rotting lodge in Ormond with three other killers where he belonged.

No, thought Joey, No, you won’t.