#I mean realistically this was sort of to be expected with all the radio silence in between trailer drops and announcements and whatever | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cinnamonest · 4 years ago

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Since people actually liked it here's the continuation of the modern Xiao camgirl!darling post I cut from the original, as promised, most if it's under a cut. Here’s the original post. I didn’t think people would actually like the camgirl concept so I thought I was rambling too much and cut this part out lol but here it is now!

Tws: derogatory language/female slurs, mentions of reader being a cheater, reader is promiscuous, murder, incel-y mentality (our modern boy would be a 4chan user, look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong) and mentions of upsetting realistic things, this one's darker than the first part. If you're bothered by other modern stuff for being too realistic best avoid this too probably, involuntary pornography ---------- Coming up on one year since you gained your most loyal subscriber, you get a rather... Unsettling request. He has something he would like this month, in fact, he adds a few hundred to the regular amount (he's been saving up just for this) and asks for just the answer to one simple question. What's your name?

Your real name, he clarifies. He doesn't need a last name, nothing like that. It would just... Make him feel closer to you. He avoids using the term "anniversary," even though that's what comes to mind. He also doesn't tell you that he already knows, that this is just a test of your honesty. For someone who's so cautious, you would think you would think to give a fake name whenever you go to coffee shops for them to yell out, or change it on the packages you get. You hesitate. And it would be easy to give him a fake one, yet, you don't really think about it too much, you kinda think about that as an afterthought, what you should have done, but your very real name is typed out and sent before you really process it, and you feel a sort of unease, but it's already sent. No big deal. He can't do much with just your first name, right? If your name is common, you feel pretty safe, but even if it's a rarer one, surely there are other people with it, right? He's happy though. Kinda surprised, really, that you didn't lie to him. Maybe you trust him?

You're not stupid, you know something is wrong, you're becoming paranoid. And you connect the weird feeling to him, bc he goes radio silence for several days leading up to finally taking you. This dude who used to respond to any messages you sent within 10 seconds suddenly... It's like he disappeared? He hasn't responded to anything you send him ever since you said your name. You send him messages saying you haven't heard from him in a while and you're worried... The way you word it makes it sound like you're worried about him, but you both know that's not what you really mean. You're hesitant and suspicious of every guy you meet. You buy pepper spray and start carrying some around, you nearly spray a poor guy who you thought was trailing you, turns out he just lives in your building. He makes note of it. He watched you buy it, and is quick to realize you always hold it in the same hand. That must be your dominant hand, that's an important mental note for the future, since you're more likely to try to attack him with that hand. He'll remember. He has a note in his phone with information like that. Height, weight, birthday, social security number, parents' names, school she graduated from. All in little bullet points. He adds dominant hand to the list. He's not worried at all really. Already watched you struggle to carry packages he could lift with one hand, your strength doesn't cross his mind as a threat. At first he just doesn't know what to say, and that's why he stops responding, he feels too awkward but... He starts to enjoy the weird feeling of power the whole situation is giving him. You're worried, you're constantly paranoid, and it's because of him. Now you finally understand the same feeling you inflict on him, how you consume his thoughts every waking moment of every day. It used to irritate him that you held so much power over him, while he meant nothing to you. Now, the tables have turned. You're forced to have him constantly in your mind, whether you like it or not, just like you are in his. It's giving you what you deserve. It gives him a feeling of significance. He matters, even if it's not in a good way. And he keeps telling himself that once he's all you have, he'll matter even more. He's smart enough to realize that if you're paranoid, you might have mentioned him by username to someone else, so to ensure he knows what to do from this point, he has to sneak into your apartment at night as you sleep. It's so unbearably tempting, you have no idea -- you're right there and so vulnerable. He has to hold himself back because he knows that if he so much as touched you, he couldn't hold back. But it's torture, standing there so close, watching your chest rise and fall as he fiddles with the phone. Even when he unlocks it with your thumb, he tries to hold the phone from an angle to do so, even if the skin of his hand grazes yours, it would be too much. You have a lot of contacts across your messages and a bunch of different apps. You have one guy in your online chat you've exchanged far more messages with than anyone else! Hundreds upon hundreds of messages, and huge paypal cash drops, who the hell is -- oh, wait, that's him. Nevermind. But, to his pleasant surprise, he's the only one of your... customers that you regularly talk to, the rest just have a few paypal notifications or clarifications on your policies, but no actual conversations like you have with him. Of course, that's literally part of your deal, he's literally paying for it, but it makes him happy nonetheless. But as he goes through your personal messages, he finds that you are... in no shortage of options. Like, holy shit. It was kind of expected. You *are* really pretty, that's how you have so many followers after all, but this is a lot. So many contacts named some variation of "DO NOT ANSWER!!!" or "creepy guy that forced me to give him my number at the club", etc etc. Plenty of unsaved numbers texting you to never get a response. You've ghosted enough dudes to make your place haunted. It's... kinda awful, really. It also kinda hurts his heart a bit more than he expected. You have so, so, so many options, even without the cam thing, he's more insignificant than he even realized. ...Well, for now, at least. He'll be significant to you soon enough. And then you seem to have a sort of "boyfriend of the month" deal going on, aside from that. Plenty of male-name contacts whose last exchange is a "don't talk to me again!" message from you, plenty of messages corresponding to the same time as those to your girl friends about how you can't find a good guy and every relationship ends badly. How unfortunate. See, it's because you choose bad guys. You probably go for dicks and not.... well, he can't exactly pull the "nice guys like me" mentality, he doesn't delude himself into thinking he is one. He's lucid enough to realize that most nice guys would not be sneaking into your house and standing over your sleeping body to stalk your phone as they make plans to kidnap you. He knows he would probably fall under the classification of a creepy guy. He's just too far gone to care. Still, he would be so much better to you, he tells himself, not a cheater or a player like you complain about. To say he resents those kinds of guys -- ones that can do the unthinkable and actually talk to girls, let alone successfully, only to be assholes, and yet girls like you still go for them -- is an understatement. You're basically just a slut, you probably ignore all the guys that would be nice to you, just like all those internet forums he reads talk about. Typical.

Well, those forums also make fun of guys like him who pay for girls like you, but he can't blame them. It *is* kinda pathetic. There is one dude you talk to, though, now. Current boyfriend of the month, from the looks of it. You have a little heart emoji next to the name. He knows it's kinda pathetic that something so simple and insignificant sets him off, but it does, makes him pout and grind his teeth and curl his other hand into a fist. It's so unfair. Some dude you barely know gets to fuck you, and you haven't even known him nearly as long as you've known him! He doubts this dude -- hell, any of your boyfriends -- has put in the same amount of money that he has into you. They fuck you practically for free. And that, unfortunately for you, only solidifies his decision. If you're fucking some dude for a month because they buy you dinner every now and then, if we're going by that scale, then you owe him quite a good deal of pussy. Any hesitancy or guilt he had about the whole thing is gone. And he's a little mad. Keeps grumbling to himself that you're just a loose whore, fucking so many people and putting yourself out there on the internet. He wonders if they even know about what you do. Probably not, you probably don't tell them. Yeah, that sounds like what you'd do. Really, you're kinda lucky that someone like him is so willing to commit to you, since you are a slut. You don't deserve it, but he loves you anyway. And you'll probably have the nerve to be ungrateful for it too. Sigh. On the bright side, by some miracle, it would appear that you have not told any real-life people about him, you haven't sent out any hey if I disappear you should probably look into this creep type of messages. But he can't afford to have you doing so in between now and when you move in with him, so, he decides he has to act within the next 24 hours. While he's here, though, he decides to do a quick sweep of your place. Makes note of what snacks and drinks you like, what brand of toothpaste and shampoo and the like you use, so he can buy some for you. Maybe you'll adjust better if you have some of your favorite things. And then, after days of silence, he sends you a message, says it's fine, his internet went out for a few days. He means it to reassure you, but somehow it makes you feel more uneasy. He has everything planned out, or so he thinks. But you deviate from your usual schedule. When you leave work or class, you don't go home, you go somewhere else, first. How strange. Maybe picking up groceries? He follows from a distance. No, looks like you're going out to eat...? Maybe you're meeting friends or family or -- no that's a guy. Fuck. You must have planned this just earlier today, since there were no messages on your phone. It makes a bitter feeling rise in his gut. He hates that he can't get close enough to listen to your conversation. Well, he hates the whole thing, sits there and seethes the whole time. Watches you through the windows in the parking lot, thankfully you chose to sit outside. Feels his eye twitch and his hand clench every time you smile and laugh. It takes way too long. The fact that you split the bill feels like a punch to the stomach too. Shouldn't you be used to taking guys' money? Oh, and what's this...? This guy isn't the picture on boyfriend-of-the-month's contact. Well, well, well. You really are a whore. See, it's a very good thing he's taking you off the market. You're probably a reckless heartbreaker too. He's doing all the other men of the world a favor by taking on such a burden as you. And it makes him feel far more justified in keeping you locked away, since he has every reason to believe, now, that you'd run off and fuck someone else if given the chance. Halfway through, the guy briefly gets up and runs to the bathroom or something. While he's gone, he sees your face fall a bit. And then he sees you look around. You turn your head from one side to the other. Your eyes scan the area. You shuffle uncomfortably and you bite your lip and your eyebrows furrow. You're scared. You feel like -- no, you know you're being watched and it scares you. That makes him a little happy, for some reason. He wouldn't be sure what to do if you went home with the guy, but thankfully you don't. No big deal, this was just a bump in the road, he still beats you back to your building and he still goes through with the original plan. Even better, now that it's even darker outside. If anything, now he's got extra aggression and testosterone in his blood, running over the events in his head and going through some... very forceful and violent fantasies. The message he sent had you uneasy, and it's also how you immediately know what's going on when it does finally happen. You keep telling yourself you're being unnecessarily paranoid, that it's nothing, maybe that guy actually got his life together or got a girlfriend or something. Things like... What you fear, don't happen in real life, that's stuff that only happens in movies and stuff. You keep calling it that or it in your head. That won't happen to you. It's not going to happen. The series of events that play out in your head, scenarios you try to push out of your mind. Sure, in the movies it always takes place in the stairwell, but that's fiction, so you go up the apartment stairwell as always. You're not gonna let a bunch of B-grade old films scare you. And it's always some dude standing and waiting, but that nice young boy that you've never seen before is just leaning against the wall, scrolling on his phone, he only glances up for a second as you pass by, he's not a threat, you're being paranoid. You flash a smile and a little wave as you walk by, he doesn't return either, just looks back down at his phone. See? This guy doesn't even care, you're being paranoid for nothing, you tell yourself. But as you make the turn to go up the next set of stairs you hear the click of a phone being put on the lockscreen, a few metallic footsteps ringing out in the open hall and echoing, coming up right behind you, but for that split second you expect a tap on the shoulder, maybe he has a question, it's not like movies, it's not like movies, you're not gonna get a cloth shoved over your face and--- Well, it's not exactly like the movies. You were prepared, but it all happens in one motion - one hand grabs the hand with the spray and twists it, making you drop it, the other wraps some material over your mouth. You were prepared enough that you don't gasp in surprise, you hold your breath and thrash, but it doesn't make any difference, you wiggle and writhe for a few moments but can't even begin to break free, eventually succumb to the lack of oxygen and take a deep breath. It takes a few seconds to settle in, it's not so immediate. You instinctively panic and thrash again, but he has a complete iron grip. The dizziness takes a second to set in. He huffs a bit in frustration and says stop moving, it's fine. It's definitely not, but it occurs to you that that's not something a kidnapper looking for any potential vulnerable girl says. It's a poor attempt at comfort. It's someone specifically looking for you. And if that wasn't enough, he says your name. Your very real name. Maybe it was a mistake to tell him after all. But the worst part of it all is that there's not a single doubt in your mind, even in your panic you have the realization, it's definitely him and this is literally exactly what you were afraid of. And it's the last thing that goes through your head. And once he's got you out cold he just takes a sigh of relief. He may have been very neutral faced to you, but in reality he was incredibly nervous. He hasn't exactly made or used chloroform before, our boy is operating on YouTube tutorials here. He's got adrenaline pumping through his veins and carries you with his arms trembling. He's on autopilot carrying you out, but his mind is also consumed by holy fuck I'm touching her she smells so nice she's so warm her face is so close I'm actually touching her-- you get the idea. He feels bad about taping your hands and feet together and putting you in the trunk of his car, kinda. It feels too much like what a really bad person would do to a girl they didn't care about, like he's a trafficker or a murderer or a criminal or something, but that's not true at all. Sure, he's still mad at you for being a whore and all that, but it feels improper, he just has no choice. It's late at night, but he can't risk getting pulled or being at a stoplight and someone seeing an unconscious girl in his backseat, so, trunk it is. But once he's home, to his tiny little downtown apartment (he'll probably be able to move into a better place soon, since he's not paying you tons of money anymore), he takes a quick check to make sure the coast is clear, and drags you out, up the stairs, all the way into his apartment, sets you down on the bed, where you'll be staying. He even washed the sheets and cleaned the place up a bit for your arrival. You probably would not like to see what this place looked like before the five trash bags worth of cleaning was done. He'll probably be more motivated in the future, though, since now he won't be so depressed all the time. And then the adrenaline of the fear of being seen is over, and that's when it sets in that this is real. It's very, very hard to hold back. You're real, in the flesh, he can reach out and touch you with his hands! It feels like a dream. And he realizes he can take this opportunity to do things he would be far, far too embarrassed to do when you're awake. He takes a few minutes to do just that, cautiously reaches out to poke your face, and then run a hand down your neck, your skin is so soft! Your hair smells so nice, he lays down beside you and runs his fingers over it. Puts hands on your body and just lays there in awe of the fact that you're real. He's pretty certain he's never actually touched a human female before now. Everything about you feels soft. Weirdly feminine, which is something very foreign and confusing to him. And he kinda uh... Loses it. Goes buckwild with just taking in every aspect of you. Again, since you're unconscious he can be gross and entirely shameless about it. Peels your clothes off and runs his hands and mouth over every inch of flesh, takes the tape off your lips and presses his tongue into your limp mouth until he's forced to let go to breathe, fingers you and tonguefucks you and sucks on your nipples and your neck. Lays pressed against you and just breathes in your scent. It takes every ounce of self control he has not to fuck you already. But he does jerk off a few times. That way he'll last longer, so it's a win-win. And then... you twitch. Tape goes back over your mouth. And then, you twitch again. And this time, you make a little "mm!" under the tape, you start trembling and he sees you try to pull your hands apart. You whimper. It sounds scared and distressed. He feels kinda bad, but it also makes him hard, and that outweighs any guilt by far. Besides, it's what you deserve after what you did earlier. You tortured him mentally, it's only fair. On the good side of things, you suppose, you don't have to worry about the usual fears one would have over such a situation - you're fairly certain he's not going to kill you, nor sell you. In fact, the bed you wake up on is pretty soft. You're naked and the tape is uncomfortable, but... At least he was considerate enough to give you a blanket. He does care about you, after all. First thing he says is asking if you're awake. Can you hear me? You hesitate a moment, and then you nod. He's a bit new to this whole abduction thing. He wants to make sure he didn't pull a muscle or something with the tape. So... Do you hurt anywhere? Does your head hurt? Oh, right, the tape. He's not stupid either. You have to promise you're not going to scream. In fact, he's angry enough about earlier that he gets a bit meaner than he originally told himself he'd be. If you scream, I'll make you regret it. Understand? You nod, so he takes it off, holding it close in preparation in case you were lying, but you don't actually answer him, you're silent again for a minute, then just ask a question of your own. You're that guy, right? He's silent for a few seconds, there's no need for any clarification. Finally just says yeah. You just breathe again. Silently. Finally you summon the courage to ask him what he wants with you. And why are you doing this to me? And his answer is fairly simple. What do you think? You don't say anything for a minute, and neither does he. He's not good with words, and you don't really have ones for this situation. It occurs to you that offering to pay him to let you go is probably not the solution. After all, this is the guy that's dumped unimaginable amounts of money onto you, you couldn't even come close to paying him back. You figure maybe, after he gets what he wants... well, you get the courage to ask. Is there anything... that I can do o-or... anything that will make you... are you gonna let me go, after you....? And the answer is, again, simple, but the one you did not want to hear. No. He's a blunt boy, so he doesn't beat around the bush, but he doesn't torment you by keeping anything from you. In fact, he's already rehearsed this speech a few hundred times in his head. He just wanted to make sure he's very clear so there's no misunderstanding, and while he likes some discomfort in a vengeful sort of way, he doesn't want you to be too freaked out to where you have a panic attack. He says he's just going to... keep you here. He has the things you'll need. He got your purse with your keys, so he'll even run to your apartment after this to go get some of your stuff. You don't need to tell him which number, he adds, he already knows which apartment you're in. He needs you here, he says. And he makes sure to add that it's your fault. If you were never out there selling yourself in the first place, this never would have happened. If you're good, he can make things a bit better for you. But you need to go ahead and accept that you're going to be staying and that no amount of begging or offers is going to convince him to let you go. He can be nice to you, he promises. A better boyfriend than the others. You just have to be a good girlfriend -- you know, obedient and sweet and do what he says. Just like you always were when you talked to him. Just keep being sweet like that and doing the things he tells you to do. You would argue that the terms boyfriend and girlfriend are not appropriate descriptors of the sort of relationship he's creating, but you keep that thought to yourself. Instead, you ask, How long are you going to keep me here? Which is a dumb question, since he's pretty sure he already made that clear. Forever. -----

There's a double homicide in the area. Takes place on the same night, and the same diameter of knife is used, so police believe maybe the two incidents are connected. Especially because they do have something in common, one girl. She was romantically involved with both of them. The girl in question's apartment has been vacated, very suddenly, and the girl has disappeared without a trace, taking things with her from the looks of it, so police believe she may be responsible, but other than that, they have no leads. A few weeks later, a video circulates all over the internet. Some famous camgirl finally started making porn, apparently. Just one video, but the description (which was totally written by her, it has to be since it's written in first person right?) says something about how she decided to quit camming, so this video marks the end of her career. She got into a relationship, so she says in the description, so she has to quit. It's roleplay porn, apparently, she's doing a good job at the acting. All tied up and gagged and getting fucked by some big-dicked guy holding the camera. He's silent, but she's making a ton of noise, cums several times. Really good acting, the fear and desperation in her eyes looks so real. Talk about going out with a bang. It gets a lot of likes. Tons of comments about how sad people are she's quitting. And of course, a lot of comments say, what a lucky guy.

#.camgirl

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drabbles-mc · 4 years ago

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Ethics

Nestor Oceteva x F!Reader (platonic)

Request by the love of my life @garbinge: I saw this on a prompt list and immediately thought. “Taylor’s Nestor”: “what i’m thinking of asking you is unethical and it might be illegal. but morally, it’s the right thing to do.” Leaving everything else up to you!!

Warnings: language, mentions of animal abuse

Word Count: 3k

A/N: I have been thinking about this every day since you sent it to me. I played out a bunch of different scenarios in my head but when I had this thought I just had to use it. I sort of loved the idea of him needing help with something that wasn’t crazy high-stakes, something completely outside his comfort zone. Hope you like it!! xo

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“I just always thought that the roles here would be reversed,” you sighed, running your hands down over your face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he looked confused, on the brink of being offended.

You looked at him from between your fingers, “You work for the cartel, Nestor. I figured that if one of us was going to be asking for a sketchy favor, it would be me going to you.”

He sat back in his chair, “Not everything I do is—” he cut himself short, shaking his head, “Never mind. Will you…will you hear me out?”

“Do I really have a choice?” your laugh was hollow.

His brows furrowed for a moment as he waited for you to meet his eyes. He wasn’t always great with his words but you could see almost everything that he was thinking if you looked into his eyes long enough.

He leaned forward, elbows coming to rest just above his knees, “Of course you do. You always do. I…I know that what I’m thinking of asking you is unethical and it might be illegal. But morally, it’s the right thing to do.”

“Might be illegal?”

He paused and you could see that despite everything, he was biting back a smile, “Alright. So…it’s definitely illegal. But we’ve already agreed before that most laws are fucking—”

“Dumb. I know,” you rested your hands in your lap, twisting your fingers nervously, “But thinking that most laws are dumb in theory is not the same as breaking the dumb laws.”

“Would it help if I said it gets easier the more you do it?”

You pressed your lips into a thin line, “No.”

“Okay. Well. Worst case scenario—we do this and we get caught. You probably won’t even have to do hard time.”

You scoff, “Aiding and abetting will get me serious time.”

He shook his head, brushing off your statement, “It really isn’t that high-stakes, I promise. It also has nothing to do with Galindo.”

That was the most reassuring thing that he’d said to you all night. Part of you assumed that it wouldn’t have anything to do with the cartel—Nestor tried to keep that part of his life as far away from you as he could. It was as much for your own sanity as it was for his. But if it had nothing to do with Galindo and the cartel, you had no idea what kind of favor he would possibly be coming to you with.

You sat back in your chair, “So. What can I help you with, Nestor?”

“I need you to steal some stuff from work.”

Confusion took over your entire face, “What?”

“I need you to steal some supplies from work. I…I don’t know what yet. I’ll need your help with that part too.”

“Why do you need me to steal stuff from work? They like me there,” you rested your hands on the back of your neck, “You don’t even have a dog. Or a pet of any kind, for that matter.”

“About that,” he couldn’t meet your eyes for a moment, “I do now.”

“Then just…bring them in to see me? Why do we have to make it illegal?”

“Because I stole them.”

“What?” you were trying not to yell.

“I had to!”

There were a million things that you wanted to ask Nestor—you didn’t even know where to start. In all the time that you’d known him, he’d never really been an animal person. He didn’t dislike them, but realistically he just didn’t feel that he had the time for one. You wanted to know how he landed himself in a position where he had to illegally obtain an animal, and drag you into it.

“Why did you have to? When were you ever in a position to take an animal?”

“Will you help me, or not? Because I have a gut feeling that my house is getting ripped apart by them as we speak. I’ll fill you in on the details on the way.”

You sighed, but you knew that you were going to cave and go with him. You were never able to turn away from an animal that needed your help. You also knew that there were very few times in the years that you’ve been friends with Nestor that you ever told him ‘no’ about much of anything, anyway.

“Alright,” you stood up off the couch and gestured towards the door, “let’s go, then.”

“Seriously?” his eyes grew wide, surprised that you were letting him take you along for whatever ride this was about to me.

“Yea,” you shook your head, “Don’t make me change my fucking mind.”

He practically jumped out of his chair and raced towards the door. He had been expecting to have to do some more convincing. He held the door for you and waited anxiously for you to lock it before walking over to his SUV.

“You steal them in this?” you asked as you sat in the passenger seat, “Because it’s not exactly what I would call discreet.”

“I don’t think someone ratting on me is going to be a problem.”

You looked over at him, eyes wide, “What’d you do?”

He glanced over and saw the look on your face, instantly shaking his head to dispel whatever thoughts you were conjuring up, “Not that. Jesus.”

The rest of the ride passed in semi-silence. The radio played to fill the space between the two of you. You nervously twisted your hands in your lap as you tried to think of what you could possibly be walking into. You wanted to ask Nestor for details about how he ended up in this position, but something told you that he’d get around to explaining it eventually.

He pulled into his driveway and his house was completely dark. It all seemed quiet. You had been expecting to hear a feral animal from a mile away, but all was calm. You unbuckled your seatbelt and waited for a cue from Nestor as to what to do next. You could see the nerves in his eyes and it made you nervous. The man worked for a fucking cartel and yet he was worried about whatever he was walking you into.

With a deep sigh he opened the door and hopped out of the car, waiting for you to do the same. You jumped out and walked beside him, your arm brushing against his every few steps as you tried to keep up with his stride. The two of you stood on his front step as he slid the key into the lock on the door.

“You know that I don’t know shit about dogs,” he slowly pushed the door open, cautiously reaching in and turning on the light, “So you gotta be real with me about how over my head I am with this.”

“Oh boy,” you chuckled nervously as you walked in behind him, anxiously looking around the house.

It was silent, and that was more concerning to you than if you had walked into a pit of chaos. You followed Nestor through the house, both of you looking around for the animal in question. The fact that he seemed as clueless as you was unsettling to say the least.

“You just let them have the run of the house?” you asked in a hushed tone, not quite sure why you were whispering.

“Clearly I wasn’t really thinking things through, alright?” he was trying to sound annoyed but you could hear the smile in his voice.

The entire downstairs was empty. For a moment you worried that the dog had escaped, but then you remembered whose house you were in—it was practically a fortress. Nestor walked upstairs and you waited at the top while he walked down the hall towards his room. He was standing still in the doorway when you heard him let out a chuckle. Figuring that meant it was at least safe enough for you to walk over, you did just that.

You peered around his shoulder and your eyes went wide at the sight in front of you. The scene raised more questions than it answered, but you had to take a moment to enjoy it regardless. In the middle of Nestor’s perfectly made bed, laid a perfectly content rottweiler. They laid there as though they owned the place, and something told you that from here on out they essentially would. Something told you that he was going to do everything he could to keep this dog, and also spoil it beyond belief. You couldn’t wait to see that happen.

“You stole a fucking rottweiler?” you finally broke the silence.

“It wasn’t my game plan for the day. It just…happened?”

You had to let yourself be amused by the fact that the two of you were lingering in the doorway, watching the dog as it curiously watched you, “How does it just happen? Like, is someone going to come looking for them?”

He shook his head, “I doubt that. Owners weren’t taking care of them anyway. I saw what they were doing and I couldn’t just fuckin—” he stopped himself and took a deep breath before he let himself get heated all over again, “I just…stepped in and told them to give me the dog if they weren’t going to take care of it.”

You raised your eyebrows, “And they just…handed over the dog?”

“It took a little convincing but…yea.”

You didn’t know if you wanted him to elaborate on what that meant or not. The fact that he didn’t immediately offer up the information led you to believe that it was a good time to give yourself some plausible deniability. You already felt like this situation was on the brink of getting out of control anyway. So rather than prying, you slowly started to approach the bed, trying to make yourself seem as unthreatening as possible.

Truthfully, the dog was in rough shape. They obviously hadn’t been fed properly in a while. No glaring cuts or outward injuries that you could see, but their ears were torn and you could see old scars and little missing patches of hair here and there. You didn’t try to reach out and touch them, or make them move, instead just sitting on the edge farthest from them and waiting to see what happened.

As the minutes ticked by, you slowly inched your way closer. The dog was obviously, and rightfully, wary of you. But they didn’t growl, or attempt to get up and move away from you. The entire time Nestor watched on in silent awe at your patience. At one point he slowly slumped down to the floor, leaning back against the doorframe but still able to watch you.

You were finally able to land yourself next to the dog and you slowly held your hand out to let them sniff it, which they did. You were careful but your moves weren’t hesitant, not wanting to show that you were feeling at all uneasy. The dog let you run your hand along its wide forehead and down its neck. After you repeated the motion a few times, speaking sweetly and softly to them, they laid down on their side with a happy groan.

You chuckled as you continued to pet their neck, “That’s a good girl,” you brought your hand back to your lap and looked over at Nestor, “I mean…she seems fine for the time being. The fact that she’s not whining in pain and that she’s letting me touch her are both good signs. I’d have to see her walk and everything to get a better idea. And I’d also really like to get her in and officially checked out.”

“Yea but I—”

You cut him off, “We can do it off-hours. Not like it’s gonna take the whole office to give her a check-up. I’ll think about what I can do if she has a chip in her, although something tells me she probably doesn’t. But for tonight, I’m gonna run out and get her some food and stuff. You’ll have to get her slowly back to a healthy weight,” you paused, looking over at him, “You can come over, you know. I’d say that she’s fairly comfortable given her previous circumstances.”

Nestor nodded as he slowly walked over. The dog lifted her head and Nestor stopped for a moment, but when she didn’t show any signs of being nervous or agitated, he came closer still. He squatted down slightly, not quite wanting to be face-level with her just yet. She gave his arm and hand a sniff before rubbing her head against it. You watched as a soft smile spread over Nestor’s features while he rubbed along her forehead and behind her ears. The soft streak that you knew Nestor had was in full effect. When the two of them got settled and more comfortable with each other, when the dog was healthy and acclimated to being in a home where she was getting taken care of properly, you knew the two of them were going to make an unstoppable team. They were definitely going to be the most intimidating pair to walk past on the sidewalk.

“You comfortable if I leave?” you asked, already feeling pretty certain of the answer.

He nodded, “Yea. Let me give you some cash for the food and shit.”

He shifted to pull out his wallet but you waved him off, “Don’t worry about it—this is part of helping you out. I’d much rather pay for some food and basic necessities than steal shit from my job. Consider this part of my dues for the favor.”

A smirk passed over his face for a moment, “I owe you.”

“Yea,” you walked towards the door of the bedroom, laughing quietly, “you sure fuckin’ do.”

The trip to the store was relatively quick. You grabbed some dog food, a pair of bowls for food and water, and some supplements that you knew would be good for her and would help get her back to where she needed to get to. You also took photos of a few different crate options for Nestor to look at. As much as you wanted to go overboard, you didn’t want to get too far ahead of yourself.

When you walked back into the house, you could head the television playing upstairs. You figured that that was a good sign. You set a few of the items down in the kitchen, opting to just fill the food and water bowls and walk them up to Nestor’s room.

You could hear him talking to her once you reached the top of the stairs, and you chuckled at the way he was conversing with her about whatever TV show they were watching, “It’s never the first guy they bring in. I don’t know why they’re wasting their fucking time.”

Walking in, you had a snarky comment ready about him already teaching her the ins and outs of crime. However, when you saw the way that they two of them were existing together, you lost your train of thought completely. Nestor was on one side of the bed, leaning back against the headboard with his legs stretched out in front of him, and the dog was on the other side of the bed, sitting upright also facing the television. The two of them looked like quite the pair. There was a little bit of space between them, but you could tell that it was a comfortable distance. Nestor reached over and scratched behind her ears as you walked in.

“Nice to see you two getting along,” you held the bowls up slightly, “Brought some food and water up here.”

Once you set the bowls down, she hopped off the bed and quickly made her way over to them. You watched the way that she walked, making a note to take a closer look at her joints when Nestor brought her in for you to check her out. You kept your distance while she was eating, walking over and sitting on the edge of the bed next to Nestor.

He motioned for you to sit next to him and you casually leaned against the outside of his arm while you both watched her eat. You broke the silence, “I’ll show you how to measure out her food and stuff so you know how much to give her. Gotta be careful putting weight on her—can’t overfeed her or anything even if you want to, okay?”

He nodded, “Got it.”

“Also make sure you give her a lot of space when she’s eating. She’ll probably be extra defensive over food for a long while.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and make sure—”

“Y/N?” he smiled down at you.

“I sound bossy, don’t I?” you laughed and shook your head, “I’m sorry.”

He chuckled, “Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you know so much. I was just, I was gonna ask,” he paused for a moment and you saw concern flash across his face, “You think I did the right thing? You think I’ll be able to take care of her?”

You nodded without any hesitation, “Of course. It’ll take some time for her to fully trust you and get comfortable. But she’s doing well so far. I think she realizes that she’s in a safer place now. Just give it time and let her be the one to warm up to you, you know?”

He nodded, “Right, right.”

After a few more minutes, the mattress dipped as the dog hopped back up onto the bed again. She resumed her sitting position on the other side of Nestor, looking around the room before turning her gaze towards the television. Both you and Nestor chuckled at the fact that she actually seemed like she was into the show.

“Worth the future aiding and abetting charges?” Nestor asked as he watched you watch the dog.

You laughed, “Maybe. But if I get shitty tattoos in prison I’m blaming you.”

“We can get matching ones.”

You chuckled, “Alright. Deal.”

#mayans mc #mayansmc #mayans fx #mayans mc imagine #nestor oceteva #nestor oceteva x reader #nestor oceteva x you #nestor oceteva imagine #my writing #fanfiction #drabblesmc

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starshipviolet · 4 years ago

Text

A MESSY LOVELESS REVIEW

I finally finished Loveless so I can follow Alice Oseman without fear of spoilers god I missed them?? It’s been over a month since I stopped following her it felt so wrong.

But here’s some Loveless thoughts! (It’s a tiny bit critical heads up if you’re not up for that.) I might edit this up into a formal review for like goodreads or something, but for right now the rambly bulletpoints just kinda work with how my brain works.

ALSO THIS INCLUDES SPOILERS

I have... let’s just say slightly unrealistic expectations from Alice Oseman novels sometimes, probably bc Radio Silence was just like, everything to me, like a major hyper fixation, it hung the stars, etc. and I related so hard to it when I read it, and her other books are fairly different than that and I’m not as quick to relate to them.

So I came into this book super excited, I live in the US and it took forever to ship (and during that time I had to unfollow Alice, and block the osemanverse tag bc spoilers, god, these are signs of the impending apocalypse.)

Overly dramatic first world problems aside, as I kept reading I was not like... overly excited about the first few sections?

I really liked the first first part, with the introduction of Pip and their texting, although Pip pressuring her to kiss Tommy was Not Fun In Many Ways. I thought Jason was sweet though and I liked the platonic relationships being set up, also the sleepover movies was a cute kinda realistic detail to throw in.

It was cool that they were just kinda dorks? (I love them, and so am I, but like. They’re such dorks. I don’t care that Jason’s trying to reframe himself as some sort of rowing jock, he is.) Like they had all their in jokes and sleepover nights and just kinda like low key hanging out which was nice bc there’s a lot of focus on like clubs and partying in YA and Alice’s books and it was cool to affirm, like “hey look, still happy without that.”

Tommy trying to kiss her was so painful but it also meant a lot to me that there was the “wait what I’ve just been lying to myself about liking him what does that mean” bc you know, lesbian solidarity vibes.

So you get to Durham, and it just... wasn’t as exciting as I hoped for the first chunk? Like I was mostly excited for enemies to lovers with Pip and Rooney but I forgot that means that they have to be horribly annoying to each other at first and I didn’t like Rooney right away.

This is where I should probably give a Big Huge Note that just because something made me uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s bad writing or that it doesn’t serve a purpose. Georgia’s social pressure to conform to heteronormative ideas of romance is a reality so many people face. Rooney needed to have flaws at first so we could see character development.

Bottom line is, for me it was uncomfortable to read parts and I didn’t start truly loving the book until probably after she broke up with Jason. Their relationship was just so terrible. Again, do I know it serves a purpose? Yes. Did it enhance my personal entertainment of the novel? Absolutely not.

That being said, there were some good Pip/Rooney moments, and as basically a theatre kid the Shakespeare Society club meant a lot to me and I thought it was a good inclusion and also JESUS I thought I was gonna freaking die from all the tension in Pip and Rooney’s Beatrice and Bertrand performance. Wow.

Also Sunil!! I love them! I did think it was slightly weird that he was only referred to with he/him pronouns when they use he/they, but I’m not nonbinary so I’ll look out for what other ppl are thinking about that. It was so cool to have him there though, bc those kids needed some guidance and he needed some time to just have fun so, win win! We are so lucky for Sunil, we don’t deserve him.

Also I need to know everything about Jess bc I have a suspicion we may be the same person. Except I’m not in orchestra. Or British. Or aromantic bisexual. Whatever. She just seems awesome! And I would’ve loved to hear some wisdom from a slightly older queer woman, I guess.

So! Jumping now to some criticisms, I feel like there’s a bunch of parts where Georgia is explaining her feelings, or explaining someone else’s motivations or actions, and it didn’t do a lot for me, I wish there was more like show don’t tell.

There were some points when the writing was genuinely so good, like Pip’s dialouge was always fantastic, especially towards the end with Georgia, it showed off their friendship in a way I really would’ve loved to see more of. Alice’s imagery and character descriptions, especially outfit descriptions had some really good moments, like the main example I think about is the ball because that was everything for me until it wasn’t.

I just really did not enjoy Rooney kissing Georgia, it was such a painful scene and even more than my discomfort, it was just trope-y, you could tell that Pip would catch them and it didn’t feel necessary. I think they could’ve structured it where Pip is just mad about what happened to Jason and it would’ve been better.

But the outfit descriptions! And the bouncy castle game! And the decorations! It was definitely one of my favorite scenes.

I also loved that Alice included Ellis, just like, hell yeah it was so good especially the part where she talks about how there’s magic and love in painting and friends and living and everything.

Georgia and Rooney’s relationship toward the end made me SO emotional and I cried at the part where Georgia was talking about how she’s afraid her friends will leave her and Rooney comforts her.

And the big platonic gestures were fantastic, I knew that they would happen but I was worried it would be too cliche but it was the perfect amount of dorky and I loved it.

This book made me so happy and taught me a lot and I can only hope it will do the same for others and Alice will continue creating brilliant content. If you got this far, gee thanks friend, you have commitment. *Gives you friendship flowers*

#loveless #loveless alice oseman #alice oseman #osemanverse #book review #ya book review #the ramblings #ya books #lgbtq+ ya books #lgbt ya books #lgbt books

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notaparty-trick · 4 years ago

Text

All Those Senseless Scars - Chapter 2

By @notaparty-trick for @asyouleft

@friendly-neighborhood-exchange

Rating: T

Relationships: Tony Stark & Peter Parker, May Parker & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, May Parker, Pepper Potts, Michelle Jones, Ned Leeds

Summary: There is a rule to the way Peter lives now. He didn’t know it at first, but he learnt it.

It’s simple.

To earn what he needs to survive, he has to make sacrifices.

---

Peter Parker's life is derailed when he's kidnapped and kept in a white-tiled room with nothing: no windows, no cameras, no food, no water, no phone, nobody else. Only his own thoughts keep him from losing his mind. If he asks for anything, he must take punishment. Tony Stark will stop at nothing to bring him home.

Archive Of Our Own link here

The second Tony hits the floor, he wakes up.

Before even the throbbing of the back of his head, he notices the kid’s arms around him and recalls the last few minutes of his consciousness, the images of a blowtorch burning blue and of waxy crimson burns spidering across Peter’s face still horrifyingly fresh in his memory.

“Get a medical team to the front door right away,” he hears Pepper saying. Pushing himself hurriedly into a sitting position, Tony sees her crouched in front of them both, her widened eyes fixed on the kid.

The kid, whose every inch of skin is littered with bruises, lacerations, swelling, raised lines that look like whip marks. Who is gaunt and frail and half-naked and blue from cold.

“What should you expect, you asked? Cho, I don’t know what to say. He’s… everything. Just, every kind of injury you could think of.”

Tony has spent twenty sleepless nights looking for Peter Parker.

He’d first begun to suspect that something was amiss when he shut up his workshop for the night and realised he’d never received the quiet ping he’d programmed Karen to send which indicated that the kid had returned safely home from patrol. The protocol had been designed so Tony would get a ping from the Spider-Man suit the moment it entered the Parker abode, and, on the flip side, would send through an alert if he stayed out past his curfew, so the radio silence was what began to raise red flags.

Tony had shoved his paranoia aside for the moment and simply called the kid.

Nothing.

After three missed calls, he patched it straight through, the guilt of prying fading in comparison to a need to assure the kid’s safety, but FRIDAY had pulled him up short. “Boss, it is impossible for me to trace his phone or suit. They do not exist.”

“Sure, they exist. Be realistic, FRI. What do you mean?”

“The most likely explanation for this is that they have both been destroyed to the point where they no longer emit a tracking signal.”

Pushing out a deliberately measured breath, Tony ran his hands down his face in a habitual movement. “What are the chances he’s... destroyed all his tech and run off to join the Amish?”

“That is highly unlikely, Boss. Mister Parker spends an average of three hours on his phone every day.”

“Well - yeah. Shit.” Fighting back a growing wave of unease, Tony tried and failed to pull together some sort of plan of action which culminated in a tentative phone call to May Parker.

“If Peter’s with you right now and he hasn’t answered my texts,” she began without preamble, “You’re both in big trouble.”

Tony’s moment of silence drove her to an instant and terrifying conclusion.

“Tony, tell me he’s with you.”

“He’s off the grid. FRIDAY’s saying his suit and phone have been destroyed.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means… I suppose we’re - we’re looking at a missing kid now.”

Tony remembers with harsh clarity the way May’s breath had caught.

“Fuck, Tony. He’s - that’s my baby.”

“I know, May, I know. Best not to get - we don’t know anything for sure. There’s a best-case scenario here.” Neither of them are convinced. They’re both catastrophizers when it comes to Peter, and for good reason: the kid gets whammied by the ugliest parts of life on the daily.

“And the worst case?” May ventured.

Words fled Tony’s mouth.

“There’s a place at the facility upstate if that’s where you wanna be. I’ll kickstart a search there.”

The plastered-on bravery in May’s tone fractured a little as she affirmed, “I’ll be right there.”

Tony called the NYPD. He gathered Rhodey and Happy and Pepper and a team of specialist SI security employees. He scoured footage and followed leads himself, gave every piece of information he had to the cops, sent out teams of drones to survey as much of New York as he could until, five days later, Pepper laid her hands on his shoulders and told him, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“He’s still out there, Pep.”

She simply smiled sadly at him and repeated, “If you don’t rest now you’re going to be useless.”

“I can’t just rest.”

“Yes, you can. Come on.” She let him take her arm and guided him out of his chair as if he were fragile, ancient. “You’re going to take a hot bath. I’m going to warm up your favourite pyjamas. You’re going to take some sleeping pills, and I’ll be with you all night.”

“The kid needs me--”

“He does. He needs you to be strong, and to do that you have to sleep.”

“Make sure I’m up at five.”

“Six.”

“Five-thirty.”

As awful as it felt harbouring a head full of horrific images of what could be happening to the kid while he let his muscles unknot themselves in a tub of hot water, he awoke the next morning with renewed determination for his task.

Losing Peter was simply not an option.

“Whoever’s got him, they must know a lot,” May remarked over coffee as she watched Tony at work that morning. “To disconnect his suit, too.”

She left for a shift at the hospital a few hours later - as much as she wanted to be around during the search for Peter, her job didn’t allow her to take leave for her missing nephew, and she was determined to remain self-sufficient - but her statement stayed with Tony.

They must know a lot.

When Tony stopped searching for a lone villain and started picturing a group - an organisation of some sort - the pieces began to fit.

“Show me feed 4, the 2nd of February, at... 2 pm. One of the first drone searches I sent out, right?”

“That is correct,” FRIDAY chimed. “The feed begins just over a mile from this facility.”

And there it is. The small, ramshackle building by the freeway. He’d dismissed it at first as a broken-down shelter, but it’s too incongruous not to take a closer look now.

“Send in a scout. I want to see inside.”

Not a minute later, the miniature drone whirred through a chink in its wall and revealed a room that appeared completely unremarkable but for the circular trapdoor set into the centre of the floor.

After ten minutes of studying that trapdoor, realisation - a thunderbolt from heaven, the eureka moment inventors like him grasp at all their lives - strikes him. He notices the design: a circle broken by a diagonal hinge on the bottom right.

“Bring up the Oscorp logo,” he demanded urgently.

An image flew to join the paused feed of the trapdoor. A circle broken at the bottom right.

Oscorp.

Lunging for his phone, he patched a call through to Norman Osborn - how he came to store the fucker’s number, God only knows, but he was thankful for it then - and hoped his hunch was correct.

“You took the kid.”

“It took you long enough to figure it out,” Osborn had returned with a short bark of laughter.

As he takes in the state of Peter all over again in the doorway of the Compound, he wishes he’d killed Osborn personally. Painfully. Made him feel every inch of pain the kid must have gone through.

The kid. The kid he’d taken out for ice cream on his sixteenth birthday last summer. The kid whose screams are still freshly ringing through Tony’s mind.

He hovers his hands over the motionless body beside him, searching for somewhere to make contact with that won’t hurt the kid.

“Fucking hell, he just - we’re - he walked all the way back.”

Pepper ends her call and immediately looks to him, gaping, her composure discarded. “What the hell happened?”

“I found the place,” he blurts. “Tried to get him out, but I must’ve knocked my head. He… took us back.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

“You should get May on the line,” Tony says, trying to clear a path through his jostled brain. It throbs, but his heart aches more acutely.

Pepper just nods, rushing to find the number.

Swallowing away the breaks in his voice, he tugs off his jacket, shakes away the coating of dust from the explosion, and lays it across the kid’s back. He seems even smaller under it, like he’s shrinking by the minute to a shell of what Tony remembers him to be. Unwilling to gather him up and risk aggravating any of his injuries, Tony takes hold of one of his hands: there’s a litany of half-healed scrapes marring the knuckles, but all the fingers look to be in their proper place, which he can’t say the same of about the other. God. “Kiddo, are you awake? Can you try and open your eyes? I just - we’ve just gotta know you’re all good.”

“May, he’s here,” Pepper says. “We have - no, I’m sorry. He’s not awake. Just - come.”

Tony brings the limp knuckles to his cheek, then his chest. “Look, it’s okay to wake up now. Here’s my janky heartbeat. You always recognize it, remember?” He laughs hysterically, tearfully. Tony Stark is on the verge of tears. “We’ve got a team coming - they’re gonna get you on the good stuff, yeah? Stuff kids your age pay hundreds for. Lucky punk.”

Inexplicably, the kid’s eyelids choose that moment to begin dragging themselves open.

“Oh. Kid? Pete?”

Peter’s face screws up the moment he wakes; he groans, a dreadfully tormented noise.

In his peripheral vision, Tony spots the elevator doors opening to allow out an assemblage of medics.

“You’re okay, kid - it’s me, it’s your Mister Stark, yeah? We’re gonna get you all fixed up.”

“M’s… s’k,” Peter garbles.

“Uh-huh,” Tony assents, although he hasn’t a clue what the kid is trying to tell him.

His gaze is brimming with exhaustion, anguish, pain, a host of harrowing emotions that Tony doesn’t ever want to see there again, but through it all shines trust.

As the medics set down their equipment, he squeezes Peter’s hand and receives a slight twitching of the kid's fingers in response. Encouraged, he prepares to make full use of his skills in comforting monologues. “You’re gonna get lifted onto a gurney in just a second so we can get you tucked up in a bed and fixed up. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Peter whines, long and low and broken. After Tony had watched him rein in his response to pain in the white tiled corridor - the fierce, guarded demeanour he’d taken upon him - he reckons the kid deserves to cry out as much as he wants. He must hurt like hell.

Tony can feel it.

He keeps his hand locked around Peter’s as the medical team lifts him onto the gurney on his stomach, the kid locking his gaze on him as if his life depends on it. As he’s carried back towards the elevator, Tony jogs beside him. “And we’re off on a magical adventure to the MedBay,” he jests feebly. One side of Peter’s mouth actually lifts a little. “Get ready to sleep for a decade. I know you’ll love that. No more getting up at the crack of dawn to take the subway, doctor’s orders.”

The elevator takes them briskly upwards, but to Tony it still isn’t fast enough. Through his tirade of falsely-chipper reassurance, the medical team makes a cursory assessment of his injuries and responsivity.

“Your aunt is on her way. She’ll be here real soon, so expect a lot of kisses. From me, too. If that’s alright.”

“Sir, we need you to clear the room while we prep for surgery.”

“Oh.” They’re in an operating room, he realises dimly. “Yes.”

Although it tears at his primal protective instincts, Tony knows he has to step away for the kid’s ultimate wellbeing. Hysterics in the OR will do nothing to ease the process along.

Laying a hand over the crown of Peter’s matted hair, he tries to imbue his own strength into the kid through his touch, though all he’s got at the moment seems to be an overload of frenzied determination.

“Be brave for me, Pete,” he whispers.

There’s an affirmation of his request in Peter’s eyes, he thinks.

He steps away; the doors glide shut before him.

“Well, fucking hell,” he remarks to Pepper who he hears approaching behind him.

“Yes, fucking hell. Do you want to explain why you were passed out and slung over the kid’s shoulder?”

“I found where they’d kept him. Well, I didn’t know for sure, I just… I’m sorry. It was a gut instinct. Couldn’t slow down if there was a chance it was the right lead.”

“Who was it?”

“Oscorp. They brought him to me, and - God - they, he was…” his headache arrives in full force, half-knocking him off his feet with the sudden dizziness that accompanies it. “Maybe we can talk about this after I’ve got some Tylenol in me. Pretty sure I’ve got a concussion.”

“Okay.” Caring Pepper returns. “Let’s get you checked out, too.”

---

Peter opens his eyes to white tiles.

The pain he’d felt so potently the last time he’d been awake has dimmed significantly, leaving him with dull aches; a mattress cushions his smarting back. It’s heavenly, almost unreal.

“They said he’d only be out for an hour or two, right?”

“It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong, May. He’s just exhausted.”

It’s the familiar voices that bring him back to reality, that cement sweet relief in his heart.

Rolling his head to one side, he finds May attached to his hand.

May. May. May who smells of freshly-washed scrubs and orchids and home.

He flexes his fingers in hers and she startles, pressing her lips together in a trembling smile. “Peter, baby. Peter.”

At the affection in her words, a bright golden thing deep in his chest that has been left neglected in a white tiled corner for twenty-one days flares to life, thawing, easing him.

He attempts to turn his head the other way but finds a wad of gauze across the side of his head that prevents him from seeing all of Tony. He spots the elbows resting on his mattress, the downturned countenance harbouring something deep and raw.

Grief settles heavily in the room. Peter’s had enough of grief.

“Tha’ was,” he tries through his numb mouth, “Tha’ w’s a trip. An’ all I got w’s… was this…” He attempts to indicate himself with a hand but finds the arm that isn’t enclosed in May’s hand trapped by a sling and a number of casts.

Like the force of gravity has suddenly been applied to him and he’s hit the ground with a thud, Peter remembers the snap of those bones breaking, the wordless screams nobody had heeded, the bloodstains that had tarnished undulating white tiling, and feels a painful lump well up in his throat.

“I d’n’t even ge’ an’thing.”

A tear races unbidden down his cheek.

“That w’s a lousy joke. ’m sorry.”

The lamentation trapped within him has been caught behind his sternum for twenty-one days; now that it’s beginning to escape, it’s impossible to stop.

Peter swallows. Another tear falls, sinking into the gauze across his face.

“Hey,” May murmurs soothingly to him, “What’s up, sweetheart?”

Everything.

“Forgot how nice y’ were, May,” he tells her, trying to distract from his crying, trying to smile. The gauze and the numbness of the side of his face gets in the way. “Ev’ryone’s real nice ou’ here. Y’ were - m'ster St’rk, y’ came?”

“I did,” he receives in reply. He’s never seen his mentor look so wrecked.

It’s not every day he returns from a kidnapping, he supposes.

“‘M - ‘m back.” He feels as if he needs to say it aloud to solidify it.

“Yes, you are.” May brushes a fond hand across his hair, tucking away his still-dirty bangs. The touch is more tentative than her usual calming gestures, but she offers him a smile that, although plastered on, holds at least a fragment of genuine positivity. “Everyone’s very happy about that, you know.”

His mind turning to the days at school he never attended, the unanswered texts in his phone, the life he’d left behind, Peter tips his head back restlessly. “Di’ Ned… we were g’na…”

“He handled your World History presentation,” May says with a huff of laughter that is mirrored by Mister Stark. “Don’t you worry about it.”

“Goo’. Prou’ of him.” He is. He misses him and MJ like hell.

May’s countenance affects stern incredulity, although she can never muster up any real discipline while he’s bedbound. Peter has learnt this through a long period of trial and error where, after engaging in some form of stupid behaviour, she’d always wait until he was back on his feet to grill him out. With the state he’s in now, he guesses it will take a while this time. She chuckles wetly at him. “You walked yourself all the way back here, you crazy boy.”

Peter takes another hazy stab at lifting the mood: “Crazy, ‘s m’ - uh, my…”

“Middle name?” supplies Mister Stark, subdued.

“Mm. M’ middle name.”

The crease in his mentor’s brow sets off a warning pang in his chest.

“M’ster St’rk?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Is ev’rythin’ all, uh…” his brain and mouth won’t work together to produce the words he wants. “All, all, um.”

Tony seems to sense the root of his concern. “You’re safe. I made sure of it myself. Multiple times. We have those guys handled, I promise.” He rests a hand on Peter’s knee, pats it a few times, but he gets the feeling that he’s holding back from doing something as intimate as wiping tears from where they’ve halted, quivering, in the hollows of his eye sockets. In a quiet corner of his mind, Peter wishes he would.

“Oh. ‘kay.”

He can’t quite bring himself to believe it.

---

The next time he wakes up, he’s gained a new level of coherence that leads him to take stock of the state he’s in. The dressing on his face feels damp but cool with whatever they’ve used to treat the burns. The burns he doesn’t want to think about.

There’s a splint and a layer of gauze across his nose to reset it; a cast on his hand, one on his forearm, and a sling holding the whole arm at a 90-degree angle. It alleviates the burning pain he’d barely even processed in his collarbone. He can feel a dressing across the lashes on his back, too, and an ice pack laid across his swollen ribs over the hospital gown he’s now dressed in. He’s free from a cannula, thankfully; there are just two IV lines trailing from the crook of his arm and the back of his hand respectively.

God, I’m a mess.

It’s certainly the most wiped-out he’s ever felt. His eyelids are ten-tonne weights.

The trouble comes when May offers him a plastic cup upon noticing his return to consciousness. “Do you want a couple of ice chips, honey?”

“Would you like some clothes?”

Peter’s heart picks up the pace.

“Uh, I - I don’ know.”

“You don’t know?” May presses, brows knitting, and he’s letting her down. She wants an answer.

“Wha’s, wha’s gonna happ’n?” he asks tremulously, recalling the thump of a whip descending on his back, the echoes of his own screams accompanied by the sickening cracking of bones, a million hands pressing him to the ground, and simply needing to know that he’s safe from it.

He is safe. He knows that. But a more primal part of him is terrified.

“What do you mean, baby? Are you feeling okay?”

From his accustomed place at Peter’s right side, Tony leans forward in his seat and interjects. “Hey, is this something to do with…?”

Peter isn’t sure why he says it. It just comes out. “T’ earn wha’ I need, I gotta take punishmen’.”

There’s an ugly silence. Tony sets a hand over Peter’s ankle; Peter can pick up the tremors in his grip. May chews on her lower lip.

“Kid,” Tony says quietly.

“‘M sorry, it just… that’s wha’ they said. I know ‘s not… bu’, uh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine.” Tony frowns good-naturedly, signalling a Mister Stark-patented statement on the way, and sure enough: “I don’t want to hear the word sorry out of your mouth for at least a month.”

It’s familiar, comforting, and helps Peter ground himself in the room, the hospital bed, the safe place.

He smiles wonkily at Mister Stark. “Y’know tha’s unrealistic.”

“Seriously, kid, are you gonna take the ice chips?” is the amusement-tinged response. Tony nods towards the cup now set down on the overbed table, his countenance radiating a schooled softness. “No strings attached, that’s a guarantee.”

“Sure,” Peter blusters, shrugging then regretting it as his collarbone is struck with a stabbing pain. “‘kay.”

May pushes a few chips into his mouth, softly pushing away his good hand, which he notices is weighed down by fatigue and more spindly than the last time he’d been in the MedBay. Almost a month of starvation does that to you, he guesses. The ice chips are heavenly against his arid throat.

“Is that how you got all banged up?” Tony inquires softly, re-igniting the previous thread of conversation, and although it unearths the reel of harrowing memories that blemish his recent past, something in Peter yearns to tell Mister Stark, to show him that he’d tried his best, even if it doesn’t appear that way.

He’d gotten captured, kidnapped, and absolutely wrecked, and he’d just waited around until Mister Stark had come to save him. Whether Oscorp was involved or not, it fosters a rankling sense of shame in his gut.

If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.

“Tony,” May hisses.

Peter nods anyway, the rustling dressing over his face irritating him. “Yeah.” He searches for Tony’s gaze, injects sincerity into his garbled speech. “I didn’ wanna ask f’r anything an’ I made it five days wi’out water. Bu’... I had to.”

“Course you did,” Mister Stark tells him with a startling level of empathy.

“I tried t’ be smart,” Peter continues, “S’ they wouldn’ hurt me t’ much.”

“Pete, I’m not grading you on how well you handled yourself in there. Relax. You got out, that’s all that matters.”

“You go’ me out,” mutters Peter.

The crow’s feet lining Mister Stark’s eyes deepen. “Same difference,” he affirms.

But it isn’t.

“Di’ you hear me, May?” he finds himself saying, blinking away a haze of rumination from his vision.

“What?”

“I called you in there, y’ know.”

The feel of the vintage telephone he’d wished into being is somehow more concrete than the real memories of pacing the floor and sleeping on the ceiling and not-crying and crawling when he became too weak to stand and screaming to a helpless Mister Stark as fire licked the side of his face.

“You - there was a phone?” May asks quizzically. She’s trying her very best to understand him, Peter knows, to listen to him and fix any problem he voices, to make it all better. It’s him who’s all over the place.

“No. There wasn’ anything. Just tiles. Bu’ I pretended. Thought y’ might hear anyway.”

His remark breaks something in May. With a sharp inhale, she pushes back her chair and stands, looking anywhere but at Peter, at the casts and dressings and stitches that hold him together. “You know what?” she says loudly, “I’m gonna - do you want a milkshake, Peter? I’m getting you a milkshake. Something nice to get you back to solid foods.”

She rakes a hand through her unwashed hair and leaves.

The mattress feels too soft for Peter now, dipping under his weight. He wallows in his own stupidity.

His memories are now too dark to share with May: she isn’t a superhero, just a woman who has lost her husband and who didn’t ask to be pulled into a world where she risks losing her nephew too. She didn’t ask to have another person to worry about, but here Peter is, breaking her heart. He almost wishes she didn’t care so ardently as she does, didn’t long so fruitlessly to protect him from the wear and tear of the superhuman world.

The silence between him and Mister Stark hangs heavily, riddled with tension and the shared recollection of Peter’s screams.

Only when Tony clears his throat and says, “I set you up a new phone,” is he pulled away from his thoughts.

“You di’?”

It’s tossed into his lap. “Go ahead and text your little Gen Z heart away.”

As hard as Peter tries to turn the device on and swipe over to his apps with his one uninjured hand, it just slips from his grip. His face reddens.

“M’ster S’rk?”

“Yuh-huh?” Mister Stark hasn’t yet noticed, having angled himself away from Peter a little and placed his head in his hands. At Peter’s sheepish call, he twists to face him again in a series of jerks. “Oh.” He lunges for the phone, newly sober. “Oh, yeah. How about I read everything out for you?”

In an instant, the notion of Mister Stark seeing all his texts manifests in all its horrifying glory, and Peter finds himself fearing something as trivial as the discovery of his awkward message history with MJ and nerdy conversations with Ned. It’s oddly relieving.

“Don’ spy on my texts,” he protests weakly. The blue light reflecting on Mister Stark’s face serves as a blatant reminder that his mentor might just be betraying him already.

Tony smirks. “I can’t not spy on them if they’re right there.”

Peter lets out a huff that he hopes conveys the entirety of his indignance, although he’s aware the side of his face that’s free of dressings probably doesn’t create a very threatening image.

“There you are,” Tony chuckles in the face of his display, “I was waiting for that little frown.”

“‘M not little.”

“If you say so, pipsqueak.”

Peter rolls his eyes as dramatically as he can. “Jus’ let me talk t’ Ned ‘nd MJ.”

“Video call?” Mister Stark suggests as if he hasn’t yet noticed the way Peter’s face must look.

The thought of his friends seeing the human punching bag he’s become cuts a sense of horror in him too deep for the lightness of the interaction he’s engaged in.

“No, no, no,” he rushes to say before hurriedly covering his panic with a languid shake of his head. “No calls. Text.”

“And you’re gonna dictate them to me like I’m a medieval scribe?”

“I dig tha’.” Peter finds himself letting out a short bark of laughter despite himself. He’s a melting pot of emotion, experiencing everything at once.

“I resent that,” retorts his mentor lightly.

“Suck i’ up, M’ster S’rk. ‘m an invalid, y’ gotta do what I say.”

Tony just swallows. Peter hopes he didn’t say the wrong thing again.

“Di’ Ned say anything?” he prompts eventually.

“A great many things. Forty-two, in fact.”

“Oh, man.” Just the thought of forty-two things makes his head spin. Ned probably went out of his mind. “Don’ think I c’d process tha’ right now. Jus’... tell him I’m alrigh’. ‘M alive an’ he can finish the Imperial S’r Destroyer wi’out me.”

“The Imperial Star Destroyer?” echoes Mister Stark, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Peter remembers the enthusiasm he used to hold for things like this. He tries hollowly but valiantly to recreate that excitement as he replies: “‘S got four thousan’, seven h’ndred an’ eighty four pieces, M’ster St’rk. Isn't tha’ crazy?”

His mentor’s eyes crinkle amiably as he regards Peter, shifting back a little in his seat as if the levity has physically purged some of his stress. “You built all of that?”

“We w’re gonna,” shrugs Peter.

“He’s typing already. It’s… I have to break it to you, Pete, but his fine motor skills seem to have declined significantly in the time you were gone.”

“Wha’ do y’ mean?”

“It’s just a string of random letters.”

“He’s keyb’rd smashin’, M’ster St’rk,” Peter giggles, ignoring the rasp of his throat.

Tony clicks his tongue. “I won’t even ask.”

Making an attempt to lean upwards in his bed and towards the glow of the screen in Mister Stark’s hands which is quickly aborted by the ache of his ribs and back, Peter urges, “Wha’s he sayin’ now?”

“I think I made out a holy shit somewhere in there… I’m gonna kill you, I thought you were dead… No, I am not finishing the Destroyer without you…”

Peter smiles.

“What happened? With an abundance of question marks.” Raising his eyeline with a dip of his brows, Tony studies him for a moment.

“Tell him i’ was S’ider-Man stuff an’ I got in trouble but ‘m alrigh’,” Peter tells him as firmly as he can.

“You’re not gonna tell him?”

“He’ll stress ou’.”

Setting aside the phone in favour of lacing his fingers together atop his lap, Tony sighs, heralding a lecture to come. “Kid, I won’t lie to you,” he says with surprising softness, “Not everything just goes away once you’re back in the world. Some things never do. You - you know that, right? You’re prepared for that?”

At that very moment, Peter is saved by the bustling entrance of May, who sets a creamy drink before him and smiles hopefully. “I got you salted caramel.”

“Th’nk you so much, May.” Inexplicably, it’s the drink, the way his enhanced senses pick up the rich, sugary smell and the slow bleeding of caramel syrup into the milky base, which rekindles passion in Peter, infuses a little color into his world. He lifts his hand until it rests on her arm, too weak to raise it further, and she sets her hand a little awkwardly but with sincerity over his.

“S’lted caramel’s the bes’.”

“I know, honey.” Returning his smile shakily, she squeezes his hand and tells him, “Now, I want you to enjoy it, okay? It’s - it’s your first...”

Where she trails off, he picks up. “My firs’ drink back in the real w’rld.”

May nods, blinking fiercely. Everything Peter does seems to upset her. So he shuts up and latches on to the straw of the drink.

It’s mind-blowingly good. It’s cool and thick and delicious and makes him feel a whole lot better.

“Can I swear?” he pipes up out of the blue. “Jus’ once?”

Mister Stark indulges him. “Go on.”

“H’ly fuck , I’ve missed s’lted caramel.”

---

Peter tried to escape. He did.

The second time he heard the rhythmic beat of boots nearing his cell, he leapt up onto the wall right beside the door, flattening himself against the tile in the hope that the masked group would be taken by surprise by his sudden attack. With nothing but unbridled terror on his side, he prepared to take out four armed guards who had wrestled him easily to the floor the day before.

The force of the group was unneeded, it transpired. As soon as Peter threw his first weakened punch, the room filled with the torturous whistle, making him drop to the floor in shock.

“Would you like anything?” he was asked mildly after the noise had ceased at last.

From his sprawled position on the floor, hands still covering his ringing ears, Peter shook his head vehemently. “No. Please, go away.”

White tiles spun with the dizzying motion of a carousel before his vision, the cacophony of retreating boots at odds with the thousands of dismembered feet he sees tramping across the unidentifiable orb of the cell. Peter bit back a cry of pain as the slam of the door assaulted his ears, rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, losing himself in the distracting motion.

His swallows became avalanches, blinking like the shutter of a camera pressed against his eyes.

“Oh, man,” he mumbled unevenly, nausea creeping up his throat. “Pull yourself together, Peter. Come on. Just - chill.”

It wasn’t the first time his senses had overloaded. The bout of sickness after the spider bite; his first overwhelming patrol; a school day he’d attended on a single hour of sleep; all had brought about these almost familiar symptoms. But before, he could crawl between his sheets, relaxing in the familiar scent of his room, and call it a day. He could stumble through his day in sunglasses and headphones, knowing it would pass. He could even lock himself in the dark, soundproofed room in the Compound - the isolation room - and shut out every sensation but his own breath and heartbeat. In his box, there was nothing to distract him from the frightening lack of control that came with the sensory overload but his own sheer willpower.

So he continued to rock back and forth for what could have been hours, simply waiting for the storm to pass by.

---

Peter wakes to a sweat-soaked hospital gown and a lump in his throat.

Sucking in a raw breath, he takes in the room: Tony stirring at his side and May passed out at his other. Nothing out of the ordinary. He burns all over, however, damp and shaky and aching.

“Kid?” Tony mutters, righting himself and rubbing at his eyes.

“Mister St’rk, I gotta go t’ the isolation room,” he blurts.

That gets Mister Stark up quickly. He takes in Peter’s taut face, his good hand clenched in the sheets, the beads of moisture at his hairline, and nods.

The transferral from his bed to a wheelchair is awkward and excruciating, with Tony struggling to bundle his fragile limbs and IV lines safely into the seat while Peter shuts his eyes against the red-hot pokers of Tony’s hands on him and the shifting of the synthetic overhead lights against his skull and the jostling of his arm and back and ribs and face. It’s worth it , he tells himself. Just a few minutes and there will be blissful silence.

“Nightmare?” Tony asks him in a hushed tone as he wheels him down corridors and into the lift.

“Flashback, I th’nk.”

Tony’s hand settles in his slick curls; he wordlessly combs them out, his touch feather-light, and it’s a welcome distraction from the deafening creaking of the cables around them.

Guiding him and his IV stand into the darkened room, he half-shuts the door and breathes, “Anything you need, give FRIDAY a command, remember? She won’t make any noise. I’ll come and get you out when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” he whispers, his brain rattling with the volume.

The door is eased shut, leaving only blissful quiet.

Blissful for a short while, anyway.

Peter has never loved the isolation room. As helpful as it is to rebalance his senses, the very name reminds him of why it scares him - isolation. Now, bound to his wheelchair, hearing only his own heartbeat, all he can think of are the days in his cell wracked with pain too great to allow him to move but also gripped by terrible loneliness.

The fear of being alone has dogged him all his life. Re-starting his life without his parents. Watching Ben bleed out on the ground before him. Floundering under the weight of the collapsed warehouse. Never was it more starkly exposed, however, than the twenty-one days he’d spent in his box.

He’d been scared. He could have rotted there forever, his last breath plagued by the loneliness he’d fought so hard to run from.

“FRIDAY,” he gasps, “Get me ou’ of here.”

Tony comes rushing through, concern clear on his face, but Peter wants nothing more than to cling to him and never let go, so he does just that, clutching him until he grunts at the pain radiating from his ribs.

“Kid, I’m here. You’re fine.”

“Didn’ work,” he says into Tony’s shoulder.

“I know.” Mister Stark’s voice brims with sadness. “It’s okay, let’s just - take a breather for a minute. Sit here.”

“Can’ do much else,” huffs Peter.

They rest, Mister Stark breathing into Peter’s hair while he keeps his hand stuck stubbornly to his mentor’s back.

#fanfic #fanfiction #irondad #spiderson #tony stark #peter parker #whump #angst #hurt and comfort #notaparty-trick

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thesportssoundoff · 7 years ago

Text

Attempting to Play Matchmaker: The 2018 schedule opening

Joey

November 13th

I started this like two weeks ago so forgive me if I'm off on any of the news. Just bein' real on it. I got up to the main event for the Belem show and then took a long break.

What you see above is the UFC's schedule for 2018. The start of the year has been laid out and it features 9 events through March. For comparative measures we had 8 in 2016 and 2017. It's worth noting that this could be the last year they're on Fox so there's a lot riding on these events to do some numbers. According to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/trentreinsmith/2017/11/05/ufc-announces-nine-events-for-first-quarter-of-2018/#583e5ca8df1c) there's TWO Fox cards scheduled for the early portion of the year which to my knowledge is normally NOT how they do things. Even if you want to account for NFL numbers being down, playoff NFL numbers are always higher than anything else going on for the year so right off the jump, the UFC will have two big FOX events and then two Fight Nights which literally will suckle of the teet of the NFL/Fox relationship. The first being the Sunday January event which will likely follow an NFL Divisional Round game and the OTHER being a game the week of the Super Bowl. I don't know if Fox has the super bowl this year but either way, that's a BIG night regardless. It's been successful for them in the past.

So you got 3 PPVs, 2 Fox cards and then 4 Fight Nights, the last of which potentially being a Fight Pass card. Maybe in the perfect world for the UFC, that FP card is the first show a digital provider is getting so a Netflix or an Amazon deal is in play. What I'm going to attempt, quite possibly in a rather poor fashion, is to JUST do the main and co-main events with perhaps a name or two sprinkled on top of that who may appear on the card. I'll also try to be as realistic as humanly possible, avoiding anything that's simply not gonna happen like McGregor on free TV or Jon Jones vs Brock or whatever. I'm also going to try NOT to steal any ideas discussed on the Dojo Talk Podcast where much was discussed to the tune of much radio silence. Just gonna try to fill this early schedule out.

UFC Fight Night From St. Louis, Missouri Jan 14th (Sunday on FS1)

Main Event: Amanda Nunes vs Holly Holm

It's been said that Nunes vs Rocky Pennington was in talks around UFC 219 before Pennington got hurt. It seems like Holm is looking for a bigger deal (or Cyborg is or somebody is) for that Cyborg/Holm fight so let's do Cyborg/Cat Zingano eventually and just roll with Nunes vs Holm in a fight that would garner a rather large heavy audience in Missouri. St. Louis seems like the sort of town Holly Holm could really pop numbers wise and Woodley isn't fighting on free TV (OR IS HE?!?!?!??!) so just gotta take your losses there. You would probably prefer this as an underneath title fight on a PPV but beggars can't always be choosers AND I'd argue a big ratings # to talk Fox into a few extra green bills might top the 50K more buys Nunes could generate if she generates any revenue at all at this point.

Co-Main Event: Jeremy Stephens vs Yair Rodriguez

So I've been toying around a bit for some potential ideas for a co-main and one idea was Darren Till vs somebody but I don't see an immediate fight that makes sense. Till could use a big, big spotlight night but this one doesn't feel too perfect for me. Till vs Wonderboy would be great but I really think the UFC is hot for Perry/Ponz vs Till winner at some point. Yair Rodriguez has been gone for a while but I can't think of a fighter at 145 lbs I'd like to see bounce back with a vengeance more than Yair. Jeremy Stephens is coming off a win and he's a pretty damn popular fighter so I think that's a fair matchup for free TV as a co-main under a big title fight.

We know that Vitor Belfort vs Uriah Hall is apparently a done deal here. I don't think that's a main event and I think that while it would work as a co-main event, giving a co-main spot to Vitor Belfort given his potential leaving of the UFC would be like giving Mitrione a co-main spot on that show in 2016 where they had concerns that HE was leaving. They didn't----and so Hall vs Vitor seems like a fine third fight. Put an action guy as the 4th spot or two big HWs to get the masses excited and move on.

Click inside for more of me trying to play God and failing miserably.

UFC 220 Boston, Massachusetts Jan 20th (Saturday on PPV)

Main Event: Daniel Cormier vs Volkan Oezdemir

There's been some internet scuttlebutt that this is actually the co-main event and the REAL main event is going to be McGregor vs Ferguson. That's cute and all but I'm not exactly sold. You get the feeling Conor's not fighting anywhere other than LA, Nevada or New York these days so I'm not buying that. Volkan vs DC might not sell 1,000,000 PPVs on its own BUT it's a really credible title fight and I don't see anything that immediately jumps out and makes me thing they're going to find an event that can top it.

Co-Main Event: Stipe Miocic vs Cain Velasquez

Look I can dream, ya know? Sipe vs Cain would be a fantastic co-main event and PROBABLY a top flight main event of its own. I just don't think that the UFC can trust Cain to step up and do something.

I guess a really solid third fight to back up those two would be something like Kevin Lee vs Beneil Dariush or Evan Dunham. Plus you gotta have a capable HW backing up any fight where Cain is on. Gotta protect yourself on a show like this. Plus Joe Lauzon because it's Boston.

UFC on Fox Charlotte, North Carolina Jan 27th (Saturday on Fox)

Main Event: Derek Brunson vs Luke Rockhold

Brunson has already suggested that this fight might be in the works. Either Rockhold or Weidman. There's basically 6-8 middleweights just hanging around looking to fight one another in Jacare, Weidman, Brunson, Rockhold, Boetsch and Yoel Romero. Brunson/Rockhold is a rare fresh fight at 185 lbs so if I'm forced to pitch a fight, this would be the one I'd go for. Besides Brunson is FROM North Carolina so yeah, perfect fit. No complaints I can't imagine.

Co-Main Event: Yoel Romero vs Jacare Souza II

I had previously thought Jacare could bet he headliner for a week from now in Belem BUT I have another idea for the spot. Jacare vs Romero is the PERFECT rematch and given Romero's insistence that his next fight be three rounds, I like this one as a fantab co-main event for a Fox card. If Brunson/Rockhold and Jacare/Romero don't get you excited then you can just miss me right here right now.

As for the rest of the card? Well we've seen some fights filter out recently but nothing I'd consider to be main card worthy. Randa Markos vs Julianna Lima could be on a main card as an opener I guess? What if you do Siyar Bahadurzada vs Brad Tavares since I believe Siyar is 100% focused on middleweight as of this time.

UFC Fight Night Belem, Brazil February 3rd

Main Event: Fabricio Werdum vs Alexander Volkov

I mean I don't see why not? I originally thought of Curtis Blaydes here but the more I think about it, the more I think that's rushing things. Plus I did an entire ramble on the DTP about how the UFC shouldn't rush Blaydes. Volkov instead makes good sense given his stock in the division and the streak he's on. Wins over Tim Johnson, Stefan Struve and Roy Nelson sets him up well for a run UP the rankings and Werdum is the best available scenario plus it's a main event in Brazil.

Co-Main Event: Rashad Evans vs Lyoto Machida II

Let's accept that both Rashad and Lyoto aren't going anywhere. Once you've done that, let's take it a step further and argue that neither guy deserves a real competitive matchup to this point. Rashad hasn't won in 100 years and Lyoto is on a similar minded slide. Both guys are big names who can bolster a card so put them on against one another as a co-main event on free TV and see who can rebuild their name value a teensy bit in the process.

As for the rest of the card? Thiago Marreta vs CB Dollaway seems like a fine fight assuming CB is coming back down to 185 lbs. I spent about a week thinking of what to do with Paulo Costa and I've decided that him vs Sam Alvey or Tim Boetsch seems like a fine fight for his progression. Francisco Trinaldo vs Lando Vannata can find a spot on this show and the same goes a fight like Antonio Carlos Junior vs Anthony Smith and Pedro Munhoz vs Marlon Moraes.

UFC 220 Perth, Australia February 10th (Saturday on PPV)

Main Event: GSP vs Robert Whittaker

It would SUCK if the UFC decided they wanted to do a big event in Perth and the healthiest/best Aussie in the company wasn't headlining. Especially givent he money spent lobbying to get an event in Perth. So how about we just abandon all pretenses and do this fight up? Unify the belts and we're all happy campers.

Co-Main Event: Tyron Woodley vs Robbie Lawler/RDA winner

I was torn between Joanna/Rose II and the Woodley fight but the best way to hype up GSP vs Woodley (because it's coming y'all) might be to just put this fight as the co-main event. I think when you bundle it all together, it's a pretty appealing 1-2 punch. Lawler in general likes to stay busy and RDA fought in June and was the back up plan if Maia turned down the fight with Woodley in July SO you're talking about a relatively quick-ish turnaround for both BUT I think they can handle it. Lawler fought in March then in May then in July one year. If not then just give Woodley one of the Till, Covington, Wonderboy trio to figure it out.

The rest of the card is what it is really. Expect plenty of Aussie filler with a pretty solid third fight to help put the whole puzzle together. If you REALLY wanna get nuts then maybe you do Rawlings vs the winner of the 125 title tournament. Also if they're smart Meagan Anderson will be on this show against some 145er they find in the mountains somewhere. Ediane Gomes FTW. Also I swear to god you can bet on them giving Dan Kelly someone who hits really hard because they like to be mean.

UFC Fight Night Erwin, Texas February 18th, 2017 (Live on FS1)

Main Event: Ovince St. Preux vs Patrick Cummins

I'm sort of stuck here. When the UFC goes to Texas they tend to bring big shows relative to the quality of free TV. The problem is this far ahead I can't really find a fight worthy of a main event slot. My first though in all honesty was Cody Garbrandt vs John Lineker but that may be too soon given that Garbrandt just had surgery. I was tempted to go Val Shevchenko vs the loser of the 125 lb tournament but eh....bleeegghh. I even consdiered James Vick vs Kevin Lee but I think I booked Lee already. As such, OSP vs Cummins makes sense. Two big dudes being big dudes. Plus we can just make this a good undercard.

Co-Main Event: Paige Van Zant vs Rachael Ostovich

Oh-kay. PVZ turned down Jessica Eye and Val Schevchenko. Rachael Ostovich vs PVZ makes some sense given that Ostovich will probably be a fighter who gets bounced from the TUF tournament but has the ability to generate some buzz given her looks (it matters y'all. We're trying to sell an event here). PVZ vs Ostovich would also be a pretty fun wild wacky kind of fight and if you're putting Paige on a main card, I can't imagine her not being really high up on a show---especially for FS1.

Bonus Fight: Sage Northcutt vs BJ Penn

WHAT?! WHAT?! Look that's THE fucking fight to make. I ain't even about to hear shit from y'all. Gimme this fight and fuck all exceptions. This is the main event unfortunately for most folks. Throw in James Vick vs Beneil Dariush and Alexa Grasso vs Danielle Taylor. Leggo.

UFC on Fox Orlando, Florida February 25th, 2017

Main Event: Rose Namajunas vs Joanna Former Champion II

I would prefer if they just moved Joanna up a weight class. To me that'd make the MOST sense. I don't make the rules here though so might as well just do a rematch, right? To me this is the perfect co-main event for a big PPV but instead let's just make it a title fight on Fox. Max publicity, easy to tell story, big "name" fight to bump a number and get yourself a juicy rating in late February.

Co-Main Event: Colby Covington vs Kamaru Usman

Don't tell me you don't want to see this even if it's for selfish purposes.

As for the rest of the show? Welp there's plenty of top flight fighters from top flight gyms in Florida who can be relied to turn a solid gate. Thiago Alves maybe? Nina Ansaroff on the strength of two straight wins could take on Jessica Andrade or Karolina K. Ben Saunders vs Cowboy Cerrone is a weird fight that sort of appeals to me as a main card opener. Jorge Masvidal vs Gunnar Nelson would be fun too.

UFC 222 Las Vegas, Nevada March 5th (Saturday on PPV)

Main Event: Conor McGregor vs Tony Ferguson

How about we unfiy these fucking titles and move on with our lives?

Co-Main Event: Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson vs TJ Dillashaw

I mean it's what they're doing. This seems like the path they want to take and I guess I can be sold on it. Big weird super fights for all.

As for the rest of the show? Dominick Cruz should be better by then so maybe you can rebook Cruz/Rivera. Francis Ngannou can get a filler fight vs a somebody if you need to keep him busy assuming he beats Overeem. Dustin Poirier vs the Gaethje/Alvarez winner por favor. The winner of Pettis/Cejudo, assuming they're asked to fight again, could take on Deiveison Figuerido or Tim Elliott.

UFC Fight Night ???, England (It's listed as London and it seems like London is where it'll be but the UFC wants to go to Liverpool as well) March 18th, 2018 (Fox or FS1?)

Main Event: Darren Till vs the winner of Mike Perry/Santiago Ponzinnibio

If Perry beats Ponz, I think we'll all be sold on his legit-ness. Besides he brings excitement and a touch of fun to this WW in rebuild. That and there are goofs who seem to really like the idea of these two jawing and fighting eventually. Having said that, I expect Ponz to beat Perry pretty decisively which would give us a fantastic clash of really good striking WWs with developing ground games.

Co-Main Event: Michael Bisping vs Dan Kelly/Sam Alvey/Jack Hermansson/Brad Scott/Anybody outside of the top 15

If Bisping is seriously retiring in London as he's stated then this feels like a perfect chance for him to take a nice step back in competition. Bisping has fought in FIVE straight five round fights so how about we give him somebody who isn't going to make him go five rounds. Pick a name out of a hat basically and let Bisping go out with a high probability for a win.

As for the rest of the show? I mean where the fuck has Arnold Allen been recently? Give Arnold Allen somebody a main card fight. Joanne Calderwood can fight a TUF castmate at 125 lbs. Oskar Piechota can get a fight too.

#MMA #UFC #Matchmaker #2018 #Till #Pettis #McGregor #Poirier #DC

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tayegi · 7 years ago

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This second chapter made me feel so much of everything, and I admire the OC for being so mature and put her anger aside. I feel sort of ashamed that it's not something I'd do hehe(seems like I need to grow more) I've never felt this way before but somehow your amazing writing makes me feel everything the OC feels! So thank your very much for sparing time to write all of this amazing stuff, even tho you're really busy. Really, thank you. I love you. ♥

Anonymous said:New rules isn't even about the boys for me anymore it's about this lowkey toxic friendship even if they've been friends for years that's the problem. OC couldn't talk to Mijoo about how she really felt not saying she should've told Mijoo to stay away from Jimin but let her know that it really hurt her feelings and Mijoo clearly didn't have a problem putting a boy over friendship. Even if it started with something small like this it could be the downfall to their friendship.

Anonymous said:I just wouldn't be able to trust Mijoo and that kinda ruins the whole friendship right then and there. It's I would think if she was so quick to ruin something for me for her over a guy what else will she do to put herself before me. I know friendships are important most of the time and the reader and Jimin were never together but I just wouldn't be able to associate with her. This is only what the reader is finding out now what else could Mijoo be hiding and I know it might not be that deep pt1

mirajoey said:Fml. I just hate how sweet demure pretty girls who are actual snake. And people keep misunderstanding 'ice queen but true' type of girls. Why do women need to be attractive (pretty) but superficial af to please men? My ex-crush is in relationship with my bestfriend tho😂 she and my other girl keep mocking me for being the only single ass in the group. Idk if they are intentional or not. I'm about to say fuck off bitch whenever they do that. But i'm a softie for friends. So yeah, am i weak?

Anonymous said:i feel like all this hate towards mijoo and the desire to hurt her is exactly how the oc initially reacted, and everyone who had sent in asks about physically hurting her is an instantaneous reaction, but will not actually do so. its kind of like being so angry during an argument with someone that you say things you dont mean. don't take it at heart. im one of the anons who sent in something about hurting her, and i would not in any way physically harm a person. much less a best friend.

Anonymous said:NR 2, Great writing as always. But I wouldnt have been as forgiving, maybe after a day or 2 we could talk things through with her after that. I get why some friendships crumble because of that. Its not because of the guy but because of the betrayal. It would hurt so much more from a friend you trust and have been open with all this. It just means they didnt choose to trust you with the truth and she didnt even admit it after all this time.

Anonymous said:wow that Mijoo... I have two thoughts: 1. "I hate snakeu" and 2. Haven't she heard the phrase, fries before guys? btw I would cut all connections with a "friend" like that. But you are wonderful Lu and never fail to amaze us♡ Thank you for sharing such quality contents so often~ Have a nice day!

Anonymous said:oH MY GOD! New rules 2 had me screeching. Bruh you make me so sad but i love it. Im in emotional turmoil for OC. Im. I just dont know man. Her friends are such asses.

Anonymous said:Ahh new rules hit me so hard, i actually cried! I relate so much to the oc and my own best friend of over 10 years pulled that shit on me and I was so, so hurt that I didn't even cared about the guy anymore but her betrayal really hit me....ahhh anyway that's such a emotional ride!!!! I love your writing 💕

Anonymous said:new rules makes me really sad of how friendships are always regarded as smth less than relationships. and the worst part is people around me would literally question me abt why im so against relationships when im not? i just feel like relationships and friendships are different but equally important.. it's so upsetting to know that friends that you treasure dont treasure you in the same way just because u r not their partner.

Anonymous said:Forgive me if I'm reading way too much into this, but I think the reason Mijo's betrayal brought so many strong emotions in a lot of readers is because most women "dread" something like that happening.. No one wants the "girls hate other girls/pick guys over friendships" stereotype to be true because it IS an awful stereotype, so when it happens (cause some people are awful and some of those people are girls) it's really heartbreaking.. 1/?

Anonymous said:the act alone is terrible but add to it that this proved the stereotype for some people and it can really sting!!I think that's the reason why "Mean Girls" is so popular! It satirizes that feeling and makes it funny/tolerable! The OC is acting in a mature way but given that she's a feminist it can also be that she doesn't want to prove that stereotype and wants to act above it! 2/?

Anonymous said:It's very understandable BUT no one would expect boys/men to be friends after something like that because it WAS hurtful and selfish and awful and Mijoo shouldn't get a pass just because she's a girl and OC wants to prove a point! Remove jimin from the equation and add a job promotion with Mijoo being sneaky and getting it instead of OC for reasons SHE instigated and it should be clear why OC needs to be angry! 3/4

Anonymous said:They should at least argue about it with a line in the sand drawn if it happens again! *not saying you should do that of course, the story is a stroy and should have this kind of layers/complex feelings, I'm talking in a real life scenario I guess* sorry to dump all this on you but it brought so many feelings and I had to write them down!! What do you think? A stretch? 4/4

Anonymous said:There would have been at minimum a month of radio silence from me if I were OC and one of my girl friends pulled a stunt like M.

Anonymous said:To be honest, I feel like maybe how the MC handled Mijoo maybe wasn't the mature thing to do? I guess in the past I always felt like being mature was keeping friends no matter what they pulled, but lately I feel like cutting off toxic friends actually is sometimes the best way to handle things? Like not causing a scene, or anything. It's just that I've come to value trust and respect in my relationships, and after part two I feel like I personally cannot trust or respect her. Just some thoughts!

Anonymous said:how is the OC so patient and... nice ?!!1!1!1 if i were her i’d be a salty ass bitch at mijoo like heck you just stole my crush away from me just because YOU like him. kdndksjsoana i feel aNgEr

Anonymous said:i hope karma fucks mijoo in the ass. i hate everything and i hope jungkook gets his ass whooped too so he can actually act like a human being for once. thanks for writing new rules

Anonymous said:As much as the OC is remarkable for her self sacrifice I feel Jimin had the right to know what happened and Mijoo really needs to know that what she did was not okay. Sure OC didn’t do the wrong thing by throwing a tantrum and ruining Mijoo’s life but I just felt like honest communication is necessary. This brings me to the point that I like how you write realistic stories because in life decisions aren’t so black and white.

Anonymous said:Yes I totally get you Lu. And in all honesty, I wouldn't have forgiven her. I wouldn't have caused that much or big of a scene, but I would have definitely ended my 'friendship' right then and there. It irritated me though that OC even went up to her and touched her asdsfhk. I would have went to sleep. I once had a friend who did the same shit twice. She dated the boys I liked, knowing about my feelings for each of them and then acted innocent. It felt like reading about me. - Reasoning Anon

Anonymous said:And the worst part is that I felt exactly the same way OC did. I just can't be mean to people. No matter how much I despise them. No matter how much they hurt or angered me. Because then I feel so evil, so I let it happen. Then I leash out on other people who never did (Jungkook). I just let them hurt me. And then I feel guilty about having mean thoughts about them. And when OC thought and felt like the asshole, the monster ... man. I already hate this story, go away 😩 - Reasoning Anon

Anonymous said:the oc in new rules is like waaay too kind to her "best friend", why would a "best friend" sabotage a girl's chance to get with a guy who genuinely likes her i still don't understand. it doesn't matter if the "best friend" likes the guy, i am betting the oc is some martyr to be that sacrificial. i would drop my "best friend" if she tried that on me

Anonymous said:LIVID. I'm so angry that Mijoo never gave OC Jimin's confession note, then had the nerve to involve OC as she was stressing over him. I'm frustrated that OC puts Mijoo on a pedestal just bc she's pretty, & seems to see Mijoo as more deserving of happiness than herself. Mijoo is a snake & deserves to be exposed bc she did both Jimin and OC dirty by not giving her his note. She deprived them both of what they wanted, & any relationship she now has w Jimin is tainted by what she did to him a yr ago

Anonymous said:I can only hope that Jimin wakes up and realizes what a snake Mijoo is. With a girl like her, I doubt their relationship can work out (or at least that's what I hope).

Anonymous said:mijoo gotta go

Anonymous said:I'm in love with new rules omg if I found out my best friend hid something like that from me I would be livid I don't know how she kept her cool. Can't wait for the next part! 💖💖💖

Anonymous said:Omg her friend is a snake and she's too forgiving 🤧😫😩 I just want to grab OC's shoulders and shake some sense into her, she's allowed to be angry at her friend, she's deserves to be happy too. I'm excited to see how the rest of this story is gonna develop, I really love all your writing. You have such a way with words that makes me feel like I watching a movie rather than just reading a story. ��❤️👌

bangtanboys-hoe said:This may be the bitch in me talking but I would've made her feel like shit. I would move out, block her number, and tell Jimin everything. I would've made her life a living hell hole. But this is just a story and I'm too nice of a person to do that.

Anonymous said:okay first how's your day, how you're doing. And second MIJOO IS SUCH A BITCH NO FUCK FHAT. WHAT HAPPENED TO LOYALTY, OC GAVE UP HER LIVE AND MIJOO DECIDED TO TAKE IT DOE SELF. FUCK JIMIN (I love you jimin) BUT BOTH OF THEM FUCK UP THEIR FRIENDSHIP. I couldn't even enjoy the smut I'm so mad. Plus GOOD JOB ON THE NEW CHAPTER! It's really good! Hope you have a good day :)

Anonymous said:Fuck mijoo AHHSGAHHDH WHY WHY WHY

omg im very overwhelmed by the incredible response to ch 2 of new rules and i feel so bad but i srsly cant answer all of your messages. But the intense reactions this fic inspired is so shocking yet understandable. I just hope you all aren’t too upset and that you can have an open mind for the next chapter ^^

#new rules #jaaneman-s #lu answers

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thecoroutfitters · 6 years ago

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Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Beyond individual and small-group home, property, and self-defense, we increasingly hear a call for citizens to stand up as modern minutemen. The term is relatively new, but the idea isn’t.

Many preppers have always expected that at some point, they’ll either be joining a group or family, friends, and neighbors with the need to engage an enemy force of some kind. While some of those expectations come from fictional sources, there are some fairly recent precedents that make a compelling argument for the ability to band together.

Images: Koreatown business owners on guard during the LA riots (L.A. Times); business owners during Ferguson’s riots 20 years later (Riverfront Times).

There are also realistic “what-if” situations where a functional independent force not unlike a ramped-up community watch has reasonable applications, long before we start entertaining way-out scenarios involving EROL troops and foreign NWO invaders.

Before we start really looking at individual skills and basic gear, there’s a few key areas that can make or break the success of a Modern Minuteman. They’re things to account for before we gather our gear to march to our woods and fences, and things to ensure any group we join has considered before we sign on, whether we’re signing up now or later.

First, Understand the Minuteman

No, I’m not going to dissect the myths and truths of yesteryear’s minutemen (although… http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/minuteman-myth/). I’m not even going to split hairs between minutemen and the militia of the era.

I just want to point out that a minuteman was – just like today’s reservists and guardsmen and many fighting forces large and small for centuries and millennia before and after them – a yeoman, tapped to fight when needed.

They were first and foremost workers. Not soldiers.

For the greatest breadth of that history – all the way up to the modern eras – most of those yeomen were involved in production and trades/crafts, and much of that production involved foods.

While a pyramid helps start to make that point, they still don’t accurately represent the consumerism and contributions of each group. The stepped versions of trophic/energy graphs start getting closer, but it’s still really difficult to appreciate the magnitudes and exponential’s of input required at each level to sustain a single member of the tier above.

Why am I harping on this opening and seemingly tangential point so much?

Because it’s expensive to maintain all the specialists within a society – any type of specialist, to include part-time and full-time soldiers.

When the American minuteman was born, he was led and organized by landowners and businessmen who were mostly still tied enough to the earth to understand production and man-hours – even the city boys.

Many of our founding fathers and the local militia and minuteman organizers were deeply involved in breeding better crop and livestock varieties for the regions, developing management techniques for timber, and fine-tuning stoves, housing, transportation, and tools to better work the land and make efficient and maximum use of resources.

While they understood the need to fight once letter-writing and overseas discussion trips failed, they already inherently understood the need for a populace to feed itself – especially with supply lines about to be disrupted.

(Fun quickie reads: http://www.edisonmuckers.org/founding-father-inventors/, https://www.varsitytutors.com/earlyamerica/jefferson-primer/agronomist)

Their citizen soldiers were also deeply tied to production. Even the urbanite craftsmen and tradesmen, the accountants and scholars, were much more aware of their larder needs, and of the seasons – harvests and planting, hunting and livestock, foraging and wood cutting.

They understood time with a powder horn instead of a plow and hammer would impact life.

While it doesn’t get the attention other aspects of the Revolutionary citizen soldiers do, the quote traced back to Napoleon was in full effect:

“Amateurs discuss tactics; professionals discuss logistics.”

He’s not the first, last, or only to emphasize it. Alexander the Great is credited with saying that his logicians were humorless, because they knew if his campaign failed, the supply chain was going to be investigated first.

Antoine-Henri Jomni described logistics as the means through which tactics and strategy could be implemented, and the main factor in creating those strategies and tactics.

Those logistics range throughout training and deployment, from mobility of troops and supplies, to types of supplies and sourcing them. Everyone involved in every step of that process has to be fed and kept shoe’d, rested, and housed.

As Sun Tzu said, “the line between disorder and order lies in logistics”.

(Fun fact: Today’s home canning methods came about due to Napoleon’s logistical challenges.)

The minutemen largely fought close to home, not called away as often or as far as the standing army and militia. The same is likely to be true of the Modern Minuteman. Even so, and even though we’ll presumably be better trained than the Revolutionary minuteman, we’re at a disadvantage.

See, we’re now largely what would have been the exception among those citizen soldiers and their organizers.

We very rarely have ingrained understanding of our larders or household supplies like water and fuel, of reasonable production/foraging yield expectations, or of the logistics involved with outfitting even short-term, short-distance yeoman fighters.

That Needs to be the First Focus.

Whether we expect to stand up in mostly “normal” conditions or during a Big-time Event, get the larder and daily-use supplies sorted. Get self- and home-defense taken care of if you’re vulnerable.

Get basic repairs for water, windows, vehicles, and roofs prepped. Know how to handle common injuries like sprains, burns, and foreign objects in eyes.

*It also wouldn’t hurt to remember how often in history yeomen – right up to today’s irregular/guerrilla/insurgent forces – spend some portion of their time producing food, and start practicing that.

Then spend time and money on the sexy run-n-gun goodies.

Next Step: Intel & Comms – No intel, no comms, no mission.

From the most elite modern warriors to cavemen with bone clubs, we rely on information. Even on a personal level – say, a home intruder – if we don’t know there’s a problem, and what it is, we don’t know that we need to react, let alone how to best respond.

Sun Tzu also weighed in on that front. Importantly, he emphasized honest self-assessment and understanding of the community at large along with accurate assessments of the opposing force.

That self-assessment is enormous.

It factors hugely in choosing when and how to engage. And disengage. And when and how to not engage at all.

Being good at making that call is one of the things that made successful resistance fighters difficult to counter even before the Swamp Fox dove around fences and trees instead of lining up to engage Brits with big “X marks the spot” on their chests. It has continued to run empire-ruling armies ragged in the centuries since.

Images: Brits in the First Anglo-Afghan war, and Russian troops fighting the same never-quite-conquered enemy 120 years and several wars later.

Whichever extreme we choose for our scenarios – commonplace likely events that occur even today or restoring order or freedom during or after something huge – the Modern Minuteman can expect to be facing larger numbers and-or better-equipped professional militaries, just like the guerrilla and insurgent forces before them.

They, too, are going to rely on accurate self-assessment combined with accurate calculation of both the local community and the enemy to successfully engage.

Images: Italian, South Vietnamese, and Greek civilian home-guard militia and resistance fighters of WWII and Vietnam.

Denying enemy intel on us is also a biggie. After all, they’re using information the exact same way we hopefully are.

Communication Is Key.

Again, it’s “no intel, no comms, no mission”. Without the ability to trickle information both ways, intel does no good. Willing, able parties with the best training and all the gear in the world can be rendered totally inoperable without communication systems.

Those minutemen had to be rallied, remember.

Somebody had to tell them where they were massing, and then somebody had to decide on a plan of action based on available information. Unit and individual assignments and instructions had to be passed.

The most likely scenarios leave phones and texting an option for Modern Minutemen. We also have regular ol’ Motorolas. I’m a fan of SSB-CB for middling distances due to cost, ease, lack of regulation, and the possible ranges without repeaters, but there’s also HAM radio – which will also send texts and email these days – and even field phones from various eras.

We can also make arrangements for a low-tech Twilight Bark https://www.theprepperjournal.com/2017/03/04/radio-silence-communication-without-electronics/, some of which offer pretty decent ranges if we have line of sight.

For near-area alerts that we should check something like a flag, hobo symbols, or message board system, or to tell neighbors on standby that it’s time to rally or to man their stations, we might also consider things like canned-air stadium squealers and boater’s fog horns.

(Having a variety of grid-down comms systems has all sorts of benefits even if A Big Thing never occurs. It also applies to things that have nothing to do with gun-toters: riding to the rescue for births, warning about fires and rising water or stock-killing loose dogs, saving steps and time to call people in for breakfast, telling neighbors we’re sick/injured, helping each other with planting and harvest…)

The Modern Minuteman

The idea of a fast-response or defensive force citizen soldier isn’t new. Nor is it fading away anytime soon. It’s not just tactics, though, or the gear each individual and team needs to employ them. It’s not even the basic skills and abilities required to engage in a fight.

Before we go whole-hog on the combat aspects of the Modern Minuteman, take some time to seriously game plan the basic tenets of logistics, comms, and intel.

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The post Modern Minuteman – Big-time Basics appeared first on The Prepper Journal.

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timestamp-renegade-universe-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Follow Through

Or, “If I had the money, I would put it where my mouth is.”

In my last post, I described the difficult set of circumstances that led me to the necessary time-out on Timestamp for a few weeks, as well as my difficult decision to throw in the towel and search for a stable income in tandem with my art efforts. In a nutshell, there is a lot of stress in this household between unstable finances, unsorted mental illness, unfounded child custody cases, and all the other normal stuff that 20-somethings deal with these days. And, as usual, I have done a poor job finding the time for self-care in order to handle it. That’s why I’ve vowed to make it a bigger priority to write on a daily basis, largely using my Timestamp blog to keep myself accountable, though I will not realistically be able to create a full post every single day. For me this will be an exercise in acknowledging and discussing mental health issues that I have previously avoided for fear of social stigma. For you, this may just be the inner dialogue of a traumatized introvert, but I hope that it would one day find community. While I am nervous to work through these issues in a public forum on my business page, I also have to stand by the fact that I am Timestamp, and my mentality/ mental health is a huge part of what and how I create.

So here’s my start.

Took time to reduce my anxiety before getting out of bed? Check. Been in contact with my therapist this morning? Check. Working on processing my situation through writing? The time has come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two posts ago I was talking a big game about the methods that I use to reduce some of my anxiety and increase mindfulness when I’m continually working from home like an isolated loser for 14 hour days. Although I have a lot more to deal with than anxiety, I’ve recently found out, these have been instrumental tools in keeping my head on straight when there’s no one around to lean on.

As much as I love my alone time and find energy in working in my own environment without interruption, I also have to say that it can be really demoralizing and lonely to be manically working at home all day every day. With all of my best friends and family still residing in Illinois, the only human I have around here is my significant other, who has a very demanding schedule outside of the house (thank god, because having another party in my space 24/7 is also not the solution for me).

Without social support when I’m starting to feel the tickles of anxiety growing, I realized early on in my small business adventure that I needed to find other instruments to lean on when I’m losing my grip. These are the ways I’ve reliably used to contend with my loneliness and generalized anxiety:

Podcasts - You know how when you haven’t seen or spoken to another human being in about two days, and you start to talk to yourself, your dog, and your guinea pig instead? Yeah, right, me either… but if I did, I would recommend that you switch to hearing other people talk on these podcasts. I spend most of my days continually streaming podcasts in the background, whether I’m writing for my day job or hand painting a new piece of furniture. They are amazingly comforting, not only for reducing the uncomfortable silence in an empty house and stimulating your brain with subtle conversation, but also for addressing mental health and philosophical life issues if you tune into the right programs. Here are my favorites:

On Being – Good god, I wish I could have Krista Tippett in my life, calmly narrating my existence and bringing up the most thoughtful, perspective-changing questions known to man. This program is life-changing. My only regret is that it took me so long to find On Being, when I have been individually questioning the meaning of it all for 20 years at this point. Every episode is 53 minutes long edited, and about 120 minutes long unedited, if you want to hear both versions of the conversation like some people do… cough. The premise is simple, ex-journalist, theologian, and author Krista Tippett has long, organic conversations with the most interesting humans you never knew you needed to have in your life. The conversations tackle issues of mindfulness, psychology, individual spirituality, and philosophy, with a dabbling of current science for good measure. The interviewees come from hugely diverse backgrounds, some of which you might expect, including a prevalence of poets and social change leaders. However, you won’t get off that easy; often the guests are quite unexpected for a left-wing public radio show, and can be challenging to approach with an open mind such as the episodes with Glenn Beck or a panel of pro-life pastors. No matter the topic, every episode is thoroughly surprising and grounding. I gain such a sense of peace and perspective from the wisdom of these enormously influential people. I can’t say enough about the grace and depth of the conversations, or the appreciation I’ve developed for thoughtful pauses before profound answers. I want to be Krista Tippett when I grow up.

The Mindset Zone – This one is fairly self-explanatory, although the host’s voice is anything but. Ana Melikian, a Psychologist and business coach with the most unique “generally European” accent I’ve ever heard, leads these short episodes that tackle the issue of mental health in small business. Finding this podcast felt like a message from the heavens, and it came during a time when I was fully losing my battle with business anxiety earlier this year. Each episode tackles a specific issue or guest relating to the mental health management that must take place to open a new business. I’ll be honest when I say that the programs are a bit hit or miss for me. Occasionally they can be redundant or feel like advertisements for her business coaching techniques, but often they are full of the exact insight I need to hear. Is it normal to be completely overwhelmed and disgruntled about the vast number of hats you must wear in small business? Yes. Does everyone doubt what they’re doing and feel the drive to retreat to a safer option? Sure do. Is failure a necessary event to be accepted and learned from, rather than feared? Yep. The messages of the episodes are simple, eye opening, and unifying. As is always the case with mental health, just hearing that what I’ve been experiencing is normal was a huge relief; in fact, this podcast is what inspired me to begin writing more openly about the issue of mental health management in my own small business. It is a topical and useful journey, with plenty of unintended laughs at Ana’s pronunciations. Sorry Ana.

Sex and Other Human Activities – Oh man, do I love the Cave Comedy Radio/Last Podcast Network. These guys are meant to be my best friends and my best friends’ best friends; they just don’t know it yet. We’re mildly obsessed, and diligently plotting ways to prove our worth as the next generation of SOHA hosts, since these two have taken a break from the program to work on other projects. Anyways, this particular show features two of my favorite CCR/LPN hosts, Jackie Zebrowski and Marcus Parks, who openly and honestly discuss their battles with mental illness, as well as answering listener questions on the same topics. Both hosts are fantastically hilarious in my exact style of humor, and very transparent when it comes to the relationship, work, and general life difficulties that come hand in hand with attempting to better understand and control your own psychology. They are incredibly relational, and speak honestly about their successes as well as failures in sorting out depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, self-doubt, and anger. Though there are plenty of laughs, it’s also clear that Jackie and Marcus care a great deal about the topics, and there are many difficult episodes that took considerable courage to record. Again, there is enormous power in this program simply from hearing that you aren’t alone in your battles. Listening to the accounts from two people of similar age and mentality, working through their issues and preaching the importance of self-kindness and professional care feels like receiving guiding support from my best friends, on-demand. I could talk endlessly about my love for all the CCR/LPN guys, but I’ll hold off for an inevitable road trip entry.

Walks – An oldie but a goodie, exercise is a crucial way to work through my emotions and ground myself when my stomach starts to tighten up in a knot. A huge part of mindfulness is observing the breath and bodily sensations, and for me the best free version of this is going on a brisk hike. There’s nothing like getting out into uninterrupted nature and connecting with my feet in order to let go of the rushing thoughts in my head. I gain so much peace from a long solo walk, where I can connect with my worries and allow myself the space to process them. This is a tool I’ve used for many years, though back in Illinois it was fulfilled through walking to and from work each day, long walks around campus on every break, and usually ending with a late evening walk either alone or with my sidekick Jacq. When my dog Jake came into my life, he became a huge motivator to keep up the practice even during dark times when I had trouble executing this style of self-care. Nowadays, the truly amazing part is our proximity to beautiful and dynamic hiking trails in Stone Mountain, which far outweigh the residential streets I used to stomp down in Urbana, Illinois when it comes to peace-bringing. The difficult part, however, is managing my anxiety long enough just to get to the park. Any deviation or distraction from my work each day carries an enormous stress load with it, so the act of going out and reducing my anxiety actually inspires a mountain of distress in the hours leading up to my departure. I do my best to remind myself that this is a critical tool for mindfulness and I need to address my issues rather than working as a means of distraction, but it’s always difficult to permit myself time for self-care. Acknowledging these difficulties in my personality, I’ve come up with three strategies to reduce the likelihood of ditching my park plans;

Arrange with a friend to chat during the walk. When there is a sense of duty, i.e. a promise I made to someone else, I have no problem following through with my plans. I’ve found it helpful, and socially positive, to talk on the phone with my friend during her lunch break as I get my exercise in. This gives me a set time to take a break from my work, prepare, and get to the park on time with a party holding me accountable. I can disappoint myself, but I can’t disappoint other people.

Leverage “shitty work days” to promote breaks at the park. There are days when I work exclusively on Timestamp projects, and I’m happy as a clam from sunup to sundown. Then there are days when I have to write and edit endless articles to pay the bills. These are the days that my brain struggles the most. Without working towards something I’m passionate about, my mind tends to get restless and wander. I have a hard time keeping my head in the game, and instead it can begin to slide into some hefty doom and gloom thinking. Sometimes, there are so many external thoughts flying around in there that I can’t concentrate on my arduous and boring task at hand any longer. I begin to lose my focus, become exhausted, and slip into a depressive state. That’s when it’s time to allow myself the luxury of a walk, in order to reset and reapproach the rest of the work day with newfound productivity.

Set a nighttime walk intention. I’ve found that there is far less anxiety and guilt associated with taking my walk at night, rather than in the middle of my day. This allows me to get all the work done that simply can’t wait before I attempt to pull myself away from the project. If, for whatever reason, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted to by the time evening falls, I still have less guilt giving myself some space when it’s already 8pm. Of course, I’ve considered switching this to morning walks so I could calm down before my work day even started, but have yet to make this attempt, as I currently use my early mornings to get unwanted writing jobs out of the way.

Social support – We all know, your support network is the most important tool in living with mental illness. That being said, for someone with a tendency to avoid and isolate when they need help the most, it can be a huge challenge to even go and seek social support. As a verified introvert, masochist, and devotee to the idea that my existence is a burden to everyone I know, I generally do the wrong thing in these situations. In the past two or three months, I’ve made a big push to get over my fear of bothering people, and attempt to contact folks when I’m having a hard time. It can be my best friend, my therapist, or even my mother if I’m feeling desperate enough. 9 times out of 10, it results in an honest and caring conversation that helps me greatly in working through whatever problem is at hand, and I have a lasting boost of self-esteem from the interaction. Even if we can’t resolve the issue, just having the reassurance that my friends and family haven’t forgotten about me and still care about my well-being from hundreds of miles away relieves many of my greatest fears. As a bonafied one-man island in bad times, my saving graces for forcing social support on myself are:

My outgoing and extroverted boyfriend. Even though he may not always understand why I’m so crippled by imaginary worries, he’ll always listen to them. At times he can do the unthinkable and convince me to do better with his own social and optimistic nature. He always wants to spend time together and to get out of the house, and this social insistence can be a gift.

My best friends who have their own battles and insights on mental health. Not only do I have a best friend who works professionally as a clinical therapist, but most of the people I surround myself with have similar struggles. We understand one another and feel less judgement talking about the things we deal with, besides the fact that their own needs for support often keep me accountable for their sake, if not my own.

My group messages with friends back home. Reaching out and talking is hard when you feel like your life is empty and depressing. If there’s no news to share, it’s hard to call someone up just to chat. That’s why these stupid facebook messenger groups are such a helpful tool for feeling social without the pressure of actually being social. The continual chatter amongst friends helps me to feel connected to my old crew on a daily basis, even when I personally don’t feel like I have anything to talk about.

Creativity - Clearly, this one rings true for me. As I’ve stated earlier, I can work on my artistic projects from dawn til dusk without feeling an inkling of anxiety or mental duress. I realize that not everyone is as enthusiastic about making things as I am, but I believe there is some real power in accessing this part of the brain. Maybe doodling, instagramming, or zen coloring is more your style - there are plenty of options. Something about the process of thinking creatively seems to be incompatible with the pathways that cause my stress and anxiety, so one can’t happen in tandem with the other. This is great when I’m in a creative mindset and naturally fend off looming anxiety; conversely it’s very difficult when I’m in a negative mindset and battling to reach a place of creativity. Here are the ways I’ve found to get past the mental gymnastics, and get into the artistic zone:

Having some sort of a schedule. As I mentioned a bit earlier, I’ve realized that it makes sense for me to get my writing assignments completed in the morning. This allows me to set aside the stress of looming busy work, earn myself a sense of achievement, and open my mind to other tasks I want to complete. Now, I don’t rigidly schedule my writing work because just as there are times I feel creative and times I do not, there are also times I feel like writing and times I simply can’t. Maybe my head hurts too badly to look at the computer screen, or maybe I’m not feeling the creative juices flowing that particular time of that particular day. That’s when flexibility is important, so I can find fulfillment in accomplishing the tasks that best mesh with my mental state, and I can achieve the most productive day possible.

Setting my intentions for the day one on the night before. Sometimes, it’s anxiety inducing just to wake up in the morning and look at my long list of business to-do’s. Should I be wrapping up this big desk, working on my newest set of prints, posting to Instagram, writing a blog, fixing my website bugs, posting new items to Etsy, checking on my sales around town, etc, etc, etc. It never ends. If I can just work through these options in the evening beforehand, coming up with a general list of priorities to focus on, I can hit the ground running the next day. Sounds simple, but usually it’s easier to finish up a long day of work and push the topic to the backburner for the rest of the night, than to begin planning the next busy day.

Writing. I huge problem I must overcome regularly is my brain’s penchant for repetitive thinking. If something is on my mind, I have a difficult time pushing it aside to focus on new tasks. My mind cycles through what’s bothering me again and again, bringing up the same physical reactions each time the sentiment goes passing through. This is why writing has so much power for me. Putting these concerns down on paper or keyboard is an excellent release from the merry-go-round of worry. It allows me to process exactly what I’m feeling about the issue, to solidify the issue as something that I am acknowledging, and to form a plan on how to deal with it. After that, I can move on from the problem with greater ease, and apply all that brain energy to another item.

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All I’m meaning to say here is, it can be difficult to allow yourself the “luxury” of caring for yourself and your mental health, especially when your focus is always on taking care of business. There’s nothing to stop you from putting your own physical and emotional needs aside when things are stressful, at the times when you need self-care the most. I’m no expert in the field of personal kindness, but I increasingly recognize that it’s important to improve these skills as necessary tools for a functional life. It’s certainly something that takes practice and a mindful outlook to make some of these changes reality, but the continued exercise only cements the positive effects further each time. I’ll be working on and expanding these practices for the rest of my life. I can only hope that my self-compassion continues to grow, and I can help another restless soul or two just by sharing how difficult it can feel to tackle these small measures, but how relieving it feels afterwards.

And remember, you’re alright kid, I don’t care what other people say.

#anxiety #depression #mental health management #PTSD #trauma #mental health in small business #anxiety in small business #mindful #mindfulness #mindfulness in small business #mindfulness techniques

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