#I’m gonna sleep until like 2 pm now

[sideeve]

LIKE YOU !! + 42!MILES MORALES

+ ex!miles morales x f!reader

+ the reader is black in mind but i guess you can read it regardless🤷🏽‍♀️, based off of bow wow’s like you with ciara, ganke exists in earth 42 in here, miles wants reader back, i am NOT fluent in spanish so PLEASE let me know if i fucked up!!

“you can’t be fucking serious.” you stare at the package next to your feet. you didn’t even have to question who it came from. no one bought you package except for him.

[ name ] morales was labeled on the package. “oh he’s ballsy.” you laugh.

picking it up and placing it in the piles which the rest of the unopened boxes, you pull out your phone, dialing his number.

“hello?”

“hey ma.”

“enough with that ‘ma’ shit. why do you keep sending me packages?”

“what? i can’t spoil my girl.” he chuckles.

your knees practically buckled at the words “my girl”. you would be lying if you said you didn’t miss it.

“i’m not your girl. we’ve went over this.”

“keep saying that, ma. y’know you love me.”

“bye, miles.”

you click the red button on your phone, throwing it on your bed. “this boy is gonna be the death of me.”

and school was no different.

you kept finding letters and small presents in your locker. necklaces, rings, earrings. shit, sometimes cash too. you weren’t complaining. most of the items were things you had your eyes on for a while.

“you like them?” a voice speaks behind your locker door. “jesus!” you slam the door. “what are you doing here?” your voice comes out frustrated but you were actually glad to see him.

“you didn’t answer my question, nena. do you like them?” you purse your lips, making it seem like you’re thinking. “maybe. but you’ve got to stop sending me shit.”

“why? it’s my money.” “i’m gonna start giving it to people if you don’t. and you have balls for putting [ name ] morales.” you laugh. “i knew you’d like it.” he walks off to ganke, but not before ghosting his hand with yours, making a shiver shoot down your spine.

“ooo~” your friends tease from behind you, scaring you. “would you shut up?” “what happened to ‘i’ll never fall in love again’?” “i’m not in love,” you scoff, “and definitely not with him.” you roll your eyes as the bell rings.

“i’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“you gonna go see him?” they snicker. not having the energy to give a verbal response, you flick them off, cursing under your breath.

8 pm read in your clock. all the studying was starting to put you into a sleepy haze. you had 2 hours left until your “bedtime” but it wouldn’t hurt to sleep early.

of course, you could never catch a wink of shut eye. a tapping from your window catching your attention. “miles?” he taps the window again, mouthing let me in.

lifting up the glass and moving aside, he steps in. “nothing has changed.” he notes. “what are you doing here?” you question, unamused. “what now? i can’t visit?” “do you not know how a break up works? we don’t see each other, we don’t talk to each other. nothing.” “see, that’s were you got it twisted. we never broke up. it was just a break.”

you laugh. “you’re crazy.” “llámalo como quieras, mami. pero todavía te quiero.” you buckled a bit. “mhm.” you smirk. “those boxes at my front door can show for it.” now it’s his turn to laugh.

“so, what’s it gonna be ma? we still together or what?” he steps closer to you, his lips ghosting yours. “i thought we were already together.”

“buena chica.” his lips close the gap between the both of you, igniting the extinguished flame in you.

llámalo como quieras, mami. pero todavía te quiero - call it what you want, mami. but i still love you.

nena - girl

buena chica - good girl

[gojo-enthusiast]

Kento Nanami ~

Wake Me Up

*Sleep Sex* MDI, 18+ Only! Kento wakes you up to a sweet surprise *😉* after working a long day fighting curses. Do not read if it triggers! Anyways, enjoy my first piece 😈

Word count: <2200

PSA: did not proof read, honestly I’m always horny for JJK men, so beware and stay tuned for more disgusting pieces. Also are we gonna talk about how fucking hot Nanami is in season 2???? Follow me on X (Twitter)

Like and reblog🫶🏻

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

You had stayed awake until midnight, taken your shower, exfoliated, & shaved.

"Ken should be home anytime soon" checking your phone seeing the time

6:00 PM

Getting yourself all prepped and ready for him to come home to a sweet surprise. You had been aching all day long, this morning he had been loving on you, slowly caressing your thighs, and right when he was going to put his hands into your heat, his phone starts ringing,

“Fuck. Who is calling me?” He groans grabbing his phone, “What the fuck does Satoru want.” He groans once again. Your husband was not one to cuss often, only when he was upset, (usually at Satoru) or when he was fucking you.

“What is it Gojo-San?” Nanami ask begrudgingly,

“Nanamiiiiii-“ Satoru says in a shrill

You didn’t hear all that was said, but the moment the called ended, your husband stood up and kissed your forehead.

“So sorry my love, but I have to leave. I promise we will finish what we started when I get home.” He says smiling faintly.

“Everything okay?” You ask, wrapping the sheets around you as he gets in the shower to get ready to leave for another day of killing curses. A job you hated so much, but you knew that him working his office job, was only making him feel suffocated, and had no meaning to his life.

“Yeah, just some curses. Nothing to be worried about. Satoru is out of town, I have to take the new kid Yuuji Itadori with me today.” He says washing his face, you see the bubbles of the soap form, and sink down his skin to the drain. You look down, and see his member hard as a rock, he looked frustrated.

“You sure we can’t fix that before you go?” You smirk, “Don’t tease me, or you’ll regret it later on.” He groans, you watched as he slightly stroked it in the shower, you watched, knowing he was about to burst any second. He wanted to fuck you right then and there, but he knew if he did, he would be late, and he wouldn’t stop. And then there it was, he had finished all over his hand, the water washing it off.

“Fuck. I wish that was in me right now.” You moan, “Get out before you tempt me anymore.” He says as he looks away from you. You do as he says, you already know how hard working your husband is, that’s why you spent the whole day pampering yourself, getting a facial, getting your nails done, everything that would make you feel and look done up. You knew how much your husband loved to see you all dolled up and manicured. I mean he didn’t work so hard for nothing. He always wanted you to be able to feel spoiled, and go definitely spoil yourself with his money.

But little did you know, your husband would be working overtime today. And you would be passed out by the time he got home.

Hubby🩵: Baby I'm running late today, I promise I will be home as soon as I can. I love you. - 6:02PM

Your husband is always home by 6PM, so you knew if he wasn’t, it was definitely something a little more serious. But you know your husband, he’s a grade 1 sorcerer, he will be home in no time.

As you lay in bed, watching some trashy reality TV, trying to stay awake. You look over at the clock

11:46PM

You feel your eyes getting heavy, the red wine you had drank during dinner finally hit you. And next thing you know, you’re cuddled under the blankets to a pillow, asleep, wishing it was your husband.

It was 1 in the morning, and Nanami finally made it home. Walking inside the house, feeling sluggish, and ready to lay in bed next to his wife, and feel her warmth.

“I need to shower.” He mutters to himself. He steps into the guest bathroom, which he usually does after a mission, because he doesn’t want to get your shared bathroom dirty. Washing off his day, feeling his muscles finally loosen up.

His phone rings again, it’s Satoru;

“What the fuck do you want Satoru?” Nanami hisses, “hey hey calm down Nanami-San, I just wanted to thank you for taking Yuuji, and taking care of those curses. Get some rest, and some ass. Ijichi told me how grumpy you were today. Take the day off tomorrow.” Satoru giggles to himself, “Was planning on it, now leave me alone.” Nanami says back, hanging up.

His phone beeps, showing that he received a text message,

Satoru Gojo: YOUR WELCOME, have fun😼

Nanami: 🖕🏻

Satoru Gojo: 🫶🏻

He finally turns his phone off, wrapping the towel around his waist, walking out the restroom down the hall, to your shared bedroom. He knows you’re asleep, there’s no way you stayed up this late for him. He walks into the bedroom, and your bottom half is under the blankets, while your top half is completely nude, and you’re sprawled out.

“Fuck, where is your clothes?” He mutters, feeling his cock stiffen, becoming erect. He climbs into bed, leaning in kissing your lips, then kissing your cheek, to your neck. “Damn it, I can’t do this while she’s sleeping.” He groans.

You had always told him how you would love to wake up to him in between your legs, but Nanami was such a “consent” man, which you loved about him, he was so respectful to you, and treasured your body, but you sometimes just wanted him to take charge and do something that wasn’t so good boy / gentlemen behavior. He remembered the conversation as he stroked himself next to you, “fuck it.” He says to himself, taking the blanket off your body.

Seeing your white laced panties, his cock at this point was throbbing. “Such a pretty little thang aren’t you?” He whispers in the crook of your neck, climbing on top of you, placing kisses down your neck, going down to your breast, starting the suck on your nipples. Placing his teeth in between your nipple, slightly biting it. Causing a moan to come out of you, while you were asleep.

“Mmm dreaming about me baby? You should wake up so you can catch the live action.” He says swirling his tongue around your areola and nipple. He started the bring himself down to your heat, sliding your panties down swiftly. “Oh how I have craved to taste you all day.” He says opening your folds with his fingers, gently placing his tongue on your clit immediately. He knew your body more than you did, and he definitely knew where you liked it the most. He quickens the pace of his tongue, sucking on your clit, you’re moaning in your sleep. Dreaming of your husband in between your legs, he doesn’t stop, wanting to taste your juices all over his tongue. He starts to rub his index and middle finger on your clit, rubbing it up and down quickly, as his tongue dips into your hole, tasting you deeply. Your eyes start to flutter open, and you’re moaning loudly now, seeing your husband in between your legs. “Ken-kento. What are you- what- ugh yes.” You try to ask what he’s doing, but he has no desire to respond back to you, his only desire is to make you cum over and over until you have melted into him. That knot in your stomach has finally snapped, and your finishing all on his tongue, he flicks his tongue up, tasting every drop coming out. “Ffffuuuuucccckkkkkkk” you groan bucking your hips up, practically humping into his face. “Yes baby just like that.” He says, still rubbing your clit, and abusing your hole with his tongue. He had one of your legs pinned down with his free hand. And the other one, was pinned down by his elbow, as he was still flicking your clit. As he continues to abuse your poor clit into overstimulation, you feel yourself about to bust. And there it was, exactly what he was wanting. You to squirt all over him, “KENTOO-!” You loudly moan, “stop, oh my god.” You cry out in pure ecstasy. You look up and see his face dripping with your liquid.

“Fuck, that’s so hot.” He says licking his lips, wiping his face with his towel. “Nanami-“ you pant, “yes baby?” He says, moving up to you, positioning himself to enter. “I missed you.” You say, wrapping your arms around his neck, as he brings his head down and starts to kiss you, sticking his tongue in your mouth. “I missed you too baby.” He kisses down your neck, sucking on it, leaving hickies all over. Because why not?

“I tried staying up,-ugh, Kento I tried staying awake.” You moan, as he starts to slide himself inside slowly, he was big, not only did this man have a long cock, but the girth was the size of a coke can. So he always had to slowly go in, never forcing himself in too fast. “I’m sorry baby I was late- ugh, today was so-fuck, - it was- so-s-so stress-stressful.” He moans, feeling your walls clench around his throbbing cock, he felt like he could burst at any moment possible.

“Damn baby you feel so so good.” Kento says finally pushing that last inch inside of you. Stretching you out at full capacity. “This sweet pussy has been on my mind since this morning. Can’t believe I went the whole day.” He pants, starting to thrust faster, “yes Kento, just like that.” You’re moaning into his ear, “fuck me baby.” You say looking into his eyes.

And that was it, that was the string that kept your husband in control, once it snapped, he and you were done for. Your pussy was about to be his flesh light. He starts pounding into you, kissing your G-spot with each thrust, you had came 3 times in the last 30 minutes from his cock alone. He kept edging himself, you knew he didn’t want it to end. He would fuck you fast and hard, and as soon as he felt like he was about to bust, he was slowing down. “Kentoooo- cum inside of me.” You moan out, “not yet baby, I’m not ready to finish.” He groans, feeling himself overstimulating himself. “Baby you feel so good. We fit perfect for each other. You belong to me, do you understand?” He says, you know it’s not a question, it’s a fact. You are his, and he is yours. And he will kill anyone who tries to get in between you two. He even thought about killing Satoru, for calling him before he was supposed to even be up getting ready to leave.

“Kento, I love you.” You moan into his ear, cumming again for the 4th time, “yes princess, cum for me.” He moans, finally about to reach his high. He’s pounding into you, with no desire to stop. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, yes-yes, I’m gonna cum in you, princess.” He whimpers, groaning in your ear, “yes baby, cum in me.” Your moaning, and that’s when he finally does, shooting his hot cum deep inside of you. Feeling your chest go up and down. The sweat from his forehead dripping down.

“Damn, that felt amazing.” He pants, staying on top of you, not yet taking himself out of you. “It was.” Your panting in union with your husband. “I just showered too.” He laughed, finally rolling off of you, pulling you to him, to kiss you.

“I’m sorry I was so late today, today was long.” He sighs, kissing your nose. “That’s okay baby. I understand.” You say nuzzling your head into his sweaty chest, not a care in the world.

“Princess, let’s take a shower before bed. I’ll change the sheets when we get out.” He says lifting you up, seeing his cum drip from your core. “Fuck that’s so sexy.” He whispers to himself, caring you to the shower, turning it on.

“Princess?” He looks at you, as you step in the shower,

His cum is dripping down your thighs, and your cheeks are red. He felt his cock twitch in excitement, I mean you guys usually go a couple rounds, so what would hurt if you both went again.

“I know you’re tired, and I’m tired. But, I’m going to need you to bend over and hold the shower rail.” He says, you look over and you see his cock rock hard again.

“Yes daddy.” You smirk, you silently thanking the universe you told your husband to give you head while asleep. It was going to be an exceptionally long shower & long night.

[sanskari-kanya]

Guess who got 30/30 on her finals’ viva 😭💃

It was the biggest adventure of my goddamn life.

The viva was scheduled at 3 pm today so I was pretty chill. I was like okay I’ll do the hardest ones till late night, grab some good sleep and wake up a little early to revise the rest.

But my university sent a mail at 10:30 pm, saying ✨surprise motherfuckers, the time is changed to 9:30 am, all the best insufferable freshers✨

Post this mail, I had made peace in accepting that I aint gonna get any sleep tonight and I had to revise 4 subjects till 8 am (minus 30 minutes to get my boogie ass ready because I will never enter the uni looking like crap and 30 more minutes to reach the university)

I started studying around 12 am because all we did was cuss the fuck out of the university and exam managers for a bloody 1.5 hours.

Considering my attention span, my study session lasted for approximately 15 minutes before I opened Pinterest and keep scrolling mindlessly until it was suddenly 2 am 🤩. Then I went for a mindless walk around the hostel, disturbed my bf for a good 15 minutes, and realised he wasn’t giving me any attention because he actually studies and uski fati padi thi so I came back in my room and re-started studying. It continued till 5 am (paired with stress eating, gossiping, watching a documentary)

THEN, I ACCIDENTALLY FELL ASLEEP AT 5 AM AND WOKE UP AT 8 AM!?!? I had to leave at 9 am so there was no bloody chance of revising Histology and Radiology that I very confidently left for the morning 🤗 I left the house at 9 and kept a ppt of histological slides open on my phone so I could at least revise SOMETHING.

If this drama was not enough, here is more :

Me and my friend had decided to pair up for the viva but some dude mishandled the list and jumbled the numbers and I had to beg my classmate to go with a random dude so me and bestie could go tgt.

As I was about to enter the viva room, a physical fight broke pit between two students and my examiner walked out to stop the fight and never returned.

I confidently wrong answered a sub question and made the doctor believe that I was right cus I answered everything else too. 10 in Anatomy ✅

Manually picked the harder examiner for Histology because bestie shat in anatomy so I wanted her to score in Histology with the easier examiner. My reactions to the first two questions- ✨ma’am I don’t know✨ and she was glaring me so bad I cannot explain y’all but then by god’s grace, she asked me more questions (redemption arc) that I answered but she gave me 7.5 so I was like okay, I did shit in the beginning so-

Next was physiology and if y’all weren’t aware of my bad reputation with the professor (George), well now you are 🤗 But then I again had a choice to choose my examiner and I chose my favourite teacher from last semester and George was like ✨why are you not sitting with me huh✨ in the most sarcastic tone ever like i would ever voluntarily chose you , kind sir.

End result, I scored full in physiology too which just proves that my physiology wasn’t a problem, George was the problem!

Last was Radiology. I was scared for my life since I slept and didn’t revise radiology AT ALL. But the examiner was impressed by my marks and gave me 2.5 🙂‍↕️

Now if that still wasn’t enough adventure for you, let me introduce you to my bad math skills. 7.5 in Histology + 2.5 in radiology makes 10 which meant I had scored 30/30 but my dumbass forgot math and thought I scored only 27.5 and went out a little sad.

Then a senior dude asked me how was it and I was like ‘Accha tha bas muje ek baat bata histology ke liye maximum kitna hota hai?’ And he was 7.5 and then it hit me ‘Oh bhaiii fir toh muje full mile hai’ 😭😭😭

I’m never forgetting this day. I narrated this entire thing to my mom twice, once to bf, a 30 min voice note to @hum-suffer and now on tumblr.

[finnsbubblegum]

Try (Joel Miller x Reader)

Pairing: post-outbreak!joel miller x f!reader

Warnings: I choose not to use warnings to avoid spoilers.

Summary (Series): You were popular in Jackson but you have been single your whole life. Despite many men flirting with you, you have never found your ideal type. Until one day, you saw Joel and you fell in love at first sight.  But he felt insecure.

Summary: Pov: you and Joel tried to conceive a baby.

Words count: 1.6k

A/N: This is part 7 for I Don’t Deserve You series. But it can also be read as a standalone. Hope you like it!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Since that night when Joel told you he loved you, he asked you to move in with him. You said yes and now you lived with Joel and Ellie under the same roof. You got along with Ellie as both a mother figure and a friend. You woke up in the morning and checked the calendar. You realized you hadn’t got your period. Your period was always regular but this time you were late. You found Joel who was still sleeping.

“Joel..” You shook him gently.

“Hmm?” He was still half-asleep.

“We need to talk.” 

“What is it?” He got up and rubbed his eyes. 

“I’m late.” 

“Okay. I’ll get the horse and ride there with you.” He thought you were late to work.

“No, no. That’s not what I meant.” You shook your head.

“Then what is it?” He was confused.

“My period. I should have gotten it a week ago. I’m never late so it must be something.” Your breathing got heavy.

“Hey, hey. It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be fine. I’ll ask Maria if we can get a doctor to check on you.” He rubbed your arms to calm you down.

“If-if you’re pregnant, do you want it?” Joel suddenly asked you.

“I’m scared but I’ve always wanted to have kids and be a mom.” 

“Then you have nothin’ to be worried for, okay? I’m here for you. It would be great to have a mini me or mini you running around the house. I’m sure they’ll be cute.” He comforted you. 

“Mini you. I want a boy.” You chuckled.

“Anythin’ you want darlin’.” Joel kissed your forehead.

The next day, you suddenly felt cramps on your lower stomach. You went to the bathroom and found out you got your period. You were disappointed. You were already excited with the thought of being pregnant and having a baby with Joel but now it turned out that your period was just late. You weren’t pregnant. 

You came home cranky. You were in the kitchen when Joel got home. 

“Hey, I asked Maria and got you a doctor. She said she’ll help us make an appointment.” 

“Tell her to cancel it.” You didn’t even look at him.

“What?” Joel raised his eyebrows.

“Just tell her to cancel the appointment.” You raised your voice.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Joel noticed you were in a bad mood.

“Nothing. Just PMS-ing.” 

“I thought-” 

“I guess I’m just late.” You scoffed.

“I’m going to bed.” You went your way to the bedroom and left Joel there.

After Joel took a shower, he joined you on the bed. 

“Does it hurt?” He cared about you.

“Hmm.” You replied coldly.

“Here?” He moved his hand slowly to your lower stomach. You nodded.

Joel slipped his hand under your underwear and gently rubbed your lower stomach warming it. His hand were warm and his movements were loving. You liked it.

“Feels good, Joel.” You mumbled.

He kissed your shoulder and kept warming your stomach until he fell asleep. But you couldn’t fall asleep. You kept thinking about the fact that you were not pregnant. You slowly moved Joel’s hand from your stomach and went inside the bathroom. You sobbed. Trying not to make any sound to avoid waking Joel up. 

Joel stirred in his sleep moving his arm to spoon you but you weren’t there. He opened his eyes and looked around. Then he heard your cries. He walked to the bathroom and slowly opened the door. You raised your head to look at him. Your eyes were red and swollen. Face was wet with tears. You’ve been crying for hours.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Joel crouched and tucked your hair on your ear.

You just shook your head. 

“Talk to me.” He sat beside you on the floor.

“I’m sorry.” You cried.

“For what?” He still didn’t get it.

“You wasted time looking for a doctor. We got excited to have a baby. And now it turns out that I’m not pregnant.” You explained while you sobbed.

“It’s not your fault, baby.” He cupped your cheeks.

“But-” 

“Look, we both got excited and it didn’t happen. But if it’s something that you want, what we really want, we can always try. I’d do anything for you.” He wiped your tears.

“Do you want to?” Your cries were calming down.

“Do you?” Joel asked you.

“I want to, Joel.” 

“Then let’s do it.” He gave you a kiss.

You were never married to him publicly. But you exchanged vows with him in front of Tommy, Maria, and Ellie. Since then, you and Joel had been trying for a baby. 

“Don’t do that. It hurts.” You stopped Joel from touching your breasts and playing with your nipple.

After a few months of trying, you were finally experiencing pregnancy symptoms. You were more tired than usual. You were having breast pain and your breasts got bigger and swollen. But you didn’t want to tell Joel, you needed more symptoms to make sure. You didn’t want to be given false hope like what happened before. Until a few more weeks, you realized you had gained weight and started to have morning sickness. One morning, you had just woken up and you ran to the bathroom to throw up. Joel found you crouching on the toilet and he helped you hold your hair up. 

“Baby, I think you’re pregnant.”

“I don’t know, Joel. I’m scared to find out. I don’t want to let you down like last time.” You shook your head.

“But I think this time you’re really pregnant.” He gave you validation.

“Let’s just wait for a few more weeks.” You didn’t want to go to a doctor to check.

“Okay.” Joel didn’t want to pressure you.

You went about your days like usual, went to work and taught kids. You were always excited to go to work but these days you were so tired and ran out of energy. You had bad nausea and vomiting. You were throwing up a lot and you couldn’t keep food or drink down. So you skipped your meals and you were dehydrated.

“So..when the-when-..” You felt dizzy while you were writing something on the blackboard.

Everything went black. You fainted.

“Where is she?” Joel was panting.

“She’s there. She fainted but she’s okay. Do you know that she’s pregnant?” The doctor asked Joel.

“I was suspecting it. But she kept denying.” Joel told the doctor.

“Well, congratulations. Your wife is pregnant. I gave her an IV. She’s dehydrated.” 

“Thank you.” Joel thanked the doctor and ran to you.

“Hey.” Joel rubbed your upper arm.

You were laying down on the hospital bed. 

“What happened?” You opened your eyes slowly.

“You fainted. You’re in the hospital now. You’re okay.” Joel stroked your hair.

“Am I sick?” You rubbed your eyes.

“No, baby. You’re pregnant.” He smiled as tears welled up in his eyes.

“What? You sure?” You propped yourself to sit.

“Yes, yes. The doctor just told me.” Joel wiped his tears.

“Oh my God. Joel..” You jumped and hugged him tight.

“We’re having a baby.” You cried.

“Yes, baby. We’re gonna be parents.” He kissed you.

You stopped working since you found out you were pregnant because you were weaker and your doctor advised you to get more rest and not overwork yourself. So you had been spending a lot more time at home. You learned how to crochet and made baby clothes. You got needy since you were pregnant and you always cried when Joel went on patrol. So Joel asked for less turn on patrolling so he had more time to spend with you at home. He helped you a lot throughout your pregnancy.  

People were starting to notice your protruding belly and you realized everyone was staring and whispering when you and Joel walked around in town. Ellie would yell “What are you looking at?!” at them whenever someone was staring at you. Ellie loved you. She saw you as her mother and she was also excited to have a sibling. You used to not care about them but you had been crying all night when you got home. You blamed the pregnancy hormones. 

“Baby..” Joel massaged your legs. He couldn’t watch you cry.

“I’m sorry. It’s the hormones.” You sobbed.

“Don’t listen to what people say. They’re stupid.” Ellie tried to comfort you.

“I know.” You nodded.

“What did the grape say when it got crushed?” Ellie was using her puns to make you feel better.

“What?” Joel raised his eyebrows.

“What did the grape say when it got crushed?” Ellie repeated.

“I don’t know.” You were too focused on finding the answer and you started to forget why you cried.

“Nothing, it just let out a little wine.” Ellie chuckled.

You and Joel laughed.

“That was good, kiddo.” Joel stroked Ellie’s head.

“Thanks, Ellie.” You smiled at her. She put on a proud face.

“Oh!” You gasped.

“What is it?” Joel turned to you.

“It just kicked.” You chuckled.

“Where?” Joel was trying to find where the baby kicked.

“Here.” You moved Joel’s hand to your belly. Joel rubbed it.

Ellie came closer to look.

“Can I-” Ellie looked at you.

You didn’t answer. Instead, you took her hand and put it on your belly. The baby kicked again.

“Whoa! That’s weird.” Ellie was amused at the feeling. 

“Can’t wait to meet you little guy.” Ellie whispered.

“We don’t know if it’s a boy.” Joel wanted a girl.

“We don’t know if it’s a girl, too.” Ellie insisted.

Joel squinted his eyes to Ellie and Ellie did the same. You threw your head back and laughed.

To be continued…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Taglist:

@nyotamalfoy @stevengmybeloved @happinessinthebeing @angelicbbsblog @aheadfullofsteverogers @mxtokko @bebe07011

[alexsoenomel]

Chokehold (Sam Winchester x Reader smut)

Request: Hey I don’t know if you’re taking requests but I was reading Adrenlize Me and I had an idea for a part 2? Sam and reader have been getting at it for a bit but this time they finally say “I love you” to each other? Rough smut with a little dash of fluff? 🥰

Pairing: Sam x Reader

Warnings: sexy times and I love you’s, mentions of addiction 

Word count: 2.1k

Note: I apologize for being so slow (school+work+ADHD). Writing this made me realize how single I actually am.

 Enjoy! Like/Reblog or both if you like it! :)

PART 1

Addiction. First, it feels like a warm hug, sucking you in, disguising itself as something familiar, something beautiful, and finally, you feel like you filled that hole in your soul. Then it starts taking, it takes and takes until there is nothing left to take, until you cannot give anymore – until you’re dead. You find out, a little too late, that the warm hug was just a one-way ticket to your inevitable demise.

This started as a deep-seated need but turned into a full-blown addiction sooner than I thought, but the only difference was this was a blissful one, with no reaper waiting for you at the end. It only brought endless pleasure. 

Sam was no better than me. We couldn’t stop ourselves; every touch, every kiss would send us into a euphoric state, and it was better than any drug known to man. 

After our little adventure in Dean’s beloved Baby, we tried to keep our dirty little secret hidden. Sam would come to my room only during the night when he could hear Dean snoring in his room, and even then, we had to be careful since Dean was a light sleeper. He would muffle my moans with his hand whenever he was on top of me, he would sometimes even let me bite his shoulder, but it was impossible to be quiet, especially when we both liked listening to each other come undone. Long story short, Dean found out.

“Good thing you two lovebirds finally got together! The bad thing is now I cannot sleep.” He told us one morning while sipping his black coffee, clearly tired and cranky. 

Lovebirds.

That word was stuck in my brain that day. It still would pop up occasionally. It reminded me that we never labeled our little arrangement. When it happened, we would carry on, pretend like this thing was meaningless, and then we would do it all over again. We would cover every topic under the Sun apart from this one. We completely ignored it, but it was there, just around the corner, something more than just a meaningless hookup. 

Sure, he was able to make my legs shake, make me forget my existence, and his touch would set me on fire every damn time, but the way he would look at me right before I would come, the way we would look at each other…  I knew I was falling for him. 

We were birds of a feather –we connected through art, books, and music. We liked the same things but were far different characters. I was more of a 'Shoot first, ask questions later' kind of girl, like his older brother, and he was far from that. He was my voice of reason when I would let my emotions consume me; he was the one who would tell Dean and me to get our shit together whenever we would jump the gun (and that would often happen because we were both hotheads). We worked perfectly together. 

***

"God, I'm exhausted!" I said and put my bag on the table. 

We just got back from a hunt in Omaha, Nebraska, and it was a wild one. It dragged to no end until we finally ganked the ghost that was killing unfaithful men. I almost got thrown off the balcony, Dean almost got stabbed, and Sam, well he took care of it. Overall, I was just happy the case was over and, that I could sleep in my/Sam's bed. 

"Me too! Gonna hit the hay!" Dean said taking his shoes off. 

"Already? It's only 10 pm." Sam said. On a rare occasion, Dean would sleep early, he was the worst night bird in the flock. For him, 2 am was too early for bed, and mornings started at noon. 

"Sammy, I almost got stabbed today! Yeah, already." Dean said and disappeared into the hallway. 

"Night, Dean!" I said. 

"Night, night!" I heard him say. 

I was immediately hit with the realization that I was alone with Sam. There was something so alluring about him that made me nervous in the best way possible. It would boost my dopamine and adrenaline – like a drug. I swallowed nervously as I turned to see he was staring back at me and I immediately recognized the look – the look of devotion. 

"What?" I asked. He looked tired, with messy hair, and bags under his eyes. I was a tired mess too. During these days caffeine kept me awake and sharp since we were working night and day trying to solve the gruesome mystery. 

"Shower?" He asked.

"Please!" 

We went to his room since I would spend most of my nights there. What started as casual, grew to be a routine. I started hating sleeping alone in cold sheets – his warmth kept me safe. 

When we entered his room, pleasant silence joined us. We stripped down our dirty clothes and sins as we went to the bathroom. We didn’t say a word until warm water touched our tired bodies.

“Warm enough?” Sam asked me.

I nodded. He shampooed my hair, and I did my body while letting my muscles relax under the shower, feeling every part of me slowly shutting down from exhaustion.  Once my hair was nice and cleaned and I turned to face Sam, kissing where his heart was as I balanced myself on my tiptoes since he was much taller than me. 

“My turn?” I asked and got on his knees, like he usually would do when I wanted to wash his hair, and wrapped his hands around my waist, cupping my ass. It wasn’t the first time we showered together, the aftercare was as important for him as it was for me, but this time it felt far more intimate and real. The aftercare would usually turn into rough shower sex, leaving me breathless and sometimes even covered in bruises, but this time I saw true intimacy and meaning of showering together. 

Sam kissed my stomach as I washed his hair, sending light shivers all over my body. His hand went between my legs, and a light moan escaped from my lips. 

“All done!” My voice trembled. Sam stood up and kissed me hungrily. I could never get enough of his kisses, his lips were soft, kisses sweet kinda like cherries in spring, nothing like I’ve ever tasted before. He broke the kiss as our eyes met, water still running down our bodies. I could feel his breath on my lips. The air, even though hot and heavy, got a little bit chilly for a second – or was I getting nervous? I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. I didn’t know why I was getting nervous. Everything that seemed familiar was now foreign to me. Even though we fucked a million times, even though we both had seen each other naked, I was still feeling that tickling sensation in the pit of my stomach. 

Sam turned off the shower. We did our night routine in blissful silence. Skincare, haircare, the whole nine yards…in blissful pleasant silence. Sam even started using my Vitamin C serum, when I told him how good it is for the skin. 

I was pleasantly surprised when he took a little bit of my hydrating cream after the serum. I would always use that after having a rough day on the job, it did wonders for my tired skin. 

“You’re learning,” I told him as I brushed my teeth. 

“From the best.” He simply said. 

***

I didn’t remember the last time I did my night routine in my bathroom – and it all started when Dean caught me leaving his room to get my toothbrush. 

“You two are louder than a jackhammer!” He told me as he opened the door of his room, messy hair, eyes barely open, clearly feeling creaky from lack of sleep…again. “Keep it down, or I swear I’ll kill you both!”

“Sorry!” I was embarrassed but trying hard not to laugh.

Ever since then, I decided not to leave his room during the night. So, naturally, I started leaving my stuff in Sam’s room. 

***

After we got in our pajamas; Sam in his gray sweatpants and me in my oversized blue T-shirt I “borrowed” from him, got under the covers. I could feel my whole body relaxing, as I let my mind drift God knows where…I was ready to fall asleep, but Sam had other plans. He wrapped his hand around my waist pulling me closer to him. His semi-hard cock was pressed against my ass, and I felt his lips on my neck. 

“Yeah, Sammy?” I bit my lower lip. 

“I don’t wanna sleep.” He mumbled between kisses. 

I turned around, missing the softness of his lips on mine. I kissed him, feeling the minty taste on his lips. My hand went in his hair, pulling him closer to me. He moaned when I pulled his locks, sending shivers all over his body. He pushed me back onto the mattress as he climbed on top of me, leaving kisses all over my jaw and neck. I loved his lips on my skin, I loved everything about them; the softness, the taste, the ability to make me wet in seconds… 

“You got me worried today,” Sam whispered between kisses. 

“Sorry, I was a hot-headed dumbass.”

I thought I could take down the ghost by myself. I didn’t stick to the plan and almost got thrown off the balcony when the damn thing attacked me – my mistake.

“Like always.”

And that’s why you love me. I bit my tongue. I felt my walls completely coming down under him. I didn’t care about labels, I didn’t care what we were, I just knew my heart was struggling to stay silent. I wanted to say those words as much as I desperately wanted to hear them from him. 

“Shut up and kiss me!” I told him instead. 

Sam pressed his lips on mine, this time his hand went down my stomach between my legs. His fingers were cold, making my skin shiver, but his touch bought endless pleasure. 

I could feel his two fingers in me for a few seconds before he pulled away. 

“Tease,” I said annoyed. He loved making me beg and feel desperate and I loved every second of it. 

He licked his fingers clean and kissed me letting me have a taste as well. 

“You are delicious.”

Everything about this seemed different. He was sweeter and far more gentle. Usually, he would tell me to be quiet, his good girl, he would be rough, but this time…he wasn’t? He had a gentle side, but I’d rarely see it. I felt something was different. I felt my heart connecting with his and my soul feeling closer to his own. 

“And you’re a tease.” 

He laughed, showing off those cute little dimples I adored so much. 

"Just a little. " He smirked before kissing me again. I was growing impatient, and it was like he heard me. He wasted no time, he moved my panties to the side as I helped him lower his sweatpants. He entered me slowly, letting me adjust to his size, letting me bask in the pleasure his cock was giving me. I buried my fingers into his damp hair, arching my back slightly. 

"You feel so good!" 

He would always tell me that. Every time. No exception. He knew his words made me needy, horny, and desperate…He knew what buttons to push. 

He started to move and that was when my heart decided to work against me…or it did me a favor? My eyes were lost in his, not wanting to break the contract. I was feeling every inch of him, slowly moving in and out, skin to skin….

"I love you!" 

I heard myself say. My heart was pounding, I could see his expression change as his hair was falling on my cheeks…he smiled and kissed me.

"I love you too!" 

I didn't expect this answer from him. At the moment it didn't seem real but I think we both knew it was coming. Between the constant staring, and flirting just to gross out Dean and the genuine connection we had, we knew…

Sam's pace became faster, and I was slowly losing it. His face was inches away from mine, feeling each other's breaths as my climax was getting closer. I could feel my body shaking, my nails digging into his back as I couldn’t get his name out of my mouth. 

“Come on, baby!” He whispered in my ear. 

I loved his voice, I loved his touch, his kiss. I loved him.

I came hard, biting his shoulder (Sam didn’t even flinch), not wanting to be too loud because of Dean and his “Next time I’m gonna kill you both” sentence. 

He kissed me before collapsing next to me. We were both panting, waiting for someone to say something, to break the ice that had already been broken when I told him I love you. But no one did. Instead, we fell asleep, my head on his chest, safe and sound. 

[wekiamo]

fell harder pt 2

skeet ulrich x fem!reader

a/n: here goes part 2! this is a lil longer than my fics usually are, i hope thats not a problem! have fun reading 🤍 BTW SKEET IN THIS GIF BYEE that man is something else

pt. 3 & masterlist

warnings: swearing, fluff

you didn’t get to sleep a lot at night. maybe it’s the anxiety you’re feeling, knowing that today you were going to meet almost everyone you were going to see very often from now on. it’s not a big deal for you, the only big deal is that in “everyone”, skeet ulrich is included.

you fear you’re gonna get nervous and say something weird, act weird making him dislike you. if that was anyone else, it would be okay. but imagine skeet ulrich disliking you? that’s what you think for almost 5 minutes after getting up from bed, while looking at yourself in the mirror.

you figure out you have to convince yourself that he’s a normal person just like you, and that there’s nothing to be scared about.

“yeah, it’s not a big deal. so what if he doesn’t like me?” you tell youself, before opening your fridge and grabbing an apple. you continue talking “i shouldn’t care about what he thinks of me. he’s a human like anyone else, so i’m gonna act like i always do. that’s it!” you sound more convinced than you thought you would be, and that makes a smile grow in your face.

you jump happily around the house, until you get to the couch and throw yourself on it. you turn on the TV and you start watching some kids show, too busy biting your apple to change the channel.

it’s silly, but you find yourself not wanting to change it, so you just keep watching it until you’re done with your apple. you turn off the TV, and start feeling sleepy.

you close your eyes slowly, and then you fall asleep.

—

“damn, that was the best nap i’ve took in such a long time” you say, before checking what time is it.

it’s 4 pm. you remember you didn’t ask dave what time you’re supposed to show up to dinner, then you make your way to your room to get your phone.

“Hey Y/n, meet us at 7. I can pick you up if you want to” 2:20 pm

“smart guy” you think “it’d be cool if he picked me up. meeting someone for the first time in their car would be a… would be definitely a new experience”

“hey, sorry for taking too long, i took a nap” 4:07 pm

“but yes! imma send you my address rq hold on” 4:07 pm

you send him your adress.

you’re hungry.

it’s time for Topanga’s Burgers - your favorite place in the world. well, not really but thats what you call it. actually, it’s just your favorite place to eat burgers. its really near your house and that makes you love it even more. you have befriended literally all the workers there. you love the fact they’re all kind and they really like what they’re doing, you really appreciate it. it makes you remember of how amazing would it be if you had a job you’d love doing. and your last job was definitely not something you loved doing, in fact, it was the complete opposite. you quit it not too long ago and you were living with your savings and your mom’s salary. she lives with you, but she’s on vacation now. anyways, Topanga’s Burgers definitely gives you motivation to keep working hard to get where you want.

you take a bath, put on some clothes you like, do your personal hygiene, and you leave your house.

“y/n!!” a worker greets you with a big smile on her face, leaving the cashier area to come and give you a hug.

“keisha! hey, how have you been?” you hug her back tightly, happy to see her again.

keisha is a 40 years old cheerful and awesome woman. she’s probably one of the most fun friends you have. she also gives you amazing advice about literally anything you ask her about. she’s the best

“i’ve been worried about you. it’s been 3 days you’re not even coming to greet us anymore!” she says, with a genuine look of worry in her eyes. that statement of hers make it pretty obvious you come here a lot.

“yes, and i’m sorry! but i got some pretty good news”

“save it just for a minute” she says, and turns around to call the rest of the workers to hear the news you have “guys, come here! y/n’s back with good news”

everyone in the burger shop starts looking, but you don’t really care. it doesn’t embarrass you anymore.

you greet everyone coming your way as they make a circle and adjust to it, to hear the news.

“come closer” you say, and they do.

“you know when i auditioned for scream 7, right? so… i did it”

“YOU GOT THE ROLE?” keisha screamed, as some other workers gasp.

“I DID” you reply with a big smile and a happy nod, as they start jumping and screaming in excitement as you do too.

“you’re not so useless, are you?” tom joked, and everyone laughed including you.

“but seriously now, who’s going to be working with you?” tom asked in a curious tone

“there’s someone special. really special”

“hurry and give us a hint” said angelica, a funny old woman who works as a cleaning lady.

“okay, okay, you’ll have to get it right. it’s this really hot middle-aged man who you all know i always had a crush on”

“no way. skeet ulrich? he’s going to be in scream 7 too?”

“yes ma’am!”

“guys, didn’t scream end in the third movie?” linda asked.

“shut up linda, let her speak” the old woman shushed her daughter, making everyone let out a laugh

“and i’m going to meet him. today”

“wait the shootings are already starting?” tom asked you.

“no, it’s just that the cast is going to have dinner together today. and i’m going to meet SKEET ULRICH”

“tell us more. where’s it gonna be?”

“i’ll tell you all after you take my order, ‘cause im like really hungry… please?”

keisha comes running to the cashier area, to get your order. there’s another man there too in all black with a black cap too, kind of covering his face - he's probably waiting for a while now since the workers were all in a circle screaming and jumping few seconds ago.

you watch keisha greet the guy and take his order, walking to the cashier area to stand right beside him.

as she’s there taking notes of his order, he looks at you and pushes his cap up, while you turn your head to see him. you’re now able to see his face.

“oh my fucking god” you think.

“hi, i’m skeet. what a funny coincidence! we’re filming scream 7 together, right?” he greets you with a handshake and a grin, as you turn your body to him and not just your head

keisha gasps. she starts laughing at your face as she goes to prepare his order.

there’s no fucking way. skeet ulrich is right in front of you and 100% heard you saying he’s hot and you have a crush on him. your cheeks turn red.

“hello” you say stuttering a bit “i’m y/n y/l/n, it’s nice to meet you” your hands still in his. his touch is warm and you find yourself not wanting to drop it. but you did, before it makes the situation awkward.

it’s not like you love him. it’s just that you’ve had a crush on him for the last 15 years. not a big deal… right?

you remember your own words.

i shouldn’t care about what he thinks of me. he’s a human like anyone else, so i’m gonna act like i always do.

“that’s it” you finish your sentence once again, but this time not out loud.

“so…” he starts

“here’s your order, sir. sorry for the wait, again”

“it’s okay, don’t worry about it. i was called hot, you know”

he really heard you. “shit”, you think to yourself

keisha laughs. you eye her, looking done and she covers her mouth to stop laughing.

“i’ll wait for you”

“nice. he wants to sit with me. how awkward is that going to be?” you think, but you stop quickly “no. it’s not going to be awkward. once again, he’s just a normal guy who’s talking to me! nothing more than that”

“like always, please”

keisha nods, still with a smile in her face stopping herself from laughing again. she goes to the kitchen and start preparing your order.

“listen, i’m sorry. can you pretend you didn’t hear me? please?”

“right ma’am. you didn’t lie, though. i am indeed hot”

“hey!” you reply, chuckling.

“sorry, sorry. but you laughed”

you start talking to him, waiting for keisha to come with your order. she’s usually really fast with your order, but today it’s taking a little too long.

she’s definitely doing it on purpose for you to keep talking to him.

you’re really enjoying it, though. he’s a nice guy and you’re a nice girl, a perfect match. you seem to get along really well. you notice something quickly - his moves are gentle and not too fast. you’re the complete opposite, but you love it when people move calmly like this, it comforts you, you have no idea why.

keisha gives you your order as you thank her and gives her a smile.

“let’s go ma’am” he smirks at you, guiding you to a table.

“you come here often?” he asks, obviously making fun of you

“take a guess” you say and you both giggle.

“is it going to be your first time?” he asks

“hm?”

“playing a part in a movie”

oh.

“ah yes. i’ve never been part of a movie before. i’m really nervous about it to be honest. i’m not sure if i’ll be able to do my best”

“don’t worry, it’s not rocket science. all you’re going to do is pretend to be someone for a while”

“are you sure that’s all?”

“well, i told myself that exact same thing for every role i played and it went great”

“i’m talking to billy loomis right now, so i guess i’ll have to trust you.”

“yes, i’m a middle aged hot man, you should trust me”

you both laugh and he starts again “jokes aside, i’ll always be on set. if you need some advice, just call me and i’ll help you, ok?“

“thank you skeet. i really appreciate it”

you kept talking to him until you were both done eating.

somehow, this guy makes you feel comfortable around him. maybe it’s just your daddy issues, but you doubt it. this man has something in him that feels just right.

“we gotta go now. we have dinner with the cast, remember?”

“am i gonna have to see you again?” you joke as you get up and he does too, and he gasps ironically

“the middle-aged man here did not like it!”

“oh stop it” you say walking beside him to the exit and he chuckles softly.

“you want a ride home, kid?” skeet asks you, as he turns to you.

“no thanks, i live near here. you can go”

“okay then, see you later tonight!” he waves tilting his head and smiling softly as he enters his car. you wave back.

“wait”

“yes?”

“do you want me to pick you up for dinner?”

oh god. you wanted to say yes, but what about dave? wouldn’t he be upset?

“i’m sorry skeet, dave’s already going to pick me up” you say, with sort of a sad tone, trying not to upset skeet.

“it’s alright. dave, huh?” he smirks at you

“do not.” you reply quickly, raising your eyebrowns and lowering your head

“okay, okay” he laughs “see ya!”

you smile in response.

in 3 seconds, you’re going to process everything that just happened.

3,

2,

1.

“no way” you say out loud.

someone touched your shoulders behind you, making you jump with the unexpected touch, relaxing right after you see it’s angelica

“little girl you better tell me everything” she said with her hands still on your shoulders.

[livsateez]

missing you (jung wooyoung x reader)

something wooyoung holds dear to his heart are your facetime calls while he’s on tour. seeing you on his small phone screen helps him feel grounded.

each call is a reminder that he’s one night closer to having you back in his arms.

[tuesday - 12:45 am]

“hi woo!” you smile at your phone, you watch the small screen as he struggles to prop his phone up.

“y/n!” his eyes light up at the sight of you, feeling himself let the stress of his recent days leave him.

“how are you? how was the show?” his smile illuminates, making the screen feel brighter than it was. not that you minded.

“it was amazing! you should’ve seen the crowd, i swear it was our loudest show this whole tour!” you laugh to yourself, his happiness feeling contagious.

“i wish i could’ve been there, maybe i can go to your next home show.” his eyes light up when you mention a home show.

since the tour began, wooyoung has been counting down the days until he can come home to you. while he loved being on the road and seeing the world with his friends, he loved the feeling of being close to you just a little more.

“one more week,” he told you, holding up one finger. you smile to yourself, knowing the countdown all too well.

“one more week,” you repeated, completing the same action.

wooyoung smiled at you, blowing a kiss, as if to give you something to hold on to until he got home.

“it’s getting late, you should get some sleep,” he could see your exhaustion as you wiped your eyes.

“normally i would say no, but you also look like you could use some rest.”

“yeah, yeah. i’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

“okay. i love you, woo.”

“i love you more. goodnight!” he hung up before you could argue back.

[wednesday - 2:14 pm]

“—and then she had the audacity to act like it was my fault!” you looked down at your phone while you walked to your car, seeing wooyoung roll his eyes at the mention of your coworker.

“i knew there was a reason i never liked her,” you giggled at the sentiment.

“you’ve never even met her.”

“okay? but you don’t like her and she ruins your day, therefore i hate her,” he had an almost matter of fact tone in his voice.

you get in your car and prop your phone on the stand, putting your hands up as if to balance it once you have it in place.

“you look like you need a nap,” he tells you as you start the car.

“funny enough, that’s exactly what my plans were for when i got home,” he puts his hand to his forehead, giggling

“it’s almost like we brainwaved. like we’re connected or something,” you couldn’t help be laugh.

“i’m gonna go so you can focus on driving. i love you,” you nodded.

“okay, i love you too.” he smiled, blew you a kiss like he always does, then hung up.

[saturday - 8:37 am]

“you do know that if you don’t get up within the next five minutes, you’re gonna be late, right?” wooyoung usually never called this early, but he knew if he didn’t, you would’ve been late to your saturday shift.

“i don’t even know why i agreed to come in today, you think it’s too late to change my mind?” he nodded.

“i told you to tell them last night, but someone didn’t want to listen to me,” you glared at him, while he laughed.

“it’s not that i didn’t want to listen b—”

“but?” he teased.

“whatever,” he laughed again.

“now get up before you’re late and then you call me about how your boss was mad because you were late,” you tossed your phone to the side and he playfully gasped.

“did you just throw me?”

“do you want me to get up?” you laughed.

“my bad, carry on.”

wooyoung stayed on the phone with you all the way up until you pulled into your work’s parking lot.

“okay, i have to go. i literally have a minute before i’m late.”

“have a good day, i love you,” you smiled at him, and held up three fingers.

“i love you too. three more days!” you yelled excitedly.

“three more days,” he smiled brightly, and blew you a kiss as part of his routine, then hung up.

[tuesday - 5:54 pm]

you ran around yours and wooyoung’s shared apartment, trying to make sure there wasn’t anything out of place. you had been cleaning since you woke up, but couldn’t help but feel like the place was still a mess. you were wiping down your kitchen counter when you got a text from wooyoung

woo☀︎ ; i’ll be home in a few minutes, i can’t wait to see you!

your eyes widened and you looked around the apartment.

“this’ll have to do,” sighing, you typed out a quick response, and ran to the bedroom to change into something other than sweatpants.

about five minutes later, you heard keys coming from the door. you took a look in the mirror, before stepping out into the living room, waiting for wooyoung to finally get the right key to open the door.

to say wooyoung was excited to see you was an understatement. the second he opened the door, he threw his bag to the side and ran to hug you. he spun you around and covered your face in kisses.

“that’s it, i’m never leaving you behind again. you’re coming with me every time i go on tour,” he told you as he put you back down.

“i don’t think they’d allow that,” you giggled. you tried to pull out of the hug, but he wouldn’t let you.

“i can just put you in my suitcase, how are they gonna know?” he laughed and kissed your forehead.

“whatever you say, woo” you leaned your head on his chest.

wooyoung rested his head on yours, sighing contently. he was finally back home.

[frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe]

i'm outta my head over you Pt. 7

prologue (Pt. 1) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 | AO3 | playlist

this is the last chap of my steddie week fic!! i have a little blurb i may do for tomorrow's open ended prompt, but for now, here's the last @steddie-week prompt: misunderstandings

Robin stops him as they’re herding the gremlins into their respective vehicles. You’d think that after nearly five hours of spending the four barely adults’ money would be enough time at the arcade. But no. They’re all fighting them on leaving. As if they all won’t be asleep by the time they get home.

“Once you get it done, you may want to get up early.”

“Uh..what?”

“Steve always goes for a run at like ass o’clock in the morning.” she’s speaking low and fast to try and not draw attention to them, but their normal level of volume with one another is normally 100 times louder than this, so she’s really doing the exact opposite. “If you get up early enough, you can leave it for him while he’s gone.”

“Okayokay, I got it! Now stop making this weird.”

She looks around to find Steve already staring at the two of them questioningly.

“Oh shit… OKAY, YEAH, GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR DATE EDDIE.” she practically yells.

“What the hell, Robin? I don’t have a date!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’ll be great!” she’s walking away already, shrugging like even she doesn’t know why the fuck she said that. “Call me when you’re home!”

Eddie smacks his palm against his forehead and turns to his van, not even daring to look at Steve again.

He finally does dare once he’s in his van and has started moving, giving Steve a ‘nothing wrong or weird here’ wave as he pulls away.

The expression on Steve’s face is indiscernible. Somewhere stuck between totally blank, and the most devastated look he’s ever seen.

Damnit, Robin.

He only ended up with Max in his van on the way back, so when they get back, he helps her inside, and resigns himself to staying up all night to finish the tape.

He pulls in next to Wayne’s truck at the same time his uncle is coming out the front door, a dufflebag in hand. 

“You off to work early old man?” and he asks as he gets out of his van, it’s only about 9 PM now and his uncle doesn’t usually go in until near midnight. 

“Yep, gettin’ some dinner with the fellas before we head in. Gotta leave shift early to go visit yer aunt.”

Ah. “That time of year is it?”

“Yep, I’ll see ya tomorrow evenin’, son. Don’t be getting into any trouble, y’hear?”

Eddie just shrugs. “You know me.”

“That’s exactly my point.” Wayne says with a crinkly smirk.

He gives his uncle a short hug, and Wayne kisses the top of his head with another ‘be safe’.

Then, because he’s agonizing about it, Eddie spends the next couple hours cleaning the trailer instead of picking the last two songs that will go on his side (listening to said tape while he does).

He’s still got some ideas from before, but only a couple good ones..and not all of them will fit in the time he’s estimated is left on the B side.

It isn’t until he gets to Be My Baby on his second listen through that he knows which one he’s going to add next.

After he’s got that one figured out and recorded, there definitely isn’t enough room left for the rest of the picks, so he adds the one he thinks says the most about how he feels about Steve, the one that says everything he needs to say.

-----

“Robin did say ‘ass o’clock’,” Eddie says to himself, glancing at the clock in his dashboard.

5:13. Yeah, that sounds right.

Eddie lets out a huge cracking yawn. Okay, he’s definitely gonna crash once he gets back to the trailer. He was so wired after finally finishing the tape, he couldn’t sleep even though he wanted to.

He makes it to Steve's street and parks up the road a bit (not wanting the rattle of his van to alert Steve to his presence if he hadn’t left yet), and walks the last leg. The tape in his pocket feels like it weighs a million pounds.

When he finally rounds the bushes at the front edge of Steve’s yard, Eddie feels every cell in his body seize up at once.

Nancy’s car is in the driveway.

What the–

Suddenly, the front door opens. He dives back behind the bushes, peeking through the leaves. You know, like a sane person?

Why the fuck is Nancy leaving Steve's house so early

Why is Steve only wearing those tiny fuckin’ shorts?

Oh no..

Oh shit.

There’s only one fucking reason

This is all wrong! Nancy knows he has feelings for Steve, was that not what that was at the arcade?

She’s with Robin, she didn’t refute it.

Oh fuck, he’s gonna have to tell Robin.

Eddie debates making himself known, let himself barrel over whatever awkwardness may arise, but he’s still got his heart in his pocket, addressed to Steve.. What’s he supposed to do with that then?

“Oh hey Steve, didn’t see you there! Just came by to drop off your very personal property that your best friend stole for me to defile! Nancy? Oh hey, you’re here! What’s up with tha–”

He’s startled out of his thoughts when the door of Nancy's station wagon shuts, the engine turning over. 

She pulls out, thankfully heading away from where he’s hidden.

Eddie watches until she’s out of sight, then jumps again when he hears Steve’s front door close.

Steve does a few hops in place from foot to foot on his front stoop (still shirtless), and starts off on his run the same way Nancy had gone. Had he been able to see shirtless, sweaty Steve whenever he wanted?? He just goes for runs like this every day? Why had no one told him??

‘Oh fuckin’ hell, shut up, shutup!!’ He yells at himself.

Now what?

Eddie sits in the grass in Steve Harrington’s front yard and stares at the back of his mailbox.

Does he still leave the tape? Of course he should, it is Steve’s tape afterall.

But what about the songs? Steve’s not gonna want his bullshit now…

He could go back to his van and re-write the note then come back and leave it. No, he wouldn’t have time now, Steve’s athletic, yeah, but Eddie’s been frozen in his front yard for a while now. He’d be back soon.

Fuck it. 

He’ll drop the tape on the front step, go back home and pack up his shit. Yeah. Good a time as any to get the fuck outta here.

Confessing your feelings to one of your closest friends who very obviously just got back together with his ex not even ten hours after you’d seen him and were very obviously flirting with each other?

Yeah. Not ideal.

Does he have the funds to get the fuck outta here? No. But he’s got enough for gas and he’s got a van. He’ll just load his mattress into the back and be gone before the rest of the town fully wakes up.

Good plan, Eddie’s brain. Thank you, rest of Eddie.

-------

Steve slows to a jog once he can see his house, cooling down from his run on the last little bit of his road, and stopping in his driveway to do some stretches back to the door.

He’s sinking down into his last lunge when he sees the little square of…something…sitting on the front step.

“The hell?”

He stoops down and picks it up, turns it over. There’s a piece of lined paper rubber banded around it.

Peeling off the band, Steve steps inside and unfolds the letter, leaning back on the now closed front door to read

“...oh no…” Steve looks down at the case in his hand. Now he sees why the rubberband was necessary, there’s another folded wad of papers shoved into the cassette’s case, now popped open without the band holding it together.

His heart, previously calmed down from his run, now beat wildly in his chest as he unfurls the short stack of paper.

He reads the first line, ‘8. I Was Made For Lovin’ You...’

“Holy shit.”

Steve books it up the stairs, he’s gotta get showered, he’s gotta get changed, he’s got one more song to add to the tape.

-------

Eddie’s just finished packing up his clothes when his alarm clock radio goes off, the 7am alarm still set for when he has to get up for school.

“...still don’t believe it, he was just leaving OH there must be some misunderstanding! There must be some kind of mistake…” blasts through the tinny speakers.

Nopenopenope, not dealing with that right now.

He slaps the clock around until it finally shuts off its maniacal teasing, and goes back to packing (and blinking away some wayward tears).

He’s just dropped the second bag of clothes and his sweetheart in her case by the front door and is contemplating if his mattress would actually fit in the back of his van, when there’s a knock on the door.

Eddie’s gut freezes mid-flip.

Oh no. Please n–

“Eddie, are you there? It’s Steve. Can I come in?”

‘Don’t move. Don’t make a single sound. Maybe he’ll think you’re not home and just leave.’

“C’mon man, I know you’re in there. You’re van’s out here.”

“Shit.”

Eddie trudges his way to the front door and opens it.

Even with floppy, just-washed, hair and an inside-out polo, Steve’s still the most beautiful person in existence.

“What do you want, Steve?” Wow. Even he’s surprised at how morose he sounds.

“I uh, I got your tape..my tape? I got your note. I added one more song and I thought, maybe, I could–” Steve looks down. “Are you..” his voice pitches high so he clears it. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Mhm.” Eddie can’t look him in the eye. He stares at the porch.

“Where are you–”

“Just going, ‘kay Steve? No need to worry about me being around anymore.” Eddie practically spits, still not looking up at his friend.

“Eddie, what are you–” he cuts himself off, his voice going soft. “Did you not mean what you said?”

That makes Eddie look up at him. Steve’s gaze is now cast downwards, staring blankly at Eddie’s packed bags.

“...I meant every word. Every song, Steve. But that doesn’t matter now, does it?” he’s truly mad now, who does he think he is, trying to act all glum like he wasn’t the one betraying his best friend.

“B-betraying my best–Eddie, what the hell are you talking about?”

Damn! He said that out loud.

“Just go away, Steve. I won’t tell Robin, but you definitely should.” Eddie moves to close the front door and turns back towards his room. He doesn’t hear it close, but he hears the creak of the floor when Steve follows him in.

Of. Course.

“Tell Robin what, Eddie? I already told her how I felt about you, that’s why she stole you the tape in the first plac–”

“Not that! You–” Eddie clenches his fists at his sides and spins back to face Steve. “That you hooked up with her girlfriend last night.” Steve’s face pales and Eddie continues on. “Yeah. I came by to drop off your tape; Robin thought I could leave it there when you left for your run. But lo and behold, what do I see when I come by? Nancy Wheeler’s car in your driveway at ass o’clock in the morning.

“Now, I may be a third time senior, but even I know what the fuck that means. Especially when, not long after I’ve gotten there, the Lady Wheeler herself waltzes out the door with Tiny Shorts McGee following her like a lost puppy.” he gestures at Steve, who’s still frozen in place by the door.

“So yeah, you can just burn those notes for all I care, I don’t even know why I still left it. Whatever. I’m leaving today anyway so you don’t need to worry about me pining hopelessly after you, ‘kay?��

Eddie’s chest is heaving, his eyes are burning with unshed tears, and Steve…starts laughing.

“I fuckin’ knew it!” There are tears spilling freely out of his eyes now. “You’re really good y’know, had everyone fooled. Even me! King Steve is alive and well, everyone!” Eddie spreads his hands wide and yells to no one.” I can’t believe you got me to fall for your good guy schtick. Get the fuck outta my house, Harrington.” Eddie points to the door, stalking forward.

“Eddie! Eddie, wait, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed.” Steve puts his hands out and Eddie stops, crossing his arms and glaring. “Eddie, please, Nancy was only dropping something off for me.”

“Yeah righ–”

“She was! She came by that early because she’s driving to an interview this morning at a paper in Indy. She knew I’d be up for my run anyway, so she stopped to give me the revisions she made to my–you know what, hold on. I’m calling Robin.”

“Steve, I told you to get the fuck out of my house, not go further into it.”

Steve ignores him and goes to the phone, giving Eddie as wide of a berth as he can while he passes. He picks it up and dials.

“I’m not fucking kidding, Harrington, get the fuck out of here–” Eddie’s anger is multiplied tenfold when Steve holds out a finger to shush him.

“Hi Mr. Buckley, this is Steve. I’m sorry to call so early, but can I please speak to Robin? There was a last minute change to our schedule…thank you.’

Eddie watches Steve’s face morph from his customer service expression, to an admittedly frightening pissed off smile when Robin apparently gets on the line.

“Hey Robin! I found my Eddie tape! It’s the funniest thing, I came back from my run and it was sitting on my doorstep.”

Eddie can hear the muffled sound of Robin’s voice coming through the earpiece.

“I know, isn’t that crazy?” Damn, Steve’s passive aggressive voice is…something else. “He must’ve dropped it off while I was gone..why wouldn’t he give it to me in person?”

Steve waves at Eddie to come closer, and when he stubbornly doesn’t, Steve rolls his eyes and comes to him, stretching the cord across the kitchen as he does.

“Hmmm...maybe.. Or maybe something scared him off?” He takes in an over-dramatic sarcastic gasp. “Or maybe, my best friend and soulmate who stole the tape for him, told him to come by at the exact worst time! When she knew a certain ex of mine and current girlfriend of hers was stopping by before leaving to Indy and it scared him off!”

Steve tilts the handset out from his ear so Eddie can hear..there’s complete silence on the other end.

“That would suck, don't you think? Seeing your crush’s ex leaving their house early in the morning when you’re coming over to confess to them?” He continues.

“Oh. My. God. Steve!! I am so so sorry I–”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to Eddie.”

Steve grabs up Eddie’s hand and wraps it around the handset, forcing him to take it, then stomps off into the living room.

Eddie puts the phone to his ear and walks back to the receiver, Robin rambling in his ear the whole way. 

“--ddie, I’m so so sorry! I totally forgot Nancy was dropping off Steve’s paper this morning before she went to her interview! Please please don’t be mad at me, actually, scratch that. Be super mad at me, but definitely not at Steve, okay? I should have remembered, I should have told you, I should hav–”

It’s effective, he feels the anger draining out of him. “Robin, Robin! It’s okay, you’re okay.” Eddie glances over at Steve, who’s pacing up and down the short length of the trailer’s living room. “But now I have a very pissed off Harrington in my house right now…you got any survival tips for me?” he mumbles lowly.

“...Oh! I know, just go over there and kiss hi–her–stupid!” Eddie snorts through his nose, her parents must still be nearby.

“Got it, I’ll try that. Thanks Birdie…for everything.”

She sighs in relief. “You’re welcome, Doofus.”

Eddie slowly hangs up the phone, and turns to where Steve is. Now stationary, he’s got one hand on his hip, and the other is rifling through his hair nervously.

‘Yep. Buckley’s right.’

Eddie takes a deep breath and crosses to Steve in three short strides, grabs his face in both his hands, and kisses him deeply.

Steve responds immediately; he wraps one arm around Eddie’s waist, his large palm centered squarely on his lower back, and one around his arm, lacing his fingers into Eddie’s curls and cupping the back of his head.

Steve pulls their bodies flush and cants his hips into Eddie’s, tugs a breathy moan from Eddie’s throat when the hand in his curls tightens.

Eddie’s nose is pressed uncomfortably into the space between Steve’s nose and cheekbone with how close they’ve smushed themselves together, but Eddie can’t find it in himself to care. 

He’s kissing Steve Harrington. 

There’s a strong thigh slotted between his, and Steve Harrington is kissing him back. 

Eddie moves one hand down to clutch at Steve’s shirt, and pushes the other back, grabbing onto those short hairs on the back of Steve’s neck.

They finally come up for air after one too many teeth clashes, their foreheads coming together.

“Hi.” they breathe out at the same time, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

“We’re kinda idiots, huh?” Steve says, looking cross-eyed between Eddie’s eyes. The hazel of his eyes sparkling with the movement.

Eddie chuckles. “Dingus and Doofus, remember?” he points to each of them in turn, only lifting his pointer finger out of the grip on Steve’s shirt to do so.

“Can I play you the last song now?”

and then they low dance in eddie's living room

Yay!! that's it, thanks for following along with this one!!! here's the last tags :o) @hellomynameismoo, @messrs-weasley, @manda-panda-monium

Here's some notes since it's the last part:

this is the most I’ve ever written in such a short time, I literally wrote each of these chapters the day before their day to be posted….most of it while at work lmao

Steve used a Sony C60 tape. i.e. there’s 60-ish minutes of space on it. before At Last, the songs on the tape totaled 55 min 55 seconds, a perfect amount left for Etta James (ending up at 58 min 54 seconds in total according to my spoofy playlist).

I know that the Eddie half of songs weren’t really…’Eddie music’, but in my head, Eddie likes music for being music. All music is good (like he said to Max in part 5). Plus, he wanted to put songs on the tape that he knew Steve would like/want to listen to.

steve asked nancy to make revisions on his nursing school application essay (he found he quite liked the process of taking care of eddie and wants to go to school for it!)

anyone else just recently realize that Take Me Home Tonight had an allusion to Be My Baby?? anyway, love that, wanted to make that a thing here :o)

and lastly, a couple of little things i LOVED about this fic that i didn’t see anyone else / only a couple people point out:

Steve singing the rubber duckie song to Eddie in part 5

Eddie literally giving Gareth the shirt off his back in part 2 when Tommy threw his pop on him (in my head, this is the same red buffalo check flannel that Gareth ends up cutting the sleeves off of and wears in S4).

that's all!! thanks for reading, friends :o)

[sleepanonymous]

Did you have fun at lorna shora? 💝

I'm gonna use your ask to post my concert recap, Anon. Hope you don't mind 🖤 But yes I had an absolute blast. 100/10, I would do it all again, even the waiting around in the heat part.

Long-winded recap below the cut for anyone who cares 🖤 you do get rewarded with a low-effort meme though.

TLDR is I had an amazing night, and I'm probably getting another tattoo because of it.

Some pre-concert notes: at the suggestion of a friend, I used Waymo to get to and from my hotel in Phoenix. That was an experience. It’s nice not having a driver so I can bask in my antisocial tendencies but those cars are confident af. I guess they can technically see better/more than a human, and they're 100% focused on the road, so they also drive better than 75% of all the Uber/Lyft drivers I’ve had. 

Day of the concert, I got to the venue at 11:30 am and nobody was there except a vagrant, a plumber, and a concerned lady with the plumber. Later confirmed with the people in line that I was the first to show up and that’s kinda crazy to me? The difference in line culture between Sleep Token and Lorna Shore is insane. At noon I was told by security we couldn’t line up on the property until 4 pm (doors at 5 pm). I’m not a local, so I took that as go tf away, so I went to Mcdonalds a block away and watched Saint Maud on my phone in the middle of a lunch rush. This is how everyone needs to experience this movie btw. Definitely adds to the unsettling factor of the film.

Around 2 pm I walked back to the venue, thinking I could loiter at the pizza place next door. Instead I found a line near the back of the venue and I was number 12 (I recounted when we lined up outside the venue at 4pm and realized I was wrong when I said I was 15th). It was a high of 106F/41C and we were south facing, but my spot was thankfully under a few mesquite tree canopies. When we moved up at 4 pm I was under some misters on a patio which was a small haven since I lost my shade. I didn’t get sunburned, and barely got a tan.

I met some Sleep Token fans while in line and dying of heat stroke. We talked a bit about what it was like being on the barricade at their rituals. A couple of them had tried for tickets to the Phoenix ritual but weren’t able to get their hands on any. I was too afraid to tell them about Vessel looking at me during TNDNBTG (even though I have the video evidence from that one uploader, I’m still gaslighting myself about it lmao).

At 5 pm when doors opened, the venue separated the line into bags/no bags, so I essentially was the 3rd person inside (1st in the bag line). Snagged a spot on the barricade at center stage, slightly to stage left. Guy to my right drove over from Texas (he showed me a picture on his phone that he took of Will outside the venue like 2 hours before, literally just standing and chatting with a dude in a Spiderman outfit while the rest of us were melting in line. literal strangest thing I've ever seen in my life). The girl to my left ran some minor Instagram page, I had meant to ask for her handle but never got a chance. The dude behind me looked like a taller Jesse Pinkman sans beanie hat/baggy hoodie and he was really polite and also did his best to talk like Jesse after the comparison was made. There was also a dude and his girlfriend (he and Jesse Pinkman were pretty amazing at keeping me from getting squished 100% of the time from the pit) and the Sleep Token girlies who bought like seven shirts and somehow made it to the barricade. We all became temp besties. We also made friends with the security and helped hand out water cups during intermissions, had mosh pit practice and dance-offs, and got a crash course in the Sanguisugabogg murderball game.

Sanguisugabogg is 100% an amazing live band. I couldn’t get into them before hand, but after seeing them live I am now a casual fan. I wouldn’t mind seeing them live again. I survived the murderball game with little effort thanks to the barricade/people around me. But I did get accidentally acquainted with multiple security guy’s crotches (ducking for them to pick up crowd surfers). This actually became a theme for a bit until I figured out a wat to contort myself between the security when they jumped on the barricade. I guess two dudes got into a fight over the ball, and the band told them to take it to the sidewalk? Valid.

Kublai Khan were super fun on stage. Vocalist wore an Arizona belt buckle and he showed it off and the crowd were extra happy about it lol. Caught some neat footage at the end of Kublai’s set. I only rewatched about one minute of it to check how the audio/video settings were for later on in the night. I do know I caught footage of him looking like a disappointed dad though so that's amazing.

White Chapel was fucking LOUD yo. Sound Guys cranked the volume to 11 for them and Lorna. But I can now confirm that baby Ves’s piano improv from a couple weeks ago did have heavier breakdowns. This band was one of my last ex’s favorite bands (apparently he lives in Phx now, so there’s a good chance he was in the pit) and he was almost spot on in mimicking Phil’s vocals, so I haven’t really listened to them for 9+ years. Surprisingly I was familiar with about half their set, so I had a great time with that, despite the ex thing.

I am proud to say that I am the lucky survivor of four crowd surfers over my head at once. Security were amazing at handling that influx in such a small space/time span. It’s my fault for getting kicked in the face because I didn’t duck in time for one, (I was filming lol) but I didn’t get a bruise/swollen lip. Morning after edit: I actually have a lot of bruises but they’re on my arms from the barricade and not getting kicked in the face. I filmed White Chapel’s new song plus a couple others, I have no idea how well they turned out yet. Also there are three guitarists?! Things I did not know about the band.

Phil spoke the least out of all four frontmen. He introduced the new song, I think he asked us to open a circle pit once, thanked us at the end, and that was about it.

Lorna Shore came on really fucking quickly after White Chapel. Like 20ish minutes, I think? It was 9:20 pm on the dot. Those roadies were busting their asses. Idk what was up but it got really hot inside when Lorna took the stage, even with being on the barricade. I recorded five Lorna songs: Welcome Back, The Pain Remains Trilogy, and To the Hellfire.

At one point Will said something about being too dry from the desert heat (he was the only person to mention the heat) and I thankfully stopped myself from blurting out “bitch where?!” because I was currently drenched in sweat. I know he was talking about the 106F high plus the 9% humidity, but still.

Okay can we talk about Adam De Micco now? I need to talk about Adam De Micco. More specifically Adam eye contact. There was so much Adam eye contact. Like, bro was making eye contact with everyone on the barricade, so it wasn’t a special occurrence… but oh my god when I tell you there was eye contact there was eye contact.

Quick fact about me: I have this thing about smiling at strangers when I catch them looking at me (because I have chronic rbf, sometimes accidentally zone out and end up looking in the general direction of people, and asking “why are you looking at me?!” while possibly looking pissed off is generally too hostile for everyday occurrences).

So. Eye contact. The first time I realized he was looking at me and not around me, I internally panicked and automatically smiled at him. Thing is, it wasn’t one off. This man was staring into the souls of every person on the barricade. But because of my panic smile we’d just hold eye contact until he had to look down at his frets or I panicked and looked at Will or Austin. At one point, he and Andrew switched stage positions and Adam would still *hold eye contact me* from the other side of the stage. It got to the point where I was convinced maybe I had a busted lip from the crowd surfer incident or my makeup was fucked from the heat. Everything was fine when I got back to my hotel? Eyeshadow, eyeliner, and eyebrows hadn’t budged at all and my lips were a little faded but not bad. My hair wasn’t even as crazy as I thought. So does Adam just do that? I didn’t catch a glance from any of the rest of the band, or any of the guys in White Chapel, I think I remember the Kublai Vocalist or guitarist looking somewhere in my direction, and the Sanguisugabogg Vocalist was literally chatting with everyone between songs. But Adam took it upon himself to make me and everyone else on the barricade feel perceived, like it was his life mission or something.

I feel like… because Vessel looked at me once during TNDNBTG back in May and I got a tattoo because of it, that I now owe Adam a tattoo too? I am 100% overthinking this. But I’m also not even joking, I’ve been thinking about getting his sigil tattooed somewhere since I left the venue. I also followed him on Insta before I was out the doors. Anyway, emotional support from Will Ramos has ended. My new emotional support person is Adam De Micco. Yes, because of excessive eye contact.

Evening after addendum: Mother Token face reveal on Lorna’s Instagram. I’m tiny and I’m the only person paying attention to Moke, but at least I’m not sobbing like I was for Adam Rossi’s Euclid sneak-shot. Also yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm probably gonna get that sigil tattooed (ref 👇). Might have to wait until after Xmas though, with the way money is flowing right now.

[st0rmyskies]

wrote this at like 11 pm 2 weeks ago and kept meaning to edit it i give up here take it

Shadow strutted into Four’s room as usual, choosing to forgo his perfected silent entrance. Even so, Four still jolted when he noticed him out of the corner of his eye.

“It’s late, Rain,” Shadow remarked as flopped down onto the bed next to Four.  Four groaned as he rolled over to make room. It was nearly 3, in fact. Did that mean it was actually early? He wasn’t sure.

“Mm…couldn’t sleep,” Four replied lamely. Clearly a lie.

Shadow scoffed. “You know I can see when you’re online, right? Don’t pretend you even tried.” 

Four sighed. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I dunno, lost track of time or something.” He set down his phone and rolled over to look at Shadow. “You weren’t sleeping either,” he pointed out.

“I was working, man! You were just lying here.”

“Working until 2 in the morning?” 

“Fair point,” Shadow admitted. He’d gone down another internet rabbit hole. Something wasn’t right about this place, and Four knew it too. He just needed to figure out what.

“I guess…well, I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately,” Four said.

“Yeah, I knew,” Shadow replied. “You’ve been more distant, taking longer to respond- you’re not taking care of yourself, Four. Have you even been eating enough?” He llifted a strand of hair out of Four’s face. “What’s going on?”

Four didn’t reply for a few moments. “I…I’m not sure,” he decided. “Got caught up in…other things, and well, it’s just been so busy, I just kind of forgot, you know?”

Shadow nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I do know.” He pulled Four close, realizing how thin he felt. “Just take care of yourself, alright?”

Four chuckled. “Yeah, okay.”

“Promise?” Shadow teased.

“Okay, okay, I promise!” Four laughed, chucking a pillow at Shadow.

“How’re the…roommates?”

“Housemates, I guess. They’re fine. I haven’t really been up to the third floor, but I am praying that the guy doesn’t have any more rooms. Nine people in a house is enough.”

“No kidding. Who even are they?” Shadow hadn’t seen much of them, he made a point to keep his presence as quiet as possible.

“Well, other than the homeowner…” (Now that guy was someone to look into. What kind of person just lets 8 other people live in his house? Maybe he had a secret desire for kids or something, but these were grown men. He was hoping it wasn’t some sort of weird fetish.) “There’s the kid. Pretty much just hangs in his room all day.”

“You say kid, how old even is he?”

            "Dunno. Young. There's Hyrule, he's the doctor." Shadow figured that was good. The guy seemed trustworthy enough.

            "What about the weird one? He a drug dealer or something?"

            "Probably not. He's got some weird friend that hangs around here sometimes, but they don't bother anyone else." (If he was a drug dealer, Shadow would probably ask Four to come live with him. The risk of being arrested is not something either of them wanted to take.) "The others are pretty alright. There's Wild, he's a bit…well, wild."

             "Mm. Yeah, there's some weird figures here, I've seen that much." Shadow nestled into Four's hair, the blond leaning back against him. "Be careful, Rain, okay?"

             "Of course." 

             They stayed in silence then, Shadow holding Four close to him.

             "I'm glad you're here," Four whispered to him a few minutes later.

             "Me too."

(this is some au where shadow never finds out about what happens in hsh until it's over ig)

stares at '15 works in four/shadow' fINE ill do it myself (i love you all)

-secret third thing anon <3

STT anon out here doing god's work, these two are so damn soft it's gonna give me cavities...

[blindrapture]

SATURDAY JUNE 4TH, 2011 (SLCEM)

12:06 AM Well, here we go. Into the depths of the night, in a country whose language I don’t even remotely speak.

12:14 AM It’s pretty tonight. Sure, red like it has been for weeks now, but it’s still pretty.

1:49 AM I’ve made it through “100 Bottles of Paracetamol on the Wall.” Not there yet.

3:01 AM Holy shit, no way. Fucking spidercat. This one’s fucking feral. Fast. I could barely see it move, but I’d recognize those demonic chirps anywhere. Got my crowbar ready. It’s time to do this shit like Gordon fucking Freeman.

3:04 AM EAT SHIT AND DIE

3:05 AM Fucker’s dead. I don’t feel barbaric anymore. Not one bit. Let’s keep moving.

3:13 AM ….motherfucking yes, there’s a car.

3:16 AM This bastard works. Fuck yes.

4:42 AM Berga.

4:45 AM Phil Collins has such a sexy voice. ..sorry, I’m listening to music. :D

4:47 AM D’accord, parked this car, now where am I gonna go? I guess I’ll look around. I mean, how many different people can there be here?

4:53 AM Dear sweet fhqwghads, the Cheat is to the limit. There’s gotta be at least twenty people here in this hotel, completely normal people. Nobody’s noticing me, though, despite my white outfit. These people are all wearing festive clothing.

5:15 AM I was able to find someone who spoke English. He told me this was the local meeting place for the SLCEM Brigada. That’s, uh.. well, it’s something in Spanish. And then “Brigade.” He says his name is Tony Marcado. Says the SLCEMs are gathering for a group meeting tonight. He says many more will be here, and it still won’t even be a quarter of the total number of SLCEMs in Spain. I didn’t realize this many people were surviving and gathering in places like this. It’s pretty heartwarming, a true testament to human will. ;w; Tony says I should rest up for today. The meeting’s gonna be important, and they’ll need all the help they can get with what they have planned. I asked if he knew where Tony Ferdinando was. He says, if he’s not here now, he’ll definitely be here for the meeting. He says Ferdinando’s an important guy. Great. And I have to “convert” him.

5:32 AM Hotel room, oh boy! I love these things. And god, am I knackered. Time for rest, Jordy boy.

1:58 PM I dreamt of a door. Just a door. No scenery, no rooms, just a door. And me. I tried opening the door, but it wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t locked. It just didn’t want to open. I heard a door rattle and then I woke up to find that was someone coming into my room. It’s Marcado. He says his job is to make sure everyone knows about the meeting, so he came in to make sure I was going tonight. 6 PM, he said.

2:22 PM Hot damn, this place has a CD player.

2:30 PM Hear them chanting:"We excavate souls" And taste the lightning Bolting down the deep See the masses See them decompose As up the current Something rides the light “We Excavate” was my all-time favourite metal song for a really long time, you know. Pure fucking Sunsetters classic.

5:13 PM Wow, I just took a nap. What the fuck, so soon after sleeping?

5:41 PM Heading to the lobby now. The meeting’s soon.

5:53 PM Oh my god, there are a lot of people here. It’s hard to move. …nobody showers in the apocalypse. At least I’m not alone in that. But wow, you don’t really notice it until you’re “Pakt Like Sardines in a Tin Can,” to put it one way.

6:00 PM Some guy’s standing on a chair. I think he’s the one giving a speech. Fuck, I just realized I’m in Spain. I can’t understand a word he’s saying.

6:24 PM I think I heard something about dildos.

6:35 PM Okay, now I’m sure he mentioned something about “That buffoon in the white.” I heard “el bufon blanco.” The fuck, just ‘cause I can’t speak your language doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings, guys. ._.

6:43 PM I heard “el bufon blanco” again. Are they actually talking about me? I get the feeling they might not be.

6:50 PM Okay, the meeting’s over. I’m gonna see if Marcado can fill me in on what was said.

7:13 PM So apparently, the SLCEMs have some big attack planned. I asked against whom, he said “fear.” The fuck, I know, right? So he explained that we’re sending a messenger tomorrow to the next town over, Manresa, where he’ll let the SLCEM Brigada there know that this base here is go for the attack. It’s standard procedures, basically. Gotta let the others know that we’re ready, gotta synchronize the attack. So yeah. Then I asked if Ferdinando was here yet. He said he was running late; someone had heard from him. Says he’ll be here tomorrow, no doubt. Great. I’m going back to bed; I’ve been so tired lately.

7:26 PM There’s some pretty young folk here. I just saw a kid who had to be no older than eight.

9:41 PM Someone’s knocking on the door.

9:42 PM It’s that young kid I saw. He said he was too cold, so I said he could come in; this room’s got towels. He didn’t come in, just ran away. …that kid was speaking English.

11:00 PM I haven’t gone to sleep yet. I’ve just been.. I dunno. Looking out at the sky. It’s red, getting dark red. I see the Thunderbirds flying around out there, and I occasionally see ‘lightning’ off in the distance. The world has gotten so quiet. It’s only been two weeks, and the world’s gotten absolutely silent. It seems like the world will never be the same again, and all we can really do is just gather in groups and hope Mistress doesn’t crash our parties.

11:11 PM I wish something good would happen.

(Attached: “Ah, 'We Excavate.’ That was a song written by Degan Allen, actually, rather than Blackwood who usually writes the lyrics. I think he said something about it being based on a dream he had? Some tower of flesh buried at the bottom of the sea, during a transitional World Flood. Lightning strikes the tower, and some flesh rides the lightning up, and this is how God eats, or something. We all had Flood dreams during that time, as we'd just finished Summer Sucks which of course ends with a great era-ending flood. Excavate was a time of dreams and of jazzy jams. I feel a lot of nostalgia for those days now.”)

[PREV LOG] [TABLE OF CONTENTS] [NEXT LOG]

[alarawriting]

52 Project #51: Dex

This story is highly autobiographical in a way that's actually kind of painful and embarrassing, and you'll all know why after you read it. And you'll also know why it has taken me two and a half years to write one year's worth of stories and I'm still not done.

BTW I hope like fuck none of the Reddit handles in here are real, but I didn't have a chance to check them all.

***

Jason had promised his boss he’d have a debugged version of the code checked in by morning.

He’d been tracking down a bug when he’d gotten sidetracked reading Stack Overflow. Dammit. He’d just lost an hour, and he still had no idea why his code wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, and it was 10 pm. Teresa was expecting a new version to be checked in by 9 am and she was expecting that it would run.

This was a job for more Coca-Cola. Jason got up, went downstairs and got himself a slice of pizza and a cold Coke.

His mom, also burning the late night oil at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, said, “How is it going? You think you’ll have what your boss is expecting by tomorrow?”

No. “Yes,” Jason said. “I just need a few more hours to track this down.”

“Well, you’re running out of them. You’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep, then waking up fresh in the morning early enough to work on it then.”

Mom was 57 and had apparently forgotten everything she had ever known about how night owls worked, despite having spent her younger years routinely staying up until 2 am. “Is that what you’re doing?” Jason couldn’t help saying.

“I’ve got a house showing tomorrow, I just have to make sure that I have my talking points memorized.”

“Why? Does the house really suck?”

“It doesn’t really suck. It’s a good house, really. Great bones, a nice big yard. But I’m gonna have to redirect the prospective owner’s attention away from how ugly the carpet is and things like that, because the seller? Whoo-ee. There’s people who have no taste, and there’s people who never fix anything, and there’s people who own dogs, and then there’s my seller, who is all three.” She sighed. “I tried to get them to rip the carpet out and install hardwood flooring before putting the house on the market, but the market is hot right now; I don’t blame them for wanting to charge forward. I just think they’d get more if their house didn’t smell like dog and look like water damage had a horrible transporter accident with the 1970’s.”

“That bad, huh?” He leaned up against the fridge, sipping his Coke. “You wanna go over your spiel with me, Mom? Some late night practice before you go to bed?”

“Yeah, actually, that sounds good.”

So Mom talked enthusiastically, if hoarsely, about the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the recently modernized kitchen and how great the neighborhood was, and Jason listened, because he wasn’t contributing nearly as much to the mortgage as his mom was and she was also paying most of the utilities, so her career was important, not to mention what stress did to her heart.

When he got back to his computer it was 11:30 and he’d finished his Coke and pizza. He thought about getting ice cream, but best not to do that until Mom went to bed, if he didn’t want to get sucked into another conversation. Not that conversations with Mom were bad; they were much more entertaining than debugging code, which was the problem.

He opened up his coding window, stared at it for thirty seconds while doing nothing, and then convinced himself that maybe Reddit would have an answer to his question.

It didn’t. It did have answers to how to solve a particularly difficult problem in his current favorite game, a number of people who wanted to know if they were the asshole, some great reviews of movies on streaming that he hadn’t had a chance to watch yet, political rants, and some really entertainingly stupid coding mistakes that people had posted.

It was 12:30 am. Teresa was expecting this at 9 and she was expecting it to work.

His eyes glazed. The act of reviewing the code for the tenth time, looking for the bug he hadn’t yet been able to find despite knowing the general area it had to be in, was almost physically painful. He checked his brackets, again. The error didn’t look like a missing close bracket, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had a dollar for every time the error didn’t look like a missing close bracket but turned out to be one, he’d have maybe twenty dollars, which wasn’t a lot in terms of actual money but was a lot of times for the same stupid thing to happen in his code.

The software was supposed to warn him when there was an unclosed bracket, but half the time, if the code was particularly complex, it didn’t. It just re-interpreted the bracket locations and then his code broke.

One more time. Stepping through. Why the fuck was it stopping there? There was nothing there that could account for the error.

Time to go get ice cream. Maybe some sugar would help him stay awake and focused enough to get this done. Another Coke, possibly, too.

When he sat back down, he had Discord messages, so he needed to check them. And messages on Slack, which he could be checking in the morning, and probably should be, but maybe one of his co-workers had found an answer to his problem. They hadn’t, but Priyal had a different question and that one, he thought he could quickly get an answer to, so he fired up Google, dug in, and got her answer for her, which he sent. She’d have it in the morning. Unlike Teresa, who probably would not have what she was expecting.

It was 2 am. Stupid of him to get sidetracked with Priyal’s problem when he was having such difficulty with his own. He flicked over to Reddit again because this was unbearably boring and if he didn’t give himself a break from it, he’d fall asleep.

But he had to go back to debugging the code. Or to sleep. He could handle Teresa being pissed off in the morning a lot better if he got some sleep.

Third page of the subreddit he was on. Four. Man, he needed to keep up with this stuff, there was so much here he hadn’t read yet.

Fifth page of the subreddit. He really, really needed to get back to work. It was 2:30.

A screenshot of something really stupid from Cicada. Damn, someone actually posted something that stupid? Over to Cicada to see if there was context that explained it. There wasn’t, but there was a lengthy thread of people absolutely shredding the OP. Including someone he followed, and he should probably catch up with that.

No, he should get off Cicada and go back to coding. Or bed. His eyes were burning. Bed was probably a better idea. Give up on finishing the debug, tell Teresa he hadn’t found it yet and would need another day.

That was an interesting news article, though. He had to check that out.

No, he didn’t. He needed to go to bed.

Jason’s mouse clicked the link to the article. His eyes read the page, despite burning with exhaustion. Some frantic voice in his head was yelling, screaming, get up, put the computer down, you need to be awake to deal with Teresa in the morning, it’s late, you’re doing nothing useful, get up.

Back to Reddit.

Stop this. Get up. Go to bed. You need to go to bed.

3:30 am. He could barely keep his eyes open, but they were still riveted to the computer, his butt still glued to his chair.

Get up get up get up and go to bed, go to bed, turn the monitor off, you need to go to sleep so you can deal with Teresa tomorrow, get up, go to bed, go to bed

4 am. Look, there was his Firefox home tab, with articles from Pocket. A few of those looked interesting.

Don’t read them, you need to sleep, you need to sleep

Right, right, he didn’t have time to read them right now. He just needed to open them all so they would be there for him tomorrow. If he didn’t do that, Pocket would refresh and he’d lose all of them.

Wow, did they really find carbon deposits on the moon? He had to check that out.

Stop it, stop it, you have to stop it, you need to sleep, stop it

5 am. There was no way he’d be up at 9 to deal with Teresa.

Email. “Hey, I’ve been up all night bashing my head against this thing and I’ve made progress—” This was a lie. “—but it’s still not running. I’m gonna have to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. I’ll be logging in around 11 am.” This was also a lie, it would probably be closer to noon. But since he worked from home, all he needed to do was drag ass out of bed around 10:30 to send everyone a status update, tell them he was diving into the code and probably wouldn’t see incoming notifications until he came up for air, and then dive back into his bed instead.

Set an alarm for 9:30 am. Set an alarm for 10 am. He’d blow through them both, of course, but they’d wake him up enough to actually wake up when the 10:30 alarm went off, and then he’d convince himself to get up and send the status message by promising himself he’d return to bed.

Check out that article about a different way to manage your ADHD?

No. Go to sleep. Off the computer. Sleep.

Right, but obviously, he needed to put on his Spotify for music to fall asleep to, and adjust the volume because he couldn’t let it be too loud or it would wake Mom up, calm and peaceful or not.

Pop over to Reddit one last time.

5:30 am. Sleep!

The panic finally overwhelmed the inertia and he managed to drag himself off his chair, turn the monitor off, and stumble to bed. Now to get some sleep.

Oh, except now, he couldn’t sleep because he was overwhelmed by his anxiety and fear about not getting enough sleep to deal with Teresa even if he slept until noon because she was going to be seriously pissed off with him because this was the third time he’d blown the deadline.

It was another hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and he knew that because the sun had risen.

***

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm.

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm, he’d blown through 9:30 and 10 just like he’d planned, but he’d never turned on the 10:30 alarm, so it was half past noon and he’d never sent that status message, so everyone would know he overslept way past the point Teresa would be okay with after an all nighter, and there was a meeting at 1 pm and he had to shower and shave because it was going to be a meeting with video so he couldn’t look like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

Or maybe he could. He sent Teresa a message on Slack. I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore, and I’ve got a migraine. And I don’t have the program working anyway, so there’s really nothing to show anyone. Can we postpone until tomorrow?

The response was almost immediate. You need to figure out how to manage your time better. You’re sick because you stayed up all night.

Yeah, but I was trying to solve the bug.

If you can’t get something fixed by 11 pm, it’s not going to get fixed. You should have gone to bed.

I know, but I wanted to try. I was getting close. This was a lie. I thought I could get it done before morning.

Yes, and instead you made yourself sick and the program still doesn’t work. ☹  I’ll postpone the meeting this time, Jason, but we need results before tomorrow. Sorry that you’re sick but you know as well as I do it’s because you didn’t get any sleep.

Yeah, I know. I’ll pull myself together, have some coffee, and get back to work. I’ll try to have it done before 5. This was a lie. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to get it done by 5, not when he was this tired.

Do you want me to have Jorge review it? Maybe he can see something you missed?

No, that would be the worst possible thing, because then Jorge would know that he’d made basically no progress last night. I don’t want to add to his workload, but if I’m running into trouble later today I’ll pass it over to him, see if adding some eyeballs might help.

All right, I’ll let him know.

And now Jason was awake, the imminent terror of Jorge finding out that he had done basically nothing last night flooding him with enough adrenaline that he could focus enough to turn on his monitor and get back to work.

***

He had to stop living like this.

Sooner or later he was going to get caught, and he was going to get fired. He couldn’t stay focused on his work when it was boring, which debugging generally was; he enjoyed the act of creating code, making things happen, but when it wouldn’t work, it was an exercise in frustration and soul-crushing despair. He couldn’t keep up with his own documentation, he missed emails and chat messages because he was obsessed with something else when they came through, and he wasn’t even spending his time doing things that were fun; endlessly surfing Reddit and checking the news and articles wasn’t something he did because it was incredibly fun. It was just more bearable than focusing on work, sometimes.

It wasn’t like there would ever be a programming job where you never needed to debug, or never needed to polish off the last few functions that you’d kept skipping because of how tedious they were. He knew that. He’d gone into the profession knowing that. But when he was younger, his meds had worked better. Or maybe he’d just been better at being able to go without sleep. Or not as acclimated to the panic. It was the panic that got him moving, that made it so he could do the boring jobs. He had to be terrified of the consequences of failure before the fear and anxiety could override the whatever-it-was that kept him sitting in his chair, playing video games or surfing the Internet, rather than doing the boring parts of his job.

It had gotten worse since he started working from home. In the past, he’d had the fear that his boss might come by and see him goofing off. So he’d still goofed off, but carefully, always prepared to jump back into his work at a moment’s notice. Sometimes he’d pushed himself, polished off what was normally three or four days’ work in one afternoon, and then goofed off for the next three days. Because he could. Because when he was on, he was magic. The insights were lightning, his speed was legendary, his accuracy was amazing. When he was on.

He was off most of the time. And more and more often, nowadays.

Medication didn’t work anymore. It just made him jittery and irritable, so he’d stopped taking it. Overdosing on caffeine did the same but somehow felt more palatable, and he’d grown to associate the feeling of being competent with the tastes of coffee and Coke, so he used those instead. Then he couldn’t get to sleep. On the nights when he actually managed to get a satisfying amount of work done, he might have a beer or two to unwind and let himself relax and sleep, but that was impossible to do when it was late and he wasn’t done. Which was most nights, nowadays.

He couldn’t keep living like this. He couldn’t depend on a state of fear to enable him to work. Sooner or later he’d slip up, he’d be caught, and he’d get fired. And then he’d have to admit to his mother that he got fired. That terrified him far more than the thought of having to get another job. Jobs weren’t that hard to come by, but his mother’s disappointment and sorrow was utterly horrible.

Jason had spent his childhood alternately disappointing her and making her proud. She thought he was stable now, that the problems that had plagued his childhood – the inability to do homework, the losing it when he had done it, the dishes he didn’t wash, the laundry he didn’t do, the leaves he didn’t rake – were gone. And it was true, nowadays he could get the laundry done, because he’d figured out how. Pile it up in front of his door, and as soon as it got too irritating to open his bedroom door, he could gather up the laundry in his arms and dump it in the wash. It helped that he’d finally figured out that he didn’t need to sort anything if he washed everything in cold water and never bought anything that was white.

He didn’t know any way to pile up a debugging project in front of a web browser. He’d tried using software that blocked him from doing anything that wasn’t work related, but the trouble was, Reddit was a legitimate source of information on how to fix issues he’d never encountered before, and Stack Overflow and other sites and forums dedicated to development problem solving were enticing time sinks of entertaining information. There was no way to solve this programmatically, because no AI was capable of telling the difference between “this is useful stuff you need to solve this problem right now” and “you’re just reading about all these other problems other people have had so you don’t have to work on your own problem.”

And even if there was…

Jason was one of the best programmers at the company. He was only 29, but he’d been doing this since he was 12. So people came to him with their problems, and he was usually able to solve those. Most problems people had were something he’d encountered so often he could fix them when asleep, which had actually sort of happened a couple of times – he had once or twice found that he’d sent an email at 3 am that he had no memory of sending, when he’d been pulling an all-nighter, that elegantly and correctly solved a co-worker’s problem.

Their problems were easy, and the feedback was immediate and gratifying. People thanked him profusely, told him he was a genius, sometimes gave him homemade cookies or delicious ethnic lunches (this was the thing he missed most about working in the office, but too many of his coworkers were also working from home; he’d gone in once or twice after lockdown was over, but it had never been the same again.) Everyone had nothing but great things to say about Jason’s willingness to help a coworker out and ability to solve their issues. His own problems, not so much. But he got a lot of leeway for being the genius who could fix everyone else’s issue.

When he was stuck, it was rare that anyone else could help him with it. And it was rarer that he was willing to let them. The humiliation of needing help, of what if it was a simple, stupid thing and it destroyed his wunderkind reputation that he’d missed it, made it so he never wanted help, not with the big problems he couldn’t solve himself. If your whole life was based on your skill at swimming, how close did you have to be to drowning before you were willing to call for help?

Jason managed to get the code working a little before 3 pm, after ignoring three messages from Teresa that maybe now it was time to bring Jorge in, and one from Jorge asking if there was anything he could do to help out. He then gratefully handed it over to Jorge. It’s working, but I could use some more thorough testing than I’ve been able to do. (I have done minimal testing because testing is so boring it makes me want to spork my eyeballs out, but I’ve made sure that it runs start to finish in the most basic scenarios and that the more complex functions kick in when given at least one example of data that should make them kick in.) The QA department would beat the crap out of it later, but the programmers didn’t hand over code to them until it at least ran, most of the time. Well, some of the time. Well, at least the one time they tried it.

He needed a nap, badly, but he was too wired to get one, and it wasn’t a good idea. If Jorge did find something in testing, he needed to at least look responsive. So he started reading the article tabs he’d opened last night, when he’d promised himself he’d just open them so they’d be available for him today.

Oh, and there was the article about a new treatment for ADHD. That was timely.

***

“The newest ADHD treatment on the market isn’t a pill, and it isn’t an app. Dex™ is an implant, that promises to revolutionize treatments for the long-forgotten invisible victims of ADHD… the ones who grew up.”

Oh, that was definitely promising. It had long been a source of deep irritation to Jason, and pretty much everyone else he knew with similar issues, that ADHD was treated as a disorder of childhood. Once you were grown up and out of the educational system, you were an adult and you could adult like an adult, because you were an adult! Right? It was a blind spot in the entire system. The go-to medications for kids could have long-term effects that got more and more unpleasant as you got older… such as developing high blood pressure. Or desensitizing to it, as Jason had. (His doctor had claimed that was not possible, but tolerance was a thing for pretty much every other drug, including allergy pills, so Jason thought that was bullshit. He was planning on changing doctors. As soon as he got around to picking a new one.)

But… implant?

“By utilizing dopamine, the natural chemical made by the body that promotes motivation, Dex™ enables adults with ADHD to stay focused on the important things in life. Their work. Their family. Their loved ones.”

Aaand it was off and running into marketing bullshit. Jason scrolled through the article, but it was pretty obviously pay-for-play.

Another article was more promising. “The idea behind Dex sounds frankly somewhat terrifying. A brain implant that uses AI learning algorithms to dose you with chemicals that make you want to do things? It sounds straight out of a science fiction dystopia. But in fact, the science behind Dex is rigorous.

“One of the biggest problems people with ADHD face is that they can’t motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. This has long led to sufferers of the disorder being told they are ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’, or worse things. But it turns out that this is a genuine medical condition. Science has identified the neurotransmitter in the brain that gives us motivation. It’s called dopamine, and people with ADHD don’t produce enough of it.

“By jolting the brain with a dose of dopamine every time the Dex user is doing something they need to do, it helps them stay focused and on task, even with the boring tasks that most ADHDers are famous for being unable to do. Wash the dishes. Remember to take out the trash. Finish that essay.

“Some have concerns because Dex is manufactured by Ulysses… the newest medical/pharmaceutical company to place its wares on the market. Ulysses’ focus has been on combining artificial intelligence with low-dose, just-in-time medication, such as the anti-anaphylactic implant Destiel or the—”

Wait. Wait. Did this company seriously name a medication Destiel? Who was that for, people who had never been in their teens on the Internet while a certain TV show had been airing?

“—or the virus-fighting Ajaxon, but—”

Too late, Jason couldn’t take a company seriously that named their product something like that. He flipped away to read about a nonprofit who would paint your roof with super-reflective white paint for free, to help fight climate change.

***

Jorge didn’t find any critical bugs, and Jason managed to take a nap after hours, which was good, because anxiety about the meeting that had been postponed started to creep in around 10 pm, and despite the fact that he knew he needed to be well-rested for the meeting, which had been moved to 1 tomorrow, he had to get online and play a video game to relax.

It was 3 am before the need to go to the bathroom forced him to get off the computer. He gratefully accepted the out his bladder had given him, and as soon as he was out, he went straight to bed. The light from the monitor was irritating, but if he got up and went over to the computer to turn off the monitor, he might succumb to the temptation of just checking one thing, and then who knew when he’d get to bed? It would go to sleep eventually, and in the meantime, he could use a sleep mask.

He hadn’t forgotten the alarms, this time. 9:30 am was probably too early to wake up when he’d hit bed at 3 am, but after yesterday, he knew he had to be online and responsive from early on to make up for his fuckup. Didn’t mean he had to actually work. As three cups of coffee made their way down his throat, he browsed online comics, read email, skimmed articles, answered Slack messages, pretended to be contributing to the discussion about the strategy for the meeting, and finally ended up at r/AMA, because when he googled Dex, he found that one of the people who’d developed it had done an AMA on it.

“I’m one of the lead scientists on the development of the new ADHD treatment, Dex. AMA”

He read over her initial post. Her name was Suzanne Burke and she worked for Ulysses, which was a subsidiary of the online retail-and-cloud-computing giant Jupiter.com. This was troubling. Jupiter was known for its forays into AI, having gotten its start with neural networks that recommended books to people, and was now well known for its near-ubiquitous AI household assistant, Ray-Ray. Mom had gotten one of those for Christmas last year, but Jason hadn’t let her hook it up. His specialty wasn’t cloud security, but he’d been working in IT long enough that he had no trust whatsoever in an appliance made by a giant corporation that could turn your furnace off and on and was probably sending all your data back to the mothership. On the other hand, he was guessing that Ulysses had been bought out by Jupiter, because naming a medical device after a fan fantasy of a gay relationship between a monster hunter and an angel from a TV show that had ended a few years ago did not seem like the kind of stupid mistake Jupiter would make.

[u/ineedcheese: How does it work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Diving in the deep end I see! OK, for any of this to make sense, I have to give you guys a simplified run-down of how ADHD itself works, because it isn’t “ooh! Shiny!” It’s a serious medical condition.

[Firstly, ADHD is described as Attention Deficit Disorder because from the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like. A person with ADHD can’t pay attention. Unless they’re really interested, and then they can’t stop paying attention. But that’s really more of a symptom. What it should be called is Executive Function Deficit Disorder or maybe Executive Dysfunction Disorder.

[You can think of a brain as having multiple multi-threaded tasks, like a computer. One of those tasks is consciousness, of course, but the rest of them run in the background and you are rarely aware of them. Until they break. Executive function is the manager, the dispatcher that takes commands from consciousness – or other parts of the brain, I’ll get to that – and, generally, informs consciousness of what it should be doing. It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is. It remembers where you put your keys. It allocates your attention to speech, to reading, to tasks.

[A lot of this is performed by stimulating the brain to release dopamine. Now, if you’ve ever sought out help for depression, you’ve probably heard of neurotransmitters. There’s tons of them, but the ones you hear about most are serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Very very roughly, and with the caveat that some recent evidence calls some of this into question, we can describe serotonin as the happiness chemical, dopamine as the motivation chemical, and norepinephrine as the excitement, fight-or-flight chemical. Very roughly.

[Basically everything a person does, is done because it feels good to do it – in some way – or, being smart animals, we know that not doing it has a bad result. If we don’t wash the dishes we get roaches – brr! If we don’t do our homework, we get a bad grade and Mom and Dad yell at us. In a normal brain, small amounts of motivational dopamine are released when we set ourselves to a task that will prevent a bad thing, but that we don’t inherently like. Or, sometimes, to a task that we enjoy, but maybe it’s hard and we’re not always feeling it. Wash the dishes, get a tiny amount of dopamine because yay, you have successfully fought off the roach apocalypse for another day.

[People with ADHD don’t get that. The small amounts of encouragement dopamine aren’t there. We don’t wash the dishes because we enjoy it, and it turns out, we don’t do it because we are afraid of the roaches. We do it because our executive function has decided that roaches are bad, and it will reward us with some dopamine for doing things to keep the roaches away. Everything we voluntarily do, we do because it gives us at least a little dopamine.

[I want you to think about the mythical Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a rock up a hill, because he’s been told he can be free of Hades if he gets it to the top – a thing he wants, a lot. What if someone tells him, the deal’s off? You’re never getting out of Hades, no matter what you do? Well, he probably wouldn’t keep pushing the rock, because what’s his motivation?

[That’s what washing the dishes is like if you have ADHD. It takes time, it’s not pleasant, and it doesn’t reward you with that little bitty bit of dopamine. So what’s your motivation to push the rock up the hill? You can intellectually know that washing the dishes is a good idea and that not doing it exposes you to disease, yucky tastes, and maybe roaches, but you don’t do the smart thing because it’s the smart thing. Or at least, most of us do not. We do the smart thing because executive function rewards us for doing it. And people with ADHD do not get that reward.”]

[u/beepityboopbop: “It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is.” Unless your name is Karen and you’ve called for technical support, in which case five minutes is an hour]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: Suzanne Burke you seem to have a serious fixation with roaches]

[u/semicolonbang: Yeah did the roaches eat your baby?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: They ate my last relationship. My girlfriend and I broke up because of roaches.]

[u/semicolonbang: that sounds like an interesting story]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it is but it’s got nothing to do with Dex so maybe I’ll answer it in a few days if I feel like it]

[u/ineedcheese: that’s a lot of stuff about how ADHD works but how does Dex work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Getting to that. People with ADHD gravitate toward things that overstimulate the dopamine reward system, because it’s the only way they get any. Playing video games generally gives you lots and lots of small rewards along the way. Endlessly bingeing Netflix feels good while you’re doing it because television is created to entertain and reward you.

[Now, being smart animals like the rest of humanity, ADHDers really do not want to spend their entire lives playing video games and bingeing Netflix. They want the same things anyone does – to do work that’s rewarding, to have satisfying relationships, to get along with family and make friends. But to accomplish those broad tasks, usually you have to do a lot of small tasks that aren’t inherently rewarding themselves. It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.

[So stimulants enter the picture. Adderal, Ritalin, and the most powerful and oldest stimulant of all: norepinephrine. Excitement, fear, anger, sexual desire, they all release norepinephrine, which tells the body to rev up. Charge up with energy. It’s time to run away from that tiger! Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl! Or ride your horse, which is terrifying and exciting because you’re moving faster than a human can, on top of an animal who is perfectly capable of doing whatever it wants instead of what you want.

[People with ADHD procrastinate, because the fear of the consequences of not doing the task eventually becomes high enough that that provides the motivation. If you can’t have dopamine, you can at least have some norepi. I don’t want to write that paper, so I pretend it’s not happening… and my executive function is so bad at keeping track of time, it’s easy for me to pretend, until the night before I have to turn it in, and my professor has reminded all of us to do it. Now I’m terrified. I’ve done exactly nothing on this paper, I’m gonna fail my class, my mom and dad will be disappointed, my asshole ex will laugh at me, I’ll suffer shame and disgrace for generations to come. Now I’m scared enough, flooded with enough norepinephrine, that I can do the thing. And maybe I will even get a dopamine reward when I’m done, because “congrats on getting us away from that tiger, buddy!” is a thing that even most ADHDers get.]

[u/semicolonbang: “It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.” Personal experience much?]

[u/estesrocketsarenottoys: “Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl!” not exactly feminist]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: “not exactly feminist” maybe not, but try being a lesbian with a beautiful girlfriend who all the guys are hitting on and she is really weirded out and upset by it and she just wants to be left alone, are you going to tell me you would not want to punch them in their sexist faces?]

[u/semicolonbang: your life story seems very interesting Suzanne Burke]

[u/ineedcheese: I still don’t know how Dex works]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Dex works by releasing small amounts of dopamine when you do a task you know you have to do, even if you don’t want to.

[We’ve used sophisticated AI to analyze the brain states of thousands of volunteers who recorded a moment by moment diary of what they were doing for a week and how they felt about it, and from that we’ve figured out how to distinguish the brain state of “I really, really hate doing this and there is no good reason to” – Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill after Hades has told him, the deal’s off buddy – and “I hate doing this, but it’s a step toward getting what I want.” When you make yourself do the thing you don’t want to do, but you know it will be good for you to do it, Dex rewards you with a little dopamine. Just like your own executive function would have, if you had one that worked.

[Dex can also tell when you’re caught in that paralysis loop – “I really should be working on my paper, but instead I am reading Reddit” – how many of you are in that place right now?]

Jason blinked. Wow, that was a little on the nose. This was posted a week ago, though, so she wasn’t talking about him. Specifically.

[If you’re doing a thing, but you feel guilty about doing the thing because there’s something you should be doing instead… Dex can uptake your existing dopamine. Basically, Reddit bores you! So you go looking for some other source of entertainment. Well, if you take that moment and use it to write your paper, or wash the dishes, Dex will make you feel good about doing it.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How good?]

[u/peterporkerthesuperbspiderham: Yeah, doesn’t like heroin or morphine also give you dopamine?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Not that good, and not exactly, but we’re not going to get into that. Dex isn’t addictive. Video games are a lot more addictive than Dex. Not that I ever blew a few hundred dollars on DLC, or anything.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How do you know?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Because we’ve tested it. There have been years of clinical trials at this point. There are a lot of people who were very, very upset at the thought of ever losing Dex… but we drilled down on that, and they were more like, wheelchair users upset at the thought of losing their wheelchair than addicts upset at losing their fix. They described how Dex made it possible for them to focus, to get things done that they’d always wanted to be able to do. Not that it made them feel good. Because it doesn’t. Tiny jolts of dopamine for washing the dishes doesn’t feel good. It just feels like it makes washing the dishes tolerable.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Should we be concerned about Jupiter’s involvement in this project?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Jupiter didn’t buy Ulysses until we were already in clinical trials, so no. They’ve been very hands off, actually.]

[u/ineedcheese: how does this fix me forgetting my appointments?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it doesn’t. But if you’re like most ADHDers you’ve been told, “Oh, just program a reminder on your phone!” And then the reminder to take out the garbage comes through, but you don’t feel like taking out the garbage, so you ignore it. Or you forget to add the reminder about the doctor’s appointment because that just seemed like a lot of work and you didn’t feel like it. What Dex will do is allow you to use those tools to manage the parts of ADHD that it doesn’t directly fix. You won’t remember the doctor’s appointment, but you will feel like putting a reminder into your phone about it was a worthwhile thing to do, when you made the appointment, and you will feel like getting up and going to that appointment is more worthwhile than checking Facebook, again.]

[u/stephaniestick: no one uses Facebook anymore]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Or Cicada, or Instagram, or Tumblr, or whatever.]

[u/ineedcheese: so it’s not as good as medication.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: In what way?]

[u/ineedcheese: medication helped me remember things I was supposed to do.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If medication works best for you, that’s a fine thing, and we’d advise you to stick with it. But a lot of adults can’t take the medication, or it doesn’t work for them.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Or they won’t prescribe it for you. I was diagnosed as an adult and my doctor told me, basically, no one will prescribe amphetamines for someone my age.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: also true.]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: you said it makes things unrewarding to do if you feel guilty about doing them. What if you feel guilty about everything?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: you absolutely should not use Dex if you have a scrupulosity complex, or in any other regard feel a lot of guilt over things you really shouldn’t feel guilty about.]

[u/beepityboopbop: so no Catholics, got it]

[u/mushroommushroom: A lot of people feel guilt over having sex, even if it’s healthy consensual sex.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, so it turns out that the human sex drive is so powerful, Dex can’t do anything with it. We tried. We recruited a few volunteers who wanted Dex to reduce their interest in sex, because they were trying to not cheat on their spouses, or they wanted to get more done… or whatever. We didn’t probe very deeply. It didn’t work for any of them. It can help with more traditional addictions, alcohol or smoking, but it does not actually seem to reduce sex drive even in people who feel guilty about having sex and want to have less of it.]

[u/supermansshorts: But you can use it to stop smoking?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If you feel bad about smoking, yes. If you know you shouldn’t smoke, and you would like to quit, but you are compelled to smoke anyway, having Dex will make smoking feel a lot less fun, which will help you quit. But you still have to do the hard work.

[Dex doesn’t magically solve all your problems. I’m pretty sure there is no implant that could do that. What it does is it gives you the tools you need to solve your own. When you have work to do, and you don’t want to do it, but you want to want to do it because you need to do it… Dex isn’t smart enough to know to reward you for that the first time you make yourself do it. It has to read your brain state while you’re doing it to know that this is a thing you should be doing that you don’t want to. You have to summon the willpower to do it the first time, yourself.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Because willpower and ADHD are so well known to be found together.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I actually think people with ADHD have enormous willpower, because they don’t get rewards for doing the useful things they have to do to stay alive and healthy. Other people aren’t really using willpower alone, they’re using the fact that it feels good to do a thing you need to do. People with ADHD have literally no emotional motivation at all, no brain chemical telling them to do the thing, but often they manage to force themselves to do it occasionally anyway. I think that takes a lot more willpower than doing a thing that rewards you with a little dopamine.]

[u/mushroommushroom: How do you get it?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Currently, only a psychiatrist can prescribe Dex.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Not a regular doctor?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: No, and actually, we recommend that you be in therapy while working with Dex. Among other things, there’s a phenomenon called spin doctoring that you might need a therapist to help you recognize and work through.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: You obviously want us to ask what spin doctoring is.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Haha, yes! OK, so you’re all familiar, I hope, with the fact that the brain has two lobes. They have a lot of overlap in function, though in a lot of people only the left side controls speech. But you are not two people, because there’s an entire wall of connecting neurons, the corpus callosum, between the two.

[Well, back in the old days, one treatment for really severe, life-threatening epilepsy was to sever the corpus callosum. So in a sense, patients became two people, but only one of them could talk. They did an experiment with those people. Sat them in front of a viewer where each eye could be shown a different image, and while they were doing tests, they sent a message to the right eye, go get a Coke. The right eye connects to the right lobe, which doesn’t usually have the ability to talk.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: Doesn’t the right brain control the left side and so on?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yep, but the crossover happens below the head. So the eyes, being in the head, are still connected to the lobe on the same side. Anyway, so they’d tell the right brain, go get a Coke. So the right brain would get the body up and head for the Coke machine. Now, keep in mind, the left brain has not seen this message, and without the corpus callosum, and given that the right brain can’t talk, the left brain has no way of knowing why the body is heading for the Coke machine.

[You would think this would be terrifying. Your body is doing something and you never told it to! Aaahh! Horror movie! But when they asked people, what are you doing? They got answers like, “I was thirsty”, or “I wanted to stretch my legs a bit.” None of them expressed any fear or uncertainty about why they were doing this, and also, none of them knew they’d been told to go get a Coke.

[So the theory goes, consciousness is not actually where all of your decisions come from! Maybe not even most of them! A lot of stuff is being done by deep processes in the brain that are black boxes, that consciousness has no insight into. But when those processes decide that the entire collection of stuff that is you needs to do something, consciousness often smoothly and easily rationalizes why you are doing the thing, without any recognition that that’s what you’re doing. It feels to you like you got up to stretch your legs, and while you’re at it, why not get a Coke? When the real reason is, the right side of your brain, which your left side can no longer hear, was told to do it.]

[u/supermansshorts: Is the right side of the brain, like, vulnerable to mind control?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, no, no. These were volunteers who’d agreed to do the experiment and follow the instructions. It’s not like the right side of your brain is a completely different person from the left side. Even if you sever the corpus callosum, both sides are still you, near-identical copies who think and feel much the same way about everything. So if the left side signed the papers and spoke the agreement, it’s likely that the right side also agreed, for the same reasons. The right side wouldn’t have done something like “jump out a window”, it’s just as capable of making rational decisions as the left side is. But it agreed to follow instructions the same as the left side did, because if the left side was the kind of person who’d volunteer to follow the experimenters’ instructions, then so was the right side.

[Anyway, so spin doctoring. Consciousness is so good at coming up with rationalizations for why you are doing a thing that some deeper process said to do, it doesn’t even know it’s doing it. So a lot of the time, we make decisions based not on anything rational, or even an emotion we understand and recognize, but something deep down that we’re not even aware of.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Like Freud’s ego and id.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Similar, yeah, but it’s more like, there’s all these different processes happening, and consciousness isn’t actually aware of any of them, just their outputs. And when the body as a whole acts on one of those outputs without going through consciousness first, consciousness comes up with a reason why they wanted to do that.]

[u/ineedcheese: But I do things all the time that I literally have no idea why I did it, like one time I poked a cake my mom had just iced and when she asked me why I did that, I didn’t even know.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, spin doctoring doesn’t always work, particularly since the ADHD brain is particularly vulnerable to processes just totally bypassing consciousness and doing a thing. That’s called “poor impulse control.”

[But the point is, we do things for reasons we don’t even know, and then our consciousness comes up with a reason why we did that thing, and then it enters our database of “reasons to do or not do things.” Like… if I found it very hard to do a thing, I might, for the sake of my pride, come up with “I really hate doing that thing” or “I think it’s stupid” or “That thing is completely unnecessary.” But maybe the only reason it was hard was I wasn’t getting any dopamine from it, and maybe Dex could fix that for me… if I was willing to try to do it, but the spin doctor might have already convinced me, doing that thing is dumb and why should I?

[One of the roles a therapist or psychiatrist can play with a patient trying Dex is to work through the spin doctor’s bullshit. Help you try out things you have already written off, or break patterns you think are just the best way to do things when maybe they’re not.]

[u/ineedcheese: Like what kind of thing?]

[u/snowflakespecialaisle10: Writing documentation if you’re a programmer.]

Ouch. That one especially hit home.

[u/semicolonbang: How is the implant done? Like do they drill through your skull?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: It’s a laparoscopic surgery done up through the nose. Outpatient surgery, you go home the same day.]

[u/supermansshorts: And that doesn’t fuck up your nose?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, your nose hurts like a bitch for about a week. When I did it, it drove me a little nuts because I have allergies, but blowing my nose would cause giant nosebleeds. Now, we give people a cocktail of antihistamine, numbing solution, and decongestant in a nasal spray, and apparently that works a lot better.]

[u/semicolonbang: You did it yourself?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I told you that I lost my girlfriend because I never washed dishes and then we got a roach infestation and she blamed me, and you think I wouldn’t be signing up for the clinical trial the moment we opened it to human trials?]

[u/mushroommushroom: To be fair, the roaches probably came in on your groceries or from the next door neighbor or something. Not washing the dishes just gave them a source of food and water to breed from.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I mentioned that. Turned out that was not a helpful argument.]

At this point, a Slack message popped up, and Jason had to turn his attention to that. It was from Teresa.

Jason, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours. Are you going to be ready for this meeting?

Ready, eager and waiting, he typed back. Shit, the meeting was in ten minutes. And look, there was the Outlook reminder he had reflexively shut off the moment it popped up, popping up again. Good thing Teresa had decided to poke him.

***

The meeting went well. Great, in fact. Jason was able to demo his code, and nothing went wrong. There were a couple of features he hadn’t implemented that the upper-level managers were concerned about, but Teresa backed him up, because he’d told her a month ago that those features would have to come in a later version. She politely reminded the upper-level managers that she’d informed them in email a month ago that those features wouldn’t be in this version. “Controlling scope is a very important part of controlling costs,” she said, and they couldn’t disagree.

Afterward there was a second, internal meeting of the team, which didn’t go quite as well because Teresa was banging the documentation drum. “If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, no one here would know how to support your code,” she said.

“Good thing I never go anywhere. No bus injuries in my future,” he said, and everyone laughed.

“But you know, they say that most accidents happen close to home,” Adrian said. “Seriously, Jason, I know doc’ing sucks, but you gotta get it done.”

Adrian extensively documented his own code, and got it done approximately 20% as quickly as Jason when he was on. And probably only 75% as quickly when you factored in how much time Jason wasted. “I know,” Jason said.

Stacy, the business analyst charged with writing user manuals, said, “It makes my job a lot easier when there are docs.”

“I’ll take a few days and go back through and do that.”

Then they talked about next steps, and the QA team revving up to test. Duane tried to get Jason’s help with a different problem he was working on, but Teresa deflected it, unfortunately. “Jason’s focus has to be on fixing his documentation,” she said. “Jorge, maybe you could team with Duane, see if the two of you could get any traction on this?”

“Sure,” Jorge said, dashing what small hopes Jason had of being able to find an acceptable task to work on that was not documentation.

When the meeting was over, he opened up his code, stared at it for three minutes trying to figure out where to even begin documenting. Due to the lack of documentation, he wasn’t even 100% sure he knew what all these functions did.

Fuck it.

He jumped over to Reddit, where he still had the Dex AMA open, which reminded him that he’d wanted to google Suzanne Burke’s claims and generally the whole thing, because the idea of a brain implant that could help you control your own behavior wasn’t real far off from conspiracy theorists’ paranoid fantasies of the CIA putting mind control devices in your brain.

Three hours later he’d learned some things:

All the bad reviews of Dex came from people who had obviously never used it or didn’t even really know what it was, people who were complaining about absurd things (“I wanted it to help me stop eating snack chips so I filled my room with snack chips to test it and it didn’t work, I still ate snack chips”) or things no one had never claimed it could fix (“I still keep losing my keys”), or people who had gotten one of the earlier versions at the start of clinical trials. Most of the most recent reviews either raved about it or said something like, “It’s a lot of hard work to re-engineer your whole life even with Dex, but with Dex I can actually do that work without getting in my own way”, or “It’s an adjustment and you’ll find there are things you are used to wanting to do that you don’t even really want to anymore, and that can be bothersome, but they’re usually things you wanted to stop wanting to do”. Most of the complaints that remained after the positive reviews and factoring out the old and/or stupid ones were about the surgery – “They said my nose would hurt for about three weeks but it’s been six weeks and it still hurts when I blow it”. One person had a bad allergic reaction and they had to take it out.

There were many complaints from friends and family members of someone using Dex. “He never has time to hang out anymore”, “We used to spend hours chatting on Discord and now she blows me off after like half an hour”, “He’s like some kind of zombie drone where it’s all about work, work, work” (this was troubling, but when Jason drilled into that, it turned out to be a boyfriend who was annoyed that his paramour didn’t want to spend hours a day canoodling, because he had work to do.)

There were a lot of conspiracy theories about how Jupiter was using Dex to mind control people on behalf of the government, the New World Order, the Jews, the reptilians, the liberal left, fascism, or corporations. These were all presented with tremendous hysteria and very little actual evidence. One persistent theory was that the founder and CEO of Jupiter, who’d expressed an interest in space colonization, was going to use Dex to mind-control a sizable workforce into going into space to build his space colonies. Another one seemed to think that Dex had been created by the infamous tech billionaire who’d managed to destroy Twitter, as if all tech billionaires were the same guy, or had some kind of hive mind agenda.

One credible theory claimed that the device had a wireless component to receive updates, and that therefore it could be used in the future to send ads to people, somehow. The wireless component turned out to actually exist, and it really was sending brain scans back to Ulysses for analysis, and Ulysses really was sending out software updates. Ulysses claimed this was fully anonymized, that the analysis was necessary in order to improve the software that ran Dex, and that the software itself was so unusual and proprietary that it would be literally impossible to infect it with malware. Jason was suspicious. All of that sounded very plausible and also something a corporation could decide to throw out and do something evil with the moment the board of directors decided they could get away with it. He couldn’t figure out exactly how it could possibly send ads, but he was sure it could be nefariously used for something.

In the end, there were two factors that decided him on not bothering to look any further into Dex. The existence of the wireless connection to Ulysses’ servers, and the fact that he’d have to find a psychiatrist if he wanted to be prescribed it. Finding a psychiatrist sounded easy enough, but given that Jason had had “change doctors” on his to-do list for two and a half years, and hadn’t been to a dentist in longer than that because he just never got around to making an appointment, he had no illusions.

But without researching Dex as an excuse to himself, he had no good reason not to work on his documentation. Just the usual reasons. It was boring, he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t make himself do it without a stunning amount of caffeine in his system.

Well. Time for early evening Coca Cola, then.

Jason had a system. Complex carbs, he thought, slowed him down and made him sleepy. Simple carbs, sugar, were a quick shot in the arm of energy, but there’d be a crash afterward. Greasy protein was even worse than the complex carbs, so pizza was absolutely terrible for focus. (This did not stop him from eating it when it was available.) The secret was lean protein, cold vegetables (because warmth made him sleepy), and sugar. So grilled chicken or salmon on a salad, and Coke. It was a pain in the ass to make this for himself; salad, in particular, was annoying because you had to wash it and then somehow you had to dry it, or wait hours for it to dry on its own, or your croutons would get soggy. He put in an online order at a local place, and then turned to video games.

The good thing about ordering food online was that, when it showed up, it would automatically disrupt whatever he was doing, so it was a great way to break free from something he probably shouldn’t be doing to switch to something he should. The bad thing about ordering food online was that it resulted in multiple interruptions while he was trying to relax with the game, because they called to confirm the order, and then they called to find his house, and then they called to tell him they were on the porch downstairs. And then Mom called up to tell him his food was here, and why hadn’t he asked her if she wanted anything?

But now he had his food, and his Coke, so it was time to focus on this thing.

This boring thing.

This thing he would rather do almost anything than be doing.

He slogged through it, incredibly slowly. He’d add a comment, scroll down, pop over to Reddit or a newsfeed or Youtube or literally anything other than this documentation, do that for several minutes – he had no idea how many – and then abruptly remember he was supposed to be doing his documentation and go back to it. As the night wore on, he became less and less efficient, more time spent not documenting, less time unraveling his own code to figure out what he did and write it down. But he couldn’t just go to bed; he had to make enough progress that he looked like he was making progress. But he couldn’t stay up all night, because then he would oversleep tomorrow and he would look bad.

The two balanced each other at 3 am, and he was finally able to go to bed, the documentation close to sort of done. Not to sleep, though, because he’d had way too much Coke and he was much too worried about what Teresa would think. Was this enough to show due diligence, or would she be angry that it wasn’t complete?

***

It took four days.

Four days of Teresa pestering him about whether the documentation was finished, four days of having nothing required of him that he actually wanted to work on. Four days of dodging the documentation as much as he could by helping everyone else out. Including helping with their documentation, because as annoying as documentation in general was, it was much better when he was getting the warm fuzzies for helping someone else, directly.

There was a weekend in the middle of those four days. Jason promised himself he’d work on the docs over the weekend and then didn’t even open the file. Then he promised himself he’d get up early on Monday to do some work on it, and instead woke up at 10, having missed a 9:30 scrum.

At 2 pm on Tuesday, he was finally able to report being finished with documenting his code. He checked the final version in, breathed a sigh of relief, and got himself a beer. He’d finished the slog. Time to unwind. He didn’t officially clock out, because frankly he’d been working so ridiculously late each night that if he weren’t salaried, they’d owe him a whole extra paycheck, so it was only fair. While he didn’t log off Slack or close his email, he did dive into a video game that occupied the full screen and wouldn’t let him see if messages came through. He told himself he’d pop out periodically and check.

Six hours later, when he finally checked, he had a Slack message from Teresa to come into the office tomorrow. It was much too late by now to ask her why.

***

“You’re letting me go?”

He stared at Teresa, a feeling of cold and heat at once sweeping through his veins. “You know I’m the best programmer in the department, right?”

“No one disputes that,” Teresa said, conciliatory. “But it takes you too long to get your work done, because you’re always in late, or leaving early.”

“I’ve been working until 3 am for a week now! And I only left early yesterday because I’d finished my documentation, and I needed a break.”

“Right. Jason, other programmers do not take four days to finish documenting their code. They document it as they write it. If you’d been hit by a bus over the weekend, we wouldn’t have had any idea how the code works, and I’d have to put someone on tracing it back and figuring it all out.”

He realized, then, that she’d just been waiting for him to finish it before she fired him. “I’m always helping out everyone else in the department, that’s why I’m slow sometimes.”

“You’re a great help, and you’ll be missed, but we need programmers who can work standard hours and hit their deadlines. I’m sorry, Jason, but it’s out of my hands. Upper management looked at your metrics and told me you’ve gotta go.” She shook her head. “I know you have personal effects here at the office, so you can go get those. Charlie here will escort you.”

Charlie wasn’t dressed any differently than anyone else at the company, but he was probably security. Certainly Jason didn’t recognize him, so he wasn’t in IT. “Fine,” he snapped.

“We’ll need the work laptop back,” she reminded him. The one he had never taken out of the box, because the box had the specs on it and he’d realized that it wasn’t nearly powerful enough for his needs, so he’d been doing all his work on his personal desktop.

“I’ll drop it off.”

He knew that by now he’d already been locked out of all the computer systems, so he wouldn’t have a copy of any of his Slack messages, or the code he’d just finished. If he wanted his email he’d have to find a way to convert his Outlook OST to an archive without actually opening it, because if he opened it, it would probably ask for a password and then just endlessly prompt him for a login until he closed it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to keep his email that badly.

What a dick thing, to make him come into the office just to fire him. But then, it would also have been a dick thing to fire him by Slack message or voice call or email, and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to get his very minimal amount of stuff, which included a few cartoons he’d pinned to his cubicle wall and a family picture he’d photoshopped to completely remove Dad, so it just had him and Mom. Not that he couldn’t print out another copy of that, but the frame had come from a college friend he wasn’t in touch with much anymore, and he had sentimental attachment to it.

***

Mom was home, in the kitchen, on her laptop, as he came in, because of course she was. “Honey? You okay?”

For a moment he contemplated saying “Fine,” and stomping off to his room like he was still 17, but Mom would get it out of him sooner or later. Better bite the bullet now. “I got fired.”

“Oh. Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry. Anything I can do to help?”

Not tell me about how it’s my fault, I hope. “Not really, but thanks for the offer.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve got savings and I’ve got health insurance until the end of the month, and more if I take COBRA. I want to see a psychiatrist about these problems I’ve been having.”

Mom nodded. “That might be a good idea. Maybe there’s a new medication you could try.”

“There’s this thing I was looking into, called Dex. It’s like an implant that helps you train your brain to focus? I’m thinking maybe I need to take it more seriously.”

“That might be a good idea. Do you need help with finding a psychiatrist?”

He was about to say no, it’s fine, I’ve got it handled Mom… and then thought better of it, because that kind of thing was the strategy that just got him fired. “Yeah. I need you to keep reminding me I need to do it. Even if I get bitchy about it.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Mom said, amused. “Also, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get your COBRA paperwork to you, but you need to get on that immediately. Check the mail every day—”

“I’d think they’d email it.”

“They might, but probably they’ve turned off your email? Do they have a personal email address for you?”

A good question. “I think they have my Gmail…”

“Check that every day. Including the spam boxes. And check the regular mail every day. There’s some time limit they’re under for how quickly they have to provide you that, but I don’t remember what it is. And it’s to their advantage if they wait a few days so maybe you’ll forget. You need to be on that. You could try to go through the marketplace, since losing your job is a qualifying event, but that’s likely to be much more disruptive, and COBRA is probably cheaper than that.”

Jason nodded. “Keep me honest?”

“I sure will.”

“Gonna hit up Dice and Linkedin, maybe Monster, see how quick I can land a new job.”

“Good luck.”

***

But he had savings, and it seemed like a dumb idea to take a new job and then get brain surgery. Sure, the AMA had said it was outpatient surgery, but what if there were complications and he had to take time off? It might be a better idea to find out if he was getting Dex or not before he got a job.

He found a psychiatrist who didn’t take his, or anyone’s, insurance, which was expensive, but living with your mom for several years and paying only a third of the mortgage and half the utilities, while holding a good job, had enabled him to save up a fairly large nest egg. She was the kind of psychiatrist who never actually told you what she thought, but spent all her time asking you what you thought about things. She presented options and made suggestions and offered to help by writing prescriptions for whatever she had suggested that you had decided to go ahead with.

The company had given him one boon; they hadn’t told the state they’d fired him for cause, even though doing so would have saved on their unemployment insurance. Unemployment was less than a third of what he’d been making, but on the other hand, he didn’t have to order food out nearly so much when he wasn’t breaking his neck for the company that had just fired him. He could actually cook. He could help his mom when she cooked, and learn how to make some shit he didn’t already know.

Jason tried three non-stimulant medications over the course of eight weeks. One of them made him horny as hell, which was unfortunate as he didn’t have a significant other, and he felt like jerking off three times a day was a waste of his time. One did nothing. One made him overwhelmingly sleepy. He tried stimulant medication, again, a slightly different formulation, but still felt like it made him jittery and his heart raced and he got headaches and was irritable. A lower dose of stimulant medication gave him the same symptoms, just a little less of them, and lower than that didn’t actually work at all to help him focus.

This wasn’t the first job he’d been fired from for not being able to keep to a schedule or make deadlines, and if he didn’t do something, it wouldn’t be the last.

In the end, he talked himself into asking his doctor about Dex, just like the commercial said.

***

Outpatient surgery, it turned out, was still surgery… it just didn’t involve a lengthy stay in the hospital. When his mother came to pick him up, because he wasn’t allowed to drive after surgery, his nose was starting to hurt like a motherfucker. They’d given him a nasal spray that would keep the area sterile, promote clotting, and relieve pain, and they’d given him decongestants because it was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, according to the aftercare nurse and the directions he was given on paper, that he not sneeze or blow his nose. If his nose started to run, they’d given him a second nasal spray that was a direct decongestant and antihistamine, and he was supposed to use that instead. If he had a nosebleed, he was to use his spray and lay down immediately until the bleed went away. Yes, his nose would clog up, because there was a healing wound and the spray was promoting clotting; he would just have to breathe through the other nostril. And this was supposed to go on for up to two weeks.

Joy.

They also gave him regular painkillers, which he quit taking about four days later because seriously, how do people get addicted to the sensation of having a fuzzy head? He had enough issues with being half-brained from exhaustion, he didn’t really want to add opioids to the mix. Tylenol and the nasal spray would do.

It was at that point that he decided to engage in the difficult task of trying to get a new job. He’d already updated his resume, but he hadn’t uploaded it; he’d already done some initial keyword searches for jobs, but hadn’t actually applied to anything.

He opened the job search site, logged into his profile, and began the laborious task of adding his newer skills from the job he was just fired from, and updating the length of experience he had with the other ones. It was nightmarishly boring, just like it had been every other time, so he popped over to Reddit. Just for a little while, just to do something more entertaining for a few minutes.

Except Reddit wasn’t entertaining.

He browsed around for a while, looking for something to catch his attention, but frankly nothing was as compelling as the idea of getting the goddamn resume done and out there, so he could get a job, get health insurance he didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, and stop making his mom anxious. So he went back to the job search site, and this time, managed to get the entire task done without interrupting himself. It wasn’t fun, but it was something he wanted out of the way, and he was able to power through it, and then finish doing the same thing with two other job search sites.

It wasn’t until after he was finished that he realized.

Holy shit. This thing works!

***

After that, Jason went a little nuts, self-admittedly, with his new superpowers of actually being able to focus and get shit done.

The AMA had been correct. He wasn’t any better able to remember where he put his keys than he had ever been. But he was able to order a bunch of devices that could be hung on key rings or slipped into wallets, that he would be able to use an app to find, and then get them set up and put them on the devices they needed to be attached to. He got “Find my Droid” configured for all the times he lost his phone, and a bunch of chargers he could plug in all over the house, including QI chargers, that he could leave the phone attached to whenever he didn’t want to deal with carrying it around, so now it wouldn’t die out of his custody.

He wasn’t any better at remembering that he had appointments. But he was able to focus enough to put in sufficient reminders, that would catch him at enough points in time, that he wouldn’t be blindsided… and enough to actually check the reminders when they showed up, rather than just absent-mindedly dismissing them. After he next saw his psychiatrist, he actually put his upcoming appointment on his calendar, so he didn’t have to run around like crazy trying to find the little appointment card when he finally remembered that there was an appointment.

He remembered to wash his clothes three days before a job interview, so he had options. (It was virtual anyway, but it did require his camera, so he wanted to look good.) He showered and shaved that morning, rather than forgetting and then racing to try to get it done before the interview. He actually ate breakfast, not just coffee, because he paid attention when his alarm went off, didn’t just snooze it, and managed to drag himself out of bed early enough that his mom was still home and making herself eggs and bacon, which she shared with him. He used Linkedin and Google to read up on the companies he was being interviewed for before the interview, so he actually knew who some of the people were and had some familiarity with what they did.

And in the meanwhile, he kept the dishes clean, the trash taken out, the kitchen floor swept, the toilet paper on the roll and the empty rolls in the trash can, the soda cans in the recycling bin, and he even got around to fixing the bathroom shelf above the toilet and taking his mom’s car to the mechanic for her, because a 30-year-old guy was a lot less likely to get scammed by a mechanic than a nearly 60-year-old woman.

This was fucking awesome.

He wrote a few of the personal programs he’d always wanted to get around to, like the one that helped him use his phone to take an inventory of his and his mom’s shit, so if there was ever a fire, they could back up their claims of what was lost… and then he actually went around taking the photographs, labeling them, and using the program to push them into the database he’d set up. He remembered, finally, after about twelve increasingly upset emails from Teresa, to bring in that work laptop and drop it off. He returned his library books, paid his fines, and checked some more out, and then returned them on time. He set up a blog and started writing about programming challenges he’d encountered in his career. He put a Pi Hole on his mom’s wifi network to block ads at the router so none of the computers had to work at that. He bought a cheap laptop and set it up with Linux like he’d always planned, and actually did the experimenting he’d always wanted to do.

His time on Reddit plummeted, and was mostly confined to subreddits about the games he was into, where he knew people and had stuff to say that he cared about, rather than endlessly surfing sites like r/AmITheAsshole and r/TodayIFuckedUp. He still gamed, in the evenings, for a reasonable amount of time that didn’t interfere with his sleep schedule, and felt no guilt about it because he was getting his important shit done, so he had every right to relax as hard as he worked. When he wasn’t doing job interviews or searching for jobs, during the day in what would be working hours, he was reading up on new technologies and actively teaching himself new skills.

Jason’s mom cried when she told him how proud she was of him for taking this step and getting his life turned around. He himself wanted to cry, sometimes, when he realized that he’d wasted 30 years of his life without this, and that ordinary people, people without ADHD, just lived like this. Out of the box. Without having to have a foreign object shoved up their nose and into their craniums.

The day he got the new job, he happily updated his LinkedIn, after making connections with old co-workers so they could see he’d landed on his feet and he wasn’t a total fuckup. A couple of them contacted him, asking if he could help out with some problems they were having. He asked them to go back to Teresa and get authorization to pay him as a contractor. They didn’t ask again after that.

He even went and updated his profile on some dating sites. Now that he had a job again, and now that he no longer felt constant guilt over what he wasn’t getting done at his job, it was time to try to get back into that game. He hadn’t had a partner since shortly before the first lockdown… that was a long time to go without.

And then his first paycheck arrived, and he grinned to himself. He’d been good… at least since getting the Dex implant. He hadn’t bought anything unless he needed it or it would help him improve skills and be more marketable. No new games, no new DVDs, no books, no new phone, no new speakers for his PC, no replacement pump and filter for the fish tank that had no fish in it and was at this point just an algae-growing experiment, no cast iron skillet because Mom had sold hers at a yard sale due to her hands being too arthritic to hold something so heavy while cooking, nothing.

It was spending spree time! He’d been promising himself this since he got Dex. Save his money while he didn’t have a job, keep spending as tight as he could, and he’d go on a spree as soon as he got a paycheck.

He went to Jupiter.com first, because that was where he could get most of everything he wanted, maybe even everything he wanted. Two new games he’d been jonesing for. Several graphic novels, a science fiction novel, and a memoir. A box set for a TV show he loved, because relying on streaming had gotten more and more erratic as fights over licensing continued. PC speakers with surround sound that were two generations better than what he had, and an upgraded graphics card. Fish tank supplies – maybe he was finally going to be responsible enough to keep fish alive. A hat, because it looked cool, even though he couldn’t imagine a circumstance where he’d actually wear it.

For clothes, though, and the cast iron frying pan, it was better to shop local, where he didn’t have to pay shipping, and he could immediately return anything that had an unpleasant texture. So he went over to Target’s web site, and was immediately bored out of his mind.

He tried to convince himself that the search tools for clothes were more specialized here, and he was more likely to be able to find one thing that fit and then six other things like it in slightly different cuts or colors. No go. It was like looking at the red color scheme and the font was draining the life out of him.

Which was ridiculous. He forced himself to look for the cast iron frying pan. That should be simple and easy.

But they had multiple options, and it seemed like just such an enormous amount of work to sort through them.

He went back to Jupiter.com. The fonts seemed cleaner, the pictures more inviting. The cost of shipping was challenging, though. But he could fix that. Just click the button for only free shipping, and look at that! He could even get three of different sizes. He added it to his cart without thinking about it much.

Clothes continued to be a challenge. It was kind of fun to go hunting, but his frustration was building, because there were so many items coming up in his searches that weren’t what he searched for at all. And no way to tell the texture of anything just from pictures, whereas with a local store he could go there and check things out.

So he tried going over to Walmart, which was disgusting, and JC Penney’s, which was overwhelming, and some of the sites for fancy mall stores, which just seemed to not have any kind of selection. He was used to buying from Target. They had good search filters for men’s clothes, that rarely pulled back complete bullshit. He should go there.

Except when he went there, everything looked overwhelmingly hard and chaotic and he just didn’t want to. All the fun of clothes shopping drained away.

And then he went cold.

Jason tried going to Barnes and Noble’s web site for a specific book. It was too hard to use the site. He’d used it before, but somehow it seemed really inferior now. He tried going to a PC online retailer to look for the video card he had already bought from Jupiter. The filters were too unresponsive. He went to Swappa to find a used phone to replace the one he had, and almost immediately gave up because none of the products looked good and he was feeling a general sense of unease about the idea of buying a used phone from a shady online store… even though he’d gotten his last three phones there and had been satisfied.

Shit. Shit.

He had to post about this. If this was happening to him… he couldn’t be the only one. He opened up Reddit and found the thread about Dex, clicked the new post button…

…and lost all enthusiasm for the task. Jesus, did he really have to write a post about this bullshit? Who cared? Probably everyone would jump his shit. It wasn’t like he had any scientific proof. And the idea of having to explain, in detail, what was happening? Humiliating.

No. No. That was more of it. He had to write this post. He started typing, grimly, using the same fortitude he’d used when he’d spent four days documenting his code so his boss could fire him.

“I really loved Dex at first, but”

“but some disturb”

“but I found”

“but there’s one thing”

Nothing looked right. The documentation, at least, had been right when he’d written it. Everything he was writing now just looked terrible and whiny and like there was no point to saying anything.

But he had to do this. He had to write this post. The thing in his head had to be making him not want to do this, not want to say this, but he’d gone for 30 years forcing himself to do things he really, really didn’t want to do.

“I really loved Dex at first, but its changing what I want, its bad, you shouldn’t”

No. Fuck. What was that? That was utter shit. Couldn’t he even be bothered to capitalize and use punctuation?

“I really loved Dex at first, but it won’t let me write this post about what it’s doing to me”

Fuck this, go read r/AITA.

Go read his video game subreddits.

Check Microsoft Teams, which his new company used instead of Slack. Maybe someone had a late-night request for help? Or something he was supposed to do tomorrow that he could get started on tonight instead?

No!

“I really loved Dex at first, but it makes me”

An hour of reading the news.

“makes me feel bored with shopping”

Just one round of his video game. Just one.

Six rounds later.

“shopping anywhere but Jupi”

This dog growled at the baby sitter, you’ll be shocked when you find out why!

25 screens later of a story he had predicted the end of when he’d started reading it.

“Jupiter. I go to tar”

Had anyone online ever posted that stupid ditty where they sang “shop at tar-jay” like the word Target was French? Go check.

“target or any other site”

Wow, it was late, shouldn’t he go to bed? Bed sounded really great. He really shouldn’t disrupt his sleep schedule for this now that he’d gotten a new job and finally established a good sleep schedule, right?

Focus.

“site and it makes me feel like it’s boring, or too complicated, or just bad”

How about his favorite TV show? Was there going to be another season of that?

“just bad, until I go to Jupiter, and then shopping feels fun”

Yeah. That was it. That was the message. He didn’t need to keep doing this. He could stop and post it here. Actually he should spell check first, right? And it was late, maybe he wanted to hold off on posting until tomorrow, when he could look at it with fresh eyes.

“feels fun. And it wont let me”

1 am. This was ridiculous. He had work in the morning. He couldn’t lose this job just because of something stupid like this.

Another half hour of reading the news.

“let me write this to warn you.”

Right! Wrap it up, turn off the monitor, go to bed! He’d done his part. The message was out there!

Jason absent-mindedly turned his computer off, and only then, wondered if he had ever actually hit post.

Well. He could check on it in the morning.

After work. And his chores. And he was supposed to game with his friends tomorrow, so after that, too.

Oh, fuck this. He'd spent his life struggling against things his brain didn't want him to do, and it was awful and it had traumatized him and he never wanted to go through that bullshit again. If he'd forgotten to hit post, oh well. Let someone else do it. Jason was done beating his head against the wall of things he really didn't want to do, that he thought he should do, forever.

[taboodreamsforlife]

A few years ago at the age of 30 ish find out i have a half sister. Pops had a child from a previous relationship. He knew but his x wife left when my sister was 3 days old traveling the country hiding. (X wife was weird and crazy and still in today). I was already married and had a career in mind and a family so her and i didn’t jive much until about 2 years ago we started texting more. I find out she’s been married once for about 6 months. For the most part she’s been a government support person which i don’t condone but it is what it is. I’m now 53 and she is 58. My wife and i are open in our relationship so after i guess a year of talking i find out sis hasn’t been laid in 8-9 years and i am like how. So i eventually tell her or how my wife and i are open and since we’re not really related so to speak and honestly when i was younger i always dreamed of having a sis to play with sexually. So now she knows about me fucking other women occasionally and somehow through the conversations over text i offer her my services. She initially declined but after weeks of talking i finally accidentally on purpose send her a pic or 2 of me and someone. She liked it and would then say she had to live vicariously through me. I again offered to come help her in that area. She always laughed it off but i was serious. 3-4 weeks ago i had to be in her town for business so i asked if she wanted to do lunch. She said sure i jokingly said ima get you buzzed and see if i can finger you to where u cum. She again laughed it off. We went to lunch and had a few drinks around 2 pm. I think she drank fast on purpose but she never acted like she had any intentions. After goofing around after lunch i acted like i was tired and needed a nap so we went to her house. She showed me her room and i laid down on the bed like i was gonna take a nap. She went on to do her thing, not sure what that was but i rubbed myself til i got hard. She walked into the room i acted like i was asleep and i can hear her tell her dog wow looky there. So i finally decide to act like I’m waking up since she won’t touch it. She said damn you fall asleep fast. I said yea. Then she finally say AND you were hard while you sleep what the heck was you dreaming about. I replied i think i was dreaming that i made you cum. She says i hadn’t came in 6-7 years. I tell her to come sit down next to me. She initially says nah but finally i talk her into it. I started like i was tickling her back and sides cause she laid down on her side facing opposite of me but she finally relaxed and i moved to more sensitive areas while whispering just relax. Don’t think of anything just enjoy the moment. It took awile cause she as majorly nervous and would squirm. I honestly think she came the moment my fingered entered her panties and touched her pubes. The moment i touched her clit her body convulsed. I leaned over and nibbled her ear and neck while she came so many times. I worked my way to a point where i sank a finger deep on her pussy and she screamed. Almost a scared scream. I asked her if she was ok and she said i never dreamed my own brother would ever do this. I never dreamed i would allow it. It’s so wrong. I said but it feels so right. The first time i only entered her with my fingers. I wanted her to want more. Her panties, pants and bed were completely soaked. We never kissed during that but before i left that day she kissed me wow and rubbed my cock thru my shorts. She said maybe next time she wants to see it

Let me know if you’d like to hear more

Arrange

[skzhocomments]

The Boundless Sphere of Fate - Lee Taemin - Chapter 3 - At each other's throats

General masterlist

Story masterlist - please consult it for the summary of the story, trigger warnings etc.

Wattpad + AO3

Chapter 2 | Chapter 4

---

Chapter 3 - At each other's throats

word count: ~1.5k words

“Psst. Wake up.”

“Ugh… just… 5 more… minutes…” Blair covers her head with the duvet.

“I’m bored, wake up and talk to me.” Taemin pulls the duvet away from Blair, then gasps. “What are you wearing?!”

He wasn’t expecting to see the girl half naked under the covers, in just a thin bralette and some pyjama shorts that were… too short and tight to leave anything to the imagination.

“Taemin?! What the fuck?!” She sits up in her bed, annoyed, reaching to grab the duvet again. “Don’t waste your spiritual energy for shit like this.”

“Morning!”

“Ugh… you piece of-”

“It’s 1 PM, how much longer did you plan on sleeping?”

“Hey, I’m recovering until tomorrow.” Blair protests.

“What’s tomorrow?” Taemin tilts his head in confusion.

“Work. What else?”

“Oh, do you work?”

“Of course. How else could I have bought this house?”

Blair reluctantly stands up, the duvet still around her body, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, and makes her way lazily towards the kitchen, brewing some coffee.

“I don’t know, maybe your parents had money or something.”

“Yeah, right.” Blair chuckles.

“Bad relationship with them?”

“You bet. One hates me, the other wouldn’t recognise me on the street.” She grabs a coffee cup from the cupboard and places it on the table, pouring the hot, black liquid inside.

“The coffee smells great.” Taemin notes.

“Hmm. It does. I love coffee. Wait, what?!” She turns to him shocked. “How can you smell it?”

“I don’t know. I sometimes can.”

That’s weird.

“So, now that I’m awake, can you tell me what the fuck were you doing in my room?” Blair sits down at the kitchen table and sips on her coffee.

“Hey, aren’t you gonna offer me any?” Taemin points to her cup.

“You can’t drink it anyway, so why would I dirty a cup for nothing?”

“Mean.”

“You started it, by coming uninvited in my bedroom. What if I were naked?”

“Ew.” Taemin grimaces, earning a death glare from Blair. He starts smirking, happy that he got under her skin again.

Two can play this game. She thinks, then asks blatantly.

“So, where exactly did you die?” She starts looking at the floor and pointing with her eyes to different areas of the kitchen. “There, in front of the oven? Or maybe there, next to the door?”

Taemin’s gaze then shifts.

“I know what you’re trying to do. Don’t.” He says sternly.

“Or maybe next to the sink-”

“Stop it.”

“Or perhaps you were sitting at the table, just like me-”

Before she finishes the sentence, her coffee mug is smacked from her hands, flying directly into the opposite kitchen cabinet, breaking into pieces, coffee staining the whole surface. She becomes expressionless.

“Rude.” She says, standing up and grabbing some napkins to wipe off the coffee from the floor. She then starts to grab the bigger pieces of her former cup, and by the time she is done and turns around, Taemin is no longer in the room.

She struck a chord.

~

~7 years in the past~

~Blair’s POV~

Today is my birthday.

Normal people would be happy in these circumstances. It would be something to celebrate, a happy day.

Not for me, though.

I dreaded this day, because today I’m turning 18, which means my mother will no longer have any sort of legal obligation to take care of me.

“Good morning, dear!” She smiles brightly, and it makes me wonder if I’ve ever seen her be so happy. I don’t smile back. “Done packing?”

As if there’s much to pack.

“Yes, mom.” I reply in an emotionless voice. I feel drained.

“That’s great! Want me to drop you off anywhere?” She is all smiles; it makes me sick.

“No.”

“Okay, then! I have a date, so I’m gonna go get ready. See you, sweetie!” She waves her hand and leaves, as if I’m going to the supermarket and coming back in 10 minutes. As if we’re actually going to see each other again.

We won’t.

I grab my backpack and a small suitcase, and I make my way out of the house.

I take a look back.

It’s weird knowing it’s the last time you’ll ever see a place; knowing that you’ll never come back.

Mira waves at me. I don’t wave back, I just nod at her. She’s been here for many years, and I don’t think she’s too happy to see me go. I’m sad I couldn’t help her cross over, but some grudges are too big to bear, and there’s not much I can do for her.

I know she’s cursing my mother for kicking me out, since she’ll lose her chatting partner.

I’ll miss Mira.

I won’t miss my mom, though.

~

~present day~

~third person POV~

“Newbie! How’s the new house?” Blair’s co-worker, Brian, approaches her with a large grin on his lips. It’s unfortunately already Monday, and Blair doesn’t know how Sunday passed by so quickly. Despite the fight with Taemin, nothing memorable really happened. She kept unpacking and rearranging stuff “Done unpacking? I see you’ve already managed to hurt yourself.” He laughs and points to the plaster on her index finger.

When scooping up the mug pieces from the floor, Blair managed to cut herself, making her curse Taemin even more.

First of all, he is stuck in my house because he’s stubborn and won’t cross over.

Second of all, he can interact with objects. I’ve seen it before, albeit not many times, but Taemin’s spiritual energy is simply shocking. The way he was able to grab the duvet, and then, minutes later, interact with the coffee mug was completely unusual.

Third of all, his fucking temper. How dare he smack that coffee cup from my hands?!

Blair scoffs, making her co-worker chuckle even more.

“Come on, don’t be mad! I know you’re clumsy.” Brian speaks and pats her on the shoulder, letting his hand linger a bit too long. “So, how was unpacking, newbie?”

“Why are you still calling me that?” She smacks his hand off her shoulder, annoyed. Brian did nothing wrong, but she is still seething from Taemin’s reaction this morning. “We’ve been working together for more than a year.”

“Damn, has it already been a year?”

“Unbelievable how time flies, isn’t it?”

“Right. Scary. We’re getting old and wrinkly and-”

“Ok, Brian, let’s keep the negativity out of this conversation.” Blair chuckled.

“We’ve been working together for a year, and you never once went out for drinks with me.” Brian shook his head and crossed his arms in front of his chest, scoffing.

“Sorry, sorry.” Blair waved her hand. “We’ll go, I promise.”

“When?”

“Hmm, let me think.” She contemplates for a few seconds while Brian looks at her in anticipation. “Mayybeeeee, uhm, when I’m done packing?”

“And when’s that?” He grins ear to ear.

“Definitely not this week, but eventually.” She shrugs, and he looks at her with a face that’s almost saying ‘Bitch, what?’, that makes her burst out laughing. “Is that not good enough?”

“Nope.” He shakes his head. “Me and you. Friday night. In two weeks. Drinks on me.” He says in a serious tone and gestures between them.

“Okay, okay. Fine. I promise.” She laughs it off.

“I hope you’re a woman of her word.” Brian grins triumphantly.

“Now I’m getting offended! When haven’t I kept my word?” Blair placed her right hand on her chest, mimicking heartache.

“Just making sure I’m guilt tripping you enough.” Brian grins again.

“You manipulator. Don’t you know that’s a red flag?”

“Oh, come on, I’m the greenest flag in the world!”

“Ok, ok, green flag, can I go and do some work now?” Blair chuckles.

It’s easy enough to get on with coworkers at work, since none of them know of her special… ability. She hasn’t been in any situation so far where she accidentally disclosed she sees ghosts and talks to them on a daily basis; it used to be harder to hide, but nowadays she’s pretty much an expert at pretending ghosts aren’t real and coming back to talk to them and apologise 5 hours later when there’s no chance of someone recognizing her.

~

A few hours later, Blair can finally go home after a full day at the office. She’s tired, her feet hurt, and she feels as if the whole world is against her as it starts raining as soon as she steps out of the building and starts walking towards her house.

The rain is merciless and she obviously doesn’t have an umbrella; she doesn’t remember where she put it during unpacking. When she gets home, she’s dripping wet and decides to head directly into the shower.

Taemin is nowhere to be seen, so she almost forgets all about him as she undresses herself of the wet clothes that are sticking uncomfortable to her skin and hops in the shower.

She turns on the hot water and closes her eyes, rubbing them. She just wants to go to her cosy living room and restart the show on Netflix Taemin rudely interrupted on Saturday, and then sleep for a while.

Weird. She thinks, as she feels the temperature of the water slightly changing.

And then it gets really really hot, to the point where it’s burning her skin, and she finally opens her eyes and notices the faucet has been turned to HOT completely.

“TAEMIN!” She shouts, annoyed, and she only hears giggling from the other side of the door.

The fucker.

~

Chapter 2 | Chapter 4

[magicalara]

The Story of Grelle the Reaper: A review by yours truly prt 3

Hello hello my lovely theorists (totally didn't steal that from matpat, I'm Em Gem)! Welcome to part 3 of my analyzation of The Story of Grelle the Reaper by the lovely and amazing @eemoo1o-animoo. If you haven't seen parts 1 and 2 where I go over the prelude and chapter 1, you can go here for the prelude and here for chapter 1! Fair warning, they're a mess. Even this is kinda a mess, but it's okay, we get through it.

I have been messaging with Ell throughout the majority of my analyzations so keep in mind that even in my works there are some little hints here and there, though nothing too groundbreaking. I am a reader myself so I don't know nor would want to know the whole story lol.

Do keep the trigger warnings for the story in its tags in mind, Section 2 deals with some heavy stuff from my own personal life and just with Grell/e in general, though I explain this more in the precursory paragraph to that section so you are warned beforehand. Enjoy!

Chapter 2 is out, it’s great, it hits me in the feelings so much and is just all around amazing. If you haven’t read it, go do so first because while I will still go though this analysis like I did previously where it’s side-by-side, the chapter needs to be read and soaked in first. There’s heavy ideals here, especially at the end so take the time to go through and read the chapter on its own and then come back over here. …You read it? Good, alright let’s get this show on the road then!

So this chapter is 6k words worth of happiness until it gets worse and isn’t happy anymore and then I start to tear up because Ell is mean /j. There isn’t really weather to comment on at the start here so I’m gonna take this time to correct myself on some things from my Chapter 1 analysis, specifically the pigs and hands.

So for Chapter 1, there’s a whole part where I talk about what pig’s blood means and I was completely wrong. So I’m gonna correct it now. In the Book of Circus episode that Ell referred me to, I overlooked Grelle calling Beast an “ugly old sow” as just a one-off thing when really that’s what I should have focused on. Calling a woman a “sow” is an insult and so when the word “sow” is used, it’s supposed to refer to an actual woman, not an actual pig. I think too literally sometimes and it leads to my demise and the destruction of my mind when everything clicks. At this point, I’d like to point you to the Prelude when Grelle has sow’s blood on her…yeah…my mind went SHSDJHAKA too. So now we know that Grellie is gonna go murder someone at some point right before she dies and I can’t tell if I’m excited for it or not.

The other thing was the hands that I had said in my Chapter 1 analysis I couldn’t get at 10 PM running on little sleep, but was later told to me to be like a comparison to show how big they are. It's a dysphoria thing. Because you know men are like “bigger” and he notices how big his hands are in comparison to hers so Grell don’t like it. 

Oh! Also the name Grell means bright like as in smart so when George and unnamed man who isn’t unnamed anymore says he takes after his name, it’s a compliment, they’re calling him smart. I think that’s all and if not, then you’ll hear about it in Chapter 3’s analysis.

In the last analysis, I did over six thousand words of paragraph analysis. I will do my best to not do that again. I’ve been suggested to try bullet points. I will be trying bullet points. If I exceed the word count of this chapter once again, I will…I don’t know I’ll do something (maybe finally do the next chapter of forever forgiveness that’d be nice huh) So let’s go on and see how bullet points go. This analysis will be broken down into two sections this time, mother/son bonding and The Mirror Scene™, fyi. Okay let’s go

Section 1: Mother/Son Bonding

Descriptions and cinematography

 This is just in general but I still wanna point it out, Ell has an amazing way of describing things that make the whole story cinematographic almost. I’m one of those people who can’t see pictures in their mind, like I think in words. When reading tsogtr, though, I can see it. It’s new for me, that’s why I’m pointing it out. Just while you’re reading, really take the time to imagine everything because, especially later like with The Mirror Scene™ I can see it and there’s like a whole movie playing in my head and I love it.

Small Room

This just adds to me the whole idea of Friedrich specifically viewing Grell as a child. You could argue that Hilary is the same way, but I think her viewing Grell as a child is more of in a motherly “that’s my baby; always has been, always will be” kind of way while Friedrich is more of a “he’s a child who needs to grow up” kind of way. The fact that Grell’s room is small isn’t just mentioned here, it’s also later on, but I’ll go into that later.

Bullying and Hilary’s kind words and gestures

Hilary loves her son, her baby, and I will say that to my grave. Her gestures and words give off so much warmth and love in this whole scene and it’s just so apparent. Rather than scolding Grell for forgetting things (like a certain someone might have), she sees that he’s upset and that something might have happened. She doesn’t demand it of him, she doesn’t get upset at his lack of words, she sees her child, her baby, struggling and wants to help. She knows of the bullying that was mentioned in the past, and she’s worried for Grell. Hilary’s patient with him, even while he’s stuttering out his words. She has probably always been a safe space for Grell and the way that she just sits with him and lets him take his time shows it so well.

“...as though a spectre was afoot.”

Well… it’s not a ghost…But it is a reaper! :D Okay sorry I’m not funny continuing

George and Keats

Authors huh. I don’t know which George this is about, I’m gonna go with Orwell because I hate Animal Farm but it’s ingrained into me thanks to high school. Keats, I’m gonna imagine him as the physical embodiment of Keats the snake because I think it’s funny. There’s no reason to mention this part of the commentary, I’m just putting it in because I can. George and Keats aren’t important and I’ll be thoroughly surprised if they show up again 

They are, in my mind, a form of “and they were roommates” because they’re always described as a pair. So yeah. And they were roommates. 

I think it’s a little interesting that the two stopped visiting as much after Grell was born. There’s reference to it and after better confirmation, I think it’s worth mentioning that Hilary is heavily alluded to having been a prostitute before Grell was born. With how George and Keats said that she was always a pleasure to see (and considering that Grell probably didn’t understand because I don’t think he knows), they most likely were…frequent employers…to our favorite momma. So once Grell was born, that would explain why they would only talk to Friedrich at the bar. They don’t see Hilary anymore because they’ve moved on and it’s probably awkward to see the accidental child that is Grell Sutcliff. 

Hilary throwing hands

Grell is very prone to overthinking to the point where his worries turn into little scenes that he sees in his head. He’s very anxious and the fact that this is something that’s happened twice in the same day really shows that. (Yes it is the same day, the talk with Friedrich from the beginning of the last chapter happened the morning of this day that’s here. The time is ambiguous, but I imagine that this conversation happens sometime between like 4-5 pm.)

Anyways, momma Hilary would 100% throw hands for Grell

“You know what I see?”

(This encompasses the parts from Grell explaining the roommates calling him like his father and beyond, I just used the quote because I liked it for this section of the section) We already know why Grell was uncomfortable and all, so all to right before the quote I put up there is just reaffirming it and showing how he invalidates his feelings, even to someone who clearly cares.

I think Hilary knows that Grell isn’t himself, not necessarily in a trans way but more in a I just need to show him that he isn’t his father and is his own person who needs more confidence kind of way. Either way, now starts my favorite scene in this whole chapter where Hilary’s just making Grell feel better and highlighting all of like his features in a way that she knows will make him feel better and I wanted to cry reading this. Anyways, she’s just making him feel better in that way that good mommas do with their kids. (Grell has green eyes idk how to insert this but he does and that might come up again once he isn’t a he anymore and really goes into that “damage cliff” stuff iykyk). She goes on and affirms that they’re “like dawn and dusk” and that they love him. As for her basically calling them two sides of the same coin, obviously Friedrich is gonna end up as a catalyst for Grell/e’s anger and I think that that can be seen as foreshadowing in a way for it.

Where did the fried egg (Friedrich; get it, fried egg, fried rich, eggs are expensive in the US right now among other things, eh, eh. It’s okay I’m not funny) go

He’s on a summons. In a noble’s manor. The next town over. Now I’m not saying that this will be important (that’s exactly what I’m saying) and it’s totally not because I know too much about the future of this story (I know a lot about the future of this story). Just. This is foreshadowing, just keep that in mind. The fried egg also told Hilary about Grell losing the job with fish and she’s plenty more supportive than the egg about it and shows as such by brushing over it and continuing on.

 “I’ve always believed the eyes were the windows to the soul. Everybody’s are different, darling.”

We have more foreshadowingggg. And also sadness. First, “eyes are the windows to the soul”, is a little ironic considering that Grell is about to lose his soul at some point soon. Second, “Everybody’s are different”, until you’ve killed yourself and are dead 🥰

Okay but no actually like it’s interesting that this is something that Hilary brings up, especially in a series where eyes mean so much both in tsogtr and kuro in general. Like demons have reddish tinted eyes and full on red when they’re in demon mode, reapers have the double green, Ciel has his demon contract in his eye. Eyes really do show the soul or lack thereof and while, yes, this is just a usual metaphor that’s been said for a long time and doesn’t have a literal meaning, but in this case it can be both and that’s interesting. 

Baby Grell

He was a little shit. At least in Friedrich’s pov he probably was. 

Also just imagine Grell as a naked ass child running around to not go into the bath like it’s just funny and adorable at the same time. I can imagine him doing it since he was baby baby and I don’t like kids but Grell can be the exception

✨ Makeup ✨

It’s a nice moment between them and one that gives me hope that Hilary will accept Grelle. Due to the time period, it’s still not a huge chance, but a chance nonetheless and I will hold on to it like my life depends on it. And Grell putting the lip paint on his mother makes it feel warmer too like it’s just a nice time.

Okay part 1 of Section 1 done. It’s shorter than I thought it was gonna be, so like, that’s a win for me. There wasn’t much to analyze here (there was another mention of pigs and they have become an arch enemy for me but it literally means nothing. eventually bees will join this list, but that’s to be talked about in another chapter). Oh yeah and I say part 1 because I combined two scenes into one section this is just my little interlude for it. Take a break, get some water, get a snack. Okay let’s continue.

Bread making

More wholesomeness. As a baker, this scene makes me very happy, especially because they made a competition out of it and I just folded at that. Someone come do this with me, we’ll make whatever sweets you want it doesn’t have to be bread I’ve made many things before so we can do it I’m open to literally anyone. Let’s make a platonic discord date out of it we can bake on call together. (That’s all mostly /j like unless we have open communication that’s just me being lonely)

 ANYWAYS THAT WAS A BIG DIGRESSION

She gave him a big smooch :( /pos I love them so much you have no idea Ell if you hurt Hilary I’ll stop analyzing this story /j 

I can’t say anything about Grell because we know where that’s going

Dancey Dance

I’m pretty sure “junge” means boy in German so Grell calling his mother that is funny to me because she probably doesn’t speak it either and so would never notice and it shows how bad he is at German despite his father calling him that in the morning. Silly Grell, it’s okay we’ll always love you. Edit: All of that is not as intended…there’s my interpretation but it isn’t meant to be like that it’s more the two making fun of Friedrich. So yeah.

More memories of dancey dancing but Hilary brings up how Grell’s grown up so fast. She says “You just loved me too much to leave” which, in context, is about how Grell was overdue in his birth, but is also just really making the foreshadowing about the inevitable really hurt more. This goes even further when she says how “the place would be empty without you.” Grell is the heart that’s kept Hilary going these years and she loves him just as much as he her, probably even moreso. Let’s be real here, Grell was not a baby who was created on purpose. Hilary was a prostitute, and a young one at that. She isn’t older than 45 which, if you do the math seeing as Grell is 27, means that she had him at MOST at 18. The estimated age is around 15-18. Friedrich is obviously older, having been probably around 21ish when Grell was born and is now in his late 40s (48-50). Grell was not made on purpose so for Hilary to have gone through with the pregnancy so young and immediately going on to marrying the man she had a baby with must have been a lot for her. It’s not like she would’ve had many options but to keep Grell but still. We all know the Circus arc, abandoning kids isn’t far off and she could’ve easily done the same. Grell kept her going and so when the inevitable Cliff Scene™, as I am now dubbing it, comes along, I know that I won’t be able to resist thinking about Hilary when she eventually learns of her baby’s death. End scene.

I said it didn’t I? I said I’d make things shorter. And I have delivered. (Future Em here: the whole thing is 4.5k words. Which technically is shorter so I do win ha) The thing is, now we’re on to the Mirror Scene. If you are reading both this and the story side by side, now is the time when I tell you to stop, go read the scene properly, and then come back. Trust me, you’ll need it. The Mirror Scene™ is one that’s full of heavy, heavy feelings and ideology that hit me hard. There are trigger warnings for nudity and dysphoria, and they should be taken into account before reading. This is an important scene towards setting up Grelle and will be coming back in the future. I am not transgender individual and so if I say something that is in bad taste or offensive, please do not hesitate to let me know. In this section, I also talk about my own struggles from being a kid and now with how I perceive myself, so be warned of that. It starts right after the paragraph about Grell turning the mirror around. If there is one thing I could ask of everyone, it’s to be kind to me about that part and if you don’t wanna see it, don’t read it. But let me talk about it for my own sake. With that being said:

Section 2: The Mirror Scene  

I’m going back to paragraphs, this isn’t a bullet point endeavor. So the scene opens and Grellie’s having a bath. We got the setup and we get a reiteration of how small Grell’s room is. Most importantly in this description is that where he bathes gives a direct path to his reflection. 

This reflection is the whole thing which sets up the scene. It’s generally something that happens to a lot of people where they become insecure at what they see in the mirror, whether because of just general insecurity pushed by beauty ideals, or something which takes root in the mind and festers and grows into something much worse. The latter of this is true for Grell. He perceives himself in his mind much differently from how he looks in real life. Grell isn’t the perfect self he sees in his mind. Again, this is something that a lot of people feel, but for him, it’s much deeper than that. He knows what he wants to see, the perfect self in his mind, however knows that that will never be him. Grell, in his mind, can never be the person who he always sees in himself, almost as if he’s locked away in a cage of who he is on the outside. The light might seem so close and the corners of the room he’s in are visible in the near pitch black, but it never gets closer nor further away. It’s a detachment from the mind yet also something that is ever present in the corners of it. This anxiety and these feelings are described as a God-given punishment and a “flesh-eating disease” in a fitting way which shows the internalized turmoil he feels from feeling this way. I asked Ell about Hilary not having aborted Grell and she had told me about how, before Grell, Hilary wasn’t as connected to religion but that after she is somewhat religious. Grell also says how he’s read biblical verses in school (though it is said “unwillingly” which suggests that neither Hilary or Friedrich cared much about having Grell submit to a religion). Obviously he knows about the whole idea that “God doesn’t make mistakes” and so to be feeling that he, in the body he was gifted and blessed with, is not his true self is a high sin. It’s the disease that eats away at his brain, the sin which keeps him from being true. Even with Hilary letting him try things for fun at times or if Friedrich was more open to it, Grell has that internalized turmoil of what he has been taught versus what he is.

Then we get to the rituals he would do to lessen his, let’s be honest, dysphoria (there is also the dysmorphia which is implied but the two tend to go hand-in-hand sometimes so I’ll touch on it more as the scene progresses but in a general sense, what Grell is feeling dysphoric). He starts slow with just turning the mirror around which seems like a pretty good idea. He doesn't have to perceive his true being when clothed or when naked and you know what that sounds like a pretty good deal. Except then he gets asked about it and oh shit I need an excuse and oh fuck I’m not a good liar and I can’t really tell people the real reason I’m doing this and uh uh uh I need a new solution. 

Something I wanna intercept this stream with here is the image of Grell having panic attacks in his room. It’s small, we know this, I keep bringing it up and so like unless he goes and has his attacks (because you cannot tell me that Grell Sutcliff has never had a case of semi-frequent panic attacks he literally had one in the first chapter and felt so much anxiety about his new job before that he ended up throwing up) on his bed, the floor is the only option. With the layout we were given, I bet you that the floor he’d have these attacks on were- wouldn’t you know it- right in front of that damn mirror. So while he’s already feeling bad, I want you to imagine Grell sitting on his floor facing the mirror or being able to at least see himself in the mirror at some point in the midst of a panic attack. And all those thoughts of his dysphoria coming in to join the party. But I digress.

Next solution, wear a shirt over yourself. The thinking for why he does it is much different than what I’m gonna compare it to, but I’m gonna do it anyway. When I first read this part, I was immediately thrown back into little Em’s mind when they used to go to the pool with their friends and were always told that they had to wear a large shirt over themselves in order to go swimming. For those who don’t know, this is something that a lot of parents do to cover up their children’s bodies from pervs, however, I, at the ripe age of 10 and even beyond to now at 19, have never been a skinny kid. I was always the fat kid and not the fat where you just developed early and wow look it’s the 12 year old with boobs (though that too), I was the fat kid who was told by my relatives to stop wearing short sleeved shirts because my arms were too fat to make it look right or to stop wearing shorts because my thighs were too big. I still keep that ideology to this day as I reach 20 this year and have not owned a pair of shorts since I was 11. Anyways, Grell wearing a shirt to bathe in reminded me of all of this because that’s what I would do. I’d wear a shirt in the shower, to the pool, and I’m sure if I ever went to a waterpark, I’d wear it there too. This isn’t all for analysis purposes that I’m mentioning this, rather it’s because this is a part which I, Em, the author of this post, hi, hello, how’s it going, resonated with very much so. I mentioned in the little disclaimer before this part, I am not a transgender individual. But for those who were following me up until like two weeks ago know, I recently changed my pronouns and while I don’t have a label for myself quite yet, this part with Grell using a nightshirt to cover himself as a way to not have to be perceived even if it’s just be himself, calling it an “unremovable suit of man’s skin”, and saying how he has a “loathing for his own form” hit me in a place I didn’t need to be hit (/hj). I heavily considered not mentioning my own feelings about this part, but to do so would be a disservice to myself, to the little girl who I once was, and to the character who has helped me through some of these feelings. And, of course, to all of the other people who may or may not see this post, read what I said, and think to themselves “I’m not alone.” I hope you enjoyed looking a bit more into who I am as a person and why I am who I am because I sure didn’t (/j). If anyone ever needs someone to talk to, please, please, please never hesitate to reach out to me. I will always be there as best I can for those who need it. /gen

Anyways, that sad stuff is over, so let’s get back into the sad stuff that we came here for :D  The delusion that the shirt will help, even if just for the moment, and the idea that maybe one day, just maybe, things will change overnight, is such a hurtful thought. Partly because the delusion and false hope of it all can just cause more harm and disappointment as time goes on but also because it’s just sad. Grell is stuck in this endless cycle and because of his internalized fears, the cycle is destined to never end. He studies himself, as if he’s an external being rather than the body that inhabits his brain. He convinces himself he’s sick. Someone who would be locked away as delusional. He hides his thoughts of her away in fear of what could happen lest he make herself truly known.

Describing her body, she doesn’t connect much to herself really. Sure, Grelle may deem it as “his limbs” or even “his penis” but it’s as she says, it’s not a combination of words which resonates with her. That isn’t her body that she sees, yet she’s still faced with the unfortunate reality that she is connected to it. Scars might be easy to conceal, but the weight will always remain. Disfigurement might not make the essential bane of her existence go away, but it can conceal some of it. Alternatively, the scar of her penis is one which is too big to conceal properly, no matter how much she may try. It’s there. She can try and get rid of it, but the scar will always remain, figuratively and literally in the case of bottom surgery. 

Then we get to the apex of the mirror scene- Grell’s art skills. Okay no but seriously, Grell lets Grelle take over here as she draws out herself while, internally, Grell is almost panicking, coming to full terms with what is really going on. He sees herself; the her who has always been in the back of his mind, plaguing his inner thoughts of his perception versus his reality. He sees who she is for the first time visually, properly, in the real world. And she loves it. She doesn’t see herself as ugly, she sees herself as her. Grelle is finally seeing what she was always missing for the past 27 years.

And then reality comes back.

The big takeaway besides the obvious reveal and realization of Grelle versus Grell is the fact that he never erased the image. One could argue “oh but he does it later”; does he random person?? Does he really?? Because I think that in the abrupt snap from Grelle to Grell, I don’t think he does. I think he’s gonna finish getting dressed, and then go back to the kitchen and leave the mirror as it is with the image of Grelle on it. I think that this is going to cause problems. Hell, I know this is gonna cause problems. But that, dear friends, is something which will be properly revealed in the next chapter of The Story of Grelle the Reaper. Until next time. (*in a matpat voice* But hey, that’s just a theory, a Grelle theory, thanks for reading. Sorry, I had to lol.)

~~~

There is so much to love about this story from the way it's written, to the relationships between the characters, to how much detail is being paid attention to here. If you'd like to be tagged, feel free to leave an ask or a reply and I will gladly add you to the taglist for the analysisisis that I do on tsogtr. And if you have any of your own theories or comments, leave those too! I'd love to start a section where we can talk about all of our theories, especially as things pick up more and more. Until next chapter!

Taglist: @hobbit-in-kuroshitsuji @superjelly11

[queens1234]

Chloenette

Queens1234: Hi everyone today in this story Chloe confesses to Marinette and Adrien and Alya have to come up with a back fire plan so Chloevand Marinette won’t be together ……………..

Mari: It’s cold out here where r u Alya? ………… Alya: Sorry about that I was down stairs reading my new book. Mari: Oh okay cool, I was looking at Adrien new commercial. Alya: Oh wow not again, I had figured u we’re gonna say that… you love watching Adrien’s commercials, well I was wondering if you want to come sleep over at Adrien’s house because I’m at his house right now, and he is planning on having an party…. Mari: Wait what I was baking some treats for Tiki and the others… Alya: K, i be waiting for u. Mari: I’m almost done packing… so I will be coming… soon… Alya: Ok Great see ya later. Mari: Bye…………….. Sabine: Marinette what r u doing?…………….. Mari: I was packing, because i am spending the whole week for spring break at Adrien’s house. Sabine: Oh okey that was nice of him to invite you over. Mari: Yeah ik… i”ll be there in a few minutes… once Adrien and Natalie comes,And Alya, maybe Nino to Idk 🤷‍♀️?? Sabine: Alright I love you Marinette I hope u will enjoy your time their… *The Car Arrives* Adrien: Hey,Mari what’s up with you today??? Mari: Uh.. n-nothing m..much I just had finished baking pastries. Adrien: Oh okay…. Alya: What’s up Mari??? Mari: N-Nothing… Alya:Oops my bad… I think we might have a little problem… Adrien: What is going on?? Natalie: According to the house chart it says that an tornado is coming to Paris at 6 pm tomorrow and is gonna stay until May or June. ……… Mari: Oh No, that’s that’s, bad news…….I feel really sorry for u Adrien because this………. means u can’t have your party.* Adrien sighs* *They Arrived at the Mansion* Adrien: Ima go to my bed room…* sighs* Mari: Adrien what’s wrong is everything ok? Adrien: It’s this girl.. I I like b-but I don’t know if she likes me back……Mari: Do I know her? Adrien: It depends her name starts with an “M and ends with An E”. Mari: Me?? Adrien:Yeah but the second reason in crying is… I feel like my dad doesn’t care about me at all. Mari: I will always care about u Adrien. Adrien: R-Really… Sniffs* Continues crying* Adrien: 😓!! Mari: Actually, Adrien I need to confess something to ya i… I Uh.. I like y-you more than a friend. Still cries*

Mari: Adrien stop crying please…… Adrien: Ok sniffs* Mari: Mwah 😘… Adrien: W-What….. okay…

Marinette kisses Adrien Again*

*Adrien kisses Mari*Chloe: What is going on!!!! Adrien stops kissing Mari* Adrien: Oh hi Chloe l.. can explain…… Chloe: Unacceptable!

Chloe: I can believe you had invited this loser over, I told ya I don’t do losers…. at all! Chloe: I thought me and u are best cousins, but how am I supposed to trust u when you invite a loser over?? Adrien: I really like Marinette and I’m not gonna let u have her! And plus, who ever said we were best cousins? If you keep lying like Lila. Chloe: I don’t even lie like that you should know that Adrien… Mari: Lemme guess you came here for Adrien? Chloe:Wrong! Adrien:DO NOT TOUCH MY M’LADY! Chloe: SHUT UP! Chloe: Marinette, u better listen to me loud and clear, u better pay attention or ima kiss u to death!

Mari: Chloe stop please it’s freaking 2 am in the morning nobody haves time to… listen to what you have to say about….. Chloe kisses Marinette~

Marinette jumps on Chloe- Adrien:Damn!