#Just a litle vent

[cyan-lun]

Sometimes i get this weird feeling. Its an unusual feeling thou its become quite regular. Its a feeling where your hands feel wrong, your boddy feels wrong, i feels fuzzy, you vision is unfocused, no matter how hard you try it stays the same, fuzzy, foreign. An unusual pulse rings in your ears, a beating heart, you thunk its yours, but your not sure, and as you sit infront of sheats of paper scribled with words you cant read, numbers you dont recognise, shapes that spin around, you poke at your finger with a pencil, theres no pain. You apply more pressure until you see blood. A single droplet falls, staining the paper in red, another one follows, yet the pain has yet to arrive, you feel numb, the world feels numb, it feels wrong, i feel wrong, aomething isnt right, you poke anothe hole into your palm, more blood flows out, but still no pain, just a pulsing numbness, and as the red on the page keeps growing a sound starts ringing in your ears, it gets louder and louder until it is all you can hear, tge world around you gets darker and darker and then there is sillence.

I forget my name sometime, i forget my age, and when i look in the mirror i dont recognise the person who stares back at me.

Its confusing, it comes and it goes as it wishes, i dont know when it starts, normally i fall asleep before it ends. Its an endles circle of unsureness, im scared of it, but also crave it, as numbing and confusing as it is, it also feels freeng, like seeing the wprld from a diferent perspective, with a diferent mind almost. I dont know how to escape it, i dont think that matters anymore.

[heyitsharbor]

It's never really a good thing these days when it's 100% Morgan hours

Timing's always bad or whatever and I'm lonely and bored and I have so much I wanna talk about but it's like fuck, fine, ignore me and then dump everything about your own goddamn interests and every time i try to say anything even slightly about what im doing or thinking about, redirect it right back to however you can tie it into what youre doing

idk im frustrated ive lost some friends and been forced to reconnect with others that are bringing up a lot of bad past im not comfortable with . and i just want to retreat from all of that. and there are new people im talking to that make me feel so boring and useless

the truth of it is i have really good friends, too. who love me and i love them and we share interests and put in time for each other even when its not easy.

its just really hard for Me Specifically bc it feels like its never me who gets to experience that anymore and its none of my friends fault but man it sucks i feel like a whole window of my life is just . shuttered

[mamasgarden]

okay thank you :) i really have no one to talk to soooo yahhh. basicaly, schhol has been realy hard, i’ve had 13 tests in the past 3 days. that’s insane. an i cant regress bc i don have time. today, i found out that my besfriend supports trump and i told him how wrong that is for us woman and overal the world and he just blocked me, manipulating me and sayin how “i think youre better off without me, bc im the bad guy right?” and so i had a panic attack and relapsed after a while :( m so sory for ventin like this but i feel safe to talk to you, sory for the text peoblems, im feeling litle but tryin not to regress until the weekent, thank you for listenin to me, love youu!

-🌙

i'm so so sorry that all of this is happening to you, love. it is insane, 13 tests in three days is terrible.

losing a friend to them being a trump supporter is horrible. i'm glad that you're not friends anymore, but the pain is awful and i'm sure it hit quick.

it's okay, love, it's very very okay to vent. if you need to get the feelings out, it's alright and perfectly healthy to talk to people.

i'm glad you feel safe here.

you're welcome for listening, angel. i'm always here to listen.

mama loves you ❤️❤️

[toad-in-a-trenchcoat]

"just a litle vent" WAAAA making spec bio is so hard!its like "convergent evolution this" "it needs to be more realistic" "no you cant have two primary consumers on this island its to small!"

ps. i am incredibly sorry you are just the only other spec bio person i talk to

No trouble at all, and I totally get it

I love thinking about biological mechanics and possibilities, but sometimes ya just want to have a funky creature in a neat world without having to consider a set of “rules” or base guidelines

[angelnightrose]

late night vent

if you're trying to make me stop it's working. i get it. you've moved on to other things. you probably just want all of this to go away forever and you're hoping i'll stop so it can all go away. or you just see me as nothing more than a litle boost to your ego every time i post. a way for you to pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing nothing. that fact that you even dare to act like you have anything to do with my shit infuriates me. i've done so much yet you refuse to respect any of it. you obviously play favorites and i'm clearly not one of them. i'm just the annoying child that you want to get rid of but you don't want to be rude so you ignore me and leave me in the corner hoping i'll leave on my own. i called you my friend once and now being your friend is so exhausting i'm not sure i want to do it anymore. i hang around your server just so i can talk to two other people that i don't share other servers with. the fact that people who know nothing about what i make are more supportive of me than you of all people speaks fucking volumes. they say actions speak louder than words but no action speaks the loudest of all. i'm done. i'm so done. i legitimately don't want you to look at my stuff anymore because it just makes me sad more than anything because you do not care. you preach the importance of making what you love and how it's important to support other artists yet you can't be bothered to do the same for your "friends".

and i know it's not just me. i watch as people you call "friend" create things with so much love and passion and you take one look and decide to ignore it. i watch it happen over and over and over until my friends stop sharing the things they love. they make the very things you claim people should engage with and yet you do not. you cry for engagement on your passion projects but cannot be bothered to engage with anything that doesn't benefit you and your stupid ego. i'm so tired of watching you do this to not only me but the other people you claim to care about. you don't really care, maybe you never did.

you don't care. you haven't cared in a long time. maybe you never truly cared and only wanted to boost your own ego and pretend you made something great. you may have planted the seeds, but you did not grow this garden. it's time to stop pretending that you did. you did not nurture these crops, you did not till this soil, you have have planted things and watered them for a short while, but you left this garden to rot. you cannot continue to be a captain when you've long abandoned the ship. i'm not saying you have to come back. you've moved on and that's perfectly fine. we all move on to new things eventually. just maybe stop acting like you own all of this and that you had some hand in things you have not touched in years. the ship has continued sailing without you and that's okay. you need to accept it.

if i wasn't so scared of the backlash i'd say all of this to your face. but the fear of what you could do to me holds me too tight. so i'll just go on sitting in the corner. staying silent. watching and caring for the garden you left to rot. only showing the new flowers i've grown to those who will actually look and won't try to pat themselves on the back for my hard work.

[curious-sootball]

Vent post

I'm not sure who I want to beat up more: my brother or myself. That idiot didn't shower and it is pinned on me. It will be pinned on me as long as we live together, regardless of how ridiculous it sounds. He made himself look stupid in mother's eyes. He made me look stupid in mother's eyes. She's going to double down on treating us like we are idiots, because as far as she's concerned, we're too stupid to notice or argue. I want to hurt myself or get blackout drunk because I don't want to hold all that anger that's triggered by being talked down to inside anymore; I feel physically sick and shaking with rage over two decades worth of accumulated "minor issue", I need tangible proof that this thing actively fucking me up is not some boogeyman I imagined.

This woman taught me to be nice. That if I word my requests or grievances in a calm and polite way, they would be heard and at least considered. I don't want to raise my voice at her, but she just ignores the calm and polite requests to do things just a litle bit differently. Maybe I should completely cut ties with her when I move out. Disappear. Just let her dream up a daughter she always wanted instead of looking at a trashbag human being she has now. "Why can't you be neurotypical?" I got it from you, and you got it from grandma. I can't buy a new brain, I can only medicate, and you look down on that, so I can't convincingly look neurotypical, either. "Why can't you be cis?" Because I can't. It isn't a switch I can flip, you dingdong. That's it. Choke on a persimmon and get beaten up by cherries right after if you don't like that. "Why can't you be nicer?" Because being nice and playing by the rules got me nowhere, and dying starts to sound better than living with you.

[silly-ehggy]

Im gonna cry therez so many ppl who don't have dni listz so I don't know if I'm allowed 2 interact with them and if I do interact and they think I shouldn't have im gonna feel bad abt it and if I don't ill also feel bad bcuz the stuff I see lookz so cool but if I don't know if these people are ok with me interacting with me or not im not sure if it'll b ok and I go down this do I or do I not spiral and AAAAAAAAAA AAHUEH HEUG HUHU UUUHHRHEUGH UEUE *sob ing* eee.... :((((

[justalittlebluetiefling]

.

[bornunderpunchestheheatgoeson]

Man is dating white people even worth it. First slave owner now white supremacist cult? What's going on

[lucidcapricorn]

the downside to dressing in baggy clothes all the time is that i either 1. feel uncomfortable in anything else or 2. i feel pretty ok but don’t how to to actually look good when dressing good

[onawhimsicot]

feeling a certain kind of way but i think this big shark plush would simply Fix Me

[midgemash]

middle siblings be like: u asked me to do one thing therefore u are a bitch

[aliceyabusamesoneball]

litle bit vent

i genuinely do not know what race i am like?? im chinese but also im cuban and also im white?? i guess?? BUT LIKE when people ask me what ethnicity i am i dont know what to tell them.. i jjst say chinese cuban american but like i dont feel like i look like any of those

like chinese people think i look chinese, cuban people think i look cuban, and white people think i look white, and technicallyyeah im all of those things but like what do i actually look like then?? like what do i identify as

on like those forms that are like indicate yuor race and there isnt a mixed option i never know what to put normally i just put asian because im more chinese than anything else (if you want to get into percentages im half chinese a quarter cuban and a quarter white) (but im not sure how much those count)

sometimes i feel like i should jjst identify as white because having to say those percentages feels so ridiculois sometimes like if i have to prove im a certain race should i even identify as it?? but at the same time just calling myself white feels like im erasing parts of myself i feel like those cultures are important to me esepcially chinese culture

but also i feel like really really whitewashed because i cant speak any dialect of chinese and i cant speak spanish either, my dad is half cuban/half white but he didnt really grow up in cuban culture so i never got to either,, my mom is from china and is fully chinese so she did teach me some culture stuff but i feel like im jsut. not chinese enough. does that even make sense.. like i dont look chinese i cant speak chinese i grew up in the usa and i’ve never even been to china

when i told that girl who asked if i was japanese that i was chinese she started talking to me excitedly in mandarin and i jjst felt so awful having to tell her that i cant speak it because she seemed so happy to find someone else who was also chinese and i told her i was half chinese and she said “so youre half american?” and i. ITS NOT HER FAULT NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST AND IM NOT MAD AT HER but it jjst made me feel so bad inside i dont know anything about chinese culture really and i cant even speak chinese. i dont even look chinese so what even makes me chinese i feel like i’m just a dumb american who doesn’t knww anytthing pretending to be a chinese person i know i’m chinese ethnically but i dont feel like it

and also the fact that i know absolutely nothing about cubans or cuban culture or anyhtuohng makes me feel so bad my dad doesnt really either so its not his fault for not teaching me bbut ohgod i wish i knew about it so bad there isnt much about cuban culture that i can find and its not like my dad knows much either and i dont really know many cuban people and i cant speak spanish and i dont evne feel cuban at all in the slightest like i at least know a little bit about chinese stuff but id ont know shit about cuban culture

i feel like a white person masquerading as different cultures and even though i know im not i still feel like it and i feel like maybe other people see me that way because i dotn know that much about my cultruel and i jjst uhsdfijjn

it just feels really lonely because i don’t really have anyone in my life that can relate to my experience because its a pretty unique mix of cultures?? ive never met anyone else who was chinese and cuban and i guessits cool but it feels incredibly lonely knowing ill probably never have anyone to relate to,, like ive never felt  truly represented in any type of media or anythinkg like ive seen more representation of nonwhite people in general and thats genuinely great!! but ive never seen anything that can relate to me as ap erson even though when i was a kid id watch things with chinese people in it and sometimes could relate i dont know if ill ever be able to really connect with a character like me SORRY THATS KIND OF A STUPID THING TO WANT OUT OF ALL OF THIS IMPORTANT STUFF BUTSTILL

sorryif this doesnt make sense  i jjst have a lot o f feelings ☹️

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

I can’t get over how he presents himself in the Lee arc. It’s equal parts I Amn Just A Litle Creacher and Tiny Space Twink Is Very Tired. I want to give him cocoa and let him vent about his string of crappy relationships.

[gaudebo]

Damn I really am gay huh

[platypanthewriter]

Nostalgia

Harringrove April day 16, Nostalgia!  Steve finds himself walking an underwater city, where everything feels familiar...except Billy.  A Bioshock AU, but I had a friend who hasn’t played the games check it, and I'm assured it makes sense!

The ocean poured inside the plane, and Steve swam for the hole blown in the side, trying to keep his bearings in the plumes of bubbles from the seats and the murky darkness of oil.  He gasped for breath when his head broke the surface, and breathed in smoke, his lungs aching.

The lighthouse was a beacon, the only safe haven in a sea of wreckage.

It felt nostalgic.

He opened the door into it and found the bathysphere, and the controls were intuitive, like he’d used them before.  All those times I crashed at sea, he thought with a snort, glancing around warily.

He emerged miles below the surface, in a world of glass walls and ceilings, flickering lights, to crackling saxophone on a jukebox.  The nostalgia was so strong it was almost metallic in his mouth, and he kept trying to remember the name of the sunken city, though as far as he knew, he’d never been there before.

The first person he saw was a little girl, tucking her dirty, frilly dress out of the way to bend over a mutilated corpse.  She was singing a little song—the made-up kind children always sang, starting and ending nowhere—and she stabbed a huge syringe into the dead man’s back.

It was strange, Steve thought, how strange it wasn’t, to him.  He watched her drink from the syringe, her eyes glowing, and the radio he’d been carrying—the radio he figured had died, in the crash or the swim—crackled to life.

“Don’t kill her,” came an urgent voice.  “They’ve worked their worst on her, but she’s still a just a kid.  Don’t kill her, I can—I can help you—”

“Ssh,” Steve whispered, as a huge, armored mechanical man—or mechanical armor?!  It was hard to tell—lumbered up to the little girl, and scooped her up onto its shoulder.  She cackled with glee.  

“That’s a Big Daddy,” said the radio, more softly.  “They—” 

The voice was cut off by the noise of screaming, as a band of people in ragged evening wear jumped down on the guardian and the shrieking little girl.  Steve aimed his .45 at the one swinging a whiskey bottle at her head, forgetting it’d been drenched and wouldn’t fire.

“Would you kindly not kill my sister,” hissed the radio, and Steve would have rolled his eyes, but the Big Daddy had grabbed the guy with the whiskey bottle and drilled through him with some kind of huge prosthetic, swinging his body to knock the other assailants away.  Steve held very still, because the little girl seemed to be protected well in body, if not in mind.

She seemed unbothered, though, by the showers of blood and viscera, and Steve watched her skip off hand-in-hand with the armored beast with the same aching nostalgia.  “Who are these people,” Steve whispered.

“Splicers,” said the voice.  “They made themselves faster, stronger—some of them can shoot lightning.  But it has other effects.”

Steve nodded slowly, bending to scoop up the whiskey bottle and take a swig.  “I wouldn’t have hurt your sister,” he whispered, keeping a wary eye out as he inspected the fallen attackers for weapons.  “There was a guy trying to knock her block off with a bottle.”

“...good.  Don’t,” said the voice.

The dead people were wrong—grown strangely out of their own clothing and shoes, bent recently so that a knee here or a deformed elbow there were skinned from having to suddenly support their weight.   

One of the women had had a revolver, and he grabbed it, then a shotgun lying nearby.  There was water pouring through part of the ceiling onto a grand piano, and Steve’s heart panged, a little, to see the destruction of somewhere that felt like...home.  

“Who are you?” he asked, and listened to silence.  The lights flickered inside to show the dimly glowing helmet of another of the lumbering, armored men outside, and Steve ducked into the hallway, keeping his movements quick and low.  He could see into another glass domed hallway nearby, where a woman threw a grenade at what looked like a machine gun turret, and everything went dark.  When the lights flickered back on, the part of the ocean where the other hallway had been was dark.

“I can help you get back to the surface,” the voice over the radio said, and Steve wondered how to explain that he felt right here, even with the violence and the water pouring in around him.  “Help me get my sister, and I’ll show you how to get out.”

I don’t want to leave yet, Steve thought of saying, but he grimaced instead, watching his boots sink into the plush, patterned carpet, with the feeling he’d watched it before.  Not until I know what’s going on.  “Where are you?” he asked.  “And what d’you need me to do?”

The voice laughed.  Through the radio crackle, it was hard to tell much, but now that Steve wasn’t distracted, he thought it sounded like a man, youngish.  “I’m not telling you where I am,” it whispered.  

“I don’t know how I can help you, then,” Steve told the voice, and it laughed.  

“I need you to kill a Big Daddy,” it said.

 The voice explained how to fool the security turrets, and as Steve wandered around the district, he began to get a feel for what the voice at the other end of the radio could see, what he couldn’t, and where he might be.  

Steve found a man with a molotov cocktail and bad conversational skills outside the pump room, and when he tried the key from the man’s corpse’s belt in the door, it turned.  The vent from there was wide enough for his shoulders, and Steve reckoned they must need it big, pumping so much air around down here.  He crawled through, listening to the voice say “...I lost you.  Where are you—” before coming up right behind the person talking.

He whipped around, panting, and stared down the barrel of Steve’s revolver, dropping an enormous wrench and raising his hands.  Steve was right—he was about Steve’s age, his curls wild where his rabbit half-mask was tied over them.  He was shirtless in ripped coveralls, with the top off and tied around his waist.  He was smirking, wide-eyed, as he licked his lips.

“Who are you?” Steve asked, again.

“I’m Billy, Billy Hargrove,” he said, leaning in, and Steve registered he was a splicer too—the veins all along his left arm were black, and that hand was twisted and elongated.  He had blood on him, like the others, but some of it looked like his own, from his split lip, and from the flesh still seeping where the bones in his hand had warped.  “I’m helping you,” he hissed, his grin widening.  “Would you kindly not shoot me.”  

Steve hadn’t really intended to, but he’d just had someone clamber across the ceiling with ice hooks—singing a hymn—and then drop on his head and try to murder him, so he was a litle twitchy.  “I probably won’t,” he said.

The guy’s mask was white and gold, an odd contrast to his filthy work clothes, and Steve glared through the eyeholes to see blue eyes, wide and red-rimmed.  “Anything I can do to shift your opinion?” Billy asked, his muscles gleaming with cold tension sweat.

“Can you shoot lightning?”

Hargrove shook his head, slowly.  “I know the way out,” he whispered, licking his lips again.  “I can do some things.  Not that.”

“What things,” Steve hissed, and Billy lowered his hands, slowly.  

“I just wanna find my sister,” he said, reaching up and pushing Steve’s gun away from his face.  “Just help me find her, she’s one of those little girls out there.  They took her.”

“They...steal children?” Steve asked, somehow more shocked than he’d been by anything else so far.  Billy just nodded, watching his face.  “Who stole her, those...armored monsters?”

Billy laughed.  “The scientists that made the armored monsters,” he said, “...and other things.”

“...the splicers,” Steve realized.  

“What the splicers used,” Billy agreed, shrugging, with a rueful glance down at his malformed hand.  “In the end, pretty much the same.”

“What else?” Steve asked, and Billy stared back at him for a long second, and then smiled.  His split lip left blood on his teeth.

“The little girls help gather it, now,” he said.  “They made little girls able to gather what will let you shoot lightning.”

“...is that what she was doing with the body,” Steve asked, his gorge rising, and Billy smirked.  

“If I don’t find my sister first, she’ll drink me after I’m dead,” he said, lightly, and Steve shuddered, for the first time uninterested in the mysteries of the city hidden away under the ocean.

“...can you use a shotgun?” he tried next, and Billy nodded, then stumbled as Steve shoved it into his hands. 

 Around then another voice came on Steve’s radio, and told him about a family in danger, a woman and a small child, and asked, trembling over the radio waves, whether Steve would kindly help save their lives.  The words felt familiar and right, and Steve tried to remember the city, remember their words, as he agreed.  

Billy just sighed.

 They wouldn’t have started trouble with the first Big Daddy, but a splicer clonked it on the head trying to steal the little girl, and it attacked everything, after that.  Steve ran out of ammo, once, and Billy chucked his wrench at it and ran up a pile of packing crates.  He yelled as the thing knocked them aside like they were ABC blocks, until Steve could draw its attention back with a tommy gun the splicer had dropped. 

They took it in turns to rewire the security turrets, and Billy still nearly died, the drill grazing his jaw as Steve emptied their shotgun into the thing’s kidneys.  Billy fell as it fell, slumping to his knees and staring straight ahead, and Steve threw the gun down and checked him for injuries, then cupped his face.  “Billy.  Billy,” he whispered.  “Are you hurt?”

“...you killed it,” Billy whispered back, laughing unsteadily, and then he leaned in and kissed Steve, his lips cold and shaking, but his mouth warm.  “You killed it,” he whispered again.  “We can do this,” he mumbled against Steve’s lips, his voice breaking.  

Billy’s shivering arms around Steve’s neck were the first time something had felt new, down here, and he sat for a long second, thinking it out.  “...we’ll find her,” he said, and Billy laughed, wide-eyed behind his mask, and then ran his tongue over his teeth, grinning.  

“You’re sold, huh,” he said, and Steve snorted a laugh, and helped him up.  

 The little girl clung to the charred hulk of the Big Daddy, sobbing, and Steve lifted her away guiltily as she kicked and screamed, and then, when he didn’t hurt her, clung to him.

“...that’s not her,” Billy whispered.  “Damn it.”

“All right,” Steve said, “—hup!” and picked her up, letting her sing her creepy little song as her eyes glowed. 

“Kill her,” said the other voice, over the radio, and Steve and Billy stopped, glancing at each other, as the little girl climbed up to hug Steve’s head.  

“Don’t,” said a voice close by, and Steve turned to see a woman half-hidden behind one of the crates.  Her German accent was as familiar as almost everything had been since he’d arrived, and he squinted under the little girl patting his hair, her weight making him stand crookedly.  

“I wasn’t going to kill a child,” he said, and the woman stepped forward, a little.  

“If you help her, she can help you,” she said.

“We’re trying to help her,” Steve said, and Billy leaned to whisper in his ear.

His breath was warm.  It was a new sensation, and Steve shivered, distracted.  “That’s the doctor that did this,” Billy told him.

“And I know how to undo it,” she said sternly, ignoring Billy’s snort.

“How?” Steve asked, trying to ignore the weight of Billy’s chilly shoulder leaning against him, and she tossed him a syringe.  

“Take that,” she said.  “It’ll let you save them.”  She glanced at his radio.  “...or kill them.  Children.”

“I will save them,” Steve reiterated, annoyed, and Billy watched his face warily, but helped him push the syringeful of glowing liquid under his own skin.  

The little girl yelped and squirmed as Steve laid his hand on her stomach and drew the glow out of her eyes and skin, and Billy’s tense fingers left bruises in his arm, but when he sat her down, she clutched at Steve’s hand.  “Thank you, mister,” she said, and Billy gave a throaty gasp, swallowing hard.  

“We’ll save her,” Steve told him, squeezing him close, and Billy leaned up for another soft kiss, lingering this time.  He tasted of blood, and salt from the tears leaking down through his mask.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling away and grabbing the tommy gun.

 He ran with Steve to try and save the voice’s family, and they watched the bathysphere they’d tried to save get overwhelmed by splicers, and sink.  “Damn it,” Billy whispered, as the voice sent them hunting someone else.  

He called the city Rapture, and it fit like a puzzle piece in Steve’s mind, the beginning of a complete picture.

“You don’t know where your sister is, do you?”

Billy grimaced, shaking his head.  “I can’t fit through the vents,” he admitted.  “Wo—would you ki…” he grimaced, and swallowed.

“We can look for your sister while helping him,” Steve said, and Billy nodded, his shoulders relaxing a little.  Steve grabbed his hand—the whole one, so as not to hurt him—and pulled him along, and Billy laughed, smiling sidelong over at him whenever they came to a stop.  When Steve pushed him into cover to avoid one of the ceiling-clinging splicers, Billy pulled him close, sliding his hands up and under Steve’s shirt, another new sensation.  Billy’s skin under his fingertips was yet one more.  

 It felt odd, but good, chasing something that he was clumsy at, that didn’t fall into place.  Even as Steve slid his fingers into Billy’s sweat-warm hair, he couldn’t help thinking that everyone seemed to know who he was.  The doctor had waited for him.  The new voice on the radio called him by name, and Billy had asked for his help as soon as he came down in the bathysphere.  

The sounds of splicers screaming and bombs detonating sank into a comforting hum in the background, and Steve had missed it, somehow.  The air smelled right, down here, he thought, where even the air in the lighthouse, unpolluted as yet by the smoke from the plane, had smelled empty and strange.

 They saved another little girl, Steve drawing the glowing stuff from her and grimacing down at his arm as she ran off and clambered into a vent.  The radio voice told him how to hook himself up to a machine in the wall, and Billy leaned around him, poking the controls.  

“There,” he said, sounding a little sad.  It was hard to read Billy, Steve thought, bending to kiss under his jaw.  “Now you can throw lightning,” Billy said, with his odd, crooked smile.

“...I won’t hurt you, you know,” Steve told him, taking a guess, and Billy’s eyes widened behind his mask.  

“...I’m sorry,” he said, but he wouldn’t explain.

 The other voice led them through more and more splicers, and finally Billy screamed as they were nearly overwhelmed, and rats poured from the walls, climbing and biting.  Billy drew Steve away, panting, as the horde of splicers screamed, eaten alive.  “I can’t do that very often,” he whispered against Steve’s shoulder, his mask knocked crooked against Steve’s head.  “I’ll end up like the rest of them.  And it’s no good against the big Daddies, not through that armor.”

Steve squeezed him tightly, and then retied his mask for him, gently tugging his hair free of the knot.

 When they found the labs, Billy found his sister, and Steve took the glow from her eyes.  She tagged along after them, holding both their hands, and when attacked, using the flamethrower Billy had found for her.

Her name was Max.

Steve was horrified by the labs,  bythe recordings of the scientists experimenting on the little girls—and on a little boy, too—though Billy grabbed him and pulled him from that room quickly, and Max set it on fire.

“You don’t want to see in there,” Billy told him, staring into Steve’s eyes, and running his thumb over Steve’s cheek.  “...there’s no fixing it anyway,” he added hoarsely, turning and kicking the wall, hard.  “Damn it,” he whispered.  

“Come on,” said Max, and Billy twined his fingers through Steve’s..

 The voice kept telling Steve to move on, to find the maker of the city, to get revenge, and Steve’s skin crawled with urgency even as he met Billy’s expressionless eyes behind the mask.  “...we’ll meet you at the bathysphere,” Billy said, watching Steve warily like Steve hadn’t proved himself, finding Billy’s sister.

The voice came on again, and Billy shoved Max behind him, his eyes on Steve, as the voice said, “Would you kindly hurry up, before the whole of Rapture floods,” and Steve shuddered.  

“Th-that’s safest,” Steve managed, watching Billy turn away and not look back.  It felt familiar again, cloyingly nostalgic, to follow the voice.  

He thought he’d seen tears dripping along Billy’s chin as he’d turned away, but it could have been sweat—or water, from the holes the splicers kept blowing in the walls.  

 Steve faced the maker of the city alone, his hands shaking as he tried to follow every directive the voice made, and still hear the man in front of him, speaking words.  When he left, trembling and bloodied, the voice told him where to go next—it didn’t even explain why, anymore, in an endless train of ‘Would you kindly’s, as Steve tried to tell it he was done, he wanted to find Billy, he wanted to go.  

When he finally found the voice, his head hurt.  Everything echoed, and the lights had halos, and he couldn’t think, his fingers twitching as his feet stumbled.  

He could hear rats.  The voice screamed and screamed, and then Billy was back.

“Shit,” he whispered, his fingers rough against Steve’s face.  “Harrington—Steve—can you—can you hear me?”

Steve nodded, grabbing him close and wondering wildly as his vision whirled whether it was Billy at all, or whether he’d lost his mind—but Billy smelled like Billy, like machine oil, and sweat, and the cheese snacks he carried to feed the rats that answered his call.  Unfamiliar, and good.

“The other girls are in the bathysphere,” Billy whispered, “—but I—” He laughed, shaking his head.  “I had to see if you were still...here.”

“The voice stopped,” Steve breathed into his shoulder.  “Was that you?”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Billy said.

“...can I leave here?” Steve asked.  “I think I...belong here.”

“That’s horseshit,” Billy said.  “You may have come from here.  But you—you get to—decide.” He bit his lips.  “...I wish you’d come with us.”

“...I’ll come, then,” Steve said, kissing him and letting his fingers slide over the edges of the mask, curious.

Billy raised his hand, hesitated, and then reached back and untied it, lifting it away to show a stubbly, mustached face with black veins running up the left side and into his eye.  He smiled, then looked up to see Steve’s face, and Steve embraced him again, cupping Billy’s face and pressing their foreheads together.  

“...you’re the only thing here that doesn’t feel right,” Steve whispered, and Billy flinched, turning his head away to hide the black veins, but Steve pulled him back.  “It means I want you...all on my own,” he whispered, and Billy huffed a soft laugh, yanking Steve upright, and hauled him along to the bathysphere.  

It was just as well.  The route to the bathysphere was just as nostalgic, and the controls came to Steve like he’d been born with them in his hands, while the girls and Billy shouted, pressed to the window.

“Get us out of here,��� Billy called back.  “Thank god you can drive this thing.”

Steve took them to the surface, and they watched the bathysphere sink.  He counted the children, found they were all there, and took a deep breath into Billy’s hair.  

The air smelled new.

The other Harringrove April prompts I’ve done