#Lester's pain

[money-and-dandellions]

Of tears and nights.

TW: Self-harm, description of dead bodies but not a lot, angst, implied eating disorder.

"...Don't deserve their kindness, you know that?"

He couldn't breathe.

Everything seemed much colder than he managed to remember, the voices hitting the walls of his skull with tedious temp, drawing undeniably clear sketches with something.

Was it blood? Was it his? 

He felt how a drop fell on his gray forehead, freezing with the touch. It sticked to the skin, not wanting to fall. It repeated a few times, burning stronger with each, marking his body.

———— ———— ———— ———— 

Blue eyes were staring at him from the ceiling, not blinking, making him want to shrink. Blond hair were dusty, red, so familiar, glasses - crooked.

What... But he can't be here, he's dead, he saw him die—

The room shook, he stumbled, almost falling, stopping millimeters away from a sharp edge of a dagger.

A small exhale was heard when pain hugged him, choking with it's warm hands.

Everything went disgustingly pink.

———— ———— ———— ———— 

"Oh, right, you're weak, you can't."

He wanted to rip off the voice's arteries, so it would finally shut up and stay silent afterwards; also, he wanted to curl into a ball, letting himself shake and go numb, letting the hot tears stream down.

The vision was covered with a thin layer of pinkish blurr, every part of his body hurt, as if he was pulled in different directions with thick ropes that were cutting in his skin. For some reason, he could feel the blood in the veins boil, turning dark-purple.

Everything was burning, his body was filled with liquid fire, eating it out. His eyes were stuffed with smoke, so we're his lungs. He felt how his ribs got crushed under the pressure, pieces of bones stabbing his lungs. For a second, he saw a glimpse of yellow, glowing eyes and a sleek long body that was wrapping around his skinny, small, one. Hissing made his ears blow up.

Bodies of Jason Grace and Meg, oh gods he is destroying everyone's life, layed on the stone floor, their spines bended around 90 degrees incorrectly. 

His own spine crushed with a wet sound. A sob escaped his throat, leaving it choked with blood.

———— ———— ———— ————

The thin mattress creaked miserably as Lester woke up, gasping for breath, his eyes wide open, unstable;  hot tears were running down his cheeks abd on his neck, wetting the a little worn-out t-shirt he was in; his curls were all around the neck and shoulders, a little damp with sweat, his heart beating, making it hard to breathe. He let out a few small shaky breaths, before wiping his face with the back of his hand. It was trembling a little.

The motel room was dirty, barely lit, the sounds of highway echoing through paper-like walls of the building. The bed sheets were dusty, clearing a cloud of dirt every time a weight was put on them. There were some coffee (at least, it was better be coffee) spots on the pillow and duvet covers; the windows were muggy with feculence, so no sunlight or moonlight whatsoever could get through it. 

A paper cup, once filled with cheap 3-in-1 instant coffee (the filthy sweet taste was still lingering in his throat), was put on a shabby, small table.

The blinding lit electronic watch was showing around 4 in the morning. If he remembers correctly, they have crashed into the room in around 11 pm, he fell asleep almost 3 hours later, trying to figure out what to do next, listening to his young master's quiet breathing—

Meg.

His eyes started to the other single-sized bed, barely noticing how messy it was. 

The thin duvet was mostly laying on the floor, only covering a half of the girl's lower body and a leg. She was sleeping in a  second-hand t-shirt that was too big for her and looked like a dress from some angle. Her black hair were all around the pillow, some - on her face or in the mouth. Her arms were sprayed on the different sides on the bed, she was weirdly turned around. 

For a second, he saw her so small bended body in Python's cave. His chest got tight, vision - blurry. His mouth tasted like warm lake water.

He didn't really register how'd he manage to get out of the bed so quickly and without falling, but his hands were already checking his sister's Meg's pulse when the afterthought came in. It didn't really matter now, he just needed to be sure that she is alive.

The beating was steady and quiet. She wrinkled her nose a little, before mumbling something about how cool those deer were.

(A few days later when they were driving on a country road near a forest, a few deer came out of it with their fawns running awkwardly along. It seemed, that the small ones were born only a few days prior. 

Meg noticed the animals, pointed it loudly out, smiling. She urged him to stop the car, he did. After an extremely difficult fight with the window, it got opened and the girl was staring at the animals for a solid few minutes. They stared black, their little black eyes resembling black holes far too much. 

After 5 or so minutes, no he didn't count but two songs passed, the animals walked away, the little ones hurrying behind.

'Roe deer.'

She turned around, looking at him strangely as if he just had grown a pineapple instead of his head.

'What?'

He looked at her once more, sighing.

'Roe deer. Those were roe deer.'

After a second of silence, when Meg finished observing how the window was closing, she turned to him once more.

'They were nice.')

He smiled a little, picking up the light duvet and making sure to tuck her in carefully, brushing the raven-black hair away from her mouth. Her glasses were on the jiggered nightstand near the bed.

One look at his hands and he froze. The veins were still a little dark than they were supposed to be. The lake taste came back. 

———— ———— ———— ————

Finding one hunched over a cold toilet seat, retching himself out is a not a good way to form a first impression. Alas, it was not the case.

It was in sickly green, hospital, colour, making the slushy saliva-only substance feel on the tongue even worse than it was already. His hands were hugging the toilet, his knees on the cold tile dirty floor. 

The situation was truly miserable.

His stomach grumbled quietly, making him groan through the nausea.

He was not hungry, or at least, not already.

Meg needed food more than he did, so, what the big deal if he will give her his portions. She was more hungry than he was, she was a child, children need food to grow and to be healthy, so, it was perfectly fine.

He is okay with coffee and some fries that half-mindedly got into his mouth. The planning was going better when he didn't want to sleep anyway and the food did not help it at all. 

His mind remembered how Meg glared at him, while he was sipping any of the cups of coffee, wincing just a little from the awful taste. How she pressed her lips, muttering something under her breath. He didn't really hear any of it, but there were more fries left in the paper box that he ate.

His hands grabbed the toilet harder, another portion of slushy substance went into nowhere.

———— ———— ———— ————

Wiping his mouth, flushing the toilet and trying to regain physical stability were hard to accomplish. Somehow, he managed to. He staggered on his feet, grabbing the sink for support, looking in the mirror for a second and meeting his own dazed eyes. 

The motel razor blade was laying on the edge of the sink, on a small package, right next to the plastic, bright orange, razor itself. He grabbed it, not really thinking much about the afterwards.

The paper got thrown into the bin creating a small sound, the metal gleemed a little in the dim bathroom light (he doesn't remember turning it on, though). 

Red was more familiar to him than gold. He never saw his own ichor, never it was warmly tickling his shoulder and forearm that were covered in similar lines, some deep, some - not, going to the brownish sink. 

The red though? A lot, not all done by himself.

He gazed at the blade, throwing it away to the  paper, washing his face and arm with ice-cold water. It smelled like chlorine. His hands were shaking a little, the liquids got on his shirt and hair. Not that they were not already wet. 

Gulping down Ibuprofen felt nice; his arm was not bleeding a lot. He sighed, stared at the sink for a while, his head empty, the buzzing was slowly stopping, and looked up.

———— ———— ———— ————

Black eyes were staring at him in the mirror, the girl's eyebrows furrowed. Her glasses were a little crooked on her nose, as it was put on in a hurry. 

He looked away, not knowing what to say. She was not supposed to know about it, about anything.

Meg pressed her lips together, shaking.

———— ———— ———— ————

'I—'

The air got sucked out of his lungs as he felt a warm body hitting his own.

Both of them were trembling, she was crying. He hugged her a little tighter, his forearm starting to bleed again.

' 'm sorry.'

[thedoodlebuggo]

The Kiss

i feel like every time i make a finished illustration i use a new rendering style. had a lot of fun with this one though-- i really like the scratching n crossing.

also, below the cut is a scrapped vers of a different interpretation that the more i look at the less i like asdhgjf (spoiler for ep 20)

i feel like this is too far from the original but it was a fun idea i guess. not going to finish it though adsjhfg

[treestomeetyou]

twelve years worth of dan and phil baking videos

[koszmarnybudyn]

So this song fits them so very well right?

[the-she-they-in-yellow]

inspired by part 26 including arthur’s murder and subsequent mental breakdown

[sparrow-in-boots]

"My heart is beating, It keeps repeating for you constantly. You're all I'm needing And so I'm pleading, Please come back to me."

[g-pistachio]

Just a bunch of little guys running away from the horrors

[lobotomist-at-claires]

"oooo this looks so good!!" dan and phil say about the most horrendous atrocious godawful appalling ghastly abominable heinous vile outfits known to man

[izel-scribbles]

it's 10:50 pm and i should be sleeping bc i have an algebra test tomorrow but do i care!?! no!!!

[ylissebian]

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL 👽🥀

[money-and-dandellions]

Apollo/Lester would absolutely cup faces of his children/his loved ones into his so warm hands and kiss them in the forehead.

And Meg. She is his honorary little sister.

(Oh, and he would cup the ash that was left of Asclepius, his beautiful son with kind hands; and I am so sorry I didn't save you, I tried—, and put it near his heart, shaking in grief and despair).

(And Hyacinthus while he was bleeding out. Apollo would cup his face into his trembling hands that were stained with blood, weeping and murmuring over and over and his love would be fine - you will live— - and that everything is going to be okay.

And Apollo kissed him on the forehead, ignoring his love's glassy eyes.)

[napolean-but-cringe]

People keep talking about the whimpering horror podcast men and how distracting it can be but as a (maybe) asexual person, all I ever heard were men in pain. Other people find the whimpering weirdly erotic while I hear a guy in desperate need of a Hospital and a Therapist

[thermodynamic-comedian]

arthur and john's relationship is built on codependence and working together because there's no other choice, but it's also a lot about arthur projecting onto john. arthur considers himself a failure as a person, but now he has a chance to prove that someone evil can actively choose to be better. he believes that if john can be saved, so can he. if john can be redeemed, so can he. that's why he tries, at every possible turn, to push john to be better. that's also why, whenever john takes a few steps back in progress, it has such an intense effect on arthur. because he wants to save john.

because if he can save john, he'll finally have proven to himself that he can be saved too.

[fryday]

handsome phil gifs — 1 / ?

[serendipnpipity]

Favorite DnP Tour Song Statistics

Settle round, little ducklings, do I have some statistics to share with you all!!

A grand total of 156 people participated in this survey, so thank you if you took the time to fill it out! 🧡

As a teaser, here’s a pie chart of the votes for your favorite song! We’ll be discussing this in depth in its own section but I know some of you f*ck vibe with pie charts more than the bar charts I use there…

To give you a clear vision of what we’ll be looking at, here are the categories of the upcoming analysis:

Phandometrics (community growth on a viewership & fandom scale)

Favorite Song (general)

Favorite Song vs. Phandometrics (the main hypothesis!)

Honorable Mentions (fun little quirks I noticed along the way)

Ready? Time to read on.

PHANDOMETRICS

Lag between year started watching -> year joined the phandom. This can be seen most obviously in the 2009-2015 portion of the graph, likely when the community was just building up. I went back to check individual points, and many people seem to join a year or two after starting to watch.

Three distinct peaks of phandom growth: 2015 (dnp popularity peak), 2019 (coming out), and 2023 (dnpg comeback, dnp renaissance). Pretty expected, but still cool to see!

The difference between the peaks when you look at viewership vs. phandom is interesting though! Especially 2019 seems to be a huge spike in viewership, but the phandom growth seems a little more gradual (maybe more people lurked at first, then joined the phandom in 2023 once they were more active?).

The 2012 peak is really interesting. Most popular year to start watching from this sample, apparently!

FAVORITE SONG

"The Internet is Here" won 51.3% of the votes... which didn't surprise me all that much. It's iconic, okay?

II is about half as popular, and beyond the song qualities themselves, I wonder if a contributing factor to this pattern could be its lack of availability as an officially released song.

I think Everything's Fine is so low partially bc I closed the poll before WAD released to prevent the recency effect from skewing the data. (Especially because I thought we were getting "Everything's Fine (Acoustic)" smh.)

FAVORITE SONG VS. PHANDOMETRICS

By era...

I had a hypothesis: based on the year you joined, which I now realize in my head wrongly equated with the year you were most active in, you'd be more biased towards the song of that era bc a) you were more likely to go to the tour or b) epic nostalgia hit.

Yeah, I was wrong.

When you group the eras you see that TIIH wins in almost every single group by a similar proportion to the total, which means this attitude is fairly evenly distributed amongst the phannies.

By year...

Separating by year, you begin to see that, hold up, the hypothesis could have some merit! In either 2017 or 2018 on both graphs, the II finale actually does win.

The super high TIIH votes bleeding in from 2015/2016 and from 2019 seemed to mask this pattern.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

I have no idea what happened here but both ways you slice it, Interactive Introverts was fighting for its life amongst the 2012 phannies???

We got three phannies that have been watching since 2009!! The fact that people have been sticking around so long (up to fifteen years!!! and this was only a sample of 156 of us!!!) is really heartwarming for me bc it's a testament to how strong of a community dnp have built their viewership to be.

At the end of the day, what can I say? That was a lot of statistics. I hope you enjoyed or took something away from this little survey. Lmk if you notice any other cool trends or have any theories on what the data means!

Thank you for listening to my yapping; have an orange heart.

🧡

[flying-fangirls]

The Dies Irae—

It is your title, your combined force—

The Day of Wrath.