#Now they took away her kids her ex husband and her goddamn house and she is just a rogue cop

[084thoughts]

this is my silly wee woo gay firefighter show. stop putting cop storylines in my found family wee woo show.

[frogsandfries]

Got my dander back up about this

I was reminded, today, about my nieces and that got me to thinking about how one of them apparently sleeps with her grandfather, in his room, in his bed, apparently every night.

But I'm the fucking predator because I dated a predator and turned them in as soon as I safely could, and assisted in their detainment.

My sister's drugged out excuse for a husband texts me how he knows I told my sister things I wanted to do to his daughters. 🙄😬🤬 First, it was a video conversation. I highly doubt my sister recorded it. Second, even if she had, I love how she left out the part where I told my ex, don't you dare think about thinking about my nieces.

But I'm the fucking predator.

I was thinking about having those girls in this house, how the damage is already done. They're most likely to not like me, not trust me and not want to be around me, because their first impression of me was screaming at their mother.....

The problem is, if she was genuinely, truly scared of her girls continuing to be exposed to all that shit, some weak bullshit like access to the wifi at two in the goddamn morning would've been something we could talk about more later. And furthermore, if she truly believed that I'm a child predator, again, why would she bring her kids here?

Which, either she's got it in her head that I am, or she likes to throw it at me because she knows how much it pisses me off. And of fucking course she would deliberately pretend, if I ever had told her, that I had never told her, I handed a predator to the law, or act like I did it to like, cover my ass or some delusional bullshit.

But anyway no, she acted like we were fucking trying to take her hostage. She still had data on her phone. If she really wanted to wuss out that fast, her piece of shit excuse for a husband still could've messaged her.

I don't fucking get it. I guess that's what gets in my craw. It's completely fucking juvenile and irrational. I don't understand acting scared of him doing illicit drugs and passing the fuck out and you took pictures--I shared them with other people, just in case. And then running right the fuck back to him?? Putting your daughters back in a situation where sooner or later, they're going to catch their piece of shit excuse for a father doing drugs; putting them in a situation where one of them sleeps with their grandfather, and somehow you've convinced yourself that even though this behavior started after his wife died, this is perfectly fucking normal??

I want to scream. I want to be sick.

It's one thing to verbally abuse and/or neglect your own child yourself, after how we grew up. It's completely another thing to do that PLUS add new traumas and abuse. It's fucking deplorable.

And we waited years to intervene or intercede because they live in a different state. The first option for foster care is to put them with family in that state. The second option is strangers.

I'm pretty sure I never told her about my intrusive thoughts, but I'm really glad she understood the keyword "intrusive". That's the closest thing I can possibly imagine; maybe I did tell her, and maybe she just....idk y'know, just jumbled up the optimal parts of the information and made up whatever the fuck narrative she felt like. She's always done that.

I didn't know what it was until relatively recently, but I've always described it as being terrifying, because it was. Whenever I tell people, I usually mention, I genuinely thought my intrusive thoughts meant I should be sterilized, that I should never have children.

However, it hasn't really been a thing in ages. Especially in my later twenties, I realized my time spent around children is mostly just enjoying whatever life stage they're in, and worrying how I'll fuck them up if I swoop in a take that thing that is not a toy away and how fast I can replace it with an actual, proper toy.

Now if she knows about that, I'm glad she's going medieval peasant levels of ignorance on my OCD. /s

I dunno which bothers me more: "How the fuck did a three person game of telephone get so monumentally fucked?" or "Why waste the time of everyone involved to drive up here only to lose your shit over the wifi? How is being without wifi over fucking night more scary than your drug addled piece of shit husband???"

[sayyestomi]

brokeback mountain ending rewrite.

hello writeblr and people broken-hearted by this movie years later. i took it upon myself to rewrite the ending because i am sick of the kill your gays trope. (the fic on ao3 and the fic itself are below)

the ride from ennis’ house back to alma’s house was quiet minus the occasional small talk. alma jr. fiddled with her fingers, lost in thought. he could tell since she was a spitting image of him in terms of personality. it was a surprise since he wasn’t really around between work and his fishing trips. but the two hung out the most when he was home. alma jr. kinda liked the divorce. it meant she got to spend more time with her favorite parent. she stayed in thought for a little while longer before speaking up.

“hey dad, can i stay with you? it’s been stressful at home with mom and the new baby. been getting stricter with me and jenny too.” she murmured, still fidgeting with her fingers.

ennis sat there and thought for a moment. a small smile started to tug at the corner of his lips but immediately tried to shove it down.

“i’ll have to make a few phone calls but get your stuff packed when you get in the house. i’ll call when everything’s ready.”

“promise?”

“promise. run along kid.”

alma jr. got out of the car and got inside the house. ennis made sure she got inside safely before driving off to his house. on the way home he thought about having alma jr. around all the time again. he was gonna try and make sure to be around a lot more this time. the one thing that would be keeping them apart would be work this time.

once he got home he immediately picked up the phone and called jack. he patiently waited for him to answer the phone, lighting a cigarette in the process. he was hoping it was actually jack and not his wife.

“twist residence, jack speakin’.”

“jackie it’s me, ennis. it’s important.”

“ennis! is everything alright? are you alright?”

“yeah everything’s fine, i’m alright. it’s just, aj said she wants to come live with me. remembered you sayin’ something about gettin’ a place together so i figured i’d take that up now.”

“there’s one i’ve been eyein’ near brokeback mountain. should fit all four of us if the kids share a room.”

“how much?”

“don’t you worry your pretty little head.” jack chuckled, twirling the phone cord as he leaned against the kitchen wall.

“fine fine.” ennis was smiling, and big. jack could hear it through the phone.

“i’ll talk to my boy about it if you’ll talk to aj about it.”

“i promised i’d call her when i finish making arrangements.”

“go do that then. i’ll talk to ya tonight or tomorrow. love you.”

“yeah yeah i will. love you too jackass.” ennis laughed.

“i’ll kick your ass for that one when we see each other.”

“you won’t do shit to me. anyway i gotta call my girl before my head gets ripped off.” ennis hung up and called alma’s house. he was hoping one of his daughters answered. he wouldn’t be able to tolerate his ex wife or her stupid ass husband. unfortunately, alma answered. he could hear the chaos in the background. he was trying to listen for aj in the back, just in case he needed to go get her now.”

“van buren residence this is alma speaking.”

“can you put alma jr. on the phone?”

“ennis? what could you possibly want with her? she just got home.”

“forgot to tell her something.”

“well whatever you say to her you can say to me.”

“will you just put her on the goddamn phone and don't be so damn invasive.”

alma sighed and put the phone on her chest before calling alma jr. to the kitchen. she came running from her room and shooed her mother away, eagerly grabbing the phone.

“so? are you gonna be able to do it?”

“yeah. you’ll have to stay here for a day or two because my friend and his boy are gonna come live with us too. you can take my room and i’ll take the couch for the time being.”

“that works. i just really need to get out of here.”

“your stuff all ready?”

“uh huh. how are you gonna come back here without mom knowing?”

“just say you’re gonna be out for the night, wait outside on the porch, then i’ll come get you.”

“but she’s gonna flip when i’m not gonna be home tomorrow.”

“she’ll be alright. she’s probably bracing for you to get out any day now since you are the oldest.”

“yeah but this is out of the blue and without her knowing.”

“once she notices you’re gone she’ll call me and i’ll tell her everything.”

“are you sure?”

“yes i’m sure. pack a small bag for the next day or two so you don’t have to unpack everything.”

“already on it.”

“that’s my girl. you eaten yet?”

“is it okay if i lie so we can go out for dinner?”

“sure kiddo.”

“then no, i haven’t eaten.”

“get your stuff together then. i’ll be there soon. love you kid.”

“love you too dad.” aj hung up and went back in her room to get her stuff together,

ennis was glad he didn’t start relaxing quite yet. he threw his jacket and boots on, grabbed his keys and went out to his truck. that truck was his pride and joy besides aj and jack. he hopped in and drove over to alma’s house. he got there and motioned for her to hop in. she did so and threw her stuff in the backseat.

“any restaurant in particular you want to go to?”

“nope.” aj shook her head.

ennis just drove to denny’s because it was cheap and hell, he’d never been disappointed by it before. he parked and both of them got out. ennis got a coffee because that is all he drinks when he can. aj doesn’t think she’s seen him drink anything else besides beer. she got a hot chocolate to mimic her dad since she wasn’t a coffee drinker at all. everything was going smoothly. they talked a lot more than the small talk in the car. aj actually vented about what was going on at home in great detail. ennis was starting to get angry but he kept his cool. he only hoped jenny could get out of there soon.

at some point ennis heard a familiar voice but he shook it off and thought his mind was messing with him again whenever he missed jack too much. to his surprise, it actually was jack. he didn’t know how he got there so quick but he wasn’t questioning it. he just stayed quiet as he listened to aj ramble about stuff that was going on in school now. she stopped rambling about her home life because she didn’t wanna make things worse with her parents than they already were.

jack knew ennis was there. he saw his truck in the parking lot. hell, the only reason he even brought bobby was the fact that he’d run into ennis on purpose. he waited for him to come over and talk but he kinda got the hint that he was doing the same thing. he excused himself from the table and stood behind ennis. he hushed aj before putting his hands over his eyes.

“guess who?” he chuckled

“mm, i dunno, who could it possibly be?”

“just take a guess.”

“hmmm, is it my landlord trying to get more money out of me?”

jack caved and moved his hands, sitting next to him. “it’s me!” he giggled, taking ennis’ hat off and ruffling his hair.

“jack twist! how in the hell did you get here so fast?”

“a magician never reveals his secrets. and you must be aj. you’ve gotten so big since i’ve last seen you! i’m your dad’s fishing buddy.”

“yeah i know, you’re the infamous jack twist he talks about whenever we’re at home. it’s nice to finally see you in person.” she giggled

“you talk about me ennis?”

“just with aj. she understands. bring your boy over here so we can all have dinner together.”

“that doesn’t sound like a bad idea. we could catch up and then bobby and aj could get to know each other before the move tomorrow.”

jack brought bobby over and surprisingly him and aj hit it off immediately. ennis and jack were relieved because both of them wanted this for so long and now it was finally happening. the dads caught up with each other even though it was only a few weeks since they last saw each other. things started to look up for everyone. jack and ennis could finally be together without their wives, or now, ex wives. aj could get away from the chaos of her mom’s family, and bobby could focus on himself instead of being pressured to be like his dad.

//

the house was absolutely gorgeous. it was near the city but also close enough to the countryside so ennis and jack could work and get away on the weekends. aj and bobby could go to school and spend their weekends in the city with the mall. both of them had the possibility of getting a job but ennis and jack weren’t going to pressure them since they didn’t want their kids overworking themselves like they were. the house was a worn down blue but it worked, it had steps that both jack and ennis had to get used to due to the height difference. they didn’t mind the minor imperfections because just them being together was already perfect.

the moving process wasn’t that bad between jack, bobby, and ennis’ trucks. the bitch of the move was the actual unpacking process. there were days where everybody just thought about tossing the boxes and just buying new stuff. the ideas were immediately put down considering they didn’t have the money to do that now. over a couple of weeks the boxes were unpacked.

surprisingly dinner was being made at home a lot. they did go out to dinner on the weekends when ennis and jack weren’t out spending the night on brokeback mountain. ennis was surprised jack could cook more than just what he could find on the mountains. usually when he heard from him he’d just gotten back from work in the mountains or something to do with his ex wife’s family. he didn’t complain though because it was absolutely delicious.

everyone’s favorite dinner night was when bobby cooked. nobody knew where he learned it since he was a pretty quiet kid, but damn could he cook. he spent his days after school in bookstores looking at cookbooks and picking out the recipes he knew he had the ingredients for at home. he usually had store duty unless he had an important project to do or he was sick. both of them were rare occasions.

both kids enjoyed school. full time school was a new experience for both of them. they were getting adjusted and made friends. jack was proud of bobby since he didn’t seem like the type to make friends. aj made a lot of friends but she only kept a few of them close. she was mostly the writer type but she also did some drawing and fashion design. ennis thought she could go far if she’d just submit her works to those fancy fashion magazines.

neither of the kids were ones to join the school clubs. bobby was one for fishing with his friend, dylan he’d met at school. ennis and jack knew what was going on between the two but neither of them said a word. they wanted them to figure that out for themselves.

as for jack and ennis they were finally content. no more postcards or waiting for months to see each other. it was nice to see each other every day without having to worry about wives or anyone that would be out to sabotage their relationship. both of them cut down on drinking immensely. they spent their nights in the small kitchen dancing and being close to each other. they shared small kisses and held each other close, just embracing now and hoping they’d never be away from each other again.

//

ennis and jack got married on brokeback mountain in the summer of ‘85. the wedding consisted of jack’s mom walking him down the aisle, aj the flower girl, bobby the ring bearer, and billie, aj’s girlfriend as the priest. it was a beautiful small ceremony. aj had her boombox so her dads could have their first dance on brokeback mountain. the del-mar/twist family lived happily between their house and brokeback mountain. aj and bobby were eventually married off to their respected partners. as for ennis and jack, they grew old together. just as they intended.

[achillestiel]

the parent trap only works if you’re identical | part five (if this get’s any longer I’m putting it on ao3)

Tag List: @littlerachelbee @imthedoctorlove @deancas-handprint @castiel-loves-dean @wanderermatthews @thelahatiel @priscillahc @mridzyp @multi-fandom-dark-lord @thefantasyfiend @harmonyhelms @imlivingliferightnow ​ @kara-merlin @still-clowning-in-this-house @never-forever-more @continuezmesfilserrants @2musiclover2 @castiels-bitch @stjimmie @cmths5

“Well thank you for dinner but we should probably be heading out.” Dean said towards the end of one of, if not the most, awkward dinner of his life.

“Dad what about dessert?”

“Claire, we need to get going. It’s a long drive back to Kansas.” Dean said, sighing internally because he knew getting Claire out the damn house was going to be hard. 

“Dean, don't be ridiculous. You’ve been driving for most of the day.” Cas said. “We have the spare bedroom-”

“That’s my room!” Gabriel interrupted. 

“It’s not your room Gabriel. It’s the guest room. You have your own house with your own bedroom.” Cas said, giving Gabriel the bitchiest look Dean had ever seen. That was saying a lot seeing as he’d grown up with Sam. “Dean, why don’t you and Claire stay here for the night? Claire can sleep in Jack’s room and you can sleep in the guest room.” Cas suggested. Claire and Jack grinned at each other and Dean just knew they'd stay up half the night whispering to each other. Or plotting. Most likely plotting.  

No. Nope, Absolutely not going to happen in a million goddamn years. 

“Cas, we can just grab a motel if I get tired.” 

“Dad, I’m not staying in a motel if we can stay here.” Claire said stubbornly. “Plus Jack and I were already planning on making waffles in the morning!” Oh, Jesus Christ. These kids were going to be the death of Dean. And damn if both Claire and Jack weren’t giving him the puppy dog eyes. 

 “Fine. Fine. But we’re heading out in the morning Claire, I mean it.”

“After waffles.” Claire and Jack said in unison. When the hell did those two learn how to do that?

“Excellent, now that’s all sorted I’m going to head home as Winchester’s stolen my room. All the wine is gone anyways.” Gabriel asked, slapping his hand on his thighs as he got out of his seat

“See you in the morning Uncle Gabriel.” Claire said with a grin as Gabriel patted her on the head, ruffled Jack’s hair and gave both Dean and Cas pointed looks.  

“Good night Gabriel.” Cas said, giving his brother a stern look Dean didn’t understand. 

“Same to you bro. Good to see you Winchester, try not to keep this madam a stranger.” Gabriel said, nodding towards Claire.

“I’ll try.” Dean said, mainly to placate Gabriel. Gabriel gave them all a salute before heading out. “Nice to see Gabriel hasn’t changed at all.” Dean said once Gabriel had left. 

“No, he’s still the same annoying ass he’s always been.” Cas said. 

“I like him! He’s invited us to Thanksgiving this year.” Claire said. Yeah that’s not happening. Dean thought. 

“I’m going to teach Claire my secret yam recipe.” Jack said cheerfully. 

“Ah yes, Jack Novak’s secret yam recipe. Involving two whole bags of miniature marshmallows and a ruined casserole dish.” Cas said, shaking his head but giving Jack a fond look. 

“Sounds about as successful as when Claire tried to make apple pie on for Father’s Day.”

“What did you set on fire that time?” Jack asked Claire. Claire could stick her tongue out all she wanted but there were still scorch marks in their kitchen. 

“Yes well, Jack why don’t you and Claire clear up while Dean and I have a quick chat. After that, you can show Claire where she’s sleeping for the night. You two can watch a movie in your room.”

“Cool, how’d you feel about The Avengers?”

“Black Widow is a badass.” Claire said. “Rock, paper, scissors for who washes and who dries?” she then asked. 

“Oh Jesus.” Dean muttered as Cas motioned for him to follow him. Instead of going into the warm looking living room, Cas took Dean upstairs and into a spacious guest room. The walls were painted a deep, honey colour that matched the wooden furniture perfectly. Unlike Dean’s guest room, which was really a junk room, it was immaculately clean. Dean was about to make a quip about the cleanliness of the room before he stopped. In the corner of the room was the very turntable he had brought Cas for the first Christmas they had been together. Without saying a word, Dean walked over and glanced at the records neatly stored in their storage box. Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and even the rare Otis Reading record that Dean had found at a vinyl fair. Cas had kept all of them. For a fleeting moment, Dean wondered if the note he’d hidden in the Bob Dylan record was still there. A hastily scribbled note saying I wasn't born to lose you. Oh, the irony. 

-

Cas watched with cautious eyes as Dean ran a hand over the box of records. Each one Dean had carefully picked out for Cas in another life. He had battled over getting rid of them for years. Gabriel had always said it was strange to keep hold of them but Cas could have never parted with them. When Jack was a toddler Cas had played all of them for him, smiling to himself at how Knocking On Heaven’s Door would always send Jack to sleep. 

“I think we need to have a talk.” Cas said, trying to ease the tension that had enveloped the room. 

“Um yeah.” Dean said with a cough as he straightened up, looking away from the records. “Cause apparently I’m cancelling my Thanksgiving plans with Sam to spend the day with my ex-brother-in-law, eating my body weight in mini marshmallows.” Dean said. “Cas...what are we going to do about this?”

“And by this you mean…”

“The kids. There’s no way Claire’s going to just go back to how it was before. Plus, Jack is an awesome kid. There’s no way I want to go back to how it was before. I mean, maybe Jack could stay with me during the summer?”

“And what? I get Claire during Easter? Christmas?” Cas asked, laughing at the absurdity of the situation. “We came up with this arrangement so the kids could live a normal life. What’s going to happen next, I have them for one year and you have them for the other? That won’t work.”

“No shit Cas but...did you see those two at dinner? They’ve only known each other for a few weeks but it’s clear they adore each other. Claire’s gonna be an even bigger pain in my ass after this. I don’t want to break my...our daughter’s heart when we separate them again and I’m sure you dont want that for Jack.”

“Of course I don’t! What do you honestly suggest then because not only did we come to this agreement to have the kids lead normal lives but it was also so we didn’t have to see each other.” Cas said because even though neither of them would say it, they both knew that seeing each other again would end in a huge fight and a lot of sex. 

"Then why did you ask me to stay?" Dean asked. Good question Dean, very good question. 

"Because it's late and you can't drive throughout the night when you've been driving all day." Cas said. Liar a small voice inside Cas said. As much as he annoys you, you still love him. 

"Oh." Dean said in a small voice. 

"Why? What do you expect me to say?"

"Nothing...forget it." Dean said. “You know, now that we’re here and I’ll probably never be here again. About that day you packed, why'd you do it? Why did you just hop on a train and leave?”

“Dean.” Cas groaned. “We were so young. We both had tempers, we said stupid things so I packed. Got on the train and you didn't come after me.”

“I wanted to but I didn’t think you’d want me to follow.” Dean said in a small voice. “Dammit Cas, you just had to send Jack to the exact same camp as Claire didn’t you? ”

“We haven’t spoken in twelve years, how on earth was I supposed to know where you were sending Claire for the summer? It might shock you to hear this but I can’t read your damn mind Dean. I didn’t send Jack there because a little voice in my head said ‘Oh Dean is sending Claire to this camp! Send Jack so he can meet the twin sister he never knew he had.’” Cas said.  "You are so infuriating, you know that right?”

"I'm infuriating?” Dean asked, looking highly offended. “What about the time you recorded over my Star Trek episode with a documentary on the life of Tomas Jefferson?"

"You have the whole series on DVD! Why did you need to record it off the SyFy channel?"

"You know why! It was the Trouble With Tribbles episode and that was on the DVD that Sam scratched when I let him borrow it!" Dean shot back. 

"Well, you set fire to the patio furniture! Don't even say you didn't because Eileen told me it was you and Sam the next morning." Cas said.

"You scratched the Impala!"

"That wasn't me, it was Gabriel. I lied and said it was me because he was already on his last warning from when he spilt red wine on the couch." 

"Yeah well, you did break my Captain Kirk mug." 

"No Dean, the asinine way you stacked kitchen items broke your Captain Kirk mug." 

"Yeah well, you...you…" Dean said and something inside Cas just broke. This man, this irritating and stubborn man had been the love of his life, his husband and the man he wanted to spend this rest of his life with. Twelve years hadn’t changed a damn thing. 

"Oh for god sake Dean, shut up." Cas said and even though he knew this was the worst plan in the world, even worse than his non-identical twins switching places, Cas pulled Dean in close, their lips crashing against one another. Oh god, it was like going home after a long trip. Cas knew this, knew it better than breathing. Cas still loved Dean more than anyone else in the history of the universe. 

"Cas this is the dumbest-" Dean tried to say between kisses. Frantic kisses that set Cas’ skin ablaze.

"Just shut up and take off your pants." Cas said before his brain could come up with a million reasons why this was a stupid idea. 

“What?”

“Dean, shut up and take off your pants.” Cas said before crashing their lips together again in a kiss that was more like a battle for dominance than anything else. 

“I can’t take off my pants if you keep kissing me.” Dean said as he pulled away and Cas just groaned because this man drove him so insane but all Cas wanted to do was kiss every inch of his body. "This is the worst idea ever."

"Worse than when you let Jo pierce your lip?" Cas asked. He could still the slight scar on Dean’s bottom lip. 

"That was not as bad as the time you wanted to make your own honey." 

"One bee flew in the house Dean, one."

"Bees don't belong in a house Cas, they belong in a beehive."

"Are you really trying to start an argument when we're about to have sex?" Cas asked. Thankfully Dean shook his head. "Good, now take off your clothes and get on the bed."

-

With The Avengers to mask the sound, Claire and Jack sat in Jack’s room as they called their Uncle Sam. After a few rings, he accepted the video call. Grinning at the pair of them with a warm smile.

"Hey kids...man it's weird seeing you two together. How's it going?" Sam asked. 

"Awesome. We made chilli and got them to sit in the same room." Claire said. 

Well, that's something Eileen signed. So what's the plan? 

Plan?

Yeah, the plan. You two are definitely up to something because Claire's involved. 

Why do you always think I'm up to something? Claire asked. 

Intuition

"Past experience." Sam intoned. "Where’re your dads now?”

“Guest room we think, we heard shouting in there about ten minutes ago.”Jack said. “Something about tribbles.”

“Is he still on about that?” Sam groaned. Just out of view on the screen, Eileen signed something to Sam. He groaned and signed back. 

“Hey! Winchester family rule, no covert signing.” Claire said. Sam looked back at her with a classic Uncle Sam Bitchy Face. “What did you say?”

“Ugh.” Sam said. “Fine, your aunt said that if they’re fighting there’s good chance they’ll end up having sex.”

“Ew! Gross!” Jack and Claire said at the same time. “Those are our dads.” Claire said, wrinkling her nose. 

“Yeah? And how do you think you two were made?”

“With a turkey baster and a very patient surrogate.” Claire shot back. “Wait...if they do...you know...do gross stuff, does that mean they’ll get back together?”

Going from past experience, no. They’ll just fight and make noises that, according to your uncle, only dogs can hear.

“That’s really gross Aunt Eileen.” Jack said. “As far as a plan goes, we don’t really have one. Come on, we’re twelve. We need help and Uncle Gabriel has gone home.”

“Good, his plan would have been awful.” Sam said. “Look kids, I know damn well that Dean still loves Cas and judging from what you’ve told us, Cas probably still loves Dean. Just let them fight it out, turn whatever movie you’re watching way up and see how things are in the morning. I know these two idiots pretty well, you can’t force them into anything.”

“We can’t play the long game here Uncle Sam. Dad’s making us leave in the morning.”

“After waffles.”

“Yeah, after waffles I’ll be shoved in the car and grounded until graduate.” Claire said. The four of them sat in silence for a moment before Eileen’s face lit up. 

Ok I have a plan but if it backfires then you do not get it from me. Claire, do you remember how to disable the battery on the Impala? 

“Yeah, I remember...oh...no car means not having to leave.” Claire said with a grin. “Aunt Eileen, you are a genius and never let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“I want no part in this part of the plan.” Sam said hastily. 

“Too late Uncle Sam, welcome to Team Parent Trap.” Jack said happily.     

[ssa-daddyhotchner]

Undercover - Chapter 23

Chapter Selection 

Aaron POV

I was in my office glancing at the doors every few minutes. I was expecting y/n to walk in and go to her desk; she never did. She was still at the house when I left... where the hell is she. 

I looked at the clock she was an hour late, I took out my phone and tapped on her contact. The phone started ringing... and kept ringing. Eventually it went to voicemail. Maybe she was still driving and didn't want to answer the phone. 

I called again and again and still no answer. I was getting anxious; I stood for my chair and walked into the bullpen, "Have you guys heard from y/n today." They said no and asked what was wrong, I ignored them. 

I went down to Garcia's office, typing in the code and going in. I shut the door and stood behind her putting a hand on her chair, "Sir you scared me." I hummed. 

"Can you track y/n's phone, I haven't heard from her." 

"Ok... it says she is on 5, she's not moving. Hold on- there was an accident that just happened this morning", she said turning to me. "Do you think it's her?" 

"I don't know, don't tell the team where I'm going. I need to make sure." Garcia nodded turning to her computers. Going into the elevator I waited for seemed like forever to get to the parking lot. I started driving to 5... 

It couldn't be her she would never be reckless. When I arrived at her last location there were cop cars and a fire truck. I approached one of the officers. "Do you know what happened here?" 

"Truck rear ended that car. There was one person injured... that's all we know." I tried to ask him what hospital they took the person too but he didn't know. I called Garcia.

"I think it was y/n... from what I can tell it's her car. Where are they taking her." 

"Oh my god... uh yeah- they're going to... the General Memorial." I hung up the phone immediately getting into my car and driving. I didn't pay any attention to the speed limit or really any other cars, I just wanted-- needed to get to her. 

When I got to the parking lot I ran in going to the front desk, "I'm here for a y/n y/l/n.”

The lady was going to give me a bullshit excuse so I pulled out my credentials and she told me what room to find her in. I went to the 2nd floor room 225, I walked in and there she was. 

I saw her chart on the wall, she had a concussion and some miner internal damage but ultimately she was going to be okay. I took a seat next to her bed letting Garcia know she was fine. The car was on fire... if she was in there. 

Y/n POV

I didn't open my eyes yet but I could feel another presence in the room. I could smell their cologne and in an instant I knew who it was Aaron. I started moving around; I winced in pain, "You're awake." I sensed him move closer and grab my hand. 

I opened my eyes and the lights burned my eyes for a moment before they adjusted. He had a sad smile on his face, "How are you?" My lips tugged upwards, "Good for someone who just got hit by a car..." The realization set in and I remembered the whole event. 

I snapped my head towards Aaron, "How's Jack." he furrowed his brows in confusion. "What do you mean? You dropped him off didn't you?" I shook my head. "H- he was in... the car", I let out a small yeah and closed my eyes tight. 

"Do you kno- know where he is." 

"When I woke up in the car Jack was gone... I didn't see anything." I watched as anger washed over Aaron, his son was missing and I was my fault. 

He didn't blame me but himself for not driving with me or taking Jack himself. "We got to tell the team. This is a case till I say otherwise." He walked out the room and made some calls. A few minutes later he walked back in and sat down with me. 

Aaron was about to speak when the nurse entered the room, "You're up, how are you feeling on a scale of 1 - 10." 

"Maybe 5", She jotted down on my chart and checked my vitals. "You seem to be ok, we'll check up another hour then we can get you the discharge papers and get you out of here." I gave her a smile and resumed the conversation with Aaron.

"Do you know how long it's been since the accident", he sat down in the chair next to me.

 "Maybe a few hours, I'm not sure... give me a cognitive."

"Who do you think might've done this." I racked my brain trying to find the answers that were hidden away. My concussion made it harder to remember little details. I sat up in the bed while Aaron turned the lights down. 

I held my head in my hands, rubbing my temple like somehow it was going to give me my memory back. I was focusing, running the moments in my mind, going through frame by frame like it was a movie.

"I unbuckled my seatbelt and looked for Jack- he wasn't in the car so I crawled out the broken window. I stumbled my way to the road and I saw a car pass by... shit." I forgot who was driving it but they looked familiar, I couldn't figure out if it was a male or female.   

"I'm going to get some sleep... it'll come back to me", Aaron looked down at his hands; a tear falling from his eye onto the floor. I noticed. "Aaron, it’ll be okay. We'll find him." He glanced at me, wiping his eyes.

"Yeah I know", I grabbed his hand and held it reassuringly. I laid back down and closed my eyes. 

"Watch out!" I didn't understand what Jack was talking about until it was too late. There was a truck headed towards the car, slamming into the rear end.

Before I knew it the car was tumbling; I got knocked out and when I came too I was upside-down. My vision was fading in and out and my ears were ringing, I made out trees and wet grass. 

I was able to unbuckle my seatbelt and turn around- Jack was gone and I didn't see a trace of him anywhere. No blood, clothes... just nothing. I stumbled out of the car and made my way to the road. Seeing a car drive passed, what I did get was a clear view of the driver... Mark. 

I jerked up, tugging on Aaron's hand and waking him up as well, "Mark took Jack." When the words fell from my lips Aarons anger returned. He kept calm but I could tell he was fuming underneath. The nurse walked back in, "Here you go." 

She dropped off the discharge papers; Aaron signed them in an instant and we left. He took me home, out of habit I checked the mail, oh fucking course. I followed Aaron inside and set the note that he left on the island. We read it together. 

You took my child away from me... something special. I can't have you y/n I cared about you.                          You fucking killed my kid. So I took something from you. 

When we were done the letter I got a call from Morgan; I put him on speaker. "Guy's you might want to get back here, this is something I can't say to you over the phone." 

I ended the call and hopped back into the car, my head was pounding from all the movement but I didn't care. Aaron rushed back to the office entering the doors and elevator. We reached the bullpen and we saw the team gathered in the round table room. 

Rossi nodded to Garcia and she turned on the tv, and it was a live feed. 

Jack was in a blacked out room, there were toys on the floor and a flat broken bed. The wallpaper was dingy and peeling. A single window allowed light into the room with crust and dirt almost completely covering it. 

Aaron was fuming, I could feel it radiating off of him. I hesitantly reached up to his arm and guided him out to his office away from everyone. "What the fuck!", he yelled out. 

"Baby, I'm pissed off too but you need to calm down." He turned, going behind his desk and leaning his hands on it. 

"And how exactly am I supposed to fucking do that! Please tell me!", he shouted and I felt small. I backed away from him going into the corner; I felt tears brimming my eyes. I get he was beyond pissed and I was too, Jack was basically a son to me. I let him express the anger. 

He slowly calmed down and realized what he did. His face dropped and he hesitantly made his way over to me, "Y/n I'm sorry." He said softly.

"It's fine", my voice was strained trying to keep it together, him yelling... reminded me of- him. 

I took my time then I stood in front of him. "I get it, not completely but I do. One time... that's it, we all lose it sometimes-", I went closer to him gripping his jaw and making him look at me in my eyes. 

"But if you ever. yell at me like that again, I'm not going to be so understanding", I saw tears in his eyes, the rage melted away and now he was just- missing his son. He nodded and he hugged me, resting his head on mine. 

"Trust me, I'm not gonna yell at you again."

2 days later

"Where is he!?", I heard from coming from the bullpen. I glanced at Aaron asleep on the couch and decided to leave him. I opened the door and saw an angry Hayley coming through.

"You can't be here", I stared at her as she came closer to Aarons office. "Fuck the restraining order, where the hell is my son", I knew if she found out that I was with him when he was kidnapped she would quite literally  shoot me right here. 

I didn't answer but the commotion attracted the attention of everyone in the office. I felt a hand on my lower back and I turned; the yelling woke Aaron up. "What do you want?", she looked at him dumbfounded.

"Is anyone gonna tell me where my goddamn son is?"

"He's not here", Hayley scoffed clearly. "You would think his father would know." I wanted to punch her, I could just imagine my hand hitting her in the jaw. 

No one on the team liked Hayley but they thought she should at least know. Rossi walked out of the round table room and called her over. She made her way through the door and was met with the live feed of Jack; he was sleeping in the thin bed. 

I watched her as she fell on the floor and was crying. Nobody bothered to pick her up or console her. Eventually she collected herself and stood against the table. Tears still flooding her face she turned to me, "This is your fault, you and your fucking ex husband." 

Aaron was quick to cover me and standing in front, "This isn't anyone's fault." Fully standing up she took a step towards him, "Of course you'd say that. You're the one that lost him." 

"If you weren't deemed unfit for a time then you would've had him with you. Then you can blame yourself. Like I said this isn't anyone's fault." He spat the words out and I was thinking what she said. In a way this was my fault, it was just Mark. He was behind everything although we already knew that. 

If I had never been with Aaron he wouldn't be in this situation, Jack wouldn't be. I pushed the thoughts back in my mind, I didn't notice but Hayley was gone and Garcia had cut the feed. 

I walked up to her, "Are you sure you can't track it?" Pen shook her head.

"It's bouncing off of so many proxy servers- I'm sorry." I sighed and went back to Aaron. He had walked back into his office when Hayley left. I softly knocked on the door, "Not right now." Not listening I opened the door, He was laying on the couch with his arm resting on his head. 

"I said not right no- oh", he saw me and sat up. I went to the couch and sat down, Aaron laid his head in my lap. I ran my fingers through his hair, "Get some sleep." He closed his eyes; I knew he was sleeping when I felt his breathing steady and he was taking deep breaths.

I moved and got up, careful to not wake him after some time. I turned off the lights and walked out to the briefing room. I was thinking about Jack, just missing his face. I saw the remote in the middle of the table and picked it up. 

When I the tv turned on there he was, Jack was awake. It was getting dark out but the camera had night vision. He was scared and cold; I could see his breath in the video. His birthday was coming up and we might not be there for it. 

I had the video muted because I couldn't bring myself to turn it on. To hear his voice calling out for his dad... me. It broke my heart. 

I was driving him to school and within seconds I was flipped over and he was gone. I made silent promises to myself that we were going to get him back. I heard steps behind me and a hand on my shoulder. 

"How are you doing?", Reid sat down next to me. "Right now... not great. I miss that kid so fucking much, he was like a son to me." Reid reached his hand out.

"It'll be okay, we're going to find him." I knew he was right but I can't help the thought if we never did. How would Aaron and I move on? Would he blame me for it? 

"What if we don't." He took a deep breath, trying to find the right words to comfort me. 

"We can't start thinking like that, we will", he was right. The negative mindset was going to set us off course. I needed to think of Mark; what was his end game. 

He wanted a child and that's why he thought I was a safe bet, he thought I'd keep it. All I could think of was that he wanted a child. Not a random child but one that had a connection to me. He wanted to feel like I was around him all the time. 

Jack was young and impressionable, he picked up some habit that I did. He wasn't going to hurt Jack but raise him as his own. Even though he was young he wasn't going to forget his parents. Which makes sense considering he was in a locked room. 

"Do yourself a favor, go home the rest of the team and I will keep working." I give him a sad smile and pat his back and walk to get Aaron. When I walked in Aaron was at his desk on the computer. 

I didn't say anything, I went over to him and sat on his lap wrapping my arms around his neck. His hands traveled to my waist and back holding me close. "Spencer said we should go home", he hummed in agreement. 

I pulled back and looked at him in his eyes, "He's not wrong, we need sleep." I got off him and pulled him up by his hand. He closed the laptop and grabbed his stuff; walking out towards the elevator we were getting eyes from the team. 

Getting pity looks, It’s what I didn't want. The unwanted attention followed us through the building as we walked through to the parking lot. Word traveled and we had people feeling bad for us everywhere. 

When we sat in the car we didn't speak. Silence coated the both of us, we just needed time. The darkness from outside made the both of us feel alone. 

Going into the empty house, no laughter, no cartoons in the background. I glanced at the coffee table seeing the drawing he made while he was waiting for me to take him to school.  

Aaron and I looked into his bedroom seeing his toys neatly stored away like he taught him. The made bed that I showed him how to do because he never listened to Aaron. I thought back to that moment and it made me smile. 

I tugged on Aaron's arm bringing him to bed. We laid down and I pulled him close to me. I was hopping any second I would hear the patter on the floor as Jack ran into the room but... nothing.

____________________________

@mac99martin @donttellanyoneireadfanfiction @appleblossoms-posts @marie1115  @wanniiieeee @oreogutz @errorcosplay67 @aberrant-annie 

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #434

“i hate this town, it’s so washed up, & all my friends don’t give a fuck  /  they’ll tell me that it’s just bad luck, when will i find where i fit in?”

You get a text from your ex. He/she wants to hang out. How do you respond? Admittedly, I would. Do you have a friend of the opposite sex that you secretly want to be more than friends with? No. Well, there are times where I think I WANT to like-like Girt, but I just don't. And yet he's always been there for me without fail, is super funny and kind and chill... but I think we were just friends for too long; he feels like my brother by this point in time. If your partner smoked, would that be a problem for you? If it was cigarettes, yes. Even weed (UNLESS it was for medicinal purposes and not a constant thing) I'd be iffy about. I just don't want to date a smoker. Lung damage is lung damage and weed actually has more carcinogens, and I don't want to sign myself up for all that. I don't want to watch my partner wither away from nonstop smoking and also have myself suffer from second-hand smoking. When will you next see your best friend? There's no telling. Right now I'm trying to be realistic and responsible with the money I DO ever get and put it towards more important investments, but I really do want to take a plane up there at some point. But that's also waiting until Covid is in the past. Heeeell no would I be stepping into an airport right now, even being vaccinated. How many tattoos would you like to have? Too many to count, ha ha. I want LOADS. Paint me, baby. :') Do you like your first name? I actually do. Have you ever talked to a boyfriend about an ex-boyfriend? Yes. It's kind of inevitable when you go into a new relationship, hoping it'll go well and be seriously invested, that you let your partner know "oh hey, this happened and seriously affected me to where I'm going to have 'my days.'" Greatest birthday gift you ever got? My snake Venus was technically a birthday present, though I obviously picked her out. Worst memory you have? Losing Jason. I can't say enough that the night of the breakup still doesn't feel real. First memory you can remember? My brother going down our slide into the Hurricane Floyd flood in our front yard, ha ha. I was around two, I wanna say? I don't feel like looking up the date of the hurricane. Oldest object you own? When did you get it? I'm sure that would be a stuffed animal we have stored away somewhere. Or my baby blanket, also safely tucked away. Meanest person you know? Why do you feel this way? I don't "know" Colleen anymore, but God knows she fit the bill. She was so fucking rude to people (yes, she was one of those people that bitched out store employees that have no control over things that inconvenienced her), the world revolved around her problems, she started drama with the damn grass... It's funny even picturing how she was my best friend once. My standards were lower for who I could befriend back then, but goddamn. Ever been dumped? By who? Yes, Jason. Technically Sara as well, but "dumped" seems like an unfitting term? Like we just talked it out and sorta mutually agreed that it was wiser that we weren't together at the time. Have you ever dumped someone? Why? Yes, mostly because I didn't like-like them. Juan was more so because I believed a rumor by Rachel, and Tyler, I just wasn't invested in and had NO desire to put up with the "we need to talk every five minutes" crap. Where do you buy most of your food? Wal-Mart. Last house you have been to: whose was it, and why were you there? My sister's, for my nephew's birthday party. Have you ever been a drunk driver? No, and fuck you if you've ever put others (and yourself) at risk like that. One kid you cannot stand? None that I know, and that's very few. Has anyone ever saved your life? Jason and Mom literally have. Last thing you cried about? Ha ha, I finished watching another SOMA playthrough earlier, and I will ALWAYS start to cry at the end. Without fail. Would you sacrifice your life for someone else's baby? I honestly think I would if it was a split-second decision. Tell me about your latest dream: I think my APAP mask wasn't positioned well last night, because I had a SHITLOAD of nightmares. Too many to even remember. Have you ever been in a limo? No. I've always wanted to experience that once, man. Have you ever been the maid of honor in a wedding party? No. Has anyone ever seen you naked? I was born naked, my man. Mom used to give my sister and I baths together, and I took a bath with a best friend once as a kid. Then one other person has. Do you have a calendar? If so, what is the theme of it? Not a current one, no. Nicest thing you have ever done for a complete stranger: I have no idea. Meanest thing you have ever done to a complete stranger: *shrug* Have you ever been sent to the principal's office? If so, why? And how did you feel? Yes, I think because they wanted to ask the reason behind all my morning tardies. I was soooo scared, just being a kid. Person you hope you never run into again: Colleen. Have you ever streaked? Heeeeell no. Why do you hate your ex? I don't hate any of them. What animal did you last pet or hold? Roman, my cat. What color is your hair? It's my natural brunette right now. I want to dye it SO badly. Have you ever fallen asleep in someone's arms? Yeah. Have you ever had to clean a cat box before? Yeah, seeing as I own an indoor cat. Christmas is coming. Who are you buying gifts for? In the hypothetical situation where I had the money, I'd buy things for my parents, my stepmom, my two immediate sisters, Ash's kids, as well as her husband, but only because I'd feel obligated to as he's considered a close member of the family. I'd also totally get something for Sara! When somebody intimidates you, how do you usually act around them? SCARED. I get quiet, stutter if I do talk, and possibly cry. Is your favorite singer in a band or does he or she ride solo? He was originally the singer of Black Sabbath, but he's been solo for forever now. I prefer him solo, honestly. Did your parents ever hang your old artwork up on the walls? Ohhh yes. Mom still does, ha ha. What is the weirdest obsession you’ve ever had? Nothing really "weird," I think... How long can you be in a car before wanting to get out? It depends on if I have my music or not. If I do, I can last hours, but if not, I don't really like being in the car at all. Have any songs ever inspired you to play an instrument? No. Do you ever use Pandora?No. Are you better with creative writing or writing essays? Creative writing, but I'm fine with both. What is the weirdest animal you’ve ever seen as a pet? I know OF someone who rescued I want to say a baby bobcat, or something along those lines, but I didn't know that guy personally. I don't think I've ever actually met someone with a truly *strange* pet... The most unique I've seen is probably just a chinchilla. If you had to change one, would you rather change your hair or your eyes? My eyes. I don't like them much, mainly the shape. What was your favorite computer game as a kid? I loved the various Oregon Trail games, as well as one I think was called The Amazon Trail 3. Then there was a few dinosaur games I LOVED, and then there were the classic kids' games like the Putt-Putt and Fred the Fish series. Any shows on TV that you flat out refuse to start watching? 13 Reasons Why. I don't even support that show existing. Pajamas with feet: yay or nay? NOOOOOOOO, that is so uncomfortable. What is your opinion on fruitcake? That's an even BIGGER "no." Who did you last dream about? I don't remember. Do you have trouble remembering important things? Yes. .-. I barely remember anything. Which animal can you imitate the best? I dunno? Have you bought any drugs this month? I don't do drugs, so. Have you ever set foot in a tanning bed? Nope, never will. Do you know the Soulja Boy dance? Ha ha, I did as a kid. My then-best friend, younger sister, and I wanted to learn it. I don't remember it now, that's for sure. What is the best ice cream flavor? Ben and Jerry's "Phish Food" is GODLY. Wallpaper on your computer's desktop? Teddy, my late dog. Do you clean when you’re upset? Hell no, I do the opposite: nothing. Do you sleep with the door open or closed? It stays open. My cat would pitch a fit otherwise. Do you know anyone who has actually been in an alcohol or drug related crash? Yes, actually. It was incredibly tragic; the both of them were high (maybe drunk, idr for sure), and my friend was driving with her best friend in the passenger seat. They crashed, and said friend's best friend died. For YEARS she would share pictures of them together on Facebook, "talking" to her, and it was just so heartbreaking. I doubt she's forgiven herself to this day, but she seems to have mostly moved on the best she could, being married with a daughter now. Have you ever gotten a professional massage? No, and I do NOT want one. I don't want some random stranger touching me in ANY way. Do you have a good relationship with your first love? No. We haven't talked in years, so maybe he feels no hatred for me at this point, but I do for myself. I don't hate him at all. Do you feel like you have life figured out? bitch hell no What would you do if you were faced with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy (at your current age)? Was I raped? I'd almost certainly abort because I would be traumatized as FUCK. If it was my own fault, I think I'd go through with the pregnancy, but give the baby up for adoption. There is no way I could raise a kid right now. Or probably ever. Water or Gatorade? I don't like either, really, but I HATE Gatorade. Have you ever thought about getting your nose pierced? It's been pierced twice, and I'm thinking of getting it redone again, but this time use a hoop instead of a stud to keep the damn piercing from falling out and closing in my sleep. Have you ever slapped someone? On the arm as a kid. That doesn't excuse it, though. Who are the pictures of in the room? I have a lot of posters, but no real photographs of anyone. Have your parents ever smoked pot? Dad did a lot of drugs before I was born, but Mom's never touched anything. I think. Would you ever consider moving to a different country? I'd love to live in Canada, if that didn't entail leaving my family. What is your favourite food from your culture? Cheeseburgers, alsdf;alwer Do you know any pick-up lines in a foreign language? No. What degree are you or will you pursue while in college? I've dropped out of college three times. I am never going back to major in anything. I changed my major quite a few times while I was there. Favorite arcade game? I don't really have one. One of my life goals is to go to an arcade that has Silent Hill: The Arcade, though. There are very few throughout the world, and it looks fun. Would other people consider your sense of humor inappropriate? I don't see how. Some inappropriate things can make me laugh, but it's definitely not my favorite form of humor, and I myself don't really make jokes of that sort. Who is your biggest celebrity crush right now? Mark Fischbach. :'') What are they famous for? He's a big YouTuber, aND WILL ALSO BE A MAIN ACTOR IN A SHOW NEXT YEAR. LET'S GOOOOOOOOOO. Have you ever had a controlling boyfriend/girlfriend? No, I would NOT stand for that bullshit. Do you have any gay family members? I know my mom's... cousin I want to say is gay. Somebody related to her is. Was your first kiss romantic? I feel like it was. What are you most likely to go to jail for? Pirating shit. Well, can you even be locked up for downloading minor shit? Shows what I know. Have you ever liked someone that was in a relationship with someone else? Boy, have I. Would you ever get a boob job? When (or if...) I lose all the weight I want, I can almost guarantee a breast lift will be something I'd want. Certain things happen when you lose a shitload of weight alsdkf;alkwe Have you ever tried to break up anyone because you liked one of them? Not intentionally. What would you think if you found out your ex was gay? If we're talking THE ex, safe to say I'd be shocked. Did you ever think someone didn’t like you, but come to find out they really did? It's weird, I've felt both ways with Girt? Like there were times I was pretty much 100% certain he liked me, but I'd also be like "nah, no way, he sees me as a sister." Turns out he like-liked me. Are you worried about anything right now? I can't possibly recall the last time I WASN'T worried about something. When you are home alone, do you still close the door when you shower? I don't shower when I'm home alone because I'm afraid of ever fainting and busting my ass again. What noise do you hear? I'm currently listening to "All Signs Point To Lauderdale" by A Day to Remember, and I can also hear my fan going. Do you go online everyday? Pretty much without fail. It'll probably be a cold day in Hell before I willingly don't come online, ha ha.

[carriecutforth]

The Shit

Tumblr is telling me to go ahead, put anything...so here it goes

I haven't been public about this for reasons that will be apparent but gonna start this with all the trigger warnings. I'm writing it here cause I can't talk to the majority of people about it cause most people can't even grasp, and then questions start, putting me in the situation of feeling like my GIANT SWEATER of trauma is being unraveled answering questions that lead to more questions and gah PLEASE DO NOT RETUMBL-- I just need to scream in the void This is the shit: On the day my sister-in-law's mother died she had to call form-1 my baby brother because his psychosis (undiagnosed mental illness which I will get to) was terrorizing their family (three small kids). My mother WHO IS SCHIZOPHRENIC had him released into her and my ANTI-VAXXER ANTI-MASKER narcissist father's care, but NOT before they found out, incidentally due to the FORM 1, he is ALSO really sick with leukemia. I only found out because I decided to dip into the special folder for emails called MOM that I try to avoid reading as long as they can FOR REASONS. But I felt for some reason an urge to, and then I had to try to parse out what had happened from her ramblings that are A LOT. Then I had to confirm with my poor sil who is at her wits end and was in no position to tell me herself. My dad stopped talking to me back in November when I called him for his anti-vax rhetoric as being EUGENICS when he told me it is just the flu and only killing old people and the disabled. I reminded him I've been immuno-compromised my whole life (he KNOWS this) and got chronic fatigue after a flu in late 2016 (he knows this), and did he not care if I DIED? (apparently not) But I was like lol, fine, don't talk to me anymore. Die mad about it for all I care. A lot of people are like: 'oh, that's tough, losing a relationship with your father' and I'm like YOLO (it really isn't if you knew him). SO THEN I have to reach out to my dad: "Why isn't my brother in the hospital being treated by medical professionals for YOU KNOW, HIS LEUKEMIA." My dad responded that the doctors were JUST GOING TO PUMP HIM FULL OF DRUGS! And that HE is treating my brother's leukemia with I dunno baking soda (he told me before it is a cure for cancer). THEN HE GOES RADIO SILENT. I have no idea where my brother is cause they got him an apartment somewhere in Toronto. *though I do have a Machiavellian plan to try to find out. The reason my brother has untreated psychosis is that even though I've begged my parents since he was a TEEN to get him diagnosed, they refused. It's like they have the opposite of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in that their ABLEISM is soooo bad they refuse to see he has been very sick, and even if he was really sick, 'doctors are stupid' <--quoting my dad. This is the backstory. My dad was always on the road for his job. My mom had my baby brother AGAINST all wishes of her doctor to ever get pregnant again. I'm not talking aborting, she got PREGNANT on purpose again to SERVE GOD'S GREATER PURPOSE even though it might kill her and said future fetus. So he was born with a lot of issues because of the very bad pregnancy's complications on TOP of the very hereditary bipolar/schizophrenia, AND everything else we got going on besides. After he was born, my mom went into a very deep depression for years and then would vacillate between that and mania. Which meant me: THE ELEVEN year old was forced to raise a baby that wasn't hers and had no ultimate authority over. I was called by everyone his *BROTHER'S NAME* SECOND MOM. *More on this later Our relationship is very strained because of this, particularly when at 17 I had enough momming a child while being constantly undermined by my parents absolute shenanigans. So there was resentment when I quit being his 'second mom' and that he equally resented for things like, trying to put him into bed, when my mom would come in and say let him stay up all night or getting him to eat something other than candy for breakfast (you can guess the dynamic with my parents here). Even if my disabled ass could sue my parents for his

care, he doesn't WANT me to be in charge of his care.

And yet still, I tried to advocate for him for years fighting my parents TOOTH and NAIL to get him on disability and out from underneath their thumb so he could have a measure of independence and autonomy. They had every excuse in the book not to get him diagnosed including expense. It was so goddamned awful fighting with them on this cause in their mind: he was going to live with either them or me forever (they decided this for me and my ex-husband and kids with no consultation), so WHY bother set up his future for him??? So when he was 20?, I hatched a Machiavellian PLAN: I got him, against my parent's wishes, into college for the sole reason of getting the resources for him to get diagnosed so that he could get on disability. AND IT WORKED! (kinda) Except my parents twisted him so much into only talking about his autism spectrum symptoms and NONE of the psychosis because their ableism is sooooo entrenched. (but I did manage to get him on ODSP). And subsequent times I forced my dad to take him to a psychiatrist, he's like: 'oh, I forgot to talk about the psychosis we just talked about the aspergers. Besides people with psychosis are untreatable, you can't convince them otherwise' (see again, my mom). Over the years, I have begged my dad to take my brother to get properly diagnosed and treated (I'm not meaning forced, my brother is also agoraphobic, and won't leave his place UNLESS he is driven by my dad and was living in a city far away from me). I said, I was very concerned for his kids but my dad always gaslights me (and tells everyone I'm crazy -- the IRONY). So now my mom is writing me emails about how this is all my sil's fault because 'she is on drugs' (she is not), 'she is sleeping around' (she is not), 'her kids are scared of her not my brother' (it's the exact opposite). WHICH IS A HUGE TRIGGER FOR ME because She did the exact same thing to ME with my other brother (a diagnosed PSYCHOPATH) who used to beat me and the rest of us mercilessly when my parents weren't around (and they never believed me, and told everyone not to believe me because I was crazy), who pulled a KNIFE on me and threw a drawer at me when I was NINE MONTHS PREGNANT, and how absolutely awful I was AS HIS SISTER to kick him out of my house with no place to live or go (cause he was living with me and my ex-husband at the time because THEY KICKED HIM OUT OF THEIR PLACE and didn't want him back.) Are you beginning to get a sense of the dynamic of my family? Soooooooo the last few weeks my brain has just been in total trauma mode going processing, processing, processing, processing as the final total realization of how absolutely awful my family is finally laid bare (I mean I knew but at least I can stop feeling guilty about cutting them out of my life). So back to the 'second mom' shit, as relevant to my trauma brain processing the last few weeks. This whole shit above is just the tip of the iceberg. I was raised as a Joho in which a lot of my trauma comes from a pedophile left loose on three generations of girls in my family over a thirty year period, and if anyone came forward they were threatened with disfellowshipment and there is SO MUCH there it would take me several Tolkien novels to get how absolutely awful, extensive it was, and how the coverup went straight to the top. ANYHOO. So who was calling me my brother's 'second mom???' Well since, I wasn't allowed to have any association with non-witnesses, it was my congregation. No one questioned that I was being parentified and it was a deeply abusive situation. NO WHAT HAPPENED instead was, this sister in the congregation told everyone (when I was fifteen and 80 pounds soaking wet at the height of 5'10 1/2) that my brother WAS REALLY MY CHILD cause it was so obvious the way that I was the one who took care of him. And the elders of our congregation MARKED me as bad association for loose morals for having a supposed child out of wedlock when I was ELEVEN YEARS OLD. AND NO ONE in my congregation would talk to me, and I had NO IDEA why, cause they never told me that I HAD BEEN

MARKED. But the caveat was I was not allowed to talk to people outside of the faith. And we only found out about this a year an a half later when she said the same shit back in my hometown where he was born to a sister who was at the hospital where my brother was born. AND NO ONE thought, hey: maybe if we think she had a baby when she was eleven we should um CALL CHILD SERVICES or some shit? So i was like 16 1/2, not allowed to have any friends OUTSIDE OF MY PARENTS, find out THIS SHIT, and then people wonder why I had my first manic episode at 17??? Yeah, so this is where my brain has been stuck the last month, complicated that I knew I would be at risk for hypomania with things opening back up, and I'm supposed to be shooting a pilot for a potential series I'm the creator/co-shorunner of, so now I've had to go BACK on seroquel and it's the worst while i try to acclimatize myself to the drugs and stave off hypomania at the same time. WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

[reylofanfictionanthology]

Authors have now been revealed for For one is love and both are one in love!

Over 170 fics were posted to our Exchange this month and we are so excited to finally share the authors with you!  Thank you so much to all of the writers who wrote for this event!  

For one is love and both are one in love collection on AO3 |  Gift Fic Master Post Part One | Gift Fic Master Post Part Two

Treats Masterpost:

Only Now Can We Remember by misszeldasayre for america_oreosandkitkats

Ben Solo arrives home, disgraced. All of Hanna City judges him—all but Rey.

just want the devil to hate me by walkingsaladshooter for america_oreosandkitkats

Three years after he killed the past, Kylo Ren returns to the town where he was only ever Ben Solo. Nothing is even remotely healed, but maybe he can start.

Each Day is Valentine's Day by HellyJellyBean for andabatae

Accidental Praise by QueenOfCarrotFlowers for andabatae

Ben likes his new roommate, Rey. She's smart and funny, and she's a good cook; she's fun to hang out with, although she seems to blush a lot. Maybe she's coming down with something? Anyway, when she has an interview and she needs some help selecting her outfit, Ben is there to help her out, any way he can.

She learned that word from Whom? by itsinthestars for aNerdObsessed

Rey and Ben Solo's young daughter, Reia Solo, says a bad word in front of them and now the couple wonder where she learned it... 👀

Her Inspiration by itsinthestars for Ann3onymous

Art student, Rey Johnson is preparing her Final Portfolio and her inspiration for it all is her boyfriend, Ben Solo.

Regeneration by crossingwinter for bitterbones

She should have known it wouldn’t work. Not wanting to tell her friends because she knew she’d have gotten a you can’t be friends with benefits with your ex talk should have told her all she needed to know.

Gentle Sin by QueenOfCarrotFlowers for CeciliaSheplin

Rey is writing a new song, maybe Ben can help.

As Boundless as the Sea by SpaceWaffleHouseTM for crossingwinter

Padmé survives and raises her kids, but decades later her grandson meets the granddaughter of the man who took everything from her at a masquerade, and sparks fly. Upon realizing who the other is, the two must make an impossible choice: risk losing the love of their families, or risk losing the possibility of loving each other.

Within and Without by misszeldasayre for CwenPhy

When Rey brings Ben back to Ajan Kloss after he saves her, Finn objects to his presence and burgeoning relationship with Rey. However, he can't ignore their friends who observe something real between Rey and Ben.

Strays by crossingwinter for dankobah

Rey rescues a mangy mutt from the site of a junkyard and brings the dog to the Solo Veterinarian Clinic. There she falls in love with the handsome son who's just really trying to save all animals.

The Gentleness That Comes by shewhospeakswiththunder for ilum

For the prompts: "1990s New York AU. Ben rejects his wealthy, reputable family (bonus points for !lawyer Leia) and decides to fend for himself. He ends up getting involved with an underground boxing community. One day, bloodied and bruised after a fight, he goes for a drink to the local bar he frequents. To his surprise, he finds a young, fresh-faced girl behind the bar instead of the usual bartender." And: "We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it." Richard Siken - "Snow and Dirty Rain."

Stay Safe by crossingwinter for itsinthestars

Just one curse.  Just one simple curse and she’ll be gone.  Blasted off the face of the earth.  When had that idea become repellant to him?

prince and the sea by thewayofthetrashcompactor for kuresoto

Prince Ben Chewbacca Solo Organa, descendant of the house of Naberrie and the line of Skywalker, heir to the Starbird pirate fleet, has followed in the family tradition of slaying monsters and ruling the high seas. Which in no way is an attempt at ignoring his soulmate bond.

to be held, and held together by walkingsaladshooter for Lightningpelt

“I want to stay here with you,” he murmurs. “In this bed. And I want to make you feel nothing but good things.” — "After the war, Ben and Rey travel to Naboo for a vacation. The first thing Ben wants to do is spoil Rey as best he can.

Beneath The Stars by itsinthestars for MBlair

Rey and Ben celebrate their first Valentine's Day with snuggles, comfort, and kisses beneath the stars.

In the Name of Whitney, Mariah, and Aretha – Amen by reylogarbagechute for MBlair

A snapshot of happily-coupled NYC Ben and Rey via: one overblown Valentine’s Day fight, one dramatic rendition of karaoke, and one round of bang-and-make-up in a dive bar bathroom. Literary merit questionable, ridiculous crack-fluff guaranteed. A #RFFA fic.

False Positive by apisa_b for MissCoppelia

The health check Ben was given after he joined the Resistance didn't come back quite as clean as he expected, which causes Rey to feel rather guilty.

Tangentially MintyCel for ninecrimes

After Exegol Rey goes through a period of deep mourning, escaping to the crowded towns of Corellia where no one knows who she is whenever she needs some time by herself. But one day, a stranger walks into the dingy bar where Rey is drinking some of her sadness away, a stranger that seems all too familiar and is wearing Ben Solo's face.

Killing Me Softly by HellyJellyBean for PalenDrome

A short Mr and Mrs Smith Reylo AU treat. :-)

bittersweet and strange by thewayofthetrashcompactor for PalenDrome

Rey has decided that she's done with waiting. If she can't have a soulmate, she's going to be the best Jedi the galaxy has ever seen, and not even Luke Skywalker is going to stop her. She'll take on a mission to defeat a monster and prove that she's as good as any of his students, despite his warnings. Of course, monsters aren't always what we expect.

Conjugal Visit by radioactivesaltghoul for persimonne

Being the last Jedi comes with a lot of perks. For example, nobody questions Rey when she brings a bag full of equipment to come visit her accidental husband in prison.

This Connection by itsinthestars for persopilliankore

After one passionate night at an office party, Rey Johnson and Ben Solo, finally confront each other...

Unshakeable by crossingwinter for politicalmamaduck

Rey is performing in another fucking musical and Ben goes to see it.

Ash and Blood by CeciliaSheplin for queenofcarrotflowers

Bloodthirsty warrior Kylo Ren is betrayed by his men and must flee. He is helped by a mysterious woman and her friends. He joins forces with them to get his revenge.

In Secret, Between the Shadow and the Soul midwinterspring for RedPaladin465

Five years after defeating Palpatine, Emperor Kylo Ren and Empress Rey rule the galaxy.

If I Was A Raindrop (Would You Be My Thunderstorm) by itsnotillegal for ReyloBrit

Rey has finally worked up the courage to tell her best friend she likes him, but an awkward encounter complicates matters...

White Silk by TourmalineGreen for SaintHeretical

There is one person, however, in the office, who does not fill her with genuine joy. “Brides don’t want unembellished gowns, they want sparkles!” she’s yelling to the owner-designer-asshole who ruins her life and harshes her chill on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. “Just last week, I had five brides who asked for more bling at a price point they—” “I don’t deal in ‘bling,’” Ben Solo is yelling back, behind his closed office door, but clearly loud enough that everyone can hear it. Everyone in the back office, thank God. Not the customers. She hopes. “I deal in couture,” he says. “I deal in design. I deal in elegance. Women want to feel elegant on their wedding day, not like a goddamn Vegas showgirl—” “Oh, oh, that’s rich, you, telling me what it is that women want?” Rey scoffs, almost laughs—she’s the only one brave or stupid enough to try this with him. “Wonderful. I am prepared to receive your insight, oh wise one.” — AKA the Say Yes to the Dress Omegaverse AU, for some reason?

Futile Devices by misszeldasayre for TheStolenQuill

When piano teacher Kylo Ren runs into Rey at his local music shop, he knows her talent must be cultivated. Who better to teach her than himself?

A Magical Surprise by itsinthestars for TheStolenQuill

Both in Ravenclaw House, best friends Rey and Ben Solo, share a moment of longing that turns into a magical surprise...

I'm the Spy by andabatae for thewayofthetrashcompactor (BriarLily)

Spy Rey is sent on a mission to figure out if Kylo Ren, tech mogul, is involved in leaking election secrets to a foreign government. She plans to seduce the information out of him. Too bad he seems completely oblivious to her advances.

Dibs by crossingwinter for tmwillson3

Ben dibses the parking spot after it snows. If he’s going to spend almost an hour shoveling his car out of the snow, he gets to park his car there later. Too bad one of his neighbors thinks dibsing is unethical and keeps thwarting his parking plans. Dibs: A Chicago Winter Parking Enemies To Lovers AU.

Syrup by walkingsaladshooter for trasharama

The first time she shows up, it’s eight o’clock in the morning and she looks asleep on her feet. Her brown hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail, her sweatshirt is sitting askew on her shoulders, and she blinks heavily up at the menu behind Ben’s head. He watches her purse her lips and immediately feels a soft fondness. “Small latte. Six pumps of vanilla.”

Lucky by BastetWrites for walkingsaladshooter

Nothing makes Ben more happy than waking up with Rey in his arms. Also lazy morning sex happens. _______________ A small gift for walkingsaladshooter for the Valentine's RFFA: Reylo Fanfiction Exchange of 2020

Endings and Beginnings by Vivien for  Xochiquetzl

Rey’s hand cradles Ben’s head before it can hit the stone floor. He’s ridiculously heavy, all dead weight, and Rey’s entire body cramps in horror before she sees the faint rise and fall of his chest. He’s not dead. He hasn’t left her. Yet. She cradles his face with both hands and sobs in relief.

You can view the other two masterposts for this exchange in this tag.

[chickensarentcheap]

Best Part of Me -Chapter 25

Warnings: mentions of PTSD, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, alcoholism, drug addiction (pain medication)

Tagging: @innerpaperexpertcloud​, @c-a-v-a-l-r-y​, @alievans007​

Kyle arrives shortly before eleven; shirt untucked and wrinkled, carrying his shoes in his hands as he takes the beach back instead of the street.  

From where he stands at the kitchen table braiding Millie’s hair, Tyler can see him as he stands by the side of the pool; cheerfully greeting the twins and Ovi –with Declan in his arms- as they splash around. It’s trouble waiting to happen; whatever is going on between Kyle and the neighbor. As angry and annoyed as he is at Nik for years of drama and issues she’s tried to cause in his own relationship, she doesn't deserve to be treated like that. No woman does. Why cheat when you can just cut ties and do things the right way? There are no kids involved, no worrying about visitation schedules or child support or the long-lasting effects of a broken home. Whatever is going on, it won’t help well for anyone involved. Nik will be hurt and jilted, and she’ll end up on his doorstep. And that’s the last damn thing he wants OR needs.

“Where have you been?” Millie inquires, as Kyle wanders into the house. “And why do you look like shit?”

“Amelia...” Tyler frowns. “...what was the one rule for today?”

She sighs dramatically. “No bad words. But it’s true. He does look like shit.”

“Busy night?” Tyler asks his brother in law; hands working at twining and twisting his daughter’s thick hair together.

It’s a far cry from what his hands used to do, when they were primarily used for inflicting pain and punishment on others. When his knuckles would be torn apart; broken, bleeding, swollen. And as he gently drags the brush through Millie’s hair, he finds himself horrified that he’s even thinking about the job.  That his brain is playing the ‘then versus now’ game while his own flesh and blood sits in front of him; his ‘rainbow baby’ as Esme calls her. The very life that he’d help created while on the job. That had kept him going on the darkest and most trying of days.

He tries to fight it. That urge to get back into things. That powerful craving for something more. The intensity and the exhilaration.  Even the danger.

“Ow!” Millie cries, and tilts her head back to look up at him, fixing him with a furious glare. “That hurt! Why’d you pull my hair so hard?!

Fuck. He’s losing it. Or at least he feels like he is. First Ovi with his ‘wanting to try his hand at the job’ bullshit and then the reappearance of Nik in his life and the fucking nightmares and the incessant and desperate cravings for the Oxy and the booze. Now THIS. The reminiscing and the longing for his former life. This is not what he wanted. This is FAR from what he’d wanted. When he’d had his mental breakdown and walked away from New Zealand, he’d been determined to leave it all behind, the blood, the violence, the danger, the death. Content to be ‘normal’. More than happy to finally settle down and enjoy his role as a husband and a father. He wants to be the man they need. The man they want him to be. The man they deserve to have.

Now he’s slipping. All of his control, all of his willpower, all of his strength and his confidence. All abandoning him. Threatening to turn him back int the old Tyler; the one that couldn’t function without the booze and the pills. The one that willingly put his life on the line and took on whatever suicide mission he could; praying one day he’d catch a bullet and his miserable existence would be over.  

And he knows if he goes there...if he follows that path...this one will be lost to him forever.

“That hurt!” Millie pouts. “Why’d you do that?!”

“I didn’t mean to,” he attempts a lame apology. “I didn’t realize I was holding it that hard. I’m sorry,” he presses a kiss to the top of her head; right on the spot that she’s been gently rubbing.  He turns his attention back to the task at home, but finds his hands are now trembling; shaking with an intensity that both surprises and terrifies him, and he lets the brush fall to the table with a loud clatter. “Why don’t you go and get your mom to finish up,” he suggests, nervously wringing his hands together, tightly squeezing one, then the other; anxious for the tremors to stop. “She does a better job than I do.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Millie scoffs. “And she’s busy. With Addie.”

“I’m sure she’s got some time to finish your hair.”  Tyler sees the way Kyle is watching him; the way his head is cocked to the side and his are both curious and concerned. And he quickly shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Go ask.”

“I don’t want to,” his daughter argues. “I want you to do it. I want...”

“Amelia!” he snaps, harsher than he’d intended. “I said go and ask your mom!”

She blinks, then her mouth settles into a firm, grim line and tears glisten in her eyes. The guilt hits him immediately. She shouldn’t be the one paying the price for his issues; she doesn’t deserve to face the consequences of his burdens and his demons. She’s just a kid. A baby still. Innocent and pure. And none of this bullshit is her fault.

“Millie...I’m sorry...” he attempts to make amends as she shoves her chair backwards and springs to her feet.  “I didn’t mean to yell at you. I didn’t mean to...”

“Leave me alone!” she bellows, then stomps out of the room, both her angry, pounding footsteps and her sobs seeming to thunder through the house.

“Fuck me...” Tyler mutters, and rakes his hands through his hair and runs a palm down his face. The cravings are back; that crippling need for alcohol. Or the meds. Maybe even both.

“What the hell, man?” Kyle scowls. “That’s your fucking kid. Why talk to her like that?”

Tyler fixes him with a cold, harsh stare. “You need to mind your own fucking business.”

“That’s my niece. My sister is her mother. That makes Millie my business.”

“You don’t even have kids. Until you do, keep your mouth shut about mine. You don’t know what it’s like. This life. Being a dad.”

“I know that wasn’t you. That you’re not that kind of dad. The one that snaps on his kids. You’re usually the calm one. Patience of a saint. So what the fuck?”

Tyler sighs, hands on his hips as he briefly closes his eyes. There’s going to be hell to pay: a pissed off wife and a hurt, angry little girl. Kyle’s right. He IS usually the calm and patient one; he can count on one hand the amount of times he’s lost it on the kids. But his nerves are shot; the last remaining shred of sanity feeling as if it’s barely hanging on.

“You okay?” Kyle asks. “What was that with your hands? The shaking.”

“It’s the meds,” Tyler lies. “One of the side effects.”  

His hands used to twitch and move in his sleep; to the point it would wake Esme up.  She’d said it was like he was back on the battlefields in the Middle East or still on the job; hands and fingers going through the motions of handling a handgun or a rifle, loading magazines, pulling the trigger.  There are times it STILL happens. He can be completely relaxed while lying in bed or sitting on the couch or lounging on the beach and his right index finger moves on its own accord.  And he actually has to focus and concentrate on making it stop.  

“Haven’t you been on those for years?” his brother in law inquires. “If you’re still having side effects after this long, I’d get your ass to a doctor."

Tyler’s annoyed. On edge. And it causes him to immediately lash out. “Shouldn’t you still be out fucking the neighbor?”

Kyle smirks. “So now you’re going take your shit out on me? I may not be able to take you, but it won’t stop me from trying to kick your ass.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Tyler retorts. “Why are you even here?”

“Esme called me. Asked if I’d help Ovi with the kids while you guys went out for a while.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean why are you HERE? In Australia.”

“I’m here to see my sister. And my nieces and nephews. I don’t get to do that very much since you decided to just pack them up and move them to the other side of the goddamn world.”

Tyler scoffs. “Don’t start that shit with me. I didn’t force your sister to come here. I didn’t put a gun to her head or give her some kind of ultimatum. We decided this together. She was the one who suggested it.”

“Same way she suggested it the first time?”

He frowns. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m talking about when she decided to give up her entire life to stay here. For some guy she’d just met.”

“She gave up a life?” Tyler gives a dry laugh. “What life? A mother that’s treated her like shit for nearly her entire life? Who stayed friends with an ex-husband that that used to beat her and force himself on her? You mean THAT life? She had no fucking life.”

“And you gave her one?” Kyle challenges. “Some guy that saw her as nothing more than an easy fuck and spent five days taking advantage of that in some shit hole motel in Bangladesh. Who probably wasn’t even going to bother with her once he got out of there?”

“You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. You have no idea what went down between me and Esme. Just what you want to believe. Or what mommy dearest put into your goddamn head.  I had every intention of continuing things with her. We had all kinds of plans; for what we were going to do after Dhaka. But we never got that chance, did we.”

“Yeah, how convenient,” Kyle snorts. “Things go completely to hell, she ends up staying here to play nursemaid to some guy she barely knew, finds out she’s knocked up...”

“Don’t talk about my wife or my kid like that,” Tyler interjects. “Don’t EVER talk about them like that.”

“And then you decide to do the right thing,” his brother in law continues. “The honorable thing. I’ll give you that much; you stepped up at least. You didn’t leave her alone and pregnant and make her a single mom.”

“Is that what you think I did? That I ‘stepped up’ and married her because of Millie? I married her because I loved her. And I stick around because I still love her. Because I’ll always love her.”

“Or because you’re too far in it now. Five kids make it pretty damn hard to walk away. Or is it your way of keeping HER from walking away? I mean, what better way to keep her around? Keep putting kids in her, keep her barefoot and pregnant...”

Tyler takes a step towards him; nostrils flaring, fists clenched at his sides. “You’re way out of fucking line, mate. Neither of us are stuck here. Either of us could walk away if we wanted to.”

“What mother is going to leave her kids? Tell me on mother who would do that. I’ll wait.”

“You think she sticks around because she feels like she has no other choice? Are you listening to yourself right now? You have no fucking clue what things are like between me and Esme. I stay because I love her. Because I want to spend the rest of my life with her. And I know...beyond the shadow of a fucking doubt...that she stays for the same reason. So fuck off with your bullshit. This is my house. You’re a guest here. So don’t walk in here like you own the place and start shit talking me. Or my wife. Or my kids. Because I will put you on your ass.”

“You threaten her like that, too? Is that how you keep her here? Scare her into being a perfect little submissive housewife? Does it make you feel like a big man picking on a little thing like her?”

Tyler’s nostrils flare once more; fists tightening so hard that the wounds on his knuckles -that he’s gained while working the heavy bag in the gym so hard- actually crack and begin to bleed. He feels how tense his shoulders are, how tight his jaw is clenched. And he knows Kyle is one more word...one more breath...away from getting himself into a situation he can’t possibly handle.

****

“That’s enough!”  Esme snaps from the doorway; holding a despondent Millie on her hip. The soon to be six-year-old is long and lanky; legs dangling well past her mother’s knees, toes almost touching her shins. “Kyle...what the hell...?”

“We were just having a discussion,” her brother says. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Bullshit. I was in the hallway. I heard almost all of your little discussion. How fucking dare you.”

“Mommy...” Millie mutters into her neck.  “...bad language.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Esme lays a hand on her daughter’s head and presses a kiss to her brow. “Do you think you could go outside for a little bit? Just for a few minutes. Mommy has some things to say and she doesn’t think you should hear them. Can you do that for me? Please?”

Millie nods.  

“Just for a few minutes,” her mother assures her, as she places her on the ground and then holds her face in her hands, pecking her lips. “And say out of the sand. You don’t want mess your dress up before grandpa gets to see it, okay?”

“Okay,” Millie agrees, and then sidestep her father’s hand when he reaches out for her. “No daddy. I’m still mad. I love you, but I don’t like you very much right now.”

“Wow...” Kyle comments, as his niece stomps from the room and throws the patio door open –and slams it closed- with enough force to rattle the glass pane. “Six-ish going on sixteen-ish. Wonder where she gets THAT attitude from.”

“First off, fuck you Kyle,” Esme snaps. “Fuck you and your self-righteous, mom like bullshit. Coming here and thinking you can say the shit I heard come out of your mouth.”

“What I said? You know what he said?” he gestures towards Tyler. “To his own kid?! How he made her cry?”

“Oh, she told me all about that. And believe me, Tyler is going to catch shit for it, and he knows it. When we’re alone and we don’t have nosey, judgmental assholes all up in our shit. It’s none of your goddamn business what goes on around here.”

“You’re my sister,” Kyle argue. “That makes it my business.”

“Like hell it does! I’m a grown ass woman. With children. So treat me like one. And second of all, fuck you again. For talking about me like you were. Never mind that, for talking to my husband like you were. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Did you hear anything he said? Or just me?”

“He was defending me. Defending US. Don’t try throwing Tyler under the bus when I heard nearly every goddamn word.  An easy fuck? That's how you see your own sister?”

He sighs. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that...”

“Tyler didn’t take advantage of me. Not in the slightest. We were two consenting adult and we wanted to fuck each other so we did. What we did during those five days has no bearing on you. None whatsoever. You have no clue what went on. The things we talked about. The plans we made. And we had them. Plans. To get to know one another the right way. To travel and to spend time learning about one another. But we never got that chance.”

“Esme...I....”

“You weren’t in Dhaka,” she continues, and wanders over to the sink; dampening the dish cloth and offering it to Tyler; so he can clean the open wounds on his knuckles.  And he accepts it with a small, grateful smile and leans back against the island. “We were. You weren’t on that bridge You have no idea how bad things were and how bad things got and how worse they could have been. So keep your goddamn mouth shut about Dhaka.”

“All I was trying to say was...”

“I’m talking now, Kyle. It’s my turn. You’re in my house. And you will not disrespect me and you sure as hell will not disrespect the father of my kids. I stayed here after Dhaka because I wanted to. Because I wanted to be with Tyler. Because he needed someone to be there for him. Because busted his ass to get me out that god awful shitty mess and the least I could do was stick around and make sure he didn’t die alone. Because he almost did. Not just on that bridge, either. I stayed because I wanted to. Simple as that.”

“Fine,” Kyle throws his hands up in exasperation, and moves towards the patio door. “You did what YOU wanted. You didn’t care about the people you left behind. You were immature and selfish and...”

“You don’t get to walk away from me,” Esme steps in front of him. “You got yourself into this mess, you’re going stick with it until the bitter end. You come in here and talk shit? Well now you’re going to get it right back. I had a shitty ex-husband who liked to rape and beat on women and a narcissistic bitch of a mother and older brothers with their heads so far up her ass....”

“Baby...”  Tyler steps forward, using his shoulder to shove Kyle out of the way so he can stand in front of her; hand settling on her hip. “...settle down, okay? Just stay calm. I know you’re pissed...”

She ignores him. “I made a life for myself in Australia,” she informs her brother. “I became a wife and a mother and I’m sorry if you think that’s selfish of me for choosing that over my shitty existence in Colorado. And selfish? Because I did what I wanted for a change instead of what everyone else expected of me? That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re just upset I’m not under your thumb anymore. That’s all you’re pissed about. You and mom.”

“You’re going to resort to shit talking her? She’s practically on her death bed and you’re going to stoop that low?”

“I don’t give a shit about her. The second she wished death on my husband...the father of her grandchildren...it was over between us. She’s not my mother, Kyle. She hasn’t been my mother in years. Maybe she never was. And I don’t care that she’s dying. Maybe it’s karma. Maybe she finally is getting what she deserves.”

“Okay...that’s enough...” Tyler gently orders. “...let’s not say shit you know you’re going to regret.”

“It’s too late for that,” she says. “The second my brother opened his goddamn mouth when it comes to things he has no clue about. I’m not trapped here, Kyle. He's not some fucking predator like Mark was. What do you think Tyler’s doing? Hiding my birth control or poking holes in condoms just so he can get me pregnant? That is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of dumb shit in the past thirty-five years.”

“Baby....stop...this has gone too far...” Tyler’s hands are on the side of her face, thumbs brushing away the tears she hadn’t even realized she was shedding. “...stop, okay? You’ve said enough.”

“He has no clue! Absolutely no clue!”

“I know. And you getting this upset is not going to change that. Just let it go. It’s not worth it; getting this riled up.”

“He has no idea. What we’ve been through. What went down in Dhaka and on that bridge.”

“We don’t need to talk about that. He wasn’t there. He doesn’t know what happened. And he doesn’t need to know. It was almost seven years ago. Let’s not talk about Dhaka.”

“You almost died,” her words manage to come out through choked, angry sobs. “On a dirty fucking sidewalk with my fingers shoved in your neck trying to stop you from bleeding out. You almost died right in front of me.”  

“But I didn’t,” he firmly reminds her. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

“And you almost died in the hospital. During surgery. Twice. And he has the goddamn nerve to act like it was no big deal? That is so fucking disrespectful to you and what you went through and what you still go through.”

“Esme....” Kyle attempts to step around his brother in law but meets resistance. “I’m sorry.  I....”

“Don’t touch her,” Tyler calmly orders. “Don’t even talk to her. You have no clue what’s going on right now.  Stay out of it. I’ve got it under control.”

“You do? Because it doesn’t fucking look like it.”

“Would you just shut the fuck up and go and do something else while I deal with this? You have no clue what she’s talking about or why she’s talking about it.  So back off.”

“She’s my sister! If there’s something I can do for her...”

“Leave her alone. That’s the best thing you can do for her. Leave her alone and let me deal with it. It’s PTSD, you fucking idiot. You can’t just jump in and fix shit. Fuck. Just let me deal with it.”

  This hasn’t happened in months; where the mere mention of Dhaka triggers such a powerful reaction. The last time had been at the therapist’s office, when Esme was asked about her most painful memory of the last ten years. That had led to a full out meltdown complete with hyperventilating and vomiting. After that the therapist had helped them come up with ‘plan of attack’; highlighting the warning signs and how he could either help talk her down before things escalated, or calm things once they got out of control.

“I just want him to leave,” she struggles to draw breath. “Make him leave. Please.”

“He’s just worried about you,” Tyler attempts to reason. “He’s your brother and he loves you and he’s worried about you. Don’t even pay attention to him. Pretend he’s not even here. Pretend it’s just us in the room and no one else.”

“I can see him though,” panic is starting to set in. “I know he’s here.”

“Close your eyes, then,” Tyler cradles her face in his hands and tilts her head up towards him. “Just close your eyes and listen to my voice, okay?”

She nods, her hands coming up to tightly grip his forearms as she allows her eyes to flutter closed. And he presses a kiss to the bridge of her nose and rests his forehead against hers.

“It’s okay, baby...” his voice is quiet, keeping the volume low and the tone steady and soothing. “We’re not in Dhaka anymore. It’s over. It’s all behind us now. We don’t ever have to go back there. We made it out. Both of us. We’re both here. And that’s all that matters. We both made it.”

*****

Within minutes she’s settling; her body ceasing to tremble, her tears stopping, her breathing returning to normal.  And when the crisis has passed, sweat is glistening on her forehead and her skin is a pale, deathly gray.  

He kisses her forehead once more, followed by her lips.  “You okay now? You gonna be alright?”

Nodding, she manages a small smile.

“Go outside and get some air. You’ll feel better. I’ll get you some water and your meds, okay?”

“Okay,” she feebly agrees, and he places his lips against cheek and runs a hand over her hair.  

“Leave her,” he snarls at Kyle, when he attempts to step into her path. “For fuck sake, just leave her alone.”

Kyle backs off, holding his hands up in surrender. Then waits for his sister to step and is out of earshot before speaking again. “What the hell was that?” he asks, as he follows Tyler into further into the kitchen. “Like what the fuck?”

“It happens every so often when she’s stressed about something. Usually it has to do with Dhaka. When some fucking shit for brains brings it up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kyle mutters. “Was it really that bad?”

Tyler scoffs. “Oh, I don’t know, mate. She had to stick her fingers in my neck so she could pinch a vein off to stop me from bleeding out all over her. What do you think?”

“I guess I didn’t. Think.”

“Yeah no shit. You have no idea what went down over there. Everything she went through. Everything she saw. Especially on that bridge. So do me a favor and don’t bring it up. Ever.”

“I never realized it was THAT bad, I guess.”

“How could you not have realized it? You know I almost fucking died. That she was the one that saved me. She’s your sister. How could you not realize that would have fucked her right up?”  He yanks the fridge open, snagging a bottle of water before shutting the door with his hip, then grabs a prescription bottle from a cupboard near the stove.  “She was dealing with it just fine until all this shit with Ovi started. And let’s not even get into what happened when Nik decided to pop back up.”

“You know she says you guys were fucking, right? Within the last six and a half years. Since you and Esme got married. She told me. That you her and have been hooking up.  Least a dozen times. If not more.”

“She’s full of shit. I haven’t fucking touched her since I met your sister. I wouldn’t cheat on my wife. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a cheater.”

“I’m not saying I believe her. Not in the slightest. I don’t think you would. Fuck around on Esme. I mean you’ve done some shitty things, but I don’t think you’d do THAT.”

“I wouldn’t. Ever. Not even in the six months when we were separated did I even think about cheating on her, let alone actually do it. I’m not crazy. I know what I have. I’m not losing it.”

Kyle nods slowly as he considers Tyler’s words. “I just thought you should know. In case she calls her or shows up trying to cause shit.”

Tyler’s eyes narrow. “What the fuck have you done?”

“What I should have done that night after Esme called Nik out at dinner. I told her it was over That it just wasn’t going to work. That we’re just too different and her career doesn’t exactly leave room for a marriage, let alone a successful one.”

“So it’s done? Totally? You and her?”

“It never should have started in the first place. It was a bitch move. Getting mixed up with someone who tried to ruin my sister’s life.”

Tyler smirks. “You think?”

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad she didn’t. Screw things up with you and Esme. I mean, you can be a real dick, but I know you love her. And I know she’s happy here. That she’s happy with her life. As a wife and a mother.”

“I like to think she is. Happy. And she’s amazing at both. I’m lucky. Even if that’s something I don’t say often enough.”

“It’s all I want for her, you know. To be happy. Especially after all that shit with Mark.”

“We try not to talk about that around here either. And look, no offence, but when I tell you I’m dealing with something...when I say I’ve got things under control...fucking listen to me the next time. Because I live with her. I’ve been living with her for almost seven years now. I’ve been the one with her through all the bullshit and all the hard times. All the nightmares and the panic attacks and the freak outs. I’ve been the one dealing with all of that. You just made shit worse. I would have had her talked down a lot sooner but you just kept escalating shit. When I tell you to back off, just do it.”

“Fair enough,” Kyle agrees.

“You and the neighbor, huh? Is that the real reason you broke things off with Nik?”

Kyle follows him through the kitchen, out into the living room and towards the patio door. “There’s nothing between Salena and I. Nothing serious, anyway. We’re just having a good time.”

Tyler smirks. “You mean your dick’s having a good time.”

Kyle gives a sly grin.

“Mine had a good time last time last night too, so...”

“Jesus Christ,” his brother in law scowls. “That’s my sister.”

“I’ve made five kids with your sister. I think it’s obvious we have sex.”

“Doesn’t mean I want to hear about it. Or think about it.”

“Look...” Tyler pauses, fingers curling around the handle of patio door.  “I don’t know what’s going on with you and the neighbor and I honestly don’t give a shit, but I’m going to be pissed if Nik shows up to cause problems. I don’t need that crap. Esme especially doesn’t need it. We’ve got enough going on without having to put up with her.”

“I told her not to bother you guys. To leave you both out of it.”

“Yeah? And when does Nik ever do what she’s told? You trying to tell her what to do probably just pissed her off even more. I just don’t want that shit here. Around my wife and my kids.”

“Think she’ll call Esme? Tell her the same thing you told me? That you guys were hooking up.”

“She better hope she doesn’t. And you better not say anything to your sister, either. Because it’s not true. I’ve never cheated on her. I never will. So if you don’t keep your mouth shut....”

“Won’t say a word,” Kyle promises. “I don’t understand how it even got this far. Nik wanting on your dick for this long.”

“Well if you saw my dick, you’d understand. I mean, it’s kept your sister around, right?”

Kyle smirks. “So did she catch the feels or something? Nik?”

“Guess so.”

“But you never did.”

“I never saw her as anything more than a boss or a friend. We used to fuck. That’s it. Nothing serious. I never wanted it to be. She never got like this until after Esme and I got together. It pissed her off that we were fucking on the job. And then it pissed her off even more when things went further than that. Guess she thought I’d never settle down.”

“Or if you did, you’d settle down with her.”

“Who knows. Doesn’t matter anyway. I never saw her that way. I never saw anyone that way until your sister came along. I’d already done the marriage thing. Once was enough. I pretty much avoid forming any kind of connection with someone. No one needed to get mixed up in that kind of mess.  Never met a woman that could put with it; the job and everything that came with it. It needed to be someone pretty fucking strong. No one I ever met fit that bill.”

“Weak women need not apply, huh?”

“Pretty much. Then your sister came along and...”  he shrugs. “...I don’t know...here we are.”

“Almost seven years and five kids later,” Kyle concludes. “Think there might be a six?”

“Why are you so hung up on us having another kid? Addie's only three weeks. Still new.”

“Make it a nice even number,” Kyle reasons. “Half a dozen. You haven’t thought about it?”

“A couple times, maybe.”

That’s a lie; over the past three days he’s thought about it at least a few dozen times. But he’s not sure if he actually wants a sixth one, or that the idea of getting dragged back into the unpredictability and the danger of the job makes him feel as if he NEEDS to have another. A way of ‘cementing his legacy’.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to talk your sister into it,” Tyler says. “She already gave in the last two times I changed my mind.”

“This thing that happened...” Kyle gazes out the window, nodding towards where his sister sits at the top of the patio stairs, arms wrapped around her slender form. “...the PTSD or whatever. She’ll be okay, right?”

“She usually is. Takes about a half hour, hour, before she’s back to normal.”

“Will it ever go away? Or is just something she’ll have to learn to live with?”

“It’s pretty damn permanent,” Tyler reluctantly admits.

And he both blames and hates himself for it.

[thisartofeveryday]

For those of you who thought I should make my life story into a book…here is the outline. For the sake of clarity as you are reading, let me explain who the characters are. The kids from my Dads first marriage: Jim1, Patty, Seana. The kids from my Mom’s (Mary Ellen) first marriage: Mary Jane and Jim2. My brother that I am a full sibling to is Charles (chuck).

I think you might know that 95% of our lives are lived from the unconscious mind. From birth to age 7 a childs mind is in Theta wave (hypnosis) and everything that they learn in those years (mainly through observation and repetition) is the program that their minds run for their entire lives. Knowing this – I look back on the first 7 years of my life.

I think we moved 7 times in those 7 years. I am certain it was because of Dads extreme anger management problems and the fact that he is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. Zero stability or chance to make lasting friendships. My dad was sexually abusing me and unpredictably violent. I was terrified of him. I was being terrorized/bullied by my brother, Chuck, who was every bit the sociopath that my dad is. My mom was overwhelmed by the number of children she was responsible for - none of which she actually wanted- and add to that, her husband was sexualizing all of the kids, so really being the last of her kids I was the last of her problems. Being the youngest (and as traumatized as I was), I was quiet and easy to forget about or push to the side. The older kids were the ones in the spotlight and where all the attention went. They were enrolled in activities and they were more the same age, so they were a unit. I was just an observer of them. I felt so left out and forgotten. Always.

I was a mistake and a burden (dads exact words to me on my 11th birthday). Mom made sure I knew that she thought I was mentally retarded- she would joke about it all the time. (I guess she never made peace with her sister being autistic) She also loved humiliating me even when I made it clear she was hurting me. Remember her sausage fingers joke or how many years I got called Boomer? I absolutely hated both of those things, made it clear, and yet she refused to give up the name calling and humiliation. There was very little respect for my personal boundaries. Dad would assault me in the middle of the night and I would wet the bed out of fear- then he would make me sleep in it to teach me a lesson. Mom would do nothing to help me, though she was awake in the middle of the night when I would work up the courage to go into their room to ask for help. She let him treat me like that. Goddamn…I remember the night terrors and being scared to be in my room at night because the scary man was sitting in the rocking chair, in the dark, next to my bed.

I have a memory of being in the garage in our house in South Windsor. I was playing with our basset hound, General…I was crawling around on the floor and the dog mounted me and was dry humping me. Dad got this sick laugh and let it happen. Mom walked in and got mad at him, but did nothing to help me. My personal boundaries were nonexistent. Nobody was protecting me from him. I remember him eating the food off my plate at dinner…or kissing me on the ear or touching me when I would tell him I hated it and to stop. I remember the baths dad would have me take with him and how he taught me to touch and work his dick. I remember the photos he would take of me after the bath. I remember being 7 years old and trying to lay on his bed and be sexy enough for him. I remember kissing mom passionately the way that dad taught me to and mom getting upset and asking me where I learned that. I remember having a baby doll that I drew all over, angrily, with lipstick. I remember being scared because my ass was bleeding and I told mom while her brother and sisters were visiting and she shushed me and scurried me away. I remember him also beating the shit out of me…sometimes for no reason. I remember being deeply attracted to and absolutely terrified of him. I was 7.  These are the only memories I have of my dad. I don’t remember him being there for me, or interested in me as a person, or engaged in anyway. I just remember him being what I now know is a predator.

7 to 13: I remember some stability in Connecticut because we stayed there for three years… but I also remember having moments of being deeply depressed and hiding in the basement of the house writing notes that I hoped someone would find, asking for help to get me out of there. When I look back, those were my first experiences with disassociation from stress and waves of major depression. While I was being assaulted during those years, those years were all about Mary Jane, Seana, and Jim2. These three had each other. These three were a team. I was just an observer to your lives. I had no voice, no opinion, no importance, never truly included and absolutely my feelings went unheard and did not matter. We can say it was the age difference, sure, that’s part of it…but that’s also just an excuse. Things could have been done to validate my importance too.  I had Charles bullying me….I had my Dad assaulting me. I was so alone.

My internal voice wants to shout: Why did nobody see this? Why did nobody help me? Where were my siblings? I guess everyone was doing the best they could…

Literally anyone looking in knowing the truth could have easily assessed that this was a horribly destructive environment for any child to grow up in. I know dad was doing this to all the kids. I wasn’t the only one. It is absolutely stunning to me that through the years of my life I have consistently been blamed by my Mary Ellen (narcissist/borderline personality disorder) and the people who chose to listen to her twisted opinions that there was something wrong WITH ME.  I mean, logically the mental health issues I have faced my entire life are perfectly normal and healthy reactions to a situation that was deeply flawed. But somehow the blame has always fallen on me.

The very first thing I think when I think of my mom is her asking me “Whats wrong with you Melissa”. Ive lost count of how many times she has asked me that very question.

I now know that its just deflection. Queen Narcissist cant take responsibility for her actions so she puts it on the person who she always denied a voice. That’s nice. Very loving and motherly. Doesn’t fix the 40 some odd years of my life that I believed her and wanted to die.

Right around age 9 or 10, we move again. I remember it being a big scandal – I think the truth came about that my dad is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. (By the way, that’s in my DNA. I get to live my life connected to that. I look just like my dad. I think like a Painter. It’s fucking unsettling.)  I remember all the pressure to say nothing about the move and to constantly behave as though we were the perfect family and nothing was wrong. So incredibly demented.

I remember a HUGE fight about Seana and Jim2 staying behind in Connecticut. (by the way: I also remember Jim1 leaving for the Marines and wondering where my brother went and why he never talked to me. At one point he came back to visit and gave me a beautiful geisha doll in a glass box that mom destroyed in a fit of anger at me…she intentionally violently knocked it off the top of my dresser in one of her vindictive off the handle rages…Im sure at 8 years old I totally did something to deserve it, right.)

And, of course I remember the night Seana was killed. (why did the man that killed her not serve jail time? Why are bad people never held accountable?) Dad wasn’t there. Again, Dad wasn’t there. As I recall he was having an affair with some woman in Arizona? Mom was already distraught to be back in Michigan. That night, I remember being awake before the call came in…watching the clock radio in my bed… it had a short in the wire that would spark. I was listening to the Beatles: My guitar gently weeps…. To this day, I hate the Beatles.The phone rang. Mom screamed to you “Mary Jane, OMG, Seana is Dead”. I didn’t understand what happened. I just knew we were packing up like we did so many times before to take yet another long drive across country. It felt to me like another move. I didn’t understand death or that my sister was gone forever. I didn’t get it.  

(an aside: I struggled in school. When I was in Beginning Algebra One for some reason that class would make me check out and I would always soul travel to the night Seana was killed and it felt like it was happening to me. I took that class 4 times including summer school before I passed.)

(later, when I was maybe 13, my dog got hit by a car in the street and now I knew what death was so I freaked out like Mom did when Seana died and I remember Mom shaming me: You cried more over than damn dog than you did at your sisters funeral. Very nice. Very motherly. Very supportive and kind of her.)

At Seanas funeral, I remember not knowing what was expected of me. I was just so focused on getting it right and who I was supposed to kiss (because that sexualized stuff was already so ingrained).

There were so many goddamn rules for behavior, (rich white republican ex-military country club going family that we were) and I remember getting it wrong and being scowled at all the time. Mom was always angry and stressed out. We had to BE someone and over and over again: “Don’t forget the family name” and how important our clan was (hilarious that she kept the Sterling last name because her current husband is too ethnic and this sounds classier to her than her own actual last name)….

Meanwhile, My developing sense of self was being assaulted and neglected/ignored out of me and I felt wrong all the time for every single action I took.

I think we moved back to North Carolina briefly and then to Florida? Whatever the case….

Then we move again. Again. Again. Now we are in Florida. Im 10. My parents are getting divorced. Mom is deeply goddamn depressed. My family is falling apart. I don’t know where my brothers and sister are. Everything is exploding. Im powerless and hostage to all this. I cannot underline the importance of that sense of being hostage to a situation that I was powerless to escape and having my feelings and my personhood completely ignored and erased. It consumed me. I wanted to die. I am, as always, the least of moms concerns.

In Florida I was so incredibly dissociative. I was experiencing C-PTSD. I remember feeling numb all over. Having no ability to react to this little girl that fell off her bike in front of me….I just stared at her…the adults nearby yelled at me for doing nothing. I went further into my head. I was so checked out. People just thought I was quiet or shy or retarded. I was deeply traumatized and needed help.

I remember Mary Jane and I sitting on the bed watching this music video by The Cars. In the video there is a woman who is laughing and crying. I remember asking MJ what she was doing because I do that too and I think she told me she was having a mental break down.  

I remember getting a Walkman and listening to the Police nonstop. That was my only retreat from how much I hurt. WHY DID NOBODY SEE THIS AND HELP ME?

I remember during that time that I was given another baby doll. I remember MJ and mom watching me play with it to see what I would do. I felt scared of them both and the creepy way they were lurking to watch me. I felt ganged up on. I couldn’t trust anyone. I was so alone. I wanted to die.

In Florida, I remember my birthday and dad cocking his fist back like he was going to punch me in the face…he did that sick laugh and told me he wished I was never born and that I was a mistake. (later when I told this to Patty she explained he punched her in the face on her 11th birthday. Im related to all that. That’s in my dna.)

My body was changing. I was getting my period. I felt crazy. I was in that HUGE school in Jacksonville and I had no friends and I was so scared. Everything was terrifying….and Dad was getting more unhinged thus Mom has Jim and Lynn move in to protect her and had you come back… and then I remember walking in to the living room in the middle of a sunny afternoon and mom on the pull out sofa, trying to make dad jealous, was fucking the guy who was there to buy the house  that we had just moved in to because we were MOVING AGAIN….

Not to mention, I remember MJ and I quickly taking Dads gun to the beach to bury it so he because he wanted to kill us all.

Im not even 13 yet….. Are you exhausted?

Any one of these things would make a fully functioning stable adult fold like a house of cards. “Whats wrong with you Melissa?”…. It took something like 20 years of therapy but now I have some clues to answer that question. Here are some more clues:

We finally make it to Boone. Mom followed her best friend, Mary Jane. After all that… that incredible pressure cooker of my pre teen childhood we arrive in bumfuck nowhere, North Carolina….and everyone is gone except the sociopath brother. The house is basically empty. Everyone abandoned ship. Where did my brothers and sisters go? I remember coming home after school and there would be nobody home. For my entire life I had come home to my family but now there was no one. I would sit on the couch and watch the clock with growing anxiety and cry until mom came home from work. It was beyond torturous. And then she would be pissed off that I needed her because she just got home from work. At this point Mom is just angry and exhausted all the time. She had to get a job outside the home for the first time in her life which she hated, she was sick of being a mom…she wanted it all to be over so she could have HER life. Charles was getting more and more abusive- physically and mentally and had to be sent away for our protection.

And then she starts dating Don Bailey. I think the sex must have been amazing because the guy was an utter low life. He was living off of her/my child support money… and beating the shit out of her. Their fights were never goddamn ending. I would hide in my room after school and not come out. I was so alone. I had no friends and no escape. Mom was friends with Mary Jane, not with me. Mom wanted nothing to do with me. One day we were driving home and I was so attached to her. I needed my mom so goddamn bad… I was struggling to make friends at yet another new school and the PTSD made me feel so distant from everyone but I had no words for what was wrong with me I just thought I was terrible at making friends (I remember this: pathetically I checked out a book at the library: How to be your own best friend)… She pulled the car over and told me “we cant be friends.” Mom has some glorified memory of us driving around looking for our favorite tree in Autumn… the only thing I remember is that conversation…her rejecting me when I needed her the most… after we moved to the town my sister lived in so she could be close to her.

Again, still no help with the major depression, the CPTSD… just a lot of blame “why cant you be happy Melissa…whats wrong with you?” and I cant be clear enough about this: all her spare time at home was spent on Don, not me. I didn’t have clubs and groups and activities that she as sure to enroll me in. I didn’t have my brothers and sisters there with me. It was just me, after all that, trying to figure it out.

I was a burden to her. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me and be done. I felt it always.

An aside: When she was unsure if she wanted to stay in Boone, I remember her asking Charles if we should stay or go back to Florida…after he chimed in with his answer, I gave my opinion which she angrily scoffed at me and told me it didn’t matter what I thought, Id go where they tell me to go.   My voice didn’t matter, I was a burden to her. I had no value as a person. I was powerless. So there I was in my bedroom that was the walkway between the living room and her room… at the mercy of whatever happened with no privacy or power over my life….. whats new.

Another aside: During that time we had gotten a dog that was a total pain in the ass for her to take care of. She gave it away while I was at school. I came home and the dog was gone and I was tearful thinking it ran away. She gave my dog away without telling me.

Then we moved out to Valley Crusis (9 miles outside of town…so isolated. I was so alone. The isolation was killing me. Where were my siblings. I needed help. I needed someone who was just there for me.) and Dons abusive behavior got even more extreme. I remember him picking me up from a concert that I was at….because he had sent Mom to the hospital with a sprained wrist and a busted lip. He was laughing about it when he told me to get in the car. Another time I remember Don looming in my bedroom door when Mom was at work and it was just us in the house… telling me: “Go ahead and call the police, nobody will believe you anyway.” I remember the woman who lived up the hill from us, with the curly hair…I think her name was Susan… coming down to the house while Mom and Don were gone and telling me If it ever gets too bad, you can always run up here. The neighbors knew I needed help. Where were my brothers and sisters? Where was my Mom? FUCK.

I remember Mom having many off the handle rages at me because I looked like a boy and my hair was crazy and I was so fucked up. I remember one morning after she had raged at me so hard that I was in stunned silence… we were sitting at breakfast at St Sinners and MJ kept looking at me, she knew something was wrong, I was clearly checked out and fucked up. I needed my sister. I had no voice or ability to speak up. I was scared of her husband, Glenn. Nobody helped me. Mom was the star of the brunch party!

I remember getting my first job at 15 and working at St Sinners…. Then, when mom bought the restaurant I stopped getting paid. She cut me off from my paycheck and told me it was my “duty to the family”… but she had Jim2 and his first wife Lynn there working and they were getting paid…and also stealing her money to fuel their coke habits. She didn’t value me, or my efforts but her golden son Jim can do no wrong even when he is fucking her out of her business.

I remember Jim2 offering me coke at a house party and John Golden and another friend getting me out of there away from my own brother. I remember Lynn being LIVID that I would stop by their house when I was lonely and wanted my family but instead I got shamed for thinking I could stop by and see them…and mom would tell me that “they had BUSY LIVES and I should leave them alone.”

I remember being so fucked up and alone in Boone….I mean, I now know I was just in shock and experiencing major depression. Mom kept asking me Whats wrong with you Melissa…when I was your age I had to choose between boyfriends… etc. Its incredible to me how Mom normalized my childhood abuse and completely erased my feelings or my personhood then blamed me for somehow being a problem child or wrong in whatever way….more incredible: people believed her.  

During those years in Boone I remember her doing things like openly making fun of me when I thought I might be gay, fixing regular hamburgers and telling me they were tofu when I became vegetarian…starting a burn pile in the back yard full of toxic things after I told her how important recycling was to me and laughing at me as I cried…..every chance she had to make me feel awful about being me and disrespected she took.

Once I visited her at her office and she told me I was “too ugly to look at and she didn’t want anyone to know I was her daughter and to never come to her office again.”

Shes right, we were not friends. She was a jealous mean girl, obsessed with appearances and her shitty boyfriend.

Lets not forget when she, with Mary Janes help, stacked my portfolio with MJs lithographies and coached me how to lie to get me in to Governors school for the summer. She wanted me gone and she got her wish. I remember feeling like a fraud that summer. I wasn’t good enough to be there. I had to lie to be included. I remember she didn’t even drive me there. She had Don do it. He harassed me in the car all the way there, 3 hours…. then dropped me…16… off on the curb in front of the college and drove away. All the other kids had parents excitedly helping them get set up in their rooms…excited about their major accomplishment of getting in to Governors school… I was there with my milk crate of shit, a fraud. alone. Acting like a tough girl who didn’t need anyone. I was a pro at that. Mission accomplished, she was rid of me.

I remember how deep my depression was becoming by the time I was 18. That last year of high school I would bang my head against my bedroom wall in an attempt to knock myself out, in hopes that I would get sent away to a treatment center or something. I couldn’t take all the fighting between her and Don. I fucking hated him and he was in my house and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to throw myself down the back stairwell at school. I barely graduated high school my depression was eating me alive.

Amazing that nobody IN MY FAMILY SAW THAT I NEEDED HELP. I was invisible. Mary Ellen cast her proclamation that all was well, she was amazing and I was a problem child and that was that.

I have a million stories about Mom demoralizing me during those years…. Whats weird is that I have no memory of my Mary Jane there. I think she was so involved with Glenn and way up the mountain, I had no way to reach her. And I was scared of her husband Glenn. And, we were never close. And, she was Team Mary Ellen…. So I was just alone and wanted to die. Sincerely. Goddamn. Let it end.

I remember Don telling me that Mom was using my child support payment to make her car payment. So I asked her about where my child support was going and she told me she used it for my Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance…. So I called the insurance company to see if I had coverage…. They had no record of me. She was, again, a liar….

When I graduated high school she couldn’t get me out of the house fast enough. She pawned me off on my boyfriend Gebeaux and expected him to simply take care of me. We broke up. He didn’t sign up for that. I was basically kicked out of the house in valley crusis. I wasn’t prepared for life on my own. I wasn’t ready. She just wanted to be done being a mom so Hey..I came back to the house one day and all my stuff was packed and that was that. I had to figure it out. Fuck me.  

At one point during that time I was living in a trailer with my friend Stacy. Mom was horrified about this. I was getting food stamps and she was so ashamed of me for being so low class. She came to the trailer and was completely off the handle. She said there was “no air” in there and grabbed a 2x4 and smashed out all the windows. Mind you from her perspective it was just another example of what a loser I am, living in a trailer on food stamps how did I end up such a piece of shit when she is such a wonderful mother… it must be because there is something inherently wrong about me.

She has seen me as trash who is incapable of being anything great my entire life.

Somewhere in there she stopped dating Don and started dating lawyer Rand Sterling…who broke her ribs multiple times and literally pushed her out of a moving car and then she walked 5 miles back to his house to be with him.  That relationship took her to Texas. She followed the money. The insanity of that relationship is all I heard about from her. She needed Jim2 to come protect her from her husband multiple times. I absorbed all of this through her very rare but insane emails to me. She has always used me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground.

I had my first total mental break right around 19 years old. I was fetal position on the floor at my girlfriends house… Jenn… I couldn’t stop crying for multiple days and I felt my mind split in two. I literally went into a black hole and was begging for death. Jenn and the next door neighbor scooped me up off the floor and drove me to the Watauga County Mental Health and got me some help… but at this point I was having a total mental collapse… the part of me that was traumatized was a child denied her voice or any recognition of her Self, so I had no way to articulate what was wrong and Mom had denied and normalized the abuse and denied me voice and my personhood for so long that I had ZERO chance of articulating what was wrong… it was buried so deep inside of me and I was so scared to trust anyone…. I was experiencing schizophrenia and Major depression.

Jenn helped me with my depression. Jenn made sure I was housed and fed. Jenn took care of me. I owe her my life.

I mean, that is an extreme mental health episode. Where was my family? How could none of the people who were supposed to love me the most see any of this? Why did none of them help me? Why did all of them think I was to blame? (my guess: Team Mary Ellen)  

Somewhere in that year my friends were moving to Chapel Hill so I packed up the car that my child support paid for and I went down the mountain. She threatened to call the police on me for stealing the car.  She told me I needed discipline and needed to go into the Army. She just didn’t know what to do with me…such a problem child. If I remember correctly, you echoed her sentiments. Everyone was always so angry at me for being so wrong and so bad. None of my family (meaning MJ and mom because my brothers had long bailed on me and my extended family has never made a single attempt to reach out to me or know me at all.)  were my friend, or loving, kind or compassionate.

I got away….I went to Chapel Hill and lived with my best friends Kerry, Lesley, Julie, and two other guys in Kerry’s Moms rental house. I was working at the Columbia Street Bakery and dating this boy, Richard…. Who happened to be a really abusive drug dealer… who held me down one night and violently orally raped me and when I called mom for help she told me with the exasperation of a mother who had supposedly tried so hard to do the right thing and raise her child with love and support but that child was just tragic and terminally fucked :

“I don’t know whats wrong with you Melissa, I guess you just like the bad boys.”  

Again, no self reflection on her behalf…she did nothing to help me.

I didn’t know how to get away from Richard who was playing mind fuck with me and I was getting high with him (LSD) …which was basically, me being drugged and him using me for sex but not being loving or kind in any way (felt like home)  Eventually, Richard got busted for selling a page of lsd to an undercover cop and threatened to kill me because he thought it was my fault… so I had to get out of there and I went to New York to chill out and work for the summer at the Omega Institute of Holistic Learning… to just be around hippies and eat good food. I hung out with Baba Ram Dass and Ben & Jerry…and took a class on the whirling dervish… These moments when I wasn’t in the pressure cooker of my life were both brilliant because I needed healing but also the worst because all this trauma would start to surface and I didn’t know what it was or how to speak about it. I would start to shatter again.

I believed it was my fault and there was something inherently wrong with me.

I was so lost. I needed help. I needed a parent or loving compassionate family or someone trusted to guide me through that time in my life. I had no one but my friends from North Carolina who were just as fucked up as me. I needed help. I needed help. Oh my god, I needed help.

Omega ended…I had no money to get out of there, nobody to turn to for help, no clue what to do next, I certainly couldn’t go back to Mom who hated me and was living with Rand so fuck that… I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were and no relationship with them so that wasn’t on my mind as an option…..so I caught whatever ride I could get and ended up in Boulder. One of my friends from Omega hooked me up with her cousin for a month and I tried to make it work… it was basically winter in Colorado at this point and I was out there door canvassing for Green Peace making no money and freezing to death. Just walking door to door for Greenpeace… looking in on other families and their loving lives together. I was so fucking sad. I was hungry and scared and completely out of options. I had to get out of there.

I called Mom for help. She said: “You got yourself into this, get yourself out”…. And hung up on me. The bitch hung up on me. I was stranded and so scared and I needed my mom. She hung up on me. She blamed me. She wanted to punish me for being such a problem. She was done being a mom. She hung up.

I remember having gone to the Planned Parenthood to get some medical help because I was sick. I explained my situation and the nurse looked at me incredulously and said “where are you parents?” I explained to her that Mom hung up on me.  I was devastated, living in a constant state of shock. Scared out of my sense of self or ability to connect to the present moment.

I was a fractured soul in every possible meaning.

My month at my friends place was over and I had to find an apartment or live on the streets. It took me another month of begging whatever guy I could find to give me a place to stay and then I contacted the boy I was dating at Omega, Scott, and asked him for money to get a bus back to North Carolina. He helped me. Bless him. He got me out of there.

I got on the Greyhound and ended up going to Idaho to visit with my friend Stacy (who I lived in the trailer with) and stay with her for a couple weeks to get grounded and feel safe with a friend for a minute. My mental break was coming back full force. I was inconsolable.  I remember laying on her bed fully having an out of body experience from the stress and being so disoriented. She is so patient and kind. She took care of me. When my time with Stacy was up, the next layer of insanity: I got on the Greyhound and took a 5 day no sleep, no food journey across country. I got chased down, carrying all my bags of things and looking like a little hippie… on a layover, by a group of drunk men in Wyoming…they almost got me but I found a laundromat that was open and full of people so I ran inside and hid until my bus was leaving again. I was terrified. By the time I made it back to Lesley and Kerrys house in Chapel Hill it was New Year night…I got some hours back at the Columbia Street bakery I was working at and got some money rolling in.

I want to mention that Poverty, which I have lived most my life in, is no joke and more damaging than anyone outside of the experience can understand. It is cyclical, like bi polar…. Living paycheck to paycheck or however you get just enough to maybe hold on for a moment longer but never knowing if more will be coming is a terror. Always feeling like the bottom is going to drop out…and never knowing when youre going to eat…and what that does to your hormones and your mental health…. Poverty is proven to damage people on a cellular level and have lasting effects that lead to chronic illness.

After making it back to NC, few weeks later the boy from Omega came to Chapel Hill and told me he wanted to marry me and wanted me to move to Boston with him. So we took a little road trip and eventually ended up in Boston. As a surprise to no one sane, that was not a lasting relationship. So after a year of misery in Boston, (more poverty, more loneliness, more no family) Scott drove me back to Chapel Hill and that’s when the girls and I all moved up to Asheville. All the while, checking in with Mom who was yelling and shaming me for being such a fuck up.

I can’t underline enough: I was disassociating the entire time. I was having episodes of schizophrenia. I was experiencing major depression and bi polar disorder. The stress of my entire life was more than I could handle and I had no support and no compassion and nobody validating my experience or me as a person. People just thought that was who I was. I was just fucked in every way possible and believed she was right and all that was normal and I was a terrible piece of shit. She had everyone believing that.  

Mary Jane believed her. She echoed her sentiments to me. Go Team Mary Ellen.

I moved up to Asheville and got somewhat stabilized. I was again living with my friends and I got a decent job at the Laughing Seed Cafe. I met Mark and I had decided to go to college because I thought that would make Mom happy and I needed to DO something with myself.  

Mark and I were together maybe 8 weeks before we moved across country and started a life together. Eight weeks.

I was so adept at being a high functioning  dissociative major depressive and I had no way to articulate what was wrong with me (all that stuff that had been normalized and ignored…all the ways my feelings and personhood was erased)… I just knew something evil bad was in me and it took me out from time to time. I thought it was my fault and I was ashamed of myself.  I was living in a constant state of shock. CPTSD.

So, I get myself into college and thanks to Mark and his truck we move across country.

When I hear my friends now talking about saving money for their kids college and really setting them up for success by helping them choose a school and get settled in or making sure they don’t have to work so they can focus on their studies and have a healthy social life with friends and do activities Im so confused. I didn’t know parents and families helped their kids with such things. I didn’t understand that in other families they help, protect and support. I made it through without any of these blessings.

Mark and I get a shitty apartment (the ceiling caved in out of rot and the place was full of roaches. The property managers stole my drum set and we would catch them on the roof at night peeping through the skylight to watch us), I get a full time job managing a restaurant…in addition to schooling full time...Im overwhelmed by the workload, scared to be across country, freaked out by college and the expectations… it was too much. I was away from the source of my abuse and things started to surface… I NEEDED HELP.

I needed my family except, honestly, I have none. Additional mindfuck: when I tried to talk to people about this I get the old trope about how everyone has tough relationships in their families and I need to love my mom and work it out with her.SO I KEPT GOING BACK FOR MORE WITH MOM BECAUSE I NEEDED HER LOVE SO BAD AND I THOUGHT THE PROBLEM WAS ME. Further, because I was so regressed I just sounded like a petulant child when I tried to talk about the abuse I had no accurate words for so nobody outside the experience really got it or could conceive how bad things really were for me… why would they? My family is extraordinarily fucked up, like nobody I have ever known.

In college, nobody comes to check on me and make sure Im ok. Nobody was calling. Id get rare emails or letters. When I would tell mom how hard it was, mom would mock me and tell me to suck it up when I would reach out to her and “complain” about how things were going for me… See, because its always my fault and Im never measuring up.

An aside: To this day, 40 years later, Jim2 has yet to even send me a single email to check and make sure Im ok or get to know me at all. He has never responded to the multiple emails I have sent him, so I stopped reaching out. I used to cry to mom about it and she would tell me that he “has a busy life” and I had to understand that’s why I wasn’t a priority to him. Personally, I cant imagine anything being more important than making a connection with your little sister, but I guess Im biased and not like him: busy getting high and drunk and being a cool party guy.  

During my college is when he married Lori. I worked over time and got a plane ticket to be at his wedding. I was sick to my stomach at the idea of having to be around my family but I love my brother and I wanted to be there. He ignored me the entire time I was there. I was a HUGE FUCKING DEAL that I could afford the ticket and made the effort to be there for him. I showed up for him….He ignored me. I was devastated and felt invisible and so worthless.

Another aside: I was 24 and that very first Christmas on the west coast Mom calls me, driving herself to the ER to get her stomach pumped from a suicide attempt. She was dramatically telling me her goodbye in case she didn’t make it. I was stressed and powerless beyond the telling of it. I cried all the way through that Christmas. Again: Mom always uses me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground. Out of all her children, Im the one with heart and she gets the sympathy she is working me over for.

During my college years, I would ask Mom for help she would mock me “Im sending baby Sava (MJs daughter) a care package…are you a baby? Do you need one too?”

Mean girl jealousy that I went to college and her life was taken from her by her children….

In college I had no friends, just Mark. No time for activities and my mental health was so fragile I had no ability to form friendships. I was barely hanging on. I would be catatonic in my time at home. We had this geometry screensaver on the computer and I would be frozen staring at it for hours while my brain felt like it was going to shatter. I was an absolute wreck and a shell of a person…but I was determined to prove I could graduate college and I wasn’t a fuck up. I wanted Mom to be proud of me.

I guess it should come as no surprise that after 4 years of no time off, working and schooling 80 hours a week, getting zero support emotionally or financially from my family …. that absolutely NOBODY FROM MY FAMILY CAME TO CELEBRATE ME AT MY GRADUATION.

Nobody came. Nobody celebrated me. Nobody saw the value in me or my hard work.

I remember being on the phone with Jim2 the day of my graduation. I had called him to ask why he wasn’t there for me. I was in tears. He told me that if that was the worst thing that ever happened to me, congratulations on your nice life. He thought it was bullshit that I was so upset. He thought I was being a baby. This loser dropped out of college which he had a scholarship for and did nothing with his life but drugs and alcohol and saw no value in me or what I did on my own. He didn’t show up for me.

Me going to college and graduating on time with full credits was a major fucking accomplishment on so many levels.

Not one of my family was there for me and I will never forgive or forget that.

We moved to the same fucking town Mary Jane was in when she was in college and never ONCE did anyone come to check on me and be interested in what I was doing or validate how amazing it was that I was in school and making it happen on my own.  

When I talk about how alone I feel in life, its in my bones.

I had worked over time to get Mom a plane ticket so she would be there for my graduation and she called me a couple days before to tell me pathetically “She couldn’t get the day off work.”  (Lie: I think she has some legal issue and couldn’t leave the state or something like that.)

After she called to bail on my graduation… at 27 years old… I had a heart attack on my walk home. I collapsed in my living room. Mark found me on the floor when he got home from work. She literally broke my heart. I was devastated. I was in shock. I was dissociating. I was so fucked up. I needed help. Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was wrong and neither did I.

Shortly after my graduation, MJ graduated and she drove to see her and was sure to tell me about it. I mean, they are BFFs so, no surprises there. GO TEAM MARY ELLEN, right?  

Whats wrong with you Melissa? My family. My family is whats wrong with me.

During college I was stressed to the point of being catatonic when I wasn’t at work or school. My mental health was tanking in every possible way… but the pressure cooker of school and work kept me hemmed in and my desire to prove that I was someone worth loving (because god knows I wasn’t going to be loved just for being me…No one was simply going to show up for me or simply be there. I had to earn it.)

…. then we moved to Seattle and I had three years at Amazon in that pressure cooker of a job… (10 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week) working as a Lead running a team of 200 people to keep me too busy to feel my feelings or connect to emerging myself.  

At some point after I graduated and it no longer mattered, I remember MJ came to visit me one time. That was nice of her. Thank you for trying, MJ.

But heres the fun part: Mark. Mark loved me.

Mark is the very first and to this day ONLY person who has been intimately involved in my life who loves and respected me just as I am.

It was Mark loving me that allowed me to start developing a voice and for that very young very traumatized person inside of me to start coming to the surface. Mark was the very best thing that has ever happened to me….and, ironically, it was because he loved me that all that evil finally came to the surface…and was our demise.

All the things dad did to me, all the never ending abuse from mom that sought to vilify and demoralize me… all of the hurt from the abandonment from my brothers and sisters… all that evil came up because he Loved me enough to make me feel safe and supported…I just didn’t know that then and couldn’t see or feel that he was the most tremendous gift this life has ever given me ….

and I started sexually assaulting myself in my sleep (woke up one time with an entire box of tampons inside of me and had to go to the doctor to get them all out). I would throw punches in my sleep. I was having an utter mental breakdown/ breakthrough… and then I started acting out sexually with other men that I met online. I felt like I was being puppet mastered from some evil unknown source. I was manic and acting out sexually. That default programing from my childhood was calling the shots. I didn’t have a sense of self so I was acting from what I knew and what Dad taught me about myself and the self-worth that mom made sure I didn’t have.

I say acting out sexually. What I should say is reenacting the trauma…which there was so very much of. I was on auto pilot and at that time if you asked me if that’s what I wanted to be doing I would have said yes out of programming but the core truth of who I am knew it was not at all right or who I am or what I wanted…that core didn’t have a voice yet.

2001, Amazon had laid us all off. I got hired working at a treatment center for abused youth.  I was major depressive and would be fetal position on the floor and cry for a month at a time but I didn’t know why or what was wrong… I was just deeply goddamn depressed and wanted to die. All the time. Goddamn. Let it end.

Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was happening. He was the perfect boyfriend. He tried so hard to help me. I honestly could not have asked for a more perfect man to come in to my life…and he was stuck with me. Mentally fucked Melissa with no clue what was wrong… and worst of all, I thought I had to get out of my relationship with Mark.

Crazy,right?….I asked Mom for help. She had no relationship with me and no clue what was going on in my life…She is a complete train wreck of a human and so deep in her own denial and so wrapped up in her latest abusive relationship with a rich man that she could honestly give a fuck about me and thought the worst of me anyway… so yeah, break up with him and oh my god Melissa I don’t know what to do with you.

I kept cheating on him over and over again. I was off the rails with my manic depression. Spending, fucking, driving my car too fast…. Through a chat room, I got mixed up with a man that felt like Dad to me and I was entranced and captive to him. Mark asked me to marry him and I broke up with him, moved out.. I was off the rails with the sexual acting out/re traumatizing myself.

(Mark immediately met the woman he has since married and has been with for the past 18 years. I would give anything to have that man back in my life…Throughout these years, my memory of how he treated me has been the standard by which I have held all other men and nobody measures up….Beyond his character and integrity, the art, music and intelligence that lives within this handsome and kind man is incomparable. I blew it. Fuck. I pushed away the most incredible man I ever knew and he loved me. I still love him to this day.)

At that same time I heard a rumor at work that one of the counselors (reggie, 24) had slept with a client(raya,16). I knew reggie was capable of it (I had slept with him) so I reported it to the Unit manager, Big Mike. ……What I didn’t know is that Reggie, Mike and the guy I was so into, Cash were all friends who grew up together and in the same gang……

and so it was that month that I moved out from Mark that the man that I was so “in love with”, Cash, drugged me at a house party and raped me with 4 of his friends to teach me a lesson for reporting Reggie.

I remember sharing a beer with Cash and then feeling tired and dizzy and asking to lay down and then multiple hours of being barely coherent and having no control over my body and being passed around for everyone to fuck over and over again.

Cash was a sex trafficker and grooming me all along. No wonder he felt like home. My need for family and my daddy issues in full effect, I couldn’t break the spell. I was terrified of him and wanted him to think I was so sexy…..He was masterful with the mindfuck and kept me under his thumb at all times which felt like attention and love to me and was intense enough that I could feel it.

At that time, in Washington, you had a statue of limitations of 8 years to report a rape.

Mind you, I was so dissociative and still had no idea I was a person or had any rights to my thoughts or my body… I was really goddamn checked out at that point in my life….I was in shock. The childhood assault trauma was just surfacing and I had no words for it because it had been normalized and my feelings negated by my parents So, I didn’t know if I had been raped or not….it took me years to figure out that its wrong to drug someone and have all your friends fuck them…

I didn’t know I should or could ask for help. I didn’t believe I could be helped. I didn’t think anyone would help me. I didn’t know I was a person. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t know I could escape or how.

ANYONE CONFUSED ABOUT WHY I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO GET HELP OR THAT I DESERVED IT???????

Whats wrong with you, Melissa?

In the meanwhile, Cash was making sure I wouldn’t report it.

He knew I was away from Mark, had a history of sexual assault and no family, and that I lived in absolute poverty so there was zero chance I could escape him.

I was in so much trouble. I needed help. I called Mom. I explained that it all to her. I explained that they were a gang. That it was sex trafficking… that I needed help…. To which she said “Let them play godfather. Whats the worst they can do?”….. (nice way to minimize the extreme danger I was in and negate me as a person, don’t you think?)

that bitch loves to see me suffer and struggle, doesn’t she. Doesn’t it make her look amazing when I look like shit? So she didn’t help me. She shit talked me to the rest of the family like I wanted to be in that situation because I was trash. Nobody helped me.

I remember talking to Mary Jane around that time explaining that I was getting counseling and she, like mom, shamed me and told me I didn’t have bipolar or something like that… She was Team Mary Ellen all the way and me getting counseling was just attention seeking or something like that.

See, this is why MJ and I have never been friends or close. I cant trust her. Shes not someone I think of as an ally. Sorry about that, MJ. Im not trying to be mean but… look at why I think that.

I really do look up to her though. She is so smart and capable. But I cant trust her and this is why.

By the way, here’s just a few of examples of the worst they can do while “playing Godfather”: They were so invested in making sure I never spoke about the rape they made sure I was living in such constant fear for my life (mental domination) that I was too scared to talk to anyone about it:

*They had voyeur cameras in my house…that they were making money off of.

*They had software on my laptop to collect all my personal data (social security, passwords, answers to security questions) so I am owned by them to this day.

*They had GPS on my car to track me everywhere I went and would leave notes on my car to let me know I was constantly being watched.

*They flipped my therapists office and stole all her files to make sure there was no record

*They poisoned my dog every day for a month while I was at work…I would come home to Milo cowering in the corner like he had been abused all day long and diarrhea all over the floor until one day I yelled out in my home with nobody there that I would find Cashs son and do the same to him…and I went online and found his childs home address…yelled that out to my empty apartment…and after that day Milo was never sick again….

*Then there are the 2 times they broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, drugged me in my sleep and did whatever and dumped me at the park. One of those time I woke up with half my face slack and paralyzed as though I had a stroke. By the grace of god I got the feeling back but to this day its still a little droopy.

*They sent their equally psycho boy Alex into my life to keep watch on me. He was horribly mentally abusive. I was so broken and demoralized. I needed to get away. Instead, I got pregnant. Alex also gave me syphilis ..and so I had an abortion. I had to get two Orders of Protection to get Alex away from me. When I called mom for help with the pregnancy, she was off the rails hysterical and I was yet even more scared and alone. Mom blamed me for all of it. Further evidence Im trash. I got pregnant by a mistake by a black man.

There is more, I mean it was 8 years of daily torture… but I think you get the idea. Complete mental domination was the name of their game.

I had no friends. None. I was so fucked up. I was terrified to speak to anyone because everything felt like danger. Just these men showing up when they felt like to to fuck me and terrorize me. Eight years. My 30s. I was miserable beyond the telling of it.

Whats wrong with you Melissa. I needed help. I was so scared. I needed my family. I got yelled at and shamed. I was so alone. I wanted to die. I was so depressed and fucked up. Goddamn. Let it end. And the worst of it all is that I really didn’t even have myself. I never had a chance to be safe enough to develop a self. I was a shell of a human. I was out of my head. I was so checked out with the PTSD and the trauma of it all. I was scared to be alive. Soul fracturing is real.

This was how I spent my 30s. Somehow pulling myself together to go to work during the day because I didn’t want to be homeless, coming home and having a total mental collapse at night and all the while being mentally tortured by a gang of sex traffickers and when I reached to my family for help I got blamed for being a fucked up piece of shit.

I had no one. When I talk about my isolation and how alone I am, its cumulative.  Its all this and more.

I don’t need to volunteer at a shelter on Christmas to be with someone for the holidays. I don’t need to get a dog. I need family. I need to be validated on a daily basis that I matter and am loveable just as I am. I need someone safe who is simply there. I need people in my life who celebrate me without me asking. I need people who are there for those simple mundane acts of living that define us…I need to come home to love.

The miracle: I kept myself employed and was successful in my corporate career path, I kept myself housed, and drug and alcohol free the entire time. I had the where with all to get counselling and try to work through my shit. I never gave up on myself even though I didn’t yet know who I am and my family had absolutely written me off from day one.

Then the Recession happened. I, of course, had never learned money management skills so there really wasn’t any savings to rely on. I was comfort eating like a motherfucker, I had student loans, a car payment and insurance and a foolishly large and expensive apartment, I had these lecherous men that were taking advantage of me financially too… I was manic depressive… I was paying for counselling (which if I am not mistaken over the years has totaled $100k) But to be honest, I don’t know where my money went… so when the Recession hit it took about 2 months before I was selling off everything I own and living in my car….where I stayed for the next year with my dog.

Nobody help me stay safe or in my integrity. I had no friends in Seattle to turn to. Mom told me to put my things in garbage bags and throw it all away…take the dog to the pound… and work with my counselor (she was angry about me getting help because she perceived it as being me trying to vilify her and this was her chance to punish me for getting help) and find a shelter to check in to because I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

Let me say that again: My mom knew I was losing everything, told me to throw my life away, dump my kid at the pound and told me to check into a shelter, I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

MY MOM.

Shes sees me as trash. She threw me away. Doesn’t she look amazing when Im failing?

Work in Seattle was impossible to find. I literally had 700 resumes out. Understand, I have held a job consistently since I was 15 years old and somehow mom thought this moment was me being a lazy piece of shit and just trying to manipulate her for money when I asked for help.

Sure. Ok.

I spent the next year in my car with no money coming in other than whatever odd jobs I could grab on craigslist to make my car payment. I drove back to North Carolina to seek help from my friends and my brother. My friends back home were not in a position to help me in any long lasting way but bless them all for what they did…

but Jim 2, who lives in Raliegh, was. He just declined. He made me a sandwich…told me there was nothing he could do for me (he has three houses)…and I spent the night in my car outside my brother’s house.

I had an ex acquaintance from Seattle who lived in Raleigh. He was part of the abuser sex trafficking gang. He let me sleep on the floor but would beat the shit out of me if I tried to sleep on the couch. I was so demoralized and out of my head, I needed literally anyone to be there for me….so, I stayed there, on the floor, for a month.

My brother was 15 minutes away, could have kept me safe but my brother chose to do nothing to help me.  

Whats wrong with you Melissa. My family. Definitely gonna say my family.  

When it was clear that North Carolina wasn’t going to be any better for work than Seattle I decided to drive back to the west coast. I had to drive through Texas and I didn’t stop at Moms house. I didn’t even try. Why would I?  I was so hopeless and out of my head with depression and PTSD. I was screaming into the great black nothing. I was cutting myself all over to get the evil out. I would punch my own face black and blue from self loathing… again, thinking it was all my fault and that I was defective. I mean… my own family didn’t want me. Nobody did. It was me. I was a horrible piece of shit and deserved to die. Nobody loved or wanted me. Nobody kept me safe. I was deeply lost in the void. I wanted to die. Goddamn. Let it end.

That year in the car was by far worse than the 8 years of being tortured by sex traffickers or the 13 years of living with my sex predator father or the 7 years of being stuck in bumfuck North Carolina with my moms abuser boyfriend stealing the show.

Without question having nobody and knowing that nobody cares if you are safe, in your integrity, have a door to lock, privacy of any kind, if you are fed or showered… knowing for a demonstrated fact that there is not a single person on earth who cares enough to validate your humanity is the absolute worst feeling I have ever known.  Being completely dehumanized, demoralized, erased. I begged for death.

Whats wrong with you Melissa?

Fun fact: during that time, instead of helping me or offering me a job at her business doing the exact job I did so well at Amazon (I asked for one and told her I would sleep in the attic at the office and she told me No), to mock me and show me what a failure I am and that I was just trying to manipulate her for money because Im a lazy loser

Mom went to her local Costco and applied for a job to show me how easy it was for her to get hired.

I mean, if youre going to be void of a soul, you should really go for it. Kudos, Mom.  

I drove through California on the way back home to Seattle and met my sister Patty for the first time. We look like two peas in a pod. We think exactly the same. She is undeniably my sister. It was the most incredible feeling.

For the first time in my entire life I actually felt and thought the same as someone else.

She casually declined to introduce me to her family. They kept looking at me incredulously because we look just the same… but she would shoo them away when they would come over to talk. I met her at her restaurant and then she took me to her palatial home. She has a huge family. She had tons of photo albums… and then she started talking about Dad…like she was in a trance and talking about a favorite lover… it was clear that Dad had sexualized her and maintained that relationship with her well into her adult life and that was the reason she had no contact with us and didn’t want a deeper relationship with me. One conversation was all I got with her. I slept in my car outside her home. My sister didn’t help me. Whats wrong with you Melissa???

In one shot from LA I drove back to Seattle. I figured out that the Queen Anne neighborhood had the lowest crime rate so I parked there. I was so sick to death of all the nights that year that I would wake up with someone trying to break in to the car. Thank god I had Milo with me. He saved me multiple times from intruders that year. My body was a wreck from car living and shit food. My mental health beyond destroyed. I was really just done. Run through. All the way run through.

I did a brief stint staying in Silverdale with my friend from NC that I managed to re connect with on my drive back… but the hour drive into Seattle from Silverdale was too much so I lumped it and just slept in my car in Queen Anne once I secured my job…..

I went in to Top Pot Doughnuts every day for a month and demanded a job until they gave me one. I was 8 weeks into that job, still sleeping in the car but I had forward momentum when I totaled the car. I had the very last car payment in the seat next to me I had worked so fucking hard to maintain my payments in good faith despite it all and come out of that situation with my car but nope…fuck me. I was on my way to the gym and I was giving myself a pep talk telling myself everything was going to be ok….and I ate it…40 miles an hour into a stopped truck on the West Seattle Bridge. Entirely my fault. Milo went to the pound. All my earthly belongings went to the impound yard. I went to the ER…. And I called every single person I knew and who I thought could help me.

Just when you think you have nothing left, turns out you can go lower. Nobody returned my call.  

Me, the unwanted, loveable piece of shit. I could die and nobody cared. Whats wrong with you Melissa?

I got out of the hospital, I had made contact with my online friend Rishad and he let me stay for a couple days… BLESS HIM… In those two days I got on the bus. I took the bus that goes through Capitol Hill and up to Queen Anne where my job was. I wrote down every apartment for rent phone number I could see and I started making calls. In the first true lucky break I had in years, this apartment manager woman at a really sweet little apartment on the hill heard me out…heard my story… it was the 15th of the month. I had my car payment check and I cashed it and gave her the money… She gave me the keys and a wink and told me I could move in “on the first”, that’s what the money I gave her would pay for…. and that she definitely didn’t know anything about a dog so no pet fee was needed.

I went right upstairs, LOCKED MY OWN DOOR and laid on the floor with literally nothing left to my name and cried so fucking hard.  

I had whiplash from the accident. I fractured 4 molars on my steering wheel and over the years as my dentist promised they have slowly one by one fallen out of my face. I had broken both my feet and wracked my knees…. But I had a place that was my own and a job and that’s all that mattered.

I went right to the pound the next day and got Milo. I went to the impound lot and got what was left of my life. I missed a sum total of two days of work…. I was so thankful to have a job again I blocked out the pain from my broken body and I just kept going.

(Mind you the only thing Mom has ever been proud of me for in my lifetime is losing weight. That’s what got her attention…that’s what she was impressed by. I went on a diet.)

That next year, I lost 70 pounds at the gym. I perceived my training team as the family I never had and I was good at lifting weights. They weren’t honestly my friends or family but it was something consistent and I needed that stability and I needed them so fucking bad. It took 5 years to start to return to a somewhat functioning human... Lifting helped me get back into my body and stop checking out so much. My nutrition plan made me focus on myself every moment of every day…and nothing beats depression like clean food and working out. Structure and consistency.

My PTSD was off the rails though. I was worse than a soldier coming back from war…I never signed up for that shit and it started when I was a child. I was suffering. I wanted to die. Every moment of every day. I was miserable to be around. Nobody wanted to be my friend. So, trust me…just work and the gym with my illusion that people were there for me and me inappropriately and overly attached to them.

The irony is that I looked amazing and strong and I was, yes. The reality is that I wanted to die. I begged for death. I had two suicide attempts in those years….I surprised myself and cut my wrist with my house keys on the way to work one day and another time I walked into traffic but the car swerved.

Coming out of all that happened and processing all that trauma took more will power and resolve than anything I have ever done. It was so dark. I felt demon possessed. I was out of my head. I would find myself walking out of my place into public with no skirt on just my tights or other crazy shit like that. I was talking to myself, having heated arguments with nobody there all the fucking time. I was punching myself in the face. I was cutting and other such self harm.

It was really bad. I was hurting so fucking much.

And, I had another sociopath boyfriend taking full advantage of my disadvantage…keeping me fucked up because it kept me there for him. Thomas was in my life for 7 years. Absolute Scum. But he was the only person who would show up in person for me. I needed to be held. I was so out of my head and I still had no friends in my life…just people on the internet.… So again, this familiar situation: I just let him use me so I could have literally anyone there. The social and emotional isolation was killing me and I was convinced I was in love. He felt like home. He kept telling me we would be together if I waited. That he loved me. That I was the Key! I was the only time he was happy. The reality was he wouldn’t speak to me during the week. He would just show up on a Friday or Saturday night when he felt like it, from 1am to 3am…literally show up with his dick out to fuck me…very often wouldn’t speak to me when he was there…then he would leave and that was what I considered my relationship and love. It was about 2 years into our “relationship” that the truth slowly started to surface that he was in a long term relationship and he lived with her….

The details of how twisted he is and how he manipulated my daddy issues is disgusting. How he used neglect to keep me working so hard for him to be there and begging for his attention….really sick.

He felt like home which is the worst part. He was exactly like home.

It took me three years at the doughnut shop to get emotionally stabilized enough to make a plan for next steps. I was too emotionally fragile to go back to corporate work or be in an office environment. I knew I wanted to go to massage school and I really thought it could be an answer for me even though Mary Jane and mom had previously shamed and mocked me when I said I wanted to go. Mom didn’t think I could be anything better than a waitress. She told me to stop complaining that I hated my work and just go do it.

It was around this time that I had to move out of the apartment because they raised the rent by double on my sweet apartment and I found my way into squatting in my Art studio, where I have been for the past 7 years.

This studio has been so needed and healed me in so many ways. It is private enough to have a complete mental collapse and since it was a former isolation tank/jail… Nobody can get in here….bars over the windows and a steel door…so, I could sleep at night for the first time in years. The rent is crazy affordable which allowed me to go to school and later afford activities to try to learn social skills and be a real person in the world…. This place is my everything.

When I had my first art show… consisting of the photos that I took when I was living in my car. One of the ways I survived and changed my paradigm to get out of the car alive was that I would walk around and task myself with Looking through the eyes of Love. I would try to find one thing each day that I could see beauty in so I could continue to see good in the world…thus my collection of flower photos that I maintain to this day as my gratitude practice.

Mom picked up the phone and called me the night of my show.

(Mind you, she has never been there for me. Over the years since she kicked me out I think we have talked on the phone maybe 10 times. There have been years where she refused to give me her phone number…she made a game of it for years…I would email and ask for it she would say she was going to give it to me in her reply but never would. Then she finally did and a week later she changed it again. Psycho. Another time I can remember a time we talked on the phone and I ended by saying I love you and she was silent and struggled to say it back. Whats incredible is that she has always pretended to be someone who knows me and knows whats going on in my life and talks about it with such authority. This is a narcissistic abuser in action. What she was doing was scanning my social media and whatever scraps of information she could get and twisting it into whatever story she needed to support her storyline about me being a problem child and a fuck up and what a wonderful mother she is so she could continue to live in denial. She cant face the past and she has never done any work to own her part or apologize. So, now Ive cut her off. She does things now like call the place where I get my mail and had the people who run the PO box office tell me my mother called and she is worried about me and she asked them for whatever information they had on me -so I had to get a new PO Box place where the owners have English as a distant 2nd language-  or she will go through my friends list on social media and contact people to see if they will keep tabs on me for her and share her story about what a problem I am and how she is just a loving mother who I have scorned and of course people believe her. She said the magic word: Mother. Nobody would suspect what kind of Mother she actually is and they see me all angry, regressed emotionally like a child and so fucked up and struggling in the world so she must me right about me, yeah? Text book actions when you try to break away from a Narcissist)

So…I get into the studio and Im all set up for my show and she called me to say this: “So, youre having an art show huh? You think youre so great. Youre still alone though aren’t you? (the mean girl was jealous that I somehow retained a sense of self and did something neat to be proud and again, she wanted to punish me…the woman is demented.) You know, the longest relationship you’ve ever had is with that damn dog.” And then she laughed at me. Made some shit comment about my basement studio “not having air” and some other bullshit and we ended the call. My party guests were arriving. My self-confidence was missing in action for the rest of my night.   Nice, right? That’s my mom.

Shortly after I get in to the Studio Milo got sick. Really really sick. As I promised him from day one, I would never let him suffer for my own selfish reasons…. So, I rented a car, took him to the vet and had him put down. The love of my life and my great protector. This sweet soul that was my constant source of love and hope for 14 years. When I posted on my facebook thread about his passing, mom commented that she was devastated at her loss. Because, you know… Milos death, this dog that she wanted me to throw away, was about how it impacted HER.  …yeah….ok.

I want to mention out of the context of a clear timeline that somewhere in here I trained for and ran two Tough Mudders. They are 12 mile courses with 20 really fucking hard obstacles. They are designed to be run with a team. I ran them both solo because nobody wanted to join me. On the days that I went to the events, neither my Trainer or the man I was so in love with, Thomas, sent me as much as a good luck text to wish me well or acknowledge my accomplishment. My previously 215 pound ass had shrunk to 140 pounds and, at 40 years old ran a team event solo and made it through in TWO AND A HALF HOURS completing every single obstacle, no excuses…. And nobody who should have been excited and invested in my success said a word.

I was still invisible. I still did not matter. I was still not celebrated by the people who should have been there for me.

I want to point this out: Even I did not think I mattered or what I was doing was noteworthy. I was still so checked out and erased to myself that it didn’t click in my head that my life and all that I was doing and surviving was me doing the impossible.

My friend Luke (who I met online dating but I knew we were meant to be solid friends for life) made a point to come with me to the first Tough Mudder. He spent the entire day out there and he took photos of me… He is the reason that I can now reflect on what I did and actually SEE MYSELF. That gift is immeasurable. Luke evidenced me. Im here today as a whole person in part because of him.  Also of note, the transition time between the apartment and the studio: Luke let me stay with him. He kept me safe and he was my sounding board and my true friend. I have nothing but the deepest most heartfelt love and respect for him. His story is equally harrowing and he is a miracle in action. Thank you Luke. I love you. Youre in my inner circle for life.

Now that Milo was gone and I was feeling somewhat more stabilized as a human, I knew it was time to make my career plan and try to get into massage school. Here is the next great stroke of luck in my lifetime: I went to Discovery Point and I talked to the women that run the school I explained my situation and that I was completely broke. They let me go to school for free in those 9 months with the understanding that I would clean the school on the weekends, make what payments I could as I went along and work out a payment plan immediately after graduation and that they would hold my diploma until that was complete.  OH SWEET MERCY.

My days during those 9 months were 17 hours long. I would manage the café in the morning 5am to 1pm, go to the gym to lift and run from 2 to 4, then to school from 5 to 10pm…all the while walking to get to each place. I was getting something like 12 miles a day. I did it. I made my 9 months of cleaning the school and keeping my life on track ( no cheering section, nobody doing laundry, cooking, keeping bills paid or there to comfort me but me: Whats new?) , I passed my exam and I was on track to move my life forward.

I feel like there should have been a celebration when I graduated because that’s fucking astounding…. but, hey… nothing happened, nobody in my life said a word of congratulations about it. Surprise.

I live alone. I have no friends beyond those that exist on the computer, acquaintances from community, and a few co workers that I have hung out with from time to time and I always make a big deal about that on social media which gives the illusion that I have people, but I really dont. My only contact with others is at work. I go home to an empty room and there is no support or comfort. Its really impossible to describe to people who have people what it is like to live with this constant isolation and utter lack of emotional intimacy and how it eats you alive…but this has been my life.

People who don’t understand tell me to get a dog or volunteer or pay for therapy for companionship. That’s a cruel tone deaf response. People need people and it is reasonable to want to be loved, intimately, from the outside in. What I want is to simply matter, and be loved and valued, and have someone who is there without having to do something to receive that…..

Because I have yet to be understood when I talk about it, I have for the most part stopped talking about my isolation that is to this day very real for me.

Im so lonely I just want to die. Whats new.

In the next year, I was waiting tables still and somehow managed to pay off $10k for my license… on a year where I only made $24k. again, no celebration when I told my co workers about it…. I thought it was a big deal.

During that year I went to the doctor and discovered that I was literally malnourished. I was pushing it too hard with working out and keeping everything on track and my personal trainer wasn’t actually reading the food journal I sent him each night… so I got pneumonia as well….but just kept going.

I also got my Personal Training Cert and my Nutrition Counseling cert that year and started working as a Personal Trainer while I looked for a Massage job. Things were lightening up for me. The tremendous crushing weight of my entire life was lightening up.

But the reality of who my Trainer was and what a fraud he was came to the light. He was sleeping with some of his clients and I have a laundry list of unethical things he, and his business partner, were doing. When I held him accountable that was the last straw for him. He was sick to death of weathering my PTSD and how fucked up and sick I was and how fucked up I was over Thomas all the goddamn time… and additionally I was calling out all the ways he was unethical: I was bad for business. I was bad for him in the fitness community.

He kept gaslighting me to try to get me to leave but that was my community for 5 years and I didn’t know what to do…….So, Matt did whats guys do: Shes crazy… and shit talked me throughout the fitness community.  He kicked me out of his gym and I now have no gym to work out at and no trainers willing to work with me. Thanks Matt! Super appreciate you!

I maintained my own lifting program for another year but honestly, I was in it for the community and sense of belonging that I never had before in my life. Without that and with Matt shit talking me in the background so I had no support elsewhere my program started to slip…. Add to that, I had begun  working full time in massage and my shoulder got burnt out. I have a repetitive stress injury from my Amazon days that was made worse at Tough Mudder when I got my arm yanked nearly out of its socket in an obstacle… so, Lifting started to fade… and honestly, I was burnt out on the regiment of it all. I needed a break. I deserved a huge break.

I think it was right around 2014 when Mom had me come to Houston for Thanksgiving as though we are friends or she was a Mom. The highlights of that visit include her telling me the reason I wasn’t welcome in Houston during the Recession was because her husband Rumi forbade it.

(I forgot to mention that all through the years of her being with Rumi she has painted this picture of him being physically and emotionally abusive. That she was hiding money to escape him and what a horror he is. She had some secret email account that she sent me emails from at one point and told me that she was trying to hack his email to see who he was having affairs with or some other drama….. but you know if you ask Jim2 who his best friend is, its Rumi…apparently they text all the time…so, you know…she loves to lie and paint these horrific pictures of who people are to support whatever her manipulation is to get sympathy or whatever pay off)

Anyway, While I was in Houston visiting her she was acting like everything was normal and fine and that I had just made up whatever it was that I went through during the Recession. She reminded me that since I “left home” at 18 she has had to give me something like $20k in support and implied what a burden I am and how I always have my hand out. She has kept track of the financial support she gave me as a parent and wanted me to feel like shit for needing her. Cool….

Another example of how mentally deranged she is: While I was there we went out to lunch. Mind you, I have maybe $100 to my name at that time. I offered to pay for lunch at this fast food place and after we ordered she commanded me to go pick a table. So I got a booth with a chair. I sat on the booth side so I was facing the café and could see her when she came out of the restroom… I waved her over and she sat in the chair. Unbeknownst to me, the booth side made me taller than the chair side…. She got this twisted angry look and became livid that I thought I was better than her. Paying for lunch and sitting above her like that….. The next day Mom and Rumi started playing a really fun game where they forgot my name and kept calling me “Savannah” (my niece) for the remainder of the time I was there …. You know… because at 44, they saw me as a child. Nothing like a little game of erasing your daughter’s person hood and replacing it with infantilism to let your daughter know you really see her and respect her.

I really hope this is making clear why I have a strict no contact in place with her that I will never change.

Now its 2017 and I get hired at my dream job. The Spa that I am at is beautiful. My co workers are the best. I make really fine money. My mental health is slowly coming together. I got Thomas out of my life and have enough mental clarity now to really see him for who he is.  I had spent yet another holiday season alone and the isolation was killing me, as per usual…so I decided that the best thing for me to do to help pull me out of my PTSD and stop being so scared to be seen or heard would be to go to music school…. Learn how to make friends for the first time in my adult life and be with people who were not my co workers. Try to trust people again. Try to trust that I could be liked for who I am….though rejection has been a very prevalent theme in my life… Try to learn some social skills that I missed out on basically my entire life.

How to simply hang out and play….was brand fucking new to me. Music school was really really really hard… not to mention I have no musical ability and I get triggered by stress pretty quickly and freeze… but I knew it was the right thing to do to reparent the kid inside me who never learned to make friends or be in activities with others and who wanted to play drums…. So hell yeah. I did it.

Thank you to Katy,Tracy,Melissa,and Kiyan for coming out to see a couple of those shows and being there to support me. You have no idea how much that meant to me.

I thought if I could make friends there I would have people to go out with and maybe could have a chance to meet a man and have a relationship… but all the women there were married with children and had little interest in going out at night, and I still wasn’t fully integrated as a Self yet… so that was a bust.

Music school was really me making up for my 20s and 30s when I should have been out at shows and hanging with friends and making art and and dating but instead I was being mentally tortured by my entire life. I gave it a good shot, but Im a mixed media artist not a musician and that’s really that. I have to take it in stride: Bless my heart for trying. Thank you to all my bandmates for being so kind and supportive of me and for being stellar humans

I was in my first year of Music school when I met the most amazing man, Joe. He was magical. He honestly loved me for me and I loved him right back. It was fast and deep and I felt so completely seen and wanted by him and OH MY GOD I NEEDED THAT FOR SO LONG. He made incredible things happen and took me on dates that made me feel like a Queen…. But Joe was terminally ill and two months later took his own life. I was in shock again….but kept going as I do.

Also out of context of timeline: When I got into that sweet little apartment I would go down to Edge of the Circle which was just a couple blocks away and get Tarot readings from Raven and Kiyan. I didn’t know how to simply ask for friendship so I would buy Tarot readings to have someone to talk to. These two helped me so much in so many ways…through their compassion and through helping me develop my Self and my skills. Over and over again these two have shown up as real people who have treated me with integrity. People who genuinely care about me and support me in my developing personhood. Ive made it through because of them and so many others along the way.

The shitty thing about being knocked out of your self is that even though you have people around you who care, you often cant see it or feel it and like a dick minimize what people are doing for you because the all-consuming feeling that nobody is there is so much larger than the gentle loving efforts of those around you…. And what happens: you push away the people who are there for you because they have self-respect and youre unwittingly being a dick. I want to say Im really sorry about this because I know for sure Ive done this.

Also out of context of timeline: Somewhere in here I started working in Tarot and caught a lucky break and got hired at Percys to be their Reader. Huge shout out to Krista who made that so possible for me. That Tarot night did more for my sense of Self and well being than I can explain and I was a success there largely because Krista made it so beautiful and kept that night going for me.

I also want to say Thank you to Tracy, Katy, and of course Brian who were my friends and co workers at the RowHouse Café… through those early massage school years. Endless support and encouragement from these guys, even when I was too fucked up to really receive it or reflect it back. Im really lucky to have met you and have had you in my life.

It was right around the solar eclipse and the night before that hurricane hit and flooded Houston and moms house got flooded that I emailed her a long list of things she had done that hurt me and explained that I would be taking time away from her and Id let her know when we could speak again. The next morning after I sent that email I again felt puppet mastered…. But this time by the little kid inside me… I literally woke up, jumped out of bed and started to dance. I was filled with glee. I was amazed by myself. I don’t know where that came from except to say that the kid inside me was OVERJOYED to be free of her.

In the coming years I kept proving to myself that I wont let her back in and that Im safe now… and as I have been staying true to this practice of not letting her, or anyone like her, back in my life… I have become happier and more whole as a human being…. More capable of making good choices in friends and finances….

She made an attempt to contact me around the holidays this year. I saw her call but let it go to voice mail. The message she left was something to the tune of her wanting to know if I had forgiven her yet and gotten over it. …See, because its about me and what I need to do because its my damage that is the problem here…. Nothing had changed with her. It was still my fault. No apology. No self reflection. Had I forgiven her yet. For fucks sake: I will never forgive her.  

I have learned to celebrate myself, take my self on vacations and to my great delight I had friends who spent time with me and took care of me!!!!!! Incredible!!!!!, give myself the compassion and nurturing that I always wished I had and reasonably should have had from my family. I have been working on being able to see the love that is there for me from the people that I have in my life, though I still struggle with that.  I have been working so hard on Self Love, Self Respect, Healthy boundaries, creating safety and stability in my life in all way and I know that Im doing great work because my inner me, those little kids inside of me that needed a parent are really responding to the parenting Im giving them…. Check this out:

A month or so after I declined her call I was out at the café in my neighborhood, having a treat and a coffee and doing some writing. I was sitting at the table and this incredible feeling came over me as though a golden light was shining on me and I could see it glittering down on me. I started laughing and crying like when you cum really hard and youre filled with ecstasy and bliss. And then I had a vision of being in a hospital room that was in the forest… it was just two walls of the room and then the woods…I could see deer and birds. In the hospital bed there was a person in a full body cast. The cast had moss growing on it and tiny sprouts of pine trees. The Doctor walked in to the room to check on the patient. I was both the Doctor and the Patient. I told myself: Hey, its time to get you out of there. And I grabbed my circle saw and started to cut my cast from end to end and crack to open like a sarcophagus. I told myself Welcome Back! We are so glad you are here!!! Go slow, take your time getting up. No rush.

I was so elated. I walked home immediately. Upon arriving at my studio I had another vision of all the ages of myself, down to the youngest and up to the oldest and wisest all linking hands. I recognized these women as my Sisters/MySelf… all of us agreed that the next would watch out for the next and that nobody would ever hurt us again. SOUL RECLAMATION.

For the first time in my life I am here, in this body, in this present moment. The first time in my life I am ME. Im currently 6 months in to my actual LIFE. THIS IS ME. I AM HERE. OH MY GOD. I MADE IT.

Yes now, of course, the world is ending and my career in massage is tenuous at best and I might be fucked again…. But so not worried because honestly, Ive survived worse with less. So I will figure this out and keep myself alive, housed and fed.

Over the years my attempts to talk it out with Mom were pointless… she would erase my feelings and angrily tell me that it was hard on all of us. She would hold no space for me and just be my mom and have some compassion for her baby girl. Nope: It was hard on all of us so stop complaining… but see, I was a child and they were my parents and that was my family and I had no choice…. So really, at this point, Im done. Im better off on my own.

I don’t know what else to say other than those yearly years were tremendously bad for everyone in my family, yes. I can now at this time in my life see and understand why everyone did what they did…. That my parents were also victims of abuse from their parents and all that and yeah, I have compassion and Im really sorry they had to go through that….But it doesn’t make it ok or make mom someone I will let back in my life. I mean, I went through it and Ive dedicated my lifes work to helping others heal and I try to be so good to everyone around me so…. No excuses. And, I still have questions like: Fuck, why did dad never go to jail? Im guessing it was about the money…..and really, how did nobody in my family see that I needed help?

Anyway… Ive done epic amount of self work to be here today as a whole person and really change my reality to one where I have value and can share love. Im still working on it… My social anxiety is still the worst. I can barely form words into sentences when Im out in public and I dont have a job to do as my role to play....but you know, I keep trying and its easier and keeps getting easier… and I have amazing friends like Brad to have mini adventures with… and I have my Studio to do my art in and now that Im feeling so much more whole as a person I think I might actually see some work through to completion that I can be proud of… and I have a job that I love and Im getting training for some other skills to expand my skillset and I feel that things can only get better from here so

I feel so lucky to be alive and so fucking grateful to be me and I really like myself. It’s a miracle. All things are possible if you just remember: LOVE IS THE KEY and keep moving in that direction.

That’s my experience and now you know.

[deans-baby-momma]

The Padackles Link-Chapter 50

A/N: How the heck am I here? Chapter 50?! What? When I first got the idea for this story, I thought I could maybe drag it out to about 20 chapters....boy was I wrong, huh? Hope you all like ongoing series because we still have a ways to gooooo. Anyways, I hope this update answers some questions you guys had with the last chapter. Also like to think my betas, @larajadeschmidt13 and @lostinaseaoffictionalbliss for reading this over for me. 

Previously on The Padackles Link:

The next morning my whole life as I knew it came crashing down around me when, while I was feeding Jackson, Jensen came through with his bags packed, kissed the top of his son’s head, looked at me, then turned and walked out of the house.

I was in awe of what had transpired. I just sat there and stared at the empty space where Jensen stood. The door closing shook me out of my stupor and I quickly held Jackson close to my chest as I stood and hurried to the door.

Upon opening it, I saw Jensen throw his bags into the back of his truck and reach for the door. "What the hell? Where the fuck are you going?" I asked, my voice loud enough for him to hear but not jarring enough to be overheard by overly nosy neighbors or to scare our son.

Jensen's shoulders slumped as my words hit his ears and he dropped his hand from the door handle. "Drea, just go back inside. Take care of Jackson for me. I'll be back in a few days, I promise."

I felt defeated, crushed. Jensen was leaving; leaving our house, leaving his son, leaving me. My chest felt tight and my eyes were burning with tears. How could he do this?! How could he just throw everything we had away? Just because his ex had moved on. Wasn't that what he had done with me?

He told me he fell in love with me and we began an affair. Then when he found out about her infidelity, he had came to me! He told me he loved me and wanted to have a future with me! Was that all a lie now? Had it ever been true?

I turned and walked back inside, slamming the door and joined Jackson in crying as I heard the truck start up and pull away.

Jensen's POV

I drive back to our house after the party, livid and infuriated. How can Dee do something like that

at our child's birthday party? Bring a man around knowing I was going to be there and see it. I wasn't upset that she had moved on, no. In fact, I was happy for her if she is as happy as I am. My problem with it was who she had decided to date. After hearing how he treated Drea when they were dating and not understanding that she wasn't ready to open up to him like he wanted

and expected, he had just dropped her. Just broke up with her, with no real explanation. What a true friend Dani had been to Drea! I was starting to see my ex in a whole new light. Is that why she was dating the doctor?  Was she petty enough to think that by dating Josh she would

upset Drea? Did it upset Drea? I didn't think she felt as deeply for Josh as Josh had felt for her but was I wrong?

As soon as we got home, I grabbed the car seat while I left Drea to get the diaper bag. I sit Jackson down as soon as I could and retreated to my office. I had a lot to think about and didn't want or need any distractions. I poured a glass of whiskey and downed it quickly and poured another, swallowing it just as hastily. With the third glass I slow down because I needed to think and wanted a sharp mind to do so.

It was getting dark when I walked into the living room where my son was sitting in his bouncy chair, playing and babbling. Sitting down on the sofa, I leaned my head back. I could see Drea in the kitchen pulling something out of the fridge. "Hey, you hungry?" she asked, apprehension thick in her voice. I grunted out a no as I threw an arm over my eyes. Too much liquor and too many thoughts running through my head had given me the ultimate headache.

I hear her place whatever it was in the oven and turn it on. I sit up and grab the glass I had brought out with me and take a drink. Drea stood in the doorway with her arms across her body. “Listen, I’m not trying judge but could you not drink around our son?”

It took everything I had not to jump up and accuse her of being just that, judgy and criticizing. I take a breath and look over at Jackson.“You think he understands? In his little one month old mind, he knows that I’m drinking? Come on Drea, be serious!” I don't mean to yell, I seriously don't but did she just accuse me of possibly putting my son, my own flesh and blood, in harm's way? I scoff as she brings up her dead husband and how a drunk parent had been his downfall. Well whoop-de-doo, I'm not Chad's father! I can hold my liquor.

“It’s one drink for Christ’s sake! One goddamn drink is not going to send him off the deep end, Drea!” There I go, yelling and acting all defensive. Get it together man, fuck!

As she continues on about how many drinks I might have had, I roll my eyes and retreat back to my office. I down what is left in the glass but don't refill it. I knew my limit and that glass was actually past it.  I sit in the darkened room and reflect on how the hell my life went so off track. Two years ago, I was married to who, at that time, I thought was the perfect woman. We had just became a family with the birth of our daughter and I couldn't have been more happier. Okay, yeah, I could have if I hadn't had to fly over 2,000 miles away for work. But I loved the show and I loved my co-workers and none of us were ready to let that end just yet. Jared and Misha were like brothers to me and we all got along surprisingly well, which in our line of work was a good thing; a rare thing. Most co-stars were at each other's throats at one time or another but Jared, Misha, and I weren't like that. The filming industry was a fickle business. I had thought Dee understood that, seeing as she was also in the same line of work but she had proved me wrong.

So just how good a judge of character was I? My wife cheated on me and wasn't sure if the child she was carrying was mine. She used our friend as a means to find that information out and just went on, acting like everything was fine. Now to find out she might just be a vindictive and petty bitch was just the icing on the cake.

A knock on the door brought me out of my thoughts but I really don’t want to fight so I keep quiet. I can see her shadow under the door so I know Drea is waiting for me to tell her to come in.

“Come in,” I call out when I realize she isn’t going anywhere. I watch as she walks in and shuts the door behind her.

“Babe, can we talk?” she asks and I can tell she is anxious and shaken. “I know seeing that she has moved on had to be hard on you but….”

“You don’t know shit!” I tell her mockingly. “You had the perfect marriage. Your spouse didn’t cheat on you. I thought I did too but she cheated on me and then rubs it in my face every possible chance! Don’t come in here all empathizing. You don’t know!”

I pour another drink in his glass as I finish yelling, my throat sore and aching from the drinking and the screaming.

“Jensen Ross Ackles! What the hell is wrong with you? So what she had Josh at the party? I was there too! How do you think she feels seeing you and I together, knowing she screwed it up? Knowing she pushed you into my arms? Huh?”

“Oh, so you are on her side?” I ask and the gulp down the poured drink. I hiss at the burn on my raw throat.

“I’m on nobody’s side,” she screams back, a look of displeasure in her eyes. “I just don’t understand what the big deal is that she invited another man to the birthday party.”

“MY baby girl’s birthday party,” I exclaim and in my frustration that she can't see that I'm as upset over it being JJ's party as I am that it is WHO Dani is seeing, I throw the glass in my hand. The glass breaks and falls to the ground; what little bit of liquor left in the bottom starts running down the wall.

Drea rolls her eyes and tells me, "I'm not cleaning that up!" promptly turning and leaves the room.

I sit down at my desk with my head in my hands. How the hell did I get here? What has my life become? Is it my fault that everything is so fucked up?

After cleaning up the broken glass and wiping down the wall and the small puddle at the baseboard, I decide it's time to just go to bed and sleep away this day.

Drea was already in bed and looked to be sleeping so I tried to keep it down as I stripped out of my clothes and climb under the comforter.  I don't want to disrupt her or cause another argument so I curl up on my side of the bed and go to sleep.

The next morning, I hear Drea get up when Jackson's cries sound through the monitor. I lay there on my side, with my back to her until she leaves the room. Only then do I turn onto my back and look over at the space she had just vacated. She doesn't need me ruining her life.

She already had a shitty deal in life already. I make up my mind and grab my phone from my pants pocket in the floor and call the first person I can think of, Dad.

After hanging up from a lengthy conversation with my father, I pack a couple of bags and head downstairs. I just need to get away and try to plan where to go from here. I just know after last night, Drea is done with all this. She didn't sign up to be put into the middle of my crisis. Dad suggested I come stay at home in my old room for a few days to get my head on straight and figure out just what I want.

I walk downstairs and Drea is on the couch feeding Jackson. I bend down and give my son a kiss, whispering that I love him and am going to miss him. I can already feel the tears pricking at my eyelids so I glance at Drea and then pull my shades down so she can't see them.

As I walk out the door, I realize that I am walking out on the woman I love and our kid, but this has to be done. I have to consider that I am just not meant to be happy. I cannot seem to keep anyone happy so I'm taking myself out of the equation until I can get my own head on straight and decide what it is that I exactly want.

When I hear the door open behind me and Drea's voice, my resolve almost falters. My shoulders sag and I let go of the door handle. 'Please just let me leave? I'm doing this for your own good.' I think to myself as I listen to her berate me for just up and leaving."Drea, just go back inside. Take care of Jackson for me. I'll be back in a few days, I promise."

I hear the door slam and I look over my shoulder at the home I had built with her.  I get in the truck and drive away. 'This is for everyone's own good,' I tell myself as I turn in the direction of my childhood home.

@lostinaseaoffictionalbliss

@carryonmywaywardcaptain

@darlingpeanut

@sunskittlex

@sis-tafics

@wayward-gypsy

@sea040561

@pretty-fortune

@squirrelnotsam

@death-unbecomes-you

@sandlee44

@internationalmusicteacher

@kricketc28

@natura1phenomenon

@mannls

@nickie-amore

@spn-tw-37

@frozenhuntress67

@blacktithe7

@supernaturallymarvellous

@thetardishasaquidditchpitch

@sirod-30

@heyitscam99

@smoothdogsgirl

@i-just-wanna-run-hell

@paintballkid711

@closetspngirl

@starfirerules

@vickiq9761

@rainflowermoon

@spnbaby-67

@flamencodiva

@tiffany-leigh

[humansofap]

I drive up Springwood Ave. to Ridge on a sunny September morning. The streets are virtually deserted and the empty lots and buildings look foreboding. I am on my way to meet Barsheen Ridout, a 57-year-old, long-time resident of Asbury Park who I befriended while taking street photos. He stopped me in front of the barbershop and asked me about my camera. We got to talking about photography and Asbury Park in general. When I told him about my project, he was suspicious, maybe even angry. His exact words were “What I want to know is why a little white girl gives a shit about the west side of Asbury Park and the people who live here!” I had prepared myself for a question like this, but was taken aback at how much I had upset him. I tried to explain how I felt that all stories need to be told and I wanted to help tell them. This seemed to assuage him a bit, and he begrudgingly agreed to meet with me to be interviewed.

I had asked him to pick a spot in Asbury Park that had the most meaning to him, and he told me to meet him at his childhood home on Ridge Ave., which is where I am headed now. I pull up to the house and Barsheen is waiting for me with a wistful look on his face. He tells me this house brings back so many memories. It was his aunt’s home and he lived with her on and off throughout the 60’s and 70’s. His life has not been easy but the times he spent in this house with his aunt were happy ones. Looking back, he realizes this home in Asbury Park was a safe haven for him.

“I lived here from when I was very little until I was 9. Both my parents were IV drug users. Dopers. My father was a pickpocket and my mother did anything he told her to do. It was in my blood, in my family’s blood. So my aunt was raising me. When I was 9, me and my sister decided to run away to go live with my parents in New York. We moved to Harlem and ended up living in 4 different places over 5 years. We were gypsies. Within the 5 years a lot of stuff happened. My father was in jail for shooting somebody. And then the same guy that killed my mother stabbed me. So my father was in the penitentiary and mother was dead and us kids had no one. So I came back to Asbury and my aunt’s house when I was 14.

I came back after the riots. Everything was so different. It was amazingly different. Sometimes I feel a little disconnected and connected to this place. It’s hard for me to say but every time I came back there was something new. It’s an interesting perspective because I wasn’t always here but I always came back.”

We decided to walk around a little so Barsheen can describe what the neighborhood looked like when he was growing up. There is an empty lot next to his aunt’s house that he tells me there used to be full of trees and the kids would call it “the woods” and play in it. He points out a house across the street and tells me it used to be a candy shop owned by Puerto Ricans. As he talks, I can see that the memories are transporting Barsheen to a different time and he gets more animated as he points out different buildings, recalling his old neighborhood.

 “These all used to be older houses but they all got knocked down and built over. My aunt used to send me to the store around the corner. There used to be a gas station right here. Lake Ave. is a whole lot different than it was back then. The whole avenue was full of stores. That used to the be nun’s home and the catholic hall. There was a church on the other corner.”

 We walk up Lake Ave. and it is hard to imagine the bustling neighborhood he is describing. Barsheen points to one of the very few businesses that are open.

 “That liquor store been there forever, since I can remember. See there are 3 things you can count on in a poverty-stricken area. Liquor stores, churches, and laundromats. Those things will always be there in low income areas. That shit right there’s been killing us for a long time. Because you won’t find that in suburbs. You can’t walk to the liquor store in the suburbs, you gotta get in your car and drive there. But in every inner-city poverty stricken community, you can walk to numerous liquor stores. That fires me up. I used to frequent the store a whole lot in the 80’s. Now understanding the science of control and conditioning, about how the establishment that kills a community can stay in the same spot for the past 40 years makes me understand it a little more. None of it is owned by members of the community. Indians run the liquor store. In the 60’s Caucasians owned it. In the 80’s they took it over. Now I’m not talking about the owners. I’m talking about the condition of the institution. That they can come to a place like this and profit. The circumstances and situations.”

 As he speaks, he raises his voice and is growing more and more upset. A man on a bicycle rides past us and stops to stare. Barsheen tells him “peace” and assures him we are fine, and he rides away slowly. We are standing in front of a non-descript building and I notice that Barsheen is looking up at the second floor.

“Up top here used to be a gambling club called the 54 House. From when I can remember till the late 80’s. I remember it when I was a kid, then I remember when I was old enough to go in it. We’d play cards, shoot dice, it was a social place for the community. Even in the 70’s when I was a teenager the block was alive. It was a construction town. There were a whole lot more people and whole lot more buildings. This was the construction man’s and the common man’s place to socialize. They had a charter from the city to have a social club.”

I am curious about what police presence was like at that time and whether they were ever shut down.

“They [54 House] did illegal activity, however the guy who ran it for years, who was called Rayfield, was partners with a guy called Artesia Moore. He [Moore] was an ex police officer and he married into a family that owned the Arking lounge. He worked for the gangsters. When his father in law passed away, Artesia’s wife gave him the racket for the town. So him and Rayfield ran it. This was left alone by the cops. They were left alone as long as no drugs were involved. I’m not sure what happened to it [54 House]. I left Asbury for a while and when I came back it just wasn’t there no more”

We decide move our conversation to Kula café, a block away. Big glass windows afford us a great view of Lake Ave. We are right down the block from 2nd Baptist church was where Barsheen was baptized. He tells me it was THE church back then. He tells me it’s where “all the uppity people went.”

He tells me that the café we are sitting in used to be a drug store. There used to be a bar across the street called the Turf Club in the 50’s and 60’s. It was home to many famous performers including the then up and coming Clarence Clemmons. He tells me that both sides of the street were full of bars and lounges. There was the Paramount Pool Hall. It used to be a movie theater until Barsheen’s cousin, Robin Hill bought it and turned it into a pool room. On the other side of the block was Cuba’s bar.

“My aunt Evelyn Smith, worked there, she was barmaid. The husband was Cuba and the wife was Mini. When the gangsters came down to Asbury and they would bring black folks with them, they would break the glasses afterward. [They didn’t want to keep glasses that black folks had drank out of] So my aunt would ask if she could take them home instead. So she had a whole collection of glasses.”

I am slightly taken about by this. I am trying to understand the demographics of the west side at that time. I ask if the neighborhood was mixed.

“In the 60’s a lot of Italians owned things, like all those stores we call bodegas now. The paramount was a black club, the turf club was black too. Cuba’s was not. It was the elite. The borderline was the railroad track and Asbury Ave. Past there you didn’t find too many black people in the 60’s. If you went to Cookman Ave., you knew you had to act right. You knew you were someplace special. You better act right in the white folk’s shit. Cuz the borderline was the goddamn tracks. Then the riots happened in the 70’s. After everything was burnt down, there was a portion of Lake Ave. that was left empty on both sides. It never got rebuilt. Recently they built a few homes on both sides. Maybe in the 90s. But it’s never been the same.”

Barsheen tells me that in the 90’s there were black-run businesses in Downtown Asbury Park, which are all gone now; a result of gentrification.

“They had Freeman’s bakery and a black woman ran it. Bond St. and Cookman, that whole side was run by black people. There was a deli on the corner, then a barber shop, then the Jamaican guy’s clothing store. Then they pushed him out by raising the rents and now he’s in Collingswood barely making a living. They pushed everybody out!”

I want to know what growing up in Asbury Park was like for him and how it affected him personally.

“This whole area right here was all lower income. This was all stores and above them were tenements. So when I came back in 79’ that’s when I was hustling. My whole crew was doing it. I would stand on this corner right here and I could see all the way down this block. I could see all the way to the bar and I could see everybody hanging out there. And I’d get butterflies all in my stomach. I was going to that corner, it was my destination. I was going to sell drugs; I knew it was dangerous. And I’ve never told anybody this but every time I did it I was so scared. A lot of my friends died or are in prison. Yeah a lot of them. My father and mother were both dopers. I sold drugs all my life, in and out of the penitentiary. Then I finally went through recovery and got clean and identified that it’s a disease. Part of it was hereditary.”

I wonder out loud if he feels like this is a continuing problem in Asbury Park.

“That’s a really complex topic. Parents passing it on might have a lot to do with it. There’s a documentary and the guy phrased it so well he said “We didn’t bring the guns here, we didn’t bring the drugs here, we didn’t invent no poverty, we didn’t invent racism. But you hold us guilty when we can’t rise above it.”

My oldest daughter for example, is an accomplished lawyer living in Voorhees in a beautiful home. She came from right here. Both her parents were drug users. She was raised in the same house in the same environment as my step son. He’s still bumping his head. So environment plays a part but it also doesn’t. If we had more resources dedicated to us, we would have a better chance to succeed. I’m not holding to the environment 100%. The cocaine epidemic of the 80’s destroyed us [the black community]. Every block had a crack house. Everybody in this community was smoking. It affected everything very badly. That effected the next generation. I’m a survivor of it. I know people in the penitentiary for life because of it. I have close friends who died because of it. My mother’s dead because of it. This isn’t something I read about, it’s something I’ve lived.

I’ve been pondering on your question you asked me the other day about how we feel about the gentrification. One: why would you want to be someplace where they don’t want you anyway? And two: if you don’t own anything in the community, the community ain’t yours. It’s who owns it who has the voices when they go to town meetings. There are very few black people that own houses. If you own something you have a voice. But most don’t own. If you don’t own it, it isn’t yours. You and I both know this. Change in constant. And sometimes change is good. Because at one time, in this town everybody knew everybody. Is it all bad? No. This place we’re sitting in is a good change. People died for me to have the right to vote. Medgar Evers died registering people to vote. But I don’t think my vote honestly makes a goddamn difference.”

I ask if he feels like he has emotionally detached himself from Asbury Park. He seems conflicted in that he says he won’t stay some place he feels like he is not wanted, but at the same time this is his home.

“I guess it’s a paradox. It’s hard to explain. No I haven’t [emotionally detached]. I have a son here who just had a son here. I have other family in this city too. I’m 57 years old. I haven’t survived anywhere else but in the hood. This is all I remember and know. This is my home.”

I ask him if he hopes his son stays and builds a life in Asbury Park. And he replies that he hopes he does not. Barsheen wants his son to see the bigger world, see beyond this town. He says he sees too many of the young people here get caught up in it. The ones that might fall victim to the environment. He believes that success means a lot of different things to different people. It has a lot to do with ambition.

“My son lives with his sister, in the same household. His sister is doing really well in school and already has college credits. My son is always with the boys, he’s a member of the Olds. He’s got a job. He gangster raps. He graduated by the skin of his teeth.”

I’m finding it interesting that the girls seem to be more motivated that the boys and I ask if he feels the same way. He says that he knows both men and women who he grew up with who have succeeded in life and built names for themselves in the community. But he admits that the women do tend to do better.

 I ask him why he thinks that is. He gets very quiet, and the silence stretches across the table and engulfs us.

I am not leaving without an answer and I dare to ask again, “why?”

Barsheen’s eyes fill with tears and his voice shakes as he finally replies.

“Do you know that the black man is an endangered species in this country? They kill them when they want to. Trying to kill our hopes, our dreams, our spirit, our ambitions. And then when they can’t do that they put a bullet in our head. What you talking about WHY. You want to keep it for real? You asked me why? Why? That’s why.”

[xpouii]

JSE Day 11: Tie

Day 11 of the JSE artists prompts 2019 by @septic-bella​

**All previous entries are available on AO3 under the title “Mayhem” with my same username.**

Warnings: MAJOR suicide themes, self hatred and depression

           The hospital room was dark and quiet, and Chase felt at odds with himself. Something wasn’t right. Everyone else had suffered physical trauma, some of it permanently damaging, and yet Chase had been left completely alone. Was it because his psyche was already broken? Life was already half over for him, or maybe Anti was looking for Stacy and the kids. Henrik had no idea where his own family was—on purpose—after the last incident where Anti had possessed him. Chase had always been more selfish, blinded by the desire to see his children, to try and make it work with Stacy. It could still work, right?

               Please, Chase. Stacy knows what a child you are. The only thing you ever did was make those idiotic videos for your defunct YouTube channel that was just a laughing stock for ex-Viners anyway. Commentators made double the revenue from your videos that you ever did and Stacy had to work full time just to cover your ass. The kids had to have a different shitty agency babysitter every evening and twice Stacy caught one of them stealing from the house. You could never be home on time, and the kids were lucky if they saw you once or twice a week. You’ve always been the worst parent and the worst husband.

          You never matured past twelve years old and now you’re the big weepy equivalent of a drunk toddler. All you ever do is vomit, shake and complain. At least when you were drunk you were sort of funny half the time. Now you’re the least entertaining person in this entire city and that’s saying a lot. You’re a pathetic, worthless spineless worm, unworthy of being called a man, a husband, a father—you’re barely human. You massive failure. There’s so little appealing about you that it’s a shock any of the others will even give you the time of day. It’s why you always have the feeling Marvin doesn’t like you. He doesn’t like trash. Jackie is constantly worrying about you, and Henrik just wishes you would die and get it over with so he can go back to treating patients he cares about. Jameson, well, he’s the worst of all. He pities you. You’re the most pathetic person he’s ever met and he can think of nothing better to do than just tell you what you want to hear and wait for you to leave the room.

          If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up a sad, stupid puddle all alone and praying for death a long time before it comes. Once you’re sober do you think your depression will just go away? You’re gonna have to get on Henrik’s pills and they’re gonna make you tired all the time or jittery and your dick won’t work—not that it was ever anything to be impressed by. Stacy used to laugh about it with her mother, and damn does that lady ever hate you. You were never worthy of her daughter, and she would give up her own grandchildren if she could make it so you never existed. Stacy can try again with a better man, and the memory of you would no longer be a stain on the family. Why don’t you just get it over with and everyone can get back to their lives? Kill yourself and maybe this time you could try getting it right, instead of failing so hilariously. What kind of fucking moron can’t even shoot themselves in the head correctly, Chase? Who the fuck can’t get that right? You were probably too chickenshit to go through with it weren’t you? You were so selfish that you’d rather live this fucking pathetic life than give Stacy or your kids the freedom to move on. Even now, when this detoxing could kill you, you’re accepting the medication and pretending like you’re contributing at all when honestly you’re the biggest speedbump.

          Everybody is just standing around waiting on you, Chase, so what the fuck are you gonna do? Do it, Chase. Go out like a fucking man. Take that goddamn tie that Henrik left and kill yourself. You can loop it on the end of the bed, sit down on the floor and just let go. You aren’t hooked up to any monitors. Nobody is gonna come check until 3 am when they come to look in on Jack. Fuck, they might not even notice you, just step over your fucking stupid legs and go on about their day. That would suit you, just fading into the background like one of those fake skeletons at a haunted house. You’re a prop in your own life you worthless, pathetic, selfish-

          Chase screamed and jumped to his feet, his knees shaking but keeping him upright. He ran his hands through his hair, tears streaming down his face as the voice shouted again and again for him to kill himself. He looked at Jack, whimpering at the thought of leaving the others, but they were better off without him. He’d attacked Henrik, sniped at Marvin, fought Jackie and refused to get help until it almost killed him. Now Jack was lying in this bed under Henrik’s control, and Chase couldn’t even stop that. There was an absolute lack of ability to do anything inside of Chase. He picked up the silk tie, running it through his fingers. It was expensive, so it would probably do a good enough job. He’d learned about knots from his father when they’d gone out on a boat. He’d retained enough to teach his own son, although he’d never gotten old enough before Stacy had taken both the kids and gone. Maybe teaching the knots wasn’t such a good idea after all. Did depression run in his family? It was hard to tell.

          Chase paced the room again, rubbing the silk against his face. It felt good, and it reminded him of the green dress Stacy wore on the day he proposed. It had been so gorgeous. He’d been planning it for weeks, and then he had almost lost the ring. He’d always been a fuck up, but Stacy had found it endearing once. He could still see the look in her eyes that he had once mistaken for love. It was pity, or longsuffering, or outright annoyance. He knew that now, the way she’d looked at him then when he asked. She had been waiting for someone else to come along, and Chase had been her backup plan. So she’d said yes. Neither of their kids had been intentional, and she had cried both times she found out she was pregnant, but Chase had been so proud, so excited. He loved his kids so much, even though sometimes he wasn’t at home to play with them, or take care of them, but if Stacy had an emergency, he’d always come home. Just like the chickenpox.

          How long are you going to keep falling back on that fucking chickenpox story? Being a decent dad to one of your kids once doesn’t make you father of the year.

          Chase heard that in Stacy’s voice, because it had been her that said it, when he missed his daughter’s birthday party. He hadn’t meant to, but things get in the way, and time is tenuous and sometimes his phone wouldn’t remind him of things. Chase laughed bitterly at his excuses, and how even now at his lowest point he was still trying to pass the blame.

          Fucking typical, Chase. You always do this! Do you know how humiliating it was explaining to my mother why my husband wasn’t at his daughter’s birthday party? Do you know the way our friends looked at me?

               “I’m sorry, Stace,” Chase said. “I really didn’t mean to miss it. I just got caught up.”

               Caught up, right, your real passion, right? The thing that really matters to you? Well maybe Bro Average can comfort you when your daughter asks why you don’t love her, because that’s what she asked me! And I almost couldn’t convince her that you do. I almost couldn’t convince myself. It gets a lot harder every time you do this.

               “No, Stacy I love all of you! You’re my world! Don’t say things like that. I’m just… I’m just forgetful, ok? I’ll make it up to her.”

               How Chase?

               “With this,” Chase murmured, looking at the tie again, “I’m sorry, baby. You know Daddy loves you more than anything in the whole wide world. He just forgets. But he’s gonna make it up to you now, baby.”

               He walked over to his hospital bed, hands steady as he secured the silk to the bed rail; he took the bed remote and sat on the floor.

               Don’t worry, Chase; how many brides can say their husband knew how to tie a tie on their wedding day, anyway? It’s kind of romantic, but keep your eyes closed! You can’t see me in my dress!

               Chase closed his eyes, and he could smell Stacy’s perfume when she leaned in, fixing the tie around his neck. She kissed him, and he smiled, pressing down on the bed lift button.

               I love you.

[magicalthoughtsendinterriblefics]

Say Love - Song-based Request

Requested by anon: I was wondering if you would write a angsty Dean Reader, where Dean went to Lisa after Sam fell into the pit, though he and the reader are engaged and he promised her to marry her after everything's over. She finds out and confronts him, and he regrets it and leaves Lisa but the Reader can't forgive him that easily for betraying her like that & anon: I was wondering if you could do an angsty dean imagine based off of "say love" by Jojo

Pairing: Dean x reader

Wordcount: 2.097

Warnings: Angst, not edited, not quite right according to the original story, Dean being a real asshole.

A/N: SO I haven’t watched Supernatural in about a year, so... SORRY. I figured Dean had to be a proper asshole in order to work for me so, if you don’t like that, feel free to go read something else.

Enjoy!

“I promise you, when this is all over, you and I are heading straight to Vegas and get married,” Dean said listlessly as he packed his guns.

“If you come out alive, that is,” (Y/N) replied. Dean sighed heavily and stopped his activity, he got up from the motel bed and walked towards her, holding her hips with his strong hands.

“I’m a Winchester, trust me, you won’t get rid of me that easily,” he smirked just the way she liked it and pecked her lips softly.

“I love you, Dean,” she whispered.

“Me too, sweetheart,” he said and turned around, going back to pack the rest of his guns before leaving.

Whatever happened that day remained a mystery to her for many years. Dean didn’t come back as promised, instead (Y/N) waited for two days for him to return before going to every hospital around the area looking for him, then she went to every morgue, then to every prison in the whole country. She didn’t find him anywhere.

To anyone else, that would’ve been weird, but she knew how supernatural things worked, and sometimes there was no body left behind to bury.

She tried to move on. At least the Apocalypse was over, that was for sure, so it meant Dean got to finish the job. It was the only thing that mattered, or so he said, and therefore (Y/N) tried to honour his memory by hunting more and more monsters.

Hunting had always been Dean’s priority, and he always said that it didn’t matter if it took your life away, you always had to finish the job. He lived and died by that motto, and (Y/N) was following his steps.

“Cicero, Indiana,” (Y/N) read out loud as she sipped from her cup of coffee, “three mysterious deaths and one missing corpse… Easy.”

She had continued moving from one motel to another, eating out from one diner to another, changing from one identity to another, just like Dean had taught her ten years before, and each day she tried to honour his and Sam’s memory and name.

She drove a rented yellow car all the way down to Indiana, he dropped the car in the highway and walked to a new car rental to get a new one. This time it was white and austere, perfect to keep a low profile.

Then she drove to the cheapest hotel she could find, asked for a room and installed herself before going out as an FBI agent to start her investigation.

She was interrogating an old woman out in the middle of the street, when she saw Dean parking on the opposite sidewalk. She had to stop the old woman from talking to focus on what she was seeing - she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Dean was no longer driving the Impala, and he had a kid on the passenger’s seat, which he was taking to school. The kid ran inside the school building as Dean waved goodbye. Then, he took his phone out and made a call.

“I told you he would be on time,” he laughed, “that was only once and we already apologised… Alright… So what do you want for dinner, I can go to walmart after work and buy whatever you want… Sounds yummy… Yeah, I’ll get that too. All right, love you, bye.”

(Y/N) didn’t notice, but her eyes had filled with tears that wouldn’t slip. She had lost her breath as she saw Dean drive away. It was him, for sure; same face and body, same clothes, same voice… Except he didn’t act like Dean. He wasn’t driving the Impala, he was working what seemed to be an actual job, he was taking a kid to school and getting him on time, and he was saying “I love you” to the person on the other side of the phone.

“Miss, are you alright?” The lady asked.

“Yes, apologies, it’s just that he was my next witness,” (Y/N) muttered and then went back to her business.

The old lady was no help at all. But (Y/N) didn’t care anymore, she had seen her dead fiancé out on the street, alive and kicking, after having faced both Michael and Lucifer.

“Michael possessed him, that’s it,” she told herself while she packed her weapons.

She had been spying on Dean for a whole week. She learned his schedules and found out everything about the woman he was living with.

“Lisa, an ex-girlfriend… Oh, Michael, you really don’t know my man, he wouldn’t go back to her… nor any other ex.” (Y/N) talked to herself as she spied on them having dinner at a fancy restaurant on a Friday night.

As they were going out, (Y/N) heard Lisa telling Dean about her want to take her son out the next night. “I think we need some mother and son time, you know?”

“I know, babe, you do whatever you think is right. I’ll stay home and fix that sink that’s giving you trouble, okay?”

“Thanks, sweetie,” she said and kissed his cheek.

“Thanks, sweetie,” (Y/N) mocked and waited for them to get on the car. She started her own car and went out to keep on working on her hunt because, no matter what, she had to finish the job.

The next night, she parked right in front of Lisa’s house and waited for her to leave. She saw Dean walking her and the kid to the car, and how she drove away as he, again, waved goodbye.

For a second, (Y/N) observed him and noticed how much of a dad he was. Of course, it was Michael possessing him but who cared? He was a good father, kind and soft, and she couldn’t help but imagine what real Dean would be like if they had their own kids. A tear rolled down her cheek at the thought, thinking of the life she could no longer have.

She waited for Dean to get back inside to leave the car. She walked back to the trunk and took out a couple blades, which she hid in her leather pants, and then a gun which she kept on a safety belt around her torso, hiding under her black shirt. Then some ninja stars she had just bought, which she kept inside the pockets of her leather jacket, and finally she took a machete out.

She rang the doorbell and moved in a way that Dean couldn’t see her face through the peephole.

“Who is it?” Dean asked from behind the door, for he couldn’t see her face.

“Oh, I’m Lisa’s friend. I just came here to pick up my tupperware, that’s all,” (Y/N) answered with a fake accent.

Dean opened the door and froze at the sight of (Y/N) standing, threateningly, in front of him.

“Hi, Dean,” she said and threw a combo of punches and kicks that made him run inside. She attacked him fiercely, and could easily trap him between the wall and her body, pushing the machete to his throat just enough to make him stay still but not enough to cut his head off. “I want answers, and I want them now, Michael.”

Dean stopped shaking, and looked at her directly to the eyes. “I’m not Michael.”

“Right, Dean,” she faked a smile but didn’t move away, “why didn’t you come back then.”

Dean swallowed lightly and prepared himself for the greatest lie he had ever told.

“So what are you doing here?” Dean asked. He was now sitting on his couch, as (Y/N) stomped around the living room. Her machete rested on the coffee table in front of Dean.

“I’m hunting a zombie in town,” she answered.

“Oh, it’s Margaret Thompson’s fault,” Dean said, “she’s been playing with antique voodoo curses.”

(Y/N)’s mouth fell open. “The old woman? How on God’s green Earth do you know that?”

“I saw her buying the book and stuff…” He muttered.

“Why didn’t you stop her?” She argued.

“I told you I’m not on the business anymore!” Dean exclaimed.

(Y/N) shook her head in disappointment, trying to hold back her tears. “This is not my Dean,” she whined, “MY Dean would’ve stopped that woman from the beginning.”

“I’m so sorry, (Y/N/N)” he apologised.

“Sorry isn’t enough.” She dried her tears with the back of her hand, took her machete from the coffee table and turned around to leave.

“Where are you going?” Dean asked, getting up from the couch.

“I’m going to kill a zombie and an old woman, then I’m going to go find a new case and so on until I take out all the rage I have growing inside of me.” She huffed.

“(Y/N), I’m sorry… I just didn’t know what to do… I couldn’t, I couldn’t get back to you after Sam’s death because you reminded me of him.” Dean said.

“Well, boo-hoo you whore, I had to spend a whole year mourning your death. I spent three months looking for you everywhere; hospitals, morgues, prisons… EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE and meanwhile you were playing Barbie’s house with that… woman and her goddamn son.” She shouted.

“I’m sorry!” Dean shouted back, “I… Alright, I’ll tell you the truth.” He took in a deep breath, “I was too scared to get back and marry you.”

“WHY? WHAT DID I DO WRONG?” She cried.

“NOTHING!” He replied, “You never did anything wrong. You’re perfect, and pretty and you’re worth it… I couldn’t help but to think I didn’t deserve you… And I still don’t. So I came back to Lisa, thinking that if she could take me back you would too when I was ready to be a good husband. I’ve… I’ve been taking this as training.”

“You… You are such a child!” She cried, “Taking this as training? Are you fucking serious? This woman is trusting you, she’s letting you live with her, take care of her child, make love to her… And you are taking this as training? I always knew you were an asshole but this is too low, even for you.”

“See? That’s what I mean, you’re too good for me. You’re perfect, and pre…”

“Pretty, and worth it…” She interrupted, “I know, that’s what you always said. But if you really care for me, you could’ve done so many other things…” She chuckled with disdain, “Hell, you couldn’t even say ‘I love you’ once.”

“I always said it,” Dean argued.

“No, you said ‘me too’ but never the L word…” She wiped a tear away.

“Give me another chance, I promise I’ll be good.” Dean begged.

“I can’t, not after all of this.”

“(Y/N), please, I’ll take the Impala out of the garage and we’ll run away just like the first time, remember?” He held her hand, “We were twenty and your father was threatening to sacrifice you for the sake of his cult… We drove away in the Impala, no bags nor anything, just you and me. We can do it again.”

“No, Dean… I’m not letting you break that woman’s heart, nor her kid’s.” She took her hand away from Dean’s grip, “Be a man for once and take responsibility for what you have started here.”

She let out a couple more tears, looking deeply into Dean’s whole frame, as a way to keep him on her mind. One last memory to close the cycle. “Goodbye, Dean.”

She turned around and left without looking back. Dean followed her, saying all kinds of things, trying to get her back, but she wasn’t listening. In her world, she had finally finished that chapter.

“I love you,” Dean whispered, but (Y/N) didn’t hear it either. She was already inside the car, with her window up. She gave him one last glance and drove away.

(Y/N) got back to her motel. She parked and cried for a full hour, willing to take all that pain away from her body. When she was finished, she got out and walked towards the door that led to her room. She was looking for her keys when a shiver ran down her spine.

“Hi, (Y/N), long time no see,” a voice said. (Y/N) froze in place and sighed with pain.

“Oh no, not you too,” she mourned.

“Wanna go for a walk?” the voice asked. (Y/N) turned around and saw Sam Winchester standing right in front of her, looking as alive as the last time she had seen him.

“Sure, why not?”

Masterlist

Requests

Schedule

To-Do List

Forever Tags: @dekahg @myfriendmagislit @thecrazyhatwoman @pureawesomeness001 @bingewatchingmylifegoby @cutie1365 @one-left-foot

SPN Tags: @dreamingintheimpalawithdean @roseyhxnt @thisisjessicatalking @hotwinchester @pizzarollpatrol @colorfuluniversewhispers @destiel5100 @bones-can-only-fly @frayedphan @shadyladyperfection @baconlover001

Dean Tags: @coffeebreakandwinchesters @procrastinating-my-life-away @rdy4thevoid @baconlover001 @wonderwinchester @imissyoualittlemoreeveryday

[buckyscrystalqueen]

Found

Pairings: Ex-Jax x Reader

Warnings: Angst, fluff, domestic abuse for a minute.... fuck, y’all I hate warnings!

Word Count: 3,429

A/N: So y’all really didn’t ask for it but you got a continuation of ‘Running’.

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

“Abel, stay close, please.” You called out to your five year old as you picked up your one year old daughter, Charlotte, from the stroller on the first day of Abel’s summer break.

“Mumma, I go slide.” Thomas said in his half American, half English accent as the three year old slid out of his seat, and ran off to join his brother.

“Stay with Abel.” You told him as you ran your fingers through your dyed, dark red hair, pulled it over your shoulder, and walked a few steps over to the swing set. Your oldest, who had become the most caring, compassionate, and patient little boy in the world in the two years you had been in England, stopped on the steps to wait for his brother as you put your baby girl in the left most swing in the set so you could see the boy’s favorite slide.

“Are we swinging?” You asked little Charlie. Her smile was infectious as she kicked her legs and laughed at you. “Yea, we’re swinging.”

“Mama, watch!” Abel yelled as he sat down behind Thomas on the slide. You looked up and yelled ‘woo’ for the boys as they slid down the spiral slide together. “Good job! You gunna do it again?” The two brothers nodded and raced each other back around the playground to get to the stairs again. Just like you did each and every day you went to the park by your house with your children, watching them play and just be kids without having to worry about someone coming to kidnap them or a drive by shooting because of who their father was, you let out a sigh of relief.

“Mumma!” Charlie screeched with a laugh as she whacked her chubby fist on the front of the swing chair. Your smile grew as you took a step to the side and looked down at her.

“What? What are you doin?” You growled playfully. You held the swing in place for a moment and gave her a few loud kisses on the cheek so she would laugh loudly and whack at your face. With a laugh of your own, you stood up straight and went back to pushing her for a little while longer before you took her down the baby slide.

——

“Yea?” Jax asked into his phone as he walked away from the Red Woody door toward his bike. 

“Teller?” A voice asked. “Toby Anderson, Manchester charter. Listen, my old lady and I were at the park today with my boy. Saw a young red head with two little boys, and a little girl… She had a crow on the back of her left shoulder.” Jax’s stomach turned violently, and he felt his blood run cold as he stopped in the middle of the parking lot.

“The boys… how old…”

“One looked to be about five and the other three, maybe four. Little girl was no older than a year. She called one of ‘em Abel…”

“You fucking sure about that?” Jax said as he kneeled down, and put his hand on the hot asphalt to keep himself from falling over.

“I’d bet my kutte on it, brother.” Tears welled in the president’s eyes as he nodded his head.

“I want eyes on her.” He choked before he cleared his throat and sat back on his heels. “But my wife is smart. Keep your distance, no kutte’s, no bikes. She will spot you, and she spooks easy. I’ll take the first flight out I can get.” Jax looked over at Chibs as he hung up the phone and shook his head. “She has my kids in Manchester. (Y/N)… she has Abel and Thomas… and my daughter…”

“A’righ’, le’s go.” Chibs said as he helped Jax to his feet. “Le’s get a flight out’a ‘ere…”

“Just me.” He said with a shake of his head. “I need to do this…”

“I’m no’ lettin ye go alone, Jackie. ’s’not ‘appenin.” With a nod of his head, he grabbed his helmet from his motorcycle.

“We gotta go now. Before she moves them again.”

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

“Thomas, don’t climb up the slide.” You scolded as you changed Charlotte on the park bench. You put your hand on your daughter’s stomach and turned to look at him with your eyebrows raised. “One…” In typical Thomas fashion, he sighed dramatically and flopped down on the slide on his stomach. “That’s what I though.” You said with a nod as you went back to changing your little girl. You looked up again at the woman about your age that had been leaning against her black SUV since you arrived at the park as she dropped her fourth cigarette on the ground and finally went around to get in her car. You picked up Charlie carefully as an unease washed over you.

“Abel…” You called out hesitantly as the woman drove off. “Thomas, it’s time to go…”

“Daddy!” Abel cheered as he slid down the slide his brother had just tried to climb up, and went running. You lurched to your feet and whipped around as Jax crouched down behind you and picked up his oldest son. You felt Thomas slam into your legs and you put your hand on the back of his head as you held Charlie to your chest.

“(Y/N).” Your ex said as he walked over to you, as calm as could be. You shook your head, and slowly backed away from him, terrified of what he was capable of. He stopped directly in front of you, and put Abel down so he could reach out and take Charlotte from you.

“No… please…” You said as tears filled your eyes. He stayed deathly silent as he pulled his daughter from your arms and sat her on his hip.

“It’s time to go.” He said as he looked down at Thomas and held out his hand. “Come on, buddy.” You shook your head, and quickly picked up Thomas to keep him out of Jax’s reach.

“Give me back my daughter.” You nearly whispered as you searched Jax’s blue eyes. “Now.”

“We’re going home.” Was all he said as he grabbed your wrist and pulled you away from the jungle gym. “Let’s go, Abel.”

“It’s alright, Charlie.” You said to your daughter as she started to cry. “Mumma’s here.”

“For now.” Jax responded as he stopped long enough to put Charlotte in her stroller spot. “Abel, I won’t ask again!” Your oldest sighed and jumped down from the stairs. You scrambled to grab his arm but missed, which meant he ran to hold his dad’s hand instead. Never in your life had you actually been afraid of the man you had called your husband for almost ten years but in that moment, as he walked toward your car, and the car next to yours where Chibs was standing, with two of your three children in his reach, you were terrified.

——

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Jax yelled as he paced the kitchen of your home as you stood between him and the stairs that lead up to the three bedrooms of your fiancé’s house. “Think I’d give up looking for my kids?”

“I never thought that.” You said with a shake of your head. “All I thought about was getting my children away from the club and all the death and danger that came with it.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit.” He snapped. “They were never…”

“Don’t you fucking dare tell me they were never in danger, Jackson!” You screeched as you pointed behind you up the stairs. “Abel was kidnapped when he was a few months old and taken to Ireland by the IRA. I was kidnapped when I was pregnant with Thomas, and how can we fucking forget that both boys, the daughter I didn’t even know I was pregnant with, and I were almost blown up IN the supposedly safe clubhouse! So don’t you fucking dare tell me they were safe! They’re safe here!”

“No, you fucking kidnapped them.” He spat as he pointed at you. “You are the one who took them away from their father…”

“Jax, did you really not see how fucked up our son was?” You interrupted. “He brought a fucking knife for show and tell to fucking pre-school and told kids they needed to protect themselves.”

“Well they do…” Jax tried but you quickly shook your head.

“He was three years old, Jackson! He shouldn’t even know what fucking protection even meant…”

“The hell he shouldn’t!” Your ex tried but you continued.

“And Thomas? He was only one. After the bomb, he stopped eating, he stopped sleeping. He had night terrors for weeks after I brought him here. Weeks! His pediatrician was concerned that we were going to have to hospitalize him! He was just a baby! I almost miscarried our daughter from all the stress. So tell me how safe you think our children were.”

“You still had no fucking right to take my kids away from me!” He roared as the front door to your home opened behind you. “They are my Goddamn kids…”

“Not any more.” You said with a shake of your head as your fiancé, James walked quickly into the kitchen to find out what was going on.

“Who the bloody ‘ell are you?” He asked as he pulled you back a step behind him.

“Someone who’s taking my fucking kids home where they fucking belong.” Jax growled back as he grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and walked toward the stairs.

“You’re not touching one hair on my kids’ heads.”

“Jax stop.” You said as you forced yourself around James as he took a step back toward the stairs to protect the kids he had raised since a couple weeks after you got to the UK.

“Move.” He growled as he went to shove you out of the way.

“No!” You shouted as you pushed him a step back with all your might. You gasped and reached out to grab his shirt when he reflexively swung his arm out to stop you, sending the blade of your kitchen knife into your stomach. You felt the stainless steel cut easily through your skin just to the left of your belly button, and your muscles clenched around it, making it feel a thousand times worse. You let out another guttural gasp and stumbled a couple steps in sheer agony as he dropped the knife and grabbed your arms.

“Fuck! FUCK! Baby, I’m sorry! No!” Jax shouted as he pulled you into his arms and gently laid you down on the tile floor. Tears welled in your eyes as your blood pooled under your palms on your stomach. You tried to catch your breath and looked over to find your fiancé’s face as he ripped off his work suit jacket and balled it up.

“Move your hands, love. Move ‘em for me.” He said softly as he put his hands on your stomach, and pressed the material into your wound.

“Ba-bies…” You tried as Jax scrambled to find some mail or something with your address on it to give to the emergency operator.

“They’re alright, my love. It’s OK.” He said as he kneeled down beside you, fighting his own tears. “I’ll call my mum to take them when the paramedics come.”

“(Y/N), I’m so sorry.” Jax tried as he took off his flannel button down to help but your fiancé, who knew all about your ex husband and all your family had gone through because of him, glared at him, threateningly.

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” He snapped. “Piss off, mate.” Jax nodded his head as you took a strangled gasp, and held on to James’ wrist.

“I l-love…” You tried as your vision started to tunnel.

“Stay with me, my love.” James said as Jax got up and ran to get the door to let the medics in before going to tell Chibs to keep the kids upstairs until your mother in law got there. Your eyes darted over to find his and a small smile pulled at your lips.

“Thank you.” You whispered before you lost consciousness.

——

“…Did you eat all your vegetables?” You heard James ask quietly from somewhere close but seemingly so far away. “Well, you know you can’t have any brownies until you’ve finished them, Abel… Yes, even if mummy is sick.” Your brow furrowed as you tried to figure out what happened and you whined as your mind started to catch up with the physical pain you were in. “Abel, let me talk to Nana.” He said over the squeak of a chair. “It’s alright, love. You’re in the hospital.” You shook your head, not understanding much of anything at that moment.

“Mum, I’ll call you later. She’s comin’ round. Make sure Abel finishes… thanks, Mum. I will. Love you, too.” You felt the bed dip at your hip as James sat down at your side and very gently picked up your hand. “I’m right here, (Y/N). You don’t have to wake up if you don’t want to. The kids are still with me mum. Been there all week…” Your brow furrowed even more as you finally forced your eyes open and looked at his blurry figure. He smiled broadly as a few tears fell from his eyes onto his blue button down shirt.

“Hi beautiful.” He breathed as he brushed your hair back off your face. “You came back to me.”

“What… hap…?” You tried, before cringing in pain.

“You were stabbed, baby.” He whispered. “It was an accident…”

“It hurts.” You groaned as you closed your eyes. 

“I know, my love. But they can’t give you anything for the pain. You’re pregnant, (Y/N).” Your eyes flew open and tried to focus on your fiancé as a mix of emotions flooded your soul.

“What?” He nodded his head, and cupped your jaw in his hand.

“Breathe for me, love. We’ll figure this out together.” You nodded in his palm and squeezed his hand, needing him to ground you. 

“Baby…” You whined in pain, fear, and happiness as tears fell on your cheeks and exhaustion hit you again. Your eyes fluttered as you tried to wrap your mind around everything and your fiancé nodded his head, and leaned forward to kiss your forehead.

“Get some sleep, darling. I’ll be right here.” You nodded your head once more and let your eyes fall closed as you snuggled into his palm. “I love you, (Y/N). It’s all going to be OK.”

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

“… Look, I get that you don’t fucking like me.” Jax said a little loudly, pulling you from the dream you were having about walking on the beach with your family of four and James by your side. “I’m gone, alright. But you need to give this to her.”

“Give me what?” You groaned without opening your eyes. You sighed and pulled your heavy eye lids open as Jax stepped around James and came over to your bed.

“Baby, I’m so sorry.” He said as he pulled a chair over to sit beside you.

“I know.” You whispered as he set something your eyes couldn’t yet focus on on the bed by your leg. 

“You’re right…”

“I’m always right, Jax.” You breathed as you looked around for some water. As if he read your mind, your fiancé came over with a small glass of water. He told you to sip slow, as Jax nodded his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

“I know you are, babe.” He agreed. “You have been right since we were kids. You were right in saying that we shouldn’t legally get married. You were right in saying we shouldn’t bring kids into my world. You were right in getting them out and you were right in staying away from me.” You nodded your head and looked over at him as he picked up whatever he had brought with him and showed it to you. “It’s all the cash I could get Opie to send to me from the house. It’s a few hundred thousand and I know you left that shit behind on purpose but you need it…”

“Jax…” You tried but he shook his head.

“You need it.” He repeated as he held the cash up to James. “Take it.” With a glance down at your slightly annoyed sigh, and a moments hesitation, he took the cash from your ex. “I’m not coming back.” He finished as he looked back down at you. “I’m not seeing the boys before I go. I want you to tell them that I did this to you. No…” He said with a shake of his head when you opened your mouth to protest. “I’m a fucking monster (Y/N). I fucking stabbed the mother of my kids. And if you don’t fucking tell them, he will. I know he will.” He gestured to James, who was already nodding his head slowly. “You’re gunna tell all of them. Abel, Thomas, and our daughter…”

“Charlotte.” You whispered. He nodded his head and swallowed his feelings back, hard.

“You’re gunna tell them every single bad thing that I’ve put you through. All of it. I want them to fucking hate the idea of me. Thomas and Charlotte know him as dad… Abel will give into it one day, too. He’s obviously been a better father than I could ever be. So it’s for the best. You were right.” He said once more as he reached into his kutte pocket and pulled out a folded stack of papers. “So they’re yours.” You blinked a few times as he put the papers down on your thighs, and stood up from the chair. He searched your eyes with a sad, tight lipped smile and sighed. “I love you, (Y/N). But I hope I never see you again.” You closed your eyes and bowed your head as he gave you a chaste kiss on the forehead and walked out of the room. Tears welled in your eyes as James walked over and took the chair Jax had just vacated.

“I’m sorry, baby.” He whispered as he moved the papers off your lap so he could have his lawyer look at them later. “I know it hurts.”

“I just want it all to be over.” You cried, in both heart break and physical pain.

“It is, darling.” He said with a nod. “It’s all over now.”

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

You could feel eyes on you as you stepped out of the church in your fitted mermaid dress, and they weren’t just the eyes of the hundreds of guests that attended your wedding behind you. You didn’t want to look, but you couldn’t stop yourself. Your eyes found those baby blues easily, leaning against a tree in the park across the street, sad, lost, lonely, but grateful all the same. His eyes left yours for a moment as Abel came running out of the church, calling for his dad, and you knew this was about to break your ex even more. 

“What are you doing?” James laughed as he turned and caught his son around the middle with a laugh.

“We can eat now, right dad?” The seven year old asked as he reached up his hand for your husband’s. James nodded his head as he picked up three year old Charlotte and headed down the stairs toward the waiting limo. You watched Abel wait long enough to take Thomas’ hand to help him down the stairs before looking back up at Jax. He nodded his head subtly, telling you so much in such a simple gesture, before he pushed off the tree and turned to walk away.

“(Y/N)?” Your mother in law, Anne said as she tapped your arm. “She wants you.” You put a smile on your face and a single tear fell from your eye as you turned to take one year old Grace from her arms.

“You ready to go dance?” You asked her as you fixed her light pink, ruffled dress over your arm and grabbed the hand rail and walked carefully down the stairs. “Let’s go dance, baby.” Your youngest giggled and reached up to play with your curls as you walked over to the limo.

“You alright?” James asked as he looked at your face in concern. You smiled and nodded your head as you glanced back up at the park.

“I’m perfect.” You said as you looked back at him. “I found my home.”

[staytiny-angel]

Inside/Out -Two

Inside/Out - Two

Rating: E

Main Pairing: Dean Ambrose/Cassandra Lincoln (OC)

Side Pairing: Seth Rollins/Finn Balor

Warnings: (for entire story) Language, Homophobic slurs, Smut, Violence, nongraphic mentions of Stalking, Attempted Kidnapping and Domestic Abuse.

Summary: Mechanic Dean Ambrose is about to be released from prison after serving three years for manslaughter after nearly beating Randy Orton, the Mayor’s son to death after Orton attacked his ex-girlfriend, the daughter of the town’s pastor Cassandra Lincoln. Having fallen in love with Cassandra himself over the last three years, Dean will stop at nothing to protect her from the still lingering threat of Randy Orton and the judgemental views of their small town.

Authors Note: This chapter is dedicated to the thirsty girl crew in the group chat. They are without a doubt the best cheerleaders a bitch could have.

2 years, 330 days ago

Hey Cassie-girl,

Books are always appreciated, Doll. I've never read the Harry Potter series before even though Seth has been on me to read them since we were kids. They're his favorite. Speaking of my brothers I hope I'm not overstepping but since Seth, his husband and Roman decided to move to Haven for the duration of my sentence, I asked them if they'd look out for you. I'm so sorry doll but even though I'm in here I heard that Orton is getting out of the hospital finally and I don't trust him. You know what Seth and Finn look like from my trial but Ro was still serving overseas so I'm enclosing a picture of him that they let me print out in the library.

Stay Safe Doll,

Dean.

2 years, 326 days ago

Hi Dean!

Those two new guys sound REALLY annoying and they actually call themselves the B - Team? How....strange. The Pastor is being weird and controlling again. I caught him trying to steal one of your letters out of the mailbox before I could get to it, So I bought a post office box. I don't trust him not to try again. I hope this letter finds you as well as you can be under the circumstances and that you enjoyed the newest care package I've included with this letter. It took quite a bit of research to find things that fit the state's requirements.

Talk to you next week

Cassie

Present Day

"AMBROSE!" a guard yelled, "Let's go!"

Dean carefully folded up the worn letter and placed it in the box with the rest of his Doll's letters. 3 years in Statie had gone by quicker then he could have imagined thanks to his beautiful Cassie.

The last thing he could have imagined happening when he'd shown up to a routine roadside assistance call was to come upon an attempted kidnapping but that's exactly what had happened.

*"Randy let go of me!" Dean had jumped out of his truck when he'd realized that the pretty African-American girl was being forced into the fancy sedan parked next to the convertible he'd been sent to retrieve. Looking closer he recognized both Cassandra, the Pastor's daughter, and Randy Orton, the son of Haven's mayor. *

"AMBROSE!" the guard yelled again "Wake up outta Lala Land inmate, don't you want to go home?"

"Course I want out Gallows. Gotta go marry my girl." Dean said with a grin. The prison Grapevine was far-reaching and though not all the guards were as fair or nice to him Gallows and his partner Anderson were old friends of his brother in law and knew the exact circumstances of his incarceration so the two had done their best to make his 'Vacation' at the state penitentiary as trouble free as possible.

"Well then get your shit and let's get you the fuck out of here."

Cassie fiddled with her hair and fidgeted as she waited, she had just gotten a text from Anderson saying that Dean would be out in a few minutes and it was taking everything she had to keep it together. She was startled out of her thoughts by the sound of the door built into the gate opening and the sight of a tall, built man with sandy brown buzzcut hair walking through carrying a box.

This was it, after three years of just letters, phone calls and supervised visits where they couldn't even hold hands, it was time for her and Dean's life together to truly begin.

Dean squinted as bright Florida sunshine blinded him momentarily. Blinking away the spots he looked across the parking lot and froze because sitting on the hood of her bright blue convertible waiting for him was Cassie.

Dean and Cassie stared at each other for an endless moment both unsure of what to do now. They had spent almost the last three years waiting for this moment.

Cassie moved first, hopping off her car and dashing across the parking lot. "DEAN!" She yelled happily.

Dean dropped the box just in time for his future wife to slam into him, wrapping his arms around her waist he picked her up and covered her mouth with his.

Cassie couldn't believe this was really happening, Dean was free, in her arms and currently kissing the absolute daylights out of her.

Finally parting, both panting from lack of air, bright blue eyes stared into chocolate brown for a moment before Dean spoke.

"I love you, Doll" he rasped " I didn't want the first time I said it to be while I was locked up, but goddamn do I fuckin' love you."

"I love you too, Dean." She whispered eyes filling with tears.

Dean nodded, his gaze filled with unspoken emotion and released her to pick up his box of belongings again. "Let's get the fuck outta here doll. I never wanna see this place again."

The two got in her car and started the long drive back to Haven. After a few minutes of silence, Cassie giggled. Dean looked at her quizzically "Cassie?"

"It's just that we've been talking as much as we could for almost three years. Now that we can say whatever we like....its like I don't have to. We know each other." Cassie said through her giggles.

"Your brothers are at the house. They were gonna surprise you but I know how you feel about surprises." She told him.

"They never learn. I just wanted one day just us before the hoard decends. They knew that. That's why they tried to surprise me." Dean grumbled.

Dean looked like he was deep in thought for a moment as they passed an industrial park that had been abandoned years ago and looked like it was still abandoned to this day.

"Pull in here Cassie-girl" Dean stated.

Cassie looked at him questioningly but obeyed and pulled into the park and behind one of the abandoned warehouses. "What are we doing?" She asked as she shut off the car and turned to face him.

"If I have to deal with my brothers for the rest of the day and night...I want some real kisses from my girl first." He said looking at her, the passionate look in Dean's eyes sending a bolt of heat straight to her center.

"Come here babydoll, Daddy has waited long enough."

Cassie debated with herself for about half a second before climbing over the gearshift and into Dean's lap.

"Christ, fuckin' finally." He gasped as her weight settled on his lap and against his already hard cock. "Gimmie that mouth again doll."

Without any more hesitation, the two began kissing passionately, their tongues tangling, Dean's hands pulling at the back of her shirt so he could get to her skin.

Cassie broke the kiss, gasping for air "Daddy, wait for a second." She grabbed the hem of her purple T-shirt and pulled it over her head revealing breasts covered in a lacy low cut purple and black bra.

Dean groaned "Are you trying to get fucked on the hood of this car right now? Cause if you tease Daddy, Babydoll that's exactly what's gonna fuckin' happen."

"But what if that's what I want Daddy? What then?" She said giving him a pseudo-innocent look.

"Open the door and get off me babydoll, You want Daddy's cock? You got it." Dean growled.

Cassie opened the car door and scrambled off him, already heading to the hood of her car. If she was honest with herself she'd been fantasizing about Dean fucking her on the hood of her convertible since the first time she'd set eyes on him, months before that fateful night when he'd saved her from whatever Randy had planned to do.

Dean came up behind her and spanked her ass fast and hard. "2 years, 2 years of Anderson and Gallows sneaking our real letters back and forth so those fuckheads checking letters at the prison couldn't get off on all the dirty, nasty things I wanted to do to my doll."

He reached under the short black skirt she was wearing "No panties? Really, doll?"

"I took them off when I realized we wouldn't get to be alone at the house right away. You told me to pull over before I could show you so we could stop." She gasped as he started to stroke her already soaking pussy.

"Lean forward, hands on the hood babydoll." He commanded, smirking when she obeyed. "That's Daddy's good little girl."

Cassie heard the jingle of Dean's belt buckle and prepared herself to get fucked hard and fast, only to be shocked when she felt her Daddy's mouth on her pussy instead. Dean had dropped to his knees on the pavement behind her.

"Gotta get a taste first, been waiting for so fucking long." He said swirling his tongue around her hard clit before taking it into his mouth and sucking messily.

"Oh fuck, Daddy please!" Dean grinned to himself, he'd made the not so innocent preacher's daughter forget herself enough to curse, something he knew was very, very rare.

"Do you want to come on Daddy's mouth or cock babydoll?" He asked standing as he replaced his mouth with two thick fingers, thrusting them inside and cooking them to hit her G-spot dead on pulling a short loud scream from his beautiful girl.

"Cock, Daddy. Need you inside of me please." She said on a wail as he hit that spot perfectly once more.

"Birth control?" He asked as he finished undoing his jeans and pulled his achingly hard cock out.

"All set Daddy, please, please fuck me." Cassie moaned nearly mindless with pleasure now.

Dean turned her head toward him, kissing her deeply before grabbing her hips and burying his cock inside her with one hard thrust.

Two loud moans, one deep and gravelly, the other high and almost musical filled the air.

"Oh God, finally. Finally fuckin mine in every single way." He growled setting a rapid pace as he reached around and pinched her clit. He knew damn well he wasn't going to last very long and he'd be damned if his girl didn't come on his cock like she wanted to.

Cassie was primed and ready feeling the pleasure coil almost immediately in her belly.

"That's it baby come for Daddy" Dean groaned feeling her pussy begin to spasm. "Shit, fuck!" He damn near screamed as he began to cum inside his girl just as she fell over the edge herself alternating between screaming his actual name and Daddy.

He laid across her back for a moment as they caught their breath before putting themselves back together and continuing the drive home to Haven.