#Sometimes we scrap things and find a use for them later

[that1notetaker]

@westwindy1 Here you go. I was meaning to post some stuff, so now you have a mix of scrapped stuff, Chapter 3 spoilers of Blue and Silver, (the modern fic, except not exactly. Magic still runs rampant and things get interesting, hopefully), and future tibbits.

[beegalactica]

hot girl tips to be more productive

With a million things to do, where do we find the time? Sometimes it can be so easy to just procrastinate, not do your work and keep pushing it back till it's too late. Let's not do that anymore.

5-minute rule - start small. If you've been putting something off for a long time, trying to commit 1 hour to it can be challenging. You can't do a marathon without a warm-up first! Could you set a timer for 5 minutes to do that task? After 5 minutes if you want to continue, go for it; if you don't, that's okay, because at least you've done 5 minutes today, which is better than 0. Tomorrow or later in the day, try to challenge yourself to do 7 minutes this time, then 10, then 15, and you will get into that rhythm.

Eliminate distractions - it's all because of that damn phone 🙄 but seriously, tech and social media can have such a tight grip over our productivity and our attention. If you cannot control your usage, set app timers that lock the app after you use it for a certain amount of time or delete the app. I've been using a minimalist phone launcher called 'OLauncher' that removes all my icons and makes me manually have to type and search for the app. In the time it takes me to search for the app, I get to ask myself, "What am I looking for? Do I need to use it for something specific or do I just want to scroll?"

Schedule properly - note down all your commitments and non-negotiables in an app like Google Calendar and make sure all your big events are displayed there. Some people can fall into the habit of planning every second of their day, but I instead delegate a few tasks to each day and give myself any time within the day to complete them, the important thing being not when I do them, but that I do them in the end.

Write to-do lists - now this doesn't just mean in-app lists, which are very useful. Physically write them out. I use a scrap piece of paper and I write: "Today I WILL..." and then list all the things I want to get done. Having it written down helps me commit to it more and the feeling of ticking it is so satisfying.

Know your WHY - Why are you doing this? Why do you want to be more productive? Why do you want to study more? Always look at the bigger picture. Where do you want to be and how will your productivity help you get there?

Celebrate your wins - whether you completed all the things on your to-do list or just one, be proud of it. Some days, you will feel super motivated and fly through all your tasks, and other days you just want to stay in bed and do nothing. Making an effort is the first step to your success.

No matter whether your goal is to complete a project, get good grades, get into the school of your dreams, or just get your work out of the way so you can focus on other things, tackle it little by little. Just 20 minutes every day for a week is better than trying to do 140 minutes worth of work on the last day.

[avocado-writing]

notes: I did a lot of research for this and yes, the manuscript I reference is a real thing. I didn’t put its name in though because that felt a step too far 😂 set in the light, the dark, and the spaces in between after ch3 so hope that’s ok! requests like this give me life.

relationship: aziraphale x immortal!reader x crowley

rated: G, pure fluff

word count: 1.4K

if you like my work you can buy me a kofi!

You’re the one who makes the tea. 

That’s because you’re the only one who changes how you have it: sometimes you fancy a chai, or a green tea, or a lapsang souchong. Sometimes with sugar or a little bit of milk, sometimes with neither, sometimes with an oat alternative. It changes. You’re human, you go through phases. 

But Aziraphale and Crowley? Nah, they’re creatures of habit. Despite the angel’s wide and experimental palate he’s oddly rigorous when it comes to his cuppa. For him, it’s loads of milk and four sugars, drowned to the point where it could hardly be called tea any more. Crowley likes his black and strong and nowhere near anything that could affect the taste. You wring the teabag tortuously into his mug with a teaspoon before grabbing all three servings and heading into the shop. 

You put yours down first, on the side next to the book you’re currently reading, then hand your husbands theirs. They both take them from you in the same way, the way they have done for centuries now, a domestic ritual: accepting the mug you offer and then your hand, pressing a little kiss of thanks and affection to the back of it. 

A heartfelt  intimacy just between the three of you. 

☕️ 

“Hurry Crowley, it’s starting!”

“Yes, yes, alright angel, hang on.”

“We won’t hang on and we’re not pausing it. Not a threat, just a fact,” you call into the kitchen. A couple of seconds later, Crowley emerges from the kitchen with three wine glasses and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. 

“I’ll be mother, then,” he mutters as the other two of you barely take your eyes off of the telly. You’ve got your legs slung over Aziraphale’s lap and he only takes a break from stroking your knee in absentminded, loving circles to take the proffered glasses from his husband, one for himself and one for you. Crowley plonks down the other side of Aziraphale and throws his own legs over him too, the two of you playing footsie for space across his plush thighs. Eventually the three of you find a comfortable pile and settle in. 

“Another ten weeks of torture begins,” Crowley says as the Bake-off theme ends and the show starts. You nudge him with your toe. 

“You don’t have to watch it with us,” you tell him. He harrumphs but doesn’t argue because, really, of course he’ll watch it with the two of you. It makes you both happy. 

🍞 

Your work is as a consultant for museums around the country, which is a fun way of saying you get paid a lot because you know a lot. But mostly, you only know a lot because you’ve been around for a very long time. So whenever a shard of pottery or a scrap of clothing needs dating they call you to come and put its history into context. 

Also, for the bigger museums, it’s a chance for you to smuggle out the stolen artefacts and return them to their country of origin. You consider it a hobby, a bonus perk of the job. 

You’ve set up this exhibition. It’s for pottery around the end of the Roman rule in Britain, stuff you’ve found and identified around the country on archaeological digs. You lead Crowley and Aziraphale through, discussing your findings in detail, before you come to a small, surprisingly intact, terra sigillata oil lamp. It sits on its own, spot lit. You asked for it that way. 

“See this? I made this. Over a thousand years ago,” you tell them, quietly, gently putting your hand to the glass of the display case. Aziraphale and Crowley take a careful look at the engraving on the object. It bears the profile of a man, and with the sharp cheekbones and little glasses there’s only one person it could be. 

“Oh, Nightingale. It’s lovely,” Crowley says, surprisingly touched. He wraps an arm around you and buries his face into your hair. 

“You could say I’ve held a flame for you for a long time,” you say, and grin. Crowley groans. 

“Did you put my face on a lamp just to keep that pun up your sleeve?”

“Maybe.”

🔥 

You next return to the museum when you pick up that Aziraphale is jealous. He isn’t jealous often but he’s pants at hiding it, and it’s not hard to guess why: he’s just seen that Crowley stuck with you for such a long time you put his face on a piece of bloody pottery. You’d probably be a bit put out too. 

So for a couple of weeks you throw yourself into your work to find the thing that will make it even. And you do, even though it takes a lot of overseas bargaining and promises to do some pro-bono work. 

You finally get the museum in America to agree to send it over for a showing. You arrange a special exhibition specifically for this, where it’s held behind a huge glass case in a dark room with only a small light on it. 

But you get special access because, well, you’re you. So you sneak Aziraphale and Crowley in one night and walk into the display room, wearing a face mask and a pair of protective gloves. 

There it sits: the Canterbury Tales. One of the oldest versions in the world. 

“Oh, this is wonderful!” Aziraphale gasps, peeping over your shoulder to inspect. “I can feel the adoration coming off of it in waves. This was a labour of love, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I’d let you have it for the shop if I had the power. But I think they’d notice if I shoved this one down my top,” you sigh, scanning the pages for what you’re after, then stop dead when you find it. 

“Here. Look.”

You point to one of the illustrations, a mounted rider on a beautiful white horse. Aziraphale takes in a quiet breath and draws closer. Because just as plainly as you put Crowley on your oil lamp, you drew your angel in the Canterbury Tales. Curly hair, pink face, beaming smile. 

“Oh my,” he whispers. You stroke the little picture and remember toiling away over painting it, repeatedly wiping your brow to make sure your sweat didn’t smudge your work. 

“I put you in all the copies I could get my hands on. And you,” you turn to Crowley, “your face is probably buried on my pottery in a dozen dig sites across the UK. I’m just saying I’ve loved the two of you since the day we met; always have, always will.”

Your husbands look at each other and then at you, before as one they step forward to embrace you. 

“And we’re lucky to have you,” Crowley whispers in your ear, as Aziraphale kisses your cheek. Their hands meet at your back and they interlace their fingers with each other, you wrap your arms around them and stay like that for a moment; three working parts of a whole. 

They kiss, and then they kiss you. You feel warm and rosy. Then you spend the evening reading through the book from beginning to end. 

📖 

You keep your wedding ring on a chain around your neck at work. Not because you’re embarrassed that you're married; far from it - it’s far too precious to risk losing while constantly taking protective gloves on and off all day. So you don’t blame your colleague for asking you on a date. He’s young, fresh out of uni, and of course has no idea you’re old enough to be his grandparent forty times over. 

“That’s very kind,” you tell him, and his face falls because he knows where this is going, “but I’m already happily married.”

He sighs in embarrassment but manages to recover quickly, instead telling you: “they must be someone special to have you.”

He’s doing the polite thing by not assuming the gender of your spouse but it turns out “they” is right on the money. On cue, Aziraphale and Crowley walk through the door to pick you up at the end of your shift. You wish your colleague goodbye and go to meet them. 

“Evening, darling,” Crowley calls. 

“How was work, my love?” Aziraphale follows up. 

“Oh, fine. I’m tired now. And hungry. Can we go and get dinner?”

You link an arm through either of theirs, heading out into the London afternoon. 

“Ooh yes, that is a good idea. I quite fancy fish and chips!”

“Let’s go to that spot round the corner. They make their own tartar sauce. Crowley, are you getting your own chips or nicking mine when I’m not looking?”

“The best tasting chips are the ones you steal.”

“Oh, he doesn’t even deny it—!”

Your colleague watches you leave the building, a little dazed, and supposes it takes all sorts to make a world. 

Taglist: @angiestopit @dazed-soul @idontmeanto @smile-eywa @staygoldsquatchling02 @underratedboogeyman @specter-soltare @candlewitch-cryptic @cool-ontherun-world @emilynissangtr @willbedecided @cool-iguana @bdffkierenwalker

[erinwantstowrite]

erinwantstowrite on tumblr dot com how do you get the motivation to plan & outline & write & finish ur fics

well, anon on tumblr dot com, motivation comes in waves, and i've simply learned how to ride it

we're all in different boats of many colors, shapes, designs, and sails, so we all have different ways to ride our waves safely, creatively, and while having fun. my methods might not work for you (i hope they do!) but they could give you an idea. however, there are basic fundamentals that every sailor (writer) should know:

taking care of yourself, body and mind

going outside to enjoy the sun and live and breathe

taking time to learn new things

outside of the box thinking

your motivation will come to you better when you figure out what helps you feel good. create a schedule or set out a certain time of day to write, and don't beat yourself up if you find that your writing isn't coming to you on certain days. it'll come back, it always does

when planning, i like to use notebooks. i have two notebooks (so far) for LoF, notebooks for my original works, etc. I treat them like it's an extension of my brain (or like a journal). it has all my brainstorming, lists and facts, timelines, calendars, etc. i have research notes in here too! the notebook is a conglomeration of everything all together, and some things don't end up looking pretty or end up in the fic at all

outlining is different. outlining is taking your brainstorms, figuring out what is "needed" to drive the plot forward, what is "wanted" to fill in spaces between plots (example: i wanted tim and peter to meet, and i decided it makes the most sense if tim was stalking him, and what was needed for the plot was for tim to figure things out from that conversation). put it in a chronological order and try to make it read like an episode or "mini-book" each chapter, if you can. no pressure on that last part.

your outline will constantly change (think like how the wind and currents in a boat could shift and you have to adjust so you can get where you're going). do not fret about it, just continue forward. make a new outline with your new ideas, reflect and keep the old one around. you might scrap a scene and then find out you can fit it in somewhere else later on

when writing, you want to know what you can handle within a day. on average, i can set aside 80 minutes a day, and write about 2000 words. but it entirely depends on my mood, if i slept right, if i have plans that day, etc. sometimes i write 2000, other times i write 20 or nothing at all. do not push yourself to write every day or write a certain word count, it will come to you naturally. you'll also get better over time and with practice, and when you find and get comfortable with your writing style, you'll be able to make your plans, outlines, and write with no problem at all

and with finishing... i'll admit that i have an issue with that. i find that endings are the most important part of a story, and sometimes i don't want it to end. but alas, it must. endings are never "endings", because there will always be a set up to what comes later, even if you don't write it. you want your characters to finish their arc, but also have room for growth once the reader has stopped following their journey. it's satisfying to get to that end and see your characters off. it's on you to figure out your way over that hill

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.

[copperbadge]

What do you mean by digital cleaning?

It's something I've been working on more this year because I had a bit more travel than usual so couldn't do actual home cleaning, but I always take a couple of days in the Month Of Cleaning where I'm focused on my digital life. It's good to make your physical home a comfortable place for yourself, but it's also good to recognize that we have "digital" homes that need attention. And often this is at least less physically demanding, so it's good to keep it in your back pocket for days when you're mentally okay but physically too tired or sore to do more of that kind of work.

In the shortest possible terms, digital cleaning is just making sure that your phone, computer, socials, and other digital "presences" are organized in a way that you find helpful, and that you take a moment to either answer those messages you've been putting off or give yourself amnesty on doing so.

This tends to make a lot of people extremely anxious in a way ordinary physical space cleaning doesn't, so I'm going to put the rest of it behind a cut...

So when I say digital cleaning, I refer to stuff like going through my likes on Tumblr and clearing them out, going through my drafts and turning them into queued posts, answering my asks. I spend time in my email inboxes, either responding to messages or removing them. I am not an "inbox zero" kind of guy, but I like to keep the read-but-not-answered messages to a minimum, and towards the end of the year that usually means a clear-out and amnesty. I clean my Google Drive -- delete old files I uploaded for others, move documents I'm no longer using into an archive, move documents I want to work on into a central work folder. I go through my catch-all folder on my hard drive and organize it; I sort through the year's photos and organize those, partly to archive them and partly because I make a scrapbook from them each year. I don't usually have a ton of tabs open but often have more than I'd like, so I go through them all and either read, bookmark, or get rid of them.

I look in my phone's file tree to make sure I delete files I don't need (mostly menu downloads, Restaurants Stop Making Your Menus PDFs Challenge 2K24) and I sometimes go through each app on my phone, make sure I still use it, and make sure it's set how I want it. If this sounds like a nightmare, bear in mind that I very rarely put apps on my phone to start with -- I think my mother has more apps open at any given time than I have apps on my phone ever.

Everywhere I clean, I look for files named things like "notes" or "deal with" or "random" and move them all into one place so that whatever is in them, I can sort through it and make sure it goes somewhere permanent. Logins go in the login/password spreadsheet I keep, addresses go into my contacts, story notes go into a "fiction scraps" file, random thoughts either get moved into a journal file or put into drafts to become Tumblr posts, etc.

If this sounds like I might have some kind of compulsion disorder, I get that; when I explain my digital hygiene systems a lot of people look at me like I'm spouting a mad but harmless conspiracy theory. But it's something I used to have to do periodically even before I created National Clean Your Home Month, because otherwise I could never find anything, and everything was just...harder. As I once told a boss who admired my organizational skills, "It was this or endless chaos."

Putting addresses into my contacts list means I always know that the addresses I have for my friends are up to date. Putting logins into a spreadsheet means that five minutes spent now will not result in five weeks of procrastination later because I can't find the login and can't do anything else until I do that. Going through my email and archiving old conversations means not only can I find them easily when needed, I don't have to look at them the rest of the time. Sometimes I even go through my various wish lists and remove old/purchased items, or clear out all my "save for later" carts.

There's no doubt this is stressful, but like every part of NaClYoHo, it's broken down into smaller tasks; I don't have to look at my computer and organize everything on it all in one day. I can answer a few asks, then sort photos (something I find very soothing up until the moment I Don't), then read and delete some emails, then I'm done for the day. I can spread "answer or file all your work emails" out over a couple of days. I can maybe empty out my Likes but just turn the ones I actually want to reblog into drafts for now and deal with them later in the "drafts" phase of cleaning. And if I don't manage to empty out my inboxes, at least they're emptier than they were.

I'm struggling this morning with having put a bunch of physical cleaning on the to-do list but not feeling physically up for it, so I did what I felt capable of doing (measuring cabinets for new shelf liners mainly) and later today I might sit down and start building this year's photobook. Or not -- I have to code Radio Free Monday, sort out a prescription and possibly go pick it up, plus a very full day of work and a couple of afternoon appointments I can't shirk, so today may simply be a "get through the day" kind of day. That's okay too; some days the spirit is willing but the schedule is full.

[gretavanmoon]

an omnipresent force• ch 2

Chapter 2- DARK ENIGMA

Jake x reader (we'll get there... I promise)

Words: 12.4k

A/N: Semi-AU// Set six years in the future, the world has decided to cast humankind aside, starting with the poisonous entities that are destroying her the most.

Warnings: Dystopian Horror Cursing, Smoking, Mention of Drugs, Feelings of Fear and Uncertainty, An Apocalyptic World, Hunting, Violence (mention of firearms), Kidnapping, Wounds and Pain, Blood, Death & Dying, Burials, Lying, Deceit, Sadness, Panic Attacks, Use of Restraints, Mentions of Sex

Cheatham County, Tennessee

Five days later

Y/N

The old wood of the rocking chair squeaks beneath me as I gently move my body back and forth, snuggling into my thick afghan wrapped around my body. There is a light dusting of snow on the ground, and I’d spent the majority of the evening out here on the porch, taking in the scene of my grandparents’ farmland before me. The lead in the pencil I’ve been writing with all evening is starting to dull, but I press a little harder to get the last few sentences written down into my journal. 

December 29, 2030

Day five back at Pap and Gran’s farm. We didn’t do much today except peel some potatoes and boil chicken for broth. Gran’s state has deteriorated since we made it back here. Paps and I truly thought that maybe bringing her back to her home would make her feel better, but she’s only gotten worse. Part of me thinks that she might have just wanted to find her peace here, in her own home, in her own surroundings before she decides it’s okay to let go. Awful of me to think that, isn’t it?

I miss my Mom. And I miss my dad, and I really, really miss my brother. Having nearly no time to mourn them has truly put me in a weird headspace, I don’t know how I’m making it day to day. Sometimes I think back to that fear I felt when I first realized I had to get the hell out of my house when I found the faultline in my foundation, that feeling that it could all come crashing down on me at any second, burying me in walls and furniture and drywall to the point I can’t breathe… That’s what this feels like. Like I’m standing in my basement again, just waiting for the whole thing to crush me. 

The only thing that is keeping me going is Paps and Gran. And the fact that if I stop, then they stop. And Gran is already slowing to a crawl. 

I pull out my pocket knife from my pants, opening the blade and sharpening the graphite in my pencil a bit before licking the tip, and getting back to work. 

I’ve lost nearly 16 pounds, and my hair feels so thin. I can feel my muscles starting to wear out, and the joints of my bones are beginning to ache. Lack of nourishment, I guess. But I don’t let it stop me, and neither does Paps. We are still getting up at the crack of dawn every single morning to look for roaming wildlife to catch. Thankfully we were able to get our hands on six chickens, a rooster, a goat, and the neighbor’s old Blue Heeler, Hank. Hank sits by my Gran’s side day in and day out… I think he remembers that she used to throw him scraps out into the front yard.

The strangest thing happened to me yesterday, and I feel embarrassed to even admit it in this stupid journal. 

For the first time in months, I got the overwhelming urge to want to fuck. 

I wish I could write that in invisible ink like we used to do in text messages, yikes. But, I guess I have to realize that I am still a living, breathing woman who still goes through her monthly cycles, and still possesses the urges associated with it all. God, I  fucking laughed out loud at myself. I haven’t seen another man close to my own age since we left Nashville and I saw a group of young people throwing a cinder block through the front glass of a coffee shop. For fucks sake I’m so embarrassed. 

But I actually even dreamed about it last night. Real, true, romping sex in some strange place… it was so real that I woke up in a cold sweat with my heartbeat between my legs. Shit. I don’t even know who it was with, but that part didn’t matter. I used to love those pointless, carnal dreams that made you blush in your sleep. But damn, now? That’s as close as I’m probably ever gonna get. 

I had to spend the rest of the day fighting the flashbacks while spending time with my literal grandparents. Ignoring the fact that I used to daydream about it, then make a phone call to whoever, and make it happen. It used to be so easy. Shit, I miss random hookups. Fucking hell. 

Now I’m spending my days collecting freshly laid eggs before a pack of wild dogs come and kill my chickens. Goddamnit.

ANYWAYS. 

Tomorrow is my 33rd birthday. And I don’t even care. It feels silly to even think that even though the world is pushing me off the literal land I stand on, I still have to age. I still have to deal with being a human. And mourn the loss of my family. What the fuck. Just lost the last of my immediate kin, I’m digging up last season’s potatoes from the ground and nursing my sweet Gran as she lies in her bed in pain, and I’m having sex dreams. Really, really fucking good sex dreams. If I could roll my eyes with paper and pencil, I’d be doing it right now. The human experience is so fuc

My thought process is stopped when I hear the sound of something I haven’t heard in literal days. Weeks? I don’t know… But I hear it, the faint sound of a tune and a melody coming through an old, staticy speaker. I close my pencil into my journal and stand, realizing I’d been sitting outside for a while now as the stars had become bright and the moon sat high in the sky. 

My brow furrows as I listen harder. It’s Billie Holiday. I push the front door open and enter the warm house, firstly noticing the crackling fire that Paps had kept burning all day. I then saw him standing in the dimly lit corner, fiddling around with his old vinyl records and adjusting the volume of the music. The wall behind him is stuffed full of records, floor to ceiling and two shelves wide… all full of the music he filled mine and James’ lives with since the time we could walk. He’d been collecting his entire life.  Truly, I owe my love of music to him. 

“Paps…” I say softly as I enter the living room. 

“Hey youngin’, sorry if I disturbed ya…” he said, puffing some pipe tobacco smoke up into the air. I used to tell him he needed to quit, but now… what’s the use?

“You didn’t, Paps.”

“I sorta… forgot that music exists,” he chuckled, opening the cover of a Bill Monroe album and inspecting the inside.

I place my hand on his back, giving him a few pats as I lay my head against his shoulder, watching the record spin on his antique hand-crank phonograph. “I kinda did too, actually,” I reply, admitting it to myself. “What made you pick Lady Day?”

He shrugs. “Not sure. Always loved her voice, hated it when she passed. She left one hell of a legacy, though, huh? Your Gran sure loved her, that’s for sure,” he mumbles on, looking back to the daybed we had set up for Gran in the living room so she could be closer to the heat of the fireplace. 

“Love her, Don. Not loved. I ain’t dead yet,” we both hear Gran stir from under her blankets. The both of us erupted in a fit of laughter at her unbridled and filterless sense of humor. 

“Hell’s fire, Jane. Didn’t think you’d be able to hear us,” my Paps laughs as he places the cover back down on the table and goes to join her at her side. I follow behind. “Did we wake you?”

“You did, but that’s okay. No better way to be woken up from a dreamless sleep than by some pretty music,” she says, propping herself up on her pillows. She still has so much strength, and though she’s weakening by the day, I’m still astounded by her ability to get up and even walk herself to the restroom. “And!” she boasts with her crooked finger in the air. “No way I wanted to miss my favorite granddaughter’s birthday when the clock strikes twelve,” she adds with a reassuring nod. 

“Gran, you don’t need to stay up this late! It’s almost midnight now, go back to sleep,” I push her, not wanting to miss one second of any rest she can get, while also wishing that she and Paps could sit up and reminisce with me until the sun comes up. I’d give anything to have just one more hour with my parents and James.

“Oh, child, I’m fine!” she pushes my hands away, pulling herself back up. “You’ve gained another year. This day and age, that means something, you know?” Her voice is weak, but she still sounds like herself, her southern drawl coming out to play as she tries to fluff the pillows behind her. 

I nod in understanding. “If you say you want to stay up, we’ll stay up!” 

There really isn’t such a thing as a true bedtime, anymore. I’m up at strange hours of the night, take many naps throughout the day… time doesn’t matter, aside from the rooster reminding us of when the sun is about to come up every morning. 

But we still set the clock, and we’ll change the batteries. The Grandfather clock against the back wall reminds us of each hour, every day. And how lucky we still are to have each and every one, no matter how long they drag us on. 

Gran taps her fingers along to ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ as Paps sings quietly along, and I place a few new logs onto the fire to keep it burning. The smell of this house has always stuck out to me– matured wood, the scent of the barn wafting through the cracked windows, the Murphy’s Oil Soap that Paps was always obsessed with cleaning the floors with… it’s all still stuck here, unmoving in time. Just like the photos on the walls, the dinnerware filling the shelves, and the wall that’s covered in pencil markings and dates, marking mine, James’, and my father’s height growth over the years. 

It’s all still here, exactly where they left it. Exactly where they carved things into the load-bearing beam that runs the span of the house. The wearing in the wood of the floor where Gran stood for fifty some odd years in front of the stove cooking meals. The screen door that hangs haphazardly on the front door, the screen ripped and aging as it served its purpose keeping the flies out of the house for however many summers.

A time capsule. And by god, were the three of us overjoyed when we pulled up and found it not sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole.

“Have you got any Sinatra?” my Gran asks, pulling me from my deep-thought trance as the Billie record spins now, without any sound. 

“Of course, sweetheart,” Paps agrees as he stands to replace the record, knowing that he’d give my Gran anything she could ever ask for, just like he always had. 

He makes his way back over to his setup and finds exactly what he’s looking for, switching the vinyl out and putting the needle back down. Gran tilts her head back onto her pillows as she hears Frank’s voice come over the crackly violin sounds. 

“Ol’ Blue Eyes,” she mutters before sitting back up and grabbing at my hands. “You know, Y/N, I didn’t always love music, it was your grandfather’s doin’ that got me to fall in love with it.” Much like he did for me, actually. “Of course I’d go to the dances at the school and I knew a few songs here and there, but it was when I met him that I truly found my love and appreciation for it.”

“He’s had that effect on us both, then, hasn’t he!” I jest, smiling and squeezing at her frail hands. We both glance at him still standing by his collection, eyeing the spines of the covers and pulling them out to look over. I truly did owe a lot to him, he taught me more about artists than I could have ever taught myself. Older ones, especially. He knew the stories that were never recorded in interviews and tabloids. He knew, because he kept them all in the back of his mind as if they were his own family stories.

“That man got me to follow the Dead around for nearly six months before I told him he’d better get me back to Tennessee so I could have me a garden,” she went on, making my face warm with a grin. I’d heard the story a hundred times before, but I’d sit and listen to it a hundred times more, if time would let me.

“Oh, shoot, Jane. We had a good time,” Paps interrupted, scowling at her as he puffed his pipe. 

“Didn’t say we didn’t, Don!” she pokes back, and I can tell they’re about to get into one of their little playful spats. “Your grandfather and I tried LSD for the very first time while we sat in a drum circle after a Dead show in Kansas City,” she said, her eyes wide as she still held my hands. 

Now that, they’ve never shared before. 

“Gran!” I exclaim, truly surprised.

“Now Jane!” Paps barks from his place.

“What?!” she replies, shrugging her bony shoulders. “It was a damned good time and I can honestly say I came back a changed woman. Nothing wrong with that, now is there? I’ve lived one hell of a life…” she trails off, earning a scoff from Paps as he waves her off. “There should be nothing stopping you from still living your life, Y/N. Do you hear me? The Earth might swallow us up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep running, keep on living, you understand, child?” she asks, moving her cold hands to cup my cheeks.

“‘Course I do, Gran. I promise,” I relent, and I envy her ability to speak to me with this regard, knowing that the end of her life is near.

“Good,” she pats the side of my face. “Don, how about a little acoustic for a dying old woman?”

Paps drops his shoulders. “Now Jane, do ya have to keep talkin’ that mess, or am I gonna have to make you?” he teases.

I laugh and stand to go into the kitchen as Paps makes his way over to the corner, plucking his old acoustic from its place. I re-wet Gran’s cloth in the icy water, wringing out the dripping water and returning to place it back over her chest. 

Paps sits beside us on the daybed, the smoke rising from his pipe as he plucks at his strings, his feeble but strong hands re-tuning them to where it sounds best. My grandfather is, and was, a very handsome man. Strong and built like an ox. I can see why Gran followed him around chasing after the Dead for six months.

Finally he strums a perfect chord, raising his eyebrows at Gran as she smiles back at him. “Guess it’s a good thing I never got my hands on an electric, hm?” he says as he bites the end of his pipe. 

Neither Paps or I have shown any signs of the rash, at all. No where. And neither of us could fathom why.

The two of us sit and listen to Paps play a plethora of familiar tunes, his fingers still agile enough to float over the strings and play little snippets of all of Gran’s favorites. I can feel Gran’s body relax as she listens to him, her mind probably floating through a million memories of watching him play over the years. He hums along a little as his eyes close on their own, listening to himself play. I swear I could sit here for days. 

After a few minutes, his fingers contort and play a little more harshly, strumming out a tune that hits a nerve buried so deep within me, I almost cry right there on the spot. His very own rendition of one of my favorite songs in the world, You’re the One. 

“Paps…” I murmur, almost whining.

“Hush, child, let me see if I can still pull through these chords,” he shushes me. And he does. I want to scorn him for bringing up the music that was made by my favorite band in the entire world. But then again, in later months, Greta had become one of his favorite bands, too. 

“Babe, ain’t no denyin’, that I got you in my head…” he sings to Gran, making her cover her face with her hands. He plays through about half of the song before he stumbles over a note or two, and decides his hands have gotten too tired. 

“How dare you, Paps. You know that struck a nerve…” I say, scowling at him. 

“Oh, quiet, now. You used to walk around the house singing their songs for days on end. Watch those silly videos of them, hell. How many shows did you go to?” he asks, truly schooling me on my own obsession with that band.

“Twenty-three,” I mutter under my breath. 

“How many?”

“Twenty-three! Okay?” I play along with him, the both of us knowing that he attended the last five of them with me. 

We’d traveled over to Kentucky for his first time seeing them live after I’d shown him a few of their songs. He was hooked after his first play of From the Fires, ripping the album cover from my hands to read along with the lyrics. After that we moved on to Anthem of the Peaceful Army, Garden’s Gate and so on, each play enrapturing my grandfather even more than the last. 

“These kids have some damned promise, that’s for sure. This is a sound I haven’t heard in ages… and their talent? Boy…” he’d said. I still remember the day I surprised him with tickets to his first show, watching him fall in just as much love with them as I was. Swaying along to their classics, singing along with the lyrics he’d learned to love. He learned their names, he learned their personalities a little. He even met a few of the friends I’d made along the way, flirting with them as we’d all stand in line before a show. 

It was Paps and Gran’s travels with the Grateful Dead that inspired me to follow Greta Van Fleet around on their tours. Not for six months straight, as I had to hold down my job, but nonetheless. Twenty-three shows I went to over the course of nine years. Strange Horizons all the way up to their last tour before the world shut down. I had tickets and plans to meet up with my group of friends for a show after Greta had gotten back from Greece, but, of course that never happened. 

Paps grew to love them just as much as I loved them. Love them. For so many years, they were my escape. My solid rock to land on as the headaches of daily life surrounded me. I made lifelong friends through them. Traveled to other countries to see them, with my friends by my side. I watched them grow into men, as I had grown into a woman right alongside them. Watched them evolve, grow, and retreat into silence before exploding back onto the scene with something brand new and fresh, roping me right back into their world. Obsessing over every little detail they fed us. Digging deeply into the meanings of songs, and discussing all the lore with my cohorts on social media. I can account many of my life’s milestones to at least one song of theirs. 

Now, when I find the world more quiet than it ever has been in my lifetime, I find myself reminiscing on those times, some of the best times of my life with that band, and my friends that felt more like family. I catch myself humming their songs, just trying to keep myself centered and rooted to the earth as it literally is falling apart beneath my feet. Greta was always my solid foundation, and even during the End of Days, they hold true to that assignment.

The grandfather clock finally decides to strike midnight, signaling my 33rd birthday.

“I’m sorry we can’t celebrate like we normally would, sweetheart,” Paps says as he continues lightly strumming.

“It’s okay, Paps. Just having the two of you still here with me is celebration, enough.” And I truly mean that. I watch as Gran’s sullen eyes fill with tears as she watches the two of us, and I know I’d give anything to keep the two of them alive as long as I possibly could. But her rash is worsening by the day, and Paps and I can tell that though she puts on a tough exterior, she’s suffering inside.

Gran had fallen back asleep peacefully to the sound of Paps’ acoustic, and we covered her up and threw another few logs onto the fire to last us a few more hours, at least. Paps kisses my forehead after he places his guitar back on its stand in the corner, wishing me a happy birthday as we both retreat to our beds.

+++

The next morning, I wake to myself shivering; Paps and I both must have slept through the night without waking up to tend to the fire. I stretch my muscles and rub my eyes, but I’m instantly startled  by the sound of someone coughing. I throw on my robe and slippers and rush to the living room, finding Gran sitting up in her bed, coughing terribly. Paps and I are by her side in seconds, asking her what she might need to get through the fit, but she just shakes her head. 

Her skin is cold and gray, and it looks as though her muscles are shaking uncontrollably. She’s almost completely covered in the rash, now.

“Do you want to get in the tub, Jane? Do you need to get in the water?” Paps begs of her, kneeling by the bedside. 

She shakes her head more. “No,” she chokes out. Her throat sounds scratchy and dry and we offer her water, but that, too, she rejects. Finally her coughing subsides and she relaxes back, and Paps and I share a knowing look. A look that we’ve both shared three times, when everyone else finally succumbed to the rash. 

This is so fucking unfair. Why don’t I have the rash?! Why can’t I take this pain away from her? Why am I not suffering, too?!

“I’m ok Don. I’m ok,” she mutters, her voice barely her own. 

We both sit there with her for hours, until the sun is noting midday. We hold her hands, caress her face, talk to her, tell her stories… anything to get her to pass with as much comfort as we can. She coughs, still, but each time she begs us to carry on with talking to her. I watch as my grandfather finally sheds a tear, wiping it free from his face as he sniffles through it. 

“Don’t you dare cry for me, Don,” Gran says. “We’ve had a beautiful life together. Beautiful… family,” she struggles to breathe. My chest feels heavy, too, with the overwhelming amount of sorrow it’s holding. I want to throw my fist into the wall, curse everything that has ever lived. I feel a rage building up in my stomach, one that is beginning to burn with so much fury that when it finally awakens, I’m not sure I’ll be able to contain it.

“I love you, I love you both…”

And with one small exhale, she ceases to breathe any more. 

We both allow ourselves time to weep at her bedside for a minute or two before I finally stand and open the windows, uncaring of how it will chill the house. I wanted to let her soul be free. 

+++

It took me about three hours to dig my grandmother’s grave, as the ground was hard from the cold and one shovel can only dig so fast. Hank the heeler was by my side the whole time, sitting and watching guard as I threw the shovels of dirt into a neat pile. I insisted Paps let me do it alone, and he spend a little bit of time with her to say his goodbyes.

 It was cathartic, really, putting my body through physical grunt work as I let the tears fall freely. I wept for her, for the rest of my family, for the heartbreak of my grandfather. But mostly, I cried for myself. I shouldn’t have, it felt selfish to, but I had hardly allowed myself any time to feel sorry for me. Fuck, a person can only take so much. My heart was already broken into a thousand pieces, but the numbness of the past few months had shielded my ability to listen to myself. My body somehow must have felt the need to get it out, so that I could put a brave face on for Paps. He’d need me to. So, as a rare bit of bright sunlight came down and scorched my arms, breaking through the freezing cold wind, I allowed myself to cry again.

It’s almost sunset, now, and Paps had wrapped Gran up in a few white sheets, topped with a pretty lace tablecloth that she had woven many years ago. It used to cover the dining room table, but it did seem fitting for it to be with her, now. 

I give Paps a sweet smile as I make my way into their bedroom, sitting on her old chest as I open the top drawer of her armoire. There, arranged still so neatly, was all of her expensive jewelry that she hardly ever wore. Gold bracelets, diamond rings, emerald-encrusted pieces… all if it is so precious, so valuable, and so completely worthless. 

I take a second to collect it all up and slip it into a canvas drawstring bag, making sure first to keep just one piece out for myself. She’d have wanted me to, I’m positive of it. 

A sterling silver ring topped with the prettiest piece of deep blue turquoise. Her grandmother had given it to her many years ago, and she only ever wore it to special occasions, but it fits perfectly on my middle finger. And if I wanted something to remember my grandmother by, it would most definitely be this. 

I go back into the living room and gently grab my grandmother’s cold, bruised hands, replacing each piece of precious jewelry onto her fingers and wrists wherever I can fit them, stacking them one on top of the other. 

“Should we add her books, Paps?” I manage to ask. 

He shakes his head solemnly. “No, might be best to keep things like that above ground…” 

Paps and I make our way out to the barn as dusk falls, and I light the few candles he has placed around on the shelves and tables. It’s dilapidated but in a good way; the walls and ceiling showing wear of many, many years of hard work. I watch as Paps grabs up one of the candles and walks to a swing door I’d never really noticed before, using some force to pull it open and propping it with a cut of a two-by-four. My eyes take a second to adjust to the darkness as he walks further inside the room, illuminating the space. There in the center of the small room is a pine box casket.

“Paps, what in the world? When did you…?” I breathe, walking closer to it. I notice that it has my grandmother’s name carved right in the top, the letters painted in black.

“About fifteen years ago, I’d say. Jane and I always said we wanted to be buried right here on the farm, when our times came. Guess we never told you kids about that. Your parents knew, a’course, but we never dreamed they’d go before us…” 

Paps pulls his blue handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes his nose, his eyes still dripping with remnant tears. 

“It looks really good, Paps. You did a great job,” I commend him, but he pays no mind. Instead he blows across it, relieving some of the old sawdust from its home on the lid. He pulls the top open and inspects it again, pulling a few pieces of straw from the inside. 

“Help me get it over to the site?” he asks, and I realize I’d never even asked him where he wanted me to dig the grave. I just picked the prettiest place that I could. Something tells me he would have picked the same place, too. “Under the willow?” he asks. 

Great minds.

“Under the willow.”

We lower the casket onto the wheelbarrow and roll it across the back yard and along the fenceline, right beside the weeping willow tree. It was Gran’s favorite place to come and lie in the grass with a book. Hank walks alongside us, his snout on guard for any wild packs that may be a threat to us. 

Together, we lower the pine box into the hole I’d dug, making sure it was level at the bottom. “Want me to go get her?” I ask. 

“I’ll get her,” he responds as he takes off back toward the house. The wind is whipping my hair across my face, now, as the stars are beginning to show themselves, and I can’t stop myself from crying again. This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t be standing beside a grave I just dug, with a casket my grandfather built, watching his back walk across the tall grass to retrieve the body of the love of his life. This shouldn’t. Fucking. Be. Happening. 

In the moonlight, I finally see the figure of him coming back through the shadows with her in his arms. I silently thank the heavens above that he is a strong man, still yet, with more brute strength than any man his age should have. Just like James.

I help him lower her inside, but not before the both of us place kisses on either of her cheeks. I work to cover her back up with dirt as he stands behind, Hank begging his hand for a pet.

“You wanna say a few words?” I ask him as I throw the last shovelful of dirt on top, wiping a hand across my cold-sweat forehead. 

He takes a quick, chopped breath. “Sixty-two years wasn’t nearly enough with you, sweetheart. Won’t ever be enough. Thank you for every single laugh, every single tear, every single argument and happy moment. Thank you for our beautiful children, and grandchildren, and thank you for filling my heart with more joy than any man should have the privilege of havin’. You sure made my life worth livin’. Give ‘em hell up there in heaven, Janie. I know ya will. I love ya to the moon.” He sniffles again as he gives in to Hank’s requests, finally leaning down and wrapping a strong arm around the dog. I sidestep and wrap my arm around him, too, and we stand there in the wind until we can’t stand any more.

JAKE

“RRRUHHHHH!” I growl loudly as I wake up from unconsciousness in a full-on panic. My eyes are shifty and dry as I work to sit myself up quickly, my hands still bound at my back. The tape is gone from my mouth now, though. 

It’s dark, and it's cold, but I’m indoors. I just can’t fucking see a god damned thing. 

“Hey! Help!! Can anyone hear me?!” I yell, my voice echoing hard off the walls that surround me. My voice feels dry and knotted in my throat as I try to swallow what little moisture I have in my mouth. When I get no response, I crack my neck sideways as pain sets in over my body, and not just from my arms being bound. I feel as though my legs have been hit with something hard, and my back feels like it’s bruised and sore. What the fuck? What the fuck!

“Heyyyyy! Somebody come and fucking talk to me! What do you want?!” I yell again, my heart rate flying as reality sets in that I’ve been kidnapped from the cabin. Alone. 

The last thing I remember is being alone in the back of that truck, rolling around as whoever was driving had little care for it’s cargo in the back. Maybe that’s why I feel bruised and beaten. Or maybe it’s not. 

Yes, alone. In the truck… six intruders… weapons… it’s all coming back now, in little spurts of memory. Where is everyone else? Where is my family? When was I brought in here? I feel bile rising in my throat as I feel a panic attack setting in, and I grind my hands against one another so as to try and free them from their ties. But it’s no use, of course. It only digs them into my skin more. 

I sit in silence listening to only the sounds of my uneven breathing, trying to calm myself and make a plan of action. No time to fall into fear, Jake. 

I maneuver my body around to get to the walls, standing on my sore legs to turn and let my hands run along them. There’s nothing there– no windows, no chairs or furniture. Just a box. I diligently run my hands along every one. Four walls. With nothing. Nothing but– 

A door. 

I turn my body to try and find a doorknob or whatever to open it, and when my hand finally grasps the spherical knob, I realize that the mother fucker is locked. Of course. I turn and slam my shoulder into it a few times to see if I can pry it, but it’s no use. “Hey! You son of a bitch! Let me out of here!” I yell again, getting mad, now. 

“Quiet, Jacob,” a voice I do not recognize suddenly fills the room. My stomach drops. 

I open my mouth to reply, but nothing really comes to mind. The voice is male, but distorted. Quiet? QUIET? 

“Who the fuck are you? Open this door and come and talk to me!” I yell again, my body suddenly feeling like my blood is going to pulse from every orifice of my body. 

There is a long pause. 

“I said quiet, Jacob,” it repeats. 

I grit my teeth. This voice is really pissing me off. 

“I’ll be quiet when you come in here and fucking show your face!” I yell even louder this time.

There is another long pause, and finally, I hear the metallic screeching of the heavy door opening. I waste no time in trying to push through it, relying on only my hearing to know what is going on, just as I had back at the cabin. Everything is so fucking dark.

But I get nowhere. I’m stopped by my body running into two stern and sturdy men again, pushing back further into the echoey room. I nearly lose my footing, but I press forward again, determined to get through that fucking door. But they stop me again, thrashing my body back so hard I hit one of the walls. It nearly knocks the breath from me, but I catch it. “Who are you? What do you want? I want to see my fam–”

“It’d really do you good to stay fucking quiet, like we told you to.” Suddenly I feel a gloved hand cupping across my mouth, stopping me from speaking. The man’s face is close to mine, whispering in my ear as he pins me back against the wall with his other arm. “Do you understand? Can you keep your voice down?” It asks, a little more lax. 

After a few seconds, I nod, but my mind doesn’t have the time to process another plan. Maybe if I cooperate, they’ll let me the fuck go. His hand slowly falls from my mouth, and I stay quiet, nothing filling the room now but my haggard and nervous breathing, again. “Who are you,” I whisper, my tone demanding. 

I notice that the second man must be standing behind the one still holding me to the wall, hearing him huff a laugh under his breath. How can they fucking see me? 

“Let’s just say that if you play your cards right, we’ll be your new best friends,” the man says as he releases my chest, allowing me to breathe. I hear the tear of velcro twice, realizing he must be taking his gloves off. 

“I don’t need any more fucking friends. I have plenty back at home,” I bark, still gritting my teeth as I stay at a quieter level. 

They laugh again. “Home? You mean the cabin you were holed up in? Barely surviving?” the man behind the first asks sarcastically. 

“Home is where my family is, actually,” I bite.

“Aww, isn’t that cute,” they laugh at me again as I hear that they’re both standing, now. I should try and run again, right? But it might get me knocked unconscious again. Maybe not. Not yet. 

“Little Jake Kiszka, maybe you really do have the heart of gold everyone says you have,” the first one says. “Maybe being rich and famous didn’t get to you, after all.” 

“What the fuck are you talking about? Who are you? How do you know my name?” I ask. 

They both scoff again. “You’re fairly fucking famous, my guy. Lots of people know your name,” the second one blurts. My guy? Who–

“Well it’s pretty convenient that I don’t know yours, seeing as how you have me fucking tied up in a pitch black room. Can we cut the shit? Or am I gonna have to try and run again?” I ask, completely over this game. Suddenly, I don’t feel very threatened. 

“You won’t get very far if you do, Jake,” the first one whispers, and I hear his boots step closer to me again, and his breath hot on my face. “Listen to me, and listen closely, okay? Are you listening?”

“Yeah, fuck, I’m listening,” I say.

“We told you to stay quiet for a reason. You’ve been captured by an outfit that’s been around for a long, long time. But you weren’t caught for just any reason,” he goes on, barely audible. 

“What does that mean? What reason?” I ask. 

“They’ve got reason to believe that you know.”

“Know what?” I ask, confused. 

“Why the fucking world ended. Or actually, how. Your brothers, you all wrote about this, didn’t you? In your music?” he goes on, and if I wasn’t confused before, I sure as shit am now. 

“What?!” I squeal, almost laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding me…”

“Hmm-mm. They aren’t kidding. Does it feel like they’re kidding right now? No.”

“Why do you keep saying they? You are the one that’s got me locked up, right now,” I retort. 

“Because we’re pretending,” suddenly the other one is in my ear. “They think we work for them. The brunt work. The dirty jobs…. Like kidnapping you,” he says. 

“Listen Jake,” the other interrupts. “We know you, we know who you are. We were… we were fans of your band, back then. But these people, the ones who hired us, they trust us. And they have worse plans for you than holding you in a dark metal box with your hands tied…”

“Why me? Why did they take me?” I ask. 

“Your music, your songs… you fucking predicted more about all this than you think you did,” the other explains. 

Josh’s dreams. 

“We didn’t predict shit, we were just writing fucking songs, we didn’t–”

“All of it is real, Jake,” the first whispers, his lips brushing my hair. “The stories you told, the worlds you built… all of it exists, and has existed for a long time.”

“I don’t get it,” I say, blinking my eyes in the darkness. 

“The lyrics you wrote about, the Garden you all dreamt up… It exists. In a complete other realm.”

I damn near laugh in their faces. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right? This is a joke?”

They stay quiet for a beat. “No jokes here, Jake. Just know that more is happening than you could ever even fathom. It’s not just the end of the world here. It’s the end of the world there, too. Well, it’s about to be, if the battle is lost,” the second says. 

“You’re both insane, and I’m in on some kind of prank. This is all a joke!” I argue. “We didn’t create that world...”

“No, you didn’t. But you knew about it. You wrote songs about it, didn’t you? You told tales of a Battle, wrote songs about war and peace, lyrics about the water rising, and the air so thin…”

My head is spinning. I’m getting a headache. And I could really use a fucking cigarette.

“Yeah, global fucking warming, who didn’t know about that?” I defend. 

They both laugh under their breath. “Let’s just say you guys literally wrote the time and space of another world as if you’d read their history books. And, lived there alongside them.” 

There’s no fucking way. This is absolutely ridiculous. 

“What do you mean if the battle is lost?” I ask, the question coming from my mere curiosity. 

The second crouches down in front of me again, from what I can tell. “Our world here has already begun to end, right? Technology itself is murdering us by the boatloads. The thing we created. It’s omnipresence became too much for earth to handle, started to suck away at her resources and poison her. Poison her natural way of ebb and flow. So she said fuck you humans, I don’t need you. You shall all suffer my wrath, and I’ll use the poison that you created to kill you,” his voice had gotten a little dramatic, as if he was reading a romantic tragedy. 

“Okay Shakespeare, we get it,” the first says, and I can’t help but laugh a little. “Here’s the thing… the other realm is suffering, too. What happens on earth is mirrored in that realm, but the mirror isn’t a clear reflection. It’s more of a…”

“Cloudy and messy shadow of what happens in our realm,” the other says. 

“Yeah, actually,” the first agrees. “It happens here, it happens there, just not the exact same way. So their world is suffering, too. But they’re going to try and stop it.”

“How are they going to do that?” I ask.

“...Have you not figured that out yet, man? Don’t you think that uh— capturing a few guys who have predicted it all to a tee so far and using them for information on what’s to come next wouldn’t be a nice and easy route for them?”

“You’re shitting me, right?” I say blankly. “You kidnapped me because they think I know what’s going to happen next after the world ends?”

“Mm, kind of. You’ve gotten it all right, so far.”

No, Josh has. Apparently.

“That and… a pretty good other reason,” the first mumbles. 

“What other reason?”

“You don’t have any signs of the rash yet, do you?” the second inquires, throwing me off. How would he know that?

“No… but what’s that have to do with all of this?” I say, my mind spinning. 

“You’re an immune. Just like us,” the second says with a bit of pride in his voice. 

“An immune? How the fuck do we know that we just haven’t gotten it yet?” I press. 

“You’ve seen how fast that shit kills people,” the first scoffs. “Don’t you think you would have at least shown a little bit of a sign of it, by now?” 

He’s right. It’s been months since the first sign of the rash, killed more people than I’d like to discuss. And quickly, too. But my whole family… none of us have shown signs…how are we all so lucky?

“Maybe the earth decided that she’d keep a few of us, the ones who aren’t fucking assholes,” the second barks, earning what sounds like a slap to the chest from the first. 

“I don’t think that’s how it worked, idiot,” he says. “Anyways, we’ve already spent too much time in here with you, Jake. But listen. Remember we’re all pretending. They’re going to push you, they’re going to make us push you. But we want you to know we’re on your team, even if we act like we’re not. They’re out collecting immunes as we speak, trying to put everyone into some type of commune to protect the longevity of mankind. But you’re special, because they think you know. They’re special because they’re immune. You following me?”

“When they kidnap more immunes they’ll group me with them, but treat me differently because they think I can help them, got it,” I say, catching on fairly easily, for some reason. 

“Bingo,” the second clicks his tongue. 

“Do the people who hired you live in the other realm, too? Like, why do they care?” I ask, feeling like I just read the plot of a fantasy novel.

“Think of it like a family intertwined between both worlds. They’re able to bounce back and forth, but they all take up space in both places. One realm can’t live without the other. That’s why they’re trying to stop the end of their world there, so they have somewhere to be if our’s ceases to exist,” the first explains. 

“That’s fucking confusing,” I whisper. “If ours ceases to exist, one can’t exist without the other. Isn’t Earth already too far gone?” 

“Maybe her inhabitants are almost wiped, but as a planet, she’s still got a long way to go before rejoining the cosmos. If the other realm is saved, it could power Earth enough to stop her eradication. Plus we have immunes. Earth won’t completely die, she’s just trying to do a hard restart, if that makes sense,” the second one adds. “She’s sick, and she’s trying to make herself healthy again.”

I let out a huff as I try and wrap my head around the dystopian film I’m apparently a part of now. Half of me thinks these guys are lying to me. Playing games to distract me. But then again, why would they be wasting their time?

“Play dumb, Jake. Pretend you don’t know a goddamn thing. Especially when they start to question you about what you guys wrote in this last album,” the first says, standing to his feet and putting his gloves back on, from what I can tell. “This isn’t gonna last forever, we’re going to put a stop to this.”

“You are? How?” I ask, pulling hard on the ties around my wrists. 

“We are. With your help,” the second whispers. “There’s a whole group of us who plan on breaking free of this shit, we’ve just got to trust each other that we can run. Gather up the other immunes once they’re captured and create our own destinies.”

“But, if we don’t go along with them, won’t Earth completely shit out on us? If their realm dies too?” I ask. 

“Catching on quickly, Jake. I’m impressed,” the first whispers. “If we recreate our own line of mankind from the immunes, everything will be okay. We just want to do it out from underneath the thumb of these selfish motherfuckers. We can do it on our own.”

The two of them turn on their heels and start to walk toward the door again, leaving me sitting in the floor. “Hey, where is my family?” I ask. 

“They were assigned elsewhere. Separated all of you, we don’t know where they ended up. Sorry, man,” the second says. And within seconds they’re both gone, and I’m alone, yet again.

Y/N

I trudge back inside the house now under the cover of darkness, after having spent a few minutes outside trying to breathe and calm myself. Paps has lit a few candles inside, and I can see the warm glow of them through the windows making the house look like a jack-o-lantern. I smile a little at the thought. As I push the door open and lock it behind me, I turn and notice he’s stood by the kitchen table, a few more candles lit across it. There in front of him are two bowls of potato soup. 

“Paps, this is so nice of you,” I mumble as I hang my afghan on the back of a chair. “I thought you said you weren’t up for eating tonight?” 

“Your Gran would have been ticked if she knew we were too upset to feed ourselves, you know that’s a fact,” he says, pulling my chair out for me. I take a seat and I can smell the herbs he’s put into the soup.

“You’re right…” I agree. “She wouldn’t have been happy with us at all.”

“Plus, figure you could pretend one of these candles is on a birthday cake, and blow it out. Since we didn’t get to celebrate you the right way,” he adds as he takes his own seat. 

“I think I could do that,” I say, picking up my spoon to dig in. “Thank you Paps, you’re really too good to me.”

“We’re all we’ve got, sweetheart.”

As we eat, I watch as Paps’ hands seem weaker now, and how they shake a little as he brings his spoon to his mouth. He’s done an excellent job on the soup, but we both know we’re choking it down, both of our stomachs too wrought with nerves and heartbreak to enjoy it like we should. 

As we clean our bowls, he pushes one of the candles toward me, holding his hand out to motion for me to blow. The candle is old and burned through almost all the wax, but it still smells of pumpkin and apple pie. “Don’t forget to make a wish, sweetheart. And make it a good one,” he says, giving me a sweet wink from behind his glasses. 

I take a deep breath and wrack my brain, feeling like making a wish right now is selfish. Normally, I’d wish for a happy next year, health and fortune for my family, or even for the next man that walks into my life to be the right one. 

But all of that feels stupid now, pointless to request of the universe. 

Next year isn’t even promised. 

Over half of my family is gone. 

And no man is destined to walk into my life to better it in the least, let alone offer me kinship of any kind. 

So instead I wish for Paps to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible, and that the universe bestows good things upon us both. Because like he said, we’re all we’ve got. 

+++

After I’ve cleaned the dishes and tidied the kitchen, I’m stopped in my tracks from the same sound I heard coming through the walls last night– the sound of quiet, staticy music. 

I find Paps with his record player again, cranking the handle on the side as the sound begins to spill from the horn. For a second, I’m happy that he’d kept this old thing, knowing that without it, we wouldn’t be able to hear music at all, probably ever again. 

I step up beside him and watch it spin, listening to “Lovin’ You More Every Day” by Etta James drift into the air. I know that Gran loved this one, too. It was one of the songs they danced to at their wedding. 

So I take his hand in mine, pulling him to stand with me on the old oriental rug in the middle of the room. I begin to sway around as he gently places his hand on my back, swaying right along with me. We’re dancing a little too slowly for the speed of the song, but neither of us care. We’re just enjoying our time, wishing that Gran was here to clap for us after the song ends. But as it comes to a close, we’re met again with static, waiting silently for the first note of the next song. 

“You’re a bit too big now to stand on my feet,” he says through a stiff smile. 

“Maybe so,” I giggle. “But it was your training that got rid of my two left feet…gave me a sense of some rhythm…” I grin. 

He smiles again as he sniffles through some more tears. “I’m sorry I won’t be there to dance with you at your own wedding, sweetheart,” he mumbles as he pulls me close, and my heart shatters into a million pieces. 

“Now Paps, don’t talk like that…” I argue. “Lord knows I’m not gonna find a man who can dance better than you, anyway.”

I hear a chuckle run through his chest. “May be, sweetheart. May be.”

We sway along to a few more songs before we’re both yawning. “Believe I’m gonna hit the hay,” he says solemnly, patting me on the head a few times before making his way to throw a few more logs onto the fire. 

“Me too, I’ll see you in the morning?” I ask, realizing that this will be the first night in over sixty years that he is going to sleep knowing he won’t wake up to the love of his life. 

“When the rooster crows, my sweet. Love you.”

“I love you, Paps,” I say as we part ways, drifting off to our respective rooms. 

I’m thankful the weather isn’t too horrendous tonight as I snuggle into my bed, pulling the covers onto my chest. I relax, but leave my candle lit, staring up at the ceiling and recounting the day. The look on Gran’s face as she finally met peace, no longer feeling the wrenching burn of the rash that had enveloped her body. Poor Paps. I can’t even imagine what he’s feeling, right now. 

I grab my journal back up and flip to the page I’d left off on, realizing I’d stopped in the middle of a thought. Instead of finishing it, I start a new one. 

I write about Gran’s passing, how and where we buried her, how I adorned her hands and wrists with all her old jewelry, and how Paps had made me a special birthday supper. I try to be as detailed as possible, leaving nothing out as I let my hand flow from print to cursive. My eyes begin to get heavy as the candle light flickers, and I realize just how exhausted I am. How mentally and physically drained I’ve become, simply from trying my best to stay alive. 

My eyes close a little, drifting down onto my forearm that’s covered in tattoos. My dad hated them, but Paps and Gran always told me they were an expression of my life at the time, like a roadmap of all of the things I loved, when I loved them. Keepsakes I’ll never part with. I always thought it strange, that coming from grandparents from an era of humans who normally found tattoos distasteful, but. 

But they were right. I have over twenty tattoos, but my forearm is dedicated to the band that I knew and loved so much, and who brought me some of the happiest times of my life.

The first one sits right in the crook of my elbow, a simple sun and crescent moon that I got right after I fell in love with From the Fires. Then words, right below that, reading ‘In an age of darkness, light appears’ in small font, wrapping all the way around my arm. Under that, a swirling symbol that resembles a radar, 13 lines that make an almost complete circle to commemorate the song that reminds me to step back into the natural world. Beneath that, a sword and an arrow, parallel with one another. And lastly, a symbol that truly represented their fifth album, lines shaped into what looks like a bird in flight. 

I never got to get a tattoo from this last album. And honestly, the darkness of the theme of it made choosing what I would have gotten a little difficult, anyway. 

I run my hand over the dark black ink and my mind begins to sleepily drift. I wonder what my friends are doing right now…are they alive? Are they sad, too? Are they still clinging to the good times we shared to keep their minds from falling into the deep depths of solitude?

My fingers stop over the Age of Machine tattoo, the little ridges of the skinny lines still rigid on my skin. I think about how much this tattoo reminded me to unplug and drown myself in nature every chance I got. How that song truly motivated me to do the exact opposite of letting myself be pulled into the false world of social media, and spend my time in my garden, or swept up in a book. Strange, now… thinking about how it made me feel when I listened. Haunted, dizzy, and uneasy. Scared, almost, but cautious. Ominous and anxious, but in the most peaceful way. Now I’m glad of the inspiration it gave me. Maybe that’s why I haven’t gotten the rash. It’s almost like that song was warning us of what was to come…

What are the men who wrote this music doing right now? Are they okay, too? My heart wrenches in a different way than it has, yet. Yearning to know of the state of people I had never met, yet worried about the wellbeing of for so many years of my life. “Silly,” I whisper to myself. But, it’s not silly. It’s just the heart they helped me find within myself to care about other people so deeply.

I close my pencil into my book again as I blow out my candle, thinking of all the nights I went to sleep excited to wake up before the sun and double check the luggage I’d packed, grabbing a quick coffee before I hit the road to travel to god knows where to see my friends and my favorite band again. Carefree, and careless. Living my life the way I wanted to, choosing the road ahead to achieve that happiness I’d always chased when it came to hearing their music live. Life unchained, the way Gran lived hers. 

+++

Just as my body is relaxing into a well-deserved sleep, I’m awoken by a loud rumble, a deafening sound so deep that I feel it in my bones. I shoot up in bed, realizing that the bed below me is shaking, vibrating. I pull the covers back quickly, rushing down the hall to find Paps already coming toward me with his candle in hand. 

“What’s going on?!” I yell above the loud rumbles. 

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” he yells back, and we both make our way to the large picture window in the living room. The moonlight illuminates the hillside of the farm, revealing a giant faultline that reaches from one side of the field all the way to the next. 

“Shit,” Paps mutters as I feel panic setting into my gut. “Faultline.”

“What’s that mean?! Paps, what is it?” I ask in succession, watching as the crack as wide as a river is eating up the ground.

“Probably another sink hole. Or one is going to happen nearby, I’d say,” he barks as he turns and rushes back to his room. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to run,” he hollers. 

What?! Run?? We can’t run! 

“Paps, but the house! We’re alread–”

“Get your backpack. Get dressed, hurry! We’ve got to get away from it!” he commands, his voice booming. The house begins shaking again as I run to my room, throwing on my pants, jacket, and boots, and tossing my heavy emergency backpack over my shoulders. I make sure to secure my toboggan onto my head before stuffing my journal into the free pocket of my backpack, rushing back out into the living room to find Paps ready and waiting. 

I hear plates and dishes falling from the shelves of the kitchen, and books falling off the shelves of the living room. It’s just like an earthquake, except I had watched a crevice form in the ground, right before my eyes. My hands are shaking, and I am already broken out in a cold, panicked sweat.  We rush to the truck, throwing our things into the bed as we climb inside. 

“Hank! Where’s Hank?!” I yell, looking around for him. 

“Leave him, we’ve got to go,” Paps says as he turns the key in the ignition, hearing the engine purr to life for just a second, before shutting right back off. He tries again, pumping the fuel pedal to get the block to heat and the glow plugs to light. “Fuck, fuck!! Come on, baby! Don’t do this!” he yells, trying to coax the machine. But it’s to no avail. The battery has died.

We open the doors and clamber to grab our bags again, realizing that on foot is our only means of escaping the growing faultline. We take off rushing down the dirt road, still hearing the deep rumble of the ground separating behind us. I wish I could describe the sound, a noise unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. The cracking and snapping of deep roots, the crashing of trees, a low bellowing sound so deep that it sounds like it came from hell, itself. Unreal. And utterly fucking terrifying. 

My legs carry me, and luckily so do Paps’, straight down the long driveway and back onto the main road. I hear the wood of the house start to creak, and more wooden-sounding bangs. Fuck. Please, not the house… 

“Should we go to the woods?” I pant, knowing that Paps is just as out of breath as I am. 

“No, to the knoll,” he points, panting too as he motions toward the top of a high hill. When we finally make it there, we stop, taking a breather as now it feels as though we’re far enough from the field to get a better view of everything that lies beneath. And there, right in the center of the field is another sinkhole, giant and deep and dark with half the farm swallowed up in it. 

Luckily, the house is untouched.

“How on God’s green Earth…” Paps breathes as he lets his hands fall to his knees, trying to catch his breath as the two of us look down on the scene in front of us. Like it was straight from a horror film. 

“Had to of been Gran. She wouldn’t let the devil himself take her home, if it was the last thing she did,” I say, earning a breathy laugh from Paps. 

“You’re goddamn right, sweetheart. You’re goddamn right,” he says, finally catching his breath. “We need to run, we’re pretty close to this thing, still.” We take off again, rushing back down the road as we still hear the ground shaking below us. We hear trees falling in the distance, and we begin running again. I’m truly thankful for Paps’ stamina and heart right now, his legs getting him to safety even at his age. 

“Keep going, Paps, not much further,” I encourage him, just in case he needs it. “We’re okay, we’re okay…”

Suddenly, I see a set of headlights in the distance, barreling down the road towards us in a cloud of dust. When it finally approaches, I flag it down until it stops beside us. An old man is sitting in the driver’s seat, his face just as panicked as ours. “Hop in! Hop in!” he says, and we listen. Paps and I rush to the passenger side and slide into the cab, the man already hitting the gas before Paps can even shut the door all the way. 

“You’ve got to turn around!” I say, “There are sinkholes this way!”

He turns the wheel harshly, and I’m glad he listens to me. We rush back the opposite way, zooming down the road so fast I can hardly fathom what’s happening. Pure panic. 

“We’re alright, Paps, we made it out,” I try and calm him, reaching for my canteen of fresh water and offering it to him as he catches his breath. 

Suddenly we’re being thrust forward as the man steps on the brake, and I’m close to cursing him before I notice he’s stopped before another faultline in the road. “My god…” the man says, opening his truck door and climbing out. 

“No, no… what are you doing?!” I yell, wondering why in the hell this man is getting out of our escape vehicle and walking towards the crack in the ground. I watch as he steps closer to it, inching his steps as he peers down over the edge. “Is he insane?! Are you insane? Please, come back!!” I scream, but he doesn’t listen. The ground shakes again, throwing the man off balance as it makes him stumble, swallowing him right up into it. 

“Oh my god!!” I yell as Paps lets out a guttural scream. My hand covers my mouth as I yell in disbelief, watching as the man is there one second, and gone the next. 

“Drive, Y/N, drive!” Paps urges me, pushing my arms to scoot to the driver’s seat. I throw the truck in reverse, pulling the door closed as I rush to get us away from it all, pushing the pedal to the floor as my eyes scan for more faultlines. It feels as though we’re surrounded by them. My heart is pounding, now, as my body does the necessary work on auto pilot. 

“Keep going! Keep going!” Paps says as we get closer to town, and away from the vibrating ground. After a few minutes of shaking panic, it feels like the buzzing of the ground has subsided, and I can finally take a deep breath. A shaky one, but a breath nonetheless. 

As I finally allow my eyes to adjust and my hands to stretch, I’m finally feeling in control of my body again. Okay, okay, I’ve got this. Just keep driving. “Paps, you okay?”

“I’m okay sweetheart, you okay?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” I breathe, taking another deep breath in to calm my shaking body. “God, why the fuck did he do that?”

“Couldn’t tell ya, dumb and curious, I guess,” he says, taking another drink from the canteen before offering it to me. “Head toward the city, we’ll need to find a place to hunker down, tonight.”

And though my heart is still pounding as his words hit me, I take the right turn off the state route to head to the interstate, both of us in high hopes that the city will offer us more than it did when we left it. But honestly, I’m losing faith. 

I’d been driving for nearly twenty minutes on the empty road before I take a cutoff exit, determined to cut our drive time down and conserve fuel. The exit leads to a sideroad that is heavily wooded, but I know it will get us to the city more quickly. As the headlights shine down the two-lane road, I notice some kind of dark, shadowed figures standing down in the distance. I blink a few times, trying to see what is there. 

“Is that deer?” I ask Paps. 

“Can’t tell, it’s too dark,” he says, so I slow my pace. My headlights do little to light them up, but the closer we get, the more human they look. Tall, dark… just standing there?

And they aren’t moving. I bring the truck to a stop, my headlights almost no help at all as the figures begin to close in on us, instead of moving out of the road. 

“The hell is this, what’s happening?” Paps yells as the figures have us completely blocked from continuing down the road, now. My panic returns. I hear Paps cock his shotgun. “Drive, drive!!!”

My foot smashes the pedal to the floor, but the truck doesn’t move. The tires screech as I continue pushing it, willing the truck to keep going. But it won’t. It’s like I’m running it into a brick wall. “What’s happening!! Why won’t it go?!” I scream, my hands gripping the wheel as the truck begins to fishtail from the force of the tires on the ground. The lights from the truck are completely gone, now. We’re in total darkness. “Paps!”

“I’m here, I’m here, honey!” and I feel him grab my hand. Suddenly the truck doors slam open, and my body is being grabbed and pulled from the seat. I thrash and kick at whatever has grabbed me, but nothing works. It’s too strong. I feel a painful hit to my head, and my ears scream as I start to lose consciousness. I feel a dark cover be put over my head and secured, completely blocking my vision altogether. “Paps!!!!” I try and yell, but I’m slipping quickly into unconsciousness as my voice is barely a squeal. My hands are being tied in front of me, and all I feel is cold. 

+++

I wake up in a cold sweat, my hands still bound as I sit with my back against a metal wall. My breathing is ragged as I try and take in my surroundings, and I realize I still have the covering over my head. I wince in pain from the impact of whatever hit my head earlier. I hear others beside me, many crying, panicked voices whimpering in the same room. I try and make a sound, but my voice is hoarse from screaming. I try and speak, but there is tape over my mouth. What is happening, where is Paps?!

My heart is pounding in my chest as I try to raise my bound hands and remove the covering, but it’s secured tightly. I’m in pitch black darkness, and I can’t see a fucking thing. I try to stand, but my muscles are weak and sore, and I can hardly will them to move, let alone stand. It’s unclear how long I was knocked out, and how long I have been sitting in this cold, metal room, but it feels like only a few minutes have passed. I feel tears begin running down my face, I feel so helpless, so exhausted. So blind.  

Suddenly I hear a loud noise, like a heavy metal door being thrust open. I see a light through the covering over my face, and I try and yell again. But nothing comes out. Just like in those nightmares where you are unable to make a sound. I hear footsteps come into the room, heavy boots pounding against the concrete floor. My covering is forcefully removed, and it takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the bright light. 

Finally, I’m able to see eight or ten others with me, all of us sitting with our hands bound, lined up against the walls of this room. Some beside me, some directly across from me. I watch as two tall, masked men work their way around the room, removing each and every face covering. A woman, a man, a teenaged boy, an elderly lady… and then, Paps. I make excited eye contact with him as I feel a squeal leave my taped lips. He’s safe. He’s here. 

I watch as the rest of the covers are removed one by one, the person seated directly across from me being saved for last. They leave him sitting for a few seconds as they exchange what looks to be laughs with one another before one of them gently kicks his legs a little before undoing his head covering. 

The man’s face is beaten and bruised, his brown hair tangled and long and falling in front of his face as he winces in pain. They throw his face covering back down to the floor beside him, laughing again as they turn and leave the room without a word, locking the door behind them. 

I peer to the hair-covered face again to get a better look, and I swear if my mouth wasn’t taped shut, I would have screamed out in disbelief. 

That’s Jake fucking Kiszka.

He feels my eyes on him as he finally looks up to me, noticing my awkward stare. Neither of us can speak. I feel myself smiling under the tape, what are the fucking odds? What is happening?! Where the fuck are we?

His eyes grow wide as he realizes I know him, and he stares back at me in utter confusion. Do I tell him I recognize him? Shit, he can probably tell I do, by now. For some odd reason unbeknownst to me, I maneuver my tied hands to slowly pull up the sleeve of my shirt, showing him the splattering of tattoos that line my forearm. I know you. I watch his eyes see them as I straighten my arm out, willing him to see them, recognize them.

I watch his chest rise and fall as he begins shaking his head slowly side to side, his breathing picking up significantly as he looks at me with red, swollen eyes. 

No? Is he telling me no?

Just as I hear the sound of the heavy footsteps coming back down the hall, I watch as Jake slowly lifts his bound hands to his face, his pointer finger sticking up in front of his taped mouth. 

My stomach falls as I realize he’s serious. Not only is he telling me no, he’s telling me to stay quiet.

Tags: @gretavangroupie @britney-gvf @sacredstarcatcher @wetkleenex-gvf @farfromthehomelands @takenbythemadness @writingcold @builtbybrokenbells @ohgodthefeeling-gvf @fleet-of-fiction @milkgemini @gvfpal @ageofcj@dancingcarbon @highway-tuna @stardustjake @jakekiszkapunchmeintheface @gvfmarge @gracev0609 @myleftsock @literal-dead-leaf @peaceloveunitygvf @ageofbajabule @slut4lando @jordie-gvf @sadiechar @tinydancer40 @rosabellagvf @capnjaket @lyndz2names @thetroublegetssoloud71 @gretavanomens @spark-my-nature @josh-iamyour-mama @anythingforjtk @alwaysonthemend @danieljlmwagner @klarxtr @fortunatelytinybasement @demonrat444 @gretavansara @watchingover-hypegirl @hippievanfleet @digitalnomadz @raviolilegs @lipstickitty @hippievanfleet @klarxtr @strange-whorizons @do-it-jakey-baby @myownparadise96 @gvf-luna @starshine-wagner @cassiesgreta @joopsandjangs @whimsiliz @kiszkas-canvas @whimsiliz @joopsandjangs @broken0mens @scoreofinfantryvines @whereiskeara @do-it-jakey-baby @miravanfleet @heckingfrick@kiszka-canvas @whimsiliz @joopsandjangs @broken0mens @scoreofinfantryvines @whereiskeara @do-it-jakey-baby @miravanfleet @heckingfrick @jenniferkiszka @jjwasneverhere @gvfmarge @pineapple-photographer @vanfleeter

[vahalia-cress]

⸸ Ilyon Asoh ⸸

Violence/Tenderness: DAY 2 @daily-writing-challenge

Violent lands wrought with countless years of tribal wars and strife. Such was the way of Tural and its inhabitants, older rather than newer. It had only come to know peace within the past 80 years during Gulool Ja Ja who sought to unite the people of Tural as a nation. And it stood, thriving even, to this day when he was setting his Promises out into the world to partake in their Rite of Succession. They considered it a pilgrimage where Vahalia was from, and the two weren’t too far off from one another in their respective purposes. It was never about the end but the journeys in between.

Vahalia had felt that nostalgia pluck at her memory bank, as she sat before the fire watching it crackle and flickler within the night air. A little over a decade ago it had been her, two others and their mentor traveling around the world taking up odd jobs on the side of their studies as Magi. It felt like a lifetime ago, she was a different person then than she was now, perhaps all roads eventually led her to this very place.

This journey.

Light golden eyes cut towards the two sleeping figures in their sleeping rolls. Cordelia and Wren were seemingly well protected as Vahalia and Castien had taken the first watch.

They had boarded the dirigibles into Yak’T’el taking their mounts with them and settled for the evening just at the outskirts of the Village of Ilyon Asoh beside the biggest tree they could find to shield them from the gentle tapping of rain they had felt prior in their travels.

A soft ruffle of the Chocobo feathers came and once more the large, geared, and armored avians adjusted back into their comforts. Castien came into few and placed the foul she had procured along the triad of sticks she had prepared prior, “Enough for the evening and morning.” she commented, dusting off her hands and exhaling as she took a load off alongside the trunk of the tree beside Vahalia.

“I take it you’ve pinned down a good idea of the land? You’ve been gone for a while.”

“Bought a few maps in Iq Br’aax, I couldn’t say no to a good start, it’ll benefit my maps later when I piece it all together,” Castien replied and she dug into her pack beside her to pull out a sketchbook and a charcoal pencil, already doodling away.

“Have you always had a fondness for cartography and art?”

“Not always but it was all I had. I didn’t have my mother around and ended up in an orphanage before I was six years old. We couldn’t afford much there so I would sometimes find scraps of paper on the ground or get pieces of scrolls from the kitchen staff after they were done with their recipes. I used to use the soot from the fireplaces after the fires died down in the mornings and I would find an interest in creating images that way. When I could afford my first paintset I was drawn to landscapes and the people.” Castien chuckled as she looked sidelong to Vahalia, “S’pose that does that to a person when you’re locked up and don’t go far. When you become your own person you sort of just want to see everything and know everything around you. I always found it…calming.”

A low hum emitted from Vahalia as she eyed the sketchbook, hardly seeing anything to truly judge what was within but she had seen Castien’s work before, plenty of times even commissioning her and buying her maps, especially when it came to her first purchasing ships for trade. There was very little to scrutinize however, she did find familiar ground with the prospect of something beautiful coming from the depths of depression and longing, abandonment and trauma.

Tenderly Vahalia’s lips curled into a subtle smile – it wasn’t perfect but it remained all the same, “you made something of yourself despite the things baring your way. I admire that.”

“Thank you.” Castien tilted her head and smirked in Vahalia’s direction.

“Some people are the prize, some are the punishment.” she retorted quietly and she slowly returned her gaze to the flickering fire before them.

“And which do you consider yourself, Vahalia?”

“That depends on who you ask.” Lady Cress’s gentle smile eventually twitched into a bit of a smirk. She was both hellfire and holy water, what you drank depended on how you treated her.

[thehollowwriter]

Warnings: death, blood, violence, implied suicide, cannibalism, gore, Silas eats a guy, and it's pretty graphic, some implied nsfw but it's super brief (don't attack me.) Word count: 4024

Key: Regular text is for the present. Italics is for flashbacks, bold is for journal entries

(Pls reblog and leave a comment ❤️)

Lamentations Pt. 6.1

Silas tapped his claws against his desk, his face blank. He wanted to write, but... he was thinking about how Raine, one of his hunters, was out of town for a funeral.

"This kind of thing always takes you by surprise, you know?" Raine said through sniffles and an attempt to level her voice. "My sister was always so healthy and happy... to think she would have a heart attack..."

Silas didn't know. He didn't know because "this kind of thing" never surprised him. It was so normal for him that he forgot it was a nasty disruption of peace for others.

He picked up his pen and looked at the paper. Then he began to write.

In the Abyss, death is a guarantee. It is rampant. Constant. Swallowing up every flicker of life it can. I'm no stranger to death. But that doesn't make it hurt any less.

Meeting Morrigan's parents made me think of my own for the first time in years.

I can't remember much about them, really. They died when I was quite young, and most of my memories are fuzzy.

My mother, Lilith, was... distant. I don't think she liked me or my siblings all that much. Smaller, weaker versions of herself she's stuck taking care of with the rest of the family, using up energy that could've been spent getting food.

She wasn't cruel to us, but she wasn't loving and warm either. We were there. We were related to her. That was about it.

It wasn't a secret that we were an accident, an unwanted outcome of a passionate night with my father. There was no way to safely get rid of us either, so we were kept around until we were born.

There were moments where she was somewhat positive towards me. When we were unable to find food for about a straight week, she tried to coax me out of the ball I'd curled myself into. Loving, in a way.

I was unsure how she even died for the longest time. I never witnessed it like I had with so many of the deaths of the others in my family.

I just barely recall the last day I saw her. Everything is fuzzy, hard to know if they're accurate. Except for one thing. Her eyes.

I'm not sure why I remember her eyes so clearly. It's a detail that has stuck with me for years.

Everyone else was sleeping, I think. She was hovering by the entrance of the cave we were in. Or was it a hole? It doesn't matter.

She was staring into the nothingness, the vast expanse of lifeless black that made up the Abyss. The weakly flickering light in her eyes had long since sizzled out.

Once bright pools of jade were now dull and sombre. I never thought you could see the life in people's eyes until I looked at her and saw there wasn't any. They were dead.

Then she just... left. She didn't say a single thing . She didn't glance back at us. She just swam out into the open waters and didn't come back.

Sometimes, I wonder if I had woken up my father or someone else, maybe she would have been brought back safe, but I just went back to sleep and later woke up to find the adults in a panic.

Nobody ever told me what happened, not even when my father and grandfather came home with grim faces and teary eyes. But now... I think I know. And I don't think we could have stopped her if we tried.

My father was kinder to us... but I don't think he really knew what to do with us. He made sure we ate and congratulated us with a headpat when a hunt was successful, but other than that, he too was distant and unfamiliar. More focused on my mother than anything else.

He was killed during a raid when one of our attackers took a bite out of his throat.

It was during this same raid that I lost three brothers and two sisters. They were devoured in a few bites, alongside the scraps of food we had stored, and my sister Mei and I would have been next if it weren't for an older cousin intervening.

It's almost laughable how quickly I lost the rest of my family during my childhood. They were picked off one by one until only myself and my grandfather remained.

My aunts and uncles died in raids and fights, my cousins went out to hunt and never returned, and Mei... Mei was shot by a harpoon gun.

Out of my siblings, I remember Mei the best. She was tough, clever, determined, and powerful. She didn't have magic, but that never stopped her. We were inseparable until we were 14, when Mei was shot by a harpoon gun.

It was the closest we had gotten to the surface. We were following a ship to target bigger prey like the reckless teenagers we were. One of the humans on board saw us, and, well, before we could get away, the gleaming metal of the harpoon was piercing through Mei's chest.

She looked at me with such terror and anger in her eyes as the water filled with her blood, and she told me to get away before they fired again.

I wasn't able to. The tip of another harpoon got lodged in my tail. I ripped it out and left a trail of blood on my way to our grandfather, who was waiting for us.

He helped fix me up, and I couldn't hunt for a long while after that. I only learned this later, but the injury caused nerve damage to my tail.

My tail hurts when I swim, and I can't move it like I used to. I can't chase prey or swim long distances anymore without being in incredible pain and feeling my body resist me.

I switched to stealth hunting after that. I'm used to pushing through my pain, but I'd rather save my energy for a quick escape if I need it.

I never told any of this to Morrigan. Why would I? How could I? How do you tell someone they can never meet the rest of your family because every one of them met their end in various excruciating ways?

Sometimes, Morrigan would tell me about his childhood and then look at me expectantly for a story of my own. I could only look back at him, unable to answer.

My childhood was violent. I am violent. At least, I'm capable of being so. This fact was a concern that gnawed at the back of my mind at the start of Morrigan and I's relationship.

Morrigan had not seen the worst of me. The me that he knew was the one who had long since escaped the Abyss, someone who hadn't needed to kill other merfolk to eat for a very long time.

The idea of Morrigan coming to realise who I truly am, the violent cannibal his family warned him about, kept me up at night. It left me worried. Almost afraid.

It was stupid of me to doubt him like that. Disrespectful, even. Morrigan is clever and likely already knew. However, knowing isn't the same as seeing... and see it he did.

I got sick with some form of flu a few weeks after our visit to the city. I had a fever, and I couldn't keep anything down.

Morrigan came to stay to help my grandfather look after me, worried I would get worse. However, I had caught up on vaccines, and my health was far greater than it ever was, so I recovered quickly.

Just my luck that just as I was going to get more food after not eating for a week, we were raided.

Midway is much safer than the Abyss, but it sits right on the edge of it, so raids still happen every now and then when the local law can't prevent it. It's mainly businesses that got robbed, including my own, but I can hold them off just fine.

There was shouting in the streets, and the sounds of doors and glass breaking, and one of the raiders... a squid mer, I think, got inside.

Morrigan was dealt the first blow and sent crashing into the nearby wall before he could even react.

He groaned, stomach churning and head hazy. His tail fins whacked him in the face and obscured his vision. He was bent nearly in half, his head resting against the floor and his eyes facing the ceiling.

He rolled over, his head spinning and body screaming in pain, and propped himself up with one elbow and one hand.

Morrigan trained his eyes on the squid making their demands, with full intent to lunge, when a blur of purple tackled them to the floor, and it suddenly got very, very quiet.

Ominous wisps of blood began drifting into the water, billowing into large blooms of red before slowly dissipating.

Morrigan watched in silent shock as Silas released his hold on the mer's throat, his teeth stained red.

Morrigan opened his mouth to say... something, but he froze in place when Silas dipped his head, and a wet tearing sound filled the silence.

Morrigan's stomach dropped, and icy fingers of fear crawled up his spine. He backed up until he was pressed against the wall, his heart pounding in his chest.

The sound of flesh ripping carried on for far too long, interrupted only when Silas stopped to swallow.

There was so much blood. It seemed to overtake the little shop, swallowing it in a cloud of dark red. Viscera slipped to the floor with a wet splat, and Morrigan felt his stomach churn.

He felt bile rise in his throat when Silas tilted his head back and swallowed a large tentacle he had violently torn off the squid whole.

Morrigan covered his mouth when Silas' hands, slick with blood, were caught in the dim light of the lanterns.

Morrigan pushed away from the wall, his back aching, to try sneak away and come back later when Silas was done doing... that.

The moment he made the slightest movement, Silas' head snapped in his direction, and he stared at Morrigan, his pupils blown so wide that only the tiniest slivers or his irises were visible.

Morrigan briefly wondered if Silas had perhaps been letting him win at their game this entire time, but he was distracted by the fact that lower half of Silas' face was caked with shiny, sticky blood.

"S...Silas," Morrigan said slowly, his voice raising several pitches. "Silas, calm down."

Silas didn't say a word at first. He simply stared at Morrigan with that wide-eyed, intense gaze. Then, he blinked a few times and huffed.

"I'm perfectly fine," He growled, his words warbled from the blood in his mouth. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, glancing at the squid he had torn into. "This one hurt you and tried to rob me. I'm just taking care of a threat. "

Morrigan suddenly felt very relieved that he overpowered Silas when they first met.

"That's- uh- great, love, but can you put that away? Far away?"

Silas glanced at the corspe, then at Morrigan. "Alright. Stay here. You're hurt."

Silas grabbed the squid mer by the hair and began dragging it to the back of the shop. Morrigan tried not to look, but before he could turn away, he was met with the sight of the carnage Silas left behind.

He promptly bent over and threw up.

The image of that squid was burned into his brain, flashing every time he closed his eyes. Silas killed them before he could even react. Then he... why would he do that?

He'd just been sick, right? He spent a whole week without eating anything because he couldn't keep anything down.

Maybe it was an instinctual thing. Silas never outright said it, but Morrigan was pretty sure he's eaten people before. And he was protecting himself, Morrigan and Emrys, right? So it wasn't a malicious act per se...

The thought alone made Morrigan wince at the barage of rage his parents would send his way were they to hear it. Endless ranting about Silas' bad influence on him, how Silas' monstrous nature would corrupt and damage him...

Well, they never knew what they were talking about. Silas was constantly proving them wrong.

Even now. He was protecting Morrigan and making sure they weren't robbed. Nothing monstrous about that. Besides... he certainly didn't look monstrous either.

Morrigan's cheeks pinkened, and he smiled a bit, running his hand over a bruise on his arm.

"Thanks, Si." He mumbled.

Morrigan turned out fine, though he had some bad bruising and quite a sore back. I was... afraid he'd leave me, want to get away, and never come back.

But... while I was looking him over and making sure he was alright, he put his hand on my cheek and kissed me. Hard.

Even though the blood stained his fingers and his tongue. He wasn't afraid or disgusted.

"When you looked at me, I was afraid you were in a frenzy," Morrigan mumbled. "That you didn't recognise me. How stupid of me. You'd never lose yourself like that."

I'm glad he stayed. And that he understood me.

I never intended to eat that squid mer. Just kill it and maybe eat it later. Not in front of Morrigan. Not like... like that. I think it was because I hadn't eaten in so long.

The next few years blended together as life carried on. I wish I could remember every detail, every joyful moment that young, ungrateful version of myself didn't appreciate like he should have.

Morrigan visited almost every day. We talked, we fought, we kissed, we embraced, and when my grandfather went to bed and the night got quiet... we tangled further.

Morrigan was never gentle, and I loved it. There was a care to his roughness. For every bite and for every time his claws raked across my skin, words of love and praise flowed endlessly from his mouth in quiet huffs.

And when it was over, he held me like I was his most precious treasure and sang to me. His voice was like honey.

I miss his touch. I miss his embrace. His compliments and kisses, his voice, his smile, and his field nature. I miss Morrigan so much.

But that's not important right now. We made the most of our time together. Morrigan began teaching me the spells and magical arts he knew, and in return, I began teaching him Abyssal magic.

Morrigan is a powerful mage, I know. He reeked of magic. It was powerful and pulsing and seemed to fill the air of whatever room he was in.

Morrigan always amazed me. He mastered spells almost faster than I could teach them, perfecting them within a few tries. Even more dangerous or complicated spells that took me months to perfect only took him a week or two.

"That boy," my grandfather would say with a fond expression. "Has an incredible gift."

And he was right. Even nowadays, after meeting other mages, I have never met someone like Morrigan.

"At its core, all magic has a basic structure," Morrigan would say to me. "Spells are just add ons to these structures you need to memorise."

It seemed so obvious to him. So clear. He knew magic like the back of his hand. He lived and breathed it. He saw the details that made the bigger picture, the threads that formed exactly what he wanted.

It took me much longer to learn Morrigan's magic. Not only the craft of the sea, but also the magic he learned on land.

Fire, water, flora, cosmic... it is all so fundamentally different to abyssal magic in a way I almost can't explain. It's like learning a new language with rules that are nothing like that of your own.

Morrigan's magic... it is filled with life. You draw from the plants, the water, the stars... it is channelled with imagination and a point of your pen or hand.

Abyssal magic is drawn from death and... I suppose you could say life. But not plants. Not the water.

Bones, blood, skin... they are what fuels Abyssal magic. A body will get you quite far. Crush a crab or something in your hand. It will give you what you need to cast a spell.

I suppose it is because death is such a core part of the Abyss. It only makes sense that a practice native to it will thrive in death, even in small doses.

Many abyssal spells have a similar outcome to "regular" spells but are much more powerful. Many more require drawing out sigils and saying certain phrases in abyssal tongue... I'm not sure why.

It was a change for me. I itched to start tracing a symbol in front of me or on the ground, to murmur those magic words that would get me want I wanted, but... I had to just envision instead a draw from the world around me.

"You're clever," Morrigan would say when my attempts failed. "You'll get it eventually."

I did get those spells right, eventually. Cosmic magic came easiest to me. It felt similar to abyssal magic. It's funny. The stars above and the inky black depths below should be polar opposites.

But... "As above, so below" is a saying that comes to mind.

However, to this day, I don't understand this new magic well enough to teach it. I wish I could.

I can't remember most lessons well as it was so long ago, but I do remember the way Morrigan's eyes lit up with joy and burned with a sense of victory when he got an abyssal spell right, teeth glinting in a large smile.

He's so perfect.

Morrigan told me about blot during one of his lessons. That thick, black, sticky substance that forms when you use magic.

Silas' breath hitched for a moment.

Morrigan's magestone was encrusted on a thin, gold bracelet he wore. He said he originally wanted it in an earring, but his nieces and nephews would yank on them.

I didn't have a magestone. I still don't. I was confused when Morrigan explained what they were, and he was shocked I hadn't overblotted as the blot gathered directly rather than on a stone.

"I don't use my magic much," Silas told him. "Not like you mages do."

Morrigan looked concerned. "Yeah, but with your level of power and how you grew up, that doesn't matter. Blot accumulates even with the tiniest bit of magic, and proper sleep and eating well are some of the only things that get rid of it."

There was a sad tinge to his voice for a brief moment. "You... you were literally starving, Si. And I've only ever seen you sleep properly a few times. Naps don't count."

Morrigan was rightfulfully concerned, but what could I do? Where or how could I get a magestone? Would I even be allowed one, untrained by government standards and technically not an existing person?

"I could organise one for you," Morrigan offered. "A schoolmate of mine is a professor at Night Raven now."

Silas shook his head. "No, it's fine. I haven't needed one up till now. I'll be fine."

I suppose one could say Morrigan should've pressed me more about this, considering how dangerous blot is, but my way of getting rid of blot was good enough for him.

My unique magic. I never knew that's what it was called, not until I told Morrigan about it. When he was pressing me about getting a magestone, I told him I knew a spell that got rid of the odd weight on my chest that would gather when I used magic.

"Another abyssal spell?" Morrigan asked, lighting up in excitement. "Could you teach me?"

Silas shook his head. "No... None that I or my grandfather know. I could just... do it one day. I don't know how."

"Oh, your unique magic?"

"My what?"

A unique spell of my own that no other person can be taught. Many people name theirs, but I've never named mine.

At first, I thought it just made my magic stronger and made me feel less sick. However, when Morrigan explained blot to me, it suddenly made things click into place.

I know what blot feels like, though I used to think I was just sick. It's a warm, wet weight on your chest that only grows if you don't clear it.

It feels like when you get sick and whenever you inhale, you can feel something coating your throat and lungs. It makes you gasp and gasp for just a bit of air.

I can't remember when I first used my unique magic. I try to, but it won't come to me.

Silas stopped writing for a moment. He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut, racking his brain for a memory that refused to surface. He has brief flashes of something... but it was too vague.

Blood. Teeth. Bursts of light. Then, nothing. Same as always.

Silas made a noise of exasperation and continued writing.

I can't remember. It's something so important, something that has kept me alive all these years, and I can't remember when or how I got it.

I... I think that applies to much of my life. There are so many things I can't remember, even nice things. They are locked somewhere in my mind. What did Doctor Koi call it again... suppressed. They're suppressed.

I still forget things. I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I sometimes can't remember who spoke to me ten minutes ago unless I write it down.

I have to write a lot of things down. I think having my grandfather and Morrigan around to do the remembering helped me all those years ago. Even though I didn't know I had... what's it called... dissosociative amnesia. And short-term memory loss. I have both of those.

I don't like forgetting things. I don't like the fact that I can't rely on my own memory, that unless I write it down, I have to trust that others won't lie to me.

And really, I have to wonder if there is some type of god out there. I never believed in things like that, but... how else could I have lived this long, if not through divine intervention?

A forgetful shark who can't swim properly. I might as well have gone up to someone and asked them to eat me.

Anyway, while I mainly use my magic on other mages, who I rarely find, I can also use it on regular people. The effects when there is no magic are much more dramatic, but I won't go into that now.

Morrigan admired my unique magic but was more relieved that I had an efficient way of getting rid of blot than anything else, even if it came at the cost of others.

"You should use it more often," He would say. "So you don't risk anything happening."

I never did that until much later in life, but I appreciated the sentiment.

There isn't much else I can say. The next few years were relatively peaceful. Morrigan came over more and even spent the school holidays with us. He let me sit with him as he planned out his lessons, telling me about his new and old students, an excited spark in his eyes.

My grandfather and Morrigan got closer. They got along so well. I was so glad. Morrigan went to get my grandfather's medicine for us and helped me get it ready, and helped me feel better about his declining health.

I would often come back home from a hunt to find them talking and laughing, showing each other tricks and spells they knew.

Yeah, it was peaceful. Fun, even. Until it was ripped away from me.

...........................................

Guide: Start, Prev, Next

A/N: Thank you so much for reading, guys! You may have noticed that this time, the flashback was from Morrigan's perspective rather than Silas'! I think it would work better that way. I'm really proud of this chapter, and it took a really long time to make, so I hope you like it! Those who are new, I've got the guide right above!

Tagging: @distant-velleity @br3adtoasty @rainesol @theleechyskrunkly @jovieinramshackle

@galaxies-and-gore @cyanide-latte @cynthinesia @officialdaydreamer00 @krenenbaker

@offorestsongs @kitwasnothere @elenauaurs @boopshoops @inotonline

@1dont-really-know @kazumify @minteasketches @elysia-nsimp @skrimpyskimpy

@casp1an-sea @offorestsongs @tixdixl @poisoned-pearls @the-trinket-witch

@ramshacklerumble @ghostiidasponk @thegoldencontracts @the-banana-0verlord @cloudcountry

@skriblee-ksk @twstinginthewind @lumdays @theolivetree123 @natsukishinomiyaswife

@authoruio @jewelulu @raguiras

[grison-in-space]

This is a bit of a subjective question but since I am potentially getting my first dog later this year (application in, but no deposit taken or breeding confirmed) my question is: when do I start getting Dog Things?

Sounds like you're getting a puppy, yeah? Bearing in mind that Matilda is my first planned* puppy as an adult, and that as far as I'm concerned you can do anything you want forever...

....advice under the cut, alongside this photo of tiny Benton, on the theory that puppy photos are always welcome.

A lot of timeline things will come down to how communicative your breeder is. For example, I contacted Tilly's breeder about a year before I expected to reasonably bring home a puppy, and she briefly and with some excitement tried to convince me that it was a good idea to take home a very promising puppy she had who was about six weeks old at that time; after some time to think we all agreed that this wasn't a great idea--and then I re-made contact when the next litter on the ground was about ~3weeks old, then finalized which puppy was going to be mine at about 5weeks. There's going to be a lot of flux and "well maybe but--" stuff in your life until you have a puppy born and on the ground who is definitely going to be yours, and your timing decisions for stuff are going to be influenced heavily by your breeder, which in turn is going to be inflected by the culture of your breed. ( @kangals for example recently took home Kepler with what, two weeks of notice once a breeder had been identified?) Some breeders are better about letting waitlisted folks know when there's a litter actually on the ground than others, and it's wise to expect a certain amount of messiness about that. Historically I have purchased puppy gear in a mad scramble immediately after confirming that there is a puppy happening--sometimes with puppy actually in hand as I do so. Nothing wrong with that, but if you WANT to be assembling things for yourself in advance...

In my experience, you will want a crate in hand by the time baby is home. Depending on how much cash and/or desire for nice things you have, you might want to look into crates that are also interior decorating or storage. We bought and assembled one that could double as an end table pretty much as soon as we were certain there was definitely a puppy coming home, because my bedroom is otherwise essentially wholly taken up by the bed and I needed a place to store a puppy that also offered a certain level of space for detritus like my glasses.

If space and/or Niceness is not a premium, wire crates work perfectly well and take about two seconds to set up nicely. Some of these advertise that they come with a divider so that your puppy doesn't take advantage of all the space to use as a toilet; I have never once used one of these for that purpose, but I have mostly had medium sized puppies. I do like having a door on both a narrow and a wide end. I like to put a waterproof crate pad and some remnant scraps of flannel in a puppy crate to start and go from there: dogs in my house lose "bed" privileges if they destroy a bed or crate pad, but I find that crate pads are a little less tempting to destroy than a bed with raised edges. I also find that the flannel scraps let them get out the itch to dig and shove things around without actually tempting destruction too much.

You will want to have chews around for teething when puppy arrives. Which chews you feel most comfortable with are up to you. I have not personally had any problems with rawhide, so I usually offer a mixture of rawhide rolls, "himalayan yak cheese" chews purchased in bulk, and a variety of higher-value faster-to-destroy chews. I have exactly one dog ever give even the tiniest of shits about a Nylabone, and it's Matilda, and I have never had a dog willingly chew a Benebone. I find that both the length of time the chew lasts and how motivated the puppy will be to chew are highly dependent on the puppy; some dogs seem to like more "give" and others simply hit anything that isn't quite hard (e.g. antlers) like a buzz saw. Your breeder will have some insight on what works for their dogs. Chews do lose their luster eventually, so I would aim to purchase those within about a month of estimated puppy arrival if you don't have a dog around currently.

You will also want to purchase training treats as well as kibble within that one-month window. I like Pet Botanics, but any semi-soft treat small enough for puppy mouths will do. (The size of your puppy will inflect this somewhat: I recently watched a handler of a tiny Miniature Dachshund puppy struggle a little with training because she'd brought only his kibble he eats for meals to catch his attention with, and that is just not interesting enough for classes). I also often offer cat treats in my rotation: Temptations are pretty popular with dogs, too, and so were tiny freeze dried shrimps intended as cat treats. If you have a small breed, cat treats are often a better size for your puppy than treats intended to be consumed by a large dog. I also heavily recommend Crump's Naturals for folks with small breed puppies; they're just freeze dried beef liver cut up real small, but it's very nice not to have to crumble it yourself.

If you want to do training classes, now is the time to find out what options are available in your area. My experience has been that you want to get your puppy on a waitlist for those as soon as you know a) the puppy definitely exists and b) when the puppy is coming home. You should expect to have the puppy at home for about a week before classes can start, to adjust to living with you, but it's good to have all your ducks in a row ahead of time, and in the past few years it's been hard to predict demand for dog training in the wake of COVID.

You should expect not to keep your puppy's puppy collar, leash, and potentially harness forever as puppies grow like weeds, so it's okay if there's a range of fits for those. Your breeder may send you home with a collar and leash--Matilda's did--but if you have something cute you want to daydream about, now's the time!

*We've had Benton from puppyhood, but he was adopted in the middle of COVID when I was in thesis hell and essentially insane, and it occurred to @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine that the single upside of COVID is that they could get a sport prospect and get to play with Doing Dog Stuff, since now we had all this new quarantine time. We had to get a puppy because Tribble is a cranky dog selective ass, and we wound up somehow getting approved by a deeply dubious rescue lady to adopt the first puppy we applied for.

[omegalomania]

okay, couple things i haven't seen people comment on yet! bolded emphasis is mine and is not present in the original text.

Buzzed off of the alpenglow.

so "alpenglow" is a specific phenomenon when the setting sun lights up the horizon in deep rose hues and soft shadows. as you can see on the article images, this can often result in pink and purple visuals.

You never think you’d look back and be nostalgic for right now - For car rides that never seemed to end, the way the world used to look in 90s newscasts, or cloroxing your groceries before you bring them in from the garage…. To all the animals you see in the clouds and the faces you memorized in the tile of the shower in your childhood home- the pareidolla-n prince.

themes of nostalgia vs. reality are definitely present in all the teasing they've done for this album thus far. "field of dreams" addresses it directly. "dark city" is about memories of a place that never existed (the beach was never real). the bit in "reality bites" about the pink seashell addresses how we assign meaning to things that ultimately don't mean very much at all.

all of that also ties into the overall idea of searching out codes and meaning in things that might not have anything of the sort. more on that later.

Placing items in my cart and continuing shopping- but emotionally. You start to wonder if you have more good road being you than ahead. Shake it off. [...] Still trying to get free of everything we’re supposed to be.

this doesn't have any special meaning or context i just like the message. maybe just being your own silly weird self is worth more than looking ahead. when they made you they broke the mold. don't let expectation pigeonhole you in. just makes me fond!

Sometimes I feel like detective working a bad beat for too many years, chasing old leads- not ready to quit but unable to solve the case- just hoping I get more than a gold watch on my retirement day

[...]

PS (thanks for always sticking around. Thanks for working the beat. Spoiler alert: we got more than a gold watch coming for you next year).

this is the part that gets to me. this is an explicit comparison between US and the detective. sometimes pete feels like the detective...but at the postscript, the comparison is made explicit. we're the detectives, to him. we've been chasing leads - websites, postcards, whatever scraps we can find. we've been working the bad beat, and all the while they've been cooking up something special for us, and now that's about to pay off.

i will say for my part...i don't think there's any secret code here. the weird formatting, the punctuation, the inconsistent capitalization - aside from the wink-wink nudging at us ("pareidolia" refers to the inclination to look for patterns where none exist) - frankly, this is just how pete types! a lot of his old blogs and livejournals were peppered with grammar errors and misspelled words, because that's just how he wrote them out. and it takes me back some...there's that nostalgia again. how about that?

[crimeronan]

wait say more about how u use tarot to make ur OCs

oh sure!!

you can basically customize whatever spread you want to whatever project you're working on. i also sometimes use tarot for solving plot tangles or inspiring new plot points.

essentially you make a tarot spread like you're asking introspective questions or questions about the future -- but you're asking questions about a character instead.

then you can write down the results and interpret them based on the card's various potential meanings. tarot is all about using vague concepts to clarify your internal thoughts and feelings, it translates REALLY WELL to writing fiction.

i just pulled out my novel planning notebook and am thrilled to report that i have Pages And Pages of tarot spreads & interpretations in here. not just sol ruby devin and nova's original spreads, but also spreads about their relationships to each other, the environment surrounding them, etc

i'm not gonna transcribe my entire reading and interpretation for all four of the main quartet. i Will say that i pulled nova's cards first, said "these are all so well-adjusted and boring," and then rafi said "but what if she's the antagonist," and...... the rest is history.

this is the spread i used:

core self (one card to return to for their personality or archetype)

childhood (what most impacted how they grew up)

parents (relationship with parents)

education (background in school, study, etc)

friendships (either an important friend or generally how this person does friendships)

sex/sexuality (their relationship to sex and romance, if any)

goal (their overarching narrative goal)

fatal flaw (what will be their downfall)

work (career, attitude toward work, etc)

mental health (is it bad)

how far they'll go (what will they do to achieve the goal in #7)

fear (their biggest fears & how they manifest)

strength (a core character strength of theirs)

the core cards for each member of the quartet are

nova - the star

sol - queen of pentacles

ruby - queen of cups

devin - strength

and again, not gonna post the whole spreads, but. if you do something this involved, you'll find that certain bits will stick out Much more than others. i did these spreads in 2019 and would say a solid 80% of the cards are STILL relevant four years later in 2023. even as the project itself has undergone multiple scrapped drafts and revisions and plot changes.

some example highlights would be:

nova is my main antagonist. her spread is littered with stability, growth, reward, responsibility, opportunities, wishes, potential, dreams, whatever. her fatal flaw is the ace of wands, the fire card, a sign of creativity and passion. her parents are represented by the tower, the most chaotic and destructive card in the deck.

so here we have a woman born and groomed into enormous power by incredibly questionable forces, who has been raised not to care about the destruction surrounding her, and who has lived an Extremely Charmed life. uh oh!

sol's childhood is the seven of swords - betrayal, deception, loss. her friendships are the three of swords - disappointment, heartbreak. her strength is the five of swords - conflict, dishonesty, intimidation, lack of reflection. her fear is the magician - resourcefulness, willpower, desire, manifestation.

and. well. that's my antihero bitch. she sucks so bad. god bless

ruby's spread is much kinder by comparison. a calm childhood with happy parents, friendships and sexual relationships that are focused on partnership. her goal is justice. self-explanatory. her mental health is the four of swords - the exhaustion card. her fatal flaw is the two of wands - plans, anticipation, restlessness, lack of contentment.

so here's this woman who loves so much and so deeply and cares so much about so many things..... and has trapped herself inside a life that makes her fundamentally unhappy. because she can't walk away

devin's fear is the five of pentacles, a card that represents loss. often called The Breakup Card. it can also mean a loss of faith. their mental health is the ten of wands - burdens, responsibility, obligation, burnout. their goal is the knight of swords - ambition, battle, assertion, big changes.

so here you have an exhausted chronically ill mess who's standing alone because they're the only person who can do so, fatally loyal to their loved ones & burning with quiet rage n a desire to rip down the entire system.

like i said, you can customize any spread for any character or relationship. you just wanna ask broad questions about what that character or relationship looks like, and then interpret the cards in whatever way is most inspiring to you! i consider tarot a tool for creativity rather than an end-all be-all of fiction plotting.... take what you like, leave what you don't.

[endlessthedestiny]

okay I read the good omens screen play / shitscript and....... it was something. here are a good idea of what happens there, for those who dosent want to read it

if you don't know what the shitscript is, it's basically a script for a scrapped good omens movie written only by Neil in 1992. it's very different from (I think) any other media/adaptation we had of good omens. apparently neil HAD to make Crowley evil, but I don't know much about it...

tw: abusive crowley

so:

Crowley owns a night club. (yes, Lucifer style)

Aziraphale works as a museum curator.

Also, Crowley cheats in every chess game and wins, making that Aziraphale never won (rather cruel if you ask me) and he hates earth. like really despises.

the plot starts with Satan (here he is more like his sandman/Lucifer2000 counterpart to be honest, even being called Lucifer MORNINGSTAR at some point) gives Crowley the antichrist (Adam).

Crowley is supposed to take care and raise Adam, but when he came back to the club, he put Adam in Madame Tracy's bag to talk to his employee.

Madame Tracy takes Adam home unknowingly. (yes, she will be the one raising him)

Crowley has a fucking panic attack seeing that he lost Adam (also he's fucking pathetic. why didn't he just chase the taxi. stupid).

He drinks alot to calm himself, and then Aziraphale comes into his club and asks what's wrong

Crowley explains (more like spilled) to him what's happening, and Aziraphale decides to help him find Adam. With the condition of being able to make Adam good.

Also theres Anathema. As a child she feels (?) that the antichrist was born.

11 long years of azira and crowley looking for Adam in every city offscreen later............

Anathema goes to tadville (the place where madame Tracy and Adam live) looking for something. she is convinced there is something weird happening.

Madame Tracy's the only one who accepts to rent her a room.

In this version, Madame Tracy's is the "crazy old lady who was hot when she was younger but now she's oooolddddd and craaazy" which is problematic (at my vision)

Adam basically takes care of everything around the house, the bills, breakfast.

Adam resembles more Warlock than Adam from the show... He sometimes is unnecessarily rude towards others, but I think that makes sense with the fact that he had to be so responsible all the time.

He dislikes Anathema at first. But they grow to be friends over time.

theeeen.... Satan calls Crowley again and they talk about the antichrist.

Crowley says that Adam is evil just like him and beautiful blablabla, and then Satan takes a look (using DemonicPowers™) at Adam's face and is very pleased.

Then Crowley comes back at his club and has another panic attack.

Aziraphale visits him again, and again asks what's wrong.

Crowley explains that he met with Satan again, and sarcastically says that he told the truth.

Aziraphale takes his sarcasm seriously and (I think) he was happy that Crowley at least was honest.

Crowley then simply says (and I quote directly) "you are so.... stupid.... you don't deserve to live. I didn't tell him anything. If I had, do you think I'd be here right now?" which is just... damn

azira gets sad and then Crowley basically says that he knows what Adam looks like and azira suggest that they should go to one more town. just one more.

Crowley gets ughhhh fine and they go to Tadville.

Then we get a scene of Adam taking Anathema to his hidden place and showing her his miniature replica of tadville. he says some creepy things about how that in mini tadville everyone does what he says, it's all his.

In the next day, Crowley and Aziraphale go to Tadville. they start looking for a room, but some lady heard Crowley calling Aziraphale "angel" and goes homophobic mode.

Everyone doesn't want to rent a room to them, except Madame Tracy.

Then Adam arrives with the groceries and Crowley immediately recognizes him. Him and Azira take a stroll on the beach, and Crowley says that he's very grateful for Aziraphale.

Aziraphale says he isn't going back to London and Crowley simply says "well, we found him, i don't need you anymore" and Azira reminds him of their agreement of making Adam good.

They invite Adam to go with them for a day in London, and Madame Tracy authorizes much to Adam's content.

They go to London, and in the museum, Azira shows Adam the beauty of humanity and all.

When Adam goes to the car, Crowley tells him that humanity is being above everyone, not caring for anyone (basically, that evil talk etc)

When they get back, Anathema discovers through looking into a crystal ball and seeing Adam's face that he is the antichrist.

Then, Adam goes to talk with her.

Anathema tries to stab him, but she psychologically can't. And she tells him he's the one who is going to end the world.

Adam gets scared for his life and runs away to his hidden place.

Satan transformed his place into a magical scenario full of games and fun and talks with him.

He basically convinces him to enter his side and Adam (who is very fragile because anathema just tried to kill him) agrees.

Basically, the town turns into a huge theater with everyone acting like puppets.

Satan thanks Crowley for raising Adam, and grant his wish of letting him go to Alpha centuri.

As Crowley is waiting for the next comet, Aziraphale goes to him and tries to convince him to help humanity and heaven.

Crowley basically says "hell nah im not helping you"

Aziraphale says "but we are friends."

And Crowley simply replies "Were." :)

Theeen, Aziraphale challenges him to one more checkers game.

They play, and Aziraphale finally wins. But only after cheating.

They find Anathema and she gives them the knife.

Aziraphale enters in full angel form (white clothing and all) and goes to talk with Adam.

Aziraphale basically does "reflect about it" talk to Adam, and Adam seems to not care.

Crowley then goes to Satan and says "I'm not going anymore" and Satan turns him into a snake.

Aziraphale interrupts and points the knife at him. Satan simply desintegrates the knife and hurts aziraphale.

Adam after seeing Madame Tracy's puppet form and reflecting about what Aziraphale said he decides to take a step back and fix things.

He goes to Satan, heals Aziraphale and transforms Crowley back and basically says "I'm not going." and turns everything back to normal

Satan is like ??? and Crowley simply says "wait you didn't rebel to your father too?"

Satan laughs and disappears.

everything ends well

theeee end :3

well, it's not the worst thing in existence but certainly not the best.

good omens but the aziracrow is the most toxic yaoi ever.

[shuobox]

Heyyyyy *twirls my hair as i make your happy canon life doomed by my narrative *

God. Rewrite aiden in my au. Where do i start w him

In my little rewrite version, he's like. His entire life is doomed from the start. Grew up with a neglectful and pushy family where he felt constantly scared and weak in, making him seek control in other parts of his life (why he's so aggressive and rude, later becoming outright violent)

During sky city, it's Lukas who's fighting against him on the bridge, and after a struggle and Aiden's whole shpeel about Lukas abandoning them (aiden, maya, gill) like nothing for the new order of the stone

Anyway . Copper golems (that belong to the founder) appear and latch onto the guy's legs, and yk the storm during that bridge scene? Yeah. The dude gets struck by lightning with the force of five dying neuron stars and then just... wobbles back and forth.... before the copper golems let go, and he falls off the side into the water

While the blazerods are stuck in Sky City as it is being rebuilt on the ground they find an opportunity to break out and they book it to the portal, get lost for a little bit in the Atlas (remade portal hallway. Imagine those images of like, illusion staircases where gravity is weird. And theres stairs and halls full of portals wherever you look. Like that.) And they pass into like the worst possible place ever that is just CRAWLING with illagers

They get trapped, thrown in jail, tortured a wee bit before maya and gill are taken dor experimentation and Aiden was supposed to be the next (his arms were already cut off, and he saw what became of maya and gill after they got experimented on) but two new arrivals were found so they decided to stop temporarily

I AM NNNOT going to continue the story from there . Because it includes another character and an oc i want to like. Build up towards

In any case, skipping ahead like a few pages when aiden manages to get out and is now travelling with 2 people (one of which is more than happy to use him as bait or a human shield), guy really just wants his arms back and feels stupid and scared without. Arms. Hes losing hope UNTIL they get to a certain dimension with a city full of these advanced redstone-loving folk

In aiden's endless luck they get into the equivalent of the black market and they find people willing to give aiden new limbs for free IF he agrees to the terms and conditions

... the terms and conditions were "we can freely experiment on ur ass for as long as we want :3" and thats. Yeah thats what the tinkerers did. They were super proud of themselves and even slapped on their logo on him

Aiden is completely useless at walking and using his mech spider legs for a long while till he eventually manages to grasp it enough to keep going. Hallelujah !! He eventually gets time to process everything that happens to him lol (he feels miserable for a while)

Other hcs down here vv

- enjoy embroidery. He's kind of shabby at it, but it takes his mind off of things. He also writes small anthology stories in a wee stolen journal he makes up when his mind drifts

- The jacket he's wearing is stolen, lmao

- when his jaw was ripped out and replaced, so was his teeth; they make a loud clank noise if he snaps his teeth. Like a beartrap!! Also a strong bite strength

- i like to think he made a small makeshift funeral for maya and gill despite having nothing of them. It helped him cope a lil

- is surprisingly kinder to kids who aren't like, loud, or overly annoying.

- misses having hands sometimes (misses being able to hold pencils normally, or feeling the fur of animals, or warmth and cold, or holding things, etc etc...)

- Loves fighting without a weapon in stupid amounts. He'll scrap w a skeleton for fun, and it's even easier with his edward scissorhands ass implants. The reason his jacket has that fire charge burn is because he got distracted with "playing" w a ghast

- in a similar fashion, likes play-fighting (i say play-fighting, but i mean like, full-on blood and bruises but without ill intent when i say fighting)

His fav mobs are creepers. Has attempted to get close to one before. In addition, really likes the nether as well.

- Given he can't yell as much anymore (though he will still be the loudest man on earth if something scares him) (think incyn from neocranium streams), he's overly condescening and sarcastic instead.

- His right pupil is all janked up because his face got slashed; the reason why was because he was trying to fight off the illagers that were taking Maya + Gill. Still believes he could've tried harder.

- occasionally loses sleep either because of adrenaline, stress, nightmares, or just because of his already abysmal sleep schedule.

^ not a morning person.

- is, in fact, still super competitive and will brag about any victory ever. Still learning not be a sore loser (its a work in progress, but its there)

- has dark humour in the sense he'll try and joke about things in the worst moments, also a bit grim or rude in the same way. He'll laugh about stupid shit in general, though.

^ when he laughs loud enough and for too long, steam will also come out his jaw vents/mouth (not to the same amount if he was to scream and overload his throat implant, its lighter and not as obtrusive)

- has a really good knack for stealing things and negotiating with traders. He likes doing it, too. He feels awfully proud of himself when he manages to pull it off.

- His little antenna thing at the side of his head emotes (whirrs up and down or twists slightly from side to side. Think warrior cat fanart or something.)

- can come off as rude (and he is, dont get me wrong), but sometimes it is just genuinely being blunt or like, brutally honest with his thoughts. He doesn't even do it intentionally, it just becomes a reflex lmfao

- Will ramble on about the history and art and process regarding architecture if he can. He'll get embarrassed about going off on a tangent for so long and will shut up but like a couple months later he will absolutely start up again

- likes using his mech spider legs to skewer zombies. Morbid stress relief, but it's still mildly satisfying to him.

- has a really bad fear of storms after the whole sky city thing; it makes him have what is essentially flashbacks to everything to the bridge fight and after it (aka, deaths of his previously closest friends). Feels similarly to copper golems and will like, discreetly knock them over or push them away using his mech-spider legs

- wont admit it for the life of him but actually really enjoys feeding birds. Wont say it because he feels like thats something people over the age of 60 do when they're having a late-life crisis.

- easy to annoy thanks to his temper

(Next design will be of a certain .,.. pumpkin-related lady ....)

[melmedarda]

@meljaymicrofics ⸻ cherries ⸻ wc: 913 ⸻ rated G

Mel's lips taste like cherries. Her mouth is dark red wine, of the finest variety. Like the bottles his parents only broke out for their anniversaries. The finest thing he’s ever tasted, her lips have the power of an addiction. It’s a mistake. They are buzzed, and she’ll regret this in the morning. (He won’t, he’ll never pull away first, will take whatever scraps she’ll give him because he’s desperate and hungry and hopeless gone for her.) On his back is how he carries her, echoing the habits of shared university days. and she relaxes against his back, the ghost of her lips tattooed on his spine. On his mind. She’s wearing the ring he gave her. Wearing his hoodie too, and it hangs off her. Far too large to be fashionable. Too endearing not to stir feelings he tries hard to ignore. Whispers of mine mine mine. It’s his idea, his fucking stupid idea because this is a dream that haunts him, this dream in which she is his. Dreams aren't to be messed with. The entire thing is a joke, of course; she’s lounging against his side at some random eatery they’ve been frequenting.

Outside the windows, the sun lowers over Piltover, and Mel sips her beer, murmuring around hoe she's like something sweet. He’s a joke because it is him who belongs whole-heartedly to her, and he’s got this stupid grin on his face as he extricates himself from her warmth and lowers himself onto one knee at her side.

"Jayce, what are you doing?" the look on her face is incredulous, but her eyes betray curiosity and fond amusement. "Come back, I was comfortable."

They are drunk, too warm on this summer night. He'll use this this fact in order to deny everything later. And by then maybe it will be true, that he's too tired, too drunk that he's lost his mind. Maybe then he'll be able to laugh about it like the joke he means it to be. But right now, Jayce is looking up at Mel. He feels an errant smile creeping along his lips.

Their friendship is a binding cord. A force intangible that upends and encroaches upon reality. Wider and wider is goes. Tighter and tighter it binds until his heart fails beneath it.

"Play along, M," he whispers, making a show of dropping his hand to his pocket. "They give free deserts to those who are celebrating something, anniversaries, proposals, and the like."

Her eyes narrow, lips twitching conspiratorially. "And you know this how? Been proposing to many girls here?" His heart clenches the words nearly tumble from his lips. He grasps for them, reins them back and stuffs them down down down.

"Never. I saw a couple here during Valentine's. Heard the waiter announce it was on the house." The ring he pulls out is one that fits her slender finger perfectly. He knows because he has measured it, though not intending to use it for this purpose.

"You've come here without me?" Mel asks, a small frown furrowing her brow (a frown which he wants nothing more than to kiss away). And he understands why. It was their place. But sometimes, their friendship is too dangerous for him, their little push and pull. Especially when he is the only one to see it in that light.

Within him, his fragile heart and mind rebel. Mel is your friend, your dearest one. You will ruin this by your feelings, and we cannot live without her. Your love is not enough to keep her.

"Might I remind you, Mel, that you were still dating Salo then." Jayce her best friend and he hates her boyfriends. He hates that she cannot find happiness in him alone. But Salo is gone now, and Jayce still remains. "Back to the topic. Free desert." He clears his throat then, raising his voice a bit as to get the attention of those around them.

"Mel, would you do me the honor of marrying me?" He hides none of it now. The love he will not speak off, the tenderness far beyond friendship that he feels towards her. Lets his hope peek through.

There's a strange look in her eye, one he's never seen before as she watches him. For a moment, he feels like running away, disappearing, certain she can tell see the depths of his emotions (she's always been rather good at reading him).

But her smile widens until Jayce feels like he is staring at the sun as she nods, reaching for his hands. In that moment, he is jubilant. He takes Mel's hands in his. Relishes their softness as he slips the ring onto her finger. Tries not to think about it too much as their fellow diners clap and cheer.

And then, the bittersweet sets in. She accepts but it is not real. It is a joke. One of which he is the pea-brained punchline for putting himself in such a situation. Mel is still smiling as Jayce gets to his feet, but there is a lump in Jayce's throat that will not go away.

From the corner of his eye, two of the hospitality team members move forward, a large smile on their faces and something sweet in their hands. Something with cherries on top.

[disabledstraydogs]

heyyyy…

Can I get Ango ask game answers… he’s my silly rn and I wanna see what other people say!!! (And maybe I want some inspiration for fics)

🌻☔️ 💤

Hmm, I don't know a lot about Ango ngl, but my base headcanons are: Hard of hearing, has vision problems, chronic migraines and pain, sensory processing disorder (possible undiagnosed autism) and he's possibly a cane user. But I don't have any concrete headcanons.

Edit: For a man with 'no concrete headcanons' I wrote a LOT lmao

🌻 - Do they do anything that helps manage their disability? (Ie medication, hot and/or cold patches, set sleeping times, ect)

I think he relies heavily on pain medication to keep the pain in check. Baths are also big for him with pain so uses those bath salts and soaks in baths to help with muscle aches and pains.

With vision he obviously has glasses, he can read Tenji (Japanese Braille). Although he does have some vision, he struggles to read small text, often using his phone and/or computers text to speech function.

With hearing he uses a hearing aid and Oda has learned JSL to help communicate with him, Dazai has as well (he's teaching other members of the PM and later the ADA how to use it as well.

Stim toys are something he also uses but due to pain he finds certian stim toys (such as tangles and fidget cubes) hard to use. Because of this he uses things like scraps of fabric, weighted crochet balls, and smooth stones to hold.

☔️ - What does a 'bad day' look like for them? How do they cope?

Bad pain day can mean that Ango can't leave the bed, all his muscles ache and he has really bad brain fog because of these symptoms. Someone (usually Oda) has to carry him to the bath and help him bathe (he does not miss a daily bath. Ever.)

Bad hearing and sight days mean that he needs more assistance than usual, he hates this because he feels weak, but usually those around him can pick up on the bad days.

Bad sensory day with Ango don't happen frequently. Usually he's understimulated, so it takes a Lot to get him to sensory overload. However when he does, he has a shut down and sometimes it gets so bad that he can't move from what Oda calls his 'nest' (which is basically a cocoon of clean blankets he wraps around himself) because the idea of touching any other material or surface makes him physically ill.

💤 - How would/will they cope with their disability worsening?

Hm this is an interesting question.

I do think that the condition causing Ango's vision problems probably will get worse until he is blind, and that does scare him. Personally we don't deal with this but I imagine it is a very scary and ever present thought for him. Although Oda does try his best and is a good listener, sometimes he can't relate to Ango's struggles and may say the wrong things.

With hearing, again I'm unsure what condition he has that impacts this so I'm unsure what getting worse would mean for him. If he looses his hearing entirely it would again be a very scary and ever present thought and I feel like it would make him sad.

Pain worsening? More pain medication, but probably reduced mobility. I think Ango is an independent man and struggles with the idea of needing to rely on someone to look after him.

For these I don't think he copes well. He keeps his worries inside and they only come out on his bad days, usually messily. He sobs, clinging onto whoever is close to him and then pushes them away one the post break down clarity kicks in.

Obviously people try and get close to him (especially Dazai and Oda) but Dazai is 15 and has no filter so has upset Ango with some of his comments (Oda has lectured him and he's apologised). But regardless Ango pushes them away because he doesn't want to be a burden.

Ask game link