#Telomere to Telomere

[processes]

[tonguetyd]

I know I know “all of Sleep Token’s love songs are actually about toxic and unyielding relationships and the damage of yearning and should not be the goal” yes I KNOW

But try telling me “and no matter the cost of rain, I will shelter you all the same” on its own is not a beautiful line

I *KNOW* the context yes! But “darling I’m noticing your flaws, they’re exactly what I want.”

I am AWARE of the underlying themes but “you guide me in to safety and silence” and of course my beloved “let the tides carry you back to me”

Those brief moments of love in a single lyric amidst all the bullshit. That’s what keeps me up at night

[fungilicious]

Riptides by @platoapproved and @marbleflan

Chapter Twelve: Seattle, 2000

“—it was like I could feel the water meant me no harm. I stripped naked and just…let it cradle me. I could hear the voices of the people on the ships, so far away. When I went under the water and saw the light coming down, it was like…like discovering a whole different world.”

[switchbladesugar]

headphones aren’t enough i need iv sleep token to play the telomeres guitar solo while standing on my fucking neck

[lowkeyrobin]

Hii! I’m requesting a five hargreeves x reader? like even in every place, every timeline they always doesn’t end up together because they can’t for some reason?? maybe something angsty (i love angst omggogn). Thank you! 🫶

oooo okay okay! I can definitely try for you! :)) ; I'm not the best with angst but I'll give it a shot lol ; thanks for requesting, hope you enjoy! ; also this was super fun to write, and this song is so awfully tua core I cannot. ; also this is formatted in different timelines for each break, the origin is always the same though the events in each timeline are all kinda different to a point but still surround the shows umbrella academy just to clear up any confusion

FIVE HARGREEVES ; again and again

summary ; in every timeline, you and five don't make it to the finish line. it's not meant to be.

warnings ; language, talk of death/murder, child abuse, gun violence

track ; again and again, the bird and the bee

word count ; 1.3k

masterlist

Every single timeline led to your untimely demise. You could never just have a happy ending. Whether it be a death, betrayal, the never-ending apocolypse getting in your way, you and Five just couldn't have a moment in peace to just be happy and live.

Somehow, in every timeline, you'd wind up together, no questions asked, not romantically, at least. Events and trigger points always kept you light years apart.

Since the ripe age of thirteen, he'd been fighting to get his way home. He spent damn near fifty years trapped in an apocalyptic world, searching for any answers, or just an escape. He cried by his siblings' dead bodies for years, watching as they rotted into the dead Earth. He trained himself into the deadliest assassin on the planet, his DNA being mixed with those of serial killers to enhance himself, which was not run by him first.

You spent most of your life trapped in a facility, being trained as a child soldier, working your way into a government weapon. You never knew anything until Five rescued you. You could barely interact with people like a normal person. All you knew was harm, violence, people looking at you, expecting something out of you. It took you forever to realize that Five and his siblings weren't like everyone you'd ever known inside a lab, they were family.

You were both science experiments until you'd found your ways out.

But just because you flee one bad decision doesn't mean you escaped them all.

"Y/n!" Five shouts, lunging toward you, trying to protect you from The Handler's automatic weapon.

Though, no one could survive five shots to the face and chest.

You fall on your face, an arm reaching out toward him before he also falls alongside his siblings. He lays next to you, the powerful strikes having both knocked you back. He struggles to breathe, gasping for any last bit of life to keep him long enough, calling for anything he had left inside to save himself.

"I'm glad you're still alive," she smiles deviously, glancing over the bloody mess she'd caused, standing over him, pressing the weapon to his forehead. "You got to see how this all played out,"

He slowly turns his head, looking at your lifeless expression, eyes half opened, staring at him as blood trails from your lips. The Handler chuckles, amused by his infatuation with you. God, he'd ruin any timeline for you.

"It'll be okay, Five. I can keep the world spinning just fine without you."

Bang!

"Five!?" you scream frantically, barely able to keep yourself afloat in the deep oceanic water. It was fucking freezing and it burned your eyes to the point you'd rather rip them out yourself.

You gasp, choking up some saltwater before wading up to the shore, slightly unaware of the previous events. One moment you and Five were fighting some mysterious, comical super-villain with powers and the next moment you were halfway drowning in the deep water down the cliff. How you hadn't died was beyond you.

You sit on the sandy shore, laying on your back, eyes closed to protect yourself from the burning sun above. Anything to just feel warm again.

You spread your jacket over a rock, waiting for it to slowly dry in the sun. You rest your boots next to it, resting your feet up on the rock while you lay the rest of yourself on the sand.

With your mind so foggy and your eyesight so dizzy, you end up falling asleep on the sandy shore without the presence of Five. Jesus Christ, you'd completely forgotten about the dinner you set up that evening. Screw any plans to try and confess to him, then.

When you wake up at the break of dawn the next morning, you realize that Five is no longer by your side, nor was he in the first place when you saved yourself from the water. You scramble into the sea, looking for him like maybe he was able to survive underwater for twelve hours.

After frantic searching with no leads, you fall to your knees, soaking yourself once more.

You spent the next three decades waiting for him on that shore. You visited every day you could, waiting for him for hours when you had nothing better to do, waiting for the tides to bring him back to you.

You didn't know why you kept your hopes up all those years, believing he'd appear from the sea like he'd been protected by magical creatures beneath the deep blue. You just couldn't accept that the water had become his tomb and you couldn't help it.

The haunting sounds of waves crashing on land and the sound of seagulls fill your ears in your sleep while you dream up nightmares of finding his skeleton on the beach, accompanied by his tattered uniform.

Your arms were open as you await his return, whenever, wherever, it would be.

"This finally the end of the apocalypses?" you ask, a drink resting in your hand as you sit beside Five at the bar.

He shrugs. "Guess so. We can't fix it, there's no hope" he sighs, taking a shot. "I love you, Y/n,"

"Love you too, dude" you reply casually, taking a shot after him. You glance back at Sloane and Luther, watching them live up their last night together. "Wanna go spend whatever time we have left together?"

"I don't dance," he chuckles.

"Oh, come on," you roll your eyes, "We're gonna die for good, enjoy life while you can." you hold out a hand for him, waiting for him to take it as you flash puppy dog eyes at him.

He sighs, setting his glass down, taking your hand. He allows you to drag him onto the dance floor, joining the couples and Viktor, Ben, and Klaus as Kehlani's Vegas plays over the stereo. You both drunkenly dance together, enjoying the solemn, mutual love between you two one last time.

Unrequited love, my favorite trope.

You dance the night away until you fade into the fabric of the universe, joining the other Hargreeves as you're mushed into dust, creating mere stars in the sky, surrounded by billions of others.

You'd see each other again someday.

You squeeze Five's hand tightly, keeping your eyes glued on him as the glowing durango-marigold soup ooze surrounds your ankles. The family shares defeated looks, enjoying their last moments together.

Five stares at you with tears in his eyes, his cheeks slightly red. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. I couldn't protect you in any universe."

You raise an eyebrow, wondering what he was talking about. Maybe more about that diner he found in that subway he kept blinking to.

"The diner. Every timeline ends with an apocalypse because of us, because of the marigold," he shakes his head. "And in every one, I couldn't save you,"

You search his eyes, looking for dishonesty, which you couldn't find. "...There had to be a timeline where I couldn't save you, Five. You tried. I tried. We tried."

He looks down at the rising ooze, watching and feeling as it eats his waist. He's silent, defeated in himself, knowing he couldn't do anything right. He couldn't save his family, he couldn't save his love, he couldn't even confess to them. He was dying, knowing that he failed. He failed everyone he ever gave a fuck about.

He squeezes your hand, feeling his neck start to be consumed, looking up at the ceiling with the others. Some of the roof had been torn away, exposing the night sky.

He softly smiles, glancing over at you. "There's Sagittarius,"

You smile, recognizing the pattern of stars above.

"See you guys in the next timeline?" Allison sniffles.

You nod. "See you in a minute,"

"Where are we meeting, again? It's not gonna be this shithole" Viktor chuckles.

"How about somewhere peaceful? Anywhere" Five replies.

"Tropical," Klaus suggests with a soft smile. "Tropical sounds nice,"

"Tropical it is, then."

[melit0n]

"Let the tides carry you back to me." has always been among one of my favourite lines in Telomeres, and so, having listened to it again recently, a little idea popped into my head. Let me explain:

While ocean tides/currents is a very common metaphor, there's an underlying meaning to it. The ocean is a beautiful, but somewhat cruel place: tides can leave you stranded on a sandbank, or sweap you away before you even know it.

To put it in short, no object or creature that goes into the ocean comes out the same. For the tides to carry something back to you, something you've lost, it will be and always will be changed: eroded.

The cliffside will fall, the cave will crumble, etc etc.

With this in mind, we're yet again greeted with another example of Vessel asking for something he can't truly have. The person he wants will not be the same as they were before; they "collapse" into him, breaking apart, but still, to him, it's "the start of something."

His memory is warped, they are warped, and it'll stay that way.

However, what I would like to add is that, in DYWTYLM, it's theorised that instead of Vessel speaking to a second person, he's instead talking to himself.

Of course, this makes the song itself much more emotional (to me). Finding love for yourself is one of the hardest things you can do, but it has to be done to find love in others.

With that idea (stay with me here), the lyrics "Do you roll with the waves? Or do you duck into deep blue safety?" match up (generally) with Telomeres, which is mostly interpretated as being towards someone else.

So, what if some lines in Telemores are directed to himself as well?

Keep in mind, the tides don't just erode and carry objects (sediment), they also reflect. The Atlantic is one big mirror, and Vessel is staring into it's "deep blue safety" wondering what, or, rather, who, he was before he was Vessel.

Overall, the album name, "This Place Will Become Your Tomb", either being directed at Vessel or Vessel to Sleep (and being a Halo quote lmao), is more metaphorical than literal.

Who he was before Vessel sits in that coffin, not his physical body.

[regexkind]

Instead of age in bio I update it every minute with the length of a randomly-selected telomere. If you care so much, stick around and do the math

[sleepanonymous]

Shout out to the underappreciated Sleep Token songs Are You Really Okay?, Telomeres, and Drag Me Under 🖤

[reasonsforhope]

"Similar to the expeditions of a hundred or two hundred years ago, the Tara Pacific expedition lasted over two years. Its goal was to research the conditions for life and survival of corals. The ship crossed the entire Pacific Ocean, assembling the largest genetic inventory conducted in any marine system to date. The team's 70 scientists from eight countries took around 58,000 samples from the hundred coral reefs studied.

The first results of the analysis have now been published in Nature Communications. This largest-ever data set collection on coral reef ecosystems is freely available, and for years to come, will be the basis for elucidating the living conditions for corals and finding a way for them to survive climate change.

Important first results of the expedition show that global microbial biodiversity is much higher than previously thought. The impacts of the environment on evolutionary adaptation are species-specific, and important genes in corals are duplicated.

Global biodiversity ten times higher than assumed

Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse marine ecosystem on Earth. Although they cover only 0.16% of the world's oceans, they are home to about 35% of known marine species. Using a genetic marker-based data set, the researchers found that all of the globally estimated bacterial biodiversity is already contained in the microorganisms of coral reefs.

"We have been completely underestimating the global microbial biodiversity," says Christian Voolstra, professor of genetics of adaptation in aquatic systems at the University of Konstanz and scientific coordinator of the Tara Pacific expedition. He says the current estimate of biodiversity (approximately five million bacteria) is underestimated by about a factor of 10.

Impacts of the environment on evolutionary adaptation are species-specific

The 32 archipelagos studied serve as natural laboratories and provide a wide range of environmental conditions, allowing scientists to disentangle the relationships between environmental and genetic parameters across large spatial scales. This led to another important finding: The effects the environment has on evolutionary adaptation trajectories of corals are species-specific. To determine this, the researchers examined the telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that are the carriers of genetic information, for the first time.

In humans, the length of telomeres decreases during life; that is, with an increasing number of cell divisions, suggesting that biological age is closely linked to the length of telomeres. Researchers on the Tara Pacific expedition have now found that the telomeres in very stress-resistant corals are always the same length. "They apparently have a mechanism to preserve the lengths of their telomeres," Voolstra concludes...

Important genes are duplicated

Research data from the Tara Pacific expedition brought to light that the long life of some coral species may have yet another reason: the duplication of certain genes. Many important genes are present multiple times in the genome. The researchers were able to determine this through sequencing of coral genomes employing a new high-resolution technique.

This technique, called long-read sequencing, makes it possible to not only determine the set of genes present, but also to look at their order in the genome. According to Voolstra, the pervasive presence of gene duplication could be a possible explanation for why corals can live for thousands of years despite being exposed, for instance, to extreme UV radiation in shallow waters.

The entire data collection is freely accessible

All data sets are openly accessible and fully described with accompanying physical and chemical measurements to provide them as a scientific resource to all researchers.

"This is unique," Voolstra says. "It is the largest data set collection on coral reefs ever collected and it is completely open access." The aspiration is that this data collection will serve as a foundation and inventory to guide future study of coral reefs worldwide for many years."

-via Phys.org, June 26, 2023

[inv3ga]

Thank you, @tempered-grace ! ^_^

[bootleg-nessie]

Fuck you *shortens your telomeres*

[tonguetyd]

If your wings won’t find you heaven, I will bring it down like an ancient bygone

I’ve always liked this line, but hearing it live made it click in a way it hadn’t before

Feels scheduled ahead

When Ves sang this line in Radio City I had the image pop in my head of the scene from It’s A Wonderful Life. “What do you want Mary, you want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and bring it down for you. Say that’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon.”

So another way to look at this line. “If you can’t find your heaven, despite the wings you have, despite the divinity you have been granted, if you just cannot find joy? That’s ok. I’ll bring it down for you. I’ll fight like hell for you. I’ll give you that joy, I’ll sauté those horrors, you postpone that funeral RIGHT now, I am going to find the heaven you deserve.”

I wish I could remember who it was (probably @melit0n ‘s Euclid essay tbh but it may have been someone else) but someone wrote a theory that Euclid is the first song written thru not the character of Vessel’s eyes, but the guy/singer/songwriter/ACTUAL dude on stage Vessel himself. And I thought it was kinda an interesting theory but I think combining that with this idea makes it a little weightier. Because, Vessel the character is very much a part of Vessel the guy by virtue of the fact he embodies the character on stage every night. Just as Vessel the guy is (presumably) in a lot of Vessel the character. They’re the same, he’s not real, hes just some guy, hes acid and alkaline, etc etc.

(Edit I reread my tags, this post from @a-s-levynn is definitely the first time I saw this idea, yes THANK YOU LEV)

So. Point being. If this is Vessel the guy singing to Vessel the character, “despite your wings and all that Sleep has given you, you still cannot find peace. So I will bring it down for you. I will be your mouthpiece, I will write the words and tell your story. And you will find the love you want.”

That’s Ves speaking to himself.

And I think that is incredibly powerful and the most self-romantic thing I have ever heard. I’ll be your my joy and bring you myself heaven and the moon.

.

Recovering from depression and wanting to leave everything behind is a long fucking road. Idk that you ever really stop being on that road. I certainly still feel like I’m on that road even all these years later, but…the biggest thing that keeps you going is for your past self. At least for me anyway. I fight for the little girl that lives in me who thinks she will never be loved and needs to be perfect and ruins everything and is constantly reminded of how unforgiving the world is.

Baby girl, if you can’t find yourself heaven, I will bring it down for you. I’ve got you. I am hugging you so tight and telling you everything will be okay, my love. Look at us now. We’re still here. And we’re just fine. We are doing great. We’re alright and loved. And I will keep fighting like hell for you and to keep you safe and happy.

And so I think this is similar to what Ves is saying to himself. And it makes it that much more of a hopeful song. “Yes, I must be someone new, but moreso…I will keep living.

I will fight, for you.”

The next time you sing that line. Sing it to your younger self. Or to the parts of you that you feel are most difficult to love. Promise to fight for them. Bring down heaven.

And try not to cry

And if YOUR wings won’t find you heaven? I got you, too. ❤️

[lifemod17]

hey guys, did you know that we go beyond the farthest reaches? like over there where the light bends and wraps beneath us?? because i know as you collapse into me, that this is in fact, the start of something. if you even care.

[kaddyssammlung]

Sydney, April 12th 2024

[tempered-grace]

what did those guys put in Telomeres because holy shit

[melit0n]

Outside of being a very intimate and, in some ways, soft song, one of the things that always gets me about Telomeres is the lyric "You guide me into safety and silence."

Firstly, while on the surface level (and just in general interpretation) it's very simple; Vessel feels safe with this person. However, with the knowledge of Sleep's tendancies, the line between 'safety' and 'danger' blurs a bit.

Secondly, in the chorus of Higher, one of the main juxtaposing lyrics is "And you need the melody, I only need the silence." So, Sleep, in all their want of constant noise and song, gives in to make Vessel feel comfortable. That's why Telomeres feels soft.

Along with this, we're also brought the question of: what is the significance of silence? Or at least a semblance of it?

Firstly, the most obvious example of silence is found in sleep, not the deity, just the action, itself. Most people (asides from sleep talkers and walkers like me lol) are dead silent when they sleep. Plus, obviously, the night is much more quiet than the day. In a place where "there was no street lights: just pitch black and passing headlights", the only noises you'll truly be hearing is the wind in the trees, the night time bugs and the odd owl.

Further, the Feilds of Elation are described to be "quiet and loamy" (which, fund fact! I always used to mishear as "could endow me"), which we could inferr means silence = joy. In The Offering, the second person is "silence on sacred shores", again, showing a link between silence and something positive.

Also, in Atlantic, we have "just orbiting the vaccum I am". Vaccum comes from the Latin word 'vacuus', which means void, vacant, idle etc. While this is most definitely in reference to how Vessel feels empty and drained, I think it's worth the mention that inside the biggest vaccum we know (space) is is completely and utterly silent.

Plus, Fall For Me, arguably the most heart wrenching song on that album, is dead quiet asides from Vessel's vocals.

I find it quite ironic, almost tragically so, that the man who yearns for peace and quiet is the one who 'speaks' the most.