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thevalleyoftriumph · 1 month

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Helloo o/ I'm the anon from earlier who sent you many many questions about your system chosen Very glad that my ask wasn't overwhelming because I approach with yet more questions >:] get ready Does Dark know Chosen is a system? Or a part of a system? Unsure of the correct way to call it. What does he think of each of them if yes? I can see Dark talking excitedly about a shared interest with Killer, Dark loves Chosen dearly but its. Difficult. To get a bit of emotion out of him. Killer though? Once they feel comfortable around him I can see them allowing themselves to become more expressive/ easily excited "Beast had sorta filed them away as one of the very few ""trustworthy"" sticks" <- quote from the answer you gave to my first ask. I'm guessing Dark was also in this list yes? Beast was co-conscious during AVA3 if i remember correctly and so saw Dark was willing to help and defend. Even if Beast didn't trust them 100% it didn't think of them as a threat right? Maybe even considered him an ally And if yes, Dark was on the Trustworthy list, what about the virabot thing made Beast decide "Hmmm no he's an enemy actually"? I wonder how Killer unmasking around Dark for the first time went, and whether that's how Dark found out his brother is a system Has Killer ever jumped 10ft in the air because they were startled by the toaster? And if yes, how long did it take for Dark to stop laughing Has Beast ever come out mid spar? Realises they're mid combat so rushes out to protect and- And Dark realises he's not fighting who he was before, Chosen doesn't look at him with infinite distrust. Killer doesn't stand both ready for combat and to flee at a moments notice (Beast wouldn't flee, but despite that, I think its always ready to). Dark just backs away slowly I think, lowering his hands and doing everything possible to communicate he's not a threat. This allows Beast a bit of extra time to take in what's around, just incase its missed something in its initial assessment and. And they're both wearing handwraps, Dark's taken their bracelet off and whoever was here before Beast tied their jacket round their waist. Beast doesn't need to protect here, but it does now need to apologise I'm guessing Beast remembers it can speak while fronting from time to time right? Even if it feels Odd. I've got the mental image of Dark cooking something for himself, except Beast ALSO likes it alot alot and Dark just hears "Please." from behind him. Turns around to see Beast staring at him like its trying to beam the thought directly into Darks mind. They understand, and Dark maybe even gets a "Thank You" after the foods made. Idk, I like small things like that, if Dark doesn't know Chosen's a system then its just a small couple What-If's or What-Could-Have-Been's Also, what is a Singlet? I cant remember where you used the word but I am unfamiliar with it Also also, VERY happy that my terminology is correct, that whole ask I was terrified that I was aggressively wrong about something and was going to end up being incredibly rude Also ALSO also, I am giving Beast a mug of hot chocolate and a weighted blanket. It deserves to relax Breaking this up into more than one ask because tumblr is angry with me

WOW. HI!!!! OH MY GOD. HELLO. you are literally the most bestest person ever for being so curious and allowing me to speak so much WOW okay let me break all this down.

putting everything once more under a cut, but a breakdown here is i FIRST go through unrelated things such as helping a bit with your confusion on terms and meanings, before getting into the actual AVA stuff, so if anyone wants to skip that, there Is gonna be a linebreak ^_^ a lot of it is just definition talk so its probably boring if you already know this stuff lol. if youve come just for the headcanon, feel free to skip down to it! <3

FIRST ! since you were a bit confused, i would like to say; DID specifically stands for "Dissociative Identity Disorder." It is probably the most well known of the disorders that would constitute as being a "system" disorder, if you will. In the past it has been referred to by other things such as MPD, or multiple personality disorder, but that is since considered inaccurate and incredibly out of date.

OSDD, or Other Specified Dissociative Disorder, is another dissociative disorder as the name implies. In one specific case, is similar to DID in that a major symptom is the forming of distinctive parts - or alters - but has enough differences that it's been classified as it's own thing [though iirc, some professionals are debating if the distinction is necessary? Honestly I'm not a psychologist so I can't really comment on that part, but I felt it was worth noting that this was brought up once or twice.]

The distinction here is this; DID is usually diagnosed when there are at Least two distinct "parts" to a person, often being two [or more] entirely seperate people, and is paired with amnesia. This is not at all everything to do with the disorder, as it's a massively complex disorder with plenty of symptoms, but it is this specific symptom set in its most basic explanation. OSDD however can vary! OSDD-1 is specifically defined by wikipedia as when one is experiencing a "sub thresh-hold" to DID. There's way more "types" to OSDD, and as such I am not nearly equipped enough to talk about 2-4, but chances are if you're speaking to a system who has it, they will usually have either OSDD-1A, or -1B. These two aren't technically real diagnostic terms, they're moreso used to describe a set of symptoms. 1A is defined as having less disticnt alters than DID or 1B. 1B is specified by a lack of complete blackouts, aka amnesia, though they may instead experience grayouts and emotional amnesia. To be fair in at least my case specifically, grayouts are pretty common rrrregardless? But honestly that might just be a My Own Thing issue and a case of overlapping symptoms than anything else, so don't take my word for it entirely lol I get complete blackouts and grayouts and its soooo miserable helppp [I'm being lighthearted in tone on purpose you're allowed to laugh ^_^ /gen]

Lastly, the term "singlet" is an unofficial term that a lot of systems online use to refer to people who do not have alters. I'm like 99.9% sure it's like, never used in a professional setting, but I'm also Not a psychologist, again, so I have no clue if it's ever used offline. It's not anything negative, just a descriptor term the same way many other descriptor terms are used :]

Okay that's about it for explaining things. If anything else confuses you for any reason please don't be afraid to ask! And if you wanna look into it yourself, all I'll say is use literally anything OTHER than social media for research, there's a crazy amount of misinfo, especially on Tumblr or Tiktok.

Onto the questions and scenarios -- for questions, I will once again copypaste and bold them. For scenarios, I'll probably end up putting in a screenshot [with IDs, don't worry] for clarities sake.

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1: Does Dark know Chosen is a system? Or a part of a system? Unsure of the correct way to call it. What does he think of each of them if yes?

For a very long time, Dark had NO idea Chosen was part of a system. [And either descriptors work, I honestly use both depending on which sounds less clunky at the time lol].

Dark had just assumed Chosen had some odd "quirks" here and there for ages, and didn't really push too hard whenever "Chosen" ended up getting really quiet, or more jumpy. I def agree with your HC that Dark probably doesn't have very many interactions [if any at all] with sticks outside of Chosen, so at most he just assumes this is normal.

Of course eventually, they do end up telling him - it takes a lot of effort on their part to build up the courage to do it and not immediately chicken out, because this is a Pretty Personal Thing after all, but like. Dark takes it so much better than they were expecting? And he's also very open to accomodating the other two with very little issue. Even if it takes time for Killer [and even Beast] to relax enough around him, and even if he does still have some trouble telling who's-who at first, he does try his best. At the end of the day, the three are his family, and he DOES care about them.

While we already know [or can at least infer] what he feels about Chosen, he does have different thoughts about the other two. You're 100% right this part specifically:

Dark and Killer do have quite a bit of overlapping interests, they realize once they get to talking to each other! They honestly bounce off each other scarily well, and are the type of people to start a stupid bit as a joke and just keep adding onto it for like, twenty minutes. For the most part, Dark's perception of Killer is positive! He's also gotten a bit into the habit of being A Bit Obviously Noisy around the house once realizing Killer's issue with being snuck up on or surprised - previously, Dark was unintentionally VERY quiet. He's naturally sorta light on his feet, lacking footsteps most of the time, and ends up startling most people. After both a discussion and accidental event, he starts trying to be more purposefully loud in their home, especially if he's somewhere Killer can't see, or has to be behind them for one reason or another. Nothing anything TOO loud - no slamming doors or footsteps, no yelling, just casual noise. Jewelry that clacks together or just humming a song.

With Beast, he's more cautious. He understands its purpose, and why it's there, and for the most part, Dark doesn't really.... saying he doesn't mind makes it seem like something it's not but honestly I can't find a better way to word it. He doesn't mind its staring or its lack of speaking, and I'm also gonna pull up another part you said because honestly while I initially wanted Beast to be 100% quiet I'm a massive fan of this little scenario and so I'm adopting it into my worldview immediately;

So yeah Dark is like, completely on board with Beast's more odd traits, once it actually is able to relax for once. I'd say Beast is probably the one Dark knows the least just by way of it rarely ever fronting outside of the more dire circumstances. He knows enough from what he can piece together from his own memories of it, plus any resulting messages from Chosen and Killer depending on how much they know about it at that point in time. However, if asked personally and privately, Dark would express a bit of sympathy, maybe worry for Beast. He understands what it's like to be seen as a sort of... villainous person - not to the severity that Beast had been treated, but he can sympathize. And while he leans into it, he knows that it's the last thing Beast - or Chosen and Killer for that matter - would want for themselves. He sometimes wishes he could do more to help it, but often refrains from trying, knowing that any pushing could absolutely do more harm than good at this point, no matter how much he wants to try. It's a tricky situation, and it's a very unsteady trust they have, and he's not willing to rock the boat too hard and end up hurting the three. As I love to say about my favorite antagonist characters; he's a villain, not a monster, he's got standards lol

1.5: Assuming Dark DOESNT know Chosen is/ is apart of a system (still don't know the correct way to call it), how does he react to switches? Or Killer and Beast in general?

Switches, in general, are meant to be pretty covert of a thing. If all goes right, no one should be able to tell, at the very least not right away, that a switch occured. Thus, before Dark learned about everything, a few little things did tip him off as to something being a bit.. off with "Chosen." He'd notice a lot of forgetfulness of things that happened literally yesterday, or sudden preferences doing a complete 180 into something else, or, like you mentioned, complete silence all of a sudden. If it's a big enough and sudden enough change then he would definitely notice how odd it is and just kinda file it away for later, thinking "oh that was really strange, maybe I should ask about that?"

Yeah honestly all of this is pretty accurate to how that'd go down pre-knowing. Like I said Dark definitely hasn't interacted with very many people [if anyone at all] outside of Chosen and thus does think this is probably normal to a degree, but the first few times [more like a couple hundred times] it DOES kinda hurt a bit and cause some confusion before they can work something out for it.

2: ...I'm guessing Dark was also in this list yes? Beast was co-conscious during AVA3 if i remember correctly and so saw Dark was willing to help and defend. Even if Beast didn't trust them 100% it didn't think of them as a threat right? Maybe even considered him an ally

Oh yeah, for a while after it was able to let go of the constantly moving train of thought that consisted exclusively of just "protect" and "danger," it did for a long time consider Dark trustworthy enough to feel safe around and to relax, even if it was just the tiniest amount. It's almost always on guard, but... well, surely it can let Dark watch its back just this once, right? It was a sort of "well, you're not hurting me, and we are fighting the same guy, so......." sort of allyship at first. It probably definitely helped that for a long time between AVA3 and Showdown, Dark and Chosen probably had pretty relaxed lives outside of the whole tormening the internet thing. They probably didn't really do anything that'd warrent the feeling of danger in their free time, so on the days when Beast would be the one jolting awake at night, it'd be able to, slowly, calm down. Plus, with Dark being so open minded about things that help Beast instead of hurt it, and the way the other two seemed fine with him, it did begin to trust him.

2.5: And if yes, Dark was on the Trustworthy list, what about the virabot thing made Beast decide "Hmmm no he's an enemy actually"?

Oh god, the Virabots. Yeah that whole thing was a complete MESS for the three honestly. It was less the presence of the Virabots themselves and moreso the actions that Dark had made them do against Chosen specifically. Until then, Chosen was mostly cautious about them - he knew they could be dangerous, but at that point still believed he could talk Dark out of his plan. Along with this, Dark is kinda the worlds most emotionally constipated guy ever, and has ZERO skills in talking about his plans and feelings without requiring people to do a five page deconstructive essay to decipher what he means about it. To Chosen, the second that first Virabot ended up trying to actively kill him, was when the seed of doubt kinda bloomed. He was worried then, and had the idea that yes, Dark is still a killer, he is destructive, always has been, and is fully capable of hurting him - or worse, if he somehow got the upper hand. Chosen knows this fact very, very well. It was quite literally their first ever interaction.

But he still wanted to believe Dark wouldn't do that.

Until he got quite literally dogpiled, of course. I'd say the second Dark started actively sic'ing Virabots at him was the moment that Chosen pulled back and Beast shoved itself into front going "okay, this is serious, this is not the person we trusted, because our Dark wouldn't hurt us like this." It was vehement denial mixed with a sort of bitter "I told you so" feeling. It saw this coming, it let its guard down, it trusted someone, and now it was being attacked by something it could barely take on as one, nevermind tens, maybe hundreds. It was being attacked by Dark. So it had to fix that mistake and remove the threat at the same time, if that makes sense.

^ Literally 100% you read my mind anon this has totally happened before, especially more in the early years of the two living together. You described this really well actually, and the way you described Beast's stance - ready for combat AND read to flee at a moments notice - is exactly how I picture it;; it's always ready to fight back and lash out, but moreso in that cornered way where it's obvious it also sorta wants to book it after getting enough hits in to where it'll be confident that whatevers after it Isn't Moving Towards It anymore.

I really don't have much to add to that scenario because you are literally so correct I am shaking you by the shoulders [positive tone] this is SO REAL RAAGH. Yeah ^_^

Honest to god yeah that's probably exactly how he ended up knowing. I think like I mentioned earlier, it's kinda a case of a bunch of little things adding up before they eventually tell him any details that help with understanding, but before that Dark definitely has his suspicions and it's totally because of Killer 😭 Unfortunately bro is NOT very subtle if they're not putting their focus into masking /j

It'd probably be something small and inconsequential and silly, really. Something simultaniously dumb as hell but also a massive show of trust, y'know? I'd have to think more on the details but I like to think that as Killer gets more comfortable, and more sure that they don't have to pretend to be Chosen to still be safe, they let go of the masking little by little, with small things - maybe a preference in food or drink here and there, or small comments about interests that they know are much too distinct from anything Chosen ever expressed liking before. It feels more natural the more they do it, before they eventually forget to mask around Dark, because it feels more comfortable to them being themselves.

Oh yeah for sure. 5 minutes at least, paired with that sorta laughy halfhearted apology for laughing, followed by the occasional snort or huff or laugh every few minutes after that whenever Dark thinks about it for the rest of the day. Killer is not mad at the laughing but they are in fact waiting for the day they can do the same towards Dark ☝ every day they hope he trips stupidly [JOKE]

3: Who was fronting during The Box? You mentioned Chosen during Wanted, and I'm assuming its either him or Killer during the beginning of the box. But once they realise they're trapped? When Chosen turns to Victim in the episode? I can see that being Beast. I know shifts aren't always easy to spot but if Beast was going to come in at any time, it was when they realised they were trapped.

You're pretty correct here; for a lot of The Box, it's primarily Chosen, though Beast is definitely doing the metaphorical "hovering ominously in the back" thing thanks to the chase and injury sustained during Wanted. It's not quite reaching the "feeling like their life is in danger" levels at this point, but it's close and Chosen is feeling very dizzy, thanks.

You're also very correct in your assessment that realizing they're trapped is what, primarily, causes Beast to switch in; collectively, they have a VERY bad history with being trapped or imprisoned. Honestly I feel like they're actually pretty claustrophobic - I don't really see anyone mention this too much, but when Chosen got caught by the firewall in AVA2, he LITERALLY gets locked up inside a little box. It's probably cramped and dark and obviously unbreakable. That 100% left an impact on him - and in this HC, his system as a whole never really escaped that being a triggering thing.

To Beast, it feels very obviously trapped - cornered and contained much like it had been when it first formed. To it, this isn't a fight to JUST protect, but a fight to save their life. It feels genuinely like that, even if it wont die here, it'll just be imprisoned all over again, chained down and used for anothers gain. And it wants anything BUT that. It will fight tooth and nail - quite literally, might I add - to get out of there, because it believes that the second it gives up it is over for them. It has no idea what Victim wants from it -- and so it defaults to that Victim wants to fully and entirely kill them.

4: Speaking again of the box, when they realise that they are NOT beating Victim, does someone elbow Beast out of the way? To try and escape? Because fighting has proven entirely futile? Or is someone co-conning (I assume that means co-conscious) with it and convincing it to pull away, since in the original post, Vic was talking to Beast while 'Chosen' was tied up on the chair

[You're right, co-conning is short for co-conscious ^^]

Honestly probably yes? For a good while it's still fighting back, or at the very least sticking around to take the brunt of whatever Victim is throwing at them - being a protector doesn't only mean physically, it also means mentally. Sometimes things may not hurt someone on the outside, but could wreck them on the inside, and they need someone more equipped with dealing with these things - or, more crudely, Used To dealing with these things - to take over.

When it becomes apparent that Beast cant fight its way out of this, someone - though I haven't really settled on who - definitely tries to front to try other methods of escape. Maybe it's Chosen, maybe it's Killer, honestly realistically they wouldn't even be able to tell either under all that stress. There's definitely someone giving passive-influence to try and escape though. Beast is determined to intimidate Victim, and to keep the others from having to experience anything rough, but... it's a bit hard to stick around when everything in your body - externally, and internally - is screaming for you to get the hell out of there, in one way or another. In short it's having an awful time and unfortunately the others are there for the ride /j

5: Beast comes out when they're trapped or in a fight for their life, but does it (and the others) have any positive triggers that will draw them out? I've heard of music being used, or toys, maybe also food? Idk, but if you have something in mind for these three I'm curious what it is

Oh yeah positive triggers can definitely happen with systems! At the end of the day they do still trigger out an alter so it can still be pretty disorienting at first, so I will say it's mostly [at least and my and my friends cases irl] only used either when we are completely okay with it [both system-wise and alter-wise] or when whoever's in front is having a rough time and kinda needs a break, but doesn't exactly want to stress anyone else out via a negative trigger, if that makes sense.

However comma ! That does not mean I can't give positive triggers to my little guys here. Because I do think they deserve good things.

You're right in that things like music, toys, and even food are really common ones, at least in my experience and from what I've seen. Sometimes it can also be certain people! It really varies quite a bit, so when developing a headcanon that relates to that, there's quite a bit of wiggle room lol

I think it'd be slightly different for these three depending on who it is;

Chosen would probably have some related to music, and maybe a more niche one related to welding. Music because I feel like he's the type of guy to get comfort from listening to songs he loves on loop, and welding because he probably heard the sound a lot while Dark was working in his little workshop, either on the Virabots or on other such projects. [Sidenote, welding as a sound is something I'm actually pretty fond of myself, but if anyone's not a big fan of the sound of sparking, or repetative "buzzing", you probably won't like it if you look it up lol. It's not too loud on video, but I can see how it'd get annoying or give someone a headache.]

Killer is definitely the more food oriented one in all honesty. Maybe even specific books it's read? Certain meals that it enjoys are primarily it though - maybe things that it's made with Dark that it has a positive association with? Or things that it's tried once or twice, REALLY loved, and ended up always snagging front when they eat it because of that association. That kinda thing lol.

Beast is... kinda tricky to think of actual positives for? Not because it doesn't enjoy anything - honestly I think it's the type to enjoy slow and relaxing activities that it doesn't need to put a lot of thought into. Moreso because it's hard to pin down anything that would actively trigger it out just to experience. I am open to suggestions here! But for now I'll probably have to leave it at just, if it has any, it hasn't found out what they are yet </3

6: Can they feel the emotions of the other alters? I'm guessing they can feel the emotions of whoevers fronting, because physical sensations, but if someone was fronting and the other two were hovering over their shoulder so to speak, would they be able to tell how they feel?

Unrelated to this question but I had no idea emotions were a physical sensation that people felt until like, a few months ago, like it was just baffling to me it's kinda funny now that I think abotu it.

ANYWAYS; honestly I'd say yes, to some degree! Passive influence is pretty common in a few systems - you'll probably hear it talked about similiarly to how you asked about it, along with people saying something like, for example, they couldn't decide what to order from a restraunt, but someone else in the system wanted [this meal], and thus there was that passive influence to get it. Not sure if that makes sense but that's basically what that can feel like - and since it applies to things like opinions sometimes, it can also presumably apply to emotions!

It'd be less of a "they can feel each others exact thoughts and feelings about this thing if they're co-conning" thing, and more of a, for instance, "Chosen doesn't have any real strong feelings about the show they're watching, but Killer on the other hand really likes it, so Chosen feels a bit of that secondhand enjoyment and positivity towards it." Sorta an ambigious background feeling if that makes any sense. They do share a brain and body after all, so sometimes things do get passed and shared that way. [This one is super projecty based off my own stuff lol, I cannot count the amount of times someones ended up passively influencing me on accident when we were stuck co-conning. It's almost comical /j]

Okay I think that's all once more, I started writing this literally as soon as you sent these in and it's been nearly 2 hours so I've probably talked your ear off [talked your... eyes out? How does that phrase translate into text. Much to think about ...] but once again literally thank you so much for being so curious, and it's really not an issue that you've sent such long asks!!!

I adore talking about this headcanon a lot. I've said it before but this HC means a lot to me as a system; we don't get a lot of representation [nevermind good representation] so a lot of the times I like to try and find a character I feel it would fit the best, and then delve into it there. This HC is very very special to me and has a very special place in my heart, so seeing not only so many people accepting and positive about it, but also your own massive curiosity and engagement, really makes me happy!

Plus, ever since I posted this HC ages and ages ago in the community I've seen a ton more pop up every once and a while. It does make me pretty happy to see HCs like this be so widely accepted and appreciated. Along with that, I've also seen other systems in the fandom get super excited about this HC!!! And I'm just so so so happy that my silly little headcanon about sticks in this guys head can make other people feel more seen. I think it's the highest compliment to anything I've ever made. :]

#this can also go into the tags! hello everyone i am back with my system chosen hc 🙏 you are seeing so much of me #this ones for u all who like this hc and say such kind things all the time 🫵 i luv you all #and once more shout out to anon for being literally the awesomest person ever for asking so many questions and giving me the chance 2 rambl #i love talking ♥#||#animator vs animation #tco ava #the chosen one ava #tdl ava #the dark lord ava #killer ava #beast ava #alan becker #kitkat chitchat #was gonna add a little doodle at the end of beast with some hot chocolate and a blanket #but i felt this already was Way too long and took toooooo long to get back to you anon #so just know. i am putting that on my list of planned ava drawings. it WILL happen mark my words ☝️#its just too sweet a mental image to just forever ignore i love it dearly. it would love a blanket and hot cocoa. itd cry about it [positiv #]

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transenbyconfessions · 1 year

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being trans and mentally ill is so weird -_-

recently i've began to dissociate from my gendered experiences (though my dysphoria was less noticeable since it expressed itself as disconnection from my own body; it's the euphoria that has me lost), and due to this i've stopped perceiving my own subconscious senses, the ones that inform me of the incorrectness of my own body. my euphoria is also a lot less emotional and the desire to affirm my gender feels more distant, and thus it's harder to prove that it is 'valid', yk? and i'm having a lot of thoughts about this

i've come out to everyone i know, and this has posed me more issues than i originally expected. i've been waiting to medically transition for a while and i'll continue to, which has been feeling quite hopeless due to the long waiting list times and a need to 'prove' my transness; thanks to the dutch transgender help system i suppose, i'm suffering so bad (dutchies are god's strongest soldiers for real (playful)) and although i've been wondering what vould've caused my dissociation, i do have one major suspect; the fucking symptoms i developed due to trauma that may even be related to a disorder!!!!!

and that's not fun! my unwell brain's basically scared of emotion at this point, and it loves to dissociate from any of them when they get too overwhelming :)) it's also lead to a lack of capacity for attachments for me, and connections are usually positive so that'd make no sense otherwise. could i have dissociated from my euphoria, too? who knows! i don't know whether transitioning will bring me back into my body. i'm hoping it will. there's also the presumption that taking hormones would make one less emotional since i happen to be transmasculine, and for me, the guy who happens to be questioning whether i have Emotionless Personality Disorder (nothing special! just szpd ^_^), this is so weird to consider! would i lose my emotions? how is that even possible? i'm gonna go from feeling nothing to feeling minus emotion or something. that's so confusing and i don't really take it too seriously, but it has me wondering! (if there are any trans guys out there who happen to be transitioning medically and who used to experience dissociation and disconnection due to trauma, please lmk how things changed for you psychologically if you'd like ^_^ though it could be my emotional state is a result of trauma and dysphoria, even if i already disconnected from my body before) it's all just a huge mess for me, but i'm hoping to take hormones and to see whether it'll make me happier, let's pray it does :))

Submitted May 11, 2023

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irbcallmefynn · 4 months

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its weird the general symptom list for dissociative disorders lines up with how i feel pretty well. feeling separate from yourself, blurred self identity, stress in important areas of life, coping poorly with emotional/work stress, memory loss, depression, anxiety (maybe some mild suicidal thoughts? they don't last long but they're there).

but then i look at depersonalization/derealization, dissociative amnesia, and dissociative identity disorder and it's like. i'm none of those i think?

i don't feel external from my body, it feels more like my body and brain are separate from each other and my sense of self, like they're all at odds with each other. nothing really feels "dreamlike" or "unreal" either.

dissociative amnesia sounds right until it's brought up that it tends to come in sudden bouts. it's a constant thing for me. i don't get moments where i forget things, i just can never recall things. i know i should remember them, but when asked to recall them i can't.

and dissociative identity disorder doesn't describe me either. it's just me in here. i'm not plural. there is one me in here, and she's different from my brain, which is also different from my body.

like i almost certainly have some dissociative disorder. but i genuinely do not know what it would be classified as. I feel like the main types fall short at best.

it's like. a sense of separation from my body, but internal instead of external. i don't feel like i'm piloting myself though. kinda hard to explain. but i also have memory loss but it feels less like i forget things and more like i can't make myself recall them. sometimes i can recall details but not when i'm actively attempting to, it's just kinda randomly during conversation. and like i said it feels like my brain doesn't want what's best for my identity/soul, and it can barely get my body to do things at times, and my body doesn't look how my brain or personality want it.

god im so confused.

#just kinda rambling #dissociative disorders #mental health #suicidal thoughts mention #im using mayoclinic as my source btw #genuinely if someone has any advice or suggestions for things to look into please speak up #even if i can't get a diagnosis for anything just knowing that i'm not the only thing like this and that it has a name is comforting #ask to tag

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bloodxhound · 10 months

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COMMON MISCONCEPTION(S). That Ray hates his father. He would like people to believe so, as he would like to believe it himself, but the truth is—he doesn’t. When he was a child, he outright idealized him. To Ray, he appeared larger than life, untouchable, almost god-like. The man was surrounded by people who respected him and coveted his recognition. Ray was no different, until that feeling slowly gave way to fear, resentment, anger, and disappointment over the years. What remains after his father’s execution is a lot of confusion, regret and the question whether there couldn’t have been a better end to all of this. It’ll take him quite a while to work through his emotions.

AN IMPORTANT HEADCANON. Sometimes when he’s being arrogant or obnoxious it’s intended as a defense mechanism, rather than a manifestation of his high confidence or enjoyment of exasperating others. To some extent, that behavior is how he weasels out of situations that make him feel awkward or vulnerable. He struggles to take someone’s gratitude or a genuine compliment. Someone complimenting him on something superficial like his appearance? Whatever, no big deal. But someone giving him a heartfelt thank-you? No, thanks. He’ll let you know how great he is himself so you can roll your eyes and he can move on from the situation.

A USELESS HEADCANON. You know that embarrassing moment when you accidentally push against a door you’re supposed pull? Couldn’t be Ray. He’ll just keep on pushing until he unhinges the entire door and then walks through. There, problem solved.

POTENTIAL TRIGGERS. In general, you can expect anything that you’d find in the A.ce A.ttorney games. Murder, death, violence, etc. Other sensitive subject matters that may crop up are mentions of emotional and physical child abuse, mental illness ( depression, dissociative amnesia ), and alcoholism. Personally, I’m fine with mostly any subject matter in threads / backstories, as long as it’s handled respectfully. Since A.ce A.ttorney isn’t a terribly dark franchise I’m more than happy to keep subject matters limited to what is discussed in the games though.

SOMETHING YOU ENJOY ABOUT (WRITING) THEM. Getting to write dog metaphors / similes to my heart’s content? Bullying my friends’ muses? Getting yelled at in d/iscord because he did something stupid? < 3 More seriously though, there’s so much I enjoy about writing Ray that I struggle to pinpoint just one thing. He’s the culmination of all the crime / thriller / detective media I love and all the character tropes I enjoy, and I like that I get to explore those in my own way!

SOMETHING YOU WANT OTHERS TO KNOW BEFORE WRITING WITH THEM. He may be a grump generally speaking, but it’s not necessarily his default attitude towards everyone. Defense attorneys, prosecutors and authority figures are received with antagonism until they’ve proven their integrity to him. He cannot stand journalists, politicians, and criminals ( who committed serious offenses ) — and he will let them know that. But everyone else? Entirely depends on them. Some types of people are met favorably from the get-go, too. Forensics, other detectives, beautiful women, kind people who remind him of his mother, etc. He often cares more about people than he lets on. Even if he bullies them. Sometimes especially if he bullies them.

tagged by: @clemencetaught (●'◡'●) / tagging: @kagoshou, @virtusdemonte, @lovlorne, @silenthcwl, @tenacquity, @kamipyre, @edgelord-dl6 ( miles! though i would love to know your takes on james as well :flushed: ) & you, reading this ! ♡

#【♞】 tag game.#【♞】 chr. study.#hmm idk if the father thing is rlly a misconception tbh #but i feel like? bc my writing is colored by ray's perception ofc it might give off the vibe he truly hates him ?

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buildingunderstanding · 3 months

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I have tried to make it a habit of stirring intention into my coffee every morning. It feels silly to say because it started out as one of those "broom closet friendly witchy things" that felt neat to do when I first tripped down thus rabbit hole, but it has helped me to be a little more present and mindful in the morning. As a person with a dissociative disorder who does not like being present or mindful, this worked as a fun little hack in my goblin brain because it was allowed due to be connected to a special interest.

I've had a rough few days and this morning it was feeling like an obligatory habit. Many things in fact, had been feeling just habit or obligatory, and I have been sort of half heartedly trying to stop doing that.

Part of being dissociated for me isn't just "not being present in the moment" but a really deep disconnected with almost any kind of feeling that isn't dread or anxiety. So while I can tell I've felt more disconnected from really form of practice lately, I haven't figured out how it feels to "apply" myself or to "put my heart into" something. I just...do stuff. I can cognitively say "this is the reason for the doing" or "I want to do this thing (for xyz reasons)", I don't always exactly know what is the actual feeling or emotion behind it. I had a thought and now I am following through with the thought. That's kind of it. When I try to look more closely at it, it gets confusing because I don't know if I'm "feeling" things correctly because I don't understand what people mean when they talk about that concept.

So this morning I was trying to figure out how to get myself to feel genuine enough to want to consider my intention for the day and put that into my coffee and that's when I was prompted with, "Well, what do you want to do today?"

And I thought for a moment and landed on, "I need to get some tidying up done, so motivation to do that, I guess? I want my space cleaner, so motivation."

And the response was along the lines of. "Hm-mm. You want to do those things, so you have the motivation. Think about what specifically you need in this situation."

I thought for a moment, frowning at my coffee for making me think that hard when I hadn't even been awake for an hour and landed on, "Buidung structure. I feel overwhelmed and I don't know where to start in the cleaning process. I need help building structure and organizing how I clean."

Now at this point, I should have known it was Loki, buy it was early, I hadn't been up long, and honestly I'm so used to my system mates, I wasn't thinking about it too hard I was just chatting over morning coffee. But I didn't figure out that's what was going on until I got a response along the lines of, "...You're gonna need Apollo for that one. Some folks consider him the God of Order, right? He's gonna be better for that then me." And just dipped out.

I mean, mad respect for knowing your limits and all, but can I at least get a high five for being present enough to figure out what I needed before drinking my coffee?

#screaming into the void #lokean #have i mentioned how much i love loki because it's a lot #i cannot stress enough how healing it is for him to be so casual with me #like yeah sure there was a bit of firmness when he told me to think specifically about what i needed this morning #but im not constantly afraid of being disrespectful from not being the right amount of formal with him

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fioras-resolve · 7 months

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I beat Virtue's Last Reward, thoughts under the cut

-Huh?

-Okay, not huh as in "I don't understand," I get it fully, I mean "Why was this the ending?" I guess I'll have to play Zero Time Dilemma to find out huh.

-This is definitely the kinda thing I'm gonna have to spend several days processing, similar to 999

-I'm thinking a bit about how the ending of a thing can overshadow so much else in a story, like even though I've experienced the rest of the story, I'm struck by just the ending right now.

-I think all-in-all the main thing I'll say is that this game got me to feel things, it got me to love, to loathe, to betray and be betrayed. I don't think a game has done that this well for me in a good while. It's inspiring tbh. Did I mention I'm a game developer? This will definitely influence my work moving forward.

-I cannot fucking IMAGINE playing this game in 2012 and having to wait 4 years for Zero Time Dilemma to come out. Y'all were hanging on that cliff so long, and it was very possible you'd never get up. As an Ace Attorney fan living on hiatus brain, I know the feeling, but also GOD, at least Ace Attorney had a consistent flow of games when I was most into it.

-I am... mixed, on how this game handles returning characters from 999. The big thing right now is This Is Not My Akane. She's basically unrecognizable, even in her past state where she looks the same. I was thinking during that whole ending, "Okay, but why did it have to be AKANE? She's been through this so many times and probably has six layers of PTSD from the thing, so why would she ever agree to this?" And it feels like the answer is a kind of puzzle-box solution that I find really strange all things considered. Like, yes, 999's ending was a mindfuck, but it also genuinely pulled at the heartstrings because like. Yeah, you were saving Akane, and this is someone that we'd built a connection to both as a character and as a player.

-I guess the thing there is that like, that kind of heartstrings ending is a single route of 999, but it's all over VLR. The ending feels like an answer to the mystery, but not to the themes, or the question of "why does this game exist?"

-It feels like Uchikoshi wanted to follow up on the cult success of 999 by making something Bigger, an even more complex mystery with even more paths and even more moving parts. And he got so invested in making this puzzle box cohere that the game ends up sidelining emotional resonance even when it's trying not to.

-I've been talking to a friend of mine who played it a while ago and felt physically ill after the ending, and like. First of all, yeah, different people just have different tolerable levels of bullshit. But also, I feel like plural systems like myself innately have more of a resistance to it because our minds are already fucky enough. Legit, during the reveal of the swap I was thinking "Oh so he dissociated for 45 years."

-Sidenote, Zero Escape feels intensely gnostic, from what little I know of gnosticism. It feels like these games are trying to use science as a conduit/justification for a philosophy I'm not sure if I vibe with. But I can vibe with it for the purpose of storytelling.

-I think I like VLR more than 999? Like, VLR is definitely playing with bigger ideas and following up on 999 in ways I really appreciate. And in general th--

-Midway through typing the previous thing I realized, holy shit, I have a similar relationship to this game that I do to Final Fantasy XIII-2. They're both sequels that follow up on their previous games with blanket improvements to both story and gameplay, but both have endings that leave me confused as to what these games are actually doing besides filling in plot before the next game. And yes, both VLR and XIII-2 are doing amazing things in the beginning and the middle, but the answer to "what is this leading to" for both seems to be "play the next game, fucker."

-I think the thing I'm pissed about is the justification given for the AB game. Like, the mechanic inherently carries interesting themes about trust, self-interest, game theory, etc. The reveals of what everyone else voted are some of the most gripping moments I've experienced in video games. I was ready for this to be going somewhere with these ideas! And then the reveal is that the reason the game was constructed like this was to give you more moments of choice to time travel through. And like, okay, fine, this game's got its higher level stuff about choice and agency and all that, that all works! But for the Ambidex Game to be primarily about making the player make the exact right choices to lead to the perfect ending, it's... Ugh! I thought the point was to explore all these other possibilities, that's why all the different endings!

-I need more time to process this game, but right now my take is this: Virtue's Last Reward is an amazing game until you realize what it is. It's a game that can raise your emotions high and get you truly fucked up. But as you play more of it, it reveals its true focus is this almost mechanical construction of plot. This construction is beautiful in its own way, but it's not what I come to a game like this for. Despite being a game designer who talks a lot about game mechanics and systems, I care so much about story. I want to get attached to characters, I want to see a narrative unfold, I want to have my heartstrings pulled. And the game seems too sure of itself to remember to pull it off.

-Or maybe this is the wrong way of looking at it? Maybe I'm criticizing what it isn't, rather than appreciating what it is. This game isn't trying to be 999 and failing, it's trying to be Virtue's Last Reward and succeeding. And I'm still along for this ride.

#zero escape #virtue's last reward #zero escape virtue's last reward #vlr spoilers

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system-of-a-feather · 2 years

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Kind of some sort of Riku Squared Blur mess at the moment, leaning a bit towards XIV by choice but, it's whatever, but a comic on dysphoria had come up on our feed and it made Riku think and now me(?) as well abut how long it's been since it even registered that we are ""female"" - like it really doesn't even click with us even when we are miss gendered or straight up called a woman. The only time I think it hits anyone is when the dysphoria itself is being Bad TM and suddenly its all that I we can think about and its like a really shitty intrusive thought; which it honestly might be cause 9/10 times I don't have an issue with thinking I'm a woman and even in the moment I don't think I'm a woman but its literally all I can think of but ANYWAYS

That was a tangent cause I fucking hate dysphoria; but it is really wild to think that two years ago Riku was entirely in their egg. Actually most of the system were in their denial egg except for Ray who was dying so badly that he - as primary gatekeeper - just put like 10 thick dissociative walls between him and anything relating to gender after getting the system back onto a track for paying attention to our body.

And like, following a year later I came back and took on the mantle as the gender King, voice, and the representative for our complex and painful gender issues cause honestly, I had the affinity and ability to feel negative emotions and handle it better than almost any other part in this system, and honestly - I mad respect Ray and I looked back there and Im like nah, I'm not gonna make the guy who soloed this and barely got out of it alive come onto the battle field unless I fucking have to

And its been fucking HELL. 2021 we were genuinely considering putting ourselves in a psych ward cause I was getting bad, but luckily we sorted the worst of that out with T and shit.

But honestly, it's kind of pretty nice to have the concept of us being "female" so foreign and distant that whenever it comes up we just raise an eyebrow like "ok you are a bit confused but OK lol".

I dunno, I'm intentionally not looking at the corner that will stab me cause right now its not appropriate to deal with that since we have a final to cram for along with other things and that thing will always be there for me cause I can't repress shit thats assigned to me, but it is kind of nice to be sitting at a resting place of being whatever gender it is that we experience.

We're not a woman, god no but also not a man. Maybe man-adjacent, maybe but *shrugs* who knows. Specifics and boxes are lame anyways but

Ugh anyways I'm gonna put this box away before I accidentally dive back into my usual realm of anger, annoyance and angst. I was sitting here trying to have a feel good Riku TM moment where I reflect on how far we've come and how the pain and shit was worth it - and yeah it is and shit, but this shits too potent for that healing feeling to last and overpower whats still here

Riku really wanted to do a healing ramble on this and I ended up out so I was like "you know what I can do it" but nah. I can't, go figure we have DID after all.

Anyways, I tried, thats what matters.

Thesis statement: It's pretty cool how far we've come and I'm pretty proud of what we've reaped off of my productive misery, but good god is it still fucking miserable jesus christ + I suck at trying to make happy bow tie posts. This just got harder and harder the less blurred with Riku I was

-Mostly XIV now

#alter: riku #alter: xiv #gender dysphoria #trans #transmasculine #transmasc #nonbinary #alter: riku squared

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ruminate88 · 2 months

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Trauma Response?

I took a test and it said my Dominate reaponse to trauma is “Flight” which can involve dissociating or emotionally distracting yourself which is what I use to do. I use to drown myself in porn becuase it gave me temporary pleasure and fulfilled the empty void left when my ex Andrew was isolating me and purposely ignoring me for 2 and sometimes 3 days. Then he would suddenly text me again or send me selfies again to keep me going. The crumbs got less and less as time went on. 😭😭😭

Eventually it got so bad that getting a selfie at all from him was like gold to me. 😝 He would reply short responses to my text like “awww” and I got really frustrated but was on egg shells and also didn’t understand it. I forgive myself for not knowing it was abuse and for not speaking up to him and telling him how he made me feel. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared but I still could have said something but I didn’t. Mostly because I had already been abused and ghosted by Cody prior to him and was afraid of being ghosted again. I knew Andrew would randomly ignore me at times anyway and I confronted him 3 times and offered to break up “if he’s too busy”.

Altho also at random times, Andrew would suddenly talk to me fine and reply quick especially if we were talking sexual. Then it was pics of him enjoying me and he’s sending me so many heart emojis and telling me how beautiful he thinks I am 😣 I wanted it to be real and I wanted him to see me and care about me but I realize now he only cared about my bare photos and the dirty words I was saying to him. I forgive myself for being so nasty towards him. I genuinely wanted love with him and in my mind, I was giving him my heart every time I sent him pics or heart emojis. It was real to me even if it was a joke to him.

I find myself now even if awful situations, begging God for safety and my brain does want to create fake scenarios in my head that are better than real life. I’ve done it with Andrew I have to admit 🥺❤️‍🩹 I’ve created ideas in my head that he’s in therapy with me and that he’s becoming self aware and seeing what he put me through but I know I shouldn’t do that 😓 I forgive myself and I’m sorry and at some point I will get past all this. I know this “healing journey” is about me and not about him.

it’s not my job or fault to heal him or change him. I can’t. I can only pray for him and hope the best for him. I need to stop prioritizing him over myself. I just use to think because he was in college, that he was “smarter than me” 🤣🤣🤣 cuz I didn’t understand he lacked emotional intelligence lol I didn’t know he lacked emotions cuz he was sending me hearts and calling me babe, I believed he was capable of “connecting” and “attaching” with me. His robotic response to us breaking up was a shock to me and hurt so much! I cried so hard the whole night just shaking and confused. Andrew was “nonchalant” about me dumping him after he wanted more time and wouldn’t break up with me first. 3 times I tried to get him to do it not because I wanted him to but because I thought he wanted to.

Andrew was making me feel like I was bothering him or else taking so long to reply to messages, I kept saying “If you’re too busy for me, you can break up with me and focus on school. We can be friends instead.” But Andrew would turn into a toddler and get aggravated with me and say, “Why are you talking like that? I don’t wanna break up.” And suddenly he’s sending me hearts again and promising me he’s gonna make more time for me and that he wants me…. Ugh and I wanted him so bad… I never wanted someone so bad before. 🤪🤪🤪 I NEVER knew it was just trauma bonding and obsession but I did care about him. I stalked his Facebook religiously to see what he does when he’s away from me. I wasn’t totally blind to the fact he’s very outgoing so I was confused why he was so shy with me… not knowing he’s emotionally unavailable and can’t help but to show his true colors to me cuz I’m smarter than I give myself credit for. Lust was blinding, not love.

I forgive myself still and I’m still working on forgiving Andrew too ❤️‍🩹 cuz he’s a person too and obviously had hidden trauma he never told me about probably from childhood but I can’t save him. I can only face reality and see him for who he really is and accept it. Wishing him well from a safe distance and hoping for his self growth! ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹 🙏🏻

#healing journal #personal post #my story #unpacking #emotional abuse #mental abuse #dear andrew #forgiveness #emotional wounds #self awareness #healing journey #betrayal trauma #ariana grande #we can’t be friends (wait for your love)#SoundCloud

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messier-47 · 2 years

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PERMANENT STATE OF DISSOCIATION. GOD THAT SUCKS. BUT GOD DOES IT EXPLAIN A LOT OF HIS BEHAVIORS. OH THE EMOTIONAL TURMOIL HE WILL ENDURE WHEN(IF) HE FINALLY WAKES UP... POOR KID

YEAH IT'S PRETTY BAD RIGHT :DDD

god it's gonna be utterly horrific

After Mada gets Izuna to wake up and active again he immediately tries to establish a connection with Tobirama, trying to see how the boy is doing; leaving blankets and bentos with his candy calling card.

Except the blankets, bentos and taffy are left untouched

At first he's really fucking confused, hiding behind a corner just so that he can witness the pale boy walk up to his dorm room, not even glance at the food basket, completely not see the bright blue candy pretty much crying 'notice me! notice me!' and Mada wants to bang his head against a wall cause he noticed only too late.

If Tobirama has been in a dissociative state for so long, then the recent firefight would only reset Tobirama back to square 1, Madara had lost all progress establishing a connection beforehand when there was a period of peace while Mada and Izu settled in.

So Mada tries once again to establish a connection with the boy, hoping that once Tobirama gets even a little bit out of his fugue state it'll be a 'take 3 steps forward' card and establish their past connection. Now that he's really paying attention and knows the signs of what the fuck is going on, Madara now see's the...honestly agonizing existence the pale boy goes through. Cause it's not like he's totally alone there's a bunch of people everywhere that try their best to connect and be friendly to their star pilot that's gone without a Handler for months but...the boy doesn't have a Handler. Doesn't have anyone or anything to ground him in reality.

He's like a ghost.

Then it happens, before Madara could firmly establish the taffy calling card with himself just like last time there's an emergency; two aliens that look like twins of gold and silver emerge and these chonky bastards are heavy duty, natural disaster level type threats and before any of the other pilots get suited up Tobirama is already ordered to go into the firefight.

Providing Madara the perfect opportunity to watch with his full attention how the Hiraishin fights.

And it's a tough, devestating, gruesome battle. It's not at all like the battle simulations or any other military endorsed fighting style, in the end the Hiraishin is fighting like a berserker animal on steroids against two rabid beasts.

the Hiraishin wins

But not without consequences. Not without dragging itself back into the loading bay "bleeding" out of every crack and cranny, a skeletal metal monster crumbling like a puppet cut from it's strings. and People start screaming and yelling, everyone rushing forward to get their boy Tobirama, Humanities Last Defense, out of the system and the boy...

oh god someone help him

#sad boy hours #my content #tobirama #madara #fanfic i only hope to write one day #Handler/Pilot!AU #anon speaks #@kiokesu #naruto

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house-of-no-regrets · 3 years

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No Regrets [in the wee hours]

Took a bit longer than expected, but I’ve finished the next little story! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep a decent pace on these. No overarching plot, just little stories in the same universe with the same characters. Warning for ~*murder*~ in this one!

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I've been all-too-easy to wake up since I was a child; I'd often needed to go from dead asleep to functional, if groggy, as soon as I heard my father demanding action or attention. While I no longer need that reaction time, the old man long since locked up to rot, my brain is set in its ways and very convinced that I need to be able to bolt out of bed and fight God if a dust bunny moves too quickly in my vicinity.

Which is how I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, the sudden shift in the atmosphere bringing on consciousness with all the subtlety of a foghorn.

My room was silent, still, but I knew without opening my eyes that there was a spirit somewhere, and I didn't even give them a chance to speak before I pointed at the sign posted on my wall, barely shifting from my comfortable snuggle in my blanket and not even opening my eyes. Yes, this happens more often than I care to admit. No, I do not enjoy it. At all.

"Resurrection hours are noon to eight. I'm still alive and still need sleep to function."

There was silence, but the presence didn't leave, so I groaned and raised my head, finally opening my eyes to see the translucent, vaguely glowing, and unfortunately blurry spirit at the foot of my bed.

It did finally speak in a bewildered voice.

"Um, I'm being murdered."

Ah, fuck.

I grabbed my glasses from the bedside table and put them on. The spirit at the foot of my bed was tallish -- I've always been bad at estimating height, maybe half a foot shorter than Yvette? Five-nine... ish? -- and seemed to be in his twenties. There was a considerable dark stain on his chest and belly; likely blood, and the cause of his death. The newly-dead tend to show things like that, as they haven't had the time to get used to modifying their form.

I really hate it when brand new ones find me. I'm not sure how it started, but it seems like more and more often, now, the dead are drawn to No Regrets before they even realize they're dead, at least if they're the type to need my help. Wish I wasn't the one who had to break it to him. I'm not great with people.

"Sorry, bro, but I'm afraid they succeeded. Where was it? I'll get the police over there."

"Uhh... my house. I think. It's a little..."

I sighed. Right.

"You're probably a little out of it still... fresh dead usually are. C'mon, I'll take you around until things look familiar."

Climbing out of bed, I headed over to grab my hoodie from the back of the chair. I learned the hard way that sleeping is not a tits out sort of occasion when you're liable to get the dead dropping in at all hours of the night, so I sleep in pajama pants and a tank top. Little too chilly for tank tops outside, though. I shoved my phone in my hoodie and my feet into loafers, then started heading out of my room and down the hall.

"You remember your name?" I asked, trying to make conversation and learn what I could.

"Uh, Davis. Craig? Craig Davis."

"Well, Craig Davis, I'm sorry to hear about your passing. You're gonna need to possess me for this little adventure, by the way, but I'll walk you through it once we're outside."

"I- what?"

Considering how often I find myself lost in normal conversations, dealing with confused new spirits is especially difficult. Still shaking off my body's angry demands for More Sleep was not helping matters in the slightest, either.

"Possession. I'll explain it in just a minute." I rubbed an eye and yawned as I stopped in the foyer to pull a set of keys off one of the hooks on the wall.

Usually, I've got a driver. Not for vanity reasons, but after three or four near-misses caused by Sudden Spirits appearing in the car with me, I elected to hire someone to drive me into and around town as needed. But it was Fuck-This-Shit O'Clock in the morning, and Graves deserved their rest. The dead don't need to sleep, but they can if they so choose -- and it does, after all, conserve energy. The same goes for Yvette and Ashby; it was too early in the morning for most people to be out and searching for a necromancer to kill, so I wasn't gonna disturb them. I could handle a simple spirit chauffeur and 911 call on my own.

The keys were to the motor scooter; it was the better choice in this situation, allowing for more mobility and no passenger seat for any extra ghosts to drop into. That did, though, mean that Craig would need to ride shotgun in my body.

When I got out to the green scooter in the driveway, I paused and looked over at Craig.

"Hey, I know you're probably still a little out of it, so Possession 101." Script time. At least having this stuff memorized made it easier to do while dozy. "Our bodies need to take up the same space, so c'mere." I beckoned Craig over.

"So like… step into you?" He asked. Good, seemed like his head was clearing up some.

"Yeah, that's part 1."

He nodded and complied, crossing the space between us and settling in the same location, the two of us clipped into each other like bugged NPCs. It always felt so weird, those moments before a spirit actually possesses you. A sort of wobbly, in-and-out feeling like physics is trying to crush you and the spirit together, or, failing that, just kick your ass to the ground so you're not both in the same place at the same time.

"A'ight, now turn around and face the direction I’m facing, and overlay your hands onto mine as best you can." It was just a moment for him to obey, and I continued. "I'm not resisting, so you're gonna start feeling like you're being pulled in and pushed out at the same time. Space is trying to equalize. Let yourself be pulled in. It's gonna feel a bit like-"

The whirlpool effect kicked in before I could finish, the sudden snap and release of tension as Craig's spirit sank into my body. I wobbled a bit and grabbed the handlebar in front of me, then shivered at the sudden chill and dizziness. I'm pretty good at taking on passengers like this, but that didn't make it any more pleasant.

"You in there, buddy?" I asked out loud. Especially with new spirits, trying to think at each other was more trouble than it was worth. My lips moved to answer, though it wasn't my voice coming out.

"Uh- yeah. Yeah I'm here."

I grabbed the helmet hanging on the other handlebar and snapped it on, kicking the stand up and plopping heavily onto the seat.

"Great. Let's go."

"Wait, why am I not in control?" came Craig's confused voice. He felt almost frustrated, an undercurrent of emotion that wasn't mine despite being in my mind and body.

"Because this is my body, and I let you in willingly. Easier to keep control when you're letting someone in. Plus," I gave a little snort. "You just died, dude. I've been letting spirits possess me since middle school."

I felt his frustration turn to grumpiness, and then the pressure in my head, like a storm rolling in, that I knew from experience was him trying to take control. I froze and let out an irritated huff.

"You stop that. I'm not dealing with you doing some dumb shit with my body. Either chill out or get out."

"Oh- uh. Just wanted to see if I could…"

"Uh-huh. Anyhow, now that you're together enough to try joyriding, do you remember much about where you were before you were killed?"

I started up the scooter as emotions rolled through my mind, detached and distant, almost like the muffled dissociation I was used to mid-shutdown. Possessing spirits' emotions always felt weird like that, both mine and not mine, held at arm's length. Craig's was especially turbulent for a new death, but given that he had been murdered… I didn't fault him for being a little confused and angry. Even if it did put me a little on edge.

"Uh- South Pine Street, Dogwood Acres housing development."

"Baller. That's not far from here. Once we get close to your body, you should be able to feel where it is, so I'll have a house number for the police. Don't want to have them scream in all blue lights and loud sirens and have your killer go to ground before they know which house, y'know?"

The muffled flare of anger that I felt was definitely not my own. I took a deep breath, hoped that the killer had panicked and tried to clean up instead of get rid of the body first, and puttered off towards Dogwood.

The housing development was quiet, lines upon lines of identical suburban boxes lit by flickering street lights that cast the sidewalks and yards in harsh white light. The occasional house had the glow of yellow within, but most of them were dormant. Weaving my way through the maze of streets, each one absolutely indistinguishable from the one before and the one to come, I felt terribly exposed -- and alone despite the spirit currently hitching along in my body.

I turned onto South Pine and brought my scooter to a puttering stop, stabilizing it with both feet on the ground. I couldn't help but bounce my legs to replace the vibration of driving; the sudden lack of sensation would ratchet my anxiety up even if I wasn't currently letting a frustrated dead man hang out in my head to catch his murderer.

...I should be more than a little anxious, really, but half-asleep Tabby once again wrote a check that more-awake Tabby is having to cash, and more-awake Tabby is very used to having to deal with the consequences of her idiot decisions. It occurred to me that normal peoples' consequences didn't usually involve murder, but when you live with the dead, you're bound to meet a few killers.

Two houses down, I could feel- not a tug so much as a presence, an echo of Craig's spirit reacting to his body. It was the only one on the street with its lights on and its garage, while not lit, was open. There was a car in the garage, another in the driveway, and a pickup at the curb in front.

"258?" I asked Craig, though I knew the answer already. His anger flared and I felt the oncoming storm again. I snapped at him. "That's two strikes, Craig. I'm sorry for your death, but if you end up driving my body into a crime scene or, god forbid, getting me killed next, I will kick your ass to whatever afterlife you're headed for and stay there to keep kicking it for eternity."

Big words for a short fat lady, but this is, in fact, my body on the line right now. I probably wouldn't be able to follow through on any ass-kicking, but dammit, I would try.

Craig was silent, and I could feel him steaming, petulant like a child denied a toy but with the power of a grown man behind it. With my stomach tying itself in knots and my hands starting to tremble, I dialed 911, hoping it would help quell the rising panic.

"258 South Pine Street. I think there's been a murder. I don't know the state of the crime scene or if the perp is still there, but you might be able to catch them if you hurry. The victim is Craig Davis, white adult male, either shot or stabbed in the chest, likely multiple times-"

"Wait, is this Tabby? The necro girl?"

Oh god I hope that isn't what the operators call me regularly-- I know I'm a bit of a 911 cryptid, since the usual intruder calls are to the non-emergency line, but if I get known as the necro girl I might have to move to a different state.

"Yeah, uh, necromancer, yeah-" I couldn't help but stumble over my words, now, with my train of thought derailed by the interruption. "-uh, murder?"

"Right! I'll send someone."

I murmured a thanks and hung up before she could ask me to stay on the line. I already had to stay around for the cops so Craig could give a statement, and making small talk with the 911 operator was not in the spoons tonight.

I don't like cops much, but in my line of work, they're kind of a necessity. I need to stay on the police force's good side because I need them to remove attempted murderers from my property on the regular. ...and also because graverobbing is still technically illegal, even if I do have the body owner's permission to dig them up.

At least most of the locals who know of me and my employees are chill about it. It took a bit of effort to get to that point, but now at least people don't run screaming from the less-presentable of my employees…

The blue lights of the police showed up fairly quickly, followed almost immediately by the red flashing of EMS. I puttered up slowly and parked my scooter just out of range as the officers set to work surrounding the house, then hung my helmet on a handlebar and walked up the rest of the way to watch the impending train wreck. I could feel Craig's anger boiling higher and tried my best to ignore it; Craig himself seemed to have fallen silent and sullen after I called him out.

"Tabby!"

I was standing just off to the side of the ambulance when someone stepped up behind me and called my name, making me jump and cringe.

"Oh- oh dear, I'm sorry, Tabs. I thought I heard you were the one who called this in!"

I straightened up immediately, face burning. I recognized that voice, bright and smooth and kind and--

"J-Jenna!" My voice was barely a squeak as I turned to face her, looking up at the round, dark face of one of the EMTs. She was a good six feet tall, maybe more, towering above me even in her uniform flats, with a brilliant smile and full lips and gorgeous natural hair pulled through the back of her uniform cap, the streetlight illuminating her from behind like a halogen angel.

Jenna had shown up to one of my early calls for assistance at No Regrets, and then she kept turning up, not every time I was in a situation where I'd be around EMTs, but often.

Concern showed on her face as she leaned to look me over.

"Are you okay? Did you see it happen, or-"

I shook my head, buying time to sort out words by tapping my temple with a finger.

"N-no, I uh- the victim woke me up, he's in here, uh, in case the cops need somethin' from him."

"Oh… are you getting enough sleep, dear? You sound exhausted. Do you want to sit in the back of the truck?"

It took me a second or two to recover from the way she called me dear, my face burning bright red. I couldn't make eye contact even for the second or two I can usually manage so that people don't immediately think I'm being dishonest.

"I- uh- um- w-well, it's, uh, it is like 4am--" I stammered, trying desperately to find words. "I-I guess 'm sleepin' okay, uh, how're… you doing??"

I have never been a great orator and the list of why that is gets a bit longer with every um and stutter.

Jenna's face bloomed into a gorgeous, open grin.

"I'm on 12-hour overnights right now, so I'm basically at least 60 percent Red Bull at any given time. Everyone okay up there at the House? Last I heard y'all were digging up half the lawn.”

I nodded, unable to keep from grinning. At least this was a subject I could talk to her about without making an absolute ass of myself--

"Yeah! The new girl, Chris, she's gotten Daryl and Roy to help her get the vegetable garden going! It's plenty big enough to take care of all of us, and I worked out a deal with the soup kitchen so that they get any of our excess, once things are running smoothly, and I can use their account to buy from that bulk food program that's usually only open to chari- oop-!" I bit my tongue and cringed. Right. I'm pretty sure that's technically fraud and I just admitted to it in front of-

There was a commotion from the house that snapped me back to attention, and the cops were leading a man out in handcuffs. He looked pale and shaken, spattered in blood, and not quite… present, like he had just checked out of reality for his own good. That… was a familiar look. I furrowed my brow. He certainly didn't look like a maniacal killer-

"He caught me with his wife," I said. Well. Craig said. I jumped. Jenna jumped. I flushed and covered my mouth reflexively.

"N-no that was him! The victim!" I squeaked. Jenna laughed, a hearty belly laugh, and covered her own mouth, though she was doing a terrible job of hiding her grin.

"I figured! If he caught you with his wife, it would be an upgrade!"

At this point, you could probably fry an egg on my face. Hell, my glasses were starting to fog up-- I stammered for a few moments, trying desperately to find something to say, and it was Craig who saved me, if you could call it that. I was too caught up in my embarrassment and awkwardness to realize how much anger and frustration he was radiating.

"Motherfucker told me he'd have my job! Son of a bitch thinks he can get away with doing this to me, he's gonna fucking pay--"

The oncoming storm crashed over me before I could get a grip on it, and all of a sudden I was lumbering forward, snarling words that weren't my own, and dragging a gardening pickaxe out of my truck -- Craig's truck -- on my way to the man and the cops--

I let out a shriek, in my own voice, feeling the sound cutting my throat raw. I wrested control of my body back with a lurch, falling on my ass in the yard with the force of it while the silvery-blue form of Craig was ejected from my body, screaming obscenities.

I threw my hand forward, fighting for whatever thoughts and words I could find to fix this. I saw Craig right himself and move back towards me, and the first incantation -- if you could call it that -- that my brain grasped left my lips in a single desperate breath, with a dizzying rush of power--

"INTHENAMEOFTHEMOONIBANISHYOU--!!"

The force of the hurried exorcism rushed outward like a sonic boom, strong enough for even the mundanes around me to feel, and Craig's spirit let out a yowl of rage for a brief second before twisting around itself and collapsing in with a sickening crunch, crushing smaller and smaller until it was gone.

I winced -- not my best exorcism. At all.

As the flare of adrenaline dropped almost immediately and I came back to myself properly, I realized -- blurrily, as my glasses had gotten thrown off somewhere -- at least two officers had their weapons half-drawn at me, though they were looking over at where Craig's spirit had disappeared.

I collapsed the rest of the way onto the grass, shaking, and covered my face with my hands, trying with everything within me not to start crying. I should have realized he'd try something like that, why hadn't I been paying attention- I could have been attacked, I could have been arrested, I could have had to watch myself beat a man to death and I- fuck--

The sob that came out was squeaky and pained, and I pressed my hands harder against my face, like that would stop anything else from going wrong. I should have brought someone-- I shouldn't have let him possess me-- I should have been paying more attention--

Warm tears ran from the corners of my eyes, down my cheeks, to pool in my ears, making my already-trembling body shiver harder with the unpleasant sensation. I'd let myself get complacent, hadn't lost control of a possession like that in years, and- I'd almost- fuck--

"Honey, honey, sit up for me. Tabby? C'mon, let's get you up--"

Numbly, I let Jenna help me into a sitting position, where she wrapped a blanket around me and pressed an open bottle of water into my hands.

"Take slow sips. Are you okay? Just shaken?"

I nodded, some part of me grateful that I couldn't quite see her face properly without my glasses, because I didn't want to see what she thought about me after that. She sighed, though, and sounded relieved when she murmured "Good."

My whole body felt like jelly, trembling so hard I could feel the water in the bottle sloshing around, and I kept flashing from too hot to too cold to too hot again, and I couldn't even sort out my thoughts--

Jenna sat down beside me and rubbed my back. If I wasn't having a complete breakdown, I might have enjoyed it.

I don't know how long it took for me to calm down and clear my head, but the car with the other man had left, and the other EMTs had loaded Craig's body into the ambulance while Jenna sat next to me and made sure I was doing okay.

After a while, though, I blinked and shifted my torso, then opened the blanket more and cursed at the bloom of red on my hoodie.

I heard Jenna curse as well as she stood up, but I grabbed her pants leg.

"N-no, 'm okay," I mumbled, and instead of trying to speak more, I reached to pull my hoodie and tank up my stomach to show bruised, but completely unbroken skin, covered in blood, rivulets following my stretch marks and making it look even worse despite my being otherwise completely uninjured. "See, 'm okay." This was not the first time I've had a possession lead to the dead's cause of death showing on my own body. It wasn't even the bloodiest.

Jenna sat back down, and I could see her leaning in a bit.

"Well damn. Magic ghost stuff, huh?"

I nodded.

"Magic ghost stuff."

I could see the flash of white against dark skin as she grinned.

"So that exorcism… Artemis or Usagi?"

It took me a moment to parse her.question, but all of a sudden I was completely back to myself, just in time to absolutely die of embarrassment.

"L-listen, I- y-you can exorcise i-in anyone's name, i-it's the power and conviction that counts--!!"

"Usagi, then." I could hear the laughter in her voice, laughter that bubbled out moments later. I wanted to crawl in a hole in embarrassment, but- it didn't feel like condescending laughter. I knew what that felt like. She seemed just genuinely amused. "I grew up with Sailor Moon, too."

I couldn't stop the squeak that eaked out, and I covered my face again.

"G-god I hope word about this doesn't get out, people already think I-I'm weird enough, and to- to fall back on anime for magic i-in a pinch is just--"

"Cute," Jenna finished.

I squeaked.

Jenna moved away for a moment, and then she settled my glasses on my nose. I couldn't make eye contact, but I did glance over at her and sheepishly murmur my thanks.

"The officers still want a statement from you, since you made the call and tried to go after the perp, but I don't think they're looking at any charges, given…" Jenna trailed off and looked over at where Craig had disappeared. "...yeah."

I nodded, slowly, and then found myself yawning, the adrenaline drop setting in especially hard.

"...d'you think it can wait 'til tomorrow… 've kinda had a rough night."

"I think they'll be okay with that."

#house of no regrets #no regrets #tabby #jenna #writing #ethical necromancy #necromancer #paranormal #fantasy #magic #writeblr #story #useless lesbian tabby has A Night

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spencers-renaissance · 3 years

Text

this heavy humanness

Summary: Spencer leaves the oven on overnight, and Derek - whose pent-up emotions get the best of him - loses it, exposing secrets neither of them expected to be spilled, for two very different reasons. They get there in the end.

or; Spencer's suffered far too much abuse in his life and Derek knew about none of it. He shouldn't have found out like this.

Tags: est. rel., past abuse, arguing & making up, hurt/comfort, miscommunication, angst with a happy ending, hurt spencer TW: implied/referenced - child abuse, abuse & csa. trauma response that could be perceived as dissociation. misplaced frustration at neurodivergence. nothing graphic but message me for more info if needed.

Pairing: Derek Morgan x Spencer Reid

Word Count: 3.9k

Masterlist // Read on AO3 // Bad Things Happen Bingo

This fills the "Domestic Violence" square of my Bad Things Happen Bingo. It's a heavy one folks so please heed the tags, but fear not, as always we have a happy ending ahead of us! <3 Title by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Spencer knows it’s ridiculous. Derek will not hurt him: this much he knows for certain. Derek is safe, he is home, he is his person. Derek would die before laying a hand on him.

This objective knowledge does not stop the fear from building in his chest, fizzling through his veins until his whole body is alight with it, simmering under the surface of his cold skin as Derek shouts, his face contorted in anger. Spencer might know that Derek won’t hurt him, but that doesn’t mean he can forget what’s happened in the past when he’s put that same expression on crueller people’s faces.

“How could you be so irresponsible, Spencer?”

He doesn’t know. The sinking feeling of failure, of disappointing someone he loves so much settles deep in his stomach as he watches Derek pace up and down the living room while he stays firmly planted on the sofa, pressed as far into the corner as he can.

He didn’t mean to leave the oven on overnight. Again. It’s just that sometimes he gets so lost in his head, in the studies he reads just before bed that getting ready for bed happens on auto-pilot, and small things like turning the oven off slip through the cracks. Derek’s never got this angry over it before, but that’s probably because he’s never said “yes” when Derek’s sleepily asked him if he remembered to turn it off, not when he actually didn’t.

He answered on auto-pilot. He didn’t mean to lie, but that doesn’t seem to matter that much to Derek as he wears down the living room carpet with his pacing, visibly seething. He tracks him with his eyes. He can’t afford to not see the blow coming.

The blow isn’t coming, he tries to tell himself. It’s not all that convincing when Derek stops mid-pace, turning to look at him dead in the eye.

“We could’ve died, Spencer! Does that mean nothing to you?”

Spencer doesn’t reply. He wants to, he really does, but the words are stuck in his throat, choked by fear and confusion and emotion and regret, God why didn’t I turn off the oven, I should’ve been better, it’s all my fault—

“Do you seriously not have anything to say?”

Spencer stares. He has so much to say. All of it is trapped in his throat, tangled in a mess of please don’t leave me and please god don’t hit me.

“You know, I can’t deal with this right now,” Derek mutters, throwing his hands up in the air, “this is unbelievable.” Spencer watches as he shrugs a coat over his shoulders, pulls on his shoes, pauses only to grab his wallet and keys, and walks out the door without looking back.

The door slams behind him and Spencer jumps at the loud noise, jolting out of his fear-ridden stupor, wincing as he’s forced out of his head and thrust back into reality. It’s only ten past ten in the morning; a nice, sunny Saturday in late Spring, and maybe in a different universe, Spencer and Derek are packing a wicker basket with a picnic, heading off to their favourite park to feed each other strawberries and enjoy jam-filled sandwiches.

In this universe, though, Spencer drags his heavy bones to the bathroom, and peels off his clothes. He feels weighed down, tied to some point of gravity far below his feet as he avoids the mirror at all costs and lets his pajamas lay where they fall instead of gathering them into a ball and throwing them into the hamper like he usually does. He turns the water on and steps under the spray, allowing himself to revel in the warm rivulets of water caressing his cold skin.

Shampoo bottles stand untouched in the caddy to his left. He’s not there to get clean, he’s there to forget and to think all at the same time. Slowly, he sinks to the floor, leaning against the wall as the water cascades down his front, but not before he turns the heat up. It’s a small comfort: the water just on the right side of too hot running down his face and his torso and his legs, pooling at his feet momentarily before sliding down the drain, never to be seen by him again.

Today shouldn’t have started like this, and it’s a hard pill to swallow that if he hadn’t left the oven on, it wouldn’t have. Derek would have smiled when Spencer stepped into the kitchen, pulled him into his arms and kissed him gently before making them pancakes while Spencer sat on the counter-top and told him everything running through his head. Derek would listen, enthralled, whether to the sound of Spencer’s voice or the words he’s saying, and he wouldn’t shut him up, not even when they sat down to eat.

They’d finally get ready for the day late in the morning, they’d decide what they would do that day, and they’d make a point to steal as many kisses as they could; making up for the affection lost during long cases.

Spencer knows this because it’s happened so many times before. They may have only been dating for just over six months, but they already live together, having fallen hard and fast; Emily teases them for it, calls them her favourite lesbian couple, and they don’t care because they’re in love.

Despite that, though, Spencer still hasn’t told Derek.

There are nights he lies awake pondering how unfair that is. He’s held Derek as he sobbed over memories of Buford, as he spilled every awful detail of the abuse he endured; he’s comforted him after he’d tried and failed to bottom, falling into a flashback every time, no matter how much he wanted to try it.

But Spencer stays silent. He doesn’t tell him about his dad beating him, or his mom getting confused off her meds and smacking him, shoving him, even punching him that one time. He doesn’t tell him about Matthew, his first real boyfriend, trapping him in an abusive relationship that took him months to get the courage to leave. About how when a third person hurt him, he began to wonder whether it really was his fault. Whether that was the only kind of love Spencer Reid deserved.

He stays silent now, staring at the shower wall. The fear has left him now the threat has too, and a cold type of numbness replaces it, and even once the water runs cold, he doesn’t leave. He traces the same four tiles with his eyes, drawing the same pattern with his gaze over and over again as his thoughts turn to an endless cycle of he’ll leave me, he’ll stay, he’ll hit me, he won’t, until he’s not really sure what he believes.

Derek is a good man, but Spencer knows how he can be. He messes up, he forgets things, he doesn’t read situations right, he doesn’t behave the way people think he should, he doesn’t think like a neuro-typical person does. And a good man can only put up with that for so long.

The proof is in the pudding, after all. Derek has always been understanding of things like this in the past. He’s given him a hug and told him not to worry about it, that mistakes happen, and no one can be expected to remember small things like this all the time. But this morning, he was furious. Spencer’s not sure he’s ever seen him so angry in all his years of knowing him, and it was directed at him. All because of an oven left on.

Eventually, a sound from the upstairs apartment drags him from his head again, and he’s suddenly aware of the cold water, of the way his body is trembling and his fingers are pruning. He pulls himself out of the shower, turning the water off, but he stands in the middle of the bathroom, aimlessly, for a long time. By the time he finally has the sense to wrap a towel around his body, he’s basically dripped dry. His hair is soaking wet and the dripping water is freezing, but he doesn’t have the energy to find a towel for his head, too, so he leaves it.

He walks towards the bedroom and climbs into bed, pulling the fluffy duvet over his damp skin and laying his wet hair on the pillow. It feels awful, being wet and damp under the dry bedding, but he doesn’t have the energy to move, so he stays there, towel still wrapped around his legs, hair still soaking the pillow, and he stares at the wall.

He doesn’t know what time it is, and he doesn’t know when Derek will come back home. If he ever will.

⭐️

Derek slams the door behind him as he storms out of the apartment, rage consuming his every move, his every thought. The force of it rattles the door frame, echoing down the empty corridor, but he can’t find it in him to care as he marches towards the elevator. The buttons are pressed with perhaps a little more aggression than socially acceptable, but the woman already on board takes one look at his face and has the sense to stay quiet.

He gets in his car and steps on the gas, the squeal of his tyres against the floor of the garage as he speeds out satisfying him more than it probably should. His jaw is locked and tight as he drives through the streets of DC, his thoughts going a million miles an hour, quieted only when he turns the radio up loud, a blasting soundtrack to his ferocious getaway.

Adrenaline pumps through his veins as he speeds down the highway, heading out of the city towards Baltimore. He doesn’t have a destination in mind: he’s just driving straight. Straight away from the apartment. Away from Spencer.

It’s after more than an hour of driving that his jaw finally loosens and the anger that had simmered in his blood so fiercely fades into reluctant rationality. He’s somewhere in the middle of Baltimore, and the traffic — the tangled road system he actually has to focus on — drags him from the absent headspace the highway had allowed him to slip into.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and turns off the road he’s on, onto a quieter one. As soon as he’s able to pull over, he does, and he hits the steering wheel angrily. “Fuck!” He leans forward, pulling off his sunglasses and burying his head in his hands. It’s not the same kind of anger he’d felt earlier, no. This time it’s directed purely at himself, fuelled by dismal regret.

Before he can stop it, his brain replays the fight with Spencer over and over, the wall he’d put up to block it out crumbling down as images of his boyfriend flood his mind. He hadn’t registered it in the moment, but looking back, God. There was something on Spencer’s face, something so broken, so scared and he feels nauseous at the realisation that he put that there.

Over something as fucking stupid as an oven.

Truthfully, he wasn’t really angry at Spencer. Waking up to see the oven left on again, even after Spencer promised he’d turned it off, was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

He’d fought with both his mom and Penelope yesterday, and he went to bed feeling like an utter failure, made even worse when Spencer had declined to join him, deciding instead to keep reading the series of papers he’d started earlier that evening. He woke up in a foul mood, and not even the sight of his peacefully sleeping boyfriend could make him feel better.

It’s his own fault. He should have communicated with Spencer: he should’ve told him about letting his mom down and saying the worst thing he possibly could have in his conversation with Penelope, but he didn’t. He silently stewed, and felt irrationally angry that Spencer wasn’t reading his mind. He knows for an absolute fact that if he’d asked Spencer to join him in bed last night, he would’ve dropped his studies immediately, and cuddled him until he felt better.

But he didn’t. And then he’d screamed at Spencer, in a way he never has before, over something he simply forgot to do. Derek swore to himself that he would never shout at or put Spencer down for his neurodivergent traits. Not in the way he’s seen so many people — regrettably, far too many of them on their own team — do before.

He’s always been understanding in the past, kissed Spencer’s hair and promised that it wasn’t a big deal, and he has always meant it. Because as dramatic as he’d been this morning, leaving the oven on wasn’t really the end of the world. He remembers ranting about the electricity bill, about how they were going to afford the house they were going to buy if he kept this up, about lying to him — even though he knew that was clearly an auto-pilot thing — about how dangerous it was. It’s a fan oven. They were never really in any danger.

What a god-awful way to let off the steam he’d built up and chosen not to let go.

As if he’s not already feeling shitty enough, though, his mind won’t stop circling back to the fear on Spencer’s face. The way he shouted back, but instead crammed himself into the corner of the sofa, never taking his eyes off him as he paced angrily back and forth.

He feels sick.

He digs his phone from the pocket in his sweatpants. He’s still in the clothes he sleepily pulled on in the dark this morning, and he hadn’t thought to bring his phone out with him, but luckily he’d picked it up off the kitchen counter that morning.

He clicks on Spencer’s name, listens to it ringing out as he desperately begs him to pick up. “Come on, baby, please,” he whispers, ignoring the tears burning behind his eyes. “Pick up, please.” He tries three more times before throwing it angrily on the seat next to him, allowing one more second of feeling the blind panic and the fury at himself before forcing himself to calm down.

Reaching over to his phone with one hand to turn the ringer up, he turns the ignition on and pulls back onto the road, heading back towards DC.

The traffic infuriates him, cursing as it takes thirty minutes to get back on the highway, but finally he’s back on the open road. It takes everything in him not to speed past the other cars, knowing that getting pulled over would only slow him down in the long run. He doesn’t turn the radio on. He just replays the fight again and again, each time remembering something new: something he said or something Spencer did.

He doesn’t wipe the tears away as they fall, lets them slide uncomfortably down his neck, under his collar, lets them drip into his lap, lets his nose run. It’s the only punishment he can afford himself right now.

Finally, finally, he pulls into their apartment building’s garage, finding their spot and parking roughly, abandoning the car as quickly as possible in favour of sprinting towards the elevator. He curses at the slow moving carriage, but it eventually spits him out on his floor, and he’s walking down the very corridor he stormed down just a few hours prior.

He pushes open the door to their apartment, closing it behind him softly. Suddenly, the nausea swimming in his gut isn’t just borne from regret, now fuelled by nerves and dreaded anticipation.

“Spence?” he calls softly.

He doesn’t know what to expect: he doesn’t know whether Spencer will be sad or angry, whether he’ll be screaming or crying. The kitchen and living room are empty, and the bathroom door is wide open, so he ventures into their bedroom.

Whatever he was expecting, it isn’t this.

Spencer’s tucked up in bed, duvet pulled up to his neck, facing away from the door. He doesn’t move so Derek thinks he might be sleeping, but when he circles the bed to check, he finds his eyes wide open, staring vacantly at a fixed point on the wall. They don’t flicker or blink or move when he steps into his field of vision, and Derek’s heart sinks, panic beginning to grip his chest.

“Spencer? Baby?”

When he still doesn’t move, Derek crawls onto the bed, and the movement or the sound or something must finally catch his attention, because all of a sudden his eyes are widening — in shock, surprise, fear, Derek doesn’t know — and he’s shifting under the covers.

“You’re back,” he says, and it’s so uneasy that Derek wants to cry.

“Yeah, baby, I’m back,” he says gently, “and I’m so sorry about earlier, I—”

He cuts himself off, because when he reaches to tangle his fingers in Spencer’s damp hair, he flinches. His hand freezes, but his stomach twists, because this is the confirmation he was both expecting and dreading. This is the confirmation of everything he prayed he had wrong, everything he wished he’d misinterpreted the whole drive home.

“Spence,” he whispers brokenly, withdrawing his hand, “I would never— never do… I’d never hurt you, God, I—”

A choked sob cuts him off this time, and another follows when he sees a tear sliding down Spencer’s face. A previously blank, emotionless canvas, his face is now full of sadness, tinged with the fear and guilt Derek hates himself for even suggesting was warranted in the first place.

“Derek,” he says softly, and his voice is so mangled with emotions he couldn’t even begin to decipher, it breaks his heart a little. He doesn’t say anything more though, eyes sliding shut instead as tears continue to stream down his face.

“What do you need, baby?” he asks, because it’s the only thing he can think to say. “Anything, I— anything you need, you can have, Spence, I’d give you the world, you know that.”

Spencer’s quiet for a long time, and Derek sits there on the bed anxiously awaiting a response while trying to summon all the patience he doesn’t have as he stares at Spencer’s crying face.

“A hug,” he decides eventually, and Derek almost collapses in relief because, God, he can do that.

He crosses the small space between them, and carefully folds Spencer into a hug, sighing in relief as he melts into Derek’s side, placing his head on his chest and cuddling into him. Their legs tangle together and Derek holds him as gently and as closely as he can, carding his fingers through Spencer’s damp curls while his other hand rests on his waist, his thumb caressing the bare skin there.

He’s still in his towel, he thinks sadly. He didn’t have the energy to properly dry himself before crawling into bed. As if Derek could possibly feel shittier.

They lay like that quietly for a while before Spencer finally speaks. Derek wishes he hadn’t. The words “I’m sorry”, uttered so brokenly, so miserably, have no business leaving Spencer’s mouth.

“Baby, you have nothing to apologise for,” he says fiercely. “This is all on me. I’m sorry. Sorrier than I’ve ever been, Spencer, because this is completely my fault. I wasn’t actually angry at you, that’s the first thing you need to know, and I know that makes what I did so shitty, because you hadn’t even done anything wrong, but I was so pent up and frustrated with myself and I didn’t communicate that with you and— fuck, I’m doing such a bad job of explaining, I just. I need you to know, Spencer, that I’m not angry, okay? And I’m so sorry for losing it like I did, that never should have happened.”

He pauses and takes a breath in, burying his face in Spencer’s hair as he holds him even tighter, trying to keep his grip as gentle as possible.

“I never told you,” Spencer whispers after a couple beats pass.

Derek’s heart seizes tightly and he swallows. Prepares himself. “Never told me what, sweetheart?”

“My dad, he… he wasn’t a good man and he… you know, he hurt me a lot. And then my mom, when he left and she stopped taking her meds completely, she’d get so confused,” Spencer admits, voice so quiet as he murmurs into Derek’s chest that he has to strain to hear him. “She didn’t mean to, but she’d… And then my last boyfriend, he—”

He cuts himself off as a heaving sob that seems to come out of nowhere strangles his words and it’s all Derek can do to hold him tightly as Spencer cries, whispering every reassurance he can think of through his own tears. It shouldn’t be like this, he thinks. I shouldn’t know this just because of an argument we had; just because I lost control. Spencer should’ve been able to tell me on his own terms, in his own time.

He tries to cry as silently as possible, but it’s not easy when the grief of knowing the pain Spencer’s suffered in his life is weighing heavy on his chest, and the acidic taste of guilt abounds.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into Spencer’s hair. “I’m so sorry, baby.” He’s sorry for so many things he’s not sure he could list them all out, neatly and coherently, if he tried.

Spencer fists his hands in the soft cotton of Derek’s t-shirt. “I’m sorry I never told you.”

Derek balks at the guilt in his tone, as if he actually believes he has anything to apologise for. “Baby, you could’ve waited until we were old and grey to tell me and I wouldn’t be mad, okay? Trauma like this… it comes out in it’s own way in it’s own time. I’m not sure how or when I would’ve told you about Buford if everyone hadn’t found out the way they did. And if I’d waited to tell you, you wouldn’t be mad at me, would you?”

Spencer shakes his head.

“I’m so sorry that I triggered you the way I did, Spencer,” Derek says seriously, gently twirling a loose curl around his fingers. “It was inexcusable, and it was a problem of my own making. I know you didn’t mean to leave the oven on and I know you were operating on auto-pilot when you told me you turned it off last night, and nothing I said was true. I was mad about stuff that happened yesterday and I failed to communicate that. It’s all on me. Nothing about this is your fault, you hear me?”

“Really?”

The way Spencer cranes his neck to look up at him, the trusting innocence in his eyes both breaking and warming Derek’s heart. “Really.”

“I want to tell you, Der, it’s just—” He sighs. “I’ve never talked about it with anyone, and it’s hard. I don’t… I don’t know where to start.”

“We have all the time in the world for you to tell me, baby. You can tell me everything all at once, or drop tiny pieces of information when you feel like it, or never tell me anything else ever again, and any of that is perfectly okay. I just need you to know that what happened this morning will never happen again, okay? I promise you.”

Spencer shifts, moving from his position curled around Derek to prop himself up with one arm, facing his boyfriend properly. “Thank you,” he says earnestly, before leaning down to kiss him. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, baby. More than anything.” He kisses him again before moving the duvet and making to get up. “Now, how about I order us some pizza for lunch and we spend the afternoon in bed. You can read or we can watch some documentaries or a movie, whatever you want.”

A small smile crosses Spencer’s face, and nothing’s ever felt more like a win.

“I think that sounds like a plan.”

taglist: @criminalmindsvibez @moreidtrash @suburban--gothic @strippersenseii @takeyourleap-of-faith @negativefouriq @makaylajadewrites @iamrenstark @livrere-blue @hotchseyebrows @reidology @i-like-buttons @spencerspecifics @bau-gremlin @hotchedyke @tobias-hankel @goobzoop @marsjareau @garcias-bitch @oliverbrnch @enbyspencer @im-autistic @thataveragenerd @anxious-enby

#my writing #moreid #derek morgan #spencer reid #derek morgan/spencer reid #spencer reid/derek morgan #criminal minds #derek morgan x spencer reid #spencer reid x derek morgan #cm #criminal minds fic #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fanfic #moreid fic #moreid angst #tw domestic violence #tw abuse #tw csa mention #moreid fluff

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ceaderblocks · 4 years

Text

Like Real People Do

A collab with @mine-sara-sp ! She drew the amazing art for this fic ♡

Iskall was in the middle of working on Sahara with Mumbo when he realized a very important, completely out-of-the-blue fact.

Iskall had been hanging around Mumbo for years before realizing they had never done a redstone grind together. Sure, they had gone End Busting and raided the Nether together, but they had never once strip mined for redstone.

“What a waste!” Iskall said out loud, slamming a shulker box down on the ground with much more force then required.

“What’s a waste?” Mumbo startled, looking at Iskall after his sudden outburst.

“You are!” Iskall gestured to Mumbo with both arms. The redstoner looked offended, and then a little hurt.

“Well, I think my skills are valuable and contribute greatly-“

“No, no, no no no,” Iskall cut him off. “You’re a magnet to redstone. You always seem to mine a bazillion shulker boxes-“

“It’s easy to find!”

“-and it’s a waste I haven’t gone mining with you. If we go together, you’ll do your weird redstone-attraction thing, and I’ll be set for the season! Plus, I need more for Sahara anyways.”

“... Do we need to go right now?”

“Yes,” Iskall said cheerfully, placing his hands on his hips. “I accidentally broke the last repeater I had when I slammed that shulker box down.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mumbo and Iskall found themselves underground in a long, hollow strip mine.

“Alright,” Iskall rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get mining! I’ll take the left side, you take the right.”

“What?” Mumbo asked, scrunching his nose in confusion. “Why?”

Iskall stared at Mumbo for a moment.

“So we can spread out and quicken out chances of finding redstone?” Iskall said, suddenly uncertain of his plan.

“Oh, well there’s a vein three blocks down and to the right,” Mumbo said, pointing in the general area he had just stated.

“Dude, what.”

“Can’t you feel it?” Mumbo asked.

“No! Oh my god, Mumbo,” Iskall squished his friend’s face between his hands. “How much redstone have you inhaled to get this superpower?”

“Well- I mean- well, you know,” Mumbo stuttered, gesturing wildly.

“Can you do this for other blocks?” Iskall asked, Mumbo’s face still in his hands.

Mumbo shook his head. “Just redstone.”

“That’s insane!” Iskall said with a laugh, dropping his hands. “You might want to get Xisuma to check that out, it doesn’t seem right.”

“Oh,” Mumbo said, his face falling. It was news to him that other hermits couldn’t detect redstone. Iskall said it was wrong, but Mumbo, from his first memory, could always sense redstone.

“It’s alright dude,” Iskall said, and threw an arm around Mumbo’s shoulder. “I don’t think it's an immediate health concern. Plus, we still have redstone to get!”

Iskall patted Mumbo’s chest with his free hand, spun away from him and pulled out his pickaxe in one smooth motion.

“Let’s get mining!”

Mumbo agreed nervously and directed Iskall where the nearest vein of redstone was.

That night, covered in redstone, Mumbo sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his red shulker box. It hummed with power, and Mumbo could see the faint outline of the redstone dust wrapped in a bag. He wondered why no one else could see it too.

——

Grian stood in front of Mumbo’s witch farm, humming to himself. He needed some goldstone (and gunpowder), and decided to borrow some while Mumbo was AFK. The problem was Mumbo was AFK inside the witch farm, which threw a very large wrench in Grian’s plan.

“I can sneak around while he’s AFK! It’ll be fiiine.” Grian said to himself. “It’s not like he’s awake.”

With his pep-talk out of the way, Grian opened the door to the farm. He immediately gave a small scream as he came face-to-face with Mumbo, staring directly at him.

“Oh!” Grian gave a nervous laugh. “Hey Mumbo! I was just coming to borrow some glowstone!”

Mumbo didn’t respond. In fact, he didn’t react at all. Grian frowned.

“Uh, hello? Mumbo?” The builder waved his hand in front of Mumbo’s face. The redstoner stared on, unblinking.

“Oh! You’re AFK? Who AFK’s with their eyes open?” Grian asked. Leaning forwards, he frowned.

“Don’t your eyes get dry?” Grian asked. “You really are AFK. I can basically see the loading screen in your brain.”

Grian scoffed, and stood back. Then he frowned, and leaned forwards. Now that he was looking, there was something in Mumbo’s eyes. It didn’t seem like a reflection, either. As Grian looked closer, he could see three circles ellipsing themselves, moving constantly to create a sphere shape.

“Huh, it kinda looks like a screensaver,” Grian said, tilting his head and leaning in closer to admire Mumbo’s eyes.

“Kinda like NPC rebooting...” Grian muttered. He was much too close, their noses almost touching when Mumbo suddenly blinked, the sphere shrinking and being replaced with a pupil. Grian shrieked and jumped back, but Mumbo didn’t respond for a moment, robotically blinking again before giving his head a small shake, emotion returning to his face.

“Grian!” He said. “What’re you doing- hey, are you okay? You look kind of pale.”

“Oh! I, uh,” Grian waved his hands around, trying to come up with an excuse why he had been nose-to-nose with Mumbo. “I was, uh, stealing glowstone?”

“Oh, you just had to ask.” Mumbo said, unfazed.

“Wait, do you not…” Grian paused. Mumbo had a terrible poker face, and would tease Grian mercilessly about this interaction. But he wasn’t. It was almost like he wasn’t aware it had happened, which was impossible.

NPC sometimes takes a few moments to reboot and never remembers the first 5 seconds of waking up. A rogue thought in Grian’s head provided.

But NPC was a machine, and Mumbo was not, and Grian was a little thrown off by the whole thing.

“Gri?” Mumbo asked, looking concerned.

“You know what? I just remembered I had some at home. Bye!” Grian said hurriedly, snatching rockets from his inventory and flying off.

“What in the world was that?” Grian asked himself, a large frown on his face and worry in his mind. “People don’t need to reboot.”

——

The more Grian thought about his interaction, the more concerned he became. He knew how robots acted, and Mumbo was not a robot. Uncapping his marker, Grian set to work writing everything down on his large whiteboard.

Robotic Traits. He wrote, underlining the title.

Robotic Movements

Rebooting when AFK or offline

Monotone or simple emotions

Overly polite

Grian paused, and added a smaller bullet point under the last.

(except when trying to kill me or take over the server)

He started on his next list, switching to a red marker and drawing an arrow from each robotic point to an explanation of why Mumbo Jumbo couldn’t possibly be a robot.

Mumbo Jumbo

Robotic Motions -> He’s just lanky and exhausted most of the time

Rebooting when AFK or offline -> dissociation(?)

Monotone or simple emotions -> mumbo is deadpan

Overly Polite -> ???

(except when trying to kill me or take over the server)

Grian sighed. His answers weren’t very convincing to anyone, let alone his own paranoia. He had been killed and kidnapped by both NPC Grian and Robot Grian in the past, and he couldn’t get Mumbo’s AFK loading icon out of his head. What if Mumbo wasn’t really a robot, but had been replaced by his own copy? What if this mechanical copy of his friend was trying to overtake the server? What had it done with the real Mumbo?

How long had the real Mumbo been gone for?

“Dude,” Iskall said, breaking Grian out of his spiraling thoughts. “What is… this?”

“It’s, uh,” Grian paused, trying to think of an explanation. “Well, I think Mumbo has been kidnapped and replaced by an evil machine counterpart.”

“...What?” Iskall said, letting out a nervous chuckle upon seeing how serious Grian was.

“No! Seriously!” Grian grabbed Iskall’s shoulders. “Listen, I’ve been replaced by robots many times in my past-”

“ You Have!?”

“-And I know what they act like! Seriously, Mumbo is always jerky and uncoordinated, just like Robot Grian. He’s suspiciously polite, almost like manners have been programmed into him! Plus I saw him wake up from AFK just a few hours ago, Iskall, it wasn’t natural. He rebooted.”

Iskall stared at him for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

“Well,” He finally settled on saying, gently removing Grian’s hands from his shoulders. “That certainly is a theory.”

“You don’t believe me?” Grian cried, wrapping his arms around his torso, clearly distressed.

“Woah, woah,” Iskall said, “It’s not that I don’t believe you! It would explain Mumbo’s weird redstone mining.”

“His what?”

“He can, like, see it through blocks. It was so strange. He could also feel it when it was deeper,” Iskall said, deep in thought. “It was very useful when we were mining it, but it was very odd.”

“Oh my god,” Grian muttered, and sat down on a nearby shulker box. “He’s a machine. Mumbo’s been replaced.”

“Oh Grian,” Iskall placed a comforting hand on Grian’s back. “Let’s not jump ahead, okay? Why don’t we get more information first?”

Grian brought his head from his hands and nodded in silent agreement. He just prayed that Mumbo wasn’t suffering like he had.

----

Embarrassingly enough, it took Mumbo almost a week to notice Grian’s silence and avoidance of him. No more Sahara meetings were called, and Grian often said the bare minimum to him. Uncomfortable, Mumbo brought it up to Iskall once while they worked on Sahara together.

“Hey Iskall?”

“Hmm?” his friend responded, chest deep in a shulker box.

“Is… Is Grian mad at me?”

Iskall’s head hit the top of the box, and he let out a short curse. “Why would you think that?”

“I feel like he’s been avoiding me. Since he swung by my witch farm last week, actually.” Mumbo said, frowning. If he said something that made Grian angry or uncomfortable, he wanted to apologize for it.

“Nah,” Iskall said with a lackluster shrug. If Mumbo had been paying attention he would’ve seen the sweat on Iskall’s brow. “I think he’s just busy.”

“Oh,” Mumbo said.

“Speaking of busy,” Iskall stood. “I’ve got to go grab more redstone. I’m out. See you in a bit!”

“Okay,” Mumbo said, his friend flying off with a wave.

Biting his lip, Mumbo noticed Iskall left his Redstone shulker box. They had just gone redstone mining a week ago, had Iskall run out that quickly? Mumbo opened the shulker box (not that he needed to) but he hoped the red outline he could see around it would be wrong for once.

He inhaled sharply.

It was full.

Sighing, Mumbo closed it. He decided that instead of overthinking why his friends were suddenly ignoring him and lying to him, he’d work on redstone instead.

Redstone, at least, was easily fixable.

-----

Cleo stood in front of Sahara, her face scrunched in an unpleasant emotion. Something in the shopping district stunk, and she followed her nose to find out what. It had led her to the redstone part of Sahara, overwhelming her senses.

It wasn’t a stench that could be smelt by normal hermits. She knew it well, it was her own. It was the stench of magic overworking itself to keep something alive.

Whatever this magic was keeping alive, it was working very, very hard.

“Hello?” She called out. “Wow, you guys need an air freshener in this place- oh! Mumbo!”

“Hello, Cleo!” Mumbo said cheerfully.

Cleo smiled, watching the redstone-covered hermit approach. Then she frowned.

“Mumbo, you smell dead.” Cleo said. “Well, not dead. You smell... un-alive.”

“I- wow. I don’t know what to say.” Mumbo said with an awkward laugh.

Cleo leaned closer, taking an intense sniff. Mumbo leaned backwards, a little uncomfortable.

“Yeah. It’s you.” Cleo confirmed. “What’re you working on?”

“Oh, uh... redstone?” Mumbo said, gesturing to himself, very confused with the whole scenario. His usually neat suit was covered in redstone, the red dust already settled in his hair.

“Are Grian and Iskall here?” Cleo asked. Mumbo made a face at that.

“Uh, no, actually. I haven’t seen them in a while.”

“How long is a while?” Cleo asked, pushing past Mumbo and walking into the redstone circuitry.

“Oh, uh, maybe two weeks?” Mumbo said, frowning and fiddling with a ring on his finger.

“Huh,” Cleo said. “It’s because you need a shower.”

“Excuse me?” Mumbo said.

“Seriously, you smell like redstone and overheating code.”

“I showered this morning, thank you!” Mumbo said, a little angry.

“Then why,” Cleo turned and poked Mumbo in the chest, a small amount of redstone poofing off his suit. “Do you smell like an overheating machine?”

“I don’t-“ Mumbo stopped talking when Cleo took another long sniff.

“Mumbo, are you human?” She asked suddenly.

“What-“ Mumbo was furious. “Yes! Of course I am! God Cleo, what is wrong with you?”

Mumbo grabbed rockets from his inventory with much more aggression then they probably deserved. He lit one and flew off before Cleo could get another word in, and the Zombie watched him go, unbothered by his words.

“I guess I should see X,” Cleo muttered to herself, the scent lightening as Mumbo flew away.

——

NPC Grian usually kept to himself. He had a small plot of land that he had built outside the Hermit’s main map, not to be undiscovered, but to be peaceful. Hermits swinging by to say hello was not uncommon, and Grian came by every week or so to catch him up with whatever chaos had happened.

NPC was not surprised to hear a knock at his front door on a stormy, Thursday night. Grian often stayed when it stormed. He was a little surprised to see a soaked Mumbo standing at his door instead.

“Hello, Mumbo Jumbo.”

“Hey NPC.” Mumbo said, shivering slightly in the rain. “Can I stay here tonight?”

“Of course,” NPC said, stepping to the side and letting the redstoner in. As Mumbo passed, a line of stats popped into NPC’s view, as it did for all hermits.

Name: Mumbo Jumbo

Species: Machine

Level: 54

Health: 20/20

Staus: Online

Role: Player

“Thanks. Sorry for invading, I needed somewhere without any Hermits.” Mumbo apologized.

“I understand,” NPC said, handing Mumbo a blanket and a towel. Mumbo smiled appreciatively, taking the towel and scrunching his hair dry. The dark, normally neat locks fell around his face, highlighting how pale Mumbo actually was.

“Sometimes humans get a little overwhelming,” NPC smiled, and Mumbo paused, a confused look coming over his face. NPC waited for his response.

“Uh, yeah.” Mumbo finally settled on saying, removing his suit jacket. “I guess we can.”

We? NPC mentally filed away the way Mumbo had used that language.

“Would you like some tea?” NPC offered instead, guiding Mumbo to the couch.

“Oh, yes please.” Mumbo said, all but collapsing into the cushions. The large fireplace in front of him was flickering, the fire strong but not overpowering.

NPC didn’t say anything while he made two cups of camomile tea, letting the clinking of cups and the whisper of the fire fill the air. Mumbo seemed much more relaxed by the time NPC came in, wrapped in blankets and eyes half-lidded.

“Your tea,” NPC said, offering the mug. Mumbo reached to grab it. “Careful not to spill it, you’ll fry yourself.”

Mumbo paused, retracting his hands. “Fry?”

“Your circuits,” NPC said, as if it was common knowledge, and he shoved the mug into Mumbo’s hands.

“I don’t have circuits?” Mumbo said, thoroughly confused. “You sound like Cleo. She said I smelt like an overheating machine.”

NPC hummed at that, realizing a few things at once.

One: Mumbo has been confronted by Zombie Cleo about his origin, and most likely ran away from that conversation if the knock at my door meant anything.

Two: Mumbo’s friends are starting to realize he might not be human.

Three: Mumbo does not realize that he is not human.

Four: Mumbo Jumbo must be malfunctioning if he is unaware that he is a machine.

A reset should fix that problem.

“Mumbo,” NPC said and sat next to him. If Mumbo thought he was human, NPC would have to treat him like that. “What made Zombie Cleo think that?”

Mumbo scoffed. “She said that I smelt ‘un-alive’ and like a ‘machine’. And redstone! That one was probably true though. It’s just like Grian the other day! He came over to get glowstone while I was AFK, and when I woke up he was a few feet away and super flushed. He said something about rebooting, and then flew off before grabbing glowstone!”

NPC took the mug from Mumbo’s hands as the redstoner got more animated when speaking.

“Oh! And then Iskall! We went redstone mining and he said he couldn’t see the redstone under the blocks, but he must be able too, because he always has lots of redstone too! He acted the whole trip like he didn’t know where it was, which, frankly, it just rude. Now Grian and Iskall have been ignoring me!”

Mumbo huffed and sat back. NPC handed him his mug again, and Mumbo took a very long sip.

“Thank you, NPC.” Mumbo finally said after a minute. “For listening. And also the tea.”

“Of course,” NPC said with a gentle smile. “Can I suggest a solution?”

“You have one?” Mumbo said, thoroughly confused.

“Of course. You just need a reset.”

“Not you too! Now you’re talking to me with weird machine terms that I know you don’t use those with Grian!”

NPC frowned. It was worse than he thought.

“That is because Grian is not a machine.”

Mumbo stared at him a moment, before placing his mug down and standing abruptly.

“Thank you, NPC. I have to go.” Mumbo headed towards the door when a strong grip caught his wrist. NPC tightened it as Mumbo struggled against it.

“Mumbo, when you get to respawn, don’t restart right away.”

“NPC, let me go!”

“Listen to me,” NPC said. “Don’t respawn right away. Just wait until you feel ready.”

“I don’t control respawn!” Mumbo said, his voice rising in fear. He desperately tried to break NPC’s grip, but his exterior was not made of metal as the builder’s was.

“Good luck, Mumbo Jumbo.” NPC said, and summoned a sword into his hand.

“NPC, no-!”

< MumboJumbo was slain by NPC_Grian >

——

Mumbo reached the void and was filled with panic. Immediately he went to hit the large, looming ‘Respawn’ button out of muscle memory. Right as his fingers brushed the lettering, he stopped.

He stayed still and waited as if he expected some invisible force to push his hand on the button, but nothing happened.

He always thought he had to respawn immediately, but here he was, hand hovering over the option as time ticked on.

The other hermits just woke up in their beds, he was sure of that. He moved his hand from the looming button, and took a deep breath.

Something else to add to the list of odd things about himself.

NPC said he could wait until he felt better, right? Besides, he had a lot to think about. Iskall and Grian were ignoring him anyways, and he didn’t really want to see Cleo or NPC. He could just wait a few minutes and collect his thoughts. Nothing bad could possibly happen, he was already dead.

He’d just stay here for a while. Just enough to collect his thoughts. Then he’d go back.

Just a few minutes.

Just a few...

----

Xisuma had never felt so much anxiety in his life. Having been an Admin for ten or so years, he was pretty adept at solving all problems. Evil counterpart destroying the server? Xisuma could deal with it. Bugs and code problems? He could do it in his sleep.

A server player being killed and not respawning for two days despite there being no bugs and his code being perfect? Xisuma was out of luck.

“God damn it!” He swore, covering his face in his hands and inhaling sharply. The line of code he had run had failed to bring Mumbo back, the redstoner still being stuck in respawn void.

Mumbo had been quite a character in Xisuma’s last few weeks. Iskall had come first, worried about Mumbo’s health when the man could apparently sense redstone through solid blocks. A few days later Grian had swung by, babbling feverishly that Mumbo had been replaced by a robot and was up to nothing good.

Xisuma had brushed both off with a gentle smile and a ‘I’ll look into it, thanks for letting me know’.

He wasn’t able to ignore when Cleo walked through his door three days ago, claiming Mumbo smelt un-alive. This very much caught Xisuma’s attention, and he sat her down to get her to explain everything.

Only an hour later the death message had come across his screen.

< MumboJumbo was slain by NPC_Grian >

Grian whispered to Xisuma: See! Even NPC realized Mumbo was replaced! Or worse, NPC is orchestrating the entire thing. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Xisuma left a concerned Cleo, teleporting immediately to Mumbo’s spawn point, waiting anxiously for the redstoner to reappear.

He waited.

And waited.

Xisuma sent a message to Mumbo.

Waited some more.

And then realized something was very wrong, teleported to his base and started working on Mumbo’s code.

“Okay, another try. Then a break.” Xisuma muttered to himself. He had been awake for far too long, but he needed to figure out what was wrong for Mumbo not to respawn. He couldn’t have the other Hermits panicking if something was wrong with respawn.

A gentle knock at his door brought Xisuma out of his thoughts. Standing and stretching, Xisuma walked over to the door, and opened it to find NPC Grian. He immediately took a step back. Grian’s messages creeping in the back of his mind.

“NPC Grian! It’s... good to see you.” Xisuma smiled, trying to look friendly, forgetting for the most part his helmet didn’t show his mouth. “It’s been a while.”

“Indeed it has, Xisuma Void.” NPC said, as emotionless as always. “May I come in?”

“Oh! Actually it’s not really a good moment,” He muttered closing the door slightly. “There’s just a huge mess, I’ve been-“

“Trying to bring Mumbo Jumbo back from respawn?” NPC interrupted.

“... Yes, actually.” Xisuma said, a little wary.

“There's no point in forcing him back.” NPC leaned in closer and patted Xisuma’s shoulder. “He’ll come back when he wants to.”

“Sorry,” Xisuma asked, confused. “But how do you know this?”

“Because he is like me.” NPC said. “If you need him back sooner, I can go get him.”

Xisuma decided to ignore the first part of NPC’s statement and the suspicions around him. He opened the door and let the robot come in. “Would you go get him? Everyone’s worried.”

“Of course. Set Mumbo Jumbo’s spawn point here-“ NPC put down two beds, and gestured to the bed on the right. “And I will set mine here. Then, kill me.”

Xisuma took a moment to fully digest the plan.

“And then what?”

“Well, then I will talk to Mumbo Jumbo and bring him back.”

“Oh,” Xisuma said, grateful for the apparently easy solution put before him. He was exhausted and decided that NPC was his best shot at this point even if there was the chance it might be a trap or something. If NPC tried to take over the server like Ex did he could deal with that later. He had already tried fixing every line of code of Mumbo’s, and he had nothing to lose.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, and I already set my respawn.” NPC said.

Xisuma nodded, and brought up Mumbo’s code again. He changed the respawn to the nearby bed, and then closed the menu, drawing out a sword.

“Are you ready?” Xisuma asked.

NPC nodded.

< NPC_Grian was slain by Xisumavoid >

Being dead wasn't so bad.

Well, he wasn't really dead right now. Dead in the overworld, maybe, but not dead here, even if it wasn't clear where here was.

Was it respawn void? It didn't really matter.

Strangely, Mumbo felt better and better the more he stayed there, suspended into nothing with the looming respawn button hovering not too far away from him.

It was odd, resting here. Mumbo felt as if he had taken the longest sleep. Compared to how he usually slept, it felt like he had never once truly rested in his life up until that point.

Mumbo felt rejuvenated, his mind sharp like he could go and rebuild all the machines in Sahara from the ground up in a week.

Strange how NPC was right apparently.

Just about respawn. Mumbo reminded himself.

There must be some other explanation for all the weird things going on. Regardless of all the strange things that had happened, he wasn't a machine.

Mumbo would have noticed, it's not like he was born a week ago.

The redstoner felt ready to go back to the server, even if he would have had to talk with Grian and Iskall about why they were avoiding him. Also talk with Cleo… Maybe she was just having a weird zombie flu? It’s the only reason Mumbo could come up with for why she was smelling weird stuff.

It’s okay, it was just a weird couple of weeks! It happens.

Mumbo looked at the button ready to press it. He reached out and - wait.

Didn't he use to have fingers and hands?

He would have blinked but he realized he didn't have any eyes that needed blinking. He didn't have a mouth to speak, ears to hear anything, arms or legs.

He should have been terrified, but strangely enough something very, very deep in his mind felt almost comfortable with this sudden realization.

Which, arguably, was the really terrifying part.

He was reduced to… nothing? No, he was still something. He wasn't sure what. He felt immense but not really, like he'd always been wearing something too tight and only now he could finally stretch out.

His body…

His body didn't fit what he actually was.

What was he?

He was human! Right? Right?!

This void was just messing with his head. It must be--

"Are you ready to come back yet?” A familiar monotone voice spoke.

Xisuma watched the beds with bated breath. A few minutes passed and panic filled his chest, quickly becoming overwhelming.

“Shit,” Xisuma said, pulling up the Admin menu again. Fingers hovering uselessly over the keyboard, Xisuma didn’t even know where to begin. Should he access NPC’s code first? Try and drag him back? But it hadn’t worked on Mumbo, and NPC was not a traditional player.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to enter any code, as NPC and Mumbo respawned on the bed. NPC sat up and gave Xisuma a emotionless thumbs up while Mumbo clutched his chest and rolled to his side, coughing.

“Mumbo!” Xisuma rushed to his side, rubbing his friends back.

“He’s alright,” NPC said. “It takes a moment to adjust back into a body. I go through it too after extended time in respawn. Being a machine forced into a flesh cage is very difficult sometimes.”

“I don’t…” Xisuma said, brain blanking after that information. “Okay, I’m going to ignore that. How do you spend so much time in respawn?”

“Machines are not affected the same way humans are.” NPC said.

“Shut up!” Mumbo wheezed, and pushed Xisuma away, stumbling from the bed. “I’m not a machine! Stop saying I am!”

“But you are.” NPC said, almost sounding confused.

“Okay,” Xisuma said, reaching towards Mumbo. “Regardless if you are, are you okay?”

“Regardless?” Mumbo squeaked, voice rising in anger. “Xisuma, you can’t be siding with them! Everyone has been treating me weird and now he says I'm a machine, and I’m not!”

“Mumbo-”

“No! There’s no proof! Everyone is just imagining things!”

NPC sighed, and brought up Mumbo’s code, displaying it for everyone to see.

Name: Mumbo Jumbo

Species: Machine

Level: 1

Health: 20/20

Staus: Online

Role: Player

“Okay, so, you get very different stats than me. ” Xisuma said. “But that doesn’t matter- It’s okay, Mumbo. Not everyone on the server is human. Hell, I’m barely human myself.”

“No,” Mumbo muttered to himself. “No! It’s not right!”

"Why can't it be that you're not hum-"

"Because I bleed!" Mumbo shouted. "I bleed and I cry and I get headaches and I get sick and all these stupid things that make me human!"

He tried to rub away some tears forming in his eyes as he continued shouting. "I can't just be a machine all of the sudden! It doesn't make any sense. I can’t be!"

There was silence, and for a moment no one knew what to say. The only sound was Mumbo's erratic breathing, muffled slightly by the hands covering his face.

Then NPC stepped over and patted Mumbo on the shoulder, which felt almost mocking.

"Silly! All those things only mean your body is human. Being a machine goes a little bit deeper."

Mumbo’s hands dropped, and the man looked exhausted.

“Mumbo,” Xisuma took a step closer, and Mumbo took a step back, hitting a wall. Uncertainty and confusion flitted across his face. “Please. Mumbo, not being human doesn’t lessen your worth. We still love you.”

There was a long silence, and finally Mumbo leaned against the wall, sliding to the ground and placing his head onto his knees. Xisuma sat beside him, hesitating for only a moment before pulling Mumbo into a side hug.

“I hate this.” Mumbo muttered.

“I know.” Xisuma said.

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.”

“I am human. I have a human body, NPC said so. I’m human.” Mumbo said, sounding unconvincing to even himself.

“It will be okay, Mumbo.” Xisuma said, praying that it would.

Mumbo said nothing, hoping with all his heart that tomorrow, when he woke up, it would be nothing but a feverish dream. That he had worked on redstone a little too hard for a little too long and had fallen into some strange lucid dream. Mumbo felt Xisuma rub his arm lightly, the up and down movements calming.

“It’ll be okay.” He said again.

Mumbo had no choice but to trust him.

#hermitcraft #mumbo jumbo #grian #npc grian #xisumavoid #xisuma #iskall85

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gentrychild · 4 years

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Suspected Traitor Izuku Ideas

Note: Sorry this ended up being super long! I just really love the idea and wanted to put in some ideas of what I think could happen. It was all too long to fit into a couple asks, and I figured you would prefer a submission than 7+ asks in a row. These are also just some fun ideas I was thinking of for the au I thought you might enjoy lol

- - - -

Izuku gets interrogated and at first goes along with the questions. He doesn’t realize why he is there at first, until they ask more and more questions showing they suspect him for something. After the second or third question about his relation to the LOV he pieces it together. They think he’s a villain.

And instead of having a confused smile or nervous laugh, his eyes widen and he whispers “you think I’m the traitor.” It wasn’t hard for him to figure it out, after all he spent so much time analyzing and trying to deduct things quickly from situations where he barely was given any information, and they practically threw the answer in his face. He was probably one of the few students who was fully aware that there was a traitor from looking at the previous attacks.

He starts to shut down after realizing this, and when people start yelling or slamming things out of anger (because no one was actually going to get physical, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the room was off limits) he unconsciously reverts back to his old habits from when he was quirkless.

This can include, but is not limited to:

- A smaller frame to protect vitals and give less room to be hit

- A quite and passive voice to try appeasing their anger

- Distracting himself from the emotional pain by focusing on the physical stuff. Mentally keeping track over where everyone is, what they are doing, and how much of a threat they are to him

- Looking for any and all possible exits, even the ones that would result in him being hurt on his way out, just in case things get worse (and he fears that they may hurt him worse than before. In a world full of quirks, it’s easy for someone worked up to forget how easily they can kill someone, and Izuku probably has experienced more than once a situation that became life or death because a middle schooler was too worked up to process how much damage they were about to do)

- Eyes downcast due to fearing that eye contact would seem like he’s defying them or trying to irritate them in purpose (thanks Bakugou for that one)

- Holding back sudden movements or flinching, when going to the point of possibly hurting himself on purpose to prevent him from acting out.

- Holding his breath every time someone moves, but forcing his body to relax/tense up in case they attack him. When your body tenses up, it can absorb him impact, but can also cause other things like knives or needles to hurt more when they cut/go through the skin. So when there is someone who has a weapon visible (probably a means of intimidation) he quickly figures out which way will hurt less and forces himself to go through with that because of the constant thought of ‘just in case’

- Forcing himself not to cry or break down. That’s what some bullies want, but sometimes it also makes them even more upset. It gives them fuel, and always ends bad for the victim.

The teachers and others accusing him of being the traitor takes these signs as him lying or trying to hide the truth, those who don’t think it’s because he’s lying see the 'experience with interrogations’ aka trauma reactions and think he was trained by the villains to act this way. No one thinks about the fact that some of the reactions are clearly not helpful with interrogations and that the villains would train him to do the opposite (ex: stay calm and keep eye contact. You don’t have anything to hide and looking away makes it seem like you do).

The only two people who know his past refuse to acknowledge or bring it up.

All might doesn’t because he can’t risk the consequences of OFA getting out, but also because he only has a vague idea because of when he was shoeless himself.

Bakugou refuses to acknowledge the signs and the relapsing to his habits from middle school.

No one else realizes the cause, and as a result they accidentally reopen the trauma that Izuku hadn’t healed from. No, he had taken it and stuffed it into a box to avoid acknowledging that he was hurt. So he never talked to anyone about it, and as a result it just festered in his mind. His intrusive thoughts from all the victim-blaming he went through never went away (because let’s be honest, gaslighting and victim-blaming are things he probably went through as a result of the bullying. He couldn’t help being quirkless, but the bullies will latch onto anything and everything they can. And because they wanted to prevent themselves from having anything marked, if they made him think it was his fault then they felt it lowered the chances of them being reported)

During the pause of interrogation when they are having Tsukachi enter and he’s about to come in, he almost send himself into a dissociative/depressive episode because of his thoughts. He forces it back when the doors click open, thinking 'no, it’s just like before. No matter how much it hurts, wait until you’re safe. You’re not safe here, they will use it against you, so you have to wait until you’re alone and safe to finally break down.’

As a result, none of the adults fully realize how broken he is after the trap/interrogation is over. But its only a glimpse that they see, and nothing more. Because Izuku’s learned that weakness = vulnerable = targeted and hurt.

And now that he knows almost all his friends- no, his classmates were involved he knows he can’t break down anywhere near them. He can’t go over and let them know how broken he is or he thinks they’ll turn against him even more.

Someone brings up the 'logical’ aespect of the interrogation and their suspicions before he leaves and Izuku’s thoughts use that and forces it against him. 'It was only logical. Everyone was convinced you were going to hurt them, that you were evil. Of course they had to do it.’ He repeats it like a mantra in his head. 'It’s only logical, they did what they had to, and it’s almost over. You’re almost done, it was just the logical thing to do.’

And why is it this that he repeats this, instead of being angry or upset?

The victim-blaming.

His own intrusive thoughts were fuelled by the victim-blaming, and because it was what hurt the most, it was also what he was most accustomed to.

But when he finally gets back to the dorms, to the 'safety’ of his room, he knows he can’t break down. Not yet. After all, if they went through all that trouble because they thought he was the traitor, who’s to say they didn’t do more? His resurfaced paranoia/anxiety from the trauma makes him search his room for hidden cameras and microphones, desperate for at least one safe-space.

He finds nothing, thank god, but then he keeps pushing back his breakdown in search of exits, ways to avoid the most dangerous people or most likely to turn on him, ways to get by unseen and to avoid any situations that would be like Middle school. He stays up making notes and maps of the school and how to best protect himself because 'You’re already used to this. Shouldn’t have expected anything different. Stupid, idiotic, Deku. You put off finding the saferoutes because you thought it would be better to try playing nice. Look where that got you, now you have to stay up and make up the months of ignoring the inevitable.’

He doesn’t sleep that night, and when it becomes time for class he still hadn’t given himself time to break down. So he returns, but doesn’t pretend to be friends with any of his classmates anymore. He uses the ways he maps, brings out old tactics, just with the hope of making it through the day without being hurt or breaking down.

Lunch comes, but he doesn’t eat. He goes to the roof, finds an elevated area with no cameras and where people are unlikely to see him and sits down. It takes a moment, just a mere second of sitting there alone before he breaks.

He cries and let’s his regret and anger wash over him. All the feelings he had been pushing back finally breaking free and coming loose. He doesn’t eat, he never got the time, and right as he is starting to realize how badly hurt he really is, the bell rings signalling he needed to get to class. So he forces himself up, pushed all his emotions away, and tries to clean himself up in the bathroom.

He ends up in a dissociative state the rest of the way back to class, and when the others ask why he’s acting different or 'weird’, he doesn’t respond. He barely registers anything the rest of the day and when teachers try calling on him, hoping for some kind of reaction, they get nothing. He doesn’t process that he’s being talked to and just sits there dissociating in a desperate attempt of forcing himself not to break down again.

When classes end, the others try talking to him but eventually give up. He slowly realizes after everyone left that he was alone and he picks up his stuff and walks to the dorms on autopilot. He gets to his room and shut the door, and finally let’s himself finish the breakdown from on the roof. This time, though, he finally lets himself cry over everything. The entire past of abuse and neglect from his peers and adult figures in his life (minus his mom), the suicide-baiting, the victim-blaming, the bullying, accusations and mistrust, all of it. And he finally fully, truly breaks.

- - - -

#Ah yes more people who loves to hurt Izuku #Welcome #suspected traitor Izuku AU #submission

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dumb-little-trans-writer · 3 years

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Rust and Black Thorn Trees. Chapter 1.

TW: religious themes, religious abuse, reality alteration, dissociation triggers, abusive parents

Dasha. Her parents chose this name because it implied purity. A gift from God, or Mother Miranda. And they wanted their girl to be devoted only to Mother, as a pure virgin girl. Her days consisted of being a housekeeper, always making sure her family’s house was as clean as possible, for the blessing of Mother. She hated this life. But the one time she spoke up, she was forced to pray to Mother Miranda on hot coals. At eight years old. “Please, Mama it hurts-” she begged her mother, hiccuping as her Mother forced her down on the coal. She screamed, “You will make our situation worse if you keep doing this, Mother is an all-loving being, and you dare to speak ill of her likeness?” her mother cried, fingers in her daughters long, dark brown hair. The child’s hands shook as they were in a prayer position, she sobbed, unable to think straight. However, in this child’s mind, she deserves it. I dared to speak against my creator, i deserve it, she thought. When she was nine, she decided to make offerings herself of flower crowns and rose stems. When her parents came home to their daughter praying at the altar, and a house that was cleaner than when they left it, they gave her love. And validation. This repeated cycle from birth taught Dasha that her only source of affection was from being devoted to a false God. Until she got chosen to come with Mother Miranda, on her tenth birthday. She pointed at the girl, staring in awe at her presence. “I want her.” she said. The girl was nervous. But she felt a pull to get up, almost like she was hypnotized. She turned around, and caught a glimpse of her parents for the last time. They were crying. They were happy. That was the last she saw of them when the blindfold was gently placed on her, making her blind. She felt Miranda’s cold hand touch the middle of the girl’s back, through the white calf-length dress. She walked forward, and felt so cold. It pierced through the skin and confused the girl. She heard the maternal voice of Miranda, “Take the blindfold off, my child.” she gently ordered. “Yes, Mother.” she obediently replied, fumbling with the soft fabric. The girl noticed the sterile smell in the air as she took the blindfold off. She was in a doctor’s room. The lights were uninviting and made her uneasy. Miranda sat on a stool next to what looked like a dentist’s chair, but it had straps. “I have chosen you to bear a gift, but for me to give it to you,” she paused, gesturing at the chair now wearing doctor’s attire, “you need to sit in that chair for me, can you do that, love?” Miranda asked, lovingly. “Yes, Mother.” she said, sitting in the chair. Miranda started closing the straps. first around her legs, then her torso, and then her upper body. All the girl could think about was how excited she was, A gift? What did I do to deserve a gift from Miranda? She thought. Mother pulled in a tray, with a syringe and a small jar filled with a pitch black liquid. “Mother, I hate to ask this of you, as you know what you’re doing, but what is the gift?” The girl innocently asked. When she didn’t respond, and instead cut the girls dress, revealing her stomach, she thought she had done something wrong now. “Did-Did i do something wrong, Mother?” the girl asked, slightly frantic as Miranda used a cotton ball soaked in some kind of orange liquid, and dabbed it on a specific area. It was freezing, and she started to panic. Thoughts running wild as she filled the syringe with the viscous, black liquid. Miranda paused before injecting the liquid into her abdomen, and put a hand on the child’s cheek. Gently rubbing her cheek with a thumb. She moved a lock of hair out of the girl’s face, exactly like how Mama would do to calm you down. The girl immediately relaxed, her mind going blank, looking into Mother. A small pinch on the girl’s abdomen didn’t faze her. Then the feeling of dread started as Miranda coldly injected what she knew wasn’t a gift, else she was too delusional to realize how sick this was. She finished the injection, and took out a pen and clipboard.

What..?

The girl was confused. She had complied. Why did this hurt so much..? Why was she so weak..? She started hyperventilating. She couldn’t control her body as it started convulsing. The girl’s frail body and mind went unconscious as her eyes and nose started leaking the same viscous black liquid that was injected. Miranda was quickly confused and took a sample. She smiled, for this one had potential. Normally, they don’t go unconscious, and usually the limited mental capacity starts first, along with the slight greying of the skin. She would’ve started to look like a corpse, normally. But it seems the alterations to the Cadou worked. A sample of Miranda’s DNA mixed with the Cadou seemed to change the progression in only female individuals. Miranda wondered how this would affect cross-species organ implantation. She knew that at the least, this would make the passed out girl in front of her infertile. It could eat away at her organs too. She decided to use fresh organs from a female wolf, and implant them into the girl. She only used the reproductive organs and the entirety of the digestive system from the wolf. Everything else was...unethically harvested. It was long, but successful. Dasha woke, confused, and in pain. She was now in a hospital room. It was uninviting and made a poor attempt to look comforting. Miranda walked in, seemingly proud and with her chin high when she realized the child was awake. “Mother, what did you do to me..?” she groggily whined through the throbbing pain throughout her body. “I gave you a gift. The Cadou, mixed with a part of me,” she paused, stepping closer, “you are a part of me.” she said, delusion plaguing her mind. She seemed so excited. The girl was scared. Being scared of God was a horrifying thought for a child. After the child healed, Miranda let her stay in her house. Unsettling. After Dasha settled into her new home, she would be subjected to horrifying psychological torture. The first time Miranda got in Dasha’s head, she created small illusions. She would reach out to touch a vase and it would go through her hands. Small things, to make her rely on Mother for her sense of reality. Eventually it grew to Miranda making her see her parents. Then came the reason for these tests. Miranda was priming the child for this. The child thought she was with her parents again. In the forest, at the place she loved to let her imagination run. She heard multiple growls, they overlapped each other, and she looked around, attempting to find the source. They seemed to be coming from all directions. As she turned to face her parents again, she saw three lycans mauling them. Her Mama’s arm was being torn from it’s socket. The girl felt herself growing taller, hair sprouting rapidly everywhere, and her body changed from that of a human girl, to a tall, lycan-like monstrosity. She became mindless, tearing the flesh from the lycan’s fragile bones, tearing their heads from one of their bodies, the spine with it. She tried to scream, but the only thing that came out of her was a gutteral croaking sound. Once she had used all of her rage, she felt so tired. She felt herself floating, the tall, muscular form she once had dissipating into a black mist, absorbing back into her body. She fell, with no one to catch her. Once she had regained her balance and composure, Mother would come running. The girl leaked the same viscous black liquid from every facial orifice. She started puking this liquid, and these symptoms, along with intense abdominal pain, as well as emotional mood swings, was the cost of this transformation. This cycle persisted for seven years. Until her parents were taken by Lady Dimitrescu. Presumably for feeding, and maidwork. Miranda realized she would never be able to be useful. The conditions for the transformation to occur, as well as the recovery, were unable to be used properly. So, assuming she would be dead in the forest, she told her the truth about the illusions, as well as the truth about her parents being taken, and drained of blood like pigs. And she cast her out into the wilderness at seventeen. God had now abandoned her. At first, she had the drive to attempt to save her parents. But then she realized this was done to her by the same person her parents deified. Made her do all the chores, primed her for being a nun of Mother Miranda. The people who beat her for questioning Mother’s decisions.

The God who abandoned her.

She had suffered for nothing.

A/N: i changed a bit of the canon because i really wanted to stick with my idea, dont worry, there will be spice and karl heisenberg content

#resident evil #resident evil village #karl heisenberg #karl heisenburg x reader #daddy heisenberg #self insert #oc x canon

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gameofdrarry · 3 years

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Wizards Hearts Smut Recs: First Time

Wizards Hearts was a four-month-long Drarry reading fest. Players were given a playing deck of 52 tropes, and were asked to find 52 different fics to read and comment on to fill their decks. To prevent the same few fics from being read, fics were restricted to only being used for the game three times before being considered ineligible for further points. The tropes and submissions list can be found here. Players could opt in to an additional suit of 13 cards, all themed around various popular smut tropes.

Check out the masterlist of fics for this trope below the cut!

📜 Another Heart Whispers Back by slytherco Rated: Explicit Words: 53,693 Tags: Friends to Lovers, Auror Harry Potter, Potioneer Draco Malfoy, Pining Draco Malfoy, Oblivious Harry Potter, Virgin Harry Potter, Unrequited But Not Actually Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Casual Intimacy, Humor, Comedy, Blind Date, First Dates, Bets & Wagers, Meddling, Love Confessions, Idiots in Love, Making Out, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, Rimming, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Post-Coital Cudding, Shower Sex, Tattooed Harry Potter, Magical Tattoos, Taste of Smut 2020 Summary: At twenty-five, Harry Potter is still a virgin and sorely lacking in options to change that state anytime soon. To help him find a plus one for Ron and Hermione’s wedding, and maybe kill two birds with one stone, Harry’s friends set him up on a series of blind dates. The only problem is, there’s something not quite right with each of their candidates. “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” ― Plato In which Harry learns that some things are worth waiting for, that looking and seeing are two very different things, and that his heart’s song has been heard a long time ago. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The Heart's Honest Truth by bixgirl1 & carpemermaid Rated: Explicit Words: 16,020 Tags: Hogwarts Eighth Year, Awkward First Times, Truth Spells, Alternating POV, Magical Accidents, Getting Together, Magical Theory, 2017 Draco's Merry-Making Mini Fest See work for more tags Summary: "Don't you think I would have gone to Pomfrey if I thought she could help me?" "Then what can I do?" "I nee--" Malfoy broke off with a soft grunt and a pained expression. He took a shaky breath and tried again, his voice wobbling. "Will you touch me, Potter?" Draco is cursed to speak in questions. Well...Spelled, thanks to the stupidly improper archival practices of the fourth century. Harry Potter is there to save the day, but Draco isn't going to give in to his help so easily. Fortunately, the method of saving might be more satisfactory than Draco expected this time. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 When All Your Dreams Come True by Drarrelie Rated: Explicit Words: 9448 Tags: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hogwarts Eighth Year, PWP, Porn with Feelings, Threesome - M/M/M, dubcon, Mistaken Identity, Pining, secret crushes, Plot Twist, virgins, Birthday, Draco Malfoy's Birthday, Birthday Presents, POV Draco Malfoy, Birthday Sex, Birthday Smut, Sexual Fantasy, First Time, First Time Bottoming, First Time Topping, Don't copy to another site, Fanart Welcome, Podfic Welcome Summary: Six weeks ago, Draco gave his friend-with-benefits a most unexpected and precious gift for his birthday. It's only fair Blaise should reciprocate if given the chance, right? ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Take a trip into my garden by Andithiel Rated: Explicit Words: 5974 Tags: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Porn with Feelings, Established Relationship, Smut, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, First Time Bottoming, Draco in lingerie, Bisexual Harry Potter, Rimming, Anal Sex, Really there might be too much feeling for it to count as pwp, As usual when I write, Enthusiastic Consent Summary: Harry has only been dating Draco for about two months, but he’s already obsessed with the git. And he knows that today, Draco has something special planned, something that includes him being dressed in skimpy lingerie. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Inside Your Mind by lazywonderland Rated: Explicit Words: 36376 Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Top Harry, Bottom Draco, Harry Potter POV, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Bullying, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, FlirtingVirgin Draco Malfoy, Loss of Virginity, First Time, Anal Sex Anal Fingering, Smut, Angst, Overstimulation, Submissive Draco, Rimming, Multiple Orgasms, Protective Goyle, very very minor d/s elements, revolving mostly around subspace, Dominant Harry, Forced Orgasm, and lavender's alive bc i said so Summary: Goyle's taken it upon himself to act as Malfoy's personal, one-man guard and Harry can't help but feel like it's only making the bullying worse. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 By Your Hands by GiRa Rated: Explicit Words: 7625 Tags: Smut, Fluff and Smut, First Time, Virgin Draco Malfoy, Established Relationship, Bottom Draco Malfoy, Top Harry Potter Summary: After being together for months, Draco wants to try going a step further with Harry. The only problem is that he actually has no idea what he's doing - but thankfully Harry is more than happy to guide him through it. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Sexplanations (Of the Horrible Sort) by bixgirl1 Rated: Explicit Words: 7048 Tags: Hogwarts Eighth Year, Secret Sex, Secret Relationship, Humor, Snark, Confused Relationships, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Dirty Talk, sex injuries, Semi-Public Sex, Embarrassing Situations, Bottom Draco Summary: Harry's willing to put up with a certain amount of injury, as long as he and Malfoy can keep doing... whatever it is they're doing. Maybe. Mostly. Especially if there might be more to it than sex. Based on a tumblr headcanon. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The Gentlewizard Club by Sophie_French Rated: Explicit Words: 28129 Tags: Pining, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Sharing a Bed, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, First Time, Humor, Explicit Sexual Content Summary: Draco wants what Draco wants. And if he has to snuggle up to Harry to get it, well, surely, Draco can handle that. Problem is, not sure Harry can. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 You Set My Soul Alight by parkkate Rated: Explicit Words: 54075 Tags: Post-War, Auror Partners, Case Fic, Enemies to Lovers, Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Pining, Getting Together, Sharing a Bed, Banter, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Loss of Virginity, First Time, Mildly Dubious Consent, Consent Issues, Secrets, Misunderstandings, Miscommunication, Sleep talking, Frottage, Rimming, Face-Sitting, Intergluteal Sex, Anal Sex, Switching, Blow Jobs, Fluff, Angst, references to suicidal thoughts, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, References to Depression, Mental Health Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Arguing, Reconciliation, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: Students are going missing at Hogwarts, but that's not the only mystery Draco is determined to solve. Something’s going on with Potter. He can deny it all he wants. Draco is going to find out what it is. Unfortunately, trying to get to the bottom of it has some unexpected consequences and if Draco isn’t careful, he’s going to jeopardise their mission. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Sincere Gratitude from the (Heart) Hand by _Melodic_ (Sae) Rated: Explicit Words: 1325 Tags: Hand Jobs, Anal Fingering, Anal Play, First Time, POV Harry, Smut, Humor, Shameless Smut, Porn With Plot, Prostate Massage, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Hogwarts Era, Students, Pining, Sexual Tension, Sexual Content, Sexual Inexperience, Virgin Harry, Oblivious Ron, Awesome Hermione Granger, Seduction, Sneaking Around, Classroom Sex Summary: Two weeks later and Malfoy has yet to repay his debt to Harry. Does Harry even want him to? Oh Merlin, yes he does! ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 You Are Safe (I Know) by hephaestiions Rated: Explicit Words: 42568 Tags: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Hand Jobs, Voyeurism, Exile, Racism, Person of Color Harry Potter, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Past Abuse, Minor Character Death, Blood, Azkaban, Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Hyperventilation, Dissociation, H/D Erised 2020 Summary: Draco Malfoy is sentenced to one year of exile following his participation in the Second Wizarding War. Harry Potter tags along. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The Spoiling of Sex From Enthusiastic Ignorance by Cibee (Cibeeeee) Rated: Explicit Words: 6087 Tags: Humor, Fluff, Mutual Piningm Friends to Lovers, Misunderstandings, First Kiss, Making Out, Loss of Virginity, Awkward First Times, Eventual Enthusiastic Fucking, Vulgar Language, Rimming, Blow Jobs, Premature Ejaculation, Post-Hogwarts, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, POV Draco Malfoy, Virgin Draco Malfoy, Flustered Harry Potter, Switch Draco Malfoy, Switch Harry Potter, Thirsty Draco Malfoy, Quidditch Player Harry Potter, Minor Pansy Parkinson/Ginny Weasley, H/D Sex Fair 2020 Summary: Draco is going to lose his virginity, so help him god, and he's going to lose it to one Harry Potter. Why? Because of his big cock, his status as The Top Five Quidditch Players in England, and Witch Weekly's Most-Eligible Bachelor for eight years straight. At least that's what he tells himself. Too bad first times rarely go as one plans, and now Harry is looking miserable and Draco doesn’t understand why. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Lost Boys by Dahlia_Rose_83 Rated: Explicit Words: 32278 Tags: Hogwarts Eighth Year, Party Games, Secret Relationship, Falling In Love, First Time, Smut, Clueless Harry, Insecure Draco, Helpful Luna, Oral Sex, Anal Sex,Top Draco Malfoy, Bottom Harry Potter Summary: On his way to meet Voldemort in the forbidden forest, Harry ran into Draco, who kissed him. Now they're both back at Hogwarts for their eighth year and he doesn't really know how to act towards the blond. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Wings on Fire by CapricornBookworm Rated: Explicit Words: 1938 Tags: Coming Out, Enemies to Lovers, Banter, Clubbing, Dancing, Semi-Public Sex, Kissing, Grinding, Blow Jobs, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Rimming, Bottom Harry Potter, Top Draco Malfoy, Morning After, Virgin Harry Potter, First Time, Wizarding Media, Idiots in Love Summary: Harry was sick of being everyone’s angel, the 'golden boy,' the Chosen One. And if he was going to go out of favor, he was going to go out flaming. ❤️ Read on AO3

#first time #smut #drarry #drarry recs #game of drarry #wizards hearts #wh masterlist

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