#and then she started sneezing but i think she's been sneezing less since ive been making an effort to clean.

[orcelito]

It really is So. Very inconvenient. As a cat owner. To have a cat-based trauma response.

[redbone135]

For the Book Asks!

I; III; IV; VI; VII; IX; XIII; XIV

(Lol I SO did not have to write these on a sticky note first🙊🤣)

Used, borrowed, or new? Honestly, new is my favorite, nice crisp pages and blank clean margins to write all my notes in. But it's less practical - lately I've been doing ARCs and Gifts since it fits with my budget and the kind of book I'm trying to read is really expensive to buy new.

Paperback or hardback? Paperback, always. I know it's very dorky 90s James Dean wannabe, but I've normally got a paperback tucked into my back pocket. I don't like books that aren't pocket sized because they are harder to bring places and I don't like being without a book.

Where do you like to read? Everywhere. Not kidding. This week I have read in my office, in my car, in the park, in bed, at a fancy work event... I always have a book and I'll read everywhere. But I guess my favorite place to read is my leather recliner in front of the fireplace I built, with a cup of something warm and absolute silence in the house.

Old book smell or new book smell? Old book smell makes me sneeze and it kinda itches my throat. I suffer through it because some of my old books have sentimental value to them, but I vastly prefer new book smell.

Favorite series? I don't think anything can replace the Mistborn trilogy in my heart. It's a great series, but it's also taken on some very personal meaning in my life, and so I think that'll always be my favorite.

Book you won't read? I don't have any one specific book I avoid - but I will quit reading anything where a kid dies on page. I've stopped reading only a handful of books in my life and that's always been the reason. It's also not something I will ever do in my own writing - to the point that scenes where kids are hurt in my writing hold no weight to my friends because they know the kid is getting better or I wouldn't write it.

Worst book you've read? Probably one of the ones I've quit for the above reason. Worst book I've finished is rough though. I read a lot of ARCs and Indies which is a total gamble. There have been some pretty bad ones in that batch. I also hold a special hatred for Dune because I think it's way over hyped, and I suffered through the first book to impress a girl, even though it was complete gibberish, and then she wasn't even impressed, just wanted me to read the next one. So yeah - I'll go with Dune is probably my least favorite non-indie book I've read.

First book you remember reading? The Hobbit. My dad read it to me, but I remember it vividly. He did funny voices for the dragon and it just kinda stuck with me and created a life long love of reading - and also reading out loud. It might be the inspiration for my first tattoo - don't tell my mom :) The first book I remember reading on my own? That's harder, I've been reading since I was very littler, so I don't have a ton of memories of starting, and obviously I read picture books and stuff before chapter books, but I think the first chapter books I remember reading, because I got so into them I insisted on reading them to my mom before bed the same way my dad had read to me before he left, was the Charlie Bone series. It was my first introduction to a well plotted and foreshadowed series and I just became obsessed with the writing style.

[vonnyphant]

To Blog or Not to Blog?

“You should start a diary and write about your experiences. It may help people going through the same thing.”

Honestly? If there’s one thing I discovered about this diagnosis, it’s that it makes me pretty damn selfish. I don’t want to help other people (not just yet, anyway). But putting some thoughts down about this time in my life may be of some sort of therapeutic value, and I do want to help myself. 

(Maybe for once, saving the world can wait. Do you remember how, soon after the pandemic hit, people stopped avoiding plastic and single-use items? When your health is at risk, suddenly rainforests and polar bears and the planet are deprioritised- not that anyone will admit to this. But this is my diary and I can say what I want!* Writing for myself it is.)

Having established my less-than-Mother-Theresa-like reasons for this blog, my conscience cleared, it’s time to start. This is where the Lifetime movie shows me, in a half daze, mellowed out on drugs while they sew a mediport into my chest to start administering chemicals. A fast lane to my bloodstream. A docking station. The soundtrack? Hopefully ‘Across The Universe’ by the Beatles (possibly Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. If I get a say in it, I veto The Walrus) Time to pump this body full of drugs that’ll make my hair fall out. 

Wait, what?

Voice Over: “Yep. That’s me. You’re probably wondering what I am doing here…” //record scratch - freeze frame - fast rewind to the psychedelic outtro of A Day In The Life//

Two months ago, during rub-a-dub-in-the-tub (less naughty than it sounds, was just washing myself), my mind inexplicably went to an episode of Beverly Hills 90210, s1 (aired in 1992- yes, I am that old), where Brenda Walsh has a breast cancer scare. I say inexplicably, because my usual shower fantasies do not include Ms Shannon Doherty - if I was going to pick a shower lady, I’d opt for Charlize Theron, Kiera Knightly or Winona Ryder in their short-hair phases, but that is neither here nor there. 

Say what you want for 90s television- weird outfits and ponytails notwithstanding, in their AfterSchoolSpecial PSA way, they dedicated a whole scene to the girls giving themselves a breast exam, including how-to instructions**, and eventhough I was only 11 years old when I saw it, I remembered what to do, and for the last 30 years, every now and then I have randomly carried it out while wondering how I always preferred Brandon over Dylan and how my tastes have changed over time.

But this time - my hand actually found something.

I took a deep breath and calmed myself down the same way I did after finding spots on my skin, lumps on my head and every time I sneezed since covid-19; by telling myself to fucking snap out of my hypochondria tendencies. One cannot go to the doctor every damn day after all. Breast tissue is pretty lumpy and I assumed it was just imaginary. I made an appointment to see a therapist, and  put it out of my mind until a few weeks later, when one of the kids came crashing down on me (literally) and faceplanted in my boob (as they do). 

Now this always hurts af, but it just hurt that little more that day, so that I grabbed the appendage in question and went “WHAT THE--!” And I felt it again- the lump, more defined than a few weeks before. 

Cue a lot more freaking out than the first time, and after a sleepless night, imagining what my funeral would look like (as one does), I decided to go to the gynocologist the same day or risk never to sleep again.

After a long wait and an ultrasound, my doctor assured me that while there really was a mass, it had every indication of being benign. We should keep an eye on it. If I was worried, I could schedule a second screening, but would not likely get an appointment before April. I scheduled one and tried to focus on preparing our first lockdown Christmas. 

But over the holidays, the lump started hurting, even when I wasn’t poking it or having a kid catapult themselves into my chest. I’d be Netflix and Chilling, and suddenly - ZAP - like someone stuck a hot needle into it. Repeatedly. My nipple would go numb or start tingling like a bodypart that fell asleep. It freaked me out, and in the new year, I realised I couldn’t wait until April - I had to get it checked out again or I may worry myself to death.

My gynocologist did another ultrasound and again, told me not to worry. I told her it was way too late for that as I had been worried for weeks, and I wanted the thing biopsied (they gave Brenda Walsh one too, after all! It’s the only way to be 100% sure). She referred me to the hospital. At the description of my symptoms, I could come directly, and the radiologist told me in no unclear terms: “I will not let you leave this room until we draw blood and take several biopsies.” Okay- not exactly what one wants to hear at that point, but at the same time, I figured knowing would be better than guessing by the shape of it.

Test results took a week. I went in, being prepared to be told (like Brenda) it was a harmless clump of random cells or a cyst we could have removed like a wart. Only it wasn’t. It was breast cancer, an aggressive, fast-growing kind, and had I waited until April, that could have had disastrous consequences.

While the doctor explained we now needed to determine the scope of the spread and take more tissue to determine what kind of chemo (if any) could be applied, all my 2020-PTSD brain could think was: 

“.............of course”. 

Didn’t hear much of what she said afterwards.

Another harrowing 4 days went by, with a CT screening with contrast solutions that gave me an intense stomach ache as well as a migraine, and finally, a fully rounded diagnosis and treatment advice could be made. 

Thankfully, all my organs as well as lymphnodes were clear, so it appears to be a localised tumor. And here we are - to fight this thing with chemicals and then cut out whatever is left. Genetics testing to see about the likelihood of a recurrency (and a possible double mastectomy if so - ‘pulling an Angelina Jolie’, ‘not saving the tatas’, insert ‘Think About It meme’...can’t have breast cancer if you don’t have breasts! THINK ABOUT IT***). 

Chances are good. I need to cling to that while I wait for this port and treatment to start. I have accepted the inevitable hair loss, have scheduled a ritual ‘crazy hair cutting party’ with my kids for this weekend (as I would rather shave it off in one go than clean up clumps and strands over the course of weeks and look like Gollum), and I have sewn several funny little hats for inside wear and ‘going out’ (though where will I be going in pandemic, idk). 

I was going to end this post on a light and happy note - but I must admit my confidence just took a really big hit in real time, as I googled how to spell Shannon’s last name for this blog entry and found out that she was treated for breast cancer in 2015, initially succesfully, but it reappeared metastasized in 2020 (again: ‘of course...when else’) and she is now in stage IV. Fuck 2020.

What are the odds that the woman whose character made me discover my own breast cancer is now, in fact, dying of the same disease? This will surely haunt me for a long time to come.

More tomorrow? Or soon? It may take a while. Until then: outro to It’s Getting Better.

*also for the record I would like to state that I’ve sewn my own masks from upcycled pillowcases and continued using fruit- and vegetable nets to avoid plastic; maybe that makes up for me being utterly selfish at the moment. Karma +1?

** https://youtu.be/pkgYXITkrfw (the scene from BH 90210)

***cis men / trans women without breasts can also get breast cancer (even though it’s rare) so this meme doesn’t really hold up, but that’s the whole point of the meme ;)

[real-jaune-isms]

RWBY Volume 8 Chapter 8 Review/Remix

RWBY finally comes back from a 2 month break, and what does it do? It scares us all half to death and then obliterates the other half with insane new story concepts and body horror imagery. Gods I missed this show~...

We return to this chaotic mess with the scene you might be expecting the least, Qrow and Robyn in their prison cells. Qrow is awoken by the sound of ships and explosions outside, and find that his three block mates are similarly left sleepless. Jacques is particularly nervous, probably because he assumed Whitley would be here to bail him out by now. Qrow picks up on an incoming sound that sounds... different, and indeed a wall is blown down in a fiery explosions that starts sending down rubble. One section of the Hard Light cell walls have been taken down, but before anyone has time to act Robyn notices a crow vehemently cawing at her before some rubble comes down above her. And... that’s the last we see of Robyn or Qrow this episode. He transformed to be a smaller target for debris and she might not have made it out quickly enough even with his disguised possible warnings.

Back to more pressing matters, we take the perspective of... the Dragonborn in the opening of Skyrim?? Wait, no, it’s just Nora regaining consciousness to see Klein has given her an IV and is saying she’ll be on the mend real quick. So that’s some good news after a few months of worry, and hey! The fan theory was wrong, she didn’t go blind from the lightning! Before we can even dwell on her wellbeing for too long, Blake opens the door for Ruby Weiss and Whitley to carry in Penny’s unconscious body. As Blake points out, Penny is leaking a green fluid most likely comparable to blood. They set her down on a cot near Nora, and Whitley is pissed about getting his clothes stained again in the span of 48 hours. But I think robot fuel/blood is at least easier to wash out than red wine. Ruby of course wants to know if Klein can help Penny as well as he has Nora, but his wheelhouse of expertise does not cover advanced robotics. The saving grace is that Pietro made her so close to human so Klein has some idea what can actually be fixed, starting with sewing up the gash in her abdomen. A thunderous rumble is heard in the distance, and suddenly the lights go out. Whitely complains about this too, but it is rather valid. Nothing quite seems to be going right, even Atlas’ power grid is against them... Ruby gets a call from May, and we learn they parted ways so May could go regroup with the Happy Huntresses and save her city. They compare notes and it’s made clear a bombing run took out part of the city’s power, though less clear is who was doing that bombing, Atlas or the Grimm? Ruby apologizes for their current inaction while they tend to Penny, but May reassures her that this may end up being more productive than trying to find something worth doing outside the city. Great googly moogly, it’s all gone to shit, and there’s very little difference a few more huntresses can make to the Mantle efforts. Ruby is left in overwhelmed despair, there’s so many problems and she doesn’t know how to solve all of them. Klein butts in with a sneeze to say she should take it one problem at a time, focus on the most immediate and possible to achieve and work outwards. For one thing, it’d help a lot of they had lights and power. 

Willow surprises everyone by showing up in the doorway to let them know about a backup generator on the edge of the estate property. She’s still the lady of this house, and she has enough self respect to not lie around getting drunk in the dark. Whitley greets her with a mix of disinterest and distain, and she notices Klein has returned to the manor and offers an off guard greeting. Weiss backs up her mom’s info drop with the fact that SDC executive members indeed have access to backup power sources if the city ever suffered a power outage like this. She doesn’t like that they have that kind of privilege while other folks suffer, but it’s for the greater good this time. This gets Whitley thinking, and my boy has a full Jimmy Neutron BRAIN BLAST! Since Jacques made him heir to the company, and the man himself is possibly dead under rubble, Whitely has full access to the Schnee Dust Company and all its resources. Since Ironwood put down the Dust embargo in Volume 4, their fleet of cargo ships are sitting empty and ready for use in a hangar. As we saw earlier this very chapter, there are automated drones that answer to the SDC rather than the Atlas military. They can use those ships and drone soldiers to give all the people stuck in Mantle a way out to fly away safely. Fantastic work, young man! You make your family proud... well, the family members who don’t commit war crimes for profit. But to do that they need the power back on so he can use Jacques’ computer, so that’s what Ruby and Blake set out to do. Getting inside the small building outside of the mansion is easy enough, and its just the flip of a switch to get the generator booting back up. In the meantime, the two share a genuinely sweet conversation. Blake reassures Ruby that the fact she’s trying to make things happen is all the world could ask of her, and an optimistic attitude like that is hard to stick with for long in this harsh world. Life in the White Fang and with Adam robbed Blake of her own similar mindset, but she truly admires and looks up to Ruby for how great a woman she is. Sadly, like most things, this moment is ruined by a Grimm. While all the lights are coming back on and Whitley gets to work, a bolt of lightning reveals that the Hound is just outside the window behind Ruby... Willow and Klein are casually sitting around waiting I guess, when they hear the loud crash of glass breaking and Willow reflexively reaches for her bottle of vodka. Weiss checks in on her teammates over comms and they tell her they need some help so she makes sure Whitley will have the business handled before she rushes out to save her friends. Ruby is getting tossed through a fresh hole in the wall, and Blake’s attempt to attack it while she regains her footing is just batted away. Blake assures Ruby that it’s just a Grimm, they can handle it as long as she can stay focused. Blake goes on the offensive again while Ruby tries to get her Silver Eyes going, but the Hound swats the Faunus girl away and tackles Ruby before sprouting its wings again with her in its clutches Blake uses the ribbon on her weapon to do what Ren had earlier in the Volume, though she anchors the other end in the ground as a tether rather than ride along as it leaves.

Weiss finally arrives at the scene of this chaos and reports the Grimm sighting back to Klein. Hearing the news of this beastly intruder leaves Willow so shaken she drops the bottle and glass she was pouring herself. Klein tries to reassure and calm her, but she’s too overwhelmed and runs out of the room... just as Penny reactivates with red eyes. Full on hacked now, and  Klein gets shoved to the floor for all his concerns about her being on her feet again. But she barely takes two steps before the real Penny resurfaces and tries to fight back for control of her own body. The struggle is deep enough to summon a whirling wind around her much like Fria had last Volume, but this one is green because Penny. Back outside, Weiss is about to summon something when a couple Centinels burrow up behind her and tear through it. From the looks of it, I think it was going to be the Nevermore from all the way back in Volume 1, so that’s a pretty cool callback to how important that fight was, and the imagery of glowing wings behind her was beautiful while it lasted. The Hound breaks free of Blake’s tether and is about to soar away, much to her dismay, when it sees a bright green glow coming from in the manor, clearly Penny going through her identity crisis. Ruby puts two and two together and realizes why the Hound has been saying “Take the Girl.” The girl is Penny, whose blood is still on Ruby’s clothes so it got a little confused while tracking. She warns her teammates, but the Hound chooses that time to drop her like a sack of potatoes and there goes the last of her Aura. Blake tells Weiss to go back inside and stop the Hound while she handles the Centinels out here, and they split up, but before Blake can reach her leader a new creature erupts from the ground and it’s bigger and more gross than the last bugs. It spits acid that comes up through a tube along its belly, and I’m confident in calling it an Alpha Centinel. Back in the eye of the storm, Klein tries to reassure Penny that she’s okay, which is phrased a little but I assume he means as “you’re in a safe place and your injuries have been treated, you don’t need to defend yourself like this”. The man is just a butler, he doesn’t know what we do about her internal struggle against antagonistic programming and her wrestling with her sense of self. Whatever new orders Watts has given her, she really doesn’t want to follow them. Luckily, there’s someone at her side to comfort her and hold her hand, and that’s Nora. Passing along the comforting words she got from Blake earlier this Volume, she tells Penny she doesn’t have to just be and do what other people expect of her. She may feel like a part of her is making her do what she doesn’t want to, but don’t forget about the rest. She’s more than just that one part of her mind or persona. It’s nowhere near the same situation as Nora’s own identity crisis earlier, but the words have the same positive effect. Penny gains control again and the wind barrier subsides. Weiss reports in that the Hound is heading inside and she’s on her way to intercept, and gets the bad news that Willow fled the room to go who knows where. Well, we know now cuz we see it, she went to what I assume is her own bedroom (god forbid she and Jacques still share a bed after 8 years of the most sour their marriage has been). On her vanity there’s another bottle or two of booze, and her Scroll. She wants to retreat to what she knows best, but hesitates and then gets spooked by the shattering sound of the Hound breaking in through the window above the front door.

It picks up on Penny’s scent from the blood stained on the floor, but by the time Weiss charges in through the front door it’s gone. The next five minutes of the episode have major horror movie vibes, and I love it. Weiss slowly looks around the foyer for any sign of the beast, when Willow screams over her Scroll to look out above her and indeed the Hound drops down to backhand her into a piano. Instead of staying to attack her, it goes to follow Penny’s scent again and leaves Weiss to check in with her mom after that sudden warning. Biggest triumph thus far, Willow threw her bottle against a wall and instead pulled up the feed from her series of surveillance cameras around the manor on her Scroll to track the Hound. It’s near Winter’s old bedroom, and Willow doesn’t seem to understand that it’s tracking a scent like a bloodhound. Maybe she just doesn’t encounter Grimm a lot or they’re just usually not this competent and singularly focused. She recognizes the direction it’s heading next with great horror, and what we see next gives us that same dread. Whitley still has blood on his clothes, and he dismisses Willow’s warning cuz he probably doesn’t think she has anything to say worth hearing after his years of dealing with her drunken state. He’s almost done setting up the automated orders, when he hears the door starting to open and angrily snaps at what he assumes is Willow coming to check on him since he didn’t answer the call. But he is dead wrong and hides behind the desk immediately, because it is indeed the Hound come to potentially kill him. He’s doing his best to hide, but it expands its vocabulary to tell him it knows he’s here. Just as it’s about to round the corner, an Alpha Boarbatusk charges in and pins it to the wall. Weiss isn’t the only Schnee in the house who can summon, and Willow will not let her son die this day. He’s about to bolt out of the room while it’s preoccupied with the summon, but turns back to hit Yes on the computer and get the evacuation plans started. Good job kid, you did more to save Mantle than your father and Ironwood combined. The two sprint down the hall with the Hound in hot pursuit, but get some respite from an ice wall forming between them and the Grimm thanks to Weiss arriving from the opposite direction. She’s out of breath, but assures them she didn’t forget about either of them, most likely as a callback to the conversation she and Willow had last Volume about Whitley being left behind when Weiss and Winter sought independence. The unarmed Schnees express their gratitude and retreat from that wing of the house, and Weiss prepares her summons for combat with the beast breaking through the ice.

Back outside, Blake is struggling with the Alpha Centinel and complains about how gross it is. She avoids its scythe blade-like arms with some clever use of elementally charged shadow clones and begs for Ruby to wake up and give her some backup. But that can’t last forever and eventually it holds her by the neck ready to slice. Before it can, though, Ruby wakes up and bisects it first. She laughs weakly and tells Blake she heard what she was saying. They hear a scream coming from inside the mansion and head inside to meet up with the others. Weiss and the Hound hear it too, and the Hound stops doing its best “Here’s Johnny” impression through the hole in the ice to go chase down this new sound. We see the source of it, and it is in fact Penny losing control of herself again to the new programming. The red eyes stay this time, and she shoves Klein aside once again to stiffly and mechanically walk out to the foyer. As fate would have it, Willow and Whitely are there too, and they naturally question the fact that she’s emotionlessly walking past them when last they saw she was bleeding and unconscious. She responds that she’s going to open the vault, and then apparently self destruct. Not to state the obvious, but we really can’t let that happen so lets hope the power of love will break through to her. Before Penny can even get down the stairs, the Hound arrives to try and grab her and she catches his hand effortlessly, and then the other, so they’re stuck in a shoving match stalemate. The Hound solves this problem by growing a new arm out of its back and using it to grab Penny by the head. It slams her around like a ragdoll, still repeating “Take the Girl”, and holds a claw up to her throat when RWB arrive at the bottom of the stairs. Blake and Weiss are unsure how to intervene, but Ruby goes stone cold serious telling it that’s enough. In the literal blink of her eye, a Silver Eyed blast blinds it and sends it falling out the window behind it leaving Penny to tumble down the stairs unconscious again. They hope and pray the threat is over as they check her body, but the real horror starts now. 

The Hound claws his way back up through the window, and part of his head has been blasted away to reveal a dog faunus with one intact silver eye. In a voice likely not used in a long time, he continues to repeat his orders to “Take the Girl...” Ruby is mortified and shell shocked to see a living person within the frame of this beast unlike any she’s known prior, and I’m sure the wheels in her mind are turning to wonder if Summer Rose suffered a similar undying fate at Salem’s hands... and if that’s what will happen to her if she is captured? He begins shambling towards them and they try to carry Penny away from him but end up cornered. Whitley gets an idea and he and Willow start pushing on the knight statue nearest to them. Just as the Hound, whose human portion I have been inspired by a podcast to call Johnny, is about to grab the girls the statue falls down and crushes him to death. A choir chants in Latin as the Grimm fades away... and for the first time leaves behind a skeleton. Ruby seems shaken to her core as she confirms to the others that that was in fact a person they saw in there.

Ending that side of the story entirely for the week, we go back to the rubble in the jail cell to see Cinder has found Watts and the two make a flying get away. So that’s fun, we’ll have to see if they make it back in time to intercept JRY trying to sneak through Monstra. Until then, I’m gonna sleep like the dead. Ciao!

[thesorrowoflizards]

yall we deserve more fairy tale aus. more maiaphael and/or magnus fairy tale aus

the beautiful princess maia, strong in her own right but so soft and kind and she just wants to help even though she’s not in a great position to do so

brave young hero raphael questing not for the princess’s hand but to help his community, his family, his sister (but he falls in love with her anyway)

“fairy godfather” magnus, a kind wizard who helps them out and indeed helps anyone he can… and perhaps dragon alec

but like the point is—oh my god

oh no

oh no mid post

mid post the idea it hit me

literally while i was in the middle of typing trying to figure out where i was going with this

ive been, metaphorically speaking, shot blank

with the idea

of

maiaphael

shrek au

oh I hate this

does this make maia fiona, raphael shrek, and magnus—DONKEY?! AND ALEC THE DRAGO—ok ok so this is happening now. amazing. i just wanted a soft fairy tale au with princess maia and hero raphael and kindly wizard magnus but now here we are. shrek au. fine. if this is how it’s gonna be, fine

i guess rather than ogre he’s a vampire which is a little more subtle—perhaps instead of becoming a vampire at night she’s a werewolf? so downworlders in general rather than specifically a vampire? not quite loyal to the original story (as she became an ogre rather than just “a fairy tale creature” for a reason) but not bad—although the implication she’d like become a wolf forever isn’t great. I mean I’m sure you can play with that so it’s more like at night she becomes a werewolf—ability to transform into a wolf, eyes flash green sometimes, can do feats of supernatural strength and so on, but like. still. hm

but like ok look the point is maia is in this tower and it’s not that she’s weak, but she can’t fight a dragon on her own and she’s been taught her whole life she was supposed to be saved, get a prince charming, etc. she’s quite well read and also very isolated and probably claustrophobic as fuck now. i’m not sure how to combine her characterization with fiona’s in a way that stays loyal to her character but still makes sense in the au tbh.... [thinking emoji im too lazy to google and paste here]

and like raphael, rather than wanting everyone out of his home, perhaps is specifically trying to help his community and get more structure? obviously magnus wants to help—still can’t believe I’m making him donkey but the dragon thing is too good to pass up, although I’m basically going to completely change his role as donkey because I physically can’t handle making him the comic relief literal ass, but like, he’s had his own issues and also wants to help get the land to set up a home for everyone and help people, so he’s travelling with raphael and is like “smol angery vampire who is willing to slap a dragon to death to save his community and specifically take care of his sister? im adopting him immediately”

perhaps for shenanigans and I have. oh my god this is ridiculous but any shrek au is inherently ridiculous so I’m making this twi malec now. consider this: twi magnus on the road literally just getting the hang of his magic after an encounter with a rogue crazy princess who’s stab-happy and needed some magical help, so it’s waking up and he’s just getting in all these crazy hijinks with raphael where hypothetically he’s powerful enough to just zap them there, zoink out the dragon and win, but he can’t fucking control it so sure he can turn all the knights’ armor pink or sneeze and make it start to rain (which is a LITTLE SCARY) but like, other than randomly floating or random bursts of managing to control it in high pressure situations, it’s like. not that useful. again i can’t be clear enough he isn’t really donkey it’s just an excuse to have him travelling with raphael. i guess simon would be donkey if i were going for serious but then they’d both be in love with maia so--

also, twi magnus and raphael? fun interaction time. especially since I’m still basically doing canon maiaphael and not trying to mess with twi, there, so like. he’s kind of trying to get out of his shell more but he cares deeply about raphael (and. well. everyone) already and he juts wants to help

and then he meets the dragon guarding maia’s tower and is immediately like….. damn……… no not getting distracted by this

but the dragon, twi alec, is just like HEY THERE PRETTY BOY ;D and like. they don’t even have to fight the dragon raphael just. walks past while they make heart eyes at each other and when alec realizes they’re walking away with maia he’s just like “ok whatever but magnus you better come back and visit sweetheart I’m gonna make you the prettiest necklace and I can find you some old books on magic, I’m sure I’ve got some in my hoard somewhere—”

meanwhile on the way back magnus is kind of pining after alec but also getting a stronger handle on his magic

and raphael is getting to know the princess

and maia is getting to know raphael (she was NOT expecting a vampire and a warlock, but they’re both incredibly nice and she was REALLY REALLY BORED in that tower) and just like…. you know,,,,,,, romance begins to bloom mayhaps

now I don’t know how to like really get across that one of their main commonalities is community, because in this scenario maia wouldn’t have a pack—unless we change canon even more and I’m just not going to rn, but put a pin in that

so like, maybe she really does care about her people and she super is a people person, but she hasn’t had many chances to show that because she’s been fucking locked up and that’s kind of messed with her you know

god you know I want to include jordan and camille here but I wouldn’t even know how to—I imagine jordan could be prince charming but he doesn’t come in until later and ehhh

so like raphael (and also magnus) are really helping her with that

and she’s also helping him be less closed off and… angry isn’t quite right, but like. she kind of helps both of them open up tbh. not to erase magnus’s friends but also I love a good magnus and maia friendship? but like she’s not afraid to start conversations or ask them questions or listen to their stories (and they listen to hers which is nice because she’s been talking mostly to walls and stuffed animals for a while now and books are great but it’s not the same)

and like she’s free not to have to act like a perfect delicate princess, but she’s also free to be vulnerable and soft too you know

so like okay also lord farquaad or however you spell it I don’t care is jace. I mean obviously annoying lord tiny penis is jace. duh. (oh my god does this mean alec eats jace--?)

and like idk this is a very scattered concept—I’m not sure these communication kings would really do the main plot of shrek where an overheard misunderstood snippet of conversation leads to such a huge conflict but I mean if he was really just beginning to open up to her and then he thought she thought downworlders were disgusting or whatever (wait no that wouldn’t work because she can’t say vampires but she can’t be saying that to magnus, either—fuck I don’t know like I said it needs reworking to fit) he could be devastated enough to just be like well fuck it

AND LIKE AGAIN. DRAGON ALEC. EATS JACE. amazing. everyones like “raphael is your friend... fucking a dragon” and raphael is like “please never say those words to me again” and alec’s like (in human form, they don’t realize he’s the dragon even tho raphael does) “actually a dragon is fucking raphael’s friend” and raphael is like shut the fuck up right now 

idk I feel like a lot of details make it not work but the overall concept could be fun as hell, probably mostly as a crack au

 god I just wanted a fairy tale au. soft princess maia, young hero raphael, kindly wizard magnus. goin’ on a quest. savin’ people. is that too much to ask for???

my brain says yes.

[aurelacs]

Ten of Wands

An Ezra/F!OC Red Dead Redemption AU

WORD COUNT: 3k

CONTENT: mentions of spousal abuse, drinking, 

A/N: Thanks y’all for your patience! There’s only a chapter and an epilogue after this one! Hope you enjoy! Also next chapter will have smut I promise.

This is set in the Red Dead Redemption universe, however there’s no spoilers for either game, and you don’t need to have prior knowledge of the games to understand the fic. I’m just using RDR for the setting and the time period (1899). Hope you enjoy!

chapter list | masterlist | read on AO3

IV. The Hanged Man

West Elizabeth was far more frightening at night. 

The way the moonlight bore through the trees cast long, ominous shadows along the worn path the two bounty hunters chose to take. Annie was tempted to talk, to ask the man where he was taking her, but she didn’t want to push her luck. The dignity he provided her by letting her ride with him was more than likely the only kindness he would afford. So she rode in silence. The sound of the horses hooves beating against the soil the only sound that late at night. It crushed her spine with the weight of the implication and dried up her throat. This was her death march, paraded through the state so far into the evening there would be no one to mourn her, to ask for her final statement, or write down her last words. The bounty hunters, referring to each other only as ‘Morgan’ and ‘Smith,’ talked idly, like she wasn’t there. 

About halfway through the ride, Annie began to recognize her surroundings a little more. Panic began to set in. Even as she was being tied up, the concept of imprisonment and death was so foreign it did little to scare her. To be so close, to have the knowledge that it was, in fact, guaranteed, made her bottom lip tremble. In that moment Annie realized that she didn’t want to die. It wasn’t because of Ezra. Without him, she could live, and she knew that, but she wanted to feel his lips on hers. She wanted to make it to the end of her life fully experiencing what it was like to not have to look over her shoulder. It had been so long that she forgot the feeling. She wanted to reach Armadillo and feel the sand crunch under her boots. She needed to breathe long enough to forget her husband’s face, to make it to the point in her life where she could call him her late husband.

Her heart sank, low, further than the pit of her stomach, as they rode under the ‘Strawberry’ sign. She thought the river that ran through the town looked better in the moonlight. The sheriff’s office was located next to the hill that housed the hotel. The dark wood of the building blended in with the hill and made it look like the office and jail was built into the soil. It gave the building a foreboding presence, as though the hill and the office and the hotel were a solitary castle looming over her. 

The porch light next to the door was the only light on across the whole town as the two men hitched their horses. Morgan grumbled a faint apology as he hoisted Annie over his shoulder to help her down off his horse. The three of them all stood by the door. Morgan knocked, hammering on the door until the sheriff hollered at them for waking him up. The transaction was nearly wordless. Morgan handed the sheriff Annie’s bounty poster, who then directed Morgan to lead Annie to the cell across from his desk before handing the men their bounty payment. 

“D’you know anything about a bounty for the man she was with? Blonde patch of hair, looks like an outlaw,” Morgan asked.

“Nothing here, but you can always try Valentine. If you’re heading that way, can you let Sheriff Molloy know I got her here?”

Morgan grunted in response and left. 

“Valentine is full up, so you’re gonna be with us for the time being. Sheriff up there’s supposed to come talk to you at some point, but he likes to take his time and who knows if those boys will actually let Curtis know you’re here.”

“What good will talking to me do?”

The sheriff shrugged before lumbering back to his cot and falling asleep. 

Days and nights passed in near silence. Sheriff Farley, as Annie came to observe, wasn’t much of a talker. He snored, loud enough to occasionally shake the floorboards of the office. She learned that Strawberry’s jail had five cells, one upstairs where she was, and four more downstairs, out of sight. Annie overheard Farley one night, as he conversed with the mayor, mention that the downstairs cells were for the more ‘worrisome’ offenders. The statement gave her a spark of hope. She knew it wasn’t often that bounties were put out on women. Maybe he could read between the lines of a woman killing her husband. Or perhaps he merely saw her as less of a threat because she was a woman. Either way, Annie still felt mildly appreciative. If she craned her head hard enough, she could look outside and see wagons passing through the town. The same position gave her the opportunity to feel the sun on her face right before dusk. Her situation was already hard enough, she was grateful to not have to experience it with the ones she heard screaming below her. 

A week into her stay, or what she believed to be a week, Annie gave up all hope in Ezra coming for her. It was a child’s fantasy, to think that he would risk his life and freedom just to save her. She couldn’t find it in herself to blame him, either, even though when she asked herself if she would have come to save him, her answer was a resounding ‘yes.’ What a fool she was to have waited. If she told him, then and there, as he waded out of the lake, how she felt about him, he might’ve been here. Or he would’ve left her. Either way her chest would have been stinging a little less. 

More time passed with no word from Farley on the whereabouts of Valentine’s sheriff, or her life. As a nervous habit, Annie would undo and redo her braids constantly until her fingers ached. She paced around her cell. There was no clock in the office, so she measured the time by the sheriff’s actions. Everyday he followed the same routine: breakfast at the butcher’s stall, sit in his office and read the newspaper, smoke his pipe, taunt the downstairs prisoners, if the sun had yet to go down when he was finished, he would invite the mayor for a drink, where the mayor would talk about his grandiose plans for the sleepy, yet beautiful, town. His talk reminded her of Ezra: weaving tales of splendor, swearing up and down that Strawberry’s beauty could not be contained. The mayor echoed Ezra’s sentiments, convinced that the work he was putting into it would make a difference. Annie was sure that Farley was going to kill Mayor Timmins because he no longer wanted bounties to be advertised in Strawberry. It figured that she would be the last, she thought.  

One morning, maybe three weeks since the bounty hunters had found her, sheriff Farley woke her by knocking on the bars of her cell. A man stood next to him, a handlebar mustache doing nothing to contain the permanent scowl on his face. Farley introduced him as sheriff Molloy, the one from Valentine and Annie’s blood ran cold. The one who would decide her fate stood there, looking unimpressed at the supposed cold-blooded killer before him, half-asleep and half paralyzed from fear. 

“I hope you didn’t pay those boys the full bounty for this,” he gestured over at her, looking sullen and beaten.  

“They didn’t seem to be the most innocent of sorts either. Didn’t wanna cause a fuss.”

Molloy laughed. Farley grabbed his pipe from his desk and made his way outside to give the two some privacy. He stood there silently with his arms crossed for what felt like an hour before speaking. 

“Why’d you do it?”

“That’s it?” He nodded. Annie was confused. Weeks of waiting and that’s all he asks? No hint of a greeting, an apology. She was hoping that maybe the sheriff would tell her how her husband’s family was doing. They would probably be in the front row the day she hangs, but in an odd way her life had felt so sheltered in the months since she killed him that hearing something was preferred to this. To the brusque ire of a man that she knew had already decided that she was going to die for what she did. 

“He hurt me,” she answered.

Molloy scoffed. “I was hoping for a more interesting answer. Not many lady killers ‘round these parts, but they all have the same reasoning.” “Maybe because they’re all telling the truth.”

“Maybe they’re all lying to try and gain some sympathy before they get hanged,” he said as he leaned in closer to the bars. The scowl on his face grew deeper. She started to wonder how many other women in her situation had the misfortune of seeing his face right before a hood was placed over their heads. 

“My husband beat me. He would scream at me if there was a speck of dust on the floor when he came home from hunting. Chased me around the house with a knife if he didn’t like the way I sneezed or walked or spoke, when I did. I let him hurt me for over ten years. I had it.” Annie didn’t realize she had started crying until her voice broke. “It’s been months and I still call him my husband. I still love him, but I’d do it again. If you’re gonna hang me for that, then so be it.” 

“I’m going to hang you for killing your husband, Mrs. Gray. I don’t care whether or not you regret it.” 

Hearing her name felt like a whip cracking. She had gone so long without the sound of it that it was foreign in her ears, like the sheriff was addressing a stranger. For so long she referred to herself internally as Annie Cobb that it didn’t register. It was her trying to move on, trying to turn back into the woman she was before she married her husband, but it didn’t have the same spark. Her identity had always been ‘Mrs. Gray,’ her maiden name taken from her too soon, before she could form herself outside of her husband. But Cobb never resonated. Maybe in her next life she’ll have a name that fits her better, like Michaels, or Robinson. Or Bird. 

The dread that churned in her stomach kept her from sleeping more than an hour at a time. It would jolt her awake with the sudden urge to run, and her heart wouldn’t stop racing until her brain finally managed to process that there was nowhere to run. At the third bout, Annie awoke to find Farley fast asleep, his snores once again bouncing off the wooden walls. Night had fallen, deep and heavily, on the town. It mirrored the night she was first brought back to Strawberry; the lantern once again the only thing illuminating the entire town. It was never intentional. Every morning he forgot, Malloy would grumble on for the rest of the day about the waste of oil. This night, this mistake, however, cost him more than a nickel’s worth of lantern oil. 

Someone entered, not with a knock, but with a bang, stirring the sheriff from his slumber so harshly he wasn’t able to collect his bearings in time to demand an explanation. The glow of the lantern backlit the visitor and made it impossible for Annie to make him out until he spoke, and even then it was only a hunch. Sheriff Farley stumbled over towards the voice, eyes still crusted with sleep and legs uneasy. He managed his way over to his desk, propping himself up with an arm before asking who had the nerve to bother him so late at night. The man closed the door gently, opposite to his grand entrance. Out of the porch lantern light, the office was enshrouded in darkness until the sheriff lit another lantern at the corner of his desk. It wasn’t until the light illuminated the rest of the office that Annie realized. 

“I do apologize for intruding so late into the evening, but I saw the lantern still on, and where I come from that means a gentleman is open for business.” 

Ezra looked different from when she last saw him. He looked a little more ragged and worn down. The bags under his eyes had grown darker. His hair was unkempt and she didn’t see his hat anywhere on him. The blonde patch of hair caught the light just right. Ezra made no attempt to speak to Annie; he didn’t even look her way as he adjusted the heavy-looking satchel that hung upon his shoulder. His kept his deep, brown eyes focused entirely on the sheriff. 

“I recently purchased myself a new abode in this beautiful little town here and my father always told me to start a new journey with alcohol. And who better among the locale to embark on that sojourn with than the sheriff himself?” Ezra reached into the satchel and forcefully placed two bottles of Kentucky bourbon on the sheriff’s desk. He pulled up a chair, not waiting for permission or refusal and sat down, eagerly awaiting his next move. Sheriff Farley eyed Ezra curiously. Nevertheless, he walked over to the cabinet by his cot and dug out two glasses. He smiled up at the sheriff. Not once did the two men take their eyes off one another. 

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“When I said ‘recently,’ it was not an exaggeration.” He leaned back in the chair. Ezra’s body language gave off a kind of confidence she had only seen from him once before: in Blackwater, towering over his debtor. Annie grew worried that he might try the same stunt again. 

“I have always heard the people of Strawberry are of a hospitable color. At least, that is what they say in Saint Denis. It is possible that they simply meant poor,” the sheriff shot him an angered glance, “but hospitality is taught, never bought, wouldn’t you agree, sheriff?” Farley grunted in response. Ezra poured the bourbon halfway into both glasses before drinking his in one go, and encouraging the sheriff to do the same. Sheriff Farley’s eyes shot up to the blonde in Ezra’s hair. The coolness of Ezra’s composure broke for a second, not enough for the sheriff to notice, but enough for Annie to start worrying. She recalled the question the one bounty hunter had asked him when she first arrived and wondered if he made the same connection. 

“Sheriff, please, I insist, drink! There is more than enough for the both of us and I want to make sure your graciousness is equally matched.”

“Is there no way to do this tomorrow,” Farley asked, choosing to match Ezra’s drink. 

“Not according to my father’s superstitions, no,” Ezra chuckled. “It has to be as soon as you sign the deed, and the gentleman I was dealing with for this parcel was quite a character. He absolutely insisted we negotiate until the very last second of the day” He took another swig of the bourbon, this time directly from the bottle. 

“Was it Mr. Rose by chance?”

“The one and the same!” 

Ezra opened the second bottle of bourbon and passed it to the sheriff as he began to tell Ezra stories about the man. Farley eagerly grabbed the bottle by the neck. Engrossed in his tales, he continued to absentmindedly sip on the alcohol, his slowly inebriated mind searching for threads to connect his thoughts. On occasion, Ezra would take a swig from his bottle to encourage him. It was a lengthy plan, but one that seemed to be working. Every time the sheriff tried to stop, Ezra would bring up something else to try and get him talking again. 

‘I have heard that your mayor is a curious one.” 

“He’s trying to run me out of a job, is what he’s tryin’ to do!” He slammed the bottle onto his desk, and Ezra laughed as some of the liquid came sloshing out of the neck and on the sheriff’s hand. Annie’s worry grew again as she peered over to the window and saw daybreak trying to make its way over the horizon. 

“I’m sure the mayor is only doing what he deems best.”

“The mayor is- he’s- the sonuvabitch-” the floorboards shook as the sheriff’s head slammed against his desk, just nearly missing the bottle. Annie wasn’t sure if he was dead or merely sleeping.  

The first time Ezra acknowledged her was as the first snore ripped through Farley’s body. He looked over at her and held a finger up to his lips. As quietly as he could, he toed over to the sheriff’s slumped over body. He gently fiddled with the key ring that hung from his gun belt. Annie could see his hands shaking as he tried every key on Annie’s cell before finally reaching the correct one. She hadn’t realized how long she had been holding her breath until the cell door finally popped open, and the only thing standing between her and Ezra was a couple feet of empty, unfettered air.  

“Missed you, little bird,” he smiled, breaking the heavy silence. 

Tears fell freely from Annie’s eyes, the mix of emotions overwhelming her senses almost to the point of collapse, and she nearly jumped from where she was sat and into Ezra’s arms. Free not only was she of Strawberry jail, but also of any hesitation she might’ve been holding onto with regard to how she felt about him. She buried her face in his neck and took in his scent, something she didn’t realize she missed. His arms gripped onto her something fierce like she would float away and out of his grasp if he didn’t hold on. It was as though the time apart wore away any inhibitions they might have had. The sheer elation of their reunion being the only thing that was on their minds. Ezra came back for her. 

That’s what mattered. 

Tag List: @immundusspiritu​ @borderlinedindjarin​ @aforces​

[someone-always-cares]

[image description: a q&a for the webcomic someone always cares. full desc under the cut because its long and wordy sorry]

post chapter 3 Q&A

first - previous - next

thanks for yalls questions!! it was fun to answer! if anyone still has questions feel free to ask whenever i am always 100% down to ramble. even if i did go slightly off topic in some answers

additional: went off topic with the hair question a bit. their bright hair is all part of the transformations. regular hair dye does exist though. best way to tell is that if the eyebrow matches the hair its probably not dyed. also, quartz’s hair is naturally ginger.

also for more on ages, check out the character bios here

also was gonna keep this in the tags but thought i might as well actually try to answer it: the question i found it hardest to answer was someone the song one. my taste in music is. a mess really. ive been listening to like the same 5 songs on repeat all day. more under the cut because i was rambling again and now its uhhh half 1am

if it helps at the time of answering that specific question i had home by cavetown on repeat, and that song reminds me of both rami and lewis. but that may be because i project onto those two a lot, and as a aro trans dude. who sucks with people skills, yeah of course i love that song.

specifically the vibes of like not knowing how to communicate (rami is fine with his friends but other people are different), the lines “ Turn off your porcelain face, I can't really think right now and this place, Has too many colors, enough to drive all of us insane” idk what the porcelain face line is supposed to mean but im picturing it as like. a mask. that you need to take off and stop hiding and rami does tend to hide when hes feeling upset, and the next two lines kinda could tie into that, like the feeling of when youre overwhelemed and just want the world to stop so you just hide somewhere. also the colours could go with chapter 3 with the chromatic abberation.

also the bit with “ my eyes went dark, I don't know where, my pupils are, But I'll figure out a way to get us out of here” just kinda sums up ramis whole hero thing with his powers and all. anyway this has turned into less what songs rami would like and why this particular song reminds me of him and lewis (lewis specifically has the hair cutting/chest hiding, [big transmasc mood], and also messy haired trainwreck who doesnt know who he is yet. also the ghosts bit)

i did end up picking upbeat songs because ramis a dude who like to try and be upbeat even if things arent. even if hes not really feeling it he will pretend to.

[full description: Anonymous said to someone-always-cares: “hi ily!!! do characters like quartz who have colored hair have that naturally or did they dye it?”

“its both natural and not! while most supers can do a magical girl ish transformation, including a change in hair colour, there are some exceptions.”

theres two small full body drawings of rami, one in civilian clothes, one fully transformed.

“if a superhero were to have a biological child, the child will inherit the powers of the parent(s). however, the child will not inherit the full transfromation. they do inherit any physical transformations, but not the outfit.”

theres a drawing of a woman in blue, quartz’s mother, fully transformed, holding her mask in her hand, smiling down at a much younger quartz as a child. hes smiling back up at her with the same blue eyes, pointy ears, and blue hair, but hes still in normal clothes.

“in the case of quartz, both of hisparents had superpowers, and he inherited those powers and the physical transformations.he can also pick and mix whatphysical traits to change.“

next is a headshot of adult quartz, his face split down the middle with one side having hair and eye like his mother, the other like his father. theres a list of traits from each parents, blue hair and eyes and pointy ears from his mum, and purple hair and eyes and pointy teeth from their dad.

 “Anonymous said to someone-always-cares:  Are all the characters the same age? If not, how old are they? Are they irl friends or just superhero friends?”

theres some headshots of rami and his team lined up with ages labelled: cam is 15, rami himself is 17, lin, mateo, and dante, are all 18, and cap is 20.

“rami and xandra were somewhat friends before she got superpowers, so when, after the incident with her old team, she found rami had developed powers, xandra stuck close to him. their other teamates started off as superhero friends but soon turned into irl friends too”

theres a headshot of lewis and jade. theyre both 17

“when lewis first decided to start being a vigilante,jade quickly found him and decided to help train himand offered to be a mentor of sorts, as they both have similar powers. that quickly derailed.”

“ cinder5555 said to someone-always-cares: How long does it usually take to make a comic page? I'm curious because they're so freaking good that they must take FOREVER”

theres a drawing of myself, a fluffy hair tired bastard in a hoodie, smiling

“Thanks! Ive been doing this shit since like 2017 and i still have no idea how long it takes me. i can get a page done in a day if i have nothing else to do or if its a simple page, but if i have work then maybe 2-3 days? i spend like, most of my free time doing this.“

another drawing of me, now looking frustrated muttering “how the FUCK does time work”

“but i can never do it all on one sitting.i will inevitably get distracted and zone out daydreaming mid drawing so its very hard to get an accurate read on how long it takes. so however long a piece of string is i guess“

the only qustion not from tumblr is a discord message from RuneStone Cabin:

“Q: Can you talk about the incidence of superpowers in this world? Like many people are supers, which powers are more or less common, how long they've been a thing for, stuff like that. Also does Omen know I'd die for them “

theres a drawing of omen pointing at a date circled on a calender marked “decembuary”, theyre saying “i know. i already wrote your death in my calender.”

then a giant wall of text reading: “Supers have only existed for a relativly short time, since the early 1940s. momento mori was the second person to have ever gained powers.

Only a small number of the population are supers! the chances are higher in more populated cities, but unusally london has oneof the higher percentages of supers. while nobody in universe has any idea of the origins of superpowers, it does seem that powers are more likely to occur in people who would actually use their powers.

as for what powers are most common, after making a badly catagorized spreadsheet of every superpowered character ive made for this world (70% of which will probably never even be seen), turns out that elemental powers are the most common. although not all elemental powers manifest as the straight up 'controling this element' as seen in characters like lin or tsunami. for example, iris's powers would fall under shadow elemntal powers, but theyre a lot more weird that just controlling shadows.there are some abilities that have never been seen before,such as ressurection or full on time travel (aka anything that could bring a character back to life), but powers are certainly allowed to toe the line eg healing, powers involving undeath, immortality, pausing or manipulating time.

aside from that, anything goes. you could get plain old superstrength, but you could also get the ability to create dogs with your mind. other not quite rules, more guidelines are that supers are immune to their own powers hurting them (unless they were pushing themselves too hard), although the way the imminuties occur may be inconvinient to the super.

while some powers may be 'more powerful' than others, powers dont really get to be way underpowered or overpowered in comparision to others. sure being able to talk to animals may feel a bit useless compared to someone who can lift 4 tanks at once, but nobodys going to end up with a power like 'can turn into a goose but only once' or 'can grow toenails twice as fast' or 'if i sneeze i can change my hair colour'. at the same time, youre not going to get someone with the power to snap their fingers and level a city, or instantly blow up the moon or whatever.

“Anonymous said to someone-always-cares: I love rami PLEASE tell me his favorite song(s) and why. I will die for you”

a drawing of rami saying out loud “i dont really have any specific favourite song, really? i just listen to whatever sounds catchy and then listen to that on repeat for hours until i hate it. i guess i do like upbeat songs? ones that make you feel happy even if the lyrics are sad”

“ un1c0rnhh said to someone-always-cares: tell me,,, please,, cam,,, are they a cat person or a dog person?? ily"

theres a drawing of cam a metre away from a cat lying down. she has her arm out and is making ‘psspsspss’ noises at it. end id]

FUCK i am so glad i didnt hand write all of that, it would have been a major pain in the ass to write it all and then have to transcribe all that next. but nope i could directly copy paste the asks and word answers. cheers if anyone made it this far down. if anyone wonders why this is uploaded late, you know now.

[bigsnzstanacct]

Kn/ives Out - R/ansom Fic

Inspired by these posts, although I went a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle overboard with it, as is my wont. This may or may not be the first of a five-or-six part series, a sort of “Five Times Ransom Pissed Off Everybody By Sneezing, and One Time He Didn’t.” Or it might just be the one little story. You know the drill, over-the-top sneezing ahoy lmao.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

    “Do we have to talk politics?” Joni asked, her fingers tensed, her eyes rolling as she walked rather briskly to the drink cart. “It’s not that I’m not willing it’s just it’s so contentious and I’m a little concerned about that kind of energy—”

“No, no, no Joni,”—Richard cutting in now, his words stretching longer in the way all of him seemed to extend and elongate when he was drunk, as though he forgot Linda and Harlan were watching and expecting—”No, Joni, you don’t get to throw stones and then hide your hand, if you say something about our President, I’m gonna say something back.”

“Now, now, Richard,”—The aforementioned Harlan—”I think we can all agree the President—”

“Our President, Harlan, our President, I’m not saying I like him but I’m saying he’s our—”

“N-now… now come on Richard”—Walt, briefly, before being steamrolled by—

“Richard, I think I’d like a change of subject now—” Linda, ordinarily authoritative enough to end the line of inquiry altogether, but apparently not tonight.

“Well I wouldn’t, Linda. I wouldn’t like a change of subject, and for that matter...” (Richard, elongated as though he forgot Linda and Harlan…)

“How boring,” Ransom said in an aside. Marta happened to be walking by, picking up Richard’s emptied drink, and Joni’s recently downed one. It wasn’t actually her job to provide maid service for these people but they seemed to expect it and Harlan encouraged it and they really were so generous.

So it was to Marta that Ransom delivered his aside, though it wasn’t really to her—it might as well have been to the drink cart, or the grandfather clock, or the nonexistent camera over his shoulder. Ransom was the sort of man who walked around as though there could always be a camera over his shoulder. In fairness, Ransom was also the sort of man cameras commonly followed around. He’d very nearly committed to at least two reality tv shows, mostly to annoy his family. He’d gotten his current sports car upon backing out of a reality tv show. It was too bad he was too old to start a YouTube channel. He was still waiting to see what he could get out of revealing Jacob’s channel to the family, whether it would be better to threaten Jacob with its reveal to his parents, his parents with its reveal to to the family, or perhaps the family as a whole with a leak to… whatever random book-related website might find that gossip interesting. Maybe just Reddit.

Marta was just about to respond, to perhaps engage Ransom in conversation. She had it on good authority--Harlan’s--that she could be good company to a Thrombey or a Drysdale. Everyone seemed rather wary of Ransom, but aside from his aversion to the dogs, Marta had no reason to think ill of him, and so tried to assume the best of him. And---she could admit somewhat blushingly---he certainly wasn’t unattractive. She could see how, in her younger, sillier days how she might nurse a bit of crush on him, the wealthy prince charming and the maid---although she was not a maid, no matter how they treated her, she was a well-trained professional, dammit---

But before she could speak, Ransom’s face suddenly underwent some sort squishing, snorting motion. His long nose scrunched up short as he took in a sharp sniff, nearly a snort. His eyes closed for a moment, and a smile played on his lips. “This’ll be fuhh-hun,” he said in half a whisper, airy breathing infusing and interrupting his murmur.

Marta tilted her head to the side, curious what Ransom could be referring to, until she saw his nose, which was twitching: once, then twice. A heavy sniff, then another, then two in a row, then a long one, for all the world like fanning a flame (a flame, as she would come to realize, to light a fuse, to burn down to an explosion...)

It was around this moment that Ransom abruptly stood, and she could not help but notice how broad his shoulders were, as his eyes fluttered, and his chest began to swell. His nose was starting to pinken around the nostrils, the flaring and scrunching continuing, his arms falling slack. The creak of his chair as he stood brought everyone’s attention towards him, and as they noticed the bizarre ritual Ransom was performing or enduring.

“Oh, god, Ransom, not this again…” (Linda, eyes rolling)

“Ransom, Ransom buddy, Ransom please...” (Richard, hands waving)

“Is he going to do that screaming thing again, I’m leaving the room---” (Joni, hands raising towards her ears)

“Leaving the room won’t do her much good.” (Harlan, with a bit of a snicker in his voice)

Ransom was starting to vocalize now, little “hehhhH… hEHHHhh…” sounds that sounded as though they were either being dragged out of him or as though he was dragging them out himself, perhaps both. His head was tilting back, that chest looking larger than ever as it stretched and air flowed in and his long nose scrunched and his mouth hung open in a tall O and his back arched and hands went over ears and then one last voiceless gasp in… “huuuUUHH!”

“HHHHEEYYY-SSHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!” 

Ransom sprang forward, giving vent to what was plainly a titanic sneeze to begin with, let alone his leaning into it, relishing it, and then on top of that, as the sneeze went on it seemed to turn into a pure, guttural yell, his voice roughening in an obviously voluntary way. It sounded as though the sort of scream one might hear on a hardcore metal record was riding the rails of an involuntary, massive rush of air, and Marta couldn’t help but frown as a visible spray was ejected from Ransom’s face along with the helter skelter noise, but she could hardly notice the spray since, standing closest to the blast, her ears were assaulted worst with Ransom’s screaming sneeze or sneeze-flavored scream, whatever it was, and she dearly wished she’d followed the family’s example and plugged her ears.

The sneeze tapered off at last, and Ransom--who’d doubled over with the blast--bounced back up, face reddened from exertion, practically beaming. Or at least he would have been beaming, were his nose not already scrunching…

“Whew! Big wuhh-hunn…” He was presumably celebrating his sneeze, congratulating himself on a “big one” although the urge had not yet left him entirely, and it seemed another sneeze was one its way. Joni was just walking back into the room as he went into his sniffing routine again.

“Jesus! Ransom you’re gonna give your grandfather a heart attack…” she huffed, before seeing him building towards another sneeze, spinning on her heel and promptly marching out of the room again.

(Harlan, for his part, was chuckling.)

“S-suhh… sorry guys, think I gotta sn-sneeze again…” he warned, breath catching as he actively tilted his head back, presumably seeking some sort of light to look into. His eyes were tearing slightly as he fanned one hand in the general direction of his nose, perhaps… attempting to spark another sneeze by fanning dust at himself? He smiled as he could the whole way, clearly enjoying this performance.

“What the hell, kiddo, didn’t we tell you about your whole yelling routine…” Richard grumbled, making a move to walk towards Ransom but clearly thinking better of it as Ransom’s breath caught yet again.

“Ransom!” His mother interjected. 

“You’re not a kid, you get allergy shots, I don’t know why you put on this whole production…” (Richard again)

“Ransom stop that this instant, you know the neighbors called the police last time they thought someone was in here being murdered.” (Linda)

“Shh, shh, shh, you’ll make it go away�� ooh, I can feel it…” (Ransom, giggling)

The rest of them were rolling their eyes, plugging their ears, shuffling away from the scene---Marta heard a door slam, clearly Joni wasn’t risking being within the house for Ransom’s next explosion.

Meanwhile Ransom seemed to have clinched the sneeze, no longer trying to coax it out but surrendering to it, preparing for it, getting ready to ride the wave and rattle the rafters… he held up his hand, and put his fingers down one by one, his giggling nearly putting him off his sneeze again as he counted down to the sneeze: five fingers, four, three, two... and just as he had one finger left up, he gave another of those great airy voiceless pulls with his flared nostrils and slack mouth and…

“EEEYYYYYYYYAAAA-SSSHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

This one was less a heavy metal growl and more a pure scream, perhaps inspired by his mother’s mention of murder, as it bent higher pitched towards the end, and Marta couldn’t help but think she wouldn’t have imagined such a large man could reach such a high pitch.

Once again Ransom pitched forward, staying bent over, hands over his face this time as he pushed out the sneeze, dragging it out beyond all necessity, but clearly enjoying it. He popped up again, “whew! Think I got the itch out that time!” He said, beaming like a child pleased to have gotten away with something naughty, before he screwed his face up again, “W-well, I think I got it…”

“Ransom, stop it, I know you’re just putting it on this time, I can tell.” Linda said, although this time she was chuckling a bit. Harlan was outright laughing, although he rolled his eyes as he said “you’ve outdone yourself.”

Marta had prepared adequately for this one, fingers plugging her ears, but she was still rather distracted by the whole affair. She’d never seen anyone sneeze quite so dramatically. Still, he seemed to have some measure of control over the whole affair; standing behind him, she couldn’t help but notice the sheen of his hands, practically glistening with the moisture from the sneeze, before he wiped them roughly on his pants. Clearly this sneeze had been much… juicier, she thought with an alarmed frown. Ransom must have anticipated that, ergo the hands tented around his nose as he’d howled out that last sneeze. 

“You done yelling at us, buddy?” Richard asked, clearly irritated. His son had managed to take up even more space than he did, after all. Practically took up all the space in the house; certainly there wasn’t a room in the house (or on the grounds altogether, practically) that Ransom’s sneezes couldn’t be heard. 

“Yeah Dad, sorry.” Ransom said, his childish grin replaced with a more adolescent smirk, his eyes cutting over towards the couch where his father sat. “Just had a tickle in my nose.” His voice grew brighter, though no less mocking, as he looked over at Marta, who once again could have been a drink cart, a grandfather clock, a camera for all it mattered. He tilted his head at her, and adopted what might have been a boyish pout (if his face weren’t so smug) to say:

 “Allergies, you know. I can’t help it.”

[d3-iseefire]

Belated Writing Wednesday

Really Belated Writing Wednesday! SO this was a story I started months ago and hadn’t finished. It’s finished now, and is long enough to be about a four chapter long fic SO I’m gonna post a chapter a day til the fic goes away.  :D :D

Little Warning: This fic gets pretty intense later on so please keep in mind that it’s still me writing it which means it’s still T Rated, No Archive Warnings and a Happy Ending. :)

For those who watch the show Supernatural, Sam and Dean make a cameo but the story is mainly about Bilba and Fili.

Anyhoo, I hope you all enjoy! Chapter 2 will be up tomorrow (on AO3). I’m not going to post each chapter on here, I don’t think, but I’ll post something letting you all know it’s up.

In the meantime, here’s the link what will eventually be the full story on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21702031/chapters/51764428

Bilba met Fili on a rainy January evening when she was six and he was eight. The rain had left her stuck inside, and she'd been slowly going stir crazy. Her foster mother had turned the lights down to put a movie on and, while the other children were engrossed, Bilba took the opportunity to sneak out to go exploring.

She headed straight to the basement.

None of the kids were allowed down there and she could just imagine the looks of awe she would receive from the others when she regaled them with tales of her adventure.

Tragically, what she found were boxes, and dust. Lots and lots of dust that tickled her nose and sent her into a violent sneezing fit.  

When she'd finally recovered, she’d looked up to see a young boy staring at her suspiciously from the other side of the room.

Fili, as he’d introduced himself, had snuck in to look for monsters. The way he said it, all serious and solemn, nearly made Bilba laugh but she managed to control herself and simply nod back with what, she hoped, was an equal level of gravity.

She could understand where he'd gotten the idea. The home she had been placed in was in an apartment building, five stories with a stone exterior stained dark in places by the passing of years. In wintertime the leaves died off which left the trees spindly and creepy and, at night cheap lightbulbs caused an otherworldly orange light to shine from the windows.

Bilba thought the place had a ghost, and she lived there.

She’d ended up helping Fili look because it sounded like fun (even though he continued to insist it was very serious) and, together, the two hunted through boxes and searched shadowy corners for any evidence of ghosts, ghouls or other assorted monstrosities.

It had been nearly an hour later that her foster mother found them, along with a tall, dark haired intimidating man that turned out to be Fili’s uncle. Fili had been dragged off, while Bilba had been sent to her room for the evening for sneaking away and making everyone worry.

That might well have been the end of it, if it hadn’t been for Fili showing up a few days later to see if she wanted to play. This time he’d been dropped off by a different, just as intimidating, man Fili had introduced as Dwalin.  

Dwalin had left and she and Fili had spent the entire afternoon running about playing. This had been followed by a similar afternoon the next day, as well as the one after that and the one after that. It was nearly five days later, in fact, before Dwalin had arrived to take Fili away again.

Bilba had cried for hours.

Two weeks later and he was suddenly back again, this time with a younger brother named Kili in tow. They'd stayed for only two days this time; and then it was another week before they arrived again.

It became a normal, if irregular, occurrence after that for both of them to be dropped off. Her foster mother explained that she and Fili's uncle were old friends, and she watched his nephews while he was away on business trips.

Fili insisted that his family was off fighting monsters, and they knew her foster mother because they'd once saved her from one.

Bilba didn't really believe him but had to admit his story was more interesting than the one her foster mother told.

As they grew older she grew closer to both of them, but her bond with Fili was always a little bit deeper than it was with Kili. When they were gone, Bilba spent most of her time sitting at her bedroom window waiting for him -- them to come back.

Fili began to visit more often, not always with Kili, and not always times where he had to stay. His family lived in a small, rundown house on the edge of town, and he’d ride an old battered bike in to spend the day with her.

On Bilba’s eight birthday, Fili and his family showed up to take her out for dinner. It was the first time she'd felt like part of a family, just like any other kid out with their parents and siblings to celebrate. The restaurant staff had given her a free cupcake with a cheap, plastic eight that she'd carefully preserved and hidden away for safety.

Later, Bilba got permission to go with Fili and his uncle on outings, sometimes to that rundown house on the edge of town, other times to the movies or the park or mall. Once, they all went to the beach and she got to see the ocean for the very first time.

She got to know them all. Fili of course, and his uncle, and then Kili. There was also Dwalin and a host of other people who came in and out at various times. Many of them were quite serious and had a tendency to brood, but they were always very kind to her.

She never met Fili and Kili's parents. The one time she'd asked, Fili had gotten sad and simply told her they were gone.

Fili's family seemed to get hurt a lot, often sporting bandages or favoring arms or legs, but she was always waved off when she tried to ask what had happened. Fili and Kili never got hurt. He said it was because he wasn’t old enough to hunt monsters yet and, as always, Bilba simply nodded and accepted it. She’d learned long ago not to be a bother. When you were a bother, people didn’t want you. She didn’t ask silly questions or raise her voice and she certainly didn’t go anywhere near the many weapons they told her to stay away from.

In addition to them, Bilba also got to meet Tauriel. She was a friend of Kili's and, when she visited, she spent a lot of time sharpening her own weapons. She was Fili’s age but, as he always complained, her family let her hunt. She rarely ever got hurt. When Bilba asked why, Tauriel said it was because she knew when to duck.

Fili got his first knife when she was eleven and he was thirteen. Soon after, Bilba stopped seeing him as often. Instead of being left behind while his uncle and Dwalin went on their trips (to hunt monsters as Fili always insisted) he went with them. Kili still came to stay sometimes, but it wasn't the same for either of them and he soon stopped.

It was around this time that the doubt first started to creep in.

She supposed it came from watching the other kids around her come and go. Mostly go. There always seemed to be people looking for a little boy or girl to come and complete their family.

No one ever asked to meet her.

She didn’t know why. Maybe she wasn't pretty enough or smart enough or a thousand different things. In the end, all that mattered was she simply wasn't enough. No one wanted her. As time passed, a small voice inside her head began trying to convince her that Fili and his family didn't want her either.  

Sure, they took her out, but they always brought her back. Always turned and drove away. Off on their business trips for days, or even weeks, at a time. Without her.

They never offered to adopt her, never even seemed to consider it.

Some of the other kids taunted her for it.

Sometimes that voice inside her head taunted her too.

Maybe, it would say, she’d never been anything more than a built-in playmate to keep Fili and his brother busy and out of his uncle's hair.

Maybe they thought she was annoying even though she tried her hardest not to be. Maybe they only tolerated her. Maybe Fili thought she was annoying but was too nice to get rid of her or maybe they thought of her as nothing more than an irritating little girl who couldn’t take a hint.

Maybe they were just waiting for her to go away.

The thoughts got louder as she got older, particularly once her eighteenth birthday started to become less of a far-off concept and more of a rapidly approaching reality. She couldn’t stay in the home once she turned eighteen. She’d have to move out, find a job and place to stay.

She'd be all on her own.

When she was three months from her eighteenth birthday and he was well into his twentieth year, Fili got hurt for the first time. Really hurt. He'd been hurt before, ever since he started going away on those business trips with his uncle, but it had never been more than a few cuts and bruises or, once, a broken arm.

This time he came home unconscious and pale, with blood still staining his neck and soaking through his shirt in a bigger pool than she’d ever seen. His breathing had been shallow, and his pulse been so slow she almost couldn’t feel it.

His entire chest had been wrapped in heavy bandages and she knew he should be in the hospital, hooked up to all manner of machines and tubes, but instead they put him in his bed and set up a crappy old IV pump that they’d stolen at the same time they’d snuck him out of the hospital he should have been in.

It was the first time Bilba had gotten mad at them.

It was the first time she’d yelled.

It was the first time they’d yelled back. 

She’d threatened to call the police, and they’d threatened to take Fili and leave...and never come back.

Bilba would always remember the cutting pain as those words had lanced right through her. She'd reeled back as if they'd physically struck her and, in many ways, they had.

Kili had shouted at his uncle, while Dwalin had ordered them all to shut up and, through it all, Bilba had simply...stood there.

She hadn't moved until their uncle had stalked from the room and slammed the door behind him. Kili had tried to talk to her but Bilba had simply shaken her head. She’d gone and stretched out on the bed next to Fili...and stayed there.

For days.

For weeks.

No one from her foster home came looking for her.

It had taken three days for Kili to convince her to eat, and then only because he’d threatened to have Dwalin drag her from the room if she didn’t. After that, Bilba had made sure to eat, and shower and do what she was supposed to do.

She did it by rote.

She did it in silence because if there was one thing she now knew with utter certainty it was that while she couldn't live without Fili and his family, they could certainly live without her.  

Life could be unfair that way sometimes.

Fili took two and a half weeks to wake up, and it would be weeks more before every moment of that waking wasn’t spent in agony.

Bilba stayed with him the entire time, even later when he was mostly healed, and the rest of the family started their business trips again.

She finally asked Fili what happened.

He told her it was monsters.

Something inside her had snapped. She'd screamed at him and, for the first time since they'd met, Fili had realized she'd never believed him about the monsters.

The fight that followed was the biggest they’d ever had, mostly on her end. All of it suddenly came pouring out. The horrible voice in her head, her anxiety over her eighteenth birthday, the gut churning terror she’d felt as she’d watched over him and begged him not to leave her.

At some point he’d stopped and simply listened to her, eyes wide. Bilba had wanted to stop, had told herself to stop, to just simply shut up, please shut up, for the love of god, just shut up.

Don’t be a problem.

Don’t make his life harder.

Don’t get in the way.

He won’t want you anymore.

None of them will.

They'll leave and then where will you be?

 Alone.

That's where.

 She couldn’t seem to stop, however, and by the end of it her voice was hoarse, and her eyes were swollen and puffy, and she was shaking so hard it was a wonder she didn’t collapse.

She’d run from the house before he could tell her that he hated her. When he'd tried to visit she'd refused to see him, and when her phone had rung with the ringtone she'd set for him she'd turned it off.

Eventually he'd stopped trying, and she’d finally learned the answer to the question she’d always been too afraid to ask.

It had been an illusion.

A myth.

A pleasant dream she’d used to pass the time until she was forced to face reality.

No one wanted her, and no one ever would.

Read the Rest Here As It’s Posted: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21702031/chapters/51764428

[dailydoseofshizaya]

Shizaya WWII AU

After I read and saw the movie Atonement by Ian McEwan in school I got inspired to write a Shizaya Nurse-Soldier WWII au ficlet by Briony’s nurse scene. It’s not a romantic scene, at all, but the setting gave me the idea. I have big finals these next two weeks, but maybe I’ll continue this : ) 

    The air reeked of fresh blood, burnt skin, and morphine, among other unpleasant things, and it climbed up their nostrils aggressively. No one wanted to sneeze less they might suck in more of the death-filled air, so they scrunched their faces instead. The orchestra of cries and moans of pain seemed to line up in sync with the barking commands of chief-medics and the constant squeak of rolling carts and the pitter patter of scurrying shoes over the grimy floors. Izaya was among this crowd right now, his eyes red from exhaustion and shock, but his body moved on its own with practiced certainty as he attended to the fresh battle wounds of soldiers coming. As he nursed wounds, administered medicine and IV’s, he tried to distract his mind and put up a barrier between his actions and his emotions, anything to make this easier, although he was no stranger to these kinds of emergencies at the hospital. He pictured in his mind a sack of rice. Sturdy, thick, and firm. Funny, how just a needle prick in one of these sacks could cause the entire mass to deflate like a child’s balloon. A large sack of rice, that could feed families or kill a man with its weight, useless with a snap.

    A hand with dry, crusty skin seized his own, and he snapped his head up to the weary eyes of a soldier who was written down with a severe concussion. Izaya offered a soft smile and eased the soldier’s hand off his wrist. He pulled the blankets up the man’s body and told him to continue to rest. The soldier had a sharp, haggard face, and for a brief terrifying second Izaya thought it could have been Shiki. Shiki, his old friend, who was a soldier in this platoon, and whose last letter a few weeks ago wrapped up in an optimistic note.

    “Nurse Orihara, get me more wrapping gauze. Then clean the chest wound for patient number sixty-five.” Commanded the head-nurse.

    “Yes, Sister.”

    Sister Naomi came into the warden around the same time as Izaya joined the hospital, and even though there was no difference in their rank since they both did the same job, Naomi always seemed to think otherwise. It was the tang of smugness in her tone and her tendency to not even look at you when she addressed you which made Izaya love to mess with her in any way that he could.

    However, that would have to wait for much later. As he marched away to do his bidding, Izaya failed to notice a stretcher carrying a terrible head injury that two petite nurses were struggling to lift up. In effect, they clashed. Badly. At least the wounded soldier was so unconscious from the morphine given to him that he wasn’t aware of the violent shaking to his state.

    “Nurse Izaya!” Naomi shrieked in her annoying high-pitched voice.

    But Izaya didn’t feel like turning around at the moment. He lazily glanced down condescendingly at the girls scrambling to lift the stretcher back up again and continued walking forward.  

    The location of the medicine storage that was usually the most supplied was thankfully packed behind a quieter corner on the building’s floor level. There would be no breaks today for the medics, and it was nice to step away from the noisy quarters for a moment. The shelves were located at the end of a long stretch of the room that was narrower than the main quarters where all the nurses and doctors were attending to the patients. There were beds spread evenly on both sides across the whole expanse of the passage, even up to a couple of feet away from the shelves and cabinets with the supplies. The storage was inside an alcove that was created from a narrow “T” dip further down the corridor. There were doors on both sides of the walls of that formed the storage “gap” which opened to stairs leading to more building levels. Due to the massive and unexpected influx of soldiers that morning, every single bed was taken, and many dollies were positioned between the hospital beds to accommodate more patients. The patients here were sleeping or quietly resting. Most of them had already been treated and the others had less demanding injuries that needed attention while the soldiers in the main quarters all needed the most urgent medical care.

    At the storage shelves, Izaya picked up a stray cart and started to pile up the needed materials. Dakin solution,  cocaine hydrochloride, chloroform, he muttered to himself. Where is the sodium salicylate? Scanning the wide furniture packed with multiple cupboards, drawers, and shelves all ranging different sizes, Izaya’s eyes finally rested upon the very top shelf where there rested fully filled and untouched bottles of the desired aesthetic. Izaya was 5’9’’ and the shelf was 6’5’’ feet tall. How convenient. He stretched up on his tiptoes and grabbed the left edge of the furniture for support. He managed to grab a couple of bottles but the rest were pushed far too back for it. He pushed his body weight up and towards the back crannies and tried poking his fingers on either side of the bottles to nudge them closer, but his fruitless endeavors resulted in shaking the old furniture and knocking a glass bottle of gauze balls instead.

    “Shit…!”, he cursed.

    “Do you need help with that?”, a deep voice suddenly spoke up.

    Startled, Izaya whipped his head around, unaware that his comical failures were being watched, but then turned back around again to pick up the gauze balls.

    “I’m sorry if I woke you. Please go back to bed, soldier.” The other man chuckled and Izaya heard the bed creaking as he adjusted himself and sat upright.

    “I think I’m taller than you. Let me help?”

    “I’m fine,” Izaya said curtly. “Thanks,” he added, “Go back to bed.”

After a moment of picking up the rest of the balls, Izaya got up and turned around to finally address the soldier. He was a broad-shouldered with dyed blonde hair with evident muscles but slim. His face was stained with soot but his eyes sparkled with interest nonetheless, and his left-arm was cradled in a sling. His chest and right arm were wrapped in bandages with blots of dark red peaking through.  

    “Is there anything I can get you, soldier?”

    The blonde man looked caught off guard and hesitated for a bit.

    “No, I’m fine I guess.”

    “You don’t look very ‘fine’ though,” Izaya said, referring to the man’s wounds. Izaya stood there, both men looking at each other and neither one knowing what to say. Realizing the awkwardness that he created, Izaya’s face turned a little red and he walked away, pushing his cart with him. When he was farther away from the blonde man’s bed, he let out a breath, not having realized that he was holding it in.

[snowe-zolynn-rogers]

Nomu!Hero Course Basics

Shinsou is the first to be taken, right after the Sports Festival because his Quirk is ‘villainous’ so AFO sends Kurogiri to collect him.

It’s honestly pretty easy given that Shinsou isn’t able to fight back well (Aizawa hasn’t offered to train him yet so he’s unskilled as a fighter and he can’t rely on his Quirk because Kurogiri won’t respond to him)

He tried that once and it was not pleasant afterwards

He brainwashed Shigaraki and AFO broke his left leg to keep him from getting further.

He refuses to become a villain so they make him into a Nomu.

He gets pretty useless Quirks because AFO is saving the better ones for the others.

“Sorry you get the useless ones. I’m saving the good ones for a friend of yours. You might remember him. Midoriya Izuku.“

Shinsou manages to stay lucid for  few hours even with the three new Quirks eating away at him.

He does slip into a catatonic state eventually though, because he figures nobody’s coming. He figures he’s just a Gen Ed student, who lives in an orphanage no less, so nobody cares.

Boy is he wrong. Midoriya is an anxious puppy about his friend and even Bakugo gets worried when he hears that Shinsou hasn’t showed up, both to school, work, and at the orphanage he lives at, for a week.

It doesn’t help that, when Hosu happens, Midoriya, Iida, and Todoroki are also kidnapped and forced to become Nomu as well.

It’s at this point that Shinsou ‘wakes up’ from his catanonia because he finally sees something familiar that isn’t these four walls and a man who keeps hurting him.

Unfortunately, Midoriya, Iida, and Todoroki aren’t that lucky.

Since Shinsou can barely keep keep himself calm when he first ‘wakes up’, he really can’t do anything without falling over so he really can’t just play prison break, even if he wants to.

He’s especially unable to be calm when he sees AFO using his Forcible Quirk Activation stolen Quirk on Todoroki with his new Porcelain Quirk (keeps shattering pieces of Todoroki to test it), Iida with his Blood Knives Quirk (forcing Iida to make weaponry to train him), and Midoriya with his new Fire Breath Quirk (it keeps hurting Midoriya’s throat after prolonged use)

Shinsou is in terrible condition by the way. He can’t eat so he’s got a feeding tube in his nose, he’s routinely got an IV in his arm because he’s always dehydrated because because ‘no, you can’t take the mask off’ even to eat.

Shinsou isn’t really expecting to be saved. And having brainless Midoriya, Todoroki, and Iida around really isn’t giving him any optimistic vibes.

But now he’s ‘awake’ so he can’t go back to ‘sleep’.

To pass time he tests his new wings and masters autonomy of them.

Eventually he gains up the nerve to tug on AFO’s sleeve and points at his wings and flaps them like ‘hey bitch, I wanna train these, you’ve got me stuck here I may as well pass time.’

AFO is ecstatic that he wants to be a ‘useful Nomu’ and agrees, although he basically puts him on a leash and hands him to Dabi.

Cue Hitoshi’s new Memory Read kicking in and he sees Dabi’s memories and just how much Dabi is hurting and in pain and sad and doesn’t want to do this anymore.

He manages to fly pretty damn well for someone who hasn’t had wings his whole life.

Dabi is highly impressed with him.

Shinsou knows JSL, because he grew up wearing a muzzle for his ‘villain Quirk’.

Shinsou uses JSL to talk to Dabi.

‘I know you’re Todoroki Touya‘ “how?“ ‘new quirk.‘ “ah, and?“ ‘your little brother is a Nomu now too.‘

Cue pissed Dabi but he’s thankfully containable or else AFO would have killed Shinsou and Dabi both.

Dabi visits Shoto when his hair grows out with the original red and it ‘wakes him up’ from his catatonia from seeing something familiar.

Sadly Iida and Midoriya aren’t ‘waking up’ yet because they don’t know who the hell Todoroki Touya is.

Dabi, unwillingly, goes through with the Forest Training Arc hoping to any god that will listen that the other students just go with becoming villains.

Damn, did he give himself false hope thinking that.

Mr. Compress captures the entire rest of class 1a just to go overboard like the showman he is.

Almost immediately the students deemed ‘useless villains’ get turned into Nomu. (Aoyama, Ashido, Asui, Uraraka, Ojiro, Koda, Sato, Shoji, Jirou, Sero, and Hagakure)

The others are with the League, where Shigaraki and the others are trying to convince them to become evil.

Haha, bitch you fail. They don’t want to be villains so off to become Nomus do they go too.

Dabi has managed to steal a few things from the kids’ houses that he hopes has meaning to them and he ‘wakes up’ Iida with an old picture of his brother and Midoriya with an AllMight action figure.

The others all wake up to varying degrees when they see AllMight and the other heroes.

So now Aizawa has twenty Nomufied students that are at varying states of their catatonia and the only way to ‘wake them up’ is to give them something from their childhood as a way of cognitive recalibration.

Once all the kids are safe (thank you Mt. Lady and the whole damn Vanguard).

The Vanguard helps save the hero course kids from being in the way. They did not sign up to this to hurt kids. They all thought the kids would just be like…left in a random place for the pro heroes to find.

They’re blaming themselves for kids being hurt like this so they all decide to save them from getting hurt and get them out of the way with Mt. Lady.

Most of the pros are shocked seeing the villains carrying/dragging the students to safety. But hey the kids are safe, help them.

All of their parents are asked to bring something from their childhood of great emotional value to the hospital in Kamino they’re being checked at.

It ‘wakes’ them all up.

And now Aizawa has twenty students with brand new Quirks they can’t control well.

So what does he do? Starts training the simpler Quirks in the hospital so they can get a handle on them and actually focus on something so they can all calm down.

First it’s Kaminari because he’s actually terrified. He’s phasing through everything and crying and Aizawa brings Mirio in to help him allow Kaminari to get a good handle on his new Quirk.

His panics are solved with putting special gloves on from Mirio’s first year prototype outfit that stay tangible even when your body goes through things (provides something stable to use as a grip).

Next is Ashido. She can’t stop using Glitch and she can’t use her Suppression on herself so she’s basically crying on Aizawa, since she can’t use Glitch if she’s touching someone.

Hatsume Mei is a goddess to 1A now. She makes them all suppressors and gadgets to help them with their new Quirks.

Mei gives Mina an inhibitor so her Quirks are lowered to a containable level while Aizawa teaches her that she can grab onto something if she feels a glitch coming on.

Poor Mina glitches when she sneezes and sadly she’s sick with a cold when she’s at AFO’s warehouse.

Aizawa pairs Uraraka with Midnight to try to contain her Laughing Gas Quirk and thankfully, together, they manage it in just over an hour.

Next is Todoroki. The poor boy was manhandled too much getting out of Kamino and now he’s got fractures and cracks in several places and the doctors are scared to touch him.

Thankfully, Sero’s new Mend Quirk is unable to be turned off and so he puts them together so Sero can heal Shoto just as fast as he cracks.

It doesn’t help that Shoto is blind now thanks to the Quirk transfer being too much for his body to handle with his already powerful mixed Quirk and his right eye froze over and was too damaged to repair, even with Sero now healing him constantly.

Bakugo is all sorts of out of it. He’s still partially brainless because, his childhood was just pain and abuse from his mother, he has seemingly nothing he’s emotionally attached to.

That is, until Masaru lets Aizawa send Yamada into Katsuki’s room and Hizashi finds an old worn teddy bear he presents to Bakugo that finally recalibrates his memories.

The Quirk transfer also made Bakugo fully deaf so now he can’t hear, but he can thankfully see peoples Auras and kind of know what their intentions are. Don’t worry if he’s scared he’ll let you know. His hair turns bright fricking purple when he’s scared.

Midoriya has trouble controlling his Light Body Quirk and he keeps accidentally activating it. Aizawa brings in Ashido and tells her to touch his hand and it’s long enough for him to get the inhibitor on him.

He also does this for Iida with his Darkness Body Quirk.

Shinsou has the most mastery of his new Quirks because he actually trained them with Dabi, much to Aizawa’s surprise and horror yet also his pride.

Like, he’s a pro at this, he’s been training these new Quirks.

He knows how to fold his Wings to get through small doorways or just to let people past him, he can turn into energy via his Energy Body and float around the doctors so that he doesn’t get in the way while they’re going past him, he can translate information to the doctors of what’s wrong with the others through his Memory Read.

Someone give him a medal, he deserves it.

Eventually he gets exhausted though and he passes out against Kaminari (who’s exhausted from crying so much), Bakugo (who just doesn’t want to be alone), and Kirishima (who’s been worried about his friends the whole time he’s been ‘awake’).

Dabi is busy with Shoto, catching up, mostly they’re both crying and hugging and Sero is so happy he gets to witness this beautiful brotherly interaction.

Midoriya is with Iida and they’re calming each other down. Uraraka and Asui join them later because their optical Quirks make it hard to look at people without fearing they might hurt them so they opt to wear blindfolds.

Yaoyorozu has determined she will test her new Will O Wisp Quirk and is using it to set small pieces of paper on fire with her fingertips (using the bare minimum to test it) to see the end result of each color.

Aoyama and Tokoyami are basically playing day and night to drive off each other’s loneliness while Shoji makes sure the shadow kid and sunshine kid are okay. Thank god, because he balances the situation a lot.

Once she’s got a handle on her new Quirks, Mina is hanging out with Jirou and Hagakure just so she doesn’t have to be alone. She’s just scared of possibly glitching out of existence and having them hug her is very comforting.

Sato, Ojiro, and Koda made a blanket fort in their hospital room and have fallen asleep there.

It was originally to make something for Sato because he wanted to bake but couldn’t, do something to calm down Ojiro, and provide comfort for Koda.

It worked.

Eventually they all end up in a giant cuddle pile in Ojiro, Koda, and Sato’s room, even those who had already fallen asleep.

Everyone came and they all brought their blankets and made it a giant blanket castle and Aizawa just sits at the door and guards them (and also to alert then when the doctors will be coming in.)

Sadly the four there the longest have eating problems, they can’t chew food because they haven’t in so long so they’ve lost both fat and muscle and are very underweight.

Todoroki is the worst, surprisingly. Since he’s now made of porcelain, his digestion is super fast compared to before so he just burns thought whatever he’s given too quickly (it just makes it worse that he can’t have solid food anymore too).

Thankfully big bro Dabi to the rescue getting all the students tons of food from a Peace Cafe in Kamino Ward, named Heiwa To Chōwa, where the owner of it has basically all but adopted him.

The cafe makes a lot of specialty foods since they’re both

a) close to the hospital so people pick up food for their loved ones there and

b) surprisingly a lot of villains and heroes have eating problems and/or food problems whether from battle, genetic, self-inflicted, or otherwise.

Shinsou and Dabi both work at Heiwa To Chōwa and he and Dabi are like bros when they find out they work opposite shifts (Dabi works day shift aka 8am to 4pm and Shinsou works evening shift aka 5pm to 12pm).

The rest of the Vanguard isn’t just forgiven immediately, even Dabi. The others are in very intense interrogations while Aizawa and the other teachers are helping the students.

The police officers aren’t about to rip Dabi away from his little brother just for questioning until they’re sure Shoto is stable and won’t go back into a catatonic state if Dabi leaves.

Though he does have Hawks following him around as protection for the students.

After two weeks, they move to the dorms and their parents all agree because there’s like limited other ways for the students to learn to control their new Quirks.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S2 Ep 41: It’s Mai’s Turn to Get Electrocuted

Hey guys, welcome to the Christmas Break.

It’s TV watching season, so lets watch some TV and over-analyze a 20 yo kid’s show, you in?

Odion, after suffering from a lightning strike and getting impaled by many pieces of that fake millennium rod he was holding gets dropped off in the only room on this blimp that has sheets. He also had the added shock of witnessing his brother morph into a somewhat evil-er dude with saiyan hair, which I dunno, I’d want to take a nap too, that’s a lot to deal with.

(And thanks to some reader input, turns out this Marik isn’t so much a ghost situation so much. I mean, I guess it’s more of a Season Zero --this is your deep down scary personality taking over-- type thing but it’s not like I really finished Season Zero so...We’re just rolling with it.)

Glad we have an actual hospital wing--confused as to why Bakura isn’t here.

But I guess lightning strike is slightly worse than having a bleeding stab wound for 12 hours. I mean I’m no doctor, maybe it is? Anyway, Odion is hooked up to all sorts of computers and life support although there aren’t any cords attached to him anywhere on his body. Not even one piss-yellow IV bag.

Check out the size of that IBM. This is what a widescreen used to look like.

The rest of the Yuge Crew are here although I’m pretty sure that’s not how hospitals work. Pretty sure you have to be related to drop on in directly after being put in intensive care but like, they are on a blimp so I guess it’s different up there. But also, this guy has abducted them once already and just tried to kill Joey for the second time, and now they are like “We’re basically on BFF family terms with this Odion guy, lets visit that bedside.”

Although, mind you, his real family is Marik and Ishizu, both of which have never said aloud that Odion is their brother. This family is sort of bad at life, TBH.

Since we’re barrelling right into a Mai arc we have to confront one of her 2 big Mai character conflicts--which is either “this is why I don’t get married” or “OMG I am going to die forever alone.” Which is interesting, because last time we hung out with her, we did whatever we could to keep her independent, while in this episode Mai mourns that being independent is the ultimate curse. Girl wants whatever she doesn’t have, pretty much.

Ah, Miss independent, never thought I’d get that song stuck in my head again. Thanks, Mai. Except in this version, instead of falling in love, Mai just makes weird friendships with jail bait teenagers. Why can’t she make friends with like, Roland? He’s her age. Or maybe this nice doctor? But whatever, age is meaningless on this show.

(read more under the cut)

Anyway, Joey has decided to tell us all about that dream he had but leaves out the parts where he dropped everything he owns, and then knocked himself over a desk onto his face, and then in the same dream Kaiba kinda walked in from off screen, dunked on him, and then walked directly off screen again.

Mai is deeply touched.

And then, because she is Mai, gets extremely offended immediately afterward.

I can keep hoping it’ll be Duke Devlin but like...as much as I want him to do more on this show, I really think the only people who remember Duke Devlin at this point are all the animators who were like “HOW many people are in this shot?! Why did we make a season where every scene is a freakin crowd scene!?”

*I know the shading on her ass was supposed to be attractive but it looks like nasty sweat stains*

(Also what the hell computer-machinery is supposed to be behind them in this scene?)

This one time where Joey doth protest too much is the first time we have ever, ever on this show seen Joey act less than vague towards Mai. During the dream episode he blushed, but I thought that was because of Serenity being there for her brother in his dream. I didn’t at all think that was over Mai at the time.

But I guess this is happening now? I mean people kept saying “yes, Joey and Mai will be a thing” and I was like “they better start building up to that because like...nothing is happening.” but this show’s version of building up to that was by just not being vague one single time.

Which in this show is a big deal, I guess. Because shortly after this event, Tea remembers that her character description sheet says “Is bossy AF” with red underline and was like “OMG I totally forgot and it’s been like 20 episodes since I did anything, I gotta hurry” and she just lost her lid.

I’m regretting more and more that joke I made that TeaxKaiba was way more reasonable than TeaxYugi, because sometimes when Tea goes ham she may as well be wearing a long spiky coat with boots leggings. Tea had two very different personalities way before she ever got possessed by Bakura. Like, Tea is kind of a monster actually, but we rarely get to see it because she gets completely distracted and cries a lot when it just feels like...the other half of her, the half that bit a guy once--like she legit bit a guy on this show--that side of Tea would just never cry over cards. Or cry, period. She sure wasn’t crying when she bit that guy!

This is mostly because I think the writers didn’t know how to write a girl like Tea since she’s a mix of a Season Zero Tea and this more old fashioned-’feminine’ version I think they were trying to turn her into for this series. It’s weird. It’s weird that this group of friends have nothing to say about these very abrupt changes in her behavior. Then again, it took them a while to notice the abrupt changes in Yugi.

Anyway, Joey isn’t done getting harassed by everyone he knows yet.

We have Marik trapped in a blimp in the sky and the entire Kaiba security force, why are we dueling him anymore? I mean I know why, we are contractually obligated to show lots of card content in this show to sell cards, but at this point I feel like maybe they should drive the blimp over international waters and resort to maritime law. Give Kaiba a gun.

Actually don’t do that, it would be bad. Don’t give Kaiba a gun. Give it to Duke or something, he seems stable enough. He seems like he’d be able to shoot somebody but not everybody, if you know what I mean.

And because it’s the Mai arc, we gotta have Mai duel next. There’s only 3 people left to go against: Ishizu, Kaiba, and Marik. I think. There’s so many people on this show. Tea isn’t playing, right? I mean I really do feel like like I’ve forgotten someone--maybe Shadi? Miho? So many people are on this blimp.

Whatever, I’ll just roll with it, if I forgot someone I’m sure they’ll show up at some point.

Mai sure is that girlfriend.

Anyway, lets see what Marik’s up to. Ah, he really is visiting his older brother after all.

That’s right--Marik has to play twice. I mean obvi the first Marik was Odion, but still, it just feels like it’s Marik playing twice.

Also can we please talk about Marik’s cargo pants obsession for a little bit? This arch villain is in CARGO PANTS. Like, they have puffy pockets. He figured out that the hoodie was a bad look, but then he was like “I’ll just cover my tum-tum, and then put on my khaki cargo pants with a sensible belt.”

It just sort of insinuates that Marik only owns cultist robes and cargo pants. Just those two things. Imagine if every pant in your closet was cargo pants. Just imagine with me. You’d go mad, too. Imagine you packed for a trip, a nice vacay on a blimp, and then you opened your luggage and you were like “oops! all cargo pants!” you’d fly home.

Marik looks like he’s going to Casual Khaki’s Friday at the office from about the stomach down, and then stomach up up he’s ready to join piccolo and fuse brains or whatever the hell goes on in Dragonball Z.

And Yugi and his friends are late to Mai’s duel because they are teenagers and also of course they would. This whole season was introduced with Yugi being chronically late to stuff.

The bathroom joke in this episode is canon, PS. I skipped a Season Zero episode where Tristan went to the loo and so Yugi held his spot in line and it took like 30 minutes before Tristan finally got back. Tristan’s epic poops have apparently been Yugioh canon since the very beginning.

I’m learning so much about the lore.

Now that Marik no longer has to hide who he is, he has decided that he’ll just use the Shadow Realm willy-nilly now. Although Marik did this without playing any cards at all, it doesn’t seem to register to Seto Kaiba that this is not a hologram. Maybe Kaiba sneezed when Marik summoned it and just assumed he missed a card play or something.

So now, for our gimmick!

Every time we fight in the Shadow Realm it feels like the rules are a little bit different, and Marik decided to make this duel a memory fight.

The Shadow Realm seems to eat on your greatest insecurities, and for Mai it’s feeling all alone. Not sure how that works once the duel is over--her friends will still be there, so like...she can just get a heads up on the one day they went camping that one time and then boom, friendship rekindled, I think. But for now, this is very scary for everyone involved.

But I mean at least she isn’t a playing card, or being thrown into a graveyard by being played as a card, or being devoured by gloopy blobs, or rapidly dying because of the exposure to the shadow zone. As far as Shadow Realms go this one seems kind of tame.

But I guess we shall see if somehow losing Tea will effect her story in any way.

Depends on which Tea, in my opinion, but if we’re going for the normal boring one that only cries wellllllll I wouldn’t notice if she were gone, just saying. Now, if it’s the fun Tea that bites people and yanks their ears off their face, well being forced to lose my memories of her is what the writers do to me basically every episode of this show. Let Tea bite more people in the arm. Let that girl rage.

But all that will be for another recap where we can all watch Mai get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-ed as if a memory wipe hasn’t happened at least once to every single person on this show with the exception of Mokuba. And Mokuba was a paper card for like I want to say about 10 episodes, so...

Anyways, if you just got here I do have these in chrono order from s1 ep1, here is a link.

[eastergrass]

Fowl

I.

I drove up to a familiar scene. Wooden chairs in the yard, flowers, American flags and silver cloudcover. My cousin is in one of these chairs, poking at a dying laptop. An orange extension cord snaked into the house, connecting back to the charger dangling over her fleshy, flattened thigh.

The house is three stories, not including the basement. The family uses official titles for different branches: the addition, the breezeway, the master bedroom, the patio, the entertainment room. The master bedroom. I’m in the guest room, or the basement, depending on who you ask. It’s the one name they don’t agree on.

My uncle takes pride in the house because he built it himself. When I was younger I imagined him doing everything alone from the ground up. Pouring concrete. Planting the hidden machinery of wires and pipes. Up on the roof, sweating on sunny days, hammering shingles.

It took me time to realize he needed help. He had hired people, and mostly just oversaw the project. It took time to realize he had more money, time, and energy than my father.

“Somebody try to shoot you?” My cousin points to the windshield.

“Of course.”

“Nobody’s home,” she sighs. “And there’s really nothing to do about it.” The clouds move, and the sun finds us for a moment.

II.

The sun was out all day after that. We’re drinking High Life on the porch. My cousin’s wearing a two-piece and I wondered what I’d look like in it. She isn’t thin but she’s healthy and dark. She has thick hips and round arms. She inhabits her body in a way that I, something like a grown woman, envy. She’s the youngest.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the yard. She’s always seeing things I don’t.

“What?”

“A turkey. A hen. Don’t you see it?”

“No, I don’t.” She leans over the railing, looking out over the grass.

“Oh. It’s gone.”

I swallow some beer and take off my dark glasses. I’ve been feeling a certain way.

III.

My aunt and I have the same name, and she left after her fourth son was born. Before this, the joke was that I’d grow up to be like her. Nobody talks about her much anymore, but the boys have when we’re alone. They use the past tense like she’s dead, but we all think she’s in Cincinnati.

My aunt used to write stories and she probably still does. There are copies and notes and drafts on a drive in the office. I read one the other night.

Two foragers are out picking mushrooms. One of them has a growth he’s been ignoring. The other is worried about ticks. They’re stopping at every rotten stump and talking about their lives. The one with the tumor isn’t talking about his medical worries. The one with the ticks isn’t mentioning the crawling in his socks, the tickle in his armpits. They crush through the leaves, snap twigs. They find one that isn’t in the book. It’s a false morel, said the man with cancer. The one with lyme disease shakes his head no: It looks like an ear, he tells his friend. It might be poison, it might be nothing. Unsure why, they pick it and carry on. But it does look like an ear, they both think. Hair even grows out the lobes. Within an hour they have found another ear, lips, a nose. Within another hour they’ve scavenged a whole head.

They divide it down the middle and eat it in a clearing lit by the setting sun, and walk home cured.

Just like her.

IV.

I got sick by June even though it was warming up. I was the one who was cold after all. In my sweatshirt laying on a deck chair I squinted at the sun through my tinted glasses. My cousin was with me, and she wore a gold cross that lay flat against her skin. She looked through a bright flyer from the grocer. I hadn’t gone to her graduation ceremony and she hadn’t gone to mine.

Her brothers and her father were all out working, driving, sitting in trucks in parking lots. She’s asking me about college.

“Do you still have friends? Like, did you lose them?”

“What do you mean?”

She was sitting cross-legged on the porch. Her dark hair was twisted up in a thick fist on top of her skull. The paper was flitting in the wind. Out in the yard, birds were picking at the grass and the mud. But they were quiet.

“I don’t know. Did you really learn anything? People say you don’t need to learn the things you do. I know a lot of people don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t see what’s wrong with learning something you can’t use.”

“You’re right.”

“But what did you learn? Do you remember it? You’d have to.”

“I guess.” I started to wonder if I did learn anything. I thought about a course on Disney. I thought about Cather, Conrad, Dante. I remembered watching Fellini instead of reading The Satyricon. Something about algebra. “Yeah, I read a lot. I know things, now.”

“Oh.”

“I took things in, you know? Honestly, I didn’t do all of the work. Nobody does. But I know some things that I liked. I might have been … a different person. That is, if I didn’t go. I wouldn’t know what I know now. Not that I can do anything with it.”

I thought of a friend I had who had fallen in the snow two years ago. She was alone crossing campus, and it was midday. A lot of people were around, but she was alone, and she fell. Someone told me she bled a little into the snow, out of her ear. Was I losing friends?

“So, you probably aren’t interested,” she began. “But do you want to go to a party? It’s a bonfire. People your age will be there.”

“How big is the fire?”

“What?”

“How tall? How wide?”

“Well, we do it in a field. So, it goes up high, and as wide as we want.”

Okay. What time?”

“Oh, later. Like Friday.”

It is Sunday. My cousin always plans ahead.

V.

I had started coughing. Neon dust is coating the cars, the deck chairs, every unmoving thing. Kids in the neighborhood drew on the car windows. A cock. A frown, a smile. Wash me. Pollen blew in through the window over the sink and coated the dirty dishes. I coughed up something a little less bright.

I was up late, reading one of her stories.

The husband of an accused witch – an owner of two cows and a father of seven – provides the court with evidence against her, in exchange for another cow. He says she sat on his chest in the nude throughout the night, her face cratered and rotting. There was a peacock. It scratched and screeched at his cows. It clawed him and the children. The Devil is in the woods, he says. He cries on the stand while his wife sits in silence.

I minimized the draft and went upstairs. I turned on the light and turned it off and took a beer out of the fridge. Do ghosts lived in new houses? Do they inhabit bodies and not homes, and follow you wherever you went? Do you have to die to haunt someplace?

VI.

Before I moved in for the summer, their dog choked in the yard. She was a golden retriever with a patrician attitude and a name I forget. The dog loved bones and rawhide and marrow. She always slept with my uncle. He would grill steaks and give her half. One afternoon toward the end of winter, she tried to swallow a bone. (They’ve told me this story over and over.) They came home and found her sprawled in the puddles, eyes at the sky. She’s buried in the woods.

I walked into the yard and the security light flicked on. There are still bones. They are big and hollow and tall grass has started to grow into and around them. My uncle doesn’t pick them up and when he mows the lawn he rides around them. I grabbed one and threw it beyond the light. I drank the last of my beer and placed it in the pale nest of grass where the bone was. All across the yard I picked dogbones out of the grass, tossing them into the woods, counting. There were fourteen I could find, and one chewed up tennis ball.

I picked up the ball and threw it. The light went off. I waved my arms, but it didn’t notice me. I jumped, and it ignored me. I stood in the dark. I heard a woman cough in the woods. I took a step forward and waited. This is what hunters must feel when an animal freezes up. They can hear a stillness. There is a restrained movement. I sneezed.

Nothing.

I went back inside, and the light turned on as I went up the porch. As I took another beer from the fridge and my uncle came down the stairs in his boxers.

“What the hell were you doing out there?”

“Fresh air.”

VII.

On Thursday afternoon, I went to finish the story about the witch. I looked for the flashdrive, and I couldn’t find it. I thought I had left it on the ping pong table in my room, but it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my cousin about it but she just shrugged. Again, she was cutting coupons she’d never use.

“Look at these deals.”

A stack on the glass table next to her shivered in the wind. She was wearing a thick flannel over her two-piece and a Red Sox hat.

“Watch out.”

She turned just as a gust picked up her clippings and blew them out across the lawn; she chased them to the railing. The sun was shining off her glasses and she blocked the light with her forearm.

“Where did the bones go?” she wondered, frowning.

I told her about the noise I heard the other night in the trees. Without looking back at me, she said it was just the turkeys.

“They sleep in the treetops, you know.”

VIII.

On Friday night we drove out to the party and I told her I wouldn’t drink too much. I could drive us home, I said. The fire was huge. There were cars parked around it with their doors open, bugs drifting in and out. Kids were laughing the dark. The car almost bottomed out as we climbed the hill. She had opened a beer and we sat there, watching everyone through the window.

“It’s been nice having you around.”

“Thanks. I haven’t done much since I got here. But it’s been cool.”

“I know.”

“When was the last time you talked to your mom?” This question had been stuck in my mind. It almost came out in other conversations, while we baked french fries, or talked about the weather.

“I’m not sure. It’s funny.”

“Is it?”

“I guess like, four years. Maybe more.”

“Is she okay, you think?”

“Why would I care?”

“Aren’t you interested?

“No,” she said. “Nope.”

“What if she were dead?”

The windows were rolled down and she reached out, playing with the mirror. “I wouldn’t care. I mean, I don’t think I would.”

“Do you think she’d haunt you?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why?”

“Ghosts don’t haunt people. They haunt houses or castles. Or forests and stuff. Or lighthouses. Not bodies. Bodies are already ghosts. Or spirits. Like a caterpillar, you know?”

“Do ghosts haunt guest rooms?”

“They haunt basements.”

IX.

She introduced me to some of her friends. A lot of them were older than her. One of them knew a guy from my school, and asked if I knew him.

“Eric? He’s super tall.”

The music got louder, the voices got bolder. I threw my cans into the fire and watched them twist and turn black. The flames were twenty, maybe thirty feet tall. I sat closer to the fire than anyone else and turned back from the heat.

I looked for things in the flames but didn’t see anything. I hoped to see faces, or numbers and letters. There wasn’t anything, though.

One of my cousin’s friends came over and sat next to me in the grass. She had thick eyebrows and short hair, I could see the makeup painting her cheeks in the firelight. She looked nice. We didn’t talk. I breathed in smoke. Over our heads, ashes floated off into the sky. When I looked around for the moon I didn’t find it.

Having some trouble, I walked into the woods to pee. With a hand against a thick tree, I squatted. On the way down my knees cracked. Nothing came out. I heard my cousin laugh and yell out I’m dead.

Finally, it came. When I was done I took a crumpled tissue from my pocket. My pants around my ankles, I heard a cough in the woods. I fell back, ass in the leaves. In my piss. This time I yelled but nobody heard me. The cough came again. A woman coughing, I knew. I pulled up my pants, and rolled over onto my side.

I watched as the thin legs of a hen stalked through the black leaves. Bird feet, something I’ve never felt. Over me, the turkey was gliding toward the field. A cough.

On my back, I looked up as she bent over me, a hood of bright hair dangling in the dark. A bare foot on either side of my head. She looked away, tilted up in the direction of the fire and coughed once more. Her nails are pale green. She wears bracelets that shake and smells like good laundry detergent. I know her from somewhere, I thought.

“You’re okay,” she told me. “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

And I thought I was cured.

[notfittoprint-blog1]

Fowl

I.

Summer started cold. Driving up north for the season in mid-May, a pebble flew at my windshield. Right in the center: a pock mark. So that’s how it’s going to be.

I drove up to a familiar scene. Wooden chairs in the yard, flowers, American flags and silver cloudcover. My cousin is in one of these chairs, poking at a dying laptop. An orange extension cord snaked into the house, connecting back to the charger dangling over her fleshy, flattened thigh.

The house is three stories, not including the basement. The family uses official titles for different branches: the addition, the breezeway, the master bedroom, the patio, the entertainment room. The master bedroom. I’m in the guest room, or the basement, depending on who you ask. It’s the one name they don’t agree on.

My uncle takes pride in the house because he built it himself. When I was younger I imagined him doing everything alone from the ground up. Pouring concrete. Planting the hidden machinery of wires and pipes. Up on the roof, sweating on sunny days, hammering shingles.

It took me time to realize he needed help. He had hired people, and mostly just oversaw the project. It took time to realize he had more money, time, and energy than my father.

“Somebody try to shoot you?” My cousin points to the windshield.

“Of course.”

“Nobody’s home,” she sighs. “And there’s really nothing to do about it.” The clouds move, and the sun finds us for a moment.

II.

The sun was out all day after that. We’re drinking High Life on the porch. My cousin’s wearing a two-piece and I wondered what I’d look like in it. She isn’t thin but she’s healthy and dark. She has thick hips and round arms. She inhabits her body in a way that I, something like a grown woman, envy. She’s the youngest.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the yard. She’s always seeing things I don’t.

“What?”

“A turkey. A hen. Don’t you see it?”

“No, I don’t.” She leans over the railing, looking out over the grass.

“Oh. It’s gone.”

I swallow some beer and take off my dark glasses. I’ve been feeling a certain way.

III.

My aunt and I have the same name, and she left after her fourth son was born. Before this, the joke was that I’d grow up to be like her. Nobody talks about her much anymore, but the boys have when we’re alone. They use the past tense like she’s dead, but we all think she’s in Cincinnati.

My aunt used to write stories and she probably still does. There are copies and notes and drafts on a drive in the office. I read one the other night.

Two foragers are out picking mushrooms. One of them has a growth he’s been ignoring. The other is worried about ticks. They’re stopping at every rotten stump and talking about their lives. The one with the tumor isn’t talking about his medical worries. The one with the ticks isn’t mentioning the crawling in his socks, the tickle in his armpits. They crush through the leaves, snap twigs. They find one that isn’t in the book. It’s a false morel, said the man with cancer. The one with lyme disease shakes his head no: It looks like an ear, he tells his friend. It might be poison, it might be nothing. Unsure why, they pick it and carry on. But it does look like an ear, they both think. Hair even grows out the lobes. Within an hour they have found another ear, lips, a nose. Within another hour they’ve scavenged a whole head.

They divide it down the middle and eat it in a clearing lit by the setting sun, and walk home cured.

Just like her.

IV.

I got sick by June even though it was warming up. I was the one who was cold after all. In my sweatshirt laying on a deck chair I squinted at the sun through my tinted glasses. My cousin was with me, and she wore a gold cross that lay flat against her skin. She looked through a bright flyer from the grocer. I hadn’t gone to her graduation ceremony and she hadn’t gone to mine.

Her brothers and her father were all out working, driving, sitting in trucks in parking lots. She’s asking me about college.

“Do you still have friends? Like, did you lose them?”

“What do you mean?”

She was sitting cross-legged on the porch. Her dark hair was twisted up in a thick fist on top of her skull. The paper was flitting in the wind. Out in the yard, birds were picking at the grass and the mud. But they were quiet.

“I don’t know. Did you really learn anything? People say you don’t need to learn the things you do. I know a lot of people don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t see what’s wrong with learning something you can’t use.”

“You’re right.”

“But what did you learn? Do you remember it? You’d have to.”

“I guess.” I started to wonder if I did learn anything. I thought about a course on Disney. I thought about Cather, Conrad, Dante. I remembered watching Fellini instead of reading The Satyricon. Something about algebra. “Yeah, I read a lot. I know things, now.”

“Oh.”

“I took things in, you know? Honestly, I didn’t do all of the work. Nobody does. But I know some things that I liked. I might have been . . . a different person. That is, if I didn’t go. I wouldn’t know what I know now. Not that I can do anything with it.”

I thought of a friend I had who had fallen in the snow two years ago. She was alone crossing campus, and it was midday. A lot of people were around, but she was alone, and she fell. Someone told me she bled a little into the snow, out of her ear. Was I losing friends?

“So, you probably aren’t interested,” she began. “But do you want to go to a party? It’s a bonfire. People your age will be there.”

“How big is the fire?”

“What?”

“How tall? How wide?”

“Well, we do it in a field. So, it goes up high, and as wide as we want.”

Okay. What time?”

“Oh, later. Like Friday.”

It is Sunday. My cousin always plans ahead.

V.

I had started coughing. Neon dust is coating the cars, the deck chairs, every unmoving thing. Kids in the neighborhood drew on the car windows. A cock. A frown, a smile. Wash me. Pollen blew in through the window over the sink and coated the dirty dishes. I coughed up something a little less bright.

I was up late, reading one of her stories.

The husband of an accused witch – an owner of two cows and a father of seven – provides the court with evidence against her, in exchange for another cow. He says she sat on his chest in the nude throughout the night, her face cratered and rotting. There was a peacock. It scratched and screeched at his cows. It clawed him and the children. The Devil is in the woods, he says. He cries on the stand while his wife sits in silence.

I minimized the draft and went upstairs. I turned on the light and turned it off and took a beer out of the fridge. Do ghosts lived in new houses? Do they inhabit bodies and not homes, and follow you wherever you went? Do you have to die to haunt someplace?

VI.

Before I moved in for the summer, their dog choked in the yard. She was a golden retriever with a patrician attitude and a name I forget. The dog loved bones and rawhide and marrow. She always slept with my uncle. He would grill steaks and give her half. One afternoon toward the end of winter, she tried to swallow a bone. (They’ve told me this story over and over.) They came home and found her sprawled in the puddles, eyes at the sky. She’s buried in the woods.

I walked into the yard and the security light flicked on. There are still bones. They are big and hollow and tall grass has started to grow into and around them. My uncle doesn’t pick them up and when he mows the lawn he rides around them. I grabbed one and threw it beyond the light. I drank the last of my beer and placed it in the pale nest of grass where the bone was. All across the yard I picked dogbones out of the grass, tossing them into the woods, counting. There were fourteen I could find, and one chewed up tennis ball.

I picked up the ball and threw it. The light went off. I waved my arms, but it didn’t notice me. I jumped, and it ignored me. I stood in the dark. I heard a woman cough in the woods. I took a step forward and waited. This is what hunters must feel when an animal freezes up. They can hear a stillness. There is a restrained movement. I sneezed.

Nothing.

I went back inside, and the light turned on as I went up the porch. As I took another beer from the fridge and my uncle came down the stairs in his boxers.

“What the hell were you doing out there?”

“Fresh air.”

VII.

On Thursday afternoon, I went to finish the story about the witch. I looked for the flashdrive, and I couldn’t find it. I thought I had left it on the ping pong table in my room, but it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my cousin about it but she just shrugged. Again, she was cutting coupons she’d never use.

“Look at these deals.”

A stack on the glass table next to her shivered in the wind. She was wearing a thick flannel over her two-piece and a Red Sox hat.

“Watch out.”

She turned just as a gust picked up her clippings and blew them out across the lawn; she chased them to the railing. The sun was shining off her glasses and she blocked the light with her forearm.

“Where did the bones go?” she wondered, frowning.

I told her about the noise I heard the other night in the trees. Without looking back at me, she said it was just the turkeys.

“They sleep in the treetops, you know.”

VIII.

On Friday night we drove out to the party and I told her I wouldn’t drink too much. I could drive us home, I said. The fire was huge. There were cars parked around it with their doors open, bugs drifting in and out. Kids were laughing the dark. The car almost bottomed out as we climbed the hill. She had opened a beer and we sat there, watching everyone through the window.

“It’s been nice having you around.”

“Thanks. I haven’t done much since I got here. But it’s been cool.”

“I know.”

“When was the last time you talked to your mom?” This question had been stuck in my mind. It almost came out in other conversations, while we baked french fries, or talked about the weather.

“I’m not sure. It’s funny.”

“Is it?”

“I guess like, four years. Maybe more.”

“Is she okay, you think?”

“Why would I care?”

“Aren’t you interested?

“No,” she said. “Nope.”

“What if she were dead?”

The windows were rolled down and she reached out, playing with the mirror. “I wouldn’t care. I mean, I don’t think I would.”

“Do you think she’d haunt you?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why?”

“Ghosts don’t haunt people. They haunt houses or castles. Or forests and stuff. Or lighthouses. Not bodies. Bodies are already ghosts. Or spirits. Like a caterpillar, you know?”

“Do ghosts haunt guest rooms?”

“They haunt basements.”

IX.

She introduced me to some of her friends. A lot of them were older than her. One of them knew a guy from my school, and asked if I knew him.

“Eric? He’s super tall.”

The music got louder, the voices got bolder. I threw my cans into the fire and watched them twist and turn black. The flames were twenty, maybe thirty feet tall. I sat closer to the fire than anyone else and turned back from the heat.

I looked for things in the flames but didn’t see anything. I hoped to see faces, or numbers and letters. There wasn’t anything, though.

One of my cousin’s friends came over and sat next to me in the grass. She had thick eyebrows and short hair, I could see the makeup painting her cheeks in the firelight. She looked nice. We didn’t talk. I breathed in smoke. Over our heads, ashes floated off into the sky. When I looked around for the moon I didn’t find it.

Having some trouble, I walked into the woods to pee. With a hand against a thick tree, I squatted. On the way down my knees cracked. Nothing came out. I heard my cousin laugh and yell out I’m dead.

Finally, it came. When I was done I took a crumpled tissue from my pocket. My pants around my ankles, I heard a cough in the woods. I fell back, ass in the leaves. In my piss. This time I yelled but nobody heard me. The cough came again. A woman coughing, I knew. I pulled up my pants, and rolled over onto my side.

I watched as the thin legs of a hen stalked through the black leaves. Bird feet, something I’ve never felt. Over me, the turkey was gliding toward the field. A cough.

On my back, I looked up as she bent over me, a hood of bright hair dangling in the dark. A bare foot on either side of my head. She looked away, tilted up in the direction of the fire and coughed once more. Her nails are pale green. She wears bracelets that shake and smells like good laundry detergent. I know her from somewhere, I thought.

“You’re okay,” she told me. “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

And I thought I was cured.

[theheaterishotjournals]

06/16/2020

Statuses

Me: Alright, I guess? Feel stupid? I dunno. Numb? Depression numb?  Sunflower Charlie: So tall. Daniel can’t even reach the top. 7′ now?? Gonna bloom soon.  Sunflower George: Almost reaches Charlie. Rivals.  Sunflower Miriam: 4 blooms! Gonna get more. Bees all the time, so cute. Yellow jackets, less cute. But good for pest control.  Tomato: They’re starting to grow. More flowers coming. Needs pruning.  Mint: Needs pruning. Keeps getting eaten by bugs.  Money plant: After the sun burning, growing so many buds now. Growing nicely. Bigger pot??  Rubber Plant: Doing well.  Pachira: Better now that the fan isn’t pointing at it.  Palm: Surprisingly alive.  Succulents: All good.  Đậu Đen: She’s doing good. Healthy. God, I hope she ain’t pregnant. 

Dear you, 

Today I went to work, still depressed. Elliot was kind enough to ask how I was doing and give me advice. I love Elliot. I don’t care what the rest of the crew says. I’m thankful for him.

Ervin told me he had to call out on Friday as well. He has hypertension. He keeps eating red meat though. I’m worried about him. I wish he could stay forever but come August, a new rotation.

Jeff wore a new hat today. It was, like. A golf cap? Instead of his usual cowboy hat. It looked good on him! I also appreciate Jeff. 

Did runs. Easy day. Picked up Hydrogen Sulfide detector. The jambalaya Daniel made was so delicious. I love that he helps me get my lunch ready. I love Daniel. 

Daniel kept sending me pics of the kitten today. I was so excited to see her. The second work ended, I drove home and ran straight to her (after dealing with mail). She seemed so quiet and lazy. It got me worried. It surprised me to roll her over and see 12 toes on her hind legs. Daniel said not to worry, she was probably napping. I couldn’t help but worry. Worry’s my middle name. Thanks to anxiety. He was trying to get me to calm down and convincing me to eat. 

While eating, I tried to calm down. Told him to put on spongebob. But I kept thinking about what I had read online. The lethargy. Kittens were supposed to have energy. Her gums looked white. She meowed weakly. 

Daniel could tell I was worried. He went out and got Đậu Đen and brought her inside. We had her and her kitty meet. It looked like the kitty kept trying to rub up on her and Đậu Đen kept walking off. It made me cry, I thought she was trying to abandon her. Daniel calmed me down, saying I was just being reminded me of my childhood. Eventually, the kitten kept rubbing up on her mom and Đậu Đen kept licking her like crazy. I felt so much relief. 

We watched the two. The kitten kept weakly going up on her mom. Đậu Đen licked her, ate, and would walk off. I was wondering if we should get the kitten back to Đậu Đen but she wouldn’t take her. We called a hospital earlier, the hospital said hard to tell if it was an emergency and that walk ins would end soon. 

I still didn’t feel right. I looked up a 24 hour animal hospital. I told her she was weak. Then I thought about it and told Daniel to tell them the kitten seemed like she was breathing hard. They said it didn’t sound right. We loaded her up in the cat carrier and took her to the car. 

Đậu Đen walked with us, we tried to see if she wanted to come in the car with us. She didn’t. I figured ‘cause she had the other two kittens to worry about. We made off to the hospital. 

There was a car there before us. A white couple with a beagle. I noticed the girl wiping away tears. It was hard to see. I wondered if we were taking up valuable timer with our kitten. 

The hospital staff quickly came out and retrieved the kitten. We waited in the car. They quickly called us and said they needed a $500 deposit to get some vitals up. No info on what was wrong. I took a deep breath. I made a lot of money now but $500 was still nothing to sneeze at. I looked at Daniel, he said it was my money. I thought about how I had $2200 in checking and $3k in savings. I said to go for it. 

I took out my embroidery. We joked around. I listened to a podcast. I felt bad joking around while the girl in the car next to us was crying. 

Daniel and I had decided to name the cat. Noticing she was polydactyl on her hind legs, she had 12 toes total. Daniel decided to dub her Doce, the Spanish word for 12. I had named Đậu Đen so it only seemed fair to have one with a Viet name and one with a Spanish name. 

Another call. They took down some info, transferred me to the doctor for the low down. The doctor explained Doce had been infested with fleas. She was a tiny cat, less than 5 weeks. With not much blood to spare, the fleas had sucked her down to nearly nothing. She asked if I had fed her. I told her just sugar water that we fed with a plastic syringe like thing we had used to give Đậu Đen her antibiotics. Then some salmon/water cat treat. I was on the verge of tears telling her this. I thought the doctor was gonna get mad I couldn’t feed her enough.

The doctor merely asked if she ate those things. I told her she did, the cat had licked at them. I think it was a good sign, that it meant Doce still had some energy. The doctor said the kitten was in critical health, knocking on death’s door. It was a good thing we had brought her in. They asked if I was willing to care for the cat, I said I was. She transferred me to billing.

While we were on hold, I joked with Daniel I hope it wasn’t $2k, knowing how much I had in the bank. 

The billing went down. 

“The doctor would like to do this test, that is $200. Then a fecal test for parasites. Another $200.” 

As she listed the items, my stomach dropped. 

The kitten had to be in an oxygen tent. $500. Luckily, she was small so IV would be cheap. Cheap as in $130. Another several hundred for transfusion. Another several hundred for blood test. 

It went on and on and my stomach was clenched. 

“Total comes to around $2,008. Not including the $500 you had put in as deposit earlier. The complete total is $2,508. What would you like to do?”

Was it expectations? Was it my inability to turn people down? I said yes. But I mentioned that I did not have enough in the bank. The billing lady said I could apply for carecredit. 

I immediately remembered the first time I applied for carecredit. I was making $9,000 a year. I had severe dental problems and the dental bill was $1,200. I cried at the dentist’s office. I couldn’t afford it. CareCredit gave no interest for up to two years if you could pay within then. I was so thankful, I thanked them profusely even if they had nothing to do with it. 

I looked at Daniel. He shrugged and told me it was my money. 

With no hesitation, I went on my phone and applied. We called billing. It was all good. The nurse loved Doce’s name. Everyone marveled at the credit limit I was given. I felt somewhat good and happy about that. 

The hospital said we could go home. They handed us the bill. 4 weeks and 3 days, they estimated Doce’s age. 

Daniel went to go get the bill. The couple next to us, I guess they were finally called to bring the dog in. The guy opened the girl for the girl, banged the door on my car. I saw her cradle her dog and hurriedly left. I couldn’t care less they banged my car. I was mad, briefly, like, hey, wtf. Pay attention. But I saw the dog. Remember my car was dinged up anyways. Felt bad I was upset. Told Daniel. He also didn’t care, he also saw how they felt about their dog. 

On the way to get gas, I realized by the time we got home, I’d have nearly 0 hours to relax. I told him he couldn’t tell anyone I spent this much. He agreed. He could tell I felt ashamed. Told me it was my money. Not in a way he didn’t care. But that this was what I wanted to make money for. I wanted to care for others. I wanted to donate most of my money. I’m saving a cat and I was looking for a pet. This is perfect. I asked what if the doctor says the kitten belongs to her mom? He said he’ll try to ask the vet if there’s any way we can keep her. Since it seems she got infested with fleas. We’ll find a way.

I hope so. I hope we can keep her but I just want her to be happy and healthy.

I felt dumb and stupid and insane for dropping this much money on a stray cat I’ve just met. I had to talk to Nevi. Nevi calmed me down, said it wasn’t a waste. 12 years of a cat’s life, this was nothing. I saw my money and knew it wasn’t completely necessary for now. I budgeted for it. I saw the value of the money going toward the cat. He helps me so much. I love Nevi with all my heart as well. 

I watered my plants. I couldn’t sleep. I should be sleeping right now for work tomorrow but I’m too energized and nervous. 

I don’t believe in God, but Daniel saw me do the sign of the cross in the car waiting to hear back on the news for the cat. Even being an agnostic, I find comfort in believing in a higher power. 

I told him he knows I don’t believe in God but does he think God sent the kitten to us? Knowing we could help her? That’s why Đậu Đen tried ot get us to see her kittens. That’s why she left the kitten with us? ‘Cause after the antibiotics, she felt better and she knew we could help her? Did she know? Did God send her right when we were looking for pets, not having one yet, so we had extra money to care for her? 

Did believing in God make me feel less guilty about spending the money on her? I think it did. 

I donated money earlier this week to grassroots organizations that supported BLM. I hope to keep donating more money to those organizations per paycheck. 

I hope that everyone stays happy and healthy. That there’s more community resources. I hope Doce survives and we can take her home and show her to Đậu Đen and Đậu Đen can see how happy and healthy she is. I hope we can be a happy and healthy family.

I love Daniel. I love Nevi. I am going to stay up and do some craft work. I love Daniel even though he’s making me shower in fear of fleas and I hate him for that. 

I go to tomorrow with hope things turn out well. And work goes out well. And Ervin stops listening to conspiracy theories and takes care of himself. I hope BLM works out and we get changes we need. I hope I get enough rest tonight so I can work well tomorrow so I can make money for the cats and for Daniel and for my future pet dog. 

I hope for everyone’s health and happiness. 

-Vi

[mastermindrationale]

Teen Mom

In 8th grade I only wore clothes that I deemed “emo” enough, thought I was way tougher than I really was, purposefully cut my arms because I thought it felt good, and had already been sexually active for a little over a year. I didn’t have a bad life at home, by any means. My mom had gone back to college just before my 8th grade year, my dad would be working night shifts as a truck driver (my parents have been divorced since I was two), and even though I had the typical teenage frustrations and difficulties, I retrospectively can say that I really had it made. Of course, I was able to completely overlook all the good things I had, still managing to feel utterly misunderstood and neglected.

Thus began the typical dishonesty with my parents, the quiet suffering, and the belief that I was totally alone and unique in my experiences. This lead to me seeking out a new group of friends that was into what I saw as “adult” things like smoking and drinking. Before long, I would tell my mother I’d be staying at a friends house, when in reality I would be in a small town partying with people almost a decade older than me. Surprisingly, this wasn’t how I would become pregnant, even though the lifestyle I led practically begged for that outcome. I became pregnant in the best scenario possible for someone at that age. A longtime friend of mine (we met at around 8 years old) who had become my boyfriend at 12, and my on-again off-again boyfriend from about 14 to 16 would be the father of my child. Our first kisses were with each other, as well as the loss of our virginity.

I remember the day I found out I was pregnant VERY clearly. I had been suspicious of the situation ever since I had a weird spotty period; but being 14 I wasn’t about to go do the responsible thing and actually buy a pregnancy test to know for sure. I suspected I was about 2 months pregnant when my mom and I were at the local baseball/softball fields watching my little sister play a game. I had shared my concerns with only a few of my friends, but unfortunately a person had found out who didn’t really have a grasp on the gravity of the situation. She had told her mom as if it were common knowledge. You can imagine my moms reaction when this persons parent casually asked her how I was doing, explaining that she was surprised at the news. Stupefying shock, intense rage, and probably a little hurt doesn’t even begin to explain what must have been going through her mind in that moment. She dragged me home and interrogated me while my step father (poor guy) bought a few pregnancy tests. When the first test immediately said positive, there was a very brief period of time where I had a functioning laptop and cell phone. Note; VERY brief.

Not that I blame her in the slightest, because I couldn’t say what my reaction in that position would be. Since that day my pregnancy was a whirlwind of various appointments and a rapidly growing belly. I had left 8th grade not knowing, and would enter my freshman year in high school about 4 months pregnant. I thought I knew who the father was at the time (I never dated him, or the longtime friend in that period of a few months, I sort of selfishly did what was convenient to me at the time) but when I had my son a month later than planned, I kind of put two and two together. My suspicions would eventually be confirmed with a DNA test shortly after my sons 1 year birthday. There were a handful of other girls pregnant at the same time as me in my school, leading to various support groups being created by local pastors (both female) and other adult volunteers. They were nice, because they brought all of us and our experiences together. These groups made it painfully clear that what I wanted and what my mom wanted were two totally different things.

She fully expected me to give my son up for adoption to my aunt and uncle who were having fertility issues since their marriage. For the longest time, my grandmother would come over every night and attempt to coerce me into making the decision she thought was best, which always seemed to end in me sitting on the floor of my closet sobbing. I knew why it made sense to do what she was suggesting, but I just couldn’t do it. She would tell my aunt and uncle that I was going to go through with it, then tell me that my aunt and uncle wanted me to come over just to talk. Whether it’s fair to do so or not, I still hold a little bit of blame in my heart towards her for making those few months of my life living hell. My mom would eventually tell me that she had kind of let my grandmother take over, because she was so stressed out by the whole ordeal and didn’t know what she actually thought was the right thing to do. It was an extremely terrifying time for me. Until I was about 7 months pregnant, I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to both stay with my mom in her home and keep my son. By that point, I had actually planned on moving in with my dads mom, in case my mom wouldn’t allow me to stay with her if I didn’t give my son up to her brother and his wife. Eventually, I would ask her if I needed to begin the process of transferring to the school district that my grandmother lives within and she told me no, my son and I could stay.

I can’t even explain how relieved I was to hear her say that. She finally started to come around to the idea of being a grandmother (even if it was at the age of 35) around that time as well. I could see her getting more and more excited about all the cute baby things and the showers she helped plan. She even helped me paint the room that would eventually be the nursery. She went to birthing and parenting classes with me, took me to every checkup, and was just being amazingly supportive since we had most of the “what” worked out, and now could just focus on the “how”.

I went into labor while walking out of an ice cream shop with my mom (shoutout to chocolate chip cookie dough from U.D.F.). I was carrying a double scoop to our car, when I suddenly had the craziest, most amazingly satisfying sneeze ever. This was followed by a laughing fit as soon as we got into the car because I joked to her about the tragedy that would be a pregnant chick losing her desert. What was not satisfying was the discomfort of a weird discharge (apparently it was something described to me as mucus?! Gross..) and an increasingly uncomfortable tightness in the center of my stomach near my bellybutton. I had already gone through “false labor” once, because of a fall l had while walking down an icy sidewalk trying to get home from school one day. I was scheduled to be induced into labor that Tuesday (the UDF visit was on a Saturday afternoon), so I was confident that this was the real deal this time. Eventually the tightness turned into mostly painless contractions, so we went to the hospital.

Soon after we arrived, the nurses decided it was indeed time, and they proceeded to break the amniotic sack (which was an unpleasant and strange experience similar to a very large water balloon popping while inside of your lady parts). Of course, it was nothing compared to the hours of discomfort I had before finally demanding that an anesthesiologist come in RIGHT NOW and make it stop. The pain was 1000% not what I expected. I knew it would be awful, but I had never really tried to imagine the exact spot where the pain would be coming from. This was probably due to both my age and the fact that I’d never really had any sexual education, but I remember thinking, “of course there wouldn’t be any pain in the actual vagina at first, there’s a whole lot more that the baby has to pass through before it can even think about getting past that part”. In summery, “dilation” is indeed not referring to the vagina, it’s referring to the cervix.

The pain was concentrated into one tiny point in the center of my stomach. Had it been any lesser of a pain, I would almost say it was similar to menstrual cramping, or how I imagine being kicked in the balls would feel like. Unfortunately, it’s not even something you can scale, let alone describe very accurately to someone who’s never had the experience for themselves. If I had to try, I would say it was similar to someone grabbing your ovaries (if you’re a dude, imagine stomach / intestines / testicles maybe??) on either side with both hands, then slowly and simultaneously squeezing harder, pulling the two hands away from each other, and doing a wringing / twisting motion, then a release for a few short moments until it’s time for another contraction. Contractions become more frequent and intense with less cool down periods the closer you get to delivery.

When I began getting more intense contractions, I went from saying, “this fucking sucks this fucking sucks this fucking sucks”, all the way to promising a God I do not believe in that I would “never ever have sex again if you’ll just please please please make this stop right now”. Around 9 PM I got a medication that was supposed to help you relax in between contractions and to “take the edge off” of the pain (it did not). And by about 11 PM I was getting an epidural (the IV / medication they put in your spine to numb you below the torso). I was so worn out, and so relieved that I immediately fell asleep, only waking when a nurse would roll me over from time to time to check my dilation. By that I’m trying to politely say, “I woke up to someone’s hands on my shoulder, and then quickly realized that their fingers were also inserted into my vagina”. I was woken up around 3 AM to start pushing. Just before 4 AM, I was holding my baby while my mom said with tears in her eyes, “look what you did”.

We were able to leave the hospital about a day and a half later, and I then proceeded to have the most intense week of my life. When I imagine how horrible it must be to undergo torture, I imagine the way I felt on the fifth day after bringing my newborn baby home. I specifically remember the fifth day because I had a checkup with my doctor (actually for myself and my baby), and upon returning home after the visit I quietly snuck the car seat inside and set it down trying so hard I ensure that my son wouldn’t wake up. When I felt confident he wouldn’t, I went into the living room to lay down and to try and get a nap. After a bit of tossing and turning, I realized I miraculously couldn’t sleep. I was so exhausted; my eyes burned and hurt to even blink, my whole body was throbbing because of a broken tailbone that I wouldn’t know had been broken for another few months, and I was so delusional I started sobbing because of the overwhelming combination of hormones, chemicals, and emotions riddling me practically useless. When my mom realized what was going on, she offered to watch the baby for me while I tried to take a nap. Once I heard that he had woken up, it was a matter of minutes before I knew I’d never be able to sleep. I somehow managed to stay up another 8 hours after that.

Of course, once you become a parent you finally start to grasp the amount of respect you should have been showing your parents all along. My mom and I have such an awesome relationship now, it really is so much better than I ever imagined it could be. I have to think that some of that is because of all the hardships we’ve made it through together. It’s hard not to look back on the early years of me being a mother and not acknowledge that I was SO fucking lucky. I had free childcare, I had supportive parents, and I had almost infinite possibilities when it came to choosing a career. I can’t even begin to explain how amazing it is that I was supported the way I was / am. I don’t want to sound too much like a pageant queen, but I can’t ignore that everything I have now, I owe to my family, various programs that helped me finish high school, and unquestionably my son.