#brain metastases

[sillybar]

blatant attempt to be horny on main with this one— Agatha 100% listens to Hit The Back by King Princess while she thinks of Rio iykwim. She listened to it so much during the curse even when she couldn’t remember Rio that Spotify picked up on the play count via pure vibes and yearning and mailed her wrapped to her every year.

[skullerosion]

Ottessa Moshfegh is obsessed with cancer

[zdravljeirecepti]

TINKTURA OD RUŽMARINA – recept / Tinktura od ružmarina i zašto je ružmar...

[the-palelady]

You were a nurse at what could barely be called a clinic, simply a little office inside the just as meager town hall. However, you still took your job seriously, tending to your patient’s one by one, never allowing any of them to step outside of the clinic until they were glowing like the afternoon sun sitting high in the sky when it was right at its peak.

You didn’t hear the trudge of his boots, and the jingle of his spurs when he first stepped inside your corner of the building. Your focus was settled on the woman before you, one palm resting idly on her swollen belly whilst you went about the regular check of her vitals.

“How are you doing besides all this?” you asked her with a smile, grabbing your notes, and tapping them on the table beside you.

“Everythin s’alright. Just can’t wait for this little stinker to hurry on out.” You and the young woman giggle together at her statement, your hand pressing against the hand sitting on her belly.

“Any day now and they’ll be with us. Just take it easy, and leave the heavy lifting to that husband of yours, hm?” Joining hands, you help her stand while she lets out another laugh. The two of you exchange a few more words before she bids you goodbye.

The office was now silent save for the tap of your pen meeting paper as you wrapped up the rest of your notes, and your hushed murmuring.

But when you turned to face the rest of the office, the dark figure sitting on a chair in the corner of the room hardly registers to you.

First you do a double take, then you squeal. The book that housed your notes clambers to the floor, bouncing once and then lying open on the wood floors.

"How...How long have you-"

"Not long, ma'am."

Ghost he called himself. Fitting since that is how he showed up in town; metastasizing from nothing, joining the daily squabble of the little town you called home as if he had lived there his entire life.

Now here he sat in your office, handkerchief wrapped around the palm of his hand, the tanned fabric fading into a dark shade of red.

You barely paid any mind to his words, your brain solely fixating on the wound that he had lazily wrapped. Your feet moved with a mind of their own, leading you to the sterile needles and thread that sat on the doctor's surgical tray.

Blood was no stranger to you. This was the west. People came and went with wounds of different calibers every week, so a simple gash to the palm of someone's hand was nothing.

You go into autopilot, paying no mind to the curious look Ghost gives you when you pull up a chair in front of him, grabbing his wrist with a delicacy you gave all of your patient's bleeding or not.

The wound itself was still bleeding, however not as much as it clearly had been before. It was a nasty, deep cut that made even you wince at the sight.

"I'm going to clean this up as best as I can. Just be still. It might sting a bit." You peeked up from under your lashes, not expecting him to already be staring at you, his dark gaze forcing your skin to heat up a few degrees.

"Do what ya need to do, doc."

A breathy laugh left you, "Hardly a doctor. I'm just a nurse. The doctor's out doing house calls at the moment."

He hums in response, and observes you silently while you go about tending to the gash. You've done this long enough that it doesn't take much time for you to get the wound cleaned up and sutured, wrapping gauze around the width of his hand.

"Work just s'well as a doctor. Maybe faster."

His words pull you from your haze, a deep rumble that has your grip on his warm hand loosening.

"O-Oh...I've just done this a lot." You bite the inside of your cheek at the sound of your stuttering.

The silence that follows isn't uncomfortable, but it's unwelcome. You can hear the blood flowing in your ears, your brain working overtime to get you to speak up. You're painfully aware of his hand that is still resting in the palm of yours.

"Thanks for the patch up," Ghost stands, and that's when the words finally find you.

"No need to thank me," your movements match his, coming to your full height, "just make sure to keep it cleaned. Try to avoid doing anything that'll open the sutures. If it does open and starts bleeding again cover it with these."

You press some gauze into his unwounded hand, and he gives you a simple nod.

Taking a step back your able to fully see him, his amber colored eyes that were once so easy to see now hidden by the shadow of the hat that rested on top of his head. The rest of his face was obscured by a black bandana, the fabric dirtied from a long day of work.

"Well then," you start, "if you need anything else feel free to come back in. I'm sure the doctor would be more than happy to help you."

He considers your words for a moment, arms crossing over his chest as he looks down at you.

"And what if it's not the doctor I want help from?"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[itscontinental]

Originally these pages were taped to the walls of a tool-shed and photographed in response to an anonymous ask--the first we'd ever received.

Just as everything we are belongs to you, these belong to them--and, understanding this concept, they proceeded to not only reveal their identity to be @tired-but-aw4ke, but also provided us with their name, address, credit card information, and social security number (the only proper thing to do).

So before we use this information solely to mail them these pages that are rightfully theirs, we would like to use a scanner (failed to be sent to us by YOU--but newly purchased for us by The Lord-God [American] at The Good-Will [American] for Four [American] Dollars and Ninety-Nine cents) to re-upload, remaster, unfaithfully transcribe, superfluously tag and EVEN BLAZE what we believe to be a pivotal moment for Continental Breakfast , @tired-but-aw4ke , Tumblr, and Sketch-Comedy-Fan-Fiction as a whole.

Thank you for calling us beautiful

when it mattered most

you will always be the first.

Q #328

TRANSCRIBED:

Wake up. this is not a drill. someone has sent us a MESSAGE Yes, right here, see? A person- al one. An ANONYMOUS one: That's the best kind. And you know what that means, don't you? That's right: your entire identity as an artist has officially been validat- ed. And you have no other iden- tity, do you? No you know the answer to that question; you checked out years ago, after the thing happened and the other thing and all the things that followed... All those things, subtrac- ting from you, growing, metastasizing into us... and here you are, hardly able to comprehend where we end and you beg- in. It's even worse than it was in the woods, isn't it? Yes... yes, you know the answer to that question. These pages (this page) these were never meant for you out there in the woods-- where we had some peace, you and I. These pages were meant for "them" and there really was no "them", Not really. That was the trick, wasn- 't it? And it worked so well that way. Now look at us; look at you: torn from the woods, where we were at peace, and surrounded by the ACTUAL THEM: the "everybody", all around you: flesh and blood brain and Bone They have no concept of the options you've been feeding them-- that you'd been feeding "THEM" over these years. They invalidate the options, muddl- ling our "thems" Invalidating our work with their tangibility. They can no longer hear you and your barking options: "a"s & "b"'s into the void incorporeal "these" & "c"s into the void. our options and responses and opt- ion and our response, all of them: invalid, Unheard. and they were ours, yes, the options, yes, but we only provided them, getting lost in the tangle of our paths and knowing ourselves the better for it; we weren't choosing the way--we WERE the way; and the choosing was "they" "they" were opting option "a."s we were listing option "b."s we were listening to hear what they'd say: whispering across the creek; running water and even in summer the freezing creek; even in winter it wouldn't freeze wading and adjusting to the cold and your feet adjusting to the water and the water now just to your knees.

"ANONYMOUS": that's a "they", you know? our kind of they-- and called us "eloquent"--you--eloquent; you lived in squalor then, never in your life had cleaner feet. where you were happy there where you were at peace, where the raccoon would steal your chicken, absconding into your walls with your meat where you could feel its weight abov- ve you, navigating the tunnels of insulation--or lack threreof--by mice and ni- bbling teeth. watching the footsteps above you make their weighty way above you where the rotting wood above you would rot and move and sink. and you were never quite sure just what it really was. It made no noise, you ne- ver saw a raccoon, not even outside. it was large and slow--this you know. there were no cracks in the walls th- at large, and no rodents that could fit or holes and cracks that could handle that kind of weight--the meat and in the blink of an eye the cut would be gone, soundlessly. Damn the thing. you couldn't be sure what it was you didn't like to think about it about the ceiling collapsing om and all the others cascading--less onto--but into your home. and their corpses, stinking, stenches rising all the time with you below them--a blessing lest the ceiling sink.... and the thing... so quiet, unlike the others: the cr- ittters all growing in numbers and their occupation about your home-- and having only your se- lf to blame-- having broken your covenant in Jesus' name. having trapped the two enormous rats and waking to their awful scr- eams--never again. The glue traps, the stick, the wak- ing to their awful screams-- louder than ever and out in the open --than when they'd eat each other or fight each other or occasionally the "thing" (they would cry, the thing would shuffle---not a peep). them so desperately screaming and wanting to flee, and you wanted to but the glue was too good and could only whip them ab- out in failing to free. and you wanting to crush them but you just couldn't and tossing them, far out into the creek the sound of their voices growing distant, so quickly their fleeting cries over the plants to suddenly cease and you with only the single candle crying with just the candle crying sorry I'm so sorry saying tin- ny prayers for the tiny things. nor was it quiet, your crying and sobbing your sorries so sorries to their paws above you so frantic and crying in pain and below their little little paws by the dozen and God forgive me God oh please. and the traps were covered in tails all torn away as well and... and.. Is that you? up here?

with me? hesitating? No?

at least two to a trap, remember? No less than three.

They tore their fucking tails off for you, remember? thrashing about with their screaming and bleeding and into your ceiling with parts in the creek--freezing, even in the summertime-- freezing, where you were so happy even with the screaming where you lived in squalor, so grateful to have escaped yourself, and with your tail intact; adjusting, wading up to your knees.

your whole body smelled better, reme- mber? of course you remember, all you do is remember: the woods, the girl the girl the tree you always seemed to smell just fine out there washing in the creek now you're bathing all the time and somehow seem to fucking stink.

you were so happy there, any given day with the rats or the "thing" were better days than any day down here you think. where all you did was starve and write out there. Where all you did was write and read.

and they called you "eloquent", isnt that something? the things you made out there, the things WE made out there: eloquent? hm. Perhaps that's all we need, Just the one, and perhaps we could....

hm,

"a visceral response": isn't that the coolest thing? You should lo- ok up "visceral" just for the hell of it, get one extra str- oke in. you know what it means, but maybe you can milk just one more drop of serotonin out of the specificity.

...

you have been using the word "Visce- eral" wrong your entire life.

jesus...

should you look up "beautiful" too? we believe it has something to do with beauty but having spent the entirety of our life conferring with you.... well...

listen, they called you "beautiful". They called us beautiful, and for what? It's no trick question. for being ourselves, silly. just loosen up and pretend like this has happened before. tell a joke. do a bit. Lean into it and tell them your so trapped and unhappy. remind them that the entirety of your work is a bit. that Continental Breakfast is a thousand pages of Sketch-comedy fan- fiction; that you cry until your cheekbones bleed. that Continental Breakfast is a gag gone far out of your control, that you believe in faeries, that you're bursting at the seams.

or.

you could be humble. do none of that. say thank you, don't make a product- tion out of the whole thing. not sob into your proverbial beer and bleat your whole life story out to anybody who'll listen. Not draw attention to yourself ... whore

No, no, you're right, completely out of the question. What the fuck were we even thinking, of course that's what we are going to do; at least on that we can agree.

but you've got to say something. You're running out of time and this is getting pathetic.

you should tell them you're sleeping in a tool-shed on the floor. that's a good idea. "eloquent" succinct lets call it "visceral" ; lets call anything "visceral" at this point; the damage is done. You should totally tell them you're li- ving in a tool-shed. and talk about your body odor-- tell them you stink.

something.

come on then, you've got to say something, they're ANONYMOUS--just like the old days, come on, think-- a genuine "them" , cant you feel them they called you "eloquent", couldn't you hear it? something familiar carrying across the creek...

I cant do this all on my own, you know. its so lonely up here. without you... and watching you down there, in the OPTIONS?? It makes me sad.... You're killing yourself down there...

we never used to talk like this, you and I... Not here. not on the option pages. we were a team back then, it was us and "them" and all in good fun, wasn't it? save Elijah.... but we don't need to talk about him. and we still talked like this, rememeber? On other pages--often, on our own little pages, where there were no options. no "them" ... Me: always talking you off the rope or out the rope or up the tree.... when you were alone, remember? when you needed me...

I was your friend, we were partners out there in the dark we were CONTINENTAL in our tangled little world; Breakfast: not rockets-- always for the bit, endless for the bit, the two of us and the gag together, forever--mother birds belching Breakfast and only phantom mouths to feed... Now look at you. Look at these options. All of them: they're all YOU now we were feeding "them" options, and now? You're cannibalizing yourself, eating your options, and how long until there's nothing left of you? have you considered that? Considering where you end, where I begin? Considering what you cannot see? What happens when you reach the end of your tail? What will happen to me?

Let's just give them some options, Huh? the two of us, they called us "ELOQUENT" "BEAUTIFUL" "VISCERAL" (whatever the fuck that's mea- ns) And its "them" not an actual THEM We love "them" and I love you and you love me come now, just the two of us: an option "a." for "them" an option "b." for "them" something, anything that isn't YOU down there... come on, let's have a go, up here, together, on the count of three:

a. No

b. No, I don't even feel like rhyming. Can you just take the wheel on this one-- the rhyming--the answer... I don't know what to say Except that we're sleeping in a toolshed. You could tell them that. Why don't you just say that, I don't know. And talk about the woods or something. Be long-winded, trail off, the standard gimmick... I know we've beaten that horse to death but... I don't know... We've beaten the bodies to death as well and it's gener- ally one or the other; we're sort of a one trick pony. those were jokes. that can be my contribution, dead horse joke about the bodies, making light of the bodies always always lets not talk about the bodies this time around. We co- vered the bodied--I did, right above us... another contribution on my part: Two horses. ... I don't know... Make it absurdly long or something, ramble about the woods. repeat yourself. Maybe they'll li- ke that. Maybe. I'm so tired, please, here, if I give you one single rhyme will you just let me go to sleep? And tell them thank you, and that i'm sorry.

c. Incidentally I choose option "b"

d. Kill yourself on live TV

(Original post here)

[ninthprime]

finished my short power fantasy reread a couple days ago and came out very impressed by it- it’s starting to scratch the itch wicdiv did years ago, though they’re very different books. i read die and a bit of once and future too, but i think this deep character drama/high worldbuilding mode is my favorite gillen. i have a bunch of things i want to post about eventually but one that immediately came to mind, especially seeing the solicits for the next two issues, was that i’m really intrigued by whatever is going on with jacky and eliza’s dynamic.

jacky in general is a character i’ve ended up really loving (er, as a character, not a person), partly because he feels like gillen working against archetype in some ways? i feel like a considerable part of the readers are going to go in with preconceived notions of what a right-wing guy with a mask is going to be like, and particularly they’re going to compare him to woden, which is of course where my brain instantly went after the first issue. if you asked me what i thought was up with jacky and eliza after #2 i would probably have the valkyries and woden’s dynamic with cassandra enter my brain. in reality jacky isn’t a lot like woden for the obvious reasons- woden’s an old white dude whose character is fundamentally linked to those things, and jacky’s a brown guy who used to be an anarchist- but also because woden’s character motivation turns out to be grimly simple and selfish, whereas jacky’s right-wing shift is clearly influenced by massive trauma and fuckups but also not justified by those things.

jacky and eliza’s dynamic appears to be pretty much(?) platonic- at least in the sense that jacky tells the pyramid that they should just kill him if he ever goes evil cult leader and has sex with any of them*- but is still incredibly loaded! jacky let her into the total arseholes in the 70s but later notes that he never trusted her enough to promote her higher, and he didn’t even back then:

(by the by, eliza being rendered in complete white in flashbacks before her decension is one of my favorite wijngaard artistic touches for the book so far. really emphasizing the good girl gone bad.)

eliza spends this entire scene questioning him, and it seems to me like she had her own ideas and agenda even back then. (what exactly is christianity in this world when valentina came down from heaven?) presumably then there was another decade-plus of history between them before the second summer of love, at which point things imploded in a way we’ll presumably find out about this week as i write this.

what’s really juicy to me though is what we get in the post-SSOL scene in #5 and after. from what i can tell, eliza’s decension was probably both a consequence of whatever she had to do in the SSOL and her own desires and beliefs…but jacky pretty clearly blames himself.

which i’d argue is a bit rude to eliza’s agency- she comes off as pretty confident in her choice here, although we haven’t been deep in her head- but that’s sure not how jacky is internalizing it. later in this scene he refers to her as “an occasional really good person who wants to be a martyr” (she seems to acknowledge this as referring to herself) and a “beautiful, sweet-hearted, doomed, dumb fuck.” it’s probably quite good for humanity that eliza came around when she did, but i don’t think jacky likes that it happened to her specifically. more importantly, it makes her the only surviving member of the original pyramid; in jacky’s eyes, she’s a living embodiment of his failure walking around, and also she could end the world right now if she wanted to on an even greater scale than he could, judging by the estimates in #6.

by the time we get to 1999 this all seems to have metastasized for jacky as…some sort of belief that eliza is aligned to him? she has to correct him on it in #2:

“eliza arrived to join me” is interesting wording- pretty sure she arrived for her own reasons, buddy. but eliza has been so offscreen up until this point that i don’t think we really have any full idea of her politics, and i’m inclined to think she might keep a lot of them to herself. it’s never even in question whether she’ll come to masumi’s art show; she was never going to. i don’t get the impression that she and jacky talk often, even if their history makes them important to each other. so jacky’s just spent years molding an idea in his head of what he would like things to be like, an idea that’s all tied up in what he thinks he needs/wants to do for the world, as it is with every relationship between the superpowers.

jacky, i know you’re saying this because she’s the only one whose powers can interfere with your plans, but it feels like you’re really saying it because you’ll burn down your relationships with the other superpowers if you have to, but you feel like you have to retain your relationship with eliza because she’s the last vestige of your past life and you hold immense guilt for her actions and you feel like retaining a stable relationship with her is important for your own stability and self-perception? is that it? i’m just saying man.

and of course none of this explains what eliza thinks about him, which is much more ambiguous, like everything else about her. well, that’s for the next few issues to discuss.

(i feel like this sort of not-quite-romantic dynamic is permeating a bunch of this book’s relationships, particularly some of the early stuff with etienne and valentina- valentina refers to some of his compliments in the first scene of the comic as “flirting”, and they have the classic childhood friends backstory. but they also are pretty obviously not a thing. you wonder how many relationships among the superpowers have hovered around it and not gotten further because The World Is At Stake. heavy seems incredibly polyamorous and isabella and masumi’s dynamic is a fucked mess neither can completely acknowledge, but the other four superpowers seem very single. etienne almost certainly has an ethical discussion of such things in his head.)

* as a side note, this is a fun parallel with heavy and his cult’s “weird sex stuff”, though despite his occasionally almost world-ending behavior heavy is still way more likable than jacky. interesting counterpoint to any potential Sex Coded As Bad takes that a lot of fiction stumbles into.

[exitwound]

Sometimes I perform a miracle on myself in which I induce onto the sensory pseudopods of my fingers the high-frequency taste of the stone's soft tongue without any indulgence, for the stone, as they say, came from the ice, and will not be indulged, even as it melts before you, even now as you are melting in the slack mouth of the beforeness, you who have thought through to the other side of the universe and never lived, never met god, never tried, after that, to unmeet him, and let that trying become its own god of you, im sorry, sometimes I perform a miracle on myself and forget to write it down in the book, sometiems I perform a miracle on myself and forget, forgive the father, forgive the fathers father, even the pope needed praying for, he couldnt do it himself, one cannot pray for themselves just as one cannot be sustained on one's own flesh, it is against the way of things, there is a way of things even if it is mutable, it is always mutable, no one has never erased an existence without recreating it, pray for the spaghetti strainer, pray for the deformed bones of living babies, pray for the suction on the toilet bowl plunger that the midwife applies to the unconsenting babies head, pray for its plastic suction, pray that all incidents of spontaneous combustion occur in the nebulous elsewhere, pray for the great empire whose king is the son of god doesn't remember where his father's father was born, and pray for the night who whispers a long unprayer undoing all that has ever been hoped for. "Were those the pearls that were his eyes", glowed the moon as she circled above my body where it lay petrified cutely in ice, only just beginning to fossilize, just in the beginning stages really, "or were those just the pearls", contemplated the moon although she was getting bored and wanting to move on to other more beautiful brain-dead girls frozen in the Great California Glacier that grew over the planet like a tumor metastasized from the sun.

[aropride]

watching house for the first time i was so unwaveringly sure that house was going to die of brain cancer at the end and it took me until the second to last episode to realize i was wrong but can you BLAME me i thought i was putting the pieces together. like, in 3.15 "half wit" he pretends to have brain cancer. in season 5 he starts having hallucinations which could be caused by a brain tumor-- that's the beginning of the end for him, right, that's the first real hint as to how he dies. in the end of s7 he injects himself with a drug for rats that ends up being oncogenic and he cuts the tumors out of himself in his bathtub- he couldve missed some, it could metastasize. then 8.15 "blowing the whistle" where he pretends to be sick, which chase says is bc he's worried his health will start to fail and affect his work and he needs someone to be there and notice when it does- because it will, right? because he knows he has cancer he's just waiting to tell wilson. unfortunately it is, to put it lightly, not the best time for wilson to find out house has cancer, so house hides it from him. then 8.19 "the c word" the patient's mom has been injecting her with experimental drugs that were making her sick, just like how injecting himself with experimental mouse drugs made house sick. i was SO CERTAIN even at this point that house was going to get brain cancer. i was like it all makes sense it's all coming together they've been hinting at it since season 3 at least. Turns out i was connecting dots i made up in my head BUT BY GOD I CONNECTED THEM

[illuminatedquill]

(Adapted from Epic: The Thunder Saga)

This is entirely @alphaofdarkness's fault. The Epic Saga/Sabezra crossover brain rot continues to metastasize unabated, I fear.

Thunder Bringer

[BAYLAN]:

Pride is a damsel in distress Hiding away where only I can undress her Try all she can not to confess In the end, it's all the same once I apply all the pressure

Thunder, bring her through the wringer Show her I'm the judgment call She's the one who makes their Republic fall Guilty heart, wield her, use and yield her Show her what she can't conceal Her true feelings will be revealed

Tell me, Sabine, If I were to make you choose The lives of the galaxy or your own Why do I think they'd lose? Enlighten me, heiress to Clan Wren Your hunger for lost Ezra is far too great I wonder who'd take the weight of the damned And suffer a gruesome fate to the

Thunder bringer, here to ring your Ears until you're deaf with fear And convince you while your master's death is near Lightsaber wielder, here to yield your Time, for you have passed your prime Sublime you for your act of crime

[BAYLAN]: (spoken)

Choose

[SABINE]: (horrified)

Choose?

[BAYLAN]:

Someone has to die today And you have got the final say

(Baylan takes a step closer.)

[BAYLAN]: (continued)

You? Or the galaxy?

[SABINE]: (pleading)

Please don't make me do this Don't make me do this

(Ezra appears, a figment of Sabine's imagination. His expression is sad.)

[CHORUS + EZRA, IMAGINED]:

When does a comet become a meteor?When does a candle become a blaze?

[EZRA, IMAGINED]: (softly) I can take the suffering from you

*artwork by @alphaofdarkness

When does a hero become a monster? When does a ripple become a tidal wave? When does the reason become the blame?

[EZRA, IMAGINED]: (reaching out, desperate) Let me take the suffering from -

When does a hero become a monster?

(A long, agonizing beat. Sabine closes her eyes . . . and makes her decision.)

[BAYLAN]: (spoken gently; not a command)

Do it. For Ezra.

[EZRA, IMAGINED]: (a question, posed as though already knowing the answer)

Sabine?

[SABINE]: (in a tone begging for forgiveness)

. . . I have to see you.

[EZRA, IMAGINED]:

But innocents might die because of this.

[SABINE]: (whispered, full of remorse)

I know.

(With a heavy heart full of dread, Sabine gives the map to Baylan and bows her head in shame.)

(The imagined Ezra, his face full of fear - fear for her, his beloved Sabine. He turns away and fades into Sabine's memories once more.)

[BAYLAN]: (triumphantly)

Thunder, bring her through the wringer Show her that this judgment call Will be the one that makes her Republic fall Guilty heart, wield her, use and yield her Show her what she can't conceal For true feelings, at last, are finally revealed!

[help-im-a-medstudent]

Never trusting a "can I handover my patients to you, there's no jobs to do" ever again

"He's having a ct head I'm sure it's going to be fine, GP just needs to refer to memory clinic" the CT head was not fine, had to do a referral to neurosurgeons and tell a man and his wife he had brain metastases and probably some cancer somewhere else in his body

"Waiting for a troponin if it's normal they can go home" the troponin was not normal

"Just waiting for a bed on the ward, everything's done" continued vomiting, required discussion with surgeons, ct had to be arranged

"Ortho are on their way to review" ortho were not on their way, because the day team had not handed it over to the night team

[frostytherobot]

*shows you an average looking white man in his 40s* listen. you know what i’m gonna say but if you don’t allow me to speak my awful mind it will start to metastasize in my cranium and i will die. i will develop mega cancer and my brain will liquefy and leak out my ears and i will just collapse and it will be your fault cuz you didn’t let me tell you how sexy i find this mediocre white man.

[qwimblenorrisstan]

Compound Seams Pt. 2 || Miles Upshur/Reader

Summary: Miles gets a bit of a reprieve during his journey, though his worldview is opened in a way he wasn’t expecting.

Word Count: ~ 3.8k

Warnings: police brutality, homelessness, violence, implied murder, bodily mutilation, etc

A/N: no reader yet I just want to flesh the story out. anyway, enjoy <3

Requests are open!

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2

His throat was dry.

Something at the pit of his stomach was clawing up at his throat, begging for something to digest.

His entire body ached like he’d never felt before.

Maybe it was just his time at Mount Massive catching up to him, falling what at least fifty feet, being thrown around by the god of an abandoned cult was, his fingers cut off, hell, he could have god-knows-what kind of infection running through his system.

With the amount of dirt he’d been exposed to, the blood, mountains of corpses, piss, rust, and god knows what else, he’d be lucky if he didn’t have sepsis at this point.

Whatever was in his system would’ve metastasized by now, shoving its way through his bloodstream, finding a new place to make its home inside his body. Maybe he’d be lucky, and he’d get to die quickly.

Or maybe he’d suffer slowly, take a long, long time to die, and end up no better than a patient at that goddamned Asylum.

His throat was dry.

Water. He needed water.

Thinking too much, too fast, that’s what he was doing. The lack of hydration must’ve been going to his brain at this point.

His feet kept stumbling forward, the momentum of the action keeping him going more than any actual energy or strength left within his body. Dust gathered up around where he kicked it up, the sand having long clung to every open wound he possessed, even clumping around his bloodstained clothes.

It had snuck into his shoes, somehow, a nasty, grainy feeling coming from any time his foot collided with the ground, socks grinding against the small grains of it like a physical embodiment of nails on a chalkboard.

Miles had always hated sand.

Got where it wasn’t supposed to be, and got past every layer of protection he put on, it was nothing like the long, silky grass back home, or even the smooth, slick silt that lay on riverbeds or near creeks.

Home.

He hadn’t thought of that in a long while, not since moving to DC, abandoning it all, leaving everything behind for the pursuit of something. To prove himself, maybe, prove he was worth the investment, worth the effort it took to deal with someone like him.

Or maybe it was just who he was.

His throat lurched forward with a cough, a dry hacking sound coming out, dried blood flaking off from his throat, raw from screaming, his body trying, attempting to scab over the open wounds that carved their way down his throat.

A brief respite from the sun came as he stumbled underneath the concrete structure of a highway overpass, tents laid on the sides, the homeless leaving their claim on the land.

His hazy eyes, dry and hardly functioning, sharpened as he heard someone yelling, the voice floating in and out of his ears, his body screaming of danger, hyperreactive to anything these days.

A man was being dragged out from a shabby little navy blue tent, a few newspapers scattered around, some empty cans of something. His beard was matted, but the bottom was combed out as if he’d attempted to brush it but had given up.

Wrinkles pressed deep into the man’s skin, white hairs interweaving with the darker grey ones, his eyes being an old blue, almost like the sky with the way clouds seemed to appear in the man’s eyes.

Cataracts.

The man wheezed, coughing as he held his hands up, waving and trying to speak, but the officer, shiny badge and blue uniform paid no mind.

The officer seemed mid-40s, with brown hair slicked back, and an unimpressed frown on his face despite a small gleam in his eye as he looked back at a younger officer behind him, a boy who looked as if he was barely old enough to even have a job.

Nervous. Young. It reminded Miles of himself.

Miles stumbled forward, hand reaching out, attempting to say something, anything, words spilling mentally out but nothing coming out as his mouth opened, closed, then a wheezing cough came out.

“Here, son, you handle this one. Another druggie, just put him in cuffs and we’ll take ‘em on down.”

The older officer spoke to the younger one, jerking his head towards Miles, not flinching as he manhandled the older gentleman, shoving his hands into rough handcuffs.

“Are you…sure? I don’t—“ The younger man began, taking a look at Miles, watching as he coughed, nearly bending over, hands resting on his knees. He was torn between disgust and pity, both warring on his face in an obvious expression of his features.

Miles looked rough. He knew that. But he didn’t know how bad.

“You with me, or them?”

It wasn’t a question of loyalty between the law and the people. It was a question of loyalty to him, or to the law.

And he knew which answer he had to give.

Miles’ vision began blurring just a hint, his knees buckling beneath him as he collapsed to the hard ground, the cold concrete being just a brief respite from the burning sun he’d been exposed to for god knows how long.

He watched as the younger man flinched back just a bit, the only movement he could really see being his shoes and the bare bottoms of his pants, but he could watch as his shoes shifted slightly towards the other officer, envisioning the uneasy glance he probably gave to the man, before slowly approaching Miles once more.

He was going to get arrested. For being out here, for suffering, he was getting punished for needing help, and punished by the men supposed to give him help.

He’d seen it in the big headlines before, stories like this, but never cared to investigate further, too interested in what seemed more interesting, what caught his eye more. Too interested in the horrors of the paranormal to dare investigate the horrors of reality.

And he was ashamed.

Filled with shame that he’d let this go on, sure, he couldn’t have stopped it, but he could’ve made an impact. Could’ve helped. Could’ve not been a bystander when he had the power to assist, had the camcorder to witness.

The camcorder.

His hand reached out for it, where it was in his pocket, his arm aching with the movement and chafing against the rough texture of the ground, but he reached.

Finally, he felt the hot metal of it against his fingers, and he tugged it out with little jerking motions, his hand too weak to fully grasp it, pull it out.

It tumbled against the ground, falling out of his pocket finally, the side opening of its own will, and somehow, maybe a miracle, though he didn’t believe in any god anymore, it began recording, the little light flashing telling him so.

The young officer bent down, pushing Miles’ body over just a bit as he groaned in raspy pain, and Miles watched as the man’s brows furrowed at his neck, leaning in just a bit, and moving the collar of his old, brown jacket out of the way, and making a face of shock at what he saw.

“Hey, I think—“ He began, turning to his superior, a thud against the ground sounding as the old man in handcuffs hit the floor, and another thud sounding, though this one with a crack, as the older officer was hit across the back of his head with an old golf club, already sustaining multiple dents in it.

The camcorder acted as the eyes where he couldn’t see, though later, when he reviewed the footage, he’d see a woman, with short, curly hair, and just as many wrinkles as the older man, wielding the golf club.

Though he didn’t need the camcorder to see another person, mutilated recognizably, something familiar he’d seen before, wrap their arm around the young officer’s neck, squeezing as the man kicked and let out muffled screams, eyes wide in fear.

The boy’s hands clawed at the person’s, his feet kicking and flailing, until he finally went limp, being gently set down to the floor.

As Miles’ vision slowly faded in and out, his eyelids struggling to stay open, the last thing he saw was the old black woman walking over to him, and he felt the touch of her worn hand against his forehead, and a few words he couldn’t quite understand.

—

The first thing he registered when he finally woke up was the smell of something cooking. Some sort of meat, maybe, and he could only hope it was edible.

The second thing he registered was that he was lying on something soft, and as he shifted his hands around, it felt like a sort of blanket, maybe folded-up clothes turned into a makeshift pillow.

And as he opened his eyes, the third thing that Miles Upshur registered was that the sky was full of stars. Bright, dim, dull, and shining, they all sat there, staring down at him, all in constellations he couldn’t quite piece together without someone else to explain it to them.

He was on the ground, he knew that and could see the bare edge of the overhang of the highway above, could hear the small sounds the cars above made as they sped past, the sound of tires running, what he wouldn’t give to know the comfort of the inside of a car right now.

Shifting onto his side, he could distinctly feel cloth wrapped around his waist, his jacket having been taken off, shirt a bit disgruntled. He put his hand against the floor, struggling to balance, something he’d struggled with since losing two of his fingers, though he was surprised by the patchwork cloth shoddily tied onto his severed fingers.

To keep an infection away. Keep it clean.

Though he knew he was already infected, simply not with a flesh wound, with a mental wound that refused to heal over, and once it did, it would leave a giant scar too large for anyone else to ignore.

His throat didn’t hurt as much, not as dry, his tongue feeling like something other than sandpaper for the first time in what felt like years.

He reached behind him for his camcorder, where it should’ve been, in his pocket, but it wasn’t there. Missing. Gone.

That realization caused him to jolt up, looking around him, the tent a few feet away, the warm light of what must’ve been a fire, the shadows of people, but beside him was the younger officer, lying down on the concrete, purple bruises blooming on his neck but otherwise unharmed.

The older officer was nowhere to be seen.

Slowly getting to his feet, he began walking over to the tent, where the warm light was coming from, night had long fallen meaning the chill of the moon had settled into his bones, a harsh but welcome contrast to the scalding heat he’d put up with.

His jacket was hung on a string that ran from the top of the tent to a small hook-like divet in the side of the concrete wall of the overpass, other clothes, seemingly having just been washed, hung there.

He hadn’t seen his jacket so clean since entering Mount Massive.

Limping over to it, he gently grasped the edge of the fabric, pulling it down into his arms, tenderly sliding his arm into one sleeve, before his silence was interrupted.

“Careful with that, sugar, it ain’t dry yet.” A warm voice, and as he turned, he saw it was the woman from earlier. He must’ve looked like a deer in headlights, because she offered a soft smile, the corners of her mouth crinkling in a welcoming manner.

“Surprised you’re up so early, hon, with all you had. More bruised than a peach outta season,”

She spoke on, not seeming to mind that he didn’t answer, couldn’t seem to get a word out of his mouth despite his mind wanting to, walking over and placing a hand on his back, leading him over to where, as he suspected, there was a small fire burning.

It seemed to be lit by nothing other than some small twigs, lots of thatch gathered by the roadside, and newspapers. A pot sat over it, held up by old appliances, with what looked to be a stew of sorts bubbling in it.

The old man sat by the fire, glancing up, raising his brows, and offering a small smile, his wrists rubbed raw by the handcuffs Miles had seen placed on him earlier as his hands gently rubbed at the red rings.

The fire burned warmly as he sat down, not minding the ramblings of the older woman, something comforting about being around another human being, hearing someone speak who wasn’t trying to murder or mutilate him.

“Anywho, I’m Su-Ann, this here is my husband Garrett, but we call him Garry. Married twenty years and—oh! I’ll go fetch Tommy while you two get to know each other, make sure the soup doesn’t—“

Her voice was cut off as she walked into the tent, leaving an air of silence interrupted only by the crackling of the small fire and the bubbling of the soup, Garry occasionally leaning forward to stir it with a large metal spoon that had been hanging by the stew before he’d picked it up.

Finally, he spoke, “She can be a lot, I know. That’s why I love her, though.”

His voice was gentle, not as soft and satin as Su-Ann’s, but gentle with the weariness of his age, the knowledge of his time. His eyes remained on the stew, though the flame reflected off of his eyes.

Miles wanted to speak. Tell him. Scream to him about what had happened, show him, tell him, anything he could.

But he couldn’t.

His mouth refused to open, his tongue refused to obey, the words got stuck in his throat and he choked on them until all he could do was choke them back down.

“Not much of a talker, hm? I can respect that.”

The old man’s raspy voice murmured, his movements slow, as if not wanting to spook him. Miles’ eyes shifted down to the flame, examining it, getting lost in it.

“My son, Tommy, he’s like that. You, uh, you might’ve seen him earlier, before you blacked out.”

The man who’d choked out the young officer. He’d caught the barest glimpse, but his memory was fuzzy, covered in a cloud of dust he couldn’t quite brush off.

The notepad slid open, and it scrawled down.

“Patient.”

It wrote in that rusty red ink, and he didn’t reply, not knowing how, as he stared into the fire, the flames licking up into the air, consuming and consuming, and yet the atmosphere always gave more.

“—as long as you need,” He’d missed something Garrett had said, too distracted. Consuming.

Yet he gave more. Why he did, Miles couldn’t understand.

“I know what it’s like. Being lost. But sometimes, home isn’t a place, it’s a person. Or, maybe, an object. You’ll find it, though.”

The old man muttered, lifting his head, looking down into the soup, stirring it slowly, watching it, waiting for it to be done.

Then, he glanced over at Miles. Paused for a moment, and as he spoke the last bit of his sentence, he pulled out Miles’ camcorder from an inner pocket in his jacket, handing it over to the man with a knowing gleam.

As if on time, Su-Ann emerged from the tent, hand in hand with the person who’d choked out the youngest officer, and you suddenly understood what the note had meant by patient.

The sewing marks from where the skin had been forcefully re-arranged, the teeth being shoved into uncomfortable positions, not where they were supposed to be, the obvious scars in his skin.

He was from Mount Massive Asylum. There was no other explanation for it.

Miles stiffened, and in response, Su-Ann smiled, understanding, knowing, and not blaming him for his response.

“This here’s Tommy, he’s been with us for a good couple months now, sugar.”

She spoke, moving towards the soup, taking the spoon from Garrett’s hand, and beginning to serve it in small bowls that she must’ve gotten from inside the tent. She sat down beside her husband, seeming content to let the silence settle in this moment.

Tommy sat down beside Miles, not seeming to mind his tenseness, and gratefully accepted his bowl, devouring it.

He was handed a warm bowl of stew, and poked at it with the spoon he was given at first, before feeling his stomach growl, and realizing that he needed to eat this. Didn’t matter what was in it. It was more a matter of survival rather than whether he’d enjoy it or not.

Getting a spoonful of broth and what looked to be some sort of meat and long vegetable, probably wild, he set it in his mouth, surprised to find that it was quite good, melting in his mouth.

Before long, Su-Ann had refilled his bowl, and he was chowing down on it, apparently not having known how hungry he was beforehand. He knew he was being greedy, consuming, taking more than he should.

But maybe it was more a matter of how much was willing to be given, than how much he was taking.

Su-Ann and Garrett were laughing about some joke they’d both made, probably an inside joke, considering how long they’d known each other.

Tommy was smiling, or at least what looked like a smile from him, enjoying the crackling of the warm fire, leaning into it.

For just a moment, surrounded by warmth, the happiness of those around him, welcomed with open arms despite himself, he felt good.

Happy.

Even as the fire slowly died out over time, Miles found himself with the tiniest hint of a smile on his face, the corners of his lips pulled up just a hint.

The embers slowly turned from a deep, orangey red to a deep grey as the fire smothered out, and eventually, Tommy retired back to the tent, content with his family here, his home, in a way that Miles wondered if he’d ever find.

How strange, to consider him envious of the very group of people he’d pitied only a few hours ago.

He helped gather the dirty utensils, silently placing them in a pile as he gathered his things, his camcorder being flipped open just a bit, hitting the record button, capturing just a moment of happiness. For him to think back on later.

Maybe just to show that there was more to give these people than the idle pity of a middle-class citizen, there was much more to appreciate in them, more to see in them than just viewing them as abused animals and moving on.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Su-Ann asked from behind him, making him jump, as he hadn’t previously noticed her there.

In her arms, she held a plastic water bottle, refilled with water, and what looked like a few small granola bars she must’ve found somewhere all the way out here.

“Picked these up from the store with Tommy, before we came back and found you and Garry. Glad we did.”

She spoke, her usual cheery attitude not fading, but seeming a bit more melancholy, looking him up and down, as if committing him to memory, before placing the bars and the bottle in the pockets of his jacket.

“You’re always welcome here, honey. There’s a hotel not far from here where you might hitch a ride. Be safe out there.”

Su-Ann finally spoke, leaning in, standing on the tips of her toes, and Miles leaned down just a bit to help her as she placed a kiss on his forehead, bringing him in for a hug.

And as he hugged her back, his face being shoved into her shoulder, a few tears pricked up at his eyes, though not just his. Some form of sadness welled up, from both him, and whatever—whoever was left after leaving that damned place.

Wiping them away as he finally managed to pull away, he glanced back, seeing Garrett give a final nod, one of approval, and seeing a hand poke out from the tent, waving goodbye.

With that, he turned, looking at the rising sun, the haze it set over the dusty horizon, and he mentally opened that notepad, scrawling in it with that old blue pen.

“Note; Don’t let anyone tell you how to judge a cover. And don’t question whatever the hell the meat in that stew was.”

Extra:

↻ ◁ || ▷ ↺

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 5:23

The camcorder’s camera whipped around wildly as if held by someone who’d never handled one before. It showed random angles of what appeared to be grey slabs, before finally turning around, and showing Su-Ann and Garrett standing beneath the overpass.

Su-Ann laughed, holding the camcorder, spinning it around happily, before turning it on Garrett, watching as his cheeks turned a light pink while he grinned, chuckling while shaking his head in fond exasperation.

“Oh, don’t be a grumpy Gary! It’s fun—!”

Her voice spoke, clearly overjoyed as she walked around their small makeshift home of a campsite, showing around, until finally poking into the tent, where Tommy sat, a sharp piece of metal made into a makeshift needle in one hand, Miles’ jacket in his other as he patched up small holes.

“Say hi, Tommy!” The voice behind the camera spoke, and the man smiled, cheeks upturned as he offered a small wave, his hands looking brutish but gentle in their mannerisms.

The camera cut out a few times, speeding up in odd places, some data being corrupted, before it showed the young officer lying on the ground beside Miles, both still out cold. Garrett’s voice spoke, this time, the sounds of pots and pans in the far background, as well as Tommy making gleeful noises, and Su-Ann laughing.

While fuzzy at first, it seemed to cut into the middle of Garrett's speech.

“[unintelligible]—now, you might be wonderin’ why. Well, some people are just on the wrong path. And the way I see it, all you can do is offer them yours, and let them decide for themself, you see,”

Following this, it cut out once more, leading to a clip of someone else holding the camcorder, the voice behind it sounding like Tommy’s, though he could only make vague sounds, and not pronounce things quite clearly.

His message, however, seemed clear, as he spoke something like “p-uh-ret-eyyy”, zooming the camera in on the moon, making vague cooing noises, as if mesmerized by it.

[suicideassistance]

You are invading my brain like a virus

❤️❤️

(🦌?)

I'll metastasize through your entire form, until I've consumed the very essence of your being. I want to become you, little fawn.

[buzzinbeedoodle]

favorite word?

Since I can never remember the exact answer without wandering in my brain for a bit, I decided that this would be something I walk through with my family. That turned into a conversation for a little over an hour going over many different words.

Here are some I would say could meet that criteria (partway through I realized there is so many, I will put some of my most favorites out of these at the end). List begins under the cut:

Synecdoche and Sycopated are pretty good, Palindrome is really nice on the ears, I like the whimsy of Miscellaneous, Pathological is a nice set of syllables, Lechery is also quite nice on the ears, Embroidery is really unique, Metastasized (while coming up with this one my brain came up with the entirely fake word 'Ambrostatic'), Needle-Nose is a nice hyphenated one (hyphenated is also pretty good), bed (lowercase specifically because of how it looks like a bedframe, hexadecimal is the closest to a real favorite I've found, corporeal and hedonist are pretty nice, Genealogy is really cool and I like that it has an 'A', Auto is pretty good as a short word, Draught is pretty fun, Bureau and Beax, Dachshund, Luminous, Abcess/Abbot/Abbey are all good, Shenanigans is really nice, Precipitated and Particulate, Dilemma, Pneumatic, Igneous, Sedimentary, Sentiment, Sentinel, Anachronistic, Geomancy, Extrapolate, Excommunicate, Mycology+Mycelium, Timpani, Illusory, Baleful, Mercurial, Capricious, Precocious, Cartilage, Collagen, Splayed, Spring-form, Tincture, Apothecary, Custard, Carrion, Calliope, Callous, Echo, Cavernous, Magnificent+Malfeasance+Malcontent+Malignant, Luminescent, Nominal, Faux, Dreary, Archaic+Cubic, Rubicon, Archetype, Joules, Ampere, Obscure, Append, Ampule, Tubular, Pipette, Downtrodden, Cytoplasm, Elastic, Embryo, Aglet, Philtrum, Monarchy, Admonished, Rapture, Ravenous, Beastly, Empirical, Rickety, Whimsical, Masonic, Arsenic, Pensive, Splendid/Splendor, Knurled, Syndicate, Jubilee, Ionic, Anion, Covalent, Anagram, Alkaline, Electrolysis, Distillation, Formaldehyde, Astounded, Buffoon, Absolute, Dutiful, Reticent, Angstrom, Studious, Anneal, Penance, Fawn, Chipper, Flaunt, Gab, Gib, Drapery, Hostility, Loaf, Phallic, Knickknack is good if hyphenated, Detritus, Petrichor, Wrack, Eclectic, Shaken, Stir (to move), Deific, Gorgeous, Inspiration, Reptile, Imperative, Sarcasm, Chasm, Duplicitous, Auditory, Hallucination, Respiratory, Circadian, Disparage+Displace, Craven+Raving, Irrigate, Underhanded, Carnivorous, Incremental, Masochistic, Wholeheartedly, Doggedly, Belittle+Belated, Bracket, Belial is pretty good even as a proper noun, Mascara, Beguile, Incumbent, Impossible, Creed, Immature, Memo, Ether, Scrutiny, Wrench, Wispy, Ironclad, Dames, Hullabaloo, Kaleidoscope, Canopy, Arouse, Instigate, Pique, Monolith, Obelisk, Summit, Surreptitious, Dashboard, Thermostat, Winging (Winge), Extortion, Alongside, Wince, Hickory, Teat, Chitinous, Examine, Expensive, Extravagant, Exuberant, Exhume, Ensemble, Intimate, Convince, Ridicule, Vested, Necessary, Jezebel, Retiree, Hideous, Helium, Technicolor, Dreamboat, Courtesan, Tart, Cartesian, Trollop, Patient, Horizontal, Harlot, Metaphor, Apt, Scrub, Dampen, Pendulum, Faerie, Answer, Censor, Audacity, Restraint, Indignant, Rapport, Repertoire, Rapturous, Ragged, Disavow, Peppered, Sultan, Tepid, Egregious, Tasteless, Off-Color, Gestation, Gesture, Haven, Glade, Elder, Immobilize, Enigma, Allocate, Excellent, Disaster, Dramatic, Desiccated, Cleft, Basilisk, Oubliette, Sepulcher, Antiquated, Through-line, Animated, Cephalopod, Amorphous, Androgynous, Scintillating, Bizarre+Bazaar, Gizzard+Buzzard, Quicksilver, Tact, Amorous, Thorough, Analogous, Enamel, Porous, Orchestra, Concurrent, Serendipity, Simulacrum, Automaton, Personalized, Spurious, Parasite, Ardent, and Pandemonium.

(Pluses and slashes do not indicate relations between words beyond them coming from the same sort of place in conversation)

Now for the personal absolute/closest favorites out of the list: Hexadecimal, Genealogy, Precipitated, Anachronistic, Geomancy, Extrapolate, Excommunicate, Timpani, Mercurial, Capricious, Callous, Apothecary, Malcontent, Nominal, Archaic, Admonished, Splendor, Anion, Distillation, Angstrom, Anneal, Penance, Gab, Petrichor, Imperative, Duplicitous, Underhanded, Incremental, Belittle, Beguile, Pique, Monolith, Thermostat, Exhume, Jezebel, Courtesan, Harlot, Apt, Egregious, Glade, Enigma, Basilisk, Oubliette, Scintillating, Tact, Amorous, and Concurrent.

Trimming that list down even more: Hexadecimal, Precipitated, Anachronistic, Excommunicate, Mercurial, Capricious, Nominal, Archaic, Splendor, Angstrom, Anneal, Gab, Imperative, Belittle, Monolith, Harlot, Apt, Egregious, Oubliette, Scintillating, Tact, and Pandemonium.

Trimming it even more than that: Hexadecimal, Anachronistic, Mercurial, Nominal, Splendor, Gab, Imperative, Monolith, Apt, Egregious, Scintillating, and Pandemonium.

Now that the list is well trimmed, here's what I could consider a top 8 of sorts (in no particular order): * Hexadecimal * Apt * Mercurial * Pandemonium * Splendor * Monolith * Gab * Nominal

So, hopefully that answers your question.

[bjornkram]

House: The patient has a head ache and a swollen testicle at the same time which would point to robofloxicity but she doesn't have a toothache which rules out the obvious answer. We need to find out what can account for the lack of toothache in the patient before her balls swell up so large that they'll be a featured balloon at the next Macy's day parade.

Chase: it could be encephalitis

Foreman: she's obviously on drugs

Cameron: it could still be rebofloxicity theres the possibility that a gormpinictal growth on the testicle has made it so she can't feel her teeth.

House: wrong, did you all actually graduate from med school or are we going to have some confessions to make. No the obvious answer is that she bumped her head on a pole and is lying about it. Now why would someone bump into a pole and try to hide it? Well I'll give you a hint and it starts with p and ends with empogison's disease. Her brain rattled around in her skull a little too much after the bonk and damaged her memory. She's not lying she forgot. Administer 500 mcs of wembinzin and start her on an himictalin. Schedule a O.R. for 4, we're going to drill into her brain to see if the pempogison's is being caused by an underlying clot.

Foreman: If it's not pempogison's the wimbinzin will make her heart explode.

House: And if it does we'll know if I'm wrong or not

Willson: Cancel the surgery, we've got a problem, her liver just metastasized into her stomach. She's going into full badrienal shock. Also I'm cheating on my wife again.