peliculasgratuitasx1-blog

[wildsaltair]

a few very low quality photos from the original promos of Gladiator

[sixspencenonethewiser-blog]

A Year Ago

A year ago I was living for everyone else and was acutely awake of this fact. Nothing I did or attempted to change made my mental state any better. I did things simply because I thought that's what people wanted for me to appear normal. I didn't know what was wrong with me, my mind was a terrifying place to be and I felt as if I was looking at my life in a mirror upside down. I didn't even know what I wanted anymore. I was lost and too proud to admit there was something wrong. I was severely depressed and unhappy with myself and my current situation. There wasn't a single thing that made me feel anything but miserable. I saw no way out, however, I conscientiously stayed in this routine torture because the thought of disappointing the people who cared about me scared me more than the actual act of suicide itself. The part that scared me the most was that the fear of disappointment was quickly being out weighed by the nagging depression of living so miserably.

And it showed. I was withdrawn, angry, anxious. I lashed out at my partner for no reason. I pushed everyone away as far as I could and retreated into my little ball of hate and anguish. I refused to let anyone in and I refused to talk about my problems and seek the appropriate help. I just wanted everyone and everything to shut up and leave me alone.

My partner tried, he never gave up, but he did get tired. In our entire time of being together we had never really had an argument that was anything more than "I thought I asked you to do the dishes?" "Well I thought you were doing laundry, but here we are." Nothing ever too serious. However even he, the infallible, valiant nobleman reached a breaking point and said almost defeatedly: "I just don't know how to help you anymore."

And at that point, I honestly thought, "well yeah, it's because there is no helping me, obviously."

I had a plan. I wasn't going to let this cycle continue another year. I wasn't going to make it to my 25th birthday, I didn't want to make it that long. I didn't think I COULD make it that long. There was no point and every day felt like I was living someone else's life. I just wanted to give it back and not have the weight of being uncomfortable in my skin to go on any longer. I was tired. I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. I was done.

It was a hot summer day. My alarm went off and I opened my eyes, disappointed that some illness or masked murderer hadn't taken me out in my sleep. I stared at the ceiling dreading the day in front of me. See the thing is, when you don't want to be alive, everything is exhausting. By the time I was in the car and headed to school I was already ready to climb back into bed and start over the next day.

I had long ago learned that the best way assure those around you that you are fine is to slip on a perfectly crafted mask of how they perceive you to be and then ham it up until they leave you alone. And this is exactly what I did to face my colleagues and peers at school.

I couldn't remember the last time I had enjoyed a day, let alone my birthday, the constant reminder that time was moving forward while I was stuck in this weird limbo sort of numbness that made everything dull and aggravating for no discernible reason. All the days had become a blur of monotony and my birthday made no difference.

I was at my lowest point of depression. If you had asked me at that point if I could tell you one thing I loved, or even liked about myself, I could honestly tell you there wasn't a single thing. I was so desperate to be done with this burden of life, I despised myself to my very core.

I was so empty, so numb, yet this numbness had a cutting, lethal edge to it. This biting ache, like when your ears get SUPER cold outside in winter because you thought, "I have a hood; I wont need a hat, it'll be fine." And then the cold hits you and you instantly regret it. The numbness taking over was like that sharp ache only it felt like it was consuming me from the inside out, slowly devouring every part of me until I was just motioning through the days but not actually there.

The day dissolved into its regular depressive cloud. Petty arguments with my partner, a tactic to wedge distance between him and I. I had this terrifying thought that had been buzzing at the pack of my mind for 6 months and I was at the breaking point, either it was going to come out and I admit it to myself and the world, or I die; as dramatic as that sounds, that is how it boiled down in my head. Either way was going to anger, disappoint, hurt and confuse the people in my ĺife; only one of them I didn't have to deal with the fallout.

I had this daunting question looming over my every move: "could this be the answer to what has you feeling so lost?"

I had worked on Hedwig, which after listening to the soundtrack 400 times, some of the songs had sort of started to resonate with me, it freaked me out, to be honest. I wondered what it meant for my life. I secretly tumbled my way on to some blogs and read about other people's journeys, I talked with a childhood friend who had transitioned and another friend who was just entering the process for themselves and they both had this.. tenacity. This wild drive, passion and genuine love for the skin they were in. I was jealous and couldn't put my finger on why. They had something that I had always been longing to find, I just didn't think that I deserved to be happy like that. It would make too many people upset with me.

I had given up, I just didn't care anymore. I honestly didn't think I could ever be who I wanted to be. In my mind I had committed myself to a certain way of living and there was no turning back. I had simply gone too far to suddenly demand to turn everything around and ask for something I wasn't sure I wanted; something I wasn't sure would help or even something I thought I was even capable of.

Rather than face my problems and figure out what the hell was going on inside my head, I wanted the easy way.

A year ago I planned to not be on the planet anymore.

A year ago I planned to kill myself.

My partner was at a loss. "I really think we should get you some help. Clearly what we're doing isn't working. I don't even know who you are anymore."

I knew I had to say something. If I wasn't going to be on this planet at least he deserved to know why. I took a deep breath and the lump in my throat finally broke free after months of sitting there and before my lips could stop it I just said it. "I think I might be trans." The words fell into my lap like a lead weight. The silence was heavy as we both waited for the other person to speak.

After a tense few moments my partner exhaled slowly. "So, what do we do now?"

Those six words saved my life.

The thought that I had any control over my life and what was happening had never been a possibility before. I had always just gone along with whatever was expected of me and hadn't ever deviated from the mold of what my life was supposed to be. What do we do? I had never questioned if there were options to my dilemma. Do? There was nothing to do. I could never take something like that for myself. I didn't deserve what ever answers this may provide me. It wasn't according to the plan.

Ever the support, my partner constantly attempted to talk be back from the ledge. "I love you no matter what. Fuck anyone else who doesn't."

This opinion sparked a whole new set of crisis questions. The kind that shake you to your core. I was trans, I had said it out loud and not burst into flames.. what did this mean?

Of course I knew broad strokes of what it meant to be transgender, and I knew I identified with what I understood, but there was still a lot of late night tumblr and youtube, ugly cry, information seshes going on to try and understand just what the hell was budding down in my soul.

I spent months agonizing over how I was going to tell people. My partner and I had chosen a name and he had begun to call me Spence. I tested the waters of this new found identity and told my sister. She and I cried and had a lengthy discussion about what I wanted and what this meant for my life. She told me she supported me 100% and was on my side no matter what or who I decided to be.

The first time I got called Spence was the first day, in my life, I had the thought: "oh, this is why people get up and not hate themselves to the point of death every morning."

Spence was important.

Spence was cared about.

Spence had people in his corner.

These few words were the ones I really needed. I had my little support group who knew what was going on in my heart and in my brain and were letting me figure it out. This gave me the confidence to be comfortable with the human I had discovered in the mirror.

A year ago I was finally honest with myself and those who care about me most.

A year ago Spence was born, from the ashes of a miserable life, like a Phoenix.

A year ago was the honest last time I seriously considered killing myself.

Spence saved my life.

[crossedbeams]

Never Again. Again.

Or the second coming of Ed Jerse. Post IWTB. Pre-Revival. 

You can blame @dangerscully @defnotmeyo @startwreck @sunflowerseedsandscience and the rest of the rewatch reprobates for this. It’s definitely mature, tw: for rough sex and extreme angst. No beta and my apologies. In advance.

Scully hadn’t noticed him at first. She’d been too busy holding it together, painting on a neutral mask that identified her neither as the terrified newcomer or someone who truly needed to be in this dingy hall. She’d avoided eye contact, made crap coffee at a table whose uprightness was only slightly more precarious than her own, and found a seat without incident. She could do this, she reasoned, keeping her shoulders square like this whole scenario wasn’t a last, desperate resort. The therapist that the hospital had forced her to see after the incident had insisted she try group therapy. The words had been kind, logical even. “Your insistence upon isolating and internalising your unhappiness is hindering any sort of progress”, but Scully knows that her personal brand of tragedy goes far beyond what any other person, let alone group of people, could understand.

 After all, that’s why Mulder won’t -

 No.

She doesn’t want to think about him now. She needs FBI distance to survive this hour of shared human misery. Her fingers crimp the cup and the coffee inside swells up and subsides along with the averted crisis, taking with it the noise in the room as introductions begin.

 Dana. She says quietly. These people don’t need Scully. That’s all she says as she scans the circle of faces impassively and selects an area of mottled wall to drown out the sympathy she can’t stand to see. She plans to offer no more. She plans to sit, to count out her hour, in breaths and heartbeats and then go back to the darkness of their home where at least she can hide from it all.

 But there’s movement on the edge of her vision. A pale crescent of anonymous face leaning in, again and again, until not looking becomes harder than just a glance and for the first time in her life Scully sees a ghost.

 Under the fluorescent striplights his face is flat and wraithlike and his eyes are hollow. Maybe this was always how he looked in the light, but Scully had only known him in shadow, in the flickering sin of a neon sign, in the stark white lines street light cast on tangled sheets. By firelight.

 “I’m Ed. Jerse,” he says. To the whole group but really just to her and his voice is a nightmare that burns through three years of numbness to coil in her belly.

He keeps talking. Sharing, Scully vaguely assumes as words reach her in unanchored bursts. “Prison,” and fingers of fear creep through the bars of her ribcage, ruffling the calm, cold detente she’s built to survive. “Regret,” and there’s a depth to the hard black of his stare that makes her lean in, just in time for, “forgiveness”. Doesn’t he know that there’s no such thing, she wonders, watching his fingers twist in his lap, scars rippling, remembering how they had felt on her body, under her clothes.

“I just wish,” Jerse says, sincerity balled up between his teeth and delivered on a sad smile, “that I could find a way to tell her, the last woman I hurt, how sorry I am. How badly I wanted her to be able to save me. How much it meant that she tried, even though she barely knew me.”

 Scully bites back a laugh, teeth sharp on her lip to the point of pain, she’d never wanted to save Ed. Not really. Every moment with him had been about trying to save herself. Or destroy herself to start over. Whichever it was, by the time she’d realised the danger, preservation had been her only priority, appealing to the ego over the ergot and praying it would be enough. It hadn’t been, and as the death glow of the furnace washes through her memory bringing with it the fatty smell of cooking skin, she tastes blood and comes back to the present.

 The group is gathering its things. Except Ed, who is sat staring at her, eyes fixed the the bloody seduction of her bottom lip, hands finally still.

 She shouldn’t go over, but she does, standing just an inch too close, towering over him as he had once in his hallway.

 He looks up, half cloaked now in her shadow and much more like the man she once knew. She feels almost like the girl she once was. Before the cancer. Before love was a word she spoke out loud. Before she really knew what broken was. She wonders if this counts as group therapy. Stepping closer she relishes the empowering recklessness of a bad decision made for selfish reason/

 ‘Dana-’ Jerse begins and she silences him with a flash of blue.

 “You want my forgiveness?” she asks, the words molasses thick and treacle bitter on her tongue and he nods, despair and desire battling in his gaze. “Okay” she says, and leaves the hall, knowing he will follow.

 She drives her own car, the steady glare of his headlights intense as a lover’s stare, unblinking in their devotion to whatever she is willing to give. He is her terrified, tantalised shadow at the motel check-in, a sharp inhale when the devil in her requests the suite with the fireplace and turns to watch his cheeks burn with shame.

 In the room she makes him watch her build the fire, silence stretching ever thinner between them as the newspaper dissolves the day’s news into ash, along with the last of her sanity, and the flames lick seductively across the pale tiles of the hearth.

 “Touch me”, Scully says finally, when the charge becomes unbearable. “Make me forget”, and Jerse knows enough about pain and regret not to ask what it is she is trying to bury.

 Instead he crosses to her and runs his hand, thumb first, from her cheekbone to the nape of her neck. A tenderness she hadn’t banked on scares her out of her planned passivity; she needed to be touched, to be wanted, but not like this and not by him.

 “No”. And her grip on his wrist is cruel, firmer even than his was in that dingy bar, South Nowhere, Philadelphia, all those years ago. She forces his hand into a fist, trapping her hair inside and then tugs his arm down, jerking her own head back to reveal the delicate column of her throat and the wild, wanton drumming of her pulse.

“Do it like before”.

She grinds herself against him, echoing the way he’d pushed her past recklessness and into his wreckage.

“Fuck me.”

And he does.

The cheap frames on the mantle fall and shatter as he drives her against the wall, lifting her to his hips and setting his teeth to the unsullied snow of her skin. He marks his way across it, teeth and breath melting and biting away all the months of loneliness, all the cold of rejection as she scores her need into the skin under his shirt.

She wants him to bleed. She wants him to burn. She wants him inside her with the prickling anxiety of a tattoo needle, scratching away the last vestiges of something pure and replacing it with lurid, living colours.

And he gives it to her. Bent forward over his knees, skirt round her ass and panties barely to one side as he drags her back to him over and over, slickening and slamming as her heels dig into the wall for some sort of stability. She’s ragdoll powerless in his grip, cock driving and thoughts  crumpled with his boxers as their rhythm animates the serpent writhing on her back, temptation turned destruction as it devours itself eternally. It’s not pleasure exactly, it’s more like fire, lighting up the dark spaces inside them, warming at first but soon blazing, sparking shards of agony breaking off and rushing to the nape of her neck, to the knotted scar of Ed’s hand bruising her her hip, to the aching broken place where her heart used to beat.

It’s not enough, she can still think, still feel and she needs to be consumed. She needs him to need her, to sacrifice himself at the altar of her forgiveness, martyr himself to her cause and she throws herself away, arching her back as he looms over her like the animal he became in Philly and begs him for more. She knows there is more. She can smell it on his skin, like alcohol and rye and death.

Scully screams when he drives into her this way. He’s bigger than Mulder, and fucking her like Mulder never would, one hand gripping her throat and the other between her legs, forcing a blistering friction that borders on pain and when Jerse roars out his climax she doesn’t even have the breath left to wonder if maybe he’s going to kill her. All she can see is the ugly maroon carpet, blurring into darkness as her climax carves out what’s left of Dana Scully and leaves her empty.

Ed is gone by the time she works her way back to consciousness, though evidence of his participation is still sticky on her thighs. Scully knows she should feel bad, how many times in her life has her need to make things right led her to the darkest places, but she’s too hollow for regret.

Ed needed forgiveness and she needed to feel something beside the crippling sadness that was Mulder, unresponsive in his office for days at a time. She needed to experience life outside the walls of the hospital where her colleagues handle her with kid gloves, afraid theirs might be the next nose she breaks over a gallows humour joke meant to lighten another hopeless diagnosis. She needed to be something beyond the disappointment she saw every Sunday she showed up to her mother’s alone. She needed to be something to someone beyond their saviour or their sacrifice. She needed to be human and she needed to hurt and be hurt in a way that had a beginning and an end, to break the circle. Ed owed her at least that. He’d been there at the beginning and he’d given her an end.

She stays in the motel, lets her phone die and wonders if by some miracle Mulder will remember he’s meant to search when she goes missing. He doesn’t.

After three days she returns, wheels weary on the long track to their unremarkable desolation of a home.

He’s in the kitchen when she kicks off her shoes, marooned between the sink and the island like he was in the middle of doing something and forgot how to carry on. She wonders how long he’s been there.

“Mulder”. She offers him an opening, tearing just a millimeter into the dam behind which she’s learned to keep her feelings, begging him to hear the hurt and the heartbreak ad to notice that something is terribly, horribly wrong.

But he doesn’t, absently looking at her without seeing and asking where she’s been in a way that makes it clear he has no idea how long she’s been gone.

The darkness inside her yawns and inches a little closer to the surface, almost ready to swallow her, but she will not follow him into this endless night

Instead, Scully seals her feelings back up and grits her teeth, clinging the the spark of anger that is the only thing she still feels beside the numbness of hurt, and stalks over to him, ruffling his space in warning before drawing her hand back to slap him. Hard.

Mulder only blinks and steps back, red blooming under the indoor pale of his skin in a pale imitation of the passion she once used to be able to arouse.

“Scully.” He names her clinically, with no inflection. As if she is a known specimen and there is no mystery, no Mulder left at all. 

“I went back to Philadelphia." Scully taunts, playing her last card, calling in a shared horror and holding her hair aside to show him the evidence of Jerse’s mouth on her skin, writing her betrayal in smoke signals in her eyes and praying for a response, for a reaction… for a miracle. He has to remember.

When Mulder doesn’t move, she closes her eyes and prays, though she knows she has little right to another divine intervention. God knows how many they’ve wasted.

The darkness behind her eyelids thickens with finality when she hears footsteps, headed away, and then the study door snicks closed. 

It’s over. 

The door is still closed two days later when she takes her things and leaves him.