#but i had a moment like “i had a nice day? i feel like i've been going and going along just fine”

[the-modern-typewriter]

Hi! I hope you’re doing well and have a nice day, you deserve it with all the amazing stories you have written. I love the way you write villain characters so much. Can I request a story between a villain x sidekick/ someone who works on their side? Your wrote the conflict feelings when the hero falls for the villain so well, I’m curious to see how you explore a relationship where the villain falls for someone who he doesn’t have to hide/ compromise his ideas for? No pressure tho!

"Have you considered," the villain said, "chasing after someone who isn't your boss?"

"Is that a request or order for me to stop?"

The villain considered their sidekick for a moment, at that. They were a bright young thing, as sidekicks so often were. Beautiful and powerful and eager to sink their teeth in the world and leave all the bloody marks of a legacy. Passion-sparkling. Not yet tired. Their fury still a forest fire.

The villain should have said yes. Stop. It was the only smart thing. The only reasonable thing. Bright young things should be with other bright young things, and if they were chasing something else it was probably a trap.

At their silence, their sidekick smiled. Quick and pleased and more confident than the villain ever remembered being at that age. They took a step closer in the villain's study, stepping in between the villain's legs, looming.

"I think you like being chased, boss," their sidekick said.

The villain raised an eyebrow, glad their face betrayed nothing of their pounding heart. "I think I like escaping heroes and leaving them looking stupid."

"Deflection."

"Truth."

"Truth can be a deflection. You taught me that."

Despite themselves, the villain's lips twitched in a smile. "Did I."

"Do you want a truth?"

"I think you're better at lying."

"True," the sidekick said shamelessly. "I think you're the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen."

The villain swallowed. They willed their face not to flush. By the way their sidekick's eyes lit up, they suspected they failed. Their sidekick leaned in, they pressed the advantage, just as the villain had bloody taught them. Their hands settled on the arms of the villain's chair, as if the villain was someone who could be bracketed in and caged.

"I think," the sidekick said, "that you go for what you want. So it's curious that you deny yourself me. Normally I'd be flattered to be an exception, but in this case..."

"You think I want you?"

"I have eyes. Tell me you don't. Make it convincing."

"Now who's giving who orders?"

The sidekick's smile turned to a grin. Feral. The villain wanted to bite it, kiss it, claim it. It was delightful. They wet their lips and there was a giddy thrill to the way the sidekick's eyes followed the movement.

Of course, the sidekick, and most of the world, always followed the villain's every movement. Just in case.

"Obviously," the villain said, "I want you. That doesn't make kissing my mentee, my employee, a good idea. I have - power over you."

"Oh, do you? Does a person like you have power? Gosh. I hadn't noticed."

"Brat."

"Boss." The sidekick's hands inched closer, dragging tantalising up the villain's thighs.

The villain should have shoved them away, but once again they held damningly still. Once again, the sidekick rewarded them with that smile.

"I don't want to take advantage of you," the villain said.

"I would love for you to take advantage of me, so is it really taking advantage? I'm not a child. I know my own mind. You're the one taught me I should go after what you want."

"Did I."

"Uhuh." The sidekick pouted at them, eyes glinting with mischief. "No takesie-backsies just because you never imagined I'd want you."

The villain's breath hitched.

Why do you want me was an absurd question to ask? The villain knew all the reasons that people chased them. Power, connection, the things the villain could give. To stop them, to own them, to ruin them.

Their sidekick's eyes spoke nothing of those things. Their mouth, when it finally descended on the villain's, promised only sweetness. Only desire. Only things that the villain had never thought they'd be able to have again, because it was lonely at the top for a reason.

"I considered chasing after someone else, sure," the sidekick whispered, "but you're the one I want. So let's not make a good thing more complicated then it has to be, yeah?"

It was a bad idea. A terrible idea. A reckless idea, of the sort that the villain hadn't allowed themselves to indulge in a long time.

And, yet, the villain grabbed a fistful for the sidekick's hair and reeled them in to kiss them. Again, and again, and again.

Their sidekick was right, after all.

The villain always got what they wanted in the end.

[girlwith15cents]

Oversharing on the internet about ADHD

I've been trying to write this post for awhile now. It relates to my previous post about mental disabilities. But it's proving difficult cause it keeps sounding too pathetic, but that's kinda the point.

I, in my present, have an idea of who I am. My interests, how I act, how I dress, who I associate with, my gender expression. These are all observable things. Ways that other people can form opinions on me. These are, by most means, who I am.

However, who I want to be is pretty drastically separate from that. I know a version of me that I can try and project but will always fall short of. I want to learn and enjoy makeup. I want a larger wardrobe of clothes that I genuinely like. I want to learn an instrument. I want to get into streaming games for fun. I want to be able to take my friends out to dinner and buy them gifts and go around the city with them. I have so many ideas for tattoos and I have piercings I want to get. There are so many things I want and yet cannot have and have no real avenue to get.

The reason I cannot reach for these (very reasonable) things is because of my lack of capital and personal agency. Extremely debilitating executive dysfunction has stripped me of any milestones of adulthood someone of my age might be seeing. I've never been able to hold a job without growing deeply suicidal due to the effort required. Hobbies cost money. Rent costs money. Expressions of the self cost money. I have always had to exist within the confines of someone else's generosity to take care of me. It has stripped me of opportunities to grow as a person. It has made me less and less who I want to be and more who I am.

All too often because of this people don't take me seriously. Financial burden that I am, I have learned to make myself small better than any other skill. I choke up when asked to assert my wants. I put others first. I'm quiet and guarded. Any strive to make myself the person I want to be feels deeply embarrassing. Like a child who is convinced they're something they aren't. So people who meet me see the child. They see the loser who won't take steps towards employment because they're lazy. They see the girl who orbits a social group but never belongs. They see a nice girl who has far less desirable qualities than the other candidate for this job position. It hurts so fucking bad to be condescended to without any ability to rebut it.

So when does it end? When I find work that won't end up being the death of me? When our government wises up and pushes for UBI or expands upon disability payments? When they invent adderal that doesn't have a million side effects? When I get sick of it and give up? There's no real end in sight, and every time ADHD gets laughed at as a pop-psych joke it gets further away. Am I doomed to be a child forever? When will I see the respect I know I deserve?

And sure, pathologizing behavior is 'bad'. Maybe the answer to all my woes is to grit my teeth harder than I already have been my entire life. Maybe the real reason I see no forward movement is because I'm projecting my own helplessness. But can't it be a little easier? Everyone else is having a rough time, but at least they're having a time. The behavior I exhibit is very normal to neurotypical people on a bad day, but it makes up my entire existence. And it sure feels a hell of a lot more severe than someone having a day of bad focus.

The fucked up thing about it is that I like me. The present me and the me I want to be. We both have so much to offer. We're both one of the best friends you've ever had. We both have skills and qualities that make us very likeable people. But these qualities have little to no monetary value. Any way that I could monetize it would also require investment. Investment that I cannot make without agency. So I'm stuck as a vague bundle of good qualities and talents that everyone sees so much potential in and is eagerly awaiting a moment where I channel it somewhere. A moment that will never occur without agency.

[imageingrunge]

oh god i was BEGGING for scenes like this with companions in DATV Something that actually felt dramatic and gave weight to their actions just to make me feel something (I was thinking about this when Lucanis got possessed by Spite in this scene)

[celepeace]

it's really hard to come to terms with but i think i just have to accept that i can't do the good work right now. and the people who are, are doing it for people like me

[mosaic-of-light]

Good thing #19: Drinking coffee right now :)

[phagodyke]

aouuugh my uterus......

[sapsolais]

.

[nexus-nebulae]

ok i get that people will have sex in some weird places both irl and in fiction but when a show has two characters trying to fuck in a hospital i cannot suspend my disbelief whatsoever bc when i was in the hospital any time my heart rate went Slightly above average a nurse would be in my room within minutes, if they've got a character hooked up to a heart monitor they'd notice that shit immediately

[sskk-manifesto]

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[grahamdollton]

[roxannarambles]

rant in tags (mental health issues)

[loumauve]

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[indigodawns]

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[miserye]

i got forced to go to a social event yesterday and it looked like i was being a (slightly) uncooperative bitch (i was) but that's just how i normally am at social events when i am outnumbered by people i don't know

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[insomtiny]

this dude in fallout 76 kept inviting me to join his team and i just kept ignoring it cause i was like that's my purse i don't know you but then he APPEARED and started talking to me in proximity chat and he was like "yeah you should join our team we're about to go do a mission and you'll get a bunch of xp and level up faster" and started explaining how to accept his invite which is really nice of him but also i needed to get off soon so i turned my mic on and told him so and he just went "oh shit" and ran away? 😭