#but like genuinely in order to navigate reality and be able to enjoy things you just kinda have to reckon with the fact that

[freakinator]

yknow i really do wish the lsers would evaluate their ableism/sanism problem at some point but i doubt thats ever gonna happen considering that shits normal in society and barely seen as a problem even in leftist spaces

[ephemerlskies]

constant craving 04 (final) | jjk

⇢ pairing: jungkook x reader

⇢ genre: “drabble” series, best friends to lovers au, slight angst, FLUFF, bestfriend!au, unrequited love, smarter idiots but still idiots all the same

⇢ word count: 6.8k

⇢ warnings: explicit language, mentions of alcohol, excessive drinking (drink responsibly), pining, jungkook is an overdramatic baby, a surplus of feelings (i am disgusted with myself), one (1) fire hazard

⇢ summary: with the Friendiversary approaching quickly, both you and Jungkook have an array of trials to navigate through. and, as Seokjin gets caught in the crossfires, you must finally make a decision that will define how the rest of your life will unfold. 

♪ playlist: constant craving - k.d. lang, bad religion - frank ocean, misunderstood - lucky daye, neu roses - daniel caesar ♪

╰ series index: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 (final)

a/n: wow.... so bitches really call this a drabble series then write a 6 thousand word finale... its me im bitches... anywho, i really love the way this played out!! jungkook had to hit the bottom to start rising to the top and it shows. also, the ending is like....... hehe well ill just let you all see for yourselves. enjoy my lovely readers! this wrapped up such a heartfelt series that is so dear to my heart. thank you all for the support for this! and i might whip up a few drabbles simply because i think this relationship is really cute hehe ok... happy reading! <3

part four: i love you too

Carrying that music box in his pocket felt like a well-deserved and all too grim reminder of what went down a few days ago. Sitting drunk yet again, though one would best describe Jungkook’s posture as more of a sloven pile of flesh and bones withering away on a bar stool, he searched for the wallet which was in one of his four pockets.

He reached for the wrong one. Instead of the faux leather skimming his skin, it was a solid wood corner pricking the pad of his index finger. It stung more than it should have. Perhaps he'd gotten a splinter, or the top layer of his skin was simply too raw from all the wear and tear of your fight. Jungkook wasn’t one to jump at such negligible shocks, but it sank him back into that night. It wasn't the wooden corner at all.

You loved him. You still love him.

That's what you said. That's what nearly put him on the floor instead of in his chair, and what had been preying on his mind as if he were no different than a helpless animal drowning his regrets in whiskey. And he knew he should have said it back. 

Jungkook theorized ways to defy the cruel restraints of time, and if the universe would be so kind as to allow him to travel back to that day in middle school when he happened upon a scared, flush-faced student running so fast and panicked that they bumped into each other, just to be the one who said 'I love you' first. Or those genies and shooting stars and blessed fountains that supposedly granted wishes; he would pay no hesitation to plead with whatever deity would listen and permit his most prioritized desire. 

The retrospective bargaining remained a ghost haunting just about every waking moment of his life. Though, he had not been quite sure if said ghost was some cosmic sent presence or simply his own guilt. If regret took on physical ramifications, then Jungkook would have been convinced that was why he felt as if his legs wouldn't have been able to carry him even if he tried.

If I could just go back to that night with the knowledge I know now, I would have hauled my ass to your house instead of that club and told you that my choice was made for me the moment I met you. Every other person I ended up with these past twelve years was simply a buffer for loving you. I had to prepare myself, because loving you was something entirely too tremendous for a boy still grappling with his own faulty speech pattern to assume.

I wish you knew that. I wish I didn’t stand there like an idiot and let you leave, thinking me some hero for finally letting this new guy Seokjin take the place I had always imagined being in. I wish I had just said that I love you.

I love you.

I love you, ___.

Jungkook’s vision resembled that of a smudged lens. However, there were no fingerprints on his eyes. The world had turned blurry and colorless, the latter he knew was not due to the sixth order of whiskey he let soak into his heart’s open wound. 

A life of color was one of the many things that left when you did.

He didn’t know it then, but Jungkook was being fervently dramatic since it had not been more than seventy-two hours the last time he spoke to you. Thought to him, it was akin to being just short of death and taking another breath would have been an expense he wasn’t sufficiently funded to pay. 

Whatever happened in the interim of him paying his tab and walking out onto the sidewalk must have landed somewhere in the blacked out stretches of his inebriated memory, since he was now staring at your contact gleaming on his phone bearing the semblance of one guardian angel.

It was so ingrained into his routine. Opening the app with the phone icon, clicking the ‘recent’ tab, and finding your name no further than three contacts down the list because he called you as if he had important things to tell you, though normally it was just to hear your voice or to tell you about what he had for lunch. And it nestled into his muscle memory as natural as it was for him to breathe or blink. Even when alcohol debilitated his driving, walking, and thinking, his body was drawn to seek a haven such as yourself. And he nearly pressed ‘call’.

Before the comfort of your voice could ring through to his phone, reality descended upon that reflex. Right now, you were probably with Seokjin, attending some pretentious art gallery for one of his colleagues.

It was just Jungkook and the night sky and the moon that he hoped you were gazing at too; it would be the only connection to you as of now. The moon, a parcel for the most longing gazes.

There are stories where the two protagonists get it right. This was not that story. That reality stung more than the residual burn of whiskey clinging along his throat.

Both you and Jungkook made every wrong decision possible. From the moment you subjected yourself to exploiting the veneer of being a ‘good friend’ to disguise any true feelings that might have taken light, to the moment Jungkook was presented with all the excruciatingly obvious signs that you were in love with him, but was simply too inept to notice, to the both of you neglecting any urge threatening the bounds of platonic. Any path that would have steered to a destination where you two would get that happy ending was conveniently untaken.

And you had a long journey riddled with heartbreak after heartbreak to prove it.

He traded his phone with that wooden music box, scuffing the soles of his shoe as he walked back home, hoping he’d be able to give the gift to you on your Friendiversary.

-----

Your pain was still raw. In this way, you had not considered, or rather avoided the idea of tending to such delicate wounds. The days leading up to the infamous anniversary had been spent hoping you would organically heal enough to allow the presence of Jungkook while denying another reopening in your wound.

You had been juggling a not so thrilling number of conflicts the three days preceding that self-acclaimed national holiday.

One, Seokjin and his bottomless supply of invitations that you felt too obligated to refuse. He had such a life packed with plans which is more than you could have said for Jungkook. He, most likely, busied himself with promoting ranks in some obscenely violent video game. Two, a mutual friend of yours had told you Seokjin was fixing to make your relationship official this coming Friday, and you didn’t want to admit the lackluster reaction upon hearing the news was equivalent to receiving a C on a test. It wasn't the worst grade to receive, but you knew there would always be something better than adequacy. Not satisfying enough nor disappointing enough to be dealt with without bending a few expectations. And three, all you really wanted, the only agent of excitability (both good and bad) that diluted the festering numbness in your heart just a tad more, was thinking about seeing Jungkook on your Friendiversary.

But with that excitement, was its equally worrying constituent: whether or not you would be able see Jungkook that day without cracking under pressure.

Things weren’t exactly attuned between the two of you. Your emotional stature had never been more unsynchronized and offkey with Jungkook’s, so, forcing a celebratory movie or dinner would be no different than adding cornstarch to the already thick tension.

“___? Are you listening?” Everything Seokjin had just been droning on about filtered in and out without a single word being absorbed, and you could have pretended this wasn't the case but  stress had apprehended caring enough to lie.

“Sorry… No, I wasn't. I’m just stressed is all.” Since that was only a half lie, self-admonition had not yet taken permanent residency whenever you would look at Seokjin’s eyes offering nothing but genuine tact.

“Oh, sorry to hear! Are you okay? Anything you wanna talk about?” That, and the soft press of his hand over yours had swallowed you into a perpetual, guilty cycle of comparing two incomparable people.

Seokjin was always like this. Serving a gentle smile and honest ears as a vessel of calmness during whatever calamity you were grappling. It was safe knowing if you fell, you’d have a comfortable cushion to soften the impact. He was mindful with his words and had the intelligence to articulate them with impressive eloquence. You were more likely to see pigs fly than to see him stutter. He had a diverse group of friends and walked a steady path to a financially secure life. And you started to wonder what else one would need in a partner? Any sensible person would do much more than you had to snag someone like Seokjin, as handsome as he was kind and respectful. He seemed to have everything Jungkook lacked, including mutual feelings for you.

It would have been entirely too easy to pick him, as if there was a ‘Seokjin’ button and a ‘Jungkook’ button and you could press Seokjin’s on a whim. If choosing him would have meant miraculous nullification of all your very real and very unremitting feelings for that idiot you called your best friend, then you would have done it in a heartbeat.

There wasn't a 'Seokjin' button or a 'Jungkook' button, nor was there a button that would wondrously redistribute your feelings towards Seokjin.

And then there was Jungkook. Always in the back of your mind when he wasn't tenanting the focus of it.

He was never predictable in the ways that mattered. It was just as difficult figuring out his next move as figuring out whether this trait was exciting or exhausting.

Though, this had not been to say you didn’t know him well; in fact, all his habits and preferences and pet peeves could be bound into a book, written by you, and it would be so accurate anyone who read it would think it was an autobiography. He knew you to the same caliber. Where Seokjin would ask what was wrong, Jungkook wouldn’t need to. He already learned your behavior to know to say something along the lines of ‘tell me what’s wrong when you're ready, we can watch your favorite movie or swing by that Chinese place with those great fried dumplings in the meantime’. And on more favorable occasions, he'd say nothing and simply wrap you in his arms and let his shirt become a delta for your tears.

To anyone else, that might sound entirely too frank and perhaps a bit dismissive to be comforting, but to you it was the exact cure for each affliction. To never need explanations that would validate your feelings because Jungkook saw to that right when he took notice; to never manufacture fake smiles through failed attempts at cheering you up since, of course, he knew exactly what to do to vegetate joy in your heart and earn a smile from years and years —and years— of practice. It had almost driven you mad, thinking about how he knew from a shift in your brow what you were feeling and yet, somehow, never realized how deeply in love you were.

All the while, the moment you were convinced you had been versed fluently in his every move, he would pawn another blindsight that would leave you breathless and amazed all the same. Jungkook always had concealed tricks up his sleeve, and life was anything but repetitive with him. You would more often than not find yourself struggling to relearn language and existing itself just to keep up with him. How exactly he managed to wield such diametric facets of being was an enigma beyond the reasoning of this universe.To feel like home, somewhere you belonged outside of your own body, and a daring voyage into a completely new world all at once must have meant he was some sort of Godsend. Only angels could have sculpted a soul so magnetizing, you assumed.

Seokjin was an umbrella, shielding you on some arcane journey under an unforgiving rainfall. Your shoes kept dry and your hair intact.

And if he was the umbrella, then Jungkook was the rain. Falling everywhere and all at once, so that you couldn't help but let yourself be saturated in his entire, vibrant being. And who’s to say letting such a water fall against your skin was a bad thing? Sometimes rain is cleaning, gentle even. They bear fruits as beautiful as rainbows that guide you to an unnamed treasure.

Your treasure, however, had a name.

Jungkook calling.

"___? Hello? You in there?" Seokjin waved his hand in front of your face mostly in a jesting manner, but part of him felt like your eyes were blinded by something held in your heart. If he hadn’t pulled you back into reality, you might have been lost forever.

“I'm just…” Your attention had abandoned this conversation the second his name gave light to your screen. “Sorry, um…”

“It's okay, you can take the call. I’ll be in the kitchen making us some coffee.”

If you were to thank him profusely, it would have been far too obvious how much you missed seeing his name among your notifications, and most likely expose how often you spent thinking of Jungkook while you were supposed to be enthralled with Seokjin. So, you just nodded and answered the phone.

Nodding and answering, as though that didn't feel like taking a breath of clean air after hours of swimming through muddied waters.

“Hello? ___?”

“Jungkook.” It took you longer than usual to form a response and what was assembled had been a half-baked utterance just to let him know you were on the other side of the phone, hearing his voice and feeling a surge of energy course through your veins like he was some delicious narcotic filling life into you after only a week without him.

“___.” Jungkook was in his own debt of words as well. The exchange halted for a few seconds, a jaded breathing cutting the cracked static.

“Look-”

“Hey so-”

Any hope that you had finally caught up to the same page as Jungkook was lost. Now, it seemed you two were reading entirely different books.

“You go.” You said after another dreadful pause. He was the one who called, so he should be the one carrying the burden of navigating through this deafening tension.

“Well, I- uh… I… Well, you see I was just, um, wondering…” Jungkook’s heart must have shut off. That would explain why even the most rudimentary of words felt closer to a foreign language. Or, why he was making conscious efforts to counteract the threat of his nearly dormant lisp.

His brain was drained dry of any blood, his inner mechanisms were shutting down. Even without the alcoholic filter catching words and common sense in its web, Jungkook felt himself fall into an overactive state of dumbfoundedness. Sobriety only a cataract for his emotional override. 

“Our friendiversary?”

“I’m sorry, I did not understand literally anything you just said.”

“Me neither.”

The charming and familiar laugh that spilled through the speaker reminded you that Jungkook was in fact a real person. Not some figmented embodiment of every lost and unrequited and tortuous feeling you had been suppressing for twelve years. Jungkook was real, his laugh and everything else you loved about him were all so incredibly real. And more importantly, the pure joy you felt was real; a permanent serialization of his. Your smiles and his smiles had always surfaced in tandem.

Now, you both were laughing. Neither were warranted by his messy attempt at forming a coherent sentence. The weight of discomfort shedding from your shoulders had been partnered with a slew of relieved chuckles.

“Anyway, um. I- I still wanna see you on our Friendiversary. Or, at least give you your gift.” Admitting that was terrifying but the thought of breaking the consecutive streak of eleven years simply because he was too much of a coward to admit he wanted to see you dizzied him. However, the thought of spending your friendiversary alone terrified him beyond comprehension. So, he thought not about that as a possibility; he carved an opening to his heart in hope you wouldn’t send sharp thorns of rejection into it.

“Yeah, I, uh. I still wanna see you too. I mean, it is a national holiday. We gotta have holiday spirit, right?” You were forcing playful banter, it felt like lemon juice scouring cuts on your tongue, but you were so desperate to make things between you two feel normal.

“You’re right! So, um… You can come over tomorrow night. I’ll set up a surprise or whatever.” He seemed to have fallen back into stride with pre-confession Jungkook. Trying to keep up with him now would just exhaust you of all your means, so you chose to save the rest for tomorrow night. Even if that meant watching him walk away to some unforeseeable finish line; his back, the last part of him you’d see until you could finally collect your broken pieces and start walking as well.

“Sounds good! I’ll, um, see you then.”

“See you, ___.”

You had no idea, and how could you, that Jungkook was now wiping small clusters of wetness from the bed of his eyelids. Why he thought you, the one person that remained a constant in his life, would say no to him over one fight (of many) made for quite the spill of tears. But if you did know, you would have told him you felt like crying too.

"Hey! How did everything go?" You were so immersed in your virtual conversation with Jungkook you nearly forgot the person you were presently with. The train of guilt wouldn't stop for your pathetic attempts at disembarking.

"Oh! Thanks for the coffee." You sipped, and it had just been a stall to blink away the tears that were straying beyond your will of concealment. "It went good. We're still celebrating our Friendiversary."

"Friendiversary?" Seokjin's light chuckle veiled his tense concern.

"Yeah... Uh, it's just this thing we do to celebrate our friendship. The day we met."

"Oh... that's..." His eyes were scaling the rim of his mug.

"That's what, Seokjin?" You were stern, knowing well enough it was born of far more than platonic defensiveness. And you had no right to be the one prosecuting him since you clearly had more to hide than meets the eye.

"I mean, it's just interesting how dedicated you are to an anniversary with a friend." Seokjin wielded that soft-spoken voice which made it difficult to be anything but patient with him. And from the tone of it, he seemed to have no ill intentions with that statement, though it had not been an entirely innocent observation. To you, however, it felt like he might as well have set you on fire.

"Interesting? What is that supposed to even mean? I mean, we've been friends for twelve years. I- I don't know why people are always so judgmental." Your arms crossed over your chest, hoping he would take notice how much his comment slighted you. If asked, you would have insisted you would have been this worked up over any of your friends. Though you knew well enough this was untrue, and it made you feel even worse acting as though Seokjin was the one at fault here.

"I'm sorry. I'm not judging you, really. I just... I just have never heard of two friends doing something like that so religiously."

You sighed out all your anger, knowing the way you snapped at him was merely misdirected frustration. "No, I'm sorry. I know it's kinda weird."

"Look, I get it. You guys are close. But, ___, you talk about him so much that half, no, over half of your stories include him. We've been dating for, what, barely a week now, and I know more about this Jungkook guy than I know about you, and I haven't even met him."

Lips parted, ready to dispatch another slew of defenses to refute all the things he said. It was more disappointing than it was shocking to find nothing but a long sigh emerging. Because he was right. Jungkook has been interwoven so thoroughly in your last twelve years that if you only told the stories without him in it, then it would be the least accurate and nondescript retelling of your life. Fragments of an unfinished novel. It would miss the most crucial pieces, entire chapters, of your story.

You would have been presenting a shell of you, hollow and one dimensional. All the inner parts of you, the lungs and veins and tissue that gave you life and made you whole belonged solely with Jungkook.

That's why you sat there, blank faced, foolishly waiting for the words that wouldn't come to your aid because you had no place to contend with him.

"Seokjin... I'm with you..." It's all that would come up your throat, and it felt like acid. You were sure it burned his ears when he heard them more than it had your throat.

It hadn’t even been partially true. Physically you were with him, but in your head you were sitting on your couch with Jungkook, consuming a concerning amount of junk food while chatting through a movie used more as background noise than entertainment.

"Okay. Does that mean you don't have feelings for him?"

"Well..."

"Can you confidently say you could replace all the time you spend with him with time you would spend with me?" Seokjin must have noticed your returning tears because he loosened his verbal grip from your throat. To you, it sounded like he was pacifying you for some horrible sin, to anyone else it sounded as though he was simply trying to dredge up feelings that would disrupt the chance of a relationship between you and him. "___, I like you. I really do, but in all honesty, I'm looking for something serious. I think we would be great together, but only if you don't have any feelings left for him."

"Seokjin..." You regretted looking at him.

Sweetness was strewn in his eyes and gentle smile. Seokjin was softer than cotton, which made the real threat, the rough sandpaper wearing away skin and bones, you. It made it all the more painful to know you had been keeping everything you felt for Jungkook hidden from Seokjin. Though, if one would have presented an objective point of view, your feelings were far from secretive. And the most brutal honesty was that you knew feelings for Seokjin were never in your attainability. Not the way they always had been for Jungkook.

He was the wrong person who crossed paths with you at the right moment. A mere convenience. And you knew he deserved much more than what you had to offer.

"And maybe I'm being an idiot, but I like you too much to give you some ultimatum which would put you in such an unfair position. So, I'll let you think this over." His compassion felt more like a sharp blow to your chest. “No pressure.”

If he hadn’t smiled like he did, then you would have broken up with him right then and there. It was not possible to rip away such tender hope away from a smile so sweet.

"I'm sorry." You meant the remorse behind those words and it still hadn’t amounted to a proper consolation. "I'm sorry. I guess... I guess I'll go... Seokjin?”

“Yes?” He replied quickly, and you knew only a pace that rapid was one brought on by a sliver of faith that you might have made your decision right then.

“You’re a really great person. You deserve the world.”

Unfortunately, you couldn’t give him what he wanted. And as bitter and unkind as that might have felt at the moment, it was the only bit of truth and relent you could have offered him.

-----

In your bed, sleep became somewhat of an abstract desire. You knew your rest was deprived from you when the digital clock on your bedside told you it was six hours past the time you'd normally fall asleep. It was because you really did have a choice to make now.

To choose Seokjin, and know you'd collapse in the safety of his reciprocated affection, though haunted by how you would never feel the fullest extent of content. And you would live with that until resentment and distance wedged irreversible damage in your relationship.

Or, to choose Jungkook, which would catapult you into a depth so dark and tenuous that you would have no idea whether you'd meet gentle snow or hard, deadly concrete when you landed. And maybe you'd never land at all; maybe you would be caught in a state of falling down and down forever, until your beating heart eventually stilled.

Which one was worth it? Which were you willing to risk? These were the questions that kept you awake.

The hours leading to your undisclosed celebration events with Jungkook ceased being actual points of your existence and merely obstructions that you had to plow through in order to arrive at some conclusive moment. Something that might give you an answer to all your questions. Something that might have released you from devotedly checking your phone for a Jungkook patented text or call.

You were turning into a half-being. Someone who could only inhale a full breath, laugh an intentional laugh, and sleep a soundless sleep when their other half was there.

If you thought being in love with Jungkook for your entire friendship was pathetic, then you couldn’t fathom what you had become now.

Standing in front of his door, the same one you lugged him to that night he was too drunk to balance on his feet, when you willingly carried all the weight he couldn’t, when your lips became acquainted and comfortable with his within half a beat, you felt as if this chunk of wood was mocking you. A partition barricading you from Jungkook. Your Jungkook. The man you always felt you were on the outskirts of, with only a window to peer into his unreadable mind. And that was enough for you ―until now.

Now you were going to knock on that door with your hand, make him open it for you, and walk into his home. You would be the one to step foot inside of the very structure that only solicited closed doors and immovable walls and fogged windows. And you would leave behind your timidity, every feeling and urge that left you with disappointing compromises for the sake of maintaining this friendship.

You would be selfish, and he would finally feel a mere glimpse of what you have always felt for the best and worst of your life.

Even when he opened the door, arming a smile that actively disarmed you, this home of his was yours to conquer. This was your time to act for you alone, despite how many smiles he sent your way. You had not any weapons or shields or an infantry for a clutch. You just had your heart and all the love it carried. 

“Hey! ___, you look… You look great.” There was no real incentive for him to censor how he truly thought you looked. Immeasurably beautiful. It was simply his own nerves impeding on the feelings that were too intense to express without it being followed by an entire soliloquy of I love you’s.

“Thanks... You too...” You could almost feel the words brimming in your and Jungkook’s mouth, carrying such raw emotions and longing intentions.

"I'm really glad that- Jungkook..." Walking into his house punctuated what you were about to say.

His living room was strewn with enough candles to steal the last of your words and to consider his house a fire hazard. That didn't negate this lovely sea of lights to be anything but romantic and thoughtful. A bit cluttered, and not at all perfect, but it must have taken Jungkook hours to set up every wax column. The thoughtfulness of this gesture would have astonished you had it not been for the consistency of Jungkook snatching your breath and words away whenever he tried. It was antithetical, the way you expected his surprises. Yet, always surprised all the same.

Unpredictable, completely surrounding you just like the rain.

"I had to turn off my fire detector but... Worth it." Jungkook considered the number of mishaps that could have dampened any chance of this being romantic.

A candle could tip over and set his entire place ablaze, the wax could leak onto his carpet and tabletops, damaging his furniture and savings for replacements, you and he could have suffocated from all the fumes steaming from the wick. But if that look on your face didn't feel like the only bit of revival to keep his heart's steady beating, if your eyes didn’t look as though it was the only set of eyes that shed beauty into this world then he wouldn't have used up exactly three lighters to pull this stunt. But it did, and he felt warmth and color return to every inch of his body.

He would have used hundreds of lighters to ignite thousands of candles if that meant an ounce of happiness from you. He wanted to say that, but he knew the candles said it for him.

The spectacle almost made you forget why you were here in the first place. It almost made you forget the resolve you managed to gather before entering. And then he said your name.

"___."

The letters flowing from his lips as if they could only be pronounced by his tongue. It sounded so good. So good, that if anyone else were to say it then it wouldn't have been your name at all. It would have sounded wrong, sullied. And it wasn't supplied by neat articulation, this new belonging of your name in his mouth. The need for him to sculpt your name into this world was more than that. "I will never forgive myself if I don't get this out while I still can."

"Jungkook, what is all this?" You didn't know why you felt a collection of tears brimming along your eyes, but you didn't care to figure it out. Perhaps you felt an influx of feelings, an abundance too heavy for your body to seal within the confines of your emotional seams, so they overflowed in the form of tears. This certainly had not been the first time you cried over Jungkook, but you had never cried over him like this.

"___, I love you!" Jungkook said loudly. It was just you and him who could hear, but it felt as though he wanted the entire world to know.

"What? I- You- What?" Your lack of verbal poise was indicative of your love for him once again taking the reins of your mind and heart. Words were a luxury you couldn't afford as of now. You just had to feel everything you were feeling until the rainstorm settled. The hope that he would spare you some remnants of fluency was far along, and you weren't too sure if what Jungkook was about to say would be gentle enough to leave you with any words at all.

"I love you. I don't know why I didn't know it sooner. Or maybe, I- Maybe I did know?" Jungkook sighed at his own ineloquence. "I'm stupid! That's it. That's my only excuse. I'm so stupid. The way I felt about you, the way I still feel about you, is something I thought all best friends had. I thought everyone felt like the moments they weren't spending with their best friends just felt like filler moments. Like, every day I spent without you was just a span of time I had to wait out until I see you again. Like every damn moment of my life is spent waiting for you. And if I don't end up with you then... then I'll never stop waiting."

"Jungkook, I-" He prevailed in surprising you, taking words and breath and thoughts all at once.

"And, I'm that stupid! I really thought all best friends had those moments when they stare at you, and- and-" Now, you weren't the only one with wet eyes and cheeks. "And I just feel like looking at you and being with you just makes me better. It makes me a better person, or something, and it makes me feel like... Like I'll never get hurt again. And even if I do get hurt, I know it's you I want to be there. I know that whenever something bad happens to you, or when you feel like crying or when you're happy or angry or anything that I want to be the one who gets to be by your side. When I look at you, all I want is to love you. To love all your pain away."

"You really mean that?"

"Yes! God, I love you." You didn't notice how it happened, but Jungkook's arms became a shield around you. Inside his arms you were indestructible. Your hands pressed against his cheeks, memorizing the plush, smooth skin. The world could hurl all the fire and ice it had, but it wouldn’t matter. "___, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry it took me so long to figure it out. I'm sorry that in that period, I hurt you. Please, forgive me. I love you, and I want to be with you."

"Of course, I forgive you. I... I can't believe this." Hearing everything you always wanted from him was drastically different when it was actually unfolding. It was a million times more than any hope or dream you used as a salve for your longing. It was everything.

"Maybe it took so long because I was afraid. Because the idea of loving you was something I wasn't ready for. Even though I did love you, God, who was I to take on something as fragile and crucial as loving you. I know I probably would have messed it up. And, fuck, maybe I'm messing it up right now. But I just needed it to be perfect. I needed loving you to be perfect because I don't want to give you anything less than that."

"You were always enough for me, Jungkook. More than enough. You were and are everything to me" His arms that pressed you further into him expressed how happy that made him. 

"But I'm not perfect yet. I might mess up... A lot. No, I'll definitely mess up. I don't know if I can offer you perfect yet. But I do know that through everything I have never stopped loving you and I will never stop loving you."

"Jungkook... I don't know what to say." Your thumb grazed a falling tear from his face. Jungkook had not cried often in front of you; and you could tally up the amount of times he had on your fingers alone. But when he did, it was still as beautiful as when he was smiling or laughing or even scowling.

"You could say you love me back." You did. You loved him, his smile that was currently on a mission to melt your heart, his arms that carried both the good and bad parts of you, his wit that you always relished in. All the reasons to love him were an endless flowing river. If you were lucky enough, you would catch a glimpse of each beautiful current and be able to give name to the gravity that pulled you into him.

"I love you too, you idiot." The last word caught in your throat because your lips were being kissed instead.

His lips. Warm and exciting, allotting your being with an infinite devotion of his. And it was more than you could have ever hoped for.

It felt like fire. Like a grove of candles encapsulating the origin of heat. You and Jungkook, holding each other so close, you could have become one. Hot and all-consuming of anything in its path. If one stood too close, they would suffer scorching embers that stray from the orange pyres. Seokjin, Irene, and any other unassuming casualty that had the misfortune of stepping between the two of you, harboring the burn scars to remind them of what fumed from their interference.

Every element concocting between you and him was that of a bright flame, cremating pure metals and wet woods and thick forests alike.

You were in his home. His arms and lips and hands told you it was your home as well. All that time spent wondering why you could never slip inside before was never because he didn't want to let you in. And the thing is, you never thought to knock until now. You sat outside in a silenced hope that he would voluntarily open that door for you. But unknown to you, Jungkook seemed to be waiting as well. Waiting in a large room with empty spaces where you belonged and where he kept reserved for your residence alone.

He waited even when he wasn't quite sure of who he was waiting for, or if you would ever actually spill your warmth into his home. He waited until his fingers turned to ice and his eyes fell to exhaustion, for you to walk inside.

"So, you're like my boyfriend now?" Your voice brushed against his smiling lips.

"Yeah, your boyfriend, or whatever."

"You know this means you have to top next year's friendiversary. And I mean, all these candles? That's gonna be tough." It could have counted as sensory overload, the feeling of his palms flush against your back, the tip of his nose grazing yours, the bright array of candles illuminating the room. But you were so, incredibly cold without him that this felt like solace to you.

"When have I ever disappointed you?" Jungkook regretted what came out of his mouth too late to stop himself from saying it.

"Oh, I couldn't count the amount of times on my fingers alone! What about that time you forgot our chains for the tires on our trip to the mountains? We almost died." His eye roll only encouraged you to continue. Maybe, if you were lucky, he'd equip that cute pout whenever he wanted his way. "Or what about when you swore you brought water, but three miles in on our hike you had that look on your face. You know I reminded you to get water and you swore you did. Or what about-"

"Okay! I get it! I fuck up, jeez." He scrunched his nose, his eyes waning into crescents courtesy of that grin of his. You counted the number of wrinkles along the bridge of his nose as you always did, though you had acquired an expertise in the geography of his face. Each line and angle and ridge were now and eternally yours to restudy and marvel. "Hey, uh, almost forgot."

He reached into his front left pocket. "I, um, kept carrying it around thinking I'd see you somewhere. Kinda dumb right?"

"Not dumb." You opened the tiny box, wound the handle until the spring felt tight and you could see the throngs prick the textured wheel, and it was one of those moments where you didn't see a gift in your hand. You simply saw his thought and sentiment manifested as a box of wood that sung a tune.

All the things Jungkook wanted to give you, the sun and the moon and the entire universe were not his to give. So for now, he settled for this music box and there would be a day when he would collect each celestial being and place them right into your hands. Maybe then, he would feel less of a debt for possessing such a love like yours.

"This is... I love it. Thank you, Jungkook." You smiled, but it was motivated in the hopes he would smile back. You thought he deserved that much, at least. And he did.

"Sooooo... Can I tell Seokjin that you're actually in love with me and that he sucks ba-"

"Um, absolutely not!" As always, his crudeness and slight inability to remain mature for too long only wedged you deeper in love.

So, terribly in love. Your state of constant craving for Jeon Jungkook had been left barren. That desolate, solitary province was no longer yours to take residence in.

You had a home now. And you had no need to crave Jungkook anymore. He was right here, holding you.

“I love you.” 

“I love you too.”

a/n: okay, cry with me.... these two.... such hopeless saps for each other i'm here for it. final destination is simp city... also (spoiler) it is completely canon that irene and seokjin bond over their mutual heartbreaks and get to smitten hehehe. anyway, my loves i hope you enjoyed this finale as much as i enjoyed writing it!!! it was a short but heartfelt journey with these two and i will miss their idiocy sm. thank u for your endless support i love u all!!! <3

[corvus--rex]

The first part of this is already on Ao3 as part of Julance 2021, and I wanted to throw it up here with the second (unfinished) part of the chapter. It's sleeping for now, but I really want to come back to it. If you've read the first part on Ao3, I said that Keith's a little dark at first, but that he has his reasons - those reasons come in in his part. It is an Omegaverse, with Alpha Lance and Omega Keith. As usual, please feel free to skip it if it's not your thing :)

~*~*~*~

Part 1: Sharpshooter

Unilu was an old neighborhood. One that didn’t care where you came from or where you were going. Didn’t care about dynamics. Didn’t care about where your money came from. The density of the buildings made the area dark even in the middle of the day. The stories said that Altea had been a beautiful city, light and free. That was impossible to see anymore. Daibazaal Industries had taken over long ago, running the nanny-state government from boardrooms.

This was the world Lance McClain navigated through on his way to a bar called Baku’s Den. He was supposed to be meeting up with Florona, a girl he’d been put in contact with. She had connections to a job he was interested in. Omega trafficking wasn’t an uncommon practice, but it was usually female Omegas that were targeted. Some bullshit about delicate beauty and submission he didn’t believe in. Lance’s mother was an Omega, wherever she was. He hoped she was safe; he hadn’t seen her in 8 years. But this trafficking ring was pretty new, and dealing exclusively in male Omegas. Lance had a feeling he knew why.

The Daibazaal state had mandated sterilization for all Betas and some female Omegas. Male Omegas were safe from the invasive procedure. The official reason was that there was a population issue and the city was over-crowded, and that, although unfortunate, it was necessary for even resource distribution, and the statistics showed that male Omegas were far less likely to have children. It was total bullshit. The birth rate had been dropping steadily for years. Some once-thriving neighborhoods had become ghost towns. The only reason a place like Unilu was still holding on was because they looked the other way on most things, becoming a haven of sorts for people like Lance. The Alpha had always had an innate talent for firearms of all types. It was a talent he’d honed into a finely-sharpened skill. One that he used to chip away at Daibazaal and the atrocities they allowed to go unaddressed, like this trafficking ring.

He’d left his hoverbike a few blocks away, making his way to Baku’s Den on foot. He stiffened when he caught the scent of someone coming up beside him, but relaxed when he realized he knew the Beta. It was another runner who went by Rolo. Lance and Rolo had first met when Rolo and his girlfriend Nyma took off with Lance’s hoverbike. He’d gotten it back from the Beta pair and their cyber-terrier Beezer, and they’d eventually become friends of a sort.

Rolo casually sauntered up beside the Alpha. “So, where ya headed?” he asked.

“Just drinks with a girl,” Lance answered. Meeting a contact,was the translation.

The Beta understood. “She pretty?” One of your usual contacts?

“Don’t know. Blind date a friend set up.” No, but I trust the one who set up the meeting.

“Well, good luck with that. Never can tell with some girls. Gimme a call if you need an excuse.” Watch your back. Call if you need backup.

Lance chuckled at the surface sentiment. “Sure. Thanks, man.” Will do.

“Well, I better take Beezer for a walk. Gettin’ late.” Doing a hacking run tonight, but I’ll be nearby.

“Have fun with that. Watch out for any stray cats.” Good luck. Keep an eye out for security bots.

“Eh, they’re easy to scare off.” I can get around them.

By then, they’d reached the block Baku’s Den was on. Lance nodded toward it, Rolo understanding that this was where his meeting was taking place. They parted ways, Lance headed for the bar, and Rolo disappeared around the corner. The sign hologram on the dark grey concrete building sat over the heavy steel door. The sign read Baku’s Den in a stylized typeface with a three-jawed serpent weaving through the letters. The serpent flew – swam? – through the bar’s name on a continual loop, executing a barrel roll around the name every third loop.

The interior looked very much like most other bars Lance had been to, whether meeting fixers or just relaxing. A dark concrete floor was easy to clean (and hide ingrained blood stains) after the inevitable bar fights. Dim lighting was both a blessing and a curse since it kept things more intimate, but it was also harder to spot a weapon. Booths were the same way. Made things more private, but also gave someone the chance to ambush a target. Lance’s cursory sweep was more tactical than he let show. He noted all exit points, where was best for cover, who looked the most dangerous. He also spotted his contact.

Florona sat at the edge of the booth in the back corner. She had closely cut maroon hair except for a white swath down the middle that was cut longer and swept to one side. Her gloss black cybernetic eyes had no visible sclera or iris, but he knew she was looking at him. He could see her brown leather jacket with dark red accents and skin-tight burgundy pants and heavy boots. It was also a pretty safe guess that she was armed. Just as it was a near certainty that Florona wasn’t her real name.

Lance McClain certainly wasn’t his. But when he was separated from his family at 16, he left Leandro Dávila behind. He made a new identity for himself, one that let him not stand out at all, one that let him hide. He wasn’t even sure if there was anything left of Leandro in him. Leandro had been a hopeful, optimistic child. Lance was hardened by years of fighting, jaded by harsh reality. Leandro would have been afraid of Lance. It was a smart thing to be.

Some people, like Florona, wore their cybernetics for the world to see. Implants and attachments that were blatantly obvious. Rarer were those like Lance. He’d lost his eyes after a run gone wrong. The crew he was with sold him out when they thought the other side would pay better for it. They blinded him, but even without sight, he was still able to take them out and escape. He’d called his fixer, who got him help. His cybernetics looked natural, as close to his original blue as they could get. But they were fully functional cyberware. Top of the line a few years back. Night vision, infrared, zooming, even the ability to limit the amount of light received – all linked in. By blinding him, his old crew made sure he would never be blinded again. Not too long after that, he lost his left hand. That run was successful, but Lance had gotten caught in crossfire and an unlucky shot blew out his wrist, shredding tendons and splintering bone. The new one was indistinguishable from his right, the artificial skin blending seamlessly with the organic.

Lance had no choice but to slide into the booth facing away from the door, forcing him to trust Florona with his personal safety. He nodded to her, careful not to say a word until he was seated. “Florona.” It was a statement, a greeting, a question, a confirmation.

“McClain,” she returned, “Or would you prefer Sharpshooter?”

He put on the illusion of relaxing, something he never truly did. “Lance is fine,” he said casually.

Florona’s lips twitched with an amused huff. “Alright, Lance. I’m going to order us drinks while we wait,” she said, signaling to the aqua-haired waitress.

“Waiting for what?” This wasn’t what Lance was expecting, and now he was getting nervous.

“Your partner.”

“Partner? That’s news to me. What can you tell me about them?”

The waitress came over, waiting for what she was sure would be Florona’s usual order. “Nunvil,” Florona said – no surprises there. “And bring the bottle.”

Lance whistled low. “You go hard.”

Florona raised a perfect eyebrow. “And you don’t?”

“Never said I didn’t. So, what about this partner?”

She leaned back, throwing an arm over the back of the booth. “Best fuckin’ swordsman I’ve ever seen. Stealth type. He’s got this one blade – let’s just say I never want to be on the wrong side of it.”

The waitress returned setting unopened bottle and a pair of glasses on the table. When she left, Florona made a show of breaking the seal on the bottle. She poured both glasses, and Lance idly played with the rim of his.

“What’s so special about this blade?” he asked. He was genuinely curious, but made sure she didn’t know that.

“Ultraviolet hard-light. Keeps it maglocked to a sheath on his back. Bio-activated so no one but him can use it. I got to see what happens when someone tried to take it once. Wasn’t pretty. New guy tried to hit on him. Pretty forcefully, but he didn’t know what he was in for.”

Interesting information. This mysterious partner of his was a known factor here. Lance wasn’t sure if Florona had mentioned that part to remind him that he was an outsider in Unilu or if she just considered it part of the story.

“I should tell you what to expect from him before he gets here. You're an Alpha, and he may take offense to that. He’s an Omega, and a lifetime of bad experiences makes him resent Alphas on sight.”

“That’s fair,” he said, and finally picked up his glass. He actually enjoyed the silky burn as it went down. “Anything else I should know?”

“Don’t piss him off. He’s not likely to actually kill you, but the threat will be there.”

“Anything else that’s not vague and threatening?” Lance asked, draining his glass.

“Mm, nope.” Florona refilled both their glasses, and Lance saw the tiniest movement of her looking to the bar. “Except that he’s coming over. Better get ready, he’s an experience.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part 2: Samurai

Keith stashed his heavily modified hoverbike in an alley barely a block away from Baku’s Den, activating the chameleon hologram that would keep it out of sight. He was familiar with both the Unilu neighborhood in general and Baku’s Den in particular, and knew to be cautious. It wasn’t just the relative lawlessness of the area that kept his guard up. Nowhere was truly safe for a male Omega in Altea. Not anymore, not with the disappearances that he now knew were a major Omega trafficking ring.

Knowing that the upper echelons of Altean society were buying and selling male Omegas like prized pets made his blood boil. It was assumed they were being taken as breeders, to be used to give the city’s elite heirs until their bodies gave out. But Keith had seen the kinds of things that happened to Omegas, male or female. Breeding was only part of it. He was lucky that he hadn’t been taken, but he’d freed more than a few who were in similar situations. Kidnapped or given away to Alphas, and even Betas, and abused into being the “perfect” Omega. It varied depending on the human garbage controlling the Omega. Docile, submissive servants, hypersexualized walking sex toys, psychologically broken breeding stock for their Alphas, and that was the better end. He’d seen Omegas so physically, emotionally, mentally broken that there was no saving them. Death was a welcome rest for them, but not for the abusers. He felt nothing for them as people when he put them down, only a sense of relief that they would never harm another Omega.

Keith was mainly a runner specializing in stealth and close combat. Taking out low-level Omega trafficking was what he did between runs. If working opposite Daibazaal Industries and its only subsidiary, Galra Technologies, was what amounted to Keith’s day job, his vigilante justice for trafficked and abused Omegas was his passion project. It was what made him jump at the chance to at least help bring down the biggest trafficking ring the city had ever seen. He didn’t know Florona well, but he trusted her boss Luxia, and she was the one who first had the intel for the run being offered.

The exterior of Baku’s Den was its usual façade of calm, as much as a high-class dive bar could be. Keith knew as well as anyone that a fight could break out at any time and for any reason. Just walking in made him uneasy, especially when he opened the door to a loud argument in progress between members of a runner team he’d seen there before. Almost subconsciously, his hand went toward the hard-light blade he kept sheathed on his lower back at all times. The near-fight ended with raucous laughter and a call for another round of drinks. He dropped his hand with a relieved sigh and made his way to the bar, intentionally catching Florona’s eye on the way.

“Keith! Haven’t seen you in a while,” Luxia greeted him.

“Yeah, been busy,” he answered, “Just finished another run last night. Anything I should know about this guy before I head over?”

She shrugged. “Experienced runner. Long-range firearms specialist. Got a couple cybernetics, but nothing obvious.” Luxia knew Keith’s preferred drink, and set the glass of SilveRing down in front of him, the dim lighting of the bar illuminating the juniberry-distilled, deep magenta alcohol from within and highlighting the silvery ring settled around the perimeter of the liquid surface. “Just so you know, he’s an Alpha, but I can tell he’s not just in it for the money. Don’t know what his deal is with that, but he seemed legitimately pissed at the idea of Omegas being trafficked.”

“Good to know. He’s still an Alpha.” Keith finished his drink, Luxia refilling it without a word. “Well, better head over there. Run’s more important than some Alpha.

~*~*~*~

Links to the rest of the series:

1 | 2 | 3* | 4 | 5* | 6* | 7 | 8 | 9* | 10 | 11 | 12* | 13 | 14 | 15* | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19* | 20* | 21*

[paradife-loft]

xue yang and jin guangyao genuinely like each other. (I'm curious about your thoughts here.)

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

Ahh, man, I hope I’m not going to be disappointing here then?? Idk, I don’t know that I have super complicated thoughts on this?

Just kidding, I apparently wrote a goddamn essay 🙃 Cut after the next paragraph for length.

So, first of all - yes, I do think they like each other! I would say “agree” though rather than “strongly agree” just because... I mean I don’t think that’s the whole of it? There are absolutely several notable ways they each piss each other off and can actively dislike each other on occasion, mostly centering around Jin Guangyao’s need for control and for respectability, and Xue Yang’s need to be an uncontrollable chaos agent. But, that aside!

Like, okay, I figure Xue Yang’s the easiest part to explain bc he’s never really all that discreet with his emotions, and as we see numerous times depending on the canon, he doesn’t exactly stay tied down in a place that he doesn’t actually like for long? And even though the material comforts of Jin patronage are nice, the presence or lack of such things clearly isn’t a dealbreaker; a steady supply of ~fun demonic cultivation victims to play with is likewise nice, but he can demonstrably get up to shenanigans of that sort of his own perfectly well.

So yeah, it seems quite reasonable for me to conclude that a part of why he’s willing to stay working with the Jin for a while is because he does enjoy Jin Guangyao’s company? Both of them are very clever and kind of... equally-matched, in a way that I don’t think Xue Yang is super used to encountering? Not just/necessarily in a power sense, but in, hmm... an ability to be reciprocally honest about a lot of things, and not be judged or rejected for it in the way they often are in the rest of the world? They have similar-ish worldviews, though Jin Guangyao ofc buys into some of the aspiration of goodness and respectability that Xue Yang thinks he’s ridiculous for - but then at the same time, I think whenever he does encounter that drive toward being genuinely good, he’s drawn to it despite himself? (In Jin Guangyao, it’s a totally hypocritical interest in being ~good, if you ask Xue Yang, but hey, at least that’s funny and fun to poke!)

Oh, and also - Jin Guangyao demonstrably likes to take care of people, and provide for them in a material sense, and I think even though luxury is not itself a huge draw to Xue Yang (certainly not for long), the reality of being cared for and given those sorts of tokens is absolutely something that Xue Yang enjoys and craves even if (especially at this point) I don’t think he’d admit it to himself. It’s very heady, meaning something to someone, even if it’s kind of fake because you’re their demonic cultivation and murder employee, y’know?

Anyway, on Jin Guangyao’s side - yeah, I think it’s definitely... relieving, to be able to not put on quite so much of the perfect servant/perfect gentleman/eternal conciliator face when he’s around Xue Yang? He spends so much time having to self-monitor, and be hyper-aware of everything going on around him, and like - it’s not as if he’s doing none of that with Xue Yang, because there’s a certain extent of it that’s just who he is and a layer of remove and control that he tends to keep to be the most comfortable, but. Even buying into gentry values in a way that Xue Yang of course doesn’t, it’s... something Jin Guangyao appreciates and values, I think, having someone to interact with who, again, isn’t going to flinch at the ugliness, the violence, the cynicism that he can’t display or admit to in any other sort of company.

(Which, actually - so, obviously Jin Guangyao can, in a literal sense, “admit” to lots of violence and the ugliness of politics around his father, because he’s the one he’s doing it for! But I think what’s more important than the literal fact of like, having a whole bunch of people tortured and killed, is the... place he’s coming from in doing it, and the valence it has as something he’s getting orders for, not just doing on his own for funzies. And that subordinate position in the context of the violence he does, and the ugliness of cultivator society, I think is kind of the key to why he appreciates Xue Yang in that specifically, in a way I don’t think he would feel as comfortable with during e.g. his stay with the Wen sect, for example. Even though Xue Yang is much more openly “lol violence fun”, they still both have an understanding of being ruthless and vicious from below, as a survival strategy, with the implied threat from their “betters” always hanging over them.)

But yeah, beyond that - I do think again, there’s the sense of being intellectually on a level, and Xue Yang being different from most of the people he hangs around with in a way that’s interesting/intriguing to him. Spontaneity and mayhem! Most of the time something Jin Guangyao does not enjoy at all, but hey, in small doses, directed at the right targets.....? I think he can appreciate a little shake-up of routine and expectation very occasionally, when it’s something that’s not threatening to his sense of control and therefore safety. And Xue Yang also has a sense of humor! That again, Jin Guangyao can actually just appreciate as a person without having to navigate the minefield of Everyone Else In The Room Needing To Be Managed! It’s nice.

(A last sub-point, also - I think Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao working together at the specific point in Jin Guangyao’s life when they did, is also fairly key to them developing this dynamic of actually liking each other? Like, if they met and had to be interacting at a point later in his life, when he’s established as Chief Cultivator and not having to work as a very fancy sort of servant for his father, I think the lack of those pressures would remove a pretty essential ingredient to Jin Guangyao finding Xue Yang something of a peer and a relief from the rest of his life, and Xue Yang finding him at all relatable and not just totally removed from his own experience and perspective. In that context, I think the reasons they’d have to dislike or grudgingly tolerate each other would play a stronger role in their interaction, and they wouldn’t end up any sort of friends.)

[mayakern]

hi maya! i've been following you for years and you've been a big inspiration to me! i'm moving back to my home state in 9 months and when that happens i want to be a full time artist. i've started emailing art directors and opened up commissions, but generally i can't get people to engage with my work. i'm coming to you because i've seen you try so many things throughout the years. if you have any insight, or if i need a reality check, it would be greatly appreciated! thanks for reading!

i don’t know you and i don’t know your situation so i can’t give you any specific advice, so i’ll try and just type out some general “i wanna do art online” tips:

1. make your art easy to find. whether that’s a separate art blog or a prominently displayed art tag, just make sure people can find it within 1-2 clicks!

2. keep practicing, keep doing things you enjoy, keep posting. online following is a snowball. it goes painfully slowly for ages and ages and ages. once it starts to pick up, the rate tends to increase exponentially. there’s also a lot of luck involved. it’s hard to predict what will or won’t resonate with people, so just try to make sure that you genuinely enjoy whatever you make.

3. if you approach working professionals/people you admire for help, demonstrate off the bat that you are familiar with them/their work and keep your email/message brief and be polite. well known/popular artists get a lot of cold emails/messages from all sorts of people, and most frequently from people who just see a follower count or a popular post or something and cold email them without any care or specificity to them as a creator. these sorts of emails usually get dismissed out of hand. 

if you are looking to someone for help, be sure there is something specific about them that resonates with you that’s more than just “i see you are popular or successful and i also want that.” no one really likes getting those emails/messages because it feels like they could go to anyone as long as they had a high enough follower count or worked at X company. instead, look at their work or accomplishments and go “this aspect of this person’s work speaks to me, they work this job that interests me, i want to learn, etc.”

AND AGAIN: KEEP IT BRIEF. it’s really tempting to want to perfectly explain yourself/your situation, but you are a stranger and most people working in art are pretty busy, and you are not the only person sending them this kind of inquiry.

for art director stuff specifically, i recommend reading through @dearartdirector. i’m not an art director so i can’t help with that.

4. remember that online following/popularity and success are NOT the same things. i know plenty of popular artists who struggle financially, who can’t break into the industry. i know tons of working professionals who have very small online followings. i know in this hyper connected world, it is very easy to conflate those two things. DON’T DO THAT.

5. similarly, it is very easy to compare yourself to other people and to feel inadequate because others seem to have an easier time of it. this is a horrible illogical thing your brain does to spite you, don’t listen to it. you don’t know other people or their stories. you don’t know their struggles. lots of people work very hard and experience hardships that you will never be aware of, but it will seem externally like they have an easy time of it. it’s the old duck in the pond thing -- above the water they look serene and easy, underwater their flippers are going crazy to churn water.

6. it is okay to fail. everyone fails. it is not shameful or a waste of your time. it is just part of being alive and trying to do something you love.

7. similar to 6 -- be careful with your notions of what failure even means. it’s ok to not work in art, it’s ok to work part time, it’s ok to do whatever you need to do (that doesn’t hurt others) in order to find your way to a happy and sustainable life. similarly, being able to make money off your art is not necessarily a question of skill. there are... a lot of factors. you should not tie your worth to money in general, but you especially should not tie your value to your ability to monetize your art.

8. this is going to be an unpopular one... do not let your passion or desperation control you. sometimes the healthier thing is to not pursue something you love. i had to give up comics after years of making them because even though i loved them, they were terrible for my mental and physical health. it’s ok to love something and let it go and it’s ok to let your goals change. it is not worth ruining your health just for the privilege of making things. 

there are a lot of exploitative companies that will try to leverage this to make you take work for terrible pay and no rights. those jobs are never worth it. it is almost always better to do a non-art job and pour that time and love and passion into a project you care about, rather than being someone else’s cheap labor.

9. make friends who are around your age and skill level. i know it’s tempting to want to reach out to artists you admire and try to befriend them -- but it is not comfortable on the other end. usually those artists will be significantly older than you and in a different place in their lives and from their perspective, you are a stranger who is only interested in them because they make a thing you like. it’s a very awkward situation to navigate because you are not treating that creator as an individual, but rather as the conduit for Content You Like.

it is important to find peers to learn and grow with. real, genuine friendship will do so much for you as a person and an artist.

also -- older creators who are very receptive to young, untried artists and who easily let them into their space on the pretense of friendship or mentorship... i won’t say this is always a bad thing, but it can be indicative of bad intentions. there is an inherent power imbalance in that sort of relationship and there are people who will exploit that. this is a painfully common practice

this is a sour note to end this on, but it is a very important one. recently we have seen many industry pros in comics, games, and animation get ousted for exactly that sort of behavior. it sucks that it is a thing we need to look out for -- but it is.

[lettingmydreamsspeak]

The Heart Knows Best: Part V

Summary: Things are slowly coming together in the grand plan of reconnecting Y/N and Chris. Little do they know how things are about to change in their favor.

Pairing: Chris Evans x Female Reader

Warnings: None

Word count: approx. 2600

Author’s Note: Catch up with Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV here before checking out Part V! I hope you enjoy this one. 

************************************************************************

You sat in the back of the town car as it slowly pulled up to the front door of the Park Central Hotel. After a long day of travel, you were glad to finally make it to your final destination. Upon realization of where you were staying, things slowly started kicking in that this wasn’t a dream, but this hotel was one place that you only dreamed of staying at. There were plenty of times in the past that you walked past this place, hoping to see someone famous walk out of the rotating doors, looking glamorous. You didn’t know that this would be your home for the next week, but you certainly weren’t going to complain. As you admired the hotel from the car window, the door quickly opened and a hand outstretched to help you exit the vehicle.

“We are here, Miss Y/L/N.”

“Thank you Charles.” 

As you took his hand for assistance, you couldn’t help but wonder if this is what it what it always felt like for those who had personal drivers. You stood on the side walk, looking to your right. There was a clear view of Central Park. You were instantly taken back to the moment you met Chris. It seemed like months had passed since it happened, but really it was just a little over a week since that fateful morning. You were in enough of a daze that you didn’t even realize you stood in the middle of the busy sidewalk, filled with people who were rushing off to work.

“Miss Y/L/N, is everything okay?”

Thankfully Charles brought you back to reality, before some angry passerby would throw garbage at you, because you slowed down their perfectly timed out walking pace to get into the office at the exact moment the needed to be there.

“Oh, yes Charles. Everything is fine. I am just happy to be back. Thank you for your services this morning.”

“You’re welcome Miss. Now, should we go inside before you get run over?”

You smiled as he directed you towards the revolving door where you are greeted by a friendly smile.

“Welcome to the Park Central Hotel. You must be Miss Y/L/N. We have been awaiting your arrival. We hope you enjoy your stay with us.”

************************************************************************

The drive into the city went quick for Chris and Scott. It gave them time to bounce some story ideas off of each other. It also gave them a chance to relive moments from their childhood, by blasting songs on the radio and singing along. They even had a good laugh when they realized they were singing some of the lyrics wrong. They loved being able to spend time like this with each other. In their adult life, they were always going in opposite directions, so when they had the chance to get out on the open road and make more memories together, they embraced it.

Chris navigated his way through Manhattan, as they encountered the end of the day rush hour. They found themselves at a standstill on West 59th Street. This street bordered the south end of Central Park, near the very spot along the pathway that Chris met Y/n on. It was the first time on the entire drive, that Chris had gone silent. He was reliving that morning again in his mind. Oddly enough, he even looked for Y/n, as if she was actually going to be there.

“Earth to Chris…the car in front of you is moving. Are you going to go?”

Vehicles behind him started honking their horns, encouraging him in a not so polite way to get going. He shook his head as he lightly pressed on the gas.

“Is everything okay? It’s like you spaced out for a moment”

“It’s because I did. All the memories of meeting Y/n started flooding back. I caught a glimpse of the spot where we met. A part of me wished that by chance when I looked over to the spot that she would be standing there, waiting for me.”

Scott patted him on the shoulder, consoling him for the wish that was unfulfilled in the moment. He felt bad for his brother, but he was really good at containing his excitement for what he knew was going to happen the next morning.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to have that kind of wish cross your mind. She must have been something special if you are still feeling this way about her Chris. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“You’re right. Now let’s focus on this meeting tomorrow, and maybe we can have a little fun when we are here. I don’t need to be back in Boston for a couple of days.”

“I like you’re thinking. I see that we are just about to arrive at the hotel. How about we drop our things off, freshen up, and go out for beer and food?”

“I can get behind that idea.”

As they pulled up to the front door of the hotel, Chris felt a sense of calm as he stepped out of the vehicle, putting his sunglasses on and turning his cap on the right way. He looked at the hotel and then looked to the right, where he could see Central Park. He smiled. In this moment he caused a bit of commotion with the passersby. Cellphone cameras snapped photos of him smiling. With not much in hand except a duffel bag, he quickly made his way to the entrance to pass off his keys to the valet and give a final wave to the few people who stood there in shock that they just saw him.

“Welcome to the Park Central Hotel, Mr. Evans. We have been awaiting your arrival. We hope you enjoy your stay with us”

************************************************************************

You despised the early hours you kept seeing on the bedside table clock. It started at 5am, an hour that you really weren’t too familiar with. You hadn’t slept much the entire night. Luckily you had a couple more hours to try and catch up on the sleep time you missed. It wasn’t happening though. It seemed as if you saw every ten minutes pass by. You blamed it on a good blend of nervous energy and excitement. Leading up to your actual alarm going off, you made notes and questions on the hotel stationary to often goes unused. There were plenty of questions you figured you wanted to ask, even though you were going into this meeting without any prior knowledge of what the project entailed.

As 7 am finally arrived, you looked at your phone. Apparently you were not the only one that was up early. Evelyn had texted you at 5:30am to apologize that she couldn’t have breakfast with you as she promised, but would meet you at the front door of headquarters at 8:30am to give you a tour and show you your office for the week. Her cancellation of breakfast was welcomed news as you just wanted to take your time getting ready. Before starting your morning routine, a quick call to room service for the delivery of a hearty breakfast and a giant  cup of coffee was just what you needed to feel like a human again. As you hung up the phone from placing the order, you stood in front of an illuminated mirror. You examined every line and spot on your face. You couldn’t help but smile.

“Alright, Y/n. Today is the day that you have dreamed about. You don’t have to underestimate your abilities anymore. Enjoy the moment and don’t forget to wow them.”

************************************************************************

“I hope you don’t need much time to get ready?”

Scott was already dressed and ready to go as Chris just turned over for the first time, smelling the coffee that his brother placed on the bedside table.

“When do we need to leave?”

“Well, we should be somewhat early…so how about you just get up and get ready. I got breakfast and coffee for you. Other than that, it’s all up to you and us arriving to the meeting on time.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll get up! Next time, maybe we shouldn’t stay out late the night before an important meeting.”

“May I remind you, it’s because you are getting old.”

Hiding his head underneath the pillow, Chris was awake enough to give his brother the finger.

*********************************************************************

“Welcome Y/n!!!”

Evelyn greeted you at the door, just like she said she would. You arrived not one minute early or late. You wanted to demonstrate your punctuality, without being too eager on your first day at headquarters. Evelyn was genuinely excited to see you this morning, as she gave you a hug instead of shaking your hand. It felt a little odd to see her in person, as you were used to meeting with her over video conferencing.

“It is so great to be here Evelyn”

“I apologize again for missing breakfast with you this morning, but I had an urgent meeting come up with our office in London. Are you ready to see what it is like here at headquarters?”

You already knew that you would like this place a whole lot more than your office back in Vancouver. There was something about the overall atmosphere at headquarters. Even though you had only walk through the lobby of the building so far, creativity filled the space. As planned, Evelyn took you on a tour, introducing you to all the people you really needed to know while you were there. She even introduced you to some of the illustrators you admired for years. They welcomed you with words of admiration for your work. What a surreal moment. The two of you then reached your final stop before the meeting; your office.

“Now, if we need you here in Manhattan more often, I promise that your office will be a lot more nice than this.” 

Evelyn said this as she slowly opened the door into the space. Your jaw dropped. What was Evelyn talking about? The first thing that caught your eye was the floor to ceiling windows that lined one side of your office. The view was out towards Midtown Manhattan. You hadn’t really realized how far up in floors you went in the elevator, as you were caught up in conversation with Evelyn and her associates. You must have been on at least the 20th floor, maybe even more. You slowly walked into the office, letting you fingers trace the edge of the glass top desk and the all the supplies you needed to work on preliminary drawings, before transferring them to digital formatting.

“Evelyn, this is unbelievable. This is more than I would have ever imagined my office to be. Thank you.”

“I really hope it will suffice. If there is anything that you are missing, let Amy your office assistant know. She will be able to help you out. We have about 10 minutes before our meeting in the conference room at the end of the hall. I will leave you to it for a bit. I’m going to go and see if our clients are here yet, to escort them to the conference room.”

“Thank you again Evelyn. I will see you shortly.”

Evelyn exited the room and closed the door behind her. You stood there in shock. This was your life now. Well, it was for the week at least. You quickly grabbed your phone to take pictures to send to your family and Haley. Not even a minute later, Haley video called you.

“Hi Hales! I hope you don’t mind, but I can’t talk long.”

“It’s okay, I have to get ready for work anyway. I just wanted to say hi and that I love your new office. Does it seem a little surreal?”

“It sure does. I think I am in shock right now.”

“Are you about to head into your big meeting?”

“I am. Good news though, I am not nervous!”

“Oh good. So I’m thinking you don’t know who you are meeting with yet?”

“Sure don’t. Evelyn didn’t even talk about the meeting this morning. She must be feeling pretty confident about it and my ability to just go with the flow.”

“Well, I’m sure you will have a great meeting. Make sure you call or text me after it, okay?”

“I will! Love ya Hales!”

It was finally time to make your way to the boardroom. You placed your personal things away in the closet and grabbed a pen, paper, and sketchbook off your new desk and reached for the door handle. Before opening the door, you took a deep breath.

“You got this Y/n. You. Got. This.”

************************************************************************

You sat beside Evelyn’s associates who were having their own conversation about other projects. You sat there trying to contain the nervous twitch you had in one leg, as you doodled on the sketchpad. You couldn’t sit still. Nerves finally kicked in, as you could hear Evelyn in the hallway chatting. There was laughter coming from their conversation. The laughter was calming, ultimately giving you the vibe that this client was going to be fun to work with. Staring out the window as your back was to the hallway door, you kept analyzing the voices and the banter they were having. You couldn’t make out what they were talking about, but they sure were taking their time to get to the boardroom. It’s as if they needed to stop every few steps. Was there something out there that you missed seeing because you were so focused on getting to the meeting and not being late?

Just then the door slowly opened. Not sure what to do, you quickly stood up like the associates did, with you head hanging down, hoping you could hide your nerves. How were you to greet this client? Was Evelyn going to introduce you, or was that up to you to be confident? You reminded yourself to do the most important thing you have learned through life, and that was to smile. Maybe following the lead of the associates was also a good idea, as they were used to this interaction. It sure seemed strange at how they clamored together though. You could see the top of someone’s head, peak into the board room.

“Sorry for the delay, everyone. He always wants to make sure that no one feels left out.”

Sure enough the associates laughed, and some giggled like little kids, after this comment was made. You recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it. The associates remained standing somewhat in a little cluster as the familiar voice returned to the hallway. Evelyn quickly came around to the head of the table. She motioned for you to both sit down. You kept an eye on Evelyn, just in case she had more direction for you. She smiled at you as a boisterous voice entered the room.

“Good morning everyone!”

Your heart stopped. You knew that voice. You slowly turned your chair so you could try and get a glimpse of who you thought it was. He made his way down the table, greeting each associate that stood there. You looked down at your feet as your heart started to race a little more, feeling like you could get ill. You then see his feet stop in front of you. You slowly stood up, without making eye contact just yet. You extend your hand and slowly raised your head. Evelyn spoke up.

“And this is your amazing illustrator…”

“Y/n…..” Chris stood there in shock as he held your hand. You were ready to faint as your whole entire body didn’t know how to react in the moment. You didn’t want him to let go, as you feared you would fall over. Was this real? Was he real? Scott proceeded to take a seat across the table from you, with the biggest smile on his face as he grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the two of you seeing each other for the first time. 

Sure enough, the picture was sent to Haley with the caption... 

Operation Reconnection: Success!

...To be continued in Part VI

[thecleverdame]

The Oath - 14

Parings: Dark!Alpha!Sam x Omega!Reader

Story Master List

Summary: After an unsuccessful escape attempt, the reader finds herself taken as a spoil of war. She ends up in the bed of a ruthless Alpha, the son of John Winchester, leader of the kingdom of Gilead. She struggles to conceal her true identity and navigate a society where being an Omega means nothing more than serving at the pleasure of powerful men.

Warnings: non-con, sexual assault, rape, attempted suicide, sexual slavery, branding, torture, ownership, voyeurism, anal play, smut, violence, and murder.

Sam is dark in this story. If any of the warnings are triggers for you, I would suggest skipping this one. Please read and heed all the warnings.

Beta: ilikaicalie

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-

The looming threat of John Winchester grows ever closer. 

For a few days, you have Greta as a company. She’s constantly angry, hovering somewhere on the verge of defeat but she talks to you like you're a person. It’s mostly just her exposition on how much she hates Dean and what she’ll do to him one day when she takes her revenge, but you don’t mind listening. She makes you feel alive and like you’re not in this alone. 

And then one day she’s gone. Dean leaves early one morning taking her with him and you’re again commended to the solitary life of waiting for a stoic Sam who makes ill-suited company. 

-

“Let me see.” Sam sits shirtless on the edge of the bed. He’s covered in a thin layer of dirt and bruises over this chest and arms. He’s been spending long days with the troops. The hoots and hollers can be heard all across the camp. Men fighting each other for sport, and Sam is no exception. He loves a good brawl more than any of them and he often comes bearing the marks of another man’s knife or fist. 

Tonight he waits patiently as you pull up your nightgown and rollover. 

Since the branding, your spirit has taken a blow. Most days you do nothing more than lie in bed. At first, it was to alleviate the pain, but now it’s to alleviate the stark surroundings of your reality. His fingers trail over the mark on your backside, but he says nothing. With a tap at your hip, you roll over and let him inspect the brand on your inner thigh. He unwraps the bandage while you stare at the ceiling. 

“What do you think of it?” he asks with interest. As if you should admire his handiwork. 

“I haven’t looked,” you admit.

“Haven’t looked?” he balks. “It’s been nearly two weeks.” 

“I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.” 

“Then look now, while I’m here.” When you close your eyes he sighs, wrapping a large, wide hand around your knee and squeezing. “Look at it.” 

Pushing down the dread you prop yourself up, taking a breath before looking down. The flesh is pink, raised and newly healed. It’s a thin outline of the letters S and W with the small recreation of his family’s crest below. 

“Why?” you whisper, staring at the wound. “Why did you do this to me?”

Sam’s confused, a genuine perplexity settles over his face. 

“Because you’re mine.” 

You laugh out of exasperation. This is what life has come to. He marked you because you’re his. It’s so simple. He thinks you should already understand. 

“And to keep you safe,” he continues. “There are countless men, Alphas, that will never see an Omega in the flesh. I don’t want anyone thinking they can just take you. My mark would make any man think twice.”

“Oh,” you counter, anger bubbling up faster than you can suppress it. “That’s why it’s between my legs? So if another man tries to force himself on me he’ll see it?”

“Yes.” He ignores your frustrations and gets up. “You don’t understand it, but you will. That mark is a gift. If you were taken, any man who found you would know who to return you to.”

“You think someone is going to take me?”

“We’re at war. There are no absolutes. Circumstances change in the blink of an eye. Anything can happen.” The muscles of his back flex, growing bruises bleeding into yellowing healed spots from the week before. 

There’s no point in entertaining this conversation. In his mind you should be grateful he’s taken such care to leave you with this declaration of ownership. Luckily, you’ve become a master of redirecting the moment. 

Clearing your throat, you sit up and adjust your skirt. 

“Would you like me to wash you?” you ask, nodding toward the tub from your afternoon bath. “It’s probably still warm. I’ll put some water on the fire to warm it up.”

You’ve discovered over the last month that he responds favorably when you present your plans instead of ask. So you set water to warm. Sam strips down and sinks into the bath without a word. Once the pot is steaming you carefully carry it over to him and pour it near his feet then sit at the side of the tub, taking a cloth and washing his back. 

There’s a deep scar along the right side of his spine. You’ve spent hours looking at it while he’s sleeping and always wondered how it got there. 

“How did you get this?” you ask, a finger trailing over the flesh. 

“My father tried to kill me. Well, actually, he wanted Dean to do it. But of course Dean would never go through with it, so John tried himself.”

“Why would he want to kill you?”

“Because he thought I was something evil. No longer a man.” Sam shrugs. “He’s not wrong.”

“He had to have cut you deep, this scar is massive.”

“It should have killed me outright. But I’m not sure I can die again. I recovered quickly. And my father learned his place in the order of things.”

As the water turns brown, his skin comes clean. The awful scents of other men’s sweat and blood wash away, leaving nothing but Sam. A strong scent that gives a preview of what’s to come. 

“Your rut is coming?” you ask for confirmation. 

“Yes.” He closes his eyes as you rub a cloth across his back, watching the water rolling across taught muscle. “Does that worry you?”

“A bit. I’ve just heard…”

“What have you heard?”

“Sometimes Alphas can’t control themselves. Especially older...I mean...unmated ones.”

He chuckles, breaking into a smile and turns to look at you. 

“Are you calling me old?”

“No, I, no…”

“It’s alright little bird. I am older than most to be unmated. That’s a fair statement. But you don’t need to be worried. I control myself better than most men. You might even enjoy it.”

Two Days Later

His rut overtakes you both. For Sam it’s an animalistic need to have you. And for you it’s desire beyond reason. His scent curls inside you, vibrating, coming alive until you think you might burst if you can’t have him inside you. 

-

You wake up out of a dead sleep, body so stiff you can hardly move. Sam is beside you, tossing and turning in his sleep, his face creased in distress. 

You imagine you seem just as desperate in a heat. Lust and pain and desire all coming together in an animal need for each other. You could fight this feeling; resist giving in to what you want and he needs, but there’s no point. Physical pleasure has become the last ray of hope and you might as well hang on to it for as long as you can. 

“Sam,” you murmur, getting to your knees and lifting a leg over his waist. His naked cock is thick and tall, hot skin thumping against your stomach as you straddle him. 

His eyes are still closed, body radiating the heat of his rut like a fever that’s about to break. His head presses back into the pillow when you wrap a hand around his shaft, stroking down and then up under the head of his cock. Precum drips from the head, and you wipe it away with your thumb. 

In one motion, you lift up and sink back down with him inside you. That familiar stretch sending pings of pleasure out in all directions. 

His eyes pop open, meeting yours in a surprised look before dropping down to where your bodies are joined together. Both hands curl over your hips, fingers sinking into flesh as he rolls you quickly onto your back, sinking balls deep back into your cunt with one powerful thrust. 

The connection you felt to him before is nothing compared to the growing desperation you feel for each other in this moment. There’s an energy building in your chest, pressure swelling as he moves faster, his hips slapping against your thighs. 

Your clit is throbbing, just a feather’s touch away from sending you over the edge.

Sam squeezes his eyes shut in concentration as sweat drips from the end of his nose, landing on your stomach. 

“Please,” you find yourself begging without even trying to speak. 

His eyes open again, looking down at you. With one hand he pushes soaked hair away from his forehead. The room feels as if it’s spinning, the moment careening out of control. 

“I’m going to claim you,” he explains, his eyes just as hungry as every other part of his body. 

“I want it,” you nod vigorously. With one hand you reach up, sliding a hand around the back of his neck and pulling him down for a messy kiss. His tongue glides over yours, tasting, searching, before pulling back. “Please.”

The rest is a blur. His knot thickens, and just as you cum his teeth sink into your neck. His bite is deep but the pain is tempered by the pleasure of your climax. You shake around him, wrapping your arms over his back and holding him as close as you can. 

His dead drops into the crook of your neck, hips still moving until he’s got nothing left to give. There’s hot breath at your pulse point while he licks at the wound. His tongue seals the open flesh, sucking and teasing until he’s as boneless as you and collapses on the bed at your side. 

-

Sam stares at the ceiling of the tent, one hand behind his head and the other wrapped around you where you’re curled into his side. 

He shouldn’t have done it. 

Alphas in Gilead don’t claim Omega’s outside of marriage. You’re meant to be a part of the ceremony, a wedding where he’ll be wed to a Beta of high social standing. Only then would he have the blessing of his father to claim you. 

What the hell happened to his self-control? One moment it was fucking the next minute you were...everything. The whole world narrowed down to the woman in his bed, asking to be his. 

He has to own it, he has no choice. If anyone senses even a hint of trepidation, they’ll take you from him. It’s what should happen, what the law demands. The offending Alpha is beheaded and the Omega paired off with some Alpha who’ll get what he can before she begins to fade. Without her mate, the Omega dies a slow death that sometimes takes years but always kills in the end. 

It’s not that he doesn’t want you. He does. Sam has zero interest in an uptight Beta, but he also knows he should have waited. He’s just created a whole host of complications and his father will be all too happy to find a reason to reprimand him. 

-

You stir at his side, waking up slowly as your eyes flutter open. You’re not truly awake as your mouth curls into a sleepy smile, eyes closing again as you nuzzle closer until your face is pressed into the side of his neck. 

That’s when he feels it, a pang in his stomach that’s there for a second and then gone. He shifts, pulling your body into his, skin on skin while you purr like a happy cat at his side. This isn’t a bad feeling. He doesn’t mind you being bonded to him in such a permanent way and if it keeps you more content, then it’s worth it. But it certainly does impose a whole set of complications he wasn’t anticipating. 

-

“Did you kill her?” Dean inspects your lifeless form, nodding from the bloody sheets, to his brother. 

“No.” Sam looks at you as well, gaze lingering longer than it should. “I claimed her.”

Dean’s eyes go wide, but he doesn’t say anything. He stews in silence for some time. 

“Are you trying to create a situation? You know how dad is going to-”

“I know.” Sam raises a hand. 

“At first I thought she was good for you. You were less agitated, not so much of a temper, but she’s proving to be a problem.”

“She’s my problem then,” Sam snaps back.

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

25. Not Fine, But Better

Previous

Word Count: 6239

Simon went to his father’s to recover. He was on an official break from school (hopefully, no longer than a year), and because of the nature of his injuries, was forced to move back home temporarily. His former employer was reluctant about giving him another position, though they worked out a few things for him to be involved in a freelance capacity, that way they were hiring him for certain projects, but not keeping him on their regular payroll. He planned to enroll in some online studies in the fall, and in the meantime, focused mainly on his ongoing project - the virtual reality social media.

A few things happened. Aside from regular visits to the doctor, because he was doing too much and reopened stitches, or for the extensive treatment that some of his more severe wounds were going to take, not to mention the healing of his spleen, which he was supposed to be taking extra care not to upset, but he was just so restless in bed and so anxious at the house, he kept getting up. The first night, he was content to lay down, primarily due to physical pain and exhaustion. 

The trauma doctor had suggested not getting on a plane, which meant that Mr. Laurent would have to stay at Simon’s and take care of him… which meant to Simon that his father would be in his personal space, contaminating it and his thoughts of it AND, he would know where he lived. He absolutely rejected that notion and said that he would hire someone for in-home health… Then he thought about the upcoming legal fees of his fights, potential jail time, even, the way that he abandoned his job, and he decided that maybe he would just go back to the Bay with his dad, against the doctor’s suggestion, because that seemed to be the least agonizing solution for him.

Of course, he re-injured himself, and spent all day in an ER, to receive word that his treatment would take longer and was ordered to bed rest for the spleen healing. He laid down in his old bed, as uncomfortable as it was and fell to sleep almost immediately. Outside of the hospital, where the medication and immediate professional help were, his nightmares became blatantly strong. He kept dreaming of laying in a pool of his own blood, on the cold ground, looking at a manhole, ready to die… and then the Void came out of it, about to swallow him whole and everything went black. He jumped up and immediately held himself. Maybe he needed to be strapped to the bed, as to not hurt more. He took a deep breath and reached for the cane that he would need to walk for a bit… and there was a white cat, resting on his old desk.

“Samantha?” He looked around the room, wondering if this was another dream, about his teenage years or something. But, he came closer and touched the cat and she pleasantly allowed it. It abandoned the cane to pick up the animal and nuzzled her. “Is it really you or did that jackass go find another white cat?” He snuggled her and limped out of the room to go get some water. He froze whenever he got into the kitchen and both of his parents were sitting at the little table. 

“Simon!” His mother said. She looked… different than he remembered. She looked younger, somehow, but extremely tired. She came over and tried to take Samantha from him, “Sorry. She must’ve snuck…” He jerked away and almost lost his footing. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Your dad said that you were here, so I stopped by and brought Samantha.”

He glared at her, “You’ve had Samantha this entire time?”

She chuckled and shrugged, “She’s MY cat, Simon. Whenever I was a little better, I stopped by and picked her up one day.”

“And you didn’t think to let me know? Leave a note? Nothing?? I thought she was dead!”

“You seem to be more upset about losing a cat than you’ve ever been about losing one of your family members,” she said. There she was. He knew that tone. He knew those eyes. She hadn’t changed. She was just better at seeming normal. 

“Don’t,” his father warned her.

Simon kept Samantha in his clutches as he went to pour himself some water. “When are you leaving?” 

The woman sat back down and looked at Mr. Laurent. “Your father thinks that you need us here. That us not being there for you is how you got to be this way.”

“What way is that, Faith?” he asked.

“Don’t,” his father warned the woman whose anger appeared to be rising, again.

“A little shit,” she hissed, despite the warning.

“Goddammit, Faith!” his father said. Simon snickered, wickedly. “Can’t you see that he’s just a hurt kid, acting out?” Now, Simon frowned. 

He wanted to storm over and punch his father in the face. He’d done so before, whenever he was a teenager and his father was drunk and complaining about his stupid memorial or whatever. But, Simon was in too much pain to even walk straight, much less, fight. He started angry crying and muttered, “Fuck both of you,” before taking Samantha back into his room, shutting the door (which hurt his side to do) and climbing back into bed with her nestled against himself. “I can’t believe that bitch took you away from me.” 

His mother was gone back to her mom’s by the time he got up again. He panicked whenever Samantha wasn’t there and rushed out of his room, clutching himself and neglecting the cane again to question his father about her whereabouts. Then, he heard her meow, excitedly, like she had something to tell him. Many things to tell him! He collected her and brought her back to his room. He kept her in there with him, scared that if she went outside, his mother might steal her again, even though his father assured him that it wouldn’t happen. “I won’t let her,” he had said. When the hell had he ever stopped her from doing anything?

He called “Dick for Brains” and asked if it was possible for him to use video conferencing to schedule an appointment. Dr. Richard was more than willing to accommodate this and seemed genuinely pleased that Simon had decided to try to resume therapy. 

However, in their first session back, Simon babbled on about this idea that he had for work. Of course, the therapist was going to let him speak about what he wanted to. It was a huge thing for Simon to even seek out help without being forced, and he was uncharacteristically excited about something. “A VR that serves as experimental experience based therapy. The premise is that you would be able to take these pick your adventure journeys, but each of the decisions would have either rewards or consequences and every choice that you make would take you down certain paths, giving you certain training to deal with your problems and conditioning your decision making, even one day could grant you diagnosis based upon your choices and solutions to said diagnosis…”

“So… you want to replace actual therapy with a virtual reality video game?”

“NO! You do the therapy to help you get better at the game. It’s like… it goes with it… unless you’re not so bad off that you NEED therapy, and then it’s just a tool in character education…”

“Okay. That sounds interesting. How is that coming along for you?”

“Ugh. It’s shit. You know… I don’t have the best gauge for reasonable decisions. So, I’m trying to program a lot of things, but I’m depending on various algorithms, and the things that I need to be more specific about, well - I’ve been reading a lot of psychology stuff to sort of help me out. Also, Grace had SO MANY resources available in her featured links on her website…” Simon’s eyes glossed over whenever he started talking about Grace.

“How is your relationship with Grace, Simon?”

He gave a sad smile and shrugged his shoulders, “I don’t have a relationship with Grace. She gave me another chance at life and I told everyone about all the messed up stuff I did to her. We haven’t spoken or seen each other in the weeks that I’ve been out of the hospital.”

“I read about that. It was really big of both of you to make the decisions that you made…”

“This isn’t about Grace,” Simon said. He began typing on one of his other laptops. “I’m not going to do that this time, Dr. Richard. I’m trying to think about treatment, but in a way that appeals to people more like me. I’m not one to sit in a room and talk about my feelings. You know how much I hate that. I AM one to sit in MY room, for hours, playing the same computer video game for weeks. As a kid, I used to create these figures. I have a ton of them at home. More recently, I’ve done robots…” Simon sounded all over the place, but Dr. Richard didn’t interrupt him. “In most games, there is a specific goal, and people tend to think… This isn’t anything that I’m used to, but the principle is fine. I want people to be able to feel like they are walking into their own worlds, and that their adventures are things that they can navigate to practice existing in the world. To get things out of their system that they should never do here, or to give them options that their minds might not automatically compose! You’re a therapist… do you think this sounds stupid or crazy or… just impossible?”

“It sounds like you’re enjoying your work and exploring more empathetic aspects of your talents. This project could be extremely good for you.”

“Okay, yeah, sure. But… do you think it would work? Do you think it would help somebody?”

“Are you making this to help other people or to get better at helping yourself?”

“DO YOU THINK IT WOULD DO EITHER?”

“There’s not enough information for me to know if it will help other people, but I think it’s already helping you and that’s the most important thing that you need to focus on. Getting better, yourself.” That was all that Simon needed to become completely obsessed with his project.

So, what happened was that he began to work on it a lot and neglect certain things he needed to do during his recovery. His father had to remind him and sometimes try to physically force him to let him check his healing, cleaning wounds, and getting ready to go have bloodwork done, etc. He was extremely irritable whenever Mr. Laurent would interrupt his work. Whenever it was more pressing medical concerns, Simon got a call from Grace.

“Hey,” she’d say casually. He’d smile immediately when he heard her voice, then frown, because he knew it meant that his dad had bothered her.

“Grace… I don’t know WHAT he’s said this time, but you need to stop doing this. How does he manage to even get to call you anyway?”

“Hazel gave him her phone number for emergencies. That is now the backup phone. Had to get her another. She’s too damn friendly, but I’ll never discourage her. She’s gotta be herself, you know. Listen. So… I’m told that you need to have an angiography. I looked it up and sounds like you gotta do this thing, and yet… Your dad can’t get you to stop playing video games?”

“No! That’s not what’s happening at all! I’m working and he just barges in! Doesn’t even knock. He’s obnoxious.”

“Orrr… you’re tired of being on somebody else’s timetable, and that’s understandable, but whenever I was in the institution, I was constantly on a formatted schedule that I had no control over. It was one of the downsides of getting myself in there. One of your downsides of starting fights that get you stabbed is doing whatever you’ve gotta do when you’ve gotta do it to get better. I’m gonna be pissed if your dad calls Hazel again because you’re acting like a child.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you. Have a good day.”

That was the last time he was cantankerous with his dad about appointments. He just had to suck it up and go when it was time. He had to listen, because he knew Mr. Laurent wouldn’t hesitate to bother Grace, as unfair as that was. Simon was furious that his dad did this. He called it harassment. Mr. Laurent didn’t seem to mind, even when Simon yelled aggressively about how Grace was always the person picking up his pieces when they were kids and he’s coming to a better understanding of how unfair that was to both of them, plus he has Samantha back and he is guilty about imposing on Grace. He sent her a message asking her to promise not to come running again for his father calling but agrees for her sake that if a real emergency comes up that she’s welcome to check in on him. She never replied, so he didn’t know if it was sent and he didn’t want to keep bothering her in her inbox. So, the months passed and he did what his father needed him to do to get better. Whenever he was able, he travelled back home, taking Samantha with him.

He was working full time and enrolled back in school part time, at a less prestigious college, but one that was comfortable for him, at this point. He still got up to MIT to see Professor Hughes and talk engineering with her. She was impressed by how well he seemed to be doing, but she would never tell him that. And he never missed an appointment with his therapist, or his physician. For the most part, he recovered. There was a little lasting damage that he would have to deal with, such as multiple surgeries to correct various problems connected to disrupting the body’s normal with multiple stab wounds, but it was manageable and he was… feeling okay. Whenever he wasn’t, he had better ways of coping than before, most of the time. Every now and then, he’d definitely lose it and break things and rage… but… it wasn’t as frequent as it used to be, so he at least felt good about that much.

Plus, he got to see Grace be SO happy with Hazel online and he wasn’t blocked from everything, so anytime anyone tried to give her trouble about him, he was able to step in and take whatever blows that they tried to throw her way. That was another thing… He had been diligently sticking to the truth about her, no matter what people asked or how guilty, ashamed, weak, cowardly, or whatever else these things made him feel. He went onto shows and conducted interviews and made videos to counter any negative feedback that Grace had ever done anything wrong. “Besides being a neglected kid with some issues related to that, Grace was a really good friend and I was a bad friend to her. Turned out my neglect issues were much deeper and I made her suffer for that, but she shouldn’t have to anymore.” 

.

Grace woke up with the sun most mornings. After she and Hazel returned to New York, it occurred to her that they had barely started living there before their little adventure in Mass. SO, they immediately made certain to try to start setting their routines and building their home style. Hazel’s room was the fanciest room she had ever had, excluding the chambers at the Monroe Estate. Grace let her have her own TV in her room, with a system that she had access to most of the apps, several games, and her favorite movies and shows. There was a housewarming plant that Grace’s friend had bought for Hazel whenever she moved in (and had to come over to look after whenever they were out), and that was in Hazel’s room, right by the window, for its sunshine. 

Hazel had gotten to the point where she was no longer sure if she wanted to hold on to having a leaf in her hair, so Grace bought her some cute hair accessories that looked like leaves - hair clips, headbands and stuff… and if Hazel ever wanted to stop, she had options, to sort of keep with her tradition that was sort of a large part of the identity she had carved out for herself. Now, though, she had a changing identity. 

She was Grace’s daughter and she didn’t know if keeping a leaf meant that she was holding on to a parent or parents that abandoned her when she had one who had fought to call her her own right in front of her. The last thing she wanted to do was possibly hurt Grace’s feelings, and she knew that Grace probably wouldn’t tell her if she did. She would just smile and make her feel good and meditate later or something. Hazel kept the hair leaf, for now. 

The room had bookshelves with Hazel’s favorite books, toys, and keepsakes, her jewelry rack and a very large quartz crystal sphere that Grace bought her “for good energy” whenever she was at her last home. It sat on a little sphere holder and Hazel generally set her singing Tuba right near it, whenever she wasn’t carrying it with her or sleeping with it. There was a framed photo of the Monroe trio - her, Grace and GlamMother, on her wall, as well as a mirror with her name on a plaque against its expensive wood. All of the furniture was well made and personalized in some way. 

For instance, her dresser had a cartoon stylized version of her smiling face on the sides and her name in lights across the top of the vanity. The colors of the room were hazel, ivory and green, and her headboard had a turtle magnificently carved into it. Grace got her the same type of products that she purchased herself. She still used the same natural beauty brands that she swore by as an influencer (and recently was reconnected with many of them) including a rebirth campaign for her own line of products. It really was like rebirth, but this time, she was living on her own conditions. She also was building for her daughter, as well, but in a different way than what her mother did. She would always ask Hazel her opinion of things, what she wanted to do, if she liked or approved of certain things that she wanted to do for her. The emblem on Grace’s products would be from a drawing that Hazel did of Grace as a tree, sitting in a lotus position, her hair as the leaves and Hazel falling from the tree into her outstretched arms. It was a pretty good drawing for a 10 year old, and Grace wanted it to stay just as it was for their emblem. 

Grace made meal prep for if Hazel had turtle days. Half the time, Grace wound up throwing the greens into a smoothie, because Hazel was fine for the most part. But, she would keep up this practice of being prepared for a long time. 

She generally saw Hazel off to school herself, instead of putting her into a car with a driver or getting her to learn public transportation like she often saw kids doing while she was out and about in the city for her first few years. She wanted Hazel to be as protected and seen as she could without being that over sheltering type of mom that she sometimes felt like she was probably being. But, Hazel liked the attention. It was nice to have somebody always having her back and ensuring her safety. It was nice always having someone waiting for you when you step out into the world, to guide you back home. 

They’d had most of the summer to settle in and the new school year was Hazel’s favorite EVER. She was finally going to be somewhere that she was getting herself to believe wouldn’t be temporary… she might actually make friends! She met a couple of people that were really cool the first week - Lucy and Lindsay. They knew each other from before, but Lindsay had recognized her from the internet and invited her to sit with them at lunch. Lucy wasn’t allowed to get onto the internet, but Hazel noticed that she had a Tuba watch and they admitted that they both still watched/loved The Mighty Tuba and Her Musical Friends. Lindsay made fun of both of them, but it was in that way where Hazel could tell that she still liked them and was gonna be their friend. Hazel LOVED it and asked if she could invite them over soon for a tea party.

Of course she could. Grace rarely told Hazel no. If it was doable, safe, and harmed nobody, she didn’t see any reason to refuse her things that she was interested in. Plus, Mrs. Monroe had bought a very expensive tea party set for the girl that Grace had to get assembled on the balcony, because she had no idea where to put it in her place… which meant that the balcony basically belonged to Hazel’s tea set. Getting that woman to understand that her space in New York is nothing like the space that they had in California was almost impossible. Her mother couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just seek out a bigger place. Like… just because I have my own money, I have to like… spend it like that?

But, Hazel began having her tea parties the second week of school. Mrs. Monroe wanted them to come to visit the weekend of the 23rd of August. “Mom. We’ve only been gone a couple of months. I told you that Hazel and I aren’t going to be coming back and forth like this.”

“I’m thinking if you catch a flight in the evening on Wednesday, Hazel won’t have to miss school that day. But, you definitely need to be here by Thursday evening’s dinner.” 

“Ugh. Mom.”

“Grace, this is important.”

She sighed. “Fine. But you aren’t seeing us again before Christmas break. Hazel has limited days off and I have things planned for my 23rd.”

“Yes, well… Julia or Gabriel, or whatever the hell this assistant’s name is will send you the list of things you need to pack.”

“Why would I need to pack things?”

“We’re going to take you to Belize, since you won’t be here for your birthday.”

“Ugh… I wish I could argue with a free trip to Belize… okay, fine. Tell ADRIENNE to send me the information.”

“Adrienne? That doesn’t sound right… oh, really? Huh. She says that is indeed her name. Well, she’s sending it. We’ll see you soon.”

Grace hung up and stretched, sputtered air through her lips and peeked out at the girls at their tea parties, with their hats and some of Grace’s good tea. “Hey, Haze… GlamMother wants to see us next week, so I’ll be packing our stuff and I’ll email the school to get your work for Thursday and Friday in advance so we can turn it in on Wednesday.”

“Yes, Mother,” Hazel said in her tea party voice. “Will we be seeing Mr. Laurent and his Sad Sorry Son Simon when we go to California?”

“I’m not planning on it. Just giving you a heads up.” The three girls raised their teacups to Grace and she smiled and went back inside to pack. Simon was back in Cambridge, as far as she knew. She had seen him around online, but never hovered, so she couldn’t be sure. But… that week was the week of his birthday. She wondered if her mother had remembered that information, or if her body was simply falling back on old habits of the season by wanting to do something around this time of year. It was a very random time to Grace for them to just want to go to Belize… though, usually Simon’s birthday was paired up with hers. The significance of his actual birth date would only matter to Grace, not her parents, as the things that they did typically occurred AFTER August 22nd. Grace shook her head and opened the email of things to pack, so that she could prepare early.

.

The Monroes had some guests, Grace could tell. Not a lot, so she wondered if this was like some politician’s immediate family or what, and she resigned herself to the thought that if for one little second her mom even tried to give her hell about taking a flight today, instead of last night (to come in all late in the night and throw off hers AND Hazel’s sleep schedule), she would take her ass right on to her old bedroom and wait for the call to go to Belize. She didn’t play that mess with her mom anymore. Hazel ran to the door and tiptoed a little to use the knocker. There was a doorbell, but something about that fancy old knocker always intrigued her.

A butler opened the door and tried to take Grace’s bags, but she struggled with him, knowing that she could do it herself. “If you won’t let him, let me,” she heard a familiar voice say. Simon. She froze. He was standing. Obviously in good enough health. He was smiling, but it became worried when she stared at him. He put his hands up and she noted that he was in some type of… weird coat draped over his arms, instead of wearing it, that she could see the top of his apology tattoos, and that his parents were at the table with hers.

Her mother got up and rushed over, “Don’t be silly! It’s his job.” She collected Hazel into a tight hug and Grace still stood there, in the open door as Hazel rushed to the table, hand in hand with her grandmother, to pass hugs around. “Surprise!” Mrs. Monroe cheered. “It’s Simon’s birthday dinner… and a therapy idea thing…”

“Therapy told you to surprise me by bringing me here, with these people, under the guise of a free trip to Belize?” Grace asked, very much not okay with this.

“No. We’re having a sit down, between all of us, as adults, to settle everything once and for all. There’s cake!” 

Hazel cheered, “Yayyy! Cake!”

Mrs. Monroe sighed and folded her arms, “My God, Grace, we really ARE going to Belize. Just sit down and enjoy dinner.” Grace pouted her way over to the seat next to Hazel. Simon returned to the one next to that one. His parents were across the table from them, and Mr. and Mrs. Monroe were on the opposite ends.

“This is messed up,” Grace muttered.

“All of us are messed up,” Mr. Monroe said. “It took a while for us to realize it. We spoke a few times when Simon was in the hospital, and we thought that eventually, both of you needed apologies from us and attempts for us to do better. Now, Grace… you had some things to say to Mr. Laurent the last time you were together…”

“I said it all. Nice to finally meet you, though,” she said to Mrs. Laurent, and her tone indicated that it wasn’t nice to meet her at all. Simon reached out and rubbed Grace on the back. She smiled a little at him, then looked confused and wondered why they were acting like nothing had ever happened. Then again, they had “gotten over” what did happen, and she guessed she was kinda touch starved, because it was nice to get physical comfort from somebody that wasn’t Hazel, for a change.

“Simon had many things to say to his parents before you arrived, too. Now that we’re all here, really… say whatever is on all of your minds. Simon… you’ve been sulking for two hours, but whenever Grace walked in, you immediately brightened up.” Simon blushed as Mr. Monroe made this extremely embarrassing announcement. Hazel cackled about it and ate a mouthful of potatoes. 

Simon shook his head, “I’m not sure what you mean by saying this, Mr. Monroe.”

“Just that we never really discussed the night that you came back into our lives, wanting to see Grace and apologize… You didn’t actually apologize until a while later and… we’re all curious about the journeys it took to get from where you were to…”

“No, Dad.” Grace shook her head. “No. Simon and I used to be best friends. I loved him. There was nobody in the world more important to me. When we broke, I broke. You don’t get to just have reflection on what led us all here, to possible health and contentment. Just… No. Where is the cake? I’m having some on the terrace. You want in, Si?” His eyes widened and he got up to follow her. The butler was bringing out the cake, and she took the whole tray. “Momma’s got you, Haze,” she said without breaking her stride. She went outside and Simon smiled as she set the cake down. “Cut my baby a piece of cake. I’ll get her dish.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Grace rolled her eyes at everybody in the room, grabbed Hazel’s desert plate and the bottle of wine from the table. She went back out and Simon was ready with Hazel’s slice. Whenever Grace gave it to her, she said, “I’ll be right out there if you need me.” Grace was… tired. She had been on a long flight, and to be faced with the Laurents AND her parents? And to have them acting like this was just okay to spring on someone? “They’re still messing up, but I guess at least they’re trying,” she glanced around. “I didn’t get glasses.” She frowned.

“S’ok. I don’t drink.” 

She smiled and said, “Neither do I, but remember whenever we were 14 and we said that we’d have our first drink together?”

“Yeah. We said on your 21st birthday.” He smiled and she felt warm in his gaze. She set the bottle down. “At any rate, they don’t need any wine. They’re being weird enough.”

“RIGHT?” Grace and Simon laughed awkwardly. “To be honest, I think that they realized that the only way to get me here was to hide their intentions from me. I wouldn’t have showed up if they had told me that they wanted to have dinner with your family.”

“Funny… I wouldn’t have come if they hadn’t told me, “Grace will be here for your birthday,” Simon admitted and leaned on the balcony rail. “All I wanted was to see you again. It’s all I could think about all month.”

“You’ve known about this all month? My mom called me last week!” She leaned next to him, her back against the rail, so that she could keep an eye on Hazel. For a moment, she had a flashback of the last time that they were out here together. The pain stung, but there was a numbness there… like that part of her that hurt was more like a limb that fell to sleep. “Hazel is the same age as we were when we met. I’ve been so paranoid about her running into trouble because I’m not present enough…”

“Is that what you think us meeting was? You running into trouble?” Simon asked. He didn’t seem offended, like he might have normally been. Just… curious.

“Don’t you think so? For both of us…”

He frowned and looked out at the Monroe yard. “I think that the people who messed up the most are all surrounding your kid right now.” 

“She loves them, though. I want her to have a good relationship with them. Not just because I didn’t, but because they’re the only grandparents she has.”

“Yeah, well… at the moment, MY parents are there too…” Grace stood up and folded her arms, looking at Hazel. Her parents had arranged for her and Simon to have their first joint birthday celebration since they were 16, and even arranged a sit down with the Laurents about everything that went wrong… Simon was also thinking about how messed up this was, because he added to her thoughts, “I feel weird about our parents finally talking, when we ourselves have finally gotten to good places in our lives and development.”

“I think it’s… A good thing, but just for them. For me… I think that the best thing has been that I survived. I thought that I was gonna die after everything. Nothing felt real. My whole life was just staring into nothingness and crying. I really did become the void…”

“No. You were NEVER that!” Simon said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You always mattered. I was just too toxic to see that. The best thing for me has been that I realized how wrong I was…” Grace threw her arms around his neck and Simon relaxed in her arms and held her close. Every time was like the first time, but this was DIFFERENT different. This was the first hug that they had in some time and maybe even the first genuine one that they’ve had. Simon was caught up in his emotions, but quickly tried to keep them in check, “Wanna grab the kid and get outta here?” Simon asked, looking at her. They were still in the hug, but let some space in between their bodies.

Grace chuckled, “I mean… you know that my perfect birthday celebration is lowkey, with the closest people to me, some dogs and a walk around the creek. But, it’s not MY birthday.”

Simon turned and leaned back on the terrace this time, “If I had just done that with you for our 16th, things could have gone very differently.” 

“I think things would have eventually gone wrong anyway. We were both… beyond our own help. You seem fine now, though.”

“I’m not fine, but I’m better.” He shrugged his shoulders. 

“Grab the cake, I’ll grab the kid,” she said with a smile. Simon obeyed, as she went inside and he followed. “Haze, grab your bag. We’re headed out.

“Headed out?” Mrs. Monroe asked. “To where?”

“Simon and I are taking Hazel to our old stomping grounds.” Hazel jumped up excited. All four of the parents exchanged worried looks, which Grace ignored and put an arm around Hazel to guide her towards the door. “Hopefully�� the rest of you will get whatever you need out of… this…”  They checked out early, giving their parents time to sort through their guilt.

The trio left the mansion, all three laughing and talking. Hazel about how she had heard so much about their adventures, though Simon was certain she only heard the sweet and not the… other stuff. He was just glad that Grace was willing to spend time with him again. It was the best birthday present he could’ve gotten. He didn’t deserve it, but he was going to be grateful.

Neither Simon or Grace had revisited much of their old places, so they wound up spending time well into the night taking Hazel to their childhood spots from when they were her age. Eventually she got so sleepy that she dozed off on the train and Simon had to carry her around. Grace told him that she could do it (she was pretty practiced in it and Hazel was a tall 10), with Simon still technically being in recovery for his injuries, but she guessed that his pride was still stubborn, because he insisted. 

They caught a cab back to the mansion, he put Hazel to bed, and Grace offered to walk him out. “Your parents have us in the guest house,” he said. 

“Excuse you?”

“We’re going to Belize… They didn’t tell you that EITHER?”

“What’re they trying to do? Get us back together??” She joked. 

He laughed, “Like you’d ever do that. You didn’t want me the first time.”

“That’s not true. I actually liked you way more than you liked me, because my feelings were selfless and pure.” He stared at his hands and nodded. She sat down in front of the front door and he sat next to her. “I wasn’t kidding whenever I’d say that I had the perfect relationship already, or whatever the hell I said that day. I can’t remember word for word, but I remember that all the words were true.”

“Yeah… If only I had been better.”

“Well… You said earlier that you’re better now.”

“Yeah…” He turned to look at her and she smiled and took his hand into hers. 

“We don’t have to talk about it. We can just live in it,” she said. That was always how she had been about them. No questions or comments about their feelings for each other, titles, etc. They were together and enjoying each other’s company again. The rest of the details were background noise. No things were not fine, and she didn’t know if things would ever be fine between them, considering the stuff that happened back then. But… things were better.

Next

[primasveraas-writing]

The Privilege of Love

Request: "about the finnpoe prompts... Could you write a fic about how after a very dangerous mission and Poe almost losing Finn, he (poe) asks Finn on a date and can't believe his ears when finn says yes and he flies him to some very pretty planet and have a fun, heartwarming date? Ps. I love your fics" -@buckysentbycyberlife

Thank you for the request ❤ This ended up being much angstier and much longer than anticipated, but I hope you enjoy!

NO tros spoilers included

Word count: 2075

XXX

Finn cried out in pain, and Poe fell apart.

At the least opportune moment, he lost all composure, in the middle of a firefight, a desperate, barely successful mission to pick up new allies for the Resistance. Responses to Leia’s call for help had trickled in slowly, but she seized every opportunity available to rebuild their forces. Or rather, Poe, Finn, and Rey did, at her behest.

However, these new recruits needed extraction. They were untrained and in the middle of a First Order-occupied planet, but the risk was determined to be worth it.

(“We’re sending in the calvary,” Leia had said grimly, referring to their trio. “We need everyone we can get to win this war.”)

At first, the mission had gone relatively well; they had gone undetected until their group was making its way back to the cargo ship they were using for incognito transport, and they were rapidly overcome by First Order troopers. Rey led the new forces, a scraggly group of about ten people, to safely, while Finn, Poe, and a few other ground fighters held off the endless waves of stormtroopers chasing them.

It was then when a blaster bolt struck Finn in the leg, and Poe forgot a lifetime of training.

He heard Finn’s yell, a terribly familiar thing after a decade with the Resistance- how many pilots’ dying screams had he listened to through his x-wing’s comms, how many friends had died just feet away from him- and his heart thudded to a stop in his chest. Poe’s instincts told him to keep fighting, don’t look. He had to stay alive, and that meant, sometimes, shooting first and examining the carnage later.

Finn, it seemed, was the exception.

With his blaster in one hand, Poe grabbed Finn’s arm with the other, half-carrying, half-dragging him behind the meager shelter of an abandoned speeder littering the street they had turned into a battlefield. He was trembling, he realized, as he held Finn’s face in his hands. The other man’s eyes were half shut, breaths coming in shudders. 

“Finn! Finn-” Poe pleaded, shaking his shoulders slightly. “Come on, buddy.”

Finn's eyes opened suddenly, bright with pain. They focused on his companion's, flashing with fear. “Poe- my leg. I can’t walk.”

“I’ll help you. Look, it’s gonna be alright, just stay with me and it’ll all be fine.”

But Finn shook his head, his voice growing steadier. “I’ll be too slow. You go while you still can.”

Poe stared at Finn, suddenly overtaken by the imagine of Chewbacca descending from the ramp of the Millennium Falcon, Finn limp in his arms. For the briefest of seconds, the glory of destroying Starkiller Base had been squashed entirely. If Finn was dead, then it wouldn’t have been a true victory, and he knew it then, ever after meeting Finn just two days prior. Instinctually and instantly, he understood that Finn was an instrumental part of his existence, one that would be all the lesser without him in it.

The thought had become a recent subject of his nightmares, the more and more he spent his nights falling asleep thinking about Finn.

“No. You’re coming with me.”

And before Finn could protest, Poe stood, hauling their combined weight to stand. He slung Finn’s arm around his neck, raised his blaster, and shouted for his men to cover their retreat. 

As they moved, slow and encumbered, Finn was silent, concentrating on his feet. Their journey was not gentle, bounding over rubble, almost endlessly, lengthening the frantic flee back to the safety of their ship.

They made it after an eternity, the last ones up the ramp, collapsing on the ground in an exhausted mess of limbs. Finn grunted in pain, more blaster bolts struck the side of their hull, one of his companions shouted “go, go, go!” towards the general vicinity of the cockpit, and the cargo hauler lurched into motion.

Poe untangled himself delicately from Finn, cautiously minding his wound.

“You’re gonna be okay, Finn.” The commander glanced up at his forces. “Lin, go get the medkit.”

With deliberate motion, Finn sat up, pressing his hand against his thigh. Poe, drenched in both his and Finn’s sweat, still shivered at the smell of charred flesh mingling in the air.

“Thank you,” he said. “For saving me.”

“Of course,” Poe replied instantly, with a brief smile that failed entirely to meet his eyes. “I wasn’t leaving you behind.”

The casual tone of his words sharply contrasted the intensity of his stare, an unusual seriousness tainted with something deeper that Finn couldn’t quite place. His mouth opened, question on his lips, but Lin returned with bacta patches and bandages, and the moment was lost. He was treated quickly enough, but before they could regain any semblance of privacy, Rey rushed in from the cockpit to Finn’s side, and after the latter had been made comfortable on a makeshift bed of emergency blankets, he was left to rest.

Poe watched him from across the cargo bay and wondered why he would never be able to let Finn go.

This was war. Poe had seen more death than he cared to think about, had learned to carefully navigate the line of personal investment and the very real possibility that they could all be dead tomorrow. He loved his friends, his fellow Resistance members, and unfailingly dedicated himself to the cause, but concurrently braced himself for the worst. Their own mortality confronted them in every waking second, and he was no stranger to accepting the loss of others.

Yet, despite the adaptive skill to endure endless casualties, Poe knew that if Finn of all people died, he would never recover. Maybe to the point of losing the ability to pretend that it was okay, to get out of bed and resume his responsibilities without acknowledging his own pain.

He released a long sigh, and turned away.

xxx

By the time they landed, Poe managed to justify his feelings. He would have saved any other of his friends like he did Finn, and it was only natural that he was afraid of losing someone he cared about. There was no difference between his feelings about Finn and his feelings about his other companions.

Aside, of course, from the feelings that caused him to watch Finn sleep peacefully from across the hull, studying the lines of his face, trying to memorize his every perfection in the span of their two-hour hyperspace journey.

The next afternoon, after a sleepless night and a busy morning, Poe accepted an invitation to play sabacc cards with Finn and Rey in the medbay, spending his lunch break to entertain his friend while he recovered, still constricted to bed.

“Poe. Are you okay?” Finn asked him for the second time, and Poe snapped back to reality, focusing on the cards in his hand. He supposed that this was better, to be caught lost in thought about his sabacc hand rather than anything else; just five minutes earlier, he had realized that he was staring at Finn and heat had rushed to his cheeks before he could rationalize why he was studying the corners of Finn’s mouth and the way they slyly turned up whenever he was about to smile.

No difference in feelings indeed.

“Uh- yeah. Just a long day.” He lied quickly, avoiding Finn’s eyes and flashing a tired smile, which, at the very least, was genuine. He had replayed the day before over and over again in his head, conducting fantasies both torturous and blissful. The paranoia of losing Finn made him ache, yet concurrently, he imagined a universe where he could have swept Finn off of his feet, away from danger, and kissed him senseless.

He was face-to-face with his affection now. Dismissing the truth was easier when he could turn away, ignore the thundering in his chest and put off his emotions for a day of calm that likely wouldn’t come until the war was over, whatever that meant for him.

Last night, as he tossed and turned, he realized that he had almost faced the horror of losing Finn, and barely prevented the sobs from escaping.

Both Finn and Rey were watching him carefully, mirror expressions of each other. Uncanny at times, they frequently possessed the ability to know exactly what the other was thinking, and would either act in tandem or finish each other’s thoughts accordingly.

“I’m fine, guys,” He told them, but the strain in his voice said otherwise. The pair accredited him enough to not question his words, although Finn fixed him with another concerned glance that he ignored, despite the pang that pierced his heart in doing so.

Poe tossed his losing cards on the borrowed medbay table, “I’m bombing out,” he announced in distracted defeat at the same time that Rey’s commlink buzzed and she cursed quietly under her breath. The men turned to her, and she sighed.

“The General needs me.” She stood from her chair next to the bed, then leaned down to kiss Finn’s cheek. “I’ll see you later!”

The Jedi smiled at them both, wide and earnest as always. Poe felt a pang of jealousy- not for the nature of the two’s relationship, because he did believe Finn’s assurances that they were indeed just friends- but for the ease with which Rey was able to demonstrate her bond with Finn. Force, how he wished that he could do the same, or even define their bond to begin with.

“You aren’t acting weird because of yesterday, are you? I know I shouldn’t have gotten injured, but I was covering for someone and-”

Holding up his hand, Poe cut him off. “No, no, that’s not it. I’m fine, really, buddy. Just glad you’re okay.”

“You know I don’t believe you, right?” Finn demanded, and Poe barely choked back a stranged laugh at his persistence. 

“I do. I do trust that you don’t believe me, but this doesn’t really change much for me.”

“Why not?” He pestered. “Look, I don’t know what’s happened in the last day, but you can tell me.” He sat up straight in bed, pushing himself up with his arms. “Things went wrong yesterday. I’m sorry you had to worry about rescuing me too.”

The words hadn’t fully left his lips before Poe was shaking his head. “Don’t blame yourself, Finn. There was a lot going on in that battle.”

Nonetheless, Finn’s eyes met his, relentless. "Thank you for saving my life," he told him somberly.

Poe melted in his brown eyes instantly, worries of staidness aside. "Of course. It's what we do around here."

The steady gaze between them lingered far too long to be considered casual. For a split second, Poe broke his stare, eyes flitting to Finn's lips.

"Actually I- I really care about you Finn. I don't ever want something bad to happen to you."

The other man recoiled slightly, surprised. "That's hard to guarantee in this line of work, isn't it?"

The deep, forbidden longing arose in Poe, like an uncontrollable wave, washing over every fiber of his being. Finn was right: it was too dangerous to care, too dangerous to promise any semblance of safety, and most of all, too dangerous to love without being hurt.

It was too late for some of those things now. Poe's love expanded beyond him, into the darkest confines of the universe, pushing out his fear and inhibitions and will to stay stoic. He could die tomorrow, and it would never matter to the First Order or anyone else in the galaxy if he loved Finn openly and freely. Their bond was theirs, their love and affection and burden all the same.

He answered Finn carefully, "You know, it is. But some things are beyond my control."

Nodding silently, Finn seemed to understand. Then, a hand slid into his own and squeezed. Poe's heart skipped a beat and out of his chest.

"There's a place I know," he began, deliberately slowing his words. He felt that his happiness, if unchecked, could lead to a mess of rushed words and sentiments that he would never be able to fathom into sense. "just over the hill on the side of the base. If you're interested, I'd like to show you sometime. It's-" he was breathless suddenly and inexplicabably. Perhaps it was Finn, subconsciously leaning towards him or the glimmer of understanding that flashed across his face, "-it's lovely."

Another squeeze. "That sounds perfect."

[the-baticeer-extraordinaire]

The Last of Us Part 2

So, I finished it a couple of days ago, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I spent about three days playing, and I plan to play it again soon. I have some Thoughts ™ about it that I decided to share, but be aware -- there are major spoilers all throughout this post! You’ve been warned! 

It’s broken into three sections: what I loved, what I hated, and what I’m mixed about. Discussion is welcome. :)

What I Loved:

In the first game, you get to see Ellie's experience with the world outside of the QZ - and most of it is new to her. She grew up in the QZ, raised by Fireflies. She doesn't know much about the world before the outbreak, but you get to see her learn about it. You see her grow up and mature in this new, violent world and the toll that it has on her. In TLOU2, she's an adult now with friends who all grew up in this new world - they don't have the experience with the old like Joel or Tommy or Maria, so they are learning as they go. They've only experienced THIS world. I really enjoy listening to their conversations about what the world is like to them, trade stories about their wildly different experiences, and point out things they find odd about the old world. For example:

Ellie grew up in a QZ, but Dina did not. They trade stories about what it was like - particularly, the horrors of living in a QZ.

Ellie and Dina comment on Joel's love for coffee, saying they didn't "get it" as it tasted awful.

Ellie and Dina discuss the first time they killed a "non-infected" and the circumstances that caused it; it's clearly something very emotionally important to them, especially as they were young. It's also likely that this is the reality for all kids growing up after the outbreak. They don't get the privilege of knowing a life where they don't have to kill others to survive.

When Jesse and Ellie stumble upon a bookstore with a kid's section, Jesse can't believe they decorated the kids area with mushrooms. Ellie says that they must have had a different meaning to people before the outbreak, and in her journal, she notes that people used to think that mushrooms were cute.

Lev points out that a kid's bedroom is painted to look like nature but that it isn't realistic, and Abby tells him that it's more a "dream-like version" meant to be cute and commonly painted by parents for their kids. She tells Lev that her own father painted her a jungle.

The uncertainty of knowing whether or not Ellie knew that Joel had lied. I had always hated that Joel chose to lie to Ellie, but I had always suspected that Ellie must have some idea. I liked the gradual revelation that she did know, that Joel had finally fessed up. There were moments when someone would ask her if she had any idea why that group would kill Joel, and I'd be saying, "Because Fireflies" but then I would have to think "Ohhh, but Ellie doesn't know that!" Because you couldn't be sure that she did until the flashback reveals.

I felt like the strained relationship between Ellie and Joel resulting from the lie makes perfect sense; Ellie placed all value of her life on being the cure, and it must have been devastating for her to hear that she could have lived up to that perceived value if it weren't for his actions. Shitty actions of the Firelfies and the unrealism of a mass cure aside, Ellie must have felt insanely betrayed by the person she trusted most. The growing gap between the two of them and her pushback against his helicoptering makes absolute sense, even if it's sad. If Ellie had just blindly accepted it without some kind of anger or betrayal, I'd have been really disappointed.

Despite the lie and knowing what he had done, she still felt a sense of injustice enough to pursue his killer. In her journal, she notes that she had suspected Fireflies all along, so she knows why they came and why they killed him.

At first, I really hated playing as Abby. I knew immediately from Abby and Owen's conversation on the cliffs that she intended to find and kill Joel, and I wasn't surprised because even though I hadn't seen any spoilers prior to playing, I fully expected Joel to die in this game. It just made sense to me that Ellie would be on a violent rampage to avenge Joel, so it wasn't hard to connect. But playing as Abby, ESPECIALLY after Joel's death, was really hard to swallow. I couldn't really get behind playing as Joel's killer, as I adored Joel as a character and I had a lot of hate for her. As I played through her scenes, I started to realize that Abby and Ellie are kind of two sides to the same coin. Both grew up in and are navigating this "survival at all costs" kind of world, both are the sort to go to the extreme to seek revenge, and both are deeply hurting from the loss of their fathers. I was slow to really appreciate seeing Abby's perspective, but in the end, I got to see qualities of Abby that I liked, even if I didn't care for her overall. It reminded me that people aren't all good or all bad - they're more of a mixed bag.

Ellie is a child in the first game, and so it's not really surprising that she doesn't really make a lot of life-altering decisions for herself. She goes with Joel and Tess because Marlene says so, and she goes with Joel because what other choice does she have? And in the end, neither Joel or the Fireflies give her a choice in her situation - she's just dragged along to whatever they think is best for her. The sequel is different - Ellie is an adult who lives on her own and makes her own decisions. She pushes back when she feels Joel meddling, and it makes sense considering how he took control of her situation before. So, Ellie's actions have a lot more weight, and she's actually responsible for them. What I love is that Ellie is unquestionably herself - even when I, the player, felt like she was doing something wrong, it was her choice to make. It makes her character all the more human that she's not some righteous saint getting revenge for Joel's death. She makes mistakes and does things that are morally questionable. It makes her like everyone else - someone who has both good and bad.

Lev. All things Lev.

Through Ellie's perspective alone, you don't get much insight about the conflict between the Wolves and the Seraphites in Seattle. Abby's perspective offers more, and it makes sense. Ellie is a visitor and unfamiliar with the territory, but it seems Abby has been a part of the Wolves for a while. It's clear that the tension has grown increasingly more violent recently, and you get to see all of that erupt with Isaac ordering an attack to wipe out the Seraphites. What's interesting to witness is that as you progress through Abby's story, you get to see the flaws of both groups and the atrocities committed by both. The real tragedy is that neither of the groups can set aside their differences to say that it's okay to live differently - instead, they constantly fight and kill each other. The Seraphites are convinced that the Wolves are sinful and need to be put down. The Wolves say the Seraphites are freaks and need to be culled. Neither side is willing to try another truce - instead, they subscribe to the "survive at all costs" idea, and the cost is the other side - who they clearly don't see as human. This is especially clear when you see how quick they are to turn on each other for "stepping out of line" like when Lev shaves his head, Danny attacks Owen for not being able to kill an old man, and Isaac is willing to kill Abby for trying to stop the Wolves from killing Lev.

Once Lev and Abby start running together, Lev constantly corrects Abby's use of "Scars" - the name that the Wolves call the Seraphites. This seems very important to Lev, and once you run into Seraphites with him, you understand his insistence as they continuously deadname him. Lev didn't give up his beliefs when be fled the Seraphites, and it's important to him that Abby not disrespect him in that way. Even more telling is that while Abby continues to use Scars for a bit, she eventually becomes more respectful and uses Seraphites instead - something that his own tribe couldn't do for him.

Holy fuck, I am in love with the aquarium. When playing as Ellie, the place had a super creepy vibe, so I wasn't feeling it. But I was genuinely excited every time I got to visit it as Abby because I LOVE that place. Except for the last time. That sucked.

Not only could you pet dogs, but you could play fetch with them, too. That's fucking awesome. 

I went into the game expecting an established relationship with Ellie and Dina, but I'm really glad I got to witness it blossom. I actually really loved how playful they were with each other, but also how comforting they could be for each other. All the little looks and touches filled my little bi soul with all sorts of warmth and happiness.

Ellie's inability to sleep, her flashbacks, and the note she makes in her journal about finally having a day that she forgets about Seattle all point to the traumatic damage that Joel's death and her revenge quest did to her. When Tommy confronts her about pursuing Abby again, Ellie seems to completely shut down at the idea, and Dina has to take control of the situation. I like the fact that they show the cost of Tommy and Ellie’s vigilante justice, like Ellie’s PTSD, Dina having to take care of Ellie on top of taking care of JJ, the failure of Maria and Tommy’s marriage, or Jesse’s parents having to live with the loss of Jesse. Similarly, Abby sees the same kind of consequences to her pursuit of revenge: she sees the loss of her Firefly friends -- something she clearly hadn’t expected to happen.

For the most part, I didn’t care much about Abby’s friends. I got pretty into Owen’s story, until he was perfectly okay with leaving Mel and his unborn child and running off into the sunset with Abby. I’m not sure how I felt about Mel in the end, and I hated Nora and Manny. However, I really did like to see their perspectives, and I especially liked seeing how much some of them struggled with Abby’s vengeance and torture of Joel. I felt like it gave me a bigger picture of the consequences of Joel’s actions at the end of the first game (and we all had to know there would be SOMETHING).

All of the cutscenes showing Ellie and Joel’s relationship over the years were an absolute delight (even the not so nice ones) because I fully expected to be able to have more Joel and Ellie interaction before his death. I’m sad we didn’t get that, but happy that I could still explore their dynamic through flashbacks. Don’t even get me started on the birthday flashback because I have so much love for that entire scene and will probably replay it more than any other part of the game.

The attention to detail in the environment was so stunning. In one the of the apartments in Seattle during Abby’s playthrough, I saw a tabletop RPG set-up and immediately screenshotted it and sent it to my gamer friend group. All of the lore notes you could pick up and read through with stories about FEDRA, Seraphites, or Wolves really hammered home the idea that each group was at fault for their predicament and contributed to the overall tension and bloodshed. I love the theme that no one is blameless, because in the post-apocalyptic setting, you really wouldn’t expect anyone to be completely innocent. Even going to view the models in extras, you can zoom in and see the level of detail they added -- like JJ actually has blemishes on his face in the one where Dina is holding him. I fucking love it, man.

What I Hated:

When you play through Abby’s story and finally get to the confrontation, the player actually has to continue to play as Abby and attack Ellie. This seemed like a particularly cruel set-up, given that most of the player base is playing this game because they loved Ellie and wanted to continue playing her story. I’ve seen comparisons of the encounter to that of Ellie and David in the first game, but I don’t feel like it’s the right comparison. The mechanics were the same, yes, but the situation is completely different. Yes, in Abby’s story, Ellie is the villain. Ellie murdered her friends. But in the case with Ellie and David, Ellie was a prisoner who then had to fight to get free of him -- Abby is not a prisoner and sought out Ellie on her own.

I understood the chronology of the story, and I enjoyed having the “so she DID know” moment after the game reveals that Ellie knew that Joel had lied before she went to Seattle, but I think that the way the game switched between Ellie and Abby felt very weird. I didn’t exactly rush through Abby’s scenes, but the cliffhanger between Abby pointing a gun at Ellie and then switching to Abby’s story years before felt super jarring, and it made me more resistant to trying to understand Abby at first. I think the switch between perspectives could have been set up differently for a more satisfying playthrough.

I swear to you, I hated the rat king with every fiber of my being. I was already so creeped out by exploring ground zero -- the sheer amount of anxiety I had as I was searching for those damn supplies was intense, and then having to constantly run from the rat king or be killed felt like complete insanity -- and I played on the easiest setting! I wish they had some sort of way to opt out of those things for those interested in seeing the story play out. I know a lot of people who struggle with the combat mechanics but who want to see Ellie’s story.

In fact, slogging through all the infected in general felt really tedious. 

Yara’s death felt like it did absolutely nothing for the plot and only served to further the pain of Abby and Lev. We had already seen how vicious both the Seraphites and the Wolves could be -- the point didn’t need to be driven home by such a senseless death. Even though I also hated Mel’s death, I could see how it played into the confrontation with Abby and Ellie -- why should Abby care about Dina’s pregnancy when Ellie hadn’t extended the same mercy to Mel? Abby couldn’t have known that Ellie didn’t know. But Yara’s death served no good purpose, and I’m still pissed about it. Also, why the fuck would you kill her after the HELL the players go through to get the supplies to save her and actually have Mel be able to save her only to kill her off shortly after? It makes zero sense.

I also really hated Jesse’s death. He seemed like such a good person and his death was so unnecessary -- especially since Tommy got to live. His family and JJ and hell, Ellie and Dina, even, didn’t deserve to lose him, especially as he hadn’t even done anything to Abby. Ugh.

When Tommy pulled out that map and started talking about having a lead, I felt every bit of Dina’s outrage at the situation. Their need for vengeance had already cost everyone so damn much, and it seemed absolutely bonkers that Tommy wanted to go after her again -- especially when he had seemed perfectly okay at the theater to pack up and go home with Abby still alive. He went from “Are you good with that?” about leaving Abby alive to “You made me a promise” to Ellie when Ellie says she won’t. Ellie had Dina, a baby, and some serious PTSD -- she had no business being set back on that path, but Tommy didn’t seem bothered by any of that. 

Was it not enough to make Ellie lose her family, but make her lose her fingers, too? I appreciated the game’s constant insistence on the consequences of your actions in this survive at all costs kind of world, but it seemed like a lot for Ellie to wind up losing her fingers in the end. Blah.

What I Have Mixed Feelings About:

I was not as upset about the ending as most people seem to be. I think it says a lot that Ellie went all that way to Santa Barbara and in the end, spared Abby’s life -- in the same way that Abby initially refused to fight Ellie. It felt like they were both fighting someone else’s fight and were finally tired enough to let it die. It did feel pretty frustrating that she went all the way out there, nearly died, and lost two of her fingers to kill Abby, only to not end up doing it and thus negating the whole damn trip, but I also feel like Ellie needed the sort of closure that trip brought. In the end, it was her decision to let Abby live -- a choice that had not been given to her years prior, when Joel took her from that hospital. I like to think that she finally understood Joel’s decision.

When Dina refused to support Ellie going back after Abby, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t really blame her. I was even pissed that Ellie chose to go after what had happened last time, and I couldn’t really understand why she’d be so willing to leave her family behind when this had already played out so poorly for her before. I also wasn’t surprised when Ellie returned to find an empty house -- I’d imagine that taking care of a farm and a baby at the same time would likely be too much for Dina, and I just assume she moved back to Jackson, where she’d have help. Either way, I’d love to know if Dina was fully done with Ellie for good, or if she’d accept her back if Ellie went to find her. I know that the loss of their relationship is a direct result of Ellie’s actions and the fact that she prioritized killing Abby over staying with her family, but goddammit, I just want a happy lgbt ending for once.

I was genuinely excited to have a trans character in the game. I cannot express enough how much I adore Lev. In a way, his and Abby’s relationship reminds me a lot of Joel and Ellie’s in the first game. They depend on each other, and they obviously really care about each other. One of the things that super bothered me was the storyline with his mother. We already know that he’s pretty much cast out and hunted for being trans -- so we can see the horror of it. It was rough enough to know that his own mother could turn away from him and condemn him like all the rest, but having her attack him and forcing him to kill her in self-defense felt like a lot. I just can’t imagine how triggering that might feel for trans people playing the game.

[bryonysimcox]

Remember to Breathe: Weeks 24, 25 and 26, Spain

Sometimes life runs ahead of you. As three weeks since my last post have elapsed, I remind myself to take stock and breathe.

I started with such good intentions. A blog post a week, documenting our adventures driving East in our van. An intention I kept pretty strong until the past few weeks, which have passed in a daze. I’m not sure if it was lack of time or lack of motivation that stopped me from writing, but I do know that as our travels ground to a halt and I have had less adventures to report on, it has been harder to see the purpose in writing a blog. And yet, it is in truly extraordinary times like these, where we find ourselves all living altered lives amid a global pandemic, that writing has value - not just in exploring the things we’ve done but the things we’ve felt.

It’s been a busy three weeks here in Spain that’s for sure. Suzi the Van has brought us her fair share of dramas, especially when we discovered a burst coolant pipe a few days before we were booked to do a video shoot over an hour’s drive away. In a series of rather fortunate events, we found a Toyota garage and a super friendly mechanic who helped us navigate old Japanese parts diagrams and who wasn’t picky about our mix of Spanglish and hand gestures! He managed to order us in a specific genuine part (which was admittedly pretty pricey for what is effectively just a section of pipe) and George fitted it himself which was brilliant.

Doing our own repairs and maintenance on the van can be incredibly rewarding at times, but also super frustrating when we don’t have the tools or space that we need to do it effectively.

We’ve definitely realised that living minimally and with no fixed address can be a real pain when it comes to needing to do practical things, and we both dream of having a workshop and stash of tools and materials one day! Nevertheless, George’s pipe installation worked a treat and he changed the oil and fuel filter a few days later too - which also wasn’t without its dramas (but that’s another story)…

(images) Repairing the split radiator pipe in the van

Measures to manage the pandemic are still very much in place here in Spain. But they do at least mean that elements of ‘normal life’ can continue in a managed way, and so now that people are allowed out and about, we’ve been able to resume filming. We’ve been working with a small tourism company based in Valencia called Valtournative to help create some promo videos - a job we had originally booked way back in March before Covid-19 had taken a hold of Spain.

Valtournative is run by a bunch of genuinely lovely people including Danny, director and tour guide extraordinaire. He is the kind of business owner who wears his passion on his sleeve and his deep fascination for the Spanish countryside and the stories embedded within places is infectious.

As soon as it was safe to do so, we headed out with them out on some of their tours, firstly to an incredible vineyard and winery called Chozas Corrascal and later to some thermal springs in the town of Montanejos. What Valtournative does best is taking people out of the city and into the incredible natural spots around Valencia, which is of course is an even more appealing type of tourism, for its ability to enjoy yourselves in a safe and spacious environment, given the Covid-19 considerations. For Broaden to be filming amid grapevines, tasting organic wines, exploring small rural villages and swimming in natural springs… well, it’s a bit of a dream really!

(images) Filming at the vineyard and winery of Chozas Carrascal with Valtournative

(images) Filming at the Fuente de los Banos in Montanejos with Valtournative

As commercial work with Broaden grows, it’s not only a way of sustaining ourselves, but a kernel of hope that the future holds activity, exchange and adventure again. That things will get better.

I’ve also been building some exciting projects with AnalogueBryony, my collage-making practice. The wicked Manchester-based rock-pop outfit ‘Glass Caves’ recently released their single ‘Eye to Eye’ which features a collage I made as its artwork, and I’ve finished a few private commissions which I’ve been really pleased with as well. It’s strange to see AnalogueBryony grow as an enterprise considering how long I’ve been just plodding away at making my collages as a project for myself.

Being able to generate some income from my collage-making is huge for me, but I also have to remind myself that it’s first and foremost a creative process I can tap into to care for myself (something I explored in my post from Week 22). It’s probably no surprise that while I’ve been super busy making commissions, I haven’t found the time to make art just for fun! That said, I have at least managed to pop into MiKENGO cafe in Valencia a few times, and seeing my art on their walls in my show ‘Stop Making Sense’ is always a humbling and surreal experience.

(image) The final artwork for Glass Caves’ ‘Eye to Eye’ single, which you can listen to here.

Amid all the doing, there’s feeling too. Whilst these three weeks have been chokka block with stuff, I’ve forgotten to stop and take stock at times.

In many ways, ‘doing’ things all the time is a form of distraction. And after the enforced slowing-down that came with lockdown, I guess I’m not alone in suddenly trying to cram it all into this de-escalation phase - both to distract myself from the reality that life is still not as it was, and to make up for the ‘lost time’ of the months that have just passed. Working on building Broaden, releasing videos such as our new documentary about the town of Portland in New South Wales, making collages, generating work, it’s all a form of ‘being productive’. And I know that sometimes I turn to these things when I don’t want to stop and think too much. 

I guess when I sat down to write this blog post after a bit of a hiatus, I thought to myself ‘what’s the overarching message’? And the message I concluded with, a message to myself, is that I need to remember to breathe.

Breathing means taking stock, looking at what’s come before and what’s ahead, and being kind to yourself. I think it also means being honest, and not fooling yourself into thinking that everything’s okay just because you’ve been busy.

(images, left to right) Moments of breathing: an incredible sunrise on the drive to a video shoot, an evening on the balcony, the deserted town square in Corbera looking blissful.

Sure, it’s an honour to be busy and especially to be occupied with wonderful creative projects, but I’ve got to remember the low points, the spectrum of emotions, the mundane everyday routinesm the frustration of still not being able to see family, the uncertainty about the future, the despair at global powers who seem to have taken climate change completely off the table. Breathing means taking it all in - the good with the bad, the doing with the thinking.

So why am I sharing this with you? It seems, yet again, that a personal insight could in fact be of value to others, that the idea of breathing, and of giving yourself the time and respect to feel all sorts of emotions about this topsy-turvy trainwreck of a year is an idea we could all benefit from.

Just because the initial hype of coronavirus and the full lockdown it triggered has subsided a bit, doesn’t mean it’s not genuinely affecting our lives, our livelihoods and our mental wellbeing. And perhaps that’s another reason I haven’t written for a while, that I haven’t wanted to admit to myself that while George and I are busy, it’s still a struggle to stay positive and keep our heads above the water. But the irony is that in admitting it, in remembering to breathe and in writing this all down, I suddenly feel a whole lot better.

Have a wonderful week of doing, thinking and breathing.

[zonamievents]

ZoNa Summer Festival Day #2

Theme: Yukata Rating: PG-14 / T Word Count: 1,669 words

It was another humid night, but Nami blamed her crew's adventurous spirit for the unbearable heat she was enduring. Even as she stood in front of the open refrigerator, she felt very little relief. The navigator in her yearned to get back out on the sea, where the ocean's breeze could cascade over the Sunny, making the mid-summer evening much easier to bear. Instead, they were docked at an island that was celebrating the longest night of the year with a grandiose festival and the Mugiwara crew just had to attend.

That's why she was dressed in such an extravagant yukata at such a late hour.

Well, that, and it helped her survive the heat.

She hadn't even turned the lights on when she entered the kitchen. The fridge's bulb illuminated its shelves well enough for her to pick out an iced cold can of beer, her hand swiping it up swiftly as if it were some hidden treasure. Once the frigid metal met her skin, Nami inhaled deeply due to the stark difference in temperature. In a good way.

She'd do just about anything to feel that chill run over her entire body.

The kitchen was empty, but even if it wasn't, Nami would have done anything in that moment to feel some kind of relief. She adjusted the collar of her yukata until it moved off of her collar bone and fell upon the curve of her shoulders. The upper swells of her beasts were able to meet the chill released from the refrigerator yet it wasn't enough. She needed something stronger!

That was when she had an idea: Nami took the chilled can in her hand and rolled it over her chest. "Ah!" She whispered a slight sound of shock when the condensation along the metal splashed down on her skin. She thought that the cold touch might make her freeze, until her head fall backwards almost instinctively, exposing the entire length of her neck. Quickly, she guided the beer can along her jugular and up to the edge of her jaw. "Mmm." Her relief was so instantaneous, she moaned aloud. She didn't only think of her satisfaction, she released a noise of pleasure into the room.

"Nami?"

For once, she genuinely believed she had said too much.

Craning her neck to face the doorway, she saw a large, stocky figure entering the room. Before her mind could even comprehend who had joined her in the kitchen, she asked in a shy voice, "Zoro?"

It was indeed the swordsman, evident in the heavy way he walked towards her awkward stance at the refrigerator. Nami felt her heartbeat thumping against the cold can in her hand. Despite how embarrassed she was to be caught moaning over it, she couldn't dare move it off of her body or she'd be burning up once again.

However, of all the people to find her, Zoro was the least interested in what she was doing to herself. When he finally reached her side, he perused the selection of alcohol in the fridge and took his sweet time doing so. In order to stick his head right inside it, he was forced to place his hand on Nami's back so he could edge around her without knocking her over.

That large palm of his was like a heating pad resting against her obi.

"Agh, Zoro." She whined rather childishly. It felt like the warmth in her decorative belt was being trapped within her outfit and the only logical thing to do to alleviate herself was to tear back the fabric of her skirt so that the bottom half of her yukata was open now too. Essentially, without her obi keeping her festival outfit on, she'd be nude in front of the swordsman just to find some kind of relief from the heat.

"Hot?" He asked her when he finally settled on his drink. As he pulled back from the fridge, she noticed that he hadn't removed his hand from her back.

Growing exhausted from the humidity that was plaguing her, Nami groaned, "Yeah, aren't you?"

He didn't answer her with words. Instead, Zoro gently rattled the can in his hand to show her that he was craving a cold one just as much as she had been. She watched as he cracked it open with one hand and took a few hefty swigs of his beer like the fanatic he was. Curious to see if she could pull off the same trick, she pulled her can out of the crook of her neck-

"Here." Was all he said to warn her before he placed his cool, half empty beer against her exposed thigh. Nami, so startled by his indirect touch, backed herself up against the counter. The edge of it met her backside - underneath his still present hand - and compelled her to arch her body until the lining of her yukata pulled farther and farther apart over her breasts. "Wh-What are you…?"

There was a question to be asked, but she was enjoying the coldness of his touch far too much.

Since she couldn't dare to fight him off, Zoro seemed to take that as a wordless kind of permission. His fingers grabbed onto her thigh and raised it up to his waist without any formal warning. The moment he stepped in between her legs, a swirl of something sinister rolled around deep in her belly.

Nami found her need to be cooled down suddenly replaced by a darker desire to feel the heat of Zoro's skin on hers…

Until the sudden crackling of fireworks went off outside, reminding her that there was in fact a world outside of the kitchen.

"Zoro, the… festival. We have to go back." It was her weakest rebuttal if she ever heard one. Tone passive, language soft, she knew she was fighting him off with an ounce of believability. It was the craze of the humidity, she told herself, that was causing her common sense to evaporate. But when Zoro's broad chest was directly in front of her, peeking out of his own navy blue yukata and threatening to compress her against the kitchen counter, why on Earth would she push him away?

Why wouldn't she want to see what he had in mind?

Why would she repel him when he took another sip of his drink and moved in closer, bringing his lips to hers so she could have a taste of that cold, refreshing beer?

Another boom outside forced her to throw her eyes wide open, and Nami realized that there was no beer to taste, no man to manhandle her. It took her a moment to focus her vision, but she quickly realized that she was waking up in the Women's Quarters and that the setting of the heated midnight kitchen was nothing more than a dream.

"W-What?" Nami sputtered as she sat up right. The jarring difference in what she understood to be reality hit her like a ton of bricks, and her clouded mind began frantically looking around the room for the swordsman who had been with her moments ago.

"Nami?" A rather serene-sounding voice called to her while she flailed. Immediately, she knew that it wasn't Zoro, and her disappointed took over her. Nami slowly turned her neck so she could acknowledge her roommate Robin in the sitting area of their bedroom. Startled and concerned, she quickly added. "Are you all right?"

"Y-Yeah, I just," - all within a single moment, Nami went from disappointed, to sad, then angry, followed by furious and finally, she landed on being disheartened - "had a really weird dream."

"Did you want to talk about it?" offered Robin, closing her book to offer her undivided attention.

Nami rubbed her forehead as she grumbled, "No, it was just really strange. But, it did remind me of one thing." "Oh?"

"We need to buy yukata." Nami explained and she could feel the blush rising up in her cheeks as the words left her mouth…

Mouth…

Lips…

Zoro's lips had been so close to reaching hers before she woke up…!

"I-In case we go to any festivals on a summer island, or something."

"Sounds like this strange dream was rather helpful, then." Robin said, her tone hinting that she might have been amused by the conversation they were having. Then, she picked up her book and resumed to whatever passage she had been reading before she had been distracted.

Meanwhile, still sitting under a bundle of sheets in bed, Nami eyed her friend with bewilderment. 'Helpful' didn't seem like the right word to use. Not after it made her think about her crew mate - one of her oldest ones, at that! - in such a perverse way. Summertime was always coupled with spells of humidity, some even dry enough to make her feel faint. Even a summer-born child such as herself felt that there were sunny days that were insufferably hot!

But she'd never dreamt of nearly stripping herself naked in front of anyone before in a meager attempt to cool off, and she most definitely didn't dream about doing so in front of Roronoa Zoro.

It must have been because of that escapade with the ice cubes! He had shown her a side to him that had caused some kind of reaction in her. Something about the fiendish way he toyed with her and fought with her and took control made her feel...like she enjoyed that kind of behavior, especially when exhibited by him. Arguing with Zoro and pushing his buttons could almost be considered a past time for her. However, this reaction she was having to that one moment with him by her tangerine grove was nearly too much to take.

Nami threw her sheets off of her body and rose from her bed with a sigh. She felt defeated as she admitted out loud, "I'm going to take a cold bath." She knew she needed one if she had any intention of genuinely cooling herself down.

[flowers-by-the-bed]

Just ignore this it’s just for me to try and organise myself because idk what to do right now aside from cut myself up and hit my head and I’m trying my fucking best to not do that. But as always I need the knowledge that my thoughts are “out there” rather than just writing somewhere private in order to feel like it’s helped me. Not that I have much hope for that anyway. I was doing so so well, moving on, making progress, taking control of things, finding good influences to be around and getting my work done and it all gets shattered over nothing or when my meds don’t work as well as they should. Everything in my life and everything about me is so fragile and built on such fragile foundations and however stable or genuine the changes I make seem, they are nothing. Even if my mood flips again tomorrow and things magically get better, it doesn’t make my emotions any less strong right now, and it would definitely flip back to this as soon as the next stressor happens. I hate it.

I wrote out a huge post about all my feelings earlier and it made me feel better but I went to post it and the fucking connection got fucked and it deleted itself and that alone has sent me spiralling and im so upset and angry and that just says everything, i almost threw my laptop at the wall but threw my phone instead. I’ve been trying to remember what I said because it made me feel better but I just keep crying and hitting things and myself and I cannot shake it, and that’s my reality rn

_____

I’m so exhausted being me and being this mess and I don’t want to even try anymore. Whatever I do and however much I think I make progress, I always end up back in this situation with no triggers or warning. No progress or motivation is worth it because I will never be fixed or stable and there isn’t a guide to navigate this. Why should I try and move forward when within three days this can happen and I’m back at square one. Either my meds were faulty or this is just me but who the fuck cares which it is because either way I’m just a fucking incapable piece of shit. There is no reason I should flip this quickly and feel so strongly over literally nothing but tiny normal inconveniences and the level that I hate myself because of everything and just in general is too much. I hated myself anyway but EUPD moods make it so much worse and so much more intense and I literally cannot do anything close to normal functioning when this happens. My dad came round to check how I was and I cried for a while but then I was ready to try and go out the house with him, but I saw myself in the mirror and had a complete breakdown and cried in bed for hours and didn’t speak. I’m fucking pathetic but I can feel all of the fucking fat on my body everywhere and it feels like a disease, I disgust myself. I couldn’t move or even think about going outside because I couldn’t and still cant stand the thought of anyone seeing my body. It’s vile and I hate it and even when I have a few good weeks and start eating normal amounts again, seeing my body sends me back into a spiral and I regret ever eating at all. I’m crying now because it just feels like you can see the fat expand by the minute and it makes my anxiety and anger and sadness go haywire. I don’t want to try anymore I’m exhausted trying to pretend that one day I’ll get fixed and I’ll be stable enough for myself that I can lead a normal life but it just isn’t possible. I want to drop dead because this is not living. I am exhausted of my thoughts making me think of the most triggering things when I know full well I am already bad enough that I want to die and hurt myself, and just sinking lower into that spiral until I scare myself about what I’m going to do. Every single month there is something that brings me back to this place where I remember that no matter what progress I’ve made, it’s all fake and down to some fucking pills. And as soon as those get taken away, I’m back to being some pathetic waste of space and effort who’s almost 25 and unable to even control their fucking emotions even at the bare minimum level so I can function. I felt so guilty with my dad here and me just being a wreck and unable to talk or go outside. It’s pathetic. I don’t know why I deserve a head that hates me this much and can’t do it’s only fucking job. I’m tired of faking it and tired of hating myself and tired of knowing that for as long as my life lasts, this is all it’s going to be. And it isn’t a life. It isn’t fair and I don’t know why I had to end up like this. EUPD is ugly and it is vile and eventually, whenever it happens, this will be what kills me. The only things that distracted me even a little was my dad coming over and keeping me busy before I fell back into that hole and Matt messaging me, because it grounded me a little for an hour or so because it was nice to interact when it’s been months, but it didn’t work for long. Those aside, I just want to be someone else. It’s too much, I don’t know how to get my thoughts out, I can’t get the anger out even when I hurt myself or break things, it’s like drowning in self-hate to the degree that you cannot see anything else. I just want to sleep and wake up and have this whole stupid fucking disorder and brain gone or a bad dream.  It’s not hard to see why I don’t achieve anything, I will never get to my full potential because of my brain and the boat has pretty much already sailed on me achieving the things I wanted to with my work anyway. Because of how incapacitated I have always been during education because of this. It’s not hard to see why people leave, why I am too much to handle. I flip so quickly and the anger expects others to understand what’s going on when in reality I don’t have any idea either. I need validation and then I don’t want a thing from them. It’s too much. I don’t blame anyone. I blame myself. Every aspect of my life gets fucked up by my inability to control myself or my thoughts or feelings and this is just a huge fucking pity party for me to try and organise my thoughts, just so that for the rest of today, I might be able to move my head away from them now. I’m exhausted. I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m detached from 90% of the people in my life and I don’t care. I just want to hide until I drop or until just one area of my life makes sense. If I could hate myself less and not want to puke and cry and cut every time I saw my body, I’d be able to come with the sad and the angry. If I didn’t react so strongly to the smallest triggers, or felt stable, or stable in my relationships, or able to trust ANYONE, I’d be able to deal with hating myself a little better. If I didn’t read meaning into everything people say and misinterpret things, or have such a strong emotional reaction to people speaking to me or whatever then I’d have more stable relationships and I could cope better with the rest. If I didn’t have such bad anxiety affecting most of my life, the EUPD in general would be easier to control. If I didn’t feel this inability or desire to share with the people in my life who actually do care, I’d find things easier to deal with and would have an actual support system. But by my own design and suspicion and refusal to overshare and burden people directly, I’m a fucking mess. Everything hitting me at the same time, at 400% power, it incapacitates me. I wish I didn’t have a personality disorder so I knew exactly what I’m actually like, and not constantly wondering what is me and what is an illness. I wish I wasn’t anxious so I trusted people’s intentions and could be myself instead of reining myself in and being terrified of being bad at things or embarrassing myself, and never making progress with anything or anyone because of it. I wish I had a healthy relationship with food. I wish I didn’t self harm. I wish I wasn’t depressed. I just want to be someone else and be a real adult. Life is hard enough without an arsenal of chemical imbalances and broken mental Schemas. I was doing SO well and it equates to nothing. I don’t want to be a 24 year old pathetic mess of a person. It’s too much. Although I do it to myself because I’m not someone who enjoys talking directly to people about my problems and I’d never want to burden them, it’s alienating and hard to try and function without explaining what is wrong.

[maxg-longform]

Outer Wilds

A new frontier for the interactive experience

Moments in gaming which are truly ground-breaking are rare, and they are only getting rarer. A dual axiom of diminishing technological returns achieved by the jumps between console generations and the rampant predatory monetisation of the games as a service modal have had many despairing and looking to games that denounce photorealism and market trends for inspiration , in much the same way those in the art world despaired at the first cameras. As they could no longer make art more detailed technically, meaning and artistry moved from technique to statement. Why is it not photorealistic? The question posed today is the same. You could make a game that is an accurate reflection of life – or a biased reflection of a certain kind of life (Military-industrial complex funded shooters I’m looking at you) – so why have you chosen to instead create something with a particular art style? What is the combination of your narrative and design choices trying to say? 

In the case of Far Cry 5, when particular attention is paid to the fact that the cultists are under the influence of drugs for the game’s entirety in addition to Obsidian’s claims that their new game concerning corporate exploitation of space colonies is written apolitically with empathetic and ‘good’ characters on both sides, the aim is all too often to actively stop you from drawing any meaningful conclusion at all, or at the very least to give the impression that there is nothing to draw.

What is the aim of this spiel then? In reality, you don’t need context to enjoy Outer Wilds, but only within the nexus of the modern games industry can you see why I’ve grown to love it so much. It also lets me talk about the game in more abstract terms without spoiling it – as it is very hard not to spoil it in talking about it, as knowledge is the only progression system within the game. The game itself, mechanically, is very stripped back. You have a spaceship to explore the solar system with, a spacesuit with thrusters for exploring each of the planets you can land on, and a translation device, which allows you to understand the language of an ancient alien race which inhabited the solar system many years prior. The story orients you as the first of your race to explore the stars with this new translation device. Explorers has previously visited each planet in the solar system, but contact with them has been lost, and they cannot translate the language there. Your objective, insofar as you are given one, is to find them and learn about the ancient aliens. In an age where open-world games have quest markers and some, such as Skyrim, have a spell which paints a trail on the ground in the direction of the next objective, the handhold-free nature of Outer Wilds is charming and arresting.

Whenever you discover anything important, it is stored in your ship’s log at the back of your small spaceship. In a way, it reminded me of Morrowind, one of Skyrim’s forebears, with the journal giving hints as to where you ought to look, but no real help beyond collating what you already know so that you can easily reference it in future. You are free to explore any of the planets at any point, and follow any lines of inquiry you see fit. In a lesser game, this would lead to a disjointed narrative experienced so out of order that it would give Tarantino a headache. However, this leads me into talking about the level design. I could not laud any higher the way in which the planets are designed. Every planet has a dynamic twist to it you need to learn in order to be able to understand how to access information on it and each planet has areas that require you to piece together learnings from around the solar system in order to access. In every sense, the game rewards exploration and understanding as a means of progress, rather than giving you new tools and telling you how to use them. This is evident in each of the planet designs – which I will briefly explain in the order I visited them (there is no ‘proper’ order).

 Giant’s Deep 

 A swirling, green water planet with four islands, which are continually tossed around by an endless stream of cyclones which make the planet hard to navigate. The pole is protected by a ferociously large cyclone and a strong current prevents underwater exploration of a porous, but fiercely electromagnetic core. The sheer size and oppressive atmosphere is compounded by the strong gravity making it almost impossible to jump, incentivising careful exploration.

 Brittle Hollow

A hollow planet built around a black hole and beset by fiery meteors from its volcanic moon. With an inhospitable surface, much of the challenge comes from discovering how others adapted to these conditions previously, and how to use the gravity of the black hole to navigate a planet that slowly falls apart and disintegrates as the game goes on due to the constant meteor bombardment.

 The Wanderer

A frozen comet with an elliptical orbit that takes it within a lethal range of the sun, and covered in mysterious ‘ghost matter.’

 The Hourglass Twins

Two planets orbiting each other as they orbit the sun. One starts as a bare rock with many caves to explore; the other as a perfectly round desert planet, with absolutely zero to explore. Then, a large column of sand starts flowing through space from the desert planet ‘Ash Twin’ to the bare one, ‘Ember Twin.’ This means areas of each planet are only accessible at certain times, and you need to beware of the sand level when exploring caves.

 Dark Bramble

A planet consisting purely of thorny branches wrapped around a core that pulses with white light. Enter the hole, and caverns that bend the laws of space and time fill massive areas within. A Tardis of horrors, this planet scared me like no jump scares could. A truly eerie vibe – a memorable and haunting level unlike anything I’d ever played before.

 While every one of these planets is in its own way unique and memorable, as are the moments when you discover how to access parts of them you couldn’t before – the best example of the game’s genius comes in the form of a location known as the Quantum moon. Before you go to this location, there are three pieces of key knowledge you need. Without them, you shouldn’t even be able to land on it. Nevertheless, I accidentally managed to land on it early in the game. However, because I hadn’t yet solved how to get into the tower of Quantum knowledge on Brittle Hollow, I didn’t understand how to access where I wanted to go. The moon has a secretive ‘Sixth Location’ you wish to explore, but every time I tried to leave the control room, the way was blocked by rocks until the moon moved back to one of the five locations in our solar system. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I was following a different lead on another planet that I figured out how to avoid the rocks, and also where I needed to go once I had made it out.

The game is filled with eureka moments, and the lack of handholding makes you feel like you have genuinely accomplished something when you solve a puzzle. For example, I discovered a much quicker shortcut to a key area called the Black Hole Forge. The game doesn’t penalise you for this; much of the beauty of the game comes in the journey. Translating the alien scriptures in each area contains hints as to the overarching story – which I won’t in any way spoil, except that it is moving, inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measure – but also contains deeply personal stories about the people who made these structures, these homes, these technologies. The tension among the clan as they tried debated their plans to achieve what they came to our solar system for. The romance and feeling amongst those who worked on their projects. The jubilation of breakthroughs and the let-downs of defeat. The struggle for life and the joys of overcoming the hostile worlds of the system. The heart-wrenching story of the Quantum moon. All pieced together in bitesize chunks, out of sequence, displaced. Abstractions anthropomorphised because we don’t know enough about them to truly contextualise them. You never even find out what these aliens looked like. But you discover their hopes, their aims, their dreams and their death – as you, the traveller from an antique land, stare at the vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Rather purposefully, I have been abstract in my descriptions and generalised the experience. In a game where knowledge is the means of progression, and real detail would be a spoiler, and its best to come into this game blind. So, I’ve chosen to focus on the feeling the game instils in you. It has a charming art direction, understated yet distinctive music that complements every area perfectly and a real warmth and passion that oozes from every pixel. In a world where every new innovation is immediately copied and run into the ground by every game in the same genre – the camp clearing from Far Cry 3 is now a chore in every vaguely open world game- or climbing the conveniently placed towers to gain map vision a la Assassin’s Creed – or that very same game series doing its very best Witcher 3 impression in Origins and Odyssey – there is an incorruptible heart to Outer Wilds. There will be games inspired by it, no doubt, but there won’t be other games that weaponise knowledge in quite the same way, or use it to explore the same themes. It’s a game about futility, about facing death but choosing to explore and challenge yourself and improve and, most importantly, to enjoy the little things and cherish the detail, to find pieces of light in that endless, futile dark.  

Games like this have always been few and far between, and are becoming even rarer now. That’s why it’s essential we cherish games like Outer Wilds. There is no formula for creating a masterpiece but when a game really connects with you, you know it, you feel it. My list of favourite games I’d consider a masterpiece is quite incongruent – SSX 3, Tony Hawk’s Underground, Assassins Creed 2, Halo 4 to pick out a few of the rather different ones –  but Outer Wilds has topped all of them, and I only spent around 12 hours with it. It strips gaming back to its essentials, while bringing new ideas to the table and presenting them in charming and arresting ways. You will never have another 12 hours like it. Its heart, soul and message are inimitable, and I sincerely urge you to open up to it and give it a try.

10/10

Played on Xbox - the game is available through Xbox Game Pass

@CoreLineage on twitter

[maddie-grove]

Bi-Monthly Reading Round-Up: March/April

PLAYLIST

“Hey, Little Songbird” from Hadestown (The Wager)

“New Slang” by the Shins (Spinners)

“Auto de Fé” from Candide (October Wind)

“Let’s Generalize about Men” from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure)

“Juice” by Lizzo (Shrill)

“Love’s Been Good to Me” by Frank Sinatra (Sex and Violence)

“Heroes” by David Bowie (Cracker Jackson)

“Listen to Her Heart” by Tom Petty and the Hearbreakers (The Cybil War)

“Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed (The T.V. Kid)

“Distant Shores” by Chad and Jeremy (Love’s Willing Servant)

“Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?” by the Mountain Goats (The Cartoonist)

“Ghost World” by Aimee Mann (Summer of the Swans)

“Floating Vibes” by Surfer Blood (Not the Duke’s Darling)

BEST OF THE BI-MONTH

The Wager by Donna Jo Napoli (2010): Don Giovanni de la Fortuna, a nineteen-year-old nobleman in medieval Sicily, loses his entire fortune to a tidal wave and soon finds himself on the brink of starvation. That’s when the Devil comes knocking with an offer: endless money for the rest of his life if he doesn’t bathe, cut his hair, shave, or change his clothes for three years, three months, and three days. This is a retelling of a lesser-known Sicilian fairy tale and, next to the sublime Breath, it’s Napoli’s best work. Instead of taking the easy route of making Don Giovanni a stupid brat who learns to be nicer and more frugal, she complicates things by making him sweet and resourceful from the beginning, as well as callow and somewhat thoughtless. (His first action after seeing the damage wrought by the tidal wave is to go out and help bury the dead for three straight days.) This makes the message of the book more powerful; if someone deep-down good and intelligent can stand to think more about others and help the less fortunate, then clearly that lesson applies to everyone, not just the worst sort of rich people. Don Giovanni’s unprocessed grief over his long-dead parents and longing for human connection are also very affecting.

WORST OF THE BI-MONTH

Spinners by Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Tchen (1999): In medieval-ish Scotland, a poor tailor longs to marry his sweetheart, a spinner, but her father will only consent if the tailor can show he’ll be a good provider. The tailor tries to make a dress that appears to be made of gold and succeeds; however, he still loses his sweetheart to a rich miller and his health to a magic spinning wheel (as one does). Years later, the sweetheart’s daughter, now a skilled spinner in her own right, finds herself in trouble when a king gets the wrong impression about her being able to spin straw into gold. File this one under “cool idea, half-assed execution.” After a certain point, Napoli seems to run out of her own ideas and just follows “Rumpelstiltskin” to its original conclusion. This wouldn’t be great for any fairy-tale retelling, but the ludicrous “Rumpelstiltskin” needs more reworking than most. Also, the tailor’s sweetheart is such an ableist tool! I’d get it if she chose the rich miller out of concern for financial security, but she just dumps the tailor because the magic spinning wheel basically gave him a supernatural stroke and she thinks it made him evil? You can do better, baby!

REST OF THE BI-MONTH

The Cartoonist by Betsy Byars (1978): Alfie Mason, a quiet eleven-year-old, takes refuge from his unhappy family in the tiny attic of his ramshackle house, drawing faintly absurd cartoons. Then his ne’er-do-well older brother Bubba loses his job, prompting a way-too-excited Mrs. Mason to decide to renovate the attic into a bedroom...so Alfie barricades himself in the attic and throws the family into chaos without saying a word. I first read this book when I was eleven, and even then I found it deeply upsetting. Mrs. Mason seems incapable of seeing anyone but Bubba as a full human being, and she never regrets hurting Alfie or her daughter Alma in order to benefit her eldest. The best Alfie and Alma can do is call her out on it--Alfie through his silent protest, Alma by finally standing up for herself and her little brother--and try to move on. It’s certainly an unvarnished message for a middle-grade novel, but it’s not a bad one, given that some parents are just like that.

Shrill by Lindy West (2016): In this memoir, Lindy West reflects on her personal experiences with fatphobia, the general strangeness of having a human body, abortion, the ethics of comedy, and Internet trolls, among other subjects. This book was genuinely inspiring and amusing to me at a time when I greatly needed a lot of confidence and some laughs, and for that I am eternally grateful. The humor can feel very social-media-circa-2015, but there are worse things than a book capturing a specific moment.

Cracker Jackson by Betsy Byars (1985): Eleven-year-old “Cracker” Jackson Hunter realizes that Alma, his beloved former babysitter, is being physically abused by her husband. Even though his divorced parents forbid it and Alma herself warns him against angering her husband, he tries his best to help her, with mixed results. By all rights, this middle-grade novel should be a tonal mess--Jackson and his best friend Goat get involved in some legit Wacky Schemes--but instead it’s a moving portrait of a kid who has to deal with gut-wrenching adult realities while also navigating sixth-grade drama. I also loved Jackson’s three parental figures. They’re all flawed--Jackson’s mom is a worrywart about stuff that doesn’t matter, his dad can’t hold a conversation with him without lapsing into Dracula impressions, and Alma sometimes treats him more like a peer than a kid--but they all clearly care about him and try to make things okay. 

Not the Duke’s Darling by Elizabeth Hoyt (2018): Years ago, a horrific murder and a dubious attempt at revenge tore apart the lives of Christopher Renshawe and Lady Freya de Moray. Now he’s a widowed duke with severe claustrophobia and a blackmailer on his case, while she’s an undercover spy for a secret society of Scottish witches who help women. (Awesome.) (Also some of them are lesbians.) When they end up at the same house party, she vows to keep hating him for wronging her family, but does that last long? No, because they’re reasonably good at communicating and can appreciate each other’s goals! This spooky Georgian romance didn’t knock my socks off, but it’s a good start to Hoyt’s new Greycourt series and it has a light touch with the serious issues it handles.

Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan (2019): Violetta Beauchamps, a sixty-nine-year-old* bookkeeper, is cheated out of her pension by her landlord boss. In desperation, she hatches her own retirement plan: swindling Bertrice Martin, a wealthy seventy-three-year-old widow, by pretending to be her insolvent nephew’s landlady. Bertrice has refused to pay her nephew’s debts on principle, but she’s willing to make an exception if Violetta will help pester him into vacating his lodgings. Shenanigans and old-lady romance ensue. This mid-Victorian-set romance novella is like an ambiguous image (for example: that picture that’s either a vase or two faces in profile). Look at it as the tale of two L.M.-Montgomery-style elderly women falling in love, and it’s delightful; look at it for deep social commentary, and it’s pretty simplistic and sometimes even callous. I enjoyed it, but it only works on certain levels.

Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars (1970): Lately, fourteen-year-old Sara Godfrey has been feeling awkward and out of charity with everyone: her absentee father, her plainspoken aunt, her beautiful older sister, the other kids at school, and even her little brother Charlie, who has been mostly nonverbal and easily disoriented since sustaining serious brain damage during a childhood illness. When Charlie goes missing in the night, though, her only thought is to find him. Despite loving Byars, I avoided this Newberry winner as a kid because it looked kind of boring. It is a little sedate in a classic-American-coming-of-age-story way--part “The Scarlet Ibis,” part Judy Blume--but I still loved Sara, who is always ready to throw down, and I found the depiction of Charlie to be surprisingly sensitive for the time. (The language is outdated, but the passages from Charlie’s POV aren’t condescending, plus he isn’t killed off, as I initially feared.) The descriptions of the coal-ravaged West Virginia countryside are also very evocative.

The TV Kid by Betsy Byars (1974): Lenny, a preteen living with his single mom at the kitschy Kentucky motel she owns, struggles in school and has no friends. (His family moves around a lot and he probably has a learning disability.) He has two sources of solace: watching TV and sneaking into the abandoned lake houses in his neighborhood. One day, though, his favorite hobbies get him into trouble. This was one of my favorite Byars books as a kid, even though I was not familiar with the TV landscape of 1974. I liked it a little less this time, but not because it was dated; instead, I was disconcerted by how pro-getting-bitten-by-a-rattlesnake it is. Also, a significant portion of the story is devoted to a child suffering horrible pain from a snakebite, which is harder to take as an adult reader. Still, it’s got some of that classic Byars melancholy.

The Cybil War by Betsy Byars (1981): Eleven-year-old Simon has had a crush on his classmate Cybil for years, because she does awesome stuff like advocate for more active roles for girls in the yearly school pageants. He’s not inspired to act on his feelings, though, until his awful best friend Tony decides he likes Cybil and starts talking shit to her about Simon. There’s a lot to like about this book. Cybil, with her nonchalant confidence and kindness, is a wonderful character, and Simon’s thorough admiration for her is adorable. I also like how Byars ties Simon’s complicated feelings about his deadbeat dad to his efforts to navigate small-scale fifth-grade drama; both weigh heavily on him, and Byars is never condescending about this. Yet the book’s not Byars’s best, mostly because of the lack of generosity towards Cybil’s fat friend Harriet and, to a lesser extent, Tony. 

Sex and Violence by Carrie Mesrobian (2013): Seventeen-year-old Evan doesn’t do serious relationships, instead preferring to hook up with girls and ghost them when he starts having feels. (His family moves around a lot and he’s got some trauma.) Then one girl’s jealous ex orchestrates a horrific assault on them both, leading Evan’s distant widowed dad to take his traumatized son back to their Minnesota hometown. It turns out okay. I liked this novel a lot more once I accepted it as an intentionally messy coming-of-age novel, rather than an issue novel...but it was still a little too messy for its own good. I felt like I was supposed to condemn Evan for having casual sex, something that’s both morally neutral and natural enough for a teen who moves every year, yet the narrative all but endorses his contempt for lower-class girls. I was also uncomfortable with the revelation that Evan was a survivor of statutory rape. It seemed like he was being punished by the narrative only for hyper-sexuality that clearly stemmed from trauma--with a physical assault with some strong sexual implications, no less--but let off the hook for his thoughtless middle-class-boy prejudices. I did feel for him, though, and that carried me through most of the book.

October Wind by Susan Wiggs (1991): In late-fifteenth-century Spain,  Cristóbal Colón (aka Christopher Columbus) tries to convince Queen Isabella to fund a westward expedition. Meanwhile, nobleman Joseph Sarmiento learns an enormous secret about his background and must decide whether to alter the course of his life. During this time, Rafael Viscaino, a young scribe, strives to rise in the world while his friends, aspiring doctor Catalina and cheerful but troubled half-Roma Santiago, have their own struggles. This historical novel (which just barely qualifies as a romance) has a lot of potential, but it wastes too much time on Columbus and Isabella, plus it gives them more credit than they deserve. Wiggs should’ve focused on Joseph, the sexiest and most likable character, and made more of his eventual relationship with Anacaona, a Guanahani woman. Or else she should’ve just made it a poly romance with Rafael/Catalina/Santiago, which she comes this close to doing.

Love’s Willing Servant by Avis Worthington (1980): Left penniless by her father and betrayed by her childhood sweetheart, Lettice Clifford decides to take herself to her sister’s home in colonial Virginia and get a rich husband. She’s surprised to find herself sharing a ship with Geoffrey Finch, a neighbor who has been betrayed by his evil twin and sold into indentured servitude. When his indenture ends up getting bought by her brother-in-law, they grow closer, but multiple creepy people and Bacon’s Rebellion threaten their love. Maybe I’ve just seen too much, but I was pleasantly surprised by the relative inoffensiveness of this Old School romance. Geoffrey is a reasonable person, there’s not a sexual assault every other chapter, and the racism issues are more “the black characters should be more central” than “this is just a defense of slavery” or “calm down with the n-word, Quentin Tarantino.” These small mercies aside, I also enjoyed the absolutely bonkers plot and the use of historical details. I didn’t care much for Lettice, though, because she’s usually either boring or kind of a dick. 

*Nice.

[baenxietydad]

Bae Mu-yeol/Marlin Bae Personality Profile

Slytherin Primary, Ravenclaw Secondary, Hufflepuff Secondary Performance - Type 5 - ISFJ-T - Neutral Good - Taurus Sun, Aquarius Moon, Libra Rising

Psychoanalyzing Marlin is interesting because there exists two Marlins - if not three - inside the same person at the same time. There’s the Marlin that he originally grew up to be and in some ways still is underneath all the layers of grief and trauma that have warped him into a different kind of person as a base, and that warped version of him has been further twisted by both himself and all of the lies he’s telling Nemo, and by fairy society’s stipulations for being allowed the safety of a Hollow.

 To talk about Marlin, you have to talk about him like Shrek. Bitch got layers. And all of his layers are there for a reason. Some are like a peacoat, worn mostly for the Look ™ , but kept safely in the coat closet when not necessary. Others are are permanent as the bones beneath his skin.

 What is your character’s Hogwarts House/Hogwarts Houses? What trait do they most relate to? What trait do they least relate to? 

 Slytherin Primary, Ravenclaw secondary, with a Hufflepuff Secondary Model (or Performance hm)

 Y’all. I straight wasn’t even gonna touch Sorting Hat chats because it honestly confused/es the hell out of me. But I braved it and holy COW did I come up with some stuff for Marlin! Actually. It more jumped out at ME like “HEY HELLO YES.” So now here’s my super extra ™ analysis.

 I initially through Marlin was a Ravenclaw Primary with a Puff Secondary, but it quickly became clear to me that a bitch was way off.

 The below excerpt from Sorting Hat Chats is what made me realize Marlin was very much a Slytherin primary.

 A Slytherin does not generally feel guilty for valuing themselves [...] or for sacrificing other things for the safety and happiness of the people they love […] An exception to this is a Slytherin who’s managed to kick themselves out of their inner circle. For whatever reason, they don’t feel like they deserve their own help or kindness. Their “me and mine” priorities are still apparent but now it’s only “mine.” They fiercely and selflessly prioritize the individuals they love, value, or feel responsible for, while excluding their own self.

 Marlin’s “mine” is only one person right now. His son, Nemo. Nemo is his entire world and everything he has done since losing his wife has been in an attempt to keep Nemo safe and make him happy. Marlin is perfectly content with living a lonely existence in a Hollow where few fairies want much to do with him, if it means Nemo is safe. He misses his parents, cousins, siblings, and friends from his Hollow in South Korea, but he feels no guilt for literally ditching all of them to whisk Nemo away to Swynlake’s Hollow because he deemed Swynlake a safer place to raise his son.

 As a Constructed House, Slytherins build a morality system to follow and make judgements with. Unlike the Ravenclaw, who holds this built system at the heart of the way they interact with life, this is a supplemental thing for the Slytherin. Their core morality is felt, an empathic need to protect and support their own, but that strong sense of personal loyalty gives little hint about what to do in situations that don’t involve the Slytherin’s people directly.

 Marlin’s self-sacrificing nature led me to believe he’d be a Hufflepuff at first. But it soon became clear to me that Marlin would only help the bleeding man on the road to Jericho if doing so would not cause any harm or any potential for harm to his “mine”, to Nemo. If presented with the hypothetical of pulling a lever to heal all the sick in the world at the cost of Nemo, Marlin wouldn’t pull the lever and would not at all regret it. While Nemo would probably beg his father to trade him to the literal rest of the world, Marlin would never even consider it.

 Regarding his Ravenclaw secondary which I thought was his Primary:

Ravenclaws’ efficacy often relies on what situation they are in: what the problem is they have to solve and whether or not they’ve prepared the proper tools for that problem. [...] Do they know how to ride horses? Speak Greek? Do they have contingency plans for earthquakes, zombie apocalypses, or a surprise visit from the in-laws?

 If they’ve already built themselves a tool set for a situation, they’re likely to excel at it. If they have not, they’re likely to blink a few times while they try to either invent something new for themselves or to cobble up something approximate from their existing resources.

 Marlin is a jack of many trades and a master of few. He has a wide set of skills he’s picked up largely out of necessity. In order to make enough human money to pay for his son’s dance classes, Marlin has to occasionally find work outside of the Hollow. Over the years he’s done yardwork, has worked some construction jobs, was a seasonal laborer on a farm in Besydus, occasionally works with temp agency in NTO primarily at banquet halls, and has thrown himself into learning new skill sets all the time because he needed the money to make Nemo happy.

 While he’s learned few of these skill sets to perfection, he learned them well enough to get what he needed. 

 Socially, Marlin can navigate the social politics of fairy society and talk with humans about topics he’s versed in - literature, music, East Asian particularly Korean culture, philosophy - but he would (figuratively) die if asked if he supported Liverpool or Manchester.

 He isn’t an improviser at his core, he likes to have a plan, but he can sometimes improvise by pulling on his previous knowledge. 

 As for his Performance/Model of Hufflepuff Secondary. Fairies are communists. They put community first. And Marlin is a very bad fairy communist. He values him and his above the rest of the community. His being his son. And having lived in mundus Seoul for years with his wife, he became accustomed to treating community as important but not the end all be all. But in order to keep being allowed to live in the Hollow, he’s crafted a nice respectable fairy of himself.

What is your character’s Enneagram? How does the “basic fear/desire” influence their actions? 

 Enneagram Type 5w6 - The Problem Solver

Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated

Basic Fear: Being useless, helpless, or incapable

Basic Desire: To be capable and competent

 Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation.

 Honestly, this Type 5 page read Marlin for filth, y’all. I believe that this is probably the most...consistent one. Meaning, he’d still have been this personality type even if he hadn’t lost his wife and developed the depression, PTSD, and anxiety following that. Because while current!Marlin has given into isolation most, ideal!Marlin would have more of a nihilist streak, and both versions of Marlin are/would be quite eccentric. 

 Negative-to-neutral qualities of Type 5s would have manifested in less severe ways in Marlin without his big trauma, but have just run wild in him now. 

 The basic fear and desire bit is interesting because like. Marlin in the state he is now literally only cares about Nemo and taking care of him. Untainted Marlin was just so vibrant and chased after several interests outside of his son, but now, he only cares about being a good father. So literally every action is an attempt to be good to Nemo because that’s the only thing, to him, he is even capable of being good or bad at is being Nemo’s father. He has no worth or purpose apart from raising his son. 

What is your character’s MBTI? Out of the four elements, which is strongest and which is weakest? 

 MBTI: ISFJ-T- The Defender

Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others. - Brian Tracy

 I- 81%

S - 51 %

F - 60%

J - 69% (nice)

T - 68%

 Damn, so honestly I feel like Marlin’s personality type either changed over the years, or, his inclination toward certain traits changed. Particularly, the introvert v. extrovert one. Marlin has always leaned more toward the introvert side, however, 81% is high for Marlin in his natural ,untraumatized state.

 He has always been someone who needed to rest after being extra social and recharge, but he used to genuinely enjoy things like parties, events, concerts, and even hosting groups of people at his and So-yeon’s home. Like, I’d say he naturally would exist at about 60% introversion, but because of over a decade of isolation and extreme loneliness on top of his depression and PTSD amplifying his need to not be too drained too often by other people/fairies, it’s got him at over 80% now.

 His lowest being  Sensing v. Intuition at 51% toward the Sensing side honestly tracks. Because he does lean more toward that side but not strongly. He’s damn near in the middle here. From myersbriggs.org, 

Sensing (S)

 Paying attention to physical reality, what I see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. I'm concerned with what is actual, present, current, and real. I notice facts and I remember details that are important to me. I like to see the practical use of things and learn best when I see how to use what I'm learning. Experience speaks to me louder than words.

 And

 Intuition (N)

 Paying the most attention to impressions or the meaning and patterns of the information I get. I would rather learn by thinking a problem through than by hands-on experience. I'm interested in new things and what might be possible, so that I think more about the future than the past. I like to work with symbols or abstract theories, even if I don't know how I will use them. I remember events more as an impression of what it was like than as actual facts or details of what happened.

 Marlin leans toward the first just barely. 

What is your character’s moral alignment? How does this affect their decision-making process? What about their relationships to authority, their family, their friends? 

 Projection: Lawful Neutral

Self: Neutral Good

 Fairy society is Lawful Neutral and you can’t change my mind:

 Lawful neutral is the philosophy that law and order are desirable ends in and of themselves. It is a philosophy of pure equitistic collectivism. This philosophy holds that the best way for all beings to pursue a rational self-interest is within the framework of a strong social order. By putting the needs of the state or social order ahead of individual desires, each being can advance the self-interest of the collective as a whole. Lawful neutral can also be associated with ethical equitism and natural law philosophies. As the philosophical "average" of altruism and egoism, equitism holds that harm to others should be minimized when advancing the self and that harm to the self should be minimized when advancing others.

 Lawful neutral philosophers generally maintain that there is metaphysical order in the multiverse and thus may support doctrines of hard determinism, predeterminism, fatalism, predestination, and/or necessitarianism. They may believe in fate or destiny. They tend to be moral objectivists, holding that values exist in the external world independently of and external to our comprehension of them; that they can be found and known; and that they must be used as principles for human judgments and conduct.

 Marlin himself, however, is Neutral Good, which can sometimes conflict with expectations from fairy society.

 Neutral good is the philosophy that goodness should be advanced by using whatever means provide the most benefit. It is a philosophy of altruistic consequentialism. This philosophy holds that people should behave altruistically and balance the needs of the collective as a whole and the needs of the individuals making up the collective. Neutral good can also be associated with act utilitarianism and ethical altruism.

 Neutral good philosophers generally maintain that there is metaphysical balance in the multiverse and thus may support doctrines of soft determinism, pragmatism, conventionalism, and/or instrumentalism. They may believe in free will or choice. They could also embrace skepticism or suspend judgment on philosophical issues. They tend to be moral relativists, holding that values differ from society to society, from person to person; that they are conditioned by the peculiarities of the society in which they arise; that they are not universally applicable at all times or in all places; and that they are correct or incorrect, desirable or undesirable only relative to whether or not they conform to a common norm or to common acceptance.

What is your character’s sun house? What trait do they most relate to? What do they least relate to? 

 Taurus Sun short description:

 He is strong-willed. He has charm, and he is tolerant and stoical. He likes pleasure and the

good things in life. Appreciates the Arts.

 Weaknesses: obstinacy, laziness. He can be materialistic.

 Aquarius Moon short description:

He is sociable, intelligent, and lucid. Thanks to great sociability, he has many friends. He is

modern, original, inventive, non-conformist, and is likely to bring new life to everything he does.

Potential issues: He is eccentric with sharp mood swings. Complex love life.

 Ascendant is Libra

 Everybody seems to like Libra Ascendant natives. They just come across as nice, pleasant, and fair. Look a little closer at their lives, and these nice people may have had quite a few problems in their relationships. Some of them have had a string of relationships, and it can be hard to imagine why! These natives attract others to them effortlessly. Besides, they simply don't know what to do with themselves without a significant other. Libra rising generally appear to be smoothing everything over. They have charming smiles, a gentle approach with others, and an easygoing image. Even if they were not endowed with good looks, they are attractive. Most pay a lot of attention to their personal appearance -- the colors they wear, their hair, the way they walk. 

HONESTLY. Marlin’s entire natal chart read him for filth. 

 Like

 -81 Opposition between the Sun and Lilith

There is a self-destructive side to you that should be managed by confronting your fears.

 FFS this is an ATTACK.