#but. i will say. i struggle with not writing horrifically long sentences and the point of this assignment was to be understandable

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

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[suksatoru]

004. CARNATIONS

"Oh my."

You squint at the paper in your hands and try to decipher the words Touya had written on them with a wince. The letters were jumbled up—some of them didn't even resemble anything in the alphabet. The majority of the words you were able to understand were spelt wrong, and the proportion from one letter to the next was horrific.

"We'll work on your writing skills later this week, alright? But I'm proud you could get this much down! " You say with a smile as Touya snorts

"There's only one word I know I spelt right." He smirks, proudly pointing a finger to a sentence you'd missed towards the bottom of the page

Y/n L/n is beyutiful.

You laugh quietly as his smirk quickly transforms into a scowl. His poor attempt at flirting didn't really seem to work if you were laughing at him.

"Are you talking about how you wrote my name correctly? Because its spelling is clearly displayed on my name tag, Touya."

You can only laugh more at his grimace, folding the written paper in half before tucking it into his file folder to go over later.

"And thank you I suppose. Oh, I just wanted to let you know I won't be able to go on our walk today, Touya. I have a meeting with my supervisor. Would you like me to find another doctor for you to—"

"No. And what's the meeting about?"

You shake your head softly at his defiance before smiling

"You. You are my only patient, after all."

He smiles a little bit at those words.

The conversation slowly drifted to Touya giving you small snippets of the skills he had to learn after waking up all those years ago. By the end of the conversation though, his mood had fallen quite a bit. He didn't like talking about his past. The words were bitter on his tongue, but he forced them out for you. He wanted you to understand him—he needed you to.

"I couldn't understand what happened to me. I had so much shit going for me... so much potential. Then I went and fucked it all up. You know, I blamed him for how I turned out, but I think I was messed up from the start. Can't blame that piece of shit if I was born like this. Defected. " He mutters, his eyes hard as his nails dig into his palm.

Defected. He swears under his breath when he sees the blood trickling down his arm from clenching his fist too tightly. His gaze moves towards you when he feels your fingers press a soft cloth to his hand to soak up the blood. You clear your throat before speaking

"You're no defect." You start firmly

"No one is. You had these terrible expectations set for you when you were so young. You can't possibly blame yourself for what happened! So many young children struggle with their quirk, and you weren't fortunate enough to get the help you deserved. That is not your fault—"

"But I could've been better. If I worked hard enough. Fuck, it might have all been my fault from the start!" He laughs hoarsely, and his eyes have a crazed look in them as he actually considers the possibility

"But—"

"Maybe if I had just—"

"Touya!"

Your voice is strained. You're trying so hard not to let him hear the tremble in your voice, but the way his shoulders slump lets you know he had caught it. He looks away, his lips set in a firm line as his eyes harden

"I don't want to talk about this." He mutters. Every muscle in his body was tense as a feeling of unease settled over him.

"I'm sorry. It's my fault. I'm being too pushy about this." You sigh, frowning as you lean back in your seat. You were his doctor, you can't be the one having an emotional crisis! You were meant to be his emotional support, and the guilt you feel gnaws at you like a parasite.

He lets out a long sigh, shifting on the bed uncomfortably as you take a deep breath

"Okay—alright, we can talk about something else. Is there anything besides this on your mind? Maybe we could—"

"Can I be alone for a bit? Can you, just, leave?"

The look on your face is like a slap to his face. He bites his tongue from saying anything he'd regret as your eyes fill with a mix of something between sadness and disappointment.

"Yes—yes of course. Uhm, would you still like to eat dinner together tonight?"

"I just need some time alone. My head hurts. It's my fault, it's never yours. Just... yeah, yeah you can come later." He mumbles, avoiding your gaze as his guilt finally hits him

"...Okay."

Your whisper is the last thing he hears before the door to his room clicks close, and when he lifts his head from his palms—the room is empty.

Touya doesn't know if he'll ever be able to face his family again.

He thought he couldn't feel anything anymore. The pain he'd once felt was immeasurable, something uncontainable to the point where he'd grown numb and accustomed to it. But now he felt all sorts of things he didn't understand. You made him feel again. He wasn't sure if he should curse you out or thank you for it.

Your long awaited return came after almost two hours, his dinner tray in hand as you carefully placed the steaming rice bowl in front of him. You stand beside his bed with an awkward smile, your hands behind your back as you speak a quiet hi.

He tugs on your sleeve, pulling you down so you were seated on your chair. A quiet squeak leaves the back of your throat when he tucks a single hand under your thigh, dragging your chair closer to him easily with little effort. Your eyes are wide from the new proximity as he turns back to his food, acting like nothing had happened.

You're speechless for a moment, swallowing the lump in your throat as he begins his dinner. He points to your bowl with his chopsticks, gently nudging it towards you

"You hungry?"

He had broken the ice so easily—and you both fell back into your usual routine. An unspoken 'it's ok' was what he'd said as he handed you your bowl. You blow on the hot rice with a small smile as he begins questioning you about your meeting, asking whether or not you said good things about him.

You shouldn't like this so much.

Your chin is resting on your knees, you laugh as Touya tells you tales about the League. They were a unique group—but knowing Touya wasn't completely alone during his time as "Dabi" makes your heart feel a little lighter.

He speaks about the League as if they were still here. Fondly.

Your eyes catch onto the clock on his bedside, the block letters on them reading 11:32 PM. Your time with him had passed faster than you wished—and he watches you stretch before you stand

"Time for you to turn in for the night, mister." You smile with a yawn. He frowns a bit as he glances at the clock, watching you reach over and grab the empty bowls from dinner.

"I'll take this down to the kitchen. You wash up while I'm gone, all right?" You smile, holding the tray in your hands as Touya nods slowly, not giving you a verbal response.

When the door closes, he gets off the bed with a quiet sigh. Even after splashing his face with freezing water—his heart still hurts.

You were making him feel a little too much.

His mind keeps trailing back to your soft giggles and the way your professional face falls with the stupidly silly stories he tells you of the League.

He wonders if they'd be happy for him.

Touya hears your approaching footsteps as he's exiting the bathroom, and quickly opens the main room door for you.

You look surprised when the door opens before you can even get your keys out. You have to crane your head up a bit to meet his eyes—which are watching you intently.

Sometimes you forget how Touya's much taller than you are. He's usually at eye level with you when he's sitting in the hospital bed—but as he stands in front of the open door, your lips part a bit from the way he looms over you.

He silently moves over a bit to give you space to enter before closing the door behind you. You send him a small smile before tilting your head towards his bed

"I'll check your heart rate before I leave tonight. That's ok with you, right?"

Your eyes are pretty. Touya thinks if he ever has a staring competition with you, he'd win for sure. He likes staring at you especially when you're unaware. There's something about just knowing you exist that calms him. He likes seeing you smile, he likes hearing you talk—he especially loves that you seem to enjoy his company. He didn't think of himself as someone enjoyable to be around, but he feels wanted around you.

Touya's never felt wanted before. You were so refreshing to simply be around—he'd be perfectly content with living the rest of his life with only you. He didn't need or want anyone else.

"Yeah. That's fine with me."

Touya waits for you on the edge of his bed, his eyes trailing on you quietly as you wrap a stethoscope around your neck. The cold metal is pressed against his chest, and he realizes you've never been this close to him before.

"Touya, your heartbeat is a little faster than it should be." You frown, leaning in closer as he stays absolutely silent—he's been holding his breath since the moment you pressed the stethoscope to his skin

He's staring at you, and his heart only beats faster when you turn to meet his gaze.

No. Your eyes are beautiful.

He abruptly flicks off the lamp on his bedside table, which was the only source of light in the dark room before immediately laying himself down on the bed—his heart was pounding now.

"I'm fine."

He can already imagine your lips forming that adorable 'O' you make when you're startled, and he rests his forearm against his eyes before letting out a steadying breath.

"Oh! Well, are you sure Touya? Your vitals this morning were fine, so—"

"Y/n."

Your silence, for once, was a welcomed thing. His face was burning—every fiber of his being was. He didn't think he'd be able to go another second listening to your wonderful voice utter another damned word.

You whisper a quiet goodnight before leaving.

He stares up at the ceiling, the glowing stars almost mocking him as he sighs

"Goodnight."

You've already left the room, but he whispers the word anyway.

CARNATIONS MASTERLIST.

a/n~ i was listening to taylor swift on repeat while writing this... safe to say she is my fuel when it comes to writing for carnations heh. AND WOWW SO MANY ON THE TAGLIST?! u guys are now my children i've chosen to adopt you all!!! it's getting a little hard to keep track of but i got this 🫡

@kelin-is-writing

@kawaiidemoneart @porusuniverse @starrmage @lilbeatlebear @bokukenmakuroo

@bbluefllame @summercreolefanfictioner @dija200 @phtmmsqrde @sunaraii

@c-lunette @gh0stgirl333 @skullkittens @gurl-pls-evn-the-sharks-fear-me

@hawkwithsocks @suresnips @sugurusmoon @matchablossomsss @moonlitmorganite

@redr0sewrites @muimuiwisteria @sukunaspillow @marsoverthestars @starsryi

@eidolonwriter @shugs1801 @imaginationmess @lasa27 @sophiathefrog

@etaerealboy @kooromin @sourbbyxo @hvnares @ephmeraloblivion

@lost-seraphiim @quokka-ina @jesuschrist2006 @jesuschrist2006

@dabislittlemouse (i got u B!!)

[pretentious-librarian]

ACOTAR Review

Unfortunately, I was not able to evade that cursed woman for as long as I had hoped. She got me, exploiting my greatest weakness in the way her own characters are exploited by that very same weakness throughout the book: fucking love. My best friend, the love of my life, has fallen victim to Sarah J. Maas and in her obsession she has forcibly dragged me down with her. Now that I think about it, my best friend is quite literally the only thing that could ever make me pick up a SJM book. So in the name of love, I subjected myself to booktok's finest (which isn't saying much given booktok's reputation) and here are my thoughts, namely the ones I couldn't bring myself to voice to my friend. After all, the whole point of even reading this in the first place was so that she could have someone to talk about it with. While I am not above pointing out it's flaws to her, I don't have it in me to spite the very thing she gets so much joy out of as deeply as I would've wanted to. Besides, who am I to talk as a Twilight enjoyer when I know damn well that series was a beloved dumpster fire just as much as ACOTAR is. And honestly, her love for the series and my love for her has dissolved some of my bias and frankly, distaste, for the book. And now on to the review.

Disclaimers: Spoilers, ADHD ramblings and tangents, ungodly amounts of pretentiousness from someone who doesn't usually enjoy fantasy, and yes I know this book functions as a prequel and the second book is way better (I started the second book last night, wish me luck)

ACOTAR felt juvenile in nearly every aspect. To be fair, I had just finished reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstien mere days before picking up ACOTAR so I had to remind myself to go into it with a level of graciousness. Yet all the graciousness in the world cannot override the horrific editing of that damn book. Attempting to fall in love with a whole new world and characters was incredibly difficult when the writer in me was literally dying inside. To be completely honest, I always evaluate the writing of any book I read, especially in the beginning. I'm not even going to discuss how the majority of the book drug its feet or worse, was filled with inescapable, constant monologuing. I could rant and rave about "show don't tell" for hours, which is why I am choosing not to spend more than two sentences talking about the god awful fucking monologuing (to be fair, I'm aware that slow starts and monologuing are often necessary in fantasy books but definitely not to this extent). But holy shit, there were way too many instances in which I was flung from my daydreams and smacked square in the face by the sheer... fanfiction-ness of her writing. Don't get me wrong, I ADORE fanfiction and I am a huge advocate for its existence and protection, especially as a purely anti-capitalist labor of love without a single care about the skill level at which it was written. But when I pick up a viral #1 New York Times Best Selling Author's book, the last thing I am expecting to see is such elementary writing--that I firmly believe could've been rectified if she had hired an editor that was even half decent at their job. My qualifications for making such a claim? Even I have edited a full-length fantasy novel and unfortunately, it took many harsh reminders from my best friend to at least attempt to focus on the story rather than obsess over all the changes I would've personally made before I considered the book decent enough for publishing.

THAT SAID: One of the reasons I always gravitate towards fanfiction when I'm in a reading slump is because it's just so... digestible. ACOTAR was also digestable in a very similar way, which is sort of what made it possible for me to finish it in about four days. Honestly, (aside from my autistic ass struggling to connect with a brand new fantasy world and characters I feel fundamentally estranged from) the fanfiction-ness of the writing made me feel the same as when I'm watching reality TV: aware of the quality but choosing to have a good time with it anyways. Because my friend loved this book so much, I desperately wanted it to be good. But once I accepted that the writing was mid, as well as a good bit of the plot and the characters, I was able to enjoy myself enough to lose myself in the story, no matter how much the pretentious bitch inside kept trying to claw her way to the forefront of my thoughts. It was almost freeing to subject myself to such a juvenile piece of literature. Speaking of, there is one aspect of it's juvenility that I will not explore, but rather, let Robert Pattinson's reaction to reading the Twilight books to voice the principle of those thoughts instead:

"I was convinced Stephanie was convinced she was Bella, and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. You're like, reading her sort of, like, sexual fantasy about some...really sexy guy and she just writes this book about it. And like, some things about Edward is [are] so specific, it was like I was just convinced that...this woman is mad! She's completely mad, and she's in love with her own fictional creation. And like, sometimes you...feel, like, uncomfortable reading this thing! And I think a lot of people feel that is...in the same way kind of voyeuristic and and it creates this...kind of like, a sick pleasure in a lot of ways".

Although this sentiment about ACOTAR may not be exceptionally widespread, personally, as a far-left rad-fem socialist who has spent years learning to decenter men, some of what Rob said resonated with me. Despite that this type of book is not particularly appealing to me personally, that doesn't mean it's inherently bad quality (but can easily bar it from being good quality), and this aspect definitely would've connected to my younger self before I became a chronically online femen@zi.

Moving on. The pretentious bitch inside me couldn't help but quietly take note of what was executed nicely and what was not, even as I was doing my best to go with the flow. I might as well go ahead and discuss what else I liked about it before I'm written off completely. I adored the imagery and sensory details--it's truly what made the experience good enough to keep reading. Her descriptions really draw the reader in and make them feel like they're right there with characters, in the good times and the bad ones too. I definitely don't have aphantasia and am a chronic day dreamer so I absolutely love descriptive books. Colors, sensations, emotions, all of it. I loved and hated the way I felt genuine emotions in all kinds of scenes (hated not because I'm a bitter hater, but hated because I can't help but feel everything any character I'm reading about is feeling--good, bad, or otherwise. And boy did Feyre go through some shit). Typically, books that can make me feel deeply are the best books but in this case, it acted more as a saving grace, especially because most of those feelings that were present in this book, though intense, lacked a certain type of depth I tend to gravitate towards.

Another thing I liked was Lucien! Lucien is by far my favorite character, not because he's particularly extraordinary, but because he feels...real? rather than being another one of SJM's romantic projections. (Sorry the writing style changed half way through, I was lowkey writing like SJM because I thought it was funny but I got tired of that real quick.) In the same vein, every now and then Feyre would get real as fuck, which was greatly appriciated when reading about such intense situations. Nightmares feel like a cheap excuse to avoid having to deal with your MC being traumatized because it's not uncommon for nightmares to be one of the only aspects of trauma focused by YA/new adult writers as well as a trojan horse a romantic scene. ACOTAR felt more believable (or maybe the word is genuine?) because Feyre dealt with real consequences from her trauma such as DSM-5 accurate depression, chronic low self esteem, mistrust, trauma bonding, etc. Lastly, I can't tell if I loved or hated the way SJM tied up all the loose ends (excluding some intentional cliffhangers). On one hand, it was satisfying as a reader to not have found any glaring plot holes yet I can't shake the feeling that she was making it up as she went. Source: trust me bro

As for Feyre's flaws, I feel that other readers have already explored in those depth and I don't feel the need to keep beating a dead horse. Same goes for Tamlin--I didn't find him all that interesting or charming even when Feyre was falling for him, so my already subpar opinion of him got worse and worse and will likely continue to do so as I continue reading the second book. He is so incredibly immature I can hardly stand it. Don't even get me started on how he always wants to fuck and thinks that suffices as an expression of love and care for Feyre. Even if that's technically not how it is, that is definitely how it read. To be clear, I'm pretty sure readers aren't meant to adore Tamlin; my issue is that Feyre goes through hell for someone so mid and we as readers are supposed to think her love and devotion are justified.

Now, let's get back to some hardcore griping! Amarantha's villain origin story makes sense until you actually meet her. Interacting with her felt like interacting with a cartoon villain from a shitty kids show. She was terrifyingly sadistic yet the justification for it was too weak to uphold her sadism. She felt like evil personified rather than a fleshed out person suffering the human condition (I know she's not human but you know what I mean). Good villains don't have to be redeemable, but they do have to be somewhat believable. These fae are all centuries old and have been through so much but somehow lack the emotional maturity I gained at the ripe age of seventeen?! I too have been a woman scorned enough to do make some interesting choices but jesus christ, Amarantha, it's really not that deep. Maybe it's the trauma that makes them like that, because I certainly have not endured what they have, nor have I ever held the amount of power they wield and I will never be able to fully comprehend what that does to a person. So who am I to talk. Anyways, I could ramble endlessly about Amarantha's shortcomings as a character but I think I've touched on her most glaring offenses.

Ugh. Now I'm gonna acknowledge that damn riddle and Tamlin's heart of stone concept that was executed so, so...let's just say, uniquely. When I read Amarantha's riddle, I came up with an answer so quickly that I was certain was it was incorrect. My personal belief system is centered around love (obviously not just the romantic kind) so I thought maybe I was biased since I try to see love in everything, not to mention the answer I had come up with seemed way too on the nose, given Feyre's circumstances and how much of the plot was driven by romance/love/attachment. But to my surprise and simultaneous disappointment, the answer to the riddle was love. I feel like even Feyre should've got that because of her Amarantha-enforced circumstances. And as for Tamlin's heart of stone--that Feyre figured out surprisingly easily even though she couldn't figure out that obvious riddle--it certainly wasn't something I was predicting, and the concept of it felt a little...elementary? Not because it was predictable or anything, but because of how squarely SJM looked that heart of stone metaphor in the face and decided to... well... do that....

I'm just glad she made Feyre grapple with her decision to kill the two innocents and let it haunt her afterwards, especially when her motives are called into question. She loves Tamlin (somehow. but maybe I'm just a manhater) which is what drives her to do what she does and what puts her in direct conflict with Amarantha but I'm just glad SJM bothered to create circumstances that let Feyre's selfishness (I'm not saying I would or wouldn't have done the same thing in her circumstance) also happen to benefit the entire kingdom-world thing. Basically I feel fundamentally estranged from Feyre because I see the value of all people and would like to think I'd do the right thing based on love and respect for all living things rather than for a whiny man child. I feel like I'm getting sidetracked somehow.

TW: SA

I'm hesitant to even talk about Rhysand because I'm not sure I fully understand him as a character yet. However, I love him as a character so far even if I don't love him/his personality that much. He felt developed in ways other characters didn't, similar to Lucien but I actually liked Lucien's personality from the start, even when he pisses me off sometimes. But on the topic of Rhysand, I was uncomfortable with how SJM wrote about SA in general. As a woman, I'm certainly not unfamiliar with the topic and have had my own share of experiences, although I will honestly admit that I haven't had any big T trauma in that area of my own life so this may not be my place to discuss this. That may also be why I can't quite put my finger on what about the way SJM wrote about SA bothered me. All I know is that something about it rubbed me the wrong way, almost as if it bordered on disrespect. But again, I'm not entirely sure.

In conclusion, my best friend just texted me not five seconds ago: "I think you just have a hard time comprehending that people write fun little fantasy stories simply because maybe they just like writing fun little fantasy stories". And she would be correct. I am too pretentious to truly love and appreciate this series the way it was meant to be. I've always felt the need to look deeper in anything that I enjoy, I've always felt the need to connect personally with each work of art I choose to dedicate my time to. I am first and foremost a Supernatural fan if that tells you anything, and even my love for Twilight grew from a specific, deep personal connection I had the concept and characters. I have just driven myself mad trying to figure out why this book was written, why I as a reader should care, and what exactly fueled SJM with so much passion that she felt the need to write an entire series (which is why I'm suspecting she wrote it as a self indulgent piece; that's the only logical explanation I can come up with, anyway). ACOTAR was not written for me and that is okay. It doesn't help that I tend to avoid fantasy as a genre anyways. Yet, I'm going to keep reading it. Because I still managed to have a good time with the story and characters, and of course, I'm going to thug it out no matter what because I love my best friend. Lastly, one thing SJM did a good job with was, in spite of it all, making me curious enough about what happens next to genuinely want to read the next book.

edit: it’s been a few days and ive gotten further into the second book. sjm really got her act together, that’s for sure. im beginning to understand why people obsess over this series. it’s a shame the first book is such a dumpster fire but im glad the story is redeemed in the rest of series (fingers crossed); the characters and world building had so much potential and im extremely happy to see sjm giving them the writing they deserve in the second book. with this new perspective i also realized that acotar was so genuinely awful that it literally made it impossible for me wrap my head around why she wrote it. thank god she get her shit together so that i can finally see the beauty of the series

[fireinmywoods]

For the writer asks (I did a double take when I saw your reblog 😂 I'm a sucker for a good meme), because I always live in fear I'll repeat something someone else has already asked, can I ask for whichever one(s) you particularly want to answer but haven't been asked yet? 💙

🌈is there a fic that you worked *really fucking hard on* that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

Sorry, y'all, I guess I'm on a SIEL kick today, but: Jesus Christ this fic almost destroyed me. With rare exception, I tend to write in an objectively horrific fashion whereby I go along writing out bits and pieces and leaving a bunch of holes (which could mean anything from missing words or sentence fragments all the way up to entire scenes or hunks of the story), and then on each repeated pass I fill in some holes and expand or revise what's already written, and then at some point I'm able to fill in the last holes and then it's time to edit and edit and edit and polish and polish and polish until at last it feels Right. This is a monstrous way to write and I do not recommend it to anyone, but alas, it's how I'm wired.

For the first two years or so (off and on), SIEL proceeded in much the same fashion. But then it got to a point where I'd pretty much filled in all the holes, there was nothing obviously missing, but it just...wasn't right. There weren't glaring neon-sign problems I could put my finger on, just this nagging dissatisfaction with the story as a whole. So, in an act of creative insanity, I ripped that nice tidy completed draft apart at the seams and fucked its shit all up again until at long (long) last it finally fit together the way I wanted it to. I won't get into specifics, because I don't think it especially benefits the reader's experience to get too detailed a look into how the sausage was made, but suffice it to say I reworked or even rewrote multiple chapters in something close to their entirety. I'm much happier with the end result and know now that this was definitely the right move, but my god, the moments of sheer existential despair I faced along the way. I'm breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.

fic writer asks

[quillsandsabres]

The Crawling King - Book Review

At the library a couple days ago, a cover sitting on a stand caught my eye:

The book is called The Crawling King, written and illustrated by Einar Baldvin. It contains seven short stories, all of which fall under the horror. Snippets of writing exist between stories as well. Illustrations accompany every story. I am not an artist, so I can't comment much on the artwork other than how much I loved it. They look mainly like ink drawings with thick line art and are often shaded with scribble or blots. I appreciate how the art changes in some aspects to better fit the atmosphere of the story (for example, using colors vs. just black and white, or varying the “cleanliness” of the line art).

Now for the writing itself:

Baldvin's writing style made me a fan. Each of the stories reminded me of fairy tales, except even darker. Little dialogue exists and the sentences are fairly straightforward. Yet, when the story needs it, Baldvin concisely explains monsters and gut-wrenching horrors that leave me reeling. I don't read horror much, but the ideas presented here feel wonderfully fresh—almost inspirational for my own writing.

The pacing also stood out to me. Sometimes, when I already figured out what the conclusion or twist would be, the story felt as though it was going too slowly. Otherwise, the events unfolded quickly, but not so fast that I missed an event or had to go back and reread. Baldvin slows down when describing the monsters I mentioned above, almost forcing you to look the beast in the eye before letting you move on in the story.

However, as one general criticism, I have to say the stories are hard to read sometimes. The font is a little confusing and in some short stories, such as one titled "Hunger," the increasingly messy tatters of paper forced me to reread sentences over and over, unable to figure out what a word was meant to be. I remember actually just moving on once or twice since I spent far too long struggling to read it. I know this was likely a conscious design decision, but they could've made the text easier to read by perhaps writing the words in a different color, like a blood red. Overall, this is a small issue that hardly tainted the experience.

Also, as I mentioned above, I could reasonably see the conclusion of the story sometimes just by reading the first few lines. This is likely due to foreshadowing, but also partially because some stories are very predictable. Predictability isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did make the stories drag more than anything. As a result, some of the stories were forgettable or annoying.

For anyone who wants a further review of some of the short stories (including spoilers), I'll put my thoughts on my favorite and least favorite story below. If not, skip to Final Thoughts for my rating and the link to purchase the book.

Favorite: “The Fool who Thought it Could Play the Clavichord”

First of all, this title describes me to a T, so of course I was drawn to it.

Second, to summarize the story, a Fool played the clavichord every year in the town festival. They played terribly. However, the townspeople were happy to plug their ears with cotton so that they could applaud their cherished Fool.

One day, two visitors arrive to the town, just in time for the annual festival. But, after hearing the Fool's performance, the two immediately head backstage and cut the Fool's hands off. The Fool runs away and dies outside the town.

In town, a series of spiders found his hands and drank the blood streaming from them. They communicate with the hands, telling them where to crawl. The hands find and grab the two visitors, dragging both to the forest where the Fool's body lay. The spiders used their silk to reattach the hands to the Fool's body, and the Fool strangles the two to death.

The town mourns the loss of the Fool by leaving a clavichord on the stage when he was supposed to perform. However, the rotting corpse of the Fool would appear each year just to play for the people, more beautifully the more years passed by, for as long as the town existed.

This story's tone takes a far different tone compared to the rest of the stories on the list. The ending feels bittersweet, rather than sickening, twisted, or mockingly sad. The Fool and the town's love of the Fool felt refreshingly sweet amongst the darkness of the story, and even spiders, usually villains, are painted in a good light thanks to them helping the Fool. I appreciate that, even though the Fool was not good, the villagers and even the Fool's family did their best to support the Fool's performing, something that doesn't always happen to people in the current day. Many people struggle to really enjoy an activity when they aren't good or are afraid they may not be good. The only difference is that, in real life, those people will get better, unlike the poor Fool in this story.

Least favorite: "Mother"

A boy named Jarin visits his mother, but instead meets a giant centipede that claims it is his mother. The centipede forces Jarin to stay there. In an attempt to find his actual mother, Jarin tries to enter the bedroom every night. The centipede blocks the way almost every time, but when he finally could peer inside, he witnesses a horrific scene: his mother, momentarily escaping the centipede, before succumbing to dust, signaling the rebirth of the centipede. Jarin continues to try to enter the bedroom each night to see his mother for at least a second, eventually staying so long that he convinces himself that he is happy living like this.

The artwork for this story is some of my favorite and the premise is highly interesting. However, the part that gets grating is the narration. Multiple times, the narrator will state something about how a mother's love kept Jarin from leaving. The story, being only about 10 pages, only really needed this statement once to get the point across. The repetitions continued though, and felt tiring or like a jarring tangent from the story. Understandably, love is a strong motivator in many stories and in life, but stories can accomplish this without rubbing the motivation in the reader's face. Other than the grueling description of the mother's fate, not much stands out about the story.

Final Thoughts: 

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of horror. For anyone hesitates to consume horror, just know that I am a coward. So if I could handle it, you can too.

Star Rating: ★★★★☆

Please check out the book and some other illustrations on the author’s tumblr, @einarbaldvin​ !

[land-of-classpects-and-analysis]

Mage of Light

Well, now. Isn’t this quite an interesting situation? A Mage of Light giving the analysis, the story, the tale of their struggles and triumphs, of the Mage of Light? Granted, this was inevitable, much like how this will happen again with the Sylph of Life analysis. However, this one has come far quicker than the other one, and so it begs the question as to whether this will be a callout post about the socially anxious host themself, or if it will be another general look at the Classpect known as the Mage of Light? In a way, it will be a little bit of both, as bias and anecdotal scenarios will be an obvious thing that may pop up throughout this analysis. Whether it relates to the narrator of this piece, or to the general population of Mages of Light, will be up to your own imagination. Now, let’s end the theatrics and get ready to gaze into the scarring heat that us Mages of Light are known to look upon for guidance, reassurance, and, of course, the answers to all the questions we have.

It has always been rather fitting for the Aspect symbol for Light to be that of the Sun, at least personally speaking. From a very young age, we are advised to never look directly at the Sun, as its rays are bright and its light a burning hot. This is a good piece of advice for the literal Sun that the planet rotates around, but what about the more symbolic or metaphysical Sun? What about the children who are told to not look too deeply into the symbolism, the meaning, the message hidden behind the letters so elegantly carved into a book? After all, children are naturally curious and are capable of absorbing so much knowledge and rarely, if ever, seem to be satisfied with what they have. Many people talk about their own “phases” where they were fully dedicated to learning as much as they could about something. Pirates, Ancient Egypt, Dragons, Folklore, the Medieval Era, and so many more things. For the most part, parents do often encourage this curiosity that so naturally comes with being a child. Except, for some parents, it is a more conditional encouragement. Telling a child they may not know what or where their Christmas or Birthday presents are is a normal restriction upon a child’s knowledge. That is now what is being alluded to here. No, this is about the parents who blind their children from knowledge that may cause the child to be smarter and more tolerant than their parent, or have their child be more aware of the more horrific and taboo things in this world - the privileges that they may have. Little do their parent’s know how strong the curiosity of a child can be.

As a child, the Mage of Light would at least somewhat be, if not most definitely exactly, like this. While children are naturally curious, the young Mage of Light is someone who is constantly asking the questions, always trying to understand, never being satisfied with the answers they are given, and despising when someone - especially adults - hide things from them. Light-bound at their worst are known to be rather fussy, and if anyone is to perfectly encapsulate such a feeling, it would be a young Mage of Light being told they are forbidden from seeking out the knowledge and answers to a burning question of theirs. Tantrums and overall meltdowns are most definitely a mark of a younger Mage of Light, while later on in the Mage’s life, this contempt for being kept in the dark would show itself more as outright rebellion and sometimes even aggression, physical or otherwise. Much like the Mage of Void, the Mage of Light would be one who will grow into a person that will stop at nothing until they get the answers they want. Out of all the Mages, the Mage of Light is one who is more than ready to bash their head against a wall - metaphorically or otherwise - over and over, especially if it means they will finally come to answer or epiphany. They are born with the never-ending, forever-gnawing hunger to know and learn, and if no one will teach them properly, then they will happily teach themself.

Due to this way of life, it could be argued that the Mage of Light is one where their journey to knowledge and understanding begins as soon as they are born. However, that is only partially correct. While the Mage of Light is indeed someone who, in their early life, believes themself to be stranded in a vast ocean of knowledge - a Mage of Light’s true dream, really. However, what is important to keep in mind is what was mentioned earlier: that those now older, typically adults, will often look back at their learning “phases”, wherein they dedicated themself to only one or few topics of knowledge. Don’t think or believe for a moment that school is a place where their journey begins. Goodness, no. If anything, school is where the suffering of the Mage of Light begins - especially those who have their journey follow the path of seeking out knowledge of knowledge. However, that is for later on this analysis.

The Mage of Light, after leaving childhood, may know quite a lot about the (literal) ocean and the life within it, perhaps they know the entire history of all the wonderful European Folktales meant to startle children, or they dedicated themself to learn how to knit, cross-stitch, and sew, as well as the history of it. It’s hard to tell exactly when their journey does truly begin, as it can vary from Mage of Light to Mage of Light. One thing is most certain, though, when it comes to a common thread seen throughout all Mages of Light: their Aspect has not only revealed itself in its most purest form to the Mage, leaving them scarred from the encounter, but it has left something in the Mage of Light waiting to be awakened. That something is the hunger for more knowledge than what they already have. You see, what the Mage has been truly missing is the true mass, the entire volume, in which Light envelopes the world around them. After all, Light-bound are meant to be those who seek out knowledge of anything - even if it is something that would have been better left unlearned. As the Mage of Light enters a moment in their life where their parents cannot protect the Mage as much as they wish they could, and it is now up to them to make the decision of whether they seek out knowledge of something or not. Later on in the Mage of Light’s life, they will truly have to face the plasma heat of the Sun, and will finally realize why it is unwise to dance atop fresh ashes and burning coals.

Much like the Seer of Light, though, the Mage of Light poses another intriguing puzzle with their Classpect. The Mage of Light is one who actively seeks out knowledge of or through Light, there is no doubt there. What is interesting is that this basically boils down to someone seeking out knowledge of or through Knowledge, enlightenment, academics, and more. It seems like an almost obvious thing, and perhaps even redundant to say such a long-winded statement of “one who actively seeks out knowledge of or through knowledge”. While the latter half claiming it is rather redundant to say that makes a good point, it is also a rather brilliant and key difference to make between the two groups of Mages of Light. There are the Mages of Light who actively seek out knowledge through Light, wherein they have a journey far more like that of a chain, or like a spelunker who always manages to find holes, crevices, and cliffs that allow for them to go deeper and deeper into the Earth. While the knowledge they learned as a child may not be too helpful for a more “real” life, this curious passion and research may cause a spark to appear somewhere off in Mage of Light’s, close or otherwise.

Have you ever discovered a topic that has sent off the wonderful, serotonin-filled surges through your brain? No matter how obscure or mainstream it is, the brain - your brain - has processed that information enough to latch onto it like that of a long lost friend, relative, or lover. “More,” your brain tells you, “I want- no. I need more of this. More. More. More.” It’s a droning sound in your head, that four letter word being repeated over and over until, finally, you give in and seek out more knowledge of this topic. All there is to be found on it: every Wikipedia article, every theory, every documentary, every book, all of it, if only to keep your head quiet- but wait. What was that sentence you just read? It mentions something - or someone - that you do not know about nor ever heard of. Context is suddenly lost on you and you can feel as your brain begins to toss and turn within your skull like it is a coffin of calcium. Most people would shrug it off and continue reading, writing, research - but not you. No. You are a Mage of Light who has gone down the path of seeking out knowledge through Light - a chain forged from the brightest and hottest flame, and you are the blacksmith creating it. It never, ever seems to end, though, as every piece of information you take, every link you click on, everything leads down further and further down these rabbit holes. Until, eventually, you will discover that not only do you not know how to go back, that you are completely lost, but that all of these rabbit holes are connected and all lead to the same, fiery den. By the time you realize this, though, chances are that it will be too late to go back as you will find yourself in the chamber of the Sun, and it is simply too painfully beautiful to look away from. So you don’t. Even if you feel your eyes tearing up at how brightly it truly burns. You dare not look away, though, for you know deep down that this, this, is the most purest knowledge you could have ever discovered through Light and countless, sleepless nights. It is so gorgeous that you swear you might even go mad and lose yourself within its beauty.

Then there are the Mages of Light who simply seek out knowledge of Light. Chances are this is the one that brings most people to start scratching their heads. After all, isn’t this simply seeking out knowledge, point blank? Isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if it was just that easy? No, unfortunately this is the path in which the Mage of Light becomes knowledgeable of the fact that knowledge is all around them, not just in the form of objects, but also from the people around them. Most importantly, though, they will realize that a lot of this knowledge is painfully biased, disgustingly muddled in a game of telephone, and that a lot of it is just plain wrong. They are the ones who, unfortunately, will often know the facts and correct answers to a wide variety of topics. Whether it is something as obscure as the history and lore of bigfoot sightings, or as well known as World War 2 and all the intricacies within it, the Mage of Light is one who has already sought the knowledge of these things. However, due to the nature of so many Mages, they are often rather reluctant to open up and share their knowledge with others - especially in regards to the people they do not like. Mages can be rather petty, indeed, and are not afraid to taunt their enemies about the knowledge they have, waving it in front of the disliked person’s face like that of a carrot to a goat. Sometimes, the Mage of Light won’t even reveal that they have the answers to some people’s question, and instead leave them to continue spouting false truths. If the Mage of Light is especially vicious, they will inform everyone who not only knows their enemy but that the Mage trusts greatly, about the real knowledge and facts of whatever story their enemy is speaking. Oftentimes this is only for the Mages amusement of knowing that they and everyone they trust is in the know of what is true, while watching those they hate continue to fumble around in the dark - lost, confused, yet infuriatingly cocky that they know where they are going.

The main suffering of these Mages of Light is that of being so knowledgeable on so many different things, yet so few people ever bother to listen or take the Mage at face value. It’s the suffering of having the weight of hundreds of textbooks, papers, recordings, files, and so many other forms of knowledge all pressing down on one’s mind. It’s the suffering of knowing how many ignorant and unaware people there are roaming the world, sometimes even within the Mage’s own life and inner circle. They actively seek out knowledge of not just simple knowledge, but rather what other people view as their own knowledge. If the Mage is lucky, then someone or something will give them valuable knowledge to hold onto and maintain - adding it to their large, mental library that they have built over the years. However, as is more often the case than not, the Mage will encounter someone who holds knowledge so wrong and tainted that it often can drag the Mage down from whatever happy mood they may have been feeling. Depending on how truly bad this tainted knowledge is, the Mage of Light will do whatever it takes to try and set the facts straight and prove to the other person or party that they are wrong. Whether this comes in the form of polite corrections or downright red-faced yelling and screaming at the person - or, if pushed hard enough, physically aggressive constructive criticism - or somewhere in between, it would be best to be careful to spout off any false ideas labeled as facts and truths when around the Mage of Light, especially if they do not appear to be in a good mood. After all, they are someone who has a large umbrella of knowledge, and it is one they are not afraid to bludgeon proper knowledge into an ignorant person’s skull.

The Mage of Light is someone who can be seen as an unremarkable genius - unrelenting in their pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Even if such determination may be viewed in an unflattering light, the Mage of Light may not exactly care, as everything they do is for the sake of learning all that is available to them, as well as understanding the world they live in and the people that reside within it. Chances are, though, that being in the presence of the Mage of Light is quite a rare occurrence. This is mostly because Mages of Light are some of the most dedicated of all the Light-bounds when it comes to their Aspect. They are willing to throw themself into the molten, searing rays of the Sun - of knowledge - for many reasons. Ranging from getting to know all there is to know about one of their favorite people, characters, shows, or other interests, to simply wanting to see, know, and/or understand what it is like to experience a certain situation that has always intrigued them. Because of this, while the Mage of Light is a dedicated student, they are also someone who often ignores their own health and wellbeing for the sake of more knowledge. If they are not careful, then this can lead to not only mental suffering for the Mage, but also physical and social suffering, as well. Those who have managed to befriend a Mage of Light may be all too familiar at the sight of seeing their message having been left on read, or sometimes having never even been opened at all. Once the Mage of Light finds themself truly enveloped in the webbing of a particular interest or topic, it may be quite a long time before anyone sees or hears from the Mage of Light again. Because of this, those within the Mage’s social circle may need to take on the extra task of checking in and meddling with the Mage of Light’s business. 

While Mages so often attract people of similar minds towards them, this may bring great displeasure to the Mage of Light at many points in their life. They hate rereading the same book over and over, after all, and so if they sense one person or the overall relationship to be all too similar to a previous one, then chances are they will often pay little mind to these people and instead continue on their work. If no one has any knowledge to offer the Mage, then they will simply not bother with this person. However, deep down, the Mage of Light would love to have a few companions in their life, if only to share with them all of the discoveries they have made and have someone listen as they rant, ramble, and rave on about all they have learned, as well as all the ignorant people they have had to unfortunately encounter. The Mage of Light is like that of a pendulum, constantly swinging from one side to another, causing people to never exactly knowing what to expect when it comes to speaking with the Mage of Light. One thing is for certain, though, and it is that when the Mage of Light is caught in a good mood, they can be one of the kindest, most non-judgemental, and warmest people to be around. If they are feeling especially kind, then they can also be someone who shares their great amounts of knowledge and wisdom onto those they truly care about and trust. 

Mages of Light are those who should rarely, if ever, be questioned on whether they truly know what they are talking about. Much like their Passive counterpart, the Mage of Light is one where, after gaining great strides in their journey, they can become a borderline all-knowing entity if they so desired. They go after knowledge wherever they can sniff and claw it out, and as such is someone who poses themself to be the most valuable ally and friend to have, as well as being the most dangerous and largest foe one could make. There would be no point in fighting a fully awakened Mage of Light - at least not physically. They already know every possible move you could make, and they are well prepared and knowledgeable on how to counteract it. Amongst their other powers is that of seeing all there is to know in the present and the future, but rarely ever the past. If it is not transcribed in some fashion, then the past is one of the biggest weak points for the Mage of Light, as it is something that has already come to pass and therefore becomes an unreliable source of knowledge. There will always be blindspots, even to the most powerful Mage of Light, and it is these blindspots that bring all Mages of Light great suffering and anger. These blindspots are more often than not that of the Void-bound - people who manage to find ways to flicker out and hide away from the harsh rays of the Sun. Many Mages of Light find these people to be perplexing, and sometimes downright infuriating, in more ways than one. When the Mage of Light finds that they cannot gain knowledge from something, they may be quick to deem it as worthless or unreliable, and in the case of people, might see them as possible threats and adversaries.

There are some Mages of Light who may try to escape and run away from their Aspect, finding themselves incapable of withstanding all of this knowledge. It will be with great fear in their hearts when they find that there is no escaping something as grand as Light, The Sun, and knowledge. It is everywhere we go, and once someone has opened their eyes and truly looked upon its burning answers, it is something that cannot be so easily ignored. If the Mage of Light is going to expose themself to a source of knowledge, they will be damned if they are not going to try their very best to understand its intricacies. Even if trying over and over again brings them even more suffering, it is better than to suffer in silence as their brain claws at the inside of their skull and the yearnful hunger gnaws away at them from the inside. The Mage of Light is driven to know all there is, was, and will be, and whether they are willing to play dirty or not simply depends on who the Mage of Light truly is. Mages of Light are truly some of the most brilliant people, but it is truly up to them whether they decide to use their knowledge for good, and share it with others, or if they decide to be cruel, and use it to twist the arms of people and bend the rules of whatever game they have been placed within. No matter what, though, Mages of Light are the ones who dared to look at the Sun when very few others could. Not only did they stare at it, but they challenged it to that of a staring contest, and instead of losing the game and their eyesight, these Mages instead rose above everyone else and were gifted with the greatest weapon anyone could ask for, and one only they can truly understand how to wield properly: Knowledge.

[radramblog]

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

…is the title of a Hugo-winning short story I just read. I’d heard the name for a while, gotten the gist of it, but for whatever reason I’d assumed it was a full on novel that I’d have to put proper time into, not a 13 page quickie made of psychological horror and fetid wordplay. This thing is dark, twisted, and probably one of the most influential stories I can think of, at least in terms of science fiction.

I suppose with such a short piece to divulge, it suits that the intro be similarly hastened. Shall I?

The cliffnotes version, although you can read the whole thing here if you’d like and it wont take too long. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, aside from being such an incredible title, is a tale of 5 individuals and the torture they undergo at the hands of AM, a supercomputer that has taken over the planet and extinguished all other human life on the face of the earth. For 109 years the fivesome- Ted, Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, and Ellen- have been tortured, and altered, and kept perpetually alive by the machine, bleeding and dying and being corrupted over and over for its tepid amusement. AM significantly changed who they were- the pacifistic Gorrister turned an apathetic abuser, the brilliant scientist Benny rendered an ape-like creature with a…monster cock…for some reason (look the reasons are fucked up aight don’t wanna get into em), and the narrator, Ted, claims to be unaffected but his paranoia says otherwise.

After AM sends them on a particularly heinous journey as part of yet another controlled torment, Ted snaps into lucidity for the briefest of moments, taking a moment of AM’s distraction to (with Ellen’s help) kill the rest of his companions for good, ending their suffering in a way that AM cannot revert, and for this crime, AM finally transforms him into a horrific bloblike mess- the title being the final line of the story as he describes the disgusting, useless form he finds himself in- helpless to reply to the hatred AM has for him for all eternity.

This story, is fucked up, in case you hadn’t noticed.

(This is from a comic book adaptation, in case it wasn’t obvious)

It’s also exceptionally well written. The descriptions of everything ooze malice and pain, the vivid nightmare that is pseudo-reality for our five protagonists lovingly rendered in ink and blood. It’s the kind of story that lets me write sentences that silly without a hint of irony, which is always fun. It might literally be one of the first instances of “suffer porn”, though at the same time there’s a hint of hope to it- despite the perpetuity of Ted’s suffering, he ultimately does manage to “free” the other four, sacrificing himself by, ironically, surviving.

But aside from the suffer porn aspect, I’m certain this short story has to be the first of its kind in a fair few aspects- and if not the first, certainly the codifier. With it in mind that the tale was penned in 1966, it’s surely groundbreaking in its crystallisation of the fear of technology, of artificial intelligence, and ultimately, of apocalypse. The end of the world being caused by the folly of man wouldn’t have been a new concept, even in the 60s, but for our hubris to be repaid so fully, so viscerally, and in such a concentrated manner is surely a development of author Harlan Ellison’s own. I suspect that without I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, we wouldn’t have Terminator, or System Shock, or The Matrix, or hell even Wargames - though perhaps that one might be for the best.

When reading it, I was also astonished to find how much of what I thought I knew about the story came instead from it’s 1995 adventure game adaptation of the same name. With Ellison’s involvement, it’s as close as you can get to an official expansion of the story, with perhaps its most iconic, non-titular monologue (pictured above) an exclusive to the additions. It’s an incredibly difficult game, designed to make you struggle in solving its puzzles, and screw it up repeatedly on the way through. Or at least, that’s my understanding, I never played it- read a let’s play instead, sucker, take that AM you cybertronic bitch.

I’d argue I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream holds up today, even as its ideas have filtered into the rest of popular culture. It still feels fresh despite its almost 55 years of publication, and despite the brutality described, it’s detached enough (and short enough) to be not too harrowing. Or perhaps I’m just too desensitized at this point. Hell if I know, but hell the characters do know.

(I think I’m very witty sometimes.)

[dragonrajafanfiction]

Dragon Dancer Chapter 6: The Walking Dead

Deep down we all know our lives can change in an instant. We all hope it will change for the better. We hope that we’ll find that dream job. That girl we’ve been searching for will show up, smile at us, and agree that she’s was searching for us too. That some prince will come and whisk us away from our problems.

We also know that things can change for the worse. In that same instant, our lives can be taken, as if by some strange magic, and everything we’ve been working for crumbles to dust. All we can do is pick up the pieces, start over again, and be grateful we survived.

When I woke up at the hospital, I couldn’t talk about what happened. Nono, at my bedside, tried to get me to say something about it, but my mind could not form the words to describe the chaos I remembered. If I focused on the memories too much, they overwhelmed me the way the strongest emotions do. They were pure sensation, coming over me faster than my intellect's ability to register them. 

There were details, focal points that my mind latched on to after the world went blurry.

The shocked look of a young man’s face when he realized he was going to die the instant before he did. The pulsating waves that were visible when blood oozed from a severed artery. The life and death struggle of a living person between my hands. Despite the clarity of these memories - or maybe because of it - their horrific nature stunned me into speechlessness.

When Nono was unable to get me to answer her questions, she said, “I think we need to get you some help.” She stood up and left me alone in the room.

I laid on my side picking at the thin threads of the soft pillow case. When the door creaked open and footsteps approached, I didn’t turn to look.

“I am Doctor Toyama.” A gentle male voice greeted me.

When he didn’t say anything more, I turned my head to see if he was still there. He had light brown eyes in a young face and a thin well manicured goatee that traced around his upper lip and chin. He wore a lab coat with a tag hanging from his pocket as an identifier. He held a notebook and pen.

That much acknowledgement of his existence was enough to make him smile. “I have a few questions for you. You don’t have to say much about this incident. The College is well aware of many details about Isaac and his… activities here. It’s unfortunate that it had to end up this way.”

He pulled up a chair and sat next to my bed. I averted my eyes from him as he continued to speak. “You’re probably blaming yourself for what happened. I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t your fault.”

He didn’t wait for me to respond. “People here all have a certain percentage of dragon DNA. The higher the percentage the stronger they are. But there is a cost.” He kept his tone soft and clear.

“If someone’s percentage of dragon DNA is too high, it begins to overwrite the human. It grows, much like a cancer and they cease to be recognizable as a human. They turn into what we call a death servitor. That is what happened to Isaac.”

“It happened to Isaac because of what I did though,” I whispered. My throat squeezed shut. My lip trembled. I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t return his gaze.

“Oh? How so?”

I chewed my lip and pressed my face into the pillow.

“I’d really like to know. There are surveillance cameras in the library. As far as we can tell after watching the footage, you walked into a conference room together. The rest is hard to make out but it’s clear you disappear. You went…” He let the sentence hang.

“I wanted to see my family.” I said shakily. Tears wet the pillowcase around my eyes.

“Why? You were only here a day. You miss them already?”

I nodded.

“Hmm…” I hear his pen click. “Did you inform one of your class advisors?.”

“Yeah. He told me that… I couldn’t see my family because the rules said I had to stay on campus… I couldn’t even call them.”

“Ah… I see. You’re very close to them then?”

“Mhm…”

“You must be  if you were willing to follow a stranger into the dark on the off chance you might get to see them. Tell me, what do you plan to say to them?” There was genuine curiosity in his voice.

“Everything here is secret… right?” I peeked up from the pillow.

“That’s right.” He's writing in his notebook.

“Well, I’d … tell him that there’s a lot of boys here. And they make me nervous.”

He stroked his goatee. “Ah… I see. What else?”

“Everything is really extravagant… and I don’t think I’ll fit in. And that I failed my first exam.” Now that I’m looking at him, he offered me a tissue box. I sat up to accept it.

“Very good.” He made a few more notes  “I’ll submit this to the board members and see if they can make a bit of an exception for some forms of communication. It’s… rare we get people like you. Who actually come from loving non-hybrid homes.”

He clicked his pen and put it back into his breast pocket. “But since you still have so much to say to them, that means you didn’t go back to your home, did you? Where did you go?”

“I don’t know where it was. There were others too. They were dressed in Japanese clothes. So maybe Japan?” I blew my nose.

“Japan? Hm…” He made a note. “That’s … odd. Why do you think he would take you there?”

“Maybe that’s where his family lives?” I looked to him for confirmation of my guess.

“His family? I thought you were going to meet yours?” He raised his eyebrows.

I explained.  “He said I shouldn’t have failed my test. He said he wanted to test me… before I went home.”

“There was no way you could have known what that meant.” He told me. “You must have … fought hard to escape.” He looked at me expecting me to fill in the blank, but I fell into an abrupt silence. My eyes were downcast. My fingers kneaded at the pillow case.

“Alright…” He said quietly. “What’s one thing you can tell me. Just one.”

My continued silence stretched on.

“Just one thing? I promise, I won’t ask any more questions.”

I didn’t reply but Doctor Toyama continued to sit and wait. My mind remembered, indexed and sorted what happened into a large pile of secrets. There was one memory that I felt comfortable revealing.

“He saved my life. I would’ve died. But when he held me, my wound healed. He brought me back before he turned into that monster.”

He watched me wipe away tears, keeping his expression neutral. “I see. Thank you.” He made another note. “I’ll leave you now. Feel free to contact me any time.” He left his card on the table next to my phone.

After he was gone, I examined the card. His title was Campus Psychologist. My phone lit up, attracting my attention. It displayed an overwhelming number of notifications. I ignored them in favor of visiting my social media page.

At the top of the feed, the official administrators had pinned a message.

This page is now restricted, only those with access may view it. If you have questions about the restriction or feel you’ve been blocked in error, keep it to yourself because you haven’t been.

Below that stretched a long string of posts by other Cassell students.

“How does one kill a servitor in a single hit?”

“Well, this new student is promising. Anyone get her number?”

“Wish she’d left some of that fight to me.”

“How can I date her please.”

“DMs are blocked :(“

“Anyone have her phone number? What about email?”

“How do you even get that strong?!”

“10/10 would watch again.”

My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to talk to or meet any of these people.

In my notifications, I found a text from Nono. “Hey, hope you’re feeling better. You’ll be getting a message from the Principal soon. Don’t be nervous, just do your best. If you need me, just call me alright? Please, if you want to talk, don’t hesitate to call me. I know you miss your family, but you can’t go back to them right now. Not without talking to him.”

The phone sang its jaunty ringtone. The caller ID was just ‘EVA’. “Hello?”

Her voice was cheerful but her words were to the point. “You passed your E3 exam with a high level of resonance with a draconic cipher. This along with your unique dragon ancestry puts you at Rank S.”

“What do you mean I passed? I didn’t write anything?”

“Most record their ciphers. In your case, this was not the correct medium. Determining your ability will take further research. Therefore, we are admitting you. Welcome to Cassell College. I’m EVA, the school AI butler. Let me know if you need help or have questions."

“AI…? A computer…?” I stammered but couldn’t form a complete sentence so she continued.

“Your meeting with Principal Anjou is in half an hour. I’ve sent Mingfei Lu to guide you there. Your uniform is there in your room. Please dress and get ready to meet him. Don’t worry. He’s very nice.”

“Wait! Who is…?”

The phone beeped to tell me there was no longer anyone on the other end. I returned it to the nightstand and slid my legs over the edge of the bed to get up. I found my purple and black uniform on a hanger in the open closet across the hospital room.

When I put the uniform on, I examined myself in the room’s bathroom mirror.  The open collar displayed my pendant over my collarbones. I turned my back to see if there was any sign of where that man had knifed me. There wasn’t.  My heart began to pound as I remembered the spear of light impaling my attacker, how his jaw dropped open in shock. I started to wonder how much of that really happened, hoping some of it was a dream.

A knock on the hospital room door frightened me so badly I stumbled backwards into the wall. Trembling, I peeked outside the bathroom to see a gangly young man with brown doe-like eyes and a mop of messy brown hair.  He gives me a cheerful wave. “You must be the newbie!”

He slowly lowered his hand when I didn’t echo his enthusiasm.  “Don’t be shy! I don’t bite! I promise!” He gave a little nervous laugh. “I’m not good at this…” He mumbled.

“Good at what?” I asked him.

His eyes snapped back to mine. “Huh? What? D...did I say that outloud?” He looked at me for confirmation so I nodded. “Sorry. Um. So, You can just call me Lu. I’ve been here for a little less than a year.”

His shoulders sagged at my silence, “So…” He steeled himself, forcibly perking himself up. “My roommate happens to run the gossip column at school. He told me what happened. It was pretty incredible. Where’d you learn to do that?”

I closed the door again, wondering if he was one of the people who posted on my feed. I leaned against it, glaring at the ground. “I wouldn’t say it was ‘incredible’.”

His voice sounded from the other side. “I know it's hard but I can help you. I… I know what it’s like okay? Just bear with it. You’ll do fine!”

I took a deep breath and cracked the door open. “Sorry…” I whispered.

“You’re fine okay?” He said, peering through the small space, his voice trembling with nervous laughter. “We just need to get you to the principal’s office. You don’t have to do anything. Oh and don’t forget to grab your coat. It’s pretty windy out there.”

As we walked down the campus paths, Lu kept glancing down at me like he wanted to say something but didn’t know how to start. “So… what’s your name?”

I felt a chill run down my spine, recalling the results of using my childhood name. “I don’t like my name.”

“Oh… then… what do you prefer to be called? I feel bad just calling you, newbie.” More nervous laughter.

“Newbie is fine.” I told him. “But if there’s a name you like, just call me that.”

His nervousness turned to surprised dismay. “What? I can’t just call you whatever I want! What if someone else calls you something different?”

The corners of my mouth turned down. “You’re Mingfei Lu, right? You said, just call me Lu. Does everyone call you Lu?”

“Ah… good point.” He rubs his chin in thought. “But… What if I call you something you don’t like?”

I chuckled. “Then I’ll tell you. Like I said I didn’t mind, ‘newbie’.”

He rubbed the back of his neck but didn’t continue to object.

The administration building grew larger into view, fronted by a stone staircase. People hurried up and down, anxious to get out of the cold.

Once inside, Lu led me to the main office. We paused at the wooden door carved with the word ‘Principal’. Lu knocked before going in. Like most things at Cassell, the principal's office was larger than it needed to be. It was fancy, with black mirror tiles and a sleek glossy desk. Behind it sat Anjou who greeted me with a sympathetic grin. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. That man fooled me into coming here and denied me access to my family. This was all his fault.

Johann and Caesar stood in front of the desk. Johann crosses his arms at my dour expression.

Caesar was bemused at my silent snarling. “It’s good to see you up and healthy. We are all grateful you made out alive.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I mumbled, my shoulders rising to my ears.

Johann's soft voice echoed in the roomy interior. “That’s Mingfei, he’s our other S-ranked student.”

“You’re S-ranked too?” I turned to him in shock.

Mingfei Lu held up his hands in self-defense.“ Don’t look at me like that! I’m just ranked as S! I don’t actually have any abilities at all.”

Anjou stood up from behind his desk, as tall as I remembered, smoking a cigar. He paced, massaging his beard as he began. “Now that we’re all here. We can start the mission briefing.”

My eyes lifted at the word ‘mission’, glancing at the others.

“Our intelligence is reporting the signal of a dragon embryo off the coast of Japan. This signal may be what we have been dreading. Analysis indicates that it is the signal of a first generation dragon lord. So we’re sending you as a team to meet with the Cassell College Japan division.”  

He took a drag of the cigar and let it out slowly. “This mission is Grade SS. We will need all of you."

My hand tentatively rose but he ignored me and continued.

“Our Japan branch is very secretive. This situation calls for the utmost discretion and sensitivity. However, I have maintained contact with Masamune Tachibana. He welcomes our assistance. Please, view this as a stepping stone for bringing our branches into closer cooperation.”

Filling with dread, I recalled Isaac’s Japanese companions and wondered if there was some connection to what I had done.

“Caesar, you’ll be the one leading on this mission.” Anjou nodded to him.

Caesar opened his mouth to speak but Johann responded. “Of course, that’s for the best.”

Caesar scowled at him. “Don’t steal my lines!” He cleared his throat. “We’ll complete the mission in no time at all, Principal Anjou! With time to do some souvenir shopping!” The blue-eyed hybrid waved a hand at me and flashed a smile, “In fact, I’d like to outfit you in the finest silk kimonos…”

“If that’s what you want to do.” I replied, reluctantly smiling back.

His eyebrows rose to his hairline. “This is your first mission as part of our team! That’s surely something to celebrate.”

“Wait… I'm going?" My smile turned to confusion. Somehow, I’d passed my E3 without writing anything. I killed my fellow students the night before. Now, he assigned me to work with top students and sent me to Japan.

While I struggled to grasp my new reality, silent seconds ticked by. Johann cleared his throat. Caesar glared at him. “You have something to say?”

Johann returned his gaze with a calm expression. “Nothing at all.”

“If you have something to say, you should say it!”. Caesar turned to fully face him.

Johann looked at me instead. “I promised you I would show you a frozen dragon specimen. But now you’ll be seeing the real thing.”

“When was this?” Caesar demanded of him. "Don't ignore me, Johann Chu!"

I looked between them both, baffled at Caesar’s sudden aggression. Lu hid his face behind his hand in embarrassment.

Anjou puffed on his cigar chuckling. “I have to interrupt.” He addressed me next. “My dear, your performance in the library tells me that you qualify for this dangerous mission.”

I frowned at his use of the word performance. “But I…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, my voice trailing off.

He turned to the others. “I’d like to have a private word with our new student.”

As they walked out, Caesar continued to menace an unflappable Johann. “Keep in mind that it was Nono and I there at her arrival here…”

Lu followed them, glancing over his shoulder at me in worry before he was forced to jog after them to catch up.

Anjou sat down and gestured to a chair for me.

“You know,” he said. “Of all the recruits, you have outstanding resilience. You come to my office after everything you’ve been through.  After you hear that I’m sending you on a dangerous mission after this incident, you don’t immediately object.”

“Do I actually have a choice in any of this? You’re just throwing things at me and I’m trying to just survive here!” My voice shook. “You’re not going to let me leave, are you?”

He settled his cigar down on a silver ashtray. “Your talent is a Class S… the strongest kind. But it is extremely unstable. The injection Johann gave you is a temporary experimental measure. I’m hoping that the Japan Division might be hiding research that can aid us in preventing you from turning into a monster like Isaac.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice lowered to a whimper.

His uncharacteristic seriousness lent weight to his words. “What happened to Isaac could just as easily happen to you. I am committed to preventing that. You’re here to today because of that effort. Had you turned servitor after the injection, we would have had no choice but to eliminate you. You did not. So there is still hope.” He said this frankly, looking into my eyes. His expression turned grim. “I cannot keep you here against your will. I can only tell you the truth. Your chances of survival are slim outside of Cassell College.”

My self-protective sense of humor faltered and I found my desire to contact Robbie lessened. If this was to be my fate, then it would be better that he never saw me again. “And if there’s no cure?” I asked quietly.

“Let’s take courage and hope. We’re working on it.” His positivity returned.  “You remind me so much of my friend Manecke. When I look at you…” He took another puff.  “I see brilliance. Something will come up.”

My throat started to close and my eyes burned.  “Can I go?”

He nodded. I stood up and rushed out of the office.

Lu was waiting for me, but I pushed by him before he could say a word.

I managed to make it back to my apartment before I gave in to the shattering grief inside. My shadow twin appeared, kneeling next to me. She tried to catch my tears but they fell through her hand to the carpet. I wished I had never accepted the offer to come to Cassell. But if I hadn’t accepted, who knew what might have happened? Had I blissfully gone through life, I might have suddenly turned into a beast. I imagined myself as a ballerina, graceful and elegant, only to morph into a horrible monster a few years into my career. Maybe even on stage. It would have been awful.

My emotions began to subside and I picked myself up off the floor. Packing for the trip wasn’t difficult. Most of my things were still in my suitcase. As I went through my belongings, I wondered what I wanted to wear on my last few days on Earth. ‘Whatever felt comfortable on a plane’ won out.

I wrote in my school notebook what I wanted people to find after I was gone. I confessed that I hadn’t just killed Isaac, but possibly six or seven other people. I was a waste of everyone’s time and effort, especially Robbie and Mom’s.

My phone buzzed. Nono was trying to talk to me but I didn’t want to anymore. It was better if she forgot I ever existed. I turned the phone off.

My heart beat fast all the rest of the day and into the night.  I spent most of that night pacing around my apartment. The racing pulse made it impossible to sleep and robbed me of my appetite in the morning.

The next morning while I was turning out the lights and getting ready to meet the others to go to the airport, someone knocked on my door.

I opened to Nono, her crimson eyes narrowed. “You know, I don’t take it lightly when someone ignores my messages. Especially someone I’ve tried to be nice to.”

My shoulders lowered and I sighed. “Nono, I…”

She cut me off. “No, you need to listen to me. I know what happened was hard. Maybe even harder than most. But you have got to pull yourself together.”

“Life as a hybrid will never be fair or easy. Not one of us has had an easy and happy life. You’re one of us now. So buck up and do what needs to be done!”

I shrunk under her stare, swallowing hard.

“You’re going on a dangerous mission with Caesar and the others. And I can’t have you getting into a funk, slipping up and then someone else dies because of it.”

When I stood silently she took a step forward, her voice rising. “Do you understand? Do what you have to do to stop moping. If something happens to Caesar, I won’t forgive you.”

“Yes ma’am.” I whispered.

She turned, her heels clicking against the tile as she departed.

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[micaramel]

Artist: Thanasis Totsikas

Venue: Akwa Ibom, Athens

Exhibition Title: The Crucifixion of Thanasis Totsikas

Date: June 15, 2020 – July 10, 2020 and September 10, 2020 – October 10, 2020

Curated By: Maya Tounta

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Akwa Ibom, Athens

Press Release:

In 1985 Thanasis painted a depiction of life’s ladder and titled it The stairway of life. In 1988 he made a sculpture in metal with the same title. I found these in the digital archive of his work a few days ago and called him up to ask about them, but he appeared pretty unenthusiastic, so I let it go. This morning as I sat down to write this text – I had a whole outline for it – it wouldn’t come out. I went back to looking at the 80s ladders. We haven’t reproduced them for you here, but just imagine, these are full of dynamism, strength and forward hope. Now it is more than two decades later, and Thanasis has repainted the ladders in a series of drawings he’s now charged with a very different emotion. In the recent works, a Sisyphus-like figure appears carrying a boulder, bent-over, tired, as if about to collapse on the floor. Thanasis has replaced hope with exhaustion, strength and dynamism with unelected perseverance. The transition leaves one with that feeling of never knowing if you’re well or not, though admittedly you remember, at some point, knowing.

Coming to this thought, I remembered something else I came across in the digital archive – a scan of the backside of a postcard on which Thanasis had scribbled something. I couldn’t totally make out what it said so I sent it to him on Messenger, and he wrote back:

“This is what I’ve written”, he said. “I slowly forget all about life’s ladder…we have sour cherry juice here…it seems like my taste comes from my mother’s side of the family”. “This postcard is from a drawing. I must have forgotten about it. I used to send things like that to the house. Sometimes I’d write in the back. This one reminds me of a (Yannoulis) Chalepas drawing.”

If Thanasis hadn’t painted his Crucifixion, I’d never see those images. I kept thinking about that. That they’re real – autobiographical, as he says, but not necessary. There’s an enormity of feeling that comes with that simple realisation, and it’s hard to know how to speak about it when it concerns another person, someone you don’t know, except for a few conversations and the work of course. The work is the testimony. Then there’s the realisation that you’ll never fully access what lies behind it.

In the exhibition, we are showing 200 or so drawings Thanasis has made in the last couple of years. Most of them depict his Crucifixion, he raised on the cross, being taken down and placed in his mother’s arms. I find it hard to look at them. It’s not so much the violence and the suffering that I find difficult but the sheer quantity of them—the relentless repetition of the pain he gave time to sediment. I also fear people might look past these drawings and pass judgment on Thanasis personally for the amount of suffering to which, he has laid claim. I have a feeling Thanasis might have crucified himself to fulfil an advance sentence he’d come to expect from the outside.

In these last few weeks of self-isolation, I looked at the histories of the Crucifixion as Christian Passion, Roman punishment and subject in art and certain things resonated with the work.

The punishment of the Crucifixion Romans would mainly impose on deserters, murderers, traitors and criminals of humble origin. Depending on their social status, Romans used to place convicts at different heights on the pillar of the cross. The higher their situation, the higher they hung. That was both symbolic like in their annual dog crucifying ceremonies, and practical. A way to ensure that different bodies would end up in the stomachs of different animals. It was typical for bodies not taken down quickly to end up as food for vultures while dogs and other wild animals would feed on the legs of those that hung closer to the ground. Also, death by Crucifixion was often slow and rarely solitary. There are accounts of people speaking to each other on the cross for hours, laughing, spitting at spectators, even singing songs in protest. I can see this irreverence in Thanasis’ drawings as well. When I asked him about why he’s painted his Crucifixion, Thanasis said he had turned aggression he once felt for others inwardly towards himself. In an older interview with Kostas Bitopoulos about an exhibition at Epikentro Gallery in Patra, Thanasis had said then: “I didn’t do it to exalt it. I did it so I could rid myself from it.”

In Christianity, the cross is a handle that God’s frail and light body uses to lift the world. According to the philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil, the cross – one’s personal cross, is a needle that pierces the quivering soul that is like scales out of balance to give it stability. The act of piercing, the suffering, the cross, is what allows each of us individually to realise that we are not the centre of the world. It is the breakdown of our sense of self-importance, of our ego, through the painful but necessary realisation that we’re bound to a force of gravity matched only by grace. For Weil, the original question that supposedly remained unanswered – “Why have you forsaken me?” – was responded in silence. For others, it’s never received a response. Thinking about the Armenian women that were nailed alive upon the cross, the words of Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison come to mind. Aitchison, who must have painted thousands of crucifixion scenes during his life, and who never professed to be particularly religious either, when asked about his enduring interest in the subject had said that he considered: “the Crucifixion the most horrific story he’d ever heard and little more; the ganging up against one person; as long as the world exists one should attempt to recall it.” Aitchison was by all accounts, a charming man who lived his life among animals he loved dearly. For some time, he had canaries living in his studio. They’d made their nest inside an old mattress. Once, the police caught him driving with his Bedlington terrier on his shoulder.

Thinking about a sequence of crucifixions across art history almost exclusively painted by men, I realised that seeing myself as a woman I’d never identified with the figure of Christ. I wondered if other female or female-identifying artists had been able to look past such markers of difference in identity and create representations of him in their way.

The first work that came to my mind was a photograph by American photographer Francesca Woodman, Untitled in which Woodman places the Crucifixion inside her home picturing herself as Christ hanging above the door. As Deborah Garcia says about this work, this unusual depiction of the Crucifixion which has a mise-en-scene quality is characterised by a mundane hierophany that is seldom found in common depictions of the Passion. In the 1977 self-portrait On Being an Angel #1, Woodman has placed the camera above her head producing a distorted image where her lower body disappears. The unusual angle Woodman has used to picture herself in this work reminded me of another depiction of the Crucifixion by artist Salvador Dali, Christ of St John of the Cross, 1951. To create this image, Dali employed Hollywood stuntman Russell Saunders to pose for him suspended from an overhead gantry so that he could study the effect of gravity on his body. Woodman’s photograph reminded me of Dali’s painting because of how they both position the viewer in space but seeing both works alongside each other made me aware of a fundamental difference between them. In January of 1981 Woodman’s body was found in a New York morgue as that of an unidentified young woman. According to witnesses, she had fallen off a building that same morning, and the fall had disfigured her face. Woodman struggled with depression for years. That struggle is visible in her photographs permeated by a thick atmosphere of melancholy, albeit her use of motifs and interpretation of symbols such as that of the Crucifixion is singular like pain is singular and at the same time novel. That embodied experience with the affective reach that it has is not present in Dali’s work which is characterised by a formal intention – a stylistic, distanced contouring of the subject.

Woodman’s intimate and embodied approach to showing suffering brings to mind not only the words of Aitchison and Weil who suffered from migraines that kept her in bed for days and who had written about this experience as a basis for her philosophy – but also Ana Mendieta’ work. Mendieta created a series of works in response to the rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten in 1973. In one performance she covered herself in blood recreating the victim’s poses as they were described in newspaper articles. Mendieta has said that all her works are in some sense a personal response to issues she cannot see herself responding to theoretically. Mendieta used blood like it is used in rituals of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria but did not subscribe to one religion. In her notebook from 1980, she stated: “my art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world”.

Text by Maya Tounta

  Thanasis Totsikas (born 1951) lives and works in Nikaia, Larissa. He is a skilled luthier, cutler and autobody-repair technician. This expertness has shaped his artistic practice and has been present in his work since his first solo presentation at Desmos Gallery in 1982. His prolific career has included participations at the Venice Biennale and Documenta. His artworks, expressive of a way of life more than the outcome of vocation, often incorporate objects and materials from his every day as diverse as mud and reeds and a Ducati motorcycle.

Link: Thanasis Totsikas at Akwa Ibom

The post Thanasis Totsikas at Akwa Ibom first appeared on Contemporary Art Daily.

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3jdiKcI

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via A "Rational Suicide" Note. Ft. Anne Örtegren.)

November 9, 2019

This is a “suicide” note left by a ME/CFS sufferer who sought and found relief from her suffering via legal, medically assisted suicide.  She says this manifesto took her months to write, which I do not doubt a bit: it is long, detailed and polished and was written when she was feeling terrible.  She wrote it with the intent to describe her almost indescribable pain and experience, and to convince others to take action on behalf of ME/CFS sufferers, both of which are lofty communication goals when anyone is seriously ill.

Describing and convincing have been my most impossible endeavors since I’ve been seriously ill myself and I think I have mostly failed, judging by others’ reactions to everything I’ve managed to gather the physical and emotional grit to attempt to communicate: that I am seriously, hopelessly ill with an incurable, progressive disease, that there is no bottom to how bad this can get, and it matters not what anyone thinks about it.  Some things are just true regardless of whether anyone believes it.

In this note, ME/CFS patient Anne Örtegren describes symptoms and dilemmas I have experienced myself and she foresees logical outcomes to her predicament, something sick people and especially sick women are never allowed to do because catastrophization. For example, she knows that her heightened sensitivity to light and sound will make treatment or recovery in a hospital setting impossible where the standard of care in that environment requires constant activity and interruptions, and provides no privacy and no escape from the harsh industrial lighting, interrogations by (allegedly) well meaning staff and the general hustle and bustle of capitalistic money making on the backs and bodies of sick and dying people.

That is but one example of a sick person making informed prognostications regarding likely outcomes of the things other people want to do to us, and as someone who shares these sensitivities to light and sound (and therefore an aversion to hospital settings) as but one example of our shared experience of being seriously ill, I appreciated her spelling it out.  I also feel extremely sad that she had to, and furious that no one who allegedly cared about her wellbeing including medical professionals who should be fucking sensitive to the actual needs of real patients could make the leap themselves.  There are many such examples in this letter.

See for yourselves, and understand that as illuminating and raw as this letter is, it’s also been edited by the publisher and a so-called suicide prevention expert because the bottom line everywhere appears to be that there is no such thing as rational suicide or euthanasia because well people and people who make money off of the long-term sick and dying say so.  And because living in this capitalistic, patriarchal nightmare is so hideous for so many people that “suicide contagion” exists, where just knowing that someone, somewhere had whatever it took to end themselves is likely to cause untold numbers of happy, healthy consumers with bright futures to do the same damn thing.  Yeah that’s it, let’s keep telling ourselves that.

The letter as published is reprinted below.  The unedited letter supposedly exists online somewhere if anyone cares to look and has the energy to figure out how and where the edited version differs from the original.  Comments are open below.

Farewell – A Last Post from Anne Örtegren

Nobody can say that I didn’t put up enough of a fight.

For 16 years I have battled increasingly severe ME/CFS. My condition has steadily deteriorated and new additional medical problems have regularly appeared, making it ever more difficult to endure and make it through the day (and night).

Throughout this time, I have invested almost every bit of my tiny energy in the fight for treatment for us ME/CFS patients. Severely ill, I have advocated from my bedroom for research and establishment of biomedical ME/CFS clinics to get us proper health care. All the while, I have worked hard to find something which would improve my own health. I have researched all possible treatment options, got in contact with international experts and methodically tried out every medication, supplement and regimen suggested.

Sadly, for all the work done, we still don’t have adequately sized specialized biomedical care for ME/CFS patients here in Stockholm, Sweden – or hardly anywhere on the planet. We still don’t have in-patient hospital units adapted to the needs of the severely ill ME/CFS patients. Funding levels for biomedical ME/CFS research remain ridiculously low in all countries and the erroneous psychosocial model which has caused me and others so much harm is still making headway.

And sadly, for me personally things have gone from bad to worse to unbearable. I am now mostly bedbound and constantly tortured by ME/CFS symptoms. I also suffer greatly from a number of additional medical problems, the most severe being a systematic hyper-reactivity in the form of burning skin combined with an immunological/allergic reaction. This is triggered by so many things that it has become impossible to create an adapted environment. Some of you have followed my struggle to find clothes and bed linen I can tolerate. Lately, I am simply running out. I no longer have clothes I can wear without my skin “burning up” and my body going into an allergic state.

This means I no longer see a way out from this solitary ME/CFS prison and its constant torture. I can no longer even do damage control, and my body is at the end of its rope. Therefore, I have gone through a long and thorough process involving several medical assessments to be able to choose a peaceful way out: I have received a preliminary green light for accompanied suicide through a clinic in Switzerland.

When you read this I am at rest, free from suffering at last. I have written this post to explain why I had to take this drastic step. Many ME/CFS patients have found it necessary to make the same decision, and I want to speak up for us, as I think my reasons may be similar to those of many others with the same sad destiny.

These reasons can be summed up in three headers: unbearable suffering; no realistic way out of the suffering; and the lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs.

Important note Before I write more about these reasons, I want to stress something important. Depression is not the cause of my choice. Though I have been suffering massively for many years, I am not depressed. I still have all my will and my motivation. I still laugh and see the funny side of things, I still enjoy doing whatever small activities I can manage. I am still hugely interested in the world around me – my loved ones and all that goes on in their lives, the society, the world (what is happening in human rights issues? how can we solve the climate change crisis?) During these 16 years, I have never felt any lack of motivation.

On the contrary, I have consistently fought for solutions with the goal to get myself better and help all ME/CFS patients get better. There are so many things I want to do, I have a lot to live for. If I could only regain some functioning, quieten down the torture a bit and be able to tolerate clothes and a normal environment, I have such a long list of things I would love to do with my life!

Three main reasons So depression is not the reason for my decision to terminate my life. The reasons are the following:

1. Unbearable suffering Many severely ill ME/CFS patients are hovering at the border of unbearable suffering. We are constantly plagued by intense symptoms, we endure high-impact every-minute physical suffering 24 hours a day, year after year. I see it as a prison sentence with torture. I am homebound and mostly bedbound – there is the prison. I constantly suffer from excruciating symptoms: The worst flu you ever had. Sore throat, bronchi hurting with every breath. Complete exhaustion, almost zero energy, a body that weighs a tonne and sometimes won’t even move. Muscle weakness, dizziness, great difficulties standing up. Sensory overload causing severe suffering from the brain and nervous system. Massive pain in muscles, painful inflammations in muscle attachments. Intensely burning skin. A feeling of having been run over by a bus, twice, with every cell screaming. This has got to be called torture.

It would be easier to handle if there were breaks, breathing spaces. But with severe ME/CFS there is no minute during the day when one is comfortable. My body is a war zone with constant firing attacks. There is no rest, no respite. Every move of every day is a mountain-climb. Every night is a challenge, since there is no easy sleep to rescue me from the torture. I always just have to try to get through the night. And then get through the next day.

It would also be easier if there were distractions. Like many patients with severe ME/CFS I am unable to listen to music, radio, podcasts or audio books, or to watch TV. I can only read for short bouts of time, and use the computer for even shorter moments. I am too ill to manage more than rare visits or phone calls from my family and friends, and sadly unable to live with someone. This solitary confinement aspect of ME/CFS is devastating and it is understandable that ME/CFS has been described as the “living death disease”.

For me personally, the situation has turned into an emergency not least due to my horrific symptom of burning skin linked to immunological/allergic reactions. This appeared six years into my ME/CFS, when I was struck by what seemed like a complete collapse of the bodily systems controlling immune system, allergic pathways, temperature control, skin and peripheral nerves. I had long had trouble with urticaria, hyperreactive skin and allergies, but at this point a violent reaction occurred and my skin completely lost tolerance. I started having massively burning skin, severe urticaria and constant cold sweats and shivers (these reactions reminded me of the first stages of the anaphylactic shock I once had, then due to heat allergy).

Since then, for ten long years, my skin has been burning. It is an intense pain. I have been unable to tolerate almost all kinds of clothes and bed linen as well as heat, sun, chemicals and other everyday things. These all trigger the burning skin and the freezing/shivering reaction into a state of extreme pain and suffering. Imagine being badly sunburnt and then being forced to live under a constant scalding sun – no relief in sight.

At first I managed to find a certain textile fabric which I could tolerate, but then this went out of production, and in spite of years of negotiations with the textile industry it has, strangely, proven impossible to recreate that specific weave. This has meant that as my clothes have been wearing out, I have been approaching the point where I will no longer have clothes and bed linen that are tolerable to my skin. It has also become increasingly difficult to adapt the rest of my living environment so as to not trigger the reaction and worsen the symptoms. Now that I am running out of clothes and sheets, ahead of me has lain a situation with constant burning skin and an allergic state of shivering/cold sweats and massive suffering. This would have been absolutely unbearable.

For 16 years I have had to manage an ever-increasing load of suffering and problems. They now add up to a situation which is simply no longer sustainable.

2. No realistic way out of the suffering A very important factor is the lack of realistic hope for relief in the future. It is possible for a person to bear a lot of suffering, as long as it is time-limited. But the combination of massive suffering and a lack of rational hope for remission or recovery is devastating.

Think about the temporary agony of a violent case of gastric flu. Picture how you are feeling those horrible days when you are lying on the bathroom floor between attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting. This is something we all have to live through at times, but we know it will be over in a few days. If someone told you at that point: “you will have to live with this for the rest of your life”, I am sure you would agree that it wouldn’t feel feasible. It is unimaginable to cope with a whole life with the body in that insufferable state every day, year after year. The level of unbearableness in severe ME/CFS is the same.

If I knew there was relief on the horizon, it would be possible to endure severe ME/CFS and all the additional medical problems, even for a long time, I think. The point is that there has to be a limit, the suffering must not feel endless.

One vital aspect here is of course that patients need to feel that the ME/CFS field is being taken forward. Sadly, we haven’t been granted this feeling – see my previous blogs relating to this here and here.

Another imperative issue is the drug intolerance that I and many others with ME/CFS suffer from. I have tried every possible treatment, but most of them have just given me side-effects, many of which have been irreversible. My stomach has become increasingly dysfunctional, so for the past few years any new drugs have caused immediate diarrhoea. One supplement triggered massive inflammation in my entire urinary tract, which has since persisted. The list of such occurrences of major deterioration caused by different drugs/treatments is long, and with time my reactions have become increasingly violent. I now have to conclude that my sensitivity to medication is so severe that realistically it is very hard for me to tolerate drugs or supplements.

This has two crucial meanings for many of us severely ill ME/CFS patients: There is no way of relieving our symptoms. And even if treatments appear in the future, with our sensitivity of medication any drug will carry a great risk of irreversible side-effects producing even more suffering. This means that even in the case of a real effort finally being made to bring biomedical research into ME/CFS up to levels on par with that of other diseases, and possible treatments being made accessible, for some of us it is unlikely that we would be able to benefit. Considering our extreme sensitivity to medication, one could say it’s hard to have realistic hope of recovery or relief for us.

In the past couple of years I, being desperate, have challenged the massive side-effect risk and tried one of the treatments being researched in regards to ME/CFS. But I received it late in the disease process, and it was a gamble. I needed it to have an almost miraculous effect: a quick positive response which eliminated many symptoms – most of all I needed it to stop my skin from burning and reacting, so I could tolerate the clothes and bed linen produced today. I have been quickly running out of clothes and sheets, so I was gambling with high odds for a quick and extensive response. Sadly, I wasn’t a responder. I have also tried medication for Mast Cell Activation Disorder and a low-histamine diet, but my burning skin hasn’t abated. Since I am now running out of clothes and sheets, all that was before me was constant burning hell.

3. The lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs The third factor is the insight that the risk for further deterioration and increased suffering is high.

On top of the nearly unbearable symptoms it is very likely that in the future things will get even worse. An example in my case could be my back and neck pain. I would need to strengthen muscles to prevent them from getting worse. But the characteristic symptom of Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) when I attempt even small activities, is hugely problematic.

Whenever we try to ignore the PEM issue and push through, we immediately crash and become much sicker. We might go from being able to at least get up and eat, to being completely bedbound, until the PEM has subsided. Sometimes, it doesn’t subside, and we find ourselves irreversibly deteriorated, at a new, even lower baseline level, with no way of improving.

PEM is not something that you can work around.

For me, new medical complications also continue to arise, and I have no way of amending them. I already need surgery for one existing problem, and it is likely that it will be needed for other issues in the future, but surgery or hospital care is not feasible for several reasons:

One is that my body seems to lack repairing mechanisms. Previous biopsies have not healed properly, so my doctor is doubtful about my ability to recover after surgery.

Another, more general and hugely critical, is that with severe ME/CFS it is impossible to tolerate normal hospital care. For ME/CFS patients the sensory overload problem and the extremely low energy levels mean that a normal hospital environment causes major deterioration. The sensory input that comes with shared rooms, people coming and going, bright lights, noise, etc, escalates our disease. We are already in such fragile states that a push in the wrong direction is catastrophic. For me, with my burning skin issue, there is also the issue of not tolerating the mattresses, pillows, textile fabrics, etc used in a hospital.

Just imagine the effects of a hospital stay for me: It would trigger my already severe ME/CFS into new depths – likely I would become completely bedbound and unable to tolerate any light or noise. The skin hyperreactivity would, within a few hours, trigger my body into an insufferable state of burning skin and agonizing immune-allergic reactions, which would then be impossible to reverse. My family, my doctor and I agree: I must never be admitted to a hospital, since there is no end to how much worse that would make me.

Many ME/CFS patients have experienced irreversible deterioration due to hospitalization. We also know that the understanding of ME/CFS is extremely low or non-existent in most hospitals, and we hear about ME/CFS patients being forced into environments or activities which make them much worse. I am aware of only two places in the world with specially adjusted hospital units for severe ME/CFS, Oslo, Norway, and Gold Coast, Australia. We would need such units in every city around the globe.

It is extreme to be this severely ill, have so many medical complications arise continually and know this: There is no feasible access to hospital care for me. There are no tolerable medications to use when things get worse or other medical problems set in. As a severely ill ME/CFS patient I have no safety net at all. There is simply no end to how bad things can get with severe ME/CFS.

Coping skills – important but not enough I realize that when people hear about my decision to terminate my life, they will wonder about my coping skills. I have written about this before and I want to mention the issue here too:

While it was extremely hard at the beginning to accept chronic illness, I have over the years developed a large degree of acceptance and pretty good coping skills. I have learnt to accept tight limits and appreciate small qualities of life. I have learnt to cope with massive amounts of pain and suffering and still find bright spots. With the level of acceptance I have come to now, I would have been content even with relatively small improvements and a very limited life. If, hypothetically, the physical suffering could be taken out of the equation, I would have been able to live contentedly even though my life continued to be restricted to my small apartment and include very little activity. Unlike most people I could find such a tiny life bearable and even happy. But I am not able to cope with these high levels of constant physical suffering.

In short, to sum up my level of acceptance as well as my limit: I can take the prison and the extreme limitations – but I can no longer take the torture. And I cannot live with clothes that constantly trigger my burning skin.

Not alone – and not a rash decision In spite of being unable to see friends or family for more than rare and brief visits, and in spite of having limited capacity for phone conversations, I still have a circle of loved ones. My friends and family all understand my current situation and they accept and support my choice. While they do not want me to leave, they also do not want me to suffer anymore.

This is not a rash decision. It has been processed for many years, in my head, in conversations with family and friends, in discussion with one of my doctors, and a few years ago in the long procedure of requesting accompanied suicide. The clinic in Switzerland requires an extensive process to ensure that the patient is chronically ill, lives with unendurable pain or suffering, and has no realistic hope of relief. They require a number of medical records as well as consultations with specialized doctors.

For me this end is obviously not what I wanted, but it was the best solution to an extremely difficult situation and preferable to even more suffering. It was not hasty choice, but one that matured over a long period of time.

A plea to decision makers – Give ME/CFS patients a future! As you understand, this blog post has taken me many months to put together. It is a long text to read too, I know. But I felt it was important to write it and have it published to explain why I personally had to take this step, and hopefully illuminate why so many ME/CFS patients consider or commit suicide.

And most importantly: to elucidate that this circumstance can be changed! But that will take devoted, resolute, real action from all of those responsible for the state of ME/CFS care, ME/CFS research and dissemination of information about the disease. Sadly, this responsibility has been mishandled for decades. To allow ME/CFS patients some hope on the horizon, key people in all countries must step up and act.

If you are a decision maker, here is what you urgently need to do: You need to bring funding for biomedical ME/CFS research up so it’s on par with comparable diseases (as an example, in the US that would mean $188 million per year). You need to make sure there are dedicated hospital care units for ME/CFS inpatients in every city around the world. You need to establish specialist biomedical care available to all ME/CFS patients; it should be as natural as RA patients having access to a rheumatologist or cancer patients to an oncologist. You need to give ME/CFS patients a future.

Please listen to these words of Jen Brea, which sum up the situation in the US, but are applicable to almost every country:

“The NIH says it won’t fund ME research because no one wants to study it. Yet they reject the applications of the world class scientists who are committed to advancing the field. Meanwhile, HHS has an advisory committee whose sole purpose seems to be making recommendations that are rarely adopted. There are no drugs in the pipeline at the FDA yet the FDA won’t approve the one drug, Ampligen, that can have Lazarus-like effects in some patients. Meanwhile, the CDC continues to educate doctors using information that we (patients) all know is inaccurate or incomplete.”

Like Jen Brea, I want a number of people from these agencies, and equivalent agencies in Sweden and all other countries, to stand up and take responsibility. To say: “ME! I am going to change things because that is my job.”

And lastly Lastly, I would like to end this by linking to this public comment from a US agency meeting (CFSAC). It seems to have been taken off the HHS site, but I found it in the Google Read version of the book “Lighting Up a Hidden World: CFS and ME” by Valerie Free. It includes testimony from two very eloquent ME patients and it says it all. I thank these ME patients for expressing so well what we are experiencing.

My previous blog posts:

From International Traveler to 43 Square Meters: An ME/CFS Story From Sweden

Coping With ME/CFS Will Always Be Hard – But There are Ways of Making It A Little Easier

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt I: The Facts – Plus “What Can We Do?

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt II: Why it Takes 20 Years to Get 1 Year’s Research Done

Take care of each other.

Love, Anne

Comments Open.

[rattlung]

okay so a lot of things

one, this took so long because i had about fourteen billion versions of this all lost to the draft fiasco that will eternally damn me. this one is one of the salvaged ones that i didn’t like at first but cleaned it up as best as i could. i wish i could say that that’s what took so long to write this, but honestly i wrote myself into so many corners, i just STRUGGLED with this one

two, you are absolutely FINE at coming up with prompts, i’m just horrific at sticking to them. reading it over for the (minor, because i’m a fraud) editing, i’m realizing that i fuckin s t r e t c h e d the meaning of it. instead of hurt/comfort it’s more “emotionally stupid dumbass gets assurance” 

three, i fucking looked up how to write korean names, got advice from comments, learned about the elements and how that goes into naming, but STILL never found the sure way to write it. every source had smth different, like hyphenated, a space in between, no space at all. so, to save myself the fucking heartbreak, i’m just going to stick with the canon spelling (tae joon) and call it a day. 

so anyway, tl;dr: 1) sorry, 2) oops (sorry), and 3) i wanna die (sorry again)

=====

“I’m telling you, that’s not right.”

“What do you mean it isn’t - that’s how we’ve always played it!”

“If that’s how we’ve always played it then we’ve been playing a different game!”

Elliott set down his hand, faces down, so he could groan dramatically into his palms. “It’s house rules, we’ve never not played aces high, just like how we don’t allow sets.”

Across from him, his decoy scoffed. “Yeah, but we agreed on no sets. I don’t remember agreeing on aces high.”

Crypto was sat at his desk, mostly slouched over with his elbow planted on the surface to prop his head up in his hand. The monitors flashed through numbers and windows, keeping him updated on the progress of a system cleaning. For as long as he had been there, there had never been a bug or an issue worth enough to report on, but he still ran the sweep anyway. He learned more from the speed of which they were completed, which is why he knew how long Elliott and his decoy were arguing. He’d been watching the clock.

They were nearing seven minutes now. Their card game had only been going on for eleven.

Crypto didn’t mind, if he were being completely honest. He used to listen to music or documentaries he found at random while he worked before. At some point, he must have made the fluid transition from that to Elliott’s company. He had a talent for talking when no one else would, filling silences with tales from bartending or just random thoughts - do you think Bloodhound’s room is a safety hazard? That’s a lot of candles. Not that I’m gonna be the one to tell them to tone it down, I just wanna be ready - or even going back and forth with one of his decoys.

It was calming, and gave Crypto something to listen to whenever he found himself pausing every so often rather than getting lost in thought. Sometimes, he still learned something random like he used to when he watched the documentaries. Bars, Crypto learned, were very colorful and unpredictable places.

“We agreed on aces high.”

“No, we didn’t. I would remember that, I’m programmed to remember.”

“Then you’re bugging out.”

A scandalized gasp. “You take that back!”

“Then admit that I’m right!”

“You’re not, though!”

“How is it,” Crypto started before Elliott could snap back at his hologram, “that you even have a hard time getting along with yourself?”

The real Elliott sputtered out a few starts to sentences while the other Elliott made an annoyed noise. “Don’t say that,” it requested. “That would imply that we’re the same person, and I don’t think I want to be associated with him right now.”

Elliott recovered from his sputtering to glare at the decoy. “We’re not the same person, I’m smarter than you - I made you.”

“That’s it,” it snapped, slamming its own cards down on Crypto’s bed. “I’m outta here.”

“Fine,” Elliott seethed just as it fizzled away in a pop of lights. “He’ll get over it,” he told Crypto as he reached over to collect the decoy’s hand.

Crypto said nothing, as he wasn’t worried in the first place. He wasn’t looking at his computer anymore, either, having spun around in his chair just enough to watch the rest of the argument unfold.The scan might have finished, but he was busy now, head pillowed on his arms and watching how Elliott’s brow furrowed at the decoy’s cards.

“He was cheating, he had to be,” Elliott muttered to himself. He flipped over the deck in the middle and fanned out the cards across the bed, looking over both hands and the pile. After glancing back and forth a few times, his eyes narrowed. “How is he better than me at cheating?”

“Your holograms know how to cheat.”

Elliott looked up at Crypto’s not-question, seeming really proud. “Yeah, of course. Does Holographic Trickster mean nothing to you? Hey,” he gathered all the cards up and, with deft fingers, shuffled them several times before spreading them. He held them out to Crypto with a lazy grin. “Pick one.”

With a heaving, deep sigh, Crypto picked his head up, straightened his back, and said, “No.” Then, he turned back around to face his computer.

Behind him was the sound of the cot squeaking as Elliott thumped down on it with a theatrical whine. “Aw, come on!”

“I know all your tricks,” Crypto reminded him.

“They aren’t tricks, it’s magic.”

“Magic,” Crypto repeated, doubtful.

“Yeah.”

“Which isn’t real.”

“Sure it is.” He could hear the smug grin in Elliott’s voice when he said, “What’s going on between us is magic, baby.”

Over his shoulder, Crypto gave him an exasperated look that had Elliott laughing. “At least you think you’re funny.”

“I do,” Elliott said around a yawn. “I really do. Speaking of magic, I’m going to bed.” He bounced his eyebrows up and down once or twice just to see Crypto roll his eyes and he laughed again. “Sorry - I’m being genuine, though, I’m exhausted and sleep sounds magical right now.”

The cot creaked again and Crypto felt something press up against the back of his chair in the next moment, Elliott reaching around him to place the deck of cards on his desk. Instead of pulling away once that was done, he slung an arm around Crypto’s chest and he could feel the scrape of Elliott’s beard on the side of his face.

“Wanna come with me?” He asked.

“I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“Wh - I do, jeez.” Despite how offended he sounded at the insinuation, his arm was still firm around Crypto in the strange hug he’d locked them in. “You look tired, is all, and my bed is comfier.”

“I’m fine,” Crypto told him - stiffly, to hopefully mask how tempting the offer sounded to him.

“You sure?” Crypto made a noise. “Alright.” Elliott stood and left two soft kisses behind, one on the metallic corner of Crypto’s jaw, and one higher up on his cheek where he could feel the warmth of it. There was shuffling behind him as Elliott gathered the few things he’d carried over from his own dorm. “I won’t say ‘I told you so’ if you pass out tomorrow during the game.”

“You wouldn’t be able to,” Crypto said flatly, throwing one last smirk over his shoulder. “I could outperform you in my sleep, old man.”

Elliott stopped at the door to glower at him but Crypto looked away before he could catch most of the heat from it. “You’re uninvited to my bed,” Elliott muttered. “For real, though, babe, g’night.”

“Jal ja.”

He heard the door open, but Elliott must have hung back there for a moment because it didn’t shut again. Crypto stopped typing but he didn’t turn around, just waited. Maybe Elliott had forgotten something or didn’t close the door all the way on his way out.

But then he heard Elliott speak. “I - “ He cut himself off and made a frustrated noise punctuated by the sound of shuffling feet. Then, like it was punched out of him, “I love you.”

Immediately, the door slammed shut.

The monitors lit up with a finished report and the screens of moving text kept scrolling, but Crypto stayed very still for a very long time.

----=----

The mistake, Crypto realized, was letting him and Elliott start in the first place.

At first, after what might have been an hour of staring blankly at his dimmed computer screen with nothing but the ringing silence for company, he’d thought to himself, I shouldn’t have let it get this far, but he’d come to understand that that was wrong. He would have had to have a stopping point in mind in the first place to know if he’d let anything get too far. He didn’t have one and that was on purpose, which he was ashamed of.  He’d done this to himself, pointedly ignored the ever-present voice in the back of his head telling him that everyone was dangerous, whether they meant to be or not. Don’t get close to anyone, because he can’t afford to.

But it was different in the beginning, he and Elliott, and how was Crypto supposed to know it would end up like that? It had just been a rivalry, then, childish and needlessly competitive, but harmless.

Somewhere along the line, though, it stopped being that. Rivalry shifted into an unsteady friendship, which turned into unsteady flirting, which then lead to Crypto shoving Mirage’s shoulders hard into a wall after a close fight. It had interrupted the praising Mirage had been giving himself for finishing the last of the attacking squad, and Crypto remembered how he didn’t seem too miffed. Mirage had let himself be pressed against wall with one of those dumb, broad grins and pulled Crypto in after him, meeting him halfway in a heated kiss.

Even then Crypto felt the shame gnawing just under the need in his chest. It was searing and cold all at the same time and Crypto chose to ignore it then. He buried it, or did his best to, and remembered thinking, I deserve this. He focused on the man in front of him to avoid the freezing burn of the feeling, tightened his fist in the other’s hair when the fear got too loud, and took what he needed since Mirage had been so willing to give.

And it was still easy, even after that first time. For all of his showboating and the need to be center of attention, Elliott was good at casual. Now, Crypto didn’t know if that was a good thing or if it was bad. Falling into their routine had been so simple he barely noticed they’d made one. Having someone to talk to - or, rather, be talked at, was something Crypto hadn’t realized he was been missing. Then there was the intimacy, the new warm and solid presence in his bed, a body leaning against his side, the sound of surprised laughter at Crypto’s dry remarks, the intense back and forth, the rasp of a beard when Crypto drug them away so he could wipe away a cocky smirk by covering it with one of his own -

It was easy. But then Elliott had to go be an idiot and ruin everything by saying, “I love you,” and Crypto just had to make it worse by wanting to say it back.

He wondered what would have happened if Elliott had waited for a response. Would he have gotten one? Would the expectant presence in his doorway have urged him, or would have Crypto just sat there, stock still, and disappointed him? Did Elliott even want him to answer back? The way he’d said it - forced from himself - like it’d been caught in his throat for so long that he had to spit it out to get it to stop hurting. Like he just wanted to get it over with. And then Elliott fled - had he regretted it? Because he miscalculated his own emotions, or because he was scared of how Crypto would react?

He prided himself on having information, and not knowing what to think or what to do, it made Crypto feel young again in the worst way possible. He thought he buried that part of him a long time ago. The man that felt fear, anxiousness, the man that could say I love you so freely, he was supposed to be gone. And perhaps that’s where the issue lay. It was all too familiar. He had said it so often before and in a different way to a different kind of people - forever family.

It was happening all over again. He was setting himself up to lose it all once more.

He didn’t get up from his desk that night. He didn’t go and join Elliott in his bed. Tae Joon Park sat in his room, by himself, and was terrified.

----=----

Their game the following day doesn’t go horribly, but they don’t win.

Mirage showed up to the drop a little later than Crypto, who only barely made it. He’d approached the lowering platform with a fresh face and a gleaming smile, greeted Lifeline with their usual banter with no hesitation or stuttering, and called out something to Wraith to see if he could maybe poke the bear a bit before they got started.

When he sidled up next to Crypto, he bumped their shoulders together but didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at him. It was easy to tell that Mirage was being cautious, that he himself probably didn’t know how to proceed after his minor outburst the night before. Crypto wouldn’t have been surprised if Mirage half-expected him to be missing again, just like all those months ago, after a different outburst. When Mirage had said his name, his real name, and Crypto had been terrified then, too.

He had planned on running that time, ditching Hyeon Kim and Crypto, starting all over again on another planet in another way. Then he came across Elliott before he could escape off the ship. Crypto hadn’t wanted to stop, but the sight of the other did something to his chest, constricted his ribs until they were tight and he couldn’t breathe - he was hurt. It hurt. Having to be reminded that nothing was safe, that nothing good was ever going to be left for a man like him, it was a painful thing. But it was a lesson he would have to undergo until it finally stuck. Until he learned.

And if Elliott Witt was going to be a lesson for Crypto, it was going to be only his. If what they had was going to be a concoction of their making, he was going to take it from them. So, he cornered the other and demanded a name. Elliott Witt was going to stay a lesson; he would remain the person that thawed Crypto enough to find a way close to the center of him. Elliott Witt would be warm, companionable, easy, and unattainable. Fake. The betrayal would have a different title, some other name, and live as the truthful counterpart to something sweet.

That was what made him weak. He couldn’t cut clean, wanted to keep a part of it. When the other talked, Crypto listened. When he explained himself, Crypto believed him. When he touched him, Crypto let him. The man made Crypto weak.

Tae Joon Park was weak, and he lost everything.

“Hey.”

Crypto tore his eyes away from the spot on the floor he’d been staring at since he’d arrived. The eliminated teams had all gathered at the small seating area in the dropship to watch the rest of the finishing match together. Two squads were left and from the jeering and gasps, Crypto imagined it was an interesting finish. He opted to linger on the outskirts, leaning against the partition to his room while he waited for his drone to finish its repairs on its dock.

He hadn’t kept track of where Elliott had gone off to, but judging by the slight dampness to his hair it was clear now he’d left for the showers. Maybe to cool off, but more likely to think, since he took the place next to Crypto and took a breath.

“Hey,” Crypto said back when Elliott held it for a while.

They weren’t looking at each other.

“Hey,” Elliott said again. “Can we - we should probably... y’know, talk.” The idea seemed to illicit dread in him despite the fact that he was the one who suggested it.

Maybe he should have left. Crypto should have gone through with the attempt the first time, and if not try again last night. Pulled out of the Apex Games and found another way to get inside. Something in him told him that would never had worked, though. It was that weakness, it told him that he could run from everything else, anyone else, but not Elliott. There was an element to him, damning and completely in control without a conscious effort. Crypto never stood a chance.

Like a grim veil, the realization settled over Crypto heavily. He’d never be finished with Elliott unless Elliott was finished with him.

“Can it wait?” Crypto asked.

Elliott’s careful, neutral facade crumbled for a split second before it smoothed out in understanding. He nodded, looked over the room even though no one was actively interested in them or looking their way. “Oh, yeah. You could meet me at my room tonight - or yours, whatever’s good with me.”

Crypto shook his head. “Not here, it isn’t safe.” To that, Elliott’s brow furrowed worriedly. “I have to,” he hesitated, then cocked his head to the side a little as he tried out, “show you something.”

----=----

It wasn’t often Crypto went into the city. He had everything he needed up in the dropship’s dorms and he believed the less he frequented the little flat he rented, the less likely they were to track him down.

Elliott walked beside him, dressed down in an effort to lower the chances of getting recognized. Crypto didn’t tell him he didn’t have to worry about it; people that lived in this area rarely made eye contact, let alone get a good long look at someone. Besides, it would sound hypocritical coming from him, shadowed and hidden underneath a hood.

The apartment’s entrance was off to the side in an alley, as the front was dedicated to the little chain convenience store it sat above. The stairs creaked underneath them. The third floor apartment must have been hosting a party; music thumped just over the murmuring of too many voices. Vehicles wailed on the street below. But once the door shut behind them, all outside noises muffled into pure quiet.

Crypto ventured inside, deciding to not acknowledge how Elliott obviously looked around at the sparsity of the living space. Over the years, Crypto had learned to pack lightly. What he had he usually collected as he moved around, then left it all behind once he had to. His system was something he could take with him, stored on his drone or his cube. It was just easier to buy new as he had to, implement software, then wipe it clean or leave it damaged and unsalvageable.

The computer he had set up there was mostly for security. He’d gotten access to the convenience store’s security system within ten minutes of moving in. The cameras’ feed was on constant display and that was just about it. Everything he needed for work was up on the ship with about a thousand different firewalls and remote access no matter where he was as long as he had his drone.

Besides that all collected in the far corner, there wasn’t much else. The windows that faced the street were blacked out, nothing else was on the walls. A tiny futon was pushed off to one side if he ever found himself sleeping there. Even the trunk beside that was mostly for show. Crypto had gotten it just in case the landlord stopped by - the last thing he needed was Mrs. Graves catching sight of a pistol lying around and have her start asking questions. Anything else inside the trunk was there for easier collecting if he ever had to flee.

Crypto stood over the trunk, staring down at the closed lid as if he could see through it. Behind him he could hear Elliott still shuffling where he hung back in the tiny entryway. His nervousness was palpable and had Crypto’s own shoulders drawing up just from the feeling.

Finally, he met Elliott’s eyes. “You know my name.”

“Which one?” He asked through a mirthless laugh.

“The first one. My real one.”

“Yeah. You told me not to say it, though.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Elliott’s gaze cut away in confusion only to flicker back in the next second. “Because you - you told me not to? I don’t - “

“Why isn’t it safe for it to be said?” Elliott shrugged helplessly, like it was too loaded of a question for him with too many possible answers. Maybe it was, and maybe this wasn’t fair, but it needed to be done. So, Crypto pressed, “You found the article, what did it say?”

“Not much, it just said you were, like, wanted. For something.”

Elliott was usually a better liar than that. Crypto shook his head but ultimately let it go. He knelt down and Elliott watched as he removed the lock off the trunk, unclasped the latches, and lifted the lid. He wandered over slowly, curious to the contents, but stopped short when he remembered himself. Crypto stood straight with something in his hand and closed the rest of the distance between them, holding the object out for Elliott to see.

He took the frame in his hands gingerly, flipping it over to look down at the picture inside. Recognition flooded Elliott’s features. “Your sister.”

Crypto nodded. “Mila.”

A woman sat in the middle of the picture, older and graced with those kind motherly features. To the right of her, a younger girl with fire red hair spilling out from beneath a beanie and a coy grin. And then a man who had all of Crypto’s sharp edges, just smoothed out by his youth and warmth.  For a moment, Crypto tried to imagine what he’d be thinking if he were Elliott, looking at the photo for the first time. Wondered what Elliott saw. What he felt.

“We used to work together,” Crypto said after the silence stretched too long.

“She was like you?” Elliott asked.

Crypto nodded. “One night, we found something we weren’t supposed to. Something dangerous.”

“Like what?”

Crypto barely held himself back from the immediate response of I can’t tell you that. He had to think about it; this was important. He needed to give enough to get Elliott to understand, but too much was out of the question. Knowledge was power and Crypto’s secrets were a lot to handle. The whole point of this was to protect Elliott.

“Something that controlled a lot of people’s lives. If it got out, it was going to ruin everything.”

“Vague,” Elliott couldn’t help saying, but he didn’t urge for more. He handed the frame back and Crypto took it from him. “So, what happened? You find the people who made it and tried to turn ‘em in?”

Crypto almost laughed. He didn’t, but it still sat in his mouth bitterly. He couldn’t even imagine how well that would have gone over for him. “No, that would’ve been stupid. I was going to leave it alone, cover up our tracks and hope they didn’t realize we’d uncovered it. The people who developed this... information, they have a lot of resources.” He paused and stared down at the back of the picture frame, running a thumb over the matte black. Stiffly, he added. “I was afraid of them.”

From the corner of his eye Crypto could see Elliott give a full-bodied twitch, like he wanted to move forward and reach out. “Babe - “

“Mila wanted to do the opposite of both,” he said, interrupting the other. He had to get it out; if Elliott stopped him, he wouldn’t understand. Crypto’s breathing was slow, his voice even, emotions drawn close and stored away somewhere deep where they wouldn’t affect him. Still, just in case, he held the frame with the picture facing down. “She wanted us to use it for ourselves. If it worked out even just once, everything would be different, but the risk wasn’t worth it. I tried to tell her and I thought she understood, but - “ He turned suddenly, moving back over to the trunk on the floor. “Mila wanted our lives to change,” Crypto said, kneeling down once more to return the frame.

The lid closed with a heavy thud and he flipped the latches closed, shutting it away along with everything else. It’s as he’s staring down at it, achingly aware of Elliott’s presence beside him, in an empty apartment that’s leased to a name that isn’t his, that Crypto fully realized his place in everything. That in some sick, morbid way, Mila actually got what she wanted. Things were never going to be the same.

“It only took them a night,” he stated flatly. “I woke up to sirens, and she was gone. And I was a wanted man.”

“They framed you for it,” Elliott said.

“They framed me for everything.”

Elliott was quiet for a long time. His expression shifted around, like he wanted to ask a question, obviously putting together and processing the new information. “I guess,” he began slowly, “I can see where this could make sense. And I’m trying to find an ell-lello - elque - y’know, like, a polite way of asking, uh, why you’re telling me this? Not that I don’t appreciate it, because that was a lot.”

“Because I owe it to you,” Crypto replied. “You deserve an explanation.”

“Okay. For what?”

“You need to stay away from me.”

It seemed like Elliott didn’t understand him at first, probably due to the casual and blunt delivery of the statement. First he blinked, narrowing his eyes, then settled on a brittle laugh when Crypto continued to not follow up with anything.

“You can’t - you can’t be serious.” Elliott scoffed at the stretching silence and shook his head. “Okay, okay, no, I don’t get it. How does that equal us having to break up?”

He faced away from the other so Elliott couldn’t see the minor, subtle flinch. They’d never talked about what they were to each other. Besides insufferable pet names and horribly creative nicknames, Elliott hadn’t called him much of anything. Not his partner, not his boyfriend. Even in recent interviews, he’s commented on how he doesn’t feel comfortable settling down or sticking to one person. The phrase “break up” contradicted that, though, didn’t it? Implied something a lot more? Obviously they kept themselves secret, but he still got the feeling that maybe the progression of... them caught Elliott off guard as well.

“My mother lost her kids. My sister lost her life. I lost everything. You’ve lost too much already. I won’t be the reason you lose more.”

“That’s stupid.”

Crypto whipped around to eye the other incredulously.

“Sorry,” Elliott amended immediately. “Not stupid - well, no, it is stupid. If that’s your whole reason, then I think it’s stupid,” he said firmly. “That stuff wasn’t your fault, you know that, right?”

He didn’t answer. He knew how to, but it wasn’t what Elliott would be looking for. In each and every case there had been a pattern, a common factor, and it’d been Crypto.

“You’re smart, and you can do just about anything, but you can’t control people,” Elliott went on, catching on to the other’s disbelief. “If your sister was anything like you, nothing was going to stop her from doing what she thought she needed to do. What happened after that isn’t her fault, and it sure as hell isn’t yours. It’s theirs, no one else’s.” His shoulders dropped a little as he let out a breath, his helpless frustration melting away until only the helplessness was left. “You’re not some harbinger of doom, you’re just - you’re just a guy that bad shit happened to. And I know - I know it’s probably really hard to believe that good stuff can still happen, because it doesn’t for a really long time. And when it finally does, you kinda just sit around and wait for the other shoe to drop. I-I get that, but I don’t think being afraid is a good enough reason to just give up on this.”

“It has to be,” Crypto said, voice strained despite his efforts. “It has to be good enough.”

“It isn’t,” Elliott told him. “I love you.”

Crypto physically pulled away, putting more distance between them as if it would help. This wasn’t going as well as he’d hoped. He thought the threat of inevitable death would have been enough, but apparently he should have taken Elliott’s stubbornness into account, his recklessness. He’d never had to before; Elliott had always been a people pleaser. Sure, he’d get passive aggressive when things didn’t go his way but he never outwardly spoke out. Maybe it was the fear of being wrong, or just the security of being able to safely say “I told you so” should something fail.

Elliott didn’t seem to have that fear now.

“Don’t make that face,” he said to Crypto, refusing to give up any ground and matching the other for every step he took. “When you tell someone you love them and they make that face, it means something bad.”

“You’re such an idiot,” Crypto said, trying to fill the cracks in the words with a scathing, bitter tone. It didn’t work.

“I’m not.” Elliott reached out to grab his wrist, moving Crypto’s sleeve out of the way so he could press his thumb right over the pulse thumping under warm skin. “I’m not, and you don’t have to say it back, but if you - if you don’t - if this isn’t right, if this is something you don’t want, then say so.”

All Crypto could manage was one more, “You’re such an idiot.”

He’s tugged forward gently and he allowed himself to be enveloped in a tight embrace, one that Elliott buried himself in. Crypto was slower, but he eventually melted into it on his own, still a little stiff and unused to the gesture. He felt the fabric of his hoodie stretch across his back as Elliott gathered it into his fists in order to pull Crypto closer into him.

This wasn’t fair. In a way, Crypto felt like he failed. Like he hadn’t learned anything after all, doomed to repeat it until he was the one who ended up dead. And what a monster he was, to take people down with him - innocent people who were just kind enough to help him, to care about him.

But in the same breath the thought came, Tae Joon leaned into the hug. He pressed his nose into the crook of Elliott’s neck and took what was being given to him. He deserved this.

“Y’know,” Elliott began wetly, muffled as he refused to pull away even the slightest bit. “When someone invites me to their apartment, it usually goes in a different direction.”

Between the sleepless night and the emotionally draining evening, Crypto wasn’t too surprised he huffed a reluctant laugh into the other’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry I kinda created this shit show for us,” Elliott said. He moved his head so he could be heard more clearly, speaking lowly just below Crypto’s ear. “I’m not really the romantic type, despite popular belief. Like, I flirt, but I never know what to do when that actually pans out for me. So I figured, if I’m feeling it, just say it - one life to live, so live it, and all that. But I didn’t really think about the delivery, or how you’d react to it. So I bailed.”

“It’s fine,” he replied, meaning it.

“Is it?”

Crypto turned his face toward Elliott’s and kissed him. Slow and purposefully, making sure he could taste the truth. “I love you,” Crypto said, meaning that, too.

Elliott’s smile was infectious. Resting his forehead against the other’s, Crypto just took it in. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the scrunch of his nose, the tip of his tongue caught between teeth, the warmth in his face. Crypto wanted to be terrified, wanted to be able to make the better - albeit harder - decision. But that was impossible, as long as there was Elliott Witt and the smile he saved for Tae Joon.

“We’re going to get each other killed,” he stated, mostly serious.

Elliott snorted. “Yeah, whatever. I love you.”

“Saranghae,” he said back, and yeah. Whatever.

If Elliott Witt was going to be his weakness, it was best to keep him close, where no one could use it against him.

=====

like i said, didn’t follow the prompt at all really. it’s kinda blink and you’ll miss it hurt/comfort. also i like to believe that elliott is emotionally smart as long as it’s not about him.

oddly enough, i had the scene from fiddler on the roof stuck in my head while writing this where one of the daughter’s love interests were asking to marry them and the dad said smth like “yeah no way, you’re just a poor tailor” and the kid argued “even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness” and yeah. that line always stuck with me. 

anyway, if you want a do over i won’t mind i swear. even pretend to be a different anon and ask for “more” hurt comfort, i’ll know what you mean lmao 

[imagineseclipse]

Smother-Scott Mccall Imagine

Listen to Smother by Daughter whilst reading this imagine I’m so obsessed I can’t.

⚠️-pure angst but there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Italics-Flashback

Red writing-Song lyrics

‘I’m wasted, Losing time, I’m a foolish fragile spine’

Your house fell silent, it had been silent for a while now. All the laughs had been muted, all the conversation had died out, no one had visited in a while...well they had, but never once had you opened the door. Instead you say alone, in the middle of your sofa.

On your table was an empty bottle of wine accompanied by an equally empty glass. You were wasted, in fact you’d been in that state for days now, drinking endlessly until you would pass out on any surface. You were wasting your time, whatever you had left of it anyway. You had a deadline, and it was slowly creeping up on you.

Your head snapped towards the staircase, watching intently as you continued to listen to the banging and the crashing coming from the second floor of your lonely home. You were too tipsy to move, and to be honest you didn’t really care if someone broke into your house. It wouldn’t be your home for long.

‘I want all that is not mine, I want him but we’re not right’

You lowered your head as Scott McCall appeared at the top of the stairs, twigs sticking out of his hair as he brushed the mud and dirt off his clothes. He caught sight of you sat on your sofa and he frowned. So you were ignoring his calls.

Scott’s calls and texts were the hardest to ignore, the past year had been a struggle for the two of you. But interestingly that had brought you closer, so close that when you parted it was like hell on Earth. Allison your sister had passed away the year before, and you felt so guilty that you had fallen for Scott. He was the one you would call when you woke up in the middle of the night screaming from your horrific night terrors. He’d often found himself outside your window on a full moon when he was finding it hard to control himself.

You understood that he would never be yours, he would always be Allison’s. Even if he did love you the way you loved him it wouldn’t be right. There was no time now.

“What did I tell you y/n”he shook his head as he decended down the stairs, stopping behind you suddenly noticing the wine.

“I can’t remember”you mumbled quietly, trying not to let Scott hear the slurring of your words. Scott looked at the state of you, he had been concerned about you worrying every second of every day.

“How much have you had?”He asked sadly as he picked up the empty wine bottle.

“A little”you closed your eyes, sighing taking in each breath at a time. You felt ashamed of yourself, you never wanted Scott to see you like this. You didn’t want these to be his last memories of you.

“I told you-

“Does it matter Scott?”you cut him off, finally making eye contact with the alpha. Revealing the dark circles under your eyes, revealing the wrinkles that had developed across your forehead.

“Of course it matters y/n”he slumped down next to you, rubbing the back of his neck.

“We’ve all been working day and night to try and stop this”he turned to you.

“It’s not going to work, you guys need to just accept this and prepare for it I mean I have been”you lay your head back.

“This is not preparing for it y/n, this is killing yourself slowly and I’m stopping it right now”Scott replied sternly. He swiped the glass and the bottle removing it from your table, he started to make his way to the kitchen to get rid of the poison.

“I’m going to die anyway”you said, this was the first time you had said it out loud and Scott didn’t miss the crack in your voice. He shut his eyes, squeezing them together as if he was in pain.

“Don’t say that”he returned by your side immediately speaking softly.

“But it’s going to happen, there’s no avoiding it. It’s my turn”you let a single tear drop onto the sweatshirt you had been wearing for at least a week.

‘In the darkness I will meet my creators, and they will all agree that I’m a suffocator’

When you had agreed to go into Stiles’ head with Lydia and Scott to try and summon him out against the nogitsune not once did you think that you were coming out with a death sentence. As if Peter’s claws in the back of your neck wasn’t bad enough.

Something must’ve happened along the way because you and Scott had been split up from Lydia. When you awoke you and Scott were laying on the Nemeton tree.

Your eyes fluttered open and you felt someone’s arms around you. You couldn’t see much because all that surrounded you was darkness, and nothingness. You felt the arms tighten.

“Y/n? Are you okay?”a voice spoke down to you.

It was Scott. Relief washed over you as you gripped onto his arms, pulling yourself up next to him.

“Where’s Lydia did she make it here aswell- you paused narrowing your eyes- wherever this is”you looked off into the distance trying to make out shapes.

“I don’t think so but wherever she is she’s probably with Stiles”Scott mumbled as he grabbed onto your hand pulling you up off the tree stump.

“So where are we?”you asked, still holding onto Scott.

“I don’t know”he muttered leading you down the only visible path.

You and Scott continued to walk, for what seemed like hours eventually coming to a stop when you noticed a red light coming towards you. It was light, but it gave off an dark demeanour. It stood tall in front of you, causing everything around it to illuminate. Scott peered around finally taking in the tall trees. The leaves underneath your feet. You were in the woods.

“Do you know why you are here?”the voice was deep, and it’s words were dragged out.

“For Stiles, we’re here to save Stiles”Scott pointed out.

“No!”the unknown entity lashed out, making the floor tremble with its words.

“You are here for y/n”it added.

Scott’s grip on your hand tightened as he pulled you a step backward behind him, the two of you didn’t know what this thing was.

“S-so if this is for me why is Scott here?”you asked curiously.

“Foolish naive children of earth”the deep voice started to cackle.

“You are tethered together”

Scott gazed down at you for a second, quickly catching your eye before you both turnt back to the creature.

“But why are we doing this in Stiles’ head”It was Scott’s turn to ask questions.

“The banshee brought you here”it revealed, referring to Lydia.

“And what are you?”you called out.

“A messenger, y/n you have been chosen as a sacrifice”the voice got closer.

Scott pulled you close to him, taking an extra two steps backwards.

“What?!”You almost cried out.

“For what, who chose me?”you choked out, this had to be some sort of dream.

“Who chose her?!”Scott was starting to get angry. He couldn’t lose you aswell as Allison.

“Your creators, they have made the decision because you are the only pure soul left”the voice started to explain that you were the only pure soul left in Beacon Hills. You were the closest to the Nemeton, and there were supernatural creatures that needed your soul.

Your eyes shot open, your eyes darting around the room, Lydia watched you in horror just as Scott came to. She then looked at Scott who was staring off into space trying to process what he’d just found out.

“D-did you find Stiles?”you asked hopefully, ignoring that fact that your brain was going crazy, figuring out what had just happened.

“Y/n...you have two months left to live?”Lydia spoke out as if she’d just been with you and Scott. Of course she’d know she was a banshee. She could basically smell death on you.

“I should go now quietly,for my bones have found a place to lie down and sleep’

Scott hadn’t left your side. He’d insisted on staying with you. He watched you as you slept heavily, your head had fallen on his chest and he didn’t have the heart to move you, he didn’t want to move you.

Ever since he had found out that you were a sacrifice he had been kicking himself. He’d definitely left it too late to tell you that he was in love with you and telling you now would only make the next couple of days a lot harder for you. What if he couldn’t find a way to save you? What if they took you? What if he was left without you?

He watched over you until he fell asleep himself, waking up hours later to find an empty space next to him. Realising what day it was he jumped up panicking, he had hope that you had only gone downstairs but when he ran into the empty living room dread filled his heart.

He fumbled for his phone, calling everyone in the pack, calling everyone he knew. Telling them to find you, telling them to not stop looking. He had to get to you, there had to be a way out of this. And he wouldn’t stop trying.

Lydia had woken up that day disoriented and she knew that today was the day. They all had sleepless nights trying to find a solution. Even Isaac had come back to help, afraid of not saying goodbye if worst did come to the worst.

You were long gone, making your way through the trees you knew what to do, your body was heavy and weak and you knew that your time was coming to an end. Breathing heavily as you grew tired.

The sun beamed through the trees as your legs paused, standing in front of the Nemeton. Scott’s feet couldn’t go any faster as he ran through the Beacon Hills forest, swerving through the trees pushing himself to go faster.

“Please, I’m begging you give us more time”Scott pleaded to the clouds as he sprinted towards the clearing where he was hoping he’d find you.

You lay on the Nemeton, your eyes becoming sore from not sleeping, you faced the sky, watching the clouds go by. The only good thing about this was that you got to see Allison again.

Scott never stopped running when he saw the Nemeton, he never stopped running towards you when the same creature from that night appeared to collect you, He never stopped running when he saw a white arrow hurtle through the air injuring the creature badly buying Scott some more time to get to you.

He scooped your lifeless body up from the Nemeton, holding you close so that no one could take you.

“It’s not her time, not yet”Scott shouted towards the creature.

“We found a way to save her it doesn’t have to be y/n”Lydia screamed as she ran through the trees along with Stiles.

All three heads snapped towards the forest, as a figure in a white cloak with brown hair was seen getting further and further away. Running towards the sun that peaked through the trees.

“Was that?”Lydia’s mouth dropped open, her eyes starting to well up.

Your eyes fluttered open, taking in a lot of oxygen after passing out. You were surprised that you were still alive in Scott’s arms.

“Allison”you simply stated, holding onto Scott’s shirt.

“She brought us time”Scott smiled gratefully.

[polandspringz]

if you still wanna talk about them, i’d love to hear your ozpin headcanons!

I ALWAYS WANT TO TALK ABOUT OZPIN DON’T YOU WORRY

(This may or may not be inter spaced with short sentences that are “fan-fic” esque in style if I get inspiration while writing a headcanon. IDK if that’s annoying or makes the reading more fun, but whatever-)

-Ozpin is actually a very emotional person. The parts of Ozma’s soul that have fused with his own may have been hardened somewhat by time and experience, but I’ve always seen Ozpin as a headmaster as a very caring and soft person. Sure, he manages to remain calm and levelheaded, but that doesn’t mean in private he’s not on the verge of breaking, especially when he’s thinking about how much he’s hiding or the childhoods he has ruined.

The mug was gently set down atop the desk, not a sound from it as it was laid to rest, before Ozpin stumbled. His knees gave out, and his body doubled over, his arms barely supporting him as he sprawled across the surface of it. He was shaking, the thought passed through him as he managed to pinch off his glasses, pressing a sweaty palm against his face as he let out a muffled scream. His hand brushed up through his silver bangs, and his eyes stung as exhaustion took over. He slumped to the floor. 

He had changed his vote, had given in to Glynda and the rest of his friends. Yes, they were his friends, he told himself, you gathered them so they could give you advice in this lifetime. They know what’s best. 

He struggled to reason with himself even as the other part of him screamed out. He knew he had just signed Miss Nikos’ death warrant. 

-Based on how Ozpin talks to Oscar about them merging at first, I imagine that the young Ozpin was likely just as frightened when he woke up to another voice in his head filling it with all these notions of destiny and legends and such, but I also imagine that he was also one of the most quickly swayed to the task. Since Ozpin became a headmaster at such a young age, and that World of Remnant detail hinted at his aura being immense, I think once young Ozpin got over the shock of everything, he was just like “ALRIGHT LETS GO LETS GO” and with the help of all the caffeine he could absorb and not die, he just blazed his way through training to the point that he didn’t even need a team. He likely had one, but I doubt he was close to them or was able to make many friendships when he had such big goals and was likely a target for jealousy.

“Hey, Oz!” one of his teammates called back as she stepped out the door, “We’re going out to sight-see before the tournament tomorrow. Want to come?”

He turned around at the small desk of their temporary dorm. He smiled at the boy, but shook his head, “Unfortunately I think I will be staying in tonight. I want to do my best in the first round.”

The boy’s face fell, although it was not smiling in the first place, “You mean our best.”

Ozpin fumbled, “Oh, ah, yes, of course. I’m sorry about that. I misspoke.”

“No, it’s fine,” the boy grumbled closing the door, eyes now narrowed into a glare as he turned to burn a hole into the carpet of the hallway, “We all know you’ll be the one to make it to the finals anyway.”

The door closed and subsequent grumblings could be heard as the boy met up with others. Loudly as they stormed down the hall, Ozpin tried his best to ignore the complaints and insults laced with his name. Ozma took over, and their hands deftly picked up the Long Memory and began to tinker with the gears inside the hilt.

“Maybe it is in our best interest to let one of them advance instead,” Ozma said, “Salem does not yet know that I am here. A low profile perhaps-”

Had anyone been looking through the window, they would have seen a green flash of light as Ozpin took over again, only the tiniest stillness in the hands before they got back to work piecing the old weapon together some more. 

“Perhaps, but it is also in our best interest that I become a headmaster as quickly as possible. You may have founded the schools, but you are right in that we cannot leave the relics alone for too long. It has already been, what did you say, ten years since your last life? The headmaster of Shade is new. We should make sure he wasn’t told too much and doesn’t plan to do too much without us.”

He reached for a gear sitting on the desk. Ozma whispered to him as his fingers hovered above it.

“It would do you some good to make some allies, Ozpin.”

“I will in due time, my friend, but as I’m sure you know more than I, trust with a task as momentous as this, must be earned. If  I am to have allies, they will have to come to me first. If they are not deterred by our secrecy and our coldness, then I will know we can tell them some.”

“You’ve been looking into my memories, haven’t you?”

“They’re our memories, now, aren’t they?” Ozpin smiled, holding the screwdriver up as he gestured to the air, “But yes, I did see a few. And frankly, I don’t want to give so much away that I die at the hands of one of her henchmen so horrifically like the last two times-”

“Ozpin, I-”

“Do not be offended, my friend. Now, focus your mind elsewhere. I will need either your hands or the memories they hold to help guide me if we want to be able to compete tomorrow,” he said, placing one of the gears back inside the weapon.

He was lucky his past self had made it so durable. The amount of times his teammates had tried to shatter it only jostled a few things loose.

-I might have just contradicted myself in those two headcanons, but I think it’s fairly obvious Ozpin puts up a front, and I believe that could apply to even himself. This may be me projecting a bit, but Ozpin probably is the type of person who will be the most mature in the room when he needs to be. If there is someone else there capable of acting and taking more responsibility for things, he will be looser and less serious. This is probably more canon when you look at how he reacts when Glynda reprimands the teams for the food fights, but it could come from him having to grow up too fast once the merge happened.

-Even though Summer’s mission may not be tied to Ozpin, or at least he doesn’t know that it was tied to him or Salem, I like to think that in the same way that Ozpin feels guilt when he sees Hazel, when he sees Ruby he feels guilt about Summer.

-Out of everyone in Ozpin’s inner circle, it is not Qrow or Glynda, but James who is his favorite. This isn’t any shipper part of me, but that I just imagine that James was probably the strongest person for Ozpin to rely on, and while he probably reassured Ozpin hundreds of times that he had the military might to end Salem once and for all and Ozpin shrugged him off, he appreciated the sentiment and the toughness the man offered him. While Qrow was his spy, Ironwood (although he is based on the character longing for a heart), was the most caring and understanding of Ozpin’s pain. Qrow may have taken stride in feeling like he knew the most out of everyone in the circle about Oz’s past, but Ironwood didn’t need more information, he didn’t need the full story. He seems very perceptive, and probably knew all along that Ozpin wasn’t telling the full truth but kept his distance, and that probably spoke volumes to Oz. Which is why it hurts him so much to see the man on the verge of a breakdown now that he is gone and Oscar is the only key between them.

-When he first woke up inside Oscar’s body, I think Ozpin spent the first few weeks in silence, trying to cope with the fact that he had died again. Although Leo and everyone says that Ozpin had never reincarnated that fast before, I imagine he reincarnates instantly but the time it takes for him to gain status and the recognition again varies. If the team was already on the road a few months by that point and Oscar just had to hop on a train to get to Haven Academy, then I imagine the first weeks or months Ozpin was silently watching and trying not to break down and let himself be known as he saw the news through Oscar’s eyes, as Pyrrha Nikos was honored with a statue in Argus, as casualties were reported, the repeated film footage of Glynda struggling to rebuild the city. Oscar, during this time, was starting to have dreams of past events, and maybe the thing that alerted him the most to something being amiss with himself was a dreamed himself dying, but he could barely remember these dreams when he woke up, just the feelings remained. It wasn’t until he had a dream of a mysterious man reaching out towards him, calling his name, that he remembered it upon waking.

[hamliet]

On Banana Fish’s Ending

Welcome to the hell that is Banana Fish’s ending. If you like it it’s hell. If you hate it it’s definitely hell. If you’re like me somewhere in the middle but closer to “I don’t like this” it’s hell. We’re all suffering. 

Like any useless writer, I cope by writing out my feelings so here, have this.

I can see why some feel the ending narratively works in some respects, and in some ways I can even agree it can be read in certain ways that make it work. But I also think a happy ending could have been just as narratively excellent, depending on the execution, and my personal opinion is that this would have been a more responsible ending. But no one has to agree, and I understand why people hate the ending and why people defend the ending. 

I’m going to talk about this in a few segments: authorial statements, social messages, and genre. (I’m writing another meta on the narrative themes of the ending because that section got massively long.) For what it’s worth, a story does not exist in a vacuum, and while it’s absolutely valid to interpret and critique a story according to simply the written story, it’s also valid to weigh authorial intent (or to dismiss it), and to evaluate how the story plays into both larger cultural messages and larger literary trends. Any author 100% knows that their story will be interpreted according to all of these. But what follows is mostly my opinion/explaining why I feel as I do. It is not me saying anyone has to feel or interpret it the same way. 

Authorial Statements

I know Yoshida has made... contradictory and, frankly, offensive statements on the ending, in which she’s said things such as that Ash narratively had to die because he was a murderer and people who kill need to pay with their own lives. In general, Yoshida seems to struggle in interviews--like saying she hates Yut-Lung when the story’s moral center character (Sing) literally tells him in his last scene “I can’t hate you” and promises to help him redeem himself. This is hardly unique to her. It’s hard to explain a complex element of story in a few sentences of an answer. Ishida’s first interview after the end of TG had some cringeworthy moments, Rowling seems to make constant missteps (and retcons), etc. Hence, I generally employ “death of the author”--I think the author’s intent matters to the extent their work conveys their intent, but not if their work contradicts what they then say. 

The entirety of Banana Fish contradicts this idea of murderous karma. In fact, the story is at its core about finding a way out of a violent cycle, of finding freedom. Ash dying with a smile on his face literally says that he did not die trapped in a system of karmic violence with no hope of freedom. 

Not to mention Sing is a murderer. Yut-Lung* is a murderer. Blanca is a murderer. They all live, and get hopeful (even happy-ish) endings and implied redemption for Yut-Lung and for Blanca. 

*I know Yut-Lung is name-dropped as having been assassinated in a later manga called Yasha but like, he never actually appears in Yasha and it has nothing to do with his character’s arc in Banana Fish, so I don’t think it’s relevant to anything relating to Yut-Lung’s character as we know him. It’s really just an Easter egg, and since Yut-Lung dying in Yasha is a retcon of the fact that his arc ending with him living in the main story (Banana Fish) I feel completely free to disregard it as not actually canon.*

Additionally, Banana Fish takes empathetic looks at children who are suffering in a world where they are forced into the roles of prostitutes and killers, and what’s the point of empathy if it can’t change anything? Eiji is noted to basically be walking empathy, having a gift for comforting those around him, and the mutual, spiritual, and yes, romantic, love he and Ash share changes things for Ash (and for Eiji). To say that death had to happen narratively is to say that Eiji was, in the words of his critics, useless, which is rather at odds with the central emotional draw of the story: Ash and Eiji’s relationship. It contradicts Eiji’s beautiful letter, the one that Ash smiled as he died because of, because in this letter Eiji assures Ash: “you can change your destiny.”

So anyways, regardless of what Yoshida says, Ash being a murderer is not a narrative justification for the ending because that simply isn’t what the story conveys.

That being said, that perspective--that Ash’s death is karma for killing--is exactly Ash’s perspective. Just when he was about to overcome his flaw of not seeing his value by realizing how much he meant to Eiji, Lao reminds him of Shorter’s death, the one thing he cannot forgive himself for. And so Ash allows himself to die. But the thing is this perspective is wrong and narratively condemned. Eiji’s letter offers a counter to this, but Ash doesn’t take it (which is slightly inexplicable). Plus, as we see in “Garden of Light,” it leaves Eiji unable to completely overcome his flaw (an inability to act/truly live) for seven years, so the story condemns it too. 

And, of course, Ash also did not kill Shorter out of malice--he was forced into it, like he was forced into the life he had to live with Dino. It’s not the deaths of one of the people begging to be spared whom Ash killed for playing a role in killing Shorter, but Shorter’s death itself that brings about fear and mistrust in Lao. To have Ash’s death be a consequence for killing willingly (which he did plenty of), it should have been for one of those nameless people we got a brief shot of, instead of as a consequence for a murder Ash had no choice in and was a victim of almost as much as Shorter was. But that also wouldn’t work because a nameless death doesn’t quite suffice for offing your main character, so. Yeah. Ash’s death is not a narrative consequence for killing others; it’s expressly framed as a tragic and cruel result of his inability to forgive himself for specific acts that were not his fault. 

Social Messages Part 1: LGBT relationships

While Banana Fish was written in the 1980s-90s (kind of a dire time for LGBT+ people in the United States with the AIDS crisis), the trope of “bury your gays” has received rightful criticism since, and the ending can definitely be seen as “bury your gays.” (A criticism that is not helped by what happens to the gay/bi character in Yasha.) In other words, while I think the themes, characters, and frankly issues of Banana Fish are generally timeless, the ending is the only part of the story that I don’t think ages well. As time goes by, it will probably get even more criticism because of current society finally moving towards being better in the portrayal of LGBT+ characters. 

*Because I want to complain and explain why I really don’t consider anything post-GoL canon: the follow-up picture book “New York Sense” doesn’t help the “bury your gays” impression either: Sing and Akira are certainly intended to be parallels to Ash and Eiji as Akira is brought to the US by Ibe and interacts with gangster Sing in “Garden of Light,” and while such framing is very ambiguous/bordering on not being there in GoL the follow-ups absolutely paint a romantic framing to their interactions in GoL. They marry and raise a son, popping up in cameos in Yoshida’s other works. Hence it runs dangerously close to reading as the heterosexual couple introduced in the epilogue got the happy ending while the gay couple we spent 19 volumes with did not. Since Sing is also still heavily involved with the mafia in all of the follow-ups, this again contradicts narrative justifications for Ash’s death as karma. 

While I very much like Akira’s character, her romance with Sing isn’t just uncomfortable because of the above issue--it’s also uncomfortable because she is 13 and he is 23 in GoL (though their relationship doesn’t have to be read as mutually romantic there, and I don’t read it that way) and according to “New York Sense,” they marry when she is 18 which... implies things that seems very, very out of character for Sing, the series’ moral compass, and dramatically contradicts the skeevy adults preying on kids theme. It can also raise some cringe-worthy questions about why it’s framed as okay for the heterosexual couple but negatively (as it should be) for the people--who are primarily men--who assault Ash (and there is noted to have been a woman who assaulted him in “Private Opinion”). Like with Yut-Lung’s death, I just... don’t accept this retconning as canon. It contradicts the themes of Banana Fish as a story so I don’t have to.*

Social Messages Part 2: Abuse Survivors

For people who have been through abuse similar to Ash’s, in which choices over basic things like life, death, and your own body are taken from you, it’s honestly cruel to show someone who has spent their entire life suffering just about to grasp happiness, and then they die. It is fully valid to find this completely distasteful, and I do too.

But for me at least, one aspect that circumvents... some of the distasteful implication that Ash really was broken by things he had no choice in is the fact that Ash triumphed over his abusers first. Yet of course, having him die afterwards still hurts people who read the story and see themselves in a character like Ash, as it can reinforce the idea that abuse defines your life. 

I do wish (though I don’t think there’s a moral necessity) that more authors/creators would acknowledge that, in creating characters whom you in theory want people to relate to, see themselves in, root for, care about, you’re asking people to suffer with them as they suffer and if they die, grieve for them. Given the heaviness of Ash’s arc and the specific nature of his suffering (especially since it was horrifically emphasized in the story’s last arc with Foxx), the fact that Ash didn’t in the end overcome the message that he did not have value is going to be very painful for readers/viewers. (Lao missed his vital organs, so Ash really chose to die instead of getting help, because he chose to believe Blanca over Eiji, which... I’m not sure it quite works.) If you could have narratively had it end happily (and it absolutely could have, and apparently Yoshida’s editor told her not to end it with Ash’s death), there’s room to say that going with the tragic ending is hurtful and bordering on irresponsible. 

Genre

That defeat of Ash’s abusers is the reason I don’t think Banana Fish is quite as tragic as other stories like, say, the first Tokyo Ghoul or Hamlet or Macbeth, though it’s certainly tragic. In those stories, every single characters’ flaws lead to them dying, and it offers a cautionary tale. Banana Fish is more in the vein of say, Romeo and Juliet, or even the movie Titanic (I’m not making a romance comparison, for the record), in that the main characters might die, but their choices and the people they loved and how they loved manage to save a city, in the case of Romeo & Juliet, or to save Rose in the case of Titanic. In Banana Fish, Ash did help Eiji live, even if Eiji would need time to process it after the set-back of Ash’s death. 

In other words, even if I’m unhappy with it and I am, I don’t consider Banana Fish’s ending nihilistic. It wasn’t “life sucks and then you die,” at least not to me. Life sucked, but it also meant something, even beyond Ash’s relationship with Eiji. Ash’s life had value. Through saving Sing in the story’s climactic battle, and then helping Max with that article that would save other child prostitutes, Ash saved younger versions of himself. That’s powerful. Not only that, but Ash found love and hope in his personal life as well with Eiji, Max, Shorter, etc., and through that genuine happiness. Even if he couldn’t fully grasp it, he knew it was there, and he died knowing there was genuine, true love, and therefore beauty, in the world too. And that, for me, comes across as far more hopeful than surface-level, cheaper happier endings. But still, the fact that Ash couldn’t fully experience this beauty and happiness because of the cycle of violence he had no choice about being involved in, plus a questionable character decision, does leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. (That questionable character decision, with the letter not having a full effect, makes tragedy seem a bit forced on Yoshida’s part.)

I want to quote Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man,” and I’ve highlighted parts I think explain how I feel about Banana Fish and Ash’s character (in particular, why I don’t think a tragic ending necessarily sends a nihilistic message, at least not to me):

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

This applies to basically all tragedy, of course, but I think some tragedies are more hopeful than others. And I see that struggle in Ash’s, and a hope in Banana Fish that I don’t see in other more nihilistic stories. Ash fought to reclaim the humanity that people tried to deny him, and through Eiji realized his humanity was there all along. 

Anyways, these are my complicated, all-over-the-place feelings on the ending. It’s fine for people to feel strongly either way, but also understand that when discussing such a heavy, fundamentally triggering work, it’s good to be sensitive to where people are coming from and interact with differing opinions with empathy. Many of us relate to characters like Ash, Eiji, and Yut-Lung, and since you don’t know where someone is coming from, let them express their feelings, and be kind. 

I’ll post another meta on thematic impressions on Banana Fish later. But to each their own. Also please note, again, this is really just my opinion. 

[juju-on-that-yeet]

Imperfect and Human Are We

Prompt: Whumptober Day 30, Recovery

Summary: MarkBop struggles with the temporary loss of his voice after the events of "Choke," and in a manner of speaking, so does Cameraman Jim after the events of "Silenced." Maybe Bop is just the person to help CJ start healing.

Warnings: Injury recovery, self-worth issues

Tagging: @peribloke @tired-eldritchhorror (ask to be tagged!)

Read on AO3 (Full Whumptober Series)

Enjoy!

~

MarkBop hates this.

One week ago, Bing brought him into Dr. Iplier’s clinic after he’d been strangled by a mugger. Apparently there’s nothing surgically that Dr. Iplier can do, and Bop just has to wait for his throat to heal on its own.

And that means no talking.

Not that he can, anyway. He’d lost his voice moments after he woke up from nearly suffocating to death and hasn’t yet gotten it back. Even if it comes back tomorrow, Dr. Iplier won’t let him talk until his throat is good and healed again.

It’s not that Bop is so upset about not talking. He knows a little bit of sign language, and Oliver gave him a notepad he snagged from the control room so Bop can write out more complicated sentences. He can still communicate with Bing and Oliver, still let Dr. Iplier know how he’s feeling.

But he hates not being able to sing.

Singing is what he was made to do. He was created to be a singer, and so he is. He listens to music nearly every waking moment, devouring albums like they’re candy and then listening to them again, over and over, until he knows every note. He only ever pauses the endless music to hum to himself, to tap the counter he’s sitting at, to draw out the earworm in his head by singing it. He’ll stay up all night, singing and recording until his throat hurts, and in the early hours of the morning he’ll crawl into bed with Bing and whisper love songs to his sleeping form until he falls asleep himself. If he can’t sing, then what else is there?

What else is there?

“What if I forget?” Bop writes on his notepad for Bing one day, too anxious to think through signing it. “What if I spend so long not singing I just…forget how?”

“You won’t forget, babe,” Bing reassures him, kissing him gently, “There’s no way you could forget how to sing. When your voice comes back it’ll be just like it was before.”

Bop wants to believe him, he knows Bing is right. Dr. Iplier has explained as much to Bop a few times already, reminding him that he’s a figment, and he can heal from anything. Reminding him that he was made to sing, and he could never lose that about himself. But Bop is afraid that every day he goes without singing is a day he loses muscle memory, breath control, skill. He might still be able to sing, but he’ll be out of practice and worse for it, won’t he? He fears gearing up to sing for the first time when his throat heals only for his voice to screech, to wobble when he wills it to be steady, to crack on high notes or fail on low notes.

But, even with all that anxiety in his head…he knows it could be worse.

Lightning apparently strikes twice at Ego Inc. because just a few days ago, Cameraman Jim was brought into the clinic with bruises, a black eye, and a crushed hand. Bop wasn’t there when he was admitted, but to hear Bim tell it, it was horrific. Poor CJ endured surgery on his hand to set the bones and remove the fragments that were too small to realign. His hand is bandaged, casted, immobile, leaving him with only one hand to sign with. Bop’s seen him after his surgery a couple times now during his daily check-ins with Dr. Iplier. Both times, Reporter Jim was there too, sitting on CJ’s bed with him and pressing his forehead to CJ’s, not speaking, just staying close.

Bop knows CJ’s left the clinic by now, probably healing the same way Bop is: One day at a time, hoping, wondering, fearing.

It’s confirmed when RJ approaches him one day, out of the blue.

“Music Jim?” he asks, “Can I, um, ask you for something?”

“Sure,” Bop signs, “What’s wrong?” RJ seems nervous, uncertain, to the point where Bop could’ve mistaken him for CJ had he not, well, spoke. The twins are practically impossible to tell apart without their differing personalities.

“It’s about CJ,” RJ says, “I mean, I know he got hurt and he has to get better, but…” He sighs, fidgeting. “But what happened really messed him up. More than his hand and his eye. He just…he won’t communicate at all. Not with me or Bim Jim or Doctor Jim or any Jim!” He hugs himself. “He could still sign okay with only one hand, and he could shake his head or nod or point to things, and I’ve tried to make him feel safe enough to speak but just…nothing works. He won’t do anything. I know he’s upset but I don’t – well, I mean, I kinda do know why he’s so upset.”

“Why?” Bop asks. He’s sort of forgotten that RJ prefaced this by asking for Bop’s help. He’s worried now, and curious, because he didn’t hear much about what happened to CJ, but what he did hear wasn’t good.

“Because the guys who hurt him…they…” RJ’s voice gets quiet. “When I scared them off, one of them called CJ the r-word, and I think…I think they said a lot of bad stuff to him while they were beating him up.” RJ sniffles. “And I think that’s why they broke his hand, because he was probably signing to them, and they must not’ve…not’ve liked it.”

Bop doesn’t know enough sign to convey how horrified he is by that knowledge. It must show on his face, because RJ nods in acknowledgement.

“It’s not the first time people have been rude to him,” RJ continues, “But no one’s ever been so cruel, and it’s never…” He whimpers. “It’s never happened when I wasn’t there.”

Bop fumbles with his notepad to write It wasn’t your fault as fast as he can manage. RJ sighs when he reads it.

���I know that, I guess,” he mumbles. “Bim Jim keeps telling me that. And he’s right, and you’re right, I just…I’d feel better if I could get CJ to communicate with me.” He brightens a little as he looks at Bop. “That’s why I came to you.”

What can I do?? Bop writes, hoping his face conveys his confusion accurately. It must, because RJ actually smiles a little.

“Well, what happened to you was a little similar, right?” RJ asks. “I mean, it was some cruel human who hurt you, and you got hurt somewhere important to you. I was thinking you could relate to him, and maybe help him out of this.”

Bop considers. It stings a little to be reminded of the reason for the notepad he’s writing on, but he knows RJ doesn’t mean anything by it. And maybe RJ has a point. Maybe CJ feels like Bop does: Gutted, purposeless, drifting, begging for the future and fearing it in the same breath. From what apparently happened to him, it wouldn’t be surprising. And Bop likes the Jims; they’re weird and goofy but sweet, and they keep asking to report on Bop’s latest covers and song releases, even though Bop is far too nervous to go on camera. If he really can help CJ, he wants to at least try.

“Okay,” Bop signs, and RJ immediately lights up.

“Thank you, thank you, Music Jim!!” he exclaims. He hugs Bop, a gangly long-limbed hug that’s tighter than Bop would’ve expected, before jumping back to bounce with excitement. “CJ’s in Bim Jim’s greenhouse!”

Bop nods and can’t help giving RJ a pat on the head before he goes.

Bop’s been to the greenhouse himself a few times, and he’s not surprised that CJ’s there. It’s a beautiful space, full of green and growth and light shimmering in from…somewhere. The greenhouse isn’t on the roof or even the top floor, yet natural light streams in through the ceiling anyway. Bop always shrugs it off as one of Ego Inc.’s weird-yet-convenient magical quirks. When he steps inside, the place is as bright as ever, the plants are glittering with water drops. The room is misty and humid, but it doesn’t take long to find CJ. He’s looking at a huge bundle of violet chrysanthemums. His hair is damp, there’s a plastic bag beaded with water over the cast on his hand. He’s probably been in here for a while.

Bop approaches him, making like he’s looking at the chrysanthemums, too. CJ’s eyes flick to him, but he says nothing and continues to stare at the flowers. He doesn’t smile. There’s bags under his eyes. Bop’s heart aches to see how bad he looks. He takes a deep breath and turns to CJ, catching his attention.

“Hey, CJ,” he signs. “How are you doing?”

CJ looks at him but doesn’t respond. Not a nod, a head shake, a furtive glance, nothing. No wonder RJ was so upset, if this how CJ’s been acting. Bop takes out his notepad.

I’m guessing you’re not doing great, Bop writes, showing CJ the notepad after. CJ makes the slightest sound, a huff of breath out his nose, as if to say yeah, obviously. But it’s something, at least. Bop smiles, a little sheepish but happy for a response.

Yeah, I know, but I heard about what happened to you. Bop cringes as he writes, remembering what RJ told him, comparing it to the cast on CJ’s hand and the thin, yellowed ring still around his eye. I’m sorry. That sounds horrible.

CJ frowns, lips pursing like he’s holding back a reaction. He seems like he wants to look away but doesn’t want to be rude.

The moment stretches long and uncomfortable. But Bop keeps looking at CJ, and CJ keeps looking at Bop. Maybe CJ is tired of staying silent and closed-off, or maybe Bop came at the right time, or maybe Bop somehow said the right things. But CJ lifts his good hand, hesitant.

“You got hurt, too,” he signs, “How is it not being able to talk?”

Fortunately, Bop can read sign better than he can use it, and CJ’s questions rings loud and clear.

It really sucks, Bop admits. I’m still afraid I won’t be able to sing right when my voice comes back, even though everyone tells me not to be.

CJ nods, considering, before raising his hand again. He lowers it, biting his lip. He finally raises his hand and replies, still apprehensive, but once he starts he can’t seem to stop.

“Why can’t I just talk like normal people?” he asks, fingers shaking, “You can’t talk because you’re hurt. I don’t have any excuse. My voice box works but I can’t use it. RJ keeps telling me that those guys who hurt me were wrong, that I’m not stupid or weird because I can’t talk. And I know if I asked him why I can’t be normal he’d say I’m fine how I am or that I’m normal for me or something, but I just…” His hand pauses in the air for a moment. What Bop thought were misty droplets on his cheeks might actually be tears. “I don’t want to hear that. I just hate that I’m not normal. I hate that I need my hands to talk and one of them is broken. I hate how I feel broken.”

Bop feels his eyes tear up. He stares at his notepad, unsure of how to respond for a long moment.

I feel pretty broken right now, too, Bop finally begins, Being silent sucks. It feels so hard to get a word in sometimes, it makes me feel like I’m disconnected from people. This house is so loud, everyone’s so loud, and I love it, but I love it less when I can’t be loud, too. It’s like it swallows me up.

CJ’s eyes are wide and glittering as he reads, like Bop is speaking to his deepest thoughts. Maybe he is, for all Bop knows. Bop smiles gently as he continues writing.

But it’s not all bad, he continues, I feel like I’m better at listening lately. Not that I was bad before, but it comes easier now. It’s easier to focus because I’m not talking or singing to myself all the time. And I know, really know, who my friends are. The ones who look to me in the conversation and give me a chance to communicate. It’s hard to talk with people, but not with Bing and Oliver. They don’t talk over me or through me, they still keep me in the rhythm. I think there’s a lot of good in being quiet, as long as you have people you can still make yourself heard around.

CJ whimpers, wipes his eyes with his good hand before replying.

“I wish I could talk. All the time.”

Maybe you will one day, Bop writes, You’re still young compared to most of us. Maybe you’ll get enough confidence to talk all the time. But even if you don’t, you’ll still have all your other ways of talking and interacting with the world that people like me don’t, that we don’t even know about. I’m gonna go back to talking all the time and be a worse listener and bad at focusing again, but not you. He grins. You’ll still have all this cool stuff going on. It’s hard not being normal, but it’s fun, too. Plus, being normal is hard sometimes, too. Being a person can be hard. We’re all just people. We’re all weird here, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

CJ nods. He still looks sad, but he seems to be gathering himself.

“Maybe part of it is that I can’t film right now,” he admits, fingers slow. “With my hand like this, I can’t even hold a camera. I already tried shooting one-handed with my smaller cameras but I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t feel so bad if I could just…just…”

Do what you were made to do? Bop writes. He shows it to CJ, sees him duck his head with the slightest embarrassed smile, before he continues. I get that. It’s really hard. But I’m sure Doc’s told you that your hand will heal completely and eventually it’ll be like it never happened. That’s what he told me about my throat. He sighs. It’s hard to believe, but we have to trust him. He knows what he’s talking about. We just have to get through this. I think it’d be easier for you to get through this if you actually tried to communicate with people a little. He lightly, playfully shoulder-checks CJ, who’s come to stand beside him to read what he’s writing. CJ smiles again, a little bit broader.

“Yeah,” CJ signs. He looks away from Bop, back to the chrysanthemums. “I’m not really used to not being able to share an experience with RJ. He doesn’t know how I feel right now, he doesn’t know what I’m thinking, when he usually…just does. It sounds weird in words, but I like not having to worry about that. I like that he knows me so well. But he doesn’t know what I’m going through now, he wasn’t there when I got hurt, and he can’t…figure out all this stuff.”

So tell him!! Bop writes, animated, and CJ actually giggles when he reads it. He’s your brother, he loves you, he just wants to help you be okay. He’s the reason I came to talk to you in the first place. Bop grins. Maybe he knows what you’re feeling right now better than you think.

CJ nods. He smiles at Bop, a full, sunny smile, and his eyes sparkle. He hugs Bop, not as tight as RJ did but just as haphazard. This time, Bop has enough time to hug back. For a long moment, all is quiet, quiet without the internal noise of communication, only the dripping of water throughout the greenhouse and the hum of the fans. The sun somehow shines through the ceiling onto the pair, dappling the floor around them, and the flowers are as bright as ever, those purple chrysanthemums standing proud.

“Thanks,” whispers CJ, so quiet that Bop almost doesn’t hear it.

Bop’s jaw drops and his heart swells. CJ’s never spoken to him before. Excitement courses through him but he’s determined not to ruin the moment. He only hugs CJ tighter in response. When they finally pull away, they smile at each other, each elated but a little awkward. They don’t sign or write anything more, and nothing more is needed. CJ only waves goodbye, still smiling, before practically bouncing out of the greenhouse, no doubt to find RJ. Bop waves after him and sighs to himself, happier than he’s been since he got hurt in the first place.

He lingers in the greenhouse for a while in front of those purple chrysanthemums, just enjoying the moment.

[karenpage]

There’s a lot to unpack with the kastle episode, so this is my best attempts to articulate my thoughts regarding it. There are, of course, spoilers below the cut but I tried to keep my discussion to only that of Karen and Frank’s interaction (with mentions of the first episode for obvious reasons). This is just my take away, I’ll write more about the season as a whole at a later point.

But yes. The Punisher season 2, episode 11: The Abyss.

Okay. First and Foremost, you can tell the writers were strapped for time, that they might’ve had a larger role for Karen/Deb if she wasn’t busy filming dds3, which sort of makes me bitter because by and far Lightfoot has treated her character better when she’s on screen in the Punisher, but I digress.

We open up on Frank, beaten 99% to death which isn’t new to any long time fan of the show- but there’s something different. Something broken in him that we haven’t seen before and I’ll be the first to admit, it’s as unsettling as it is upsetting. Watching Frank, who has persisted through the worst of the worst, who has conquered unimaginable hurt and grief, be so willing to give up.. Ready to die in way that’s more a sense of him deserving it, rather than a byproduct of the life he’s chosen to live.

It’s all over the news, the radio announcing ‘the Punisher in police custody at the hospital’, and then we cut to Karen toting the sixth amendment and strong-arming her way past the heavy police protection surrounding Frank.

A direct, obvious, and intentional parallel to when they first met.

Frank’s tied to the bed, the setup is similar to that of dds2, visually. But Karen pulls a chair up to his bedside and she waits.

We don’t have any context for time, as for how long she’s there while he’s unconscious but something I’ve read in 10,000 fanfics winded me the moment he woke up. He was having a nightmare, saw the same vision he’d seen of Maria and the kids and then heard a hail of gunfire and screamed when he woke. Karen was there. Soothing him. Comforting him. And she grabbed his hand with both of hers.

Two hands.

It’s hard to watch as Frank relives their deaths, talks, at length about the day his family died and major kudos to Jon Bernthal, yet again, delivering a monologue that ripped my heart out and spat on it (not dissimilar to the speech at the graveyard in dds2 eps4), but Karen’s there every step of the way. She’s quiet, and supportive, and everything he needed in that moment because Frank’s grappling with something big and ugly.

He thinks he accidentally killed some women in a shoot-out with Billy Russo and his gang, they were innocent bystanders, and that circles back to what he’d been dreaming about. About his entire identity as the Punisher, and why he feels like he deserves to die.

‘Now I’m the monster’, GOD, let’s be real for one second. Kastle notwithstanding? That Shit HURTED the emotions evoked with a single sentence, with tears in his eyes and a trembling lip. I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Recover.

But Karen outright refuses to believe that. Denies that Frank deserves to die and she knows something’s up. Because Karen’s pursuit of the truth continues to be a cornerstone in their relationship. There’s some uh … Questionable Writing that I think they meant to use as comic relief but it just came across as gross (like some scenes in the season, the implied humor falls flat in the face of glaring and problematic issues), but, the effect is that she and Madani discover that it was meant to look like Frank killed those women, but Billy had executed them beforehand.

He wanted Frank to suffer. He knew that that’s a wound he’d struggle to heal from when they could only do so much damage to him physically (without killing him, and Billy didn’t want that).

Now, at this point, Frank’s TRIED to have a ‘normal life’ (time to segue into that real quick, because I have to break down episode one even if I’d rather claw out my eyes). Now, I firmly believe that he was doing what he did, behaving as he had because he doesn’t know how to heal. Frank’s never had the after. He says so himself in the end of season one. He’s scared. Where does he go? How does he navigate a life that no longer resembles his own? That’s a lot for a person to do by himself but Frank is headstrong, stubborn, and so he does it anyway.

PTSD (especially recurring, horrific trauma) can make people act… differently to say the least. One of the things associated with losing children, losing family, is that there’s no measure on how to cope with it. Frank saw a chance to feel normal and he took it, but he did himself (and Beth) a disservice. He’s a damaged man, and he was bound to bring all that accompanies it, to her doorstep. I’m not a fan of episode one but, surprisingly, it’s not that Frank hooks up with someone. Not that Frank tries to ground himself in a stranger, carve out a bit of an after. Which, again, people with PTSD don’t know how to open up to the people closest to them because they have the most to lose. If that person/those people can’t see through the fog of his struggle, the loss of them would be catastrophic. It’s infinitely easier to do that with a stranger. You have nothing to lose if they walk away.

My issue was him having sex with a woman named Beth, (his late wife being Maria Elizabeth) and that in the sex scenes they CONSTANTLY hone in on the wedding ring he’s wearing around his neck and he has flashbacks and it’s strange and mildly upsetting? It feels a bit like they were trying to show that Frank’s projecting (which he is) but they went about it all wrong from a narrative standpoint. And then, again, she gets shot - at least she doesn’t die, that would’ve solidified all of my fears - but that pain, that visual is still a raw wound for Frank and it’s what sets him back on the path of being the Punisher, with Amy by his side.

OKAY. BACK TO KASTLE. I have some issues with the scenes, but, again, I think it’s more based on the storytelling (which I’ll address at the end, independently), overall I just.. I love them deeply and profoundly but it definitely hurt to see Karen admit her feelings (again) and be rebuffed (again). NOT because Frank doesn’t feel the same way, not because, in an ideal world, Frank wouldn’t want to be with Karen. But because he doesn’t think he deserves it. He doesn’t think he gets to have a happy ending, period, which is stereotypical of a protagonist in the middle of their hero’s journey (we saw the same shit with Matt Murdock).

Karen straight up said she doesn’t want Matt. That she wants Frank (even if that means wanting and loving the Punisher too - which is new. Karen can’t deny who he is and I don’t think she’s trying to any longer). She told him to give loving someone other than a war, a chance (her. Love her, Frank. Choose her.) and watching her open herself up… pour out the contents of her heart only for him to give nothing (in that moment) in return??? That Shit Hurted 2.0. BUT, him saying ‘he doesn’t want that’, in reference to life with her, where they try together. Is just a continuation of the same thread they’ve shared from the get-go.

Frank continuing to push away the people he cares about most (Curtis, Karen, hell even Madani in the end), while they hold onto him tighter for it. That’s a pretty poignant and reoccurring theme in Marvel’s Netflix; that the heroes detach themselves. Think they don’t get a life like everybody else, and then have to get slapped in the face by the persistence of the people that love them.

He thanks her. That she waited by his bedside for him to wake up and was there for him when he did. He thanks her and there’s something broken in that, too. Like it’s him trying to say goodbye but he can’t find the words just right.

So Karen tells him to show her. AND MY HEART ! FUCKING ! STOPPED ! My gut knew we wouldn’t get a kiss, but this was clearly intended to be one, and Amy���s interruption is a semi-colon. It’s not their end. Just the middle. Which leads me to believe that, should we get a season three, Karen will continue to play a significant part in Frank’s life and they’ll take advantage of the fact that she’s no longer filming Daredevil, and her availability won’t be nearly as limited. Lightfoot and Jon both confirmed that they’d want more and more of her, always.

My take away: They are in love. They confessed it. It was as heartfelt and sad, as beautiful and ugly, as any of their scenes have ever been (And likely will be), but it didn’t feel like an end because it wasn’t. It’s ‘not right now’, if Frank had kissed her, if they’d pushed through and tried to be together then, it just wouldn’t work.

He’s in the middle of his story. That means there’s growth and learning yet to come and Karen deserves more than where he’s at, now. (Doesn’t stop me from writing a fuck ton of fanfic about it, though). He has to learn how to co-exist with the two halves of himself, and that’s something that needs to be done without throwing romance into the mix (but he really shouldn’t be alone, he should get help, and I really fucking hope they touch on that in season 3).

Karen’s also a big girl. She can make her choices and is fully aware of what they mean. I didn’t like that she was hurt, again, by someone she loves, again, and at the end of the day, Karen Page deserves to be loved deeply and entirely and Frank just can’t be that person right now. That doesn’t mean never (what’s the point of telling their story if it ended like that? Lightfoot might be on thin fucking ice but he wouldn’t do Karen OR Frank dirty like that).

The Punisher was written in three parts, the beginning, the middle, and the end (much like every other story, ever). Middle installments tend to be the most poorly received, which isn’t an issue in film franchises because of the revenue stream attached, but it DOES mean shows struggle in their Sophomore years. I like to use ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ as a point of reference, because it was almost universally hated upon release, and is now a cherished part of a dynastic film franchise. People cannot tell a story, or understand it, with only two acts of a three-part play so it can come off strangely, or the general tone can feel ‘off’, because there isn’t active resolution and we’re left with just as many questions as we entered with.

Ultimately, we need a season three to see how this plays out, (we DESERVE one, and a kiss, goddammit), but if this is where it ends. If this is the last time we see Karen and Frank, at least it’s ended knowing they’re in love, that it’s an indisputable fact of canon that cannot be ignored. Whatever that means going forward, we as a fan base can figure out in our own writing, conjecture, and in the beauty of all they’ve shared up until this point.

I am so profoundly happy with what we got, the tone of the season and everything else notwithstanding. I have issues, yes, of course, I do, but I’ve waited well over a year to see them share a screen and this is what my sleep-deprived brain could make of it.

Thank you all for reading, xo.