#dr. proust

[double-aa-batteries]

what I think about a lot is that if Neil ordered a hit on Grayson for Jean, it's almost certain that Dr. Proust was bloody dead and in the ground the second championahips were over

[andylantsov]

Does someone remember the name of that one aftg fic where people can be brought back to life- there are people who do it naturally and people who need help to come back, the kind of help that Easthaven (run by the Ravens) and Wymack's place provide.

Neil is a Natural at coming back to life, he's initially brought back to life in the foxes' place, Andrew takes Neil to Columbia and drugs him, Neil is captured by the Ravens and is experimented on, Andrew goes to Easthaven/Evermore to rescue Neil and gets off his drugs in the process

Dr. Proust is a good person in this fic

I remember almost the entire plot, but not the name of the fic or the author. Help?

[thatsbelievable]

[fandomsandhappiness]

exy fans will try to cancel neil josten on twitter for his use of homophobic slurs even though he's in a gay relationship and not like. his extensive ties to organised crime. smh

[nomisong]

remembrance of things past by marcel proust + the cabinet of dr caligari

[cozyrosykay]

Dang I wrote something else 🤣 and it’s only been a few days since my last fic! I’m on a roll lol

This is something that has been rolling around in my brain for a while and I decided I finally need to write it down.

Bee gets revenge for Andrew

[coldsaturn]

Does Neil ever find out exactly what Proust did to Andrew? And what is his reaction? Killing him or torturing him first like his father would’ve?

In canon he doesn't know in excruciating detail, but he's smart enough to connect the dots.

Riko talks of "reenactments" right after mentioning Drake, so it's very clear what his plan is.

"Did you know I've bought one of the doctors at Easthaven, too? Unless you want these little therapy sessions of his to turn into therapeutic reenactments, you will be on a plane to West Virginia tomorrow morning. Jean will give your ticket to Kevin. Do you understand me?"

We also know about Neil's reaction when he finds out that Proust did abuse Andrew, because it's a very important scene in TKM:

Neil didn't know if he could say it. Thinking about it was almost too much. Andrew was waiting, though, so Neil choked back his nausea. "Riko said if I didn't, Dr. Proust would—" Andrew clapped a hand over his mouth, smothering the rest of his words, and Neil knew he'd failed. Riko said Easthaven's Dr. Proust used "therapeutic reenactments" to help his patients. It was a thin line between psychological cruelty and real physical abuse, and Riko made it clear Proust was willing to cross that line if Neil disobeyed. He should have known better than to trust Riko's word. Hatred thawed a little of the new ice in his veins, but the bored look on Andrew's face was hard to stomach. A couple months ago Andrew was so drugged he laughed at his own pain and trauma. Today he didn't care enough to do even that. Neil didn't know which extreme was worse.

Then Andrew himself unambiguously words it this way:

"If you believed that you wouldn't be planning how to kill Proust." "This is not revenge," Andrew said. "I warned him what I would do to him if he touched me. This is me keeping my word."

From the extra content we have this:

Neil had already had it confirmed that Proust had hurt Andrew and that Andrew did not want to talk about it

Now, about what Neil would do to Proust: nothing direct.

Anyone that Riko used – anyone that Ichirou can prove Riko used – is erased. These people should have known better than to sell their services to the wrong brother. Proust is not the first to die, but he is definitely on the list of people erased. ((Neil expects a little sourness from Andrew, that the Moriyamas executed a man he was planning on killing once things calmed down, but Andrew only says that it saves him the trouble of finding an alibi. Neil doesn’t quite believe him, but he knows better than to press the matter.))

This is beautifully hypocritical because it's like he thinks the Moriyamas took away Andrew's revenge and he's like "oh no are you sad? :(" when in fact it was Neil himself who told Ichirou that Riko had bought a psychiatrist at Easthaven, and then later tried to confirm it from Stuart for good measure lol So basically

I feel Neil getting directly involved would cross into the alternative storylines where Andrew is out of the picture, and we have extra content on that as well to imagine his reaction. This is the timeline where he would get all the details.

In May, Neil Josten would finally vanish, and Nathaniel Wesninski would go straight for Proust. He wouldn’t have told Stuart Hatford about Proust yet, so he’d snatch the doctor out from under everyone’s noses. And he’d get the information he needed and the confessions he needed however he needed, and learn the how and why and when and how-much of everything he’d done for Riko. This information would go straight to both the press and the FBI, and in the chaos that followed Nathaniel Wesninski would vanish overseas.

[aftgtandn]

patient violence

Rated Mature, 6981 words

Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Relationships: Andrew/Neil, Neil&Jean, Andrew&Jean

Characters: Andrew Minyard, Neil Josten, Jean Moreau

Summary: Andrew is at Easthaven. Neil is in the nest. If Andrew wants to change the latter, he must first change the former. In this one, the fox saves the rabbit from the raven's trap.

💚💚💚

An orderly catches Dr. Proust and Andrew ends up escaping Easthaven early. Where to next? Well, Neil’s in the Nest and Andrew’s looking into a jailbreak. In this fic we find out what happens when Andrew goes to get Neil out of the Nest.

[otdiaftg]

"You weren't supposed to leave Kevin's side. Did you forget?" "I promised to keep him safe," Neil says. "I didn't say I'd hound him every step of the way like you do. I kept my end of the deal." "But not like this," Andrew says. "You already said this had nothing to do with Kevin. Why did you go?" Neil doesn't know if he can say it. Thinking about it is almost too much. Andrew is waiting, though, so Neil chokes back his nausea. "Riko said if I didn't, Dr. Proust would—" Andrew claps a hand over his mouth, smothering the rest of his words, and Neil knows he'd failed.

Day: Tuesday, January 2nd Time: 2:15 PM EST

[dearstanny5]

(English is not my first language and I am writing this mainly with the translator so I apologize in advance for any mistake)

EI was wondering if the year TFC took place there were any rookies on the Ravens roster which raised the question, what must it have been like for them?

Just imagine someone who came from a functional family, someone who was a real Ravens fan and who started playing for them. Imagine the joy of that person when they are chosen for the team. Imagine how happy he must have been in the months before he went to the nest, how proud he was, talking nonstop about everything he knew about the Ravens to his parents.

And then January comes and the departure of Kevin Day, one of his idols, is announced along with his transfer to the Foxes. He finds it strange, who would trade the Ravens for the Foxes?Why would he leave Riko? He would probably feel betrayed like most fans, but he would let it go. It wouldn't affect his spirits.

June arrives in the blink of an eye. He says goodbye to his parents and gets on the plane towards his dream. He marvels at the entire structure of the nest and Nevermore, He's so happy to meet his favorite players. But hey, why don't they look so happy? What's this buddy system? 16-hour training sessions? Confidentiality clause in the contract?

This is so weird. There was nothing about this on the Ravens forum. No one ever told him about it.

I think he would have let that go at first, after all that was the perfect team, their coach was the founder of the sport, he must have known what was going on.

But time begins to pass and things don't seem so perfect anymore. The Ravens are violent on and off the court. Coaches not only yell but also punish you when you make a mistake, and it's not just you who pays for that mistake, sometimes you pay for mistakes you didn't make. Then there's number one, Captain Riko Moriyama, who is nothing like who he pretends to be in front of the cameras. He screams, he threatens and most of all, he hits. And nobody thinks it's weird. Nobody thinks it's wrong. Do they pretend there's nothing wrong going on or do they think there's really nothing wrong with it? You don't know and you can't ask anyone because hey, your phone was taken away from you and after a few visits to Dr. Proust, you know he won't answer you.

And then the things we already know happen. During the winter feast, their captain and the others are being passive aggressive towards the Foxes. Kevin Day looks terrified. Neil Josten humiliated Riko non-stop and no matter how funny it might be, he couldn't laugh because he knew what would happen when they got to the nest. When winter break comes, he can't go home because his partner won't go. So just imagine when suddenly, Neil Josten, the Foxes' offensive lineman who has been destroying the Ravens since the beginning of the season, arrives at the nest and Riko's mood suddenly improves. After a few months you knew something was going to happen, but you didn't expect it to be that. Imagine his reaction when Riko orders them to throw balls at a red-haired, injured and unprotected Neil. When Riko orders them to mark him on the court. When he-

EHe doesn't think that's the perfect court anymore, that's the perfect team. He wants out. He doesn't want to be like them. But there's no way he'll pay the fine for breaking the law.

[a0wz]

The Butcher's Son Self-Assignment

TKM Spoilers, set directly after Neil found out about what happened to Andrew while he was at Easthaven Hospital for rehab.

Content Warning: torture, insinuation of assault, kidnapping, racism

Neil felt a fire rise in his chest. Of all the stupid thing's he's done, believing Riko would keep his word was the most egregious. In silence, Neil went back to his room but unable to respond when Matt asked if thing's were alright. Too much was going through the striker's mind as he found his phone on the charger. Neil's father spoke of making him an apprentice, it was his mother's love and borderline paranoia that kept him from turning into the monster they spend his entire life running away from. He disobeyed and betrayed all that she had sacrificed just to play Exy for a year. Now, he would continue to betray her in the worse way possible.

The text to Wymack was short and did little as a heads up.

You: I'll be back in 3 days.

The response was immediate;

Coach W: THE FUCK YOU WILL

But Neil's vision was merely a haze of what was around him. All Nathanial wanted to see was the inside of Dr. Proust's ribcage, warm and drenched in blood. Nathanial's finger twitched at the thought of such a sensation, plucking shards of bone from the wedges of a hammer. He almost couldn't hear Matt's phone ringing as he rushed out the door. A high laugh escaped between his gritted teeth, it was hysterical to him that he was running towards, and not away, from his first kill as the Butcher's son.

He disappeared form the fox tower to make his way across highways in the dead of night to reach Easthaven Hospital. It was as simple as waiting for the doctor to come in the next morning. The anger Nathanial felt against himself kept his nerves from subsiding. Nearly manic with energy the Butcher's son had a day to prepare, a day to execute, and a day to cover his track further.

Walmart had everything he needed for cheap, but he jogged around the entire city to different locations to split up his purchases. Nathanial knew to grab some clothes and shoes that didn't fit to make himself appear as a different, much larger body type. He knew hydrogen peroxide and sponges would get the blood stains out of most materials. He knew a generic air freshener and a wide brush to fake vacuum patterns along the carpet would make it look as though custodial came by through the night. He knew to get a disposable camera to keep track of where everything was in the office before the struggle.

It was easy enough to get Dr. Proust personal phone number, home address, and the name of his house maid. It was easy enough to find a dead bird in the park. It was easy enough to wait until the doctor came in the next morning so coworkers could watch as he willingly left work in the middle of the day due to a 'personal emergency'. It was easy enough to make the call pretending to be a police officer investigating that maid's suicide which left a positive pregnancy test and note addressed to him by name. It was easy enough to knock out the security camera in the parking lot by chucking a dead bird at it just before dawn. It was easy enough to have drained the oil from his car. It was easy enough to watch his engine blow out in the middle of the road and him getting out red-faced and stomping.

"Shit dude, hey I have a shop not too far form here I can get you to were you need to go in no time!" A hooded figure with his hands in his pockets shouted from across the street.

"I truly don't have the time for this crap, I'll just call a cab -uh, thanks for the offer though." Dr. Proust waved off the hooded figure and turned his back to dial something in his phone.

The hooded figure crossed the street and pointed just a block away, not lifting his head enough for Dr. Proust to see his face clearly, "I can have someone give you a ride if you let us rotate your tires on top of checking out the engine bust."

Dr. Proust rolled his eyes and sighed, "Fine, fine, but I better not see a scratch on my car when your done and no messing with the headlights I know one is out and I've never met an maraca shaking alien who could change them right." Dr. Proust didn't make it half the block before being pulled into a dark alleyway. A wash cloth damp with chloroform muzzled his shouts and before he could remember why he was out of his office in the first place, the world went to black.

Nathanial brought Dr. Proust to an abandoned shed a few miles out from a walking trail. The lanky heap was bound in cables and duck tape. The blaze-haired Fox prowled around his prey, watching as he groaned and twitched in confusion. Nathanial spent some time examining the doctor's hands. Wrinkled with age and sun-spotted, Nathanial doubted Andrew was his only victim. The Butcher's son would be doing many people a favor by getting rid of such a monstrous bug. Nathanial's teeth ground as he sneered, almost involuntarily, at the sight of it. All he went through thinking Andrew was safe, instead this creature violated the only person he's ever trusted since his mother's death. The hands, that's were he'll start, dissecting them like he was taught to dissect and destroy minds.

Dr. Proust woke to the feeling of skin peeling form the back of his hand. He writhed in pain, eyes rolling round the room without truly seeing. Nathanial had redone the binds to wrap around his forearms to keep him still while also exposing enough flesh to work with. Is glassier-colored eyes looked on with curiosity as he prodded and poked the now exposed veins and muscles surrounding small bones. Nathanial didn't mind the trembling or desperate muffles of what he assumed were bargaining pitches. He knew no amount of money could correct what he had done to Andrew and so many others. Not even blood could pay them back for their trauma. Despite this, Nathanial looked into the doctor's brown eyes and smiled. A smile Andrew couldn't help but wear to bury a deep anguish.

Within the day Dr. Proust was slowly dismembered alive.

After the initial rounds of argument between the Foxes, Nicky had the news broadcast on blast incase something came up about Neil while he was gone. Dan thought they should put out a missing person report but Kevin spoke up against it. Instead they watched the news, correctly guised whatever Neil was up to would be picked up on, with or without his name being mentioned. On day two, Dr. Proust was reported missing after leaving work at his own free will. His car was found abandoned width the engine blown out due to an empty oil tank. Unfortunately, a bird had smashed the camera that would have recorded any tampering with the doctor's vehicle.

When the Foxes brought the news to Wymack, he raised his hands and said, "I don't see how nay of this has to do with us unless there's a warrant involved." Uneasily, the Foxes waited another day for their striker to return. When he did, smiling as if nothing had ever happened, Andrew smacked him in the back of the head and did little to pretend he wasn't targeting Niels ancles during practice. Matt tried to tell Andrew to knock it off, but Neil chuckled and said it's Andrew's special way of saying thank you. The goalkeeper's glove was thick with padding and made a prominent, very visible middle finger.

[ifitmeanslosingyouthenno]

never asked permissions (he just hopes that they forgive)

day 23 whumptober prompt: forced choice | “i’m doing this for you”

“it’s up to you nathaniel, you can either sign, or well, dr. proust can make sure that andrew minyard never is fit for leaving easthaven”

every single bone, every single muscle hurt beyond anything neil had ever lived through before, but rage was a good enough motivator to stay aware of his surroundings, to stay aware of the predators lurking in the nest, to stay aware of the psychopath threatening his family

“i told you not to touch him”

“oh but i’m not doing anything nathaniel, as i’ve been told, he has a history with self inflicted harm, sure would be a shame if he tried to hurt himself again and something bad happened to him”

nathaniel lunged forward, ready to hit to cut to kill this fucking bastard

but arms held him back, hands wrapped tightly over his arms, already filled with bruises

he was too weak to fight back, running on basically no sleep and no food for days

he couldn’t fight riko and his ravens

and worst of all was that he couldn’t stop him from hurting andrew if he was stuck inside the nest

he wasn’t dumb enough to think riko was above planning andrew’s death, he had no issues with killing seth and ordering drake’s attack, so what was stopping him from killing andrew? seth he didn’t even have personal conflict with, but andrew was already on his bad side

neil knew not to doubt monsters were capable of everything

he hoped he could be able to explain to the foxes someday, that no, he didn’t mean to leave them

this wasn’t his choice

he hoped he could explain andrew someday, that he could apologize 

but no

he had to do this for them

better him than them

they didn’t deserve to be hurt because of him, andrew didn’t deserve to be hurt because of him any more than he already had been 

he slumped in the raven’s hold and stared at riko with murder in his eyes when the raven king smirked

“if i ever find out you hurt him again, nothing and no one will stop me from killing you”

“i’d love to see you try, wesninski”

good, let him underestimate him, let him think he was bluffing

nathaniel looked away before riko could see his rage, his pain, his grief

“ready to sign now, nathaniel?”

he took several deep breaths

this was for the foxes, for andrew, he had no choice but to do as he was told

“where’s the fucking pen then?”

short and kinda meh but i mean, i had no idea what to write for this prompt and didn't find inspiration in any other alternative lol title from redecorate by twenty one pilots

[jc-wolfiet]

blame it on my short term memory. i reread tkm, jumped immediately back to tfc and short circuited a little:

how did mind your own business mystery man i dont swing neil and psychotic midget andrew go from “nothing” to “this”

like that book 3-1 jump made me realise how big the gap was

neil called it self preservation? andrew started by digging up neils past, the very thing he was running away from. then deals fly around and neil risks his life to save andrew from dr proust.

neil just seems to understand what everyones feeling or thinking or whats going on

the fact that they worked all that out through deals and ended up with more than what they initially had

thats power

[stupot]

speaking from experience if you go into The Sopranos blind and come upon the scene where dr melfi is explaining the concept of emotionally associating things with one's childhood by providing the example of marcel proust's In Search of Lost Time (wherein the taste of a madeleine cookie unleashes a tidal wave of memories), and tony hits her with that "this sounds very gay" without missing a fucking beat, it is so intensely funny it feels like you're getting shot point blank and you will need to pause the episode entirely before you can carry on

[bookquest2024]

100 Books to Read Before I Die: Quest Order

The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Under The Net by Iris Murdoch

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A Passage to India by EM Forster

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1984 by George Orwell

White Noise by Don DeLillo

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Ulysses by James Joyce

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

A Dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Little Women by Louisa M Alcott

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Watchmen by Alan Moore

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Money by Martin Amis

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

[frigid-moon-fall]

Wanting to grow up quickly probably helped to hurt Leon's few relationships.

He can't be honest when he's focusing on being seen as mature. Even though he is pretty openly immature with Marian, it probably makes him hesitate a little or say something he doesn't mean even with her. A lot of thoughts and wants aren't okay to share because they're too childish--and he doesn't want to be seen as a child.

And they make a point of him having many childish traits, some of which are a little lost across the culture barrier. I wonder how many more he might have been hiding.

A lot of emotional needs for a lot of people go unmet because it doesn't feel like something they can ask for. It's not something that someone like them should ask for. "Someone like them" could be any kind of box that they think they belong in.

I know that sweets are the most obvious and comedically framed thing, but there's probably plenty of things in life that get treated the same as sweets for him. Things he'll deny himself if other people are watching because it doesn't fit the image he wants to project. Things he'll deny in any scenario because wanting something--anything--looks bad. It has to be insisted at him over and over and framed as something that someone else wants him to do so he has an excuse.

I'm kind of scared to talk about what that reminds me of exactly. It's something that you'll find is very very common (and in fact pretty rare to not be the case) in a specific type of media. It's something that's uncomfortable for audiences outside of the culture it was produced, and the reasoning for it being that way always has to be explained. I hate speaking so vaguely about it, but I don't think what crowd is left here is especially interested in it.

(Or, ignore all of that in favor of the aside in Tales of Fandom vol1 where apparently he's fine asking for frivolous things like imported eggs and sugar just for his flan lmao ridiculous little rich bastrd)

And, related to the previous post, I think that Marian herself has also unintentionally (and yet it was probably sadly inevitable) hurt his ability to bond with others.

He may also be close with Chaltier, and some continuities even place Leon as basically never having gone a day in his life without Chal being there. But Chaltier is still different. There's love there, but Marian is everything. She is every love to him, and she's been able to physically hold him through the worst of his youth.

And it's basically been drilled into him (at least in Proust's continuity, for sure) that nobody will ever love him like either of them do. Nobody will understand him like Chaltier does. Nobody will accept him wholly and unconditionally like Marian does. Even when that's demonstrably untrue with Stahn's unshakable belief in him.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was intentional on Mictlan's end. A real long con manipulation. It helped corner and put Leon right where he needed him to be, after all.

And in that, Chaltier and Marian are victims as well. They probably know that Leon putting that much value in them is hurting him in the long run, but can't really do anything to correct course. They've both tried. They've encouraged him to branch out and make more friends, to reach out to Rutee, and he fights it every step of the way. There is nothing that they can personally do to make him see that other people could care for him like they do. He has to be the one to take the blinders off and see and learn that for himself.

It's just a shame that he took them off just a few minutes too late.

tl;dr this kid's been spectacularly set up to fail from birth.

(Bonus: In Director's Cut where Marian finally has the chance to reject him, that could have gone incredibly poorly. We don't get to see the awkward aftermath that led up to them still being close and comfortable friends, but like, one wrong move could have probably cemented that mindset into "Not even Marian can love me" and isolate him further.)