#for some reason my prescription also got lower and i don’t understand why that might be fucking up things too

[lunimy]

i changed my glasses right and i’m like 50% sure there’s something very wrong with them bc i’m seeing like an unfocused camera and i don’t think that’s should happen

[anxietysroomsupport]

i found out pushing doesn't work. that's what my sister does when she thinks something's wrong, she pushes that she wants to go to the doctor. eventually our parents give in. i think i mentioned it because i sent an ask here recently, but my joints have been giving me grief lately. several months ago my knees kept feeling like my bones were grinding when i put weight on them for a few days. more recently, in january i think, after spending an hour or two outside, my hips did the (1/?)

(2/?) the same, that night and for the next few days. sometimes it was fine, usually better mid morning, but other times i couldn't put wait on them. it felt like they were grinding, or going to give up on me. it's been happening longer where i feel like if i move the wrong way, something will pop out. i try to sit up and swing my legs and my hips yell at me with slight pain, so even though they would probably just pop, i wait till it stops, just in case. because i don't want to see (2/?)

(3/?) what would happen if they didn't. but recently, a week or two after i started these new exercises (my mom thinks it's related to that, which it may be slightly, but i don't think so completely), modified push ups so i could get better core strength and stuff, my joints have started popping. started feeling like they'll go out more often. and i mean popping loudly. i kneeled earlier in the process of sitting up, and my sister, who was talking and a few feet away, asked me if i (3/?)

(4/?) okay. it only hurt a little, it's more just the sensation of the popping, tiny pain. but my right knee sort of buzzed, like my elbow did yesterday. except yesterday, my elbow hurt. it felt, just from a random movement, like it actually popped out for a moment, or tried to, and my elbows are usually fine. if it's the exercises, i don't want to just give up my hopes. i want to be able to one day walk on my hands. i know i'd never get back into it after this, even if it's not the (4/?)

(5/?) problem. anyways, sorry, there's a lot to say, i'll try to hurry this up. recently after reading something they flared, when it started happening nearly every time i move, then went down a little, and have stayed that way for about a week. the exercises have been making me feel a little stronger, and i just don't think they're doing this. but, i kept mentioning it. my pain. asking if people could hear it. only my sister cares to listen. she always cares. always listens. (5/?)

(6/?) mental or physical health she's there for me. she keeps saying that i really should go to the doctor, so i keep asking. i mentioned the knee thing to my mom. she said she kept researching but couldn't find anything narrow enough to be diagnosable. that i should just wear the shoes that i can't stand, stop the exercises, start up again with walking when my body calms down, as if it will. i can't stop now. but i don't think she'll take me. i think i have to wait till something bad (6/?)

(7/?) especially after the thing i read, i don't want to wait. i don't want to ignore the signs. if i could save myself so much pain, why can't i try? just two or three days ago i was getting into school when my hip started to hurt. the hallways are one way, so i have to walk around nearly the entire school to get to my class, and i only had a few minutes to get there. i just told myself to keep walking. ignore the fact that i could barely put weight on my right leg. i had to get to (7/8)

(8/?) class. but pushing doesn't work. i pushed to go to the doctor. i got in an argument. i had stuff to do and i was starting to cry, so i just said i wouldn't bring it up anymore. i'd stop. my sister's an adult. i just realized i can ask her to take me. if another bad thing happens, i will. if they flare up again, i will tell my parents that i need to go to the doctor. if they won't, i'll ask my sister. i don't want to. i know my mom tries. she said normally she would, but covid. (8/?)

(9/?) but i have to go. maybe it's nothing, or maybe i will have to stop doing the exercises, and break my heart a little bit more as i give up on another goal. but i have to. i have to. i can't cripple myself for life because i wouldn't go. i have no idea what could happen to me one day or some day soon even if i don't. maybe i'm just overreacting and i'm fine and it's growing pains but i haven't grown in 1 1/2 years and it hurts. and i'm so so tired. been reading, sorry it's like prose (9/9).

~

I sent an ask about my joints recently? Yeah, well, this. yesterday I was hesitantly diagnosed with Hypermobility Syndrome, pretty wide across my body but mainly in my lower body. basically the doctor said, that since it's the best guess, I need to go to Physical Therapy and try to strengthen my tendons and joints. so obviously I'm so glad to have a solution, maybe not be in so much pain anymore, but at the same time, I like being a little bendy. I'm not stretchy, not good at gymnastics (1/2)

(2/2) or whatever, but I do like feeling a little different. so I guess it's just like, what if PT makes it so I'm not bendy anymore? is it like those metaphors where you break a stick, then put a bunch together and can't break it? or am I folding the stick in half, forsaking mobility for strength? and I don't think that a diagnosis for an actual chronic illness has hit me yet, I know I'll be more nervous when my first PT comes in 3 days, but I still feel normal.

~

Hypermobile anon here, I believe I said I wished it was something a little more for some reason? Yeah, well, good news, I don't anymore. My pain is like, I'm in so much pain, but not actually that much, and I know that I both am and aren't, and it doesn't actually feel like that much, but it is? My point is, tonight's been really bad and I'm starting to think it's good the friend I tend to go outside on walks and stuff with was busy. Also, my mom, in complimenting my drive, (1/2)

(2/2) said that while my sibling was told to do physical therapy to keep their hand working and didn't do it as much as they should, I was doing physical therapy regularly and faithfully to stop my joints from aching. I know my family, mostly my parents, has lots of issues and then just powers through, but you'd think that my mom, who has a bunch going on (allergies, diabetes, random undiagnosable stuff), would understand chronic illness. To her, my joints ache. Sorry, it's not actually too bad.

Hi Anon,

First thing, so so sorry for the delay on this one.  And it’s great that you have continued writing in with updates!

Thank goodness you did keep pushing and get your diagnosis (even if it may be a hesitant one)!  You really could have ended up struggling for a long time.  Arthritis would have been another guess if your doctor hadn’t come to Hypermobility Syndrome.

Hopefully your doctor is treating this seriously, but remember that if any doctor is trying to ignore your concerns, you can very clearly say to them, “If you’re not going to do tests I want it noted in my chart.”  

From the advice of a lot of chronically ill folks, it is also strongly recommended to get your vitamin levels checked, especially b12, iron, and vitamin d. These can actually cause joint symptoms if they’re low enough and lots of things can affect your absorption of them.

It is definitely still possible to build muscle and continue to be flexible.  It takes quite a lot of bulk to start limiting your range of movement, and physical therapy will probably be gradual enough that you can assess your flexibility as you go.

As far as feeling “normal”, having chronic illness actually is really common!  In 2012, the National Health Council stated that roughly 133 million people in the U.S. were dealing with some kind of chronic condition.

It is awful that you’re in so much pain.  Your doctor should also be helping you manage that, since strengthening your muscles isn’t going to be an immediate solution.  That takes time, but you’re in a lot of pain right now.  Anti-inflammatory painkillers can help with joint pain, and heat treatments like warm baths, hot water bottles, and heat-rub creams can be useful too.  Beyond that, you might need prescription treatments.

Your mom is probably just trying to encourage you, but it’s small comfort compared to the level of pain you’re dealing with.  People will often deal with chronic illness in different ways, especially different generations.  It might help to find groups online that are dealing with similar issues, or chronic conditions in general.  Places like reddit, facebook, etc will have groups or subreddits dedicated to creating a community, so you can share your experiences and find other people dealing with the same issues.  You might ask your physical therapist if there are any in-person or online support groups locally.  

You’ll have to find a way to manage your chronic illness, your way.  If your mom doesn’t understand it, don’t worry about her.  You got this.  And your sister’s got your back.  

-Kai, bun

[sinjata]

Inuyasha / Kagome Fanfic : When Your Heart Makes a Wish - Chapter 2 - Memories from somewhere far away

Here’s the second chapter, it’s all yours! :) Hope you like it! Oh, you really should listen Inuyasha soundtracks, when you are reading this story. Those are so good!

Chapter 2 - Memories from somewhere far away

Kagome cannot help it, sometimes she just has to let her memories to be heard, no matter how painful it is. At one point, she realized she had to try to learn to cherish her memories. They did not stay in her mind just for fun. How could I ever forget? Every place is reminiscent of Inuyasha, even the market where we went together... Kagome had to avoid that place too for some time. It has been difficult for her to protect herself from crushing memories, but gradually it succeeded. Until now, when Kagome’s mind fills up for a long time with questions, to which she has not dared to think of answers.

Has Inuyasha forgotten me, went on in his life? Did he ever think, that our time together might be coming to an end? Is everyone alright there? Did Sango and Miroku get married? Shippo and Kirara, how I would love to hug you both now. I miss you; I miss you all so terribly! Sota misses you too, Inuyasha, but he doesn’t say it out loud, because he’s afraid that he would hurt me... Kagome just sees it from him every now and then and when she hugs him wordlessly, Sota understands.

Suddenly, memories - good and more painful ones - makes a return to Kagome's mind, as if someone had opened the huge gate, that protected them. Kagome has tried to push certain memories, especially those which were like one big monster, somewhere very far from her mind. But now they seem like to suffocate her, unless she will release them. She can't help but give up.

Kagome remembers the moment, when after surviving the attack of the centipede demon, she got up from the well and ended up in the woods. Thinking that she had found the Holy Tree and her home yard, but then she saw a boy, Inuyasha, nailed to the tree with an arrow. She remembers rubbing his dog’s ears, totally unable to resist the temptation. Such ears... Those doesn’t belong to a human. She remembers thinking, waking up from her thoughts only, when the villagers shot them with arrows.

Suddenly Kagome does wince and almost drops her tea mug. She now realizes that she actually instinctively protected Inuyasha from the arrows of the villagers, by throwing herself in front of him, without even considering that she could be hit by herself. I could have jumped to the ground for being safe or something, but for some reason I didn't do it... She wonders.

“Thanks for that, you were just trying to kill me,” Kagome says sadly.

But Inuyasha took very good care of me too... Kagome is thinking and smiles a little for her memories. When this got sick at the Feudal era and she returned home, Inuyasha followed her. He prepared medicine for her using his mother’s prescription and kept watch at night, that Kagome was able to sleep. And he didn't even get a jealousy attack, even though Hojo was here... Maybe he was more focused on thinking about ways to get me in better shape.

Inuyasha often called her an idiot, and yet at times he behaved like one, however, he remained by her side in such moments, helping to the best of his ability. Like she was doing same for Inuyasha, there was no doubt about it.

In Kagome’s mind is now a very distant memory, of how Inuyasha was not at first allowing her to go back to her own time, when she wanted to and tried to block (or destroy) the well with a large rock. Kagome became enraged and repeatedly used the sit -command on Inuyasha, so that he tumbled to the ground and the heavily stone striked to his back. Later, a mask demon attacked Kagome and Sota, but Inuyasha rescued them by destroying the demon. However, Inuyasha was really offended about what happened with the stone and rudely refused to help them, before apologizing. As dawn came, before Kagome left for school, she vowed Inuyasha to go his own time and so he did - for a moment.

When Kagome came home from school, she found Inuyasha from her room, who was sitting on the bed while Buyo was sleeping next to him. At first Kagome was angry, because she knew how impossible it was to study while he was around. Inuyasha got bored insanely fast, if he didn’t come up with anything to do, and Kagome didn't always have time to keep him company. Fortunately, Sota helped her sometimes with that, but now he was not home yet.

“You! Why are you here? I’m not coming back yet, you know -” Kagome asked, dropping her backpack from her shoulder to the floor.

Soon, however, she saw that he was not okay. Inuyasha sat unanswered with his ears down, holding his side while his face distorted in pain.

"Inuyasha, what’s wrong with you?" Kagome asked, sat down next to Inuyasha, while concern swept over her when seeing him like this.

“Back”, grumpy hanyō growled, looking accusingly at Kagome. I hope I didn't come here for nothing... What if she doesn't want to help? Inuyasha thought somehow worried.

“Oh no - still? It seems to get a bad hit then...” Kagome muttered nervously, feeling a small sting of guilt. Somehow, it’s weird... Inuyasha often gets worse hits with demons, as those wounds healed very quickly. But now one stone cause such terrible pain? She wondered, without daring to inquire about the matter any further.

“Why didn’t you show it to Kaede? She would surely have found the right herbs for your pains -”

“As if I would show anything to that old hag! Hngh... Stop nagging and do something!” Inuyasha groaned in pain.

“Well, once you ask so kindly...” Kagome said in a sarcastic tone, sighing deeply.

“Take off your clothes”, Kagome ordered.

“Shirts, I mean”, she clarified quickly, seeing Inuyasha’s look.

Inuyasha then nodded quickly and put his Tessaiga sword from his lap to the floor, to lean on the bedside table. He turned his back and began to carefully take off his kimono. To his surprise, he felt Kagome helping him, her noticing that every move seemed to hurt him.

“Thanks...” Inuyasha said quietly. Damn, even just this feels painful...

After Inuyasha got his shirt off too, Kagome saw many big bruises on his pale back, but some of them were already healing. However, the sight gripped Kagome's stomach kind of nasty way, because Inuyasha's back was looking as if this had gotten beated badly.

“I’m sorry...” Kagome said quietly, touching his back lightly with her fingertips.

“Well now you sounded more, like you really meant it too. Last time you didn’t really convince me”, Inuyasha muttered and shuddered slightly, when he felt her gently touch on his back.

"Hey, do you even realize, that you were going to break the well permanently?!" this made Kagome flicker angrily and crossing her arms.

“How did you imagine me getting back to my own time without the well, huh? Here, back into my own life?? It’s little bit hard to apologize anything after that! Fine, I’m not making you sit under a stone or anything else anymore, but you can’t assume -”

“Okay okay, I understood!” Inuyasha interrupted, turning around and nailing his golden-yellow gaze at Kagome.

“Maybe I overreacted just a little bit, but what else should I do, when you always leave at the wrong time! We have to look for Shikon shards, but you seem to always have something hell more important here -“

"I would probably have stayed there for the rest of my life, if the well had broken!" Kagome tries to make him see, how serious the situation was.

“It doesn’t sound so bad though...” Inuyasha muttered, no longer looking at her. Damn, what I’m saying?!

“What...?” Kagome stared at him for a moment wondering, if she had heard wrong.

“It wouldn’t have broken down so badly”, Inuyasha said now louder.

It was as if you had said something completely different... Kagome was still wondering in her mind.

“Inuyasha, I also have to go to school here or I’ll get kicked out from there! My future depends on it, it’s very important to me. When will you understand that?” Kagome huffed, shaking her head slowly.

Seeing Kagome's face like that, Inuyasha understood not to be so stubborn, if he wanted help from her now.

“Maybe I’ll try it now”, Inuyasha shrugged his shoulders and turns his back again to Kagome, leaving her there with open mouth for a moment. As long as you don't kick me out, but help me...

“I don’t know if massaging would help or would it only make it worse...” Kagome did wonder out loud, while she also decided to let the dust settle and focus on caring his back.

“Try”, Inuyasha decided on her behalf.

“Lay down, it’s easier that way”, Kagome instructed, and he obeyed lowering his head on Kagome’s pillow.

"You say right away if it hurts too much, is that clear?" Kagome adjured and Inuyasha mumbled approvingly, while Buyo took a new sleeping place next to his feet.

She moved closer to him, moving Inuyasha's long, silver-white hair aside and gently pressed his back searching painful spots. The bruises gave a good clue about those, but it was also easy to find those because of the noises, he made. At least his shoulders are little tight, no wonder though... Kagome noticed as she used more force.

How can it feel so... Kagome's hands, her sweet scent in this soft... I guess I've never been able to relax like this before... Inuyasha was thinking somewhat sleepy.

"Does this relieve any of your pain?" Kagome asked after a moment.

“Mm-mh...” was the only answer Inuyasha, who had closed his eyes, gave her.

Did he fall asleep? He at least seems to trust me a little bit more now... Kagome thought, and couldn't help but smile. Inuyasha seemed to relax moment by moment, making Kagome’s job easier. I didn’t want to cause you such a pain like this, but why you have to be so stubborn... Otherwise, I would now be wondering by the remains of the well, how to get back home. Kagome thought, then getting an idea. Hmm, would I dare try that to him... Yes, it might really help!

“Inuyasha, I’ll be right back. Just wait here, quietly.”

“Mm...” answer came from the pillow again.

I guess he's somehow awake. Kagome smiled, then headed to the bathroom. She took a mint green tube from the mirror cabinet and returned to her room. Kagome carefully sat back next to Inuyasha and opened the tube. Buyo woke up fast like a flash and its horrified look told, what that thought about the smell. The cat jumped to the floor and found safer place from Kagome's chair. At the same time, Inuyasha woke up too.

“What the hell stinks so strongly?! It burns my eyes!” he rose suddenly to sit, stared at her with narrowed eyes wondering, what she was doing.

“I’ll put you a cold gel, it will relieve the pain. But its effect may seem a little strange to you at first, I just warn you”, Kagome gently let Inuyasha smell the open tube and his reaction was reminiscent of Buyo’s reaction, which couldn’t stand the smell of menthol either.

"You're trying to poison me with that stuff, just admit it!" Inuyasha argued holding his nose and retreated next to the wall on the bed, kicking with his feet. Just when I was about to trust her...!

“This isn’t poison, you fool. Just watch...” Kagome said and put some gel on her own hand, while Inuyasha was about to attack to stop her.

Crazy woman... How dare you put that anywhere near your skin?! Inuyasha thought, glancing eyes wide at Kagome, then stared fixedly at her hand, as if waiting for the skin to corrode.

They both just waited for a moment and while still nothing significant happened to her hand, Inuyasha pondered his options. He moved back to Kagome's side and pushed his hand to her.

“On your own risk, woman,” he said, while Kagome just nodded smiling, applied gel to a small area on his hand and waited for the gel’s and Inuyasha’s reaction.

Inuyasha stared at his hand, tapping his knee with his fingernails. With an impatient nature of his, he was already asking, what they were actually waiting for. Until...

“Gaaah! What...! What...? It feels - cold... No, burning?!” Inuyasha was panicky for a moment, until he somehow restrained himself and sniffed his hand, then he was about to taste it too.

"No! You can’t do that!” Kagome grabbed his hand at the last minute, trying to pull it out of Inuyasha's reach, but accidentally pulling the whole patient closer to herself.

Clearly not... Inuyasha thought looking at their hands and then Kagome, while his tongue was already out of his mouth just a little bit.

“You really shouldn’t put that thing in your mouth, it would hardly even taste good...” Kagome said, then released Inuyasha’s hand in a quick motion and retreated a little further away from him, while her cheeks flushed.

How can he look sometimes so... And why I’m blushing?? My thoughts are wandering far too much now... That's Inuyasha, wake up woman! Kagome thought and felt how her hands was getting sweaty. She closed her eyes tightly for a tiny moment.

“Just trust me now. Turn around”, Kagome ordered again to avoid Inuyasha’s gaze.

What just - happened? Inuyasha thought, when Kagome's look somehow disturbed him. He nodded slowly and turned his back somewhat reluctantly. He grabbed Kagome's pillow in his arms feeling a little excited and gave her a permission to apply that substance called gel, to his back.

Kagome continued her work again and Inuyasha was remaining silent. I really hope this helps you... She thought watching the bruises, while cold gel cooled her fingertips.

It was secretly fun for Kagome to follow, how Inuyasha was squirming and twisting, when he tried to understand what he was feeling in his body at that moment, as the gold gel began to seem to gradually show reactions here and there on his skin.

This feels somehow different than before. As if her touch would burn... But it doesn't hurt, but quite the opposite. Funny feeling... Inuyasha thought, staring at the cork board hanging on the wall in front of him.

“It’s ready”, Kagome snorted as she closed the tube.

Oh... Already now? Inuyasha found himself thinking.

“Such a strange poison... That - actually helps”, he said after a moment looking relieved, when he peeked over his shoulder.

For some reason Kagome felt blushing again. She felt good while she helped, and the fact that Inuyasha took help from her, she felt like the direction was right.

“You're welcome... Still, don’t mess with it too much now. Give it some time to heal”, Kagome advised as she got out of the bed, while Inuyasha was wearing his light shirt.

“Keh, let’s hope then there won’t be any surprises on the way home. You wouldn't - come along already?” Inuyasha suggested from the windowsill, after grabbing his Tessaiga from the floor, though he already knows her answer.

“Not yet, I have to pack and -“

“Well, as long as you will return soon!”

Kagome watched, how Inuyasha leaped into the invisible. And he’s gone again... Well, let’s hurry up then!

She decided to take a bath and then pack her yellow backpack. The backpack became a little too heavy from schoolbooks and other necessities, as usual. Kagome said quickly goodbyes to her grandfather and mother before stepping out the door, then colliding with Sota.

“Bye then, Sota,” Kagome said to him, without stopping her way.

“Sister, isn’t there too much stuff? Are you leaving again?” the boy asked, when he saw her weighing a backpack.

“A girl can’t travel by empty-handed. You never know, what you’ll need there”, she justified.

“Okay, by the way I already saw -“

*CRASH*

“...Inuyasha”, Sota ended his sentence after Inuyasha interrupted him, as if he would have fallen from the sky.

“What are you doing there??” Kagome breathes in fright, as the silver head crashes on her backpack.

“Dumb head...” Inuyasha said, grabbed Kagome’s backpack on his shoulder and headed for the shrine.

“Let’s go already!” Inuyasha said bustling, but stopped abruptly his way and turned to stare at Kagome.

“Oi - you didn't happen to pack that poison -“

“Oh that, I have it”, Kagome smiled at him, patted her backpack, knowing her travel company was talking about the cold gel and Inuyasha also nodded with a smile.

At least he waited, but here...? He really carries my backpack... His back also seems to be much better. Kagome thought contentedly, following him to a new adventure, forgetting everything else for a moment.

He finally started to trust me, even just a little... She thinks while lifting her tea mug to her lips, remembering how difficult the start was with Inuyasha, but how she decided not to give up on him. No matter what. How she was able to do that, she does not know even herself. How long a human can miss someone? The rest of this life, or is it possible to get used to it somehow? At least I'm not used to it yet, if I ever will... Kagome stares at the bottom of an empty mug in her thoughts.

Kagome wonders, how her nerves burned with Inuyasha’s overflowing jealousy because of Koga, however, usually enduring it somehow during their clashes.

It was kind of sweet to be jealous of me, but... Did he take me as for granted? It just felt like it at times... He immediately ran to Kikyo, if he got her scent somewhere nearby. As I turned like into air to him. Until she didn't show up for a while. Or did I just imagine it? But even Koga noticed it and that too, how I felt when Inuyasha did that... And Inuyasha also just wondered, why I was so tense somehow after those times.

I couldn’t help it... And when someone showed some signs of interest in me, he got pissed, even though I did nothing. As if I were just his property. You - you selfish...! Urgh... I’m not some rag doll to play with, just when he or anyone else wants! But he couldn’t help it either. That's just the way he is; always trying to save everyone, even if it’s impossible... Kagome thinks feeling little bit sad and how her pulse is rising, but then calming herself down.

Eventually, something just snapped in her head and she could not help, but explode right into Inuyasha’s face, that he can’t take her for granted. And that he always disappeared into his own little world, when he heard about Kikyo. Inuyasha did not notice any signs of danger in the air, as he said wrong things at that moment and angry Kagome used the sit command on him several times. But saying it out loud seemed to purify the air - at least for a brief moment.

However, even before that, Kagome’s heart went totally broken, when she found Inuyasha and Kikyo together in the forest, knowing Inuyasha had made his choice - and it was not Kagome. When he was ready to say goodbye for good, to focus on protecting Kikyo. However, she was not ready to hear it yet, so she went back to her own time. Kagome then realized, why she couldn’t just let it be; would return Shikon’s shards and return home, permanently. She finally realized, that she loves Inuyasha.

I didn't meet him by chance. I couldn't have abandoned him, no matter how many knife blows my own heart would have felt... Kagome wonders, until she suddenly covers her mouth with her hand and collapses into an almost silent cry. Why does the heart remember this same pain so well even now, over and over again? Is that why it feels, like my heart is little bit tilted? It just hasn’t forgotten yet...

Kagome lowers an empty mug to the ground and lies down on a bench. She crosses her hands on her stomach, trying to calm down. It’s all gone by now and behind, has been already a long time. It would finally be a good time, to forget all the bad... She looks at the tops of the tree and tries to get her thoughts in a more positive direction.

...To be continued...

So, now you have second chapter. Kagome and Inuyasha shared their memories, each in their own minds, in their own time. That’s why there are perspectives on both points of view in the memory part. Just for clarification, why it’s like that. :) Have a great week!

[lady-divine-writes]

Klaine Advent Drabble 2019 - “Riding Accident” (Rated NC17)

Summary: Kurt goes to the E.R. for an embarrassing reason, which gets compounded when they end up assigned to see their six-year-old daughter's pediatrician.

Notes: Written for the Klaine Advent Drabble Challenge 2019 prompt 'beer'.

Read on AO3.

“I don’t want to tell her,” Kurt mopes, eyes shifting away from his obnoxious husband’s face since it’s too painful to turn his whole head. As an actor, Blaine should be better at sympathizing. Or better pretending to, at least.  

But he’s failing miserably.

“You might have to, honey.”

“She’ll be disappointed in me.”

“She won’t be disappointed in you.”

“Why does it have to be her anyway? I mean, of all the doctors in Manhattan, we go to the E.R. and end up seeing Tracy’s pediatrician!?”

“She’s on rotation,” Blaine explains, having inquired with the nurse after the first half dozen mortified times Kurt asked. “The E.R.’s slammed. We didn’t have much of a choice. Be grateful she is here. She’s the reason the hospital didn’t turn us away and send us to Urgent Care.”

“Yeah, well, that won’t last long.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once she hears why we’re here, she’ll kick me out.”

“She’s a medical professional,” Blaine coos, taking off his coat and draping it over his husband to keep him from getting cold. “She won’t kick you out. And maybe, if you’re completely honest with her, she’ll have some advice for you so this won’t happen next time.”

Kurt shoots a disgusted look at his ridiculous spouse grinning like a viper. “The way you keep smiling like you just won the Indie 500 there probably won’t be a next time.”

Blaine chuckles. “I’m sorry. I just … I’m not helping. I know. What can I do to make this better, hmm? Anything I can get you?”

“I could really use a beer.”

“You don’t drink beer!”

“True, but I don’t think they sell tequila in the hospital cafeteria and I can’t see myself going into this sober.”

Knock-knock-knock.

Kurt’s eyes snap to the door. That knock. He knows that knock. It’s the doctor knock. He’d been waiting throughout their conversation for it, heralding the end of any comfort he may feel for the next few years of his life.

“Come in,” Blaine calls without consulting him, which makes Kurt’s frown deepen and his annoyance at his weirdly smug husband grow.

“Mr. Hummel? Mr. Ander-Hummel?” A familiar face and high blonde bun pops through a crack in the door.

“Hi, Dr. Parsons,” Blaine says. “Come on in.”

“How are my favorite parents doing today?” she asks and Kurt dies inside. “Not too good, from what I hear.”

“No, not too good,” Kurt says before Blaine continues answering for him.

“I see, I see.” She walks in the room, letting the heavy door close behind her. “It says here that you’re experiencing extreme lower back pain, that it hurts to stand, to sit, to walk …”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Did you have a fall?” She stops beside the examination table and smiles down at him.

“You might say it was a riding accident,” Blaine jumps in, bursting immediately after into a fit of adolescent laughter. Kurt shoots him a glare, but takes a deep, cleansing breath, determined to continue with as much dignity as he can muster.

“Horses? Or ATVs?” Dr. Parsons asks, flashing that professional but innocent smile that only pediatricians have. Kurt swallows hard, praying he can get through this quickly and head home, preferably with a prescription of powerful painkillers, the kind that help you forget stressful situations. Blaine was right. He needs to be honest, whether it kills him or not. But how can he be honest about this with this woman in particular? The woman who delivered his daughter? Tracy’s only six! They have twelve more years of seeing this woman ahead of them! And every time she looks at him, she’s going to think about the next words coming out of his mouth.

“Actually, I got hurt having sex so technically … my husband?”

Dr. Parsons looks at Kurt sideways, her face suddenly blank. “Oh …”

In the corner of the room, drifting farther and farther away, Blaine nearly chokes on his tongue.

“I don’t understand how it happened,” Kurt rushes, trying to bring this conversation back to an adult tier. “I---I used to be a dancer. I’m more flexible than …”

At the word flexible, Blaine stumbles red-faced and gasping out of the room.

But his howling laughter, bleeding through the door, remains.

“It’s okay, Mr. Hummel,” Dr. Parsons says with a reassuring smile. “It’s actually quite common to injure oneself during sex. Or doing any activity, strenuous or no. Some of the most painful injuries I see can happen when you’re not exerting yourself – walking, jogging, picking up something light. At best, you just pulled a muscle, but I’m going to order up some x-rays. Rule out a herniated disc. And let’s get you something for the pain.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Kurt sighs with relief and regret. “And I’m sorry.”

“For what, Mr. Hummel?”

“That after today, I’ll need to find Tracy a new pediatrician. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to walk into your office and look you in the eye ever again. Also, I’m thinking about murdering my husband.”

Blaine snorts during the pause. Kurt shuts his eyes.

“Correction. I am going to murder my husband.”

“Well, I’m okay with the latter, but not the former,” Dr. Parsons says with a wink. “We’re adults here. Believe me, I’ve heard it all before. Plus, I’d miss Tracy too much. Besides, good pediatricians are difficult to find in this city.”

[emperorsfoot]

This is not part of my larger Sky High fic series. This is an alternate version of the first meeting between Barron Battle and Ms. Peace. 

Barron Battle loses his glasses. Mara Peace finds them.

...

One of her fireballs finally connected, catching the villain on the side of the head. The hood of his costume was singed by the heat, and the force and air pressure of the blow threw him off balance. The supervillain went tumbling off the catwalk.

He hit the ground with a hard THUD.

Flamebird landed next to him.

It was her first time going up against this particular supervillain. He was not a member of her usual rogues gallery. In fact, he was the self-proclaimed ‘Arch Nemesis’ of the Commander. But that didn’t mean much. The Commander had, like, twenty ‘Arch Nemeses’.

Dressed all in black, not unusual for a supervillain. A hooded vest, boiled leather polished to an almost satiny shine. Buckles on the sides. An emblem of crossed swords on the best. She was sure his villain name was something dramatic and violent, but Flamebird could not imagine what it was. Maxville had so many villains, and this guy wasn’t one of her usual ones. It was had to keep tracks of the names that went with the costumes.

Hell! He probably didn’t know what name went to her costume either!

“It’s over-“ a pauses because she really could not remember what he was supposed to be called “-villain!” Flambird hovered over him, arms crossed over her chest. Stiletto-heeled boots dangling mere inches above his hooded head. If he wanted to continue the fight, all he had to do was reach up and grab her ankle. She was definitely giving him an opening. “It’s in your interest if you surrender! Turning yourself in could earn you leniency. But if you- you- hey! Are you paying attention!?”

He was not even looking at her.

And Flamebird was striking one of her better mid-air, low-hovering poses too. Arms crossed, pushing her –mostly flat- breasts up, making them look bigger than they actually were. Turned a quarter turn to the side, making her waist look smaller. Legs crossed at the ankle, making her hips look wider. She just an alluring figure. A figure that was expertly complemented by the costume she wore.

A tight little number. Thigh-high stiletto boots. Bare legs. Booty shorts that showed off the curve of her hips and the round bottoms of her butt-cheeks. An exposed mid-rift displaying her flat belly and toned abs, adorned with a belly-button ring that sparkled red. The top covered a lot in comparison to the rest. Long sleeved and high collared. It hit how small her breast were and allowed attention to fall to the more alluring parts of her body.

But this supervillain didn’t even raise his head to look at her!

Instead, he was on his hands and knees, head down, hands outstretched in front of him. Feeling around on the ground. As if he were looking for something.

“I can still hear you, Sparky.” Apparently, he did not know what name to put to her costume either. “Keep monologueing.”

Thrown off her game, she actually did continue. “Your evil machinations are through! You’re only course now is to- I’m sorry, but what are you doing?”

What was he looking for on the floor that was more important than starring at her shapely figure while she rubbed his nose in his defeat.

“It's nothing you need to worry about, Hero.” He assured her. “I’ve just lost my glasses.”

“You- your- you wear glasses?” Flamebird blinked at him. “But you’re a supervillain! You’re all… all black leather and buckles, and- with so many knives, and- and-!?”

“I’m still human, Sparky.” He told her. “I like to read. Sometimes I don’t always have the best light. Enough years like that and it’ll eventually ruin your eyes too.”

Blinking her own eyes behind her mask, Flambird just stared at him. At this terrifying supervillain from the Commander’s rouges gallery, who claimed to be the Commander’s Arch Nemesis. Who was dressed head to toe in black. Leather and buckles. He looked like a total badass! …up until he fell off the catwalk and lost… his glasses.

Now he was just an edgy Velma feeling around on the ground for his glasses.

Heaving a sigh, Flambird landed on the ground. She looked around the immediate area. Nothing stood out to her as looking like glasses.

Raising a hand into the air, she created a ball of fire. Expanding it until it illuminated the whole warehouse.

There!

She saw the flames flicker. Reflected off the glass lenses and wire frames.

Leaving the fireball burning in mid-air in the center of the warehouse, Flambird crossed the space to pick them up. A pair of wire frames, with lenses, and thick glass. Curiously, she put them on over her own mask. Hot damn! This guy’s eyes must be really, really bad! Everything was blurry through his prescription lenses. The only visible thing was her own ball of fire in the center of the space. No wonder he was feeling around like a character from Scooby-Doo. He was literally, actually, effectively blind without them.

Flamebird flew back over to him. “Here.”

Leaning down, she pulled the leather hood off his head.

A cascade of sweat-soaked hair tumbled over his shoulders. Messy from being in the hood –and probably their fight too. Dark brown, a brown so dark it might as well have been black. Thick and curly, and kinda long for a guy. It framed his face nicely, giving him roguish, untamed, almost wild look. The face was also pretty nice too. Handsome in a rugged sort of way. Square jaw and high cheekbones. A straight nose. Thick eyebrows. And his eyes! A rich dark brown. Not brown like his hair was brown. Brown like deep woods or rich earth. Flamebird decided she liked the way he looked.

“You’re beautiful.” She breathed, not realizing she was even speaking.

It was a shame he was a villain.

He grabbed his hood and yanked it back up over his head. “You won’t think that once I find my glasses.”

Kneeling down in front of him, Flambird slid his wire frames onto his face. “These glasses?”

He blinked at her. Able to see her again now. Mouth hanging open slightly.

He was right. He was not quite as roguish and wild with the glasses on. But he was still handsome. In more of a ‘scruffy, overworked academic’ way. With those glasses on, and maybe his hair combed and pulled back he would look very neat and clean-cut. He could easily pull off both.

“You’re still pretty.” She announced.

He just stared at her.

Flamebird didn’t know how long they stayed like that. Kneling on the floor, just looking at each other. Doing nothing more than making eye-contact. Her hands were still resting on the wire frames of his glasses.

Finally, he cleared his throat, pulling away first.

She blinked behind her mask.

“Oh! Um…?” She pulled away.

He also backed up.

They stood there for a beat. Unsure of what was supposed to happen now. This was not usually how super-fights went.

“You, uh, you were in the middle of your monologue.” He finally reminded her.

“Huh? Oh! Yeah.” She nodded, hovering back up into the air. Looking down on him. “It’s over, villain! Your-“ she paused, shoulders slumping, “I’m sorry, but what is your name?”

He looked up at her with a confused frown, the only part of his face visible from under the shadow of his hood was his chin, his mouth downturned in that frown, and straight nose. She couldn’t even tell he was wearing glasses. “Battle will do.”

“Really?” She looked at him. “That’s what you’re going with?”

“Yeah. Why? What’s your name?” He growled back. Though, he was suddenly grinning for some inexplicable reason. As if this weren’t a normal super-fight anymore. As if this had somehow become… friendly banter?

She stared down at him. “Flamebird.”

His head tilted up more, looking her up and down. This time, she could just make out the bottoms of his wire frames. “Fire powers and flight.” He noted. “Flame. Bird.” A shrug. “Makes sense. A little simplistic. But easy to understand.”

“Yeah.” She agreed. “It is easy to understand. Way easier than ‘Battle’. What’s that supposed to mean? All I’ve seen you do all day is just not get hurt.”

“I get hurt.” Battle assured her. “I just heal really fast.” A pause. Then, muttered under his breath so that she wasn’t sure she even heard right. “...And don’t die.”

Since she didn’t understand the last comment and wasn’t sure if she even heard right, Flamebird decided to ignore it. “And the name ‘Battle’ is…?”

“It’s my name.” He told her.

“No, I get that.” She assured him. “But what does it have to do with your powers? Or your motivations? Or your aesthetic? Why did you choose ‘Battle’ as your supervillain name?”

“It’s not my supervillain name.” Battle informed her. “It’s my name, name.” A pause. “You didn’t go to Sky High, did you?”

“I did!” Flamebird assured him. “Class of ’81.”

“Huh.” He nodded. “So, you’re freshman year would have been the ’77-’78 school year. Your freshman year was my senior year. You seriously don’t remember going to school with a guy named Battle? I mean, I got the lead role in the senior class production of Oklahoma!”

Flamebird landed on the ground in front of him. “Okay, first of all, the lead role in Oklahoma is a female role. I assume you didn’t play Laurey. Curly and Jud were supporting roles. Secondly, all I remember about the senior class my freshman year was this one obnoxious asshole who just had to be adored by everyone.” A pause. “Stan…? Stew…? Steve…? Something like that.”

Battle lowered his hood so that she could see his face. His whole face. Behind his glasses, he was staring at her with surprised admiration. “He was an obnoxious asshole! Yes! Thank you!”

“I’m guessing he was your arch rival.” She seemed unimpressed.

“You have no idea.” Battle told her. “He was just the worst!”

She only shrugged. They were not in the same grade and at the end of the school year, he was gone so she never really had the opportunity to form an opinion.

“Hey, are you still gonna do your monologue?” He asked.

“Huh?”

“Your monologue.” Battle repeated. “Are you still gonna talk my ear off about ethics and ‘good’ or whatever then take me in?”

“Oh.” She honestly forgot that was what was supposed to be happening here.

“’Cause I’d kinda like to take you out.” Battle announced.

Flamebird leaped back into the air, both arms igniting with fire. “You can try. But I’ll roast you alive!”

“No, no, no.” Battle assured her calmly. He understood the misunderstanding. “I mean, for coffee or something. Do you drink coffee?”

Flamebird lowered her arms, they were still on fire, but she wasn’t in a fighting stance anymore. “Oh. Um… I don’t really date guys I meet in costume…”

Battle noted that she did not say she did not date supervillains, just that she did not date people she met as ‘Flamebird’.

“I see.” He nodded, grinning a mischievous grin. “But, if you were to meet someone outside of costume… Say, at a dimly lit coffee shop in downtown? Perhaps you might see someone you recognize, sitting in the back corner against the wall, reading something by Thomas Aquinas, and if you were to come over and say ‘hi’…”

“Ooh, Aquinas.” She sucked in a breath between her teeth, recognizing the name. “So, you think you preform good acts with bad consequences. Not surprised. He’s exactly the kind of philosopher I’d expect a supervillain to read.”

He looked momentarily insulted.

“So, what would you do if some random woman comes up to you and starts educating you on more Kantian views instead?”

Battle smiled at her. “I think she and I would have a lot to talk about.”

Flamebird smiled back at him. For a supervillain, this Battle was actually rather charming. Was this really happening? Was she actually considering meeting him out of costume for coffee?

“Now, I’m gonna need you to think fast, Sparky.” He told her.

“Wha-?”

That was all the warning she got before Battle threw one of his weapons at the catwalk supports. A segment of the walkway began crashing down and Flamebird needed to do some quick flying to get out of the way before she was struck by some falling stray metal.

“The coffee shop on the corner of Hamilton and Main!” She heard Battle’s voice call as he disappeared into the night.

…

END

[nancywheelxr]

it’s no better to be safe than sorry (read on AO3)

Penny, in true Penny form, rolls his eyes, stepping aside to impatiently motion them out of the elevator and into a shockingly white room. “Calm down, you guys don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine down here,” he hands them two glasses of what turns out to be an also shockingly good Scotch. “You’re here for Quentin, right?”

“Yeah,” Julia nods, eyeing his suit and tie suspiciously, “are you going to try and stop us?”

It brings a burst of laugh out of Penny. “God, no. Please, take him with you,” he shakes his head, “do you have any idea how much trouble he’s causing here?”

And that brings an almost-smile out of Eliot, because yes, that does sound like him. “Please, do tell.”

* or, first, Eliot grieves. Then, Julia finds a hare-brained solution that's right up their alley. After that, a lot of talking happens. 

Alternatively titled, Eliot and Julia's adventure in the Underworld.

“Are you going to be okay?”

Margo asks because she’s off to the library– the one in Brakebills, lower case, less fascist, less likely to stab them in the back– and Eliot has probably been staring out the window for too long now. It’s been three weeks since Fillory, and it’s been three weeks since Eliot woke up, and it’s been three weeks since– it’s been three weeks, and she’s given up on asking him to join her, on dragging him with her, on leaving her eyeball on the desk, staring at him, daring him to do something stupid.

“Of course,” Eliot says, because yeah, he’s been staring out the window for too long now and she needs an answer and he can’t drink while he’s on pain medication, he knows that. The orange bottle is on her coat’s pocket or maybe on her bedroom and she’ll either be back on time to hand him the pills or send Penny 23 to dutifully stand in her place. “Call me if you find something. I’ll look into some books while you’re gone.”

That’s a lie, a well practiced one that falls off his tongue with ease. It’s the one that convinces Penny to give him an extra pill because today, oh dear, the stitches are hurting to breathe. What’s the point of getting prescription Vicodin if he can’t even get high while he’s at it.  

“El,” her forehead creases, eyebrows knitting together, and Eliot reaches for her, drawing her into a hug because Margo has a whole Kingdom to worry about, she shouldn’t add Eliot to the list. There’s been enough worrying over him. There’s been– Eliot’s fine, or fine enough at least. He wishes he were a better person, a stronger person, the kind that would follow her to the library and help find a way to go back to Fillory in the right time and stop this dethroning business, but while Fillory as a land is alright for him to think, the books– Fillory and Further, El, look, the answers have to be here somewhere, we just have to look– the books are off limits for him.

“Go, Bambi,” he presses a kiss to her hair, and pulls back, smiling the closest thing to a smile, “I’ll be fine.”

She nods, straightening up and visibly pulling herself together. A warrior queen, once again. High King Margo, the Destroyer, he thinks fondly and watches her walk out of the cottage, head held high.

*

The thing about grief is that Eliot is no stranger to it, and yet, it still catches him off guard, even after he mourned enough times, enough things in his Happy Place. How ironically fitting it is that here Eliot is again, in the Physical Cottage, grieving for things he can’t fix and opportunities he can’t change.

“Why did you do it, Q?” He asks the ceiling of his bedroom, “did you want to be a hero? Did you think it would be okay?”

Predictably, he gets no answer, except for the low chatter downstairs and the birds chirping outside.

“It’s not. Okay, I mean,” Eliot continues, imagining the nervous way Quentin would fidget, looking away from Eliot and hiding behind his hair. “Didn’t Margo warn you, Q? Because that was one dumb decision and–” his voice breaks, and it would be embarrassing if there wasn’t already a shit load of things broken with Eliot, “no one likes a dead moron, Q.”

Fleetingly, Eliot thinks of Quentin and Alice’s disastrous seance spell from their first year, so, so long ago, a lifetime ago. He wonders idly who might come through this time, with no more Beast to terrorize them, and he’s in the process of letting it slide off the hazy static floating around his mind when there’s a knock on his door.

Quick, direct, but still gentle. Julia, then.

He waits in silence while she decides if she truly wants to come in, not particularly feeling like talking with her. Nothing personal, truthfully, it’s been a while since he wanted to talk to anyone, really.

His door opens slowly, Julia peeks her head in first before slipping in. “Hey,” she says, holding a cup of water like a white flag and on her cupped hand there are two little white pills. “Painkiller time. How are you feeling?”

A standard question that begs for a standard answer. “Fine,” he shrugs.

“Margo is busy at the library and Penny is busy at, well, the Library,” she explains as if she needs a legitimate reason to be there, as if Eliot might kick her out otherwise.

Julia hands him the pills and the water.

“So you’re on nurse duty,” Eliot surmises, nodding sagely, then swallowing down the Vicodin like a shot and wishing it would leave him half as numb. “There, you can report back to Margo now. Tell her I took my medicine like a good boy.”

The look she gives him is not one of the pitiful, understanding ones, or the confused, accusing ones. It’s clear and dissecting, like she’s peeling away his patchwork, fragile armor he had hurriedly built up after leaving the hospital. “Eliot,” Julia sighs.

“Julia,” he counters.

Her sigh is heavier now, and she closes the door to Eliot’s bedroom, taking a seat beside Eliot, on Eliot’s bed, without asking for permission. She’s a warm weight beside him and the dip of the mattress to accommodate another body is painfully familiar, but Eliot still feels terribly cold.

“I know you loved him,” she says, staring at the wall opposite them, legs crossed at the ankle. “And I know you’re wondering why I’m here. So, that’s why.”

Eliot refuses to look at her, refuses to give away more than she already pieced on her own. He means to be brave, but it’s so much harder when he can’t even remember how to be a full-fledged functional human being anymore. Time is an illusion, like he said two lifetimes ago, nevertheless, he thinks he might need more of it. “Shouldn’t you be consoling the actual widow instead? You know, short, blond, and pretty?”

“Alice is,” Julia searches for words, pulling a complicated face. It’s a journey to watch, half-amusing, really, so he gives in and turns to gaze at her, until she settles into something almost diplomatic. “Diving into work. With the Library. And Kady. However that’s gonna work,” she adds, quieter, then shakes her head. “She’ll be fine.”

“So will I,” he tells her honestly. Or, he hopes it’s honest. He would like to be okay again, someday, maybe. It feels helplessly impossible now, but it’s a nice dream, like Fillory– like a rundown cottage in the forest with a garden of peaches and plums and a mosaic to finish, like Quentin, like being in love, like being happy. Then, something occurs to him. I know you loved him, she had said, and Eliot remembers he’s not the only one who did, who does. “What about you, Julia?”

“I know,” she smiles sadly, patting his knee, and her voice is wobbly and brittle and sounds as cracked as Eliot feels. “I’ll be fine, too. It’s just– I still miss him so much.”

A choked out sob breaks through her clenched jaw, and Julia grips his arm with claw-like fingers, nails digging into his skin through his shirt. Eliot feels oddly empty, watching her overflow like this, as if all the too much– ness that had been weighing him down lately had been drained, taking the stuffing out of him as well. “Do you ever,” he pauses, swallowing thickly his own sob and closing his eyes briefly to steady himself, starts again. “Sometimes, I find myself looking at the door–”

“Expecting him to come home?” Julia guesses, wiping a tear track with the sleeves of her coat. “It’s like I’m still waiting for him to just, I don’t know. Show up here, awkwardly apologizing for making us worry and ready to drag us into another quest.”

“With his ridiculous little smile,” Eliot half-smiles himself, imagining the scene so clearly on his mind like a memory or a dream. “And tripping over the new rug in the living room.”

Julia hiccups a laugh and rests her head on his shoulder, shifting so she’s curled around him more comfortably. They had never been very close, but once upon a time, Eliot had offered her a hand to bring her out of her downward spiral and Julia had the same kind of Monster-flavored guest on her body not too long ago. It’s enough of a bridge to share this loneliness between them– Quentin left a differently shaped void in both of them, but when Julia asks if Q ever told him about that time when we tried to skip class and ended up trapped in the school’s kitchen, and Eliot repays her with did he ever tell you about the time when he accidentally saved a talking cow– it feels a tiny bit less empty.

*

After that afternoon, Julia turns up in the cottage enough times that Eliot now is privy to an assortment of sort-of secrets that he’s not sure what to do with. He now knows Alice and Kady are working with the Library, capital L, allegedly ex-fascist organization, and the situation between the Hedges is not looking so good. He is not to talk about that too much, it’s all very delicate. Julia can do some magic, but not all kinds and it’s just as screwed up as the rest of magic around the world. He is also not to talk about that, see, Penny 23 is the only other who knows.

Eliot, for some reason, finds that keeping these secrets is easier than he thought it would be, but he figures he’s got a lot of empty space within himself to hide them in.

And it’s not like they are actual secrets. They’re just sort of secrets, so if Margo hears bits and pieces of them, definitely not enough for her to figure out the big picture, only for her to send him odd looks, half concerned, half confused, before shaking her head and kissing his cheek, it’s okay.

It becomes almost a routine and Eliot finds a calming blanket on that. He knows what to expect and he feels less like he’s drifting at sea, no land in sight. There’s peace in habit and it’s during one of her visits that he finds hope too.

“Eliot,” she says, dragging him upstairs and closing the door behind them. Her eyes are alight with a wild gleam and Eliot is forcefully reminded that she used to be a goddess. “I think– I have an idea.”

She doesn’t have to elaborate further for him to understand the fine writing in between the lines. About Quentin, on how to fix this, to bring him back.

His own heart kicks up the dust and cobwebs to drum in his ribcage as he takes in a ragged breath. “Tell me,” he orders, pulling the last shreds of himself together.

“Back when we were looking for the keys, Josh and I, we found one of them in timeline 23, right?”

“Yes, no need for the recap, I was there for the first time,” he waves her off, impatiently gesturing her to hurry up and get to the point.

Julia nods, grinning. “Yeah, so. Quentin had,” she hesitates so briefly, stumbling over the word nearly imperceptibly, “died there too. But Alice23 brought him back.”

It takes a moment for what she’s saying sink in. Quentin dies in the other timelines, that was a given, they all do, Penny23 and Marina23 are proof, and Eliot had heard Julia and Josh recounting their adventure at the time in all of its creepy glory. But for the first time since the keys, since the Monster, since, he shifts the emphasis from the key and the Beast to–

Alice23 brought him back.

“You can’t tell Penny,” is the first thing he says, because one of the sort-of secrets is that Julia and Penny23 are having a thing and Eliot won’t have her little love affair stop them from saving Quentin.

“I know,” Julia nods back, decided and giddy and spilling her relieved excitement all over the place. She pulls him into a hug and wraps her arms around his torso, burying her face on his chest. It reminds him a bit of Margo, in the early days after the hospital, when he still had a cane. “We’re going to get him back– Eliot, we’re gonna get him back.”

Something warm and light and syrupy bubbles up on his chest, filling in the blank spots around his lungs, under his ribcage– with a start, Eliot realizes what it is. Hope. Because this plan is absolutely crazy and desperate and insanely dangerous, but it’s a plan.

It’s enough.

“We will, darling,” he whispers into her hair, his tears falling unprompted. It’s an unspoken decision that this will be another one of their sort of secrets, that they need to hash out a few more details beyond it’s our only idea before telling people. They don’t need their friends throwing an intervention, gently guiding them away from what they would call stupid, grief-induced plans.

Sure, Eliot will be the first to admit it might be a terrible, insane plan that did not work all that well in the 23rd timeline, but in his experiences, it’s exactly the kind of Hail Mary they’ve pulled off over the years.

*

“Wanna run that by me again?” Margo asks, eyebrows raised impressively high as she looks between Eliot and Julia. Then, her forehead creases in that worried frown of hers, “you two are up to something.”

“Of course not, Bambi,” Eliot reassures her, slipping an arm around her shoulders and leading her towards the cottage front door. “I’m merely helping our cause. Julia is now the closest thing to a Fillory nerd we have,” he tells her in a stage-whisper, and a piece of his heart falls to the floor but he barely notices it. None of it will matter once Quentin is back. “Go look in the dusty library. We will get Julia’s books in her old apartment. The doctor said fresh air might do me some good, anyway.”

Margo pins him with a suspicious look, glancing behind his shoulder to narrow her eyes at Julia. Then, her shoulders sag and she sighs. “You know what, fine. You’re out of bed, you showered, and now you’re back to scheming– in my book, that’s progress, baby,” she smiles fleetingly, relieved beyond belief, before steeling herself and pointing a finger in their general direction. “But whatever this is, it better not come bite us in the ass, hear me?” To Julia, she adds, “and you better return him in pristine condition, or I’ll fuck you up, alright? Sorrow and Sorrow are still in my bedroom and they work just fine to cut a bitch,” she exhales, adjusts her clothes, “and please, make sure he eats something.”

With that, Margo is gone, hurrying through the campus to get to the library.

“Well, she’s still terrifying,” Julia comments, lips quirking up amusedly.

“Yes, the axes do suit her, don’t you think?” Eliot can hear himself softening as he watches Margo disappear in the crowd of students. God, he had missed her. A part of him feels guilty for keeping this from her, but Eliot knows he wouldn’t have been able to bear if she had looked at him again with wide eyes brimming with teary understanding that had felt so much like pity. He’ll tell her as soon as they get solid proof it can be done. “What shall we tell your Penny, when he comes in?”

Julia scrunches up her nose. “He’s not my Penny,” and oh, the lady doth protests too much? “But I told him we needed to talk with Alice about the Fillory situation.”

A sting of pain echoes on his chest as Eliot thinks of Fen, alone and dethroned, but he can only help one dead friend at a time. After they get Quentin back, after the world is once again right in its axis, then they will save Fen and Josh and Fillory. Would you look at that, Q, another noble quest for you to tag along.

“Sounds mildly believable,” he graciously allows, just in time for Penny23 to pop into existence in the middle of the living room without warning. “Why, do make yourself at home.”

Penny ignores Eliot, making a beeline to Julia, fussing over her in a way that Eliot has to look away; it reminds him a bit too much of a time when he had been the one searching for his own little nerd and checking him over for any injuries. Perhaps, staying in Brakebills might have been a mistake. Perhaps, Margo was right, a place with fewer memories would have been preferable.

“Eliot?”

Julia’s voice snaps him out of his thoughts and both she and Penny are looking at him like it was not the first time she had called his name. Oh well. Spacing out is hardly the worst of his attitude lately. “Are we finally getting a move on?”

“Yeah,” Penny drawls, studying him for a drawn-out minute and sounding like he’s been talking about Eliot. With Margo, most likely, and Julia, although he expects the latter to have been more skittish about the topic recently. “Are you sure you’re alright, man? I mean, the whole possession thing must take a toll, right? And with–”

“I’m perfectly fine, thank you,” Eliot cuts him off before Penny could say something ridiculous like– something Penny hasn’t the slightest idea of what he’s talking about. “Now, if you would be so kind?”

He raises one eyebrow, waiting for Penny to take Julia’s hand and offer him the other, one last warning look sent his way, and then the world blurs as they travel to the Library and hope talking with Alice, their Alice, isn’t a mistake.

*

The Library is under renovations.

It should not come as such a surprise, Eliot thinks in hindsight. With both Alice and Kady in charge of things, some fundamental changes were bound to come. Though he’ll admit he had expected them to be more philosophical than literal, he won’t complain about the new color palette.

Grey is terribly dull.

“Are you insane?” Alice hisses, her glasses glinting off the artificial light, and she looks beautifully sad. Melancholy has always suited her, Eliot supposes, even in the early days of their little ragtag family. “Look, I miss him too, you know I do, but this is too crazy, even for us.”

She pushes away from the desk, her new Head Librarian desk on her new Head Librarian office– no, sorry. Co-Head Librarian. Julia trades a warning look with Eliot, her patented don’t be a dick look, and steps closer to Alice approaching her like she’s an injured animal. “I know how it sounds,” Julia begins, choosing her words carefully. “But think about it. We already know what went wrong in the 23rd timeline. We can do it right this time, here.”

Her arms are wrapped around herself like Alice needs to physically shield herself from this conversation. She shakes her head several times, purses her lips. “Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

“Help us save Quentin?” Eliot can’t help prodding. It’s not fair, he knows, but it still irks him that she’s not jumping at the chance to get him back.

“You know it’s not that easy,” Alice glares, softening after barely a minute. Her grief seems to sharpen and dust off her edges in random intervals, and ever since the bonfire, what had once driven a wedge between them now makes her reach for Eliot with a shared sense of understanding. “You can’t just go to the Underworld branch and bring a soul back– and even if you could, you,” she points to Julia, “told us he became the Beast when I– when that Alice did it. Can you imagine what that would mean with magic the way it is now?”

“Then let’s make sure we bring his shade back,” he shoots back, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Stop pretending it’s easy!” She finally snaps, and Julia quickly slips between them, hands in front of her chest, but Eliot isn’t done.

This is their best shot at saving Quentin and they already took a big leap of faith in telling Alice about it. He hasn’t even told Margo. “Listen,” he says, walking around Julia to place his hands on Alice’s shoulders. “When you were a niffin,” at that, her eyes widen and she tries to move away, so Eliot holds her there tighter. “When you were a niffin, he stopped at nothing to bring you back whether you wanted to or not. When Julia was shadeless, he did his best to help her and never gave up on her, no matter what. And when the Monster possessed me,” he trails off. They all know how that turned out.

“So who cares if it’s not easy,” Julia joins him, giving him a sympathetic look, “it’s Q. We can’t give up on him now.”

Alice purses her lips, but something about the way she sighs, deflating under his hands, tells Eliot she’s giving in. “Even if we did bring his soul back,” she caves, averting her gaze and adjusting her glasses, “he would still need a body.”

“A golem?” Eliot suggests. It’s not a very good solution, but he knows from first-hand experience that you can’t feel the difference. And it certainly beats death. Alice, though, twitches in that awkward way of hers. “Unless you have a better idea?”

“When Penny died,” she confesses, “I tried to make him a new body. With Osseus Confervium.”

“Bone-knitting?” Julia’s eyebrows rise.

“Yes,” Alice nods earnestly, apparently warming up to the idea. “It’s difficult, but you said it yourself– who cares, it’s Q. And with magic overflowing like this, it’s probably the best time to do it.”

Eliot smiles something so close to a smile, he even surprises himself. “So it’s settled then,” he says, uncharacteristically optimistic, “all we have to do is make a new body and break Q out of the Underworld. Sounds like a regular Wednesday, no?”

*

As it turns out, bone-knitting is even harder than what they had expected, even after Alice had admitted failing to make Penny a body. It’s a long, drawn-out process and they take turns working the spell, unwilling to stop the process.

“You know,” Margo says, her fingers weaving smoothly over the ever-growing skeleton. Never let it be said this spell isn’t creepy as fuck. “When I said you should get a hobby, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Eliot huffs a laugh, his brow still furrowed in concentration, but he has to admit relief is there too because he hears the it’s okay, I get it, in between her words. And she really does, especially now with Josh long gone in Fillory, he supposes. “Then what did you have in mind, Bambi? Golf? Jogging? Book club, perhaps?”

Thank you, he hopes she hears.

The brilliant smile she gives him, relieved and hopeful, tells him she did. Margo snorts, and it feels almost like back to normal. “Like half of our problems didn’t come from those goddamn books.”

*

Is this brave enough already, Q?

*

It takes them two weeks to get the body ready and it takes Eliot until the body bag is zipped all the way up for him to breathe again. Seeing Quentin like that, so still and unmoving– a shudder wracks his body. It’s disturbing and wrong and Eliot can’t understand how Alice and Julia can pick it up without throwing up on the carpet.

No longer depending on modern medicine, he takes a swing from his flask, lets the alcohol soothe the shaking of his fingers.

“Let the record show, I think this is shitty ass plan,” Penny23 scowls from where he’s leaning against the wall of the cottage. For the last two weeks, he had refused to help, needlessly reminding them of what happened in his timeline as if they didn’t already know. As if Julia hadn’t already told every little detail about the pathetic state Alice23 had been, how it all went to shit. They all know the risks.

More importantly, they all know Quentin.

“Yeah, we heard you the first twenty times,” Margo glares; the shadows under her eyes, the ones so deep and pronounced her makeup can’t quite cover, betray her worry, though.

“I’m just saying,” he continues, fiddling jittery with the bracelets on his wrist. “If this goes sideways– like it probably will– I’m killing the motherfucker before he can go all psycho this time.”

Before Eliot could do anything, Margo takes his hand, holding it tight enough to hurt, to pin him in place. It’s not worth it, she means.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Kady do the same with Alice and oh, okay, interesting.

“Can we just go?” Julia asks, sounding hurt and weary. Her hands shake as she drags them across her face. “The sooner we do this, the better our odds.”

Penny steps away, his reluctance reminding everyone that he’s only doing this because Julia is asking, because Julia had been torn apart by– she’s been hurting as much as Eliot, as much as Alice. He holds out his hand to her and Julia reaches for Eliot and Margo while Alice grabs Penny’s other hand, taking Kady with her. Quentin’s new body is a heavy weight between them.

Traveling to the Library makes his stomach churn as always and everyone gasps, blinking to get their bearings inside Kady and Alice’s brand new office. “Okay,” Kady recovers first, marching to her desk to root inside her drawer. “Everyone knows the plan?”

“You and blondie over here keep the Librarians from reading our books out there while these two Orpheus the shit out this,” Margo’s summary is a pretty accurate one and her satisfied smirk as she caresses her axes is so Margo, a rush of fondness washes over Eliot. “I and Mr.Sunshine will keep guard, just in case.”

Kady produces two small bottles from her drawer, throwing them to Eliot and Julia, the bright red liquid sloshing inside. She nods at them, giving Alice a meaningful look before slipping out the door. “Right. The potion will stop your hearts and all brain activity for exactly an hour. Your bodies will be in stasis until it kickstarts again,” Alice explains, nervously tucking her hair behind her ear, “it should give you enough time to look for him in the Underworld, but you have to be back in the elevator before time runs out or you’ll be stuck out of your bodies forever.”

He trades a look with Julia. She nods. “Well, this is encouraging and all,” he says, exhaling heavily, “but we’ll be fine.”

Alice hesitates, biting her lip. “I would go with you guys, but,” she trails off, looking helplessly at the door.

“You and Kady are our best shot at keeping them in the dark,” Julia finishes, smiling knowingly, “we know.”

The door closes quietly behind her as Alice hurries out of the room.

And with that, there’s no more delaying it.

It’s now or never.

Eliot turns to Margo, finds her already watching him with worried eyes in a display of vulnerability she rarely ever shows, much less in front of other people like this. Although, Julia and Penny do seem to be completely lost in each other. “Hey, don’t cock out on me now,” he says softly, brushing her hair out of her eyes, “it’ll be fine. We’ll be back home before you notice, making that martini you love and most likely hearing about some other fastly approaching apocalypse.”

She slaps his shoulder, laughing quietly and involuntarily. “Don’t go around stealing my lines. Asshole.” She pokes his chest, trying to go for a threatening expression. “And you’d better make it back, hear me? We didn’t just get you back for you to disappear on me again, alright?”

“Of course,” he does his best to smile back, gently cradling her face to press a kiss to her forehead. “See you in an hour, Bambi.”

At his left, Julia moves, uncorking her bottle, and Eliot does the same. They knock it back like a shot and between a blink and the next, the world stays dark.

*

Dull, cheerful elevator music is playing when Eliot opens his eyes again and it takes him a second to recognize that he is, in fact, in an elevator. Another second, and Julia blinks beside him. “Fuck,” he breathes, “we’re dead.”

“Still hate this song,” she mutters, rolling her shoulders and readying herself into a fighting stance, and Eliot wonders if he should do the same. Between the two of them, he’s the one with reliable magic, after all. Not battle magic, but still.

With a loud ding! the doors slide open and–

“Hey, welcome to the– oh, thank fuck.”

“Penny?” Eliot stops short, lowering his hands, and beside him, he sees Julia do the same. “Penny 40, I assume?” Then, quieter, he whispers to Julia, “should we have made him a body too?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers back, eyes glued to Penny in front of them, “is this a double rescue now?”

Penny, in true Penny form, rolls his eyes, stepping aside to impatiently motion them out of the elevator and into a shockingly white room. “Calm down, you guys don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine down here,” he hands them two glasses of what turns out to be an also shockingly good Scotch. “You’re here for Quentin, right?”

“Yeah,” Julia nods, eyeing his suit and tie suspiciously, “are you going to try and stop us?”

It brings a burst of laugh out of Penny. “God, no. Please, take him with you,” he shakes his head, “do you have any idea how much trouble he’s causing here?”

And that brings an almost-smile out of Eliot, because yes, that does sound like him. “Please, do tell.”

“Since I left him at the station, he escaped security at least ten times,” Penny does tell them, “he refuses to board the train and move on, and since dead people don’t have books, he’s getting real good at evading security.”

Julia grins. “That’s Q,” she bites her lip, visibly relieved they won’t have to convince him to come with them. Or worse, Eliot realizes. “So you’re gonna help us?”

“I could get in trouble for this,” Penny admits, looking around as if he’s afraid librarians might step out of non-existent shadows, “but fuck it, follow me.”

The Underworld branch is weird, Eliot decides as soon as they go through a door that definitely had not been there before and end up in what looks like a perfectly ordinary parking lot, except for the inexplicable door in the middle of it. “That’s where he first went through,” he explains, handing them two brightly colored in blue metro cards, “this is as far as I can go, but I’ll keep the portal open for as long as I can while you look for him.”

“Thank you,” Eliot says sincerely, tilts his head, “you know, you are surprisingly nicer here. Is it a death thing?”

Penny laughs, shaking his head. “Why does everyone say that?” He claps Eliot in the back, makes a shooing motion, “yeah, it’s a death thing. Now go, before someone realizes we’re not supposed to be here.”

Once again, they go out of the blue and into the dark.

*

The door leads them into a metro station, busy bustling with people. They pass through them in a daze, and Eliot watches them enter fill in the wagons, not once looking back. A few seem to be sniffling, others openly crying, but most walk calmly away, letting the train carry them through the dark tunnels.

“It certainly smells like a subway,” Eliot comments, scanning their surrounds. Above, robotic voice filters through the speakers, announcing another train would be leaving the station shortly. “Points for realism, I suppose. Although, I could really do without the piss.”

Julia purses her lips, her fingers curling around Eliot’s wrist with white knuckles. “Don’t get lost,” she warns, frowning soberly at the crowds stumbling over them. “There’s something off about these people and it’ll be hard enough to find one person here.”

Eliot blanches. From what he can tell this place stretches for miles in both directions, with trains coming and going non stop and no ending in sight. There could be hundreds, thousands of souls here if this is where everyone goes when they die. And if Quentin is already hiding, it’ll be impossible to find him in half an hour.

Unless–

“Maybe we don’t have to find him,” he smirks, hope igniting in a flickering flame on his chest.

Following his gaze, Julia looks up at the sound system hooked on the ceiling. She grins. “Maybe he can find us.”

He offers her his arm with a flourish. “Shall we follow the wiring?”

“Yes,” she links their arms, tugging him forward, “let’s.”

*

For once in their godforsaken lives, things go slightly according to plan and the small broadcasting cabin is blessedly empty. The security is most likely still chasing after Quentin, then. Or, Eliot hopes they are, anything else could mean a scenario he doesn’t want to think of.

They didn’t come all the way here just to drown a few feet from the shore.

“Do you think this will work?” Julia asks, looking up from where she’s ripping cords and cables and replugging them in different exits. It looks random to Eliot, who has no idea where to even start, his degree has never been anywhere near technology, but he hopes she knows what she’s doing and the lost little shadow on her eyes is simply a case of the what ifs. What if Quentin is gone? What if he doesn’t hear us? What if it’s too late? What if he doesn’t want to come back? “Hey, try saying something on that,” she points at the microphone closest to him.

“It will work,” he reassures her, sounding way more confident than he truly feels, but considering anything else would render Eliot unable to carry on this rescue. He has to believe it’ll work or the weight of this world will be too crushing otherwise. “Hello? Good night– or good morning, I can’t tell, it doesn’t matter– listeners, this is your host for the duration of my stay in this truly dreadful place,” the speakers screech with static in the beginning, distorting his voice, but after Julia changes yet another bright blue wire, it runs smoothly, echoing around the station.

She crowds into his space, pushing him aside none too gently to hog the mic. “Q, if you’re listening,” Julia grips the receiver tightly, her tone tinged with a desperation she had been previously keeping at bay, “we’re here, just follow the wires– we have a plan, we’re bringing you back, Q.”

Since this isn’t a cell phone, there’s no reply beyond a few static hissing, and in the silence that follows, Eliot can hear his own heart drumming up a circus in his chest. “Q,” he says, hesitating briefly and clearing his throat. “You have to hurry, we don’t have long now,” the watch on his wrist ticks on mercilessly, counting down to their deadline. “And I was hoping to get another fifty years with you.”

Julia squeezes his shoulders, unplugging the microphone and gently setting it aside. “Now we wait,” she says quietly, “he’ll find us.”

“Do you know,” Eliot can’t help asking, not when they're so close to making or breaking it, not when she’s politely averting her gaze from the way his eyes are shining with unshed tears. “Do you think he knew?”

Did he die thinking I didn’t love him back?

“I– he wondered. I think he didn’t not know,” Julia answers hesitantly.

The answer is yes, then.

They fall silent after that, tension and anxiety humming in the air like a tightrope ready to snap, and if Quentin doesn’t make it to them in the next fifteen minutes, there won’t be time to go back to the elevator in time, and Margo would kill him if Eliot gets lost outside his body and it’s not fair of him to make her worry like this again, not after all she went through in the past year and all she sacrificed to get him back.

Eliot wants more than anything to stay and wait forever if that’s what it takes, but he owes it to Margo to survive at the very least.

“Five minutes,” warns Julia, glancing at her own watch.

Neither of them moves.

Then–

The door bursts open, slamming hard into the wall, and Quentin dashes inside, hurriedly locking it behind him, and–

Quentin leans against the metal door, panting. His black hoodie stands out in stark contrast with the light blue paint–

Quentin looks up, his eyes– impossibly dark, melted chocolate eyes– find Eliot and he smiles– beautiful, and shy, and happy, and heart-stopping– and Eliot stops breathing, stops thinking, stops–

Quentin smiles, says, “hey.”

“Hey, yourself,” someone with Eliot’s voice speaks, except it can’t be Eliot because Eliot’s mind is still in a loop–

Quentin, Quentin, Quentin–

“Q,” is all Julia gasps before flinging herself at Quentin, clinging to him as if she’s afraid he might disappear if she lets go even an inch, as if her life depends on it, as if the world is ending and this is all there is.

In the meantime, Eliot looks away and tries to remember how to breathe.

She finally pulls away and she’s crying, but that’s fine, Quentin is crying too, and Quentin is still ridiculously mesmerizing, even if his hair is shorter now, too short for him to hide behind it, and the artificial lights are framing his silhouette in a way that reminds Eliot of a priest preaching about angels a long time ago in a dusty town surrounded by corn fields, and this time Eliot agrees– it’s all terrifyingly beautiful.

“Hey,” Quentin says again, takes a step closer, pauses. His hands twitch at his sides like he wants to reach for Eliot but isn’t sure if he’s allowed and Eliot wants to say he’ll give Quentin whatever he asks for, it’s all his already anyway, it always has been.

So instead, he thinks show, don’t tell, and crosses the space left between them and draws him in a hug, marveling at how easily Quentin fits against him. They curve around each other– Quentin buries his face on Eliot’s neck and Eliot cries quietly into Quentin’s hair, and arms wrap around waists with a familiarity that comes from fifty years of muscle memory. “It’s really you,” Quentin murmurs, half in awe, half in disbelief, and entirely in longing. “I missed you so much, El.”

“No more than I have missed you,” Eliot whispers back, feeling for the first time like his chest isn’t collapsing into itself, like he’s one breath away from toppling down like a house of cards. “Q,” he says helplessly, “Q.”

The letter falls heavily from his lips, packed with so many more words, it dissipates in the air like cigarette smoke, the kind that he could shape into anything at all– a dragon, a ship, a heart, a cottage in the woods, a little boy laughing in the backyard, two people growing old.

Julia chokes on a laugh, hand flying to her mouth. “Sorry guys,” she blinks back tears, wiping her cheek, “we gotta go.”

Quentin pulls away, and takes Eliot’s hand. “I’m ready,” he says, sounding like means it, and smiles, “lead the way, Jules.”

*

The walk back to Penny is a giant blank space in Eliot’s memory.

He’s too distracted with how solid, how warm, how alive Quentin feels to pay attention while Julia explains their plan. Everything feels like a dream and Eliot is too scared to pinch himself to check, isn’t sure he wants to know the truth, because does it even matter if it feels this real?

They might have been chased by security, they might have run for their lives, Eliot might have thrown someone in the rails and Julia might have cracked someone’s skull against a light blue concrete wall, Penny might have said something about thank fuck, you little shit, do you know how much of a pain you’ve been? to Quentin, but it all happens from a distance– for a second, Eliot almost worries he’s slipping back to the Happy Place, but Quentin’s hand is still warm and sweaty and clinging desperately to Eliot’s to the point of his fingernails breaking skin in tiny half-moon shapes, so it must still be Eliot at the wheel.

It’s only when the elevator’s doors are sliding closed and the godawful song starts chiming again that it dawns on him.

They did it.

“We did it,” Julia exhales, breathlessly and giddy, hugging Quentin again, and they’re both laughing and jumping together in a mess of limbs. “Q, we did it!”

Eliot lets them celebrate with an amused half smile, an overwhelming wave of fondness rushing unbridled inside his ribcage.

Idly, he notices Quentin has let go of his hand. Then, the world goes dark and the music abruptly cuts out–

– and Eliot sits up, gasping for air, heaving in a breath like a man drowning at sea.

“Oh, thank god,” Margo gathers him in her arms, and from behind her shoulder, he sees that Julia is already on her feet, leaning heavily against her Penny, and oh, Quentin is holding Alice like a lifeline, or maybe Alice is holding Quentin, it’s hard to tell with how entwined they are, but yes, that checks. Margo draws back to glare at him, shakily fussing over his hair. “Always had to make a fucking entrance, didn’t you?”

“I thought you appreciated being fashionably late,” he teases, hoping to balance himself in their usual banter. I’m here, I’m alright, he means.

“I’d appreciate you not giving me a heart attack every other week,” she shoots back, helping him up gently, and her hand stays firmly at his back even after his knees no longer threaten to give out.

“Just to check,” Eliot calls out, waiting until Quentin disentangle himself from Alice and look back at him. “Before Penny 23 here decides to undo all of our hard work, do you happen to feel any murderous urge? An irrational liking to moths?”

Quentin scrunches up his nose in his adorable puppy way, and Eliot’s traitorous heart skips a beat obediently in response. “No? I– should I? I mean, I’m hungry, I could definitely eat, but– not moths?”

It works to loosen up the room, as if the building itself had been holding its breath and now it’s suddenly let go. Julia and Alice chuckle softly, wetly, and even Penny rolls his eyes, looking less like he might be hiding a knife behind his back.

“Hey,” Quentin continues, shaking off his confusion to beam down at his hands, “my arm is not made of wood anymore– nice.”

*

In the days that follow, not a lot happens.

Except for a lot of serious conversations, it seems.

Having Quentin dying on them, sacrificing himself like a goddamn martyr, like he never heard of live to fight another day, may have kicked them all with a sort of urgency to resolve their unfinished business.

Because their group of sort-of patchwork family has never been particularly good at talking things out but have always excelled at sneaking around, Eliot never quite catches these talks, only glimpses.

He sees Quentin helping Margo clean her axes one afternoon, talking in low voices, but their eyes are suspiciously shiny and Quentin’s hands shake as he wipes a cloth over an already pristine patch of iron.

There’s a morning, Eliot wakes up to the smell of eggs and bacon and when he enters Marina’s kitchen, Quentin and Penny are silently having breakfast.

That same night, Julia asks Quentin to teach her a card trick, but when Eliot walks past her bedroom later before going to sleep himself, the sounding of crying is unmistakable. He doesn’t know which one of them is sobbing, but the next day, they trade a hopeful smile over coffee, the it really is going to be okay kind.

Then, it’s suddenly Eliot’s turn.

“We’re ordering pizza,” he says, knocking on the open door and leaning against it. Quentin looks up from where he’s sprawled on the bed, drops his phone on his chest. “I have been tasked to find out which topping you would like. Please,” he holds up a hand, “before you decide, do take into consideration that there is a wrong answer.”

“Are you threatening to kick me out of Marina’s flat if I ask for pineapple on my pizza?” Quentin snorts, raising one eyebrow.

“It’s technically Kady’s apartment now, she already paid this month’s rent to the Babayaga downstairs,” Eliot informs him mildly. “But yes, absolutely.”

“You know,” he sits up properly, his phone falling to the side and nearly to the floor. The expression on Quentin’s face is so softly amused, Eliot’s chest aches. “That would’ve been more threatening if you hadn’t just broken into the Underworld to rescue me.”

Eliot finds that sighing theatrically is better than overthink the sentence in his head. Be brave, he thinks. Be brave, even if it’s scary, even if it hurts, be brave, you promised. “You got me. I love you, but that still doesn’t mean I’ll allow that crime against humanity inside this apartment.”

A pin-dropping silence blankets the room. Quentin’s eyes are wide and dark, and if the curtains had been open, Eliot is sure the whole night sky could have reflected off them. “Did you just– I mean–”

“Q,” Eliot deflates, ignoring the urge to flee from this, from the chance– from the possibility– and sits at the edge of the bed, carefully keeping a good distance between them. Quentin could still cross it, could still cover Eliot’s hand in the mattress with his own if he wanted. He doesn’t, though, and Eliot tries not to be disappointed. “I love you. I thought– I hoped you knew by now, but in case you don’t, there. I love you.”

“But, I mean,” he blinks, forehead creasing in his confusion and he runs a hand through his hair, just like old times. “That day, in the throne room–”

“I was scared,” Eliot admits, the words rushing out of him like a bursting balloon, “and I thought not knowing was better than having and then losing.”

Quentin pauses. “That sounds familiar– is that a poem?”

“Sort of, it kind of goes the other way around.”

“Sorry, that doesn’t matter,” Quentin shakes his head as if he could physically disperse his thoughts. They tend to get tangled in his head, Eliot had noticed. “I– so when you said– back when you broke out of the Monster for a minute, and then at the metro station– you really meant it?”

“Yes,” he simply says, “but I’m not expecting anything from you, don’t worry your pretty little head. I just– I’m trying this new thing, being brave, so I promised myself I would tell you. You deserve to know the whole truth.”

You deserve to have the chance to choose, he doesn’t say.

“Eliot,” Quentin breathes, and for a second it looks like he’s leaning forward, but there’s a knock on the door and it startles them even further apart.

It’s Penny, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world except here. “Hey, huh,” he clears his throat, “Margo’s asking what you guys want? She’s on the phone with the pizza place and, well. We need an answer.”

“I’m fine with anything, thanks,” Quentin stumbles out his reply, still looking caught like a deer in headlights.

So Eliot shoves his feelings into the back of his mind and pulls himself together, getting to his feet. “I should go relay the message,” he says, smoothing out his clothes, “someone should stop her from scaring away the delivery guy.”

He forces himself to leave the run in a sedated pace, and he never looks back.

*

After that, Eliot pours himself into helping Margo find her way back to her Fillory, tearing through books like he never did in his time at Brakebills. They raid Marina’s library and camp out on her living room, and only when it’s late at night, when everyone else is asleep, when it’s only him and Margo and the low light from the candles– only then he lets her hug him and spills the aching sadness that had pooled where his heart used to be.

To be honest, it’s neither better nor worse. If anything, the only change is that he sees even less of Alice. She leaves them for the Library more often than not, Kady defiantly in tow, so Eliot figures she knows.

And Quentin– he avoids Eliot, or perhaps Eliot avoids Quentin, or they avoid each other, or there’s no avoiding, there’s only Eliot losing himself in his research and Quentin taking his time to process things. Either way, it takes him three days and two hours before he seeks Eliot out.

“Can we talk?” Quentin asks, fidgeting in the threshold of Marina’s library, and Margo kicks Eliot hard under the desk.

So he nods, wincing at how loud his chair screeches when he pushes it back, away from the table.

“Look,” he says, closing the door to his room beside them. Quentin looks decided, serious, nervous. “A lot of shit happened since the last time I saw you. I mean, you you, and I– things got kind of twisted at the end, I was in a really bad place, and then in the Mirror World, I thought– I don’t know– wait, hey, did you know I figured out my discipline?” No, Eliot had not known. “Yeah, Mayakovsky told me. Minor Mendings.”

“That’s great, Q,” Eliot smiles honestly, “it really suits you.”

Quentin grins back, wide and brilliant before huffing. “Thanks. Anyway, that wasn’t– what I’m trying to say is, dying puts a lot of things in perspective, I guess? No, that’s no right. It’s just, after Penny gave me that metro card and I was suddenly there, at that station, and I was supposed to fucking move on– I realized I didn’t want to. There was so much shit I still wanted to do, that I wanted to say, and I had never even gotten to talk to you after the Monster was gone, and I– all I wanted was to come back, to take it back.”

“Yeah? Penny said you caused a lot of trouble down there,” he says slowly, studying Quentin’s face, trying to decipher the look on his eyes. It seemed familiar, but Eliot couldn’t quite place a name.

“Yeah, they really didn’t like that,” Quentin shakes his head, “but it didn’t matter, because I knew– El, I knew you would come for me. Do you know why?”

“Why, Q?” Eliot asks, feeling his heart suddenly clawing its way up his throat.

“Because if it was the other way around,” he says, smiling, and takes a step closer, then another, and another, until there are only a few inches between them and Eliot can count his lashes, each of the freckles he got from walking in the park with Julia every afternoon since coming back, “that’s what I would do. I guess, what I’m really trying to say, is that I love you too.”

Time stops and the world spins out of control as Eliot lets these words sink in, wondering if this is a dream, if he’s still in the Happy Place– how can it be real?

But Quentin is smiling up at him softly and his hands are tugging Eliot down, burying in his hair, and then they’re kissing and it has to be real because none of Eliot’s dreams have ever felt this good.

“What about Alice?” Eliot has to ask, pulling away to breathe in oxygen into his aching lungs, and waits to see if his heart is going to be handed back to him battered and bruised in a silver plate.

“Broke up a week ago, get on with the program,” is all Quentin laughs, breathlessly against Eliot’s lips, and Eliot is more than happy to swallow the sound and the moan that follows.

There’s still so much to do– they have to find a way to save Fen and Josh, and the Library isn’t happy with them for stealing Q back from the Underworld, and magic is still haywire, and the situation with the Hedges is precarious at best, and there’s a lot of shit to talk about, therapy possibly, but. Quentin loves him and Eliot is terrified but there’s strength in numbers and look at all the things they already survived.

For tonight, they kiss and it tastes like peaches and plums, and a cottage in the woods, and a golden tile. It tastes like magic and it tastes like stars, and Eliot knows, whatever happens from here on out, they’ll be alright.

[hachama]

Democratic debate analysis

I’ve read the transcripts.  I read the fact-checkers’ analysis.  I have ranked them. 

Due to the size of the field, I’ll be splitting my analysis into four groups.  This first one will be the Please Do Not Make Me Vote For Them group: 

Ryan, Hickenlooper, Williamson, Bennet, Delaney, O’Rourke, and Biden.

Under the break, I’ll be analyzing their debate performance, how effectively they represented themselves on the issues, and how much I hate them, in reverse order of preference. Let’s begin.

20) Biden

Biden is so… so out of touch.  Even the moderators asked if he was out of touch, and when the moderators of a debate you’re participating in think you don’t know what you’re talking about?  For a career politician, that has got to hurt.  Frankly, they were right.  Biden thinks that the reason people can’t pay their student loans without sacrificing everything else they want to do with their lives is because we’re not earning more than $25k a year, that freezing payments and interest until the graduated student crosses that threshold would magically make everything ok.  If he were right, there’d be no Fight for 15.  A $15 minimum wage, assuming full time hours, is more than $30k per year.  

His response to accusations of racism was to point to his “black friend,” former President Obama, which… dude.  You’ve got to know better than that by now.  Please tell me you know having been the first and only black President’s VP does not immediately absolve you of being an old white guy who worked with Southern Segregationists against integrating schools.  

His entire platform seems to be “remember when I was a senator/the vice president?  Wasn’t I great, back when I had ideas and did things?” and I gotta say, No.  No, you weren’t that great, Joe.  Even his closing comments were lackluster, talking about “restoring the soul of America,” and “restoring the dignity of the middle class,” and “building national unity.”  His answers to simple questions were, frankly, terrible.

Joe, what would you do, day one, if you knew you’d only be able to accomplish one thing with your Presidency?  Thanks for asking, I’d BEAT DONALD TRUMP!  Joe.  Joe, that’s how you get to Day One.  Unless you mean “grab him by the collar, haul him out on the White House lawn, and bludgeon him with heavy objects,” you’re not answering the question.   Joe, which one country do you think we need to repair diplomatic ties with most?  NATO!  Joe.  Joe, NATO is more than one country.  I just… *sigh*

To his credit, Biden trotted out many of the same old campaign promises Democrats have been making for as long as I can remember.  Closing tax loopholes, universal pre-K and increased educational funding, let Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices.  These are tried and true campaign promises because they’re things we can all generally agree we want.  But they’re old, a lot like Biden.  They’re not the bold solutions we need.  His newer ideas all sound pretty moderate and old, too: free community college (not 4 year public university), creating a public option for healthcare so people can choose between insurance companies and Medicare, rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, and instituting national gun buybacks.  His suggestion of requiring all guns to have a biometric safety is also a vague gesture in the direction of a solution.

Biden is too old, too timid, and too arrogant to understand that he’s got nothing to offer in an election where Millenials and Gen Z are going to be the largest portion of the electorate.

19) O’Rourke 

Beto, or as I like to call him, Captain Wrongerpants, got off to a roaring start by giving a non-answer in two languages.  This incredible display of pandering, and wasting precious time, made him seem pretentious and obnoxious in twice the number of languages most politicians aspire to.

Possibly more than any other candidate, O’Rourke completely failed to answer any question he was asked.  He presented a few good ideas, saying that he sees climate change as the most pressing threat to America and calling for an end to fossil fuel use.  He supports universal background checks and reinstating the assault weapons ban.  He wants comprehensive immigration reform, to reunite families separated by the Trump administration, and to increase the corporate tax rate.  

Unfortunately, he wants to increase the tax rate from the new-for-2019 level of 21% to a lower-than-2018 28%.  He wants immigration reform to protect asylum seekers, but thinks other immigrants should “follow our laws” and makes no guarantee to decriminalize undocumented border crossings.  Like Biden, he supports healthcare “choice,” meaning that for-profit healthcare would continue in this country until everyone, in every city, state, county, and cave, can be convinced that insurance companies don’t care about them.

In short, O’Rourke reaches for relevance and relatability, and lands in pretension and centrism.  

18) Delaney

John Delaney is the first candidate on my list to have been caught in a bald-faced lie by Politifact. Good job, John.  His lie, by the way, was about Medicare for All.  He claimed that the bill currently before Congress required that Medicare pay rates stay at the current levels, and that if every hospital in America had been paid at Medicare levels for all services, every hospital would have to close.  The truth?  The Medicare for All bill does not require that pay rates stay at current levels, and even if it did no one knows what effect that would have on the country’s hospitals.  There is no data to support his assertion, even if he was right about the terms of the legislation being considered.

Unsurprisingly, John is another healthcare “choice” advocate.  I think I’ve said enough about why this position doesn’t fly for me, so I won’t rehash it again.  

In a discussion of family separation, he interjected that his grandfather was also a victim of family separation, which must make him feel so relevant.  He also referred to company owners as “job creators,” a lovely little conservative talking point, and claimed that America “saved the world,” in some vague appeal to American Exceptionalism.  He also agrees with Nancy Pelosi about not pursuing impeachment proceedings.  

On the “I don’t hate him quite as much as Beto and Biden” front, he’s in favor of tax breaks for the middle class, increasing the minimum wage, funding education, family leave policies, a carbon tax (which he imagines would fund a tax dividend paid to individual citizens, rather than, I don’t know, paying for green infrastructure development?), thinks China is our biggest geopolitical threat, and is scared of nuclear weapons (a very sane, reasonable position, really).

If you want to pick a candidate based on who your moderately conservative uncle will yell about least if they win the White House, Delaney might be your guy.  If you want to pick a candidate based on issues like student loan debt and healthcare, keep looking.

17) Bennet

I had never heard of Michael Bennet before the debates.  In fact, I just Googled him to find out his first name.  After the debates, though?  You guessed it: I hate him.

His closing statement was an appeal to the American Dream.  He thinks there are too many people in America to make a single payer healthcare system work.  Asked to identify one country to prioritize diplomatic repairs with, he named two continents.  And he believes the world is looking to America for leadership.  

However, he did rate higher than three whole candidates, and here’s why: He supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.  He wants to end gerrymandering and overturn Citizens United.  He wants to expand voting rights and electoral accessibility. He considers climate change and Russia to be the biggest threats to America, and he didn’t use any obvious racist dogwhistles.  He’s from Colorado, so he’s kinda proud of the state’s marijuana legalization and reproductive health policies, but he’s way too quick to see partnership with private businesses as the ideal path forward.

16) Williamson

Oh man.  Marianne Williamson.  I almost threw something every time she opened her mouth.  She is like a walking, talking, uninformed Tumblr guilt trip post.  At a nationally televised debate, she asked why no one was talking about… something. I didn’t write it down in my notes because I would have had to gouge out my own eyes if I had.  According to Google, she is a self-help speaker and that explains So Much.

In her closing statement, Williamson claimed that she would be the candidate to beat Trump, not because she has any plans, but because she will harness love to counter the fear that fuels Trump’s campaign.  I am not making this up and I wish I was.  

She claimed that Americans have more chronic health issues than anywhere else in the world, and attributed this to all sorts of factors, starting with diet and chemical contamination and extending, I assume, to solar activity and Bigfoot.  According to Politifact, the only American demographic with a higher incidence of chronic illness than other countries is senior citizens, and I’m going to guess that has a lot more to do with our crappy healthcare system than it does a lack of detox teas.

When asked what policy she would enact if she could only get one, she said that on her first day in the White House she’d call the Prime Minister of New Zealand and tell her that New Zealand is not the best place in the world to raise a child, America is.  

When asked which one country she’d make a diplomatic priority, she said “European leaders.”

By now you must be wondering how she rated higher than the bottom four, and I can sum it up in eight words: She supports reparations and the Green New Deal.

Please, please do not make me vote for Marianne Williamson.

15) Hickenlooper

John Hickenlooper is the former Governor of Colorado, and proudly takes credit for everything good that has ever happened in the state.  He is also proud of being a small business owner, a statement that makes me immediately suspicious of any politician.

To his credit, he supports “police diversity,” a charmingly non-specific term that could mean one gay Latine nonbinary single parent in an otherwise entirely white male department, or could mean he wants the demographics of the police force to match the demographics of the population being policed.  He also considers climate change a serious threat, and China.  The best thing he said all night?  He supports civilian oversight of police, a policy which has improved police relations with citizens.

Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong.

He also supports ICE “reform,” as if there is anything redeemable about that agency, and thinks that the worst thing the eventual Democratic candidate could do is allow their name to be connected to anything socialist.  He said it twice, it wasn’t an accident.  

14) Ryan

That brings us to the last of the worst, Tim Ryan.  Tim here cannot stop using conservative dogwhistles, like talking about “coastal elites,” and saying that acknowledging differences between people is divisive.  He is a basic ass white boy in the worst, most boring sense.

He wants to bring about a green tech boom, supports decriminalizing border crossing, supports gun reform, and thinks China is a serious threat to America.  He also thinks that, in addition to dealing with the issues that allow school shootings to happen, we need to address the trauma kids are growing up with as a result.  Unfortunately, he thinks that school shooters are misunderstood victims of bullying.

His confrontation with Tulsi Gabbard was very instructive and possibly the most damning exchange all night.  He mis-identified the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center as being “the Taliban” (they were Al-Qaeda) and said that our military forces have to “stay engaged” for… stability?  I guess? As a veteran, I’m with Tulsi on this one: that’s not acceptable.

[pimpson18]

Month of the Sad Boy

I know this is tl;dr as heck but whatever, here you go.

In honor of #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth, I decided to have probably the worst breakdown I've ever experienced in my life. I'm ok now, but I feel compelled to share my experience, because as much as I appreciate all the memes saying "It's ok to take a day off" and "Being Bipolar isn't just moodiness", I feel like it makes struggling with mental health issues feel "cute".

It feels like struggling with mental health is a brand that's being promoted. Burger King made freaking UNHAPPY MEALS for Christ's sake. Your brain might not be able to produce serotonin, but it's generating some great marketable content.

My Mental Health Awareness Month® started with the death of my grandmother. I tend to handle death and loss pretty well, but this absolutely wrecked me. At first, I thought this was because I had lost my final grandparent. An entire generation of my family was completely lost. Cue a heightened sense of mortality and existential dread.

This was also the first time I was over a thousand miles away from my family; Outside of reasonable driving range. Air travel costs $700-$1000 for a last minute ticket. Cue resentment and helplessness caused by capitalism and class struggles. It's reasonable that maybe my anxiety and depression would be heightened by this predicament.

Thanks to some help from my parents, I was able to make my way out to my grandmother's funeral and spend some time with my family. It felt nice spending time with them. We cried and laughed in equal measure. A salve filled the wound left behind from the loss. Healing had begun.

But something felt off.

My foundation had shifted.

In quiet moments, I felt fear. Not "ooohhh it's kinda dark and creepy in this room" fear, but "Dear lord the specter of death has their (that's right, death is a they. I'm progressive) hand around my heart" fear. I have never felt this way before. It was terrifying. I truly thought I was dead.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every second all I could think was, "You've lost your mind. You're dead. You'll never stop thinking like this. You've lost your mind. You're dead."

It was like The Tell Tale Heart but I hadn't murdered anyone. My only crime was being alive and having a brain.

There would be moments where I could distract myself. I could get caught up in a conversation, or watch something engaging enough on TV, but these moments were fleeting. I'd feel myself get pulled back in, the demons inside dragging me, clawing and screaming, back into the endless abyss. I’m not being melodramatic here. If this were an UNHAPPY MEAL, it would be the Supreme Deluxe Family-sized XXL Jumbo Anxiety Box with a Large Cup of Depression and a tote bag full of Chili Cries (Sorry, it was too easy).

The thoughts went on for weeks. It was constant. Each passing thought a stone piling on top of the last one, slowly crushing me. I was trapped inside of myself. It was the opposite of an out of body experience. I was withdrawing deeper and deeper, sanity slipping further and further out of reach. I was plummeting like a rat that had been given a pair of brand new concrete shoes.

During all of this, I was seeking the help of professionals. I’ve been seeking help since I moved out to DC. My wife (who is a saint deserving of a thousand Michelangelo murals) and I left hundreds of messages with psychiatrists. A few have gotten back. Most of them weren’t available for an appointment well into the fall. Nothing really soothes an anxious breakdown like sitting and waiting.

We kept searching. I tried getting a teleconference with a psychiatrist so I could get at least some temporary relief. The app my insurance provided me hooked me up with some dude who was holed up in Alaska. He was an older gent who could only seem to get his wispy white comb-over in the frame of my phone screen. I don’t remember his name, but he was very warm and considerate. He recommended I double the amount of Welbutrin I was taking to help curb my anxiety.

“Isn’t Welbutrin an upper? Won’t that actually make my anxiety worse?” I asked.

“It is an upper but it will actually help lower your anxiety.” He said comfortably from his remote psychiatric ward/icefishing hut in Alaska.

One of us was right, and it wasn’t the person who has a license to be a psychiatrist.

I receded further. The thoughts of death and insanity looping tighter and tighter around me like dual anacondas, preparing to swallow me whole like Jon Voight in the movie Anaconda, only I wasn’t going to pop back out and wink at Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube. My wife consoled me as I sobbed in her arms, terrified I would never be able to enjoy another second with her ever again. This had been my life for two weeks, why would it ever stop?

My wife finally found me a psychiatrist who could see me immediately. A stroke of luck! She also found a therapist who specialized in CBT and sounded like a nice guy on the phone who could see me the same day. A two-for-one luck special!

The psychiatrist was part of a larger “mental healthcare group”. Whoa! Cool! It’s like they’re the Avengers of giving out happy pills!

Not really. It’s more like they’re brain farmers herding sad cattle into a slaughterhouse, grinding them into a bunch of manufactured Happy Paddies™. I got prodded into a cold, desolate office where a woman stared unblinkingly at a tablet, while she entered all my symptoms into some kind of program. The algorithm confirmed my medications were out of whack and suggested I #glowup the milligrams of my bipolar meds, while I cut down on the Welbutrin, which was not sparking my joy. The psychiatrist never made eye contact with me and the visit ended within 10 minutes. It was just like my wedding night, hey oh!

Next was the therapist. I thought I wanted eye contact until I saw this dude. He was 100 going on 100,000 years old. His eyes were bloodshot, his office smelled like soup, and his phone rang at least 20 times. It felt more like an interview to be his caretaker. I was so deep within my mind that I was about to fall down my throat and into my stomach.

The icing on the Shit Cake™ was when I mentioned that I did comedy (I can’t help but brag about myself, even when I’m completely collapsing. I’ll probably plug my Twitter page on my deathbed.). He stopped the therapy session and began plugging his side hustles. He mentioned that he did career counseling and could help me get gigs that paid upward of $40-$50 an hour. He also said I should bring by show flyers for him to look over. He dabbled in graphic design.

I was furious. Our session was 45 minutes in. I had opened up, cried, and begged for relief. He merely saw me as an opportunity. Someone he could upsell.

I had some choice words and stormed out.

Tears ran down my cheeks as I got in my car. They were bitter and hopeless.

At least I got a new prescription.

Turns out that was actually a decent enough solution. I’m 5 days into my new medication regiment and I’m close to normal again. The thoughts will pop up every now and then, but they’re faint and go away quickly. I’ve had two good days in a row. Feels like I’ll have a lot more.

The reason why I wrote all this is two-fold:

1. I like the attention

2. I wanted to show what the struggle looks like in all its ugly glory.

Depression, anxiety, bi-polar, etc. can be managed, fought back, and abated; sometimes for short periods of time, sometimes for years and years. It can be like a common cold or it can be full blown brain AIDS. You may need to take a mental health day; you might need to go to the ER.

Treatment can be as capricious as the sickness itself. You may feel safe, seen, and cared for. You might feel like a product on a conveyor belt, being inspected by an uncaring factory worker or gobbled up by an unqualified Lucille Ball (does this metaphor track? I think it does.)

Mental illness is hard because even the person suffering through it doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Sometimes all we need from others is to know that. Sometimes we might appreciate some effort, like going out and getting us an UNHAPPY MEAL™.

[deadmomjokes]

Normal Anon Again 1: Your response was great, don't worry about a thing there. I just really feel stuck because Im still with my emotionally abusive family, and so I had to sneak to even see a doctor. I honestly felt like the doctor barely ever heard me at all, so even though she did prescribe an SSRI (not that she said what brand), I'm kind of scared to continue treatment with her. Because I made the notebook with a lot of care, she said I had OCD and did bring it up again later when I

had refuted it and tried to explain the notebook was just something I wanted to be well done for her. She didn't ever look at it either, so she based it off me buying little tabs and labeling them for ease of access and writing my name on the front I guess? I don't have a lot of money, as I don't have a job, and getting a job is the main reason I want to try medication... I basically have to move out by 2020 from my family, both by their desires and mine, so I'm on acrazy deadline to try to get my life together and I feel like I have no time to find someone new if I'm going to be looking to move away when all the apartments are renting. So it feels like if I want to try medication this is my one chance, but I don't feel like I can trust the doctor handling them. I don't know if I should just try to find a way to make my life work out for a couple months or give the medication a shot even though I don't trust the provider...I've got to worry about getting a job this month or being homeless too, which is why it feels so one or the other for my current situation. Thank you so much for all your feedback, sorry if this was a little messy being explained, I'm a bit frazzled yet, haha.

Oh man, I’m SO very sorry for everything you’re going through! You’re dealing with a ton, and this incident with Dr Garbage certainly didn’t help.

One thing that may be a possibility is going to a normal doctor, like a family medicine doc or general practitioner, and talking to them about your anxiety/depression problems. They can also prescribe psych medication, and it might be easier to pass off around your family and/or to find once you move, since a lot of offices partner or have networks that you can just transfer through. Anyone from a Nurse Practitioner to a PhD in general medicine can prescribe meds like an SSRI or even low-level mood stabilizers. (For my recently upped dosage, I went to a PA-C and they consulted with the folks at my obgyn, so I never even saw a psychiatrist. Tho I’m trying to get in with one anyway, but that’s way beside the point.)

I definitely understand you being unable to trust the current provider; she clearly didn’t hear you or take everything (anything?) into account. Anyone who comes to you from an emotionally abusive situation should warrant a ton of follow-up questions and in-depth probing. Even beyond that, just in general, taking stock of all the symptoms and reviewing any identified triggers is going to go a long way toward real diagnosis. Your notebook should have made her job a breeze, instead of her having to pick through your anecdotes of what happens when, she could just look at your notes! You were doing everything right; a therapist’s dream, honestly. I’ve been in therapy for years and I’m still not that good at keeping tabs on my own symptoms and patterns. I’m enraged on your behalf, because when someone comes to you for help you should reach back out to them, not be prescriptivist even if you’re dealing with prescriptions.

If medication is something you’ve been considering for a while, and feel like it might be a good fit for you, it may be worth trying the current prescription even though the current doctor is garbage, since SSRIs are usually the first try medications anyway. But that always comes with risks, because sometimes the first try doesn’t really work out for you or your specific situation. But SSRIs as a category are pretty safe, and are used for anxiety disorders (including panic disorder and generalized anxiety), ptsd, depression, and ocd as well. So chances are even if you found a psych who did their job well (aka not labeling you ocd for being prepared), they were going to land on an SSRI as a first try, too. That definitely doesn’t make it an easy decision, tho. That nagging fear may always be with you if you try it anyway despite not really trusting her diagnosis, and that could add a layer of complexity to deciding whether the medicine is right for you. Especially if you end up needing to switch medication or dosage, having a doctor you trust from the outset is going to be important.

I obviously cannot tell you what to do, nor do I want to, or even think I should if I could, because personal situations are just that--personal. I would only caution that if you’re already having difficulty getting or doing a job without medical assistance (ie medication), that trying it under serious stress for a few months may do more harm than good as far as worsening your difficulties, or causing new ones. However, sometimes we aren’t in the position to make the “best” decision for our health because living takes precedence; I’ve taken plenty of jobs that wrecked my mind and body and I kept them anyway because I absolutely had to. So I’m not going to get on a high horse because I know exactly how hard it is, and the difficult decisions you have to make in order to survive. I’m just so very sorry you are in that position to make such a decision.

If you do decide to try the medication anyway, some tips on kind of “going it alone” since you won’t be able to/won’t want to go back to the original doctor:

Start at a lower dose than the full final dosage. If she didn’t prescribe a “titration” schedule, starting at half dose for a week is a good place to begin.

Understand that things might get worse before they get better. You might have horrible mood swings, really bad depressive days, or bad anxiety spells before you start seeing the true effects. This isn’t indicative of whether the medicine is going to work eventually, but if it becomes too much for you to deal with, you should stop anyway.

Side effects may come and go. Just worth noting.

If possible, have someone close to you who knows that you’re starting this medicine. Obviously not a family member given your situation, but if you have a friend or anyone you do trust in your immediate vicinity, or even a friend you communicate with long-distance, make sure someone knows. That way you have someone to report in to and who can check up on you as you adjust.

Start by taking them with food, even if it doesn’t have a nausea warning. I’d suggest evening meal or soon thereafter, because SSRIs often cause drowsiness at first (great for helping with insomnia tho!).

You’re probably going to have a full month or two before it reaches its peak effect, since this is your first time trying them. You might see some relief right away, but full efficacy takes time as it builds up in your system. If you can tolerate the side effects (or don’t have any), and you’re able to deal with the mood swings or psychiatric effects, stick with it at least 6 weeks.

Listen to that “don’t drive or operate machinery” warning. First-time-medication drowsiness is a special breed that sneaks up on you and also makes you feel WEIRD.

You can also see about filling the prescription and then researching the name on the label before you decide whether or not to take it. Or, if you have an online account with the pharmacy, as with CVS, you can see the name of the drug there, or even call the pharmacy she sent it to and ask them what the name of it was (”for insurance purposes” or “because I forgot which one it was”) and then research it on sites like Mayo Clinic and rxlist.com (don’t do webmd). These websites include lists of what it’s approved to treat, so if you’re fairly certain you actually have anxiety/depression, look for that on the list. Just know that all websites are essentially required to remind you that an SSRI (really any antidepressant or mood stabilizer) could worsen any suicidal thoughts or behaviors, though this is mostly a risk for the 24 and under crowd with emphasis on teenagers. And it doesn’t happen to everyone.

Should you decide not to do the medicine right now because of the doctor who prescribed it, I applaud you for your bravery and strength in facing both your uncertain future and your mental/emotional difficulties without the assistance you feel you need. That’s a hard, hard thing to do, and I wish it wasn’t a choice you had to make.

I’ll be sending good vibes, thoughts, and prayers your way as you’re dealing with so many transitions and difficulties. I know cyber hugs are kind of a dated internetism, and may not mean much, but I give you all the cyber hugs my cyber arms can muster.

[northernrainforest]

Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving here in Ketchikan (and everywhere else in the US) and the past few days have been an interesting study in island living. Tuesday Ladybug and I ran a few errands after her morning at the gymnastics club – they open it up to little ones one day a week and it’s a pretty awesome way to blow off some steam when the rains are hitting hard. Our first errand was to drop a package at the post office. Hot tip: if you’re ever in Ketchikan, and the line of one or two people at the post office right by the Alaska Marine Highway ferry terminal seems interminable, you can head five miles north and go to the post office in Ward Cove. Ward Cove as a neighborhood is just a blip: if you’re driving fifty up Tongass Highway (not, by the way, an actual highway by most people’s standards) you’ll have to downshift slightly as you go around the bend, the cove to your left, with its Fed Ex outpost and handful of float planes. The gymnastics club is tucked in next door to Fed Ex, in a converted warehouse. They moved recently (though before we arrived) and there was some grumbling about the jump in price: a 10-punch card for Tot Gym is now $40, up from $25. I could see how this would feel like a big increase. On the other hand, I would encourage anyone who’s actually mad about this to go to any indoor play space in a big city in the lower 48; it will cost at least twice as much.

Anyway, if you continue north less than a quarter of a mile, you’ll see the Ward Cove post office on your right. Tucked into the same little shopping strip – can I call it that? I’m going to – is a combo gas station/liquor store/pizza place, a hair salon, and the Green Bean, one of the best coffee places on the island. They roast their own beans – a good reminder that we’re living in… well let’s call it the GreaterPacific Northwest. I doubt anyone in Seattle or Portland is looking to Ketchikan for our coffee culture, but it’s here and it’s real. It’s similar to how good coffee is omnipresent in Amsterdam – walk into any office or home there and one of the first exchanges you will be a part of is “Koffie?” “Ja, lekker.” I think the weather and the dark winters foster this attachment to warm deliciousness, which is fine by me. I’ve always been a fan of a hot drink on a cold day.

All that to say: you’ve just experienced Ward Cove. You could continue north and you’d never know that you missed a magical feature of the island. So instead, turn inland from Tongass Highway via Revilla Road (within a very short distance, you’ll be fully surrounded by Tongass National Forest), then turn onto the road with the brown campground signs and you’ll hit Ward Lake, with its forested loop. The first time Steve and I did this easy little hike, he told me he’d Vision-quested it: as in, when we were trying to escape Los Angeles like we were in an old Kurt Russell movie, he pictured what he wanted, and the Ward Lake loop was it. Dark and mossy, it’s the kind of path that desperately wants to grow over itself; but for all the pesky walkers, it would undoubtedly succeed. In the time of the WPA, folks up here erected several wood and stone shelters with fireplaces – after a walk or a fishing expedition, and even in the pouring rain, a person could have a pretty excellent picnic, looking out at the lake. The last time Flo and I were up there, someone had made a fire and left it burning; the little cabin beckoned us, and we sat by the fire and warmed up.

So that’s Ward Cove andWard Lake. But back to the post office. It was raining (I forgot to mention: it’s always raining now) and Ladybug whimpered about not wanting to get out of the car again. So I gave her an apple, I locked the doors, and I left her in the car. It’s worth noting that there have been incidents of arrests for leaving small children in parking lots in big cities and suburbs. It’s also worth noting that I wouldn’t have left her alone in the car even in our gatedcarportin Los Angeles. But if you could see this post office, you’d understand. There’s just no reason to imagine that a child wouldn’t be safe there. And of course if you’re reading this in a small town like Ketchikan, you’re probably wondering why I’m bothering to mention it at all – of course a five-year-old is okay on her own, in a parking lot, for three minutes, especially with the doors locked. What could possibly happen? It’s just such a shift for a kid raised in New York, who started raising her own kid in LA – places where anythingcould happen.

Errand number one: done. It was back to town and into Island Pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Island Pharmacy is one of three pharmacies in Ketchikan, and it’s the only one that’s independent (the other two are at Safeway and Walmart.) It’s also a single minute from our house. While we were in there, one of the women working behind the counter mentioned that she still needed to go shopping for Thanksgiving.

“Don’t,” said the older woman paying for her prescription.

“Uh oh,” I said. “Are the stores crazy?”

“Yes,” she said. “And there’s nothing on the shelves.”

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but it is possible to walk into a grocery store here and find that they’re completely out of, say, eggs. And I mean completely out. Not, like, you might have to buy brown instead of white, or the only ones they have are the $7 cartons where the chickens sleep on memory foam mattresses and only eat kale. (I’m usually somewhere in the middle: uncaged, ideally organic, but I don’t need the chickens to have been massaged on a daily basis.) There are simply no eggs, and any plans you may have had involving eggs will have to be put on hold. So the idea that the shelves were wiped clean was not a crazy one.

Flo got home early that day, so the three of us hightailed it to the grocery store. As we’d been warned, there were some gaping holes. No heavy cream. No egg nog. And, as a lady told me grumpily in the produce aisle, no canned sweet potatoes. We had a long talk about how many fresh sweet potatoes she’d have to use to make her casserole, which normally required three cans; this conversation felt so backwards that I wasn’t even sure I could be helpful, but I tried.

In the end, we got everything we needed. We’d already found a pasture-raised turkey (read: the kale-eating kind) a few weeks prior (two turkeys, in fact; we did a test run when our friend Charlotte came up – Flo made a full on Thanksgiving dinner for her birthday.) It’s Thanksgiving morning, the turkey is thawed out, I have some pumpkin and cranberry-related items to start making, and my parents will get here tonight. When people ask when they’re coming, I say either “Flight 67” or “the 5:00 ferry,” and everyone knows what I’m talking about. It’s like living in an extended episode of Wings.

Last year, our family was one of millions who drove east out of Los Angeles the day before Thanksgiving. We were headed to Castle Valley, Utah, to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s magical place (Flo and I got married there, in the shadow of Arches National Park.) It took us two hours to drive twenty miles; we pulled over and had dinner, after which things picked up a little bit. Flo showed me a picture of that same exodus a year later – lines of unmoving cars, brake lights illuminating the freeway. This year we’ll be driving a mile and a half to pick up my parents from the airport ferry.

I’m thankful for a lot of things today – for Ward Lake, and for the Ward Cove post office with its empty parking lot, save a small apple-eating girl. For Green Bean coffee, and the local pharmacy, and the fact that I can live without whipped cream on my pie (BUT JUST THIS ONCE.) For the people I’ve met here, and the people I haven’t met yet, but will. For the sunshine and long days we had when we moved here, and for the rain and the darkness we have now. For the two people I live with whose hearts are all wrapped up with mine, and the third little person who’ll be joining the party soon. And for all of you, wherever you are. Happy Thanksgiving from southeast Alaska. Please eat enough whipped cream for me.

[leyahroehl]

what is policy number on insurance

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :coveragedeals.net

what is policy number on insurance

what is policy number on insurance quotes? Is it on your checking package list? Are all carriers on the list? I had a few quotes with carrier’s names, that had my insurance company on the list. So in this article I am going to go over them and why they were not a good match. But the next question is that they did have names on their insurance documents. Is it on my insurance document? I have no problems with insurance, I just don’t want them on my insurance card. I just want to be known which agency is the best match? You know I do need one because I have two vehicles with different coverage. I can’t go to any agency that has an insurance card, so I don’t want any agency I don’t need. I’m a good person because I’m not poor but not looking to be a person, no car and I live in Ohio. So I need to file a car insurance policy. what is policy number on insurance? Insurance companies know their policy number is too small in the first place. The way that someone’s policy number is used is called the number of the owner who sold the property, so a small number is used to determine that person s insurance cost. If you pay your car insurance premium on time, you’ll be able to keep your policy from turning into a problem later on. Car insurance companies’ insurance premiums can be significantly different than those of your neighbors’ policies. It’s important to know exactly how much each individual is willing to pay for coverage according to their policies’ coverage limits, based on their driving record, credit score, and other factors. If you or a loved one has had multiple accidents, claims, or suspensions, you may only have to pay the amount of coverage they have available through their insurance company. If you do not have this, you’ll likely . When the cost of a life insurance policy was estimated by ,. what is policy number on insurance policies?) so I guess people are going to have to just get on with their lives. Maybe they’re going to have an accident and no accident. I think most people will never drive on the roads. But that won’t mean that the government can’t take action. In your case, the accident happened in a vehicle you didn’t have and this is one incident that will be in the record and in your mind is not just about car insurance, but also about any other situation that comes up. This is the thing to consider when deciding whether the government should investigate you for any kind of insurance fraud. But I also think it’s one of the most important things to do when you’re trying for change in the world. Just really wanna see if I can give you a piece of mind that if there were ever anywhere, I’m thankful I was covered. Thanks in advance for visiting my local shop. When I was buying.

Steps To Check Car Insurance Policy Number

Steps To Check Car Insurance Policy Number: The car’s license plate must be registered with the owner’s name The license plate is required by law. It is also required by the State of California. Check Your Car Insurance - Your car’s license is required for a variety of vehicle types but you can legally drive any road with the exception of charterions or ranches. You can only drive after proof of insurance, a minimum of $100, and your driver’s license is required, too. Auto body repair and maintenance If damaged or disqualified, your insurance company will not be liable for the parts of your vehicle that are damaged or disqualified. For example, the shop you use to maintain a factory program or install a new one will not be liable if these parts are not made in good order. Insurance company liability If you are at fault for a car accident, your insurance company will pay reasonable expenses associated with liability. The following are the for the drivers.

What if you lose your health insurance card?

What if you lose your health insurance card? We’ve got you covered. Get out of the expensive health insurance plans and into the health care you love. At The Health Group, you can have more choice with your insurance provider, including lower rates. Our policies come with the best discounts for your individual, family or group. You can’t go wrong! The best way to get the lowest rates is to shop around! Let us help you find the best rate and protection for your health and your finances. The one thing that really should keep people away from this insurance plan is your choice. Your premium rate will also be the same for everyone! You might think that your health insurance covers the doctor’s visit cost. Well… we’re not the only ones that do this..

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How to use your health insurance card: Your health insurance card is valid for two years and provides you with tax credits and low-income tax credits. You also can use your card for your Medicare insurance needs. Health insurance can be a great way for Americans to save money on auto, life, home, and health. But how does health insurance work? Health insurance is a type of insurance product that reimburses you the cost of medications, emergency rooms, prescriptions, and lab tests in the event that you need access to health care services. Most Americans get their healthcare through their employer or through a state-sponsored program like Medicaid or Medicare. There’s an important reason to use health insurance if you don’t have an employer: Almost everyone in the U.S. has access to a Medicaid managed care program, so you don’t have a hard time finding coverage. In some cases, these Medicaid managed care programs require you to prove you have health insurance or purchase an insurance policy that can cover both. For.

When Do You Need Your Car Insurance Number?

When Do You Need Your Car Insurance Number? Many insurers will ask about your insurance information even if you don’t use your policy information. And in cases where you don’t use insurance information at all or are unsure as to where to begin, . If you aren’t sure if you should purchase your current insurance coverage, you can shop around to find out how you can maximize your savings. First, it’s important to understand why your auto insurance policy might be canceled. Not by choice, but by accident, you will be required to carry a new car insurance policy up to age 59. You may already know this – your insurance policy will expire if you get too sick or injured, or if someone who was drinking failed to pay the premium, or you’re in an accident with only a few cars. However, if you choose to purchase your next car insurance policy, it might be safer to not purchase at a time as crucial as when you’re purchasing your policy. A car insurance policy.

How to read your health insurance card

How to read your health insurance card: The cost of health insurance is determined by the exact type of health coverage you choose, , and how often the program is used. In general, health insurance cost-sharing (also known as co-pays or deductibles) is based on: Whether you’re shopping for health insurance coverage or are shopping around for your next policy, being self-insured makes you look more than the average insurance plan. When you decide on coverage, do you want accountability for all costs, including medical expenses? You should know that not all insurance is created equal. Most policies are structured and structured differently. You’ll want to look at a company s claims, premiums, co-pays, and benefit amounts. Some companies are much more lenient in billing, while others are very lenient in claiming and accepting medical payments for treatment costs. In most cases, you won’t risk paying the full cost of care (which can.

When do you need a health insurance card?

When do you need a health insurance card? Your card needs to prove a high level of risk that requires you to apply and pay a fee (typically over two months). These may include being overweight, having a pre-existing health condition, having a history of a previous diagnosis from a particular hospital, or taking an extended vacation. There also may be other medical conditions which will be beyond the expected risk for you to be exposed to (such as diabetes or heart problems). If you need to apply for a health insurance card on the weekend, for a cost less than 3% of your weekly income (this is a great reason to make sure to compare rates if you re going to work outside of the country). In addition, you may want an insurance card with diabetes and heart conditions (such as the one used for the medical exam). When you get to the office, you are likely to meet with representatives of various that are available for a fee. When you get to the phone, there is a computer, and you will be offered.

Other Methods To Check Your Car Insurance Policy Number

Other Methods To Check Your Car Insurance Policy Number We provide a list of other websites that provide information regarding our services. By using this site, you will be authorizing us to communicate with you via telecommunication, text or direct mail. . Copyright 2012 - 2020. All Rights Reserved. We accept almost all car insurance providers like State Farm, GEICO, and Progressive. But it is very hard to find a policy that works for you. Here’s a list of the car insurance policies and coverages available with each company you should talk to. State Farm is a major player in the market for low-cost car insurance. If your car, truck or SUV is parked where it will be parked for at least 30 days every year, you have 1/2 that it will be covered in a standard insurance policy. This policy covers your car for the length of the cycle of your vehicle as defined under State Farm insurance policy. This includes vehicles, trailers, school buses, and rental cars. For example, if a motor vehicle is parked and.