#fuck tumblr for flagging our rp which had nothing that should have been flagged

[prevariicatorarchive2]

Pleased with Algrims acceptance to his offer, Loki nods, a cocky grin spreading on his lips. “I knew I could lure you away from your solitary confinement. No one else believed it possible, they believed my boldness to even suggest the offer to be quite distasteful. But of course, none of them can compare to me, can they, Algrim? I am, after all, your favorite pupil, am I not?” Chuckling, he motions for his mount to take a left turn down the cobbled streets as the light begins to dim from the sky, the pale blue abovebecoming bruised with night. Shifting his gaze upwards, he tries to gaze at the setting suns, but finds only rays of light waning through the cover above.

“I am pleased to here you accept my offer, Algrim. Thor believed me mad when I suggested it, claiming I ought not waste time on such trivial things. Instead, he suggested I find someone to lay with each night, as if that would cure all ailments that trouble my mind. The only things my brother thinks of are his cock, his own selfish wants, and that damn hammer.” Grimacing, he takes a moment to close his eyes and let out a heavy breath. Keeping Thor OFF his mind had been his priority tonight, but it seemed no ater what he did there was no escaping his elder brother.

“Forgive me, Algrim, I let my mind wander. I want to know more about what you enjoy doing so we may plan any future gatherings accordingly. But let’s discuss things further when we reach the tavern. I’m sure there will be plenty of time to discuss such matters as well as enjoy our time out. I have.. one more favor to ask of you, Algrim. You have denied me this favor in the past, but perhaps now that I have aged you will be more willing to indulge my curiosity. I want to know more about passages between the realms. There are tales of a time when the Bifrost was not the only way to leave the realm. These tales have been regarded as childrens tales, fallacies to awe young minds. But every story told bares some truth behind it. What can you tell me of the truth behind these stories? Is there truth behind the passageways, or do they remain as non-existent as Unicorns and candy fountains?”

Loki’s smugness earns him a chiding glance from Algrim. “Arrogance does not suit you, Loki.” His statement is intended as an admonition, but the gentleness of his tone belies the underlying sentiment. “Both you and Thor are my favourite pupils,” Algrim clarifies. “I prefer neither of you to the other.” And it is the truth. Two brothers could scarcely be more different than Loki and Thor, yet Algrim loves them all the same, for they are both equally deserving, both equally gifted - albeit in different ways.

Letting Loki lead the way, Algrim keeps close to his side as he listens to him air his grievances about his brother. Loki’s casual use of vulgarisms meets with further reproof. “Loki, please – have care how you speak.” Algrim knows well that men – boys – of Loki’s age are prone to letting themselves be influenced by the coarse speech of warriors, imitating those they like and idolise. “Your brother has always been the more… physical one,” Algrim contributes to the subject. “I will neither deny the appeal of bodily pleasures nor diminish the part they play in a young man’s life, but the body can only consume so much before even the most exquisite indulgences will lose their shine. Only the mind can be truly insatiable in its appetite.”

Loki’s evident interest in Algrim’s private life, in his joys and habits, coaxes another small smile from the counselor that turns into a perplexed frown at the abrupt change of subject. Algrim recalls an earlier exchange between them, remembers Loki’s eagerness to learn about the mechanics of the Bifröst for reasons the younger had opted not to disclose back then. It puts Algrim on his guard immediately.

“A proficient enough user of magic will find ways and means to travel between the realms as he or she pleases,” he offers vaguely. “As to these secret passageways you heard about, let me tell you this, Loki – there is a grain of truth in even the most absurd tales. Just look at Alfheim,” he adds as a humorous afterthought, “where unicorns thrive and candy fountains are as common a sight as are drunkards in Asgard’s taverns.”

-- 

  Carefully, Loki glances briefly towards Algrim to see his expressions of daunting disapproval at his behaviors. Had it been anyone else he may not have cared to stop, nor consider the consequences, of his behavior and language. There were few who could bring about a rising shame within him when he behaved in a way that was considered too crass for his status, though the other warriors in training he’d seen spoke far worse than he ever had, and Algrim was one of those few. The only others who could bring about the flood of embarrassing shame and cause him to momentarily feel his insides tremble from being reprimanded were Frigga and Odin, and, on the rare occasion Sif. Though he would never admit that to her, after all, he’d been smitten by her for years, but she, as many did, preferred the hulking beast of muscle that outshined him in every way.

“Come now, Algrim, Thor and you have as much in common as a bilgesnipe and a unicorn. I have much more in common with you, haven’t I?” His voice strains, his eager desperation for Algrim’s approval written clearly on his face before turning to pretend to watch the scenery around them. With a sharp intake of breath, he calms and composes himself. “Forgive me, Algrim. I’ll refrain from such vulgarities from now on. It would seem I have lost myself in my ranting of HIM. Let us refrain from speaking of HIM again.” With a small smile, he turns down a street of homes and businesses, waving on occasion to the few who notice their prince and bow in respect or call out a ‘Good evening.’ Formalities which, while he’d adored the attention of, had always bored him to no end.

Listening closely, Loki’s features twist with deep thought, his hands loose on the reigns of his horse. It was true that he could use a number of ways to pass through the realms without the need of the Bifrost, but there were few which would allow him to pass through without being noticed, or rather, without HEIMDALL noticing. “So you do not deny there are ways to leave without the use of the Bifrost, but neither will you confirm they exist-at least to the extent of your knowledge, is that what I am to understand Algrim?” Stopping his horse, Loki stares at Algrim in the low light of the taverns torches, noting how Algrim’s features seem almost menacing in the dark with only the low light of the flame to illuminate his sharp features.  

“What if I wanted to go..undetected? What magic would I need to go between realms without the watchful eye of Odin’s lapdog? Hypothetically, of course. I have mastered all of the spells which you and the other scholars, including mother, have taught me. I want to know more. Even if I must dwell into the dark magic of the nine.”

[swampgallows]

for the first time in a while, at least a month, i woke up screaming again. i fell asleep around 4, which i was proud of, feeling myself slowly sliding back toward a preferred schedule. lately i’d still been falling asleep at 6am but would wake up a bit earlier, getting fewer hours but at least seeing more sunlight. the urge to hurt myself yesterday was strong, but luckily there are understanding and generous people in my life to ease me through it, and i am beyond thankful. 

two things have happened.

one, an old face from my previous WoW server has resurfaced and sought me out specifically. a different friend had namedropped them out of nowhere, but was also drunk and wouldn’t extrapolate on why he had mentioned it. he just said the character’s name, then drunk-dialed me a bunch of times until i picked up and then had their “gay roommate” scream across the room that “asexuals aren’t lgbtq!”, then hung up.

but anyway the old face returned. we’ll call them “Pockets” because it’s 7am and I’ve barely slept and so i’m pullin raver names out of my ass. I met Pockets back on thobro in 2006ish. we’re the same age, and so we’ve known each other for a fairly long time and kind of grew up alongside each other. Pockets eventually got into a relationship with...I guess we’ll say “Dizzy”. Now, Dizzy lives very far away from Pockets. Pockets lives in America, like me, and Dizzy lives in Australia. But as the capabilities of the internet were improving every day (especially with the advent of internet telephony like skype at the time) it was easier than ever to sustain a long-distance relationship. But by the time I had quit WoW in early 2009, Pockets and Dizzy’s relationship had not progressed as one should have. For instance, Pockets had barely seen any pictures of Dizzy. While they chatted all the time, at that point they hadn’t yet had a webcam chat. It had been some years of constant companionship, yet they never had a plan to meet. But that was fair, I thought, since Pockets and I were only 16 in 2006, so planning that thing was kind of difficult. But by 2009, we were 19, and Dizzy was a bit older in the first place, so surely two people who loved each other would want to meet irl, right?

But Pockets said they respected that Dizzy wasn’t so open about their looks or personal life, etc. Okay. Pretty big red flags, though, if someone you’ve spent almost every waking moment with for three years is being this conservative about their identity. They were prominent characters in most of the server’s RP, so there was a lot of talk. “Maybe Dizzy is like... WAY older than they say, and they don’t want to admit it.” “Maybe Dizzy isn’t the gender they say they are.” “Pockets will get fed up with this eventually—they’re young! They can’t just wait around forever.”

So Pockets found me in game, yesterday, and had transferred to WRA, where a lot of thobro refugees (like myself) ended up. And they sought me out specifically because they remember my friendship with them, and that I had known them (and the rest of our community) all that time ago. And Pockets told me, yesterday, that Pockets and Dizzy had finally broken up. They had stopped talking for about two weeks, and for about two solid weeks, Pockets was staring down the cavernous hungry maw of suicide. “Everything was just... so quiet.”

They must have been fucking married by now, I thought. Either way, it had been over ten years! I knew Pockets was taking it really hard. Except... Dizzy and Pockets never met.

Not once. Not once in over ten fucking years of being in a relationship did they ever meet. And Dizzy had actually been to America a handful of times throughout the relationship. Yet Dizzy never went to meet Pockets.

I don’t know what the rest of the situation was like. If they video-chatted every day, if they called each other all the time, or whatever. Regardless of how you look at it or what the situation with Dizzy was, Pockets was catfished and abused for over ten fucking years. “It’s my fault. I should have left when [etc. etc.] happened...” Pockets told me that they hadn’t even seen end-game content past Cataclysm, despite playing WoW the entire time. Dizzy never wanted to do any of it, but would get upset if Pockets did it without them. So all Pockets did from Cataclysm onward was PVP, and once they reached the top achievements, felt there was nowhere else to go from there and stopped. Dizzy only wanted to play alts and quest. No raids, no PVP, no dungeons even. Just running around and questing, and preventing Pockets from doing any of that content. When someone you have never even fucking met is controlling the way you play a video game and what permissions you have within the game that you pay monthly to play, something is wrong.

Pockets knew they were lacking confidence. They were so lonely and so latched on that they let Dizzy run the show. And Dizzy barely cared. Pockets knew they basically only existed when it was convenient for Dizzy, but outside of that, they were nothing. I felt that about halfway through my relationship with my ex qp, and shared those feelings with Pockets. It took so long to break away and I held on past everything, past my own pain and self-torture, because I had some kind of hope that things would change. And part of me, an insidious part, said that this was the best I was going to get. After all, I’m some broken asexual idiot—”I should be so lucky,” the words rang out in my head, yellowed and worn but enduring and broadcasting itself loud and vivid over and over for years and years and years, tattered even during my childhood, “I should be thankful,”—and this person was my best friend. I should take the affection in the times I could get it. I should just accept that they will want other people sexually because I cannot provide that, and my best friend has a right to be sexual, and they are being so generous by fixing me with their limp novice dick. 

So I bit it back and squashed it down and even after asking six times and getting no answer, “Do you have a problem with hurting me?” it took them falling into the pit of legitimate white supremacy and Nazism for me to finally let go. And I had tried a number of times but felt myself being pulled back, and they, too, were so desperate for some sense of power in their shitty meaningless life (if that wasnt obvious), so lacking initiative and direction that when i floated back upstream, they took it in stride like every other aspect of existence, as if i were just some trash that floated down the river that they, some huge, slack-jawed bloated fish, gobbled up regardless. I existed only when it was convenient for me to exist, and the moment I started being consumed by my anxiety, getting combative, demanding more affection, more outward recognition, I was gaslit and told, literally, word for word, in fun little tumblr doublespeak, “Your feelings are valid, but this is all based on things within your head.” me coming to my QP and saying, “I feel like you dont care about me because I keep asking to hang out and you’re completely ambivalent about it, and when i asked you, ‘Do you want to see me?’ you said ‘You can visit if you want,’. It’s a yes or no question. Do you want to see me?” DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HURTING ME? and then being told it’s “all in my head”, it’s a perceived disinterest. YES, that is what I’m perceiving, which is why I’m trying to address that you are not giving me enough attention and acknowledgment for someone you claim to care about! But obviously, it was me that was the problem, because i was daring to exist outside those convenient parameters. If you didnt want to fuck me right now then what was I even doing breathing your air?

And I’ve been thinking about them a lot because it was around this time 3 years ago that i had started my job, which i had to quit, and had also had a falling out with them, and was mourning that loss. as well as a, in retrospect, MUCH LARGER LOSS of tokin, who had taken his own life that same week. so i tried to turn it into a new beginning, doing my job and being appreciated, but eventually i crawled back and, one-sided as usual, tried to mend things with the QP. But it didnt matter to them. I didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. “Oh well,” was their shitty little trademark. Yeah buddy, life is fucking just happening to you and you’re stuck in one place without even a dream of things getting better, or worse, just taking things as they are, apathetically, without interest, wanting for nothing except to fuck girls but not enough to do anything about it, only if they’re delivered to your doorstep.

So here’s the second thing that happened.

Yesterday was coming out day, and a sort of friend-of-a-friend posted their story on facebook. I read it this morning upon waking up.

She mentioned her living situation and how she was living with other women who promised that they would help her, which is, in her words, “a huge red flag”. She says things settled into a routine, and eventually the big problem that she needed help with fell to the wayside in the wake of all of the smaller, but more prolific things: “focused on other fires, both making and putting them out.” She talks about the time she wasted living with these women and how she was “on the edge again”. She trusted people she loved and that loved her to help her, and they couldn’t. But then, after hitting a very low point, she had a breakthrough:

I did something I'm not sure I'd ever done before in my life: I took the initiative to help myself. I researched, found, and made an appointment with a therapist who specialized in this sort of thing. I worked through a tremendous amount of repression. I did mental exercises to actively re-wire my brain, and unlearn my unhealthy coping mechanisms. It was painful.

And then, she wrote this:

Maybe my point is that you can't entrust your journey (ugh, hate that term) to anyone else. You can't let other people tell you who you are or are not. No matter how much you love and trust someone, they cannot do the work for you. They can facilitate it, as [redacted] failed to do, but in the end, it's you... get help, get the best and most objective and impartial help you can, do not let yourself be held hostage by people or environments or your own fucking apathy which benefit from you being inert.

When someone you love offers you help, it's normal to want to take the help, and oftentimes you should. But sometimes, it's too much to give, or they have their own problems or motives, and the help is unreasonable to expect. Do not turn yourself over to someone. Deal with these things on your own terms. Define the terms by which you exist. I lost two fucking years of my life...because I believed that someone else could and would do it for me.

But at least I'm there now. You can get there, too.

I do not know how I can start this journey. I have been trying for ten years, but I have very little direction or resources. I’ve spent the last... god, I guess 8 years, just trying to keep my head above water. Basically since my second year of college, all I’ve really done is survive, and the only times I felt truly alive and like myself were within the rave scene. So I have been clinging to that, and it is a definitive part of me, because it helps me breathe. I don’t think it is “holding me back” because I am not heading anywhere. But I have spent so long gasping for air that I’m almost nauseous from taking a breath. Since I was really young I have cared about electronic music, somewhat in defiance of my live musician parents [drum machines have no soul], and going to thunderdome in a week (!!!) or so is like a pilgrimage to gabber mecca, but also a kind of zenith. 

where do i go from here? I’ve said I want to DJ just because parties dont play the music I want to hear, but within the last few years I have felt myself so plugged up and insecure that I don’t know what I want. I’m too old to be precocious and have lost some of my identity in that way because of it. Now that I’m getting older, I feel like I don’t have permission to be new at things. But I have been restrained by permission my whole life. I have earned money yet i’m not allowed to pay for things. I earned my driver’s license by myself yet i’m not allowed to leave my house. i am controlled by my mother’s desperation and neediness and guilt, and by my father’s disconnect and judgment. I am controlled by my siblings’ apathy and my friends’ disappointment in me. i am afraid of not being perfect because then my parents won’t want me, so i put off things that i even want to do and i fear messing up, fear not acquiescing, fear not providing something expected of me, because i will be hurt.

but ultimately i am constrained by my own fears, my fear of pain. i am hurt by the thought that my parents don’t love me and that, to them, i just exist when convenient also, only when they can brag about me, only when they need something done. “I’m worried you don’t get out enough,” my mom says, but all she can offer are words because her heart is closed. she loves by worrying, by stifling, by pity. and i dont want to continue that. i dont want my love to be just good intentions. i want it to be good actions. love, love is a verb.

“I took the initiative to help myself. ... It was painful.”

There is a lot of red tape between my life and my parents’ control. and sometimes doing any action is so exhausting that I cannot do anything for the rest of the day. But I don’t want to be Pockets, waiting for the people who control me to start loving me actively, to have faith in their control benefiting me somehow. I’ve done it before by getting my license by myself. It was slow, and agonizing, and incredibly difficult and drawn-out, but I have it, and it’s mine, and my mom “felt bad”, but I can’t care. Now it’s just a matter of literally getting out the door, without the inquisition, without the mire of their guilt. I am genuinely starving, living on bread and half-expired milk and soda, because I am tired of making my mom cry by asking her to buy things, or coming home with things that, if I had only asked, she would have gotten for me.

I am not asking anymore. I am just going to go get things myself. It will make her cry. She will cry that she is “obsolete”, and that she has “no purpose”, and that she “lives for her kids”, and it will be painful. Like Pockets, I have wasted over ten years of my life banking in good intentions, on the trust that people who love me will help me. Or the trust that even people who are paid to help me will help me. 

"Do not turn yourself over to someone. Deal with these things on your own terms. Define the terms by which you exist."

Asexuality is a term that has helped. It gave me more agency in my verbs, of making a command decision about how I approach sexuality, whereas before I was giving myself, in every imaginable interpretation of the phrase, over to someone else. It hurts that I have to fight so much, that I must fight constantly for personhood, even from those who claim they would do anything to give it to me, even from those who physically did give me personhood. 

For my entire life I have thought my bloodline cursed. I have lived beneath the shadow of my father's greatest failure. I hated him for what he had done. I hated him for the burden he left me. But now... You have shown me truths that I would have never known. You and your allies have gifted me with something that cannot bear a price: Redemption. Thrall, redeemer of the Mag'har, you honor me as none ever have... On this day, a great burden has been lifted from my chest. My heart swells with pride. And for the first time, I can proudly proclaim who I am. I can finally unleash the fury in my heart. 

As long as I know what I stand for, even if I don’t know what I want or how to get it, I can get there. Because I’ve done it before.

When the bread was finished, the tired little red hen asked her friends, “Who will help me eat the bread?” “I will,” barked the lazy dog. “I will,” purred the sleepy cat. “I will,” quacked the noisy yellow duck. “No!” said the little red hen. “I will.” And the little red hen ate the bread all by herself.

Not that I even have my first tattoo yet, but if I ever get a second one, it should be a little red hen on my wrist. It can be my personal shorthand for “take it easy, but take it”.