#fun fact: writing it down is organizing it in my brain paradoxically

[riftwalker-limbro]

god i think i'm gonna write (my version of) the new strange tonight after i finish my uni work - there are simply too many brainworms going on at once. this is untenable.

i'm gonna let them out a little here i think.

fair warning, after writing out what i wanted to, it includes spoilers for the whole outline i've got so far. and they're extensive. but if you, like me, believe in the enjoyment of the story regardless of if you know the outcome or not, feel free to go read

so imo ordis is a bit prone to hero-worship, right? he hears about simaris being this great, knowledge-driven guy, and he goes full heart eyes immediately.

in my opinion the same happens with the operator - ordis is obviously told "this is the operator. you love them" and he takes this assignment incredibly seriously. the operator is perfect, of course the operator would want a perfect cephalon as well (and the canon operator never does contradict him, do they?) to serve them, and the operator is so very powerful, so very strong.

i'm gonna show my cards here, so perhaps someone reading this might see what i'm trying to do and get as excited about it as i am (get inflicted with my brainworms *throws a handful at you*)

the "outline" i've been talking about is structured in five chapters, what you'll also see in my writing masterpost as i fill it out more - and the chapters are very deliberately/explicitly structured/paced to represent stages in the ordis&operator friendship

Awakening: will be finished up with the new strange - setting up the basic things, the scene, for the rest of the everything. things are as close to canon as they'll ever be, here.

Resurfacing: starts off with the second dream, which will fuck up (edit: tumblr ate everything after this point in this bulletpoint so i'm going to rewrite it) -which will fuck up the way that kelth has been existing so far by splitting up their consciousness from excalibur, to whom they've been melded so far, actually. i've been trying to write kelth/calibur in Awakening as kind of having two minds in one, except Kelth is the main one and excalibur provides some supporting characteristics - kelth is the main brain, the main initiative, behind everything, and excalibur brings the methodicality to get everything done, the calmness in the storm. he's the kid who grew up in a dojo stereotype

Disillusionment: the illusion of the friendship honeymoon period starts to shatter. ordis realizes that the operator is not infallible - far from, actually (i'm thinking kelth has the initiative to get things going, but excalibur previously contributed the focus to see them through. he's still there and helps however he can, obv, but kelth's not in active transference with him all the time) because they're not quite... as brave as they were before they remembered everything, and realized the scope of their sitaution in more detail. the other direction of the "honeymoon period" is also broken - kelth starts discovering ordis' fragments. basically, at the end of this chapter, everyone should be a fucking mess.

Mending: this is the chapter where the initial idea happened - ordis & kelth do the limbo theorem quest (see the name of this whole damn blog lmao.) and there are so many angsty feelingsy notes on this bulletpoint god i am looking forward to this. limbo's personality is already 70% ish worked out and i- god i can't fucking wait. what else what else - ah right, so yesterday i published the bit where operator-excalibur get a "strange pang" in their chest at ordis mentioning machine code? that's because kelth used to program little things on the zariman, mostly for entertainment! (i'm a software engineer and i love coding shit. i will inflict my hobby upon all of you) and so with this newly rediscovered knowledge kelth starts coding things to help them navigate the origin system etc (i have a stupidly elaborate warframe progress spread sheet. instead of writing a program to manage it like i've wanted to for months i'm writing about writing a program to manage it. help) and it speeds up collecting ordis' fragments a shit ton, and by the end of this chapter they should be all complete again - with, uh. consequences.

Bond: the final chapter lmao. and also pretty much the second seriously invasive brainworm i had about this whole universe. kelth asks about ordis' code, because See Glitches, and through some iteration (code versions, developing friendships, everything is getting iterated) they eventually discover some old code, that, when re-enabled, allow ordis to do transference with warframes as well. (i did post about this earlier!!!! ordis is at least as traumatized as everyone else on this fuckin ship!!!! he should get to join!!) (also it's old code that was hastily implemented at the start of the Old War by some orokin programmers, to figure out if they could use Cephalons to pilot the hella dangerous warframes, but it was all disabled and the project abandoned when they repurposed the zariman children for this purpose instead) (bonus info: my notes literally say "But then Excalibur emerges, with Ordis inside, who is barely QWOP’ing his way out of the fancy closet" and please just visualize that) and this is where so much fluff is gonna happen i've barely been able to think about it so far. they find rhino's blueprints in some corpus locked. they rebuild him. they put prime shit on most warframes. there's so many feelings.

god okay yeah i've tamed my brainworms. i'm gonna go back to work. i can't wait to get to the last one. it's gonna be so fucking juicy. haugh.

and, just as a note - i'm doing this for fun, i'm not looking for any kind of criticism, including constructive. my writing generally is super self-indulgent on the fluff and angst ends, and i'm very solidly & openly on the ace spectrum so do not expect romance. if reading this made you feel any feelings (that are not criticisms) i will love to hear about them in my ask box. come yell at me - about my shit, about your shit, anything. >:)

[therenlover]

Would The Danny Bunch Survive A Holiday With My Family?

A/n: In the wake of recent life garbage, I have neglected to write a whole fic, and I’m sorry. In the interim, please enjoy this writing exercise I have put together in the hopes of nailing some characters I haven’t written for in the past in time for a larger project I’m working on! Cheers!

Characters: Laszlo Kreizler, Alex Kerner, Niki Lauda, Andrea Marowski, Ernst Schmidt, and Helmut Zemo

Rating: T

Warnings: Swearing, Mentions of Mild Misogyny, Mentions of Alcohol/Alcoholism, Mentions of Mental Illness, Non-Graphic Mentions of Death, Minor Spoilers for The Alienist Season One, Minor Spoilers for Goodbye, Lenin!, Spoilers for Rush (2013), Minor Spoilers for The Cloverfield Paradox maybe??? I haven’t actually seen the whole movie, blame Wikipedia if things are wrong. 

Laszlo Kreizler

NO

As the first of all of the Dannys to be put through the ringer, Laszlo Kreizler unfortunately would not survive a holiday with my family.

First of all, this man does not like massive huggy kissy crowds, so he’d already be off his game the second he walked into the packed house. That’s not why he’d die though, surprisingly.  

His downfall would be his status as an Alienist. 

There is simply so much mental illness and childhood trauma present at my family holidays that he would combust within 15 minutes of sitting in a room with all of my relatives.

Even if he were to somehow make it past the introductory phase, my family is nosey as hell, so they’d be grilling him about his arm and his own childhood trauma within the first hour. 

Laszlo, for all of his strength, simply wouldn’t be able to withstand it.

His death wouldn’t come from the initial combustion though. No, it’s not that simple. 

Knowing Laszlo, once he had combusted and entirely lost his composure the first time, he would become extremely intrigued about the interconnected nature of everyones issues with each other and he would start asking questions. 

That’s where the problems would begin. 

Because it’s one thing if my drunk great aunt starts badmouthing her sister at the table for abandoning her 90 year old mother for a lake house with her new boyfriend. That’s fine. 

But when Laszlo hops in and starts picking apart the mommy issues and underlying reasons for their decades long sibling rivalry? 

Oh it would be over for him. 

The yelling would never end. 

And, I have no doubt that Laszlo would start to psychoanalyze whoever started to yell at him, which would only lead to more yelling. 

In the end, someone would throw a probably full and probably fresh out of the oven casserole dish at his head and he’d be unable to defend himself because of his weak arm. 

We’d have to cart him out in a wheelchair and even if he were to technically survive, he’d never come back. 

Therefor, Laszlo Kreizler would fall victim to my family and die before we even got to dessert. 

Alex Kerner

YES

Ah, little baby Alex! A great contender here for holiday survival.

He seems relatively young in comparison to most of the Dannys on this list, though I don’t actually know how old he’s supposed to be. 

Based on his relative youth, he would automatically get points with the fam for not seeming like a creep or sugar daddy. Instead, he could be just about any dude I brought home from college. 

His skillset as a semi-skilled laborer would also earn him some points, seeing as several members of the family are in similar professions.

Alex might get lost in some of the more complex conversations about the local organic scene or the fine details of running a fine art gallery, but he would fit right in with the majority of the younger members of the family, smiling and nodding his way through the conversation. 

His enthusiasm and optimism would brighten the room and leave everyone excited to see him around again. 

There’s also the semi-small detail of him caring for his mother, which would earn sympathy from the older members of the family as they are in charge of caring for my deaf, blind great grandmother. 

Now, all of these aspects have already set Alex up for a successful survival of a holiday dinner with my family, but the real secret weapon he has up his sleeve is what really cements him in place as a survivor. 

What is his secret weapon, you may ask?

Lies.

Alex Kerner is really, really good at lying, and is even better at figuring out increasingly convoluted ways to keep his lies straight. 

If he managed to hide to fuckin’ Berlin Wall coming down from his mother for as long as he did, he could keep a couple of white lies up for appearances if he was asked any potentially embarrassing or weird questions that would make him look bad. 

He could also lie about enjoying my great aunt’s cooking, which is a vital skill for holiday survival in my family. 

Therefor, at the end of the day, Alex Kerner would not only survive a holiday with my family, but he’d probably enjoy it and get invited back for every subsequent holiday he could possibly attend. 

Niki Lauda

NO

Niki is another Danny that falls very firmly into the category of characters that would absolutely not survive a holiday with my family, for many, many reasons. 

First of all, just like Laszlo, Niki is not huge on going to big huggy kissy parties. 

Both adults and children would be all over him the second he walked in the door, which would probably make Niki get very uncomfortable and cagey. 

Little does he know at that point that people aren’t just all over you when you get in the door. 

No, no, no; from the moment you show up to the moment you leave, if you’re at a holiday with my family you are being basically accosted with questions and hugs and conversations that get weirdly personal. 

It doesn’t help that the whole entire house is packed and there are eyes on you at every moment, so he wouldn’t even be able to sneak in a break for air or a cigarette. 

If my own mother can’t sneak out for a smoke when she’s been going to these events her whole life, the new guy who’s still being vetted by the family sure as hell won’t be able to either.

Needless to say, Niki would start to get really, really tired of it all in an hour tops. I’ll give him until dinner at most. 

That’s where things would start getting really sticky.

See, a lovely little fact about the Niki Lauda that lives in my brain, as portrayed by Daniel Bruhl in Rush (2013), is that he’s just a little bit misogynistic. No more than would be period typical, but a little misogynistic.

Another fun little important thing to note is that my family is entirely matriarchal in nature. 

There are only 4 reoccurring male guests at family holidays out of about 20 to 25 guests at each event; My great aunt’s husband of many, many years, the two male siblings my mother has that live in the area, and the young son of one of those siblings. 

Men, specifically boyfriends, simply do not last in my family. They are considered pretty disposable and easily banned from family events after breakups or small mishaps. 

So, not only would Niki not have any other manly men there to chat about sports with over a scotch and a cigarette, he would be surrounded by so much estrogen that he would definitely struggle with his inner asshole even more than usual. 

In fact, we never have sports on, even on Thanksgiving. Poor Niki would be stuck hearing conversations about artisanal candlemakers and how to hand felt a woodland elf puppet.

Back to his downfall, the second he made a slightly sketchy joke about women in the kitchen at the dinner table to my great uncle, his fate would be sealed.

If you thought the yelling at Laszlo would have been bad, this yelling would be ten times worse, because he would be surrounded by like 20 very angry, very defensive, and very strong women waiting to beat the shit out of him and I would not be any help. 

He dug the hole, so he can climb out of it. 

In the end, his death would come when he tried to light a cigarette and calm himself down at the dinner table while trying to rescind his earlier statement, because smoking inside around all the precious textile art? Thats a big no no. 

My great aunt would grab the lighter right out of his hand, light up whatever cocktail she had at the moment, and throw it all directly into Niki’s face.

It would be like crashing his car all over again, only this time he would be surrounded by people who would rather he burn than try to get him out of the situation. 

Moral of the story, Niki would die within the first few hours of a holiday with my family because he made an asshole comment to a room full of women who don’t put up with that shit. Don’t be like Niki, even if you think you won’t get killed for it. 

Andrea Marowski

YES

Andrea is pretty much the polar opposite of Niki here, and I love him for it. 

He is very soft, very kind, very pure, and would never dare to say something rude at the dinner table like a certain racer we all know.

He couldn’t even say something rude if he tried to, because he probably wouldn’t have the English in his vocabulary to say the things he wanted to say even if he intended to say them out loud. 

But let’s be honest here, Andrea would never. 

Even with his limited English, Andrea would appreciate being surrounded by a whole bunch of people who think he’s the sweetest little thing since the invention of cake. 

My great grandmother, despite being almost entirely blind and deaf, would say he looked darling and he would immediately be a member of the family from the moment he stuttered out his thanks. 

Andrea, like Alex, is also relatively young, so he would get points for not being old enough to be my father. 

I feel like, because Andrea was shown living happily in a tiny village by the ocean with two old ladies, he would have an appreciation for craft, so he wouldn’t mind sitting quietly as my great aunt pawns off a handmade blanket from my great grandmother to him. 

He would also happily sit with the younger children and do whatever craft or simple game one of my aunts brought for them that time. 

The cherry on top with Andrea is his skill with the violin. 

My family is one that appreciates fine art a lot, but more than anything we appreciate music. 

I wouldn’t say that any of us are anywhere close to Andrea’s proficiency, but we definitely aren’t terrible, and we all can appreciate the effort, practice, and talent that goes into getting truly good on an instrument like Andrea is on his violin. 

He would be encouraged to play, of course, and he would happily oblige. 

If he felt comfortable enough, I could even see my great uncle grabbing his guitar, my cousin sitting at the piano, and my sister bringing out her own violin to do a little quartet with some simple song they knew as everybody else sang along. 

By the end of the holiday evening, once dinner was served and people were heading to the cars, Andrea would definitely be considered a member of the family. 

Needless to say, he’d survive and pass their tests with better than flying colors, even despite the language barrier. 

Ernst Schmidt

NO

Now, Ernst was probably the most difficult one on this entire list to put into the living or dying category. In the end, though, there were a few things that couldn’t be overlooked that send him into bad territory. 

To be fair, though, he would last the longest out of everyone who would die tragically at one of my family’s holiday gatherings. 

He, like the past two victims, would not be exactly suited for the mushy crowding that’s inevitable when it comes to my family. 

That being said, I think he would deal with it a little bit better than the other two did and would make polite conversation with the family when he could. 

The fact that he was trapped in a packed house filled with drunk people who have several generations worth of beef with each other, though, would start to get him eventually. 

If we consider all of the shit that happened while he was in space to be canonical minus, you know, the earth getting really fucked up, he would probably start to go a little bit nuts while packed together with that many passive aggressive people.

The second someone burst into tears on the way to the bathroom he would start to lose his shit. 

Still, I think Schmidt would probably be fine-ish until dessert was served, because that’s about the time where all the adults are absurdly drunk, so insanity ensues. 

They would start poking at him about his credentials and experiences as a physicist. 

He would answer their questions at first, but, unfortunately for him, the questions would turn more and more personal and uncomfortable as time went on. 

Did he ever still think about what happened up in space? Did he blame himself for not getting things to work correctly? How much did he miss his old world and old life? Did he ever have nightmares about what he saw? How much did it hurt to get shot?

They’d poke and poke and poke in their drunken state until poor Schmidt would snap at them, flying into a slight rage at their insistent probing. 

From there, he would be swiftly asked to leave and then “accidentally” run over while calling an Uber to take him to wherever he’s staying as my drunk great aunt tries to back out of the driveway to drive down the block to her house. 

In the end, Schmidt and his wit would be really close to surviving a holiday with my family , but he would, unfortunately, let his anger get the best of him, and it would be the last thing he ever did. Literally. 

Helmut Zemo

YES, BUT ONLY BARELY

Okay, so my earlier comment about Ernst being the most difficult out of everyone was incorrect. Zemo was, by far, the hardest to put into one category or the other. 

His wit and charm won out in the end, though, and I determined that he would survive one single holiday with my family. 

If he ever came back for a second he definitely wouldn’t make it, but he would succeed in living past the first one. 

Helmut’s problems start, surprisingly, not with the fact that he is a criminal. In fact that doesn’t even cause any problems for him. 

No, instead they start with the fact that he is 43.

I am 99% sure that my mother is 43, and I know for a definite fact that he’s older than one of my uncles who would be present. I, at the time of writing this, am 18. 

Needless to say, literally everyone would be massively suspicious of him and his intentions the second he walked through the door. The amount of money in his bank account definitely wouldn’t help in this situation either. 

The family would warm up to him eventually, though, because if there’s one thing Helmut is good at besides killing people, it’s making people like him even if they absolutely shouldn’t. 

With his expansive knowledge of what feels like literally everything rich and niche, he would slowly win over the older members of the family. Who knew the strange old man Jac brought home was so well versed in the American pottery scene, or that he could name specific jewelry artists from across the world that my family had done business with for years?

My family definitely wouldn’t. At least, not at first. 

Oh how they’d learn, though. 

Another nice thing about Zemo that would allow him to survive is his aggressive politeness.

No matter how many weird glances or dirty looks he got over the course of dinner, he would simply continue to be the best version of himself in the hopes of impressing everyone. 

He would even pretend to enjoy my great aunt’s cooking and get himself seconds, because I’m sure it would be easier to scarf down than whatever he and his EKO Scorpion squad had to eat while serving in the Sokovian special forces. 

On the tail end of reasons he would be accepted, Helmut Zemo drinks alcohol like it’s water, so he would fit right in drinking white wine and cocktails through the night with the rest of the adults. 

((I think he’d totally tease me about not being able to drink with him, but that’s a story for another time. Anyways...))

His slight downfall would come from something entirely uncontrollable by him or anybody else. 

And that something would be my flirty aunt. 

I love my aunt. She’s wonderful in her own special way. 

That being said, I know if a hot Sokovian baron with a nice smile and a fat pocketbook showed up to one of out holidays, even if he was introduced as my partner, she would be going for the kill all night long. 

This would make Helmut more and more uncomfortable as she got more and more drunk, because lets face it, he’s probably not very comfortable with being touched by near-strangers anyways, and being touched by a drunk member of his partners family who is very obviously coming on to him? 

That’s even more difficult to deal with. 

That being said, Helmut is a man who has been shown to be extremely in control of his emotions. 

He would swallow down whatever awkwardness he felt, make it to the end of the night, and, once he had escaped her clutches, he would politely say that he was never going back to another holiday function with my family again, though he would be happy to facilitate me still attending them. 

So, in the end, Helmut Zemo would survive one holiday with his sheer stubborn politeness alone. 

I will say that his patience would absolutely wear thin if he attended a couple more holidays and he would eventually die of a stress induced heart attack after being unable to politely decline my aunt’s advances. 

For now, though, he’s safe.

[sagemoderocklee]

Ooh, directors commentary on TAOL?? I know it's an epic so maybe just on the chapter where Lee and Gaara are traveling in Jade Country :3

sorry for letting this sit in my ask box for a couple days. i got kinda sidetracked and then had to go back to work today, which is not a fun time tbh but the evils of capitalism and so on....

anyways, im thrilled you asked for this particular part of TAoL because I absolutely loved that chapter (x) and put a lot of work into it between building up the culture of Gyokukakushin and making sure all the Arabic and Chinese I used was legit (which is partly why it took like 4 months to write). plus the chapter has a lot of great GaaLee moments that make me really happy.

one of my biggest downfalls as a writer is how long it takes me to actually finish anything. as i think most people who follow my writing know, i tend to prefer lengthier stories with lots of heavy politics, and that tends to mean that the build up of romance takes a while... which is again how i like it. i prefer a slow burn--a proper slow burn, not these 2k fics tagged slow burn. i mean, 100k into the story and the most you’ve got is an accidental hand brushing another and some intense eye contact... which admittedly TAoL has given more than just a little bit of physical contact and intense staring, but my point is that when i say slow burn i mean S L O W

anyways, onto the actual director’s commentary

So, Jade Province--as it’s not a country in itself, but a province within Wind Country--is a sprawling section of the south-east portion of Wind. I started building Jade Province and its capitol, Gyokukakushin sometime before I started on Ch10 of TAoL, but it was all a very loose idea. I’d initially conceptualized some things about it for the one shot I wrote, Keepsakes, because I’d been doing some background work on the Kazekage lineage and the culture surrounding the Kazekage family--such as arranged marriages, treaties, etc.

My idea is that Karura and Yashamaru are actually from Gyokukakushin. They would have been the children of a person in the political sphere within the capitol, and the marriage between Karura and Rasa would have been arranged early on and she would have been sent to Suna as a pre-teen or teen so that she would feel that Suna was home. I imagine she and Rasa would have married sometime when she was between 18-20. This was the main reason Rasa was able to take on the roll of Kazekage, based on the family tree I built up for the Kazekage line--he was the only one who was married and could produce heirs.

Not that any of this ever comes up during TAoL. In fact, Gaara doesn’t even realize that in going to Gyokukakushin he’s actually visiting half of his ancestral home. However, there’s a lot of fun hints about his connection to Gyokukakushin if you recall the many mentions of the color the same shade as Gaara’s eyes in that chapter. This was a specific nod to his heritage, and something that the locals definitely would have been fascinated by because there’s lots of significance surrounding that particular color in the region. I also wanted to use the reference to his eyes to highlight Lee’s particular fascination with Gaara’s appearance, and especially the element of Gaara’s eyes and the many ways he looks at Lee.

The biggest challenge within this chapter, of course, was the fact that I was using languages I’m not familiar with and had to find a good place to gather resources. Thanks to @ghoste-catte I discovered that reddit (of all places) has a translation subreddit which I was able to use to help bring that aspect of the story to life in an organic and respectful way. My Japanese is rusty, but I have a much better grasp on it than I do Chinese or Arabic, and so I spent many, many, many, many, many..... many hours searching for resources, watching YT vidoes, at the bookstore--I even bought a small book on Arabic. In the end, the subreddit was way more helpful than anything else because it allowed me the chance to get more concrete explanations from native speakers, so I could understand exactly why something was said the way it was. Most of the phrases used in that chapter aren’t really Gaara saying anything special--things like “be quiet” or “stop”--which I usually alluded to with Lee racking his brain trying to drudge up the vocabulary Gaara has taught him.

However, there’s one line--which I hope people did not turn to google translate for--that makes me especially happy, and that line really would not have been possible without that subreddit. I think the best part about being able to successfully navigate the challenge of using other languages is creating the same confusion Lee feels for those readers who doesn’t know those languages, and for those who do, offering them a nice glimpse at what’s going on that Lee cannot grasp. It’s fun and really changes the experience for each reader.

Language is such a beautiful and intricate aspect of people and culture, and my biggest fear with approaching the use of Arabic and Chinese was not only saying the wrong thing, but being disrespectful. So it was an incredibly good experience, and I was incredibly lucky to receive the help I did!

Building up the tension between Gaara and Lee was something I’d really wanted to execute well, too. It’s not often I write stories where the romance doesn’t start from scratch. With TAoL, Lee needed to already be in love with Gaara, and that was a big stress for me because I’m constantly asking myself: is this earned? I think one of the biggest failings of fanfiction is that people don’t ask that question. You really have to ask if your romance is earned. If your character growth is earned. If a redemption arc is earned. And I constantly worry that I’m moving too quickly with romance in particular, especially for Gaara and Lee. I’m not big on putting them together without a lot of development, and I’m not big on established relationship fics (that aren’t sequels) for them either. I like the work it takes to get them together, I like the journey of getting them together. And I don’t like it to be easy.

But for me, TAoL is one of my best actualized works. I think Alliance really helped me build the skills I needed to execute a story like TAoL on so many levels--from the complicated political landscapes, to the cultures, to the relationships between each character. And so I do feel like Lee being in love with Gaara at this point in their lives makes sense, and does work despite the fact that we didn’t see him fall in love with Gaara during the course of this fic. There are subtle nods to his feelings for Gaara in the early chapters, but I didn’t go too hard at indicating those feelings until really the second Lee chapter, this chapter I’m talking about now. I think there were some hints in the first Lee chapter--the chapter where he broke Gaara out of prison and whisked him away from Suna--but I tried to keep those things to a minimum, partly to not over do it and ease people in to that, and partly because I wanted to keep the suspense alive surrounding the real purpose for Lee being in Suna.

So when they get to Gyokukakushin, it really gave me a much better chance at showcasing his feelings. There were moments prior to Gyokukakushin, but those were from Gaara’s PoV--like the moment within the destroyed village, Myoujou, where they’re hiding from the group of shinobi and Gaara’s trying desperately to get Lee to focus his chakra enough to mask it.

But the success of that particular moment is lost on Gaara because he doesn’t really know how Lee feels about him at that point in time, so his impact on Lee is entirely lost to him....not to mention he’s dealing with a lot of grief and trauma, so he hardly has the wherewithal to be paying attention to whether or not his rescuer is secretly in love with him.

One of my favorite tender moments is this one:

“Do you have a favorite word?” Lee asked, before a yawn interrupted him.

“In Indigosi? Or in general?”

“Both.”

Gaara glanced at Lee from the corner of his eye. “Affection,” he murmured, almost as though he were afraid to admit it. “In Indigosi...” Gaara was silent, his gaze shifting away from Lee to the window. A warmth spread across his brown skin, a blush rising on his high cheekbones. “Rohi.”

He looked down at Lee, something bright behind his eyes.

Heat burned Lee's face like an inferno. “What does that mean?”

Gaara looked away again, hiding from Lee in plain sight. “My soul." The words hung in the air with some other meaning, one that Lee could not decipher. Gaara would forever be a paradox, an ever expanding puzzle for Lee to piece together. He didn't ever want to figure him out completely, but he would never stop trying to get as close to epiphany as he could.

“That is beautiful,” Lee told him as another yawn overtook him.

“I should let you sleep,” Gaara said, moving to get up.

Lee stopped him with an imploring hand against Gaara's forearm. “Stay? You did not finish telling me about your trip to Dusk Country.”

“You kept interrupting,” Gaara teased lightly, settling back into place.

Lee smiled up at him, ever so slightly cheeky. “I promise I will be quiet.”

“You're going to fall asleep,” Gaara corrected.

“Probably. It is very late.”

I love so many of the emotional scenes from this particular chapter, but I love how simple and sweet this moment is. There’s such a wealth of affection in small actions, and I really wanted to highlight that Lee and Gaara have grown closer during their time traveling from Myoujou to Gyokukakushin, and things that were born of necessity (like sleeping close together for warmth) are now things done because they want to. There’s comfort in the closeness of sitting next to one another, there’s something peaceful about Lee falling asleep while Gaara talks to him. It’s a nice moment, less high emotion and more quiet contentment, which I think is much needed after everything they’ve been through.

I think that my other favorite scene would be the scene on the beach, right after they’ve watched the sand artist and Gaara makes his model of Suna. That scene is a complicated affair for Lee because he’s both enjoying his time with Gaara and feeling guilty for enjoying that time together. And of course Gaara’s got a lot going on too, which Lee can only guess at.

One of the other things I really enjoyed about this chapter is the fact of Lee and Gaara being in disguise, and really the use of their aliases. I particularly like any excuse to get Gaara to call Lee “Ren”. I’m particularly in love with that stroke of genius regarding Lee’s alias, and there’s a certain emotion, a certain connection that I really hope I could convey with how they use each other’s aliases.

I could probably talk about this chapter forever, but unfortunately there’s also thins I don’t want to say at the risk of spoiling future chapters since this is still a WIP (and probably will be for a while longer, though we’re almost halfway there! Two more chapters to the halfway mark!) Thank you so much for sending this particular ask anon! I had fun chatting about it and I hope you enjoyed reading my comments! 

[braindamageforbeginners]

Campbell’s “The Highwayman”

So. I'm starting treatment tomorrow. Which means this might be my very last post. Sort of.I should point out that, although I'm afraid of dying (that's hardly unique), that's never been my chief fear. Don't get me wrong, I'm very scared of that possibility (and it's still one of the likelier options), but, far and away, the greater fear has always been that I'll suffer some sort of severe, permanent brain damage resulting in noticeable neurocognitive defects. Or, to make that less cerebral (as, indeed, my oncologists will make me - literally), I'm worried that treatment will make me dumber. Or mess up my memory abilities. Or steal my scientific literacy. Or steal my literacy. Or just make me less... well, me. I'm not great at being myself; I think I'd be hilariously bad at being someone else.

I've written elsewhere about how neat and strange individuality is - just on a biological and biochemical level (I’ll be repeating and/or paraphrasing some stuff I’ve written elsewhere, so forgive me if you’ve read this). To help me out this time (because I no longer have enough time to be direct), I thought I'd use Zeno's Paradox. Zeno was an ancient philosopher, who came up with the following hypothetical, and I've updated it for the modern reader (you're welcome). Let's put LeBron James in a race against a tortoise; however, that's hardly fair, so we'll give the tortoise a 20 ft (6 m, to my communist friends) head-start. LeBron will never even reach the tortoise, because, before he can overtake the tortoise, he has to cross half of those 20 feet (10 feet); before he gets there, he has to cross half of 10 feet (5 feet), and so on. The numbers get ridiculously small, but you get the idea - you have to cross infinity to get anywhere (which is also what it feels like convincing the insurance company to pay for radiation treatment, but that’s a different topic for a different time). The fact that people walk didn’t deter or invalidate Zeno’s hypothesis (philosophy, while fascinating, has very little practical application); then, many centuries later, in one of those moments I live for, science and math overtook philosophy and invalidated it. In this case, it came in the form of calculus, which takes all those infinite little fractions and adds them together to get a real, usable number (unlike philosophy, mathematics is enormously helpful, albeit sometimes in highly specific situations). The biological punchline of all this is that you are the end-product of countless interactions, collisions, mistakes, and encounters, from the sub-atomic level to the moon’s gravitational force on Earth (the tides are important for life on this planet). Human beings are very similar; it takes a lifetime of small, slight, random encounters, interactions, and collisions to make you who you are; perfectly formed by countless infinitesimal incidents that we can’t recreate.

The second part of this concept requires a little help from you, dear reader (I know, homework; I’m sure there are a few of you would switch places with me to get out of it)(also, if that swap were possible, I guarantee you that I would take it, no questions asked). Make a list of things that make you who you are - in excruciating detail, and including the most minute and irrelevant details; from the stuff that barely counts (”has a weird recurring dream about Godzilla”)(I can’t be the only person that happens to) to the big stuff (”loves spouse/kids/dog”). To connect this to Zeno; this is an endlessly long list. You want to write a lot of assorted details (”fully remembers details from Thanksgiving 2010″) and random quirks. Now, you’re going to hand that list to a random stranger and ask them to cross off five items on this list; those things are no longer a part of you. According to Zeno (and my oncologists), those things probably aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, and you will still be you. But will you, really? Will you know who you are? Will you know what’s missing from that list? And can you get it back, or is it gone forever, or is it not worth it to recover what’s missing? And when do you stop being “you?” Obviously, there are a few big-ticket items that would permanently - and terribly - alter you (see that “loves spouse/kids/dog” one), but, if you look at that list, it’s not a dozen major things that define you, it’s the countless, tiny, unimportant things (I realize there’s some overlap with the Theseus’ Ship, but I like math). Again, according to Zeno and my oncologists, these probably aren’t worth fretting over, but it’s not them on the chopping block.

The concept that we’re working toward is a working understanding/empathy of what it’s like to live with brain damage/neurocognitive impairment/neurodegenerative disease, so I’ll be a little more blunt. Imagine a life in which you are unable to remember where you put your keys, phone, and wallet. The minute you set them down, bam, they’re gone from your mind, even if you leave them in the exact same place you always leave them. If you want to leave the house, you have to physically look for them until you find these items. You’ll still experience the same aggravation and frustration as anyone else, the only difference is, you’re usually unaware that there was a time - very recently - when this wasn’t a real problem. Those are the good days - the ones when you’re smart enough to observe these sorts of deficits. Other days - and these constitute at least 75% of your time - are when you don’t have that frame of reference; you’re just aggravated and upset that leaving the house now takes 45 extra minutes. And tired. And, a philosophical question that I can answer; what’s worse than being dumb? Being not-quite smart enough. Imagine a world where you’re intelligent enough to be ambitious - but not intelligent enough to accomplish those ambitions. That’s the fun little parting gift from neurosurgery #1. This is why I’m get a little paranoid whenever a clinician admits that there will be some brain damage - it’s like statisticians using the word “dismal,” it’s got to be really bad if they’re going to warn you about it prior to starting treatment. And there are still no guarantees that this will work, or even that it’ll buy me anything more than a few months, and that’s just a few months of my heart beating. What if this is as good as I will ever feel, for the rest of my life? I’m not feeling great right now, but the thought that this is as good as it gets is, to say the least, exceptionally unpleasant (on Thursday, in the final pre-serum screening, I was given three words to remember - “truck,” “apple,” and “blue” - and I couldn’t remember them at the end of a ten-minute interview. Not exactly hopeful, since I haven’t even started treatment, but the stress and lack of sleep is definitely a factor to consider). And that’s definitely not going to get better in the near future, unless my doctors start prescribing me more powerful drugs (with my luck, I come down with a horrible disease the minute the medical establishment starts getting paranoid about opiate precriptions)(but, hey, thinking positively, marijuana will be legal here in a few weeks)(I mean, uh, drugs are bad and you should never take them, kids)(unless they’re nearly-fatal drugs prescribed by a licensed doctor to, uh, kill very specific pieces of you)(yes, that’s how this medieval cancer treatment monkey-business works).

I’ve also thought a lot about the stages of grief, like you do when you’re mostly just waiting to either die or the treatment to work (and this sort of horrible uncertainty is - far and away - the most unpleasant emotional situation I’ve ever experienced), however, no one seems to have informed my limbic system, because I’m hitting all five of those simultaneously. Sort of, I’m still stuck in “bargaining,” I still can’t escape the idea that, maybe, with the right treatment and doctors, I’ll make it past this one - of course, the basic mathematic probability that I’ll almost certainly die within the next decade hasn’t really sunk in, but that’s also because I’m so exhausted and scared all the time that basic planning beyond a 72-hour window is completely beyond me (this might be some sort of self-preservation thing).

This is not to say that I’m automatically opposed to change, but the potential for dramatic and immediate neurocognitive change is dangerously high. Imagine the sorts of personality and emotional changes that occur just due to hormones, or antidepressants, or other drugs, and you can imagine the changes that can occur by dramatically altering my anatomy. Sort of; this is more like slowly stripping out pieces of me, and potentially who I am. Which is unpleasant enough, but, because I’m still tumbling down the rabbit hole, I recently learned something just as problematic: you only get one radiotherapy course per organ per lifetime. Which means I am pretty much all in on this gamble, and if this disease ever returns (spoilers; this is the second time I’ve come developed a malignant (or potentially malignant) glioma), thanks for playing. I will probably, thanks to my lab rat connections, be in line for whatever crazy new, experimental treatments that science can concoct, which is a good thing. But, how many AIDS patients died waiting for science to catch up to them? And, since we’re cutting funding for health insurance and medical research, is that realistically a good gamble? These things bother me in an abstract sense, but that 72-hour planning window is helpful in this situation.

This blog exists to painstakingly document my path so that the next person in my position might have an idea of what to do (or not to do), but, more importantly (to me, anyway), I’m doing this for the exact reason any human has ever done anything - from making the great pyramids to having children (although I realize the stated rationale at the time might be slightly different) - that there might be some small scrap of me that remains in the world, if the battle goes ill. It’s sort of like scribbling “Kilroy was here” in wet cement (and blog sites owned by Yahoo will last forever, right?). I’m not going to leave any grand legacy for the ages, unless everything goes much, much better than expected and, even then, I’m not likely to change the world (for all you future generations that might be reading this, your self-confidence decreases dramatically when faced with a grisly ending). This blog is also, if everything goes right, a baseline, a form of self-reflection for me to figure out a way to get back here, if everything goes well (again, even if everything goes flawlessly and better-than-expected, there are still going to be some neurocognitive changes). I don’t know who will be writing this thing in 24 hours, or in several weeks (major side-effects and problems are expected to start showing around Week #3), hopefully that guy won’t be too different from the person typing all this, and, if that’s the case, hopefully this will be some sort of guide to get back to normal (well, “normal” for me). And maybe someone else can get similar use out of this thing.

Obviously, there are going to be some days where I don’t feel like writing (if I go weeks without checking in, you can start to panic), or I’m too busy (if, God forbid, you develop cancer, you’ll spend many, many happy hours in the hospital), so I thought I’d just give a quick run-down, starting with height and weight (I realize those are mostly-irrelevant, and I won’t mention my height again, unless that changes). Hopefully, that won’t be too hard to keep up with over the coming weeks. HEIGHT: 6′ (183 cm) WEIGHT: about 210 lb (95-ish kilos) CONCENTRATION: Good, though I’m somewhat distracted; ability to start and focus on tasks is great, although completion isn’t always guaranteed (I still haven’t finished watching the latest episode of “Happy,” for example). Basic tasks are still pretty easy, but you don’t get many points for that outside of a psych researcher’s office. MEMORY: Not good, for me (I usually have close-to-eidetic memory), but still better than the average person’s. Still, using myself as a baseline, there’s been some noticeable-but-not-significant deterioration in that area, but, again, I’m not getting much sleep and I’m super-stressed. Still, I’m not forgetting the important stuff, yet. APPETITE: Good. I’m still eating as much as I usually do, which is a lot. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Good. I didn’t go to the gym today or yesterday, but since I went to the gym four or five times over the last week, I’m not going to beat myself up too much for it. SLEEP QUALITY: Nowhere near good, but much better than it was two weeks ago (but that’s not saying much, since I’ve gotten about 2-6 hours of sleep, on average, over the last month). Still, I’ve never slept very well (and I’m probably never going to sleep well again, not counting general anaesthesia), so it’s a little hard to gauge that. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Much, much, much better than it was this time a month ago, but my whole left side is still about 5-15% below-normal. I’m readily completing basic two-handed tasks, but I’m not going to be a concert pianist any time soon. Or in the next life, come to that (assuming there is a next life).

Tune in soon for the continuation of the reality-TV remake of “Flowers for Algernon.” And a very merry fuckin’ Christmas.