#ghost keeps running into him at shows and he recognises that self destruction all too well

[s0fter-sin]

metalhead ghost who’s been in moshpits since he was a kid and is now a veteran of the scene and the self appointed look out. he keeps an eye out for anyone falling or passing out, kicks the shit out of anyone crowd killing or putting their hands where they shouldn’t

and he’s been keeping an eye on the punk in the kilt since he saw him throw himself headfirst into the wall of death

he looks like the type to start shit - loud and aggressive as anyone else here but a punk doesn't end up at a metal show for no reason - but there's also something niggling at him that he's gonna end up getting himself hurt. and ghost can’t tell if he’s going to do it on purpose

if he does, ghost needs to know. he uses these places as an escape - the music, the violence, the community - always has and he knows all to well how easily an escape can curdle and become destructive. he’s seen too many people lost to the darker parts of the scene, almost lost himself to it; he doesn’t want it to happen to anyone else if he can help it

so when he sees the punk sweating his mohawk off, his movements becoming looser and uncoordinated, he has no issues with yanking him out of the pit and pulling him away from the crowd; pushing him up against the venue wall and ordering him to open his mouth

the glaze that falls over his eyes concerns him even as he obediently lets his mouth fall open. he was right; the punk’s severely dehydrated, tongue and gums far to pale and along with the look in his eyes, he half-thinks he’s about to drop

he reflexively tightens his hold on his jaw to keep him up and the punk shivers, a flush creeping up his neck. an almost confused arousal joins the haze in his eyes and ghost smirks beneath his mask

looks like metal shows aren’t the only thing the punk is new to

[rogue-durin-16]

THINGS NEVER GO AS PLANNED (Part II/VII)

"candy floss"

Summary: After Fred's death, George and Y/n lean on each other to carry on. This wasn't the most brilliant idea, though; George was pretty much in love with the girl, and Y/n— well, she had been dating Fred prior to the Battle of Hogwarts.

Pairing: George Weasley x Reader

Genre: angst

Tags:

Suggested by: @crispykittywitch

Things never go as planned: @sarcasticallywitty15 @beautyschoo1dropout @s1ut4georgeweasley @leovaldez37 @missmulti @weasleywh0r3s

Permanent taglist: @elia-the-bibliophile @randomparanoid @karlthecat15722 @thebutchersdaughtersblog

Warnings: grief, feels, brief mention of Fred x Reader ig?

A/N: I decided to name the parts bc why the fuck not so keep an eye on the titles 👀. This story is based off this convo and these headcanons. If you wanna be tagged in the next parts tell me, and enjoy <3

Prologue :the aftermath

Part I : sleepless nights

Part III: shock therapy

Part IV: wrong name

Part V: the perfect excuse

Part VI: the downfall

Part VII: apart

Epilogue: I still love you

Rogue-durin-16 masterlist

The moment the last group of customers decided it was time to call it a day and exited the shop, I left the till counter and grabbed my wand from my pocket, instantly turning the sign in the door so it could be read from outside 'closed'.

A sigh escaped my lips as I leaned against the multicolored wooden rail.

I was drained.

The shop helped our minds to get distracted and stray from the grief, yes, but it was also exhausting.

We had been subconsciously overworking ourselves to the point where it was borderline self-destructive.

It didn't help that I was throwing myself into comforting George, either. I could not be blamed for doing that, though; he was broken.

A part of me, the rational one, knew he would pick up the pieces and build himself up again, it would just take a lot of time.

There was another part of me, though, that depressed, drained part, that was beginning to think he would never heal by himself —maybe he wouldn't heal at all�� but still held onto the hope that, if I tried hard enough, I would be able to mend what had been broken in him.

A terrible idea, really, because I started to dismiss in its entirety my own miserable, damaged state.

And George, ever the caring, sensible one, would have noticed that; he would have made me realize I was not doing nearly as well as I thought, he would have talked some sense into me, but he wouldn't— he couldn't, because George was lost in an ocean of grief, trying so hard not to drown that he wasn't able to notice I was trying to aid him from my very own sinking boat.

It also seemed to be working; he was more animated, slept more soundly, and his smile was a bit brighter even —at least the one he had for me.

"Rough day?" My eyes, which I didn't know I had closed, fluttered open at George's voice.

"Very."

He walked to me with a tinge of guilt in his face. "You know we can switch places, right?" I had been working as the public face of the shop since we had reopened, and George had taken on the task of doing the paperwork and shippings instead, showing up from time to time to help me and to let people know there was still a Weasley running the business.

I had been the one to suggest this, since I knew George had compromised with reopening only because of me, and he was clearly not ready to put up a sociable, positive attitude for dozens of people every day.

"Nah, it's fine like this." I assured him with a reassuring smile.

He measured me with his eyes for a second; I couldn't really tell if he saw through me or not. "So I was preparing the today's shippings," he rocked a tiny purple basket I quickly recognised in front of me. "I found this in the back of the stockroom."

"Are those—?"

"Candy floss cupcakes, yes." A year and a half ago we had bought five baskets of candy floss cupcakes from Honeydukes per George's request in order to unsuccessfully try and implement them.

"Are they even edible anymore?" I couldn't help but laugh.

"I hope so?" He chuckled too, tearing the film covering the sweets. "Thought we might as well finish them."

My eyes travelled from the basket to him and viceversa before stating, "well I'm hungry so..."

"Same here." He was the first one to pull out a pastel colored cupcake, though he handed it to me. "Wanna get food poisoning together?" Laughing, I gave him a nod as he grabbed his own cupcake. "At the count of three?"

"One"

"Two"

"Three." We said in unison right before taking a bite of our respective madeleines.

I frowned at its surprisingly good flavour. "Am I delirious or are they actually edible?"

"Dunno," he shoved the rest of his cupcake into his mouth with a shrug. "maybe we're just starving."

"Go big or go home, I guess." I finished my cupcake before leaning on the basket to pick another one. My head snapped up with my brow quirked when I heard a soft chuckle. "What?"

"Nothing." George shook his head, motioning at the stairs. "Shall we sit down?" I followed his lead, sitting on the stairs and waiting for him, who had stepped towards the drinks aisle to grab a couple of juice bottles, to do the same.

We stayed there, eating and drinking in a comfortable silence until the basket was empty and our eyelids threatened to shut.

"I think we should head back to the flat." He spoke, leaving the half empty juice aside so he could stretch.

"I'm gonna learn how to cook." I stated, getting up. "We can't get by based on most likely expired sweets and whatever is in the Leaky Cauldron menu."

"Aight." He mimicked my actions, picking up the stuff we left on the stairs. "We will learn the basics tomorrow." He got behind me and began to gently push in the flat's direction. "But now we're gonna get some sleep, miss."

I would be lying if I said my heartbeat didn't pick up when his hands landed on my shoulder blades and made their way to rub both my arms reassuringly.

I would be lying if I denied I leaned back when he did that, letting myself get closer to his chest.

And I would definitely be lying if I said I didn't crave going back to my room so I could cuddle him all night.

One Week Later

"—right in the cauldron, love." I pointed at the cauldron besides me, giving a sweet smile to the kid in front of me, visibly going to be sick thanks to the free sample of Skiving Snackboxes.

"Y/n!" I spun around at the loud calling of my name above the shop's racket. I was able to discern a long, red mane flowing fast towards my position right on time for the owner to wrap her arms around me.

"Glad to see you too, Ginny." I laughed, trying not to lose balance due to her enthusiasm. "How come you're here?" I questioned, pulling away.

"We heard you were open." Harry walked up to me, appearing from behind the girl, "And thought we'd pay a visit to our friends, right?" Ginny nodded, looking around while Harry gave me a quick, yet comforting hug. "Where's George?"

I motioned up to the small office, redirecting the couple's eyes to the second floor. "Doing paperwork—AH!" I jolted when a pair of hands tickled my sides, my head snapping to see the towering ginger standing behind me. "Speaking of the devil."

"I thought I saw Gin through the window," George explained, his hands lingering on my waist for long enough to his sister to stare, before pulling Ginny into a tight hug. "And came down to check if she was distracting my employee."

"You got her all bored here, mate." Harry pointed out, a light joking tone in his voice.

"And you're the one supposed to help with that?" George rolled his eyes dramatically. "Pfft... What a world we live in." With the said, he gave the boy a side hug. I heard Harry murmur an 'We missed you' before they pulled away with a pat on the shoulder.

My gaze landed on the youngest Weasley, whose welled up eyes were trained on her older brother's half smile. I only averted my eyes and waited for her to discreetly wipe away the unspilled tears while Harry and George catched up.

By the letters she had sent me, I reckoned the last time she had been near George, he had been lifeless; seeing a glimpse of who was once one of the most cheerful, funny and charismatic people in her life, was probably poignant to Ginny.

I hadn't realized she had moved closer until I didn't hear her soft voice. "Thank you." I offered her a confused smile, though deep down I knew what she meant.

Two Days Later

George was having one of those days.

We both knew it was coming soon; it had to happen sooner rather than later, since he had been in a surprisingly good mood for almost a week. I suspected seeing Harry and Ginny had brought back the events of the Second of May.

I suggested to close the shop for the day, since he was unable to move out of bed; he refused to do so, but I convinced him to stay in the flat and rest —it was Tuesday, anyway; I wouldn't have to handle many customers.

Due to that, when I saw Hermione, Ron, Bill and Fleur entered the shop, it was understandable that I hadn't become the happiest person in the world.

I greeted them, there were hugs, kisses, and even a joke or two, and when Bill asked about George, I excused him without giving much detail.

They understood.

Fleur was the one to restart the conversation, lightening a bit before requesting a tour for the shop, since she had not yet been there.

It was when we reached the love potions that Hermione, using the fact that Fleur was very much interested in the product, held my hand and pulled me aside.

"So... how are you doing?" The frown in her face, the fact that she was whispering, the squeeze her hand gave mine, let me know she had read me the moment her eyes met mines.

I sighed with a shrug.

"You can tell me." Could I? "No one's asking you to put on a happy face, Y/n." The girl assured me, her eyes digging into mines. "It's not just George, we all lost—" she shook her head at her own words before correcting herself. "you lost him too."

I lost him too.

I bit my lower lip to stop it from quivering.

The memory of Fred's broken smile as his corpse laid on the stretcher, that memory that haunted my dreams, appeared vividly before my eyes.

My lips started to burn with the ghost of that kiss he gave me before we split up, him with Percy and me with George; it hadn't been meant to be a goodbye kiss. It was meant to be a good luck kiss.

I covered my mouth to muffle a sob, and Hermione's arms were quick to be wrapped around me, reassuringly rubbing my back.

GEORGE'S P. O. V.

I saw them entering from Y/n's balcony; I wasn't emotionally ready to face them all at the same time, but when I didn't see them exit, I figured Y/n hadn't been able to dismiss them.

I decided I owed to them all to bite the bullet, so I threw on a shirt and the first trousers I grabbed, cleaned up a bit and left the flat.

With a deep breath, I made it to the second floor and mentally prepared myself to go down to the first one.

As I began to climb down, though, I noticed Hermione and Y/n talking in private, closer than the others to the stairs.

I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but all my senses were automatically focused on Y/n whenever we were in the same room; she just stole me away from reality.

"You lost him too."

Hermione's words visibly triggered something on Y/n.

'Something', as if I didn't know what they had triggered, as if I didn't know what— who was on her mind.

I guess he was always on her mind, though.

What was left of my heart shattered in a million pieces when she broke down to tears —for several reasons—. "I miss him." She whispered in Hermione's shoulder. "I miss him so much."

If I had any tears left, I would have cried my eyes out right there. Had I been so selfish that I had disregarded how she was feeling? So blinded by the light and love and warmth she was constantly giving me that I had forgotten about her grief? Was I that bad of a person, that I would have rather live in the illusion that she had not lost the boy she was dating?

My mind told me I didn't want any of those questions answered.

"George!" As Ron yelled my name in surprise, Hermione and Y/n pulled away, the latter rubbing her eyes while both of my brothers jogged upstairs to hug me. "Ginny told us you're open—"

"But Y/n said you weren't feeling well." Bill finished, squeezing my shoulder. "We only stayed a little longer for Fleur to see the shop."

"Yeah, we'll come back tomorrow," Ron assured me. "So you can rest and..."

My brother's voice sounded further and further with each word; I felt myself drifting off, getting lost in my own mind and gravitating towards the same thought over and over.

She deserves better.

[armageddon-generation]

The C-Lister’s Club

(The Fall and Rise of Booster Gold)

AU where the major Justice League characters all sacrificed themselves saving the earth.

Only C-list heroes are left, who are only effective against major threats with government support. These heroes become unwitting propaganda figures

Booster Gold is the only one onboard with this (he’s finally getting the fame he’s always wanted)

Hero work essentially becomes a warped kind of reality TV show business

Booster’s publicists manipulate his naivety and vanity to get him to rat on heroes that start fighting against the system and doing ‘unscripted’ hero work

Eventually Booster becomes the new system’s figurehead, their equivalent of Superman (Finally! he thinks)

His publicists begin rewriting history so Booster is given credit for the old Justice League’s greatest achievements

The other heroes are given the option to get with the programme or retire. Blue Beetle retires and becomes a recluse in his mansion, Plastic Man becomes a bum because his criminal record stops him holding a steady job

All this time, without any other heroes to give him a reality check, Booster is in his happy bubble of luxury and celebrity, willingly unaware of the totalitarianism he is being used to create.

The government replaces his robot buddy with an audience tested new model, who is ridiculously chipper and doubles as Booster’s butler (which he loves)

They even create a parody of the Super Freinds cartoon with Booster as the lead character. There’s an awkward moment when he has to do publicity photo shoots with an actor dressed as Blue Beetle (whom he has been avoiding since his retirement)

He keeps chasing validation (awards, medals, licensing deals, public adoration) because he’s convinced they will finally make him happy. Finally make him feel heroic.

But they never do, and he slowly sinks into depression.

All this time the next generation of the Justice League (Damian Wayne, Jon Kent, Emiko Queen, Mar’i Grayson etc) have gone underground and are attempting to fight the system

They have to sacrifice their civilian identities and become full time ‘terrorists’ (like how people see Rorschach in Watchmen).

Booster starts to drift. On a whim he tracks down his ancestors in this time and finds a broken family of washouts and nobodies. They remind him too much of who he was before he travelled back in time from the future, and seem to confirm to him that all his fame is pointless and he will always be a loser

Booster’s life becomes a cycle of public appearances, increasingly rare (and fake) heroics and meaningless relationships he destroys to punish himself. Occasionally, just to twist the knife a little deeper, he’ll stalk his ancestors from afar (he has a government detail monitoring them at all times) and watches them fall apart

The government (who slowly confiscated all superhuman related substances when the League died) start adding an infusion of Poison Ivy’s mind control spores to government-approved food and drink they advertise with Booster’s face

Skip forward a few years and the new Justice League mounts an assault on Booster Gold’s penthouse, expecting to defeat him and force him to make a public address and denounce the totalitarian government

Instead they find an uncaring asshole with substance addictions and self destructive tendencies

Booster’s only ‘freind’ is his robot butler, but only because the robot is programmed to tell him exactly what he wants to hear

The government haven’t actually used Booster for hero work in months; they’ve begun using Brother Eye satalites (converted from old ARGUS satalites) to control random members of the population (using the additive in government approved foods), imbue them with powers and dress them up like Booster. This is a test run for widespread mind control

This infuriates the new League. Damian in particular, who has grown to dearly love his civilian life in its absence, starts hitting Booster, demanding he fight back. Damian hates Booster for forcing him to become the full-time terrorist (and perceived monster) the League of Assassins wanted him to be

Booster doesn’t fight back and the others have to pull Damian off him and flee: They’ve wasted months planning to take down a useless figurehead

Booster goes to see his ancestor family to punish himself, but accidentally ends up having a conversation with their youngest member, a curious ten year old girl (his great great about twenty other greats grandmother)

They end up pulling him into their house for dinner, and he realises he had them pegged wrong: the family are trying to pull themselves back together, and seem to genuinely care about each other

This experience (and the Justice League meeting) shakes Booster enough that he goes to visit Blue Beetle (whom he’s been avoiding talking to since he retired)

Booster has to break through BB’s advanced security, and the experience reminds him (unwillingly) of hero work

He still gets caught in a trap; BB doesn’t want to see him after what he did)

(Think of BB as like George Clooney’s character from Tomorrowland)

Booster is stubborn and they keep playing this game for days: getting through the grounds of BB’s mansion is like a huge hi-tech assault course

With each run of the course Booster gets closer BB’s front door, ignoring the constant orders to give up and go away- he is convinced that if he gets to the front door he will be able to mend their friendship

(Think of this like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow - repetition again and again, being creamed again and again)

When he eventually does get to the door Booster is angry and confused when BB still refuses to open up

Booster wants to apologise for what he did but BB says that’s not enough - Booster is caught up in his Hollywood fantasy, the real world doesn’t have clean endings like that. He has to live with the shitty thing he did. Actions speak louder than words

Booster still refuses to leave and sleeps on the porch, but eventually has to admit defeat and goes back home.

Booster tries talking to His ridiculously chipper robot butler, but for the first time actively realises how unfulfilling their conversations are

Instead goes off (in disguise) to private therapy. He acts like this should be a huge honour for the therapist. Who is his therapist? None other than Carrie Kelly, Damian Wayne’s old therapist

Carrie takes none of Booster’s bullshit and initially he storms out of their sessions

Unfortunately for Booster, all the other therapists are too intimidated by his connections to the government to be effective at their jobs - their conversation is just as bad as the robot butler’s

So he and Carrie are stuck with each other. They don’t get on, and Booster mostly tries to hide weakness with ego and humour

Slowly, Carrie begins to challenge his perceptions of the world and himself. She is secretly still a rebel and reports about Booster to the new Justice League

The League ignore this (Booster is a nobody and they are concerned with the government’s new mind controlling satalites)

Booster’s new routine becomes filled with therapy and visiting the family of his ancestors

Listening to his stories as he starts to open up and be more honest with her, Carrie has the idea for Booster to write a memoir that tells the truth about himself and his life, thereby exposing the lies the government are telling the world

Carrie becomes Booster’s ghost writer and making the book forces Booster to re-evaluate himself

His family is viewed differently in comparison to the ancestors he is now good friends with - he begins to appreciate the simple life he had before he traveled back in time

He begins to recognise that exterior validation won’t make him happy, though he still has a hang up over trying to convince Carrie that he was an innocent victim, and deep down he’s a good person

Comes back to what BB told him about actions outweighing words. Booster’s conscience sounds like BB’s voice in his head, but over the course of his therapy the voice begins to sound like Carrie

Carrie is like no-one he’s talked to in years. A rebellious punk who genuinely cares about people, doesn’t give a shit about her appearance and has a scathing intelligent wit the plastic idiots he’s used to can’t touch

Between her friendship and his adopted family (whom he now views as a chance to undo his mistakes with his real family, and to whom he has become a zany uncle figure, showing how his feel-good Hollywood mentality hasn’t disappeared) Booster is the happiest he’s been for years ...

... so of course he fucks it all up. Because Carrie is the only person who really understands Booster, he becomes reliant on her. He mistakes that reliance for attraction and makes a move on her

Carrie (of course) has none of this and kicks Booster out of her office. This is the first time Booster has been refused something he truly wanted in years. He also hasn’t cared about something this much, so it stings twice as much. AND it brings back memories of Blue Beetle, his best friend, turning him away at the front door

In a fit of pettiness Booster takes the only digital copy of the manuscript of his memoir with him, so Carrie can’t even use that against the government

Booster runs to his ancestors family for comfort, but they also turn him away, furious. They have just found out about the government tail Booster put on them for years and want him as far away from their children as possible

Booster flees home and relapses into binge drinking and skim reads Carrie’s bitingly honest ghost-written memoir of him

He becomes fixated on his old robot companion Skeets, the only friend he thinks hasn’t betrayed him yet.

On a bender, Booster locates Skeets in an old government storage facility, takes him home and reactivates him.

Booster uploads his memoir into Skeet’s memory banks and, still drunk, rants to him about how cruel the world is

Skeets counters each of his complaints with intelligent logic, but this only infuriates Booster further.

As a last resort Skeets begins projecting old news footage of the original Justice League saving lives onto the wall. This is the first time Booster has seen the unaltered footage in years and he breaks down.

There he is, head on the table, weeping, when Booster hears his own voice over Skeets’ speakers. It’s a tiny story, a few minutes long, about a family he saved from a fire back when he was a C-Lister. Hardly important compared to the big stuff. But Skeets reminds him that family is alive because of him. He was a real hero once.

At this point Damian Wayne breaks into Booster’s house. Damian has heard Booster tried to force himself on Carrie and is here to kill him.

Booster is out of practice and barely holds Damian off: he is only saved when Jon Kent arrives to stop the fighting, though he makes it clear he’s there for Damian’s sake, not Booster’s

At this point, Booster’s government-built robot butler walks in to investigate what is causing all this noise. The robot sees Skeets, who should be in storage, projecting an illegal newsreel on the wall, and Booster talking to the two most wanted terrorists in the world.

The robot attacks. Booster and Skeets (who know how it works) destroy it and save Damian and Jon.

Before it gets destroyed the robot sends out an alert about Booster being an enemy of the government

Remembering the government detail he ordered on his ancestors, Booster and Skeets race off to save his family from a danger he put them in.

Jon and Damian follow Booster. Together they save the family and Jon peesuades Damian to help the family go into hiding

The look on the youngest girl’s face looks exactly like the family Booster saved from the fire in the news footage Skeets showed him, and this is the first time Booster feels genuinely proud of himself in years.

Booster comes up with a plan to get his memoir (which is in Skeets’ data banks) out to the public

He returns to Blue Beetle’s mansion with the new Justice League in tow. He is now backing up his words with actions, so Blue Beetle lets them in. There is still no easy reconciliation; BB is suspicious and pointedly ignores Booster, talking only to League.

They use BB’s tech genius to hijack the government’s mind controlling Brother Eye satalites and use them to beam Booster’s memoir straight into the head of everyone on Earth, exposing the government’s lies

Booster also adds a promise to make it up to everyone he hurt

This doesn’t spark a rebellion as Booster had (big headedly) assumed, but now the people have two versions of the truth in their heads and the freedom to choose which they believe in.

Blue Beetle takes advantage of this and beams a message from the resistance to the people to galvanise rebellion. This is Booster’s big moment: he recognises that this isn’t all about him and lets the new Justice League take the lead

Booster now feels very exposed: Carrie’s brutally honest telling of his life story has been read by all his new allies. He is suprised when instead of judging him for what he did they trust him quicker for this honesty.

The new Justice League now has enough of a foothold in the public consciousness to rally more allies, and they begin an all out war against the totalitarian government

To his surprise, Booster becomes the emotional rock of this team; all the new members begin paying his honesty back in kind and confide all their deepest fears in him. Only Blue Beetle keeps his distance

The new League members holding Booster up as the reason for them joining up becomes too much for Booster because it’s too close to the way the government used him as a propaganda figurehead. Everyone has a story of oppression, and Booster is painfully aware that those stories are his fault.

Booster starts to spiral again , but Blue Beetle arrives to pull him out of his pit and take him away

“Where are we going?” / “You need a therapist.”

BB deposits Booster in a room where Carrie Kelly is waiting (whom the Justice League has just fake kidnapped)

At first Booster is incredibly awkward but Carrie is much more forgiving than BB and is proud of his progress. They resume therapy

Together Booster and Carrie save the Justice League; Booster as their emotional support, Carrie as their therapist

One day (with Jon’s support/gentle bullying) they even get Damian to open up about missing his family and his civilian life

Booster teaches the new recruits (the old C-listers like Plastic Man) to prioritise the kind of work they were doing before the old League died (damage control and saving civilians) over everything else. They can’t hurt the mind controlled civilians the government throw at them.

Slowly, Blue Beetle starts to talk to him again, until one day Booster is fighting next to him again. Trust is back

Embrace their small-time roots

And there is a global war between the growing Resistance against waves of superpowered mind controlled civilians (Think the World War Z zombies) and the next generation of the Justice League lead them to victory and are the heroes everyone names, but Booster Gold is the hero everyone knows but no-one needs to name.

And he is (close enough) to happy

[essayofthoughts]

Wanda "eternal sunshine"s herself from Pietro's mind before dying to protect him from self destructive grief. Who the hell is Pietro without a twin? PAIN. LOTS OF PAIN.

Are you sure you’re not some kind of masochist?

Send me fic prompts!

AO3 Mirror

i.First there is pain, nothing but blinding pain.

Then, there is nothing.

ii.When he wakes things feel… off.

iii.They are kind to him, the Avengers. He’s not sure why. Sometimes he catches them whispering, falling silent when he nears. He considers using his speed to listen in, decides against it..

They have been kind. For now, that is enough.

iv.When he wakes, he is disoriented. Off balance. He leans to his left as though expecting something there - a hand, an arm, a shoulder to bump against. He almost falls several times.

“Psychic weapon,” the Captain tells him. “Of some kind at least. Not much by way of physical damage, but it addled your brains a little. Did something to Clint too, but you saved him from the worst of it.”

Pietro tries to remember. He remembers the city, flying, remembers a flying thing, a gun firing.

Remembers pushing a car to cover the archer. Remembers pain.

Then, nothing.

v.In his pocket is a picture. It shows him, at about seven years old, his parents, his sister. She’s wearing a red dress and has a serious expression on her face. He tries to remember her name and can’t, not for the life of him. His parents names are not as hard - Erik and Natalya.

He unfolds the picture, folds it back up. Slips it into and out of his pocket. There’s a crease in the middle, a line between him and his sister, between mother and father standing behind them.

He assumes they’re dead. His parents died in the shelling, he remembers that for definite, a shell etched with Stark scratched into his memory like a scar.

His sister though… he’s not sure. She’s dead, she has to be, or gone at least; he knows he would not keep the picture for no reason. When did his sister die? During the shelling? While they waited to be saved? Or was it after, on the streets, or in some foster home of illness? Might she still live, somewhere far away?

He can’t seem to remember, no matter how hard he tries.

vi.He goes back to Sokovia, goes to Novi Grad. About a third of the city is intact, another third being repaired. The last third is filled with refugees. He walks down streets and hopes.

Some things feel familiar - a baker calls his name, asks after his health, asks if he’ll return to run deliveries now. At a cafe a woman asks after his sister.

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “I lost her.”

The woman nods, pats his hand sympathetically, looks towards the broken road that leads to the chasm.

She says, “If I see her, I’ll tell you.”

vii.Pietro does not think she will see her.

viii.Novi Grad feels odd, empty. A patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar. He can remember cycling down a street, turning a corner and then… nothing. He stares at a street he knows he travelled down and recognises nothing.

“It addled your brains,” Steve reminds him. “We don’t know how. We don’t know if this will ever change.”

He wants it to change. He doesn’t like not knowing.

ix.He walks streets over and over, night and day. Walks them, jogs them, runs them in all his new speed. Looks at them from every angle. He spends a whole hour picking at a sandwich, staring at the town map, and another in the library, reading books on memory.

He finds a new block of flats where they’d lived before the shelling. It looks almost identical to the old one - run down, broken in, full to bursting with people.

He considers going in, seeing if the layout is the same.

Instead, he walks.

x.The others are still kind. The Captain smiles sadly at him, offers to play baseball, work off some energy. Stark sits in his lab and tinkers, occasionally emerging with velocity-proofed goggles or clothes that change structure and breathability depending on wind pressure. Rhodes and Sam talk of warzones from the other side; a new perspective. Vision offers small reassuring nods, even knife-sharp Natasha offers her own brand of kindness.

Clint invites him to his house.

xi.“Without you,” he says, “I wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t still have me. I wouldn’t see my son born.” Clint’s hand is heavy on Pietro’s shoulder as the archer looks him in the eye. “You’re family now.”

They are not so quietly kind, at the farm.There is no quiet whispering in corners. Cooper and Clint help Laura with the baby and Pietro ends up keeping a sulking Lila occupied. She likes to run across the fields to the trees, climb the trees to a vantage point like her father would and flick stones at him with all the precision expected of Hawkeye’s daughter.

Pietro lets her.

xii.He wanders Novi Grad so often he starts to walk it in his dreams. As he sleeps he walks the remembered-not-remembered streets, walks to the cusp of the chasm and walks his way through the city’s scarlet ghost.

There is the old church, the big synagogue. A street he remembers protesting on. And then, he emerges from the ghost town to the other end of Novi Grad.

It feels like something is waiting for him, something walking at his side. His memory, maybe, or his sister, or the secret that will end this not-knowing.

He goes down to Stark’s lab.

xiii.Stark is brusque around him - around everyone. He shows his kindnesses in fits and starts and avoids everyone often. Pietro approves. It means it feels less like Stark knows something he doesn’t. As though, of all of them, Stark has not participated in their whispering circles.

Stark looks up from some welding when he enters. The blowtorch is set down amongst circuitry and metal bolts, three different multitools and a hammer.

“Roadrunner,” he says, peeling off his gloves.

Pietro takes his photo out of his pocket, unfolds it. “You can find people,” he says. “When you are not being Iron man and not being Tony Stark, when you are part of the team but not fighting… you find things.”

Tony looks at him, goggles on his forehead, grime on his face. “Well,” he says. “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.”

Pietro shows him the photo. “My parents are dead,” he says. “This I know. But my sister- I do not know what happened to her. If she died in the shelling or after it, if we parted ways or if we lost each other, if she died in a protest or the experiments or if she lives on elsewhere.” He looks at Stark, the man looking a little like a rabbit in the path of a car at Pietro speaking more to him in two minutes than he has in two weeks. “I need to know what happened to her. If she died, if she lived. Where she lives or is buried, what parted us. Will you help me?”

xiv.Stark promises to look for his sister. His fingers are gentle when they take the photograph, set it down on a desk and have FRIDAY scan a copy. 

“I’ll do what I can,” he says, tilting the photograph in his hands. “I can’t promise anything. Sokovia’s organisation is terrible, worse after Utron. Half of the records are still on paper. But I’ll do all I can.”

Pietro accepts this promise and resumes searching for his memories.

xv.He’s at the graveyard when he finds them.

His parents’ graves, side by side. Erik and Natalya Maximoff their dates and a passage of Hebrew so chipped it can’t be read anymore.

He stays at the graves for an hour.

xvi.It’s Stark who pulls him out of it. His phone starts up with some horrific jingling noise and when he hits the button it’s Stark’s voice.

“Roadrunner,” he says. “You in Novi Grad again?”

Pietro does not answer. He knows Tony can track the phone if he needs to.

“There’s a shelter,” he says. “For homeless teens. Records say you and a girl with the same surname stayed there a few times.”

Pietro’s mouth is dry. “Is she there-”

“Now? No, I don’t think so. But someone there may know where she went.”

xvii.The shelter is one Pietro has walked by and never spotted before. He does not recognise the boarded up front, the battered doors, the sign proclaiming it Novi Grad Youth Shelter.

He wonders why he remembers so little.

There’s no one there now. Stark’s aid efforts have set up better shelters, been building new homes, employed volunteers from the old shelters who can speak any of the myriad languages a Sokovian might call mother-tongue. Pietro walks through empty halls.

In his phone is a list of dates that he and his sister signed into the shelter. The rooms they stayed in, when they left. Pietro remembers… dislike. Having to mark themselves down, where anyone could find them. He continues down the halls, room after room. He searches the one the list says he stayed in, tries to recognise something.

Its as he’s lifting the ceiling tile of one room that he finds them: books.

They are mother’s books, her handwriting, in Hebrew, Sokovian, Russian and Polish, Hungarian edging around Serbian and German and Yiddish. Mother’s books, mother’s knowledge and spells, the books she gave to Wanda.

The name hits him like a punch to the chest.

xviii.Pietro searches the rest of the rooms they’d stayed in and finds nothing. Then he searches all of the other rooms to make sure.

Then he sits on the floor in the main room with the books. 

With Mama’s spellbooks.

He remembers when she’d first tried to teach them magic, hands dancing and incense smoke, ritual words in a soft voice. Neither of them could do it.

He wonders how long they saved the books. He wonders why they saved them.

xix.The base is oddly quiet. The others don’t whisper in corners anymore, or maybe he just doesn’t care enough to notice any more.

Stark has no more news on Wanda - Wanda, his sister, he has her name now. He did not have that this morning.

Pietro sleeps half-curled around his mother’s spellbooks.

xx.Wanda. The name turned over and over in his mind until it becomes nonsense. Wanda. Wanda. Wandawandawanda Wanda Wanda Wan da Wa nda W a  n   d    a.

Wanda Maximoff, his sister.

He can barely remember her face.

xxi.He trains with the Captain, with Natasha. Races with Vision and Sam as they fly. He talks to them, shares food with them, is welcomed by them. They sit around the bar and share vodka strong enough it actually does something to his metabolism and the Captain’s.

They are friends.

They are wrong.

xxii.At night he wracks his brains, trying to understand what is missing.

xxiii.This he knows: his sister is gone. He doesn’t know where.

This he knows: his parents are dead and have been going on ten years now.

This he knows: his powers are strong, the team are his friends, everyone knows something that he does not.

xxiv.This he knows: something is wrong.

xxv.He pores over the books, practices his Hebrew and his Hungarian, his Polish and Russian, backwards and forwards until he can barely function.

He reads mother’s books: a charm for protection, to divine the face of your lover, to call a storm, to heal a great wound. To make sacrifice, to swap one’s wounds for one’s unharmed skin, to make living the dead, to call creatures of the wilds to one’s side.

Spell after spell he could not do.

Spell after spell he tries again, hoping.

xxvi.“You doing okay, kid?”

Pietro jumps. Clint’s in the doorway, concern etched into his features. Pietro pushes the books underneath the bed.

“Pietro. You doing all right?”

His jaw’s half-locked in shock, he shrugs. “Something’s off,” he manages. “I know it. I just don’t know what.”

xxvii.Clint makes him socialise, drags him out to dinner with the team, everyone drinking more than they should. At the end of the evening the only people even vaguely sober are cold-turkey Stark, Mr. Magical Metabolism Rogers and himself.

Stark taps at the screen of his watch, sends off some signal, nods to Pietro. 

“Go home, Roadrunner. We’ll take care of them.”

xxviii.He doesn’t sleep. He keeps on trying spells.

Levitation, far sight, locator, luck. Languages, binding, unleashing, growth.

None with any result.

Pietro leans forward, over his crossed legs, over the carpet, pressing his brow to the book’s pages.

“Mother,” he whispers. “Please.”

A spark shivers on his palm.

xxix.Wanda trained. Wanda fought. Scarlet shields, scarlet blasts, scarlet tearing apart the toys sent at her. Blood and magic, reality and power, ethereal and physical in one, stronger than mountains and ephemeral as air. It looked like Mother’s magic, was cast by the same movements from her hands. It was magic, in part, of the same kind as Mother’s, just more instinctual. When she tried Mother’s old spells, now, they worked.

Wanda trained. Wanda fought.

xxx.Bullets in her brother’s body. Bullets tearing him from her. Bullets in the blood and Wanda called to it - to blood and magic, to the bond strung between them as twins. Wanda pulled the bullets from him to her, shed her blood for his and combed scarlet fingers through her brother’s mind so he might live without her.

You must not tell him, she sends to the archer. Save my body if you must, and bury it. But you must not tell him. If you do, we are all lost.

With her last breath she casts destruction all around her.

xxxi.With her first breath she chokes.

Pietro’s fist drips blue and silver power, magic burning and desperate in his blood.

Magic awoken by the experiments.

It had taken three spells already to bring him here - one to see if his sister was living or dead, one to locate her body, one to create a portal to an abandoned SHIELD base, an abandoned graveyard.

Pietro had dug up the coffin himself, bare fingers against the dirt.

Wanda’s body was rotting, yes, but even he could see the bullet holes.

xxxii.Wanda chokes, Wanda gasps, Wanda screams.

Wanda rises in a nimbus of scarlet power, her body still glowing with Pietro’s silver.

She lands. She coughs. She looks up at his face.

“Pietro,” she says. “Pietro what have you done.”

And Pietro remembers everything.

xxxiii.The team are shocked, surprised, happy. They welcome her back with open arms.

Something in Pietro seethes.

xxxiv.“You left me!” he rages when finally they’re alone. “You tore through my mind, tore my wounds from me and you abandoned me!”

Wanda looks terribly small, folded on the edge of his bed.

“You could have let me die,” Pietro says. “You should have let me die.”

xxxv.He does not see how Wanda’s face falls as he avoids her. He does not let himself care. 

He’s good at that, refusing to let himself. Once, long before, he’d refused to fear his sister, refused to abandon her.

Then, she’d abandoned him.

xxxvi.He feels her presence at the edge of the group, the looming scarlet mass of her mind. He avoids it. After what she’d done, tearing herself from his mind, tearing his wounds from him, his death, his purpose-

After she’d left him alone, with no memory, no purpose… he will not let her back into his head.

xxxvii.“Hiding from your sister, Roadrunner?” Stark’s standing by the doorway, hands tucked into suit pockets.

Pietro watches him for a moment before, “After what she did to you, aren’t you?”

Stark walks over, plops himself onto the seat beside him.

“Believe it or not,” Stark says. “No.”

Stark’s dressed up smart - by now, all of the team will be. Pietro’s clothes are hanging from the back of the door in a fancy bag.

“The press conference is in fifteen minutes. Now, you and I both know it will take you fifteen seconds to get your suit on and get over there and that you’re going to wait to the last minute to stress-test the new fabric I designed way sooner than intended but, Pietro?” Stark is looking keenly at him. “Maybe don’t let the press know you hate your sister right now.”

xxxviii.Stark isn’t defending her. Perhaps that is the only reason he doesn’t throw the suit in the ocean and flee. He arrives five minutes early instead, and hides himself in the back.

xxxix.“You know she did it to make sure you’d live, right?”

Clint’s voice is calm, steady.

“You know that you lied to me.”

xl.Wanda doesn’t apologise. Wanda doesn’t try to apologise.

Wanda’s eyes say What apology could ever be enough?

xli.One night he wakes to see her scarlet eyes.

He skids across the room, out of the room, and is halfway to Canada when Stark and Vision catch him.

“Roadrunner,” Stark says. “If you want to go for a midnight run, maybe put some shoes on first.”

Pietro curls against the tree that’s holding him up. Beneath his feet, blood glistens on the grass.

He says, “I won’t go for midnight runs if you keep her away from me.”

xlii.“I do not understand,” Vision says. “She watches you and does not talk to you and you ignore her and avoid her.” He rolls his next words around his mouth, pauses before saying,” Before, you did not hesitate with each other.”

Pietro remembers. Remembers how her hands holding his calmed him in the castle, how they turned to each other for advice and protection, for comfort and consideration.

Remembers, I’m not leaving you here and Come back when everyone else is off, not before and her scarlet fingers scraping over his mind, tearing his memories apart.

Pietro hunches his shoulders. “You do not know what she can do,” he says. “What she has done.”

“She wiped your memories of her,” says Vision.

Pietro turns, looks Vision in his unnaturally green eyes. “I trusted her,” he says, “And she destroyed that.”

xliii.Wanda stays at the edges. She dares not step closer. She could, she could, and the team would welcome her in, make a space for her. Already Vision smiles at her in the corridors, the Captain and Widow nod. Clint brings her a mug of coffee from the bar and sits beside her, unflinching.

They come to her, and she is careful not to push them away.

She doesn’t want them, though. What she wants, what she needs, the torn and tattered bond to her brother, is something she may never have back.

xliv.“You tried talking to him?” Clint asks. He’s found her latest hiding place - the roof, scattering seed for the birds. He stands in the shade by the door and watches. 

“I can’t,” she says. “I cannot insult him like that.”

“Isn’t an insult if it’s an apology.”

Wanda huffs a laugh, an exhale of breath out her nose, a slight jolt to her shoulders. Even with her brother’s glittering blue magic she can still feel the scars of the bullets she took from him. “I could apologise,” she acknowledges. “But it would mean nothing. For me to do what I did to him, after all we shared, all we knew... There is no apology that could ever be enough.”

xlv.It’s killing her though, slowly and surely. She and Pietro relied on each other, had grown around each other. In her last moments she’d made a scaffold to give Pietro strength, to make him last, to help him support himself.

She has no such thing to help her.

It is ironic, she thinks. The one thing that saved Pietro’s life was to tear her from his memory. The thing that will kill her a second time is that she did so.

xlvi.He runs from her. He avoids her in the day, yes, but the one time she drew close, sensing a nightmare in his mind even though she tries not to look, dares not touch, he woke and he ran from her.

When he stumbled back in his feet were covered in blood.

He fears her. He fears her as everyone has always feared her. Mama had looked at her anger and worried for her, feared for her future. In the children’s home the other children had feared her, her rage, her drive, Pietro at her side like a guard. The kids on the street had feared her rage, had respected her knowledge, had called her witch. The soldiers had feared her powers, List and Strucker her potential, the Avengers had feared her - do fear her - and now...

Pietro never feared her before. Had never let himself, had chosen to refuse to feel fear in the face of all she could do. Had been the one person unflinchingly honest, never letting fear catch his tongue.

Now he runs from her. Now he avoids her. 

Now, when she tries to soothe his nightmares, his heart is going so fast that Stark’s readout says “heartrate critical” when Pietro screams at them to keep her away from him.

Now, Stark is no longer his nightmare.

She is.

xlv.“You died for him,” Vision says. She hadn’t heard the door open, but maybe it hadn’t at all. He can phase through walls after all, can fly without effort. He settles on the edge of the roof beside her. “I don’t understand why he hates that.”

Wanda smiles at him, small and gentle. “It’s not that,” Wanda says. “It’s a matter of trust.”

“You took his memories from him,” Vision says. “To save his life.”

Wanda stares at the horizon, kicks her heels against the concrete, taps her fingers against the very edge of the building. 

“Would he have done the same, in your position?”

xlvi.He’s eating less and less, sleeping barely at all. He’s only in the base when she isn’t - she goes off for some training exercise he returns to sleep and grab a shower. She returns and he goes for a run, or for a training exercise of his own.

This dance goes perfectly until one day he’s at the Bartons and Lila asks about his sister.

Pietro’s over the horizon in a heartbeat.

xlvii.“What happened?” asks Laura down the phoneline. Clint had called first, Lila sniffling and tearful in the background, but he’d passed the phone to Laura within two sentences. “I don’t know what happened, Lila’s incredibly worried she’s said something awful and that you’re never coming back and she won’t say a peep to us. What happened, Pietro?”

Pietro leans against a tree, feels the bark press into his forehead. His throat feels like lead, his stomach like some horrible void, his hands are still trembling even where they hold the phone to his ear. 

“Ha-,” he starts, but he can’t make himself finish. He sighs, swallows, tries again. “Laura,” he asks, sounds out the familiar word, lets his mouth find itself again. “Has my sister been visiting you?”

xlviii.Laura yells at Clint for the first time Pietro’s ever heard, a blistering outpouring of protectiveness he thought she reserved only for her own children, her own husband. Clint, cowed, heads out with a Quinjet to pick him up. While he waits, he sits at the base of a tree, and stays on the line with Lila.

“‘m sorry,” she mumbles as soon as she’s passed the phone. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have just run.”

“Is she really that horrible?”

Pietro picks at the grass around him, tears up blades of it and scatters them around him. “I don’t know,” he says. “She wasn’t before. But-” and his throat is closing up, is filled with lead and dread and he can’t make himself speak until he takes ten deep breaths. “What she did,” he says. “I can’t-”

“Is it like...” Lila says, trying to fill the gaps for him. “Like when Coop and I fight. And we hit each other and we get bruises and cuts and Mom tells us off but we had fun and it helped so it doesn’t matter. But if I tried to actually hurt Coop, like really hurt him, like kill him hurt him. That isn’t fun and that isn’t okay.”

Pietro laughs, tilts his head back against the tree and laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “Like that. You trust Cooper and he isn’t going to hurt you. And Cooper trusts you and you aren’t going to hurt him. But if you then did hurt him-”

“He would hate me,” Lila says. “Like you hate her.”

They fall silent for a while, a peaceful quiet, and Pietro can hear at the other end of the line - Cooper playing with Nate while Laura rattles around the kitchen, taking out her protectiveness on unarmed kitchen utensils. 

“Are you okay?” Lila asks after a while. 

“No,” Pietro says. “I don’t think so. But I’m getting better.”

He can hear the smile in Lila’s voice as she says, “You’re lying.”

“Maybe,” he says, but he’s smiling now too. “What do you want to do when I get back?”

They’re discussing plans to build a proper tree-house when the Quinjet eventually lands, and Pietro’s heartrate is finally back to normal.

xlix.“You’re one of the family,” Laura says once he gets in and she’s given him a hug. “Of course I’m protective of you.”

Pietro can’t help the shaky smile he gives at that.

l.They don’t put the twins on missions together. Even if it’s an emergency they keep one back, keep one in reserve, and pile everyone else in instead.

This is why Pietro feels absolute shock when he sees what is unmistakably Wanda’s scarlet at his back. He spins, runs backwards, sees his sister standing between buildings, a vast scarlet shield holding back bullets meant for him.

“Run!” she yells in Sokovian, “Get out of here!”

And then the shield falls.

li.Pietro wakes dripping in sweat, his heart as fast as a hummingbird’s.

He’s at the base. He’s at the base, and in his room, and he can’t see Wanda’s scarlet anywhere, can’t feel her mind anywhere nearby.

The final image of his dream dances before his eyes.

Wanda, going down in a hail of bullets.

lii.He dreads seeing her, fears the slightest spot of scarlet in the halls, avoids her still.

His heart races as soon as he senses her mind growing near, as soon as he hears her voice over comms.

He wonders how he hid this fear all those years, how he could possibly have refused to fear her at all, when he fears her this much.

liii.He sees her face, glimpses it through a window as he’s running and he’s bowled over by the fear and the relief he feels.

It was a dream, she isn’t dead.

She isn’t dead. She can still hurt him.

He stays in the fallen sprawl he came to rest in and waits for his pulse to slow before he makes his way into medical.

liv.Doctor Cho clucks at him as she patches him up. “You are not doing yourself any favours,” she says. “Are you sleeping enough? Eating enough?” She pokes his ribs, shines a light in his eyes. “You do not look well.”

Pietro doesn’t know how he looks. It’s not like he checks a mirror every day. He knows he feels tired and that he rarely has any appetite and that his sleep has been messed up beyond belief and littered with nightmares.

“Your heartrate is worrying,” she says. “And you’re shaking, did you realise?”

Oh. He hadn’t.

lv.More nightmares. Nightmares of Wanda stepping into bullets in his place, memories of the bullets digging into him, the terrifying blinding moment as Wanda’s scarlet fingers had scraped through his mind and locked his memories of her away. Nightmares of Wanda dying - in Novi Grad, in the base, halfway around the world - and being torn between relief and dread each time.

It’s worse when he wakes and he spots her around the base.

lvi.Wanda uses scarlet to sleep, to wake, to survive around base. She avoids Pietro now, as much as he avoids her, stays out of his way if only to ease his worry after Clint told her what happened at the farm.

She’s tired and she’s worried: not seeing Pietro, not being able to glance and know in a moment how he’s doing is nerve-wracking for her, but after what she’s done she isn’t going to make things worse for him, not if she can help it.

She’s committed one crime against him, against all that they ever were. She won’t do so again.

lvii.She stops visiting the Bartons. Pietro needs a safe space to call his own and if the base can’t be that for him any more then she cannot begrudge him the Bartons freely-given hospitality. She stays in her room, or she sits with Vision and reads, stays out of the way of the paths her brother walks.

There is a gulf between them, unbridged, and she thinks there is no hope of it ever being repaired.

lviii.He sees her leaving her room and the fear-relief hits him again. He stumbles to a halt, his blue fading out behind him.

For a long moment they stare at each other in silence.

He wants to ask Why did you do it? but he knows why. He wants to ask How could you do that to me? but he knows that too. He wants to ask Are you ever going to even try to apologise? but he can’t unstick his tongue. He can hear his heartbeat racing like a hummingbird’s.

Wanda looks at him, a deer in the headlights. Her mouth is slightly open - shock or about to speak, he doesn’t know, until she eventually licks her lips, closes wet eyes.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says. “I could apologise, but it would be meaningless. I would save you anyway I could all over again. I would apologise as best I can, but-”

Pietro manages, just, to unstick his tongue. “If you touch my mind,” he says. “I’ll kill you.”

Wanda nods, blinks. As she walks away Pietro sees the glimmer of tears on her cheeks.

lix.He can see her and it doesn’t kill him. He can speak to her, even if he feels like he’s going to lose what little lunch he had. 

He’d wanted to know what happened to his sister. Wanted to see her and speak to her, to know that she was well.

He’d wanted the world to feel right again, to stop feeling off balance, but now, knowing everything, it only feels worse.

lx.This he knows: nothing was ever truly right.

[shmkxx-blog]

Untitled.

Right, so I need to sort my shit out. I don’t think anybody can live like this. It feels like a million thoughts rushing through my head at the same time. It becomes unbearable and they are all just that; thoughts. I need to break the cycle, before it breaks me.... before it breaks us. It sounds crazy, but for the first time in my life, I have met someone who sees under my mask without taking it off, and yet I am still afraid. I say that I’ve moved on and that I have gotten over everything that I have been through so far in my life, but I’m starting to think that I’m lying to myself. I need to get to the bottom of why it still affects me and why it still has a hold of me. Perhaps I need to start from the very beginning and work my way through my timeline, despite how painful this could be to bring to the surface. I suppose the more that I bottle it, the more the pressure builds, and that’s why I experience these emotional outbursts, so let’s try something new, something completely different.  Growing up, I had a pretty happy childhood, it just took me a long time to remember those types of memories because all I seemed to hold onto were the ones that make me freeze, that make me fearful and scared and unable to trust. My dad had a temper that often got out of control and as hard as it is for me to write this, I was no stranger to physical violence from him. I think he has blocked out that time in his life too, because the dad I had then, is a completely different person to the dad I have now.  My house was constantly filled with screaming, shouting, crying, the sounds of slapping, hitting and hyperventilating.  My parents went through a very unamicable divorce when I was 10 of which I was thrown in the middle. My dad and his family turned very nasty towards me. It’s sickening thinking of everything that they did to me. They criticized the way I looked, would corner me with a hand raised, threatening me. They swore at me. I was told on several occasions that I was a mistake, I was never wanted and that my mum should have got rid. This went on for 4 years, and by the time I turned 14, I was depressed. I started having anxiety attacks at school which would involve frequent visits from paramedics and trips to the hospital because I would lose consciousness. At this point, I cut contact with my dads family including my siblings and suddenly felt very alone and unloved. I think being at a pinnacle point of my life where hormones and emotions were flying around, it was one huge mess. Just as I got rid of my bullying family, I started getting bullied at school, physically, verbally, emotionally, mentally. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and seeing someone I didn’t recognise, like I was in there somewhere but it was so deeply hidden it was barely visible. I remember getting some nail scissors and cutting myself. It wasn’t deep, I knew it wouldn't scar, but I found that physical pain was easier to cope with than the emotional pain I was feeling inside. This bullying went on until I finished sixth form. It was never-ending for another 4 years, despite intervention by my mum and stepdad and also teachers, it carried on, even outside of the school gates. I grew too exhausted to fight it and just pretended it had been sorted.  When I was 18, I went off to university. It was supposed to be such an exciting time for me, I was starting my career as a childrens nurse, something I had wanted to do for a long time. I felt like my life could suddenly take off, but the euphoria was short lived, as the bullying started all over again. Even worse that I lived with them in the same student flat. Every night was spent in floods of tears, I had my belongings defaced and destroyed, the kitchen wall tiles were covered in marker pen, horrible names, mockery, disgusting drawings of me that I would have to clean off. They would bang constantly on my bedroom door chanting at me. Once again I looked in the mirror, and the person staring back was ghosting. Finally after 6 months, I went to the doctor who diagnosed me with severe depression and anxiety and I packed up my belongings, packed up my course, and returned home. I lost a lot of weight, i suddenly became obsessed with my weight and started making myself sick and taking strong laxatives. I started self harming again but this time it was intense and noticeable. I started smoking and drinking heavily. I became somebody that I never thought I could. I got into my first lesbian relationship, and it wasn’t me. I convinced myself that it was, but I wasn’t gay, I just tried to make changes in my life, anything that could bring some happiness where possible. I was searching in all the wrong places for all the wrong things. This girl encouraged my depression, she encouraged my self harm and even spoke about assisted suicide where we would take an overdose together. I became very emotionally disturbed to the point I started having seizures. They were psychological. My brain activity would get too hyper, my anxiety would flare, my heart would race, and I would find myself on the floor fitting.  Then I ran away. Well not exactly, I didn’t just up and leave, I needed a new start. I got myself a new job in Sidmouth, Devon and I moved down here nearer to my grandparents. It was a place I had been holidaying to since I was 6 years old. It was like home. Life seemed to be getting better, days seemed easier to manage. I was sleeping better, eating better, but the problem with running away is that your problems follow you wherever you go, because they’re inside your head. I met David. At first everything was amazing. He was loving, kind, supportive and he gave me the confidence boost I needed. He appeared when everything started going down hill again. I had started getting my seizures again, even whilst at work. Hospital became my home from home. Finally I was diagnosed with PNES (Psychological Non Epileptic Seizures). In short, my body cannot hand certain levels of stress and anxiety, so it shuts down. David was there through it all.  We fell pregnant twice between Aug 2011 and March 2012, both ended in miscarriages which were even more destructive to my mental health. During this time, I was finally diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This means that you have to have at least 5 of the following behaviours (I had all): Extreme reactions to feeling abandoned. Unstable relationships with others. Confused feelings about who you are. Being impulsive in ways that could be damaging. For example, spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating Regular self-harming, suicidal threats or behaviour. Long lasting feelings of emptiness or being abandoned. Difficulty controlling your anger. For example, losing your temper or getting into fights. Intense, highly changeable moods. Paranoid thoughts when you’re stressed. The way I am isn’t my fault, I was born this way. It just needed some trauma to trigger it. What causes BPD?

‘It is not clear exactly what causes BPD. There are different factors that can lead to someone getting borderline personality disorder (BPD). The main causes seem to be the following’: Traumatic childhood. You might have experienced difficulties in your childhood. This could include neglect or being abandoned by a parent. Or physical, emotional or sexual abuse. Brain problems. You might have slight differences in your brain. Genetics. Some research shows that BPD may be passed on through genes. But there is no clear evidence that there is a gene that causes BPD.

It gave me some clarification in understanding myself and why I was experiencing the emotions I had. I was put on a medication called Quetiapine, which would help with the anxiety and keeping my psychosis under its peak. Not long after I went on it, we fell pregnant again in August 2012. It had been something we both wanted and we were very happy and excited especially when we had, had the 12 week scan to show everything was as normal and it was highly unlikely that I would miscarry. I still had the pain of losing my 2 previous babies, I still do now to some degree. It becomes more manageable.  My pregnancy had a few complications, but overall was a smooth, happy and exciting time. I couldn’t wait to be a mother. The day that Oliver was born, was the best day of my life. After losing two babies, I finally had one that was warm, and crying and suckling against me, and he was all mine. The first few days were an incredible experience. David was a fantastic hands on dad, he would help me with the night feeds, he would watch Oliver so I could get my head down. We were a happy family and then on day 4, my brain switched. I’m not sure what triggered it, but I was suddenly unable to be anywhere near my child. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t do anything for him, I couldn’t even be in the same room as him. I became severely mentally ill. I was sectioned into a psychiatric facility and then moved on to a mum and baby unit. I was self harming and attempting suicide. On discharge, I was put under social services and Oliver was a child in need. I had to work hard for him not to be put into foster care and adopted. This drew a huge wedge between me and David. He was having to look after a newborn baby on his own, and I knew he was bitter. I started group therapy. It didn’t seem to help at first, but after a few sessions, I noticed a difference, I started recognising my triggers, and learning to accept the bad days when they came around. I started being able to bond with Oliver. I started being able to give him a quick cuddle, and then I started to give him a bottle, then change a nappy. They brought in a care worker to work with me and help me with my relationship with Oliver. When Oliver turned 6 months old, I had worked so hard to repair everything that social services closed my case and I became unsupervised and able to be a responsible parent for my own child. It was the best christmas present I could have asked for. As my relationship with Oliver improved, my relationship with David deteriorated. He didn’t want to be involved with either of us. He would rather go out with friends, sleep and game. Yet still, I decided to marry him on 7th June 2014. I immaturely thought that it would make things ok again. At first it did. Our relationship was great, and then as the honeymoon wore off, all of our problems just reared their ugly heads. I started finding conversations to other people about how he didn’t want to be with me anymore, I found emails to other girls, off of craigslist and porn sites wanting to meet up for casual sex no strings attached, I then started finding bags of powder around the bedroom and snorting equipment. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what he was doing, and I felt that I only had myself to blame. I would ask him, and he would fob me off with stupid excuses, often getting verbally abusive with me, which would then cause me to shut down and apologise for my behaviour. Seems crazy really when I knew what he was doing. I was apologising for challenging his infidelity and drug taking. Things became a lot worse between us, the abuse became more frequent as was his sickening behaviour. The abuse became more frequent, it became verbal, emotional and physical, and he started to blackmail me. He would also throw in my face about me being a crap mother who couldn’t even touch her own baby or look at him. Something I was trying to get over. It all came to a head in September 2016 when I returned from America. Oliver was being quite difficult and causing me a lot of stress trying to get to bed. I could tell that David had, had a few drinks and I thought he had probably taken something... he had pushed me and grabbed oliver by the neck of his clothing and started screaming in his face, Oliver started crying and saying he was scared, David then grabbed him and threw him across the bed, his head narrowly missing the wall. All I can hear in my head to this day is ‘daddy no, daddy please don’t, daddy im scared’ over and over. David then thumped him, right on his back and growled to the side of his face like he was an animal. At this point I was in floods of tears, trying to get my child to cuddle him, but David was snarling at me. Then the doorbell went and the neighbour had come round concerned. He saw the look on my face, he had heard oliver’s crying and fear, and he wanted me to leave and get rid of David. So that night, I did, I waited until David was asleep, packed our bags and Oliver and I were greeted by my parents in the car as we snuck out the house. There was no looking back after that. I felt alone, and unloved and deserving of all the pain and suffering because it was all I had ever really knew.  On top of this, my granma who had been my support and my rock, passed away when Oliver was 2 weeks old from an aortic anerysm. It was sudden, and it turned my life into deeper turmoil. 

My biggest fear is it happening all over again, even though this time I know that it won’t. I’m scared of trusting, I’m scared of being loved, because it never usually works out for me, but if I want to be happy, I have to put all of this aside and move on. I can’t keep revisiting this as a setback, otherwise I will never learn to be happy. I can’t keep holding onto what I went through. I can give that advice to other people, but when it comes to taking it myself, I have a hard time digesting that information. The truth is, I CAN be happy now. I have a beautiful relationship with my son, which I was scared wouldn’t happen after our experience. I have a roof over my head, and I provide for both of us. I have the most loving and caring boyfriend a girl could ever ask for. I am so very lucky that he is in my life. I have a loving and supportive family unit who will always be there for me. My relationship with my dad and his family is even fixed. I have a fantastic best friend who is like a brother to me, and we have been there for each other through thick and thin and I know he’s not going anywhere.  Ultimately, I have so much going for me, that some people could only dream of. I need to start accepting and appreciating what I have and stop looking back to what I didn’t. So that’s what I’m going to do, this passage was a way of me getting everything down and off of my chest so that I can move on from all of this. So that it doesn’t have a hold over me, so that I can start to enjoy life and see everything as a learning curve. I wish I wasn’t as sensitive as I am, but I am and I can’t change that, it’s part of my personality, but what I can change is my outlook on everything. I need to be more positive and wake up each day feeling lucky and happy. Ryan says I have nothing to worry about and nothing to fear, so I’m going to start trusting him, and not fearing it, because I love him. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anybody in that way. We have a beautiful connection and I would be an idiot to break that and throw it away, all because of insecurities that are based on past events which I can’t change. I can’t change the past, I can change the now, so that’s what I’m going to do, change the now. Because the now is where I want to be, building a future with Ryan, Lilia and Oliver. That’s all I want. The simple life. Just us. Because having that, makes me the luckiest girl in the world.