#girl who recently escaped the psych ward | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

pickledpascal · 2 years ago

Text

Sweet Nothing

Chapter Four: You’re in the Kitchen, Hummin’

Summary: Blake and Will have an idea to get Abigail to open up better.

Warnings: A little bit of swearing, sex jokes (kind of)

Word Count: 2.5k

Sweet Nothing Masterlist

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

On a day spent with Blake, in between classes and figuring out cases, Will brought up the subject of Abigail Hobbs. The girl with the serial killer father who obsessed over her, to the point that he would both kill and consume other girls with similar features to his daughter. Blake didn’t know much about the case until Will started talking with her, of course it was monumental–there aren’t many…. Families like Abigail’s.

They were in Blake’s office as she filled out some paperwork, something about the recent case with the man who created ‘angels.’ “Myself and Hannibal think Abigail would benefit from more time outside in the real world, while Alana believes it would help her more if she stayed inside a controlled environment and focused on getting better.” Will explained, adjusting his glasses slightly as a sigh of frustration escaped him. “She can’t stay in there forever and I’m…. afraid she won’t feel as normal anymore if she does.”

“All teenagers are different.” Blake responded, still writing down some notes as she talked. “I, for one, loved staying in my room. But I can imagine it gets very…. stir-crazy when the only thing she is,” She paused, “For lack of a better word, forced to talk about with others is her trauma.”

Once done with the report, Blake closed the folder with an idea forming in her head. She folded her hands on her desk and said, "If you truly believe Abigail would benefit from time outside the psych ward, it would have to be in a controlled environment. So, maybe, you can sign Abigail out and take her to my house. We can have lunch and do, really, whatever she'd like to do." Blake proposed.

Will pursed his lips, staring at the edge of the desk for a little while. "It will be hard for her to learn to trust you." He warned.

"I know the feeling." Blake countered. "I will be able to see the signs in case she feels uncomfortable or like backing out. Just make sure to remind Abigail that it's alright if she wants to leave at any time." She said softly, a light smile on her face.

Blake knows what it's like to be forced to do something that you may absolutely despise doing. To the point she may have a panic attack or a nervous breakdown.

Will nodded, eyes making their way upwards to meet Blake's. "Do you…. Think it would be okay if you invited more people?" He asked softly. Perhaps getting to know people not affiliated with the FBI would make Abigail more comfortable.

"I have a few friends I can ask to come over if it would help." Blake nodded.

—-------

"Are you…. Sure about this?" Abigail asked, nervously fiddling with the scarf around her neck. "I mean, I'm alright with it but are you sure this is not just…. For nothing?" She knew what this was for, to help her acclimate for a more 'normal' society but she didn't feel normal anymore. In fact, she wasn't sure she ever would feel that way again.

Will rubbed Abigail's shoulder as they stepped onto Blake's porch. "Doctor Bloom approved this for the fact that it would help your mental health, and I think so too." He admitted softly before he pushed on the doorbell.

The pair waited for a few moments before they realized some music was playing on the inside. Eventually, it stopped and Will could hear footsteps that gradually got louder signifying they were coming closer.

The door swung open to reveal Blake in much more laid back clothing. At the Bureau, Will was used to seeing her in turtlenecks and sweaters paired with some sort of blazer and plaid slacks. In her home, though, she wore a sweatshirt with a graphic design on the front and jeans. Blake's makeup style changed as well. She would usually light makeup at work with minimal eyeliner while in this more comfortable environment, her eyeliner was thick and winged at the end, and her blush was more apparent. The changes made Will blink, averting his gaze quickly as he felt a heat rising on his face.

"Hey, Abigail! It's nice to meet you, I'm Blake Adler." She introduced herself, holding out a hand to shake. She seemed more outgoing than usual, perhaps she was simply trying harder.

Abigail looked to Will for a moment as a crutch of some sort before she shook Blake's hand. The younger woman stayed quiet as Blake led them inside.

"I do have some friends over at the moment but I sort of yelled at them to keep it down. I can introduce them to you if you'd like. They're not necessarily extroverted but they're friendly." Blake joked softly, taking a small breath. "Anything you'd like to drink? Lunch is pretty much done, just let me know when you'd like to eat."

Abigail smiled stiffly, taking a look into the living room where she heard people's voices. They certainly were a colorful bunch of friends. "Water is…. Fine." She said softly. "Can I…. Talk with them?"

"Of course!" Blake said happily, filling up a glass of water to give to Abigail. "Just…. Ignore whatever Zach says." She warned, a light grimace on her face.

The younger girl's eyebrows furrowed as she took her water and made her way to the group in the living room. Abigail also took this time to admire Blake's home. She was born and raised in Minnesota, she grew up on hunting and her home showed that. With its many deer heads plastered on walls that were an off white and exposed deep wooden beams.

Blake's house was more maximalist and all-around darker than many stereotypical homes. Her kitchen had deep green cabinets with black and golden marble countertops, her walls were decorated with vintage posters and small paintings, and her furniture seemed vintage as well and yet her home had a modern feel. Abigail found Blake's home very…. Comfortable. It felt lived in and loved in ways she couldn't quite describe.

"I must admit…. I'm nervous too." Will sighed out, shaking his head slightly. He hoped this went well and he hoped Blake's friends…. Would like him.

Blake's lips quirked upward for a moment as she set some plates down on her table. "Will, you and Abigail will be alright." She then went over to Will and cupped his cheek which he leaned into. "This could be a turning point for Abigail. Either she understands you can't just turn off the bad stuff or she doesn't."

"And if she doesn't?" Will asked, swallowing thickly as his gaze drifted to the back of Abigail's head.

Blake let her hand drop to Will's shoulder. "Then her journey to acceptance of her situation will be a much longer road."

—-----

Abigail walked to the group, interrupting their conversation. She observed them for a moment. Blake certainly had a colorful group of friends, some with dyed hair and others with their natural hair color. Abigail had to admit, she had relatively normal looking friends before everything happened.

"Am I…. Interrupting?" She asked, suddenly feeling self conscious.

"Not exactly." A girl said with a polite smile, sending a glare in the direction of one of the boys. Specifically, the one with shoulder-length black hair and olive skin who wore glasses. She had purple streaks of hair dispersed through the rest of the brown.

Actually, Abigail noticed most of them wore glasses. Including Blake.

"Zach likes to…. Say a lot of things." Someone else piped up. He had a similar look to the one the purple-haired girl glared at but the underside of his hair was shaved and his face was rounder. "I'm Matt." He was the first to introduce himself. At least, Abigail could begin to put names to faces.

"Right! We didn't introduce ourselves yet. I'm Elle." The purple-haired girl said with a smile. "Zach's that guy." She motioned to the man next to Matt.

Speaking of, Zach mumbled under his breath, "You guys bully me." He crossed his arms and pouted like a child.

"What else are friends for?" A new voice joined. He certainly looked taller than everyone else and even, normal, compared to the rest of them. "I'm Chris." Chris kind of had the look of a frat boy. What the hell was he doing there?

Abigail cocked her head at Chris for a moment before her gaze drifted to the last person who had yet to introduce themself.

"Jayme. Also known as Jay or the resident trans rat bastard." They said, a light chuckle escaping them as they introduced themself. "And also the hater of the group." Jayme added.

Abigail let out a small but genuine laugh. She couldn't really remember the last time she laughed. It's been a while. Then she realized she hadn't introduced herself to them yet. Although, she expected Blake to have at least told them her name. "I'm Abigail. I don't really…. Know what I am right now." She admitted.

"Ah, that's fine. We have experience converting people." Jay joked, shrugging. Abigail cocked her head in confusion, not knowing what they meant.

Elle let out a sigh, "Some day, you're gonna have to accept that people are going to like men no matter what you do." There was a light joking tone in their voice.

Abigail raised a hand to her mouth to keep herself from laughing too loudly. Well, now she knew why Blake kept them around.

"Blake is a work in progress though. One day she will like only non-men and women and it will be glorious." Jayme clutched their fist as if their cause was a noble one.

Blake's voice cut through them from the kitchen, "I heard that, Jay!"

"You're halfway there! Being bisexual is just one step away!" Jayme yelled back, a light smirk on their face.

Elle chuckled nervously, "They're joking." She clarified for Abigail, afraid she may be taking it the wrong way. "It's not that Jayme hates bisexuals, they just hate men and don't really understand how…. Someone can like one."

"I don't think Blake is a work in progress anymore." Chris said in a hushed voice, discreetly pointing over to the kitchen. Slowly, all their eyes were on Blake and Will.

The scene unfolding in front of them, one could only describe as…. Affectionate. Cute, even. Music was still playing lightly in the background so they couldn't quite make out what they were saying but they didn't need words to know how the pair felt about each other.

Blake grabbed a thermos and filled it with some golden liquid that was being stored next to her stove. She then gave that thermos to Will who hesitantly pressed a kiss to her cheek in thanks.

Abigail realized. No one she talked with in the FBI talked about themselves so she didn't know much about Alana or Hannibal or Will, even. She could sense the tension between Alana and Will, though, and Hannibal…. Really everyone. They dealt with criminals for a living so it seemed everyone was on edge all the time, something she could now relate to. But with Will and Blake, there was no tension at all. In fact, Abigail saw Will's shoulders visibly relax as he stepped onto that porch.

"Oh shit…. She's giving him the cider. The I-Want-To-Fuck-You cider." Zach gasped, putting his hand on his chest as if he was truly shocked.

Elle's eyebrows furrowed as she shook her head. "Blake literally gave all of us that cider. If that was true, she would've fucked all of us." She countered with a light laugh.

"Well, you never know." Zach shrugged.

"Zach, you have a girlfriend what the fuck are you saying?" Chris laughed, shaking his head.

Jayme's eyes widened, "Yeah. Weirdo." They teased with a small smirk.

"Abigail, you should eat." Will said from the kitchen, not necessarily listening to them but the words stuck in his mind either way.

The young girl nodded, giving those she sat with a small smile before she stood. Abigail walked over to the kitchen where Blake and Will stood by the counters. In front of Blake were two plates filled with a nice looking sandwich. She slid one over to Abigail as she sat at the counters and handed the other plate to Will.

"It's called the Adler Special. This sandwich got me covered all throughout college and even high school." Blake chuckled softly.

Abigail picked up a slice of sandwich with her two hands and observed it for a moment. The bread was toasted, the meat looked to be turkey, there was some sort of green on top–arugula–as well as some oil that seeped out onto the plate below. She took a bite and hummed at the taste. It's been a while since she's had a home cooked meal, psych ward food wasn't that good. So Abigail appreciated it more than she probably should have.

"Was…. College fun?" Abigail asked after a while, wiping her mouth with her arm. Ever since what happened, she felt hopeless that she wouldn't have a future. No more college. No more friends. No more…. Fun.

Blake shrugged, "It could be. Classes were a little hard but making friends is really what makes it fun." She smiled softly, "I was lucky enough to meet them during orientation." Blake motioned to the living room as she talked.

Abigail hummed in response, looking down at her meal.

—-------

As Abigail left to get into Will's car, Blake held Will back to talk with him. Among…. Other things.

Will blinked as suddenly Blake's lips were on his. He cupped her cheek as Blake set her hands on his waist. This kiss was a bit more heated than their first one…. It was also in front of people who actually knew them. But, for once, Will's mind was clear.

"W-What was that for?" He stammered as he tried to catch his breath, taking a deep breath.

Blake squeezed Will's waist for a moment, making the blush on his cheeks redden. "You looked like you needed it." She teased softly.

Will cocked his head slightly, eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

"You're worried about her." Blake jutted her chin in Abigail's direction, letting Will go so he could stand on his own. "She's made progress today, Will. And I think she'll continue that progress with your help." She said softly, caressing Will's cheek.

Sometimes people believed Will Graham didn't care about many things besides his dogs. But the truth was, if he started to care he would care too much and perhaps even destroy himself in the process. So he liked to distance himself as much as he could. But Abigail…. Will felt an obligation towards her after killing her father. Someone had to be there for her. And it was either going to be him or no one would.

"Just…. Watch her. And be careful. But also, don't act as if she's made of glass. Don't throw her against the wall and shatter her but maybe slam her against the table." Blake advised, planting another kiss on his lips.

Will breathed in softly, "I'll keep that in mind."

#will graham #will graham is soft #will graham x oc #hugh dancy #hugh dancy x oc #nbc hannibal #hannibal #hannibal lecter #hannibal is a cannibal #blake adler #sweet nothing

5 notes · View notes

biaswreckingfics · 3 years ago

Text

Liminal: Part 1

Pairing: EXO x Female Reader

Genre: Witch!AU

Word Count: 4.5k

Warnings: Some strong language

Summary: Magic. Murder. Mystery. You don't know when this became your life, but your choice in the matter is long gone. Someone is after you, someone is killing witches, and when a coven approaches you and tells you you're one of them? You're sure they're crazy. What's so magical about a girl stuck working in a greenhouse?

------------------------------------------------

Junmyeon swipes up the newspaper that Chanyeol had thrown down on the table with a sigh. Kyungsoo watches the anger take over his face as he reads the article they have all already had the displeasure of seeing.

Another senseless murder.

Another witch dead.

Everyone in the room shares the same frustration. The same anger and helplessness that is fleeting across Junmyeon's face at this very second, and they have no idea how to stop it.

This is the sixth body that has shown up in the past two months. The police think it’s a serial killer, but they have no real idea of what's happening. All they keep managing to do is get in the way of the people who actually have a chance of solving the murders - and they needed to be solved quickly before anyone else is killed.

None of the covens or elders can figure out why this is happening. What would someone gain from killing witches? Even worse, what would someone gain from killing witches that didn’t practice magic?

That is part of what shocked Kyungsoo. Not only were witches being slaughtered, but there were entire lines of witches hidden from the covens. Sure, he had heard of people going into hiding after the war centuries ago, but he hadn’t realized how many there were or that they were still in hiding after a couple hundred years.

Did those who were killed even know they were magical or was that knowledge lost to them a long time ago?

It was a surprise to the elders too. When the first few deaths occurred, none of them realized it was witches being killed off. The only reason anyone figured it out is because an Elder works on the police force. Kyungsoo didn’t know if it was his instincts or something about the way they were murdered that caused red flags to go off in the Elder’s head, but if it wasn’t for him, they still wouldn’t know. He raised concern, and others began tracing back the deceased familial lines, ultimately discovering it’s their own being murdered.

“What should we do?” Seoyeon quietly asks.

“You carry on with what you’ve been doing.” The High Priestess says as she sweeps into the room. “You keep perfecting your skills, and let the Elders keep tracing family lines.”

Jongdae watches her from across the room, already shaking his head as she speaks. “That’s not enough. We need to find these other hidden witches before whoever is killing them does.”

“How do you suppose you’re going to find someone you don’t even know exists?” She asks calmly, clasping her hands in front of her as she comes to a stop next to Junmyeon. When nobody offers her an answer, she continues. “Running around like a bunch of blind mice isn’t going to solve anything. Obviously, report it if you see any suspicious activity. Otherwise, let the Elders handle this for now.”

Her words frustrate some of the members, but they leave no room for argument. Besides, only fools would argue with their High Priestess. Though, something about her words sends a thought through Kyungsoo’s brain.

He has noticed suspicious activity lately at a place that he frequents quite often. At first, he thought it was just paranoia because of the murders, but now he thinks it’d be stupid to ignore. Especially when someone’s life could be at stake.

“The greenhouse,” his deep voice rumbles, causing everyone to look at him. “I’ve noticed odd people hanging around there, and they only started coming once the murders began. I thought it was in my head, but now I’m not so sure.”

He ignores the way his cousin’s eyebrows furrow and focuses solely on the High Priestess, who nods at his words.

“I’ll check into the employees that work there. For now, continue going there to keep an eye on things.”

------------------------------------------------

You hum to yourself as you bend down and check the sage plants for any bugs. There’s only about an hour left of work, and you figure this is the quickest way to pass the time. Plus, you didn’t mind this part of the job. It’s mindless and lets you escape into your fantasy world that is always quietly calling your name.

“Did you know that some people use sage to ward off evil?”

You jump when you first hear the deep voice next to you, but a smile quickly grows on your face. Kyungsoo. One of the greenhouse’s most consistent customers and definitely one of your more favorite customers. His monotone voice would make you think he’s bored, but you could always hear the passion in it when he talked about plants.

You straighten up to meet his stare. “Is that why I get the random terrified customer that comes in asking for it?”

The smile immediately falls from his face as he processes your words. “What?”

“I’m joking, Kyungsoo,” you tell him as you hold back a laugh. “Besides, aren’t there specialty shops for that?”

“Probably.” He shrugs his shoulders before a curious gaze takes over. “So, do you believe in things like that?”

“In evil spirits?” A small laugh escapes from you. “No, not really. Ghosts, demons, magic… I don’t believe in any of it, but if someone comes in here looking for sage to protect themselves, I’m definitely not going to stop them.”

Kyungsoo nods at your words, but you can tell his mind is elsewhere. Either lost in a world of magic and evil or just in a daze. You glance past him to make sure everything else in the greenhouse is going okay and notice another customer watching you.

Changmin. Someone who only recently started coming to the greenhouse but wasted no time in trying to get to know you.

“Do you need any help Changmin?” you ask, causing Kyungsoo to look over at him.

The two make eye contact for a moment, and you curiously take in the sight. Did they know each other? Because the vibes you’re getting aren’t exactly friendly.

“I do, actually.” Changmin finally says, ripping his gaze away from Kyungsoo to look at you.

“Okay. One second.” You tell him, focusing back on the man in front of you. “Did you need anything else, Kyungsoo?”

He eyes Changmin a little longer before turning back toward you. “I’m good. Thanks. I’ll see you around, though.”

You nod and watch him walk away before making your way over to Changmin. His brown eyes still watch Kyungsoo until he’s out of the store, causing you to furrow your brows in confusion.

“What’s up?” You ask in an attempt to get his attention.

“How long have you known him?” He asks, leveling you with a stare.

You jerk in surprise at the unexpected question. There’s no obligation to answer him, but you can’t deny you’re curious why someone you barely know would ask that.

“He’s been shopping here for a couple years. Why?”

Changmin slowly nods before looking back in the direction Kyungsoo had left in. You study his side profile, taking in the locked jaw and intense stare. They had to know each other, and not in a good way.

“Changmin?”

He studies you for a moment before saying, “I wouldn’t trust him if I were you.”

Your mouth parts slightly as you try to take in his words. Who just says something like that, and why did he think he could say it to you?

A smile grows on his lips as he takes in your expression. “Just some friendly advice.”

“…Right.” You finally find your voice, though a weird feeling fills you. Something about this entire thing feels off, and you don’t want to be dragged into it.

“Well, thanks for the help.” He winks at you and heads toward the entrance.

A minute passes before you find your bearings again. That entire encounter was awkward, and what’s more, you never even helped Changmin, so you didn’t know what exactly he was thanking you for.

Pushing the last five minutes from your mind, you pick up a nearby watering can and start giving some of the drier plants a little bit of water. You follow the same monotonous routine as you normally do and sigh. You’re so bored… and not just here but in general.

Working at the greenhouse is fun, and it’s refreshing to be surrounded by nature and warmth every single day, but it isn’t enough. You crave excitement and adventure. You want to travel the world and experience all that life has to offer, and you know you won’t find that here in the greenhouse.

You want more.

As your night wraps up, you turn off the lights and begin to head out, turning to lock up the greenhouse before you go. It’s the same routine that you always have, but something about tonight feels different. Something in the air feels different.

Brushing off the odd feeling, you throw the greenhouse keys in your bag and begin the journey home. It’s nights like these that you’re grateful you only live a couple blocks away. You get to tune into your thoughts and let your mind wander in the peace and quiet of the night, but tonight, that odd feeling remains.

You glance over your shoulder to glimpse the empty streets. Vehicles parked along the road for the night and a few trees scattered along the sidewalk greet you, but that’s all. No other human being catches your attention; however, you still can’t shake the feeling growing inside of you. The feeling that you’re being followed.

Quickening your pace, you try to remain calm and clearheaded. The odds that you’re being followed aren’t very high, but the recent string of murders in the city has you feeling on edge anyway. You debate if you should continue going home or if you should go somewhere else, but there’s no public place between the greenhouse and your apartment, so you continue on your path.

It’s probably just paranoia, especially since it’s nearly all the city can talk about. The news, the papers, social media… it’s everywhere, and that’s why you assume the odd feelings are just in your head. You’re psyching yourself out… but that still doesn’t stop you from feeling a sense of relief the second you get into your apartment.

Locking the door immediately behind you, you take a deep breath before letting out a breathy laugh at your actions. They were warranted, but you still felt a little silly. You turn on the lights and move to drop your bag on the table near the door. Before you can take any further steps into the apartment, your phone rings and you phish it out of your pocket, barely glancing at the caller ID because you already know who it is.

“Hey, mom,” you greet her.

“Did you make it home okay?” The worry is clear in her voice, so you avoid any sassy responses and move to sit on your couch.

“Yep! Safe and sound.”

You’ve grown used to the nightly phone calls you’ve been getting from your parents over the past couple of weeks. Ever since the news broke the first couple of murder stories, your parents have been worried sick about you, even more than usual. You’ve been trying to keep them calm and not become frustrated by their actions because you understand. You’re their only child, and you live alone in a dangerous city, but sometimes you really want to forget about the horrors that exist on the other side of your apartment door.

“Good! Make sure your door is locked!”

“It is mom.”

You hear her sigh on the other end of the phone. “You know we just want you safe, sweetie.”

“I know, and I love you for it.”

“Love you too, baby. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

You let out a soft laugh as you hang up the phone and drop it on the couch. Turning your head towards the window, you take in the city lights and listen to the soft sounds of the still bustling city that slip through the glass. Your mind can’t help but think about the odd feeling you had when you left work. The feeling that you were being followed. Was it paranoia as you suspected, or something more sinister?

The following days prove to be just as boring as usual, and after your spooky walk home a few days ago, you welcome it. For once in your life, you welcome the quiet, boring life you lead. The only difference you’ve noticed over the past few days is the more frequent visits of Kyungsoo and Changmin. It’s like every time you turn around, one of them is there. It’s almost eerie how they manage to do it.

Kyungsoo is a welcome distraction. He often talks about the plants you have in the greenhouse and similar ones he thinks you should talk your superiors into growing. He often makes comments about magical herbs or ones that’d be used in rituals, and you have to laugh. It’s funny to you how into magic he is, but you can tell he’s passionate about it, so you let him continue telling his stories.

Changmin, on the other hand, seems more concerned about Kyungsoo than you or the greenhouse. You often catch him watching Kyungsoo from a distance, and you know Kyungsoo can feel it because he has caught him several times himself. It’s odd how Changmin doesn’t even bother trying to hide it, and things take a really weird turn when Changmin approaches you about him directly.

‘Didn’t I warn you not to trust that guy?”

The small shovel you’re holding in your hand drops back into the pot as you stand up to greet Changmin. “Hello to you, too.”

His eyebrow quirks up as you ignore his previous sentence. “Hi. Did you not hear what I just said to you?”

“I heard you just fine. What I’m not hearing is an explanation.” He gives you a confused look, so you elaborate. “This is the second time you’ve told me not to trust Kyungsoo, but you’ve yet to give me a reason. Kyungsoo has been nothing but nice to me while you, on the other hand, keep sending him death glares across the greenhouse and telling me not to trust him.”

He studies your expression for a moment before nodding. “I just thought I’d help you out. You’re a nice girl. Maybe a little too nice. Didn’t your parents ever teach you that looks can be deceiving?”

Confusion causes your brows to furrow as you try to figure out how on earth you should even respond to that. This man that you barely knew, not only is telling you not to trust someone but is calling you naïve directly to your face. Who does stuff like this?

“I’m just saying,” he shrugs his shoulders, “maybe watch who you befriend.”

You meet his stare for a moment before saying, “Yeah… I’ll do that.”

For the rest of your shift, all you can think about is how relieved you are that Changmin is gone. The man is starting to creep you out and why he felt like he could tell you who you could and couldn’t trust really bugged you. The two of you are friendly but not friends. You barely know him, so why does he think he can come up to you and say things like that?

“Don’t forget to turn out the lights!” Your coworker reminds you as she breezes past towards the door.

“I got it, don’t worry. See you tomorrow!”

She throws you a smile as she exits the greenhouse, and you try to focus on the last-minute things you need to do, but your mind is elsewhere. Sighing, you toss your work gloves into a bin by the counter and move to grab your purse. You’ll deal with the rest tomorrow.

As you walk out of the greenhouse and turn to lock up, you get an eerie sense of déjà vu. You lift your head up and look at the area around you. The sight that greets you causes a bad feeling to work its way up your spine.

People are scattered all over the place. On the sidewalk on each side of the greenhouse and across the street. They stay half-hidden in the shadows. Not enough to show their faces, but enough that you can tell they’re there.

You take a deep breath and try to keep calm while you watch the shadows. There had to be 10 to 15 people around you, and that’s enough to set off your alarm bells because you’d usually only see maybe four people maximum when you closed.

The way they all stand still as they watch you causes your heart rate to spike. You stare at the wooden door in front of you and debate on running back into the greenhouse since the key is still in the lock, but you know that’s not going to stop them from whatever it is they plan on doing. Something tells you they’re here for you and that they won’t stop until they get what they want. You don’t know why, but your body is screaming it at you.

You needed to find a place with people, or at least, a busy street, and there wasn’t any toward your apartment, so you pull the key out of the lock and head in the opposite direction. Your steps are slow as you come close to one of the people leaning against the building next to you. The girl doesn’t move as you pass her, and though you try to find her eyes, it’s like she leans back deeper into the shadows, making it even harder to see her.

Once you pass her, you pick up your pace and almost swear when you hear footsteps behind you. You knew this was going to happen. Now, you just have to be quicker than the rest of them.

Quickening your pace to a jog, you force yourself not to look behind you. Every time the person looks behind themselves in a movie, they fall and bust their ass. That would not be you. However, something else tries to force its way inside your head…

What if these people had something to do with those murders?

You force yourself into a jog, noting the wind has noticeably picked up. Good. Maybe they’ll get tired of going against the wind to follow you. You smile at the thought until you feel the wind push against you even harder.

You stumble a little at the force of it but try to keep going. You ignore the harsh whip of it against your face, but it stings enough that you question where the heck this wind even came from. Was it even supposed to storm today? You could’ve sworn the forecast said sun all day when you woke up.

An even harder gust of wind slams against you, and you find it nearly impossible to move your body. Chancing a glance behind you, you see the people that are following you having an even tougher time. It’s like they’re somehow getting even more wind than you are.

What the hell is going on? You’ve never experienced wind like this. It’s almost… unnatural.

Lightning arcs across the sky, being immediately followed by thunder, and all you can think is “great, a freak storm, that’s exactly what you need right now”. You look up at the sky and feel your face scrunch in confusion. There aren’t any visible clouds, so you’re not entirely sure where this storm is coming from.

More bolts of lightning streak across the sky, lighting up the road around you until suddenly one of the bolts hits a streetlight behind you. The thunder that accompanies the bolt is monstrous, startling you into turning around and searching for damage.

Smoke comes off the light that had just been struck, but before you can process it, another bolt hits the light across from it, sending two of your followers stumbling. You jump back as more bolts begin hitting the road, and that’s when you realize the lightning isn’t following any basic laws of science. Tall buildings, other streetlights, plenty of metal objects surround you, and instead, the lightning hits the ground, bypassing everything. Even odder, the bolts only hit the ground around the people behind you, none of them near you.

Momentarily stunned by the odd storm, you realize this is the perfect distraction to get away. You turn back around and begin to fight against the wind to move. At first, it feels like you’re cemented to the ground, but ever so slightly, it becomes easier to move. You push harder, fearing that if it’s easier for you, it’ll be easier for your followers to move as well.

Wetness suddenly hits your face, distracting you and causing you to look back up at the sky. Rain too? Of course, it makes sense, but there weren’t even any clouds thirty seconds ago. The sky opens up moments later, dropping so much rain on you that you’re drenched instantly. It pelts against you almost painfully, like thousands of needles being jabbed in your skin, and you cry out before you can stop yourself.

Turning your head towards the buildings alongside you, you search for a place to hide out. You can’t stay in this rain any longer, and when you glance behind you, you notice most of the creepy people fleeing the storm, making your sense of urgency dwindle. What you need to do now is find shelter, then as soon as the storm lets up, you can go get help.

Taking a step towards the buildings on your side, you notice a shape approaching you and you immediately tense up. The creepy people didn’t leave like you thought. They just went around to trap you instead. You quickly back away as the figure moves closer to you and notice it’s not as hard to move as it was. The wind is starting to let up as is the rain, allowing you to see the person approaching you.

You blink a few times as you take in his sudden appearance.

“Kyungsoo?”

“Come with me,” he urgently tells you, holding his hand out for you to grab.

You look between his hand and his face as you try to push past the startling confusion you’re feeling. What the hell is he suddenly doing here, and why does he want you to go with him?

“Please! We don’t have a lot of time!”

The urgency in his voice has you looking over your shoulder. You didn’t have a lot of time? Is he talking about those people? How would he know about anything that’s going on?

“Where?” You turn back to him and shout to be heard over the rain.

“Please, just trust me!” He yells, looking behind you.

You send one more peek over your shoulder before glancing down at his hand. Changmin’s words telling you not to trust Kyungsoo work their way into your mind, but you squash them. You barely know Changmin, and a part of you feels like you can trust Kyungsoo. He, at least, feels safer than being out on these streets alone at night.

Taking a deep breath, you place your hand in his and allow him to pull you back in the direction he came from. The two of you run toward the end of the block, and then he pulls you around the corner, where you see a black car already running and waiting for you.

He opens the backdoor, and without question, you jump in. You look up as you find your seat and come face to face with another man. Your movements halt, but Kyungsoo jumps in after you, blocking your only exit. You look up to the front of the car and see two more unfamiliar men in the driver and passenger seats.

Oh. You fucked up. There’s no possible way jumping in an unfamiliar vehicle with three strangers and someone you barely know isn’t a fuck up.

“What the hell, Kyungsoo?” You turn and hiss at him.

“Calm down. Everything’s going to be okay.” He tells you as he places his hand on your arm.

You immediately move away from him, not wanting him to touch you. “Like hell it is!”

Tearing your gaze from Kyungsoo, you look at the other men in the car, and that’s when it hits you. Not a single one of them is paying any attention to you. They’re all concentrating on something behind you, outside of the vehicle. You take a moment to study them as they focus on whatever it is they’re doing.

Next to you is a thin man with brushed-back hair. You see his eyes focusing on the trees as they almost violently sway, and you assume he’s as curious about the wind as you. In the driver seat is a shorter, muscular man. He stares out at the rain like he’s almost in a daze, and an unnerving feeling begins to prod at your skin. Lastly, in the passenger seat is another man, but his face is turned away from you. All you can tell is that he’s looking up at the sky like it holds all the answers.

Slowly, you turn to face Kyungsoo, who’s looking out the back of the car in the direction you came from. He must feel your eyes on him because he quickly turns to face you. You try to find your voice to speak, but the most that comes out is a whisper.

“What the fuck is happening?”

Before he can answer you, you feel movement from your side, and you immediately snap your head in that direction. You meet the cautious stare of the man next to you, the one who was watching the trees, and blink a few times before you realize how quiet it has gotten.

Reluctantly, you pull your gaze away from the man and look out the window, noticing the storm had disappeared as quickly as it came. The night is now silent and eerie. The trees no longer sway, the rain no longer drops, and the lightning is long gone. You sit frozen as you try to figure out how any of this is logically possible until you realize that it’s not just the man next to you that is focused on you. The two men in the front are as well.

You turn to look at Kyungsoo, the only one you know. “You have about five seconds to tell me what the hell is going on.”

He searches your face a moment before nodding. “You’re in danger.”

You quickly open your mouth to argue with how absurd that sounds, but he holds his hand up to quiet you.

“Those people are after you, and they’re not going to stop until you’re dead.”

Tagging: @haveanotherkpopblog @iibonniee @making-me-blush @monbabyzshoebill @jay-scenarios @svmmi-viv @quaaacky @lunaselenamoon98 @moonlightcandy00 @kpop---scenarios @baekhyunsdangerouswoman @bellapinkrose @sanaxking

118 notes · View notes

literaticat · 3 years ago

Note

Do you think “issue books” are becoming less popular and being out-paced by more escapist works now?

I feel like in the 90's / early 2000s, there were a lot of books that were very obviously ISSUE BOOKS. Like, SMACK -- about kids addicted to heroin, or CRANK, about kids addicted to meth, or GIRL INTERRUPTED about a girl in a psychiatric ward, or IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY about a boy in a psychiatric ward, or LIVING DEAD GIRL about a girl kidnapped by a pedophile who lives with him for YEARS (omg that book is SO disturbing!). These were often quite intense, "edgy" books about very dramatic issues.

Those books still exist, but they are more likely to be somewhat more nuanced -- and the ISSUE at the core is more likely to be about Social Justice, racism / transphobia / something like that, or exploring mental health issues or whatever it is within the context of a larger story, rather than the basic "this is what it's like in a psych ward" narrative.

In other words, maybe more like social issues intersecting with and woven into regular contemporary realistic YA, rather than straight up "harrowing portraits of kids on drugs" or "majorly disturbing accounts of molestation."

So, books that I'd consider more modern, nuanced "issue books" are like, THE HATE U GIVE (which yes, sure, it's "about" racism and there is an act of police brutality that sets it off, but is also interwoven with lots of other stuff) - - or DOES MY BODY OFFEND YOU (about girls who start a dress code revolution in their school, among other things) -- or WITH THE FIRE ON HIGH (has a teen mom at the center of the plot, but it's not ABOUT that, it's just a fact that she is dealing with in addition to lots of other things)

Then again.... lots of books that are "purely escapism" ALSO weave in "issues." Like, there are lots of fantasy novels from recent years where the "bad guy" seems a lot like T___p, or the hero is saving the world from some despot who wants to take away civil rights, etc. In the graphic novel SQUAD for example, like yes it's about girls who turn into werewolves (escapism!) -- but also it's about girls who turn into werewolves quite specifically to kill and eat date-rapey douche-bros. So, it's fiercely feminist and explores fighting against toxic masculinity, etc (Issues!).

I guess my point is -- I think these days it's more likely that even purely "bubblegum" escapist fare will weave in a little thread of "issue" -- and "issue" books will also weave in some romance, thrills, friendship, fun, or otherwise escapist threads.

7 notes · View notes

myhauntedsalem · 3 years ago

Text

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw

I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane?

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter

I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One

I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs

My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed

Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death

They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject

I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives

As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma��am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

#13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps #shared stories #paranormal #ghost and spirits #ghost and hauntings #haunted salem #myhauntedsalem

28 notes · View notes

lightphieric · 3 years ago

Text

Fluffuary Prompt #12: First “I Love You”

AO3

Fandom: Zero Escape

Ship: Sigma/Diana

CWs: General dark themes that are present in canon; first scene has a medical setting; mention of sex

The first time she heard it was January 3rd, 2029. Sigma woke up from surgery to a hospital in chaos. The staff had left him to die as people succumbed to Radical-6 left and right, but luckily, Diana had been able to sneak her way into the recovery ward amongst the confusion. She slowly brought him off the anesthesia, monitoring his pale, scarred face for any signs of pain, and gasped in relief when his eye cracked open and he murmured her name.

“Crash… ‘kane… help us…” he slurred, his slow, heavy breathing masking the urgency of his words.

“Shhh… Sigma, you need to rest.” Diana’s words were horrifically punctuated by a blood-curdling scream from the hallway. She swallowed and shakily patted his leg, careful not to disturb his IV.

“…get out of here together…” Sigma babbled, not hearing her. “I promise. I love you.”

He was neither lucid nor coherent, and perhaps because of this, Diana knew he meant it. She also knew she didn’t deserve it, not after dooming the world. She never let herself cry while treating patients, but she wanted to. To have his love – to still have his love, she realized – was more forgiveness than she could ask for.

---

The first time she said it was April 12th, 2029. Sigma and Phi’s SHIFT was imminent, and the Kurashikis had given them and Diana a merciful break from space travel preparations to let them say a private goodbye in the shelter’s sleeping quarters. Phi had already spent most of the time comforting Diana, who had been struck by a terrible case of vertigo too strong to even stand up from the cot.

“I’m never going to see you again, Phi!” she sobbed into the sweater of the girl she had sacrificed six billion lives to save.

Phi coughed uncomfortably. “Well, how do you think Sigma feels?”

Diana looked up to see Phi biting her lip and cringing. Sigma’s expression was one of horror. It was obvious to everyone that referencing Diana’s impending death had been in extremely poor taste.

“Uh. What I meant was –”

On the plus side, it had been shocking enough to break Diana out of her vertigo. She interrupted Phi with a hug. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I was scared I wouldn’t get the chance to say… I love you.”

She meant it for Phi, but as Phi hugged her back, Diana looked over her shoulder at Sigma. He was leaning stoically against the wall, silently affected by the fact that his fleeting reunion with Diana was ending. He nodded as she made eye contact, and she knew in that moment that the words had reached him too.

---

The first time he heard it was April 13th, 2029. Diana would curse herself afterwards – he was no longer the wise and mature man she knew, just a terrified kid who was a stranger to her as much as she was a stranger to him. But Sigma was afraid of flying. He spent the countdown gripping his seat in the rocket so hard his skeletal metal knuckles would have been white. It came to her instinctively as the best way to console him, a hand on his shoulder and a whisper: “I’m here, Sigma. I love you.”

It worked, if only by baffling him out of fear. Diana spent the next several hours averting her eyes, while Sigma couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. He felt the sting of his recent breakup, which had until that moment ceased to be anywhere near the greatest of his worries, but he also felt that pain eased. An adolescent part of his brain he knew he would have to grow out of was absolutely psyched – his older self had game and was leaving him to go live alone with a hot woman who was in love with him.

She had spoken to more than just his libido. As they left Earth’s gravity and the last tethers to his home, ravaged as it was, were severed, Sigma gasped Diana’s name and reached out to her. She laid her hand in his and pulled him back into his seat, and Sigma felt the first inkling of hope that the moon could become a home, too.

---

The first time he said it was September 5th, 2029. Although Diana had gotten comfortable expressing affection over the past several months, realizing 23-year-old Sigma wasn’t fundamentally that different from the 67-year-old, Sigma was slow as ever to reciprocate. It was some pathetic macho hang-up he was trying to shake. Even though it was abundantly clear to him that she was the love of his life, he was afraid to be vulnerable, afraid that sincerity would bring about a more complete rejection than he had ever experienced.

It was during an especially rapturous night together that it came to him in a morphogenetic flash, the revelation that she was hiding something from him, that their time together was limited. She held his face in her hands afterwards, running her thumb gently underneath his eyepatch, and he ached knowing he wouldn’t be able to feel this forever. He grazed his lips over hers, barely kissing her, just inhaling her warm, sweet breath, and breathing it back hesitantly: “I love you, Diana.”

“Oh!” Diana grinned and her flushed face turned redder. “I love you, too, Sigma,” she said with a shy giggle.

To her, the exchange was one of young love at its purest, but Sigma had to hide his dread. There would only be so many more opportunities to say it and hear her say it back, and the worst part was, he didn’t know how exactly how many that would be.

---

On December 31st, 2028, all of these memories yet unmade appeared in their heads alongside the Decision Game’s many alternate paths. They were points in a cycle that had finally been broken. For the first time in any history, Sigma and Diana embraced their daughter while knowing who she was to them. Around Phi, they found each other and joined hands. Sigma gave Diana a squeeze with the affection of every first they’d lost inside it, without any of the pain.

Phi noticed, and although she could barely stand to separate from her parents, she pushed them both gently away and gave them a knowing smile. “I ought to give you two a moment.”

They weren’t out of the woods yet. Part of them didn’t want to get ahead of themselves, not before the Decision Game was over. But as they moved behind the bar, alone in their shared fog of memory and love, they knew that this was part of a new beginning. Diana threw her arms around Sigma’s shoulders, and he lifted her to meet him. They whispered it simultaneously, their new and only first:

“I love you.”

#fluffuary 2022 #zero escape #sigma klim #diana ztd #zero time dilemma #ztd spoilers #vlr spoilers #fanfiction #my writing #fluff

8 notes · View notes

elianamarie-blog · 4 years ago

Note

Can you do an imagine with Hyde and a depressed reader?

I’d love to my dear.

I Just Need You To Hold Me

Lately, Y/n L/n hasn’t been acting like herself. She doesn’t smile or laugh as much as she used to. And if she does, it doesn’t reach her eyes. In fact, it barley graces her lips. As if she’s just faking it to make sure her friends don’t worry about her. Fez who always makes her laugh with his cute, innocent, or even lewd jokes didn’t seem to faze her. But her boyfriend, Steven Hyde, had definitely noticed. Everyone else did too, but were too timid to talk to her about it. She had even stopped taking care into her appearance. Her hair had become dull and barley combed, dark circles had developed under her y/e/c eyes, and she wouldn’t shower a few days at a time. She would use deodorant and perfume to cover up her odor.

Before they knew it, she stopped showing up to hang out. She stopped showing up to circle time and even worse, she stopped showing up to dates. Steven and the rest of the group was starting to get really worried about her. On another occasion of her not showing up to hang out, the gang sat in the basement, worrying about her.

“Should we go check on her?” Donna asked. “I mean, I haven’t seen her in three weeks. I’m really starting to worry.”

“Yeah, I think we should,” Fez responded. “She hasn’t been herself.”

“Do you have any idea what might be wrong with her?” Eric asked Hyde.

“No,” he responded, shaking his head. “She won’t let me in, man. I’ve tried asking her if she’s okay and she just keeps saying she’s fine. Clearly things aren’t fine.”

“Well, if she says she’s fine, she clearly doesn’t want to talk about it,” Jackie replied, filing her nails. “Girls do that.”

Hyde gave her a deadpanned look. “You don��t say.”

“Yeah, man. Why do you keep pushing it? Clearly, she’s okay. As long as you’re getting action, that’s all that matters,” Kelso said.

Hyde glared at him before throwing a magazine at him.

“Ow! My eye!” Kelso cried out. “Stop doing that!”

“Get smarter!” Hyde yelled back.

Suddenly, the phone rang, silencing the group’s laughter. Hyde answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” a sweet, familiar voice said from the other side.

“Hey,” he responded in a gentle tone.

“I know that this is last minute, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to the movie tonight with everyone.”

“Y/n, this is the fourth time this week. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she lied. “I’m just super tired. College finals are kicking my butt, you know?”

“Y/n, you’ve been on spring break all week,” he said. “C’mon, seriously. What’s wrong? I’m worried. We all are.”

“You’re worried?” Kelso said from the background. “You guys, he’s totally in love!”

Hyde motioned his hand towards Eric who nodded understanding and reached over, slugging Kelso in the shoulder.

Kelso whimpered before laughing. “That was a good one.”

Y/n weakly smiled before sighing. “I’m just going through a rough time, that’s all.”

“If you’re going through something, why didn’t you tell any of us?” he asked her. “We’re your friends. We’re here for you, you know that. Especially me.”

“Yeah, I know. I just--I didn’t want to burden you guys.”

“You know you don’t. C’mon babe--Y/n,” he quickly corrected himself after receiving raised eyebrows from the group. Knowing Hyde for so long, he’s never used pet names with his girlfriends. Well, not in front of them anyway.

“Steven, I said I’m fine. Can we please drop it?” she said frustrated. “I don’t want to talk about it, especially with you guys. You don’t need to know my business. If I choose to not talk to you about it, then I don’t have to. Please respect that.”

“Look, I was just trying to help--”

“Well, don’t,” she snapped. “I don’t need it. I can handle this on my own. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

With that, a click was heard on the other end. Hyde pressed the phone to his forehead before hanging up himself.

“What was that about?” Eric asked.

“I don’t know, man,” he responded. “Something is wrong. I can’t just sit here. I have to go see her.” He stood, grabbing his jacket and keys off the table by the door.

“Well, let us know what she says. Babe,” Eric teased.

“Remind me to pound on you later,” he threatened before ripping the door open and practically running to his car.

Once he reached Y/n’s house, he walked up to her front door and knocked. After a minute, the door swung open, revealing her mom.

“Oh, Steven,” she greeted. “What a pleasant surprise. You must be here to see Y/n.”

“Yes, Mrs. L/n. Can I see her?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea right now, sweetie. She’s been...in a mood lately.”

“I know, that’s why I’m here. I just want to check on her and see if she’s okay. I haven’t seen her in a while and I’m worried.”

“You’re such a sweet boy. Come on in.”

When Y/n had brought home Steven for the first time, her parents weren’t crazy about him. It’s a small town, people talk. They knew his reputation, but they couldn’t deny how good he treated her and how he even changed for her. They knew he was a sweetheart and knew about his home life. It was hard to dislike him when they saw how gentle he was with her and surprisingly affectionate. And when they saw how happy they made each other, they started growing a soft spot for him too.

Steven immediately took for the stairs, making a left and going two doors down to Y/n’s room. He raised a fist to knock, but heard soft crying from the other end. He didn’t bother to knock and just let himself in. “Doll?”

The sight he walked into, made his heart drop. Her room was dark and her curtains were closed, allowing no sunlight in. Empty glasses and dirty plates littered the room, but the thing that caught his senses was the smell emitting from the room. If she hadn’t turned around upon hearing him enter, he wouldn’t thought maybe she wasn’t alive.

“Steven, what are you doing here?” she croaked.

“Oh my God...” he trailed, taking in the sight of the room before his eyes landed on her, covered by her duvet. She was a mess. Her hair was a rat’s nest, the dark circles under her eyes were even darker, her skin was dull, and she was still in her pj’s, given that it was four o’ clock in the afternoon. “Y/n...what happened? What’s going on?”

“Please, Steven, just leave,” she begged, her voice weak.

“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” he said, standing firm. “You’re done lying to me. You need to tell me the truth. Did something happen? Did I do something?” His heart picked up slightly thinking that all this was due to him.

She shook her head meekly. “No. It has nothing to do with you. You’re perfect.”

“Then please tell me what’s wrong,” he begged, sitting at the end of her bed. “Let me fix it. Please.”

“You can’t. You can’t fix it,” she croaked in a high pitch voice, fighting her tears. “Nobody can fix it.”

His eyebrows knit together. “What’re you talking about?”

She sat up fully, facing him. She casted her gaze down to her hands, afraid of wanting to admit what was wrong. “Lately, I haven’t been feeling well.”

“Is that it? You could’ve said something and I would’ve brought you some soup or something.”

She shook her head. “Not that kind of sick.”

He looked at her in confusion. “Then what kind?”

She took a deep breath, a few tears escaping. She sniffled and wiped at her eyes. “I went to the doctor recently because I haven’t been myself. I can’t get into what normally would make me excited. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. I can’t even get out of bed to take a shower.”

“Y/n, where is this heading?”

She scrunched her face in anguish before being able to answer. “The doctor seems to think I have depression and anxiety. He recommended that I either see a therapist and psychiatrist and go on meds or admit myself into a psych ward.”

“What?” he asked in genuine shock. “Why didn’t you tell me you were feeling this way?”

“Because I didn’t know what was wrong with me!” she exploded, tears streaming down her face. “I thought I was going crazy. I was so scared you would t-think that I had l-lost my mind and l-leave m-me.” She was hiccupping, trying to get through a sentence through her sobbing. “I was afraid that you would see me as a burden and too much and leave me alone with e-everyone else.”

Hyde’s heart shattered after hearing her tear-felt confession. “Oh, baby doll. Come here.” He shifted himself up to her and wrapped her in such a tight hug, that she for the first time in weeks, she felt safe. “For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy or a burden.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Steven. I can handle it.”

“I’m not lying,” he answered honestly and kissed her temple. “I promise I’m telling the truth. You have no idea how amazing you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Shut up and listen to me,” he said and pulled her back, wiping her tears with the pad of his thumb. “You are the most badass girl I know. You are smart, and funny, and kind, and so beautiful. I’ve never met a girl like you before and I love you.”

She paused, looking deeply into his steel blue eyes. That was the first time he’s ever said that to her. They’ve been together for at least three months now and they’ve never exchanged those three words before.

“You...what?”

“I love you, Y/n,” he repeated. “Just because you have something screwy going on in your brain doesn’t make you less amazing. While I agree you should get some help, it doesn’t take away how much of a badass you are. You’re the only chick who can make me laugh as hard as you do. The only one who isn’t afraid to challenge me and make me think. You don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. You don’t take people’s shit and you’re such a good friend and girlfriend. Not too mention you’re the best sex ever.”

He winked at her, making her genuinely smile for the first time in weeks.

“You promise?” she asked weakly.

“Of course I promise, Doll,” he replied, squeezing her tighter. “You just need to let me in. And tell me what I need to do to make everything better. Even if it’s just in that moment. Please.”

She nodded. “I’ll try. This isn’t easy for me.”

“And I’m not expecting it to be,” he said, rubbing her back. “I just need to know when you start to feel this way so that I can help. Even if you feel like you can’t say anything, you can do something as squeeze my hand and I’ll know.”

She nodded, burying her face in his chest. It was a comfortable silence for a minute with him rubbing her back and her trying to control her breathing. “I loemf youem too,” she mumbled in his chest.

“What?” he asked.

“I loemf youem too,” she repeated, head still buried in his chest.

“Y/n, I can’t understand you.”

She pulled away, looking directly into his eyes. “I love you too.”

He grabbed her face and pulled her in for a much needed kiss. Not just any kiss. The “I miss you” kiss and “I’m here for you” kiss. The “I need you” kiss. The “please don’t ever let me go” kiss. Everything they wanted to say to each other was said into this kiss.

When he finally pulled away to breath some air, he rested his forehead against hers. “And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone until you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“But you do realize you’re going to have to face them.”

She nodded. “I know. Will you be there with me?”

“Yes, of course, baby doll.”

“Can you do something for me now?”

“Anything. What do you need?”

“Just...just hold me.”

“As long as you need me too,” he responded and got comfortable, taking his jacket and boots off. He laid down on his side and pulled her in close, wrapping his arm around her waist. “How’s this?”

“Perfect,” she whispered.

“When was the last time you ate?” he asked her, thumb rubbing her stomach.

“Two days?” she asked, rather than state. “I don’t know. I kind of lost track.”

“Okay, what do you say we get some food in you and get you in the shower?” he asked. “Some food and a fresh shower always helps me feel better.”

“Is this your way of telling me I stink?” she joked.

He chuckled. “You know me so well.”

“Steven Hyde...” she warned.

“Yes, doll?”

“You’re lucky I love you.”

Let me know what you think! I’m always open to requests!

17 notes · View notes

all-things-skam · 5 years ago

Text

Title: To talk...or not talk

Ship: Wtfock | Robbe + Sander

_______________

At night, Noor was still hungover from all the alcohol she had drank the previous night, therefore, she didn't feel like partying with the group. Her head was still pounding and her stomach sensitive, so she preferred to rest.

Even though he didn't want to be around her at the moment, Robbe's caring heart had offered to stay in with Noor, but she shook her head and told him to go with his friends and have fun. She was just going to sleep it off anyway, she didn't want to ruin his night - again.

Robbe did just that. He drank beers with Jens and the boys, chatted with the girls around the fire until he felt a little buzz from the alcohol. He wasn't drunk - only two beers -, but an intense feeling of loneliness crashed into him as he finished his second beer.

Not wanting to be a downer, Robbe retired himself from the group and walked along the sand until he found a quiet place to sit. He looked out at the dark ocean, the cast of the moon shining over the water as sadness invaded him.

The main reason Robbe came here was to escape his problems, escape reality. A part of him was hoping that going away with his friends for a week would revive his spirits and that he could possibly forget about his personal struggles and anxieties, but they quickly caught up to him.

Firstly, there was his mom. Robbe felt guilty for not being able to visit her this week. She was alone in that psych ward while he was on a 'vacation' with his friends - and Robbe couldn't count on his father to visit her. Leaving her alone in that ward stressed him.

Thankfully, his living situation had gotten better. Zoe's offer couldn't have fell more perfect. At first, Robbe felt uncomfortable moving in with Zoe, Senne and Milan, but he rapidly got used to it. Zoe had taken the role of the big sister, asking news from his mom and making sure he ate healthy food, and Milan had quite an entertaining personality. Despite its chaotic environment, Robbe felt appreciated at the flatshare, something he hadn't felt in a long time in his own house.

There was also Noor. Although Robbe liked spending time with her, he couldn't see himself being with her for the long run - sorry Noor. She was a nice girl, adventurous and artsy, but she wasn't it. With her, Robbe was pretending. He didn't have feelings for her - and would never have. She was too touchy-feely for his liking and her eagerness to get intimate made Robbe uncomfortable. Especially since he couldn't get it up for her... Now he's forced to share a bed with her for the week. He really doomed himself on this trip.

Sighing, Robbe pulled his legs up, arms resting on his knees and pressed his head on them.

Did he really thing that coming here would make his problems go away? What a fool was he...

''There you are!''

A bit startled, Robbe turned around and saw Sander standing there, black hoodie covering his platinum hair and a grin on his lips.

''Were you hiding from me?'' Sander asked as he sat down beside Robbe.

The brunet scoffed, shaking his head.

Perhaps he was hiding, but certainly not from Sander. He was a breath of fresh air in Robbe's life. He was bright despite wearing only greys and black, spontaneous and carefree. If anything, Sander made Robbe feel lighter, less tense. He even got him to genuinely smile for the first time in a couple weeks.

A shoulder brushed against Robbe's, pulling him out of his thoughts.

''Everything okay?'' Sander's caring voice asked, sensing that the boy's mind was preoccupied.

''Eh, yeah,'' Robbe responded, a slight hesitation in his tone. He forced a smile, but Sander cocked an eyebrow, not buying his bullshit.

The blond cocked an eyebrow. ''Why do I have a feeling that you're not telling the truth?''

Casting his eyes down, Robbe tensed. How could someone he has known for less than twenty-four hours manage to see through his act and read through him when Jens, whom he has know for years, is as blind as a mole rat?

''I...'' Robbe bit his lip, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt.

Personal struggles and anxieties weren't something Robbe was used - nor liked - to share or open up about. You could say he was a bit closed off, prefering to keep everything to himself instead of opening up and seeking help. He was barely capable to talk about his mother to Jens, let alone someone he had recently met.

''Hey,'' Sander started in a gentle, calm voice, his light green eyes searching for Robbe's. ''I didn't say this to pressure you into telling me something you don't want to or aren't ready to share. I just mean, I'm here if you want to talk...or not talk. We can just sit and watch the water too.''

A relieved chuckle escaped Robbe's lips, lips twitching and turning into a small smile. Sander mimicked his smile, but wider which provoked a weird feeling in Robbe's stomach.

Sander mimicked his smile, but wider which provoked a weird feeling in Robbe's stomach. The same feeling he felt when they were at the grocery store, spinning around and racing with the shopping cart. The same feeling he felt when they their eyes met as Sander fed him the croque in the kitchen.

''Who invited you?'' Robbe asked, breaking the silence. ''I just- I've never seen you around school,'' he justified, not wanting to come as rude although he was pretty sure it was too late.

''That's because we don't go to the same school. I go to art school,'' Sander informed with a proud grin, almost cocky.

Robbe snickered. ''Why am I not surprised...''

It wasn't a negative remark, far from. It's just that with his platinum hair, layered shirts - that leather jacket - and his obsession with David Bowie, Sander screamed typical art kid.

Sander gaped in fake shock and shoved Robbe lightly. ''Hey!''

Panic rose inside the smaller boy, afraid he has truly offended Sander. ''No. I didn't mean it like that. I-''

A grin broke on Sander's face, amused. ''I was messing with you.''

''Asshole...'' Robbe muttered, shaking his head.

#robbe ijzermans #robbe x sander #wtfock #not my best writing #the next one will be better I promise #don't forget to tell me what you want to read

159 notes · View notes

punk-of-the-opera · 4 years ago

Text

Okay so I'm gonna finally open up about why I switched schools.

MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING HERE

In the middle of 9th grade, I was a very depressed kid. I had gone to the psych ward back in 2018, but it wasn't helping. I had so many undiagnosed issues, mental and physical. I had never dealt with the abuser I mention a lot in my vents, he came later. The only things I dealt with were my overwhelming dysmorphia and bullying for so many reasons at school.

So, on March 18th, 2018, I tried to kill myself.

It was really an impulsive decision, I'd been crying for help and nobody could hear me. My girlfriend at the time was begging me not to, but I just couldn't handle the stuff I was dealing with.

So I downed 11 acetaminophen tablets and waited. The whole time my girlfriend was texting my parents (who were at work) what was going on.

She convinced me to call 911, so I did, explaining to my 13 year old sister that the paramedics were coming because I had downed all those pills.

God my stomach hurt so badly.

But the ambulance, police, and parents came. There I was shipped off in an ambulance to the hospital, all the while woozy as fuck.

There I drank charcoal, I'm lucky I didn't have to get my stomach pumped.

I spent the night in a hospital bed, hooked up to so many machines, IV in my arm, texting my girlfriend on my dad's phone.

The next morning, they transferred me to the psych ward, the worst one I've ever been to.

I got put in the girls ward, due to my bisexuality and how the guys there would absolutely harass and assault me for it (this place was mostly for violent behavior issues and teens going through drug rehab).

I didn't mind staying with the girls, they were nice and calm and all.

Through the whole experience, I wrote over 100 pages of a journal to my girlfriend, I still have the book.

God, it was awful there, always kids getting into fights, adults trying to escape, and the worlds most uncomfortable chairs.

Finally, I got out, and immediately had to attend school the next day.

Why did I change schools? So my parents could watch over and keep track of me, they both work for the school in the next county over from where I live.

My relationship with my girlfriend was fine, I regret ever putting her through that kind of pain, she deserves so much better.

I'm choosing to attend this other school for the rest of highschool. Not only are the classes easier, I got a fresh start. I could be a new person, I made some of my best friends.

I'm still friends with one person from that school, the best friend ever who's stuck by my side since the first day of 6th grade.

But anyway, that's basically my story. I later got diagnosed with OCD so that helped a lot with getting on the right medication. I got a new therapist and psychiatrist and while my mental health isn't the best right now, things are moving forward. Slowly but surely.

To end things off, enjoy a glowup of Mira (bff) and me. Truly my best friend forever, one of the only ones who's stuck by my side. <3

Oh god this had to be like, what? 6-7th grade?

To now:

Yes, I know we're in cosplay, but it's the only good pics I have of us together recently lol! I'd say we both had a glow up.

Thank you if you read all of this! My journey might not be as interesting as others, but I felt the need to tell it.

Just remember, you're so very loved.

Erik.

#vent tag #vent #vent post #vent tw #trauma vent #tw ocd #tw

5 notes · View notes

metawitches · 4 years ago

Text

In episode 5, we lose some beloved characters in some violent interactions with some hard characters. It’s a tough episode to get through.

Teen Charlotte learns her origin story from Old HG Tannhaus and meets Teen Peter. The two Adult Claudias meet for the first time. Alt Claudia gives Prime Claudia the triquetra diary. Child Elisabeth finds Young Noah in the caves.

Recap

The episode begins in the Prime world, 2020, with Prime Adult Claudia burying Adult Regina, who was recently murdered by Alt Old Tronte under orders from Alt Adult Claudia. Regina was dying anyway, so it was basically a mercy killing, but Prime Claudia wasn’t read to let go.

It’s raining, of course, as Claudia digs a hole in the ground by herself. She’s placed a wooden cross as a grave marker. The body is wrapped in plastic. As we know from our world’s 2020, it can be hard for suppliers to keep up with a heavy demand for caskets.

Sirens blare in the distance as Claudia finishes. A warning that other natural disasters are still occurring or that serious crimes, such as arson or riots, are out of control in the post apocalypse Prime world? Or a warning that this turn of events signals a new, even more dangerous direction for Claudia’s plans?

Old Claudia does the opening voiceover:

“Why do we die? What is death? Could we escape it if we knew when to expect it? Is the time of our departure predetermined? Our dying part of an endless clockwork? We all have one truth in common. We are born and we die. No matter what path we take to get there.”

Claudia questions death, but then finds it something that all beings share, the great leveler. Yet “and then she will live” has been Claudia’s motivation since early in season 1. Claudia identified the “she” as Regina early on. Now that “she” is dead in both realities.

In 2053, Adam tells Charlotte that she always ends up standing there, having her life mansplained to her by him, while the corpses of the suicides and Elizabeth’s kills dangle in the background. Charlotte is clearly questioning the life choices that led her to be this version of herself instead of the one with the blonde highlights and clean clothes over in Martha’s world.

Same.

Adam continues, saying that Charlotte is drawn to Elisabeth. Their souls will always bring them back together.

That must make Franziska feel great. At least she and Magnus have each other, since no one is risking their lives or attempting to murder anyone to find them.

He asks if Charlotte has decided whether she’ll play her part in the next stage of their plan. In one more day they can finally unravel the knot. Charlotte asks if he’ll play his part. She doesn’t say what his part is and he doesn’t give a straight answer, as is his habit.

Adam: “Eva will never achieve her goal. Her world is no more deserving of salvation than ours is. You know that.”

Still fighting with the ex, after 66 years.

Over to Eva’s Alt world, November 2019, where it’s one day until the apocalypse.

Jonas is asleep in Yellow Raincoat Martha’s bed. He’s wearing the White T Shirt of Purity, so we know that what he and Martha did last night was a Good Thing in the long run. A hand creeps over his shoulder, as so often happens in his dreams. He turns to see Prime Martha lying in bed behind him, in her white wedding dress. There’s no black goo to be seen, for once. Time hasn’t caught up to them yet.

He wakes up. It’s not a full startle, more a slow motion shiver awake. Very effective.

He rolls over to see Yellow Raincoat Martha asleep behind him, wearing black. Of course she is. She’s no longer pure. Time and motherhood have infected her. I can see Daniel Kahnwald scratching her off his list of potentials as we speak.

Jonas just sort of accepts that this is what his life is now and gets out of bed, then gets dressed. Martha wakes up while he’s getting dressed. They look at each other, then look at everything but each other. While Martha gets dressed, she tries to accept that she’s not the Martha he was looking for, even though he’s the Jonas she was looking for.

When she’s done, she sits on her bed. He puts on his raincoat, then picks up her yellow raincoat and brings it her. She looks up at him, waiting to see what he’ll say: “Let’s go. To the nuclear power plant. We don’t have much time.”

It’s not much, but he handled her coat gently and didn’t reject her outright. A desperate girl can live for days on those little signs. Before they leave, Martha starts to say something, but changes her mind. Better not to know the answer to some questions until you have to.

Katharina is waiting for them when they get downstairs. Oops, they didn’t make it back from the future in time for dinner. It sounds like they were gone for a whole day when they went to 2052. Plus, Mom liked Kilian the former drug dealer better than Jonas. And she doesn’t even know that Martha and Jonas are related yet.

Martha hugs her mom tight while crying a little- the apocalypse is only a day away and no one has mentioned the bunker to her as a place where she could keep her family safe. Bet St Kilian would’ve mentioned it if he were the savior from the next planet over.

She tells Katharina that she has to go. Her manner spooks her mom so much that Katharina doesn’t try to stop her. Jonas basically makes a run for it, hoping Katharina has forgotten he’s there.

Over in the Prime world, September 24, 1987, Prime Adult Katharina is in the psych ward with Old Ulrich, going over their escape plans. She tells him to wait by the entrance at 10:00 PM. She plans to steal Helene’s psych ward key card when she’s done with her shift at 5:00 PM. Then she tells him they’ll get Mikkel, too.

Once she says that, you can see the shift in Ulrich. He thought the plan might work if it was just the two of them escaping back to their time, but he’s accepted that Mikkel can’t leave this time period. He apologizes to her for all of the trouble he’s caused her.

Old HG Tannhaus has the radio on in the clock shop: “One year after the horrific events of Chernobyl, 5 members of upper management at the reactor have been given long prison sentences. Meanwhile, German nuclear power plants have seen an increase in security measures and testing. Still, the government… that German nuclear power plants are safe. In the US, German Foreign Affairs Minister Hans-Dietrich addressed the UN General Assembly in NY and urged global superpowers to take further steps toward disarmament… The German research vessel Polarstern has set out to explore the Antarctic… The expedition’s aim is to research the hole in the ozone.”

While he waits for the world to end, Tannhaus is working on a pocket watch at his desk when Young Charlotte enters the shop. She’s wearing her teal cap and is out of sorts. He asks if she had a rough day. She responds by asking if he’s ever wondered if it’s possible to rewind time.

There’s a loaded question.

He chuckles and says he has. She wants to know if he thinks it’s possible to go back in time and change the past. He gives her a long look and decides she’s old enough to know more about her own past.

Tannhaus: “For quite a while now I’ve wanted to be able to turn back time. But my place is not in the past, nor the future. It’s here, with you.”

As he’s speaking, he retrieves a small leather box from a cabinet- another Pandora’s box. Except this one is THE Pandora’s Box. He takes a photo from inside the box and hands it to Charlotte. It shows a young couple with an infant. She asks if they’re her parents. She’s been told that there are no photos of them.

Tannhaus: That’s not you in the photo. Those aren’t your parents. That’s my son and his wife. And my granddaughter. They died in a car accident. That night, when it happened, I woke up. There was a noise downstairs in the shop. Two women were there. Strange looking. They were carrying a bundle. That bundle was you. They said that on that night, everything would be taken from me and then I’d be given everything. And then I got the call. On the bridge, a truck had forced my son’s car into the river. They only ever found the bodies of my son and his wife. My granddaughter was never found. This is the only thing you brought with you.”

He gives her the “For Charlotte” pocket watch that’s been passed down through generations of the Tannhaus family since at least the early 1800s.

If Charlotte isn’t his granddaughter, how did she get the Tannhaus family watch? Was it passed down through a side branch of the family? Why doesn’t HG know that the watch is a family heirloom? Is this another bootstrap paradox? The pocket watch needs an episode of its own so that we can follow its 200+ year journey.

Charlotte is confused and angry. She asks who her parents are, who she really is, but he doesn’t know. She runs out of the shop.

Over to the Alt world, November 2019 and Blonde Highlights Charlotte, who clearly knows she’s got the best deal of all the Charlottes. Other than the apocalypse that’s coming in 1 day that no one’s told her about. But she will die young and leave a beautiful corpse, as some dream of.

She’s waiting for Aleksander again in his office, looking mildly confused about the dirty plastic bag on his desk that’s evidence in a murder case and a potential blackmail case. Prime Charlotte would have taken photos of the bag, sent them to the crime lab and had the results before Aleksander walked in. But Prime Charlotte also touched her daughter’s hand at the end of S2, went through the rift and became a cult member in the future (because she has no other options), so you know, curiosity killed Schrödinger’s cat and all that.

When Aleksander enters, she tells him she needs to ask him some questions about the body in the bunker. He realizes the incriminating bag is still on his desk and fails to act nonchalant. She notices that he’s nervous and asks if something’s wrong. He says everyone at the plant is nervous right now, while they’re planning the demolition and decommissioning of the power plant for next year, when the plant will go offline. He never expected his career at the plant to end this way, but everything has its time.

He’s just watched his beloved wife of 30+ years die of cancer and he’s helping to end his own 30+ year career. That takes it out of you. Bartosz is all he has left.

Charlotte asks when he arrived in Winden and when he began work at the plant. He tells her that he came to Winden in Fall 1986 and began working at the plant soon after. He wonders why she’s asking. She doesn’t say. Then he asks if she received the power plant shift schedules she asked for. Charlotte asks if previous shift schedules are archived, going all the way back to 1986.

Since Aleksander is a wanted man, this makes him more nervous, but Charlotte, like Ulrich, is narrowing in on Helge.

There is a drumbeat instead of the swoop to change worlds, but the switch happens, nonetheless. We move to the Prime world, September 2020. Obviously, it’s raining.

This is some kind of terrible post-nuclear-black hole-quantum-entanglement-apocalypse radioactive fallout rain going on in Winden that you do not want to be caught in. This stuff probably evaporates into the black goo/Cesium 137 and they scrape it up off the streets, then store in in barrels, similar to what they did with the Trinitite green radioactive glass formed at the first nuclear test site.

Adult Claudia makes her way into the boarded up police station where Regina died and where she apparently now lives. She can sense someone waiting there and picks up a piece of rebar to use as a weapon. It’s Alt Adult Claudia- this is their first meeting. Alt Claudia says hello as they circle each other warily.

Prime Adult Peter and Young Elisabeth leave Benni’s trailer, then make their way to the military encampment to search for Charlotte and Franziska again. Elisabeth refuses to enter the encampment, despite Peter’s pleas. She’s given up hope for finding her mother and sister alive and can’t bear to look at any more corpses. Peter tries to convince her to keep looking, but she walks away from him. He hesitates as she walks away, unsure whether to follow her or keep searching as planned.

Alt Claudia explains to Prime Claudia that she’s from another world and is there to guide Prime Claudia into the Light.

Maybe that sounds different to Germans and not like she’s the Angel of Death.

Alt Claudia continues: “There are two groups out there who are fighting for superiority in time travel. Light and Dark. I want you to join our side. Eva’s side. I know you thought you could trust him, but you can’t do that.”

Prime Claudia is confused about Eva, then confused by “him”. Alt Claudia clarifies, “Jonas. He belongs to the dark.”

Prime Claudia believes that Jonas died in the shockwave, since he didn’t make it to the bunker and she hasn’t seen him since.

Claudia tells her that Jonas isn’t dead. “He wants to destroy both worlds forever and untie the knot. He doesn’t know that death is what he’ll want in the end. But all his impulses on this journey will lead to that end. But Eva wants to save both worlds.”

So much irony here. Here is a rule you need to remember from here on out: Claudia lies constantly and ruthlessly, even to herself.

We already know that Eva doesn’t want to save both worlds. Jonas does want to destroy both worlds, but that’s not the end of that story. And I don’t think there’s been a single time on this show when someone has recruited someone to the side of “the Light” that they’ve had that person’s best interests at heart or were telling them anything close to the whole truth.

At this point, the light and the dark are meaningless distinctions. We saw in the Alt world’s 2052 that light can be deadly and dark can be protective, as the darkness of the cave and bunker have been at times. They do not automatically equate to good and evil.

Prime Claudia says that Jonas wants to change the cycles. He taught her that if they change one small piece, they can change everything. Alt Claudia says that Prime Old Claudia taught Jonas that, which Prime Adult Claudia already knows. It was one of the first things Jonas told her. But Alt Claudia acts like she’s making a big reveal about the “positive feedback loop” of Claudia and Jonas mentoring each other in time travel.

Alt Claudia: “Jonas opened the passage in 2020. The older Jonas has closed it in 2019, as well. After it had been opened for the first time in summer 1986. In all three moments, they left behind traces of Cesium residue, a component of the black matter.”

Prime Claudia: “Radioactive half-lives.”

Alt Claudia: “In each cycle, in all three moments, this Cesium is carried through the tunnel and back before it’s completely decayed. It exponentially expands endlessly.”

Prime Claudia: “So that’s how the passage was created.”

Alt Claudia: “And that’s how it must continue to exist for eternity. Everything has to happen again. Jonas bringing the matter into the passage. The opening of one of the drums in the plant triggering the apocalypse. Everything in this loop repeats itself. Life and death.”

Back to the Alt world.

Jonas cuts through the chain link fence which surrounds the nuclear power plant so that they can sneak into the facility and stop the barrels from being opened. Martha asks what’s in the containers. Jonas says he doesn’t know exactly, just that the substance is what’s leftover from the 1986 accident at the plant and is what makes time travel possible. The trucks carrying the barrels will arrive later, so they’ll lay low until dark.

So why are they rushing to get there, if nothing is going to happen for hours? Because that’s what Jonas does. The Alt world storyline is supposed to mirror the Prime storyline, but without Jonas the pieces don’t fall into place properly. So characters are moving around the board like playing pieces in an Alice in Wonderland chess game who aren’t sure why they’re making the moves they’re making, they just know the moves are very important and need to be done quickly, or off with their heads!

This is part of why I’m certain that Martha was always the chosen one in this world, but Jonas also existed there as a natural part of the world until a fairly recent cycle. They are working too hard to compensate for his absence for it to be a natural part of this world.

As they crawl through the fence, Martha’s cheek gets scratched. She tells Jonas it’s nothing but he realizes that it’s the same scratch that the other Alt Young Martha had, the one who grabbed him from the Prime world apocalypse at the end of S2 and dropped him in the caves. She said she was trying to change the eternally repeating loops, just like him, but Martha’s scratch proves that so far, everything has stayed the same. If they continue on the same path, nothing will change and Yellow Raincoat Martha will become Alt Dark Emo Martha.

Jonas asks Martha why Eva lied to him about saving his world, but I think he’s mostly asking himself. Martha answers anyway, trying to get him back on track. She reminds him that they’re supposed to be stopping the apocalypse in her world. He interrupts her, wondering if they’re actually the ones who trigger the apocalypse and if maybe that’s what Eva wants.

That would correspond to the way Charlotte and Torben walk in on Clausen with the barrels in the Prime world. But the apocalypse will happen, one way or another, no matter where Martha and Jonas are. If they aren’t there to trigger it, Time will send someone else. The mirroring between the two worlds wasn’t a lie.

The differences between the two apocalypses would be in how energy is being used to further the goals of Sic Mundus, Erit Lux or Claudia, what that means for how they’ll manipulate the placement of pawns people and what events they might try to synchronize with the opening of the barrel.

Martha doesn’t understand this system at all yet or why Eva would want an apocalypse. Jonas isn’t able to wrap his head around explaining time travel theory and the knot from the beginning so that Martha will understand, so he just starts where he is, in the middle: “Because they’re lying. I always do it. They keep telling me I have to, but it’s them. No matter what I do, it just gets worse. I have to go back to Eva. I finally want to know what the truth is.”

He might want to start by doing what someone else, who’s not so intimately involved, wants to do, instead of following his own instincts or the authority figure’s instructions every time. Maybe listen to the rest of the Scooby Gang for once. Yeah, it’ll never happen.

I love the way he pretends like he hasn’t demanded the truth from everyone, every time, and like they haven’t assured him that they were telling him the truth, for real this time, every time. He is eternally ready to try again, once he comes out of his latest suicidal depression, like the springtime after a long winter.

He goes back through the fence. Martha reluctantly follows.

Back to the Prime world, September 1986.

Teen Charlotte sits in the shelter at the one bus stop and traffic light in town. A bus pulls up and a teenage boy gets off, but Charlotte doesn’t get on. Like Teen Regina, Ulrich and Hannah, she’s using this as her thinking spot.

The boy asks how long the walk to Winden is. Charlotte tells him,”I’d turn back if I were you.” Winden is a black hole that sucks your life away and never lets you leave again.

She’s feeling a little dramatic. But it’s also true.

The boy is into that kind of thing and sits down at the other end of the bus stop bench. When he asks if she’s okay, Charlotte tells him, “It’s complicated.” He agrees that life is complicated. She asks what brings him to Winden. He repeats, “It’s complicated.” But after a moment, he continues, explaining that his mom recently died, so he’s come to live with the father that he’d never even heard of until a few days ago. His mother told him his father’s identity on the day she died.

Charlotte asks if he thinks someone can be brought back from the dead. He asks if she has a specific plan in mind. She says she was thinking of using time travel- she’d take the person out of their timeline before they die. Without a time machine already in place, that’s further than the boy can manage with this thought experiment right now, but he’s intrigued, so he introduces himself. He’s Peter Doppler, Charlotte’s future husband.

Back to the Alt world, 2019.

When Charlotte gets home, Elisabeth is sitting on the living room couch. Charlotte calls for Peter and asks why Elisabeth is home. Mother and daughter don’t seem to be close here. Elisabeth says she didn’t go to school today. Peter enters the room. Charlotte tells him that she got the 1986 power plant shift schedules from Aleksander.

Helge worked until 6:00PM on the day Mads disappeared. Then Mads disappeared around 6:21PM. Peter tells her again that Helge was with him all night when the body appeared in the bunker. He doesn’t know why Helge confessed, but he has dementia, so she should let it go.

Charlotte insists that Helge’s confession is valid, so he may be involved in the murder of 2 boys. She says this with no emotion other than annoyance that Peter can’t understand why she’s pursuing this important case so enthusiastically. There’s no acknowledgement that this is a family member who lives with them and the idea that he could be a murderer hurts the people who love him, like her own daughters.

Charlotte must have been looking for a way to get Helge out of her house, she’s so excited to be able to pin some murders on him.

Peter pulls her out of the room, since they’re having this discussion in front of Elisabeth. He tells Charlotte that Elisabeth isn’t deaf. Charlotte doesn’t respond directly. She brings up Erik Obendorf and Helge’s penny instead, then says that Ulrich is right. It’s all connected. Peter isn’t happy that she brought him up, though he doesn’t mention the affair. Charlotte goes back to the station.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Back to the Prime world, September 2020, raining.

Elisabeth returns to the trailer and locks the door. There’s a strange man already inside stealing food. When she tries to leave he tells her not to be scared, then smashes her forehead against the window, knocking her unconscious. When she awakens, she’s on the bed with her hands and feet are bound. The man is heating up soup on the stove. He pretends to be friendly and chats her up.

Kidnappers and rapists are so weird this way, pretending they’re nice guys while they’re invading your home and forcing themselves on you in some of the worst ways possible. Then acting like you’re the rude one if you don’t cooperate, because their expectations seem reasonable to them. There is a purpose for all of that socialization of women to be nice at all times. Makes it much easier to victimize us when it goes against to grain to disturb other people.

I mean, don’t women like to be tied up the way Elisabeth is right now?? In that man’s mind, he can convince himself she’s sitting quietly because she likes it. Or she will once he’s done with her.

Once the soup is hot, he sits next to Elisabeth on the bed. She’s supposed to be maybe 9, at most 10, in the Prime world, but this anus thinks he’s on a date now. When she refuses any soup, he decides she’s ready for him and tries to rape her. Peter walks in on them and a fight for their lives ensues. The anus stabs Peter in the chest with a knife and kills him. Before the anus can turn around, Elisabeth turns her attacker’s head to pulp with a fire extinguisher. When she’s done, she’s in shock and covered in blood.

In September 2053, Adult Elisabeth stares at the God particle.

In this scene, we get a good look at Elisabeth’s blind eye, which is frequently left in shadow. Were we supposed to figure out that her eye or optical nerve was damaged in the fight for her life? We’re not going to get another explanation for what happened to her eye, so let’s go with that. The optical nerve is actually squeezed between bones on its way to the brain. So a blow to the head like the one she just got could have shifted bones or caused swelling that put pressure on it, damaging the nerve. Combined with a lack of medical treatment, she’s probably lucky to be alive, even though she escaped the attack.

Adult Elisabeth, Franziska, Charlotte and Adam are having a family reunion in the God particle observation room. Franziska hugs Charlotte and Elisabeth tight. Adam says that it’s time and tells Franziska to let the other two go. Elisabeth and Charlotte put on hazmat suits and go to the God particle, while Franziska watches like the Rapture has come to take them. Maybe it has, since it seems they won’t be back.

In 2020, Alt Adult Claudia hands the pristine triquetra diary to Prime Adult Claudia and tells her that she has to stop Adam from untying the knot. “You need to lead them. Jonas. Noah. Elisabeth.”

“I don’t understand. Lead them where?” Prime Claudia is confused about where she’s supposed to be going. That is the question of the day. Where is all of this going?

Alt Claudia takes out the Golden Time Snitch and says they’re not going anywhere.

Prime Claudia should lead her young friends along the same path that they’ve always been on. She must maintain the knot, cycle after cycle. Alt Claudia will be doing the same in her world. She reiterates that Claudia needs to work with Jonas for a while, then turn against him. It’s all in the book. As she’s disappearing in a puff of golden glitter, she says they’ll see each other soon.

Prime Claudia kind of liked the idea of going somewhere, though. She’s always been a daring adventurer and pioneer. Repeating the same life for eternity was never going to sit well with her. Plus, while Alt Claudia is still the director of the power plant, Tronte’s lover, Regina’s mother and perfectly groomed, this version is alone and wearing muddy plastic while living in a dirty hellscape. She wants out. She views the triquetra diary not as an instruction manual for maintaining the status quo, but as a Bible she can use as the starting point to decipher a way out of the eternal recurrence.

So- this is where Claudia got the diary and why she’s been following it up until now. But it’s always been clear that the original sequence of events is not being followed from cycle to cycle, even though both Eva and Claudia pretend that’s what they are doing. Adam and Jonas’ relationships to the book are too hard to even keep track of anymore.

The Unknown (and maybe others we haven’t seen) has gone through and changed events, then written down the new sequence in the diary in order to make sure it’s followed. The triquetra diary itself is necessary because so many changes have been made to the cycle that the characters will no longer naturally make decisions necessary to maintain the new cycle. These are the bootstrap paradoxes, the parts of the cycle that don’t make sense anymore.

The fact that Alt Claudia gave Prime Claudia a pristine new version of the triquetra diary suggests that they’ve just made new changes in the book and the cycle. Otherwise, they could let the book change hands as a bootstrap paradox each cycle and become worn, with no one sure of its origin, the way copies of HG Tannhaus’ book have done.

Back to the Alt world, November 2019.

Jonas and Martha march back to the Erit Lux HQ in the caves. Martha stops him outside the entrance to get an answer to her real question, finally.

Martha: “Jonas, what if it’s the truth, though, and only one world can make it? Either yours or mine?”

The camera spins around them as they stand face to face, equals who could be enemies or lovers. Jonas doesn’t answer.

Martha understands his non answer. She steps closer as she speaks. “You decided long ago. You want to return to your world.”

Jonas almost whispers: “I didn’t want any of this. You have to believe me.”

Men are raised to think lawful karmic neutrality is most honorable. Women are raised to believe loyalty to loved ones is most honorable. Why does our culture create these clashes?

So Jonas thinks that it’s reasonable to tell Martha that he didn’t want what’s happened between them, because, to be fair, he was basically kidnapped by Dark Emo Martha. But he definitely wasn’t coerced into having sex last night. That’s obviously on Martha’s mind, and this being her first rodeo, she doesn’t realize where he’s going with his argument.

When she questions whether he didn’t want what happened between them last night, he says, “This here is wrong. I am wrong here.”

She kisses him. They kiss. I think she might have actually taken his soul with her this time, but when she asks him if that was wrong, he stays still and silent. After a moment, she turns and walks toward the mouth of the cave. He follows her.

At least he finally figured out that sometimes, it’s better to say nothing if you can’t spill out the entire 10 page thesis of nuance.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Back to Prime world, 1986.

Helene Albers takes the forest path home from the hospital. She’s wearing a bright pink jacket. Pink is an ambivalent color in this world, dark mixed with light. Katharina approaches her from behind with a knife. She has on a similarly ambivalent purple-pink.

Helene hears Katharina and asks what she wants. Katharina demands the keycard from Helene’s work and comes in close to put the knife up in her face. Helene says she thought she knew Katharina from somewhere when she came into the ward. Katharina grabs for Helene’s bag. With both of her hands occupied, it’s easy for Helene to grab Katharina and overpower her. Katharina forgets and says, “Mama, let go!”

Helene recognizes her daughter’s voice and is so spooked that she drops Katharina’s arms and runs away. Katharina chases her to the beach, where they fight each other for the bag until Katharina hits Helene in the head with a rock. Then she walks a few feet away and turns her back on Helene while she searches for the keycard.

While Katharina is searching, Helene wakes up, takes the rock and hits Katharina in the head as hard as possible, stunning her. Katharina drops to the ground. Helene tells her that she’s not her mother. She says Katharina must be an apparition sent by the devil. Katharina pulls Helene’s St Christopher medal off as Helene beats her head with a rock until she’s dead. Then Helene fills Katharina’s backpack with rocks and drags her body out into the lake.

Katharina is the dead woman in the lake that Bartosz told Martha about in S2 when they were swimming.

Ines and Mikkel/Michael pull up to their house. Katharina has only been dead for moments, but Ines knew it was safe to return home. Michael is in a daze. He barely responds to Ines. But he notices the broken window in the door that Katharina left. The first thing Ines does is offer him more drugged hot chocolate.

Teen Katharina is doing homework at the kitchen table when Helene gets home and starts drinking straight from the liquor bottle. Helene is covered with blood and Katharina is worried. She tries to get her mother to tell her what happened. Helene insults Katharina and hits her repeatedly, then says Katharina isn’t worthy of her name. She wishes she’d gotten rid of her as well.

She did, just decades later than she planned.

She leaves her daughter crying in the kitchen.

Montage time. The song is In the Woods Somewhere by Hozier.

youtube

The St Christopher medal lies on the beach, where it will stay for 33 years, until Martha and Jonas find it.

Ulrich waits for Katharina, but he already knows she’s not coming.

Alt Charlotte looks at Ulrich’s empty office.

Old HG Tannhaus looks at the photo of himself and Teen Charlotte. To HG’s relief, Teen Charlotte returns to the shop.

Teen Peter goes to his new home with Helge. Or not. Adult Helge should be in a care facility and Peter’s grandfather Bernd is dead.

Alt Adult Peter sits with Alt Child Elisabeth on the couch, where she is asleep with her stuffed animal. He wins parent of the episode, maybe the season and series. Everyone is ready to go out and fight in this show, but so few are ready to simply stay close and protect.

Prime Adult Peter is still dead. Didn’t even have the courtesy to move his own body.

Prime Young Elisabeth remembered what Young Noah told her at the Kahnwald house and went to the caves to wait for him. He finds her, still in shock and covered in blood.

Prime Adult Claudia reads the entire triquetra diary.

Back to the Alt world, Erit Lux HQ, time period doesn’t matter, but probably November 2019.

Young, Kidnapped Jonas and Yellow Raincoat Martha enter. It’s her first time here. She asks what this place is. Jonas says, “It’s what will become of you.”

They stop to look at the Adam and Eva paintings until Old Eva makes her dramatic entrance. “And thus everything starts over again.”

Jonas accuses her of lying to him when she said he could save both worlds. He asks if it’s even true that they can only save one world? He demands to go back to his own world, now.

Eva speaks to him like an annoyingly patient mother. Of course he wants to go home, but that’s just not possible. Jonas responds with, “What are you saying?”

And now we get Eva’s version of Adam’s three lives speech. She’s not offering him an education, though.

Eva: “A human lives but three lives. The first one ends with the loss of naivety. The second, with the loss of innocence. And the third with the loss of life itself. Yours ends here and now.”

Plot twist! Eva is a busy single mom. She doesn’t have time to fool around with a baby daddy who thinks she and her kid are wrong for existing. It’s time for Jonas to say hello to the end of stage 3. Stranger Martha appears from the shadows.

Old Eva says that Jonas has done what he was meant to do in the Alt world. Yellow Raincoat Martha argues that they haven’t done anything. They haven’t even stopped the apocalypse. Stanger Martha shushes her. Dark Emo Martha appears from another corner.

The two Young Marthas step close to each other and Yellow Raincoat Martha asks Dark Emo Martha who she is. Dark Emo Martha says, “I’m sorry.”

Then she shoots Jonas, just the way Adam shot Prime Martha.

Jonas takes a moment to fully act out his reaction to being shot, then he falls down. I thought for a minute he might spin around a few times before he fell, like a cartoon character. He’s been trying to die for a long time. Maybe this time, it’ll take and he’ll get some peace. He’s gonna give Eva her money’s worth with his death scene, either way.

Once he’s down, Yellow Raincoat Martha drops down next to him to cry and mush her hands around in his bloody torso and tell him she can’t live without him. He takes the opportunity to rub some blood on her face and give her the St Christopher medal so that the Alt world will always have one to remember him by. Even in death, he’s thoughtful like that.

Eva must have a bowl full of them.

The Greek Chorus of Other Marthas watches them for a minute, then wanders off. It’s probably the Unknown’s bedtime and they have to decide who tells the Old Man his story. He looks to me like he’d be picky and a little deaf and expect a different voice for every character.

Jonas gets really pale and lethargic. Yellow Raincoat Martha tells him she’ll make this right, mirroring his words over Prime Martha’s body.

Gosh, this would be so ridiculously sad if they hadn’t spent 2.5 seasons teaching us that Young Jonas can’t die.

Cue the haunting music.

Commentary

In this episode, the themes of taking what you want, survival of the most ruthless, domestic violence and the fragility of love and family bonds move to the forefront. Almost everyone who shows or even feels love or compassion is punished for it. Guilt is also used as a tool to take advantage of other characters. The relatively innocent forces of Young Mikkel’s S1 magic by distraction and secrecy and Hannah’s S1 magic by intention and Will have grown into forces that can create and destroy planets.

From what I can tell, everyone in Adam’s gang is disposable once they’ve served their purpose, except for Magnus and Franziska, who must act as the maid and butler. Sometimes the Sic Mundus alumni are murdered, sometimes Fate gets them, as with Ulrich.

I have a growing sense that the woods we see in the future with the hung corpses and the giant knots in the tree trunks are Dante’s Wood of the Suicides, where Adam’s leftovers go to die after they’re done serving his death cult. Or maybe an occasional member manages to leave town and start over somewhere. Let’s be hopeful. But, while Martha’s world came out of her mind as a Harry Potter-Dante’s Purgatory mash up, Jonas’ world came out of his mind as the Circles of He11, with him as Dante chasing his unattainable lost love through eternity, so, yeah.

Someday, let’s figure out what Bartosz’s 3rd world would look like. We aren’t being shown the trio photo over and over and reminded that Bartosz comes from a happy little family of 3 people all season for nothing. Now Tannhaus’ son’s little 3 person family has been added to the group of 3s. A Trio of Young Chosen Ones, Triquetra Knots, “Past, Present and Future”- 3 worlds are necessary to balance the system. If you haven’t guessed that yet, let me remind you that Tannhaus told us in S1 that the Einstein-Rosen bridge/wormhole through space-time would go in 3 directions, not 2, just as the passage does.

The connection between worlds is an expansion of that science. It’s not new science. I’ll go into the theory more in episode 6, but for now, keep in mind that Dark is a system based on the number 3, rather than a system based on dualities. As soon as there was a 2nd world, there was almost automatically a 3rd. Listen to Tannhaus’ science, not Claudia’s. Claudia knows the truth, but usually when we hear her speak, she’s lying to someone to get what she wants from them. Pay attention to actions, not words. She has an agenda of her own and most of what she leads the others to do is either distraction or in service of her underlying agenda.

RIP Prime Alt Young Jonas, Katharina and Peter. It doesn’t pay to be a pretty good person or parent in these worlds.

I really wanted to see Jonas pop up off the floor and tell the Marthas that he was just kidding, he can’t die. Nice try though, he hadn’t shot himself yet in all of his suicide attempts.

The main characters who were primarily parents, who were on the outer edges of the knot, are being taken out, one way or another. Daniel, Egon, Regina, Katharina, Peter, Bernd, Jasmin- dead. Hannah and Doris- driven out. Young Egon was gotten out of the way by being driven to drink. Other than Claudia, who is in charge, Alt Aleksander might be the last adult mom or dad standing who’s not inside the knot. Prime Ines died in the shockwave and Alt Ines wouldn’t be a mom, since she didn’t adopt Michael. I think Greta left town when Egon refused to find Noah for her.

A certain amount of the knot and of Adam’s actions are about creating and destroying close bonds between souls. The bonds between some parents and children are broken so that Jonas or someone else can encourage cult like loyalty. Now he’s particularly collecting daughters from within the knot- Alt Martha, Franziska, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Silja, Agnes. In the past, there were sons who were chosen ones or close to chosen ones- Mikkel, Helge, Noah, Magnus, Bartosz. All but Magnus have served their purpose.

Now that we know that Katharina is the lady of the lake, that means that there may not be a dead woman in the lake in the Alt world or the story surrounding her may unfold differently. Which means that the circumstances that brought Magnus and Franziska together in the Prime world and the Alt world and which kept them together had to be completely different.

The only thing that’s mirrored is that they’re together. In the Prime world, In June 2019, Bartosz tells the lady of the lake story while they’re swimming, then Magnus notices Franziska floating face down in the water and uses the story as an excuse to talk to her. He watches her in dance class and follows her when she exchanges money for meds for Benni. Since she’s deaf in the Alt world, she’s unlikely to be in dance class and Alt Benni doesn’t appear to be on hormones.

They stay together as part of Sic Mundus, stuck in the past and then in the future. In the Alt world, they aren’t part of Erit Lux, but they are still devoted to each other. I haven’t given them much credit as a couple, but I have to admit that they’ve been through a lot in both worlds and I’m touched by their quiet, enduring devotion to each other. Whenever things get intense, in a good or a bad way, the camera always shows them grabbing each other’s hands and holding on tight. Claudia, Eva and Adam have separated almost everyone, but not them. Magnus and Franziska are inseparable in both worlds.

Both Prime Charlotte and Unknown wear teal, suggesting that Prime Charlotte may also be a child of more than one world. But she’s not connected to different worlds in the same way that the Unknown is. Alt Charlotte wears navy blue, probably because she’s not self aware of her true nature in the way that Prime Charlotte is. Prime Charlotte has always had a connection to the mysterious.

In the absence of Jonas, Alt Charlotte seems to have connected more closely to Ulrich. That’s thrown off her intuition, her connection to Elisabeth and to the rest of her family.

In the Prime world in S2, Ulrich was obsessed with investigating the dead and missing boys, while Charlotte sensed that she was at the center of the mysteries in Winden and began investigating her own past. Her intuition in S2 both made sense and didn’t make sense- it panned out, but she never gave us a firm reason why she thought she was connected. The story of Tannhaus’ lost family and Charlotte’s mysterious appearance in his life brings that into focus. Did the two women who brought baby Charlotte to HG also run his son’s vehicle off the road?

In the Alt world, Ulrich is still obsessed with the case, but without the loss of Mikkel and with Mads sort of ID’d (Can’t they run a DNA match on the body? Wouldn’t that be a normal step to take in 2019?), his focus is more narrow. Alt Ulrich is trying to find Mads’ killer rather than to stop more children from being taken and to undo the kidnappings in the past, the way Prime Ulrich hoped to do when he attacked Helge.

Charlotte is picking up more of the police investigation than she did in the Prime world, but Stranger Jonas isn’t there to leave his box of clues in Regina’s hotel, so she won’t be given that help. (That’s why Stranger Martha’s bunker has chalk writing- there’s no tradition of paper and string.)

Without Jonas, we’ve barely seen Alt Mikkel all season. His connections, even to his own nuclear family, are broken as well. Alt Katharina isn’t passionately keeping track of her child’s welfare the way Prime Katharina did even before Mikkel disappeared. She’s barely mentioned him. Mikkel is a lynchpin character, but only when he’s connected to Jonas. Without Jonas, he fades into the background, even within his own family.

Without the Mikkel-Jonas-Michael circle, Alt Magnus didn’t become closer to either of his siblings the way you’d think he would have. He and Franziska have become an isolated unit instead.

Without Jonas and Michael, Alt Hannah has faded into the background as well, since Alt Ulrich ignores her in favor of his job, his obsessions and Alt Charlotte. Her pregnancy is her only ongoing storyline outside of her marriage.

With the shocking death of Prime Katharina, Prime Ulrich’s part in this cycle is done. Mikel’s family is now gone, other than Magnus, who is in the future, and Ulrich, who has been locked up in the past for his crimes for more than 30 years. Michael’s suicide is a necessary part of the cycle because it instigates Jonas’ journey, which is what instigates everything else, from one perspective. But I suspect that he also dies when he does so that he doesn’t have to watch the disintegration of his family of origin and then die in the apocalypse anyway.

Ulrich acts as the Judas to Helge’s Chosen One in both worlds, which is an odd role for him to play, given how separated they are in time and in the Winden social world. Charlotte is the only connection and she doesn’t interact much with her elderly father-in-law. Both Ulrichs use women and children badly and Helge is a child of rape who both Ulrichs try to murder, so maybe there’s some karmic debt being paid there.

Jonas tells Young Alt Martha that Eva/Erit Lux is “what will become of you.” We’ve heard that phrasing once before, from Stranger Jonas in S2, who used it in an odd way, as if he weren’t speaking about himself, when he said he couldn’t stop Adam, but he could change what becomes of him. This season, I’ve wondered if that was actually an Alt world version of Stranger Jonas, from a cycle before he was removed from Martha’s world. I already had the theory that there were two Strangers in S2. Now we’ve seen 2 Claudias in the Prime world. I think that Alt Stranger Jonas also traveled to the Prime world to help keep the cycles on track, before he convinced Martha/Eva to remove him from the cycles so that he wouldn’t become Adam.

Claudia, Jonas, Tannhaus, Time Travel and Quantum Entanglement- Some Theory

Alt Claudia mentioned the passage in connection to Jonas and made it sound as if he’d created it in the summer of 1986. We’ve never been shown any evidence of that, so I’m assuming she’s either lying or wrong. But the passage does seem to be bound to Jonas and Mikkel in some way, using quantum entanglement, so maybe she’s right in some sense.

Let’s start with some theory that I consider common sense- Eva stated very clearly that certain people and events will always be born or occur. They must happen, genetics, probability, etc be d-mned. Where there’s a Will, there’s a way. The Dark universe simply doesn’t work if you don’t accept that truth about the Prime and Alt worlds.

That means that Jonas could still be born of different parents, in a different time period. His undying Will is the crucial part of him that would be reborn. For TV purposes, Louis Hofmann would still be cast as Jonas, but he could look like anyone. Or he could look like Jonas. Some people drastically overestimate the variety in the northern European gene pool. Doppelgangers exist in the real world. Truth really is as strange as fiction. And fictional universes can operate under any rules they want, as long as they follow those rules consistently.

[[If you’re not going to define, in your own mind, the fundamental principle which your universe is centered around until you write your third book, and then you’re going to try to cover up your inadequacies by having your main character commit suicide for no apparent reason, and then you’re going to run around retconning your entire universe to fit your last minute change of plans, you have no business creating alternate universes, in my humble opinion. But I’ll complain about Divergent some other time. Death and suicide= the most overused plot devices of the 21st century.]]

Magnus and Franziska illustrate the basic idea behind the mirroring of the 2 worlds- their relationship happened in both worlds because it was meant to, even though it came about in completely different ways on each world. One of the Doppler sisters was meant to be deaf, but it was Elisabeth in one world and Franziska in the other. And in every world that’s close to Martha and Jonas’ world, they don’t have children.

That’s the second half of the theory- this only applies to worlds that are close neighbors of Martha and Jonas’ worlds in the multiverse. Worlds that are many orders of probability away from these two worlds will look very different from them. These two worlds were largely mirrored, but they weren’t exact, which is why Kilian existed as a character this season and Hannah is pregnant in 2020.

Okay, back to actual time travel theory.

My theory is that the loop in time that Young Jonas makes from 11/2019 to 11/2019 during his S1&2 travels, stopping in every time period except the 1950s (Jonas never appears in the 1950s) was orchestrated by Adam and Noah and was probably needed to create or stabilize the connections between time periods, especially 2052 and 1921. I have a feeling that Jonas didn’t originate the passage in his world, but he’s bound to it and has been responsible for expanding its capabilities, just as we’ve seen him expand time travel capabilities in other ways.

Tannhaus and Jonas have similar skill sets and have worked on the same machines. Tannhaus mentored Jonas in time travel theory. And Tannahus is bound very closely to his shop. In this episode, he told Charlotte that he wanted to time travel, but he was required to stay in the present, something that he repeats like a mantra every time the subject comes up. There’s something unusual going on with him and with his connection to Jonas.

Maybe Tannhaus is an anchor to a particular time and place, allowing time travel to occur as the connections radiate out from that point. The Chosen Ones may be like Christ’s apostles, but anointed through quantum entanglement so that they are able to create, stabilize and enhance connections in time and space. Possibly Charlotte, Ulrich, Jonas and Claudia are entangled with Tannhaus.

Ulrich makes a long loop through time, from meeting Child Mikkel in 1986 when Ulrich is a teen to attempting to rescue Child Mikkel in 1986 when Ulrich is an old man. This loop through time is similar to the one Jonas makes, but Ulrich largely stays in place as time passes naturally. He only time travels once, back to the 1950s from 2019, but doing so eventually connects 1986, 2019 and 1953, through his encounters with time traveler Mikkel. He also encounters Helge, another Chosen One, in the other 2 time periods, 2019 and 1953, so it could be that between the 3 of them they do something important for the passage. This might be one of the earliest knots that helped create or stabilize the passage and that’s why it relies so heavily on time passing naturally.

Ulrich gives Helge his first death and puts him in place to go through the rift, then eventually helps Mikkel understand that he can’t go back to his native time period, so his actions are essential. In a sense, it’s one sacrificial child from each era. Ulrich, the one from the central period, had to make contact with the other two periods and children. The other two children had to come to the central period. Helge made it to 2019.

You would think that Mikkel should have gone to the 1950s as well, in order for the knot to be complete, but I think they keep certain people far away from Adult Tannhaus, maybe so that he doesn’t wake up in some way. He could be an anchor or he could be under house arrest/a long term hostage. He and Bernd were born in the same year, 1913, in the same small town, and both became physicists.

Tannhaus wrote the book on time physics and engineering and was descended from the family of time travel experts. He had Sic Mundus memorabilia in his clock shop, so he knew them well. But then he’s largely shut out of the process and Bernd becomes Claudia’s mentor. He doesn’t remember doing his own research or writing his own book, which means that they bootstrap paradoxed his memories away.

He’s allowed to keep enough of his memories to raise Charlotte, repair the time travel device, and do some essential mentoring with Jonas, which was probably his original role. Somewhere back in time, it’s possible that Jonas was Tannhaus’ protege just as Claudia is Bernd’s protege. Because some things have to happen as they always have, Jonas must still go father the Unknown, and Tannhaus still has to mentor Jonas.

Or maybe a Tannhaus has to- the Unknown kills Gustav while Stranger is working in the 19th century and we never meet Gustav’s son/HG’s father, Leopold, who would have been an adult while Stranger/Adam is stuck in the past. The Tannhaus family and Sic Mundus have largely been wiped from time travel history and we never really hear their side of the story.

Instead, Jonas is driven mad (keep your eyes on Claudia’s grandson, Bartosz), Tannhaus is basically given severe memory loss/dementia, Noah is half mad over the loss of his only child, one Martha is murdered and the other is kept busy protecting her only child. Ulrich and Helge- locked up. Mikkel- convinced to commit suicide. Hannah- well, her time is coming. The only one who stays alive, sane and in control throughout is Claudia. And Bernd, until the Unknown murders him.

I suspect that Jonas stabilized or opened new connections to 2052 and 1921 during his S1-2 loop through time, since Adam and Sic Mundus seem to have been stuck in the past until just after Jonas left. Then they abandoned the cave lair and moved to the 2050s for reasons that aren’t clear- possibly they didn’t want to be around for the Nazis and then the power plant interfered with their activities.

As a reminder, the past present and future are all recreated at once whenever changes in the space-time continuum are made. Once the new connections were opened, it was as if they had always been there. Even just the intention and variables all falling into place can be enough to create the intended events, so it’s hard to retroactively put events in order in the Dark world.

Specifically, starting at the end of S1, Young Jonas made the loop over the course of the next year in his life. Young Jonas went from 11/2019 to 1986 in hopes of rescuing Mikkel. He saw Child Mikkel in the hospital, but then he was kidnapped by Adult Helge and Adult Noah, who were also in the hospital room, and locked in the time chair room in the caves, which is next to the bunker and the passage. He saw Stranger Jonas, then he and Child Helge, who was in the bunker in 1953, touched hands through the time rift while Stranger Jonas was closing the passage. Young Jonas became entangled with 1986 Noah, Mikkel and Helge from the encounter in the hospital room. A vision of Adult Mikkel/Michael sat in the passage with Stranger, so the child and adult versions of Jonas, Helge and Mikkel, 3 Chosen Ones who have sacrificed themselves/died and come back, were in the cave/entangled at the same time while Stranger raised a large amount of time energy by creating a feedback loop between the passage and the device.

The feedback loop opened up the rift between 1953 and 1986, allowing Young Jonas and Child Helge to touch, which propelled each of them forward 33 years. Using that destructive energy, Helge became the first child to survive the trip through the time chair back to 1954 and Jonas time traveled to 2052, and then later back to 1921, where he met Young Noah and remet Adult Noah. Creation through destruction- Stranger destroyed the passage and broke the device, but he opened up 2 new time periods and helped get the time chair working properly, which led to the invention of the other time travel devices.

Don’t try to make it make linear sense- time isn’t linear in the quantum realm. There are real world theories that Space-Time itself is created by quantum entanglement, rather than existing independently, and that quantum entanglement is what makes up the threads that hold the fabric of the universe together.

When Young Jonas left 1921, he went to 6/2019, ostensibly to prevent Adult Mikkel’s suicide, but actually to instigate it. From there, the timeline gets murky, but we knows he teams up with Old Claudia and learns about time theory and engineering from her, while also making a pit stop in 11/2019 to help Child Mikkel back to 1986. Then Old Claudia goes on her way while Young Jonas goes to 1986 and picks up Adult Claudia, who’s fresh from murdering Old Egon. They reopen the passage so that it can be part of the energy exchange/apocalypse when the barrel is opened in the power plant in 2020, then go to 2020 to rescue their families from the ensuing apocalypse. Thus, Jonas also made a loop in time from 1986 to 1986 and saw Child Mikkel at each end.

The knots are being tied through entanglements in location/space-time plus various forms of creative and destructive energy plus incestuous family relationships as individuals make contact with each other during time travel. They form a trinity knot in this way. If you look closely, you can see the places where the bindings occur, even though the Unknown is erasing many of them to create bootstrap paradoxes in an effort to stop them from being changed.

Just as Stranger told us you have to complete a labyrinth rather than circumventing it, and face your demons in the center, I don’t think there is a way to untie the knots, even without the paradoxes, but Eva must have sensed that someone is trying, since she’s making sure they can’t be undone. I think you have to consider the knots a spell that was cast by someone else or a past action that’s ultimately unchangeable, and continue your own way through the labyrinth/continue working the same sort of spell, with the same sorts of energies, to gradually bring the worlds back to where you want them.

This is essentially what we were told in S2. The characters need to face their own demons and tame them, no matter how long it takes or how far into the darkness they have to go. Cheating doesn’t work. You can’t simply erase a demon with a bootstrap paradox or a little incest. The same situations will continue to arise on every world they travel to, in every cycle, no matter how many superficial changes they make.

In this episode, Alt Adult Claudia was dismissive of her Older Prime self and what she taught Jonas, but we’ve seen many small changes happen between cycles, and a few larger ones, like the appearance of the Alt world. I think the 3 cycles we’ve been shown are separated from each other by time jumps of many cycles. These are 3 cycles in which something bigger changes.

One of the bigger things that happens in this cycle is that once both Reginas are dead, Claudia’s attitude changes. She’s usually much too focused on what she sees as purely practical matters to ask questions about the nature of death and dying, predetermination and whether humans are more than gears in a machine. In her voiceover Claudia refers to philosophical and spiritual concepts normally associated with HG Tannhaus and Stranger Jonas, rather than the theoretical physicist of the bunch who speaks the language of pure science. She’s moving into the metaphysical area of the quantum realm and opening up her thinking about the universe as a whole, asking questions about what might be possible and applying science to those questions.

In her voiceover about death, Claudia only acknowledged the truths we have in common. She didn’t accept them or show any sign of letting go of her questions. She’s always had an innate ability to keep quiet, an extremely valuable asset. She often lies, but frequently she doesn’t have to. She lets others fill in the blanks for her and create the lies in their own minds. Only later will they realize that she didn’t say what they thought she said.

Claudia’s new questions and goals bring out her ruthless side as well as her philosophical side. Bernd told her to take what she wants because nothing happens on its own and she took his advice.

Images courtesy of Netflix.

Dark S3Ep5: Life and Death Recap- We lose some beloved characters, Prime & Alt Claudia meet, Charlotte learns her origin story & Child Elisabeth finds Young Noah in the caves. #DarkNetflix In episode 5, we lose some beloved characters in some violent interactions with some hard characters. It's a tough episode to get through.

#Dark #Life and Death #Lisa Vicari #Louis Hofmann #metacrone #Mystery #recaps #review #science fiction #Time Travel

1 note · View note

ichigopanhpff · 5 years ago

Text

BNHA Fic: Blink! Ch. 19

Read Ch. 18 | Masterlist

No spoilers and just a filler chapter while the canon part of the storyline focused on the League of Villains. Also, please note some of the things I’ve written in this chapter are not 100% accurate when it comes to animal behaviour. It’s just bits and pieces I’ve put together from reading some books and watching TV shows.

After the excitement of the Culture Festival died down, U.A. was back to their regularly scheduled classes and quirk training. Just like the first years, the second years were also enduring intensive training in mastering their quirks. Having had her bangles damaged from the raid fight, Ren focused on strengthening her quirk and physical strength more while the Support Department was fixing them.

She had two goals: One, double the distance of her teleport radius and two, arrive at her destination faster. She’s noticed she has a 1-second delay when she uses Flicker due to her reaction time. But thanks to her late night training sessions with Bakugou, Kirishima and Todoroki, her reflexes have exponentially improved, thus shaving off her teleport time to half a second.

“Is it just me or have you gotten faster lately?” Ito panted out and wiped some sweat off of his chin.

“Maybe. You’ve gotten stronger too,” she complimented and noted the cut on the sleeve of her gym uniform.

Ito Kaede’s quirk was Sharpen, where he can transform his limbs into really sharp knives.

“I recently got a better whetstone,” he joked and readied himself to attack again.

Once class finished, they slowly filed back to the main campus for class. As Ren walked on with Tomoe and Seri, she noticed a lot of people looking in their direction.

“What’s with the eyes?” she casually remarked.

“Your reputation must be getting around school from the show,” Tomoe assumed.

“Everyone else’s performance was amazing too.”

“That is true. I have had a few from the support and general studies department confess to me already,” Seri casually added. “But of course, I’ve rejected them all.”

“As expected of the Heartbreaker,” Ren off-handedly remarked with a smirk and shoved her hands into her blazer pockets.

“What ‘bout you, Ren-Ren? Have anyone come up to you yet?” Tomoe asked out of curiosity.

“Of course not,” she abruptly answered as if it was obvious. “I’d ask them to examine their heads if they ever found me attractive.”

“But you are quite adorable, Ren-Ren,” Seri replied. “I’d date you.”

“Aw that’s sweet.”

The pink-haired girl draped her arm around Seri’s shoulder and pecked her on the cheek.

“Hey what about me?” Tomoe pointed to herself. “You’re hurtin’ me here, sweets.”

“You’re a close second,” their owl friend deadpanned.

“Ouch, sloppy seconds,” Ren playfully commented. “Unfortunate, friend.”

“Oh piss off. I’m a fuckin’ catch.”

The three laughed aloud as they headed back into class for lessons. The chill in the air brought Ren’s mind drifting like a leaf in the wind. So much has happened these past few months even though it felt like years.

She never expected to get along so well with 1-A, thinking their relationship would be your typical senpai-kouhai one, but it was the exact opposite. Ren saw them as her equals in ability and mental strength.

They really will be the shining generation of heroes after U.A.

“So the thing with Togata-senpai the other night,” Seri casually brought up. “What was with that hug?”

“Just Mirio-senpai doin’ his thing as usual, I guess.” She huffed a surprised chuckle and lightly shrugged. “You’d think after knowing him for this long, he’d run out of surprises.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance he may–”

“Nope.” She confidently confirmed. “He’s got a lot going on right now. Last thing he needs is to be in a relationship with someone.”

“Are you saying that to convince yourself or…?” Tomoe questioned, making Ren slowly turn back with a hint of annoyance.

“I got my closure. It’s all sorted out.”

All Tomoe and Seri could do was exchange dubious glances at one another.

As classes ended for the day, Ren bundled herself into her self-made red infinity scarf to keep the chill away while walking back to Heights Alliance. Looking down at her accessory, she saw a stray piece of yarn unraveling. Glaring down at it with a sense of compulsion, she rubbed the fabric between her index and thumb.

“I should fix this.”

Dinner tonight was beef stew in the 1-A dorms. Ren asked Bakugou and Iida to help with the prep work, much to the former’s complaints. Soon after, the whole floor was engulfed with a sense of warmth and aroma from the stew. The stomachs of everyone growled loudly, as if begging the chef to hurry up and finish cooking. With their appetites satiated, Ren sat down in the common area with some of the students. Jiro casually glanced over at her phone’s lock screen.

“Ren, who’s the dog?” the earphone jack girl asked. “It’s adorable.”

“Oh, that’s Skye*.”

She turned her screen to give her a better look, with a few other students piling over Jiro’s shoulder to see.

“Aw, she’s so cute!” Hagakure squealed. “So floofy!”

“She was the best dog...” Ren trailed off with a sad smile. “I still miss her.”

“Oh that’s right… you mentioned she passed away,” Yaoyorozu said with regret. “Have you and your mother thought about getting another one?”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be fair to the dog. My mom already works crazy hours and I’m here,” she reasoned. “They’d be too lonely.”

“You really love dogs, don’t you senpai?” Uraraka gushed with a matching smile.

“All animals are pure and good in this world. We don’t deserve them,” she firmly stated.

Sunday quietly crept up and for once, Ren was free to leisurely do what she wanted. Looking at her hung up scarf on the wall hook, she was going to go off campus for some shopping. Having already gone through the proper steps in getting permission to leave, she put on a long, thick white and gray stripped sweater dress with skinny jeans and grabbed her leather jacket from the closet and the rest of her accessories to stay as warm as she can.

Closing the door to her room, she went to the elevator and pressed the call button for it. Moments later, the door opened to reveal a familiar bi-colour haired boy already inside and greeted one another. He was wearing a tweed jacket with a black turtleneck. His bottoms were casual slacks.

“Heading out today, senpai?” he asked.

“I gotta get something in town. You?”

“I’m going to visit my mom at the hospital.”

“Hospital?” Her concern grew with a matching expression. “Is she okay?”

“Ah, yeah. It’s just...” He awkwardly rubbed the back of his head. “It’s complicated.”

“Gotcha.”

A mild, tense silence filled the elevator ride. It was Todoroki who broke it.

“Would you… like to come with?”

Ren glanced up at the tall boy with surprise.

“To the hospital?”

“Y-yeah… Unless you don’t want to,” he stuttered out.

“Where is it?”

“It’s the private hospital in Musutafu.”

“If you don’t mind me tagging along, sure. It’s along the way for me.”

Heading out of the dorms together, they put their shoes on and exited. Ren readjusted her scarf and hat as the condensation from her breath escaped the wintry airs. One of the pro-heroes assigned as a chaperone to the train station rendezvous at the school’s entrance. Dropping them off at the nearest block due to traffic, the two U.A. students hopped on the train in silence. About thirty minutes later, they arrived at their station and got off.

“It’s getting cold fast,” she shivered and bundled her hands into her jacket pockets. Her shoulders shrugged up the moment they left the station. “You must be okay in weather like this with your quirk, right?”

“I guess…” Todoroki shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it much.”

After a short ten minute walk, they arrived to the hospital. A gush of warm air welcomed the two newcomers. They entered the elevator and he pressed the button for the designated floor. Other nurses and doctors filed in, pressing their respective destinations. The pink-haired girl removed her hat as she quietly followed a few steps behind the dual-hair colored boy after they got to their floor.

They passed a sign on the wall reading “Psych Ward.”

Ren couldn’t help but feel a mixture of loneliness, yearning and comfort coming from him during the commute. Just what happened in his childhood that made him into who he is? She wanted to ask, but felt it wasn’t her place to. Sure, they were friends and got along well with one another, but the blurred lines of where she stood with him made her hesitate in taking that step forward.

He stopped at the entrance to his mom’s room and looked at Ren, whose eyes were currently downcast at the floor.

“Senpai, are you okay?” he asked with worry, jolting her head up and out of her thoughts.

“Hm? Yeah. I’m good,” she responded and flashed a quick smile. “I’ll… wait out here for you.”

“I’m sure my mother wouldn’t mind meeting you,” he softly replied with a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes and opened the door. He entered and greeted the person inside. Taking quick deep breaths, she slowly followed him into a brightly lit room. A woman with snow white hair like Todoroki’s right half sat by the window, looking up at her son and smiling. Her gaze then went to Ren’s.

“Oh hello,” she warmly greeted. “And who may you be?”

“A-ah, I’m Takahiro Ren,” she introduced and stiffly bowed like Iida. “I’m currently class 1-A’s resident advisor and a second year at U.A. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Oh, you’re Shouto’s senpai? And here I thought you were his girlfriend,” she replied in a motherly manner and chuckled. Ren immediately sucked in a quick breath as a tint of pink dyed the apples of her cheeks.

“We both happen to be headed the same way and he asked me to join him,” Ren politely explained, feeling the nervous sweat exude from her palms. Todoroki’s mom’s pale and thin hand gestured her to sit down on to the empty seat next to her son, to which she did rigidly out of nervousness.

“I got your letters, Shouto,” his mom told her son. “How have your provisional classes been going?”

“They’re tough, but I’m learning a lot.”

“The final test is coming up soon, yes?”

He nodded.

“It’ll be around December,” he confirmed.

“Well, Takahiro-san,” Mrs. Todoroki addressed the R.A. and placed a gentle hand on top of her son’s head. “Please take good care of my son. He’s very bright and talented, but sometimes he has trouble asking for help.”

“He’s been making good progress, so I don’t think you have much to worry about,” Ren endorsed with confidence, making the boy look down bashfully. A small sense of warmth bloomed in his chest. “Todoroki-kun will definitely get his license and he’ll be a hero you can be proud of.”

Mrs. Todoroki gave her a beaming smile and replied, “I’m already proud of my son.”

The three talk for a bit longer before heading out. Ren bowed once more before leaving the room with the younger Todoroki following.

“You’re the first person other than my siblings to see my mom,” he revealed. “Thank you… for coming with me.”

“You’re the one who invited me,” she quietly replied, still surprised by what he jus said. “I should be thanking you.”

The two teenagers walked on with their quiet footsteps echoing in the corridor.

“Your mom... She’s really kind,” she finally spoke up. “And she looks well.”

“The doctors said she’s been making good progress due to her hard work.”

“I’m sure your visits are helping with her recovery too.”

Todoroki stopped in his steps and turned to give Ren a grateful smile.

“I hope so.”

The two exited the hospital and back into the cold. The strong wind blew at their faces, making Ren squeeze her eyes close with an extremely displeased expression.

“I wanna drink hot chocolate and eat all the warm things,” she groaned out.

“I know a place,” Todoroki suggested. “It’s a bit of a walk though.”

“Anywhere is fine but outside,” she shivered and placed her hands in her underarms.

“You really can’t deal with the cold, can you?” he teased with a smirk.

“I’m rather sensitive to it,” she revealed and adjusted her scarf to minimize skin exposure. “Flicker’s lag gets worse in extreme weather conditions.”

“Lag?”

“The time between I can react to get from point A to B.”

She froze and blinked dumbly, realizing she let slip of one of her weaknesses.

“Interesting,” Todoroki remarked and placed the knuckle of his index finger to his chin.

“You’re gonna use it against me in sparring, aren’t you?” Ren flatly asked, already knowing the answer.

“Maybe.”

“’Maybe’, he says,” she mocked and huffed a breath.

Realizing the walk was a lot longer than anticipated, Todoroki looked down to his left at Ren’s bundled form. The lower half of her face was buried into her red scarf, shoulders shrugged up with her hands in her pockets. Her white breath could be seen floating up into the air. She looked miserable.

While waiting at a walk light, he casually placed his left hand under her scarf and let a small amount of controlled heat from his palm at the back of her neck. He could feel the tense muscles from her shoulders loosen up as she gradually brought them down.

Noticing the sudden warmth around her neck, Ren glanced up at the duo-quirk user staring straight on nonchalantly and noticed the wrist of his left arm draped on her shoulder. She leaned into his hand a bit and smiled to herself underneath her scarf. The light turned green for the pedestrians. The two followed foot traffic all the while Todoroki kept his hand stationary and walked beside her to keep her warm. After a few twists and turns into streets and the two reached their destination.

It was a dog cafe.

Before she could say anything, the boy took her by the wrist and guided her inside. She looked around in amazement to see the brightly lit space with white paneled walls decorated with dog themed items, from mugs to t-shirts to treats. One of the store staff greeted the two and seated them before handing them two menus: one of which was a standard food menu, the other was a dog menu where they can choose which four-legged companion to keep you company.

The two removed their jackets and accessories to settle in. The warmth from Todoroki’s hand slowly seeped away from her neck upon removing her scarf. But before Ren could even ask anything, her friend immediately answered.

“I overheard your conversation about your dog the other day,” he began. “And I looked up nearby dog cafes to take you to. As I was about to ask if you were free this weekend, it just worked out that you were headed out to town today since I had to visit my mom.”

“Wow.” She blinked a few times in amazement. “And everything went according to your plan.”

“I’m just as surprised as you are.”

“But why would you go out of your way to do this?” she asked out of genuine curiosity.

He paused for a short moment, trying to gather his thoughts.

“You sounded so sad… when you were talking about your dog,” he shyly mumbled out, not knowing what was coming out of his mouth right now. “I guess, this is my way of thanking you… for helping me through my stuff and lending me your shoulder.”

His eyes quickly shifted down to the menu, which was very appealing for a distraction right now. He brought his right hand up and rested his fingers on his nose bridge, trying to hide his oncoming blush. Not knowing what to say, Ren picked up the dog menu and stared intently at a random spot on it, biting her lower lip.

Moments later, the server returned to their table, asking if they were ready to order. She took this chance to ask about the dogs as a way to distract herself from the awkwardness.

“Is it possible for me to go in and let the dog pick me instead? Of course, with one of your staff members supervising.”

“Unfortunately, only staff are allowed back there,” he regretfully replied. “While I do understand your logic, it’s for safety reasons.”

“No, no. I get it,” she replied with a tone of understanding.

“But I could let you see the dogs through the window instead,” the server suggested as a halfway happy option.

Ren’s eyes lit up with joy and practically leaped out of her seat with Todoroki in tow by his wrist. The server brought them to the window and several dogs could be seen in the room; some were playing while others were chilling out and napping. She couldn’t help but gush at the adorable fluff balls of joy. Then she spotted a gray and white colored poodle-maltese mix in the far corner sitting on its own, watching three dogs tugging at a toy with each other.

“That one in the corner, please,” she requested.

“Ah, Hiroki is… a bit problematic,” the server nervously said. “We’ve been having trouble socializing him and doesn’t seem interested in anything.”

“I can help with that,” she confidently stated. “Can you put me in a room with him? With a staff member for supervision, of course.”

“Senpai, what do you intend to do?” Todoroki asked.

“Skye was the same way when we adopted her,” Ren softly answered. “She came from a home where the owners neglected her and didn’t trust humans because of it. It took a while to coax her out of her shell.”

“I’ll talk to my supervisor and see what they can do,” the staff obliged.

Moments later, the supervisor came up to talk to Ren about procedure, to which she fully understood. If the dog was to show any sort of aggression at her, they would step in. Ren and Todoroki slowly entered and closed the door behind them. Some of the other dogs came up to give them a smell and jumped up on their leg, wanting to play. Hiroki, however, looked at them passively.

Taking a few steps in, she sat down by the wall with him following suit.

“So… what do we do now?” he asked.

“We wait. Hiroki needs to approach first so we don’t scare him.”

She took out a bag of treats given by the staff. All of the dog’s ears, including Hiroki’s, perked up upon hearing the crinkle of plastic.

“Oh, you want one don’t you?” she coaxed and broke off a few small pieces of biscuit to chuck in various directions. When one piece landed nearby the anti-social pooch, the dog sniffed and accepted it. She threw another piece at him and turned her attention to Todoroki.

“Thanks for warming me up on the way here.” She gave him a soft smile, ignoring the dog for a moment. Some of the friendlier ones circled them and sat nearby the two for attention. The two teenagers gave them casual pets on their heads.

“We can’t have you catching a cold with final exams coming up,” he passively answered.

“Your flames… They’re different from your dad’s,” she suddenly let out.

“How do you mean?”

“It’s kind and radiates life. It’s… gentle and comforting.”

She turned her attention back to the dog, who was now staring intently in their direction with his tail wagging with curiosity. Breaking off another piece of biscuit, she threw it in a different direction, with the dogs pattering after it.

What Ren didn’t notice was the look of surprise on Todoroki’s face. The left side he’s hated for so long because of its constant reminder of his dad was… gentle?

“Why do you say these things?” He looked down at his strained left hand. “This fire isn’t kind. It’s...”

“It’s kind because you are,” she interrupted his train of thought.

He looked up with glistening hetero-chromatic eyes into Ren’s tender hazel-green ones. As her hand started reaching up to touch his scar, the attention suddenly shifted when she felt something crawl up her leg; it was Hiroki grabbing the remaining piece of biscuit in her hand. Succeeding in his mission, he splayed out on her lap and gnawed on the treat, getting crumbs all over in the process.

“I knew you’d come around,” she looked down at the dog and drew her attention back.

He remained on her lap even after finishing the treat. She slowly brought her left hand up in the form of a loose fist up to his nose. Hiroki gave it a lazy sniff and licked her knuckles a few times. She stayed this way until the pup got impatient and started pawing at her hand to pet him.

“Needy little thing, aren’t you,” she cooed out in between chuckles and gently scratched under his chin. “Just needed some patience and love, didn’tcha?”

Todoroki could only look on stunned and in amazement. She was able to entice this dog who everyone was afraid to approach to its current state. Ren looked back up at him with a smile.

“Give me your hand.”

He absentmindedly reached his right out into her palm, to which she gently cupped it into a loose fist. She then brought it down slowly near Hiroki’s nose, to which he got curious about and crawled over to inspect the new limb. The dog’s cold and wet nose on Todoroki’s knuckle made his muscles jolt a little from the touch, but soon got used to it.

He eventually lost interest and went back to Ren for more pets and cuddles.

“I don’t think he likes me,” the boy dejectedly assumed.

“Not necessarily. He’s got your scent and doesn’t think you’re a threat, is all,” she reassured.

“But he’s all over you.”

“Because I have treats.”

Watching her play with the dog some more, it was then he realized how at peace she looked. He discreetly took his phone out and snapped a candid photo of her smiling with Hiroki on her chest licking her chin. Upon hearing the sound of the shutter, she immediately turned to him like a deer caught in the headlights.

“Delete that. Right now,” she flatly demanded.

“Nope. It’ll be my keepsake.”

“Then I’ll just have to snap pictures of you,” she suggested. “I think that’s a fair trade.”

“If you can even manage to,” Todoroki challenged.

She cocked one eyebrow at him with a smirk.

“Oh you’re on, peppermint,” she teased and stood up holding Hiroki in her arms. The supervisor was amazed at how she handled the dog and the two got into conversation about how to train him moving forward. Moments later, they found themselves back at the table they were seated with their new friend in tow.

They finally managed to order lunch and played with Hiroki until it came. At one point, Ren dropped the animal into Todoroki’s lap and neither one knew what to do with each other. After watching how she picked him up, his successful attempt to hold the furry beast made her snicker as she snapped a picture. He merely stuttered when he heard the shutter go off, only to have her snap a few more for good measure. The look on his blushing face being caught off guard was priceless.

“This is so gonna be your caller ID on my phone,” she laughed as she was setting it.

“Senpai,” he quivered out, still holding Hiroki stiffly. “Please delete it.”

“Only if you delete mine.”

“I refuse.”

“Then I refuse too.” She flashed an arrogant smirk at him. “You challenged the wrong girl, Todoroki.”

One of the staff members assisted him with Hiroki as they served them food while another brought a high chair for the dog to sit with them. Wiping their hands with the wet naps given, they dug into their lunch as their puppy friend munched on some kibble. Ren took her mug of hot chocolate and brought it to her nose, enjoying the aroma.

Then came the shutter sound from across the table, followed with a glower from her.

“It’s like that huh?”

“It’s like that,” Todoroki taunted.

What was supposed to be a relaxing time turned into a competition of who can snap the most candids of one another. They called a truce the moment they got one of each other with whipped cream on the tips of their respective noses from the hot chocolate and laughed. The moment the check came, it was an all out war settled with janken, to which Ren lost yet again. Todoroki ended up paying in full, something he intended to from the start.

But beating her made the victory that much better.

“One day, I’ll win,” she declared. “I can’t be bad at janken forever.”

“I wish you would so I can keep winning against you,” the boy teased as they exited the cafe.

The wind greeted them with a cool whip of biting chill, making Ren groan into her scarf. The two made their way back to the main street and walked a bit further to find themselves entering small a yarn store.

“Senpai, you knit?”

“It’s one of the many things I picked up when I was younger to relax from my ‘other hobby’,” she explained while looking over the yarn selections. “Plus, it saves me money in having to buy overpriced sweaters in department stores.”

She found a roll of yarn that was the perfect shade of peach pink and placed two into her basket before moving on.

“What are you thinking of making?” Todoroki asked and looked around the store casually.

“Something for Eri-chan.”

“Eri-chan?”

“The little girl who was with Mirio-senpai during the festival,” she reminded. “I want to make her something warm this winter.”

A peaceful smile graced her lips as she looked at the other selections of yarn. After wandering for another moment, she got all she needed and paid. Exiting the store, they looked up at the sky painted a fiery orange with clouds floating on as the sun decided to call it an early day and retire. As they were a few blocks near the train station, a sudden explosion rocked the peace away. Pedestrians started screaming and running from the commotion. Ren and Todoroki looked at each other and ran to it.

It was a small apartment building that was smashed in with a big and burly low rank looking villain standing not too far away laughing manically. He then turned around and that’s when she saw it: the black tongue and blood-shot eyes.

He was on a quirk-booster.

They were on a narrow street, which wasn’t optimal for Todoroki’s quirks since it may damage surrounding buildings. And with her bangles still being repaired, she had to fight with her abilities and quirk alone.

“Todo-kun, assist with the rescue of the victims in the building. I’ll fight,” she instructed as she placed her shopping bag down. “Let’s make this quick.”

“But–”

“Did you forget I have my license? As long as you’re with me, you’re fine.”

She ran on ahead and teleported up to the roof of the closest building while Todoroki used his ice to travel on and to put out the fire.

“It’s the villain’s time to shine!” the man cackled out as a heavy heel drop landed right on his skull by Ren. She zipped away to a safer distance. The man was barely stunned and looked at her with menacing eyes.

“Oh, let’s play, little girl.”

“Shove it, bowling ball.”

Going on the offensive, she went for a frontal attack and landed a hard punch to his stomach, throwing him back only a few steps.

He laughed again and taunted, “That’s all you got?! Even mosquitoes hit harder than that.”

The rotund man charged and swung a fist at her. Due to her current lag from the cold, she barely managed to dodge on time and got away with a few scrapes on the sleeves of her jacket and face. From her peripheral, a stream of ice traveled down the street and encased the villain’s left leg before landing on the balls of her feet.

“I’ve double checked the building and made sure there it was empty,” he caught her up with the situation. “What about him?”

“He’s on boosters,” Ren updated her partner. The villain growled as he struggled to free his leg against the ice. “Keep holding him down. I’m going up.”

“Got it.”

Not letting her guard down, she remained on the attack and zipped up into the sky while the bi-hair coloured boy released more of his ice, now trapping both his legs to distract the criminal. Free falling to build up momentum, she somersaulted and finished the villain off with a heavy stomp to his abdomen and wedged him into the pavement.

He heaved out his stomach contents onto his person and was knocked unconscious from the force. Ren quickly turned and used Todoroki as her phase point to return. Not realizing she moved too fast into teleporting, she accidentally knocked into the boy with a little more force than she liked upon reappearing. He let out a soft grunt and caught her between his arms in a loose embrace.

“S-Sorry! I overshot my momentum.”

She looked up and hurriedly stuttered before stiffly pushing herself off his torso. Her cheeks were dusted red from a combination of the cold, the fight and sheer embarrassment.

“It’s fine.”

By the time the cops came, a safety perimeter had been created and the villain was now in cuffs. With the drugs out of his system, he reverted to a malnourished version of what Ren fought. She explained to the officers what happened and showed her license to them for good measure so Todoroki wouldn’t get in trouble. After the debrief finished, the two walked past the victims, one of which was a crying young boy by himself wearing nothing but a thin long sleeve shirt and pants. Stopping in her steps, she walked up to him and knelt down.

“Hey, what’s your name?” she asked in a gentle voice.

“T-Tairo,” he hiccuped.

“Tairo-kun, where are your parents?”

“M-Mom n’ dad are workin’ and w-won’t be back un-until late-e,” he sniffled out and shivered.

Ren took her scarf off and draped it over the cold boy. Suddenly feeling the warm enveloping him, he slowly stopped. She patted him on the head and gently smiled.

“I’m going to get a police officer over here so you can get to your parents, okay?”

Tairo furiously nodded and thanked her. She grabbed an officer when she stood back up and told her about the details of the child, to which they immediately acted on, before walking back to Todoroki.

“Is everything okay?”

She glanced over at the young boy again with softened eyes, who was now hugging the accessory she gave him with a hopeful smile, his tears fully dried. His eyes slowly followed after.

“Yeah… we’re good.”

As they walked past the caution taped crowd, applause and whistles erupted from the pedestrians, thanking them for their help. The two couldn’t help but smirk and bowed before heading back to grab their belongings and head back to U.A. The train ride back was crowded and cramped.

“God, I don’t miss this,” she groaned out and found herself uncomfortably pinned between a railing and the corner of the door.

With the train pulling into another stop, a shift of commuters made no leeway in freeing up space. Todoroki found himself being shoved up onto Ren. Her face planted into his chest while her arms wrapped around his torso for balance. His arms were perched above her head by the elbows on the glass part of the door, trying to shield her from anyone hitting her. Both felt part of their breath knocked from their bodies from the friction.

“You okay?” she looked up and asked with a look of concern.

“I’m fine,” he groaned out and looked down. “You?”

“I’m shoved up against my human shield and can barely breathe,” she quipped. “But I’ll live. You have it harder than I do right now.”

“Glad of you to notice.”

Several uncomfortable train stops later, the crowd of riders gradually dissipated. Both Ren and Todoroki let out a sigh of relief. Realizing she was still hugging him, her hands immediately released, only to be thrown back into him from the jerk of the train cart from switching tracks. She yelped as her face hit his chest hard. Ren let out a muffled groan into him and lifted her head up with a displeased expression. Her nose bridge and chin were throbbing with a numb pain. Todoroki couldn’t help but let out a snicker.

“Y’know, for someone so muscular, I had to hit the one bony spot on your chest,” she griped and rubbed her chin.

“I’ll be sure to specifically work out that one bony spot then.”

Finally reaching their station, they got off the train and exited. The sky was now pitch black with stars slowly coming out to play. The two’s white breath swirled up and mixed while walking back to campus. Ren’s teeth audibly chattered en route, rolling herself into her leather jacket further and pulled her hat down. Todoroki walked closer to her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

“What are you–”

A sudden surge of comfortable warmth radiated from his left side as he turned away from her, his cheeks red from the wind.

“As long as I’m keeping you warm like this, you won’t get sick,” he spoke in a low voice. “That’s fine, right?”

She rolled her lips in and hesitantly nodded, looking down at her moving feet. The two walked in silence until they got past the gates.

“I-I think I’ll be okay from here.”

He turned to look down at her and never realized how short she was next to him. Ren looked like a fragile creature that needed protecting from the elements.

“Are… you sure?”

“Yeah. I mean...” She scratched the back of her head, avoiding eye contact. “You draping your arm ‘round me like that? People might think we’re a couple and stuff.”

“Oh… I didn’t even think of that,” he realized. “I’m sorry.”

“I-It’s fine. You were just being considerate. So… thank you.”

She gave him a warm smile that could thaw the coldest of ice he could generate with his right. He felt his heartbeat suddenly increase as smoke trailed up his left shoulder.

“U-Uh, Todo-kun?” She pointed to his shoulder. “You’re catching fire.”

He quickly turned and immediately patted himself out with his ice quirk and clicked his tongue.

“Let me guess, favorite jacket?”

“And this is why I can’t have nice things,” he sighed as she chuckled.

Ren walked up to him and tip-toed up to his shoulder to analyze the burn.

“Eh it could’ve been worse. Gives it character,” she joked.

Immediately looking up, she didn’t realize how close their faces were to each other. Todoroki carelessly reached up and tucked a loose hair strand behind her ear, their eyes not leaving one another. The cold surrounding them suddenly felt like a balmy spring day. His hand hovered by the side of her neck as his thumb brushed against her cheek and felt something sticky.

“You’re hurt,” he whispered and saw his thumb had a crimson smudge.

“O-Oh.” She pulled away and took off her glove to feel her cheek with her palm. Looking down, there was a bloody imprint of a cut. “Must’ve happened during the fight. I’ll get it cleaned up.”

The two made their way back to the dorms in haste, with Ren entering first and hurried upstairs to clean the superficial cut. Todoroki came in not too long after and slowly removed his shoes.

“Todoroki-kun, you okay?” Midoriya asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Your face is really red.”

“It was really windy out today,” he half-lied.

A series of suspicious ‘hmms’ came from the couches of the common room. Deciding to ignore them, he took the stairs to his room to change out of his outside clothes before showering. After a long day, the dual-hair colored boy decided to relax in the silence of his room. Taking his phone from his desk, he unlocked it and scrolled through his photos to find all the ones he took of Ren today.

Smiling to himself, he clicked on one of the candids where he got her mid-conversation at the dog cafe with a smirk on her face. He swiped right and it was the one where she got whipped cream on the tip of her nose. Her face was scrunched up in the frame, making him audibly chuckle.

He’s been finding himself gravitating toward her more and more lately, but didn’t understand why.

Was it because she’s so effortless to be around?

Or was it because she always seemed to know how he was feeling?

Curiosity and confusion peaking, he pulled up the search app on his phone and typed in specific keywords. The top results pulled up blog posts and dating articles from various magazine websites with titles like, “Knowing Your Crush,” “Top 15 Dead Giveaways You Like Someone,” and “Make Your Crush Notice You! The Tried and True 5-Step Plan.”

Although some of the results were super obvious on it being click bait, Todoroki carefully scanned the results and clicked on the ones that looked the most reliable. After reading through the fifth article, he heaved out a long sigh while pinching his nose bridge and squeezed his eyes shut. They all said the same thing: if you find them to constantly be on your mind and notice yourself acting out of character, you have feelings for them.

He had a crush? On Ren-senpai?

Sure, they were friends and he respects her, but were his feelings really on a more romantic scale?

Unable to sort out any more of these new discoveries about himself in his head, he closed his phone and plugged it back into the charger before going to bed. The screen woke up to his lock screen being the sleeping photo of him and her Jiro took.

*Reference to the one-shot I wrote titled “Cloud.”

#bnha fanfiction #mha fanfiction #bnha oc #mha ocs #todoroki shōto #todoroki shouto #bnha season 4 #bnha season four #mha season 4

2 notes · View notes

forwardcharlton · 2 years ago

Text

It is 2019, my mother, aged 56, sits in a flat she never leaves in a town we never chose to live in having been moved there by the police to escape a violent ex of my mother’s. This ex was housed half a mile away from us after being released from prison for repeatedly assaulting my mum and pulling a knife on the arresting officer. My mum was released from a psych ward with him despite the fact they both had a history of domestic violence. In this case, he, the abuser and she the victim. We had a panic button installed in our flat for a few months, my mum drinking heavily, reliving the same trauma we went through when I was born and had to outrun my violent father some 7 years previous.

Back then we ended up in a women’s refuge in South London, I was 2 years old and count our escape as my earliest memory, up front in a transit van with a Hells Angel called Chub who had turned on my father to help us get out. My father had done time for his part in a gangland shooting and was, by all accounts, a violent and cowardly man. He had come by the hospital after I was born and tried to take me but the midwives managed to change the name on my wristband to hide me amongst the other new-borns.

My mum and her brother had been born 13 months apart and, along with their older sister, had grown up in the army travelling from place to place with my grandma and grandad. My grandma was of Romani stock, selling heather from door to door with her grandmother when she was a kid and was a strong and stoic woman. My grandad died of a heart attack aged 49 whilst working shifts at the local Nestle factory, plummeting the family into more poverty and grief. He had been an alcoholic gambler and left the family with not a penny to their name. All 3 kids suffered sexual abuse at the hands of more than one culprit. They ended up on a council estate on the greenbelt just south of Croydon. I lived on the same estate for a while, riding the neighbours Great Dane, pretending to have pierced my ear with a metal hoop clasped around my earlobe so I fit in with the local kids.

My uncle was, in hindsight, on the autistic spectrum. He had been a chronic yet functioning alcoholic since his teens, working as a groundsman at a local private school, setting alarm clocks to wake him for a bottle of wine every hour, stashing vodka in the hedges on his way to work and then finishing in the local pub for 15 pints of Guinness and a shot from every optic. He was a chronic self-harmer but luckily ended up going to rehab for a year in 1999 before completing an access course at college. He was offered a scholarship at Oxford University after a tutor at college recommended he apply. The pride we felt when his success story made The Times newspaper. He’d turned it around in a big way and against the odds.

As soon as he got his degree he came straight to our aid. I was 13 at the time, suffering for the weight of the responsibility of my mother’s care, missing school to stay home and look after her and generally misbehaving the way any child would, given the start I’d had in life. My uncle was my hero, introducing me to literature and music and taking me to gigs on a regular basis. For 9 years we got by a little better, a positive male role model in my life for the first time. My mother’s health deteriorated rapidly both physically and mentally, but I was able to flee the nest without worrying she’d be alone.

I left home aged 18, travelling to Brighton to stay on a mate’s floor. I’d recently been arrested for bottling a dealer at a party in Manchester. The local police had cautioned me because of my evident remorse, and, in hindsight, the colour of my skin. A lucky break. This was enough to push me to get out of the north a while. I stayed in Brighton for a year, did a few months in Edinburgh with a girl I’d met before we broke up and I jibbed off to London to squat with 200 others in a block of 94 flats near Limehouse. (A part of my life best left for another piece of writing). I travelled a bit further after escaping London under much the same cloud as had made me leave the north, staying in a commune in the south of Spain, squatting in Basque country and generally drinking, stealing and fighting my way around Europe via free trains, hitchhiking and busking. I returned from one trip just after my 22nd birthday. A few weeks later my uncle was found dead on the sofa aged 47 by my mother, our whole world was torn apart.

In a cruel twist of fate his death came at the same time as massive cuts were delivered to our local mental health services. Not only had we lost our rock, but all professional support was withdrawn, including my mothers CPN whom she had been working with for over 10 years. I was 22 at the time and already 8 years into a life of petty crime, violence, undiagnosed mental health problems and alcoholism. In the aftermath of this shock I tried to take my life 3 times but failed. I was repeatedly denied any form of psychiatric help. I drank and tried hard to balance caring for mother with dealing with my own grief. I met my ex who had an 18-month-old daughter and moved in with her whilst my mum was moved into a small flat after deciding she couldn’t stay in the house she’d found her brother dead in. There were times my mum accused me of killing him, times when she seemed to be having an exorcism, cowering in the corner screaming for hours, not knowing who I was. It was fucking horrible for us both.

As I write this my mum is most likely sleeping, forever coshed by a heady mixture of prescribed drugs that have the fleeting medical professionals on emergency hospital visits visibly shocked, unable to fathom why and or how on earth she has been over-prescribed so much medication at such an alarming rate. She has been prescribed so much morphine her bowel has paralyzed, which means she often runs the risk of vomiting her own faeces, yet the NHS refuses to provide her colonic irrigation and she can’t afford nor physically make it to private clinicians. This coupled with a constant stream of sedatives including Valium prescribed to her daily for over 15 years means she is disabled by the medication alone, any medical professional will tell you that this is a dangerous mix, not to mention the mass load of anti-psychotics that keep her from feeling anything but absolute disorientation and confusion. At present she takes over 100 pills a week. My mother has been a victim to a failed system all her life. Enforced ECT aged 15 to treat her grieving for her father, a life of violence, domestic abuse, poverty, illness and addiction that I in turn inherited.

With her care package cut from 66 hours a week to just 0, we are in the shit. A no DSS policy means we cannot move to be closer to her nor can we move her to be closer to us. The family unit broken down, services cut, we are on our own fighting a battle that we know will only be over for us if by some miracle I make enough money to put her into private healthcare, or if we somehow meet a generously rich benefactor who cares enough to offer some financial support. With the conservatives in power I hold little hope that the services and support we so desperately need will return any time soon, much less that they will return with progressive treatments at the forefront of their initiatives instead of yet more medication.

Just like my mother and uncle before me I am a recovering alcoholic diagnosed with a plethora of enduring mental health problems. My experience with my mum has led me to eschew all medication in my battle, a tough call but one I am prepared to attempt in the name of avoiding a pharmaceutical addiction that I stand less chance of receiving support for than my alcohol and drug addictions. Just 3 weeks ago I was convinced that taking my own life was the only way out of this situation, I wrote my note but luckily found enough strength to share my feelings with my partner who pushed me to ring for help. My partner has been the only person to help us out. Juggling my ongoing problems with those of my mother. She is our lifeline and I worry for her own mental health and the effects such massive responsibilities will undoubtedly have on her.

I am lucky in that I am a highly creative individual. I was actively excluded from learning any instruments at school and have never been able to get on with the education system enough to make it through college or university, but I continue to make music and art as part of a loose collective of artists and have found moderate success in acting, writing and documenting my experiences through creativity. Without these vessels of communication, I fear I would crumble under the weight of it all. I am engaged in alcohol services after experiencing seizures due to my dependant drinking and am currently 21 months sober. I also await further therapy on the NHS, but with waiting times of up to 2 years I have had to forge my own path of self help which includes, amongst other things, cold water immersion, art therapy and basking in the comfort of nature and wildlife.

My mother is awaiting a place at an over 55’s residential home. I wish more than anything I could provide a few more years of something resembling independence for her, but know deep down the best thing for her is 24-hour support in a place where she gets to see more than just mine and my partners faces. I continue to communicate our experiences with anyone who will listen and thank my lucky stars I was raised with love and books and am able to sit here and voice these things rather than join the mass of people suffering in silence at the hands of a system not fit for human purpose. People are dying on our streets, the social cleansing of the most vulnerable people in our society continues and all to prop up the lifestyles of an inherently psychopathic elite who continue to grow richer with blood on their hands. I thank my friends, my partner, her family and my mother and uncle and their mother before them. They all show me love and that, I am convinced, is what has kept me alive and out of prison to this day.

0 notes

obduratemoon · 5 years ago

Text

Sedimentary City 04: Transmission

To live and die on level 1. The only place with access to a firmament whose dead heights few would ever witness. Other things which exist only on level 1: forests, parks, rivers, birds, universities and academies, rampant pride and optimism concomitant with a dense accumulation of wealth, power, and ennui.

Those from level 2 considered themselves happy and superior as well, for many could visit level 1 at least on a temporary basis. Sunlight from the surface was delivered to them via giant fiber optic arteries that splintered off into a manifold of scintillated capillaries, thereby distributing star-sourced photons to those with subscriptions.

In the lounge other guests were gathered, strapped into their devices, silent and reposed as corpses. Yet the fact that they still collected in this room was an unacknowledged and vestigial need for animal proximity, some recessive urge to smell and feel the faint heat of other mammalian bodies.

Leaned back in their seats, headsets wrapped around their eyes and connected to a corporeal-cyber jack, it looked like a ward of the catatonic. Yet each was richly engrossed in a private slice of the Central Network, a universe which was boundless in its expansion, an infinity contained within an infinity. For many found that the physical world they had been birthed into lacked the verve of this other place. It was not so much that some line between what was real and what was virtual had been blurred, but rather that the polarities of dominance between these two realms had utterly switched, the moon now worshipped like the sun. The real seemed to them bland and unreal, a dream hardly worth dreaming. The Central Network provided delight and society, an ontological framework juiced to ensnare the attention of their psyches, the human conscious experience a tenuous projection of reality to begin with. And so much the better for the State to observe them here, then, in a world where it sat enthroned like some leviathanic demiurge.

Most of the people in the pension were young and had been taught from childhood how to use the mind-machine interface: an integrated cranial chip would listen for specific thoughts which mapped structured linguistic patterns to computer grammar.

Jan plugged his headset into a port behind his ears. He was part of the first generation to be introduced to the mind-machine interface and learned to use it around the time when he had just begun lecturing at the academy. By then he had already lost most of the supple receptiveness of a child’s mind, but years of training and usage had brought him close to fluency.

He searched through some recent news and clicked through a series of links, his eyes scanning over everything but registering nothing, just another malaise soaked individual traversing this endless graph of entertainments. He then turned to the Affection Section and searched until he found the girl as instructed: short haired, a specific mark on her skin. A bit of an aesthete, he thought. He messaged her. Jan did not know who the girl was or if she even existed except as a digital figment, but he was able to ascertain that she was indeed his contact. Her replies had followed the scripted pattern of conversation he had memorized and conformed to the security covenant.

As he proceeded through their conversation, Jan surreptitiously slipped in the data he had been collecting these past months. It was encrypted and hidden within an envelope that looked like duplicates of the messages he was sending her. Most messaging protocols used at-least-once guarantees which meant that it was standard to resend when an error occurred during transmission. Therefore, the existence of duplicates would be seen as normal and expected.

Jan guessed that on her side, she had some bit code which could extract and decrypt the information contained within those faked duplicates. She would then act as a node which further disseminated the data and thus preserve it by redundancy and distribution.

Utilizing the pension’s public access point further obfuscated Jan’s communications, his messages lost in the network activity of those reclined around him as they pneumatically respired data. The State recorded and compiled it all into its vast and minute compendium, but perhaps they would not detect this small and subtle undercurrent. There were times when Jan felt a wry pang of sympathy for this malevolent entity; for anything to know everything seemed to him a plausible definition of Hell.

Afterwards, Jan returned to his hexagon room and sat down on the bed, his work for a moment complete. He sat quietly, trying to savor some modicum of nothingness but soon boredom and a particular vein of loneliness visited him, a familiar guest in the house of his body. Gripped by a powerful urge to escape the company of just he and himself, he donned his All-Suit and headed out with deliberate steps.

At the front desk he asked the boy with the color shifting hair: “Hey, I need a drink -- any bars nearby? Cheap and effective.”

#sedimentary city

0 notes

myhauntedsalem · 4 years ago

Text

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. HOLDING HER OWN EYES

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. THE SAW

I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

He has since completed suicide.

3. JANE?

4. THE VAMPIRE

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. THE SPITTER

6. THE ONLY ONE

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS

My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. UNDER THE BED

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. TIME OF DEATH

Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way. They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. THE TEST SUBJECT

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. THE BOY WHO LOVED KNIVES

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. THE NEW MOM

13. BUGS

#13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps #paranormal #ghost and hauntings #ghost and spirits #haunted salem #myhauntedsalem

12 notes · View notes

void-galaxy-shenanigans · 6 years ago

Text

Why the United States in in chaos & almost everyone wants to leave

Hello Tumblr. I am a United Statesian (or, as some say “American”, despite the fact that there is a North, Central, Latin, & South America as well & all of them are technically Americans but not United Statesians), and not proud of it. Here’s a list of angsty reasons why. There will probably be a few side rants but I want to clear up exactly what is going horribly wrong in this shitty ass country. I will give a list overview, then expound upon each item.

1. The abortion laws/bills in over a dozen states that may go federal because the administration sucks. Alabama refused to make exceptions for the death or incapacitation of the mother, for rape, or for incest in their abortion law. 26 white male lawmakers passed the bill and the governor signed it, despite being “representatives” of the people. This means the mother (or anyone with a uterus, because remember transgender men and nonbinary people can have one too) is just a fucking INCUBATOR for a child if her spouse decides so. An 11 year old girl got raped by a 26 year old man in Louisiana, but thanks to their Heartbeat Bill she’ll have to carry & deliver a child at ELEVEN YEARS OLD. Let that shit sink in, because that’s horrifying. What happened to “the land of the free and the home of the brave”?

2. Mental Health, & how people view mental health & use of hospitals. We live in a very individualistic society. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. Everyone assumes the other people are insane druggies and alcoholics who will murder or steal from them given a second’s chance. If a person (say, someone suicidal) decides to seek therapy or a mental hospital for assistance, everyone is even more afraid! They assume crazy and refuse them jobs, homes, financial aid, and all kinds of basic human decency & respect. They say they don’t do this, but the proof is in the statistics. Majority of United Statesians will, at some time during their life, develop a serious mental disorder--and of these 90% or so who do, only 10% of that crowd will seek help because it causes so much grief. 1 in 5 adults (around 20%), 1 in 5 youth between 13 & 18 years of age, and about 13% of children aged 8-13 years old will develop a serious mental disorder IN ONE YEAR, but very little is done about this because it is so hushed and frowned upon to admit distress and seek aid. Everything has to be done on your own and support systems are gone so things like Shaken Baby Syndrome have sprung up (from overwhelmed parents who probably haven’t slept in days and shake their child out of frustration, and this causes the child as it grows up to be unable to walk in a straight line, always drifting left or right).

On a similar note, the bystander effect. Kitty Genovese (Catherine Susan Genovese) was brutally raped and murdered over 20 minutes in 1964, while 20 onlookers did NOTHING. The attacker left and returned to finish the job, and no one did anything. This was the only reason people were interested in studying this effect, because these people were everyday apartment livers, not psychopaths. This happened in broad daylight, in an open courtyard where help was easily accessible if anyone had had the worry to do so. The bystander effect means if the people around you are doing nothing or seem unconcerned, you are likely to assume crackhead or druggie or not a big deal instead of possible emergency, or to assume others will act, and to do NOTHING about serious events like Kitty’s death.

3. Monetized Healthcare. Sometime during the Nixon administration, this administration signed a bill into law allowing insurance companies to monopolize healthcare. They are now allowed, by this law, to charge as much as they want, however ridiculous. Ambulances cost around $6,000 to take a dying person to the hospital. If you get shot it’s about $154,000 (per person) to get it treated in a hospital. A stab wound costs around $12,000 (per person). The legal, federal poverty line right now is $20,000, and at $65,000 a year my family (medically unable to work mother, working father, two children) was living paycheck to paycheck with about $20 to spare after taxes, bills, and necessities were taken care of. Stanford researchers reported that between 2006 and 2014, more than $6,600,000,000 was spent on gunshot injuries (6.6 billion was just in-the-door costs, not including treatment). Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, an article describing the costs of those victims was published…& it reported that in-and-out patients on average spent $5,254, and anyone kept one night or longer spent on average $95,887—as if their day wasn’t already bad enough!

4. LGBT+ concerns. LGBT+ hate crimes are on the rise. Between 2016 and 2017, the FBI’s Department of Justice reported 2206 hate crimes based on sexual orientation, 243 based on gender identity, and 77 based on sex. This means about 16% of hate crimes were sexual orientation, 2% were gender identity, and 1% were sex. This seems like a small number, but that is a solid 2,449 attacks (rape or murder) based on LGBT+ status and 77 based off a physical, genetic trait we do not choose. That is a terrifyingly high number. 1 in 5 LGBT+ people remain silent, because of statistics such as these and (often religiously inclined) pressures from their family and social circles. People still openly hate and discriminate against these people for something they cannot change. They are called delusional, confused, and broken because they are certain of who they are and what they like, love, and enjoy.

5. HATE CRIMES are on the rise again, and it’s terrifying. See above (#4) obviously, but also racist & religious crimes are on the rise. There were 642 more crimes in 2017 than in 2016, and between the two years this totals 7,620 race-based hate crimes. Each crime can mean one person got hurt or attacked or killed, or it can mean hundreds at a time…it varies depending on the perpetrator and what they hope to achieve. Religious crimes, especially towards Muslims and Jews, are on the rise again, with places of worship being shot up or burned down. In 2016 and 2017, 2837 hate crimes were committed because of religion. This includes a 291 incident rise from 2016 to 2017, and it’s still rising.

6. School shootings, and the NRA’s response. The NRA (National Rifle Association, the main distributor of weapons) refuses to admit that mental health concerns should be taken into account when distributing weapons. They’re so worried about profits they don’t care that children are getting ahold of their weapons and killing and injuring hundreds to thousands of innocent children and adults in schools. One incident occurred because a girl turned a boy down when he asked her out, and instead of accepting this and moving on he tried to kill her. She escaped due to the aid of classmates, but it was a very close call. In other cases children went after their bullies (many of whom had their own issues), and we’ve had hundreds of innocents die while the NRA does absolutely nothing and denies any involvement or responsibility. When it comes to abortion people shout “what about the children” (despite the fact that the fetus doesn’t even have a heart until about 5 weeks, and the heartbeat bills sit at 3) but when it comes to school shootings they ignore the children who have families and lives and hopes and dreams in favor of their guns, because it is written into law that is very difficult to change the people have a “right to bear arms.” But this amendment was added when one-shot rifles were it, and now we have automatic rifles with 300 rounds, but people still scream they have their right because it’s written down somewhere.

7. Lack of respect in the police force & authorities. Tying into number eight…the police (among other authorities) have an overall lack of respect for the people they serve. Naturally there are remarkable exceptions, but it is commonplace. They are taught to act before they think and to profile people. They will go after women and people of color far more often than men and white people. They will criticize women and trust men’s judgement over women’s. They assume people of color or women are always (or almost always) in the wrong, no matter their surroundings. Women and people of color are taught to be on edge always and to fight dirty and run, and never to expect respect.

8. Single-parent families, & views of their parenting skills. My friend’s mother just got screamed at for her “horrible parenting” skills. She is a single mother with a 5 year old daughter, an 18 year old daughter, and a 10 year old son. She works full-time on top of caring for her children and doesn’t always have the energy or time to pay attention to them…unless they act out. Learning this, her son decided to start running away all day without telling her where he was. He could be gone 8am to midnight the next morning. The last time, he refused to get out of his therapist’s car so she called the police (with mother’s permission). The police, rather than realizing from the story of a neighbor whose 17 year old child had been beat up by the 10 year old or from the family who insisted that this child had been acting out a lot recently and had called his mother a whore several times, a bitch, and told her to burn in hell…decided to lecture this single mother on her parenting skills because “ten year olds can’t be dangerous”...and possible because he is the only male in the household. There is now concern, after a night in a psych ward where this child called her abusive, that the 5 year old will be permanently removed from their home despite no abuse having occurred. Single-parent families are only given attention when they fuck up, and never any aid or counseling or financial support to prevent massive explosions like this one.

9. LGBT+ families, and scrutinized views of their parenting skills. Oftentimes LGBT+ families are amazing parental systems. They love themselves and as such are free to love their children unconditionally and expect nothing but encourage everything. Their parenting skills have been scrutinized due to doubt of this fact, and it’s been proven true. A few states have now banned LGBT+ families from adopting children, as if their sexuality or birth gender (“what’s in your pants” again) is any of the adoption agency’s fucking concern.

10. EXTREME POLARIZATION over party lines. Everyone is turning party on party. It’s always the Democrat’s fault or the Republican’s fault if something goes wrong. There will be a blind eye turned to any information to the contrary that possible one’s own party has done something they do not approve of. This results in dog-piling of anyone with a solid opinion. 20 people leapt down my mom’s throat for suggesting people try to change the administration rather than complain about it on social media, and she was called an “unAmerican Nazi”. People throw things like this around nonchalantly, as if they’ve forgotten its roots—and most of them have.

11. Lack of policy knowledge before voting. People are so focused on party lines (“Independent”, “Democrat”, “Republican”) that they don’t do any research on the policies of whom they choose to elect to lead our country. Our electoral college system is fucked and refuses to be changed. It was supposed to represent the people’s choice, but majority vote chose Clinton and the electoral college landed us with Trump. This is not how our system is supposed to work. We are living in a capitalist oligarchy lead by corporations, not a democracy.

12. Ethnic heritage, & loss of policies. Our administration proposed removing all protections for the remaining land of the native peoples of the First Nations, as well as all the scholarships for their education so they can participate as functional members of our society. A person of Cherokee descent told me on the university campus that 6 year old children are still being quietly kidnapped from the nation and brought into white society, never to see or hear from their families again (or be seen or heard from) due to a systematic destruction of their culture. Racist hate crimes are back on the rise, since hate-filled people are emboldened by the current administration’s open hatred of certain ethnic groups and sexes. Petitions are not enough, peaceful protests get brutally shut down by cops with batons, and nothing is right.

13. Unemployment and homelessness. This is a huge crisis that is being dealt with improperly by our management, AKA the Trump administration. They bring back unhealthy jobs that will destroy our world and call it a job well done while kicking more people to the streets. Every homeless person is assumed to be a druggie or an alcoholic, especially the men, but this is extremely wrong. Many of them do have disorders, this is true (schizophrenics and sometimes druggies will end up homeless), but not ALL of them are. Most are simply everyday people living paycheck to paycheck, reduced to begging money from high-and-mighty classist (often racist or sexist) closed-minded people who rarely care enough to offer aid.

14. Breathable air, & drinkable water (that doesn’t light on fire, thank you very much), AKA lack of pollution. Our president, who is supposed to represent WE THE PEOPLE, abolished clean air and water acts preventing coal companies saying he was “bringing back jobs for the people”. What this means, in reality, is that we won’t be able to breathe in about five years, water will all be polluted by offshore drilling, and climate change may well envelope the world and kill all life (grim and dramatic, but a very real possibility). The water within miles of any natural gas fracking fills with fracking chemicals and will LITERALLY LIGHT ON FIRE, and it causes various cancers and other illnesses. Vast majority of these people can’t afford to move, or are too old or sick to do so. Pollution is everywhere. I have asthma…it sucks hardcore.

15. Obesity, overweight, & physical health problems.

The corporations keep everyone so stretched living paycheck-to-paycheck above the 20 year old unchanged poverty line that they’re forced to consume everything offered. A soda or energy drink is $2 or $3 LESS THAN WATER, and when you’ve got only $20 to buy food that may make you more inclined to buy the corporation’s syrupy nutrition-less crap. A McDonald’s meal, to call out a corporation, costs about $4 (compared to $20-$60 for a decent, healthy restaurant with good non-GMO healthy food), but scientists were legitimately unable to figure out some of the chemicals in the food—and the human body sure as hell can’t use that for energy, but it costs so much less it’s a necessary evil sometimes when budgets are thin! This leads to severe obesity (especially in children), cancers, heart failure, and clogged arteries, among other complications.

16. Anxiety & depression are so commonplace they’re dismissed as actual disorders. This is a terrifying revelation. These are severe disorders…that are being overlooked. Depression means the person has a severe lack of motivation, the things they used to enjoy are no longer enjoyable, and sometimes they even desire an early (very soon) death. But due to the fact that this is very commonplace and almost everyone is depressed, people with this disorder are told to “suck it up” because “life sucks”, or to “just smile” or to “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or to “get over yourself” or that “other people have it worse. This makes depression a much grander monster to tackle, because there is no social support system for a disorder that nearly everybody suffers and considers a normal state of mind.

Anxiety in and of itself is perfectly normal. It’s why we care how we look, why we get up to go to school or work on time, why we look presentable and friendly, and part of how we engage with others around us. However, too much anxiety can be crushing. It seems every person at my university has an anxiety disorder of some kind (social, general) or is distressed (not just stressed, but so over-stressed their systems are failing and they’re getting headaches and finding themselves unable to cope). The pressure of finals or midterms that will determine your fate for the next semester or year, the pressure of clubs or kids or other commitments… it’s all too much. We’re all overwhelmed. Our systems are overridden. We’re running on 4 hours of sleep and an energy drink or a coffee every day, and the greasy sort-of-food in the cafe with its heavy salt and heavy oily fatty foods draw in swarms of distressed and hungry students and staff. Everyone is on a grind. Our brains are overwhelmed, constantly slammed into overdrive. There is no reprieve. It’s school, work, kids or homework, studying, tests, repeat…over and over until people drop out of school or social groups they used to enjoy. 90% of college students will develop a mental disorder in their time on campus due to the financial and emotional stress of attending school.

17. Retirement age keeps going up (it’s around 70 for full benefits) despite life expectancy going down. One can reap the rewards of Social Security by 62 for a loss of 30% of the money you put in there out of your own hard-earned paychecks, or full benefits at 67, or 21% extra benefits if pulled at age 70. This is despite the fact that kids are committing suicide and people are dying of poor health (at the hands of corporations and processed foods and chemicals leading to heart failure and severe obesity and cancer) between 45 and 65 years old…and most people will never reach 70.

18. Suicide rates are on the rise as young as 11 years old. Kids as young as eleven are committing suicide. It’s extremely common for 13-18 year olds to self-harm, starve themselves, or commit suicide. The pressure of society to have sex as young as possible, to get married as soon as possible, to know what they want to be when they’re older, and to fit in is so strong it crushes their will to live. This is terrifying.

19. Pressures of social media & the Internet. Kids learn very fast that if you don’t have a good “brand” or persona online, you will fail socially. Now they have to learn Internet lingo as well as proper grammar, despite how difficult grammar on its own is to learn, and they learn from social media influencers that what they have to do to get attention and “followers” is to flash bare skin or beat someone up or take part in a “challenge” that may harm or kill them. With the way school is taught and how white-washed it’s become (especially in Texas), it is increasingly difficult to convince children this is NOT what they want from their life and why they can’t become a YouTube star overnight like some kid who reviews toys and makes millions of dollars doing it (he’s only eight by the way).

20. Lack of filtering for children...and dangerously adult “children’s” websites. So-called “children’s” game sites full of games such as Mafa.com, where it’s supposedly for children but it’s games with injured or pregnant favorite characters and a game that the entire purpose is to hit Dora’s bare buttocks as fast and hard as possible (it even has a scream effect with it). This is advertised as ‘the best girl games for children’. What is this teaching our kids?

21. EVERYONE IS TRIGGERED BY EVERYTHING. This ranges from the words “flesh” and “moist” (especially together), politics, the news, and school shootings to actual abuse and rape (abuse and rape are legitimate reasons, don’t get me wrong, but these are things we need to talk about and people are too triggered by everything & kind of wimpy (don’t hate on me for that, it’s true that people have lost majority of their ability to handle stress & there are legitimate mental health reasons for that)).

22. College is encouraged but funding is shitty & most students can’t afford to eat. There are federal grants/scholarships but they’re so so limited in scope and what they’ll give, and 3/5 of the students at my university (a commuter campus mostly composed of middle-aged & young parents with 5-11 year old children) CAN’T AFFORD TO EAT FOOD while they attend school, and the stress levels are high enough it’s almost guaranteed (about a 90% chance) that the average university student, regardless of prior ability to handle stress, will develop at least one mental disorder, and this is usually some form of anxiety or depression. This is so “normal”/commonplace no one cares.

23. COMPLACENCY. Because let’s face it, if even half of these things happened in France or someplace else there would’ve been a full-scale revolution that overthrew the whole administration, but we’ve had nothing. No one wants to talk about politics, we all get angry and depressed/suicidal talking about it, and unless the bad stuff DIRECTLY, IMMEDIATELY, & STRONGLY affect people, no one cares. If you drink water with natural gas in it & get cancer/get sick, maybe you’ll care a little. But if you watch someone do that or light their tap water ON FIRE, you can just turn the screen off and go on with your life like Oklahoma and all other natural gas sites have nothing going wrong.

24. On that note, corporations are polluting everything, and no one is stopping them. We need purified water & ice from the refrigerator or some purification system now because natural gases & all kinds of unhealthy chemicals have infected our waters. A military facility dumped 3 tons of nuclear waste into the Puget Sound despite it being illegal, and no one said a damn thing. No one cares that fish and other marine life are swallowing plastic and dying, or that we drink plastic, or that plastic is literally made from oil, or that these toxic wastes getting dumped in the water will cause cancer in 2 to 5 years, or that they soon won’t be able to breathe the air, because right this second it doesn’t seem to affect them. We’ve gotten so used to pollution that we don’t really notice it anymore.

25. Public transport is unreliable & sucks. Unless you live in a huge urban city, public transport is unreliable. In big cities it comes every fifteen minutes to all ends of town; in a suburb, it comes maybe every forty-five minutes (they’re often late)...and though it goes to all the commerce centers and downtown, public transportation from one end of town to the other where the university is doesn’t exist, because society doesn’t care enough about education to complain. Everyone is so overwhelmed with work and home life and survival stress they have no time to care about the things that should matter, because it doesn’t directly affect them.

26. Living is expensive as hell! This especially applies in big cities, where a one-bedroom shitty apartment can cost as much as a full three-bedroom 2-bath house in a small city. The more immigration comes to the city or suburbia, the higher the prices. Just two years ago my parents’ 3 bedroom 2 bath house cost $300,000; the same house now costs $500,000, and it’s still going up. This is good for the seller, but horrible on the buyer.

27. Education is there to brainwash you & tell you how to think, and to pit people against each other in a fight for “good grades”, not allow freedom or true creativity. We are told from age 6 that money is everything. We are told how to do math and how to write, but never to understand what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. We’re not taught to truly think for ourselves, or the consumer society would ultimately collapse. Schools are too busy cramming tests in for everyone from kindergarten to senior year of high school that the kids aren’t really learning, just temporarily memorizing. Kids are starting to hate school. 5 and 6 year olds are skipping classes. Everything is about tests and grades, tests and grades. No true learning takes place. It’s all about the numbers, not about the reality.

The No Child Left Behind program seemed like it would help keep kids from socially falling behind, but instead it resulted in 18 year olds who still can’t read (though by 5 most kids can) and kids who slack off because they legitimately can’t comprehend what’s going on. Kids compete for “good grades”, a concept made up by someone many decades ago that no one fully understands except as a statistic for performance. If one child asks why they’re told to shut up and take notes; if a kid takes a creative approach to an assignment such as turning an essay into a thorough powerpoint or an art project they’re given a failing grade; freedom and creativity and critical thought are being crushed. Children now learn to keep their heads down and be shy, to be a bully, or to be an outcast because those are their only offered options.

28. Rape culture. “She was asking for it.” “She shouldn’t’ve gotten drunk.” “She shouldn’t’ve worn those clothes.” “She didn’t say no.” “Rape doesn’t happen to men.” “Oh, boys will be boys.”

These phrases are commonplace on the Internet and all around the country. We hear them all the time. Just because the woman was dressed comfortably or fancy because she was comfortable in her own skin, she wanted to be raped. Just because she wanted to have a good time that night and decided to drink, it’s her fault it happened (even if a rape drug was involved). Just because she didn’t outright say no to him (or her), it’s her fault she got raped. “Boys will be boys”, used to excuse anything a man does. Rape never happens to men and it’s somehow funny to suggest it might. Women never rape people. It’s bullshit, plain and simple. Everyone likes to excuse behavior like that. If you raise a boy, girl, or nonbinary child to respect people and see them as personalities and lives instead of toys and prey, rape wouldn’t be viewed this way. If you raise a boy, girl, or nonbinary child to expect respect and not give in to pleading or coercing or allow anything under standard, rape wouldn’t be viewed this way. This culture is changeable, but no one is willing to make the change. There are legitimately people out there who laugh about men getting raped. Statistically, 1 in 6 men will get raped in a year…and that’s just the ones, in this fucked up culture, who are willing to report it. Statistically, 1 in 3 women will get raped…and again, just the ones, in this culture, who are willing to report it. In high school I couldn’t find a single girl who had not been raped at least once (whether orally or whatever form doesn’t matter), and I (physically female but genderfluid) was the only person I knew who had not experienced it. I came very close around 9, but luckily my older brother caught the guy in time and thanks to him I was the only one untouched by high school, by 18 years old. …Shouldn’t that be terrifying? By the time this generation is reaching adulthood, 1 in 100 kids has not experienced rape, and most of it is because we are taught to sexualize and objectify everyone instead of befriend and love them. We are taught apathy or pity, not empathy.

Now do you understand why we’re in chaos? Why I want to escape? Why everyone wants to leave?

I’m really stressed every time I turn on the news because it’s always more and more bad things. We live in chaos. There are days I don’t want to wake up, days I contemplate self-harm, and days I want to leave the country entirely. This chaos is enough to crush a society.

#fml #anxiety rant #why #united states #united states government #united states policies #politics #stress #mental health #health #anxiety #depression #distress #rape culture #public transportation #the system sucks

0 notes