#i actually managed to do it a while ago but i consistently forget about the existence of this blog my bad

[braveclementine]

I Spy

Warnings: None, maybe some angst?

Copyright: I do not own any Marvel characters or locations. However, I do own my OCs, which consist of Penny Fury, Elizabeth Nelson, Elijah Chan, Katya Venice, Violetta Moscow, Lan Le, Josh, Trang Tien, Ahni Jallow, Mai Ito, and Ghaida Kashual as well as other OCs that will come up throughout the story.

The way I imagine Loki and Elizabeth sleep to keep cold if they're in hot weather. 

🤕🤑 ᔕ𝕥ｏ尺𝕪 🌐💠

Violetta crept down to Tony's lab, slipping in easily. Everyone else was up at breakfast so there shouldn't be anyone down here for another hour or so. And by then, Violetta would be long gone. 

She quickly pulled up a chair and started typing furiously at the computer on the side. Hacking into the server easily using her knowledge of Trang, she was able to quickly pull up the information she was looking for: Sharon Carters' phone records. 

She was kicking herself mentally, knowing she had wanted Tony to look into them almost an entire year ago but had forgotten about it with other things going on. Now, it was more than likely that Sharon was the spy and Vi had fucked it up by forgetting. 

Sharon's info was locked tight, she couldn't access more than what her phone number actually was. Violetta had to run it through a software program before attempting to hack it again and after eight tries, managed it. 

Then, using ctrl + F to look up, she started to type out the phone number, starting with the Ohio zip code: 513. 

Immediately, there were four hits. Every single one of them dated back to way before, like back before Penny was even around. They were the same number though: (513)-347-1111. Lucinda Nelsons' phone number. 

Violetta immediately zipped the file and sent it off to Fury with an anonymous email. Then she looked into Rumlow's phone files. There were plenty more calls to Lucinda in Brock Rumlows' phone file. Vi was honestly surprised that Fury hadn't looked into it. 

Unless. . . 

Vi bit the nail on her thumb, thinking. If someone on the inside could hide the phone number files, then Fury wouldn't have known about them period. But it had to be someone close inside on the investigation and it had to be someone that would want to protect Rumlow. 

What if they were soulmates? 

Vi straightened up, looking up Rumlow's file but once again, it was to coded and protected for her to access it digitally. If she went to SHIELD headquarters now, she might be able to get her hands on the paper ones. 

She stood up in excitement and turned around, before shouting in fear. Natasha was standing there, eight months pregnant and with a death glare. 

"Nat! What the hell!" Vi shouted, hearting slamming in her chest. "Give a girl some warning!" 

"What are you doing Violetta?" Natasha asked and Vi knew she was in trouble, because Natasha never, ever called her Violetta. Natasha's eyes were also shimmering, like she might cry. "Tell me you aren't the spy Violetta." 

Vi's mouth dropped and her heart sank in sadness. She knew she looked suspicious so she couldn't blame Nat. She was down here, in a place she never was, while everyone else was somewhere else, searching for something on the computer. 

"No Nat." Vi whispered, sitting back down in the chair. "No, I- I think I actually found the spy." 

Nat shifted on her feet, looking hesitant. "Well, lay it on me." 

"Okay." Vi murmured and showed her what she had found with the phone numbers and how Sharon and Rumlow had been called and had called the number several times. "The only problem," Vi said now, "Is that Sharon could be completely innocent. Rumlow and her were close. He could've simply borrowed her phone to call Lucinda on it. It might also have been a way for him to dump suspicion on her." 

"And the dates that the number was called all date back to before Rumlow was dead." Nat nodded. 

"Exactly. But, Sharon told me yesterday that Fury had called her and that she's supposed to be on the hunt for the spy. But look," Vi said, pointing. "Fury hasn't called her in three days. She called him once, and that was the day before yesterday. So either she lied, or she has another phone." 

"A burner phone which wouldn't be on the records and could be calling Lucinda on." Nat nodded. 

"Right. So, I'm off to SHIELD headquarters." Vi said, standing up. "I have to get my hands on the paper copies of Rumlows' death report and also on Sharon. I need to see their tattoos. I need to see if they're soulmates. Cause Sharon might be covering for Rumlow at the very least, even if she isn't the spy." 

"I'm coming with you." Natasha said immediately as Violetta started marching out of the lab. 

"No you're not." Vi replied shortly. "You are eight months pregnant. If you think that I'm letting you get into anything dangerous-" 

"I'd like to see you stop me." Nat snarled. 

Violetta spun on her heel. "Do you trust me?" 

"That's not fair Vi." Nat murmured. 

"So you don't." Vi stated flatly. She wasn't sure why it mattered so much. Maybe because she loved this woman to death. Maybe because this woman was all that had mattered to her for years. That this woman was the one that had saved her. This woman was her role model and her admirer. 

"I- Vi-" Nat went silent and then said, "Just let me come with you." 

"Fine." Vi whispered, turning away. "What's trust anyways?" 

It wasn't like Vi knew anything about trust to begin with. She had trusted her parents. They sent her to ballet and she came out a murderer. Elizabeth had trusted her friends. They had shoved memory pills down her throat because they were to scared to face her mother. Steve had trusted Sharon. Now she looked like she was turning out to be the spy. 

"Vi." 

"Nah." Vi shook her head. "I have more important things on my plate right now Natasha. I have a spy to find to save my family. So just leave it. I don't have time for an argument." 

The coldness lasted the entire ride until they got to SHIELD. Vi hated the way she was acting, the coldness she was treating Natasha with. Especially since she was pregnant so all Vi wanted to do was smother her with love. But Nat probably wouldn't have appreciated the help anyways. 

Vi didn't bother with the front desk, only flashing her ID when someone looked at her for identification and kept walking. Nat followed. 

Vi and her got into the elevator, taking them to the top floor where they found Fury in his office, already talking to someone on the phone. He raised an eyebrow when they walked in and said, "I'll finish this call later. Agent Moscaw, Agent Romanoff, to what do I owe the pleasure?" 

"Did Rumlow have soulmates and are they recorded?" Violetta fired off immediately. 

Fury raised an eyebrow. "No. But I have a feeling you're about to give me the name of the potential spy now." 

"Sharon." Vi said. 

It was silent in the room for a moment and Fury crossed his arms over his chest. "Even if Sharon is Rumlow's soulmate, do you really believe her to be the spy? She has fought on the side of SHIELD every single time against HYDRA." 

"That's the thing." Vi said. "Lucinda isn't HYDRA. She's private. She started HARPIE." 

"Nick." Nat said softly. "Sharon didn't fight on SHIELDs side through everything. She fought on Steve's side. And now, Steve doesn't want her. And who does he want?" 

Fury's head tilted upwards more as he came to the same train of thought. "This isn't about SHIELD or HYDRA at all. It's simply her jealousy for Rogers." 

"I need to see the reports." Vi said. "The tattoos. Not just Brock, but Jackson too." 

Fury led them out of the room and they headed down six floors to the records room. Fury put in his authorization and they found the files quickly. 

"Here." Nat murmured. "It's some sort of bird. But they both have it." 

Vi snapped a picture and sent it to Elijah with the caption. 

: 𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝚋𝚒𝚛𝚍 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜?

"Does Sharon have her tattoos recorded?" Nat asked. 

"They're only listed." Fury said, pulling out Sharons' records. "One is an alligator, the other is a crocodile." 

"Screams brothers to me." Vi snorted. "They've got the bird in the same place too." 

Violetta's phone dinged with the sound of crackling fire and she picked it up and read Elijahs' reply. 

: 𝙸𝚝'𝚜 𝚊 𝙲𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚘 𝙱𝚒𝚛𝚍

"Elijah said it's a Cuckoo bird." Vi said. 

"I've heard of them." Natasha said. "Those are the birds that will kick out the eggs of other birds, put their eggs in the nest, and then the mother bird thinks they're her eggs and takes care of them." 

Her phone dinged again from Elijah, him spewing all of his knowledge about Cuckoo birds. His fingers must've been on fire from how fast he'd typed the huge paragraph. 

: 𝙲𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚘𝚜 𝚖𝚘𝚜𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚕𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚜, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍-𝚍𝚠𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚖𝚒𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚜, 𝚕𝚊𝚛𝚟𝚊𝚎, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚜 𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚏𝚛𝚞𝚒𝚝. 𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚢'𝚛𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚊 𝚋𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚕𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚎𝚐𝚐𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚒𝚎𝚜. 𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚛 𝚒𝚗 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚔 𝚖𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢'𝚛𝚎 𝚜𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚐𝚘𝚍𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝙷𝚎𝚛𝚊. 𝙸𝚗 𝙹𝚊𝚙𝚊𝚗, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚘 𝚜𝚢𝚖𝚋𝚘𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚎𝚜 𝚞𝚗𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚠𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝙸𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚊, 𝚌𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚘𝚜 𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝙼𝚢 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚏𝚊𝚟𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚕𝚞𝚎 𝚌𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚘 𝚋𝚒𝚛𝚍, 𝚒𝚝'𝚜 𝚊 𝚐𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚘𝚗𝚎.

"Jeez Elijah." But Vi could only chuckle at it. 

"What do you think Nick?" Natasha asked softly. 

"I think that we need to alert the others, immediately." Fury said, stacking up the files and putting them back in the drawer. "And I need to figure out where Carter is." 

He called her right then and there as they headed out of SHIELD headquarters. They went over to where Violetta had parked the car, but didn't get inside of it so that Sharon couldn't hear that they were in a vehicle. 

"Agent Carter, where are you?" Fury asked. "I need you to take lead in a case." 

There was silence as she answered and then he said, "I need you to take point on the spy that's hunting down Captain Nelson and the others. There's a file waiting for you in your office." 

More silence. 

"Good. And promptly Agent Carter, this is a high profile case." Fury said and hung up immediately. "Let's go." 

"Where is she?" Natasha asked, climbing into the passenger seat with a little difficulty. Vi hopped in the drivers seat, leaving Fury to get into the backseat, sulking just a tad. 

"She's already at the tower." 

[sybaritick]

ok actually fuck it i will talk about one of my random feedist wips i was tagging about here

my description of it to a friend:

i did start writing a little bit of it at some point a few months ago, and, how very feminist of me i actually decided to do it m/f with the girl as the dom feeder. a bit of near future speculative stuff but mostly realistic. however the "plot" is 110% self-indulgent. girl is obsessed with him because he's a journalist trying to expose this whole "food additive that kind of drugs you into obsession with overeating" thing... and therefore he is trying very hard to avoid a particular list of brands and things that might contain it. of course, that list grows by the day. of course, he knows too much, so she needs to get rid of him. but he's also kind of cute, isn't he? i mean, not quite her type yet but she sees some real potential in that skinnyfat 20something little belly. boy's all lanky and fidgety and increasingly paranoid. would be a shame to take care of him without at least... taking care of him. :)

tl;dr as part of the normal course of trying to engineer more craveable, chemically-delicious fast food this lab stumbles upon a supremely effective drug but for an effect vanishingly few people would actually want (that is... craving-inducing and metabolism-destroying in a way that causes like 90% of people who are regularly exposed to 1) gain significant weight, and 2) experience pretty strong chemical addiction.) the thing is that i don't necessarily think it is much more than what existing medication causes-- some people end up gaining significant weight as a side effect of gabapentin or prednisone or antipsychotics. i want to do more in-depth research for the science here but i want something with a bit more consistency and with that as the primary effect. but what is relevant is that it is not ultra-sudden-instantly-fat because while i understand the appeal of that it's just not my sort of thing, i am obsessed with a more gradual change.

anyway. hides the longer-term studies, manages to get it considered Generally Recognized As Safe by the FDA, and gets enough people coming back for it that it's starting to look... weird. and suspicious. cue the journalist investigating this with a company that is increasingly unwilling to talk about what's going on.

but he will eventually discover the head of R&D seems to have things other than just the profit motive in mind, shall we say. look she's living out her dream here watching this cascade across the population as people try to figure out the cause (and she tries to evade actual blame for it.) girl you better burn any evidence of those studies before you're having them read to you in court...

but What You Can't Have is always such a temptation and this particular guy's insistence on taking on the company alone betrays he has read a few too many cute stories where the underdog wins the day. the truth will get out in the end, right? the good guys win.

anyway 'ts like catnip to her. who would not daydream about declawing him and keeping him as a trophy. he's soooo paranoid about accidentally taking a good few doses of this little concoction in his food. it's not like it'll make you forget about this little crusade! at worst you'll put on a few pounds and find yourself with a bit more of a french fry habit. what's the harm, hm? is it really worth being such a conspiracist? sorry, with a schedule like hers the only time she's available to talk this week is for a lunch meeting, but she knows a good place...

[trans-ralsei]

this is the n-th day I've wondered if I'm neurodivergent

I've sort of accepted that I have adhd traits, and that these things hinder me from being a more functional human being

and that it's actually painful sometimes for me to try to make myself work but i've actually managed to do it - meet my deadlines (mostly), make sure the work I do is somewhat up to par, etc.

i was way more dysfunctional a year ago, when i was juggling work with managing the city-wide trans Discord community (which, actually, was REALLY HUGE) and creating resources for that from scratch. people at the domestic newspaper i worked at and later got effectively fired from couldn't understand that i wasn't able to actually commit myself to it, more than I would be able to commit myself to, say, Other Stuff. (to be honest, i probably could, if they gave me enough incentive. but they didn't.)

i've been struggling with the idea that i might have undiagnosed A(u)DHD for a while now. for the longest time i thought my alexithymia was a symptom of autism, but i've been able to recognise some of my feelings after transition and understand that the fact that i couldnt' recognise how i felt was consistent with a degree of dissociation, a lack of a sense of self.

on the raads-r test i took last year, i scored 88, which wasn't very high, but was higher than the threshold of 65. (autistic people score a mean of 130)

reading descriptions of how kabru of utaya might be autistic got me thinking: what if part of the reason why i know so much about the people around me was largely to ensure that i could communicate effectively the wants and needs of myself and my friends?

the thing is: it's entirely possible that i end up forgetting this in a month or so until it crops up again. the first time in 2017, when i wondered if i could get myself formally diagnosed, i was told it would take around $2k USD in consultations. i'm pretty certain that isn't going to be the case today, but back then i said to my then closest friends that i was just simply going to park this tiny, nagging idea somewhere deep in a box and deal with it when i have a problem.

i'm not sure if this would be the turning point that forces me to get a diagnosis. it is in one of the top things to do Within The Year (apart from 'get proper health insurance', 'get back on track with my career', and 'start saving up for the House i just bought with the money in my pension savings with my partner'), but yeah! what's the Point

two of my best friends are autistic. most of my friends are ND. my partner has ADHD. my senior at the city-wide movement for trans rights reads as autistic (being a dad to two autistic daughters should be a giveaway?) and so do a lot of people around me. my ex-boss said on stage that she was on the spectrum, as a joke

[stowaway-society]

Mechs & Torchwood Crossover AU dump!

So, a few days ago I came up with this very silly niche little crossover AU of The Mechanisms meets Torchwood (essentially human/mortal Mechs & they work for Torchwood Cardiff instead of the Canon team) and I've been yelling about it since because it's my two biggest Special Interests in one so here's a list of what I think everyone's role on the team would be and how they'd do-

-Carmilla was the 'original' team leader and the one who hired everyone (with the exception of Marius, Raphaella and Lyf). 'Mysteriously' dissappeared one day, everyone has their own little theories about the where and how. Until her disappearance she also functioned as the team's doctor/medic

-Jonny was the first she hired, probably because she saw him fist fight a weevil or something. Originally Second-in-command but since the Docs disappeared he's officially in charge now. He has no clue what he's doing, he doesn't know how to properly lead, but still refuses to give up being in charge

-Nastya was hired for her technological knowledge and engineering skills but ends up doing most of the actual leading after Jonny was put in charge (she's their braincell /lh). She also developed and installed a fully sentient AI, Aurora, into the Hub (think Hera from Wolf 359).

-Aurora is,, just taking care of her silly little humans blocking off their PCs if they work on them for too long, ordering food online if they haven't eaten in a while etc, because yes, those are her silly little humans and they keep forgetting their self care or basic human needs

-Ashes was hired for Hub security and finances (aka copious safety hazards and tax fraud the first months, no one knows what Carmilla was thinking when hiring them or keeping them around, but Jonny and Nastya were fond of them enough not to question it too much) but eventually ended up mostly being a field agent

-Ivy naturally works as their archivist and along with Raphaella does most of the research. She's also in charge of the Hubs artifact storage and typing up reports

-Brian didn't actually get hired, he came through the rift (like in "Out Of Time") from the past (very far past), where he worked as a sort-of "witch" doctor. Carmilla decided to let him stay at the Hub for a while as they didn't know where he could go and she decided retconning him might be too risky (as he doesn't know anything about the modern age and retcon wouldn't change that). Eventually he ended up being an actual part of the team, mostly as a field agent. Somehow he ends up driving (he does not know how to properly drive, but their captain can't captain and their doctor can't doctor so he thinks it's fair enough, no one's died *yet* it's fine /lh). Despite having worked as a doctor before he doesn't on the team, as his knowledge in modern medicine is near non-existent for the first while, and they still had Carmilla

-The Toy Soldier isn't officially part of the team, it's more like. That One Alien-Or-Whatever-It-Is (None of them are really sure) that everyone just looked at and went "Yea OK so it's not dangerous so it doesn't need to be locked up or neutralized and it DOES need a place to stay so let's just keep it". While not being an official employee, it does do work around the Hub, which mostly consists of bringing people tea or food while they work or tidying up after the ADHD Gremlins that is most of the team (it finds a lot of joy in both, truly, it's just happy to be involved /lh)

-Tim got hired for his knowledge and experience with weapons, mostly by Jonny's request, after he saw Tim and his best friend Bertie handle themselves in a gunfight against an alien. Bertie died in the gunfight and Tim blames Jonny for not helping sooner (Cue them recreating that one scene from Fragments where Owen just tries to beat the living shit out of Jack) but they eventually manage to get along

-Marius was the first to be hired after Carmillas disappearance, originally to replace her as medic, though Jonny didn't really care about proper procedure or professionalism enough at the time to notice that his medical degree was entirely forged (nor did he care too much after it was discovered by Ivy). He does have medical experience, but it's just barely enough to patch someone up in case of emergency. While he does officially function as the team's medic, he more often works as a field agent working with Raph on the experimenting part of research (like the Rat Jam thing, because I can very very much see him have the exact same delighted reaction as Owen /lh)

-Raphaella was hired out of a UNIT cell (similar to Tosh), that she was in for a history of highly unethical experiments, including on human and alien subjects. Jonny mostly hired her for that, having gotten the recommendation from Ivy after she found Raphs file and being fascinated by it. Also because they were very much in need of an actual scientist.

-Lyfrassir pretty much get hired the same way Gwen did, still working as a cop when they run into Torchwood. They run into Marius, Ivy and Raphaella while those three are on a field research mission, and the trio takes quick liking to them after they help catch an alien specimen with surprising casuallity. They end up getting dragged back to the hub and Marius pesters and convinces Jonny that the team could really use their abilities and contacts until he actually hires them. They are more or less the least fucked up (morals wise) person on the team and much like Gwen help to "humanize" the team a bit more

(if this does well or people actually wanna hear more about this silly little crossover AU I have a lot more thoughts about it and am currently trying to write this into a fanfiction /lh)

[konstantintreplev]

WIP Wednesday?? sure, my liege

“Morse. Morse!” DeBryn wakes me by holding a bundle of herbs under my nose, and I nearly inhale them as I lunge upwards, grabbing his tunic more roughly than I intended.

“What in God’s name is that?” I exclaim, snatching the herbs away and proceeding to sneeze violently. DeBryn is probably the best healer I could be assigned, but his bedside manner can be… well, it’s probably better than mine would be.

DeBryn ignores the question: “The vision is back,” he says with wide eyes, and I sigh internally, because I never should have told him about the vision to begin with, but he had managed to banish it with some heavy sleeping potion for at least a few dreamless weeks, so I suppose it was mildly worth it.

What is the vision, you might ask?

Oh, nothing. Just me with my hands around the neck of our land’s mad king, bringing an end to his reign of terror for the past two years.

Did I mention I was once his favorite cleric-knight? That I bent my knee to him, swore an oath to protect and defend, and was promptly banished on the advice of a lord I was rude to once or twice.

Dare I also mention that I was performing protection spells on a near hourly basis, out of a rightful fear that someone at court was trying to turn our fair ruler’s mind against all he ever fought for and loved?

I missed one protection spell after being distracted by… well never mind who I was distracted by, she couldn’t possibly have… well.

The king’s head was turned, I was summoned, and he angrily sent me off on a ‘mission’ to keep the moors ‘safe’.

Needless to say, I pointed out that the moors defend themselves quite well.

Ever seen a man you pledged your allegiance to and steadfastly protected for years turn nearly purple while ordering the guards to ensure you leave the castle as soon as possible? Maybe the vision is not prophetic; mayhaps it’s more psychologically induced when all is said and done.

I know, though, that if I found myself back in the throne room, I would not grasp at his throat.

No, I would kneel to the King, to King Thursday the First, long may he live, and declare my allegiance as strongly as I pledged it long ago, when King Thursday wasn’t seen as a vindictive mad man, but a righteous defender of law and order in the kingdom.

Maybe that would knock some sense into him. Better than my hands around his throat, I hope.

Hope’s all I have, and it’s diminishing each day I wander these moors, DeBryn by my side, eyes consistently wide with concern.

“Do you need the draught again?” he asks. I turn my eyes up towards him, and I hope the loathing I feel at that question is clear.

Still… “Let’s see how I feel tonight. Almost dawn. I suppose we could continue our aimless search of the moors.”

“I had an idea about that, actually,” and I see a gleam in my companion’s eyes, and a worried feeling starts boiling in my stomach. “We are but a two day’s walk from my childhood village, I think.”

“You think? We both know your sense of direction is not good…”

“I know. Is that better? A man does not forget the moors surrounding his childhood village.”

[anthros-vanitas-archive]

#CalmWriMo Final Weeks (Wrap-up 19-31)

Hello it's been a while, hasn't it? So this is the final actualization of this month event, and as you can see for the date is December already... my bad.

In this case there was supposed to be an actualization the past Sunday 26th and another one marking the finish line on Friday 1st. That didn't happened however, I got a lot of things keeping me busy this past weeks and at the same time I didn't have quite the energy or the motivation so in the case of progress I didn't have a lot to show you...

But after all that I did wanted to do this post, marking the progress of this month dedicated to build and reach certain goals but, in spirit of the same tag #CalmWriMo, doing those at my own pace and with as much calm as I wanted.

So here's my late and final actualization of this journey into this month writing and selfcare goals. First blog here for reference.

Writing Goals.

I did have some notorious progress into the writing of the Eternal Throne, I wasn't able to write everyday as I was looking forward to do but I did manage to write 11 out of the 30 days.

Tracking this progress in my spreadsheet I manage to have a final word count of: 18,362 marking the progress of this month alone to 2,240 words

I didn't catch up with all the request and tag games I had in my backlog because of having to be too much hyperfixated in certain scenes I wanted to edit and a particular scene I wanted to finish before releasing.

I did reorganize the archives, and they're feeling quite cozy lately. It's great to see the new organization, and that I no longer need to scroll down to find certain things as well as how the Archives thematic feels just as I intended since the beginning.

Second blog planning has been rough but I still have hope into it's development.

Gaster ☝✌💧❄☜☼

Self-care goals.

Now with the progress of the Archivist trying to be kind to themselves.

The sleep schedule recovery mission had their ups and downs but I would say now is more stable that it was a month ago which is great.

I did go back to running each week successfully (yay!) out of the 5ish weeks of the duration of this event I did go for this exercise 4 out of 5. Mixed results with each but the habit is back on track, after so many months without being able to be consistent so that's great.

My health was 'good?'. As the sleep schedule it has been a bumpy ride, but at least I'm better now. I would not get into details but before this month started I was really concerned about that regard, now finally I can say that at minimum it doesn't concerned me that much anymore.

So that's all I have to say. Thank you to the ones who keep up with this journey and for those in the future who just pick their interest. This archivist is very grateful for your visit and they hope to see you soon, take care and don't forget: Memento Mori.

[3pirouette]

The Captain and the Missus (4/?)

Title: The Captain and The Missus 

By: TriplePirouette/3Pirouette

Spoilers: AU of CA:TFA

Disclaimer: They're not mine.

Distribution: AO3 Anyone else please ask first :) 

Story Summary: Instead of wanting to recreate the serum, Schmidt wants every trace of it wiped from existence so he can be the sole one to benefit from it. This means that Steve’s life is in danger, and Peggy’s new job is to keep him alive as he travels in hiding with the USO tour. 

Story A/N: AU of CA: TFA, based on @roboticonography’s idea of having Peggy go on tour with Steve as “Mrs. America”

(Robot’s post HERE: https://3pirouette.tumblr.com/post/654017864817360896/steggy-24-49)

SO... Yes. yes, it's true. I've somehow managed to only update this once a year during the past three years for Steggy Week. At least I'm consistent.

For 2023, this satisfies Steggy Week Day 2: WIPs and Updates.

Chapter 4: Bubbling Pots

Summary: Peggy and Steve are off on their adventure, but she’ll need to start relying on him just as much as she wants him to rely on her if this is going to work.

A/N: My goal today was to reacquaint myself with the story and get a good outline going. After I did that, I realized that I do, in fact, have a fairly solid chapter. I only ended up doing a few edits. I spent most of my time working on where the story is going, and figuring out what comes next. So, you ACTUALLY GET A CHAPTER. And without having to wait a year!

~*~

Peggy sat in the audience, next to Steve, while the chorus girls sang on stage. She tried to keep a pleasant look on her face as the one on the end, Marie, warbled off key, but found it quite difficult. She and the rest of the cast were filling the seats as they slowly moved through the script. 

“This reads like a bad radio play,” Steve whispered, leaning over. 

Peggy hummed, nodding in agreement. The “scenes” they were to play between song and dance numbers were trite and silly. “Think of whose left, though. Wives and kids, mostly. They’re not looking for Shakespeare or Descartes, just some hope and a little time to forget.”

“True,” he looked around, leaning closer to her and dropping his voice. “Just seems so disingenuous.”

“Most of it is, anything they think will squeeze a penny from our pockets,” Angie leaned over the seatback between them, voice barely more than a whisper. “Since all the proceeds here are going to the war effort, you can almost forgive it, but that’s all showbiz is: trying to figure out what will get butts in seats.”

Peggy almost smiled, but winced as Marie missed another high note. She waved the script she’d been given just an hour ago when they arrived at the rehearsal. “You really think this drivel will get people coming?”

“That drivel?” Angie draped her arm over the seat and poked Peggy’s script. “No, not at all.” She shrugged and rested her chin on her folded arms. “And Marie’s gotta stop telling them she’s a soprano when she’s clearly an alto, or the little bit of draw we’ve got in the music’s gonna head south, too.” 

Steve dropped his head in his hands as the piano player plunked out a line of harmony for the singers. “This is going to be so embarrassing.” 

“Aw, don’t worry, Cap.” Angie’s sarcasm softened, “Usually after some rehearsal they figure out what fits, what doesn’t, and the show gets at least a little better.”

Peggy reached over, letting her hand sit on his shoulder. He wasn’t a boastful man to begin with, and she’d seen the little hints of panic in his eyes when they talked about the show. Getting on the stage was not going to be easy for him. “You’ve done many of these, Angie?”

“Many might be an exaggeration, but I’ve auditioned and understudied loads of them. Usually got cut by the time they had the show ready to take on the road, but that ain’t happening this time.” Her smile and confidence were infectious, and it bolstered Peggy. 

“I’d hope not,” Peggy supplied as they all clapped mindlessly as the trio of girls exited the stage and the director called up a pair of tap dancers. 

Angie leaned back. “Certainly won’t. I was ensemble then. I’m a feature now.” She sighed, picking up her script and flipping through. “Though, who knows. Last show I toured with they replaced a bunch of girls once they got to Chicago.”

“Why?” Steve tried to split his attention between the conversation and the dancing happening on stage. 

“Who knows? I mean, Doris was a rough dancer to begin with- and she wasn’t getting any better, so that’s probably why she got the axe. There were a couple of girls- well,” Angie leaned forward, a smile on her face as she stage whispered, “when you’re on one of these shows, there are rules about how late you can stay out and who with- be glad you don’t have to worry about those, English, because I think a few of the girls got caught with some GIs one night and that’s why they were ousted. We never knew for sure, but they were out all crying and sobbing the next day.” 

While Steve was enthralled and Angie was completely unbothered, the tapping was starting to fray Peggy’s nerves. She found it difficult to focus on the information Angie was giving her- information she sorely needed as she had almost none. “Who enforces such a thing?”

“They call her a chaperone, but she’s basically a baby sitter who rats people out when they want to have fun. I don’t think they’ve hired one for us yet, though. At least, if they have, we don’t know about it.”

~*~

“You know, we weren’t involved in any of the morning rehearsals, either,” Steve mused, underlining and making little notes next to his lines in his script as he sat on the bed. Peggy and Steve were dismissed for the day just before lunch while the director worked on the choreography they weren’t involved in. “They made us go just to get scripts?”

“Probably,” Peggy mused, trailing her own pencil against the back of her script, the list of the names of the cast lined up in her neat handwriting as her nails tapped on the wood. She’d told Angie she was horrible with names, and had asked the girl to go through each cast and crew member as she made a list on the back of her script. Now, she perused the names as she sat at the small table, mentally ticking off the little she knew about each of them. Usually, she didn’t have a problem connecting a face with a name, but she usually didn’t meet so many in such a short amount of time, and she usually had one or two to focus on. 

Steve hummed low in his throat, turning another page. “This is really horrible. ‘I’ll fight for the right of justice along the Earth!’ I mean, who talks like that?”

Peggy tapped her manicured nails along the edge of the table in a quick tattoo. “You do, apparently,” she replied with little thought. 

“’Where Hitler goes, I’ll follow.’ Really?” He huffed, shaking his head. He turned his head, taking her in when she didn’t reply, listening to the nervous tapping of her nails, watching as her knee bounced in time, her breathing just a little heavier than normal. “Peg?”

“Hum?”

He tried to smile, but couldn’t hide that he was a little concerned. “You’re gonna put a hole in that table if you keep tapping on it like that.”

She leaned back, the chair creaking under her. “We’re on our heels,” she muttered, lifting her hand from the table, the nervous tapping continuing as she placed it on her thigh without the tell-tale noise. “It’s a bad place to be.”

Steve set the script next to him. “What do you mean?”

She shook her head, rubbing her hand over her face before looking back down at her list. “I know nothing about any of these people, and from what I learned from Angie today it seems any one of them would be just as likely as another to be an operative.” She sighed, tossing her pencil on the table. “I should have traipsed around Europe pretending to be a lounge singer,” she mumbled, “less background to worry about than a secretary or a seamstress.” 

“But you said you can’t sing,” Steve supplied, trying to lighten her mood. 

“Don’t.” She didn’t turn her head, but looked at him before turning her attention back to the names. “I don’t sing. Doesn’t mean I can’t sing; I simply choose not to.” She leaned back and sprung from the chair at his interested hum, unwilling to give up on her frustration and pacing the room. “I don’t like being on my heels.” 

He slipped forward to let his feet dangle off the bed, closer to where she walked the length of the room. “I see that.”

“Usually I have something,” she scrubbed her hands down her thighs, trying to walk off the anger, “a place to start. Even if it ends up being wrong, I have a place to start.” 

He shrugged, pushing his script to the side and motioning towards hers. “Isn’t that list a place to start?”

She looked at him, pausing for a moment and bouncing her head on her shoulders in what wasn’t exactly a nod but wasn’t a shake, either. “Yes and no,” she muttered, moving back into her pacing. “Usually, I have a target or a suspect. Someone I can focus on.” She stopped leaning back on the stacked cases. “There’s no person of interest, no place to start at, just a list as long as my arm of suspects and nothing to go on, not until one of them tries something, which might be too late.” 

Steve smiled, shaking his head. “You’re taking this way too seriously.”

She leaned back, affronted. “I am not.”

He looked at her back as she turned, opening the top case and pulling out the file she’d hidden in the lining the night before, opening it to reveal the scant information they did have. He sighed, “Ok, maybe that’s not what I meant, but so far I haven’t seen anything aside from that horrid writing that I would call dangerous.”

“That’s the point,” she huffed, turning back to him, top secret papers strewn across the top of her clothes is the case. “You don’t see it coming until it goes pear-shaped. And it will, Steve. We know it will.” 

“Brandt might be planning something. But right now, we’ve just got a bunch of show kids looking to put on a show. Not a single suspicious face in the crowd. Even if someone tries something, I’ll be fine.” He shrugged, trying to lighten her mood. “I can lift tanks, remember?”

Peggy swallowed, hard, and tried to keep her composure. “Oh, I remember.” She looked at him coolly, eyes falling to the floor. “I remember your blood flowing through my fingers, and Erskine’s on the ground next to me as it poured out of him.” She set her chin, looking at him fiercely. “Very few evil men telegraph themselves by wearing a swastika on their sleeve,” she bit out. “That operative didn’t, and someone in our ranks isn’t, and that means your life is in danger here, silly little show or not.” 

Something about her ire raised his own hackles, and his lips turned down, sour. “Well, then, couldn’t I be doing more somewhere else? Somewhere where they do wear their allegiance on their sleeve and I’d know who the bad guy was?” He stood, pacing himself. “Europe, for example?” He sighed, hands on his hips. “I’m not sure what you want, here, Peggy. Neither of us likes this.” 

The fight had bloomed so quickly she wasn’t sure where it had come from, or why his words hurt her so deeply. “No, I suppose neither of us do,” she replied, knowing it was harsh. She did, actually, like being with him very much. It was the intelligence side she couldn’t stand. “The quicker we figure this out, the quicker we’ll be done with all this.”

The words hurt the moment she said them, and she could see the pain in Steve’s eyes. “Sure,” he replied tersely, looking as small as the day she’d met him. “We get through this, we get an annulment, and you get to go back to the SSR and I’ll head out to Alamogordo.” He turned, heading for the door. 

She crossed the room, her hand on his wrist stopping him from leaving. “It’s not what I meant,” she whispered. 

“I think you might have,” his reply was soft, wounded. “I’m no prize, Peg, and we both know this is babysitting duty.”

She stepped in front of him, taking his hand. “This is not babysitting duty,” she whispered emphatically. “What has happened to you may be the most important discovery in the history of science. There may be a war on, and you may have been meant to be a soldier, but think of all we’ll lose if you’re lying dead on a battle field or in the footlights on a stage? Same result, either place.”

“So, I’m a thing then,” he resigned, looking away. “you’re stuck babysitting Brandt’s Science Fair winning experiment, is that it?”

“Stop being thick,” she ordered, turning his head back to her. “That laundry list of ailments you read me that kept you out of the Army is cured. Cured.” She softened, letting her fingers caress his cheek as they fell from his face. “With Erskine gone, you and Howard are the only ones who can recreate his work.” She stopped his response by speaking again. “How many able-bodied men would we have at our disposal if we could cure asthma? Polio?” She saw his self-deprecation turn a little at her words and she pressed on. “What would your mother have given to see you better as a little boy, hum?” 

“I don’t think Howard needs me to—”

“He might,” she interrupted. She shook her head and looked up at him, smiling. “Erskine gave the Army a super soldier because that’s what they wanted. But his research? His research had always been about helping people, curing people, making them better.” She stepped back, putting space between them. “You might be able to lift tanks and fight Nazis, but in truth Erskine was more interested in your health, and what that could mean for the future of medicine. He just didn’t have enough time to show you that.” She squeezed his fingers tight. “There may come a day when they call you to the front, but his life’s work lives within you, Steve. Don’t discount your safety so easily.” 

His ire was abated, and he nodded. “I’m sorry, I just…” he shrugged, looking down at their hands, at a loss for words. 

“We’re on our heels, both of us,” she pulled him back to the edge of the bed, sitting next to him and pulling her hand from his. 

He nodded, rubbing his fingers against his palm, his hand empty without hers. “But we’re a team.”

She smiled, a little calmer. “Yes, yes we are.”

He looked around, setting his jaw and his mind after a quiet moment. “So, how do I help you?” 

His question caught her off guard. “Help?”

He nodded, somber. “I can’t… do… anything right now but read these ridiculous lines over and over and get ready for rehearsal tomorrow. But it seems like you need help, so…” he shrugged. “How do I help you?”

She scrubbed her hand over her face. She’d always worked on her own, never had a partner to play out scenarios and thoughts with, she wasn’t exactly sure how to voice her process. “Well, I… I’m trying to get a handle on who these people are. It’s… infuriating how little I know about them.” She pointed towards her script. “The more I know about people, the easier it is to catch them in lies, or pick up when they mess up details. Right now, I can hardly put a face to a name.” 

“When you have dossiers,” he finally put together, “you have something to compare their stories to.”

“Exactly.” She nodded, feeling a little lighter with him taking on even the tiniest of the burden. “But I don’t have anything to compare it to, and quite frankly I’ve never had to try to weed out a suspect from so many unknowns before. Usually, I have no trouble with it, but keeping their details straight seems like a herculean task at the moment.”

Steve looked around the room and bounced up, quickly darting to his own trunk and coming back with his sketch pad, setting it on his lap to an open page and smiling as he split the large paper into four sections. “Who should we start with?” 

Peggy wasn’t sure exactly his plan, but she picked the most obvious and easy to manage. “Angie.”

“Angie,” he repeated, scratching out her name across the top of the first box. “What do we know about her?” he asked without looking up, instead concentrating as he sketched out a rough likeness of her face in the corner. He nodded as Peggy listed off the few concrete facts she’d mentioned, writing them across from her picture, just like it was his own classified dossier he’d seen often enough on Phillip’s desk. Below her picture he added his own words: friendly, talkative, and nosy. 

Peggy laughed, a smile on her face. “I believe ‘gossip’ would do well there, too.”

He nodded, adding it for good measure. “Anything else?”

“Not just now. Who else do you remember?”

“All of them,” he said shyly, one shoulder shrugging up. “I had a real good memory before the serum, but Howard called it ‘beyond photographic’ now.”

Peggy was astounded as Steve spent the rest of the afternoon sketching the cast from memory in quick likenesses, helping her recall details about their stories and listing them on the pages. As they completed each page of four people, she tacked it up inside the trunk’s lid with pins from her sewing kit, and by the end of the afternoon they sat staring at the entire cast and crew, laid out like any war room list of suspects she’d ever seen. 

“Thank you,” she smiled, running her hand over his shoulder. “We don’t know any more, but this…” she took a deep breath, “this makes me feel like it is a little less overwhelming.” 

He chuckled, looking over the nearly fifty faces. “I think it’s still pretty overwhelming, now that we’re looking at it.”

“But I don’t have to remember it all off the cuff while trying to memorize trite lines,” she added, standing and running her hand over it. “We can add what we’ve learned each night, compare and contrast what they’ve said. With a pool of suspects this big, this can only help.”

~*~

Steve was distant at dinner, despite the way he’d helped her and the smiles they’d shared after their strained afternoon. He remained thoughtful and stoic as she made her toilette and they swapped times in the small bathroom. He was still and quiet as she read in bed, sitting in the little wooden chair, staring out the window. 

It wasn’t until they were both in bed, lights out, that he spoke. “Bucky used to call me a self-righteous asshole after he knocked out whatever bully I’d managed to rile up,” he started in a soft voice, staring at the ceiling. “But my Ma just used to say I was like a little bubbling pot, I’d boil over when you least expected me to.” He laughed, a little burst of something between a happy remembrance and the darkness of loss. “I remember when I was a kid, sometimes I’d just get so angry…” 

She looked at him as he sighed, his long eyelashes fluttering as shadows over his cheeks, silhouetted in the moonlight, waiting for him to say more through long, quiet breaths. 

“I hid it, so much, until it would just burst out, you know? I’d be so mad I was stuck inside all winter that I’d finally lash out and have a tantrum, then end up gasping for breath, my Ma standing over me and shaking her head.” He smiled in the darkness. “She’d chide me a little, but mostly shake her head and remind me that the Asthma was why I was stuck inside instead of out playing in the snow in the first place.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I got better at hiding it the older I got. Let my anger out better places, but it still didn’t stop me from picking fights with bullies or doing some idiotic thing to make a point about a school rule or some other stupid, hare-brained stunt I’d come up with when I wasn’t thinking straight.”

He turned his head, looking at her in the darkness, eyes boring into hers. “I’m sorry I picked a fight.” She nearly stopped him, but nodded instead, curious to see where he was going. “It’s been a lot—”

She laughed, a light, soft sound. “Steve, it’s been less than a week since you were picked for the Project. You’re allowed to be a little overwhelmed.”  

“Doesn’t mean I can be rude or thoughtless or a jackass,” he shrugged, the blanket over them shifting. “You’re in this, just like me.” He smiled in the darkness. “We’re both on our heels.”

“I’ve never been in a situation like this before,” she whispered, reaching her hand out on the pillow between them. “I’ve always had an out, a safety, a handler who was just a phone call and an extraction point away. When whatever is going to happen here happens, it will be just us. You and me.” He reached out, taking her hand and twining them together as she continued. “We won’t have Howard or Phillips or the Army, just each other.”

“I think we can do that,” he replied gently. 

Peggy turned to the ceiling, not letting go of his hand but suddenly understanding the freedom the white plaster and cover of darkness gave her to be just a little more honest. “Every night when I close my eyes, I see it again: the bullet piercing you, you falling, Erskine falling just a second and a shot later. The blood pumping from your chest.” She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “I don’t ever want to see that again, Steve. Not ever.” 

“Not if I can help it,” he replied softly, holding her hand just a little tighter. 

“You won’t, not if you don’t take this just a little bit more seriously.” She turned back to him, knowing her eyes were pleading. “I know it’s not what you want, and I can’t make you want it. But we’re here now and there is a very real threat, that I can promise you.” 

He nodded, closing his eyes for a second. “I can do that. It’s just hard,” he barked out a laugh, tipping his head to the table where their scripts lay, “with that sitting there, staring me in the face like some farce.”

“It’s hardly Shakespeare,” she replied with a smile, “but needs must, and while it might not win any awards, there will be little children who might somehow find some solace in the thought that a great, big super hero will be fighting Hitler right along side their fathers on the front line.” 

He shook his head. “They should pick up a Superman comic, then.”

“They should look up to someone like you,” she rebutted, happy he couldn’t see her blush in the dark. “You may boil over a bit every once in a while, but Erskine picked the right man for the job. I know that, and he knew that.”

He kept her hand tight in his but rolled on his back, regarding the ceiling again. “I don’t know if I can do this, Peg.”

She didn’t move, didn’t even need to think about what she wanted to say to him. “After all the things you’ve done in basic training and in that lab, getting on stage is what scares you?”

He laughed at that, nodding. “I’ll try to take it all a little more seriously, I promise.”

“And I’ll try to do better asking for help, instead of bubbling over my own pot, alright?”

He hummed in acknowledgement and they both held the other’s hand just a little tight. 

Peggy wasn’t sure exactly when she fell asleep after that, or what time it was when she opened her eyes in the middle of the night, still turned towards the no-man’s-land of the pillow between them, their hands still tightly clasped together as he slept across from her, his mouth a  slack circle as his eyes danced behind his eyelids in dreams, but she knew when she woke up, still in the same position but devoid of his hand and his side of the bed empty, that something had changed last night. Whatever it was she was feeling, whatever he was reciprocating, was a danger they’d have to navigate just as carefully as they navigated the rest of the cast and crew. 

[invisible-storyteller]

Why didn't Scott return to Beacon Hills?

(Okay, so I'm just putting my thoughts out there because they would plague my mind otherwise, and movie!Scott doesn't deserve to be spared that much thought. I did like Scott's character in the series - while acknowledging the dumb shit he pulled in canon -, but I absolutely do not like movie!Scott, and yes, I'm making that distinction because this movie feels like an AU more than anything.)

In the movie, it was established that Scott hadn't been back in Beacon Hills for a long time. It was also implied that he simply didn't keep in touch with a lot of his packmates: think about the awkwardness of meeting Malia for the first time after their break up (probably years ago and then they never talked again, ouch) or how he didn't seem to know that Lydia does not use her banshee scream anymore (which makes it pretty likely that he also does not know about Stydia's break up).

Then we have this conversation between Scott and Eli:

Scott: Wow, you got really big.

Eli: Yeah, it's probably because I was only 3 the last time you saw me.

If we accept that 2014 (when Eli was 3) was the last time Scott was in Beacon Hills, then it means that Scott hasn't contacted the pack in 12 years. This might not be correct, though, as the final scene in 6B was literally a flash forward to 2015 (if I remember correctly) when the pack was still together and fighting hunters as a united force. Or the writers are once again forgetting their own canon because I doubt that Derek - with a 4-year-old son at the time - would go off picking battles and getting himself in life-threatening situations while his son is waiting for him at home. Plus I can't imagine Scott being in contact with everyone but not visiting Eli. (Sidenote: Lydia seemed pretty surprised by Derek having a son. Like she didn't know before they met him in the preserve, which is weird in my opinion. Did no one tell her? Had she not visited Beacon Hills in years, too? This pack is so scattered, I swear.)

Anyway, something must have changed in 2014 or 2015 for Scott to choose to burn all bridges and sever all connections. And I think that something was Monroe.

Monroe was formally defeated at the end of 6B but the fight didn't end there. Scott and his pack probably fought hunters on and off, while trying to stay in university and live their own lives, chasing dreams and whatnot. And if there's one thing that has always kept Scott's pack together, then that's a common enemy.

I think 2014 or 2015 was the year when the pack finally put an end to the huge wave of hunters going against their code and managed to establish some kind of peace between the two communities. It didn't mean there were no more hunters, but things returned to "normal", aka the hunters sticking to their original beliefs (hopefully). And with the end of the war came the realization that the pack no longer had a common enemy to push everyone together.

Don't get me wrong, I do think a lot of them stayed in each other's lives. They are friends, after all, and not all ties will break just because some members decided to go MIA. But without the war and the constant proximity of his pack members, Scott's old fear of being unworthy and unimportant resurfaced once again. How do I know? Because Scott seems to have an alpha complex in the movie.

Hear me out! His side job consists of saving people from collapsing buildings, and he does this hero-rescue thing so often that people have an alias for him: the Alpha. When faced with the Nogitsune, he insists on the importance of his role (the Nogitsune can't win until Scott is off the board) and he even shouts "I'm still the alpha!" while revealing what he believes is the Nogitsune's endgame.

But would an actual alpha abandon his pack for 10+ years? I mean, he isn't involved with pack business anymore and he isn't even the one defeating the Nogitsune - that job gets passed onto Parrish and Derek. And yeah, Scott's eyes might be red still, but he's no alpha of anything. He has no pack to take care of and he certainly doesn't have a territory to defend. He still desperately clings to the title, though.

So here are my thoughts on what (must have) happened: After defeating Monroe, Scott realized that he couldn't give much to the pack anymore. They didn't need his leadership, his hope, his supervision or alpha roar or anything like that. Scott was... a friend. There is nothing wrong with being just that, per se, especially with how much emphasis Teen Wolf puts on friendships, so I'm sure the others would have still loved to have Scott in their lives, supernatural threat or not. But here's the thing: Scott has always wanted to be special. Admittedly, I think a lot of us do. But it's sad to see that Scott couldn't overcome this fear of being obsolete, of being mediocre. For 15 years, he couldn't realize that his worth went beyond his alpha status, meaning that he's the main character without any character development.

He probably did come back after the first year at uni and watched Derek be happy with his son and living a quiet suburban life, no longer relying on an alpha. Malia probably broke up with him or they just parted ways somewhat awkwardly, so that was one more person who didn't need him anymore. Lydia was working on her career, busy balancing school and a relationship while she was finally out there spreading her wings. Stiles was free, too, finding his true calling. And Beacon Hills was peaceful. Certainly didn't require an alpha's intervention.

So Scott decided to look for another place where he could still be useful, where people needed him. He began to rescue dogs and people alike because that's what he knew how to do, because that was what made him feel like an alpha again.

It's too bad he didn't realize that he was already important. That he could have helped so much by just being there for his pack, for his friends.

The bottom line is: I do not like movie!Scott, not because he's OOC but because the writers didn't bother to develop his character past his high school self (I'm sure Allison and he won't have problems with picking up where they left off). And if Scott abandoned his pack, then I think this was the reason behind it. His own insecurities.

[angeldiaries777]

Does anyone else scream and talk in their sleep? I used to do this very frequently a few years ago and it calmed down for a while I used to wake up in cold sweat because of night terrors but lately I’m just feeling very trapped. I’m claustrophobic and I’m having the worst nightmares of the past a lot recently just of situations I’m VERY over. Like things from years ago that don’t affect me anymore Things I don’t care about but they just pop up in my dreams and I’m forced to relive those same memories I think it’s my brains way of coping with social isolation. It’s just making me very anxious and it’s making me feel very low when I’m clearly on a healing journey and trying really hard. It’s just suffocating. It’s very tiring revisiting memories that I want to forget. I’m so over it. I’ve addressed these things and moved on through so much self talk. Yet everytime without fail my nightmares are horrifically repetitive. Probably cuz my life is repetitive. I think it’s a sign to change things and that im not doing enough. I thought I was healing but you can only heal so much in your little bubble. I have to take the risks I’ve been putting off for years. I thought I had to start with the basics but I realized that the basics are actually pretty easy to manage but it’s the difficult things that’ll only get harder with time that I have to do now. Not later. Now. And I’ve always known this but my sick brain and tired body were making excuses for myself. And it’s such a form of self harm to hide from the world because it scares you. I know I’m not alone in these feelings and others have had similar experiences yet when you’ve been alone for so long you start to convince yourself you’re unloveable and you you start to believe lies about yourself. Like you’re just a bad person, you’re not easy to get along with etc. It’s the cycle I’ve been living in and only I can break it. And it’s going to take even more consistency but it’ll be so worth it. Those feelings of hopelessness and anxieties about people and the world should dissipate the more I emerge myself into it. I think it’ll also give my thoughts more clarity and I’ll get confirmation and maybe even be proven wrong the more I leave my comfort zones in every aspect of my life and stop identifying so heavily with my pain and my past and find out who I really am and what I really want even if there is never a certain answer to those two things. Yeah I know what I have to do. Its gonna be really easy. The only reason it’s stayed this way is cuz the cycle hasn’t been broken but I know that I’m capable now.

[monstersandmaw]

Ghostiiiiiiiii! It’s time for your random ask of kindness~

Your stories and posts are the only reason I open tumblr at all these days, they are all so detailed and unique and each one leaves me with such a distinct feeling (be that warmth, comfort, fondness etc). I can’t count the number of times I’ve read and reread your works. They consistently help to pull me out of whatever depressed funk I manage to get myself into.

You really go all out when you come up with the characters feelings and descriptions of the setting/plot. It plays out like a movie in my head, which is the best fucking thing ever! I’m seriously and eagerly waiting for the day that you publish your writing so I can tell my friends and order a physical copy to put on my bookshelf.

I feel like lately (and maybe this has always been the case and we’re just seeing a few) you’ve been getting an influx of nasty or entitled people in your inbox.. and you’re brilliant at dealing with them but I just would like to remind you that for every uncouth dickhead there are 10+ others who love and appreciate your work and all you do for us. We love seeing you get excited about stories, reblogging DA content/funny meme shitposts and sharing your really cool hobbies (seriously, chain mail is badass and I’ve always wanted to try making it).

I hope this message will at the very least make you smile- you deserve every kindness. You are amazing 💕

(P.S. don’t forget to drink some water, stretch and make sure you take breaks!)

-🇦🇺 (it’s good to be back)

Excuse me while I just scrape my gooey, ectoplasmic heart back up off the floor where it melted into a soft and wibbly puddle after reading this!!! What a beautiful message!!! Thank you.

I realise you didn't ask for advice on mail making, but if you do decide to have a go, the best weaves to start with are the classic 'chainmail' pattern of 4-in-1 (sometimes called European 4-in-1), and 'Byzantine'. I'm not on Facebook anymore but there used to be a really good and truly massive group dedicated to chainmaille (that's how jewellery folks like to spell it), which had some great resources for beginners. The website linked here has some fabulous info and tutorials (especially for beginners), and I'd recommend learning about aspect ratio (AR) so you can make weaves in whatever size you like. Lemme know if you actually want any info or help because I'd be very happy to tell you more if you like. (I know of this supplier for Aussies but have never used them myself for obvious geographical and shipping reasons).

As for actual physical book stuff, hopefully I'll publish Gabe & Odessa properly, and perhaps the fae story I'm working away on in the background (that, or the reworked 'Winter Solstice' story I started ages ago). We'll see, but it's always so reassuring to hear that people would be interested in buying something like that!! Thank you.

I just had two truly enormous mugs of tea, and I went for a walk earlier with Mr. Ghosti because it finally stopped raining for a couple of hours, so I've had a good break!.

You take care of yourself too, dear Aussie Anon, and thanks for sticking around and for taking the time out of your day (night?) to leave me this!

[dreamingsushi]

Till the End of the Moon - Episode 26

I’m back from vacation, so now is a good time to get going with this series. I’m kind of anxious, because it started off so well and the last few episodes, we lost a little bit of that character consistency that made it so good to me in the beginning and it has been very frustrating. Hopefully it’s going to keep steering in the right direction and I won’t be too disappointed by the following 15 episodes.

She starts it up quite strongly. She asks Tantai Jin to marry her and make her his empress. Ye Qingyu disagrees with Tantai Jin agreeing to it. He says she needs to go back home and face what she has done, but Tantai Jin says that he doesn’t want to trouble her before the wedding and that she wants to cut ties with the Ye family, so her name should be erased from the family records. Tantai Jin wants to proceed with the wedding as soon as possible and ends up choosing an inauspicious day for it. Ye Xiwu acts cruelly towards her brothers. Ye Qingyu says she’s changed. And on to the wedding.

Tantai Jin’s coat looks like it’s covered with grass. I think... this is going to be the first costume design that I highly disagree on. The wedding starts. When he reaches out his hand for hers, she doesn’t take it. This sounds bad. We also discover that she got all of the nails when she asked him to marry her (but they’re already married, so I don’t get it). Anyways. It starts snowing. He offers his hand again and this time she takes it. Overall, she’s really off, but I guess he’s too drown in happiness to actually notice that she behaves extremely WEIRD!

While waiting for the husband to come to the bed chamber, she gives herself a pep talk that she did all of this for this day. She notices that Tantai Jin must be very happy. She’s super awkward, I wonder how he does not see anything of it. Or I hope he’s pretending? So she was missing one nail. When she kisses him, it created the ninth one and her eye turns purple. I forget about the jade she took for him. She admits that her goal was to kill him and that’s why she came back. After stabbing him with the first three nails. He says he still loves her, but she tells him she never loved him. Why? What’s the help to your mission in saying that? Especially when like 5 episodes ago before you left to free Xiao Lin you were thinking you could spend your life with him as your lover and prevent him from becoming a demon. But when she’s about to send the last of the three nails, the dragon scale protects him. The nails desintegrate. Nothing protects the evil bone/essence anymore. He asks her why she lied to him, but they both fall down together.

Ye Qingyu finally realized that Ye Xiwu cut ties with her family because she knew all along what she was going to do. He tries to convince his dad to leave, but he won’t abandon his daughter.

Tantai Jin has three years left to live. They can’t remove the six nails from his chest. Nian Baiyu is very sad. He wants Tantai Jin to rest, but the king wants to get changed and go see Ye Xiwu. And he’s wearing his wedding clothes, with the grass. Why? So blabla, you betrayed me all the time, I was still nice to you, loved you blabla. I failed, there’s no point to live, kill me. No, let’s suffer together, since you didn’t want my love, here’s a serving of my hatred. And that’s how she made him become a demon god. She shouldn’t have meddled to begin with. But at some point it’s interesting to see that sometimes, the supposedly “good ones” are actually awful people too.

Ye Qingyu gets the permission to go see Ye Xiwu. However, Ye Bingchang is there already. She reveals how she poisoned the porridge. Ye Xiwu blames her for Xiao Lin’s death. Then Ye Bingchang tries to strangle her. Meanwhile... She thinks of the past. Qingyu and Pianran comes just in time. Pianran tosses away Ye Bingchang while Qingyu tends to Xiwu.

And that’s it. I don’t see how they’re going to manage from now on. I don’t see anything. My mind is totally blank. I’m confused. Did she resent him for the death of her granny and Xiao Lin and that’s why she decided to act finally and stopped hesitating? I don’t know.

[kharmophron]

I was curious on how quickly all of this stuff seemed to unfold for you?

Hermes and I made friends about 2-2.5 months ago, since then, Persephone has come forward (although she took me a little while to identify), and now Apollon seems to be showing me signs as well. All in just a few months. I’m a little worried about not having the time to keep up a quality worship for so many, as polytheism is very new to me as well. Do you have any recommendations on how to balance it all?

Do they tend to be pretty understanding? I don’t want to accidentally neglect any of them.

ok honestly this was pretty hard to answer because it involves a lot of things i also struggle with! so rant time

things did unfold quickly for me. a few years ago, once i started looking into magic and witchcraft, i quickly came in contact with polytheism, and started to look into deity work. then i kind of left the witchcraft part aside and tried to focus on practicing polytheism, and each time i looked into my worship i grew interested in more and more deities and other beings, and i would try and add them to my practice.

i wont go too much into detail because it has a lot to do with my mental health, but suffice to say im really not good at consistency. that would be my best tip: if you can, just be consistent with your worship. its a cliche, but its true and its something thats been signaled to me by the deities i [used to] worship many times - doing something very small every other day is better than doing big stuff and then vanishing for weeks. thats the best thing you can try to keep up in terms of quality when you're starting, i think. don't worry about setting aside too much time to do things, there's absolutely no problem if you can't do big things right off the bat!

another thing is: yes, they're very understanding. they know what you're struggling with, and if it helps, you can always talk to them / pray about it! and you can also get directly involved with the ""gentler"" aspects of the deities you're interested in. but don't forget, they might push you, and they might show that they're upset in some context, and that doesn't mean they don't understand what you're going through. they truly want the best for you, and sometimes getting to that is a hard journey, but they're by your side

there are deities that i've been meaning to actually worship for literal years now but i just can't stay consistent with my offerings and prayer, like Haides for example, and he's always been understanding as long as i talked to him and tried my best to set aside some time to at least think about my worship. i don't consider myself a worshipper of him or many of the deities i used to reach out to because of this time management / consistency / iniciative problem. i know the gods are always out there for me, and i eventually do pray and give thanks or the occasional offering, but i know im not ready to incorporate a lot of deities to my worship (specifically, at least). another thing that helped is that im very religiously eclectic, so "hellenic polytheistic" is not the only thing that describes it, as the orthopractic approach alone tends to make me very anxious. so i let myself be very free with the way i relate to the religion and with my practices, and it's something i talk about with the deities im in touch with.

also, its never a problem to adapt your practice to what's easier and best for you! when i first started getting into polytheistic devotion, i tried to take activities that were already a part of my life and routine and thought of what could "fit" with the deities i worshipped. going for a run? say a quick prayer to hermes before and/or afterwards! going to the beach? meditate and pray to poseidon! it's raining outside? give thanks to zeus! all of this made me feel way more connected to the gods, because i truly saw them in every part of my life.

i hope this helps, and i wish you all the luck Hermes can bring! just be sure to be kind to yourself, and try to stay honest with you and with them. im here if you want to talk about it too!!

everything will work out great, even if its not the way you think 💛

[spinaroos-47]

Batdr is fine. When you take only the game itself into account but yeah its pretty much impossible to remove it from all the context of what went down with the studio. Buuuut Im not well versed on that and i want to talk about some stuff about the game in itself.

Batim used to be a spin some years ago, from before i even created this blog. So i kinda wanted to check it out, just out of curiosity

Gotta admit, i had a better time watching it than i thought id have. Though i literally just finished watching a playthrough a few hours ago so my opinions might change in the future, probably will be my only post of this game here

Out of the gate i have to say, i didn't really like the talking animations. Like, the gestures dont feel like gestures you do when you're talking with someone. Theyre too floaty and simmetrical. A good example of the floaty thing is in the intro where Audrey is tapping her fingers on the desk. Doesnt look super right.

The style took me a while to get used to. I was more fond of the style in the first game but it grew on me. They really expanded on the style, made it more detailed and really worked with the sepia and black in a way to give everything a lot of depth while still keeping it cartoony. Dont know how to feel about the addition of new colors.

The story was pretty interesting! I do like how they messed with the concept of the loop without outright conflicting with the canon Batim estabilished. It makes sense, its very interesting! I liked the flow of the story, but i did get a little ehhhh when it began showing that Audrey was trusting Wilson to do the right thing. Because like, the man fucking drowned you and trapped you in an inky hellscape. Even when you dont know his plans, why would you trust him? Yes, he's a familiar face but still doesnt make sense.

Joey making Audrey is something i really liked for some reason, its very interesting. Maybe because of the toh brainrot fjdndnf. Though it does contradict his line at the end of Batim where he says that Henry got a loving family and he only got a crooked empire. There was a lot of small things from the first game that they seemed to forget or just contradict, which is odd because there also was a lot that was consistent.

One thing that didn't sit well with me was how more at the end it seemed to go in a direction of showing how Joey changed for the better, but never really adressed all the workplace abuse and overall shittyness he brought onto his employees. Though what else could we expect from the kindlybeast?

For a while i was thinking they would pull the "oh the loop is better than the world Wilson has made" and while Wilson's whole dictatorship thing was very bad, i don't think the loop was good either. So i like that it was framed more as something that really couldnt be changed without being paused and put into stasis like Wilson did. Neither is good but one keeps the balance of that world, and Audrey is doing her best to make it more bearable.

Also Audrey basically managed to get Joey's wish from the first game, to bring the cartoon characters to life in a good way. But the credit scene with Gent taking the ink machine intrigues me. Because wouldn't she need it? She found another way to do that?

It suffered the same thing as Batim where some stuff was just brought up and not expanded as it kinda led you to believe. Actually it felt even more here, Batim felt more tightly packed in the story department. The father thing with Wilson felt kinda out of nowhere/underdeveloped. Like, if you dont pay much attention to it, it doesnt hurt much but it sure is weird.

Im not a really well versed guy on gameplay stuff, and i watched a playthrough instead of playing the game myself, but the problems in the first game seemed to be improved in this one. Definitely didn't get all solved some of them, but improved for sure, especially the combate.

When Audrey got the flow hability i realized they were sticking close to a formula like dishonored, with that and the way they did all the collectibles (the batteries, slugs, etc), which i think it might have been a good choice since dishonored is considered a pretty good game.

So, yeah, a fine game, though the enjoyment is tainted by the irl stuff that revolves around the game and the studio

[tryst-art-archive]

Nov. 2012: "ThirdEssayD1_ScrapForParts.doc"

An unfinished start of an essay for my nonfiction class.

--------Essay------>

            I have a poor memory where my own life is concerned. My mind tends to be overactive, busily poring over every moment, every word, of my present and past, constantly revising and editing them down to their barest parts, turning them into legendary events instead of actual moments of time. The end result is that, when asked about my life and its formative events, I provide not so much an accurate account but a ritualized and carefully formulated myth that, while wholly based in fact and actual happenings, cannot be definitively confirmed, much less by me. This same process watches everything I do and say, commenting upon my actions and then commenting again upon the thought about the actions and so forth and so on down the line; the space in my head is a babble of thoughts, and I am at my most functional when they are a rumbling background noise from which only an occasional impression emerges. Conversely, when my mental rumble solidifies into a single, articulate stream of thought, into actual words, I become utterly dysfunctional, suddenly clumsily failing to accurate complete tasks that were second nature a moment ago, whether that means printing a flyer to fit an letter-sized sheet of paper or simply breathing in a normal fashion. (I forget how to breathe three to five times a day, usually when I’m on the train, and often because I can’t hear my breathing over my headphones and some other passenger looked at me askance like I’ve committed a social faux pas at which point my mind erupts into tangible thought to ask, “Oh god am I breathing loudly?!” causing me to think about how breathing works.) About two to three times per week, walking eludes me, usually when I remember previous compliments from past sexual partners on either my rump or my consistent and daily ability to walk in high heels, and I spend the rest of the day chanting “Heel toe! Heel toe!” in my mind, occasionally skipping a couple of feet because my rhythm might be off, visually. I sometimes forget how my facial muscles work as well, smiling longer than I’m used to—which admittedly isn’t very long; years of cultivating invisibility have provided me with a default facial expression that is at best morose and at worst downright unfriendly—and then, suddenly strained by the fatigue of holding my cheeks and mouth and eyebrows in an upright position, I have to roll my features around in an effort to relocate normal.

            Verbal thinking decimates me, emotionally as well, ultimately destroying my ability to feign normalcy until, through chance, I sink back into my comfortable state of floating buzz. I often don’t remember the things I write, especially if I or others wind up liking the results, and back in the days when I was visually artistically inclined, the same was true of my sketches and digital drawings. In the summer before my senior year of college I took on a graphic design internship at a magazine company which began with a panicked me constantly thinking verbally about every little design decision and whether or not my new, temporary coworkers would approve. The results were atrocious, worse than work I’d made for classes the semester before that had landed me this internship in the first place, worse than poorly Photoshopped posters I’d made for my high school’s literary magazine or indeed the pathetic attempts at InDesign use I’d managed for that very magazine. It wasn’t until despair at every being able to feel even remotely comfortable or accepted at the internship in question set in that I relaxed at all and my verbal monologue moved away from my design choices and to how ridiculous it was that my current coworkers were handcrafting Caesar salads for lunch while I hid behind my uncomfortable Mac eating Lunchables that I began to turn out any designs that were worthwhile at all. Of course, by then I’d managed to quietly break and then repair the computer I’d been loaned by first unintentionally loading over thirty thousand fonts onto its hard drive and then hand-deleting them until I could open InDesign without the computer crashing; the quality of my free advertisements and newsletters were the least of my worries. In fact, as the internship went on and I became less and less interested and invested in it and more and more certain that I was utterly useless and had damned myself forever in the eyes of my coworkers simply by existing, the better my work became, eventually becoming portfolio-worthy. I’d seen the same effect in my photography as well; a shot carefully constructed and planned out inevitably had a car passing by at the worst moment or an obvious light stand at the edge of the frame or my thumb in the corner, but if I sketched a quick thumbnail of an idea for a shot, gathered up a model or a prop and vaguely threw myself at taking that photograph and simply seeing what rolled off of it otherwise, I wound up with solid images that I could feel a little proud of. And why? Because my mind was barely involved, or at least I wasn’t consciously aware of what I was doing; I was merely doing it.

            When I write well, if I write well, I typically start out consciously aware of my words, selecting them and putting them down, for any number of pages, until eventually I stop knowing. I enter what I can only call a trance state in which words fall onto the page via my fingers and keyboard, and I do not know that they are happening. I effectively black out, and when I come up out of writing I breathe like a surfacing swimmer—to abuse a simile—and do not remember what I have written. I generally know the gist of it, have some sense for what occurred, but I absolutely never remember the actual words. Most of them are familiar, but when I have done well, I find a gem or two, a sentence here or a word choice there that strikes home and that I simply cannot remember having ever put down, as if someone else put it there. Yet I am the only one here, and so I must have done it.

            It is the same phenomenon that allows me to breathe properly one moment but not the next; my mind’s involvement, or rather my mind’s lack of involvement, is directly tied to my level of success in any matter. Writing is merely the most extreme form of that phenomenon. I suppose I could be experiencing a sampling bias in this matter—I am one of those infuriating people who has never had to try to succeed, and while that’s mighty convenient in most academic settings, it turns out it’s a violently debilitating factor in the real world in much the same way that growing up without any hardship whatsoever tends to generate entitled brats instead of well-adjusted, useful citizens, to put what is probably going to be an unpopular opinion out there—but it is at least what I perceive to be true.

            For most of my life I’ve had a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. This isn’t to say that I have spent many years in a state of delusion or that I ran around believing dragons were real long past their expiration date; it’s much more subtle than that. I typically have very bizarre dreams that, usually, either mimic video game logic or actually feature a stereotypical video game user interface with health bars and ammo trackers and mini-maps and scores overlaid onto the dream proper. On the occasions when I have realistic or, at least, believable dreams, I spend anywhere from three days to three months believing that they have happened. The illusion is only ever broken—if it’s ever broken—by something missing. For example, I once dreamt that my high school drama club director gave me an important role in an upcoming play and that she had given me a certificate to prove it. Perhaps the certificate and the inclusion of a tub of goo in the dream should have tipped me off to the unreal nature of the dream, but the school’s auditorium looked exactly like the school’s auditorium and the drama director was entirely herself, physically and mentally, and so I missed the obvious. It wasn’t until we were a month into rehearsals for the play that it dawned on me that I had a bit part—one that I had been rehearsing and practicing for a month—and that the dream-memory had never, in fact, happened. Within my memories and on an emotional level, the dream’s truth trumped a month’s worth of factual actuality.

            That was probably the last time, that I can recall anyway, that I had such an extreme reality break. My disassociation from reality was worse back then; I’ve become more and more fixated in the actual moment as I’ve aged and begun to manage my own affairs and therefore my own survival. The disassociation has hardly disappeared entirely, however. Typically, I simply don’t feel myself, the things around me whether people, places, or things, or events occurring in my life to be real. It’s all just a hazy, unending fog. I can distinctly recall one occasion on which the fog lifted.

            The moment occurred in high school as well, on a weekday afternoon like any other. I was home alone, my parents being at work, and I was at the familial computer, my home and my refuge since the tender age of thirteen, when all at once I felt the facts of my existence. It manifested as a crushing weight which I visualized as a series of tombstones stacking up on my back, ascending past the ceiling as a morbid skyscraper. I felt the absolute certainty of my impending and, relative to the universe, quickly approaching death; I had the complete knowledge that in a blink of an eye I would be wholly responsible for myself and that, really, I already was, that everything I existed as and everything I had ever done and everything I had ever felt was, one way or another, directly my fault, and that my unending and overwhelming unhappiness was entirely my own construction and mine to dismantle. I knew that life as it existed at that moment would disappear, that my cats and family and friends would all die and that all of those things were impermanent even without the threat of death, and I froze, stymied by the sudden knowledge that everything that was happening was real. That thought echoed in my mind, leaving my paralyzed and horrified, completely at a loss.

            All of this occurred within a second, and the moment passed as immediately and inexplicably as it had come, and my dreamlike fog settled on me again, though thinner than before, and it was some days before the afterimage of the grave on my spine fully dissipated.

            When I was five or seven—pardon my fallible memory—I spent most of my nights trying to imagine death. I was raised a Roman Catholic and attended CCD and church, but the idea of heaven was, even then, completely implausible to me. They told me there was a benevolent and loving God, but if that was true then everyone should be happy, but they weren’t. They told me that God always listened but on the one or two occasions I prayed to him to ask for something—on both occasions it was for No School Tomorrow—the prayers went unanswered which seemed unfair because it wasn’t like I asked for things all that often, and all things considered I was a pretty good kid. These things contributed to my skepticism, but the clincher on my early aethieism was the day they told me that animals didn’t go to heaven. I never voiced my doubts, but they went something like this: Heaven is paradise, i.e., the place where everything is happy all the time forever. In order for me to be happy, my cats must be with me. Animals don’t go to heaven which means cats don’t go to heaven which means that when I go to heaven, I will be unhappy. Which means it isn’t heaven because I’d be stuck there without my cats forever. From there I got to wondering about what happened to the families of “bad people”? When the Bad People got sent to hell, didn’t that mean their families were miserable in heaven, like I would inevitably be? Or was it that the Bad People went up to heaven so that their Good People families would be happy? But then wouldn’t that mean that everybody was in heaven? So then hell was pointless? I couldn’t reconcile the ideas and, in the end, was forced to conclude that the whole Catholicism thing was a sham. (Over the years I went from aethiest to agnostic to aethiest to agnostic and now finally I just don’t give any kind of damn at all, though I still abhor organized religion as a concept.)

            Well, if heaven and hell didn’t exist, then that meant there was no afterlife, and that, of course, meant simply not existing after death. It made the most sense, and I still hold to that opinion: Just Dead. So, as a child, recently convinced within her own mind of the fallacy of the after life, I spent most of my bed time, before I fell asleep, trying to imagine being dead.

            I would lie very still, like a plank, and close my eyes, and try to breathe as little as possible, holding stillness within myself. I would then will my entire personality away and try to embody someone who does not exist. This is very hard to do, and I’d frequently get caught up in thinking of how dark or cold it was, being dead and not existing, and then I’d realize that dead, nonexistent people don’t think or feel so I wouldn’t notice the dark or the cold and I wouldn’t be thinking about it so stop doing that. And I’d try to still everything within me again, and eventually thoughts would bubble up again, and I’d quell them again, and so on until I fell asleep.

            Later, when puberty set in and brought with it a pile of depression, I repeated this same exercise as an effort to will myself to death. Willing oneself to death, it turns out, is also very tricky.

            My first memory is of a dream. In the dream, there is a baby that I instinctively know is me. I am not in her perspective; I am floating outside of her, looking at her glare at her surroundings and wave her piggy arms and legs that I loathe, quietly. She’s in a car seat—it’s white with primary colored polka dots gathered together like the Wonderbread logo—that is set on a long, folding table of plastic and fake wood paneling. I have confirmed with my parents that they owned this car seat, and I did, in fact, sit in it as a child. I know the table existed because I saw it many times throughout my childhood and adolescence; the table both in dream and in reality were in a dim marbled function hall of linoleum tiling, ugly striped wallpaper with white wood paneling, and fake, electric candle sconces. This was the function hall at the Knights of Columbus in [...] (which recently declared bankruptcy, a relic of my childhood gone), a place my dad bartended at for many years and which I spent many post-elementary school afternoons roaming about.

            In the dream, I remain focused on baby me, somewhat elevated above her, aware of the table and the car seat and the speckled linoleum floor and the dim wall sconces. There are shadows all around her, falling onto her curled fists, and there is the hubbub of laughing and talking relatives—my relatives. The shadows belong to my maternal grandmother and my great-aunts. They are laughing and chatting and drinking wine, and this is some kind of party for me, about me, to do with this baby on the table who is me but who I am outside of, staring down, disliking. I do not know if this party happened in actuality, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did.

            I wake up from the dream at age five, in a room painted Strawberry Fields pink with an ugly salmon carpet and fake wooden door. I do not know who I am. My mind is utterly blank. There is nothing but absence within it, a feeling that I should know this place, should know myself, should remember something, but I do not and I stare at the far wall, bolt upright in my tiny twin bed with its glow-in-the-dark dinosaur sheets and Barbie princess pillowcase, clutching those fossils in two upraised fists.

            It seems a long time that I sit like this, but it must have been only a few seconds. Facts begin to pour back into me. My name: R[...] R[...] M[...], just like that, as you’d write it at the top of a test on handwriting; then my phone number and my address, just as you’d recite them to a police officer if you were lost. My spreadsheet filtered back into me, and as it did so I got out of bed and walked slowly, stunned, to the door. It opened out into the kitchen, and that felt familiar and new at the same time, and at the wooden kitchen table there was a woman with dark brown hair like mine and a sad mouth like mine and deeper, blacker eyes than mine, and she was reading a small novel, and she looked up at me as I walked out, and almost smiled, but seemed to see something wrong so that the smile became concern and she asked something or said something with a question mark—something like “Good morning, honey...?”—and still dazed I did not answer but sat in the chair next to her and curled up and I thought to myself in the clear, slow language of one in a haze who tries to define what is inexplicable before them, “This Is MOM.”

            I don’t remember anything after that, but I know she was younger then.

            I want desperately to live the world through someone else’s mind. I crave knowledge of experience besides my own. I want to know what it’s like to be a man and have a penis—my friends and I have joked for a long time that I have worse penis envy than my transgendered roommate who is currently preparing for surgery to remove his breasts—and I want to know what it’s like to be a social person who goes out and has fun and parties and knows so many people and does drugs and all of the rest of that lifestyle. (Logically I know I could do these things, but it isn’t in me; that isn’t who I am and the prospect of half of them is a terror. It took me until I was twenty to even accept the idea of alcohol and people drinking it; before that, I conceived of non-adults who drank as Bad People.) I want to understand the world through the eyes of the certifiably mentally diseased and through the certifiably healthy so that I can determine both where I fall on that spectrum and whether or not there’s as much difference as there appears to be. I want to live life as a cat and a fox and then a deer or a bird and a jellyfish and a shark or maybe an amoebae or a virus and thus understand the world and whether animals and humans are all that different because logically, biologically, we shouldn’t be. I want to be a plant and learn if they feel. I want to be a rock and then I want to be a cloud and then I want to go back to humans, complex as they are, and be a baby but remember this time and be an old geezer and not lose all the rest of these memories and I’d like to be President for a little while and a garbage man for a little while and a heroin addict for a little while and every single person I know or have ever met and I want to understand everything. I have always felt trapped inside here—not in my body, in my mind. It’s like a cage; there’s so much world out there, and I can only perceive a tiny sliver, and I am physically or, in some cases, emotionally incapable of exploring it fully, and I so want to know it, and I’m endlessly frustrated by my inability to step out of my head and simply be someone or something else.

            But, you know, more often than that, I fantasize about not existing. Not dying, per se, just disappearing out of the world like a ghost fading with the dawn, and when I indulge in these fantasies I lie rigid in my bed with my eyes closed, trying to be still, right down to the breathing I don’t always remember how to do, and I find some way to disappear, like a character exiting a novel, and the perspective shifts and suddenly I am my friends, and I watch them live out their lives, and I know it all, and that is contentment.

[blow-me-a-kis]

I kept wondering how I was so zen last year compared to how stressed I am these days, and I thought maybe it was that I was on prozac? But I was peeping into the digital version of my old bullet journal, and it's like utterly hilarious how different of a person I was just a year ago??

My morning routine consisted of things like "Sit outside for half an hour without phone and focus on gratitude"?! And I remember I would prepare my matcha (which I'm also not drinking anymore 😭😭 switched to coffee, literally the strongest available) and sit outside without my phone and sip my matcha latte (w/oatmilk, also stopped that, now I do creamer with DAIRY god) and literally practice gratitude. Thanking the universe for my family, friends, health, and everything I could think of.

I remember I liked it because it reminded me of the constant prayer I would do as a kid in the Christian fundy cult. Prayer was one if the few things I enjoyed about the faith I was brought up it. My prayers were often answered, sometimes immediately. It was the first experience I had of my witchy powers.

My previous morning routine was also definitely a manifestation practice. I've been really into Damien Echols since the pandemic, and I think last year, based on lessons from his book, I was really committed to improving my meditation and manifestation skills, to further my magik, and commit to a practice.

With adhd and depressive episodes, it's really easy for me to lose track of what was working, and pick up habits that I formally wrote off as unhealthy for me. Like, I also had a creative practice of just sketching for about 15 minutes daily. I completely forgot about that. I kept looking through old sketchbooks, wondering how I filled the pages, and it was that I was intentionally sitting down and getting ideas out my head.

I really need to make a maintenance guide for myself lol. Cause I literally forget so much about how to take care of myself. I was doing research on some of the digestive issues I've been having, and I think I may have developed a IBD flare up from consuming a bunch of stuff that I don't usually eat. I just haven't been as mindful about these things.

The outside stressers I'm dealing with don't help, but I literally was drawn to Damien Echol's practice because it was created for him to survive a death row prison sentence. My favorite meditation, the Mountain Meditation is about maintaining inner peace throughout all sorts of changes on the outside. I was resorting to meditation to manage chronic pain and anxiety. I wanted a practice that could sustain me through the greatest challenges of my life.

Even my parents were confused that I haven't been meditating or doing Tai Chi, or my daily stretching. Even my parents remember when I was with them before I was committed to some kind of practice. I actually did some Tai Chi while my sister was here, to see if it was something my dad could do during recovery, and it felt so good lol. On my tight back especially. There was so much I was doing to FEEL GOOD. And I just lost track of it all.

[plu-mes16]

"Creative living is any life that you live, where your decisions are based more strongly on your curiosity than your fear. And if you consistently, habitually, routinely, at every sort of intersection and decision in your life, make decisions that are based on curiosity rather than fear, then you will be engaging with creativity. Your life itself will sort of become a work of art, if you could consistently live that way."

I heard this sound on tiktok today. It's really interesting how tiktok is something we quote nowadays, though I guess that it does make sense, seen as it is-though questionable-a source of genuine media. In a way, some tiktok creators have managed to recreate the feel of a tumblr post, with image and sound. Perhaps not quite though, tumblr was indeed a unique platform, I miss it (it's not the same anymore). So I heard this sound on tiktok-and yes I did transcribe it word for word-and at first I didn't think much of it. In fact, I scrolled down a few more videos before I paused. The words whispered in my mind and something felt off. My curiosity was piqued. I went back.

It's interesting, truly, how sometimes we do things so unconsciously and routinely, that we lose-or perhaps forget-why we do them in the first place. And this got me thinking.

And I realised, a little to my dismay, that the reason I have not felt fulfilled in a while is because I forgot. I forgot not to be afraid. I think that somewhere along the road, I fell. And I called myself stupid, and weak, and told myself that I wasn't enough. And maybe someone else backed me up on it. Actually I know someone did. But that's beyond the point. Because I let them. And somewhere along the way I believed it. And I got scared. So I played it safe. I think on the timeline of things, this would have been around two years ago. A long time to be lost when the passing of it keeps you awake at night.

I've wondered what I did wrong, or perhaps differently. I concluded, begrudgingly, that perhaps I just wasn't good enough. That I was scared because I had reason to be.

But I forgot what had driven me up until that point, what had made me who I am.

Some people live for hope, others out of spite perhaps. I had feared failure my whole life until one day I didn't. Because I convinced myself that I wouldn't fail, and that if I did, I would just go onto the next thing. The world doesn't end with one failure.

But lately I've been scared again. Not of failing, but of losing this routine. This monotonous, safe and boring life I've built. It's safe, it's quiet. I've been shielding myself from reasons to be scared, because life has been throwing them at me lately, like hot cakes. And I've had no choice but to gobble them up. Why would I create more reasons for myself to be anxious, afraid?

So I didn't.

But this sound made sense to me. This is what I should be doing. This is a little piece that the old me-yes I sound dramatic bear with me-would never relinquish.

The girl who always gave herself her best chance, the girl who switched schools left and right and fed herself books and science and all the knowledge she could gather. The girl who looked up at the sky because she was too afraid to miss something. I now notice that I look down a lot. I do.

She travelled across the ocean, away from everything she'd ever known, at 17. Had the worst year of her life and yet she didn't go back, though she would have been safer. She kept going, she pushed and pushed and pushed. I've stopped moving at some point. And now I'm stagnating.

And it hurts.

I want to live creatively. I want to reach out to the sky again and leap. I want to leap and not worry about whether I will fall.

(appreciate the dramatic gif pls)

I need to go on.