#i even tried to advocate for mental medication like i always fucking do and again theres no clearance for me to be on anything to help

[marinaraimpasta]

doctors visit was really awful today

[brucewayneargento-moved]

To All My Fathers (Chapter 1)

Summary: Damian Wayne, a fourteen year old with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, goes onto a road trip with the four men who shaped him as a person before his bone marrow transplant.

Fic also avaliable on FF.net

Damian had definitely decided he would not wear a fanny pack.

It didn't matter that it was the most convenient and comfortable way to take a chemo pump iv from place to place. He'll much rather attract attention with a backpack connected to a pump than to regress back to the eighties in the most horrendous fashion. Sure he might pick up unwanted attention from strangers but A) He could always stare at them back; B) He was past the time to care and C) He already didn't have eyebrows so that was kind of a moot point.

The boy was currently seated at the med bed of the 666 room. (Drake had made several jokes about it, which Damian didn't mind and in fact encouraged, because with his diagnosis came a morbid sense of humor and he was also glad at least one person still treated him like a human being). He was practicing violin while he could still hold it and also enjoying the fact that he was wearing actual comfortable clothes and not a paper robe that made his autism completely and utterly fucking lose it.

Some kids from the other rooms had come to see him perform and Damian loved to have an audience. Because he had an ego, not as much and not as evil as people usually thought, but still. Most of them were children younger than ten who just needed some entertainment that wasn't a superhero.

"This was Ode To Joy by Bethoveen," Damian explained. The three children around him applauded. When they stopped he could still hear hands clapping, he looked up and his eyes met his father's.

Bruce came closer to him and the kids left after being called by a nurse. Boy and man looked at each other for a few seconds.

"Are you ready?" Bruce finally asked

Damian might have sounded insane if he said it outloud, but his father and Jon were very similar.

The blue eyes, the black hair and the fact that they both cried before or after entering a room with Damian in it, bonus points if he was being stabbed with a needle right at that moment, then you could see their eyes getting crystalized almost in slow motion.

And it's not like Damian was annoyed by their emotions as one might have thought, it was more of a...sting, (man being stabbed with a needle on a daily basis was really taking a toll on him, wasn't it?) like, something that hurt but it wasn't enough for him to do anything about it more than to grit his teeth and power through it.

Numbness was apparently a common thing among patients. But Damian thought of himself as many stuff, but common wasn't one of them

And perhaps his ego was the only thing keeping him optimistic, perhaps thinking that he was too special to die alone in a hospital room was what made him stronger against the whole GvHD thing.

Leslie had told him that he was lucky to find a donor that was relatively near, in Kansas nonetheless, home of Superman and. So now he had just to keep up with the program: L-asparaginase,dexamethasone and vincristine several times a day and wait.

Or at least that was the original plan.

"Yes." he finally answered, standing up.

When all you receive in your life is gaslighting, you don't even notice the medical gaslighting.

Maybe it was the whole "being indoctrinated since birth by an ecoterrorist death cult" thing but his ability to exercise his free will hadn't been particularly developed.

The bruises? Vigilante stuff. The fever? Probably the flu. Weight loss? Maybe he had gotten a growth spurt that just made him seem thinner…He had to throw up blood to even be admitted into a hospital.

The Wayne-Head name allowed him the finest care probably ever known to man. "Nepotism: where you can die comfortably" that was an actual thing he had said while high on sedatives. He could only imagine his mother's face upon hearing it.

When he woke up both his parents were there. Damian could immediately tell something was wrong. His father was crying and his mother was stoic.

"Oh, ok, so I'm dying" He said, grabbing their attention. Both Talia and Bruce turn to look at him. Damian tried to sit and noticed his arm was cranked to an IV. "Oh, I'm actually dying."

"Do not speak like that." His mother warned him with a threatening voice. Bruce kept quiet but still with a face wet with tears.

Next to them there was a third person. She was an older woman with gray hair and glasses. Doctor Thompkins, his father's godmother. She went over to the medbed and sat on the foot. Damian crossed his arms. She was a smart woman but had the annoying habit of treating him like a perpetual child. Probably the closest thing he had to an actual grandmother.

"Damian," she fixed her glasses and looked at the clipboard she was holding. "Your blood count is in the 200.000 white cells."

Damian's eyes slightly widened, which covertly hid how much of a gut punch he just received.

"I can't have leukemia," he simply stated. There was a slight pained sound coming from his father's mouth which made Damian look him in the eye…that's how he knew it was true.

He started to grin which turned into a giggle which turned into a laugh.

Bruce and Talia looked at him with worry.

"Denial is very common," Leslie stated, trying to remain calm and also sooth Damian up. The teen kept laughing and then stopped to talk.

He had tears in his eyes. "I mean... so much for being an eugenics frankenstein monster, I've failed at even that."

The rest of that afternoon was a blur for him. Except for the being stabbed with needles on his spine parts, that one he remembered very well. Since he had such a high tolerance for pain, the fact that he was casually hurt was news to him.

Of course Dick had been the first one to enter the room.

Damian had hoped that he wasn't but after all it made sense that he did, he was his Robin. He could imagine him punching a wall and screaming when he heard the news. That mental image didn't upset him at all, clearly.

Damian was pretending to watch TV where his oldest brother entered the scene. He had prepared what he was going to say. How he was okay and how he was too stubborn to die anyways. But all of that went to hell when Dick entered the room and immediately ran up to hug him.

All of the walls he had been building up until now feel down hard. Damian just had to press his head against Dick's shoulder for the tears to start running.

"I want a falafel."

They were in the hospital room after a particularly hard session of chemo. His brother was on a chair in front of him reading a book and not looking at him.

"You just threw up on my shoe," he reminded Damian.

"I'm here for a good time, not a long time"

Dick rolled his eyes, now accustomed to the fact that his sibling had developed a morbid sense of humor because of his condition. Right at that moment the door opened and Doctor Thompkins entered the room.

"How are we?" She asked.

"Great." Both responded almost robotically. Damian gagged.

"I wanted to talk to you, Dick, about the bone marrow transplant."

"Why not talk to me?" Damian intervened. "I'm the one whose blood isn't working."

"Because you're still a child," Dick answered as a matter of fact. And despite everything he was glad his older brother at least now had the courtesy of treating him like he had always done. "What's the prognosis, doc?"

"We're considering the umbilical cord transfusion." Leslie explained. "But you will have to ask my godson first.

"Why would he need to...wait...Selina's pregnant?!" Damian asked but then he threw up again. "That wasn't meant to signify my feelings on the matter."

Leslie continued. "But that will still take a few months and...I'm afraid we don't have that much time."

Damian pretended to gag and looked down at the bucket, all to avoid looking at Dick's face.

"But the good news is that we found a match."

Damian hadn't even had time to think about that sentence before he blurted it out, but now it was there, out in the open. For everyone to hear.

"I want to have children."

Everyone being an hyperbole since Alfred was the one who was actually there. His father had to go to patrol so the butler had the night shift to take care of Damian while at the hospital to which the boy was appreciative of. Except for this moment when he was mentally slapping himself for letting on too much. Side effects of being raised to be a killing machine.

"I...did not know that." Alfred admitted. Up to twelve seconds ago he had been standing up listing the symptoms of chemo at Damian's request since he didn't trust Leslie to do it without sugarcoating it and his father might burst into tears in an attempt to do so. Damian had been listening attentively before Alfred mentioned that it was possible that he might wind up being infertile.

The boy simply turned around to the other side of the bed and sighed as tears left his eyes.

Dear Damian

I could not be more content that you are receiving the transplant that you so much need. I wish I could accompany you on the journey to Kansas, but sadly Lady Talia needs me to look out after Bialya...I wish you nothing but a rapid recovery. I implore you to remember that you are not alone in this, to remember that there is a plethora of people that adore you with all of their souls and that you will always have their help. Even when you do not want it.

Best Wishes

Ravi.

Damian looked at Alfred who glanced at him for a nanosecond in the mirror of the car. He knew he was the most active ally he had in this game. Since he not only advocated to his father for this trip to be possible but he also was the only person to always show his compassion in spite of if he actually deserved it or not. Bruce was next to him while Richard sat next to Damian and assesed his condition.

They stayed in comfortable silence in the car with only the sound of "dad music" on the radio for background noise. Damian allowed himself to close his eyes and to feel the soothing bounce of the car against the pavement on his skin...

They stopped suddenly after a while and Damian opened his eyes, he frowned in confusion as Alfred parked the car in front of the airport.

"What are we doing here?" he asked curiously.

Alfred turned around to look at him. "Your father , Master Richard and I thought It'll be a good idea to fly in a friend of yours."

Damian's frown deepened. "A friend?"

Suddenly a tap was heard on the window. They both turned around to look at the front window. It was being slightly knocked on it by a man with a white cane and a bald head who was smiling at them.

"Ravi?" Damian rubbed his eyes and felt them watering up.

Damian knew that he could never make up to Ravi for being responsible for losing his vision. And he also knew that in spite of that the man would still love him unconditionally.

That could be proven easily by the letters that he had written to him when he found out about his diagnosis…

All his father figures were here, suddenly he felt an internal strength he hadn't felt in a while.

[jonjordanforrealz]

12 Years Is a Long Time

September 29th is my son Arron’s 11th birthday – a cause for celebrating for sure, and a time for this parent, as most parents do, to ponder aloud, “How in the hell did that go so fast?” For me, sentimental sap that I am, birthdays are always a time for reflection too.

In doing so this morning, I was, of course, reminded that September 29th is also the anniversary of my brother Michael’s passing. A year to the day before Arron came into this world, Mikey left it. 12 years ago today. That’s gone a different kind of so fast itself.

I’ve talked about my brother’s death many times over the years and it never bothers me to do so. Most of the time, it makes me happy just to talk about him at all. To be remembered is to be loved and he certainly is in both instances. But I don’t think I’ve ever really shared much publicly about his last day.

And I need to let it go.

Who knows? Maybe something like this can help somebody.

For 12 years, I’ve carried the weight of that day and never really faced it or dealt with it. And I’m tired. It’s heavy and I’m tired. And to fulfill my final promise to Mikey, actually, I need to get rid of it, once and for all.

Following a lifetime of major medical issues and severe mental and physical handicaps, and doing all he could over the course of his 25 years to beat the odds and somehow conquer and survive one and all, Michael would meet his match in the form of an internal bleeding issue that just couldn’t be solved.

A kid like Mikey, who couldn’t really communicate outside of very basic emotions, had no way of conveying to doctors what anything felt like, where it hurt, how long something had been bothering him, and so on and so forth. So oftentimes, things got worse, sometimes as bad as they possibly could get, before anyone could even get anywhere close to figuring out what the hell was going on. And in his final chapter, this reality first led to him being transported to be treated by specialists in Tampa, and then ultimately, to our family’s greatest test. That we were so conveniently able to face that final decision together thanks to his relocation to my neck of the woods was a stroke of luck that I don’t think anyone appreciated until years later.

Michael’s bleeding issue just wasn’t going away no matter what the doctors tried. Not to cheapen the matter, but I think someone likened it to plugging a hole in a hose with your finger, only to have another open shortly thereafter. At some point, you run out of fingers. And so, we were faced with two choices: An exploratory and very invasive surgery that guaranteed nothing or a nonsurgical Hail Mary that was every bit the final hope. My parents encouraged me to speak freely and honestly in that days-long conversation and as I recall, my opinion never wavered, though of course, I respected and understood their agonizing back-and-forth.

To me, this kid had already been through so much, literally since Day 1. Countless major surgeries and painful procedures that would absolutely hammer (and maybe finish) most “regular” people were the worst of the lot. Other concessions over time – simple things like eating and drinking normally – also took a toll, I’m sure, as every human needs simple joys.

Throughout his last ordeal, there had already been several procedures, and in my eyes, he didn’t need more of that. With the proposed surgery highly likely to kill him anyway, I didn’t see the justification to put him through that sort of torture again. I didn’t want that to be his way to go out. As his closest advocate, because “brothers” means something more that those who don’t have can know, I knew he didn’t want that to be his way to go out either.

Instead, I argued, that through the non-invasive course of treatment, while the odds of that working were stacked heavily against him, this put the ball in his court. This made it so that he could fight, if he wanted to. For a kid who rarely had the chance to call his shot at any time in his life, this was that. “Scrap if you want to, kid,” I thought. “If anyone can beat the odds one more time, it’s you.” And if not, I thought he had that right too. And I wanted to fight for that. This time, I wanted to fight for his right to fight. Or not.

And so, with my parents on board, we gave him his shot, and at first, true to form, the kid was responding positively. Amazed yet unsurprised, we carried on with some hope for the first time in seemingly forever … and then everything just tanked. Quickly.

I’d prepared for this my whole life. And I had thought I had been stepping into this moment already time and time before. But I wasn’t nervous. I felt a sense of urgency, after getting the call, because I wanted to be with him but I wasn’t nervous or scared. Something that always comforted me was a belief that if anyone ever deserved a peaceful end, it would be Mikey. Once we were faced with the grave news, the doctor assured that as they stopped doing whatever they had been doing to treat him, and focused on making him comfortable, that he would indeed get that peaceful transition. And I know in the medical world that nothing is ever guaranteed but I really believed it. I believed in that. It’s all I wanted, then, knowing that there was no winning this last fight.

But it didn’t go down like that. His last day wasn’t, at first, peaceful at all. It was prolonged. And there were gasps and groans. At one point, a seizure. And I was mad. I was so mad.

At the same time, I knew what it was, really. This kid’s will to fight just doesn’t go away. It’s funny because from the very beginning, one of the things he was diagnosed with was some syndrome called Failure to Thrive. Fuck that.

When the worst moments hit, and I watched my brother and my family suffering, I didn’t feel mad anymore. I just felt like I had to do something.

There’s a picture that I have of my brother and I in bed. I was maybe 10 and he, six. We shared a room at that time and when my mom or dad would come in to get us up, if I was being a bum and still laying there and we had somewhere to be, they’d plop Mikey right in my bed next to me. That always got me up. Nothing like an eye poke or swift kick from the kid who “couldn’t control his movements” to start your day – accompanied, of course, by his trademark giggle.

That little shit … It’s still my favorite picture in the world.

In those final moments, I just crawled as far into his hospital bed as I could to lay next to him, just like we did on those mornings as kids, and I whispered to him, “It’s okay. You don’t have to fight anymore. We’re going to be okay.”

You see, I’d often wondered, when I was very young, why he pulled through so many things that most people wouldn’t. After all, I’d always noticed people bitching and moaning about the stupidest things (oh, contemporary America!), wandering around aimlessly in perpetual woe-is-me mode. If anyone should have ever just said, “Screw this!” and checked out, Michael should have. But he had us. And we, him. He pretty much defined us, really, for better or worse. I felt like there was at least a little something in him that told him he needed to stick around for us. And I just wanted him to know that we would be okay if he couldn’t anymore.

Within minutes, things calmed down. His breathing slowed. The stupid machines making noise start doing so more sporadically. And then, before we knew it, it was over. That was it. The end.

I remember lots of hugs and tears and one of many goodbyes to come. And then we said thank you to some staff members – really a symbolic thank you, from me at least, to so many over the years. To people in the medical field, I look at you as I do teachers, and that is in the highest regard, having intimately known both worlds, whether I wanted to or not.

I remember going outside and nobody saying very much.

I remember sitting down at a table.

And then I remember saying, “Well, what do we do now?” I don’t think I ever quite figured out what to do. A purpose I’d always had was now gone.

Of course, in the coming days and weeks, we had plenty to do – plenty of the mind-numbing, gut-wrenching things you have to do to prepare for a loved one’s final arrangements and all that. I took on a lot more of the sort than I ever had at that time because I felt like my parents shouldn’t have to, so I was distracted by productivity. But soon after that, I don’t remember anything. Don’t remember his funeral. Don’t remember leaving my parents and coming back home. Don’t remember going back to work. Sports, friends, events … nothing.

Truly, I think I completely lost a year. I don’t remember a lot at all about the time in between Mikey’s death and Arron’s birth. And then the latter happened and it was like the pause button I’d pushed on life had been pushed again, whether I was ready or not.

And while I was obviously happy to be a dad for the second time, I was also still hurting, which I must have forgotten about too in that year prior. And again, I was mad. I was so mad.

In the years since, that anger lingered, because if you don’t hit something head-on, it doesn’t just go away. Anger leads to hurt, fear, panic, anxiety, a defensive existence, and isolation. I’ve experienced it all and I wouldn’t wish any of it on my worst enemy. I’ve distanced myself, I’ve been checked out and I’ve lashed out, retreated within and pushed people away. It has caused me problems in every element of my life at one time (or more) or another.

None of it is any excuse and it’s a lot for which to apologize over a long period of time but if my suffering has ever caused any sort of suffering for anyone reading this, I am sorry.

(Note: I’m still going to enjoy my space and my distance more than most people but, overall, I can be better!)

I feel like some of this might be a surprise to people because I don’t show it, hardly ever. I’ve gotten good at projecting this version of myself at any time, regardless of what’s really going on. I even manage to have and to be a good time, probably a bit too often influenced by some additives I’ve grown fond of over the years. But there are times when all of that is just masking a wreck. And it has to stop.

I don’t know why I’m shedding this now other than that I need to – because it can’t go on forever. I haven’t come close to being the best version of myself and I have people around me who deserve nothing less than that. What better time than now if I’m finally recognizing that, at times, I haven’t been good? And at my worst, I haven’t even been okay.

And the bottom line is that I promised my little brother, as he left us 12 years ago, that I would be.

I’ll never let go of him. He’s on my arm and in my heart and I hear his voice – especially that laugh! – every single day.

But I’m letting go of that day.

12 years is a long time.

It’s been heavy.

And I’m tired.

And I have to be okay.

[imasimpforstevengrant]

Why do we like this clown so much?

Change the "we" for "I" and you get an usual tag I use whenever I post my content in Tumblr. And it sounds funny at first but whenever you start diving into that phrase, the deeper it becomes. So, I finally have decided to share my thoughts about this strange but wholesome attraction to this deeply flawed character. It's not something I usually do since I don't know how to write down my feelings properly and also in english so please forgive any typos (I'm from Chile so don't be surprised lol).

So...Why do we like this clown so much?

Why was it that a character precisely designed to scare and to disgust the fuck out of us ended up unchaining a series of feelings that shouldn't have taken place in a beginning?

Let's take a look at the background: Joaquin Phoenix was cast as Arthur Fleck/Joker in 2018. The first image of him as the aforementioned character revealed a deeply disturbed man. We knew the plot. A man driven to insanity after a brutal history of abuse, creating concern in people if the upcoming film would inspire real life violence. Incel violence and mass shootings, more specifically.

(the image in question)

As 2019 arrives, the two trailers generated so much hype that media needed to fuel its concern about it. Since it wasn't your typical comic book film, media basically bombed our minds making us believe this film was going to be a total disaster, an excuse to cause harm to others among other nonsense, as if the film would justify everything Arthur would do in the film, eventually. As the release date is closer, the film receives thunderous applause and unanimous praise from critics. At this, fans rejoiced and expressed impatience to watch the film.

October 5th.

People left the theaters amazed, shocked and genuinely moved by the inhuman treatment Arthur received in the film. The fear media tried so desperately to infuse in us with all the incel bullshit and such turned out to awake one of the most positive, best feelings in humans:

E M P A T H Y

The word that so gloriously cleared away any dark thoughts or actions not only proves media was wrong but it turned out to ridicule it in way nobody will forget: Hundreds of people advocating for mental illness, calling out to the kindness that could change a person's bad day and questioning how politicians and rich people are indifferent to social problems proved how much as a society we have changed in comparison with the one shown in the film.

However, since we are on Tumblr, I'll get straight to the point and try to explain why the fuck does this clown has us dying out of love and compassion (and lust).

I. Background.

As nurturing as we women are for a biological matter, we see a man deprived of a good job, is on seven different medications, working like a slave to sustain his ill mother, putting aside his own health and well-being to look for her, struggling to make his dream of being a comedian despite everyone stepping on him, underpaid and treated like a freak for a disorder he did not ask to suffer, which makes it impossible to be indifferent to all the horrible ordeal that eventually will reach the limit of what he can tolerate without going insane. It is impossible to not say or think, at least, that someone (even if it's just one person) should stand for him just as it is impossible not to feel the need to throw ourselves at him to shield him from people who hurt him or simply offer him our shoulder whenever he has had a bad day, specially when he learns he was sexually assaulted by his step father.

This horrid behaviour terrifies newer generations because they get a taste of what being a social outcast was like more than thirty years ago in comparison with today, where there's more acceptance and treatment for mentally ill people like Arthur. We see in him someone who could have been saved with a proper education and emotional support instead of descending into madness as a criminal. Others simply saw themselves being treated like him at some point in their lives and couldn't help but put themselves in his shoes.

II. Personality.

TRUTH BE TOLD:

There's something called "attraction by proximity". It is the explanation to the eventual love you feel whenever someone doesn't catch your eye at first terms of physical attraction but his/her personality does attract you. This happens to be the base of this situation. His shyness, introverted nature, tenderness and innocent desire to make people laugh and put on a happy face awake some kind of tenderness we cannot resist. This combined with the gloomy background increases our understanding (but not justifying) of the bad decisions he'll eventually take during the course of the film. This traces a line of harsh, almost hurtful contrast of the violence he shows later on the film. Once again, it is not justified in any way but it is certainly understandable.

III. Appearance.

Arthur Fleck is unconventionally attractive.

This happens to be a plus for most women. He is out of the male beauty standards (no abs, not too muscly or particularly tall), which makes him even more unique. It is precisely the fact that he's not a model one of the reasons women love him. He could easily be your man next door or your colleague or the guy you always see but never dare to talk for fear to bother him Because it's about proximity. Arthur looks like your common neighbour. He's not meant to be your typical desirable male protagonist at all.

... And yet.

Jesus Christ, he's so fucking hot I can't even---

It's not about how beautiful his green eyes are, his long slender fingers, his hair or his smile only. It's the charm behind it.

Another "magnet point" is the way he dresses. I know he's impoverished and his wardrobe tend to be repetitive but it is so unpretentious, so simple that is hard to not fall for. The modesty of the shirts, ironed trousers reminds us of a mature man deeply withdrawn into himself, love starved and longing to be seen and loved by others, like a war veteran who still fights the most important war: with himself. Is someone who needs to be listened and understood.

AND OF COURSE WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT IT?

He's also brought back the old gentleman outfit, white shirts, red/yellow vest, red suit and elegant dancing moves and the retro style of the film boosts this attractiveness.

People keep comparing him with the previous interpretation of Joker (Leto's) whose costume appealed to young women with a tattooed, gangster, mumble rapper crazy-guy wannabe which didn't connect with the audiences (young people in general). This supposedly was to match or even have a sexy, tormented and desirable villain like Marvel's Loki. We all know how that story ended but it's the link for the next point below.

IV. Transformation

This is a particularly strong point considering how much we loved to watch the process of this weak, powerless, forgotten caterpillar into a beautiful and visible butterfly that will gracefully stir its wings for everyone to see its colours.

When Arthur transitions to the Joker, it's so cathartic to see taking revenge on those who wronged him (even when we're not supposed to root for him) like seeing his shyness fading away into a vivid confidence when dancing half naked in the bathroom, or witnessing him making way to make his name known to people in Murray Franklin's Show:

Adding to this newly gained confidence, there's another turn on: the way he walks.

At the beginning, his pace is hunched and limping, displaying his submission to violence, which makes the viewer more satisfied to see his broken yet beautiful soul turning the past pain of his existence into art: he lets music guide his moves as a way to tell the world he's a new man by cutting most of the sick, evil roots that harmed him, that he's invincible, that no one can stop him. Watching this cathartic display of euphoria was the most iconic scene in the film, following his speech at the TV and the inevitable meltdown that caused Murray's death.

Going to further appreciation, even his clown make up is beautiful. Why? Simple. The combination of colours, shapes and the intimidating glare just embellishes even more the character.

The dark blue triangles in his expressive eyes makes the light green colour to highlight, specially in dark backgrounds, giving the impression he's piercing your soul whenever he stares directly at the camera. Same can be said about the red smile and emerald green hair. They boost an already intimidating look.

The cold and warm colours paint a picture of a man full of intense emotions, mirroring it in a simple yet masterful artistic way.

Another interesting point is the way Joker dresses. Usually we had almost every single live adaption of this character in purple coat, hat, etc. But this particular version is not following any comic, which gives more freedom to creativity and once again, out of the standards of what we could have expected.

Red is a colour related to passion, action, love, strength, motivation and excitement. As for yellow, it indicates freshness, happiness and enlightenment and finally, green. Green is renewal, growth and regeneration. Colours that represent a new stage in his life, a mirthful chapter at last. We finally get to see our battered, always humiliated protagonist (or hero) descending into madness, but finally free from his repressed man who held his soul captive like a bird to fly away, to never come back. An insanity that despite being his downfall, turned out to be his ticket to freedom as he walks to the light in Arkham Asylum dancing at the end.

Ladies and gentlemen: behold the film nobody asked... But the film we fucking deserved.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

❤️💚💛

[florenceandthemachine]

okay but jackson falling for single dad stiles (◕‿◕✿)

SO (and I feel like I’m going to be saying this a lot) HERES THE THING.

@jacksonstilinskis, as you can assume, the first time they meet is a fucking disaster.

It’s a disaster because Stiles moved to New York for his bachelor degree, partially in an attempt to chase the highest scholarship he was awarded and partially in an attempt to get the fuck out of Beacon Hills, the place that killed his mother, his father, and his best friend — and the place that left him with a squirming three month old less than a year after he graduates high school, a gift from the recently departed. 

He gets a major in Criminology and a minors in Mythological Studies, rocks the single father gig, and manages to teach Claudia (Scotts idea, Stiles had cried when he found out) what is okay to bite and what is not okay to bite, but getting into grad school is a whole other animal. 

It’s a disaster because Stiles decides to forgo taking out a mortgage in student loans and tries to save up for his masters program by joining up with the NYPD. They have amazing benefits, amazing child support, and a legal team that could kick anyones ass.

It’s a disaster because six years later, when Stiles and Jackson first meet, Stiles is in uniform (a uniform he looks damn good in, Jackson begrudgingly acknowledges) and Jackson’s Porsche just hit about 87 miles per hour in a 55.

The best part is (well, the best part if you ask Stiles — the worst part if you ask Jackson) is that Jackson has been pulled over hundreds of times before, and he always — always — gets out of it with a smile and a laugh and an apology, and Stiles could not give less of a fuck. Jackson breaks out all the tricks. The smile, the pout, the puppy eyes. He actually thinks it works for a second — Stiles is smiling back at him, and Jackson isn’t above tilting his head to get a better look at the way the uniform hugs him, but then Stiles is asking for his registration and insurance and Jackson’s smile falls into a scowl.

Finally, he brings out the big guns — he casually gestures to his scrubs, mentions he’s on his way to a surgery, because being top of his class at Harvard Medical had to count for something — and he really was in a rush, officer, he had to get to the patient right away. 

Stiles has the audacity to roll his eyes and laugh as he hands Jackson his ticket, and Jackson has to pretend that the sound didn’t make a shiver dance over his skin. “Well, I certainly hope you take more time and care with your patient then you do on your commute. Have a better day.”

The cruiser follows him all the way to the hospital, and Jackson feels a moment of petty anger before he realizes that the 23rd Precinct is basically right across Park Avenue from Mount Sinai Hospital. If he looks out the window of his office, he can see a steady stream of police cars going in and out of the underground garage. 

Huh. 

—

Jackson allowed himself a full week to whine to everyone who would listen about his ticket after he plea bargained it down, but then even he got tired of sulking —

(“I am not sulking, Laura.”

“It was over a month ago. You are absolutely sulking, you baby.”)

— sulking over who he had only thought of as Officer Asshole. Who the fuck gives a speeding ticket to a doctor, a doctor that was on his way to surgery?

Not that Jackson had actually been on his way to surgery. He was never in a rush to surgery, because he was never late to surgery, because he barely left the hospital on his days off, let alone a day he had a surgery scheduled. 

Either way, that was months ago, and even Jackson couldn’t hold a grudge that long. He was in rotation today — Mount Sinai may have been one of the best hospitals in the nation, but it was first and foremost a children's hospital, and being in rotation — and seeing the people that they were helping, the kids they were helping, really helped bring that home to everyone. 

He grabbed the next clipboard off of a stack and pushed open the door to the waiting room, taking count of all the parents and kids waiting for everything from a bruised knee (helecoptor parents) to any number of fakers (midterm season was rough on everyone).

“Claudia and Stiles... Stilinski?”

What the hell was a Stiles?

Jackson only had half a moment to think about it before a dark head popped up, a child that couldn’t have been more than six in his arms, and Jackson almost felt resentful when he realized that he was staring at Officer Asshole again. And Officer Asshole had a kid, who looked absolutely miserable, and Officer Asshole looked miserable in proxy to his kid, and Jackson really needed to start thinking of him as a “Stiles” before he accidentally called him officer Asshole out loud. 

Jackson guided them back to an exam room full of stuffed toys and bright colors on the wall, letting Stiles take his time setting Claudia down on the bench before sitting right beside her. He introduced himself and smiled down to Claudia — who had a low fever and was squirming uncomfortably, rubbing her little hands against her flushed cheeks, and Jackson would never think that was not cute. Even a sick kid was a cute kid, and though this kid was sick...

“...it’s nothing to be worried about. Kids get sick all the time, and it sucks, but it happens.” Jackson said, using his full soothing doctor voice on Stiles, who looked at the same time utterly relieved and totally embarrassed. 

He confirmed as much as he stood up, taking a prescription from Jackson for some children's medicine to help bring Claudia’s fever down, shaking his head slowly. “Sorry. It was probably overkill to bring her to a hospital, but I’m still pretty new to this parenting thing. I just... I don’t know, I have a tendency to assume the worst, after... well. I just do.”

Jackson almost laughs again, shaking his head. “Don’t ever apologize for advocating for your kid. It’s the best thing you can do, next to pulling over innocent doctors who definitely aren't speeding.” He reaches out to shake Stiles hand, dazzling smile on his face, and Stiles’ blooms into recognition. 

“You’re the doctor! The doctor I pulled over. Sorry, I forget names and faces, but I could never forget that smile.” Stiles said, a grin on his own face, shaking Jackson’s hand for a few seconds before his eyes widened in horror, yanking his hand back. “Oh god. That sounded so creepy, I’m so sorry, she’s kept me up for three days straight. I didn’t mean it in a weird way. I just—uh, I have to go. Thank you again! Please don’t think I'm some freak in a uniform!” he says, almost tripping over a nurse as he backs out of the room. 

Jackson is grinning even wider, a real smile splitting his face, and he can’t help but call after him. “The coffee cart on 102nd is great for long nights. Favorite for all on call doctors and most of the boys in blue.”

Stiles smiles weakly and gives a thumbs up, disappearing down the stairway. 

Officer Asshole — Stilinski, he reminded himself — wasn’t just hot, he was actually kind of cute. He was a cute dad. 

Jackson was kind of fucked.

—

Jackson is sitting on a bench on 102nd Avenue, looking up at the dark night sky, when a danish lands in his lap. Jackson just looks at it for a minute — he’s just finishing up a thirty hour shift, and he’s only vaguely sure what’s real anymore — before he looks up, staring dumbly at the cup of coffee extended to him. 

“It’s uh, a peace offering. And an apology? I mean, I’m not sorry for writing you a ticket. You were speeding. But I am sorry for calling you Doctor Dickbag for like a week afterward. But that medicine you gave me had Claudia back to her giggly self in no time, so I think you’re even. With yourself.”

It’s Stilinski, and judging by his pressed uniform, styled hair, and bright (if not nervous) smile, he’s just getting on shift while Jackson is mentally checking out of his own. 

As soon as he puts two and two together, Jackson gratefully takes the cup and takes a too long swig of what tastes like frothy sugar milk, almost gagging as he looks at Stiles like he had been poisoned. “What the hell is this, a hot milkshake? Oh god, I should have known you were the type who drinks hot sugar, not coffee.”

Stiles has the audacity to laugh as he sits beside Jackson, and the two of them fall into easy, if shallow, conversation. They talk about work, and themselves, and soon Stiles is checking his watch with an apology, because his shift starts at 4 and he has to get into the precinct. 

Jackson watches as he stands up and puts on his fancy police hat, and later, he’ll blame it on sleep deprivation, but he calls out after Stiles’ retreating form. 

“So, coffee and a danish, maybe breakfast next time? I’ll buy.”

Stiles stops and turns, looking Jackson over, and he grins as he nods his head, even if his cheeks are pink. “It’s a date.” He winks and turns back around, and Jackson actually feels goosebumps on the back of his neck.

Oh, Jackson was fucked. He flops back on the bench and smiles to himself, before frowning, whirling around to yell at Stiles’ retreating backside. 

“Wait, what the fuck do you mean you were calling me Doctor Dickbag?!”

—

They manage to have several coffee / breakfast / here’s a meal dates, and Jackson is almost proud of their timing—Stiles kisses Jackson on date number two, a quick peck that leaves Jackson’s world on it’s edge as he grins at Stiles blushing backside as he speaks rapid fire into his radio, now buzzing with life. It’s cute on their first date, but gets old by their fourth date, they manage to kiss for almost twenty seconds in the ambulance bay at Mount Sinai before Jackson’s pager goes off. He groans and pulls away, glaring at the device as though it personally offended him, and Stiles laughs as he brings Jackson’s hands up to kiss Jackson’s knuckles. 

“Go, go save lives. But, uh, if you were free on Thursday, I was thinking... maybe we could have our next date at my place? I’ve already got Mrs. Bobrowski on speed dial to babysit.” Stiles says, his tone confident even if he’s chewing his lip nervously. It’s a trick question — Stiles is off, and Stiles knows that Jackson is off, and Stiles already secured a babysitter, and Jackson can feel Stiles eyes dipping back from his lips to the low V of his scrub top, and Jackson wastes no time before agreeing wholeheartedly. 

“It’s a date.” he murmurs against Stiles lips, squeezing his ass through the uniform, and Stiles squeaks in appreciation as he swats Jackson toward the hospital doors. 

Thursday rolls around and Jackson puts on a tight pair of jeans, a button down shirt with far too many buttons undone to be decent, and adds just a drop of cologne to his pulse point. He looks good. He feels good. He buys flowers, for fucks sake, which means that of course when he knocks on Stiles door, Stiles is wearing a ratty tee shirt and sweats and has a pained look on his face. 

“Jackson, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Bobrowski cancelled on me and I couldn’t get another sitter and I wanted to call you and tell you but I left my phone at the station and—”

Stiles looks miserable, and that’s all Jackson needs to know he’s telling the truth, that he truly is sorry, and that he’s going to tell Jackson “another time”, like having a kid involved would ruin a dinner date. Jackson takes a split second before shutting Stiles up with a kiss, brushing past him with a grand flourish as he says Claudia in the living room, bending down to give her first choice on Stiles flowers.

Stiles just stands in the doorway, stunned, looking as Jackson goes to the kitchen, Claudia skipping along happily behind him, excitedly waving her new purple flower in the air. 

“Jackson, you don’t have to—”

“Stilinski, you have three seconds to shut up and tell me where to find a vase, and then tell me how I can help you with dinner.” Jackson says expectantly, and Stiles feels something warm curl around his chest.

—

They have dinosaur nuggets and carrots and peas for dinner, and Jackson loves it. 

They watch a Disney movie and Jackson holds Stiles hand on the couch, and he loves it.

Stiles puts Claudia to bed and then turns to Jackson with such a hungry look in his eye, he can hardly blink before Stiles has him pulled into his bedroom, and fuck, Jackson loves it. 

They barely get each other naked before they tumble into bed, and Stiles is rubbing against him so deliciously, and Jackson mouthes at his neck and bites at his pulse, and he would almost be ashamed of how quickly he comes, his body warm against Stiles, thrusting against his hips, but Stiles is right behind him, and they’re warm and sticky and have a mess on their abdomens. 

Jackson just looks at Stiles in surprise, and they both stare a moment before they’re both laughing, desperately trying to stifle the sound so they don’t wake Claudia. Jackson wipes them clean with something on the floor (”that's my shirt, you ass!” Stiles basically squawks) and then they both lay there in bed, listening to the sounds of the city from the window, and Stiles starts to talk. 

He tells them about his best friend Scott and his wife Allison that married right out of high school, and Allison who got pregnant before her first day at UCLA. He tells them about how after Claudia was born, they made Stiles the godparent, and then left Claudia in his care while they went on a much-delayed honeymoon to the coast, and then he tells them about how a little gas leak in the hotel robbed him of his two best friends and robbed Claudia of her parents. 

He goes through it quickly — “what happened then sucks, but there’s no sense in wishing it was different” — but it brings him to his next point, lying with his head on Jackson’s chest, fingers tracing the lines across his stomach. 

“Usually, guys run like hell when I say daughter. I’m a 26 year old cop with a 6 year old kid, and something about that is terrifying. Not that I think you’re going to be terrified, but—”

“Stiles, if this is the part of the show where you tell me that you and Claudia are a package deal, can it. I know. I’m not mad about it. Hell, I’ve already fooled you into thinking I’m more than just a dickwad, I’m not backing out now, I’ve put too much work into this.” Jackson snarks, and Stiles looks at him for a minute like he was crazy before he reads into Jackson’s facial expression, and his smile softens again. 

“You’re still a dickwad. Doctor Dickwad.” Stiles says, playfully squeezing Jackson’s side. “But I guess I can keep you around as long as Claudia finds you useful.” he says with a dreamy sign, nosing along Jackson’s jawline once more.

Jackson just grins and turns to kiss him, taking a moment to realize—

he was so, so fucked.

[xxgoblin-dumplingxx]

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: Twenty- Three

“Y/N,” Bruce scolded gently, reaching over to slow down your treadmill, “easy, sweetheart.” You bite your tongue and take a deep breath. Honestly, you’re just thankful Bruce is still letting you do anything at all. You’ve got three weeks left to go and as the days tick down, he’s a bigger mess. “Bruce,” you say, giving him a look. The scientist smiles sheepishly and takes a drink of water.

He watches you discreetly after that. Looking for any sign of distress or discomfort. You’ve been having more back pain and the starts of contractions for the last week. Lea and Medical are both in agreement that you could pop at almost any time. When you’ve finished the little bit of your workout Bruce can handle you doing, he breathes an internal sigh of relief. 

“C ‘ mon, sweetheart,” Bruce says, kissing you softly, “Let's get a shower and get you off your feet.” You smile and press into the kiss, wrapping your arms around his neck, “Baby,” you soothe, “ I’m fine, I feel fine.” He sighs, “But,” he starts. You kiss him, “It’s all normal, sweetheart. There’s nothing to worry about. Yeah. Harper could come at any time. That’s normal too. Babies set their own schedules.” You take his hand and tug him after you. Even if you’re a little irritated right now your feet and your back to ache terribly and you wouldn’t mind a rub down and some tea. He chuckles and follows after you, thankful that you were healthy and that you felt well enough to be irritated at him for coddling you. He’d read about everything that could go wrong. All the ways you could be hurt or killed. Everything that could go wrong with the baby. You’d banned him from reading anything else after he spent the whole night falling down a hole of incredibly rare diseases and pregnancy-related problems and going over every detail of your chart, quietly fretting while you slept. 

The whole thing had culminated in him hulking out and lifting you out of bed carefully, rushing you to medical and insisting that there was something wrong. He’d scared you to death and you’d burst into confused tears, making things worse for Hulk. He’d not understood why you were crying and hadn’t known how to fix it. It had been a rough night for everyone and after that, Bruce was not allowed to read anything related to your pregnancy or the impending birth. He still worried but he was a lot less anxious, and that was an improvement. 

In your rooms, he starts the shower and he gets a little more insistent about kissing you. It feels good, feeling you warm and eager in his arms. He lets you undress him and returns the favor before helping you into the shower. He can’t refuse you when you stroke his prick and suck a soft mark into his chest. Bruce hadn’t intended for things to get filthy while he helped you clean up, but he’s not disappointed by the turn of events. He loves when things are slick and soapy. The feel of your skin under his hands and how easy it is to make you breathless and needy as he toys with your hormones. “You sure, baby?” he asks softly, palming your cunt as he kisses your throat. “Yes,” you pant, “Please?” Bruce turns you around gently and waits for you to get positioned comfortably. “This won’t hurt you?” he asked, hesitating. “It might help put me in labor properly,” you tell him, “But it won’t hurt me.” Bruce nodded and kissed your shoulder, pushing into you gently and reaching around you to cradled your breasts in his hands. You moan softly and he starts to thrust gently. He could get you both off in moments if he wanted with how sensitive you are, but right now he wants to enjoy this. More importantly, he wants you to enjoy this. A lazy slow afternoon of lovemaking and cuddling. You deserve it. And, Bruce reasons, if you’re blissed out and lazy, you aren’t stressed. 

He focuses all his attention on you, coaxing you into orgasms one after another until he spends inside you. When he wraps his arms around you slowly, petting your stomach and nuzzling your spine, he smiles softly, “Good girl, he praises, “Always so good for me.” You let him help you out of the shower and he dries your skin carefully before leading you to the bedroom and starting to smooth lotion over you while you sit on the edge of the bed. He kisses your stomach and smiles when your fingers slide through his hair and you sigh. “Just relax,” he says softly, “Let me take care of you today?” You smile, “I don’t see how I could say no,” you hum, “you’re really good at that.” Bruce preens a little and arranges your pile of pillows so you can lay back, “I gotta take care of you,” he said simply. He helps you into some panties and an oversized shirt before laying you back gently. You sigh and pull him next to you where you want him and cuddle close. You need him nearby. It makes you anxious when he isn’t there to hold you while you sleep. Bruce smiles tenderly and pets your tummy, “Nap time?” he chuckles. It doesn’t take much to wear you out, but he knows that you’re fine. Just pleasantly tired after having been loved properly. You yawn and close your eyes, “Yeah,” you murmur. “I’m sorry,” you say softly.

He kisses your head and keeps rubbing your belly lovingly, “You can be lazy, baby,” he soothes, “I’ll be just as happy to be at your service when you wake up.” Under his fingers, he can feel Harper moving. He imagines she’s probably a little irritated and cramped as she grows too big to be comfortable. He smiles softly as you fall asleep and follows suit, happy to have his girls warm and safe. It’s a nice day. A perfect Sunday. Slow, lazy lovemaking and Bruce feeding into your need for attention happily. He’s never minded that. You never really gave a fuck about gifts, but you do like attention. All the attention he’ll give you. Bruce adores when you’re feeling a little needy and snuggly. It’s the easiest to keep you safe then because you stick to him like glue. He knows it’s your biggest love language. Touch, attention, time. And he’s happy to give you all of it. 

_________

It’s getting late when Bruce looks up at the clock with a sigh. You’re still in your workshop, desperately trying to finish up some things and tie up loose ends before you go on leave. It’s getting closer to midnight and he’s a little worried. You should be in bed. Or at least on the couch with your feet propped up. So he makes his way to the shop, mentally preparing to coax you into coming with him. He pauses at the door and smiles a little. You’re sitting on top of your desk, cross-legged and munching on an apple as you stare at your chalkboard. He knows what “stuck” looks like when he sees it. 

“Hey, beautiful,” he says, kissing tart apple sticky lips when you look up at him. “Hey,” you say smiling a little. “How’s work?” he asked. “The magical equivalent of algebra and I hate it,” you grouse, “Fuck alchemy.” Bruce chuckles and holds out his hands to help you off the desk, “How about you fuck me instead?” he teases. You let him help you down and stretch, “That does sound,” your voice trails off and you gasp. There’d been mild pains through the day. Just like it had been. You hadn’t thought much of it. It was just some discomfort that Lea and medical had been keeping an eye on. This pain was not that. 

Warm fluid runs down your leg under your skirt and puddles around your feet on the tile. Bruce stands there frozen for a second and you look up at him, “I think it’s time,” you say swallowing hard. “Time?” Bruce stammers, “No. There are still two more weeks.”  You wince and squeeze his hands, “No, babe. There isn’t. Harper’s coming now.” Bruce’s brain takes a few seconds to get traction but when it does, he helps you to medical and calls Lea. Your godmother was going to be doing the actual delivering. You felt more comfortable with it, and honestly, Bruce couldn’t fault you. Lea had been bringing babies into the world for centuries. The compromise was that she do it in medical. Just in case. Bruce wasn’t terribly comfortable with you giving birth in a house. Any house. Even if Lea’s was magically immaculate. 

Once they got you settled, sans an IV to avoid you having to deal with needles, and with Lea there to advocate for you and help Bruce keep you as comfortable as you could be. It was time to wait. There was nothing to do really but monitor things. The only hiccup was a nurse, a new nurse, coming in with the things to give you an epidural and subsequently having a terrified witch threaten to hex her into the middle of next week. Beyond that, once they got you calmed down it was fine. Bruce was thankful Lea was there when it was time to push and you were exhausted and scared. 

“Y/N,” she coaxes, “C ‘ mon. Push.”

“I can’t,” you pant, “I just can’t.” She smacks your calf lightly, “Try,” she coaxes, “your mother said the same thing. And here you are.”

You grip Bruce's hand and he feels his knees buckle. If you haven’t broken a bone in his hand he’ll be shocked. “You’re doing so well, sweetheart.” he praises, “ You haven’t hexed me. Or told me we’re never having sex again.” That coaxes a laugh out of you and he wipes tears away gently as you rally to push again. 

“One more,” Lea coached, “ One big push, mama.” You do, crying out and sobbing for breath and if you hadn’t broken a bone or two in Bruce’s hand before, you did then. Black spots blossomed in front of his vision and he felt his stomach roll over as pain shot up his arm and he tried not to whimper. Harper was in Lea’s hands, bloody and screaming and suddenly he forgot how badly his hand hurt. 

He helped Lea then, cutting the cord and helping a waiting nurse to get her ready to hand to you. Well. He tried to help. He was crying and not able to do much more than be in the way. But, as the nurse put her in your arms and you said your first hello, he was convinced you’d never be as beautiful to him as you were in that moment. He could taste tears on your lips as he kissed you softly and wrapped his arms around you. “She looks like you,” you say smiling up at him. Bruce tutted, “Silly girl, I told her I wanted her to look like you.” He smudged a kiss against your head and gently fluffed your pillows. “You can’t have everything you want, Bruce,” you snort. 

_______

When you fell asleep, Bruce went to get his hand seen to. You had indeed put stress fractures in his hand in a couple places. Luckily, it wouldn’t need surgery. He’d just need to baby it and wear a brace. That done, he slipped downstairs to update the others properly. 

Thor swept him off his feet in a bone-crushing hug and laughed when Bruce told them all that you were both just fine and you’d probably be up to visitors soon. “What happened to your hand?” Tony asked, looking up from pouring celebratory drinks. “She broke it,” Bruce said calmly, smiling a little. Steve sputtered for a second, “On purpose?” Bruce gave him a look and laughed, “No, of course not.” Natasha snorted and Clint looked a little horrified. “What?” Bruce said, “I wasn’t not going to hold her hand.” 

“So you just let her break it?” Bucky asked. Bruce nodded, “She was pushing out a seven-pound 8-ounce baby. Without pain killers. A couple stress fractures aren’t that bad. She didn’t just do it for fun... She’s just stronger than she looks.”

“So,”‘ Clint said taking the shot he’d been handed, “Is Miss Harper green after all?” He had a shit-eating grin on his face and let Bruce chuck a pillow at him, “No, you cretin... She’s perfect.” There’s a round of teasing Awww-ing as Bruce visibly softens, thinking about his girls upstairs. “I want pictures!” Nat demanded, snatching Bruce’s phone out of his pocket. “You keep that,” he said, heading towards the elevator, “I’m gonna make sure they’re still doing okay.” 

_________

Two years later

The Hulk is at your back, you sling magic and he flings robots, tearing them into pieces. You don’t have time to think about the fact that there’s a second baby on the way and you hadn’t told Bruce yet before everything happened. 

You can’t think about Harper. At home with Lea waiting for someone to tuck her in. Thinking about her big dark eyes and messy curls makes tears sting your eyes. You have this awful feeling in the pit of your stomach. A feeling that you won’t be coming home. A feeling that crawls over your skin and crashes into reality for you as the Hulk inadvertently brings down part of a building on top of you. 

The rubble saves the day but Hulk, in his despair, runs away. He hesitates just long enough to hear someone say you’re still breathing. But As Natasha calls out to him, he doesn’t turn. He hurt you. He could have killed you. Taken you away from Harper because he wasn’t careful enough. 

The time on Sakaar passes in a blur. He isn’t sure how long he’s been gone but it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing but endless fighting. There are no other women. Not even the Valkyrie that reminds him so much of you. Driven. Smart. Ferociously kind. It makes the Hulk miss you terribly at the same time it soothes him. Until Thor arrives.

Thor throws a Monkeywrench in everything. 

“Go away,” Hulk roars. He doesn’t want to hear about you. About your pretty house. Or the kids. Two girls. Bright and beautiful. “She misses you,” he blurts out. It hurts. It’s a blistering sort of pain, the kind the Hulk just can’t take. 

As Bruce came back groaning on the floor he looked around, “Oh god. Where am I?” Thor helped him sit up and hurriedly handed him clothes, “A planet called Sakaar,” he said. “Y/N, Harper... Oh god. How long has it been?” 

“Y/n, Harper, and Lyra,” Thor corrected gently, “It’s been two years.” Bruce covers his face this his hands and swallows hard, processing. “Lyra is yours,” Thor murmured, “Y/N was with child when you left. She had to expend a lot of energy to get them through a building falling on top of her, but. They’re healthy.” It’s all Bruce can do not to fall apart.

He left you.

He proved you right. All those anxieties you’ve ever had. 

_________

When he makes his way to the house, Thor and his Valkyrie friend in tow. He stops the car and just stares. Harper is beautiful. Dark hair and dark eyes. All Curls and dimples and chubby kid adorableness. And Lyra. Lyra looks like you. A tiny, adorably chubby version of you as she totters along in the grass giggling as she chases a red ball. “I can’t do this,” Bruce said taking a shaky breath, “What if she throws me out?” Thor shook his head, “She won’t. When we thought you were dead, she never gave up. She’s been waiting for this since the minute she woke up and you were gone... Don’t disappoint her.” 

The memory of tears welling up in your eyes gets him out of the car. It makes him stop and take a deep breath as Harper tears into the house yelling for you, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” she yells, “Uncle Thor brought friends!” You step out on the to porch, drying your hands and freeze.

“Bruce?” you ask softly. It’s music to his ears. You look almost the same. A few threads of white coming down from your part. Your hair is longer and you look more muscled. Less soft than you’d been even when he met you. You had harder edges now. He starts forward carefully and when you bolt into his arms, he stops and catches you, clutching you to him as your legs wrap around his waist and your lips find his. He tastes tears but he doesn’t stop. You feel like home. Still. 

Neither of you hear Valkyrie whisper to Thor, “How did that idiot get a wife that hot?” Thor snorted, “She’s not his wife.” Valkyrie grinned, “So you’re saying there’s a chance?” Thor barks a laugh and scoops up both kids, carrying them into the house. “Uncle Thor,” Harper asks wide-eyed, “Who’s that?” Thor grinned and kissed her head, “That’s your dad.” Harper gave him the same Skeptical look Bruce had given him dozens of times and he chuckled. These were definitely his kids. “Promise,” he said, “Your mother doesn’t kiss just anyone like that.”

Tags: @lancsnerd​ @stevieang​ @golddaggers​ @blameitonthecauseway​ @qxeen-of-hearts​ @process-pending​ @xmarveled​ @beautybyfire, @etherealwaifgoddess, @mschellehitt

[whysperingwoods]

Really sick and tired of people who act like those of us dealing with mental illnesses can’t advocate for ourselves or have opinions that matter about our own health or experiences. People are so uneducated about mental illness that they seem to think that the second you sit down in a doctor’s office, you won’t have anymore symptoms and everything is just peachy from that point forward. 

Even if you are on medication, symptoms still continue. It’s not only wrong, but downright harmful to set the expectation that mental illness stops the moment you get a prescription. 

I have been diagnosed with BPD for going on 12 years now. I’ve been on medications for only half of that, because guess what? Medication doesn’t always work, especially not alone. I didn’t have the option for a regular follow-up with a psychologist, and even if I had that kind of thing takes MONTHS if not years of work. 

Out of the 6 years I’ve been on medication for, I’ve only just in the past year found one that actually works well for me and doesn’t give me terrible side-effects, and that’s only treating the depression and anxiety symptoms. The medication I’m on didn’t even exist when I first was diagnosed, and since it’s not covered by the health plan here its price would be prohibitively expensive if my doctor hadn’t managed to get me on a government program to fund it (otherwise it’s $300/month, which I can’t afford). It’s the fifth med I’ve tried, and it takes time on each medication to figure out if it’s even working and sometimes side-effects don’t show up until months later and then you have to start from scratch. The gov-program I’m on now only lasts a year, and when I asked my doc what my options are after the year is up she said “we just have to hope it’s covered by then”. 

That’s not even talking about psychotic symptoms. Anyone who has been on anti-psychotics can tell you that it can be absolute fucking hell. They completely ruined any quality of life I had to the point I decided I would rather deal with the symptoms than deal with the medications, not to mention that they were once again prohibitively expensive and the only reason I was able to be on them for as long as I was was because my doctor was stocking me up on free samples. 

Some people are really lucky and do really well on meds, take to them right away and have little to no side-effects and are able to use the cheapest drug on the market. My mom took to the first antidepressant she tried, had zero side-effects, and it’s covered by the provincial health plan so all she pays is the monthly out of pocket which is very affordable for her as someone with a full time job, but even her situation isn’t perfect. You don’t go from depressed to cured, you still have to learn to deal with the ups and downs and emotional regulation and all kinds of things that you have just never been equipped to deal with. 

And that’s just for the people who have a diagnosis. I’m extremely lucky to be in Canada and that I was able to even get crisis mental health care when I needed it, as inadequate as it was, it did save my life. If I had been living in the US at the time, I’d be dead. It’s that simple. I absolutely would not have been able to go to a hospital or have ongoing treatment for any amount of time. YES see a professional when and if you can, that’s super fucking important, but just because that’s the first and most important step doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a backup plan for when people DON’T HAVE THAT OPTION. 

People experiencing the symptoms of mental illness, diagnosed or not, NEED to have accessibility to tools so they can have something to work with. We NEED to have a plan and some kind of hint at what to do in crisis situations. We NEED to advocate for ourselves, and we NEED to have backup plans for when ideal treatment routes aren’t available. I’m not the first person to say this. There are groups everywhere of people dealing with exactly these types of situations that are advocating for information to be more readily available, but we need to be taken seriously and not told that we’re best to just “see a professional” whenever we try to speak. It’s extremely fucked up and ableist that our voices are immediately dismissed the moment it comes to speaking up about our own mental health and our own experiences, every time we try to help each other out by posting information that may benefit our peers. Stop going around to people you don’t know on a topics that don’t effect you just to shut them down with your bullshit opinion. Having a MH or knowing someone with a MH does not give you the experience to speak over people discussing a specific symptom that you do not have. 

[imperialbogmonster]

I’m not drunk enough to be crying this hard, fuck.

So. I’ve been watching Criminal Minds on Netflix. I got to season two, episode eleven—that’s the one where Reid imprints on a budding serial killer. The end, with Reid desperately trying to save this poor, fucked-up kid, is what got to me.

See, fictional suicide usually only bothers me when it’s an overdose, because that’s my sister’s preferred method. But for some reason, this really fucked me up. I guess it’s because I know that sometimes doing your best isn’t enough. Sometimes you can love someone so much that there’s nothing of yourself left, and it’s still not enough. You can do everything that it’s in your power to do, and sometimes the people you love will still take a bottle full of sleeping pills. You can do everything you can, and it’s like you’ve done nothing at all.

I vividly remember the first time she tried to kill herself. It was a Saturday. January 19, or something close. I was a teenager; she was barely out of adolescence and already on more medications than I could name. We—me, my sister, our mother—were on our way home from the aquarium. I had thought that it had been a good day. We’d petted horseshoe crabs and been impressed by the whale skeleton, all the things people do at aquariums.

We were on our way home, on the highway. I’d been chattering about everything we’d seen, and all the things I’d wished they had, but it was getting late and I was getting tired. For a little while, the only sound was the radio. It was tuned to a rock station. My sister had picked it. I was riding shotgun, and she was in the back, like usual.

She leaned up between the front seats and pressed something into my hand. She didn’t say anything. It was an empty pill bottle. Her anti-anxiety meds, though I wouldn’t find that out until later. I didn’t understand at first. In hindsight, I’m just glad she didn’t have her sleeping pills with her.

Mom pulled over on the side of the highway. She told my sister to make herself throw up, and she did. Mom held her hair back. She’s always had long hair, ever since we were kids. She’d always been vain about it, but that night it was like none of her vanity mattered.

I didn’t do anything. I watched them, in the flashing hazard lights. I didn’t panic or try to help. I just...watched. I didn’t feel anything.

I didn’t stay with her at the hospital. I said I was going to bed, said I had to be up early for work the next day. The thing I remember most vividly is the empty bottle she gave me; in second place is early the next morning. I was ironing my uniform when I started to cry. I didn’t sob or gasp or hiccup. I wasn’t loud. Even then, I was more concerned with worrying my parents than I was with myself. But I still cried. I remember, distinctly, the hot tears on my face, and how they blurred my view. I didn’t want to be crying. I just wanted to finish ironing my clothes. I remember tears dropping onto my shirt, how the blue fabric had gone dark. Even as I cried, I felt nothing. It was like I was hollow.

I remember asking my manager if I could keep my phone on vibrate because my sister was in the hospital. I remember how my voice had cracked, and how much I’d hated that show of weakness, but not as much as I’d hated the pity in his eyes when he said yes.

That was the first time my sister tried to kill herself. So far she’s made four attempts. We do everything we can to help. We love and support her, we make sure she takes her medication and goes to her appointments, and somehow no matter what we do it’s still not enough. I can’t stand to handle empty pill bottles of a certain size anymore; our mother has nightmares about her youngest child killing herself in the next room; our father blames himself for not being there for her, even though he’s always been her biggest advocate.

I feel, in a way, responsible for her most recent suicide attempt. There was some drama leading up to it.

I live alone. My sister still lives with our parents. For a little while, it was the three of them, plus my sister’s boyfriend (who we’ve hated and distrusted from day one), and my sister’s best friend, who had been unofficially kicked out of her parents’ house.

Then the boyfriend (his name is Christian Edwards) raped my sister’s best friend. She told me and my dad first, because she wasn’t sure how my sister would react to the news and wanted support.

Predictably, my sister sided with Chris, despite his changing story. First he said that nothing happened; then he said they slept together, but it was consensual; then he said she was passed-out drunk, but she didn’t say no so it couldn’t have been rape. My sister stuck with him through every permutation of the story.

I got angry. I yelled at her, told her our mother had raised us better than that victim-blaming bullshit. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I tried to use my size to intimidate her, stood while she was sitting and got right in her face.

Six hours later she took a bottle of prescription sleeping pills.

I was at home, drowning my sorrows in cheap vodka and trying not to think about the fact that alcoholism runs rampant on both sides of my family. She took the pills around four am; I didn’t find out until two o’clock in the afternoon, when I surfaced from my hangover long enough to see a dozen panicked texts from my parents.

After everything, she stayed with Chris. He’s no longer allowed in our parents’ house, but she regularly goes out to meet with him. I don’t know what I’ll do when our paths inevitably cross again. Smash his teeth in, probably (hopefully?), or something equally violent and ill-advised.

He’s hurt so many people in so many ways. If I ever saw him alone on a backroad, I don’t know if anyone else would ever see him again. Does that make me a bad person? I can’t think about him without wanting to hurt him, wanting to kill him.

The girl never pressed charges. She didn’t want to retraumatize herself over and over again, only for Chris to walk, which he would have if it had ever gone to trial. A young man with no record against a girl with a history of mental illness? She never would have stood a chance, even though it was exactly those illnesses that made her look like an easy target.

I love my sister. I really do. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I didn’t. If I could just wash my hands of her, and all the bullshit that follows her.

The other day, my dad told me that when he was about my age he sold everything he owned and moved to Alaska. As a child, I never really fantasized about running away, but as an adult, that might be one of the most tempting things I’ve ever heard. The idea of starting over completely is a compelling one. And if I were in Alaska, no one could fault me for not spending hours at her bedside the next time she decides that being dead is easier than dealing with her problems.

This got a little out of hand, didn’t it?

[kaoruyogi]

How to Win Wars and Influence Nobles (Ch. 25)

Rating: E for Explicit/NSFW Content! 

Check it out on AO3!

You’d think a video game lawyer could just drop into a pseudo-medieval universe filled with magic and demons and be totally okay with it, right?

Nah.

In the wake of her brother, Spencer’s, disappearance, Belle dropped into Thedas with luggage, but without a clue. After a brief but memorable panic attack, she resolved to be the best goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. Even if she was the only goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. And even if that obstinate asshole, Cullen, wouldn’t stop giving her the side-eye every time she walked into a room…Or every time he walked into a room with her in it…Or every time they walked into a room together…Or–Fuck it. You get it.

Chapter 25: What the Fuck Now?

Cullen’s newness to the world was like a second infancy. It was adorable and impatient, sweet and frustrating. He had questions about everything in their first month of living in Orange County. He asked Belle some questions she didn’t have answers to, and he asked her some questions that didn’t really have answers. The fecundity of his imagination was boundless. It was impressive, and it was exhausting.

She showed him how to use the internet on her laptop early on. She watched him do what she had done when she first got to Thedas. Research. He clicked and clicked and clicked, treading dozens of varied informational pathways a day, drinking up knowledge like a man in an oasis surrounded by a million miles of desert in every direction. She supposed he was a man lost in the desert, really. In the back of her mind, she worried he would reach the point of knowing more about the world than she did.

Cullen began by educating himself on the topics that interested him the most. He started with war. The long-documented history of tens of thousands of battles took his pouring over for nearly a week. Faster than Belle could have consumed all that information. At one point, however, the geographical proportions of the world popped onto the screen alongside the current global population. The size of Earth and the amount of people on it put him in a state for two hours. His brow furrowed and unfurrowed, and he paced around their suite’s living room trying to reason it out.

“These numbers cannot possibly be correct. How can there be that many people in this world? Nearly eight billion?” he said, distracting Belle from her neglected Tumblr feed for the fifth time since his pacing began.

She let her wrist go limp as she flicked her attention to him, knocking her phone into her bare ankle. She groaned, and half sighed her reply. “Dude, I dunno. A combination of the spread of mass religious beliefs that advocate copious reproduction, improvements in medical science to stop people from dying from literally everything, and really shitty birth control methodologies up until the past couple decades. You could have Googled that.”

Cullen glowered down at her. “I apologize that it is not yet my first instinct to beg answers to my questions from a machine.” His tone was razor sharp.

Belle set her jaw hard. So did Cullen. Several brutal seconds into their tiny standoff, she relented. She shut her eyes and inhaled. The cool, conditioned air buzzed in through her nose and blew out through her pursed lips. When she opened her eyes, much of Cullen’s ire had melted into a complicated kind of remorse.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I.” He brushed his hand across her shoulder before returning to whatever dark corner of the internet he’d found in his endless clicking. A passing gesture of love stretched thin by proximity and inactivity.

Cullen’s click-click-clicking lead him next to history. He told Belle he intended to focus on the history of her nation, but she suspected, after seeing images of several very steepley, thousand-year-old-looking churches splashed across her 4K laptop screen, that he had wandered well past the United States. Those same steepley, thousand-year-old-looking churches dragged him into religion. She knew he’d discovered the sordid and bloody history of Judaism when, following a dispersion of disgusted grunts, he sat on the couch beside her and swept her into his arms. He clutched her tight, wondering aloud how her people seemed so happy after all they went through. She thought to bring up the elves, but decided against it when he buried his nose in her hair.

Religion lead back to war, as it so often did. Belle watched as Cullen found himself at a loss for what to read. He thought he’d exhausted the contents of the entire internet. She pressed her lips together to bite back a giggle at the sight of his mild distress. But the next day’s malaise, coupled with a rapid response by hotel security to his courtyard palm-tree-dummy training session, brought him back up to their room with questions about physical maintenance. He asked Belle first. She put a hand on her soft gut and reminded him that she was the last person he should be asking about exercise. She ate another Cheeto, and he took to the internet once more. When she woke the following morning, she found him with a towel draped over his shoulder preparing to shower after lifting weights and jogging in the hotel gym while she slept. He was settling in alright, she reckoned.

Eisiminger called them to his office after two weeks of radio silence. He told them that there was no record of any radical group calling themselves “the Inquisition” in any database in any country. Belle said that of course there wasn’t. Why would there be? What kind of sense would that make? She spouted off about shell corporations and airspace rights and that movie, “The Village,” and Eisiminger leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. She didn’t have to feign her anger when she told him that what she and Cullen experienced was real. It was real, and it was painful. The bit about the pain was no lie, either. The anguish of being ripped away from the people she’d grown to call family, not to mention her actual brother, clawed and gnawed at her with incessant persistence. Cullen corroborated her every word.

When she ran out of steam and all she could do was sit and seethe, Eisiminger apologized. He didn’t apologize for his occasionally suspicious glances or his sporadically accusatory tone. She didn’t expect him to apologize for that. That was behavior she would hope for in a detective, had she presented him a real crime to solve. Instead, he apologized for the lack of progress on her case. He told her that, with no leads and nothing more on which to follow up, he was going to have to put her case in the “inactive” file. She put on a dramatic show of anger to hide her relief, tearing up and scowling, demanding something more be done. Eisiminger apologized again, and Cullen put on his own dramatic show of comforting her. Eisiminger went on to recommend that Cullen apply for a U-visa if he planned on remaining in the country, and handed him a form. Belle knew full well that the single form was insufficient, and said as much before she and Cullen stormed out of the Homicide Bureau’s offices. She wept real tears when they got into her little blue car.

On the third week, Belle sent her parents home to Washington. They protested for hours before and during dinner at the little Italian restaurant in Downtown Brea that was always too busy. Cullen sat at the outer edge of the booth and faced the door while they ate and argued, still hypervigilant, still nervous. Belle was too, if she was honest. They both jumped when someone dropped a plate. He reached for his absent sword. Everyone cheered at the waiter. Belle’s hand trembled until Cullen took it in his under the table. Her father narrowed his eyes at her in a silent question, and she answered him with a near imperceptible shake of her head.

Not long after, he capitulated. He caved first, as she suspected he might. He tried to bring Ilana around by reminding her that they should probably get ready for Belle and Cullen to move north, because Belle was a shoo-in for that job at Microsoft, of course. Fear and discomfort passed over Ilana’s face for a moment. She said something in a voice so soft that the discordant eaters around them drowned it before it could reach Belle’s ears.

Belle’s father nodded, and Ilana swayed with the cadence of his hand running up and down her back. “We’re only a few hours away if he comes back.”

Ilana’s eyes went watery, but she nodded too. Belle and Cullen shared a communicative glance. It was time to tell her parents why Spencer wasn’t there, why she and Cullen were so jumpy, why he needed a U-visa.

She sat her parents on the sofa in their suite after dinner. Unwelcome news was always taken best when surrounded by the comfort of one’s own belongings. Cullen sat in the chair next to Ilana, and Belle stood. She was accustomed to making presentations, and standing gave her a feeling of control over what was about to happen.

“I’m going to start telling you what I have to tell you in a second,” she said. “But first, I need to know that both of you know I’m not crazy. I’ve never exhibited signs of any mental illness that would alter my perceptions of reality, right?”

“Right,” said her father.

“Of course not,” said Ilana.

“Okay. Dad, you’re an engineer, and I know you’re not that kind of engineer, but what do you know about wormholes?”

He cocked his head. “Not a whole lot. The bit with the hole in the folded piece of paper is about it.”

Belle let out an irked little noise. She paced in front of the lifeless black television. Two steps left, two steps right. “So—and again, I swear I’m not crazy—what I told the police—what I told you—is about half true. Spencer and I were in a place called Thedas, and Cullen really does come from there, but—” The words caught in her throat, causing a strangled squeak. “Thedas isn’t anywhere on Earth.”

“What?” said Ilana.

“It sounds insane. It sounds one hundred percent batshit cuckoo coco-nuts, I know. But I was waiting for an Uber outside my apartment to take me to the airport, and this green hole thing that I can only assume was a wormhole or something like that just appeared on the sidewalk and sucked me up. Just sucked me and my bags right up.” Belle pantomimed with her hand, flicking her wrist and closing her splayed fingers. “And when I woke up, I was someplace else. The geography of the land was different than here, and the seasons were different from here, and I didn’t just stay in one place while I was there. We,” she said as she gestured between herself and Cullen, “rode halfway across the continent on horseback and in carriages. We would have hit some modern civilization by then, right? Then, one random day, another wormhole thing just poofed into existence in front of me and Cullen and ate us both.”

“Wormholes?” said Ilana. The blankness in her tone welled up anxiety in Belle’s chest. Her flowy T-shirt felt three sizes too small.

“Yeah. Wormholes. That’s why Spencer isn’t here, why he didn’t come back too. They were just these blips. Opened and closed.”

“My confirmation of what she says cannot mean much to you, such as things are,” said Cullen, “but everything she says is true. In Thedas, we call these wormholes ‘rifts.’ Spencer fell out of a rift about three months before Belle did, but that’s how both of them arrived in Thedas. And it’s how Belle and I were taken from Thedas to arrive here.”

Belle’s father cleaved the long silence that followed before it grew too great to bear. “So Spencer…” He stopped, searching for the words, searching for the question to which he might even begin to put words.

“Spencer’s alive and well. He’s actually pretty happy there. He met someone.”

“My sister, Rosalie.”

Ilana wore confused horror like a mask over her usually happy face. Belle’s father opened and closed his mouth like a fish drowning in air. She hadn’t planned this, she realized. Hadn’t done it right. Predict, prepare, preempt. She forgot to follow her mantra, and now she was ruining her parents’ lives. They were sitting in front of her trying to figure out if they should commit her. Slap her in the loony bin with the rest of the crazies. Deport Cullen to nowhere or hold him in ICE lockup on indefinite detention because they would never, ever figure out his country of origin.

Belle stood in the prison of her anxiety, spinning out into oblivion. Then her father asked, “Why you?”

“Huh?”

“Why you? And why Spencer? I mean, I love you, and don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but neither of you are that special.”

Belle laughed. It was a delirious thing, and it burst out of her without warning. She wasn’t helping the case for her sanity. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “No one there knew either. And it’s not like I can run around asking proper astrophysicists why without sounding bananas crazy.”

“Okay,” said Ilana. “I believe you.” Determination had replaced the mask of confused horror. Determination and certainty.

“Me too,” said Belle’s father.

“Really?” said Belle.

“Yeah. And, honestly, it’s more plausible than human trafficking.”

“Why?”

“You really think you, of all people, would get kidnapped and escape and come back here without telling every single person you talked to some crazy story about how you punched at least one guy in the face?”

“Or stabbed one to death,” said Belle.

Her father gave her the side eye. “Or stabbed one to death.”

Her parents flew back to Washington two days later.

Four weeks after Belle and Cullen’s unceremonious landing in Orange County, she had her Skype interview with the council of counselors for Microsoft. Vic’s friend, Josh, sat between two women, and across from one woman and one man. They were friendly, and they asked her all the questions Josh told her they would ask when she’d spoken to him on the phone three weeks earlier. She felt as prepared as she could have been, having spent a year without any technology just before interviewing for one of the largest tech companies in the world. She offered a few quips, and the council of counselors laughed just the right amount.

Cullen sat on the sofa two feet away and watched the entire process. After almost an hour and forty-five minutes of back and forth, the council of counselors muted their end of the conversation to deliberate. Belle watched their mouths move, but they were too far from the camera, their mannerisms too subdued for her to make out what any of them said. She reached for Cullen’s hand out of view of her webcam. The warmth of his calluses on her palm and her fingertips reminded her that she had been battle-hardened. She had been through so much worse than waiting for a few lawyers to decide whether she was skilled enough to work for them. She had been stabbed, for Christ’s sake. Twice.

The council of counselors unmuted their microphone, and Alicia, the woman sitting across the conference table from Josh, told Belle that Josh and the other two women were going to be stepping out for the duration of the conversation. Belle said her farewells, and Josh winked toward the camera on his way through the metal doorframe.

When the door to the conference room closed, Alicia folded her hands in front of her and smiled. “Okay, so let’s talk relo expenses. If you have a down payment, we’d like to help you with moving costs and closing.”

Less than half an hour later, Belle was e-signing an employment contract. She started sobbing halfway through the at-will provisions, and Cullen took her up in his embrace. She clung to his powerful forearms as they wreathed around her neck and shoulders. His galvanizing presence reminded her how lucky she was to have him. She loved him so much it was like a stone in her stomach. The certainty that she could provide for them was an indispensable boon, a small but sturdy umbrella in the torrent of fucked up shit raining down on them every day.

But their relationship wasn’t all peaches and light. As time passed, as Belle wrapped up the task of un-disappearing, as she met with everyone she needed to meet, and as she waited for her parents’ video tours of prospective houses, she and Cullen began to go stir crazy. They played a dangerous waiting game that threatened to rend them from one another by exposure. Between them, they managed no more than an hour or so apart each day. He had his burgeoning workout routine, and she had the odd friend with whom to eat lunch and avoid chatting about her disappearance. The other twenty-three hours of the day, they were locked in their suite, alone, bored, and bickering over tiny annoyances.

Sex helped. It staved off the ennui and frustration, and it tethered them to one another in a way that felt natural, unforced. It was also almost the only exercise Belle got in the absence of her daily need to walk up and down five thousand flights of stairs.

During their refractory periods, or their post-argument periods, or really any period not occupied by a solid fuck or something solidly fucked, they watched movies and TV shows and listened to music. Cullen had over thirty years of catching up to do on the media that helped form Belle’s personality, and she was more than happy to use it as an excuse to ease the occasional tension. They situated themselves on the couch, her ankles always crossed over his thighs, and dug into their respective snacks—that douchenozzle nibbled on apples and strawberries while she stuffed her face with Doritos and chocolate—before she hit play.

Cullen’s opinions, as in most cases, formed quickly. He liked John Wayne. He disliked Alfred Hitchcock. He said he thought RomComs were feckless, but Belle caught the worry on his face when it seemed like the main characters wouldn’t end up together. He scoffed when she pointed out that he practically was Mr. Darcy. She laughed so hard when he and Matthew Macfayden made the exact same sound in unison that she had to pause the movie with Keira Knightley’s eyes half closed. Cullen conceded.

When it came to music, he surprised her. He favored classical and neo-classical composers, which she anticipated. He grimaced at most EDM, though he tolerated ambient electronica, and he slammed her laptop shut when she started playing her favorite death metal track, which was to be expected. But he asked her to play more of her indie and alternative music, like Ray LaMontagne and Feist and Fleet Foxes, he loved the blues, and he latched onto jazz singers like Billie Holiday. Belle should have known that he would be contrary and old fashioned, even in a different world.

She glanced up at him once, a few minutes after telling her realtor to make an offer on a four-bedroom house with granite countertops in the kitchen and a plum tree in the backyard. He sat at the desk in front of her laptop with his chin resting on his fist. “God Bless the Child” emanated from the speakers as his eyes scanned over some half-visible article about the Yukon gold rush. She watched him for a moment. He squinted and craned his neck toward the screen, and he sighed when he returned to his resting position.

As she watched him, for the first time in more than a month, she didn’t think, well, what the fuck now. For the first time in more than a month, she thought that maybe their lives weren’t ruined. For the first time in more than a month, she thought there might be a future for them that didn’t exist in the past.

He smiled when he caught her staring.

*****

“Just breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“Yeah, but do it slower.”

Cullen glowered. “Was there no other way to get to Washington?”

“I am not driving for nineteen and a half hours in a rental car. Maybe someday, in our own car, for fun and shit, but I’m not doing it just to move.”

Boong, boong. Flight attendants, please prepare for takeoff.

Cullen jumped at the announcement and squeezed Belle’s hand so tight her fingers began to tingle. His other hand clutched the armrest near the open window. The too-close Orange County morning sun glared rabid on the tarmac outside the thick plexiglass. She wondered if he knew how much she had to love him to give him the window seat.

“Do you need a Valium?” said the leathery woman in the aisle seat. “Or a Xanax? I’ve got both.”

Belle smiled her sweet, phony smile. “Nooo, thaaanks,” she said in the way only someone from Southern California could say it. “He’ll be okay. It’s just his first time flying.”

“This is unnatural,” said Cullen through his teeth.

The leathery woman giggled and reached across Belle’s lap to touch Cullen’s thigh. Belle made an ugly face in her shock and repugnance. The goddamn nerve of some fucking people.

“It’s science, honey. Perfectly natural.”

Belle cleared her throat and nudged the woman’s arm. They shared another phony smile as the leathery woman withdrew to her own space. She set about the task of ignoring everyone around her by putting in earbuds and starting “BIG” on the little screen stuck to the seat in front of her.

Belle shook her head, turning her attention back to her terrified…boyfriend still didn’t sound right. Cullen stared out the small window. The jets on the wings just behind them whirred to raucous life. She couldn’t feel her fingertips anymore. “Do you want to close the window?”

“What?”

“Do you want to see everything, or do you want to close the window?”

“I want,” he said between shallow breaths. “I want to see.”

“Okay.”

Everything began to rattle as the Airbus lurched down the runway. Cullen’s chest heaved. He had to be getting dizzy. The plane sped up until everything outside became a blur of soiled beige and shiny black. He gasped when the aircraft lifted off the ground, and the rattling all around them stopped. Her fingertips started to burn.

He leaned his forehead against the mottled plastic window frame and watched the ground recede. His breathing slowed amid the awe that spread over his face. His mouth hung open, and his grip on Belle’s fingers loosened. The pins and needles set in as the blood poured back into her digits. The plane flew west on its takeoff flightpath, and the wide blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean stretched out beneath them. Cullen looked out ahead, and said, “I have never seen so much.”

“So much what?” asked Belle.

“Everything.”

For the whole hour of their flight, he stared out that window and held Belle’s hand. She watched him watch the deserts fade into mountains, and the mountains blossom into forests. “You were right,” he said when the Pacific Northwest clouds shrouded the earth.

“About?”

“The clouds. It’s like a sea of cotton. And I have never seen sky so blue.”

When they began their descent, Cullen watched the rain part around the wing behind them. Belle explained that they were going so fast they cut through the air and the rain. She helped him pop his ears as the earth came into view once more in shades of gray, blue, and green. She endured the pins and needles in her fingers a second time when they went wheels down.

SeaTac was a much larger airport than the local one from which they’d departed. The volume of people was larger too. Belle rushed them through the terminals to avoid allowing Cullen enough time to become overwhelmed by the crowd. Once they reached the baggage claim, he scowled at the chute until their luggage appeared, both bags flipping end over end. He lifted them off the conveyor belt with enviable ease. Belle saw a few people watch him do it, and watch him for a little too long thereafter.

She had to stop him when he tried to unzip his bag to check on his sword and armor—he wouldn’t let her ship it ahead. It had been difficult enough explaining the blade and plate to TSA when they checked in. They didn’t need to be detained on their way out.

It was raining when they exited the terminal. Belle suppressed a grin at Cullen’s tentative mastery of sliding glass doors. He put his hand out from under the awning to feel the rain on his skin, and he looked at her with a kind of satisfaction. “Rain is the same everywhere,” he said.

She smiled. “Did you think it was going to come up from the ground?” He shook his head and kissed her forehead.

Her father picked them up in his green SUV a few minutes later. He told them he would have been there faster if anyone knew how to drive in this fucking airport. Belle let Cullen ride shotgun to avoid his carsickness.

“So, Cullen, how was your first flight?”

“Harrowing.”

“Ha,” said Belle.

They stopped at the car dealership on the way to her parents’ house. Cullen told her he wanted to ride home with her father, and she gave him a dubious look before he closed his door and they went on ahead. She verified the car on the lot was the car she ordered. It was bigger, bluer, and sportier than her last vehicle, which she’d sold in Orange County to make their move easier. She made her down payment, signed the paperwork, and followed a few miles behind her men. By the time she reached her parents’ house, her things had been unloaded from the SUV. She parked in the driveway beside it and went into the house.

“Belle? Is that you?” said Ilana’s voice from the kitchen.

“Nope. Just a murderer, here to do some murderin’. Don’t mind me.” Belle hung her raincoat on the rack near the door. “How many people do you guys give your keys to?”

“Oh, anyone who will take one, really.” Ilana’s voice grew closer as Belle followed it into the kitchen. “Dad just goes to the park sometimes and hands them out to vagrants. You know, in case they feel like robbing us blind or relieving us of our lives while we sleep.”

Belle laughed and hugged her stepmother. “I bet they appreciate that. No one likes a house that’s hard to burglarize. And murder is so much harder when the door’s locked.”

“It’s good to see you, sweetie. How’s your new car?”

“Fast.” An oddly familiar scent filled the warm kitchen and Belle’s nostrils. She sniffed the air. “What are you cooking?”

Ilana beamed. “Well, I did some Googling, and I found some recipes that I thought might make Cullen feel more at home. I decided on roasted mutton, potatoes, and root veggies. It’s weird, but I realized I’ve never cooked a parsnip before.”

Belle’s mouth watered. A year and a half ago, the thought of roasted mutton, potatoes, and root veggies would have sounded okay. Just okay. Never as amazing as it sounded that day. Despite being in her parents’ house, a place that was a second home for so many years, the food in the oven would be the first thing in a long time to give both her and Cullen even a fraction of that kind of comfort.

“Where is he, anyway?”

“Your dad took him into the garage to make sure his sword and armor made it through the flight okay. That’s so weird to say.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.”

Belle made for the door leading out to the garage. In front of the door, a heap of red Rubbermaid tubs marked “Camping” blocked her view of most of the room. “—t kind of steel is this? A few of the machinists I used to work with would be really into this craftsmanship,” said her father. The soft ping ping of a knuckle rapping against metal punctuated his remarks.

“It’s silverite. Steel armor is ill suited against enchanted weapons or magic. Templars are given silverite armor after completing their initiation. I was used to it, so I commissioned a modified version of that it upon joining the Inquisition.”

Belle rounded the Rubbermaids to see Cullen kneeling on a moving blanket on the floor with his armor spread out piecemeal. Her father sat on a tool bench. He was hunched over with a touch of awe on his face, running his fingers over the Templar insignia on one of Cullen’s bracers. “We don’t have silverite here. I wonder what the chemical composition of this stuff is.”

“Everything all in one piece?” said Belle, drawing their attention away from the armor.

Cullen stood. “It seems to be. It’s difficult to know for certain, but I don’t want to strike it without any way to repair it.”

“It’s pretty cool,” said Belle’s father.

“Did you boys have a nice ride home?”

“Yup. How’s your new car? You want to take me for a ride later? Maybe let me—I don’t know—drive it?” Her father gave her a signature Dolan family shit-eating grin.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Belle. “God, so desperate.”

Her father stood with a guttural groan. His pain had gotten worse while she was gone. She wished Eudora could have fixed his back too. He patted the spot between her shoulder blades where her tattoo proclaimed, “A Man Chooses,” in strong black ink. She hugged his waist. Cullen watched with a wistful look, a small smirk curling his lips and crinkling his scar.

Belle took her father out in her new car, as promised. They went to an empty school parking lot so he could do slippery donuts on the wet asphalt. They cackled together as the tires squealed and he cranked the steering wheel to the right, then to the left. She had missed him.

During their drive back to the house, she asked him what he and Cullen talked about after they left her at the dealership. He said, “Stuff.”

She struggled not to cry at dinner. Her backward nostalgia hit her like a truck the moment the first forkful hit her tongue. Her eyes burned, and her vision blurred. She could just make out Cullen hoovering the meal like it was his first, or his last. The flavors stoked memories of the early moments of their tenuous friendship, of dinners with Sera and Dorian and Bull, of lunches with Max and Josie and the visiting nobility, of Spencer. She barely maintained the wherewithal to tell Ilana that the food was delicious.

Her dreams were fitful that night. Barbarous and bathed in green. Her friends and her brother died and came back over and over, each death more heinous than the last. She tried to intervene. She screamed, she battled against the weight of her feet, and she called out to them to flee. Not one of them recognized her. Not one of them listened. They just died. Again and again, they died.

She and Cullen went to their new house the next morning. It was sunny. They met the realtor and the escrow agent for their first and final walkthrough before signing the closing documents. Everything was as Belle imagined. The bedrooms were large and clean. The master bathroom had a shower that was separate from the tub. The tan granite countertops in the kitchen gleamed. The plum tree in the backyard clung onto its last few leaves, each one the color of Cullen’s eyes.

Sparks didn’t fly when she signed the closing documents and handed over the cashier’s check. The heavens didn’t open, and the angels didn’t sing. It was all rather anticlimactic for the accomplishment of such a lofty goal. Her pen just scratched across some papers, and a stranger just took tens of thousands of her dollars with little more than a tepid “Congratulations.” He handed her the keys and a copy of the paperwork, and he and the realtor left.

Belle and Cullen stayed behind in the silence of their new home. He’d knocked on and jiggled a few things during their walkthrough, no doubt testing the flimsy modern craftsmanship. What wouldn’t seem flimsy after living in a place as staunch and fortified as Skyhold? But in the new silence, he just stared at the high living room ceiling.

“What do you think of it?” said Belle.

“It is…different.”

“Different than what?”

Cullen shifted on his feet. His movement was silent on the new carpet. “Since I was a boy, I thought I would live and die in a Circle or a Chantry House. That was the only way a Templar could honorably leave the Order. After joining the Inquisition, I did not have the luxury of time to consider what I might do if by some miracle I survived, let alone if we won. But I suppose I believed that, should I ever have a home of my own, I might have at least a hand in building it. This is simply…beyond my expectation.”

Belle laid down on the living room carpet. She sprawled out beneath the skylight, letting the muted warmth of the sun soak into her pale skin. She closed her eyes and breathed deep the lemon cleaner-scented air. “Well, we got a good deal. Cause I’m a Tom Slick, hotshot motherfucker who gets good deals. That’s what I do.” She smiled.

Cullen chuckled his three low chuckles. “I suppose it is.”

The sound of socks shuffling on carpet got loud and close, then the sound of someone laying down rustled up beside her. The weight of Cullen’s head came to rest on her stomach. She carded her fingers through his hair. They laid together in the sun puddle for a quiet minute or a quiet hour or a quiet day before she said, “You know, most of my furniture is old, hand-me-down crap. We need new stuff. So, if you want, you can still have a hand in putting this home together.”

Cullen wrapped his hand around her wrist and removed her hand from his hair. She frowned. He kissed the back of her hand, then pressed her palm to his chest. His heart beat a steady rhythm under her touch. Thuh-thump, thuh-thump, thuh-thump. She opened her eyes, and the sunlight bleached her vision.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Anytime.”

*****

[jednozycie]

I'M DONE MY DUDES!!!! BUT ALSO NEW BEGINNINGS!!!

Long rant ahead about personal things (keeping it kind of vague but then not vague, you'll see what that means). This is also an update as to where the fuck I've been since I've been super absent on the wonder that is the internet and social media; aka I suck at keeping contact in general. Like so bad. Astronomically bad. This is also an experience to type on mobile but I'm doing it anyway!!!! Also I go into ableism. SO MUCH. MOSTLY MY OWN WITH MYSELF. BUT STILL.

ALSO LONG.

WELL. A few months back (or two??) I had a very bad(TM) episode involving mental health things, which I am keeping vague but those that know, know and if not there's always private messages I guess. But that started spiraling last year, BUT THAT'S GETTING SORTED SO NO WORRIES (I feel caps really gets the point across so sorry in advance)!!!

Now we get to the other things that therapy has dug up. Internalized ableism. Which is as prevalent as externalized ableism, honestly. It also applies to phsyical disabilites as much a mental or invisible disabilites but to avoid writing a goddamned 100 page post, I'm going to stick with the more physical or external because that's what I've been coming to terms with these last few weeks; aka that's what has been more salient so here we go!!! (This is honestly the first time I'm putting any of this into actual words and sentences, so if it's seems kind of like paragraphs are random. Yeah.)

I'm also more of an advocate for the affirmation model of disability so if that's not your jam, maybe you're better off not reading this? Or you can see the point I'm trying to make; there is a point to this, not just rambling!

The condensed version of the affirmation model is essentially not viewing diabaility as this TRAGIC, TERRIBLE CIRCUMSTANCE. It's understanding and being able to understand it as an identity or as a part of an identity; aka I really fucking hate the medical model and it can go suck a fuck because most of it is archaic and it deserves to be trampled. BUT AGAIN, THAT'S A DIFFERENT POST IN ITSELF SO I DIGRESS.

I'm done with dealing with shit as a """medical condition""" and """bad luck""" because no, it really isn't and it doesn't have to be just because the rest of the able-bodied world is the "gold standard" (FUCK THE GOLD STANDARD ALSO, BUT AGAIN I DIGRESS). I also do want acknowledge that I am white and college educated so I definitely have a lot of fucking privlege in other areas of my life.

So let's go back in time to where my crippling internalized ableism started. Ah yes, back in February on a shitty, stormy Sunday in 1994. But how could it start when I was just born? Well, because of ~ableist culture~ that was already there the day I arrived. I don't even know if I want to state that I ""appreciate"" that they tried to surgically fix my hand, although it did give me the use of my thumb so I'm conflicted. Still. Super medical model.

Queue doctors trying to convince my parents for the next five years of my life and random years in between during my childhood that they could "fix" my hand via hand transplant or by removing my fingers and transplanting my toes and making them more "finger-like" so they could become fingers on my hand. I'm still creeped out about that to this day, but I'm not going to judge anyone who may have had a similar procedure because I do still understand and in the end, you do you.

This essentially lead my parents into the mode of "you need to compensate for that disability so no one can judge you on it". Like what the actual fuck. Who puts that idea into their child's head???? ~Ableist culture~

And oh man, I still got fucking bullied as a kid. Like I'm talking about being called terrible things I didn't even understand at 5, and even getting spit on!!! The best part is that happened at a PRIVATE, CATHOLIC instituition. : )

That did get better because I involved the principal to the degree of having the guys almost expelled (and they were like 11-13 when they did that kind of shit and I was 5-6 so. HM. NICE LADS. TRULY).

This led to a life long habit of hiding my hand and freaking the fuck out anytime there were activites that involved holding hands or having hands visible.

But for every fuckwad that made me feel like an abomination there were good people that quite literally did not give a single fuck and thought it looked cool. So kids are alright sometimes. It's actually children who still are super accepting of it and just roll with it even if they don't understand. Teenagers... on the otherhand. Well, I love getting candid (but so fucking obvious) shots of my hand followed by laughter. Alright.

Even worse is the pity. Like bruh, I did not ask for your pity. Nor do I need to hear about it as "it happened for a reason; all in god's plan". Bruh. BRUH. NO.

"Wow you're dealing so well with it" "Wow you really don't let it affect you" "it could have been much worse you know, (insert story about another person with a disbaility that they know)"

Gotta say, more than my actual hand, it's those comments now that make me go fucking berserk. Those comments do come from our ableist society, but also from misunderstanding, or a society that is hyper-focused on appearance. Or all of that simulateneously.

Even my own relatives get angry with me when I try to discuss my hand or anything related to ableism because it's something I should be ashamed of!!!! NO. no. N. O. NO!!!!!!!!!!!! As if we're supposed to just sit back, hide it from plain sight and "manage" it.

It's only after therapy that I've realized how much I've internalized everything and how it does connect to other problems with myself and the self-hate I used to struggle with and I am going to get over it. Self compassion goes a long way. And if that doesn't work I will live out of spite for all the shit that I've gotten over the years.

This is the hand I was born with; the hand I will have for the rest of my life; the hand that has chronic pain; the hand that has made some tasks difficult; BUT IT'S MY HAND!

TLDR; I don't ""suffer"" with ABS (Amniotic Band Syndrome), it's just another part of who I am and I'm done with trying to obscure it. I may only have a full thumb on my left hand but I have enough of my middle finger to throw it up when the situation calls for it. I've found peace with that. From now on I will absolutely wave my hand around like it's the shit. Because I'm done trying to fucking conform. DONE.

This is also a big FUCK YOU to a French doctor that tried to convince me that "beauty is pain" and that I should have gotten a cosmetic hand prosthetic. Like if wanting cosmetic prostheses (and cosmetic surgeries) comes from a place within the individual, aka outside of pressure to conform or pressure from peers and this fucking pervasive culture then I'm all for it. But personally, none of it was ever about my needs. I'm now old enough to discern that I never needed it and I never will.

[brucewayneargento-moved]

To All My Fathers (Chapter 1)

Fic also avaliable on Ao3

TW: EXPLICIT DEPICTIONS OF LIFE OF A LEUKEMIA/CANCER PATIENT

Damian had definitely decided he would not wear a fanny pack. 

It didn’t matter that it was the most convenient and comfortable way to take a chemo pump iv from place to place. He’ll much rather attract attention with a backpack connected to a pump than to regress back to the eighties in the most horrendous fashion. Sure he might pick up unwanted attention from strangers but A) He could always stare at them back; B) He was past the time to care and C) He already didn’t have eyebrows so that was kind of a moot point.

The boy was currently seated at the med bed of the 666 room. (Drake had made several jokes about it, which Damian didn’t mind and in fact encouraged, because with his diagnosis came a morbid sense of humor and he was also glad at least one person still treated him like a human being). He was practicing violin while he could still hold it and also enjoying the fact that he was wearing actual comfortable clothes and not a paper robe that made his autism completely and utterly fucking lose it.

Some kids from the other rooms had come to see him perform and Damian loved to have an audience. Because he had an ego, not as much and not as evil as people usually thought, but still. Most of them were children younger than ten who just needed some entertainment that wasn’t a superhero. 

“This was Ode To Joy by Bethoveen,” Damian explained. The three children around him applauded. When they stopped he could still hear hands clapping, he looked up and his eyes met his father’s.

Bruce came closer to him and the kids left after being called by a nurse. Boy and man looked at each other for a few seconds. 

“Are you ready?” Bruce finally asked

Damian might have sounded insane if he said it outloud, but his father and Jon were very similar.

The blue eyes, the black hair and the fact that they both cried before or after entering a room with Damian in it, bonus points if he was being stabbed with a needle right at that moment, then you could see their eyes getting crystalized almost in slow motion.

And it’s not like Damian was annoyed by their emotions as one might have thought, it was more of a...sting, (man being stabbed with a needle on a daily basis was really taking a toll on him, wasn’t it?) like, something that hurt but it wasn’t enough for him to do anything about it more than to grit his teeth and power through it.

Numbness was apparently a common thing among patients. But Damian thought of himself as many stuff, but common wasn’t one of them

And perhaps his ego was the only thing keeping him optimistic, perhaps thinking that he was too special to die alone in a hospital room was what made him stronger against the whole GvHD thing.

Leslie had told him that he was lucky to find a donor that was relatively near, in Kansas nonetheless, home of Superman and. So now he had just to keep up with the program: L-asparaginase,dexamethasone  and vincristine several times a day and wait.

Or at least that was the original plan.

“Yes.” he finally answered, standing up.

*

When all you receive in your life is gaslighting, you don’t even notice the medical gaslighting.

Maybe it was the whole “being indoctrinated since birth by an ecoterrorist death cult” thing but his ability to exercise his free will hadn’t been particularly developed.

 The bruises? Vigilante stuff. The fever? Probably the flu. Weight loss? Maybe he had gotten a growth spurt that just made him seem thinner…He had to throw up blood to even be admitted into a hospital.

The Wayne-Head name allowed him the finest  care probably ever known to man. "Nepotism: where you can die comfortably" that was an actual thing he had said while high on sedatives. He could only imagine his mother's face upon hearing it.

When he woke up both his parents were there. Damian could immediately tell something was wrong. His father was crying and his mother was stoic. 

"Oh, ok, so I'm dying" He said, grabbing their attention. Both Talia and Bruce turn to look at him. Damian tried to sit and noticed his arm was cranked to an IV. "Oh, I'm actually dying."

"Do not speak like that." His mother warned him with a threatening voice. Bruce kept quiet but still with a face wet with tears.

Next to them there was a third person. She was an older woman with gray hair and glasses. Doctor Thompkins, his father's godmother. She went over to the medbed and sat on the foot. Damian crossed his arms. She was a smart woman but had the annoying habit of treating him like a perpetual child. Probably the closest thing he had to an actual grandmother.

"Damian," she fixed her glasses and looked at the clipboard she was holding. "Your blood count is in the 200.000 white cells."

Damian's eyes slightly widened, which covertly hid how much of a gut punch he just received. 

"I can't have leukemia," he simply stated. There was a slight pained sound coming from his father's mouth which made Damian look him in the eye…that's how he knew it was true.

He started to grin which turned into a giggle which turned into a laugh.

Bruce and Talia looked at him with worry.

"Denial is very common," Leslie stated, trying to remain calm and also sooth Damian up. The teen kept laughing and then stopped to talk.

He had tears in his eyes. "I mean... so much for being an eugenics frankenstein monster, I've failed at even that."

The rest of that afternoon was a blur for him. Except for the being stabbed  with needles on his spine parts, that one he remembered very well. Since he had such a high tolerance for pain, the fact that he was casually hurt was news to him.

*

Of course Dick had been the first one to enter the room.

Damian had hoped that he wasn’t but after all it made sense that he did, he was his Robin. He could imagine him punching a wall and screaming when he heard the news. That mental  image didn’t upset him at all, clearly.

Damian was pretending to watch TV where his oldest brother entered the scene. He had prepared what he was going to say. How he was okay and how he was too stubborn to die anyways. But all of that went to hell when Dick entered the room and immediately ran up to hug him.

All of the walls he had been building up until now feel down hard. Damian just had to press his head against Dick’s shoulder for the tears to start running.

*

"I want a falafel." 

They were in the hospital room after a particularly hard session of chemo. His brother was on a chair in front of him reading a book and not looking at him.

"You just threw up on my shoe," he reminded Damian.

"I'm here for a good time, not a long time"

Dick rolled his eyes, now accustomed to the fact that his sibling had developed a morbid sense of humor because of his condition. Right at that moment the door opened and Doctor Thompkins entered the room.

"How are we?" She asked.

"Great." Both responded almost robotically. Damian gagged.

"I wanted to talk to you, Dick, about the bone marrow transplant."

"Why not talk to me?" Damian intervened. "I'm the one whose blood isn't working."

"Because you're still a child," Dick answered as a matter of fact. And despite everything he was glad his older brother at least now had the courtesy of treating him like he had always done. "What's the prognosis, doc?"

"We're considering the umbilical cord transfusion." Leslie explained. "But you will have to ask my godson first.

"Why would he need to...wait...Selina's pregnant?!" Damian asked but then he threw up again. "That wasn't meant to signify my feelings on the matter."

Leslie continued. “But that will still take a few months and...I’m afraid we don’t have that much time.”

Damian pretended to gag and looked down at the bucket, all to avoid looking at Dick’s face.

“But the good news is that we found a match.” 

*

Damian hadn’t even had time to think about that sentence before he blurted it out, but now it was there, out in the open. For everyone to hear.

“I want to have children.” 

Everyone being an hyperbole since Alfred was the one who was actually there. His father had to go to patrol so the butler had the night shift to take care of Damian while at the hospital to which the boy was appreciative of. Except for this moment when he was mentally slapping himself for letting on too much. Side effects of being raised to be a killing machine.

“I...did not know that.” Alfred admitted. Up to twelve seconds ago he had been standing up listing the symptoms of chemo at Damian’s request since he didn’t trust Leslie to do it without sugarcoating it and his father might burst into tears in an attempt to do so. Damian had been listening attentively before Alfred mentioned that it was possible that he might wind up being infertile.

The boy simply turned around to the other side of the bed and sighed as tears left his eyes.

*

Dear Damian

I could not be more content that you are receiving the transplant that you so much need. I wish I could accompany you on the journey to Kansas, but sadly Lady Talia needs me to look out after Bialya...I wish you nothing but a rapid recovery. I implore you to remember that you are not alone in this, to remember that there is a plethora of people that adore you with all of their souls and that you will always have their help. Even when you do not want it.

Best Wishes

Ravi.

*

Damian looked at Alfred who glanced at him for a nanosecond in the mirror of the car. He knew he was the most active ally he had in this game. Since he not only advocated to his father for this trip to be possible but he also was the only person to always show his compassion in spite of if he actually deserved it or not. Bruce was next to him while Richard sat next to Damian and assesed his condition.

They stayed in comfortable silence in the car with only the sound of “dad music” on the radio for background noise. Damian allowed himself to close his eyes and to feel the soothing bounce of the car against the pavement on his skin...

They stopped suddenly after a while and Damian opened his eyes, he frowned in confusion as Alfred parked the car in front of the airport.

“What are we doing here?” he asked curiously.

 Alfred turned around to look at him. “Your father , Master Richard and I thought It’ll be a good idea to fly in a friend of yours.”

Damian’s frown deepened. “A friend?” 

Suddenly a tap was heard on the window. They both turned around to look at the front window. It was being slightly knocked on it by a man with a white cane and a bald head who was smiling at them.

“Ravi?” Damian rubbed his eyes and felt them watering up.

Damian knew that he could never make up to Ravi for being responsible for losing his vision. And he also knew that in spite of that the man would still love him unconditionally. 

That could be proven easily by the letters that he had written to him when he found out about his diagnosis…

All his father figures were here, suddenly he felt an internal strength he hadn’t felt in a while.

[newhologram]

Stay, Spoonies

I'm still getting more and more messages from newly diagnosed people who are terrified and veteran spoonies who have suffered for a long time as well. I'm so glad that being public and super vocal about all of this has helped others, but it hurts to know that there are so many people with these illnesses that cause so much suffering and that doctors, our society, the government, and even family and friends can be unreliable in supporting sick people who need help and love. This makes the suffering worse. 

Even when we're super pro-active about our self-care and do our best with mindfulness, meditation, and use various coping methods to get through the day, we can still end up suffering a lot. We are at the mercy of our illnesses but we still try. You guys know how nutty I am when it comes to my schedule and pain management routine. If you've ever worked with me on set you've seen my Bumblebee backpack survival kit, full of things to manage every symptom, from the pain to the depression to the on-the-verge-of-having-a-meltdown-from-overstimlation. And you also know that I'm very comfortable talking about this broken mecha that I have to live in. 

But just because I'm loud about it doesn't mean everyone else is. A lot of people suffer in silence because of everything I mentioned. Trying to get help, be heard, be understood, be supported—it causes a lot of heartache. Doctors shrug and patronize you. Insurance companies deny treatment that would help ease your symptoms and instead go for what's cheaper and doesn't even put a dent in your symptoms (and usually, makes some unbearably worse). Lots of your friends ignore it. It's too awkward and they have their own lives going on. Family doesn't understand it, and so they fight with you about it. They fight with you and make you feel horrible for being sick. They make you feel like you're just an awful, pathetic person for being sick and not being able to live normally and "make more money" and you always have to hear about how "you need to be moved out by next year" even though they know you can barely work and they see you throwing up all the time and always in bed in pain. A lot of spoonies end up scared, hopeless, desperate, and angry. We hate ourselves, we hate our bodies, we wonder why they were ever born, we rage that people just won't ever fucking get that we are not in control of these illnesses. You wouldn't fight with someone for not being able to "just be positive" until their tumors shrank into nothing. (Note: I'm actually a huge positivity advocate but the idea that it alone is some kind of cure is silly, it's part of a BALANCED spoonie self-care routine. It takes HARD WORK TO BE POSITIVE! It's hard shit, man, and I can't always do it and I crumble but that's why I have superglue, bitch)

We end up feeling very alone and we feel like people resent us for being sick, which is out of our control. We feel that we're a bother, a burden, we ruin other people's happiness because our bodies are sick and because we're not "strong enough" to just magically be able to smile our organ deficiencies away and "overcome" our differently functioning brains into line with a "normal" person's.  

It's scary. It scares me daily. Spoonies kill themselves and I need to be really very forward about that and not pussyfoot around it because it's really uncomfortable to talk about. SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE. The ones who are still here have had to work really, really hard to stay here. It becomes a very serious choice that we make BUT again, we're at the mercy of our flare ups, so there's this horrible fear of "will I end up having a flare up so bad and that lasts so long that I won't be able to take it anymore and I'll have such bad tunnel vision and depression and anger and guilt and see only the bad, only the pain, only the suffering, and then get into another huge fight with my family about my inability to get better, that out of desperation not only for my own relief to stop suffering, but to 'relieve' my family of the burden of having to provide for me because I may never, ever, ever be able to be a functional independent adult—that I do it? That I end it because I see no other solution? Because in that state I feel that my family will never be happy as long as I am alive and sick, so it's better to be dead and not able to be sick anymore so my family can save all of that money they spend on my medical bills and self-care supplies because I could barely work? What if I do that? I won't be able to undo it. It would be done. I would be gone and they would hurt forever and ever because I was too sick to see that and my perception of things got so warped that I actually seriously believed that me dying would make their lives better?" There is so much more to life than pain, even for those of us who have to face it each day.

Being sick hurts a lot. It hurts physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Most spoonies go through intense suicidal depression because trying to live life with your body working against you is like trying to keep a jet in the air while it's on fire. But that's just "normal" to us. That's our "normal" to be in pain. Imagine for a moment you could almost never be completely comfortable because you are sick every day. Your body is exhausted like you stayed up for 3 days straight, everything hurts, when the pain flares it's very hard to think, several of your organs have issues and cause more problems, even resting is hard because of this level of discomfort. And you have to save your sick days for when your illness is ER level bad or of course you won't be able to hold your part time minimum wage jobs that mostly go into medical expenses, now will you? 

This is every day for you but you have to make it your priority every single damn day to convince yourself that it's worth it being here and that life is strange but it's also beautiful and fun and you are valuable and irreplaceable and that as much as you suffer, there would be immeasurably more suffering if you decided to not be here. 

But it's not just about other people. Spoonies have to learn to be selfish to survive. We have to learn to say "no" a lot. No, I can't meet up for dinner after work, I need to rest. No, I can't meet that late, my pain will be too high and since I'll have to drive I won't be able to medicate and then I'll be worse off. No, I can't cover your shift, I'm having a bad flare up and I spend the past three days vomiting. No, I can't do you this favor right now, my body needs rest. 

It's okay to be selfish. But please stay. Do whatever you need to do to challenge your brain when it tries to tell you that everything would be better if you weren't around. Living sick is very hard. But it doesn't mean you can't live. 

[fatbottombucky]

Say Something *Steve Rogers x Reader*

Summary: Steve has to come to terms with that fact he can’t save everyone, not even you, and not even from yourself. Warnings/ Triggers: Self Harm, Depression, Mentions of suicide/ suicide attempt Characters: Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson Italics is a flashback

Inspired by the songs: Say Something - A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera &  Carry You Home - James Blunt (I used lyrics inspired by these songs)

Note: I kind of told myself I’d never write anything like this. That I’d keep how I felt out of my writing but I’ve always been an advocate of the only way to “feel free is to expose those feelings and let them free fall away”. Everything reader feels, says or does, is coming from a very real place. When I was 13 I did my first suicide attempt, obviously, it failed like the others. I had many friends try to “help” and “fix me”, it only hurt more when they realised there was nothing thy could do and didn’t want to stick around to see me succeed. I guess, if this doesn’t help others, it at least connects to someone and makes them realise that they’re not alone. My feelings haven’t changed, if anything I want to kill myself more and more every day, it’s just suppressed from medication and therapy. I’ve linked some suicide help lines websites at the end of this. - Rosalee

“You can’t save ‘em all, Cap. Not even her.”

Sam’s words echo through Steve’s head as they sat in the hospital hallway, two brews of black coffee in front of them. Steve toyed with the paper cup watching the steam float up into the air, the smell of hand sanitizer filling his senses and the smell of the blood? Of course, he was still wearing the shirt and jeans that he found you in.

He didn’t realise he was shaking till the hot coffee sloshed onto his hand, momentarily breaking him from his thoughts and Sam gently pried his strong grip from the paper cup. He was grateful Sam was here but yet, he could feel the pity stares! He was getting pitied, which he didn’t understand. He supposes it was the fact he felt like a failure, all of his efforts literally going down the drain in your shower.

You were getting better, so he thought. He truly believed you were, you seemed so happy and carefree when together, it was if things were truly looking up for you and he felt some sort of satisfaction that he was the one helping. Maybe that’s why it went from good to worse, he didn’t think you would relapse and eh got cocky? Maybe he’s cocky for blaming himself for your relapse. He didn’t know but he felt like he failed you in some form. As a friend and a boyfriend.

He tried not to let his mind drift; it only went back to a few hours ago. All he could see was red. So much, so much blood; he doesn't think he’s ever seen that much blood, ever.

Steve walked through the front door of your apartment, calling your name as he toed off his sneakers. He didn’t hear a reply and frowned; he could hear the shower running once he got to your room and could see the steam coming from under the small slither of the door. Not thinking too much of you showering he walked into your kitchen.

He slowly drank a glass of water a nagging feeling in his brain, he didn’t like the feeling, and he got it a lot when you spent too much time in the bathroom. It’s not that he didn’t have full faith in you; it’s just that he knew what your mind can do. He walked back to the door and knocked twice for precaution; you may be shaving, again the thought of a razor near you always made his heart flutter. He trusts you, of course. Does he?

“Y/N?” He spoke loud; he knew you’d be able to hear it over the shower. “Are you okay in there?” He didn’t get a reply or even hear a shuffling of the curtain. “I’m coming in!” He placed his hand on the door handle, frowning at the locked door.

You never locked the door. It was a fact; Nat and Sam have countless times walked in on you by accident because you just never locked doors. Without giving a second thought Steve broke the handle off and pushed against the door till it cracked under pressure and fell to the floor. He huffed and looked up, that’s when Steve’s mind blurs because it was an out of body experience. He just stopped and stared, it was only for a few seconds but it felt longer.

Then finally his body caught up to his mind, he was quick to action, almost stumbling against the wood of the door as he ran into the bathroom. The shower was on blasting hot water against your limp body that was folded against the corner of the shower cubical. The water was sloshing away red water down the drain, so much red.

And he distinctively remembers saying; “Y/N, wake up! C’mon, baby. Wake up,” you didn’t wake up, not even when he went under the spray of the water and lifted up your body, blood dripping onto his jeans and his hands holding pressure to your wrists. “You’re not leaving me, not like this.”

“Say something!”

Only the blood wasn’t just pouring from your wrist but your thighs too, he couldn’t count how many cuts there was, mostly because the mess the water was creating was making it a watery, red blur. From the state of his clothes he guessed, it was enough. It was enough.

Then he remembers the ambulance showing up but he doesn’t remember phoning them. They walked into the doorway, seeing Steve holding your body to his under the spray of the shower and then he remembers someone putting a blanket over him, asking if he’d like to change but he decides against it. And someone must have phoned Sam, or maybe he did.

“Mr Rogers?” Steve is abruptly pulled back from his thoughts and looks up to see a Doctor in front of him. “We have news on Y/N Y/L/N; would you care to follow me?” Steve stands up silently with Sam beside him.

They’re both silent as they listen to Doctor Matthews talk, it’s just noise to Steve at this point. They’re walking to the intensive care unit, his blood is pumping so hard he can’t hear anything over it apart from his heart picking up its’ pace, he can hear the muffled voice of Sam asking a question. Everything works in slow motion almost, the big doors open and they walk pass this depressing waiting room to another door, a clipboard with your name printed in black pen on the outside.

He opened the door silently and gestured for Steve and Sam walk in first, Steve’s heart raced inside his chest as he walked inside the small cold room. The curtains were shut and the light was on casting a warm lighting onto the bed, a machine beeping letting them know you were somewhat stable. Wires all connected to you to different machines, bandages wrapped delicately around your wrists going up your forearm, he didn’t even know you had cuts that far up.

You were still so pale, so lifeless. You looked fragile, if he touched you, you’d break and maybe you would. He was stuck in the corner of the room just watching as machines helped your breathing, wondering what he has done wrong. The doctor reads a list of what they did to help you, how long they think you have till you wake up and telling Steve maybe, you should consider therapy. He eventually leaves Steve and Sam with you in the room. Sam gently pushes Steve to sit down beside your bed as he walks out of the room to get more coffee.

Steve remains staring blankly at you, he doesn’t know what to say or do. And he’s sorry he couldn’t get to you, not fast enough anyway. If maybe he answered the phone earlier this morning, he did text saying he was in a meeting, but maybe you needed him more. You definitely needed him more.

He’s going through every conversation with you the past week to find some sign, something he missed that led to this but he couldn’t. He knew how depression works, he knows that there are no warning signs or words that really stick out, let him know that if he paid attention he may have stopped this from happening. He knows that it can just happen; sometimes it’s a flick of a switch in the brain that you can’t control. Sometimes it’s just urges to cut, sometimes it urges to be left alone and just cry, and then there’s this. This urge to leave. To just stop and have it all end.

And for the most part, he thought it had gone away. He always had an inkling it may creep back but he thought he was strong enough, he thought he was enough for you to make it stop. He shouldn’t be making this about him but he can’t help it. He can’t help but feel mad, you were going to leave him and everyone behind, and he felt kind of sick.

“I think, when she wakes up, we need to be easy to her.” Steve frowns as Sam places the cup of coffee on the side beside Steve, sitting in a chair on the opposite side nursing a cup of tea. “We have to be gentle, I know you. I know you’re mad at yourself and possibly, her. But we have to be patient.”

Steve sighs lightly but nods, he hadn’t been through anything like this, this time with you felt different than the last (which was almost two years ago). Having Sam here was good, Sam would know what to say.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sam begins, “what if I did this, what if I said this, nothing would have changed from what happened today. You can’t think about what if’s right now.”

Steve sighs gently and looks back at you, “what if she really wanted to. Sam, what if me saving her wasn’t actually saving her at all. I’m just preventing her from-“

Sam cuts him off. “No, don’t think like that. Don’t give up on her, you can’t now. It’s a long road to recovery for them, for anyone with her mental illnesses. They relapse; they have good days and bad days, granted their bad days are fucking shit days. Right now, she’s gonna feel like she failed, not just her suicide but everyone around her. And we, us, are gonna have to let her know that it’s okay. That her good days are to come.” Steve just sighs and slumps back against the seat. “I’m gonna back to yours and get you some clothes; you’ll just make her upset looking like that.”

Steve is left sat in the hospital room staring at the blankets covering your body, your hands rest above the sheets and bandages wrapped securely. Curiosity gets the better of him and he leans over grabbing the medical examination at the end of your bed, his eyes glance over the messy handwriting describing the self-inflicted injuries. Also describing a few cuts that are a few weeks old. How did he never notice them?

He sighs; he blamed the bitterness of the weather in New York for your long sleeves and baggy jumpers. He blamed the coldness of your apartment that you wanted to be under the covers when having sex. Signs he should have noticed but overlooked, he should have known something was wrong but you did say in the beginning, you had years of practising at covering things up. Makeup, excuses, you had everything down.

You didn’t want him to know. You didn’t want him to come to your rescue. You specifically picked a time when you knew he was busy, only Tony didn’t want to have the meeting any more than Steve did, so it was cut short. You wanted this. And Steve took that away from you, and he felt everything leave him. All sense of thought and feeling, he felt empty at the revelation dawning on him.

“Say something?” Steve sucked in a breath and looked up, you had weary, and tear filled eyes as you stared at Steve. He didn’t know how long he was in thought for but Sam still hadn’t returned so it can’t have been for too long.  

Before Steve can speak a nurse comes through, “Oh, you’re awake. I’m just here to put new bandages around your wrists, sweetie, that okay?” You meekly nod, no strength to really decline anyway.

Steve remains silent and watching intently as the woman unwraps the gauzes, grabbing some cream that must be to help stop infection she softly, rubs in circular motions on your wrists. Asking you how much it hurts, if she is wrapping too tightly. She informs you that she’ll be back in an hour to place new bandages on your thighs, and also she’ll let the doctor know you’re awake.

You’re left in awkward silence with Steve; you look over to him tiredly. He seems to be having an internal battle with himself like he has something to say but he doesn’t know how to word it.

“Say something.” You mutter again, your voice coming out all crackly.

“I don’t know what to say,” Steve admits in a rush, “what do you want me to say?” he asked you, looking at you pleadingly. You shrugged, looking away the pain of failing him too much to even look him in the eyes for longer than ten minutes. “I thought I was watching you breathing for the last time when I found you.” His voice is soft, almost a whisper.

The confession hangs in the air for a few seconds. You let it settle in how scared he must have been, you didn’t plan for him to find you, and you didn’t really think of who would find you. Maybe you should have but you didn’t really think for anyone at the time. You notice Steve’s clothing and grimace, you didn’t want him to be the one to find you, not again.

“I feel like I owe you and explanation but I don’t know what to say,” you tell him and Steve remains silent. “You were so happy, so happy. I didn’t want to bring you down, you don’t deserve to be unhappy, Stevie. I tried so hard, I really did. I was happy, I swear, I still somewhat was. It was just all too much. I couldn’t-you don’t- I just wanted it to be over.” You cried, “And I… am feeling so small and I was over my head. You’re just so you and I am this mess of a person. You were so proud, so proud of me and I don’t want to drag you through any of this.”

Steve remains silent, watching you cry and he wants to reach out, hold you and tell you it will all be okay. He’s not sure if you’ll believe that, he’s not sure he believes that. “I hate we always end up here, Y/N.” Steve speaks up, “I thought the last time was the final time, I thought we got through this.” You don’t say anything in response, and he shouldn’t but he becomes angry. “Say something,” he commands and you flinch. “I’m giving up on you…” it comes out as a small whisper but you hear it.

He regrets it instantly, as soon as the words leave his mouth. He sighs and leans back against the uncomfortable chair, you look at Steve as he shut his eyes, you let out a few shaky puffs of air and with all the strength you have reach for his hand. Holding it and he looks at you, you give a little smile.

“I can’t keep watching you die,” he tells you softly and you nod lightly. “I… swallow my pride, I can’t save everyone, and I know that but don’t make me admit defeat on you. Just say something…”

“What do you want me to say?”

“That you’re okay, we’re okay and after we sign you out, I’ll carry you home to finish watching Sherlock on Netflix.” You smile and nod.

“I’m okay, Steven. We’re gonna be okay, and when we sign me out, I’ll get a piggy back ride home to get doughnut’s for when we watch Sherlock.” He nodded with a smile, squeezing your hand as you go back into silence.

You fall back asleep holding Steve’s hand and he gently pries his out, standing up as the same nurse comes in, giving him a gentle smile. “Oh, she fell back asleep. You should go home and get cleaned up; we’ll call if she wakes up before you’re back.” Steve nods lightly as she leaves again.

“As strong as you are, I’m not. You’re the one that I love and I’m saying goodbye,” he leans down and kisses your head before leaving; no one even second glances at his clothing. He leaves the hospital before Sam arrives again, clothing in hands for Steve.

A note on his chair from Steve saying, “You’re right, I can’t save them all. She can only save herself if she wanted to.”

(Link One, Link two and Link three. So, I’m really nervous about posting this. I’ve never been one to post something like this, I hope this connects with people the way I want it to. My intention isn’t to hurt or trigger anyone, I hope this helps people realise they’re not alone. And it isn’t your fault people walk away from you, it’s because they aren’t strong enough themselves. I’ve had people walk out for this reason, I don’t blame them or myself, I blame my illness more. It doesn’t just make me sick, it makes the people around me sick also. I love everyone of you, please seek help or talk to someone. - Rosalee)

Tagging list: @girl-next-door-writes @22ifyoukeepmenextoyou  @t3-daria-todo @sebby-staan @skylark50 @thegoddamnfeels @gillibean9 @sergeantjamesbarnes107th @full-of-sins-not-tragedies @fxcknbarnes @broncos5soslover @say-my-name-assbut @fangirlwithasweettooth @buckyismybbz @phanalamatrash @charlotteblanden @wholockiand@momscapris @mashroom-burrito @firewolfkelly @winterboobaer

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[divinationcentral]

Journal.

I have learned one thing in my life: that people will let you down. 

If you cannot learn to trust yourself, life will become very hard...

That includes trusting your own decisions good or bad; vice-versa: good & bad lol... 

We have to learn, in life, that mistakes are reversible. That bad plans can be turned into experiences that teach us what good or better plans are, and what they look like as they reflect in our lives. 

We don’t just give up because we want to, despite how bad we want to. 

Perseverance is an art that has not yet matured to its full potential within me...I find myself defeating my own progress, almost daily, if I can be honest. 

My habits aren’t constructive. Nothing I do from the moment I get up from when I go to sleep is helpful: I don’t sleep on time, I don’t wake up and eat breakfast or at least have something to drink...Nope. I stay up past a time that I’m supposed to go to sleep, knowing full well that if I sleep, it’s going to provide me the adequate amount of sleep I need to wake up refreshed the next day to do things... 

I wake up literally minutes before I have to roll over onto my desk and work. 

Did I have time to use the restroom? Nope. Did I have time to kiss my pet Hermes (she’s a birb) in the morning? Nope. Did I make myself breakfast, go over my emails, or even CHECK my personal Email for any good news? 

NOPE. I woke up, essentially started my day late, woke up starving and feeling sick to my stomach, and just plunged into the day. 

Did I finish it? Yes. Was it to the best of my abilities? No. 

I am not, and I don’t let myself be at full capacity. 

So...in other words: I have not seen who I am when I am at full potential. 

Often I have thought I needed help. And I did. I remember being in a place in my life not too long ago where I needed a crisis intervention (back in September of 2019). 

I couldn’t eat properly, I wouldn’t even function through varying day-to-day tasks...Like sleeping, brushing my teeth, even showering was a huge monumental achievement (and it would hurt, my body was sensitive to everything, touch, rest, lack of sleep, exercise, food...). I couldn’t hold a job down, because my anxiety would cause me to break down on a daily basis, crying and freaking out about work loads or people making fun of me. 

I had traumatic experiences like losing my job and my boss threatening me. I injured my knee and had surgery and was jobless for 6 months before I could start the road to financial recovery... 

In that time, if you’re wondering, what did I do to remedy any of this? 

Well - I scrambled. A lot. I sold personal items to make up money I didn’t have for bills I needed to pay off. I had to find my own attorney to help me with a stupid worker’s compensation case I didn’t want to see through but now have to (yes, I am currently still in the thick of it, and that was back in 2019)…I jumped from customer service job to customer service job because I had to (and I still have a customer service role, that pays okay, but doesn’t exactly let me live the life I wanted), and I tried getting help for my mental instability by joining mental health programs and seeing various clinicians and therapists. 

I jumped from agency to agency before someone hired me. And before I could even consider a job, I had to go through educating myself and gaining a certificate to seem viable to any of these companies (that was while I was jobless and getting medical help for my knee injury). 

In that time I was still trying to heal my injury, and was going from medical facility to medical facility trying to get it to a point where I could have surgery (this took nine months of absolute torture dealing with the insurance company that wouldn’t take responsibility for my injury). 

I kept meeting really unstable people who pretended to be my friends to get what they wanted out of me (which was made only very clear when they decided I was all used up for what they needed me to do: which was be an emotional punching bag of sorts, but offer absolutely no commitment or support to me when I needed it - mind you: I was DISABLED physically, emotionally, AND even financially, and I STILL found it in me to help these people - I wasted my time, my money, my resources, my stability, and not at one point did they go: I am so much better off, this person actually needs me, not the other way around). 

Why did I entertain these people? 

I was so fucking lonely. I had lost all my friends that I had for years because they were terrible for me, and I terrible for them.  I spent the loneliest years of my life not talking to ANYBODY. Being in a laborious job that I felt so worthless doing for five/six years. I developed zero social skills, and I feared everybody. I got myself to a point after finishing all my therapy courses and surgery to jump back into that loop again, unfortunately. 

I also had a shit relationship with an ex who was emotionally and mentally manipulative. Lied all the time and was inconsistent with me, blamed me for being upset about very valid things. And I continued to have bosses who were either crazy, creepy, or just downright mean. 

In none of this tumultuous time did I EVER have a break from advocating for myself or did I ever get the goddamn sleep and rest that I needed (until I was basically blacking out and telling people to leave me alone for just a few moments of my day). It felt like someone was always tugging at me. Saying: Me, me, me - me next PLEASE. 

I had to keep saying: STOP. GO FUCK YOURSELF, only when I finally realized what they were doing to me. 

That isn’t life. 

Every time I sought a few weeks of a break...it was thwarted by the maniacal, cynical people in my life. Throwing their baggage and past experiences onto me. 

Either that or my family was creating new freaking life altering moments in them. 

It was terrible. I couldn’t find the goddamn respite I wanted. 

I never healed emotionally. 

Am I happy? No. No, I am still not happy. 

I got better at managing practically (like my money and being patient with my financial circumstances, and medical procedures, even dealing with unhealthy and unbalanced people, or bad coworkers, and bad freaking receptionists and doctors...see how its still me adapting to these things though?). 

But none of these skills are to the capacity I know I should be in them...I’m not mastering anything. I’m just flailing, trying to get by... 

Steps I’m making taking now to turn my life around? I don’t know. I asked myself seriously one day: What are you doing? Are you really even managing? You can’t even cook yourself a week’s long worth of meals. You wake up and you maybe have breakfast and you have lunch if your family made it...

I realized, even though I’m as financially stable as I can be right now, given my current circumstances - absolutely none of it is going towards making me healthy. 

I waste it. I still waste my time. I still waste my resources, my energy, and my own patience. I continue to entertain negative or bad people in my life. 

Why? I don’t know. What was all that therapy for I wondered lol...and so I keep seeking. Seeking answers to my own instability. 

That said, here is what I decided to do about it. 

I made a list, and I’m sticking by it: 

I’m seeing a psychiatrist. Who is willing to help me figure out the emotional imbalances of what is going on in my head (in terms of chemistry - thankfully she’s really smart lol). 

I’m seeing a bunch of other doctors to figure out how to help me with my current medical conditions. One being that I have two fucked up legs/knees now, because the other is compensating for the left knee surgery I had that made me shorter in one leg! Wee...lol. 

I’m trying to join a nutritional wellness program, and a massage therapy program so I can just...I just need major improvement there. Both because my digestive issues are bad and my pain management is terrible. I don’t know what to cook for myself because everything makes my stomach react AND hurt (I have leftover issues from a bad infection that could have caused me cancer if I didn’t take the medication to clear it in time). 

I blocked and got rid of a lot of negative people. People who just kept pushing their goddamn ideals on me. I’m not you. Stop treating me like I need to fit a mold. I’m fine as I am. I’m happy with who I turned out to be, what I like, and how I spend my time. You don’t need to belittle me to achieve your goals or your dreams. Why not do that to yourself and see how that feels quite frankly - I’m sure you wouldn’t get too far. Why? BECAUSE ITS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE. You continue to waste your time on people when you decide to be petty. And even worse: when you’re petty to yourself. And you throw that crap onto me, because you get tired of treating yourself this way. LEARN. Learn who you are. That’s your responsibility - not mine. 

I paid for a really cheap online art class~ it was discounted c: and it’s just to reset my creativity and my passion for doing art~ because I love to draw. <3 I have always loved to draw. 

I want to work on a few designs for stickers I’d like to start selling~ and even design my own plushie! 

Financially? Idk. I’m still hoping for a miracle lol. But we’ll see. I need my health first. I realized that finally. 

What is my point? 

I didn’t fail me. 

I have never failed me. 

I have always picked myself up, did the work, cried about it later, and STILL pushed me to do something. 

I still asked myself to achieve, even when I really didn’t want to. 

I got up, brushed my teeth, took a shower, and went to all my scary therapy appointments, all of my horrifying doctors visits, and still went to work to get yelled at by people I would never meet who would flat out tell me I was worth nothing. 

It took its toll every day - and I still found the strength to do these things. And I kept changing them, by the way. 

I kept changing jobs. I kept changing friends. I kept changing my financial circumstances. 

I’m finally at a job that allows me more leisure, even if I deal with the one or two petty clients of the day (sometimes its like seven, lets be real lol)…but I learned. 

I taught me. People helped. The right ones did, but because I decided who those people were going to be and who or what I wouldn’t tolerate anymore. 

END OF STORY. 

[yesithoughtthat-blog]

It’s OK to quit your job

Maybe it was when I sat at my desk that I realized it, or in line at Pret and feeling the urge burning in my throat, clouding my mind, numbing my hands. 

“everyone cries -- I’m just an easy crier.” I wasn’t ashamed of crying, crying is in my blood, it’s the first way I usually come to express my (almost always) overwhelming emotions. So when I casually strolled into the bathroom at Pret, which I knew would soon become my safehaven, I immediately burst into tears as a way of relieving all the emotions building up. I wasn’t necessarily overwhelmingly sad, but I knew I could afford a little meltdown before I had to head back into my first day of work, and why not? It would give me relief and then I could pick myself back up and continue on my way. I think it’s funny how whenever I cry, I always look at myself in the mirror during the midst of my breakdown. I’m always surprised by how I look even though I’ve literally seen myself cry a million times. Just like, wow, your really deep in some emotions right now, huh. I was going to type, “this bitch really is ugly af when she cries” but I’m working on reducing my use of self-depricating humor. 

So going back to my breakdown, I’m in the mirror, crying, realizing my foundation is being wiped away with my tears, fuck I didn’t pack my foundation so I’ll just blot my face when I get back to the office and hope there aren’t obvious tear tracks on my face. I don’t exactly remember if I felt relief, maybe just relief that I had a moment to not pretend I was ok, but the sadness was still there. I had had a stressful morning, me and my dad had missed our train, fast-walked to my building, I was exhausted from not sleeping (stress and anxiety, ofc), I had barely ate (because not eating when I’m stressed is a great habit, ofc) and now I couldn’t stop the thoughts coming into my head.

The thoughts. Like I miss being at college, I miss my friends, I can’t believe I’m an adult now. The thing about having OCD is my mind tends to go to extremes, tends to believe in the worst case scenario, tends to make me, or at least try, the most miserable I can be. Thankfully it’s all kind of muted and hazy thanks to my antidepressant, my dear dear antidepressant Viibryd. And reading this now I am remembering I never took it today. 

OK back from that. So, yea, I missed being at college, I was exhausted, I could not believe that I would have to repeat this whole day again tomorrow. That drived me nuts too. I hate waking up early with a passion. Again, stems from staying up late because anxiety then it becomes a habit then it starts to interfere with my life, as do all self-destructive habits that come along with mental illnesses. And on top of that, starting a new job is just stressful in its itself! So I had all of these seemingly nice people welcoming me, I had a promising job, but I was miserable. I was silently crying at my desk, I was barely able to concentrate on my job, but I figured it’s pass, that I needed to give myself time to adjust and that I could push through it like I had everything else. 

And thennnnn the next day came. Let me preface this by interjecting that when I say I have an “anxiety disorder” (because OCD is usually met with a face that I can tell is thinking “well I have no idea what that it is but it sounds unpleasant”), they (anyone I tell), is usually thinking that I am anxious over the standard things. Like, oh, I’m anxious people won’t like me, or I’ll have a lot of work, which yea, I was. But also, OCD gives me alot of other stuff to worry about. So just going through about my usual day, I can list off the top of my head what I’d be worried about. Like, I get out of the car and say bye to my mom, and I think “What if this is the last time I see her,” which is not a fun thing to think. And then I wait for the train and I think “what if I passed out right now and then I fell on the tracks, or I tried to get on the train and I fall through the gap” or then I get on the train and think “what if the train gets stuck AND THEN i pass out on the train or I have an anxiety attack” AND THEN i get to penn and I think “what if i passed out in front of all these people or get an anxiety attack” AND THEN i walk to work and that’s when the vertigo starts, or the dissociation, or the clammy hands or dry mouth or all of the above and I’m thinking “all you have to do is walk in a straight line, just walk to work” and I can feel the fuzziness in my hands, I can feel it all over my fucking skin and I feel like it’s someone else looking through my eyes and I just can’t grasp if it’s me looking out or if it’s me thinking about thinking and if I’m really there and am I losing my mind or am I imagining my vision going slightly shifty, slightly hazy to make me nervous but not to put me in any danger, just uncomfortable enough to put some sweat on the back on my neck and twitch my hands in my pocket, picking at the same piece of skin next to my thumbnail over and over until it’s bleeding and I have to suffocate it. I have to suffocate the thoughts and I have to get to work on time but I’m so stressed I’m so. fucking. stressed.

And then I get to work. And it doesn’t stop. And mind you, this is my second day! And of course, the second day I cried again, silently weeping at my desk. Of course this job involved the two things I hated, public speaking and flying. it was almost laughable. I actually did laugh, me and my therapist later on. My whole job was giving presentations to clients (middle-aged, stoic faced, insurance or investment clients), and FLYING to different states to give these presentations. Maybe by myself, maybe with a coworker. And I knew 100% I couldn’t do that. So why would I stay? Quitting right before I was supposed to give a huge presentation was obviously not a good idea. But to even think about the work I was doing right now, at that moment, at my desk bored as fuck and feeling so inferior to everyone around me working on computer science and business, which is probably not an accurate but yes how I did feel thought, and then to be stressed, to just want to catch my breath. I knew I had to quit. I knew I was pushing myself too hard. My mom knew it, we had looked at each other before I had gotten out of the car and I had known that fuck, this was going to be hard wasn’t it. So on top of all this stress was my good old friend vertigo popping back into my life, and I’m sitting at my bosses desk and were listening in on a meeting and I feel the floor shift. I had felt it before too when I had gone to the bathroom and that sometimes happens when I sit for too long (and meanwhile as I’m peeing my coworker is brushing her teeth because she had forgot to this morning, if anyone wants an idea of what adult life really is like), and anyways, I’m at her desk and I feel the floor shift. Up, down, tilting side to side like I’m on a boat and I start to feel a little uneasy. And I cannot wait for this fucking meeting to be over. For this client to just shut up already the software is fine, do you really need to understand that part Kathy can I please just leave already, so I’m essentially just staring at the desk at this point and then my boss asks me if I have any questions and I :) of course do not have any, I’m great, awesome, thanks! And I get back to my desk and S.S. Anxiety is fast away on its course, taking me up and down and downnnnn and up and I am freaking the fuck out, naturally. This happened to me before, so it’s not a new feeling, it’s probably my birth control (which is another long story) so I of course then begin to realize -- how am I walking back to Penn. And that fills me with dread. A lot of dread. And after about 20 minutes of deliberation I meekly walk into the girl’s office next to mine, HR, because I guess that’s where you ask to leave early? Who knows. And i ask her if i can leave early and I can feel the tears wanting to surface, I’m embarassed and she tells me I have to ask my boss and I do noooot want to do that. So I sit back at my desk and I’m trying to do some deep breaths, trying to calm down and it eventually it passes! Thank god it passes. And thank god it finally becomes 6 and I start walk to back to penn and I get in the first cab i see because i have had a long day and I deserve this thank you very much. And the cab driver is super nice, telling me how to get to penn because he can tell i have no idea where I’m going, poor girl. And i get to penn and I get on a 6:20 train and i close my eyes and almost miss my stop. But it’s ok because I’m finally home. 

Fast forward the next 2 days, I’m home sick with vertigo, I go to a primary doctor and then an ENT and get prescribed medication that helps. I think my boss is mad at me but I’ve got other fish to fry. I go in monday, I try my hardest, and it’s too much. And that’s what I want to get at. Life is not linear. Just because your “supposed” to do something doesn’t mean you have to. I took a year off of college, even though I wasn’t “supposed” to, and I will never regret it, I am so fucking thankful and grateful I did. And when I sent my resignation letter in later that day, I knew I would be grateful I did.

It’s OK to not follow the line people try to paint you. To take a break, to take care of yourself. My happiness and health comes first. I will be OK not having this job, with finding something else, what other job, I do not know as of right now. But for now, I am going to commit to working on things I have wanted to for a whileeeee, like working out! and continuing to improve how I manage my emotions, because that will always be an up and down situation I can work on. I ranted alot to my friends about this, but I also googled “quitting job bc of anxiety” and reading the 3 other blog posts I found made me feel a little less alone, and I’m a huge advocate of speaking out about mental health, so hopefully someone else out there reads this and knows they aren’t alone too. You’ll be ok. Trust me.

[crazythatcounts]

So I need to rant a little bit and this isn't directed at any one person in particular but it's definitely been a thing I've noticed over the past little bit and it's driving me up a wall

Sometimes, you need to get in there and help yourself.

Now look, there's like, the shitty version of "why not just do it" that neurotypicals use and that's not what I mean. I'm not advocating not getting help or not seeking friends to help you or not getting advice or not seeing a therapist/getting meds/doing right by you. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I AM saying is there are points in a person's life when they're having trouble and someone has handed them all they need to get what they need to get done done - and then comes the point where they actually have to DO it.

And I have seen a lot of people struggling with that particular aspect of things in my friends recently and it's kind of driving me a little crazy. In mental health, in dating, with parents, in lots of respects, and it's not just one person but like four separate people, unrelated, just-- not helping themselves. And I get it, life is hard. Helping yourself is the hardest part. But when a friend gives you all the advice you need to get a real girlfriend, and you IGNORE that advice to do all the same things you've been doing and then complain about it more like you didn't just brush off what would have probably worked for nothing, then people lose sympathy for you. Like, you know your way didn't work the first 400 times you tried it, and you did good and sought advice and that advice was sound as hell and then... you didn't take it. And now you want us to feel sorry that you're still single when we worked our asses off to help you? Nope. At some point you have to step up and go "alright, the shit I'm doing isn't working and I need to actively change that" and then actually work to change that. Just thinking it won't wish a girlfriend to your side. And even if it did you'd still be essentially looking at them like they're garbage and we tried to help you undo that gross cismale nonsense of objectification and its still an issue.

And like, I know it's harder when you're not neurotypical and I'm not asking a lot of anyone. But when you're mentally ill and you've got the good start and meds and a therapist and it's still getting the better of you, then like, the next step is to sit down and go "what can I do for myself now". You need to be actively good about figuring out what your triggers are so you can avoid them, or you need to bring up the issue with the therapist. You need to be good about realizing what parts are recurring over and over and maybe attempt to put a block up to stop them, or you need to actively bring it up to a therapist. I get that sometimes there's a lot to unload at a therapist but if you're having issues, the same ones, every night, to the point where you're causing physical distress, that's kind of more important than anything else you gotta unload. And if that's happening and you're on meds like, you might need different meds. A different dose, a different combination, a different brand, something - and like, that's how meds work. You try a thing, and if it doesn't work for you, you try a different thing, and again and again and again until you find something that does work. It's a pain, but a medication not working isn't like, the end of the world. It means those store bought neuro-transmitters weren't the right kind and that's it.

Like, look. I don't do therapy for a lot of reasons (mostly because they really like to blame my mother for everything and I'm kinda... over that trauma and really don't need to relive it, thanks) but I've got my shit on lock - because I step up when I need to step up. Yesterday I had like maybe 3 spoons total. It was a bad day - weekend stress hit me all at once and I was barely functional. So I made myself take baby steps because I needed to do things for myself - I told myself to get out of bed to play Dragon Age. I like Dragon Age, and I did. Once I was up I asked myself if I could eat any of the random food items on the table. The chips were stale, but those and some leftover easter candy were technically food. And then I got myself to get a soda, and then I let myself curl back up in bed. Baby steps, and yeah I essentially treated myself like a five year old but when you have three spoons that’s how it’s gotta be. And when an issue came up that got my bad triggers rumbling, I was upfront. I was "hey, I'm having a bad day and am particularly sensitive to these issues and right now this thing is going to send me spiraling into a hellscape, I understand this is not a rational thought but that doesn't mean it'll go away - can we make some kind of compromise where we can all come out of this feeling alright?" and that's all you really HAVE to do. Like, communicate, be upfront. Say "hey this thing is bothering me" and if it's something that's usually NBD then like, try and find some reasonable compromise.

But YOU have to step up and communicate. You can't expect your friends to ask you every time "what's wrong", especially when those friends are also not neurotypical and don’t necessarily want to spend their spoons on you. Especially when you always look kinda mad or sad about something so there's always something wrong because we're not going to baby sit you, if you need us you need to tell us what's wrong and then if we give you advice and it's sound you need to at least consider taking it and if you don't have a decent reason why not. Like, "I didn't tell my therapist about my near constant anxiety yet because X problem came up and that's effecting me significantly more right now and until I work through that I shouldn't address anything else". Alright, that's totally understandable, life sucks and that happens. "I didn't tell my therapist about the near constant anxiety because it just didn't come up" uh no?  If it's something you're constantly having issues with, like constantly, and you're coming to us all the time for it, then you reallllly need to make sure it comes up because it's a problem and your therapist isn't going to out of the blue know that it's an issue. You have to communicate with them and also with us and YOU need to do it.

There's an aspect to self care that's literally "you need to take action" and by god the people around me need to learn how to fucking handle themselves. And they wonder how I've managed to be in a relationship for 4 years and stay relatively happy - it's because I know my shit. I know my triggers, I know what makes my anxiety spike, I know what things bring my mood down. I know being outside tends to help my SAD, but vitamin D is a good sub. I know my SPD means I can't eat some foods, but I try and make sure I communicate those things to people when it's applicable and if everyone is like "let's go to X place" then I try and find something I can eat. I don't ask people to tiptoe around unknown variables and then expect mines everywhere - if there's something wrong, I'm upfront about it. If someone makes a decision and it upsets me, I tell them. Sometimes I tell them a day later when I'm a little cooler, but I tell them "hey this upset me". I always try and make sure people understand that I know some of my shit is not rational, but it doesn't mean it's not there, it's just we both know this shark shouldn't have feet but it's got them and we've got to deal with the shark in the fucking room. That's all I ask of anyone, is the basic communication and self understanding to be able to go "I know this thing is bothering me" or the ability to go "I don't know what's up but I am feeling X and I don't know how to deal with it". Like that's an acceptable answer, yknow?

Sorry I'm just. Yesterday was a day and I'm still not exactly over things that happened.