#i love that his mental condition is neither caused by or really interacts in any way with his good nature. it just exists alongside it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bubonickitten · 4 years ago

Link

Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 || Tumblr

Chapter 18 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 18: discussion of passive suicidal ideation; unintentional self-harm (scratching at arms as a stim, to the point of drawing blood); brief allusion to childhood neglect; internalized ableism (re: ADHD, but not explicitly stated as such); brief acephobia (past experience & internalized); Jon-typical negative self-talk, guilt, & rejection sensitive dysphoria; discussion of past trauma (including having bodily autonomy overridden, canon non-consensual surgery, & stabbing); internalized victim blaming/comparing victim to their abuser; discussion of self-inflicted blinding/eye gouging (past attempts & potential future attempts); brief mention of Mr. Spider/arachnophobia themes; swears. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Chapter 18: Reconciliation

Once Jon opened the door and the Fears rewrote reality, not only was sleep no longer a physiological necessity – it was no longer an option. Much like the Coffin, even a temporary escape via unconsciousness was contrary to a world defined by the ceaseless generation of terror. And just as it did any human in that place, perpetual wakefulness took its toll on Jon’s already ravaged mental health.

The fact that he was no longer plaguing the nightmares of his victims may have been a small consolation, if not for the fact that he was instead witnessing the waking nightmares of billions of new victims: the same scenes looping over and over, layered one on top of the other, an endless soundtrack screaming in the background of his mind. Venting a statement from time to time could only do so much to quell that storm. He’d really had no choice but to learn to compartmentalize on autopilot and dissociate on command.

So when, for the first time since before the world ended, Jon awakens to Martin at his side, his mind cannot immediately reconcile the sight. He might think he was dreaming, if not for the fact that he hasn’t had a pleasant dream of his own since he became the Archivist. And even before then – well, he’d always been more predisposed to nightmares.

Jon feels his heart stutter in his throat when he sets eyes on Martin. Their hands are still clasped together, and despite the sweatiness of their palms and the way Jon’s arm is cramping from the angle, he has no desire to let go. Instead, he lies still, breathing shallow and measured, fearful of any sound or movement that might shatter the almost uncanny peace of the moment.

He really shouldn’t be staring like this, though, should he? Martin has given him permission to stare many times before, but that was in a future where they had Seen each other at their most vulnerable. Being seen, truly seen – as terrifying as it was for the both of them – became a comfort, because of what they had been through together. Here in the past, Martin hasn’t shared that experience. He might not be as keen to put up with Jon’s incessant watching.

Those reservations still aren’t enough to stop him, though.

Martin is still sat in his chair, but bent sideways at the waist to lean halfway on the cot. He’s snoring lightly, his head pillowed on his free arm, glasses askew. The angle is probably hell on his back.

Maybe I should wake him up, Jon thinks idly, one corner of his mouth turning up in a small, fond smile.

He doesn’t. Instead, his eyes remain rapt on Martin, soaking in every detail, as beloved and familiar as always: the length of his eyelashes, the shape of his lips, the spray of freckles across his nose, that particularly stubborn cowlick that always, always stands on end. Jon wants to reach out, sink his fingers into those curls, massage his scalp in that way Martin used to love – but that would be a step beyond staring, wouldn’t it? So he watches: unblinking, aching, adoring, and so overwhelmed that he's at risk of tearing up.

It’s painfully, embarrassingly maudlin of him, he knows, but can he really be faulted for that? Jon surpassed the lifespan of a normal human several times over, bereft and alone in a desolated realm of his own making. He spent much of that time out of his mind with grief, drowning in hopelessness and guilt, cycling between numb dissociation and raw destruction. When he wasn’t wandering aimlessly – near-catatonic, subsumed by the never-ending deluge of fear permeating that world – he was lashing out. Although he couldn’t die, he could still hurt, and so he did, with exacting focus: both himself and all the other monsters going through the motions in that doomed world.

Ending them neither decreased nor increased the net output of fear, but it was the closest Jon could come to some nebulous, fleeting sense of justice. He didn’t enjoy it – in fact, he hated the other Avatars sometimes, bitter that they could attain a release that seemed impossible for him. His first few acts of vengeance in those early days had felt good in the moment, but the high never lasted: just like taking a statement.

Eventually, once the fear began to grow scarcer, it felt more and more like granting mercy – often to monsters who never showed any themselves – rather than meting out justice. A few moments of pain was preferable to slow, torturous starvation. Breekon was the first to request such a favor. He was far from the last.

It made Jon feel monstrous in an all new way, offering escape to predators when he could do nothing to save their victims – at least not without turning them into Avatars themselves, creating more monsters to replace the old. But it also made him feel real – a tangible, active presence interacting with the world, as opposed to a ghost, unseen and unknowable. An undeniable consequence, rather than a detached observer.

Tears start to gather in the corners of his eyes. Jon tries to swallow them back, but his throat has grown thick with emotion. He never expected to escape that place; never expected to see a friendly face or hear a kind word ever again. And now that he has…

This isn’t for you, says an insidious little voice in the back of his head: some twisted chimera comprised of all those who have known him well enough to see him for what he is, to catalogue his failings, to pass judgment. There is no place for you in this world. You don’t belong here. You were made for something greater; eliminate that, and what remains –

A gentle knock-knock at the door startles him out of his thoughts.

“Jon?” Georgie pushes the door open and peers through the gap. “You awake?”

“Yeah.” It comes out as a fractured whisper. He sniffles and rubs his eyes, but Georgie has already noticed his distress.

“Bad dream?”

“No.” Jon clears his throat and props himself up on one elbow. “No, ah – quite the opposite, really.”

“Oh?” Georgie says, probing for an explanation.

Jon's gaze drifts to his hand, still joined with Martin’s. “None of this feels real, and…”

“And?”

“I, uh…” Jon closes his eyes, blinking back tears. “I don’t deserve it.”

“The world doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe it should.” Jon lets out a wet, clipped laugh.

No one got what they deserved in the world he created, only what hurt them the most. Tempting as it was to find some meaning in it all, to retroactively draw correlations between past actions and current circumstances, Jon Knew from the very beginning that there was no cause-and-effect at play. Not really. Any misery being experienced in that new world was utterly unrelated to the lives people lived before the change. It was indiscriminate. Everyone was afraid and in agony, regardless of any subjective judgment on whether or not they deserved it.

And nothing Jon did changed those material conditions in the slightest. He could shift an individual’s role from subject to object and vice versa, reassign their place on the spectrum of the tortured versus the torturer, but at the end of the day, he was still just facilitating fear, regardless of what shape it took. Despite being one of the most powerful and fearful things roaming that scorched earth, his options were as limited as they’d always been. Every choice led to more or less the same end.

By every measure that could be said to actually matter, he was ultimately powerless.

Would it have been any more tolerable if the suffering was more proportionate? If at least some of the people trapped in the domains could be said to be receiving just punishment for any agony they themselves had inflicted before the end of the world? Maybe. But probably not. Securing vengeance never actually yielded any meaningful catharsis for Jon. Even Jonah Magnus' ultimate fate produced nothing but revulsion. The Archive may feed on such fear, but after all this time, Jon – all the pieces of him that still belong to him – has no desire to behold suffering. He has seen enough for several lifetimes, and he was never once given the option to look away, let alone put an end to it.

Jon shakes his head and begins to fully sit up, slowly and carefully so as not to disturb Martin. He’s hardly expecting Georgie to engage with his newest avenue of brooding, but after a minute, she gives a thoughtful hum and leans against the doorframe.

“Don’t know that I want to see what that would look like,” she says pensively.

“What?”

“A world where ‘deservedness’ was quantifiable – where you could put a precise value on suffering, and every action had a moral price tag on it that stayed the same regardless of the circumstances. Where subjective experiences could be – shoved into neat little categories that everyone could agree on.”

“Like Robert Smirke,” Jon murmurs.

“Sure.” Georgie shrugs. “I don’t know if humanity as we know it could even exist in a world like that. We’d be… unrecognizable.”

“O-oh?”

“Mm. We aren’t equations. Or – well, we are, I guess, at the most basic physical level, if you scale down small enough. Atoms, physics, chemical reactions and all that. But when it comes to the experience of consciousness, personal identity, free will… isn’t the complexity what gives it all meaning? If we could account for every last variable, know the exact effect of every cause, what would that make us?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Life isn’t about the destination, I guess is what I’m saying.” Georgie runs her thumb over her lips as she muses. “We already know the destination. One way or another, everything dies.”

“‘The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one,’” Jon recites, a distant quality to his voice. “There’s no difference between that last moment that ushers us out into oblivion and the one we experience now – everything ends, even the universe, even time. And… that means it has always already ended.”

It takes a moment for Jon to come back to himself, blinking dazedly. It's another few seconds before he realizes what happened – and when he does, a sudden, heavy coldness takes root and blossoms in his chest.

“I’m so– I didn’t – I wasn’t –”

“It’s – fine,” Georgie says, although she sounds a bit rattled. “It was an accident.”

“Still, I’m sorry, I –”

“Apology accepted, Jon. I’m not angry.” When she sees Jon gearing up to belabor the point, she holds up a hand. “You’re forgiven. Let’s just move on, okay?”

Jon bites down on his lower lip, torn between dueling impulses: groveling, berating himself, shutting down, or… simply taking Georgie at her word. With a long, shaky exhale, he settles on trust: Georgie expressed a desire to drop it and move forward. He should respect that, right? Right.

He bites back his protests and nods stiffly. “Okay.”

“Look, what I was trying to get at is – knowing the destination doesn’t invalidate the journey, right? If anything, the inevitability of an ending is what gives meaning to all the rest.”

The End forced Georgie to confront the insignificance of her own birth and death against the backdrop of a vast universe – but rather than allow that realization to immobilize her with despair, she opted to make all the moments in between meaningful. Jon can't help but once again remember the confidence with which Martin countered Simon Fairchild's brand of flippant nihilism: I think our experience of the universe has value, even if it disappears forever.

I might have a type, he thinks to himself, equal parts wry and endeared.

“We all end up in the same place,” Georgie continues, “but that doesn’t have to mean we all follow the same path. What matters is what happens along the way, and – if you could map out every bit of the journey, predict the outcome of every single step you take, then – what else is left?”

“If you already know the answer to every question,” Jon says softly, “what’s the point of being?”

Jon isn’t sure what expression he’s making, but whatever it is, Georgie blanches when she catches his eye.

“Oh, I – Jon, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –”

“No, it’s – it’s alright. You’re not wrong.” Jon chuckles awkwardly. “Is it odd that I find the thought…reassuring? Sort of?”

“We’re getting lost in the weeds, aren't we?” Georgie says with a flustered laugh. “My original point was – this obsession you have with deservedness, and establishing dichotomies, and trying to find simple, objective answers to complicated questions – it’s a skewed way of looking at the world, and it’s eating you alive. You have to stop treating your life like it’s a scorecard. Relentlessly punishing yourself isn’t going to change the past. It’s not healthy, it’s not productive, and it just makes you more likely to sabotage your future.”

“I know. It’s just… the things I’ve done, they’re – unforgivable. I can’t leave it behind, and I can’t take it back.”

Jon used to wonder when the Eye would make him too monstrous to feel shame. It never did, never had to: he abetted it regardless of how he felt about it. For the most part, he can’t even apologize: the people he hurt are either dead or have no memory of what Jon did to warrant it. Besides, some consequences too irrevocable, too catastrophic to cushion with remorse.

Sorry that you died because I failed; sorry that I burned a bridge that could have kept us both safe; sorry that you’re trapped here just because I stood too close to you. Sorry for the invaded privacy, sorry for the mistreatment, sorry for all the hunger and fear and nightmares. Sincerest apologies, everyone, for the eternal torment.

He could have composed a personalized apology for every last person in the world had he wanted – he’d certainly had the time to spare, as well as detailed knowledge of each victim’s plight. But any apology he could possibly make, no matter how eloquent or sincere, would have been insulting in its inadequacy. What reparations can be made to soften the blow of a life lost or a world ended?

“S-so,” he says, eyes downcast, “that just leaves… guilt.”

And fear. Fear enough to cram an Archive full to bursting.

“I know,” Georgie says.

“I’m sorry, I –” Jon breathes a bitter laugh. “I’m a broken record, aren’t I? I fall apart every time I see you.”

“Jon,” George sighs, “you don’t have to apologize. You’ve been through unimaginable trauma. You’ve had barely any chance to start to heal from it. You’re still living it. I don’t expect a few heart-to-heart conversations to close the book on… all of that.”

“Still, it’s – annoying, I imagine.” Jon picks nervously at a loose thread on his trouser leg. “To sit through the same conversation over and over again.”

“I’d be more worried if you went back to just – pretending to be okay, refusing to talk about it. It’s been barely a month since you got out of the hospital. Shit, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since you crawled out of that Coffin.” Her eyes narrow slightly, intent and searching. “Speaking of which, I should ask: Are you a danger to yourself right now?”

“What?” The question catches Jon off guard. “No? N-no, I’m – why would you –”

“Just checking in. Which I’m going to keep doing. Regularly. So you may as well make peace with that now.”

“It’s not like I’m going to kill myself,” Jon mumbles – aiming for casually unconcerned and instead landing squarely in transparently uncomfortable territory. “I’m fairly certain I can’t die a mundane human death, anyway.”

“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still hurt yourself. And being suicidal sucks regardless of whether you actually plan on going through with it.” Jon studiously avoids eye contact as Georgie speaks. “Anyway, I know I sound like a broken record, but I’ll say it as many times as you need reminding: You have a second chance. You said you were going to make the best of it, and you can’t do that if you won’t let yourself have some peace.” Her expression softens, as does her voice. “Just… let yourself be, won’t you?”

There’s truth to what Georgie is saying. Even if he wasn’t mired in guilt, though…

“I’m afraid,” Jon whispers. “Of losing him, of losing everyone, of…”

Of dooming everyone. It was so easy. All it took was his voice, an incantation, and this ceaseless, aberrant hunger. He’s seen the consequences of the destiny for which he has unwittingly been prepared. Like it or not, he is the most dangerous thing in this world – a walking hair-trigger, already having overstayed his welcome on this earth by several lifetimes. One misstep, and…

“I should be grateful to have this, to have him – and I am, but every – every time I come close to letting myself feel – safe, hopeful, content, it… it never lasts. It’s always swallowed up by fear – not of if something goes wrong, but when. It just feels like… any choice I make is bound to end in tragedy. Like there’s no way out. Like nothing I do will change anything. I – I’ll mess it up; I always do.”

It’s a pattern that began long before he became entangled in Jonah’s machinations. Jon was a difficult child who grew into an even more difficult adult, always saying and doing all the wrong things because he’s never been able to fully grasp the invisible rules that other people seem to navigate so naturally. At home he could never shake the feeling that he was an odd guest, secretly unwelcome but with nowhere else to keep him; at school he was a menace, asking all the wrong questions at all the wrong times and prone to following his own lesson plans whenever the curriculum failed to hold his interest. Peer relationships typically failed to take root: he’s too guarded, too abrasive, too annoying and tactless and awkward. Whatever friendships managed to blossom tended to wilt before long, for all the same reasons.

Romantic relationships have historically been even more fraught. There are expectations that he will never meet, forms of intimacy that are traditionally assumed to be required rather than optional for such a relationship to qualify as normal, healthy, and sustainable. In his experience, setting those boundaries have usually been a deal-breaker. Georgie was the first to accept that aspect of him unconditionally; Martin was the second – and although Jon no longer believes that it’s a problem to be fixed, those old, long-held insecurities still rear up from time to time.

He had hoped he could at least prove himself capable as a Head Archivist, but, well… he was inexperienced with the duties of a mundane archiving job, unsuited to managing a department, and his preexisting difficulties with establishing rapport were exacerbated by his need to maintain a professional boundary between himself and his assistants. He tried to make up for those shortcomings with effort and dedication and – in retrospect – frankly obscene levels of overwork, but he never did manage to be a good boss or a good coworker.

It’s a cruel joke that of all the roles to finally excel in, it’s as the Archivist – or, specifically, Jonah’s Archivist. He met every expectation, even – perhaps especially – when he didn’t know what those expectations were. Not like Gertrude. She would doubtless be disappointed by her successor: constantly second-guessing himself, resolving indecisiveness with impulsivity, stumbling around in the dark, pointlessly sabotaging himself and those unlucky enough to find themselves in his orbit – ultimately devastating a world that she had made so many ruthless sacrifices to protect.

Jon has spent most of his life fumbling at being a peer, a friend, a partner, a colleague, an ally. If he couldn’t manage to figure it out when he was still human, how is he supposed to play at being a person now, when he’s…

“This – this isn’t for things like me,” Jon says hoarsely. He can feel more tears teeming as he looks down at Martin: kind and good and so, so deserving of happiness, of security, of a peaceful life that Jon fears he will never be able to provide, no matter how fiercely he loves. “I don’t get to” – end the world – “to become – this, and still get a happy ending.”

“Do you Know that?” Georgie asks.

“N-no, I can’t predict the future, but –”

“Then you shouldn’t assume the worst. You don’t have a fixed destiny, no matter what you’ve been led to believe.” She scowls at him. “And stop referring to yourself as a ‘thing’. It really doesn’t matter how human you are or aren’t, you're still you. You’re still a person.”

Jon doesn’t know how to respond to that without either contradicting her or offering lukewarm, disingenuous agreement. Luckily, he doesn’t have to: Martin begins to stir, and Jon hurriedly wipes away any evidence of tears, fighting to regain his composure. With a snuffle and a sleepy groan, Martin opens his eyes, blinking blearily.

“Hey there,” Jon says with a soft smile.

Martin returns a vague grin, muzzy with sleep. With unfocused eyes, he appears to slowly take in his surroundings, gaze lingering briefly on and then skating over his hand, fingers still interlocked with Jon’s. When his attention drifts towards Georgie, he stares at her for a long few seconds, squinting at the influx of light from the hallway. Another slow blink, another extended stare at his and Jon’s linked hands, and then his eyes widen. Color blooms on his cheeks as he abruptly surfaces into full consciousness, glasses tumbling off his face as he jerks upward.

“Oh, god, I’m sorry,” he says, groggy voice at odds with the panicked embarrassment in his eyes. He pulls his hand back, mumbling apologies about clammy palms. As he straightens in his seat, he lets out a pained hiss.

Jon cringes sympathetically. “You should’ve taken the cot.”

Martin ignores the comment, scrubbing at his face now, hiding it in his sleeve. It does nothing to conceal his reddened ears, Jon notes with amused affection.

“Did you sleep alright, otherwise?” Jon asks.

“Mm?” Martin retrieves his glasses and slips them back on before turning his attention to Jon. “Oh, uh – yes. You?”

“Yes, actually.”

His first routine breakdown of the day notwithstanding, Jon did manage to sleep through most of the night, only waking once after a brief foray back into Karolina’s nightmare.

The rest of the dreams were relatively benign. He spent some time with Georgie. Naomi was pleased to see him and eager as ever to regale him with cat anecdotes. Dr. Elliott was less pleased, but he was at least no more afraid of Jon than he had been during the coma. Seeing Jordan Kennedy was as uncomfortable as ever; Jon doubts he’ll ever know what to say to him. Tessa was more difficult to read. She wasn’t exactly happy to see him again, but she didn't seem angry, either.

Should’ve known it wouldn’t last, she’d sighed to herself – and then promptly changed the subject before Jon could stammer out an apology.

“Learned a lot about the right to repair movement,” Jon says absently.

“What?” Martin asks, bewildered.

“Oh, uh – Tessa Winters. Gave a statement in 2016 about a haunted chatbot. It forced her to watch a seventeen-hour-long video of a man eating his computer.”

Georgie perks up at that.

“Oh, is that the, uh – that creepypasta about that guy who mutilated himself trying to upload his mind to his computer?”

“Sergey Ushanka.”

“Yeah! Something about how he tried to crack open his skull and wire his brain to the motherboard?”

“That is one variation of the story, yes.”

“What,” Martin says flatly.

“I was thinking about doing a What the Ghost episode on that one,” Georgie explains, her sheepish smile doing little to conceal her lingering enthusiasm. “Haunted technology is always a popular topic. Didn’t expect that one to be real, though. I wonder –”

Jon answers her question before she can ask it: “I doubt Tessa would be interested in being a guest on the show.”

“Yeah,” Georgie sighs, “I guess not.”

Martin lets out a nervous chuckle. “What, uh – sorry, what does any of this have to do with right to repair?”

“Oh. Right. Tessa’s one of the people whose nightmares I… invade. Perpetuate, I suppose. She’s, ah, not my biggest fan, considering what I’ve put her through, but she says I’m a decent audience.” Martin gives Jon a blank look. “She basically gives me free lectures sometimes? Technology-related subjects, mostly. Fascinating stuff.”

“God, you sound like a grandpa,” Georgie says.

“Yes, yes, Tessa tells me the same.” Jon rolls his eyes. “Anyway, she has some, ah… strong feelings about Apple. Among other things.”

“Right,” Martin says slowly. “Wait, back up – you know what creepypasta is?”

“Yes, Martin,” Jon says with a sigh and an indulgent smile, “I know what creepypasta is.”

“That particular internet rabbit hole was one of his many, many avenues of procrastination in uni, believe it or not,” Georgie says.

“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a Luddite. I tried to introduce the Archives to the twenty-first century, remember? It’s not my fault the Beholding has a retro aesthetic.”

“Huh,” Martin says with a bemused smile. Then he yawns. “Sorry. What time is it?”

As soon as the question is posed, the Beholding drops the knowledge into Jon’s head.

“About 10:30,” Georgie answers, just as Jon says, “10:28 and forty-six seconds” – and then, wincing at his own pedantry, “Sorry.”

Georgie looks ready to let loose with a snarky reply, but before she can say anything, Martin is on his feet, the blanket on his lap sliding to the floor.

“10:30? Jon, why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I – I wasn’t really paying attention to the time, I haven’t actually been awake for…”

Jon trails off as the Beholding casually notifies him that he woke up thirty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds ago. He can feel heat pooling in his cheeks as a vague sense of shame sets in. Good lord, was he really just watching Martin sleep for that long?

“I should have been upstairs over an hour ago,” Martin says, frantically scanning the room for –

For his shoes, the Eye informs Jon.

Do you ever mind your goddamn business? Jon shoots back. On impulse, he swats at the air to his side, momentarily forgetting that the ever-present eldritch tagalongs he’d grown accustomed to during the apocalypse are no longer with him. In his dreams, he’d come eye-to-eye with them again for the first time since waking up in the hospital; apparently, that’s all it took to reintroduce this old, reflexive shooing tic to his waking life.

Georgie raises her eyebrows at the gesture, but Martin appears not to notice, preoccupied with his escalating panic.

Jon scrambles for some way to soothe him, but he’s at a loss. In his future, through trial and error and intense observation, he had painstakingly learned how to comfort Martin. Now, though, after so much time spent alone, Jon is out of practice. Moreover, he’s always been more adept at offering comfort through action and touch rather than words – and right now, he’s still uncertain where Martin’s boundaries lie.

So Jon continues to sit there, hands fluttering slightly as his mind rifles through a mountain of inane clichés in search of something, anything that might be able to help. Meanwhile, the Archivist in him is distracted by Martin’s growing anxiety. It isn’t the same as abject fear, per se, but it’s similar enough to pique the Eye’s interest.

Once again, Jon takes a swipe at the empty space beside him – and again ignores Georgie’s amused expression.

“If Peter notices I’m not in the office…” Martin nearly trips over the blanket on the floor as he turns in place to search behind him. “He – he’ll be suspicious –”

That’s when Georgie decides to speak up. Thank god, Jon thinks to himself. She exudes far more confidence than he does in this sort of situation.

“Won’t he already be suspicious?” she says, calm as can be. It’s enough to bring Martin’s fretting to a pause. “It’s not like you can keep this a secret forever, right? Your change in attitude is… pretty noticeable, Martin.”

“I – I – I didn’t really think much further ahead than –” Martin laughs nervously. “I was just – playing along, and it felt right, like if I just kept following the path I’d reach a – a – a conclusion? I don’t know what, but…” His shoulders slump, leaving his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides; he tugs at the hem of his shirt, as if he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “I don’t think I cared much? I figured I could just – gather information and pass it along, and if nothing else I could keep Peter’s attention away from the Archives, and… that was the whole plan, to just keep doing that until… until whatever was going to happen happened, I guess, and now I don’t – I don’t know where to go from here, and…”

“Martin?” Jon says softly.

“Huh?” Martin finally glances up to meet Jon’s eyes.

“Can I take your hand?”

Cautiously, wordlessly, Martin offers his hand. Jon takes it in his, lacing their fingers together loosely.

“It’ll be alright,” he says. “You don’t have to figure it out on your own. Not anymore.”

Martin’s lips move minutely for a few seconds before meekly saying, “That doesn’t feel right.”

“I know.”

“I’m – I’m not saying you’re lying,” Martin says, rushed and anxious to appease, “it’s just…”

“Hearing something isn’t the same as accepting it. Or trusting it.”

“I do trust you, I do, it’s just… I don’t know. It’s like I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“It’s alright,” Jon says gently. “I understand.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin whispers, his voice steeped in guilt.

“You don’t need to apologize.” When Martin opens his mouth to protest, Jon reiterates: “You have nothing to be sorry for. I promise.”

“Okay,” Martin says after a pause, still sounding somewhat doubtful. Then he grimaces. “I, uh, still don’t know what to do about Peter, though.”

“That depends on what you want,” Jon says, squeezing Martin’s hand. “I trust you. I’ll follow your lead.”

“O-okay,” Martin repeats. He blinks several times, surprised, before giving a nervous chuckle. “Only… I, uh, don’t really know what I want, to be honest?”

“Break it down into smaller pieces,” Georgie says. Martin flinches slightly – he must have momentarily forgotten she was in the room. “Do you want to go back to the Lonely?”

There’s only a short delay before Martin says, “No. I don’t… it feels different than before. Doesn’t fit right.”

“Do you want to continue working with Peter?”

“I don’t know,” Martin says slowly. “Not really? I mean, I never wanted to in the first place, it just… seemed like the thing to do.”

“Okay, rephrase,” Georgie says. “Do you want to stop working with him now?”

“I think so.” Another pause. Martin’s brow wrinkles as he stares at the floor in thought before glancing back up at Georgie. “Yeah, I – I think I do.��

“But…?” Georgie prompts, sensing Martin’s uncertainty.

“I worry about how he might react. He’ll probably start paying more attention to the Archives, and…” Martin looks at Jon. “What if he takes it out on you? Or – I mean, I don’t want him to hurt anyone, but I…” He looks down at their joined hands, tightening his grip just slightly. “I think you would be his most likely target.”

“Maybe,” Jon admits. He’s witnessed firsthand how vindictive Peter can be. “But I would rather take that risk than have you torture yourself on the off chance he’ll let me be. And… I think we’ll all be safer if we cooperate as a group rather than stay divided.”

“I guess. I’m not sure how to go about it, though.”

“Well,” Georgie says thoughtfully, “it depends on whether you want to quit all at once or ease into it.”

“I don’t know.” Martin looks to Jon again. “If I continue to work for him in some capacity, would it give us an advantage?”

At this point, they know more about the Extinction than Peter does, and Jon has a decent grasp on Peter’s goals and how he operates. So…

“I… don’t think there’s anything to be gained if you keep working closely with him, no,” Jon replies. “And anyway, I – I would rather that not be the deciding factor? It’s your decision, of course, it’s just – your wellbeing is more important.”

“Hypocrite,” Martin mutters, but there’s a tinge of endearment there.

“I know,” Jon sighs. “I’m working on it. But to the point, I worry that working closely with him might drag you back into the Lonely.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m also worried about you confronting him directly to resign. Especially on your own.”

Peter is patient. Moreover, he enjoys a long game. If he sees Martin’s change of heart as a surmountable obstacle, Peter is likely to take a step back and wait for another opening to regain the upper hand. If, on the other hand, he decides that Martin is a lost cause… well, Peter is a sore loser. There’s every chance that he could drop Martin into the Lonely out of spite again.

“Either way,” Jon says, “I don’t think it’s safe for you to be alone with him. Sooner or later, he’ll realize that the Lonely’s starting to lose its hold on you.”

Unthinkingly, Jon tightens his grip on Martin’s hand.

“It’s been slipping for a while now,” Martin says quietly. “I think he’s already noticed.”

“In that case… there’s no telling how he’ll react if he decides your allegiance to the Lonely is too tenuous to salvage.”

“Do you – or…” Georgie appears to grapple with wording for a few seconds. “Can you Know what Peter knows?”

“No,” Jon says. The last time he tried to Know something about Peter, not only did it yield nothing of value, it nearly incapacitated Jon – and he didn’t recover until he gave in and fed on a new victim. He can’t afford to repeat the experience. Daisy’s supply of statements is finite; Jon needs to ration them as much as possible. “I do know that Peter can’t spy from a distance, but that doesn’t mean he can’t just turn invisible to eavesdrop. Or that Elias won’t feed him information.”

“Let’s focus on the immediate question, then,” Georgie says. “Do you want to go upstairs and walk into your office two hours late with bedhead” – Martin runs a self-conscious hand through his hair, eliciting an affectionate smile from Jon – “or do you want to no-call/no-show?”

“Well… Peter isn’t actually around much,” Martin says. “Sometimes days go by before he checks in. He might not realize I’m not in my office yet. Maybe I can just – go about my normal routine for now?” He glances at Jon, almost beseeching. “At least until I have an idea of how much he knows?”

Like everyone who has worked in the Archives, Martin has developed a harder edge over the years. Early in his tenure, he seemed unassuming on first impression. He was by no means a pushover, but he was eager to please and preferred to avoid unnecessary confrontation. It made him an all-too-easy target for Jon’s insecurity-fueled ire.

But rather than roll over in the face of criticism, Martin has always been determined to prove his detractors wrong. Whether it’s risking his life for the sake of doing his due diligence – Jon cringes at the memory – or stubbornly caring for people who deemed him incompetent and didn’t appreciate his attentions, Martin is tenacious. It would be admirable – and it is, to an extent – but all too often it leads to self-neglect, bordering on self-harm.

And right now, despite the thicker skin that Martin has been forced to grow through necessity and loss, his demeanor when he looks at Jon is vaguely reminiscent of those early days in the Archives: cowed, cautious, desperate for approval and dreading reproach. With a pang of old guilt and a desire to soothe, Jon forces a smile and kneads the back of Martin’s hand with his thumb.

“I trust you,” Jon says, “and I know you’re more than capable. Just – when the fog starts to creep up on you, try to remember that there are people who care about you. You’re not a burden; you’re not – unseen, unwanted, undeserving, or – or whatever other lies the Lonely wants to tell you. You’re not alone. Not anymore.”

“Right,” Martin says in a breathless whisper. He gives Jon’s hand another squeeze before letting go. “I guess I, uh – I guess should head upstairs.”

“Text or call if you need a reminder,” Jon blurts out as Martin turns to leave. “S-sorry, I don’t mean to – to hover, it’s just… sometimes it helps.”

In Scotland, once Jon was too hungry to safely visit the village, Martin had to go on supply runs alone. Although he had largely left the Lonely behind, it still lurked in the background, waiting for quiet moments in which it could seep back in through the cracks it left behind. It was opportunistic and insidious, passive until it wasn’t, and it could strike unpredictably. And so, he and Jon would check in with one another frequently whenever Martin had to go into town.

In many ways it was an exercise in codependence, but they were doing their best, considering their particular circumstances.

“Thanks,” Martin says, splotches of pink staining his face again. “I – I will.”

“There’s no service in the tunnels,” Georgie reminds them. “Just in case you were planning on going down there today, Jon. Martin, do you have the rest of our numbers?”

“I have Basira’s. And Melanie’s.”

“Give me your phone. I’ll add my number. And Daisy’s.” Martin makes a face at that, but hands his phone over. “If Jon doesn’t answer, text one of the rest of us. We can make sure to always keep someone up here and reachable, just in case.”

“That’s really not necessary,” Martin says stiffly. “I don’t need my hand held every second of the day.”

“No, but you might need your hand held at any second during the day,” Georgie says, entirely unfazed by the shift in attitude, “and there's no shame in that. Sometimes a bad time sneaks up on you. Doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“I’ve always taken care of myself. I can handle a few hours alone.”

“I’m sure you can, but that doesn’t mean you have to.” Martin looks ready to object, but Georgie cuts him off. “You’re not going to win this argument; I’ve already heard it all before. I’ve known this one” – she jerks her thumb in Jon’s direction – “for years, and you have near-identical hangups about being an inconvenience or whatever.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Jon mutters.

“Yeah, this is directed at both of you. People want to help you. The world won’t end if you let yourself accept it without berating yourself in the process.” Georgie looks between the two of them as she hands Martin’s phone back, and then chuckles. “Huh. You two have damn-near-identical scowls, too, by the way.”

Simultaneously, Jon and Martin both roll their eyes.

Compared to the last time Jon saw her, Melanie looks… well, better. The wild, furious look in her eyes has subsided and the bags underneath are no longer quite so heavy. Her posture doesn’t look relaxed, exactly, but she doesn’t seem nearly as overwrought. She's still clearly weighed down by ambient tension, but she always has been – and the Archives have a way of making even the most well-adjusted person feel on edge.

She pauses at the bottom of the ladder, watching Jon with an air of distrust and uncertainty. Then Georgie takes her hand and a little more of that stiffness bleeds out of her. She allows Georgie to lead her over to the circle of chairs where Jon waits, and mirrors Georgie when she sits.

The ensuing silence is thoroughly unsettling. When it becomes clear that Georgie isn’t going to break the ice for them, and Melanie likewise keeps her silence, Jon reluctantly takes the initiative.

“Hi,” he says eloquently. He starts to give a little wave, but doesn’t fully commit to the motion, instead allowing his hand to hang awkwardly in the air for a few seconds before lowering his arm again, self-conscious.

“Hey,” Melanie replies – guarded, somewhat flat, but without any outright hostility.

Melanie scuffs one foot against the ground. Jon bounces his leg, chewing the inside of his cheek as he stares at the floor. Neither of them speak.

“So…” Georgie says after a minute, drawing out the vowel. “Do you two want me to, uh… I can leave, if you’d prefer to have this discussion in private?”

“Stay,” Melanie says abruptly, seeking out Georgie’s hand again. Georgie looks at Jon, a question in her eyes.

“I don’t mind. You can stay, Georgie.”

“If you’re sure,” Georgie says. “Just – let me know if that changes, I suppose.”

More silence. When Jon can’t take it anymore, he blurts out: “H-how have you been?”

“Well,” Melanie says sardonically, “I’m essentially trapped in an eldritch fear prison, doing the bidding of an evil voyeur-god, and apparently the only way out of its unfathomable contract is to gouge my eyes out.”

“Right,” Jon says with a hollow laugh. “Stupid question.”

“How are you?” Melanie asks with mock cheeriness.

“Same as you, really. Well. Except for the eye-gouging clause.”

“What, don’t have the stomach for it?”

“No, uh – it… it just won’t work for me, is all.” Staring down at his lap, Jon occupies himself with tracing circles onto one knee with his fingernail. “The Beholding isn’t keen on losing its Archivist.”

“It didn’t mind losing Gertrude.”

“Gertrude… wasn’t as far gone as I am,” Jon says quietly. “She never fully embraced the power the Eye offered. Not to the extent that I did. Blinding herself would have released her from the Eye’s service. She planned on it, actually, but Elias got to her first. And she was still human enough for a gunshot to kill her.”

And wasn’t that a release, in a way? Is it morbid for Jon to envy the fact that Gertrude even had that option available to her?

“Right,” is all Melanie says. She sounds dubious.

“I’m not just speculating a worst-case scenario to give myself an excuse not to go through with it.” Jon can feel himself bristling now. “I know it won’t work. I’ve tried. Multiple times. It hurts like hell, and then I heal. All I got out of it was an onset of chronic cluster headaches – though, who knows,” he adds acidly, “that may have just been the side effect of becoming a linchpin of the apocalypse and having all the world’s terror crammed into my head. I didn’t bother Knowing. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“Jon,” Georgie says gently – and all the fight goes out of him, shoulders slumping.

“Sorry,” he sighs. “Didn’t mean to snap.”

“I wasn’t scolding you. It’s just – you’re scratching.”

Oh. Jon looks down to see long, angry red scratches on his forearms, already fading now.

“Sorry,” he says again. “Didn’t notice.”

“It’s alright.”

Another awkward pause, until Melanie breaks the silence.

“Are you sure blinding will work for the rest of us?” she asks. She no longer sounds suspicious. Simply… curious: reminiscent of how things used to be, back when she was an avid investigator, beholden only to herself.

“Yes.”

“Did I…? Last time?”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Jon waits until Melanie gives a firm nod before he answers the question. “You did.”

“And it worked.”

“It worked.”

Melanie nods again. She’s clenching her teeth, if the subtle movements in her jaw are any indication. Closing her eyes, she takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly – and her shoulders relax. By the time she’s opened her eyes, there’s the hint of a smile on her face.

“Good,” she says, equal parts relief and determination.

“S-so, do you think you’ll –” Jon stops himself, shaking his head. “No, sorry, I shouldn’t pry.”

Melanie simply shrugs. “I haven’t made a decision yet. Let’s just say I’m strongly considering it.”

Georgie’s hand tightens on Melanie’s, worry lining her face.

“Tell me what happened last time?” Melanie says. “I’d like to hear the whole story.”

Jon takes a deep breath, rubbing his arms as he orders his thoughts.

“Last time, I didn’t know about the bullet until after I woke up,” he begins. “I, ah, only saw you briefly – you were, um… you were convinced that I wasn’t me anymore. Didn’t want me anywhere near you.”

Thought I should have been the one to die, he doesn’t add. Most days, Jon couldn’t find fault in that assessment. He didn’t want to die – most of the time, anyway – but if he could have traded his life for Tim’s… well, it wouldn’t have been a difficult decision.

“So how did you find out about it, then?”

“I just… Knew it, all of a sudden.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Melanie narrows her eyes suspiciously.

“It’s an Archivist thing. I mean, you're probably already aware – I just… Know things, sometimes, even without compelling anyone. It started before the Unknowing, but it wasn’t as noticeable. Or as often. And it was typically more vague impressions, rather than specific truths. It got worse after I woke up from the coma. More frequent, more detailed, more – intrusive.”

“Fantastic,” Melanie says sourly.

“Yes, I’m not thrilled about it either. Sometimes I can Know things by choice, but the Beholding has a tendency to withhold answers to the questions I actually ask. Mostly it just airdrops information on me unsolicited. Often without me even wondering about a thing. Just… apropos of nothing. I did have much more control over it after the world ended, but, well…” He shrugs, awkward. “Not anymore. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Melanie repeats.

“Last time, I had – still have, I suppose – a tendency to Know things about specific people. Things they wouldn’t normally share with me. I still remember things I Knew back then. Including some things about you.”

The color rises in Melanie’s cheeks. “That’s –”

“An invasion of privacy, I know,” he says, contrite. “I really will try to avoid it, just… sometimes things slip through the cracks when I’m not paying attention.”

“So, what, you can read minds?” Melanie says, an accusation threaded through the question. “Like Elias?”

Jon visibly recoils.

“Melanie,” Georgie begins, but Jon cuts her off.

“No, it’s – it’s a fair question. Elias’ powers come from the same source mine do.” He pauses, nervously flexing his fingers as he composes an explanation. “I can’t see your thoughts verbatim. It’s just… Knowing things. It’s the same with Elias. Sometimes it seems like he can read minds, b-but that’s – that’s just because he’s very – very good at reading people –”

“– finding you when you’re at your lowest point, when you’re your most emotionally vulnerable. And when you’re at that point it’s astounding what can crawl into your heart and start to fester there –“

Jon bites his tongue, applying pressure until the Archive stops its clamoring. Melanie raises her eyebrows in an unspoken question.

“Sorry. Sometimes it just slips out, and…” He laughs and massages his temples. “Well. Still an Archive, in the end.”

His voice cracks and Georgie’s already-concerned expression grows more serious.

“Jon –”

“I’m fine, Georgie,” Jon says, more curtly than intended. “Sorry. I just – I can’t go there right now.”

“We can take a break if you need,” she says.

“No, I… let’s just continue.” He nods at Melanie. “You have more questions.”

Melanie gnaws on the inside of her cheek for a moment, mulling over her words.

“Can you do that…” She wiggles her fingers vaguely. “That thing where you put thoughts in people’s heads?”

“No. Not – not really.”

Not anymore, he corrects privately. During the apocalypse, he was able to make others See and feel things, but… only because he could call upon the Ceaseless Watcher to turn its gaze upon them. Here in the past, the Beholding and all the other Fears remain cloistered behind their door, leeching through the cracks but unable to fully manifest in the world.

“But I, um…” Jon pauses, wetting his lips nervously. “In addition to compelling people to tell me things, sometimes I can compel people to… to do things. Nothing – nothing complex. Simple commands, mostly. ‘Stop,’ ‘leave,’ ‘look,’ ‘don’t look,’ that sort of thing. I haven’t done it often, but the times I have… with a few exceptions, it’s usually been accidental. A sort of – knee-jerk defense mechanism of sorts.”

“Hmm.” Melanie crosses her arms, tapping her foot on the ground.

“I realize that reflects poorly on me.” He swallows, mouth going dry. “It’s… a terrifying prospect, being near someone who can do something like that, and doesn’t have full control over it.”

Jon knows – and Knows via billions of proxies – what it’s like to have something other supplant his will and commandeer his body. Melanie deserves to know the risks of standing too close to him.

“I promise I’ll try to keep it under control, I just – wanted you to be aware of it. I won’t blame you if you’d rather not be around me.”

“Stop being so melodramatic,” Melanie says, rolling her eyes.

“I’m not,” Jon says flatly. “Compelling answers and – and subsisting on a diet of fear has always been more than enough to justify people keeping their distance. Adding more sinister bullshit on top of the pile doesn’t exactly do me credit. I know – Know how people see me.” He laughs, a harsh and humorless thing. “I can’t not Know.”

People tend to naturally give him a wide berth, as if they can sense that there’s something wrong about him, even if they can’t quite discern why. If he’s too careless, if he locks eyes with the wrong person, sometimes they can’t look away – and sometimes he can’t, either, and he’s forced to watch as the terror dawns in their eyes. Just like the nightmares, bleeding into his waking life.

Jon can feel when people are afraid; the Archivist in him relishes it, gravitates towards it like a flower turning to face the sun, soaks it in regardless of whether or not he wants it. And there is always a part of him that does want it, that always wants more – and isn’t that fitting, taking a page from the book of his very first monster? He is, quite literally, a thing of nightmares. Helen is right: he is what he is, and there’s no use denying it.

He’s always been hypersensitive to how other people perceive him. Being able to Know how people really feel about him has historically tended to confirm his customary hostile attribution bias. Vicariously feeling the reality of others’ hatred and fear of him, passively basking in it, being forced to derive sustenance from it – god, it’s like cannibalizing his own vicious self-loathing, a sustainable resource that can be recycled ad infinitum. It takes self-flagellation to a new and perverse extreme.

“I Know when people don’t want to be near me,” he says, unable to suppress the bitterness in his tone. “When someone nearby is afraid, I feel it – as natural as sensing the temperature in a room. I feed on it. It’s an automatic process. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not bask in the knowledge of how much the other people in the room can’t stand breathing the same air as me, if I can avoid it.”

“Jon,” Georgie tries again, “I know how things used to be, but –”

“It’s different now, I know. But the Eye tends to prioritize – well, unpleasant impressions. I know it’s only giving me one side of the story. That there’s more, even if I can’t See it. But fear is loud. Doesn’t leave room for mindfulness.”

Georgie has a reply ready, but Melanie speaks first.

“Okay. I get it.” At Jon’s blank expression, Melanie heaves a sigh – aggravated, but not hostile. “It’s like how anger was for me, okay? Rage has a way of drowning out everything else. Reliable, when nothing else can be trusted. Makes things clearer, simpler. Made me feel more… alive, real.” She hesitates, crossing her arms and shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “Nourishing. Sort of. I guess.”

“Yeah,” Jon says, picking aimlessly at his sleeve.

“I’ll just avoid being in the same room as you when I’m… having a day,” she continues. Jon nods. “Or you can just tell me to go away if I’m – I don’t know, giving off rancid vibes, or whatever.”

Jon breathes a surprised, amused huff. “Well. Same goes for you, I suppose.”

He’s even more shocked to see a grin twitch to life on Melanie’s face – very small, but present all the same. Then, appearing to take pity on him, she changes the subject.

“So, you Knew about the bullet.”

“Yes,” Jon says, grateful for the opportunity to move on. “But not until a couple weeks after I got out of the hospital. Didn’t even realize I Knew it until I said it aloud.”

“Meaning it had more time to poison me, where you’re from. Was I… worse?”

“Well, the first time I saw you after I came back, you attacked me on sight, so… maybe? But I don’t really have a point of comparison. That was the only time I saw you up until we removed it, so I don’t know how much you deteriorated in the interim. And this time, I only saw you after the bullet had already been removed.”

“I attacked you?” She doesn’t sound surprised, really. More… intrigued.

“In your defense, you didn’t think I was me anymore. Tim died, Daisy was presumed dead, and I was still alive.” He knows that, of the three of them, Melanie wouldn’t have picked Jon to be the survivor. I hope it hurts, she’d said in her testament. Instead, he slept for six months and then woke up wrong. “You were angry, and afraid, and you had a bullet in your leg making it worse. You needed someone to blame, and Elias was beyond your reach.”

So I was the next best thing, he doesn’t say. Bitterness aside, Jon can’t say he blames her.

Melanie narrows her eyes suspiciously. “Then how the hell did you convince me to have it removed?”

“We, uh… we didn’t. I told Basira first. She – didn’t think you would have agreed. So, we…” Jon forces himself to meet Melanie’s eyes as he gives the confession. “We performed some amateur surgery. Without your consent. Basira procured some local anesthetic, and the Eye let me See where the bullet was, how to remove it with… minimal damage. You were using some rather strong sleep aids, at the time, so you slept through most of it. You only woke up once the bullet was out. And you, uh, promptly stabbed me with the scalpel, though I – I probably deserved that.”

“What the fuck, Jon.”

“I – I know, I know. I’m – well, it might be – odd, to apologize for something that never happened from your perspective? But I am sorry. It wasn’t right, for us to do it that way. We should have asked you.”

“I might not have agreed.” Her voice is tightly controlled, but there’s still a quiet sort of fury simmering just under the words.

“No, uh – probably not. You said later that the anger was always there. Motivating you to keep going. Helping you survive. The Slaughter validated that rage. Made it feel like home.” Melanie stares, unblinking. “You told me the bullet stayed because you wanted it, and… we took that choice from you, decided what was in your best interests without asking you how you felt about it.”

Melanie is quiet for a few more moments, glaring at the floor, before her eyes flick back up to meet Jon's. “What would have happened if you didn’t get it out of me?”

“I can’t say for certain, but it’s likely that you would have become a Slaughter Avatar. Reached a point of no return.”

She scoffs. “So it was worth it, in the end?”

“I don’t know. I want to say yes. You saw me as a monster, and I doubt you would have wanted to become like me. Something inhuman, feeding on suffering. But…”

“But?”

“It’s easy to look at how things ultimately worked out for you and use that outcome to justify what we did,” he says, “but I – I’m not fond of the idea that the ends justify the means. I didn’t know at the time that you and Georgie were this close. If I did, maybe I could have asked her to talk to you, except…”

“We weren’t speaking,” Georgie says.

“Yeah. I – honestly don’t know what else we could have done, but… still, the way we went about it was wrong. You were trapped here like the rest of us, and we… we stole the only thing that gave you some semblance of control. What we did was a violation of your autonomy. I know that feeling, I know how it feels to…” Jon shakes his head. “We saved your life, or – your humanity, at least, but in doing so we took away your choice. Subjected you to more trauma, made it so you couldn’t feel safe anywhere. Eventually you quit, and you and Georgie seemed happy together after that, but the fact that you were able to start healing – that doesn’t change the fact that we hurt you in the first place. I’m sorry.”

“This place,” Melanie says with a breathless laugh.

“Yeah. It’s… not known for presenting benign choices. I’m, ah… I’m glad that this time, it was your own choice.”

“And what if I had still said no?”

“I probably would’ve given you the line about becoming a monster like me. I would have told you what happened last time – or, told Georgie and let her tell you, more likely, if only to avoid any, ah… stabbiness.” Melanie huffs, but it sounds amused rather than offended. “And if you still decided to choose the Slaughter after being fully informed… well, it wasn’t my place to take the choice away from you.”

“Even if I wasn’t in my right mind?” she asks.

“Even if you weren’t in your right mind.”

Melanie’s stare is piercing, scanning him for any signs of dishonesty. Eventually, she folds her arms and leads back in her chair with a hmm.

“What?” Jon asks, heart in his throat.

“Just – unexpected. Would’ve expected you to make a unilateral decision.”

Truthfully, Jon doesn’t trust himself to make those kinds of decisions. Last time, he’d let Basira call the shot. Not only did he trust her judgment more than his own – secretly, selfishly, he was relieved to abdicate at least some of the responsibility. He doubts that his conscience would have been able to carry the full burden of that choice.

Later, during the apocalypse, he had made an executive decision on someone else’s behalf: Jordan Kennedy. In that instance, there was no one with whom he could share the blame. Although it was intended as an act of mercy, Jon cannot deny that he created an unwilling Avatar – stripped a man of his humanity and reshaped him into something other, same as had been done to Jon.

The people in that domain would have continued to suffer just the same whether it was controlled by an Avatar or a hivemind of ants. At least this way, one person could be spared the torture. But it didn’t save anyone. It did not even end Jordan’s suffering, only transformed it into a different, hypothetically more endurable but still horrific shape – one that Jon knew all too intimately.

It was done with merciful intentions, and he may have given Jordan the choice to reverse it – a choice that Jon has never been given himself – but making that decision for Jordan in the first place… well, at the end of the day, Jon could never shake the feeling that he’d taken a page out of Jonah’s playbook. It wasn’t the same, but it felt… adjacent, too much so for comfort.

The choice has haunted Jon ever since. It eats away at him every time he sees Jordan in his nightmares, whenever Jordan watches him with the same dread that he does Jane Prentiss. Yet, Jon still cannot say for certain whether he would do anything differently, if faced with Jordan’s agonized pleading a second time.

But as for Melanie’s particular situation…

“I know what it’s like to have someone else decide on your destiny for you,” he says quietly.

Melanie looks thoroughly unimpressed.

“Look, I – I understand why you resent me. Elias used you to further the Archivist’s progress. Same as he used Tim, Sasha, and Martin, and Basira and Daisy, and Helen… even Jane Prentiss, Mike Crew, Jude Perry – and Jared, Manuela, Peter… everyone, everyone who crosses his path is either irrelevant or a stepping stone. Which means that everyone who crosses my path suffers.”

Stop, Jon tells himself, shutting his eyes tight against the first stirrings of panic lapping at the edges of his mind. It’s pathetic, he thinks, how easily he sinks into this headspace. Jon’s mutinous brain does all of Jonah’s work for him – like prodding at a recent wound, just to see if it still hurts, even knowing full well that it only sabotages the healing process. Stupid, pointless. Just stop dwelling on it.

He can’t.

“All of it – all of it was to create the Archive to his specifications –”

“– bound together – I would look at him, and see a grim sort of destiny for myself: trapped here, until I became him; any future I might have had, sacrificed to his –”

“– and I just – I don’t want people to look at me and – and see him. Or the Beholding –”

“– keeping its prisoners ignorant in pursuit of… knowledge –”

“– I've spent enough time being synonymous with the Eye. I don’t want it. I never wanted it, even if I did choose to – to keep looking for answers –”

“– idiots who destroyed themselves chasing a secret that wasn’t worth knowing –”

“– I can’t reverse that, but I can still make it difficult for Elias to get any use out of me. But I’m sorry – I’m sorry that I let him do it for so long –”

“– any idiot could have seen it would play out that way –”

“– I’m sorry you got dragged into all this. I wish I could have gone back to the very beginning, back to the day I took the job, and – god, I thanked Elias for the opportunity, and he – he smiled, because he knew, he knew I would be easily manipulated, knew everything about me – knew all about –”

Thankfully, Georgie interrupts his heated muttering and brings that thought train to a jarring halt. Or – no, she's been saying his name, but he's only just now heard it.

“Jon,” she says, loudly but calmly. She's leaning forward in her seat, hand prepared to reach over to him. “You’re scratching again.”

So he is. Badly. As soon as he stops, the scratches along his forearms heal, leaving only drying blood behind: thin, messy streaks painted across his skin and caked under his fingernails. He should probably clip them shorter, at this rate.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling his sleeves down to hide his arms. “I’m just – sorry.”

“Change the subject?” Georgie offers, lowering her arm.

“I think that would be best,” Jon agrees, discomfited and more than a little annoyed with himself. Will he ever be able to spare a thought for Jonah Magnus without completely unraveling in the process? Hell, will he ever be able to go a day without sparing a single thought for Jonah Magnus at all? Okay, no, stop harping, he reprimands himself. “Just – give me a minute.”

Jon forces himself to take several breaths until he can no longer hear his heartbeat thundering in his ears. Once he regathers his composure, he meets Melanie’s eyes again.

“What I mean to say is – I owe you a lot of apologies, Melanie. I was dismissive of you when we first met, and it just sort of – snowballed from there.”

“It was mutual, I think,” Melanie says guardedly.

“Still, I was – unprofessional, at the very least. And unnecessarily cruel. It was my job to be impartial, but I didn’t have to be callous. Most of the statements that come in aren’t real, but they aren’t impossible, either. And even if a story was due to – substance use, or mental illness, or – or even just an overactive imagination… most people who came in still believed that their story was true. Their distress was genuine. They deserved comfort, not ridicule, regardless of whether or not their story actually happened the way they remembered. And beyond that, it was… poor research methodology, really, to refuse to entertain the possibility of a story’s veracity simply because of my first impression of a statement giver.” His voice grows quieter. “Or because of my own baggage.”

“Your own baggage?”

“I, ah…” Jon deliberates for a brief moment on whether to share this part of himself. It seems only fair, given the personal details he knows about the rest of them. And… telling Daisy had felt cathartic in its own way, hadn't it? “I had a supernatural experience of my own once. Before working at the Institute, I mean. I was a child, so of course it was chalked up to an overactive imagination. And then at some point I was too old to still be afraid of monsters.”

Jonathan, this has gotten out of hand, his grandmother had told him with hands on her hips, exasperated after once again finding every door and cupboard in the house thrown open. Ten is too old to be sleeping with the lights on and checking closets for monsters.

And with that, she had closed the closet doors, flicked the light off, and pulled his bedroom door shut on her way out. He had clung desperately to the hope that she would at least leave the hall light on – but moments later the thin strip of light filtering through the crack under the door was snuffed out. When he heard the click of his grandmother's bedroom door down the hall, he'd dissolved into tears. Turning his face into his pillow to muffle his sobs so as not to alert her to yet another of his childish meltdowns, he spent the rest of the night – and countless nights thereafter – sleeping in fitful stops and starts, plagued by phantom knocking and chitinous clicking and creaking doors. He knows now that such sounds were nothing more than hypnopompic hallucinations, the remnants of nightmares chasing him into wakefulness; knows that the web binding him in place and the hulking presence in the room were only symptoms of sleep paralysis; but at the time…

Jon shakes his head.

“The fear doesn’t go away just because people don’t believe it’s based in truth. So, I learned to hide it instead. To stop talking about it, even though I never stopped searching for an answer –”

“– was there when he was taken; he never got over what he saw. Or didn’t see. After much searching and despair, it drove him into the waiting arms of the Institute –”

“– damn,” he hisses, flustered.

“You okay?” Georgie asks.

“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “Just – one moment.”

Pause, breathe, recollect. Listen to the quiet – which really shouldn’t be so difficult, should it? Aren’t archives supposed to be quiet? Why does this library have to be so horrifically noisy? – and breathe, breathe, breathe. Okay.

“What I’m saying is, I coped with it – poorly – with denial. I could never shake the conviction that what I saw was real, no matter how I tried to rationalize it. But I was still afraid that admitting belief in monsters would – draw their attention to me, somehow. Again. And because of that, I was… unsympathetic, to people who were genuinely afraid. The last thing they needed was derisive skepticism. Or projection. I know what it’s like to not be believed. I shouldn’t have put others through the same thing.”

“Huh.” Melanie looks him up and down. “That’s… unusually insightful for you.”

“I had a lot of time alone to obsess during the apocalypse,” Jon says drily. “Some of it even ended up being productive.” Melanie snorts; Jon gives a cautious smile. “I, ah, also should have tried harder to warn you away from India. Or the Institute in general.”

“And I would have told you to fuck off, because I already didn’t like you, and you would have been just one more in a long line of pompous men acting like they knew better than me.”

Jon laughs. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Look, we just – we both treated each other poorly. You were the easiest target to take my anger out on. Martin’s too nice, Basira was basically a hostage, Daisy is Daisy, and Tim… Tim wasn’t around much, and anyway, he would have thrown whatever I gave him right back in my face. You were a prick, but I think I blamed you more than was fair. And I guess… you were – are – trapped as much as the rest of us. So. I’m sorry too.”

“Well, it’s not like I tried to make a good first impression.”

“Neither did I.” She glowers at him, daring him to challenge her. “Accept the apology or don’t, but don’t throw it back in my face.”

“Fine,” Jon sighs. “I accept the apology.”

“There. Was that so hard?”

“Excruciating,” he deadpans.

Georgie snorts. Melanie and Jon both look at her with a combined, “What?”

“Just… watching the two of you. I think I may have a type.”

Another simultaneous, “What?”

“Curious, stubborn, temperamental, cute, short…”

“H-hey,” Melanie protests, “I’m at least a few centimeters taller than he is –”

“One-point-eight, actually,” Jon mutters under his breath – and then cracks a smile, encouraged by Georgie’s bright, surprised laugh. Melanie just glares at him.

“You know,” Melanie says, “you make it very hard to like you sometimes.”

“Sorry.” He’s not sorry at all. Shooting Georgie an indignant glance, he adds: “Also, I’m not cute.”

“I’m sure Martin would beg to differ,” Georgie teases. Jon sighs, arms crossed and face uncomfortably warm. “Well, anyway…” Georgie grins, looking between the two of them. “Does this mean… truce?”

Melanie gives Jon another long, searching look, and Jon forces himself to meet her eyes.

“Yeah, alright,” she says after a moment, then looks down, bouncing her heel against the floor. “Seems the only one who isn’t trapped and miserable is Elias. And you’re not him. Or working with him. So.” She shrugs one shoulder. “That just makes you one of us. I guess.” When Jon doesn’t reply, she glances back up at him. “What’s that face for?”

“That, uh…” Speechless, Jon roots around for something substantial to say. Instead, one corner of his mouth quirks up as he says, with tentative daring: “That might just be one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me, is all.”

“Yeah, well…” Melanie scoffs, but there’s a hint of amusement in it now. “I’m still going to call you out when you’re being a dick, mind.”

“A public service, really,” Jon says, wry and more than a little elated.

An invitation to playful bickering as opposed to scathing antagonism is, as far as he and Melanie are concerned, an undeniable olive branch.

End Notes:

Jon: my type is Aggressively Idealistic Existentialists Who Give Amazing Hugs, apparently Georgie: and my type is Short Nerds With Strong Feelings About Basically Everything ~*mlm/wlw solidarity*~ But seriously though,,, I love the idea of Georgie and Martin meeting the End and the Vast, respectively, and basically going "hey why don't you read some Camus and maybe you'll calm down???" I may or may not be projecting. I need them and Oliver to have a philosophy book club. Actually everyone else can come too. Basira strikes me as the type to have some Strong Opinions about Certain Philosophers and yes sure that dude may have died ages ago and maybe she shouldn't take it so personally but if she found a Leitner that let her temporarily resurrect him for an hour she might just do so if only for the opportunity to debate his pompous ass in a Tesco parking lot. (I, once again, may or may not be projecting. I was a philosophy minor and I WILL pepper in the fact that I hate Kant. You cannot hold this against me.)

____

Citations for Jon's Archive-speak are as follows, in order of appearance: MAG 094; 153; 144/101/111/014; 101.

Martin's "I think our experience of the universe has value, even if it disappears forever" quote is from MAG 151 and yes it IS one of my all time favorite Martin quotes, how could you tell

Disclaimer re: how Jon talks about his ace identity: I'm ace & projecting a bit, like I do with Jon's ADHD/neurodivergence. The way I describe ace stuff is not meant to be reflective of all ace-spec people's experiences.

would you believe me if I said the whole 'deservedness' spiel was written before the latest episode??? bc it was and then I read the newest ep transcript and I was like "oh"

Sorry for the delay in getting this chapter out, btw. funny story: I accidentally let the prescription for my ADHD meds expire and I had to go like four days without them before I could go get another paper script bc it's one they can't submit electronically or call in, soooo I got fuck-all done for half of that week and it broke my writing flow :0 hoping to get back into my usual flow from here on out and manage to have the next chapter ready in 2ish weeks, but we shall see. Thanks for sticking with me <3 (I might start shortening chapters again, the last few have been 10k+ compared to the earlier 6-8k and I could probably stand to split them up a bit.)

Speaking of the next chapter - yes, I AM planning on moving the plot forward I swear. I realize the last few chapters have basically taken place within a single week and have been mostly People Talking About Things, RIP.

And as always, thank you for reading, and for all your comments! <3 They're basically 50% of my regular serotonin intake. The other 50% is my cat's motorboat purring.

28 notes · View notes

kaleidescope-writes · 4 years ago

Text

Faithfully Yours–Chapter 3: It Couple

In partnership with @accio-boys

Billionaire!Tom Hiddleston x Doctor!Reader

Slow Burn! (Yay)

Warnings: Some Hecking Swearing, Dress.⬇⬇⬇, Tom himself should be a warning. Cliff hangers are forevermore a permanent warning.

Masterlist

“Come here sweetie.” his sultry accented voice asked. You walked over to him, a smile gracing your lips as you let him wrap an arm around your waist facing him. You wrapped your arms around his neck, looking up at those steel-blue eyes of his. Tom smiled down at you, winking as he pulled you just a little closer.

~~~~~ 48 Hours Earlier~~~~~

“So what do you want to talk about?”

He didn’t turn to face you. He just kept looking down at the city below. “It’s a lovely night. The streets are busy as always, but at least the city lights are still as beautiful,” Tom admired. You rolled your eyes in frustration, “What the hell do you want, Hiddleston? I’m a very busy woman and if you continue to waste my time I’ll walk away.” He sighed at your threats, finally turning to face you. “You have to leave the city,” he said plainly. You looked at him “What?!” He took a step closer to you, quickly stopping when he noticed your glare. “If you leave the city, the marriage arrangement we were so forcibly put into by our families will be canceled. There can’t be a wedding with one of the participants missing,” he explained simply.

You pondered for a moment before shaking your head, “As tempting as that is, it would never work. I have a job to do--that I’m sure is much more important than yours. And even if that wasn’t a factor, you don’t know my family. They will go to the ends of hell to find me if I leave.” Tom groaned, opening his arms and shrugging his shoulders. “Then what exactly do you suggest?” he asked sharply. “Why don’t you leave?” you questioned. Tom looked away, hands on his hips, “Let’s just say my family has connections everywhere. I’d be found before I even reached a desired destination.”

Groaning, let your head fall upon your shoulders. This was actual hell. “So what do you suggest we do?” He asked, trying to find an alternative. You thought for a moment, reviewing the conditions of said marriage. You couldn’t run, hide, or call it off yourself. The marriage was inevitable. But no one said it had to last. Your eyes widened, realization hitting you hard. “What if we go through with this for the time being?” you breathed out, making Tom look at you in both horror and strange intrigue. “The arrangement is that we have to get married,” you explained, “Nothing about it says it has to last long. We could fake a big fight that leads to a divorce.” Tom nodded cautiously, mentally working out the plan in his head before speaking up. “That could work,” he silently agreed, taking a step towards you. “But there is one you have to do for me,” you mentioned, crossing your arms as you took a determined stance. Tom rolled his eyes, walking closer to you until he was a few feet away. “What? Fund a charity for you at the hospital? Perhaps be a sponsor to your research?” he asked in an annoyed tone. You laughed, “Maybe some other time,” you snarked, “But for now…” You looked from him to the floor, then back.

“Kneel,” you smirked, watching as his face contorted to confusion. “What for?” he asked almost in a whisper. You took a step forward, challenging him slightly, “If we’re going to do this, I need a proper proposal. So, get down on one knee, pretty boy, and ask away.” Tom groaned, rolling his head as he began to descend onto his knee. He looked up to meet your eyes, dread filling his. Your smile widened, giggling as you looked down upon him, “You look so pathetic from this angle, Tom. It suits you.” Tom glared at you, raising his left hand as if he had a box in it. “Will you... marry... me?” he hissed. You gave him an innocent look, pretending to think for a moment before saying, “Fine. Let’s do it.”

~~~~~

"I had this teen girl in emergency earlier. She came in because she felt pain near her appendix. Turns out, she had a tiny cyst in her ovaries. Completely curable," Luke commented, taking another chip from the bag and taking a bite. You leaned into the wall, disregarding the pad in your hand as you listened to today's chosen topic of conversation; false alarms.

"There was a woman that came in earlier. She said she had been having a migraine since yesterday and it got worse today. We did a CT, but nothing showed up. Her blood test results came back with a high hormone count. It was a side effect from entering menopause," Lucille followed up, leaning right beside you. Isabel sighed, "I can't even count how many pregnancy scares I had today alone. Seriously, some tests aren't accurate at all." You looked up to meet her eyes, "Wait, you were working the clinic today?" She shrugged, slouching into the wall a little more. "I wanted an easy day. Besides, Juniper's training the interns today, so all my cases were handed over to her and Ashby," Isabel said simply. You nodded, looking down to check the time on the pad. "What about you, miss boss doc? Any false alarms today?" Luke asked, finishing his chips and tossing the bag into the bin in the hallway. You would invite them into your office, but you always reserved it for business, not social interactions. That, and you liked being in that hallway. It reminded you of when you were still an intern, dreaming of being the chief of Cardiology and a member of the board. Simpler times.

"Nope. I handle surgeries mostly. In surgeries, it's never a false alarm. There's always prior testing to make sure something is really wrong with the heart," you stated, looking back up to your friends. Lucille smirked and you could practically see the horns growing on her head. "Speaking of which," she started, "How goes it with your messed up heart that won't accept Mr. Heartthrob Hiddleston?" You rolled your eyes, groaning silently as you stood up. "Nothing is wrong with my heart. I just had a first and only impression of him being an absolute asshat and I didn't want to marry him," you explained simply, putting your hands in your pockets. "I'd still marry him," Isabel shrugged, taking a sip of her coffee. Luke nodded softly, looking down at his feet. He perked up suddenly, something striking his attention. "You said 'didn't' as in past tense. Did something happen?" He asked you, almost concerned. You looked up at him, feeling slightly uneasy, but you knew this was going to happen eventually. "About that," you began before getting cut off by someone behind you clearing their throat.

"I was told I might find you here," a familiar voice said. You turned around, only to see the asshole--or rather, your fiance-- you were talking about. "Tom," you greeted in a false voice, "Why are you here?" He addressed your friends with a smile before saying, "It appears I'm here to take you out of work early." Luke gave him a confused look, "Why would you do that? I thought you didn't like her." Tom's smile widened slightly, causing a feeling of dread fill your stomach along with a strong desire to punch him in the gut… or lower.

"She didn't tell you?" He asked, turning you around to face them and wrapping an arm around your waist. "She said yes. We're officially engaged," he spoke in such a happy tone, you'd think it was genuine happiness. The group looked at you in awe, completely baffled by his declaration. You laughed dryly, removing his arm and snapping them out of their daze. "Can you excuse us a moment, I have to have a chat with this as….. my fiance," you almost cringed at the word. Realizing they weren't going to move anytime soon, you grabbed Tom's arm and led him to your office. Opening the door, you let him in before turning to Luke. "I meant to tell you, honestly. He beat me to it," you said in a hushed tone. Luke just nodded slowly before turning around and walking away. You took in a deep breath, exhaling softly before walking in yourself and closing the door.

"Your friends are lovely," Tom smiled, already sitting in your chair. "What is it now?" You asked bitterly. He leaned back, putting the bag you just became aware of on the desk. "Actually, we were invited to a dinner party in celebration of our engagement. It starts in about half an hour and the house is ten minutes away," he explained. You gave him a glare, "Thirty minutes? That doesn't give me enough time to change! Why didn't you tell me earlier?" "I was busy earlier," he rebutted, "And I know it's not enough time, that's why I bought you this." He pushes the bag to you. You eye it for a moment before going to look inside. There was black fabric--possibly a dress-- and a pair of shoes. "I had to ask your mother for your size. You should have enough time to change now," he said dismissively.

You lifted the dress to inspect it, unfolding it carefully. Once you saw how revealing it would be, you gave him an indignant glare. "Are you fucking serious?" You asked, staring him down to get an answer. Tom, once again, shrugged, "I thought it would be your style. Apparently, I was wrong." You scoffed, putting it back in the, "I'm not wearing that." He sighed, "Going in your scrubs isn't an option and I doubt you have clothes appropriate for this kind of event in your emergency drawers. You don't have a choice."

"When it comes to you, I never have a choice," you rebuked, taking the bag and walking into the bathroom. Once he heard the door lock, Tom turned to the door and shouted. "I hope you come out of there ready to be a good fiance!"

~~~~~Presently~~~~~~

You smiled at the guest currently congratulating you, slightly leaning back into Tom’s chest as he wrapped an arm around your waist. “It’s astonishing how quickly you both changed your minds about the union!” another family friend started, “Neither of you wanted to go through with this a few days ago. What changed?” You laughed slightly before responding, “We just needed to spend some time together. I was quick to judge him before I actually got to know him, but now that I do, it’s like I can’t stay away.” Tom laughed behind you, saying his own words of confirmation.

“Excuse me, everyone,” your mother called out to the guests, tapping a glass with a metal utensil, “If I could have just a moment of your time, I would like to propose a toast to the newly engaged couple.” You and Tom turned your attention to her, a soft feeling of dread spreading slowly in your abdomen. A feeling you chose to ignore for the sake of the act. “My dearest daughter,” she began, looking at you in the eye, “My sweet, girl. I watched you grow up and become the woman I hoped you’d become. You work so hard at the hospital, always putting other people’s needs before yours. Fixing the hearts of others and disregarding your own. Your marriage to Tom, I hope, will allow you to finally regard your own heart and find the love you deserve.” You smiled despite the voice in the back of your head screaming at everything she said.

You looked up at Tom, who was already looking down at you with a bright smile. His arm tightened ever so slightly around your waist. “Tom,” she continued, “I trust you’ll care for my daughter. I trust you’ll be good and treat my little girl like a real man should. Pardon the rhyme. I know that you are meant for her as much as she is meant for you. My only wish is that your marriage is everlasting and blesses both of you with children of your own. Children that will grow up to be the perfect mix of both of you.” You had to fight to keep the smile on your face as you looked back to her. Did she really have to talk about this now? In front of everyone? “Your union will be filled with love and hope for the future,” she admired, “And what better way to start than with a loving kiss to show everyone how faithful you’ll be to each other.”

Every part of you was against it. Why the hell would she do this to you? Wasn’t it enough that she arranged for you to marry a complete stranger? How could she be this selfish?

“Well, darling?” Tom asked, looking at you with something akin to affection. Truthfully, if you weren’t aware of the situation, you’d think it was sincere. “Shall we?” The words felt sour to hear, but you had to suppress your true feelings just a little longer. You’ll take it out on him later. Feigning yet another smile, you nodded and leaned into him slightly. He leaned in as well, closing the distance between the two of you as you closed your eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Tom’s lips were surprisingly soft. You barely reacted to the kiss, surprised at how much feeling he put into it. How was it possible that he could put so much false emotion into a kiss he’s sharing with you? Tom pulled away slowly, opening his eyes as you found yourself involuntarily leaning towards him unhappy with his absence. You opened your eyes as well, looking deeply into his own as you tried to find anything that suggested all of it was an act. Before you could find one, however, you suddenly became aware of the cheers resonating in the room around you. You looked around the room, scanning over the smiling faces of the cheering guests. Your eyes stopped on one of them; the face of your brother. His expression was one of concern mixed with skepticism. You knew that look. It’s the same one he gave you when he knew you were lying.

“Well now, their first kiss is over with,” Genevieve spoke over their happy cheers, “So I suppose it’s time for the happy couple to reach another benchmark of sharing their lives. As of this morning, I hired a moving crew to pack all Y/N’s belongings and send them to Tom’s place. As of tonight, the lovely to-be’s will be living together on Tom’s very adequate estate!” More cheers filled the room as your eyes went wide, slightly twitching as you thought of a million and one obscenities you’d loved to voice at the moment. You weren’t given the chance, being brought back to the current setting. “Congratulations to the happy couple!” someone called out over the cheers.

Happy. Were you happy?

Your eyes fluttered open, cringing at the amount of light in the room. You stared up at the ceiling for a moment, listening to the voice of a child in the room with you. A child? Turning to the left, your nose was inches away from Tom’s, who was slowly waking up as well. Remembering last night’s events, you turned back to the ceiling, eyes wide as your mind began to race with a million thoughts.

I live with Tom now...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: No, it is not currently Sunday, but I owe you guys! It’s been a while, but I’m back and ready to post. There will be some changes due to certain controversies going around at the moment (Meaning I will delay any works I have planned for Sebastian Stan), as I understand that people are upset, to say the least. I do see it adequate to post stuff involving (even in the slightest) a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about. Posts about Bucky as a character will continue as planned. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this well overdue Chapter. There are several more well overdue works on the way. As always let me know what you think. Show some love for the absolutely marvelous @accio-boys for all her ideas and contributions to the series. You should definitely go check out her blog as well as her Wattpad. Thanks so much for all the support, I appreciate every single one of you. Stay Safe, PLEASE be careful out there, Stay Proud, I Love You, and have a wonderful rest of the week!! I’ll see you soon for the catch-up chapter posts!

And to all my new followers, Welcome to the Family!!😘💖💖💖💖

Taglist is OPEN

@myraiswack @falling4uke @accio-boys @ashcrimson-is-writing @just-trying-to-survive-marvel @whathefuckrichard69 @allthecreativeonesaretaken @hunterofartemisblog @frostedgiant @lyka-k @racewife2004 @juniperwoodwell @adepressedstudentslife

#tom hiddelston x reader #tom hiddelston imagine #tom hiddelson #tom hiddleston #thomas hiddleston #tom hiddles #loki fanfic #thomas william hiddleston #loki fandom #tom hiddleston imagine #tom hiddleston x reader #thomas hiddleston x reader #character thomas #tom hiddleston x ofc #tom hiddleston x you #loki (marvel)#loki x y/n #loki x reader

37 notes · View notes

calliecat93 · 4 years ago

Text

ST: TNG Watchthrough Episodes 17-20.

Home Soil: So from what I’ve read, this would be Gene Roddenberry’s final episode as showrunner before getting replaced by writer Maurice Hurly. I won’t comment on the behind the scenes drama and such that caused it because it was decades ago and not relevant for a First Watchthrough post, but since this is the last I wanted to make note of it. My thoughts? It was okay. This is very much borrowing from the TOS episode Devil in the Dark (the one with the Horta) with the plot being of an alien presence killing humans... but only because the humans were unknowingly causing it harm. It’s done fine enough, not being any better or worst than when TOS did it, but that’s about it. It does executed it a little differently with the events and the alien is FAR less willing to comply than the Horta was at first and ends with the alien backing down, but refusing contact with humans for three centuries, which DOES make it a nice contrast to how Devil in the Dark ended. It’s not great. It’s not horrible. It’s just okay with the biggest criticism being pulling too much from TOS again. Look, I love TOS and so far TNG hasn’t passed it. I outright have a 30 disc Blu-Ray set coming in the next few days of all the TOS material, including TAS and the films. If I want to revisit TOS, I’ll go watch it or read fanfiction or heck, go watch AOS. TNG has remained painfully average or not good at this point because it’s trying to retain what TOS had, despite it being over 20 years later and even the TOS films had changed how it did things compared to the show. Whatever one feels about Roddenberry, his removal I hope helped push TNG away from TOS and let it carve it’s own identity while still honoring what TOS had stood for, and according to history it did. Not sure if we’ll see the quality go up in these final few S1 episodes, but still. Sorry, felt appropriate to finally get this out here. Going back to the episode, it’s perfectly fine and it delivers it’s message well, and hey it’s not always a bad idea to showcase the same themes as the previous incarnation in a spinoff especially fi a relevant one/gets shown to viewers who hadn’t seen that TOS episode. Not the best, not the worst, and that’s not such a bad way to end up. 3/5.

Coming of Age: Alright Wesley, it took a bit but you’re starting to grow on me. So we have Wesley going through a test to get into the Academy while Picard and the crew are dealing with some rough interrogations and Picard being painted as an incompetent captain by the interrogator. They don’t seem that connected, but infact the latter is a test for Picard to determine if e’s ready for a promotion. I like how they bring up Picard’s actions in past continuity that WOULD present him as at least fallible to major error, ignoring certain conditions that caused it to begin with and how he got them out of the situation. Like I said, this was one of Wesley’s better episodes. While doing well with testing, his worry about the psyche test and not knowing his own fear and therefore worried about what the test will unleash upon him is very relatable. Heck his talk with Worf was a really nice scene, especially with Worf outright stating that only fools fear nothing which in turns add more depth and dimensions to the Klingons. The reveal fo his greatest fear, while I wish he had hesitated a little bit more, made perfect sense and he acted as a true Starfleet Officer. Which since this was before Undiscovered Country, is a VERY positive development. Picard guiding a kid who made a stupid decision was also good and shows why he’s a good captain, and his talk to him as well as encouraging a disappointed Wesley at the end was a nice moment to cap the episode off with. As far as Wesley goes, he may still be presented as too competent and intelligent, but he is more likeable and the testing setting allows him to shine like this without, again, affecting the adult characters. Plus text anxiety is super relatable haha. Now of course due to Status Quo is God, Wesley fails, but he takes it well and proved that he will be ready for it in the future. It was a pretty nice episode all in all. Nothing spectacular, but I enjoyed it, neither plot overpowered the other, had a good theme of one’s integrity as a person/doing your best, good use of past continuity, and it really shows the best in characters like Picard, Wesley, and the crew’s loyalty to the former. 4/5.

Heart of Glory: Back in TOS, the Klingons were depicted as war-loving jerks. They weren’t without some depth and episodes like Day of the Dove did attempt to give them a bit more positive limelight, but it wasn’t enough to overpower the one-dimensional characterization. The films were a bit better, Undiscovered Country especialy, but that one hadn’t been made yet and they still stuck with the ruthless characterization, just changed up the makeup to make them look more alien like. It was weird sicne whenever I ddi watch TNG back when that’s all I knew of Star Trek, Worf never came across like a ruthless warmonger but like an honorable warrior which made him stand-out amongst the cast for me (that and because I freakin’ love Michael Dorn due to his animation voice over work, anyone else remember I.M. Weasel? XD). So now we get an episode where Worf gets to interact with other Klingons. I lift a brow at Worf not knowing about most Klingon customs when he seemed perfectly knowledgeable about i in past episodes. Maybe that wad due tot he shift after getting rid of Roddenberry/ IDK, but these kinds of retcons happens sometimes. This was an interesting one for sure. The Klingons are much better presented here than the entirety of TOS, showing more of their culture/customs and compared to Worf, who was raised by humans and therefore not fully in touch with his people and their ways. This is probably one of, if not the first time he’s interacted with his full culture and naturally he’d want to interact with them and learn more now that he has the chance. There’s the themes of one growing in another culture, how they adapt while still trying to be part of that culture, and finding one’s own path. There is the question on why Worf wans’t just returned tot he Klingons as a child and IDK if they address it down the line, but that type of life and struggle with identity/culture clash due to upbringing IS real and VERY relatable. I’m really glad to see the Klingons fleshed out past their TOS depiction and it’s overall respected by the cast, showing how far things have come since Kirk’s time. It fleshes out Worf’s character a great deal and makes him more likable/relatable and giving him a very realistic struggle, and in the end he stands by his beliefs and even gets the respect and offer to serve with Klingons in the future by Klingon Captain K’Nera. Very much glad that I watched this one~ 4/5.

The Arsenal of Freedom: Oh boy, war machines that killed everything! That theme never gets old! I’m not joking, with how modern warfare and technology are growing and being sold for profit, it feels like it just keeps getting more and more relevant. There’s a lot of tension in this one with Yar, Data, and Riker dealing with the arsenal that is intelligent and they’re unable to be beamed up, the ship getting attacked with Geordi in command and the Chief Engineer (they seem to go through a LOT of those this season, guess they couldn’t handle the strain of acting as miracle workers like Scotty) being an asshole to him, and Crusher injured with Picard trying to keep her alive and not get killed. Seriously, I loved Geordi here for being an effective acting commanding officer during a VERY intense situation AND telling off the Chief Engineer without even so much as raising is voice while encouraging the other officers. Badass and admirable. The away team scenes were also good with everyone being plain awesome~ Crusher having to explain to Picard how to treat her injuries while she’s in obvious pain was really good character stuff and Thank God that they avoided indulging in the obvious shipping fodder. I know they’ve hinted a little at Picard/Crusher... but I’m not really interested in it int he romantic sense at least currently. It comes off as a Captain and CMO trusting the other (not quite the same as say... Kirk and McCoy, but the trust is very much strong here plus Picard and Crusher should be allowed to form their own dynamic) and that’s the kind of interaction I live for~! It feels like everyone got a moment to shine, even Troi checking on Geordi’s mental well-being and letting him express some of his nervousness was really nice. And of course the arsenal having destroyed their own creators... like I said, a theme that just seems to grow more and more in relevance. Like I said above, some themes are necessary to repeat, and this one very much qualifies. But yeah this was great for it’s tensions, the characters being all great especially Geordi, and it’s themes (even fi IDK how intentional it was) being a huge reminder of the dangers of modernized warfare/using warfare for profit. It doesn’t go well. 4.5/5.

Okay, it’s late in the season, but we are FINALLY getting somewhere! The characters have truly grown on me and their characterizations are getting better (i.e. Picard is still a serious captain, but is very much warming up and not as cold as he was early on), the stories are steadily improving, and even with what I said about the first one, I really enjoyed this batch of episodes! Only five remain in the season, and the plan is to knock ‘em all out tomorrow. Might take a day or two off before tarting Season 2, but golly I’m finally feeling excited~!

#st watchthrough

5 notes · View notes

simplycomplicatedwriting · 5 years ago

Text

Here’s a mini thing I got carried away with (Shane x Farmer)

I was playing with an idea I had for an imagine and pitched it over discord. This is just a copy-paste of the messages I sent about the prompt which turned into a half-assed mini story. It starts off as a prompt but goes into more detail and Yes the tense changes at points- sorry about that, but I was writing this over the course of a few hours between doing other things. I really liked the idea in the end so I thought I’d share :)

Shane x Farmer OC/You except it's an alternative POV Groundhog Day-esque mystery, where Shane's anxiety and low self-esteem makes him question why on Earth the farmer wants to be friends enough that he starts to notice how they can act a little weird. Weird as in the way they pause at random moments before something happens as if they were expecting it when there was no way they could have known, or how they seem to know everything he likes but play it off as a "good guess". Then, of course, the Farmer and Shane fall in love and start dating. Shane notices the Farmer goes to Cindersap forest a lot, and always in a sneaking manner. He hears from Lewis about the weird man who lives in a tower and those insecurities kick in once again. Shane and the Farmer have a fight about it, with the Farmer flatly denying any suggestions and tries to defuse the situation (and they seem to know exactly what to say to calm him down, which only frustrates him further). Shane then goes to investigate on his own and see if the Farmer is cheating on him (which is what he suspects). He finds the wizard in the tower,

[completely out of character dialogue but you get the gist]

Rasmodius: Ah, [Farmer's name]'s husband... what do you want?

Shane: ... husband?

Shane: Who- we're not married. I'm not their husband. Who are you?

Rasmodius: A-hah, finally divorced you, have they? I'm not surprised. If you want a love potion to win them back, that's not how this works

Shane: What are you on about? We have never been married- I've barely known them a year!

An awkward silence ensues and a look of concern washes over the Wizard's face. He mutters something to himself and makes a wave with his hand. Shane is pushed out of the tower against his will and the door slams firmly shut. He goes home confused and still, if not more, upset.

The next morning Shane wanders onto the farm hungover from the night before, him having drunk himself to sleep. As he approached from the upper right from town, he can hear loud voices. Once he gets close enough he see's the wizard on the Farmer's doorstep and the Farmer in the doorway. They're having a heated discussion. The farmer looks like they've been crying. Being the caring boyfriend, Shane goes to the Farmer's defence without hesitation. The wizard gives the farmer a look, which causes them to cast their eyes down. They don't look at Shane.

"You need to fix this," the Wizard states firmly. The harshness and obvious anger in his voice makes the Farmer wince. Shane goes to intervene, but the Wizard leaves too quickly for it to matter.

The Farmer doesn't invite Shane into their house like they normally would. They keep the doorway blocked with their body and come off as reserved. The sight of them causes a pain in Shane's head, like a memory fighting its way to the surface. It makes him blurt, "We've been here before." The Farmer sobs. Shane doesn't comfort them, only looking on in shock and confusion.

"We're were married," The Farmer confesses.

Long ago, in another life, the Farmer had met Shane in the secluded Pelican Town in Stardew Valley. It was like a whole other world, so cut off from the rest of society. The war hadn't reached the valley, nor had it been consumed by modern technology. The other threat to it was Joja mart, which the Farmer swiftly put an end to with the help of the Junimos. Shane and the Farmer married in the Summer of the Farmer's third year. Their love was sweet and naive. It took the Farmer a long time to gain Shane's trust, to learn what he liked and what he didn't, but they enjoyed everyone second of it. Of course, married life was much different from dating. Very quickly the threads of their relationship came undone. Tempers were tested and their love was challenged. Snide comments turned to midnight screaming matches and neither could find common ground. The Farmer was hard-working, but at times struggled to empathise with him. Shane was passionate, but still struggling with his mental health and found it difficult to have any motivation.

That was their first marriage.

With a quick deal, the Farmer was given a second chance to start again. A new life in the same old Pelican Town. A completely clean slate. They knew what they were doing this time. They knew how to woo Shane while also keeping the Farm in good condition. They were like a machine. The two married in the Winter of the Farmer's first year. Shane, unaware of the upper hand the Farmer had, was smitten. He'd found his soulmate. They were perfect together, so of course, when the topic of babies came up, they were quick to make a decision.

"We had kids...?" The memories Shane was getting back were faint and hard to interpret, but he knew the Farmer was telling the truth. He felt sick. The regret that washed over the Farmer's face when he spoke only made it worse.

"You- We, hated it. We were terrible parents. I wasn't fit for it, I-I was too busy all the time, and it stressed you out so much. We weren't happy." The Farmer's voice began to crack. "It just wouldn't stop crying... no matter what we did... it just wouldn't stop."

The Farmer had found themselves on the Witch's doorstep again, ready to make a deal. They had remembered what the Witch had offered them last time and decided to take them up on one of their offers. 'Only you, I and the wizard will have any memories of these events you are about to erase'. With a hefty fee, the Farmer wished for their troubled child to be set free, to be turned into a dove.

This was no easy fix, though. Somehow, in some way, Shane figured it out, and he stood in the rain where he was standing now, looking at the Farmer as they stood in the doorway, hoping- praying for some kind of answer that would make it all better. He relied on the Farmer for that. They always seemed to fix his problems for him, but all the sudden they were the cause.

"You were going to hurt yourself... I couldn't let you go. I had to stop you."

Shane had gone to the cliff edge like he had done times before, but nothing the Farmer had said changed his mind. They were the problem, not the solution anymore.

One more time. Just one more time and they'd get it right. Things would be perfect, and they would be happy. But the Farmer couldn't restart again. They felt themselves getting older both physically and mentally from the constant stress. A different deal with the witch, and with a little extra. Erase the town's memory of Shane and they're relationship. Any trace that they had been any more their friends would be gone. Additionally, for the price of their soul, Stardew Valley would continue to be a secluded, untouched miracle in a war-torn world, where no ill would come to the valley and its inhabitants would stay in their happy little bubble. There would be no death, no ageing, and the outside world would only resume when interacted with. It was a strong spell, but it was worth it for an eternity of paradise. The Farmer could start again with Shane while keeping their progress on the farm and with the rest of the town, that way they would be ready for anything.

"So here we are," The Farmer said with a forced laugh. They looked like how Shane felt- complete and utter shit. Hopeless, lost and hurt was a good way to put it. By now the hidden memories had come back just like any other memory, but it didn't ease Shane. Somehow he could comprehend it all, but what does one do in that situation? Knowing knowledge that shouldn't be known. Sure, the Farmer told him of two instances where they had reset their relationship (and practically time itself), but how many other times had they toyed with this power? How could one determine what was genuine and what was a forced lie implanted into the mind? Shane thought of the child he now remembered. He felt guilty for forgetting. He felt grief for the child he had lost. He felt betrayed, oh so betrayed, by the one he thought he cared for so deeply, who had used and toyed with him like he were some program that could be edited and reset at a whim.

"I hate you,"

Those three words. Three words the Farmer thought they could never withstand hearing from him... but they had. They had more times than they would ever acknowledge. The naive Farmer who came to Stardew Valley would have never survived the heartbreak, but that person was gone- consumed by the determination to fix things. They were barely fazed by the words at this point; the phrase was like a paper cut, it hurt, but only for a moment. Why should they worry, anyway? They'd get it right next time.

"One more time," they said. "It'll be the last and I'll get it right. We'll be happy. I'll wipe the slate clean this time."

#stardew valley #shane #sdv shane #x farmer #oc #reader #imagine #just for fun #gender neutral reader

53 notes · View notes

wanna-b-poet31 · 6 years ago

Text

A (maybe) 4-part meta on Good Omens: Part 1: Aziraphale’s Abuse and Trauma

SOOOOO I promised myself I wouldn’t get too obsessed with Good Omens but I’ve got some meta-thoughts.

So, it’s no secret that abuse is prevalent in Good Omens, but the methods of abuse are interesting ultimately working as a catalyst for how Crowley and Aziraphale interact with humans, Heaven, Hell, and each other.

Several of the characters we see in Good Omens are traumatized by the time we meet them, although some more than others. For example, Newt, for what little we see him is clearly ostracized by everyone around him and he shows signs of trauma via isolation. Until the end of the world, it’s heavily implied that he’s bullied, if not dismissed from the rest of the world due to his explosive tendencies with computers. He’s not shown to have healthy coping skills with the isolation, and although it is ultimately good he doesn’t get his job, and works with Shadwell, and meets Anathema, but he’s unable to express himself in a healthy way or handle his past. Similarly, due to the stress of saving the world, Anathema is traumatized by the expectations of her family, of being a “descendant” of Agnes Nutters.

But, both begin recovery journeys by beginning to assert their own needs and well-being. Newt begins forming real, relationships and coping with his loneliness by making friends and Anathema defies her family’s obligation by burning the letters. Overall, it’s a straightforward approach to begin recovering from traumatic events.

However, Crowley and Aziraphale do not have quite as straightforward a narrative.

Heaven is unbending. It is clear to both of them that God and her representatives punish independence, asking questions, and having any defined version of a “self”.

Look at the photo below. It’s an environment that (per my last post) is cold, abusive, and really, isn’t a functional space. Nothing can get done reasonably in here. There aren’t any personal touches and it makes the space devoid of any sense of home. AND THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE HEAVEN, land of milk and honey Heaven. It’s not just bland, it’s much more insidious than that. It’s false transparency, a “nothing to see here” mask that the angels use to belittle, attack, and intimidate each other.

Then there’s the messy business of the dogmatism Heaven follows that affects Aziraphale throughout the series. We see it first in the garden that questions (a la Crowley) lead to abandonment. The fear of falling, of knowingly being discarded by people/entities that supposedly love one another is a violent space to grow up in and incentivizes the remaining angels to keep their head down and not question actions that are clearly wrong. It is Crowley who asks why it would be okay to kill kids (because it’s clearly wrong) to which Aziraphale responds: “I’m not consulted about policy decisions”. It’s clear that 1000 year after the garden he’s internalizing his conditioning.

His behavior, especially coming from THE angel who gave away his flaming sword without any hesitation and then LIED to God about it, shows that he clearly knows right from wrong is jarring. But, it’s unsurprising, given the abusive place he is attached to. Heaven’s love for him is conditional and wholly dependant on him being able to do as he’s told, not what might be right.

It’s also clear that Aziraphale is being abused during the events of the series. While not always physically violent (although I’ll get to that in a second), he is continuously belittled and degraded.

Take a look at Heaven’s least favorite Asshole: Gabriel

When we are introduced to Gabriel the first few things out of his mouth are insults. Although we’ve had Aziraphale for only like 5 seconds and we already can tell how passionate he is about food. Aziraphale is eating sushi, presumably a favorite food given his familiarity with the chef, and taking some time for himself, and like a good family member offers some to his “fellow”, his “ally”, an entity who supposedly had his back. When the food is refused, it’s presented with a dismissive tone and called “gross matter” that would “sully” his body. This is is a smack in the face to Aziraphale and he quickly lies, saying he’s only eating to keep up appearances. This shutdown of interests and likes pushes Aziraphale to be like Newt, ostracized from people who are supposed to be his friends. Then, like Anathema, his exposure to the “great plan” and what is expected of an angel is villanizes his interests, causing him to feel shame and associate his individuality and sense of the self with “wrong” or “broken”.

This differs greatly from how Crowley and Aziraphale meet. Although we see Crowley tempt eve, they talk to each other as equals and Crowley does the one thing Heaven has never done -- tell him he’s doing a good job. There is no harm in eating or enjoying eating but he’s being treated like he’s committing some kind of sin. Crowley, in contrast, reaffirms Aziraphale’s actions and helps relieve his concerns. Gabriel, instead, aggravates his anxiety.

Then, we see Gabriel do one of the more insidious discreditings of Aziraphale’s sense of self at the bookstore. Whereas Crowley is able to tell when there are new books in the shop and knows that losing the shop is a significant loss for Aziraphale, Gabriel can’t be bothered (more on that at the end). At some level, it’s his disdain for humanity that makes him indifferent at best about the bookstore. But, his disregard for Aziraphale’s livelihood, something that is a clear point of pride and joy, is belittling. He is demanding that Aziraphale drop everything he loves to fight the great war, and while asking to fight is not intrinsically abusive (Crowley too asks Azi to join him and fight), the dynamic is not of equals with the same motivations, rather it is clearly meant to be talking down to Aziraphale. Gabriel sees no value in the shop or his “brother” and if he can’t see it there must not be any. The blow to Aziraphale’s emotional state is apparent in the grimace he gives the two angels.

Even when Aziraphale, (who does his best to uphold what he has been conditioned to be “right” and after many millennia has grown to trust Gabriel despite no reciprocation) DOES go to Heaven with a plan, news about where the anti-christ is and how to stop it, or push him to be neither satan no saint, he’s met with more belittlement. None of the angels at the meeting believe that Aziraphale can accomplish his goals, but worst than that, none of them are willing to give him the support he needs to achieve his goal. Sure they don’t smite him where he stands for purposing an alternative to the end of the world, but that’s not the same as being a support system he can rely on. He can’t even voice here the reasons why he cares so deeply about Earth or why they may be wrong. He is not their equals in their eyes.

You can also see it at the park when Gabriel and Aziraphale are running, and Gabriel punches his stomach, telling our adorable angel he needs to lose the gut, devaluing Aziraphale’s worth further. Even the face he makes in the gif below is filled with condescension. He’s not taking Aziraphale, or Aziraphale’s concerns seriously.

Which brings me to the final nail in Heaven’s abusive coffin via Gabriel. The intended violence of his “sentence” is meant to, like the fall, strike the fear of abandonment, disownment, and death into Aziraphale. There is no scenario (except the one we see) where Aziraphale is meant to make it out of Heaven alive.

After Armaggeddon’t Gabriel, who knows Aziraphale’s intentions of diverting the apocalypse, if perhaps not the rationale, is pleased to belittle the restrained Aziraphale. There is legit joy in his face when they force Aziraphale to walk into the hellfire.

In the above gif, you can see that not only is he being verbally abusive, throwing ill-intent insults at Aziraphale, but that he fully expects the fire to kill his supposed brother and PLEASED about it.

LET ME REPEAT THAT. The place/people who Aziraphale is supposed to love, trust, and be loyal to are ready, and happy to, drop him at a moment’s notice. At this point, considering the layers of abuse already outlined, Aziraphale’s insistence that he can’t be on Crowley’s side because Heaven wouldn’t like it is symptomatic of someone who is longing for a genuine, honest connection and has been “raised” to believe that is Heaven, no questions allowed.

this is not to say Heaven isn’t above physical abuse towards Aziraphale.

I’ve seen some excellent metas floating around dissecting the Crowley vs. Aziraphale and the Angel’s vs. Aziraphale “intimidation” (although I can’t find them now, please @ them if you know them) and the bottom line is that Aziraphale is terrified by Uriel and her legion of Angels much more than Crowley ever could. Aziraphale is damn well aware of how violent the angels who aren’t even touching him can be vs. his calm response to Crowley pushing him against a wall.

Which brings me back to Crowley and Aziraphale. Although I can (and will) do another one of these on Crowley, and dive deeper into the implications of their relationship and the closure they need/got by being on their own side. I want to take a second to articulate just how much Crowley does not (try) to do be this way to Aziraphale.

I maintain that Crowley, is aware of Heaven’s abusive tendencies due to his fall and the subsequent fear that must have caused other angels, I do not think he’s aware of the levels of mental, verbal, and emotional abuse that heaven throws Aziraphale specifically. The way Aziraphale talks up heaven, you’d suspect he was getting awards left and right, or at least some semblance of respect. But no. In stark contrast to Gabriel, Crowley will entertain Aziraphale’s interests/passions like food and books even if they aren’t something he indulges in often himself. Whereas I said earlier Gabriel dismissed the bookshop and presupposed it was something Aziraphale would be able to drop like a rock, Crowley KNOWS that Aziraphale cares so deeply for his books, his food, and his identity as an angel, that losing any of them would be unbearable. Although Crowley pushes and sometimes goes too fast for Aziraphale, he’s not approaching Aziraphale in bad faith.

Of the 10 observed historical meetings, we see Crowley initiate at least 6 of them (it could be said the Victorian meeting is also Crowley’s doing, but the jury is out about who called that particular meeting as Aziraphale walks toward Crowley first in that scene). We also see Crowley go out of his way to do things that make the Angel comfortable and does not once break his trust. Although he storms out 3 times in the show, he always uses it as breathing room, before once again seeking Aziraphale out, and doing his best to work on their relationship AS EQUALS. Their dynamic (Which I’ll go into more later) is not on uneven footing, and both parties treat the other with a kindness neither of them is offered by their respective worlds.

TLDR: Crowley’s love for Aziraphale helps heal him from the abuses of Heaven

Thanks for coming to my tedtalk

#good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley and aziraphale #crowley #aziraphale #the ineffable plan #thanks for coming to my ted talk #tw: abuse #tw: mentions of abuse #tw:trauma #tw: trauma #these two are in love

2K notes · View notes

littlemisskookie · 6 years ago

Text

We’ve Got You: Pt. 2

We’ve Got You: 1 2 Ship: Hoseok | Reader | Yoongi Description: The line between fiction and reality blurs further, and you’re unsure whether or not your best friends improve or worsen it. Warnings: Death, Mental Illness, Threesome, Dom!YoonSeok, Dirty Talk, Spit Roasting, Intercourse, Oral, Overstimulation, Multiple Orgasms, Unprotected Sex, Creampie Word Count: 3,441 A/N: I didn’t even plan to write part 2 but here we are- the conclusion.

"I don't understand any of it! I thought this medication was supposed to work, or do something. But she's still... she's still seeing them," Jin seethed, his tone exasperated.

Dr. Kim sighed, giving the man a sympathetic look. "Medication does take a while to work. Besides that, many have to try out different antipsychotic pills before finding one that works for them. If there was one pill that could immediately cure symptoms of schizophrenia, the world would be a far better place. But perhaps you're right. I'll look into switching her from Abilify to something stronger or more suited to her needs."

"Y'know, doc, sometimes I start thinking that they're real. Like she's got those two assholes just following her around and trying to... I don't know, take her. I see them for a moment and I'm convinced I'm the delusional one- but then I remind myself I'm just letting it get to my head."

"It's normal for you to be feeling this way- there's a lot of stress for taking care of someone with this disorder," Dr. Kim reminds him. "I'll remind you that if you ever feel the need to send her to the ward, we'll be more than happy to take her in."

"Is this normal, though? For someone of her condition?" Jin ponders. "I've been doing so much studying on this, but usually the hallucinations or delusions don't pertain to... well, dead people. To people she knew."

"There is a first time for everything. Besides, she's displayed other symptoms that link up to it. Stress tends to trigger mental illnesses, and it's usually around this age where it pops up for the few people who do have this disorder. Besides, according to your records, your family does have some history of schizophrenia. She's shown the symptoms of delusions and hallucinations, but another thing you've got to remember is that people with schizophrenia tend to be more of a danger to themselves than others. That's especially concerning considering what you told me happened last night. If she continues to show this sort of behavior, we may have to detain her regardless of you admitting her to the hospital."

Jin sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. "I understand, Doctor. I'll keep her safe, trust me. What should I do in the meantime?"

"There's not much else I can advise other than what you've been doing. Just make sure she takes her medication and keep her out of harm's way. It's the bare minimum you can do for now until we get more done," Dr. Kim advises.

"Alright, thank you, Doctor," Jin says. He leaves the office to see you, sitting in the chair, leaning back and crossing your arms. He feels so, so tired, but he wouldn't show you that side of him. He didn't want you to believe that you were a burden.

"So, what'd Dr. Kim say? Should I be locked up because I'm crazy?" you huff. "I would think that I'd get to listen in on those conversations. I'm still a functioning member of society, might I remind you."

Jin offers a weak smile of amusement, glad you still had some pep to you despite the lack of sleep. "Y/N, I think we should talk."

"This again? To scold me?" You huff childishly, but he knows you're only playing. You understood his concern.

He leans in front of you, holding your hands in his and locking your gaze. "Y/N, you're an adult. As you said before, you're a functioning member of society. But you and I both know that... Well, you're sick. Really sick. I'm- We're, trying our best to help you. But you've got to help, too, y'know? We wouldn't be here if we didn't care, and you know I only want the best for you. I only want to help."

Your hard stare softens when you analyze the expression on his face. He's gotten paler these past three months. There were circles under his eyes, and he seemed very sullen and skinny. Your brother was handsome, no doubt, even now. However, he seemed to lose the glow that once was.

"I know," you say slowly, diverting your gaze to your lap.

"I know it's normal for someone of your condition to truly believe what she... sees. But surely there's a part of you that knows that what you're seeing... it's not there. Yoongi and Hoseok are dead- they died three months ago. I know you need time to cope- they were your best friends and it's only been a few months. But you're only going to end up hurting yourself and me if you continue chasing after something that's not there."

Your eyes began to well up with tears. "I know... I just..."

"You miss them?" Jin offers for you.

"You don't understand. It seems so real. I can feel them, touch them, hear them. It's them through and through and... it feels like they're still there."

"Y/N, you saw their bodies at the funeral. You know what happened."

"I know, but don't you ever wonder... just wonder if ghosts are real? I've been thinking so much about it. No hallucination can touch me. No hallucination can seem so... so lifelike. It was just like them."

"Hallucinations and delusions are common for someone of your condition. I did ask the doctor about it, though, since it is... special. Most only have auditory hallucinations, but as he pointed out there was a first time for everything. As for physical interaction, I can't say I know much about that. I'm no expert, and the best I can find is through scholarly documents. But I am trying to use what little I know to help you," Jin says.

"I know. They always hated that about you," you smile weakly.

Jin mimicks it. "I need you to cooperate, though. When you... see Yoongi and Hoseok... don't follow them. They're not real. Don't do anything they want- they can't really harm you. You have to remind yourself that they're not real because they've caused nothing but harm. Even after death, apparently. Another thing that's common for people with your condition is that they tend to be more harmful to themselves than to others, despite popular media has shown. Think to yourself whether or not something's truly tangible, and what the ultimate consequences are. It'll be hard, I know, but I want you to try."

"I understand," you say softly.

"Good. I talked to Dr. Kim about getting you a new prescription since the pills we have doesn't seem to be very effective. If the new meds work out, you won't be seeing them again," Jin smiles, the sentiment one of good intent.

You didn't find it nearly as comforting.

You're woken in the middle of the night, the two of the boys beside you on the bed.

Yoongi smiles at you, combing his fingers through your hair- just like he used to. It feels so heartwarming and comfortable that you let yourself melt into the sensation, humming quietly in content. Hoseok, meanwhiles, snuggles into your side, affectionate as ever, curled up in fetus position as he wraps around you like ivy.

"How'd you sleep, beautiful?" Yoongi whispers in your ear, voice husky. "Did you have sweet dreams?"

At that, your eyes snap open. You realize despite the fact that his fingers thread through your hair, you can't feel his breath on your neck. You couldn't even feel Hoseok's chest rising and falling with his breath.

Because neither was breathing, to begin with.

You pull back from both, sitting up to stare at them with wide eyes through the dark. "You're not real," you whisper quietly.

Hoseok scoffs at that, rolling his eyes as he stretches. "Is that more bullshit your brother is spewing?"

You squeeze your eyes shut. "Please stop. You're not real and I know I miss them but... This hurts too much. Seeing you, feeling you, as though you're actually here."

"We are here, Y/N," Yoongi says, his voice soft as he presses a cold hand to the side of your face. You look up at him, still present. "You feel that? You feel me?"

You reach up to the hand on your cheek, but you can't make out a pulse. You don't know if it's because your brain can't make one, you're just too sleepy, or something else. "I don't know anymore. Hallucinations... they can touch you... I think..."

Hoseok grumbled at that, pulling you to him, your back flush against his chest. "Hallucination, huh? Could your imagination really even compare to this, though?"

You whine, arching your back when one of his hands gropes your breasts, his mouth finding its way to your neck, nibbling, biting, and licking in that way he knew you loved. You gasp in surprise, but his other hand comes up to your mouth, blocking the noise. "Shh, baby. Wouldn't want your brother seeing you getting off with a couple of hallucinations, now would we? Now be good and spread your legs for Yoongi."

You comply, your legs shaky as you spread them for the older man, relaxing when you feel his veiny hands massage the skin, loosening your muscles.

Yoongi and Hoseok had shared you plenty of times, and other times when it was only two at a time. The sort of polyamorous relationship shared between three friends. You kept it a secret, however, knowing your brother wouldn't approve. Turns out that the secret would be taken to the grave.

Yoongi tugs down your pajama shorts, sucking in a sharp breath once he sees you're not wearing any underwear. "No underwear, huh? Dirty girl. You were just begging to get fucked tonight, weren't you?" Yoongi questions, his thumb twirling around the small nub in a way that made you keen. "That's right, get nice and wet for us baby. We'll show you how real we really are."

The hand that Hoseok had clasped over your mouth now shoves fingers inside, muffling the moans as Yoongi continued his ministrations, two fingers delving inside to roughly finger you, knowing you can handle it.

"Do you remember the first time you did this with us, Y/N?" Hoseok questions. "On prom night? How we shared you in the back of a dirty old limo, with the driver oblivious to what was happening in the back? To how wet you were and what a nasty girl you were for us?"

You nod, some of the drool going down your chin and onto Hoseok's hand. Your eyes roll back as Yoongi leans down, capturing the small nub in his mouth and sucking harshly, his ministrations rough in an effort to get you to cum as soon as possible.

It had been three months since you had been fucked, and God had you missed it. Hoseok pulled his hand down, forcing you to look directly at Yoongi between your legs. His stare was predatory, locking with yours as he feasted between your legs, enjoying the way your eyes started to glaze over.

"That's right, baby, look at him. He's taking such good care of you, isn't he? He's getting you ready for cock. We've held back from you for long enough."

Yoongi's gaze stays locked on yours as he stimulates your g-spot and clit, trying to get you to race towards the edge. Your tells begin to show, from the slight quiver in your thighs to the glaze in your eyes as you tumble towards the edge of subspace.

"That's right, cum for us," Hoseok rasps in your ear. "There'll be more where that came from."

You find your orgasm washing over you, and the moan is suppressed. Yoongi holds your thighs down, still lapping at your heat, doing his best to overstimulate you as you soak the sheets. You whine in pain at the sensation as Yoongi continues to lap at your clit, but Hoseok only pets your head, calming you as you let the pain subside for pleasure, another orgasm, though less intense, coursing through your veins.

Yoongi comes back up for air, his face glistening with your juices. He grabs the back of your neck, Hoseok letting go of you as Yoongi presses you towards his own body, smashing your lips to his. You taste yourself against his tongue, and you feel yourself getting hot all over again at the thought.

Yoongi breaks apart, a string of saliva connecting you now parting into nothingness. "Still think we're just a figment of your imagination, baby?"

Your face goes red, and your mind is still hazy despite the fact you're wide awake now. "I... I..."

"She still doesn't know, hm? Maybe she needs a bit of cock to help get her senses straight," Hoseok chuckles. "Get on your knees, baby. It's time to take what's ours."

You obey, your limbs shaky as you get on all fours. You observe Yoongi, who has now yanked down his boxers and pants, stroking his length before you. Your mouth waters as you remember the girth of his cock, and how deliciously it would stretch you. Hoseok's cock wasn't as girthy, but he made up for it in length, always using it to mercilessly batter your g-spot.

At that thought, you feel the blunt head run over your folds, a low hiss coming behind you from Hoseok. "Fuck, I've missed this." He pushes inside, an easy slide from the copious amount of lubrication, and both of you gasp at the feeling. Hoseok stills inside of you, and reaches forward, grabbing your face and opening your mouth, pushing your head towards Yoongi. "Why don't you suck him off, Y/N? He was so nice to you. It's only right to return the favor."

You nod, opening your mouth in compliance. Yoongi accepts the invitation with little fanfare, pushing inside of your mouth as you begin to bob your head. Yoongi fucks your throat as Hoseok begins to fuck you from behind, both of their paces controlled and in rhythm, as though the two were synced.

Hoseok grabs fistfuls of your ass before pushing his chest against your back, his face next to yours as he observes how lewdly you swallow Yoongi's cock whole. "What a good fucking girl for us, taking our cocks so well."

"Shit, baby, just like that," Yoongi grunts, his hips stuttering slightly as he continuously dives into the warmth of your mouth. "You were made for our cocks, weren't you?"

You can't even nod up at him, fucked out as you rock between the two men, your mind going plank as you enter another plane of consciousness. All in a result of an orgasm that consisted of being sandwiched between two men. Everything seems to go into a dreamlike state, a subspace only they could bring you to.

Before you knew it you were swallowing all of Yoongi's cum, and Hoseok was filling up your pussy with a low grunt. You were brutally used by both men, with three orgasms now to boot.

Yoongi wipes the sweat from your brow, smiling fondly at you. They both look at you as though you're their world- a look you'll never forget. "Still think we're imaginary, Y/N?"

"No," you say, your lashes fluttering as you slowly come down from your high.

"Then come with us," Hoseok smiles. "It's time we finish what we started."

"Here again?" you whisper quietly, looking down at the seemingly endless abyss below the bridge.

"It's the simplest way," Hoseok shrugs.

You ponder for a moment, tossing the switchblade from hand to hand. "I didn't give it much thought last time you tried to get me to do this. But it's clear now that I think about it what you want from me. My only question is why."

Yoongi gives you an understanding smile. "Ah, you've figured it out."

"What can we say? We picked a smart one," Hoseok chuckled.

"If I cut this, we'll all fall and die. But you two can't die, can you? Because..." You suck in a deep breath. "Because you two are already dead."

The two are quiet for a moment, your words hanging in the air.

"What is it like? To die?" you question softly.

"It's quick. As you know I died on the spot. Hoseok wasn't so lucky. He had to go through a lot of pain and even a coma before he died," Yoongi pointed out.

"I remember," you say, tears welling up in your eyes at the memory. "They wouldn't even let me see him."

Hoseok gives you a warm side hug, embracing you. "It's alright, Y/N. I'm here now, aren't I?"

"Yes, but..."

"You wanted to know how death was like? It's painless when it comes, but with this method, it's quick. I don't want it dragged out for you the way it was for me," Hoseok says.

"We just want us all to be together, Y/N," Yoongi tells you. "We promised we'd always stay by each other's sides, right? We're a team, a trio. We'll never love anyone else as much for as long as... Well, ironically as long as we lived. You belong with us, Y/N. Even you know this. We wouldn't be here if you didn't."

You were conflicted. Could this be your mind playing games with you in order to bring about your doom? Or were they really ghosts set out on doing unfinished business... which was reuniting with you.

You swallowed hard.

"What about Jin?"

"What about him?" Hoseok scoffed. "Y/N, he thinks you're crazy- he thinks you're delusional. We're telling you we're real, and he's been out here drugging you, about to take you to some ward. He feels burdened trying to brainwash you and take care of you. He doesn't have your best interests at heart like us."

"Yes he does," you begin to defend.

"No, he doesn't," Hoseok clarifies. "He's always had the goal of keeping us apart. He's going as far as to get you drugged up on something new, isn't he? So you'll no longer see us? Do you never want to see us again?"

"No," you say. "I love you. More than anything."

"Then let us be together finally," Yoongi says, taking your hand in his and bringing the switchblade up to the rope. "We'll finally have our happily ever after, just the three of us."

You nod, the two of them giving support as you begin to drag the blade across the rope.

You're down to the last few threads when-

"Y/N!"

You turn, seeing Jin run towards you. You hold the blade up above your head, eyes wide as you threaten to bring it down. "Don't come any closer!"

Jin freezes in place before the bridge, panicked. "Y/N, don't! Please, let's just go home!"

"No! I'm not going anywhere, Jin. You've got to understand that. You've kept me away long enough," you say. "Yoongi and Hoseok... They're real. They're here, with me. They're real!"

"Y/N, Yoongi and Hoseok are dead. Please, we can get you the help you need. They have a division at the hospital to help you-"

"No! No more doctors, no more pills, no more treating me like I'm crazy!" you exclaim. Your eyes water as you stare at your brother. "I'm a burden enough to you, Jin. Let me go."

His eyes get glassy as well, and a lump forms in his throat. "I just don't want to lose my baby sister."

You falter at that, slowly lowering the knife to your side. Hoseok, however, grabs your hand, halting your surrender. "Remember what we said," Hoseok hisses at you.

"He's my brother," you whine.

"And we're your best friends. You didn't choose to be siblings with him, but you chose to love us," Yoongi says.

Jin sees you speaking to yourself at the bridge, and quickly makes out what he believes is going on.

"Y/N, I can't see them," Jin says. "Doesn't that prove anything to you?"

"You can't see them?" you question, eyes wide.

"Because he's a fool. You see us because of our bond, Y/N. He's blind," Yoongi hisses.

"Y/N... please..." Jin begs.

"He's going to send you away to some ward because he thinks you're crazy," Hoseok tells you. "Do you want that? To be locked up and become a prisoner? You're not crazy, Y/N. You're not."

You stop for a moment, torn between two worlds.

You look up to Jin with glassy eyes. "Maybe I should've died in that wreck, too."

"Y/N, wait-"

"I love you, brother."

With that, the bridge came falling down.

294 notes · View notes

allisondraste · 6 years ago

Text

Let’s Talk About Cole

Hi! It’s me again with another segment of “Allison Can’t Stop Analyzing Dragon Age Characters.” This time, I am going to be talking about fan favorite Cole. I think it’s relatively universal for people to like Cole and to enjoy his character. People like to draw him, write about him, and just talk about our Fade Friend all the time. It’s great!

However, the nuance of Cole is a little harder to understand, and as with most characters, he often gets reduced down to basic qualities and then those basic qualities are changed ever so slightly that the character starts to not even feel the same anymore. I love Cole, and I have done some research about him in order to write a handful of scenes involving him, so I am just here to share some of the things that helped me out while I was learning about what makes him tick!

Step 1. If you have not read Asunder, I cannot more highly recommend it. It has so much information about Cole’s back story. Also, if you haven’t read Asunder and you don’t want spoilers for Asunder, you should probably go read it and then come back to my post later.

Step 2. The Cole section of this post right here is literally magic. The whole post is magic, but since this is a Cole meta, I’m specifically referring to the Cole piece.

Step 3. Things about Cole that are essential to understanding him:

Cole is Neurodivergent ( and no, it’s not up for debate)

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, “Neurodivergent” is simply a word that describes a person whose mind works and processes information in a way that is considered different from an average joe neurotypical person. Often times neurodivergent is used to describe autism, ADHD, and other conditions that affect neurological development.

Because Cole is a spirit, he processes the world around him differently from non-spirit characters in the Dragon Age Universe. He perceives different things and understands things differently from how other characters might. Cole also has some misunderstandings and misperceptions about human social norms and boundaries, that he becomes more acquainted with over time. It is important to note that this development happens *regardless* of the path chosen for him with regard to Varric V. Solas (I am not a fan of this particular part of his character arc, but I am going to go into that later). The fact that Cole is neurodivergent means that someone who is neurotypical is likely going to have a hard time understanding him and may perceive him as “childish,” “naive,” or “helpless.” They might also have difficulty understanding his speech patterns and especially recreating them if they seek to write him!

Neurodiversity is so important, and Cole is excellent representation, so it’s equally important that we strive to do our research and make sure that we are not removing that representation or presenting neurodiversity in a way that its harmful to others. Different is different, not bad, and certainly not less.

Cole is Not a Child

I mentioned above that there is a tendency to interpret Cole’s neurodiversity as childishness or naivete, and even when it is unintentional, it is an ableistic view point that can be harmful to entire communities of people. There is a pattern (not just in DA fandom, but also in DA fandom) whereby neurodiverse folks are often viewed as children. They’re infantilized and treated as if they are helpless and/or cannot make good decisions on their own. Cole suffers from this as does Merrill (sometimes Sera, too).

For Cole, this situation is not helped by the fact that the game portrays him as helpless and in need of a “father” figure to help him choose his path. Hence we see Solas and Varric arguing on whether Cole should increase is affinity for spirtdom or for humanity. I understand that everyone has their own opinion for what the “better” path for Cole is, and I’m not here to argue that; however, I do think that his arc would have had so much more meaning and been so much less invalidating for neurodivergent people if Cole had the autonomy to make his own decisions. In Asunder, we see Cole being very independent and making his own choices, figuring out who and what he is. At the very end, his very last line in the entire book is, “I’m not helpless anymore.” I don’t think that sounds like a character who cannot make his own decisions.

Fun fact: Cole is designed to be approximately 20 years old, which is the exact same age that Alistair was in Dragon Age: Origins. (While Alistair is also the victim of infantilization… it still puts things into perspective a little bit). In order to avoid the “kid”/child dilemma, it is best to conceptualize some of the things in Cole commonly interpreted as childlike or immature as “newness.” In Inquisition, Cole has only been in the mortal realm for a few years, and he has only been cognizant of the fact that he is not a human, but a spirit of Compassion for even less time. Rather than treating him as a “baby” it is best to treat him as someone who is just learning a new culture, a new world.

Cole is a Spirit of Compassion, Not a Spirit of Matchmaking and/or Meddling in your Personal Affairs.

A trend I see often is Cole as matchmaker, or Cole as interested in every detail of everyone’s sex life or Cole being a filterless vent for whatever the people near him are thinking. It’s easy to assume that about him, as he does comment on a few relationships (Cullenmance, Solavellan, and Bullmance) in particular; however, there is an interesting tidbit of how Cole’s thought reading works located in his banter with Dorian.

Dorian: That little trick, Cole, when you dip into someone's mind and take a drink?

Dorian: Do you choose what you're looking for, or is it random?

Cole: It has to be hurt, or a way to help the hurt. That's what calls me.

Cole: Rilienus, skin tan like fine whiskey, cheekbones shaded, lips curl when he smiles.

Cole: He would have said yes.

Dorian: I'll... thank you not to do that again, please.

Essentially, Cole can only tap into thoughts that are 1.) Painful or 2.) Can help lessen the pain in some way, shape, or form. So, when he accesses thoughts about an LI or something else very personal, he does so to HELP. It is not random. It is not filterless. It is a very pragmatic way to be compassionate. When I was thinking of ways to explain this, the first thing that came to mind was the work that I do as a mental health professional. We are actual practitioners of compassion. It is our job to listen to our clients and help them to solve the problems that are causing them to suffer. We ask a lot of deep questions and probe about a lot of personal things, but it is very targeted. We do not ask intimate questions just out of curiosity or just for the heck of it. It is geared toward the issue at hand. That is exactly what Cole does.

Unless prodding your OC about the details of their sex life is going to make them feel better, he will not bother.

Cole is Not an Innocent, Precious, Little Cinnamon Roll

First of all, that goes along with the infantilization of his character, so it’s just a really ill-considered choice of language to describe him. Second of all, it is simply not true.

I understand that for people who have not read Asunder or played the Champions of the Just questline (and especially people who have done neither) there is very little information about him to judge his character on, and what we do see is a person whose only mission, his sole purpose, is to help the hurt. That does seem very wholesome.

In Asunder, we see a much different side of him. Believing himself to be Cole, a young mage who died of starvation after being forgotten by Templars, Compassion roams about the White Spire in a confused and lonely daze, unaware that he is actually a very powerful spirit. He is called the Ghost of the White Spire, a legend that is terrifying to those that inhabit the tower. Why? Because he murders mages.

If you are thinking “oh, he probably killed them because he felt them suffering and he thought it was the only way to end their misery,” you are thinking exactly as I did, and you would be wrong. While he did target individuals who were despairing, it was not altruistic. He killed them because it felt good when they died, because that was the only time anyone could see him. The way the book describes it, it was almost an “addiction” or a physiological need for him to kill. He was distressed by his actions, but was not able to stop without Rhys’ help.

Over the course of the book, Cole learns more about his past and figures out what he is. He also, through the help of his relationship with Rhys and Evangeline, comes to understand that he does not have to murder people to be seen and remembered. When he is sent to the Fade using the Litany of Adralla, it all finally clicks and he returns to haunt Lord Seeker Lucius, for all the pain and suffering he caused his friends and loved ones. It is such a brilliant character arc and I so wish that we got to see more of it in the game.

Cole is a Person the Entire Time (Human vs. Spirit/Varric vs. Solas be damned)

Regardless of your opinion of Solas, one thing he gets right is in arguing that Cole is already a whole and complete person when he joins the Inquisition. He actually argues for the personhood of all spirits in general, and I think that any reasonable person can look at the spirits (and demons) with whom we have interacted so far and, putting aside feelings about Solas, draw the same conclusions.

Let’s take a look at all of the Spirits/Demons we have had actual interactions with thus far:

Valor

Justice

Compassion

Command

Wisdom

Choice

Desire

Pride

Sloth

Rage

Fear

Envy

While some of these interactions were minimal, each of these entities show qualities that one would associate with personhood. Qualities such as motivation, goals, higher order thought processes, emotions, etc. When we meet Justice in DA:A, he is a thinking, feeling being who longs to right wrongs and comes to care for mortals a great deal. He comes to this conclusion on his own after interacting with his companions in the events of the game. Choice, or Imshael, who we see in The Masked Empire, and in DAI, has such an identity of his own that he does not like to be referred to as a demon. I could go on. These are not mindless, thoughtless creatures, and so viewing them as people just makes sense. This is part of the reason I do not like the Solas vs. Varric questline (aside from the fact that Cole should be able to choose or not choose as he wishes). Cole is already a person, and Varric’s line of thought is not “making him more human,” it is only serving to make him “less compassionate,” and that’s all. He becomes more selfish which is why he is able to have more of his own personal goals (it’s not because he did not have them before; rather, it is because they were drowned out by everyone else’s).

This is not to say that I think Cole should have to forgive his abuser. He shouldn’t. Not unless he wants to, and that choice should be his to make, not Varric’s, not Solas’, and not the Inquisitor’s. I have an opinion as to which path is better, but I’m not going to discuss that here because it will detract from the actual point which is that the language of “human” versus “not human” is just bad and here’s why.

It implies that forgiveness is not a human quality.

It implies that in order to be considered a person, one has to “think” and “do” as everyone else does.

Because of Cole’s romantic/sexual interest in Maryden when Varric’s path is chosen, it implies that lack of romantic/sexual attraction is not “human,” which is aphobic.

Because of his Maryden interest in the “human” path, and because he has “become more human” in his thought processes, it implies that neurodivergent people cannot or are not interested in relationships, which is ableist.

TL;DR: I’m not a fan of that questline. Your mileage may vary.

Finally, and Probably the Reason You Sat Through the Rest of It: Cole’s Speech Pattern!

Cole’s speech is really difficult to capture in a way that is both enough and not too much. It is not as simple as just seeing how much alliteration can fit into a chapter. Sure, Cole uses a lot of alliteration, and it is incredibly fun to play with while writing him; however, his communication is not as simple as that. If you check out the link I shared in Step 2, it will take you to a Character Files reference where there is some information about Cole’s speech pattern that is much more in depth than I am going to go so definitely check it out. When I am writing Cole, I categorize his speech into three different types:

Synesthesia

- the alliteration, the purpley flowery descriptions, the metaphors, the in the moment, no regard for grammar, run on sentence speech he is known for. This comprises most of his dialogue.

Direct thought reading

- when he is actually quoting characters’ thoughts or stating their feelings out right. He might speak as them or he might speak as himself observing them.

Cole’s own thoughts

- Yes, he has them, and he has a lot of them. Many of these show up as his interpretations of and suggestions for others regarding their hurt. However, he also shows a lot of agency of thought. He wants to know if Dorian thinks he’s handsome, he talks about wanting there to be more rabbits in stories because Bunny was Cole’s sister’s name and it reminds him of her. Cole expresses a lot of his own thoughts and feelings if you just take time to listen.

Writing Cole effectively involves a good balance of all three types and I recommend just playing around with it!

To Sum It All Up

Cole is amazing, but he’s also often misunderstood and mischaracterized, and Allison has a lot of feelings about it that you could spare yourself from reading if you do Steps 1 and 2 and skip the middleman. The end!

#dragon age #dragon age inquisition #cole meta #understanding cole #writing reference #my ramblings

158 notes · View notes

kihyuni3 · 5 years ago

Text

Seventeen (Vocal Unit) Reaction to Their S/O Flinching During a Fight

Okay, wowie it’s been a long time but here we are back at it again. Gonna finish up this series because I love it. Even though reading/writing angst makes me super sad. Sorry if I’m rusty everyone, I’ll try my best.

~Izzy

Warning(s): There is no actual domestic abuse depicted in this reaction but it could possibly be triggering still to those readers

Hip Hop Unit

Jeonghan: Jeonghan always strikes me as the kind of person who is super caring. So even though the two of you would be in a heated argument, he would still be very aware of your condition. He would be upset and angry, but even in this kind of situation, nothing mattered to him more than your well being.

An argument started when the two of you were playing around and having a little banter. The mood was lighthearted and playful and he took it just a little too far. Usually, this wouldn't be that big of a deal seeing as your relationship was one where you were both very open and could talk about things like this. However, tonight for some reason Jeonghan couldn’t see the issue in what he had said even after you said it was hurtful. Somehow this back and forth escalated into a full screaming match where both of you were accusing the other of many different things. Because neither of you fought much in this relationship neither of you knew how to back down. That was until JeongHan went to run his fingers through his hair and he watched you flinch away from him, fear evident in your behavior and body language.

Immediately the caring and loving man you knew would return. Not only was he deeply concerned for you at this moment but also he was disappointed in himself for letting the argument get the best of him and impeding on his abilities to care for you. He would approach you slowly and gently in an attempt to show that his intentions were nothing but kind and apologetic. He would take you in his arms and shush you trying to calm you and quell your fear. The argument could be sorted out later if that’s what you two wanted, but right now what was important to him was making sure that you were okay.

“I’m so sorry baby. Let’s just take it easy okay? Do you need anything?”

Joshua: Josh seems to me like someone who is very level headed in most situations. However, he is also very passionate that’s why when he sometimes gets too emotional about something he can take it too far. This includes things like arguments.

Josh had just gotten back from a long schedule which included and Inkigayo performance. One in which he had not only messed up the new choreo, but also one of his vocal lines. He had been working for a long time on this comeback so this fluke would really be eating at him. When he came home he would just brush you off and go on to do his own thing. You would try to approach him a few times, but he was not having it at all. After the sixth attempt to interact with your boyfriend he would snap. It was less f an argument and more of him just yelling at you. He was screaming about things that weren’t even relevant to the situation, but he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t even realize how far he had taken it until he went to quickly move past you and you scurried away from you clearly panic-ridden with tear streaks down your face.

He would realize how badly he had messed up, but he would still have a hard time calming himself down due to his earlier episode. Josh wouldn’t want you to ever think that he would do anything like that to you, but since he was still so heated he knew he just had to leave the entire situation. He would utter a very curt but sincere apology before excusing himself to another room or maybe even leave the apartment completely. It’s not that he wouldn’t want to fix it, of course he did, but first, he knew he had to calm himself down before he caused any more problems.

“I’m sorry. I’ll make this better when I come back.”

Woozi/Jihoon: Woozi seems like the kind of guy who would rarely show any anger towards his partner. Not that he would never be upset with them, there were definitely times when he was, but he would always talk it out with them in a calm way instead of resorting to yelling. He would have to be extremely upset or in a very bad mood before he resorted to arguing or yelling.

Woozi had been at the studio for almost 24 hours because of the upcoming comeback. Although deadlines were rapidly approaching, he still had yet to compose anything that he or the company thought was good enough to work with. This was taking a real toll on his mental state. He decided to take a break from composing and return home for a while to clear his head. However, you weren’t aware of the situation and assumed he had finally been able to get a song out and approved. Your immediate questioning about the new song really got under his skin and caused him to blow up on you. He would scream at you for being inconsiderate and nosy and continued to barrad you for a long time before he realized what he was doing. He would stop yelling and go to move toward you, but when you flinched back away from him that’s when the severity of the situation would really set in.

Although he is usually very good at adapting to different situations and overcoming adversities, this was one situation where he had no idea what to do. He would remain completely still for a while trying to figure out how to fix this. After a few minutes of excruciating silence passed he would explain everything to you and apologize without trying to get any closer to you. He would want to give you space and time before he tried anything more, but he knew this was all his fault and he would be willing to do anything to fix it.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry this is all my fault. I can go back to the studio if you want, I understand.”

DK/Seokmin: Although DK is a very cheerful and sociable person there are definitely times when he needs time to himself. After a hard day or something, he seems like the person to want to be on his own to recharge. It’s not that he didn’t want to see you, but he wanted to always be his best for you and didn’t want you to see him when he was down.

It had been a particularly difficult day for Seokmin and all he wanted to do was be on his own for a while to recharge. He hadn’t realized that you were home so when he got back and saw you he tried to hide his tired demeanor and be happy for you. However, this also took a toll on him, things that were normally fine and fun for him were really bothering him and getting more and more frustrated until the both of you got into an argument seemingly out of nowhere. All of his tiredness and frustration would come out on you making him say things that he didn’t mean. The argument would just continuously add on to his already foul mood until he couldn’t take it anymore. However, when he balled up his fists and made a groan of frustration causing you to turn away in fear he would realize what he had done.

Seokmin’s features would soften as all his frustrations disappeared and he became only aware of his growing worry for you. When you turned around he would be kneeling on the ground near you with sad eyes and his hands reached out in a sort of peace offering. He was prepared to do anything to make it up to you, but he also knew that if you wanted to leave him he would have to be prepared for that as well.

“I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. I know you’re not going to want to stay, but please, please give me one more chance to make things right.”

Seungkwan: To me, SeungKwan seems like the type to get into little arguments when he’s upset about things, but never would he try to escalate things. Even if he knew that if he pushed a little harder he would win the argument, he wouldn’t try it because he knows how that might affect you and he would never want you to get hurt because of him.

It had been a day where the other Seventeen members had been teasing Seungkwan quite a lot. While he would never let them know that it actually got to him, in reality, it very much got under his skin. So when he got to your apartment and you made one small joke, he would get really upset. The only reason he even considered escalating this argument is cause he was already upset from before, but as soon as he did it he realized that it was a mistake. The screaming match that started was something he never wanted but didn’t know how to take back. He was so desperate to stop this fight that at one point he reached out to grab your wrist in almost a silent plea.

When you ripped your arm away from his grasp fear painted across your face he would be completely shocked. Not only did he not know what to do at all to reconcile the situation, but he would also get so mad at himself for even letting you get to a place where you thought he would hit you. His emotions got the better of him and he would break down into tears immediately going to you. He wouldn’t know what to do other than apologize in between cries.

“I’m sorry.....I’m so sorry......”

Request

Masterlist

Shop

#seventeen #seventeen reactions #seventeen reaction #seventeen request #seventeen drabbles #seventeen scenarios #seventeen imagine #kpop #kpop reactions #kpop scenarios #kpop drabble #kpop imagine #seventeen texts #seventeen snaps #kpop texts #kpop snaps #kpop blog #svtcreations #svteditors

40 notes · View notes

mercutial · 5 years ago

Text

A More Wholesome Take on Victor Vallakovich

Hey guys! I hadn't found any deeper interpretations that made Victor out to be particularly wholesome, so here's the version I'm using in my campaign.

I've read u/guildsbounty's post on Victor, and while I love it because it fits in so well with the gothic horror themes, my party had already become friendly with Victor and he had already been established as a mild-mannered guy who didn't really have an aversion to people in general, mostly just timidity.

I've borrowed elements from u/MandyMod's fleshed out version of the Vallakovich household - the parts about Vargas and Lydia neglecting Victor emotionally for pretty much his entire life.

Background

Vargas has avoided contact with Victor out of fear of being abusive like his own father was to him, and Lydia is no more than a brainwashed peanut. They don’t really bother socializing him with people outside of the household either... so Victor has been deprived of healthy human relationships. To pass the time, he read all of the books in his father’s library, which were mostly old histories and a few on philosophy, passed down from his great-grandfather.

Cats

In lieu of human relationships, Victor has always loved cats. Cats are the closest thing he's had to companionship. He understands their need for space, their fickleness, and he loves it when he can finally earn their affection.

His first cat he found as a stray kitten and named it Twinkle, because as a child he read a book that talked about stars in the night sky, and how they “twinkled”. Being a Barovian, he had never seen a clear night sky before. So he named his cat after the sight he wished he could see, out in the free and open world beyond the mists.

However, Twinkle met an untimely end. (You can decide whether this is caused by the Wachter boys, either accidentally or intentionally, or if Twinkle was killed by an accident or rabid dog or something.) Victor was devastated. He refused to bury Twinkle, keeping the cat’s decaying body in a chest in his room until a maid noticed the smell and freaked out, prompting his parents to make him bury Twinkle in the garden. Later he went and dug up the grave in secret and took the body back to the attic. He never buried it, even after the body rotted away, leaving only the skeleton, which he kept hidden in an old toy chest.

He had read in a book somewhere of a mage who had been able to raise animals and people from the dead. Surely that was possible? Some of the travelers who came through Vallaki from were capable of magic. Driven by the promise of possibilities, he acquired spellbooks and books about magery, scouring them for knowledge. His two focuses: magic to raise the dead, and teleportation out of Barovia.

Magic

Eventually through numerous trials and errors, he figured out how to perform simple raisings. Despite the fact that Twinkle was now a mere skeleton, when Victor attempted to raise Twinkle, it was an undeniable success. The little feline skeleton picked itself up off the ground, turned to face him, and rubbed up against his leg just as it had always done. He was overjoyed.

His teleportation experiments weren’t so successful, however. The incomplete diagrams that he had acquired were not enough for him to complete a working teleportation circle. No matter what he did, the countless circles he drew in chalk, in ashes, in blood all remained inert.

Stella

Around a year and a half before the campaign started, Lady Wachter began to push her agenda of attempting to wed Stella to Victor, likely due to her husband’s recent death. Victor and Stella had met a few times in the past, but neither had really been made to interact. But now Lady Wachter began bringing Stella over for tea, “accidentally” bumping into Victor the few times he was out and about, and insisting that she and the Vallakoviches leave the two alone to talk on their own.

At first, Victor was resistant to the forced interactions. He had always been shy around people, and occasionally mocked or at least stared at, and so always tried to limit his time with other people as much as possible. But for whatever reason, Stella seemed to take a genuine interest in him. She was a cheerful and polite person, and her well-mannered inquiries into Victor’s daily life and activities grew on him over time. When eventually asked about why he spent so much time indoors in the attic, he dropped his hedging and timidly hinted at his “experiments”.

To his surprise, she wasn’t put off. In fact, when he admitted that he wanted to find a way to cross the mists, Stella’s eyes grew wide in fascination. Uncharacteristically, she immediately began bombarding him with more questions about what he was doing, how he was doing it, what he had tried. Flustered, he offered to show her.

And so the two of them began to work together on the experiments in earnest. After swearing her to secrecy, Victor brought Stella up to speed on everything he had found – not difficult as she proved to be a quick learner. Lady Wachter and the Vallakoviches were curious at first as to why their children were spending so much time together, but the Vallakoviches quickly lost interest, and Fiona decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Soon it felt to Victor as if progress had more than doubled; Stella’s fresh inquiries and perspective revealed a couple of the faulty assumptions that Victor had subconsciously incorporated into his calculations.

Then at last, a breakthrough! One day, one of their circles came to life and zapped a test mouse away. However, Victor and Stella soon realized there was still some kind of issue with the circle. The various inanimate objects and mice that they zapped through only came back in pieces, and even then only occasionally came back at all.

The two didn’t give up, however. At this point, several months into their pursuit, they were not only energized by their recent successes, but had also grown close. Perhaps, Victor hoped, as real friends… or perhaps even something more?

He had never really felt this close to anyone before – not his parents, not the servants, and certainly not the other townspeople. In contrast he found himself actually wanting to see Stella again, looking forward to hearing her lively voice, seeing her bright smile at the front door. He had always suspected that the love spoken of in his history books and novels might have a basis in reality, but he had never really felt it to be true until now. His parents’ loveless mess of a marriage, built upon the farce of a happy town they had created, had never come close to the ideal. But what he felt when he saw Stella… perhaps that was what the books meant. And perhaps the shining looks she gave him, the smiles and knowing winks they traded in their parents’ presence, the little inside jokes they had started to develop… perhaps that meant she felt the same way.

They had also begun to open up about things other than their experiments. He learned what she thought of her family – her concerns about her mother, her loving but somewhat antagonistic relationship with her jokester brothers. And he poured out his heart about his parents – how he wondered, after all he’d read in his books, whether something could have been different between him and them.

At one point they made several modifications to their most recent iteration of the teleportation circle. They were no longer receiving body parts of unfortunate mice and rats in return, but they were also fairly certain that the bodies weren’t being vaporized. Perhaps, perhaps they were really sending them elsewhere? But there was no good way to tell. Unless…

The Accident

Stella offered to send herself through the circle. Victor objected vehemently. Hadn’t she seen what happened to some of the things they sent through? It was their first full-scale argument, and it ended in tears and Stella storming back to her house.

Later that night, Victor was awakened by a sound on the stairs. He made it quietly to the door just in time to see someone slipping into the attic. Following, he discovered the intruder was Stella – activating the teleportation circle and stepping into it.

It all happened so quickly. One moment Stella was setting foot into the circle, the next thing Victor saw a blur of fur and realized one of his cats had darted into it as well… and then a flash of light blinded him.

In hindsight, it was lucky that Stella hadn’t been shredded to pieces, sent far away, or ended up with cat-like features or fur. But her mental state was just about as impossible to explain, and Victor was in no state to explain it. Lady Wachter was furious. She immediately took Stella home and locked her away while threatening the Vallakoviches with all manner of consequences she could safely threaten, and all Victor could do was watch miserably, numbly, in utter shame. Couldn’t he have stopped her if he’d just been a little faster? If he hadn’t lingered on the stairs? He should have known, he should have kept the attic door locked. In fact, he never should have introduced her to magic.

Victor had always been reclusive, but after the incident, he often shut himself away for days on end. Tray after tray of uneaten food sat by his door.

Eventually he went back to his attic and his books, but with a new objective in mind: restoring Stella Wachter.

During the Campaign

Stella is the only person who has ever shown that she truly likes Victor. He would feel numb about his parents dying, but if Stella died, he would probably lose all will to live. So she’s basically all he has left. If the party befriends him, he’ll likely ask them to help him find a scroll of Greater Restoration and/or someone who can cast it on Stella (e.g. Rictavio.)

However, even if the party manages to free Stella and find a scroll/caster, Victor will be nervous about restoring her to sanity. He’s afraid that she’ll be angry and blame him for her condition, and she’ll end up hating him… like everyone else in his life. To that end, he’s unsure if he should have someone perform a Greater Restoration on her at all.

And the way Stella is now (if she’s freed and gets to spend time with Victor), at least she’s very affectionate with him. She likes him a lot and wants to be with him all the time. If her sanity was restored, would she still feel that way? He doubts that. Why would anyone like him so much anyway?

Somewhere in the pit of his heart he feels that her former affection towards him was a fluke, or worse, fake. He knows that keeping her from being restored is selfish, but he also justifies it by arguing that it’s far crueler to force someone to understand the bleak world than it is to have them live in blissful ignorance. He feels that she’s probably happier being the way she is now. He feels like he would be.

–––––

So that’s it! Hope this was an interesting take on Victor and gives you a few ideas for how to run him in your campaigns. In mine, it led to an interesting (though a little frustrating) roleplaying scenario between Victor and the party when he started getting cold feet about using Greater Restoration on Stella. Let me know if there’s anything you want me to expand on!

#curse of strahd #victor vallakovich #cos #dnd #dnd 5e homebrew

33 notes · View notes

missmentelle · 6 years ago

Note

What is BPD and how does it manifest? What are your personal experiences with it and what are the misconceptions?

Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health condition that severely disrupts your ability to form stable and healthy attachments to others, and to form a stable and healthy sense of yourself. It usually develops for the first time in your late teens or early 20s, and it can last for the rest of your life, although many people with BPD are able to successfully control their symptoms or even achieve full remission if they seek mental health treatment. BPD can be a brutal disorder to live with, and the symptoms can seriously impact your day-to-day functioning. People with BPD may find it incredibly difficult to achieve their goals or lead a “normal” life. Unlike people with other personality disorders that affect relationships, people with BPD desperately want to have healthy relationships with other people, but their symptoms make this incredibly difficult to achieve, which is a constant source of frustration and shame for many people who have this disorder. Symptoms of BPD include:

Intense and near-irrational fear of abandonment. They live with constant fear that the people in their lives will abandon them, even if there are absolutely no signs that this is the case. They will go to extreme lengths to avoid being abandoned, even if the risk of abandonment is entirely imaginary.

Relationships that are very intense, and very unstable. They tend to engage in a pattern called “splitting”, where they see someone as wonderful and flawless and perfect in one moment, and then see them as worthless, unreliable and untrustworthy the next. They either have you on a pedestal or they are convinced that you hate them, with very little time spent between those two extremes.

Frequent mood swings. This is more than just the usual “up and down” of something like bipolar disorder - they swing between a wide range of emotions like shame, disgust, euphoria, despair, rage and everything in between.

Disproportionate emotional reactions. People with BPD have more or less the “correct” emotional reaction to events in their lives, but the intensity of their emotional reaction is completely blown out of proportion. A neurotypical person might be mildly annoyed if their partner forgot to text them when they promised to. A person with BPD may lapse into full-blown rage and despair, and these intense feelings could last for hours or days. Anger is the most common emotion that they experience with added intensity, and it can even cause harmless interactions to quickly escalate.

Reckless behaviour. People with BPD often partake in high-risk behaviour, like drug use, unprotected sex, gambling, spending sprees, or unsafe and reckless driving. They also have a tendency to self-sabotage - sometimes when things are going well in their lives, they will suddenly quit their jobs, drop out of school and break up with their partners with absolutely no warning.

An unstable sense of their own identity. This is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it, but most people have a pretty stable sense of who they are, what they value, what they want, what their goals are, etc. People who BPD do not have any stable answers for any of those things. Their sense of “self” shifts rapidly and often. They may completely change their entire image of themselves from day to day, or go through periods where they even doubt if they exist.

Self-harm and suicidal behaviour. People with BPD frequently self-harm, and they have one of the highest suicide rates of any disorder. Their self-harm is usually triggered by a real or imagined abandonment or rejection, and it can be extremely difficult to manage.

A general sense of emptiness. People with BPD often feel that their lives are meaningless, or that they will never be happy. They might feel like nothing matters, or that they are bad, worthless people who do not deserve to be happy.

BPD is a very tricky disorder to cope with, especially when it comes to relationships. It is important to remember that people with BPD are not bad people, and it is not their fault that they have this disorder. Many of the behaviours they exhibit are the result of all the pain and distress that they are feeling, not because they have any malicious intent. Many of them are simply desperate to be loved, and their extreme emotions are what prevent them from achieving this in a healthy way. At the same time, though, it’s important to acknowledge that people with BPD can cause serious harm to people they form relationships with, and the pain that their friends, family members and partners feel is just as real and just as valid. People with BPD are sometimes the perpetrators of abuse (as well as the victims), and it’s naive to think that a potential partner can overcome these issues through love and patience alone. The symptoms are aggravating to deal with as a person with BPD actually experiencing them, and they can be exhausting or terrifying to deal with as the partner of a person who has BPD. A diagnosis of BPD is not an excuse to treat others badly, and people with this disorder are still responsible for recognizing when they need to seek help, or when they might need to take a break from relationships as a whole.

I’ve had numerous experiences with BPD in my lifetime. I’ve worked with it as a mental health professional; many of the homeless kids I worked with met the criteria for BPD, and for many of them, BPD was at least contributing to their ongoing homelessness. Some had burned bridges with family members or professional organizations that could help them, due to their erratic or intense behaviour. Many had experimented broadly with drug use, reckless behaviour or casual sex, and had faced life-altering consequences - like drug dependency, criminal records or unwanted pregnancies - as a result. Many of them were caught up in very intense and very unhealthy romantic relationships, and they were unable to work on other aspects of their life (finishing school, finding housing, finding employment, etc) because all of their time and energy was devoted to their high-needs relationships. It’s hard to get someone to sit down and work on their math homework when they feel an intense need to comb through their partner’s instagram for any signs of cheating. It can be a very tricky disorder to deal with as a professional, because you are no exception to the person’s fear of abandonment or their intense relationship style - it can be more difficult to form consistent trust and rapport with BPD clients than it is with other clients, which makes treatment difficult.

I also have a lot of hands-on experience with BPD in my personal life. I lived with a partner who had BPD for two years, although he only received his official diagnosis after we had already ceased living together. We got together as teenagers, and as far as I can tell, he developed BPD in his early 20s, around two years after we met. My ex refused all forms of mental health treatment, and living with a person who had untreated Borderline Personality Disorder was one of the most exhausting and difficult experiences of my life. He had the classic “splitting” pattern; much of the time, he had me up on a pedestal, and he would boldly tell me and other people that I was the most perfect person who ever lived, that I was the answer to all of his problems, and that he never needed anything or anyone else in the world as long as he had me. Other days, he would tell me that I never cared about him, that he would never be good enough for me, and that I secretly wanted to leave him. We had some happy days, hanging out and just being best friends who were madly in love with each other, but as his disorder really took hold, the extremes became much more common. His behaviour became reckless and erratic, and he started leaving our apartment at night to break into nearby abandoned buildings and construction site. He never developed any anger problems, but he became despondent, and started spending entire days sobbing on the couch and contemplating suicide. His goals and view of himself changed weekly - some weeks he saw himself as smart and studious, and some weeks he saw himself as being doomed to homelessness. I cared about him very, very much, but I could not live like that anymore. He was not a bad person and his situation was not his fault - although it was his responsibility to accept help, which he failed to do - but he was not good for my own mental health. No one is obligated to stay in such a tumultuous and unstable relationship, and unfortunately it reached a point where I could not do it anymore.

Unfortunately, my current partner and I are also dealing with a situation with BPD at the moment. In this case, however, he has an ex-partner with BPD who cannot accept that their relationship is over. Every couple of weeks she calls him in the middle of the night, sometimes to declare that he is the most wonderful person she ever met and insist that they were meant to be together. Other times, she calls to tell him that he is a terrible person who never cared about her or respected her, and she informs him that she is in the middle of self-harming because of him. We both acknowledge that she is a deeply troubled individual, and neither of us have any ill will toward her. He informs her family every time she calls, and I have no issues with him picking up the phone to talk to her in the middle of the night if it means that someone can be made aware of her in-progress self-harm. Again, she is not a bad person and her issues are not of her own making. Her case happens to be particularly extreme - most people with BPD do not even approach this level of inappropriate behaviour - but I cannot deny that it is a source of distress in my life.

There are two big misconceptions about BPD that I think should be dispelled. The first is the notion that BPD is a “female” problem. While it is true that female diagnoses of BPD outnumber male diagnoses considerably, there are probably a lot of social biases at play. A man who has intense relationships in his early 20s and copes by doing drugs, sleeping around and driving fast is seen as “normal”, or “just blowing off steam”. A woman who behaves the same way is considered mentally ill. Men who present with characteristic symptoms of BPD may instead receive a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, depression or anxiety, due to the notion that BPD is only a female problem. Women who have symptoms of Bipolar Disorder, depression or anxiety may be diagnosed with BPD. People tend to see what they expect to see, and many clinicians expect to see lots of women with BPD.

The other misconception I want to dispel is that idea that BPD never gets better. It is the most treatable of the personality disorders, and most people with the condition see at least some improvement after their mid- to late twenties. Therapy and medication can help treat the symptoms to make life and relationships more manageable, and people with BPD who receive proper treatment can even achieve full remission of their disorder. This is a difficult disorder, but it is not a life sentence, and it should never be assumed that people who have this disorder are going to be this way forever. Hope and treatment are out there.

Hope this answers your question!

87 notes · View notes

comicteaparty · 5 years ago

Text

January 6th-January 12th, 2020 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from January 6th, 2020 to January 12th, 2020. The chat focused on The Demon Archives by Daniel Sharp (Author) and Sebastian Piriz (Artist).

Featured Comment:

Chat:

Comic Tea Party

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on The Demon Archives by Daniel Sharp (Author) and Sebastian Piriz (Artist)~! (https://demonarchives.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PDT), so keep checking back for more! You have until January 12th to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. Who do you think Konstantin Yakovlevich’s benefactor is and what is their goal? Why exactly are they having him build death bots? Overall, do you think Konstantin’s choices to team up with them have done more good or bad for his community?

DaemonDan (The Demon Archives)

(oh hey, this is me)

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 3. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 4. Do you think that Viktor will be able to recover from his brain damage as Tenzin did, or is it a lost cause? Regardless of which you deem most likely, how do you think that will affect him and those around him?

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 5. What has been your favorite illustration in the comic so far? What specifically about it do you like?

QUESTION 6. What moment of Tenzin’s PTSD stuck out to you, and why? What do you think this story shows us in regards to PTSD’s affects and the path it takes to heal? Ultimately, do you think Tenzin can overcome his PTSD?

RebelVampire

1) My favorite scene is probably when Jane and Viktor forcibly stop Tenzin from going out as the bait. It is a heart wrenching scene watching Tenzin being forced to stand idly by while the others take the risk for him. And I like that there is a mix too in whose side you should be on. Cause on the one hand, Jane and Viktor have logic on their side, but on the other hand I super empathize with Tenzin. And at the end, you wind up feeling angry, sad, and a slew of other emotions, and I think it really helps sell the scene. 2) I don't have enough evidence to make a good theory on who the benefactor is. However, I do feel the factions who are attacking Minerva are involved. It's just a little too convenient that they're suddenly attacking on the eve of Aegis taking a massive hit. Someone there knows something. As for the benefactor's goal, I assume domination. Cause this is really the only reason you build death bots, is when you want to murder a bunch of people and take over. I feel like Konstantin's choices have been more of a mixed bag then one way or another. There's a lot of "what ifs." Like, if he had rejected the offer, what would've happened without the supplies? Or "what if" he had rejected the offer, and everyone was killed because they were going to take things by force? At the end of the day, while I might think his choices have probably done more bad in the long term, there was probably no good that would've come from the situation regardless. Either way would've had bad results, which is really the shit thing about the world sometimes.

3) My favorite character at the moment is probably Tenzin. I really just like how he's this imperfect character. He cares deeply about people, but at the same time can be a major asshole. But at the same time you understand why he's an asshole cause he's dealing with a lot of bullshit and trauma. So all around, he's just this interesting and complicated character that I enjoy exploring. 4) I feel like Viktor's fate may be more bittersweet. Like maybe they'll be able to recover his brain somewhat to a degree that he won't be catatonic. However, I don't feel that he will ever recover as well as Tenzin, and probably be bed/wheel chair ridden for the rest of his days. Not to mention the obvious mental trauma he's gonna have to live through which is a whole other horrible topic. I feel anything less than a full recovery is gonna 1) cause everyone to lose some hope and 2) send Tenzin into a reckless rage where he just wanted to murder the enemy three times overkill. And that attitude will inevitably alienate him until the others can talk sense into him again. However, I think it will really force him to maybe address how he feels personally responsible for Viktor's condition, so maybe he can get some help. Maybe.

RebelVampire

5) My fave illustration is definitely this page https://demonarchives.com/chapter-4-page-18-shattered/ This is just the perfect use of exaggerated, distorted lensing to express both the horror and grief going on. Plus with the beautiful addition of the montage in a circular composition, everything is just tied together really well and puts you in the head space. 6) The moment of Tenzin's PTSD that stuck out to me the most was more just the overall fact/idea that his own reliving of the trauma was slowly killing him. I kind of feel like this was a direct, physical consequence of what trauma feels like it. Cause no matter how many years you put between yourself and certain traumas, you will always remember them clear as day. And if you're not careful, you can get lost in them and relive them over and over and over. So I kind of feel like this representation really caught that. As for whether Tenzin can overcome it, yes. But I think it will take years and not something we will see 100% until like...and epilogue chapter or something. Especially cause Tenzin is in a situation that is only going to bring more and more trauma. I do not expect him to get over anything anytime soon.

snuffysam

All right, a bit of catching up to do. 1) My favorite scene was the one where Jane first inserts herself into Tenzin's mind. It was a big moment that showed that no, she isn't just a cold, calculating machine. She really cares about Tenzin, and she doesn't want to be responsible for any more pain. 2) I think either Oculus is straight-up the benefactor (creating discord to give themselves more power in Minerva), or whoever is the benefactor is also controlling Oculus. Like, there's clearly something fishy going on there. 3) My favorite character is Jane. I just really like how... human she feels, and how she cares for others. Sometimes, I'm not sure if she's actually calculating all of the tactics she says, or if she's making some of the numbers up so she can act like she isn't clouded by emotions (e.g. giving higher priority to protecting Tenzin).

RebelVampire

@snuffysam I'm more in the line that Oculus is in control of the benefactor. Cause your henchmen don't have such menacing and vague replies unless they're working for someone else and using you. https://demonarchives.com/chapter-12-after-credits-4/

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 7. Which characters do you enjoy seeing interact the most? What about their dynamic interests you?

QUESTION 8. What do you think Commander Kubek of Aegis and President Smith of Oculus are up to (if anything)? What role do either of them have with the current attack and sabotage going on with Minerva?

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 9. What sorts of art or story details have you noticed in the way the comic is crafted that you think deserves attention?

QUESTION 10. What do you think the attack on Minerva has to do with the APERs? Also, why do you think Jane and Tenzin are now deemed the biggest threat, and how will that affect the people around them?

RebelVampire

7) I probably enjoy seeing Tenzin and Jane interact the most of the characters. I feel they have the most interesting relationship since its this weird mix of being close and being antagonistic towards each other. But I also like seeing how the two kind of challenge each other in different ways and force each other to grow as people. So everytime they interact, I know one of them is gonna change in some small way, and who doesn't love character growth? 8) While I don't think President Smith is the big bad behind everything, I do think he helped the enemy in some regard and potentially manipulated things to make Aegis look even worse than they did. All in an effort to gain more power and steer diplomacy in a way he thinks is best. Meanwhile, I feel the Commander is using Tenzin somehow to ruin Smith's attempts at power. However, I also think he could care less about the actual stakes. I really think he's being driven by his own desire of power and keeping things squarely with Aegis. So in the end, I think together they're making everything worse because neither cares about protecting Minerva as much as they should, and that the attack and sabotage are made worse because they're solely focused on their own duel for influence.

9) I've really enjoyed all the little details in the world building. Like how people are getting essential things like food and water, how technology has adapted to suit the needs of the current state of the world, and even the small spiritual touches because of how dire everything is. Overall, there's just a lot of thought put both into the designs and additions here that really make the world feel all encompassing and like it's an actual place where people exist. 10) I do think the benefactor of the APERs has the factions under their thumb. So I think it was all an orchestrated thing to make sure Minerva's defenses were basically in shambles, thus vulnerable to attack. And the APERs were created to make domination easier since so far Tenzin and Jane have been the only effective force against them. As for why Tenzin and Jane are the biggest threat now, it's cause they're basic killing machines, but Tenzin and Jane have shown they can adapt as well to them. So of course, even if it's only two people, they're a threat to an easy path to takeover. Which sadly, I think they're gonna get people around them hurt and killed, cause collateral damage is a thing.

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 11. What do you think are this particular comic’s strengths? What do you think makes this comic unique? Please elaborate.

QUESTION 12. What do you think the story shows us about the dangers of AIs? What about the potential humanity in AIs? In general, do you think AIs like Jane and SOPKA are more useful or more dangerous, and what is your reasoning?

Comic Tea Party

QUESTION 13. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

QUESTION 14. With Minerva behind them, what do you think Tenzin, Jane, and everyone else will ultimately do? Or, in other words, what do you think will happen to them on their journey for answers? Also, how will events in Minerva continue to affect them?

RebelVampire

11) I think this comic's strength is a combination of the tone and character writing. As I mentioned in an earlier answer regarding Tenzin not being all good or all bad, I kind of feel this is present throughout the story. Characters are forced to make difficult choices because of the circumstances, and in general, none of these choices are really that optimal. Someone is always going to get the short end of the stick, someone is always going to be mad, and so forth. However, I think this makes the setting feel uber real, because when it comes to survival situations like this, there usually aren't good choices. So in the end, the consequences in the story have real weight, both on a character level and on a political scale, and it just makes for a worthwhile read since bad stuff can and does generally happen. 12) I think the story shows us that AIs or any similar program aren't a universal bad or a universal good. In the end, the scenario in the society is one I feel is the most likely. Some AIs will go rogue, some will find a way to understand humanity and even respect and emulate human traits, and others will remain machines focused on the purpose they were programmed for. In the end, though, I think Jane kind of reminds us maybe its worth the risk, since AIs can be our allies if we respect them.

13) I am looking forward to Konstantin actually. Especially cause at this point, he surely feels like things are his fault. And when people feel like things are their fault, they tend to do desperate things to make up for it. So I'm interested to see how that situation plays out. 14) I think Tenzin, Jane, and everyone else will first find the source of the APERs i.e. SOPKA but then change motivations to find the benefactor when they learn the thread of corruption runs even deeper. Obviously, the whole way they're going to be fighting death machines, but I also think Oculus might get more and more involved. I feel like ultimately, their journey is going to make them question if Minerva is worth saving a bit. It's kind of easy to forget a place, whether it be a country, city, or even a village, is more than just the people in charge - especially when you aren't there any more. So murdering a specific person become synonymous with killing the whole place. Granted, I do feel eventually they'll remember the people, but I think at the very least, their eyes will forever be opened to how easily corruption springs up.

Comic Tea Party

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about The Demon Archives this week! Please also give a special thank you to Daniel Sharp (Author) and Sebastian Piriz (Artist) for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked The Demon Archives, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: https://demonarchives.com/

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheDemonArchives

Daniel’s Paypal.me: https://www.paypal.me/TheDemonArchives

Daniel’s Gumroad Shop: https://gumroad.com/daemondan

Daniel’s Zazzle Shop: https://www.zazzle.com/store/thedemonarchives

The Demon Archives’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemonArchives

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #demon archives #the demon archives #daniel sharp #sebastian piriz

1 note · View note

gprado34-blog · 5 years ago

Text

MIMQ RATING

To The Bone

To The Bone tells the story of Ellen, a 20 year old woman struggling with Anorexia Nervosa. The film follows her journey after being kicked out of treatment for refusal to cooperate. We meet her family and are shown many possible things that may have attributed to her developing an eating disorder, from her absent father to her mother who seems to have given up on her, to the death of a young girl which she feels responsible for. She is put in the path of Dr. Beckham, a Doctor whose unconventional methods for eating disorder recovery are her last resort. As she moves through her journey, we watch her interact with the people in Dr. Bechkam’s inpatient and with her family. The film ends with her returning to the treatment center of her own accord, embracing recovery after leaving abruptly.

Authentic:

Criteria:

The film never explicitly says that Ellen has Anorexia Nervosa, however, based on her symptoms, rituals and habits she exhibits and clues from the other characters of the movie, she fits an accurate depiction of a sufferer of the disease. When deciding my Authenticity rating for the film, I will look at Ellen, and analyze whether her symptoms shown are conducive with a factual depiction of Anorexia Nervosa, or if it promotes any myths or misunderstandings.

Facts:

Anorexia Nervosa is a mental illness that is characterized by restricting or abstaining from eating, having a BMI that is extremely low, being malnourished or underweight, obsession with food- including rituals when eating such as cutting food into small pieces, controlling what exactly is eaten, calorie counting and distorted body image.

A person suffering with Anorexia Nervosa may have trouble being around food, strange habits or rituals when around food, denies being hungry, and will usually exercise compulsively to burn off any calories consumed, however small. Physical symptoms include but are not limited to Lanugo, which is comorbid with Anorexia because it is the bodies way of attempting to keep itself warm by growing hair, from an excessive loss of body fat. A woman with Anorexia will usually lose her period. Dizziness, feeling cold constantly, and dressing in layers to hide weight loss or stay warm are also signs.

When the illness progresses to severe points, many patients have a tube inserted through the nasal cavity to introduce calories into the system (usually not by choice). Continuing on, hallucinations from malnutrition may occur, fainting and eventually, when it has continued to a fatal point, usually causes an electrolyte imbalance and cardiac arrest.

Examples from the Movie:

From the very first 5 minutes of the film we get our first look into Ellen’s brain and her obsession with food. She is leaving a treatment center and as she is driving by in a taxi, if you watch closely, she notices a grocery store and Taco Bell, and becomes visibly uncomfortable. At the dinner table, her sister plays a game of “guessing calories” with her and she gets all of the calories of the food on her plate correctly. She exhibits other symptoms such as body checks (when she holds her arm with her fingers to see how big her arms are) and constant exercise in the form of sit-ups on the floor, which gives her bruises. The scene in the bathroom with her stepmother shows that she is clearly underweight and malnourished, you are shown her almost bare body which is thin to an extreme. When we see her around food, she picks at it and cuts it into tiny pieces, moves it around with her fork, or takes miniscule bites- to give the appearance that she is eating without actually eating.

When she is examined by Dr. Beckham, he asks when her last menstrual period was- she doesn’t remember, it was a “long time ago”. He also points out the Lanugo she has, which is a condition in malnourished people wherein their bodies grow hair to keep them warm. She also wears multiple layers and sweaters, to keep herself warm. In the treatment home, we hear Luke and Pearl use the word “rexies” a slang term for Anorexia, which is an actual mention and acknowledgement of the Eating Disorder. She mentions being “tubed” a few times, and then at another point when asked about purging she responds that it was never “her thing” which leads the audience to conclude that based on all of these symptoms, rituals and clues she suffers from Anorexia Nervosa.

Analysis of Examples:

All of the symptoms and signs listed for an individual with Anorexia Nervosa are vast and vary from person to person. However, Ellen displayed a wide variety of them and although it is never expressly said that she is Anorexic, we know based on the facts that she does exhibit these signs and symptoms and it can be concluded from this and the absence of purging or binging that she has Anorexia Nervosa, and not Bulimia Nervosa or Binge Eating Disorder, as those are characterized with different, but sometimes similar symptoms.

I feel that the actual diagnosis should have been mentioned at least once for the audience. I know many people do not know the differences between the Eating Disorders classified in the DSM-V.

I feel that the portrayal of Anorexia Nervosa through Ellen was very accurate. I didn’t see any of it that was dramatized. They tried to cover many of the symptoms to make it clear to the audience what she was struggling with- even the unappealing parts such as mentioning the Lanugo and her loss of her menstrual period. They showed a clear image of her body, which was emaciated to show that she was extremely underweight. Her rituals and obsession with food were sometimes subtle, but there and noticeable. She had bruises from constant sit-ups and was shown wanting to exercise in the form of walking or wanting to run whenever she could. Overall based on the facts about Anorexia and the specific things we saw Ellen do and go through, I would give this film a “Strongly Agree” about their authenticity, with a dark green heart.

Attractive:

Criteria:

The things I will be focusing on when rating Ellen’s attractiveness to the audience are her attitude towards others, especially in treatment and towards her family and her physical appearance. I will talk about her physical appearance only because many people in the audience will view it as one of the most important things in the film, considering the subject matter.

Examples from the Film:

Firstly, Ellen’s attitude towards others changes throughout the film, but she is abrasive, distant and even sometimes mean as we follow her journey. Our first introduction to her character involves her belittling a patient in her treatment center by responding to her share with “Society’s to blame. The World is so Unfair. I have to Die.” in a sarcastic, exasperated tone. She then holds up a sign that says “Suck My Skinny Balls.” That is our first encounter with her. She seems to be, at a glance, closed off, but when we see her interact with her sister we see a softer side of her that shows vulnerability. Her asking about her father’s absence also hints at an inner child that wants and craves love from her parents. The ice really begins to melt when she meets Luke and he works his way through her tough exterior. Then, during her family therapy she seems like a little kid, quietly sitting and almost dissociating from the moment as her “moms” argue around her. She has a complex personality. She has moments, such as when Luke is trying to get her to eat a candy bar where she snaps and is cruel, and the viewer might assume that she is a mean person. We then see the shadows of a different Ellen when they go on a non-date to a Chinese restaurant, laughing and joking with him as he gets them beers pretending they are cancer patients. She decides to change her name to Eli to mark the start of a new her. By the end of the film, she embraces her sister and stepmother (who she seemed not to like very much) and we see her walk into treatment looking lighter and transformed.

Ellen is classically beautiful, but she is clearly underweight and is shown in the opening of the film in baggy, dark clothes, with boots and smoking a cigarette. I think the film is trying to show this to make the point that Anorexia isn’t about being “attractive” or “thin” and “pretty”. She is shown in her underwear in the bathroom with her stepmother and we see how malnourished her body is. She is extremely underweight. At the end of the film, as her disease progresses, her face gets more and more gaunt, her eyes become dark and lifeless and her lips become dry and cracked.

Analysis of Examples:

I don’t believe the film wanted to make Ellen very attractive to the audience. They wanted to show the “ugly” side of Anorexia. She was just attractive enough to draw people in, based on her personality and the likeable parts of it- her interactions with her half-sister, her relationship with Luke, her childlike innocence with her mother, and her penchant and talent for artwork. Her clothing made her look “cute” and she is a pretty girl, as is very apparent when we see “healthy” Ellen in her hallucination. The end of the film brings her full circle and the audience sees her as she is, a young adult who wants to get better and is connecting with her family and with people after her epiphany. She also, however, had an ugly side in which she could be sarcastic, biting, cruel and withdrawn. When we see her body fully, it is not “attractive”. Her stepmother even asks her, rhetorically, “Do you think that’s beautiful?” And it isn’t- it looks sickly, which is a truth that is hard to swallow and look at. Because these two contrasts are so stark to each other, I will give the Attractiveness rating of the film a neutral “Neither Agree nor Disagree” white heart.

Friendly:

Criteria:

The criteria I will focus on here will exclusively look at Ellen’s family, her stepmother, mother, father and half-sister. I will look to see if they are supportive of her recovery, and if their support came across in a constructive and helpful way, instead of a damaging or guilt inducing way, which is unintentional sometimes but harmful nonetheless.

Examples from the Movie:

Ellen’s half-sister is absolutely the most supportive of her, followed (strangely) by her bumbling and somewhat catty but well meaning step mother. Her father and mother are absent and when we do hear about them, Ellen’s mom is in Phoenix with her new wife and her father is nowhere to be found. In the film, we never see Ellen’s father. He doesn’t come to the group session, or to dinner. Ellen never interacts with him. Her stepmother, Susan, is critical but also through her actions and certain moments in the film shows that she cares about Ellen. She gets her a “hamburger” cake that although was a horrible idea, it was well meaning. She takes a picture of her in the bathroom as well and unintentionally shames her. She tries again to get her into treatment, and although she is annoying and pushy, she is trying to help her genuinely. WHen she is embraced by Ellen at the end of the film, her shock and happiness are shown so clearly you see that she loves her. Kelly is loving. They share moments like on the hill when she shows her her butterfly tattoo, and when she asks her, in a quiet moment of desperation at the dinner table, “will you please try this time?” In therapy, she admits the pain she feels at having her life taken over by Ellen’s illness and although her feelings are valid, she says that her friends view Ellen as a “freak who killed a girl” and also says at one point that she “doesnt get it… like just eat.” which are both very unhelpful. Ellen’s biological mother, Judy, is revealed to have had bipolar manic breakdowns, and left Ellen’s father for her best friend, Olive. They reject taking Ellen back in with them, stating that they are too tired to help her and they cant take her “right now”. In the end, when Ellen ends up back with her mother and the infamous “rice milk” scene happens- where Judy states that it might be her fault because of PPD that Ellen has issues with eating. She feeds 20 year old Ellen rice milk, holding her like a baby in a hut outside. It is both uncomfortable and a nod to extremists who believe that all things can be cured through spirituality and weird pseudo-therapies.

Analysis of Examples:

I try to look at this from the perspective of the audience and not someone with a family that very closely resembles some parts of Ellen’s family. Her father is clearly uninvolved- the reason doesn’t really matter. Him not being there is enough to show that she doesn’t have his support. Her sister Kelly clearly loves and supports her but is shown to be tired of dealing with the illness her sister has- which I understand, but the audience may take it another way. This film speaks differently to people who have had or love someone who has had an Eating Disorder. Kelly is mostly loving though and I do take her age into account, I believe in the therapy session when she finally vented to Dr. Beckham maybe it was the first time anyone had asked her how she felt. All in All, Kelly was loving and supportive of Ellen. Susan, although she could come off as ditzy and overbearing, was the one doing the most out of anyone to make sure Ellen could get treatment. She was genuinely happy when Ellen gave her a hug at the end of the movie. I feel she was also very supportive and loving, but also had a side of her that did not understand Eating Disorders and so she made a lot of mistakes, like taking a picture of her in the bathroom, etc. I think Judy is too wrapped up in herself and her own life(shown when Ellen takes a look at her Facebook) to really be the type of mother she should be to Ellen. At least based on what is shown in the film, I don’t know what happened before. The rice milk scene was just gross and unhelpful, and at the dinner table when Olive and Judy are talking about Dr. Beckham having a “god complex” and talking badly about Susan it was clear that they had a somewhat self centered nature. Based on Kelly and Susan supporting (even though at times it wasn’t the best) and never giving up on her, even going to treatment to find her when she left, and being there to embrace her when she got back, to dropping her off at treatment again, I feel that the friendliness in the film deserves a light green heart or an Agree. I think that her stepmother and Kelly’s love and support of Ellen brings the film from a neutral rating to an “Agree” rating.

Hopeful:

Criteria:

What I will focus on when determining whether the film showed a hopeful ending for the audience is based on whether the film ended on a note that showed a positive outcome or transitional experience for Ellen.

Examples from the Movie:

After her epiphany moment in the desert, wherein Ellen sits on a tree with Luke looking luminous and healthy, she looks down to see her grey, emaciated corpse on the ground and is shocked, asking “is that me?” She swallows a piece of coal Luke gives her, that is supposed to represent her courage. We see her awake in the desert, lips dry and cracked, severely underweight and looking much differently than the Ellen we were first introduced to. She checks her pulse, laughs, gets up and walks out of the desert, and seemingly straight into the yard and arms of her sister and stepmother. She hugs her tightly, whispering “Im gonna be okay.” into her ear. We then see her returning to Dr. Beckhams treatment of her own volition, looking lighter, even dressed differently,in white and a light sweater, with her hair pulled up and a smile on her face as she greets the other house members. She hit rock bottom, got up and decided she wanted to live.

Analysis of Examples:

The ending being her returning to treatment after her epiphany in the desert is a very hopeful ending. She experienced near death, survived, and her first move was to walk away from the desert, and straight into the arms of the two people who supported her most in the film, Susan and Kelly. Then back to treatment. Her smile and a sense of peace as she said that she was going to be okay indicates to the audience that she is serious about her treatment this time, and that there is a huge chance she will recover. I give the Hopeful part of the film a solid green heart as a rating.

Helpful:

Criteria:

I believe the most important criteria to determine if the mental health professionals in this film were portrayed as helpful to the audience is to see if the way they treated Ellen’s Eating Disorder was in a way that was specific to her problem, ethical, responsible, professional and effective.

Facts:

People suffering with Eating Disorders generally have trouble opening up about their problem and trusting people to help them recover. It is natural for them to resist getting better. They need a therapist or doctor who can guide them gently and with patience. Eating Disorders are severe illnesses that are often fatal, they have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness. Specifically, Anorexia Nervosa.

A mental health professional should always behave professionally and ethically. One of the first rules in regards to being in the medical profession is “first, do no harm.” Mental Health professionals must be sensitive to the individual needs of each patient, and have a manner about them that helps to take people who are in a vulnerable state, in the throes of mental illness, and guide them to a place where they are able to get better. They should conduct themselves professionally and in a manner that creates clear boundaries between themselves and their patients. Creating too much of an air of familiarity breeds problems such as projection of emotions or co-dependency.

There are several forms of treatment that are extremely effective for treating Eating Disorders, specifically Anorexia Nervosa. These include but are not limited to ACT, DBT, CBT, CRT and Family Based treatment. It is important to note that Family Based Treatment, in which families are taught to be support systems for the individual suffering from an Eating Disorder, and are shown how to be sensitive and help them recover has merit to it. This method of treatment is also known as the Maudsley method. It is very important, even in cases where the individual is not using FBT as their treatment, that their family and support system be educated and involved as much as is necessary to ensure that a patient in treatment be successful when they leave.

Examples from the Movie:

Dr. Beckham was supposed to be portrayed, I think, as that “tough love” doctor, almost akin to Robin Williams portrayal of Dr. Sean McGuire but a little less intense. Beckham tells Ellen in their first meeting- when she says she doesn’t need more inpatient- that if she doesn’t agree to it then she “needs to find another doctor.” He tells her he “sees kids like her everyday, and as a rule they are usually full of shit”. He uses profanity a lot, from the very first time they meet. While I personally don’t have a problem with it, he doesn’t yet know his patients to see what makes them comfortable. He even curses during the family therapy scene. I feel that he sits back and lets chaos unfold but doesn’t lead the narrative or do what he should as a health professional to ensure that the conversation stays productive and on topic. After that, he completely writes off family therapy. He also seems to not be very present during Ellen’s recovery, or at least not as present as I imagine a mental health professional with a recovery home should be. When Susan and Kelly go to him, concerned because she left treatment, then he tells them that it is important for her to “hit bottom” in order to recover. He is never shown doing any particularly important work- only short snippets in which he talks to Ellen about changing her name, or in their last session when he really works the “tough love” angle and also seems to encourage a relationship between Ellen and Luke stating “what happened with you [two]? Seemed like you had a good thing going. He then calls her “childish and cowardly” for wanting to be reassured, and gives a very movie- ish speech about the uncertainty of life that even gave me anxiety. He tells her to stop waiting for someone to save her, after she tells him that he’s supposed to teach her how to live healthily. Ellen leaves in a hurry, and leaves treatment.

Analysis of Examples:

Dr. Beckham’s rough exterior and initial dismissive nature in his first meeting with Ellen may have made for an edgy attention grabbing Doctor type for the film, but is extremely misleading for the audience. A person in a place as vulnerable as Ellen would probably have left and not went to seek help again. Being dismissed that way is not ethical or professional. There were many ways he could have handled that first meeting when she said she didn’t need inpatient that weren’t as rude. If a Doctor told me I was full of shit, I would report them. That isn’t just unethical, its unprofessional and dangerous to gamble with someone’s mental health by speaking to them in a way that can come off as aggressive or uncaring. If a Doctor is working in the mental health field, I believe they should conduct themselves under the saying of “Doing No Harm.”

His complete dismissal of her family as a “shit-show” is extremely damaging. Families can be very beneficial to treatment, if taught with patience the proper way to support their loved one. If he were unable to get them to cooperate, that would be one thing, but writing the, off after one group session in which he sat back and let women that had previous issues bicker, instead of leading the conversation somewhere it could have benefitted Ellen more than traumatized her again, it may have worked. He needed more time with her family before completely throwing away the idea that they could help her.

The film didn’t place enough emphasis on the support of a mental health professional in recovery. Dr. Beckham was not very present, in fact we only see him 6 times in the film for a total of 17 minutes. It seems that he wasn’t involved enough, from what the audience is shown. At one point, he asks Ellen about her relationship with Luke and it seems like he’s encouraging it which I think is very unethical considering they are both in his treatment center and mental health professional should not be giving opinions about the personal lives of his clients in that way, as it can be very triggering for them. The last session he has with Ellen, where she is very clearly getting sicker and in a vulnerable place, he pushes her to the point where she leaves treatment by almost provoking a panic attack and not giving her any reassurance or guidance when she clearly needs it, even asking for it. It may have made for a “good” movie moment but it was extremely misleading to the audience to believe that this was a proper way of treating a patient. All in All I would give Dr. Beckham a grey heart for “Disagree” because while I don’t think he was intentionally trying to harm Ellen, he behaved in a way that was NOT helpful.

References

National Alliance on Mental Illness(n.d.) Eating Disorders; symptoms, diagnosis, causes and treatment. Retrieved from:

https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-conditions/eating-disorders

National Alliance on Mental Illness (January 2013) Anorexia Nervosa Fact Sheet. Retrieved from: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d140/e26781f10daaf5ff40f46b416fbc6159d03a.pdf

National Eating Disorders Association (n.d). Anorexia. Retrieved from: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/anorexia

Cleveland Clinic(June 27, 2019). Anorexia Nervosa: Management and Treatment. Retrieved from: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9794-anorexia-nervosa/management-and-treatment

National Eating Disorders Association (n.d). Types of Treatment. Retrieved from: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/types-treatment

Beresin, Eugene. (July 21, 2017). Two Psychiatrists Weigh in on Netflix’s To The Bone. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-in/201707/two-psychiatrists-weigh-in-netflix-s-the-bone

1 note · View note