#i mean it's vague but it's there

[wreywrites]

Tiger Shark

Part 4: The Anchor

Chapter 21

I don’t knock. It is too quiet in my room, and he’s been living here for a month. I just let myself in and crawl into bed next to him.

“Hi,” he mumbles.

I pull the blanket up to my ears. “Will you tell me something?”

“Can’t sleep?”

“Too quiet. I can hear them.”

There is a long sigh. Finnick rolls over and we are nose to nose. “You promise?”

“It’s the usual for a reason, Odair.”

“Listen, honey, we have very specific rules on nicknames, and if you’re going to backpedal on your end…”

“Sorry. I’m just frustrated and tired and I can’t sleep.”

“And you want me to solve your problems.”

“You’re already awake.”

He sighs again. “Fine. Close your eyes and imagine it: a ten-year-old me, about to be stung by his first jellyfish.”

I can’t help it. I open my eyes and raise an eyebrow. “You were ten before you got stung?”

“Yes, and I could have been older, but I was distracted, now let me finish.”

I close my eyes again.

“It was the first really hot day that summer, and my mom took me swimming. We went out past the reef up by the Traps and swam out to the drop off. Mom loved going over the drop off. I did not. But the reef was so jaw-dropping up there, with all the fish, and no fishing boats to scare anything off or to have to watch out for. So Mom was swimming a few yards past the drop off, and I was on the shallow side…”

~~~                               ~~~                               ~~~

I wake up the next morning earlier than I would like to. This means I am once again alone with my thoughts, which is what I was trying to avoid last night. Oh well. A deal’s a deal. We’ve been doing this for almost a month. At night, when everything is quiet, I can’t sleep. It’s when my fades get really bad, because there is nothing to block out the sounds in my head. So for a while I asked Finnick to sit in my room and talk until I fell asleep. Once I was asleep, he would walk across the hall and sleep in one of the empty rooms. And then one night we both remembered how well we slept that night the week before my shortened Victory Tour, so we tried it out, and now we’re hooked.

I still try to sleep alone. And sometimes I can, but most nights it doesn’t happen. Thankfully I’m not plagued by nightmares—once I fall asleep, I usually sleep through the night. Finnick, not so much. He has terrible nightmares, and he never wakes up without thinking he’s back in the arena. So the deal is that he talks until I fall asleep, and then I stay in bed until he wakes up. Thankfully, he’s not one to sleep in to excess, because the silent mornings sometimes prove troublesome as well.

So I watch him sleep. It’s a little creepy, but he looks so different asleep that I can’t help staring. He looks younger. Or maybe he just looks his age and I’m used to seeing him have to act like someone much older, bearing more responsibility than any twenty-year-old should have to bear. In sleep, he doesn’t hold life and death for some luckless teenagers in his hands. In sleep, he has no Capitol to despise, to obey, to fear. In sleep, he is not a victor, not a Capitol toy, not a celebrity, he is just Finnick Odair, the boy who wasn’t stung by a jellyfish until he was ten, the child who was convinced that his mother forgot how to tie shoes, the man who seductively ate strawberries just to make me uncomfortable. And in this moment, I can almost forget the horrific things I’ve seen and done, the blood on my hands, the loss I’ve endured. In this moment, I am content.

He snuck up on me all right.

~~~                               ~~~                               ~~~

I’ve learned what to look for when Finnick is about to wake up. He doesn’t look relaxed anymore. His eyelids twitch, and he squirms and moves a lot. It is midmorning when he starts turning his head from side to side and mumbling.

I take a deep breath. One day last week he punched me when he woke up, so it takes a bit of mental preparation now. With one hand, I take the closer of his hands. I put the other on his cheek. It occurs to me that puts me in prime biting position. I hope he doesn’t bite me. I hope very much he doesn’t bite me.

“Hey,” I say quietly. “Finnick, you can wake up now. You’re home.”

His eyes snap open and his free hand grabs my wrist. I wince as his fingers clamp down. If he ever went off the rails in a fit of nightmare-induced irrationality and tried to kill me, he could do it.

“Hey,” I say again. “Good morning.”

He blinks, then closes his eyes and lets out a slow breath, letting go of my wrist.

I run my thumb over his cheek. “Bad dream?” I don’t know why I ask. The answer is always yes, and he never wants to talk about them. But what else am I supposed to say in this situation?

He nods.

I start to pull my hand away, but he grabs it, holding it against his cheek. After a second, he opens his eyes to look at me. “Stay?”

I smile, nod. “As long as you want.”

~~~                               ~~~                               ~~~

I actually fall back asleep, apparently, because the next thing I know I am waking up again. This time Finnick is already awake. Or maybe still awake. And this time he is watching me sleep.

I grin and wrinkle my nose at him.

He smiles back. “I wish it was raining.”

“What?” I laugh. “Why?”

“Because it’s going to feel weird just laying in bed all day if it’s nice outside.”

“You want to lay in bed all day?”

“I do!” He brushes a stray hair behind my ear. “I want to lay in bed all day and do nothing but look at you and remember exactly what you look like right now and exactly how I feel and…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Damn it, you keep sneaking up on me.” And then he kisses me.

It’s surprising, but somehow also not at all. I should have, could have, seen this coming a mile away and months ago. Actually at several points in time I did see this coming, but I did nothing about it. I didn’t alter course, I didn’t steer around the reef. Snuck up, my foot.

And yet… I would’ve steered far away if I saw this coming. In fact, at the first sign of danger, I had panicked. Only to learn later and the hard way that it was already too late. For better or worse, I need this man in my life, and it took me a long time to realize that. But now that I know, I’m not letting go of this any time soon.

I’m the one that breaks off. I don’t want to, but I do. Because there, still in the back of my mind, always there, is Mako. And this seems wrong. And I am hungry, which is a convenient excuse. But I’m hoping Finnick doesn’t follow me to the kitchen, because I need to sort through the shoal of thoughts crashing against each other in my mind.

Sadly, frying some whale bacon doesn’t help. I’m still confused, and the smell brings Finnick to the kitchen.

He starts to apologize.

“Don’t.” I cut him off. “It’s… I need to figure myself out.”

He nods. “I’m still here either way. I’ve decided I like sleeping through the night.”

I smile. “I know what you mean.”

~~~                               ~~~                               ~~~

So he starts sleeping in his house again. It goes poorly for both of us, because I spend my nights lost in a haze, drifting between reality and the arena, and I’m confident his nightmares follow him. But we do spend our days together. Reading, drawing, tying complicated trick knots, learning how to bake (Finnick is surprisingly good at this, I am not good at all), napping on the couch. And the whole time, in the back of my mind, I wrestle with memories of Mako.

Winter stretches on, and then spring comes. I am looking forward to lobster diving, even to just being able to swim without threat of hypothermia. And on the first warm day we get, Finnick and I go up to the Traps.

We spend the morning lounging on the beach, waiting for the heat of the afternoon to swim. I doze off for a while, but soon it is warm enough for swimming, so we swim out to the drop off.

I’m floating on my back when Finnick calls from a few yards away, “Right here. This is the very place I was stung by my first jellyfish.”

I return to an upright position and swim over to him. “How do you know this is exactly that spot? There’s no way.”

“There’s a rusty anchor just to the left here, and I- you fell asleep before I got to the part where the jellyfish stung me, didn’t you?”

“I might have. Your stories tend to get long-winded.”

“Well you tend to take a long time to settle in and fall asleep.”

I shrug. “So this is the place?” I clear my throat and put on my best Caesar Flickerman impression. “History was made here. In this humble yet beautiful part of District Four, a boy became a man.”

Finnick rolls his eyes. “I don’t know why I share intimate details of my life with you.”

I laugh. “That’s not intimate. And please don’t take this as an invitation to share the actual intimate details of your life—I don’t want to know. But enough of this reminiscing, let’s go over!”

And then he does one of the few things he has ever done that truly surprises me. His eyes widen and he shakes his head rapidly. “No, no, I’m fine staying here.”

“What?” I feel a smile creeping across my face. “Are you scared?”

“No!”

“Then just come with me!” I grab his arm and pull him toward the drop off.

He pulls back. “I don’t have to prove myself to you!”

“No, you don’t. And you won’t be proving anything, you’ll just be swimming.”

But he doesn’t budge, and we’re equally matched when it comes to swimming, so I have to leave him. I drift over the edge. It is scary, being in twelve or fifteen feet of brightly-lit water one minute, and the next having blue-gray eternity stretching down below you, but I love it. The rush of the unknown, the feeling of being so small and insignificant, the knowledge that my very presence is a challenge to the sea. I love it. And as I grin back at Finnick, I can see he does not.

“Will you just come back?”

I laugh at him, shake my head, roll onto my back and float over the abyss. And I don’t know why I feel so recklessly safe here, but I do.

But Finnick looks lonely, like a lost puppy, so I drift back to the shallow side of the drop off.

After a while we go back to the beach. I draw in the sand while Finnick looks for oysters. They’re hard to find here because the whole point of the Traps is that it’s where the Capitol socialites stay when they visit Four on vacation, so the beach is perpetually picked over. It takes him a few hours to give up, and by then I’ve drawn and erased a shark several times, trying to get the teeth right. Not that sand is the best medium for detail.

The afternoon turns to evening, and we head for home. I lay awake late into the night.

Things seem to make sense now. All the nights we’ve spent sitting up, talking, all the days relaxing on the beach and lobster-diving, all the jokes, the laughing until we cried, the quiet moments when we got lost in our own terrible memories, the afternoons he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder while I read, the nights I curled up next to him and listened to endless stories until I finally fell asleep. I think I might have been in denial for a long time, but now, lost in thought as I frequently am, I wonder about what Mako would think of everything that’s happened since I won. He wouldn’t be proud, that’s for sure. He would have wanted me to live my life to the fullest, and that eventually leads me to the realization that he would expect, maybe even want, me to move on. He would certainly want me to be happy again eventually, and dwelling on all the horrible things I’ve seen and been through and all the things that can’t be isn’t making me happy.

So I decide to live as best I can.

****

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Tag List:

@avoxrising @snow-dragon-rider @anakins-ride-or-die

[bananonbinary]

also worth noting that "abusive" doesn't actually mean "irredeemable" either.

there's a lot of people that have done things in the past that were bad, because they weren't taught any better, or they were in an overall toxic situation where EVERYONE was shitty (like a cult), or they were just at an especially low point and hurt others for it.

you don't have to forgive them. you don't have to ever speak to them again. you can be angry with them until you die if you want.

but society cannot function if we don't allow them to move on. to change their behavior and fuck off somewhere else and build meaningful relationships without bothering you again. we need a path for people to change, or nothing ever will.

[gipsyjr]

Batfam playing "Never have I ever" for family night:

Tim: Never have i ever... been presumed dead.

Everyone: Groans

Batman: Takes a shot

Jason: Takes a shot

Dick: Takes a shot

Damian: Drinks his orange juice

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[egophiliac]

I don’t think we’ve ever seen you draw knight of dawn before 🤔 what are your thoughts about him? Or take?

I've drawn him a couple of times, just really little/in the background. but I should draw him more, I love this guy a lot! I have many, many thoughts about him and the way he parallels Silver...and also I think it is extremely funny that his ghost is stuck in a ring. especially considering where that ring has been for the last 16-ish years.

[knightwhoisni]

seeing a new influx of players coming to warframe because of the addition of Hot People You Can Kiss only for the only way to get to them to be like a bajillion different quests and mission types and systems you gotta figure out is kinda funny tbh. not for the fact they're here because of that (godspeed to those baby tenno!) but because we're basically giving dating sim players guns and sending them out to save the solar system like twenty times over before they can even think about that.

like yeah, you gotta learn about the horrors of war n' exploitation and the struggles that come with discovering one's own identity but also the power of love, understanding, and community first. also you gotta figure out what a mod is and shoot this guy's weakpoint a kajillion times if you want a chance at that last frame part you're missing. sorry.

[kissingwookiees]

SOLAS in DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD

[megaawkwardhuman]

ah just another thursday I see

[dreamyluigi]

something something luigi doesn't remember the final events of spm or dimentio at all after he's defeated (but mario remembers everything)

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[daily-sifloop]

We've seen tiny Loop, but what about tiny Siffrin?

Day 68: Am I big or is it you who's small?

[windybluebelles]

A lot of the justice league canonically have children who they raised more or less since birth,

(there’s a few time travel/rapid aging/losing them for a few years issues, but ignoring those)

,It’s not entirely out there to think that one of them would bring their kid to the watch tower.

I want there to be a fic where someone brings their kid, and have that kid meet Captain Marvel. There’s no doubt on this persons mind that Cap will adore the kid, he’s great at interacting with children, and their right! He’s great with the baby, answering their questions, picking them up, giving them hugs and high fives, all the cool shit!

He’s this 9 foot tall god speaking to a 3 foot tall toddler and answering all their questions with the seriousness of an actual interview, it’s going wonderfully!

When the kid toddles off to go interview another one of the supers, Billy turns with this big grin on his face and asks the parent,

“So how old did you say they were? 2?”

And the parents like,

“No? They turn 5 in a couple months,”

And Captain’s smile just, drops.

His face pales, he looks back at the child who is chatting with one of the more human members and doesn’t even reach their waist. That’s what a four year old looks like, laughing at everything, chubby cheeks, small curls, and teeny tiny body.

That’s how big four year olds are.

That’s how big Billy was.

That’s what Billy looked like after his parents had died and he was sent to live with his uncle.

That was what Billy looked like right before he became homeless

Oh God-

That’s the day when he found that he could technically throw up while powered up.

[habken]

Katsuki's cat lore:

He saw her all roughed up in an alley and took her to the vet, they fixed her up, and saw she wasn't chipped and sent her to a shelter so hopefully if she had owners, they'd pick her up. That didn't happen and so Katsuki, sentimental in his age (23), went back to the shelter to adopt her. Izuku tagged along cause he's nosy.

Izuku's the one that suggested the name Tofu and Katsuki was like "pssh that's stupid" but actually secretly liked it. Izuku is very smug about it

[chamerionwrites]

Possibly The most surprising thing I have discovered on the internet is the number of people who will unironically refer to others as "degenerates" without expecting anyone reading this to immediately assume that they are a straight-up fascist

[oswaldpettyeyeart]

👁️👁️

[buggachat]

honestly just in general it's very exhausting to try to analyze media that is literally meant to be analyzed, only for the replies to be filled with people arguing not against your analysis, but against the premise that the media can be analyzed at all.

i don't even know what to say about it without starting to really betray my frustration, so i'll just settle with— just don't engage with analysis posts? I'm serious. if you're typing a response to a media analysis post, reread what you've written and ask yourself "is this comment/response against the very concept of analyzing the media at all?" and if the answer is yes then delete it all and go sit in the shame corner. throw your curtains away if you want to so bad and stop telling me that I'm not allowed to hum and haw at the fact mine are blue