#i tried to explain how they function without using the big terms so everyone can understand.. hopefully-

[eryanlainfa]

Learnt about Welcome Home lore litteraly just yesterday... SO HERE IS MY OC!

Their name as a whole is Weekly! They have a dissociative identity disorder, making them multiple identities within a single body.

(Disclaimer : my OC is in no way a good/realistic exemple of DID. This is a fictional fan-character for a fictional story about a fictional show.)

In a universe where the show aired other days than just saturdays- Weekly is a reccuring neighbour who seems to be a different person depending on which day of the week we're in. Always taking after one of the other neighbours (except Wally) they seem to always be assisting one of them.

Each identity refers to the others as if they were all members of the same family, insisting they are all different people with different lives, and calling you crazy if you dare insinuate otherwise.

They all have different relationships with the neighbours, and different preferences and way of thinking. Some of them do share memories with each others but not every identities will remember the same things.

[inside-black-moon]

Today is a special day for me.  Before this, I had never “celebrated,” so to speak, this day.

So, if anyone doesn’t know, today is World Autism Day and its main goal is to educate the public.

Speaking specifically about me, I received my official diagnosis last year.  To be honest, this allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief.  My difference from neurotypical people was finally scientifically explained and it helped me accept myself.

Do you know what my life was like?  It was like I was a duck in a pack of wolves.  I sincerely believed that I was also a wolf and refused to face the truth.  But other wolves, for the most part, convinced me that I was a wolf, without focusing on the fact that I had no fangs or fur.  And ducks don’t know how to howl like a wolf.  What was most difficult about this was that the wolves expected and demanded from the duck the behavior and lifestyle of a wolf.  A duck cannot hunt deer, a duck cannot run as fast as a wolf.  And instead of howling at the moon, I'd rather sleep, I swear.

I tried in vain for many years to be like everyone else.  But my body and psyche began to fail.  The critical point was just that year, a few days before visiting the psychiatrist.  And from that moment I had to start rebuilding my whole life.

The first thing I needed to do was accept the fact that I would never become a wolf.  Yes, I can coexist with people in society, but not in the same way as most people.  There will always be some invisible barrier due to the purely biological aspects of the brain.

Despite this barrier, I had very long-term close friendships with people - with one friend we were friends for 12 years, with another - 4. It was like a discussion club, an eternal search for something new, studying, self-education and mutual support in this.

The second important aspect for me was to explain to people close to me that I, in principle, am not able to do certain things due to the way my brain works.  For example, most autistics have very poor vestibular function (this also manifests itself in clumsiness) and in my case I am very unfriendly with stairs and transport.  But nevertheless, throughout my childhood I was forcibly forced to travel in public transport.  What’s funny is that I lost consciousness, I felt sick, I fell, but my parents and I went to the doctors to find out what was wrong with me.  And for many years of such trips, not a single doctor could diagnose me.  Now only 1 person understands me and is tolerant of my characteristics.  I didn’t announce the diagnosis to my relatives because I know them and I know their reaction.  This will again be a situation where the wolves will force the duck to hunt the deer.

Fact - culture, level of awareness and tolerance greatly influence the acceptance or non-acceptance of autism by others.  Sometimes it really makes sense not to tell some people about it because you might get rejected.

In my homeland there are big problems with this - culture and ignorance destroy even the hope that a person with autism can be part of society.  The culture of “disdain for those who are different” and autistic people are equated with the disabled, the lower class, the scum, the biological trash.

They bully us, humiliate us, avoid us, wave their hand - “he/she is sick”, some believe that it is contagious, some believe that autistic people are doomed to live a short life, the majority are convinced that people with autism should (!) be permanently in psychiatric hospitals  basis away from normal people.

This whole outcast attitude is depressing.  Yes, there is a certain percentage of autistic people who cannot withstand such pressure and die - either on their own or due to diseases caused by overload of the nervous system.  But there are also those who find the strength to swim against the tide and become outstanding people - media, famous, geniuses in their field.

Third - acceptance and study of yourself.  At some point you come to the realization that you are not like everyone else, you do not fit into the general picture of society, the world, the universe.  It’s as if you live on planet Earth, but at the same time you feel like you live on some other planet.  Even the atmosphere is different, even the laws of physics.  Everything is different, everything is not the same.  Understanding this in time, before you run out of strength in stupid attempts to be like everyone else, is a great success.  Time is our main enemy.  I really spent most of my life living incorrectly; doctors of different specialties and ranks were looking for the reason for my “difference”.  But all this was to no avail, because they were looking for the wrong thing.  For most of my life I tried to play by rules that I didn’t understand and tried to somehow rationally explain to myself.  How to be friends, how to communicate, how to live.  But one fine day I heard a very good phrase - you think rationally, and they think emotionally.  At that moment I was in a stupor - how is this “emotionally”?

This is one of the main and very controversial problems for autistic people - emotions.  I think many people imagine a stereotypical autistic person who does not speak, sways from side to side and looks at one point.  Yes, the spectrum of autism is very wide and such people also exist (more on this later), but believe me, even such autistic people have emotions, feelings and are even capable of love.  But not like neurotypical people.

And now I will tell you about the magic of autistic emotions.  Ooh, guys, believe me, you won’t find this in books about autism.

It’s as if our nervous system is not under the skin, but on the skin.  We love not with our hearts, but with our minds.  We love not through emotions, but through awareness.  The best gift for an autistic person is something that will give him a pleasant tactile or visual sensation.  Way back when I was in school, when I had a scientifically minded friend, we discussed the theory of the development of the mind.  At that time, I was a volunteer and was developing the first “scripts” for the AI, according to which it would further train itself.  My friend was working in parallel on another project, at a higher stage - he created learning algorithms for AI.

And we had an argument.  My theory was about associative thinking.  For example, if as a child you liked yellow color and free-flowing consistency, then there is a high probability that as you grow older you will like yellow rice, sand, and yellow beads.  And this affects your overall lifestyle, hobbies and even food preferences.  And the greater the variability of “favorite things,” the greater the variability of the “end point.”  Following this concept, I trained AI.

Now I can say with more confidence that this theory fits perfectly into the mind of an autistic person.  Many parents of autistic children complain of an unpredictable reaction to something - it seems like an ordinary sunny day, but the child screams endlessly and cannot explain what is wrong.  And it turns out that a certain brightness of light irritates him.  Therefore, this child does not need to be taken to the cinema, where there will be the same bright light.  Often, even speaking autistic people cannot understand what causes sensory overload just because the world moves at a breakneck pace.  We just don’t have time to understand what suddenly unsettled us.

I don't like bright light, by the way.  And that’s why I became a big fan of various lamps, garlands, and fixtures.

The system of associative thinking is precisely the key to the emotions of an autistic person.  For example, if your gift fits into the associative system of pleasant things for an autistic person, then it will be the best gift in his life.  In turn, don’t be surprised at how accurately he gets the gift for you right.  He will not only guess what exactly you want, but will also know what color and texture are ideal for your preferences.  Because an autistic person cannot do otherwise - he does not know how to do otherwise.

Also in love relationships, family relationships.  Any.  If an autistic person finds common ground with someone, if that person intersects with this internal network of “nice things,” then these will be the most sincere, open, honest and considerate partners.  Autistic people are not capable of behind-the-scenes games and intrigues - this is too difficult for an already overloaded brain.  We see no point in lying, deceiving, saying one thing and doing another.  But we expect the same attitude in return.  And we are sincerely perplexed that it could be otherwise - that a partner or friend could lie (why?), be a hypocrite (why?), use it for selfish purposes (why?).  And this greatly affects our psyche.  We are naive and gullible.  We are open and absolutely do not understand hints/sarcasm/innuendos/intrigues/conspiracies.

In a work group, autistic people work the most - they don’t waste time on intrigue, talking about the weather or the past weekend.  But at the same time, they may be considered outcasts (because they avoid general conversations) or upstarts (you work harder than everyone else = please your bosses = you put yourself above everyone else = an arrogant egoist).  Therefore, the ideal job for an autistic person is not in a large team, or completely without contact with people.

But unfortunately, the autism spectrum can be quite...severe, let's put it that way.  I'm talking about those boys and girls who don't even live to be 20 years old.  I'm talking about those young people who barely made it to 30 and, due to the lack of a guardian, ended up in psychiatric hospitals and their lives were reduced to 4 walls, belts on their arms and legs, and tranquilizers.  And I'm talking about those who have lived to an old age, are left alone and create very serious and dangerous problems for those around them.

But society in my homeland equates all autists with one red line - these are sick people, these are dangerous people.  Moreover, due to a backward healthcare system, autism diagnosed at an early age is reclassified as schizophrenia upon reaching adulthood.  And autism is being treated as schizophrenia.  This is a terrible mistake.

Throughout my life I have met several autistic people of varying degrees:

- One guy, he studied with me in the same class at school.  We all thought he was normal, but also a little strange.  He spoke exclusively in lines from his favorite films and at the same time perfectly imitated the voices of the actors who spoke these phrases in the original.  This is how he communicated with other guys.  Teachers rarely bothered him.  What’s interesting is that he voluntarily chose a literature exam (one of the most difficult) as his last exam at school.  He was the only one from the entire school who chose literature.  He really had some crazy talent for writing and analyzing literature, even though he literally never spoke his thoughts in his own voice.  On paper, everything was completely different.

- Another guy who went to school, but was separated from all classes.  Sometimes our class crossed paths with him in the same office.  He always sat somewhere in the back and everyone tried not to be distracted by him.  But it was difficult - he could laugh, shout numbers, throw things.  God bless the teachers who tried to teach him at least some minimal knowledge.  He was over 20 years old at that time.  After school his mother always picked him up and they walked leisurely around the city.  I often met them together.

- The worst case... I confess - despite the fact that for personal reasons I have not communicated with this person for more than a year, I still worry about the life of his child with the most severe form of autism.  I understand that this is not my child, not my responsibility, but... it’s difficult to explain.

There is a type of autism in which the instinct of self-preservation is completely absent and there is no speech.  There are very few such children all over the world.  They are unable to take care of themselves, they are hyperactive.  They may not sleep for several days.  But at the same time, parents/guardians should not sleep either, because such children require constant supervision due to the high risk to the child’s health.  These children are monstrously strong physically.  They can literally start beating themselves until they bleed and suffer a concussion due to sensory overload or any other discomfort.  This could be anything - from a chafing tag on the inside of clothing to a vase standing “wrong” in the hallway.  But they cannot say this because they are not able to speak.  They see hallucinations, which can also frighten them.  In some cases, with age (puberty), they develop epilepsy and most often this is the reason for the end of their lives.  My mother talked about a similar family, where there was only a mother and daughter.  Daughter with this form of autism.  And the mother looks like a zombie - after all, she needs to somehow support her family and look after her daughter.  It's terribly difficult.  I've read stories of similar families.  Most often, parents are afraid to inform others about this situation.  This is both shame and fear... fear that people will turn away, that there will be very tactless questions and unsolicited advice.  Believe me, in such a situation, to receive advice “can you get rid of this child?”  It just blows your mind.  Parents of such autistic people are in unbearable and hopeless conditions.  The only thing that can save is outside help.  Even a simple trip to the store to buy food for such a family a few days in advance will save them and make their life much easier.

But I really ask, if you know or suspect that there is a similar family in your environment - do not give advice, tactless questions, do not say “can I help with anything?”, but say “I can help. I can buy you food,  fix something, do something, call and arrange for repairs, pay for something."  This way you can save someone's family.

In conclusion, I would like to say that despite the diagnosis and the accompanying unusual features, all this did not prevent me from building a career, starting a family and communicating with people.  Even write a book on learning to draw and an autobiographical novel hidden in a futuristic thriller-melodrama.  All this did not prevent me from achieving certain heights in various types of activities - from drawing and journalism to photography and modding.  This will sound strange, but I can enthusiastically work in the 010 editor (which I learned to use on my own) and with no less enthusiasm search for quartz stones on the beach to replenish my collection.

Warframe became a home environment for my high-functioning autism from the first minutes of the game. The alternation of completely different types of activities in the game helps to organize the endless stream of thoughts in my head, and team play allows me to be part of society and feel the absence of an invisible barrier between me and neurotypical people. This is a place where they won’t say “go away, you’re ruining everything” or “you’re not like everyone else, that means you’re worse.” My gift for incredibly fast reaction and analysis of the current situation allows me to be both in the support team and as an attacker. This is the type of player who saves everyone, including all companions, while killing a crowd of enemies and asks with burning enthusiasm - one more round? Yes? Yes? Yes?

Autism is a huge iceberg, which is 80% hidden underwater from the eyes of others.  And if you have a bathyscaphe “desire for knowledge,” then a completely new world may open up before you.

I'm Irene Wolf, thank you for your attention.

[young-dumb-and-vaccinated]

The Cult Girl (Hannibal x Female!Reader) pt. 13

Hello friends we have come to the end of Cult Girl. Thank you all for hyping me up throughout this story and giving me the confidence to actually post my work. Y/n and Hannibal throw a dinner party.

The sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating the entire kitchen in that homey mid-morning glow. You were enjoying your coffee and scrolling through an article on your phone.

"Senator Hatch reportedly coughed up his late wife's toe on the floor of the precinct." You read out loud. "Huh. Wonder how that could have happened."

You side-eyed Hannibal, who was contentedly sharpening his knives. Placing a rather large meat cleaver to the side, he met your gaze. "I have my ways."

You finished off your coffee and brought the mug to the sink. "There was no way Theresa was going to survive that night, was there?"

"Clever girl." Hannibal praised.

"You were going to kill her if I didn't, were you?" You felt a smile coming on. "Did everything turn out as expected?"

"Darling, this all went much better than I could have ever hoped for." He smirked. "See, I had the whole evening mapped out. I was hoping you'd be the one to deliver justice and kill her, but I had to prepare for the possibility that you wouldn't."

You folded your arms and leaned against the island. "Is that why I was so sick that day?"

You could have sworn you saw some hesitation in Hannibal's face. Maybe even a touch of regret. "Yes. You needed an alibi. It was as easy as removing a single birth control pill from your packet. You'd see it was missing and think you'd already taken your medicine-"

"So I'd neglect to take my focus meds." You cut in. "Yeah, I knew something was off."

"By the end of the day, you'd be experiencing full withdrawal symptoms." Hannibal nodded. "I don't take any pleasure in upsetting the delicate balance of your brain chemistry, and for that I am sorry. I did what I had to."

"Yeah, don't ever do that again." You ordered, no disarming smile in sight. "I need those meds to function."

"I promise you, darling," Hannibal said, sincerely. "I would never keep you from being anything but your very best. I was just looking after you."

"I suppose now that all this is out in the open, you won't need to pull any shit like that again." You muttered. "But I'm still going to keep my pills at my apartment."

"That reminds me." He said. "Would you like to invite your roommates for dinner tonight? I've prepared a wonderful Spanish-inspired menu that's perfect for entertaining."

"I'd love for you to meet my friends, but, they all keep such weird hours I doubt they'll all be free tonight." You shrugged. "I'll give them a call though."

"Wonderful." He smiled. "You make arrangements while I prepare the kitchen."

You stepped into the office and called up Pilar. She answered within the minute.

"[F/N]!" She near shouted. "Holy fuck, how are you doing?"

"I'm actually doing..." you looked back into the kitchen, watching your beloved Hannibal in his element. "Really well."

"I heard about your cousin." Pilar cut in. "One down, two to go."

You snorted. "No fucking shit."

"Sorry, was that okay for me to say?" She apologized. "I know you said Theresa was a bitch, but it's your trauma and I-"

"No, you're fine." You laughed. "She was a bitch. Hey, do you have any plans tonight?"

"Uh, no. I don't think so." She answered. "Why?"

"Hannibal wants to invite you all for dinner tonight." You said with an audible smile. "Y'know, to celebrate the bitch's death."

"Yo! Steph!" Pilar shouted across the room. "Wake Randy up! We're having dinner at [F/N]'s rich boyfriend's house!"

You could make out Stephanie's voice in the background. "It's about damn time. We've been waiting for her to redistribute the wealth."

"She means thank you for the invitation." Pilar corrected.

"It's not like I had to twist his arm or anything. It was his idea." You chuckled. "He loves having guests. And excuses to dress up."

"Oh so we're getting fancy, huh?" Pilar's voice turned up in excitement.

"Hey [F/N]!" Randy snatched the phone from Pilar. "Text me the menu for tonight. My girlfriend'll steal a nice bottle of wine to pair. She's a pro, she works over at Cavatappi's wine and spirits."

"Much obliged, Randy." You said. "I'll see you guys at seven."

You returned to the kitchen with a smile. "They're coming."

"Well, we don’t have a moment to lose, then." Hannibal placed something wrapped in butcher paper on the counter. "Come now. Let me show you how to properly prepare a heart.

You and Hannibal spent the rest of the morning and the whole afternoon preparing a bountiful meal. You reveled in the irony of finally finding a space for Theresa in your life. That space just so happened to be on the stove.

Seven came far too quickly, but your friends were always a welcome sight. You greeted them at the door with hugs, Hannibal watching with stoic adoration.

"Guys, this is Hannibal Lecter, my partner." You introduced. "Hannibal, this is Pilar, Stephanie and Miranda."

"It is a pleasure to meet you, ladies." Hannibal greeted. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

"Here you go, Dr. Lecter." Randy handed him a bottle of wine. "Thank you for inviting us."

Hannibal examined the bottle. "Yes, this will pair quite nicely with our meal. Thank you very much. [F/N], could you show our guests to the dining room?"

You nodded and accepted the bottle, given the extra responsibility of pouring. You led your friends to the dining room and wasted no time distributing the alcohol.

"A toast." Stephanie rose her glass. "Too many of history's worst have had the privilege of dying on their own terms. Today, we celebrate the death of one who didn't: Theresa [L/N]."

"She will join her sisters Nancy Reagan and Madame Nhu in hell tonight." You concurred, tapping your glasses together with a series of satisfying clinks.

"Okay, you need to spill." Randy scooted her chair up and leaned towards you. "How the hell did you get away with it?"

"Well, it helped a lot that her husband was already a felon." You teased. "If I didn't kill her, he was going to eventually."

Pilar made a face. "I can't believe it took actual murder to get that latter-day lump thrown in prison."

"Well, the LDS church is a very influential organization with a stronghold on all of Utah." You explained. "There's a long history of legitimizing sex abuse there."

"We know, cult girl." Stephanie laughed. "You remind us every time your pedophile cousin-in-law comes up. Relax and take your victories where you can get them.” 

“Ladies,” Hannibal entered. You rushed to his side to help him with the dinner plates. “Have we ever tried organ meat before?” 

Everyone’s eyes found Pilar. 

“Braised liver is delicious and you guys are just cowards.” Pilar protested. “I will die on this hill.” 

Hannibal smiled and presented your friends with their plates. “You are a woman of good tastes, Pilar. Our first course is Riñones al Jerez.” 

“Kidneys.” Randy translated. “Who’s kidneys are we eating today, Dr. Lecter?” 

He tilted his head. “Theresa’s, of course.” 

“I don’t care whose organs you harvested.” Stephanie said, her eyes rolling back into her head. “This is delicious.” 

You and Hannibal shared a glance and a smile. 

You and your roommates devoured the Riñones al Jerez, then dug into the next serving of heart stewed with chickpeas and olives. You finished off the evening with natillas de leche and a bottle of Sauternes Hannibal just happened to have lying around. 

“This is the first time since like, Keith Raniere got sentenced that I’ve seen [F/N] happy-drunk.” Stephanie observed.

“Or even just... happy." Pilar said, looking at Hannibal. "I'll have some of whatever she's having, please."

"My pleasure." Hannibal poured her another glass of wine.

Your phone began to buzz on the table, capturing the attention of your guests. You didn't even need to look at the caller ID to know who it was. Nobody else in the world had such horrid timing.

"Shit, you've got to answer it here!" Stephanie pleaded. "So we can all give her a piece of our mind!"

You looked over to Hannibal, who you knew was just as curious.

You dragged the answer icon across the screen and put it on speaker. You gestured for your friends to be quiet. "Yeah?"

"Well look who finally decided to pick up." Grandma said. "Thank you for gracing me with your attention. I know you have so much going on right now, you're just too busy to pick up the phone and talk to your grieving grandmother."

"For your information..." you stumbled over your words. "I was interrogated by the police yesterday. I think that counts as having something going on."

"Are you drunk?" Her voice was laced with a disproportionate level of disgust.

"I'm grieving too, Beatrice." You counter. "What, suddenly you're the only one who can drink the pain away? That's not very democratic of you."

"In your state, you shouldn't even be thinking of alcohol!" Grandma scolded. "You of all people should know the effects alcohol has on an unborn baby."

You smacked yourself on the head. Of course Theresa would plant a seed to fuck you over one last time. "Did Theresa actually tell you I was pregnant?"

"It was her last message to me, actually. Anyway, you're coming home." Grandma said, without so much as waiting for a response. "I won't have my great grandchild living in that dangerous city that your cousin was killed in."

You exchanged looks with your friends, who were going through the same combination of emotions as you were. Grandma's words just seemed to fade out as you shared an entire nonverbal conversation with the people around you.

"And you're leaving that terrible, terrible man."

Hannibal raised an eyebrow and looked at you, waiting to see how you'd respond. You knew what you had to do. It was finally time. You did something you should have done a long time ago.

"No." You said, your nerves loosened by the wine.

"What?"

"No. And I mean it." A big smile crossed your lips. "Theresa lied to you. I'm not pregnant. And you have to live with the fact that your granddaughter's last words to you were a blatant lie."

Hannibal looked at you with pride and your friends began to silently gas you up with encouraging gestures. "

"...And that you're the only one to blame for her deception." You continued. "You raised her in your own image."

"This is why I refuse to let you raise my great grandchild with that man!" She wailed. "He's twisted your mind against me! He's made you cruel!"

"Hannibal made me see clearly that you made me cruel." You said with absolute certainty. "You'll never see me again."

"Don't be like your mother, [F/N]." Grandma snarled. "Don't cut people out for trying to help."

"You'll never see me again." You repeated and decided to leave it at that. You ended the call and blocked the number, joined by an eruption of excitement from your friends.

It was finally over. Your life could truly begin.

[whitehotharlots]

The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc. 

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism. 

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable. 

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself. 

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing. 

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want  students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse. 

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back. 

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure. 

[takuyakistall]

I recently re-read his Dorm SSR personal story here! A few questions and thoughts lingered inside my head as I read it and it collectively got worse when @poisonepel​ started questioning things too. Which ultimately led to me writing this down while running on half a brain cell and a spoonful of rice for lunch. This isn’t necessarily an analysis but more of just me questioning a lot of stuff. I already pointed out things that are already obvious so it might get repetitive. Placed under the cut since it’s a bit lengthy! I tried my best to be coherent in the very least.

Rook’s Nickname for Jade - Rook calls Jade “Monsieur Mastermind” and perhaps you’re already telling me right now that I shouldn’t look deeper into this since it doesn’t look like it matters anyway but let me tell you right now that I tend to overanalyze things when it comes to Jade. I find it a bit odd how Rook calls Jade the mastermind, presuming that we’re talking about the Octavinelle trio, when it’s often Azul that’s shown to be as such. Of course, it’s been revealed that Rook analyzes or stalks nearly everything that happens to catch his interest (Jade’s Gym Personal). So it’s safe to presume that his judgement is, if not entirely correct, accurate. “Your staple food, your habits, your walking speed, when you sleep, your heart rate, how many times you blink… those and many others I have recorded perfectly.” Just by reading this line alone I became pretty sure that he observed something deeper than that--which is his personality.

       The question is, why is Jade the mastermind instead of Azul? Why is Azul’s nickname “Roi du Fort” instead of being the mastermind? Well, it might be common knowledge but Jade, in a way, controls Azul despite what it looks like to the public which is Azul controlling Jade since he, as the higher authority, has power over him. I read a popular post explaining why Jade probably undertakes the role of a servant rather than taking the position for himself knowing that he has the full capabilities to do so. This will be explained further later in a different note.

What I’m trying to imply is that behind the scenes, Azul isn’t really the mastermind behind everything despite what it seems. It’s Jade who’s really in control of things, by picking up the act of a servant or butler. 

“If the entire hierarchy collapses just due to the absence of a single person, then that proves that they aren’t all as great as they seem.” - I just had the need to point this particular line out since it just seemed so… Jade. Everything about this line just screams out the same vibes he radiates, cold and severe. I know he’s faking the whole thing about having a falling out with Azul and wanting to join Pomefiore but I think it is true that without him, Octavinelle won’t nearly be as great from when he was still there.

First of all, He’s Octavinelle’s vice-dorm leader. Surely, being in such a high position, he carries a lot of duties that only he can do as the acting vice leader. There’s also the fact that he does it superbly than other people which is why Octavinelle is the way it is right now, it would be hard to replace him. They would have to look for someone who’s on par with Jade, in the very least.

Secondly, he’s somewhat an emotional pillar to Azul. Judging from their childhood and current relationship as of now, I like to think that a big reason why Azul is the way he is right now, is because of Jade and Floyd acting as his emotional support or whatever even though they insist that their relationship is purely just for business and will drop it if it’s no longer beneficiary to them. The main reason why I think that way is because of the Octavinelle CM which has a scene of Azul holding a bubble in between his hands. Inside the bubble were the twins in their eel forms. The next thing that happened--the bubble popped and disappeared, along with the tweels inside it. We could see the horror on Azul’s face when it happened in that scene and slowly led to the overblot scene which says a lot about how Azul views the twins. Have a more detailed explanation regarding their relationship here! Summary, Azul will lose his shit if Jade were to disappear. Now, where is Octavinelle in all of this? Probably a mess in the corner right there with their dorm leader not in his right state of mind. In short, Octavinelle will probably crumble under the absence of Jade. The reason why Octavinelle is still functioning under Azul’s command during this whole stunt Jade is making is precisely because Azul knew that it was all an act.

"Jade’s excellence in everything he does is renowned even among the Dorm Leaders. He might be a super secretary or something to be able to answer Azul's difficult requests." - Vil's words to Rook during their little talk about letting Jade into Pomefiore. This stuck out to me because back then I didn't really give this much thought but now that I'm re-reading this, it makes me wonder how good is Jade at his job as a Vice Dorm Leader? These words coming from Vil hold a certain weight I can't describe, for him to say that his excellence is renowned even among the Dorm Leaders and to be described as a Super Secretary.

For Jade to have earned this kind of reputation despite being in the land for only two years so far is quite a feat! I would've expected less from someone else but this is Jade we're talking about so, ignoring his terrible weakness in flying, I can assume that Jade worked hard for him to have reached this kind of performance level in such a short time. To be recognized by almost all of the Dorm Leaders isn't an easy feat.

Jade as an attendant - During his first day as Vil's attendant, Vil mentioned how off-putting he is from the fact that Jade was almost too good for someone on their first day. "You managed to get on such friendly terms with the stuffy and straight-laced people of the industry in such little time; and you were also perfect when it came to helping out with the shooting. You've worked much harder than I thought you would." His words. I think this is due to the nature of Jade's silver tongue, which is being able to speak in a way that makes other people do or believe what you want them to do or believe. It seems very fitting for a character like Jade.

Because of the recent personals that got released for Jade, namely the Birthday SSR, they talked about family there and it got me thinking quite a bit as to how Jade can speak so eloquently especially now that I've read that he managed to get on the good side of people who are probably way older than he is and straight-laced, no less. He vaguely mentioned their family background when he was telling a story from his childhood and said how different people would come over to their party and offer them presents. I'm assuming that these people are possibly older than he is, judging from the fact that one of them attempted to give the twins liquor despite them being at a young age, and I thought that maybe Jade grew up used to being surrounded by adults to the point where he picks up a lot of speech patterns and habits. Which inevitably leads to what he is right now. Nothing is confirmed yet, this is a mere thought I had.

Jade's past with Azul - It's briefly mentioned here in the story. Jade mentioned how there weren't as many mer-folk as there are humans so they were all basically put in the same class together during elementary school. Azul didn't catch his interest back then, it seems. He mentioned not being able to remember the very reason why the three of them—Jade, Floyd, and Azul—ended up together currently in Night Raven College.

I am genuinely curious as to what actually made the twins interested in someone like Azul. Correct me if I'm wrong but they did mention it in Chapter 3, right? Was it the growing interest when they finally took notice of Azul using his unique magic on basically everyone who fell into his trap? Someone tell me the details if it was ever mentioned, my memory is failing me.

“Tenebres” - The shoe brand Vil wanted to get his hands on but unfortunately did not obtain, particularly, the Mirror Shoe. "Tenebres" apparently only sells their products to people who they deem worthy for designs, even the designer themselves has yet to make a public appearance as they are shrouded in mystery. Vil didn't have enough time to acquire it but, surprise! Jade Leech has somehow managed to get his perfect hands on the pair of red shoes Vil wanted so much. Frankly enough, Vil was impressed he managed to obtain something he could not—alone, no less.

This is just me pondering but this particular line made me wonder, "Heh, they did some at the cost of a bit of trouble. No matter, how about you try these on instead of dwelling on the matter?", to what lengths did he actually have to go through to obtain just a pair of shoes? Or rather, what connections does he have to be able to obtain this so easily and brush it off with a mere, "cost of a bit of trouble" when clearly Vil already expressed the difficulty in obtaining these?

Another note I have to make but not completely sure if it's relevant is his family. As I've said before, they mentioned that they deal with a lot of people due to the nature of their business and that made me wonder if the designer/owner of this certain shoe brand is one of them? Perhaps Jade was able to easily contact them because of connections his family has although Floyd's wish in the event Stars & Wishes contradicts this possibility.

In Floyd's wish, he mentioned wanting a pair of shoes and Idia immediately asked him why he couldn't just buy them. Floyd answered with a simple, "I can't usually get them." Because of the price. Which, again, contradicts my theory about the Leech family being connected to the shoe brand. Although! Vil did mention how the shoe brand only sells it to people they deem worthy. Perhaps, Floyd isn't…? No—it still wouldn't explain how easily Jade got the shoes and had the brand get Vil a job there as an ambassador. Surely, that isn't due to just any normal connections anymore. Definitely shady, I want to know more.

Jade is in control - As I've said earlier, Jade is somewhat in control despite playing the role of a servant. Prime example is when Vil told him his throat was parched, Jade immediately acted upon it fully knowing what his original intentions were. He gave Vil a drink that the Mostro Lounge was apparently serving without having Vil question it further and even went as far as to let Jade take a picture and post it—even he decided the caption for the post! With a simple flow of events just like that, Jade has managed to manipulate Vil without him knowing. He did it all while taking in the role of a servant and that in itself says a lot about how he does things

I think it's worth it to take note of the fact that Jade does not like bringing attention to himself and merely brushes it off as mere shyness of some sorts when really, all he wants to do is lay low and draw as little attention to himself. It makes his job easier that way—perhaps that's the reason why he lets Azul take the spotlight all the damn time.

Another thing to take note of is something I saw from a post in Tumblr which basically sums up the whole reason why Jade is always adopting the butler persona wherever he goes. It's because he likes to be in control that way—you'd let down your guard around him and let him serve you. You want a drink? He'll serve you a drink but-! He is in control over what you will get. That's exactly what happened in this exact scene, Vil waltzed right into the center of Jade's palms.

Vil never noticed - I'm not saying Vil is dumb, because he is most definitely not. Although through the very end, I don't know if it's just because Vil got carried away with the feeling of achievement taking over him due to recent events but he did just brush away the reason why Jade was in Pomefiore in the first place and let him go away peacefully, "So long as he doesn't bare his fangs at us." In other words, Jade managed to outsmart Vil and possibly, Rook.

This is probably one of the reasons why I am confident enough to say that Jade truly is one of the most cunning bitches in the entire game because this whole ordeal just pretty much proved it.

Aftermath - There we go! We got an explanation about how Jade managed to manipulate and use Vil for his own gains err, in this context, probably Azul's. When Jade took a picture of Vil with the drink and posted it, he did it with the intention of taking advantage of Vil's popularity and viewer reach. Jade expressed his thankfulness when he mentioned how Vil saw him as "useful" perhaps his reputation prior helped him reach his goal? 

Azul praised Jade with something along the lines of "As expected of you, Jade. You're the best Night Raven's College has to offer when it comes to sneaking into another's pockets after all." Which really just backs up some of the statements I made earlier about how Jade manipulates people by letting people let their guard down around him while thinking they're the ones who have power over Jade when clearly it's not as simple as it seems. Azul mentioning that only Jade could pull off something like this just puts me off for some reason but I'll leave it be for the time being.

After that, Jade and Azul had a conversation that started with Azul asking him if he had any difficulties during his stay in Pomefiore and if he had any troubles keeping up with Vil. Jade, jokingly(?), responded that it was nothing compared to Azul's demands and orders and his time at Pomefiore was actually a vacation of some sorts for him. Which really makes me wonder what jobs does Azul usually give him if this one was somewhat of a break for Jade? A task that seemed impossible to Floyd, Jade said it was a vacation. It's a bit frightening but I guess that's his charm? Hard-working is one way to put it. 

That's the end of my Dorm SSR mini-analysis, I guess! Thank you for sticking with me till the end even though a lot of these might be repetitive. I'll probably add more depending on future brainrot but for now, this is fine. Feel free to tell me what you think about this!

[quidfree]

prompt: tdbk in a post-apocalyptic setting (HEHEH)

self-servicing AND a helping hand to a friend in need, we love a good strat

this got incredibly out of hand but i hope you enjoy!!

--

it’s been two months and five days since he last saw someone that katsuki lays eyes on him. two months and five days, and yes, he is fucking keeping score, why wouldn’t he be?

two months and five days is long. two months and five days is long enough that he’s taken up the habit of muttering to himself to fill the air, because dead silence makes him paranoid, always expecting sudden interruption, and he chooses to ignore the fact that muttering to himself is a quirk he might have picked up elsewhere. jesus. if deku, scrawny and asthmatic and perennially, psychotically self-sacrificing, is somehow still alive, he thinks he might be glad to see him again, just out of sheer disbelief.

there’s other people he’d be glad to see. perfect timing, for the zombie apocalypse to erupt right when he’d been on a summer internship in tokyo. to think the old crone had been bitching about it before he’d left- don’t get mugged on the underground, all that shit. like he was some hare-brained tourist. like people didn’t expect him to mug them. whatever. he thinks his parents are safer, out in a smaller city, than anyone has been in tokyo, tells himself it’s not blind hope that makes him explain the radio silence away. it’s statistics, and the geography of the outbreak, and the memory of his mother beating a would-be pickpocket over the head with her shoe until he passed out.

six months ago he’d first walked into his cramped rental flat in tokyo, barely the space to unroll his mat. six days later the pandemic had begun. slowly, first, confusingly, two weeks of shadowing jeanist to court and back while the news got increasingly weirder, and then by the third things took a turn for the fucked, and his parents were calling frantically telling him to come home stat, but by then it was too late. tokyo’s the new york of japan- in sci-fi movies it’s always struck first. the city was on lockdown before he could so much as book a flight out.

that was five months ago. by four and a half his phone carrier service had gone dead.

he doesn’t like to linger on anything, but he especially doesn’t like to linger on what happened between the start and the middle of it, the slow descent from incomprehending disbelief into hell on earth. he doesn’t throw the term around- not one for flowery prose. for the first while there’d been something almost rewarding to it, the whole survival strategy, him and the interns and lawyers at jeanist’s office taking scope of their resources and planning their ways out. now it’s been two months and five days since he’s run into anyone alive, he fails to see the bright side.

the media called them the infected, or the walkers, or some other dumb shit, but everyone knows they’re zombies. it’s some kind of chemical weapon- americans, if you ask him- that’s mutated them, but they’re zombies by anyone’s definition. lumbering, decaying, dead, very keen on extending the invitation. the first time he’d seen one up close- whatever. he’d killed it. he’s killed so many by now he’s lost count, and that’s not an exaggeration. these days he’s not so big on those.

the office had been overrun, in the end. some of the other interns, panicking. bitten. dead. jeanist had held them off while katsuki dragged hysterical staffers out of the window, and the last he’s seen of the man he was catching his unflappable gaze as the doors burst open and jeanist slammed the window shut.

they’d scattered. maybe he would have stayed on, tried the group thing out of a sense of responsibility alone, but there were too many subgroups for him to rotate around. he’d split off, eventually, cut his losses. sometimes he catches someone he recognises walking the streets, wonders when and how and what. he’s still never seen jeanist. he thinks probably he offed himself.

if it ever comes to it that’s what he’s doing. he has a gun ready for it. one bullet. in the apartment he’d stayed in for a while, some forensic doctor’s place, he’d studied the angle that worked best. straight through the temples, angled down.

then there had been that thing with the league. he doesn’t want to think about that, but he does, constantly, because that’s how he knows. two months and five days. the last person he spoke to was that fucking girl.

like zombies weren’t enough- criminals who fancy themselves cultists roam the streets in packs. it’s like every shitty blockbuster movie he’s never bothered to see packed into one.

two months. five days. there’s no way of communicating with the outside world. after he’d shaken off the league he’d had jack shit on him- lost his bag in the initial fight, and his apartment was a lost cause. in the end he’d made his way back to the firm, but that had been a literal dead end too. he’d managed to retrieve, of all things, his phone, skirting the streets around the firm, probably dropped in their original escape. it’s functionally useless but he’s managed to charge it once or twice, stare at old photos and texts that fail to send. he has nothing else of his own except the clothes he’d worn that last day with jeanist.

he’s remade his belongings, obviously. he’s competent, as it turns out, in apocalypses. somehow it doesn’t surprise him. he works out a routine. when he’d first found a hole to burrow himself in post-league he’d spent days just picking up patterns- when, who, from where, how. once he was entirely sure he’d gotten it down to a science he’d risked it back out, mapping the area out incrementally, one rotation at a time. two months and five days in he has it down to an art instead.

he moved regularly for the first month post-league, avoiding anywhere that seemed inhabited by zombies and people alike. can’t trust anyone, and besides it’s way too much of a liability having other people around to get themselves bitten. he can look after himself, but he’s not signing up for charity work. by the second month he’d found his current address, the top floor of a mid-rise apartment complex in meguro city. apartment complexes are risky, but this one’s door locks are still functional, and once he’d cleared out the ground floor and made the rounds to check for stragglers he’d wagered it about as secure as it could get. the stairs are a bitch, but the zombies don’t like them either, preferring to straggle in lobbies, and for another thing the height is convenient. the roof’s close by for a way out, and it gives him a good view of the surroundings.

the apartment itself is nothing special. residential. he picked the cleanest one, which also meant the one half-moved out in a hurry. he pretends like he thinks the owners got out but he spotted a suitcase with their name abandoned in the elevator. the guy was a teacher at the university. the woman was in sales. it’s decent for a tokyo flat, two bedrooms, a bathroom, good kitchen, nice living area. the fridge had been full of expired goods, but the shelves had some cans in them- soup, rice, beans. pots and pans. he’s been working through the floors of the place one room at a time taking inventory, lugging the useful shit back up. nothing beyond the strictly practical- he takes food, medecine, clothes, someone’s watch once, binoculars. he’s not making a home for himself, just stocking up. he sleeps with his bag on his back, the essentials locked and loaded. the gun was an apartment find too.

his biggest problem is transport. he recognised this early on, because so could anyone with half a brain. tokyo’s teeming with public transports overrun by the undead, cars abandoned on the streets, but the actual streets are packed day in and day out. whatever movie said zombies hate the sun was full of shit, because as far as he can tell the only time they actually react to the weather is when it rains. all night and day they’re shuffling in tireless motions around the city, gaining numbers. there’s a rhythm to it, sure- they’re more sluggish at night- but it’s an incessant flow. he can’t drive a car, has found no convenient manual stored nearby, and google went and croaked on him when the electricity did, so there’s no way he can just take advantage of a lull and jump in. by the time he’s figured out how to get any given vehicle to start he’ll be surrounded. even if he could find a way in, there’s no way out- driving through streets packed with zombies is a doomed exercise, especially given that half of the cars in the city are busted or low on fuel.

his current plan involves boats. he’s not sure if zombies can swim yet, but they don’t like the rain so he’s betting no, and even if they do they’d fare no better than a human at climbing a boat from the waters below it. if he can make it to tokyo bay somehow- at least off the coast there’ll be room to manoeuvre. but he needs to figure out the basics of ship-operating first, and also to relocate his supplies nearer to the bay somehow. if he ends up on the open seas he’ll need the food to last him the journey.

so he’s been doing this. rounds, collecting shit. taking inventory. scoping the streets out. he spends the nights planning, the early mornings reading. there’s no power in the building. it’s freezing. six months since his internship, winter rolling in. if he gets to tokyo bay the waters will be frigid, but the sea doesn’t freeze over.

his biggest concern at the moment is hypothermia, if he’s being honest. he’s collected every fucking duvet in the building, it feels like, but there’s only so much he can bury himself under. he’d be warmer if he didn’t insist on bathing in melted snow, but he went so long without washing in autumn that he fucking refuses to waste the opportunity. he smells like some ridiculous apple berry blast bullshit because he’s cycling through shampoos, but sometimes he thinks he’s only sane when he’s brushing his teeth in the mornings so he’s not about to let up on the hygiene.

three and a half months ago he was meant to be back at school. he has no idea what’s happened to his classmates. most of them were home for the summer. he thinks yaoyorozu was abroad. lucky her. kirishima was the last he heard from, all suppressed terror, and even now it makes him feel sick to think about it, because he knows full well the asshole was scared for him. sometimes he thinks about what it would have been like facing this shit as a group, but he never dwells on it. he’s better off alone.

he’s cold. he’s tired. he needs to get to the nearest library, because no one in the building has shit about boats. he doesn’t want to leave the building yet, but he needs a book. can’t go into this shit blind, not without knowing what he’ll need once he gets there. and besides he needs to stay sharp on the streets- get back into the swing of it, literally. one month since he moved in and he’s barely seen a zombie in the rotting flesh. the doors have been holding up, and he’s far up enough that none of the regulars outside can smell him, decide to unionize and break the door down.

he’s had an assortment of weapons, since the start of this. most effective was the gun, also a heavy chair once. his trusty hockey stick had snapped on his way into the building, a month ago, leaving him to fend the last three tenants off with goldfish bowls and doors to the neck. he’s found a sturdy baseball bat since that he’s claimed as new weapon of choice, though never used. he takes this, when he goes. the bat, the backpack that never leaves his back, the longest coat he can find in his collection. not the heaviest, despite the biting cold, because that restrains movement, but the longest, to minimize contact. hat and gloves for the same reason. balaklava just for the cold.

the apartment is empty as he winds his way down, footsteps loud, and it’s dusk- just late enough that the zombies are slower, though not late enough that it really makes a difference. it’s be too dark if it were; he’s trying to save flashlights for real emergencies.

the setagaya library is the only actual library near him, as the maps inform him, but too far to risk. in the address book he finds a local bookshop three blocks away, and it’s there that he heads, already cold to the bone as he grits his teeth and locks the complex door assiduously behind him. there are zombies just across the street beginning to moan in his direction. he ignores them, breaking into a jog.

maybe because their blood doesn’t flow to their brains, maybe because their muscles are deteriorating: zombies aren’t incredibly fast or incredibly intelligent. what they are is resilient, and single-minded. but outrun them and outsmart them he can, and so he does- runs the paths he’s memorized, sticks to corners and shadows and scales ladders and crosses rooftops and just about manages to get to the street in question without even having to swing his bat.

once he gets there, though, he gets swinging. the bookshop is in an unfortunate position, and there’s an entire group parked in front of it. he lets them spot him first, so they break off in his direction, then climbs onto the overturned truck they’ve shifted to and springs back down into the doorframe of the bookshop, kicking the door in before they can register his itinerary. he slams it shut just before a greying hand scratches at it in outrage, heart pounding a steady tattoo, then glances around rapidly. no sign of life, but that means nothing.

there is, then, an unmistakable jingling sound from the very back corner of the room, behind rows and rows of antique-looking books. keys, or metal on metal. movement.

company, katsuki thinks, between anticipation and trepidation. his bat sits comfortably in his hands as he raises it.

jingling, closer, and he moves in on instinct, breathing feeling loud as he brushes past the anthropology section. he can just about see around the corner when a sudden sixth sense makes him whip around, bat swinging down heavily, and just in the nick of time- wood connects with metal, hard, knocking him back a pace as his teeth snap together from the impact, but he’s swinging again in self-defense just as there’s a sharp intake of breath and his brain catches up- red, white, painfully familiar. the bat makes an aborted spasm.

“bakugou,” shouto todoroki says, in disbelieving tones, crowbar lowered but not dropped. katsuki gapes.

“am i fucking hallucinating?”

the crowbar lowers further.

it is him, unmistakably. maybe with someone else he would have hesitated longer, but todoroki's hard not to single out. his red-white hair is tousled, long behind his ears like he's absently tucked it and forgotten about it, and he's grimy, smells sour and dusty, but it's him. katsuki's own hands stay gripped around the bat, their gazes playing some odd symmetrical game as they catalogue each other for the same exact thing- looking for bite-marks. todoroki's less covered than katsuki is, but there's blood on him, old, dried. too old for recent bites, anyways. inconclusive.

"what are you doing in-" todoroki starts, maybe having concluded that there's no way to assess his status with the layers he has on, but then his frown twists. "oh. your internship?"

which answers katsuki's own question, sort of, because now that he thinks of it enji was on that high-profile murder case in the high court. still- still, his brain is stuck on the incongruity of it, shouto todoroki in the apparently living flesh, and it's been two months and five days. he just keeps staring.

"i came for a book," is what leaves his lips, eventually, rough, and his voice sounds hoarse with disuse. it jars him into action, moving past todoroki on auto-pilot, because somehow he can't quite register his presence, doesn't know where to begin. he wasn't factoring this into his day.

it's dark inside, books hard to discern, so he gets his flashlight out, hits it against a shelf so it alights. there's a section on travel near the back. nautical travels of the eastern seas. useless. a map book of the japanese seas- maybe. he mechanically slides it into his bag. his fingers feel rigid. he's still cold. what the fuck is shouto todoroki doing holed up in a bookstore? where is his father? how long has he been here? what is he doing, alive, talking, walking, in the apocalypse, ambling into katsuki's routine with a crowbar in hand?

he can't see or hear him at all. now he's back here he can tell the ringing was rigged up- tiny trap-wires set around the store, what looks like fishing wire with bells attached. smart. of course it is. he's losing his mind. where has the bastard gone? is he even here? it's fucking freezing in the bookstore. where does he sleep? he hadn't looked starving. actually he hadn't looked anything- just blank as usual, barring the surprise. fuck! he's been staring at the same book for a good thirty seconds without registering the title.

beginner's guide to boating. miraculous. he nearly breaks todoroki's kneecaps when he sees his legs appear silently next to him.

"fuck! don't sneak up on me, you asshole!"

"boats," todoroki says. "that's your plan?"

it makes him flare hot with something like rage, because he doesn't fucking want input on it, doesn't want to be told odds, and it has him on his feet, slamming todoroki back into the opposite bookshelf within seconds.

"mind your own damn business!"

todoroki seems mildly startled at best, shifting a little so a book isn't digging into his neck, and for a moment katsuki is distracted by the scalding warmth of him under his arm. he doesn't know when he last came into contact with a living body. it's disorienting. he thinks probably it was the senior partner who fell down the stairs, minutes before the zombies swarmed the lobby, pulse skittering frantically with fear.

he drops todoroki, steps back. two months five days. maybe he's gone a little crazy.

whatever! whatever. he's fully functioning, he has his book, he's leaving. he's going to be off-schedule at this rate, times gone muddy with distraction. even without touching him he feels like there's residue warmth on his palm, making the rest of him shiver by contrast. if the zombies could have just gotten properly active in summer...

he's halfway to the door when he remembers- again- todoroki is actually there, watching him inscrutably from the bookshelf, swaying a little on his feet. despite himself he turns to stare back. he doesn't know what to- this wasn't in the plan, he doesn't know. he's going anyways.

it's because he's staring-cum-glaring at todoroki that he sees his eyes widen, and then he's leaping forwards on instinct as the window in the door shatters, decaying arm bursting through as loud moaning suddenly fills the dead silence.

"shit!"

"it's because there's two of us," todoroki reasons, in a tone like he's annoyed with himself for not realising this, which would make katsuki feel marginally better about his own stupid lack of thought if he wasn't so pissed. he'd counted on the zombies losing interest on his presence once he was out of sight, but the smell of two live humans in close proximity would obviously keep some of them near.

"is there another way out of this place?"

"back entrance, but it leads into a dead-end alley," todoroki retorts, suddenly functioning, eyeing the creaking door as thumping intensifies from the other side. "there's a way to scale onto the drain-pipe above but it wasn't made to take two people's weight."

"shit," katsuki curses, feelingly. "where's the drain-pipe lead?"

"roof. i don't know if either of us could scale it fast enough for the other to follow before they get there."

katsuki looks at him, crouched calmly stacking something or other into a loose duffel bag, rusty crowbar by his feet, then looks back to the groaning door. his gut tightens with a sort of pissed off fatalism.

"how long 'd it take you to get to the roof? five minutes?"

"i could do it in three, maybe less," todoroki estimates. "it's slower with the frost."

three minutes. katsuki hoists the bat higher, takes a step then two back from the door.

"fine. go. i'll follow."

"bakugou-"

"it's the most logical fucking plan of action," katsuki snaps, eyes still on the door, adrenaline spiking. "if you get up there before i get outside i can make it to the drainpipe before anyone nabs me. i can hold them off for three fucking minutes. and you're the one who knows the way up. you go."

"i know," todoroki says, which makes katsuki glance back at him, finds his face set with nothing but fixed determination. "i was going to say to give me your bag. it'll make it easier to climb."

there's something about this that makes katsuki's head briefly thud with something like a pounding headache, lungs gone tight, but he refocuses, blinks away the dizzy spell. the last fucking thing he wants is to give the bag away, but unless the plan goes as hoped he's dead anyways, so there's no point in arguing.

he shrugs his backpack off, slides the gun out, shoves it into his back pocket. todoroki fastens the straps around his shoulders without comment, then turns and runs, not wasting any time. it makes something in him-

the door breaks in.

there's five of them at least, the ones from before. the first one goes down with a direct hit to the head, skull caving in with a crunching sound, but he has to retreat immediately, make them spread out of their pack formation as he zig-zags back through the rows of books. they're slower than humans but not slow, breaking into a fast paced shuffle after him; he turns a sharp corner, doubles back as fast as he can to catch a second one from behind. crack, snap. the one in front lunges back before he can swing again, sending him running back; he jumps onto the seller's counter, dodging an arm, then brings the bat down full-force onto the zombie's neck. three. there's another one nearing the broken door, the other two circling back to the front at the commotion. he jumps over the counter, ducking under an arm, knocks into the nearest bookshelf with all of his weight, sending it sprawling towards the door, books flying and frame landing awkwardly across the doorframe. it doesn't block entry, but it befuddles the would-be incomers.

there's an arm grabbing his shoulder; he dodges a gaping mouth, bat spinning to hit at the rotting jaw, once, twice, bones splintering decisively on the second hit, but the last straggler is on him and the others are crawling in through the door. he runs, down to the back of the store, nearly trips over todoroki's traps himself as he goes, miraculously jumps clean of them as his pursuers stumble. it gives him the seconds to jump up to the back portion of the shop, grab a nearby chair and throw it at the advancing huddle, knocking them back a step, then turn sharply into a row, sprinting down to the back of the room where the emergency exit sign hangs half-broken. it's closed, likely behind todoroki, but he slams through it before any of the zombies near, staggers at the sharp gust of cold air that hits once he's out. the sun is nearly set, casting a red haze over the alley, and there's a pack of six zombies right beneath the glinting drainpipe, still trailing after todoroki's scent, moaning around the corner signalling backup. fuck.

there's a loud scraping from above, then todoroki's head appears over the edge of the roof, something grey and unwieldy in his hands; a satellite dish comes falling down, catching speed as it goes. it hits the pack dead-centre, crushing two of the zombies into pieces on impact, others reeling backwards in confusion, and he doesn't have the time to question his odds four-on-one. he runs in while they're still dazed, beats one into the wall, head splattering, turns and swings into the second as it zeroes in on him, head collapsing inward and drenching him in blood. the other two are too close to hit; he twists, jumps back, curses, eyes the alley entry where others have scented blood. fucking- no, two on one, god, he's not dying two on one, not after the bullshit he's been through. he kicks heavily into the one's chest, just missing the hand trying to nab his ankle, which sends it knocking into the other, and like that they're just aligned enough that he yells and slams the bat through the first one's head, in three rapid blows, hitting the one behind it on the third as bits of skull go flying. it's not enough to take it out; he hits again, manic, and it gets him on the second go. then he's scrambling to the drain pipe, mindful of the others closing in, shoves his bat down the back of his shirt and under his waistband before he throws himself at the drainpipe.

"brace against the wall," todoroki calls, almost in the moment he does so, hands slip-sliding on the damp pipe as his boots hit concrete; there are arms nearing, outstretched, but he bunches his stomach and drags himself up, feet first then arms, side of his arm scraping heavily against the wall as he moves almost horizontally upwards, fingers clenched around metal. the fucking gloves are no help; he pauses, braced and shaking with tension, to rip his gloves off with his teeth, one hand then the next, dropping to the floor below as his bare palms hit the freezing metal.

he's so cold it hurts, but he's halfway up the wall. methodically he moves. one foot. other foot. one hand. other hand. stomach muscles, straining, arms pulling. up a fraction. then another. then another.

"wait," todoroki says, closer than he feels, and he glances up for the first time, finds him an arm and a half's length away. "you'll slide at the top."

"then what the fuck do you suggest i do?" katsuki bites, half a yell, too strained to scream. todoroki leans, heavy, arms outstretched.

"do one more. then take my hand."

katsuki wishes he could spit on him. todoroki's expression has gone tight like he knows what he's thinking, like he's not sure katsuki won't let himself fall all the way down rather than put himself into the uncalloused hands of shouto todoroki.

the pipe creaks. katsuki moves up, ignores the way his blood boils, eyes the outstretched hands. he can hear todoroki breathing, hot against the cold air.

"drop me and i'll turn you."

he braces. one hand leaves the pipe, and for a godawful moment he's grasping at nothing. their hands connect, rearrange themselves; todoroki has a death-like grip on his wrist. his foot slides. the second hand is thrown rather than extended, and todoroki's eyes flash alarmingly as their fingers brush and miss, but he doesn't fall, hangs there by an arm for a heartbeat, jolt like he's dislocated his shoulder before his boot catches something and he shoves upwards, todoroki grabbing hold of his hand and yanking full-body at him.

katsuki falls over the top of the roof in disjointed movements, the both of them half-hitting each other as momentum carries them down, lands with an elbow in todoroki's stomach and a hit of tile to the jaw.

his head spins; he shoves up immediately, falls back down when his arms protest, adrenaline pounding hysterically. his limbs are shaking with belated exertion. todoroki is still holding his wrists, punishingly tight, his breaths heavy nearby. his body is still hot beneath him.

he scrabbles backwards, onto his knees, todoroki dropping his hands and dragging himself up to his elbows. for a moment they stare at each other, panting loudly.

he wants to yell at him but the words don't come. two months, five days. it's not even todoroki's fault, really. he was living there unperturbed. there's a flush of exertion over his cheeks now, and maybe he's just gone crazy what with the constant thinking about unbeating hearts but he feels a little obsessively interested in the visible flow of blood beneath his skin, wants him pink all over if that'll prove him living a minute longer.

he shakes himself, exhales in a burst.

"are you all right?" todoroki asks, and up close katsuki realises his voice is hoarser too. in the shop he'd been too dumbstruck to register it, but it's there beneath his normal cadence, a scratchy undertone. he hasn't spoken in a while either. something about it-

all right, he'd asked. unbitten, he means. katsuki shakes his head.

"we need to get going."

he hadn't meant the 'we', but he thinks at some point when todoroki's fingers dug into his arm hard enough to pierce flesh the message had gotten under his skin too. they're not fucking splitting up now. of course they're not. this isn't model un or a baseball match; it doesn't matter that the guy drives him insane. and this is todoroki, too- excruciatingly hyper-competent at every challenge life throws at him. if there's anyone less likely to rely on katsuki for the next however-long until one of them is forced to shoot the other, he hasn't met them.

"where?"

"my place. 's not far. how d'you get down from here?"

"the next building over has a fire-escape."

"fine. let's go then."

todoroki hands him back his backpack. he hits his bat against the wall to shake some bits of bone and flesh off, eyes unfocused on the task. he thinks desensitisation is the word. it's maybe the third or fourth time he's fought them off without registering anything about them once. usually he gets stuck on some detail or other, schoolgirl shirt or smile wrinkles. freckles. proof of life. there's that movie he watched once with kirishima and the rest of them, some kind of sci-fic thing, and at the end when the monsters come the dad shoots his whole family dead to spare them. turns out it's the military instead, come to rescue them. kirishima had cried.

questions pile up in his throat. he forces them down.

they jump from the rooftop to the next with relative ease, the gap narrow, his foot just catching on the edge before he rights himself. the fire escape is solid where the drain pipe wasn't. he wonders how in the fuck todoroki ended up here, in some old bookstore.

he's gotten good at scaling shit. he thinks in another life he'd have made a top-grade gymnast, or a superhero. when he'd broken out of the league's hold he'd made a spiderman worthy leap onto a clothes-line.

they make it back to the apartment as the sun vanishes, late, and because they're late his perfect scheduling is off, leaves them facing a pack of easily a dozen zombies swarming around the doors. there's another way in through the side, but it requires forcing a door open that he doesn't have keys for, and that means an entry-risk.

"i'll clear a way to the door," he says, hoisting his bat higher. "you keep them off my back."

todoroki follows his gaze, nods.

they advance in the dark, close together, and it's bizarre having someone breathing down his neck after so long, makes him on edge, expecting a bite that never comes. when the first zombie starts turning their way he breaks into a run, brings the bat down fast and heavy so it connects with a sick thud, flashlight clicking to life where he holds it between his teeth. it blinds one zombie long enough that he gets it too, and then it's chaos, flashlight swinging drunkenly as he batters this way and that, fighting off the clawing arms with irate kicks and loud swearing. if there's one thing he fucking loathes about the apocalypse it's how touchy-feely everyone is, all endlessly grasping hands and drooling maws straining for a piece of him. it makes his skin crawl, which makes him see red, which makes him go through fights like this, all furious movement, too keyed up to feel afraid. he never goes into a fight expecting to lose.

behind him, around him, wet crunching and moans track todoroki closing the pack; in off-beat synchronisation they move their way through the group, dropping bodies as they go. he's by the door before he knows it, light catching the heavy glass, switches the bat to one hand as he drags out the keys. the first time he'd gotten in the door had been open; his luckiest find since was the functioning key, sealing him out of harm's way. he's efficient with it, no fumbling, has it in and open in the time todoroki exhales sort of shortly as their backs connect. bakugou yanks the key out in the same movement he grabs blindly at todoroki's collar with his bat-holding hand, hooking a finger to swing him through the door and diving after him to slam the door shut on a wrist, bone snapping and the hand falling limply to the floor as they put their weight on the door for as long as it takes him to lock it again.

todoroki's crowbar is sopping red, guts in his hair; he casts a look around, doesn't even ask if katsuki thinks the door will hold, if katsuki has thought of their scent luring zombies in. most people would have.

he has, obviously. thought of it. that's why he lives on the top floor. the scent doesn't linger. doesn't matter if there's two of them up there. the door holds for as long as the stragglers press up against it, but as soon as they're out of sight the zombies will drift again.

they make their way up the stairs. he's warmer now, purely from the exercise. heat rises. another reason he lives at the top. doesn't feel like it when he's freezing his ass off at night, but he knows his science.

they make it to the top floor in silence, and he pushes his door open (unlocked, this one, because by the point anyone reaches him up here he'll be long gone), goes for the camping lamp on the floor, trudges along with it in hand. remembers his houseguest.

"kitchen's there. there's a bathroom. two rooms. living room. no power or running water but i have some water in the bathtub if you want to wash."

"it's nice," todoroki says, and the worst thing is he sounds like he means it, almost politely. it makes katsuki stop dead to look at him, struck again by how unreal it all feels, but it almost feels reassuringly normal, staring at todoroki in disbelief. in the bad lighting he looks otherworldly, even despite the filth and zombie gunk he's covered in, all half-lit and angelic like something out of a hazy dream.

"i can't fucking believe it's actually you, half 'n half."

it escapes him unthinkingly, but it's true, and besides that it has the unforeseen consequence of making todoroki's composure fracture, shoulders rising and falling on a mute laugh, exhausted wryness in the tilt of his head. for a split second his gaze is dizzyingly and uncharacteristically frank, almost intimate.

"the feeling is mutual."

if the moment stretches he might do something wholly deranged; he rolls his aching shoulder, gestures to the bathroom.

"you go first. you reek."

todoroki says his thanks to his back as he retreats.

he returns to routine. strips, despite how fucking cold he is, wraps his shoulder tight enough that it hurts, rubs alcohol onto the more worrying cuts and scrapes. drags some bedding to the second room, then drags himself to the kitchen, shivering, mentally redoing his maths, then pulling out his notebook to jot down the edited stock. pauses, hesitates. in the margin under the date he writes: found half 'n half. it's not a diary, but he feels like he should make note.

todoroki appears silently in the doorframe, wrapped in a towel and scrubbed red, and there's something reassuring about how clean he looks, balanced out by how disturbing it is to see him so casually bare. he's barely glanced up at him that he drops the towel.

"the fuck-"

todoroki just turns in a neat 360, then wraps himself back up. katsuki snaps his jaw shut, ears burning but head clear. no bites. right. the previous times- whatever. reluctantly he stands and turns. when todoroki eyes his boxers he glares.

"you don't think you would have noticed if i got bitten on the dick today?"

he's not entirely sure todoroki won't fight him on it, but he concedes after a moment's assessing stare, shifts from foot to foot.

"you can have some of my shit to wear," katsuki says, pointing to the wardrobe he's requisitioned. "some of it's too big. should fit."

todoroki just nods, follows suit.

he wonders, as he scrubs himself down with a bucketful of water, teeth chattering and bath-tub still half full, if todoroki was always so goddamn quiet or if he's traumatised or some shit. the guy was always the annoying silent type, but he doesn't remember him this monosyllabic. habit, probably. what does he know.

he dresses, layers up, shoves his dirty clothes with todoroki's in the basket. when it fills he'll dunk the whole lot into a tub of his used water, but until there's that many dirty clothes he leaves them out.

todoroki is sat on the couch wrapped in blankets and wearing someone's dad's heavy knitwear, illuminated by (of all things) a gas lamp that katsuki had found but never managed to light. so the asshole has matches.

"you hungry?" katsuki asks, really only to make him speak. todoroki nods, counter-productively, but he's talking next.

"don't waste your food on me."

"shut up, asshole," katsuki mutters, on instinct, fatigue setting into him. jesus. the martyrs he's surrounded with. "you can make the next grocery run."

todoroki only looks at him longly, but he follows him into the kitchen, eats the cold soup without complaint. he likes cold food, katsuki thinks, then stops at the thought. he has no idea how he knows it. it feels like a memory from a different life. he likes cold food. like that matters.

it's not very late, though it's pitch black out. he goes to bed early these days to make the most of the sunlight. he's not sure what to do with todoroki, though rationally that's not his concern.

he can't find it in himself to ask the obvious questions. it's partly because he doesn't want to hear the answers and partly because he doesn't want to have to give his own. it's not like they were fucking bosom buddies before this all went down- he's past hating the guy, despite how unbearable he finds him, would call them something adjacent to friends under duress, but it's not like they make a point of hanging out outside of class. and todoroki's a terrible conversationalist, always.

even so. two months, five days. he wants to talk, if only for the pleasure of getting to call him a superior bastard, if only to know that he's still the same confounding weirdo whose face he wears. it's not even the words, really- he wants to hear a pulse beat near him, to catch alert eyes on his, to watch his chest rise and fall. alive.

he can't believe the asshole stripped naked like that. pale flesh all over, but not that diseased grey tint, just regular winter cold, like the inside of a peach. bruises and scratches littering his limbs. nasty half-healed scar like someone had tried to gut him with a knife.

his lips are peeling when he licks them. he found vaseline in someone's drawer but he uses it sparingly. whenever he goes outside his lips crack to the point of blood. against the glow of the stove he can see only half of his new flatmate where he sits surveying his newly clean crowbar.

"what's in the duffel?"

he'd have bristled more at the invasion, pragmatic though it is, but todoroki only shifts obligingly to raise it to his lap.

"medical kit- bandages, aspirin, tweezers, needle and thread. three water bottles. instant noodles. biscuits. matchbox. a city map. a change of shoes. a space blanket. my wallet. wire. rope. an alarm clock. a mechanic's manual." he pauses, feels around, drags out a glass bottle. "this."

it's vodka, of all the things. katsuki half wants to laugh.

"you drink now?"

"kept me warm," todoroki shrugs. which is, maybe, all there is to it. maybe not.

"i'll run you through inventory in the morning," katsuki says, if reluctantly. best todoroki knows what they have on hand, despite how little he feels like letting him into his notebook. it's not like he's deku, writing down his little feelings all over it, but it feels revealing anyways, for todoroki to know what he's been tracking.

there's nothing else for them to talk about without heading into dangerous territory. todoroki packs his things back into the bag, careful, and katsuki is sick of his own weird emotional breakdown, doesn't know where this sudden needy cloying bullshit is even coming from.

two months five days, his brain says, chipper, and then offers to rewind the days preceding that. he hisses through his teeth before he remembers he has company.

"i'm going to bed. 's fuck all to do without wasting light. stay high up if you want to go exploring."

todoroki has gone back to muteness, because he only nods as katsuki glowers at nothing in particular and makes his way back to his room, unhappy at the sight of his diminished bedding. it's not like he's actually able to use the whole apartment's bedding anyways- too unwieldy, too heavy, whatever- but the three duvets and two quilts had been working well enough to insulate him against the chill, and with two sacrificed he's resigned to a night of tossing and turning.

fuck his life. he thinks maybe the reason he's been having these fits of weirdness across the days is just fatigue. between the nightmares and the cold and the actual zombie break-ins over the past six months he doesn't think he's managed a single night's good sleep beyond the times he's blacked out. he feels untethered, at times both more and less emotional than he's used to being.

no surprise that having a real life human being around- and one that he knows at that- is making him almost ill with conflicting urges. part of him wants to lock todoroki out in a cold sweat and never lay eyes on him again. part of him wants to cut him open and grab at his beating heart just to confirm he's not alone. the rest of him lies there wondering what the fuck is wrong with his brain.

he lies there for maybe an hour trying to get to sleep, but his mind has kicked into overdrive in the way that it does every goddamn night nowadays, replaying scenes he didn't even notice in the moment. one of the zombies by the bookstore had barely reached his shoulder. when he'd washed his bat there had been bits of an eye clinging to the base.

he's too busy being cold and annoyed and possibly hysterical to notice the soft footfall until it's close, jerking up on instinct to brandish his bat, but he can tell by the moonlight filtering in slivers through his blinds that it's todoroki, if the lack of shuffling hadn't given it away.

"what the hell is wrong with you?"

"i didn't mean to startle you," todoroki says. monotone, but in an off way, almost dreamy, like he's asleep. it makes katsuki's skin prickle with foreboding; he stares at the little he can see of his face, alert now.

"then what do you want?"

"you sound cold," todoroki says. still in the doorframe, unmoving. he wishes there was more light.

"it's the middle of winter, jackass, of course i'm cold. can you fuck off?"

"my father is dead," todoroki says, completely unprompted, voice not changing in timbre in the slightest, and it makes katsuki's heart jump before he sits fully upright, trying harder to make his face out.

enji todoroki, gone. he guesses he'd known that on some level, for todoroki to be roaming around like a ghost, but it doesn't compute. jesus. maybe todoroki's actually fucking lost it since. he imagines two months and five days tracking back to losing his father, feels that gut-punch of paralysis in his stomach.

he's so caught on processing it that he doesn't even register todoroki is climbing into the bed before he's halfway under the sheets.

"what the fuck are you doing?" his voice half-breaks on it, rising in sheer disbelief as he jerks violently back, because seriously- there's insane and there's insane, and he's starting to suspect todoroki is so out of it he'd snap his neck in his sleep.

todoroki has the audacity to shush him, distracted, and it takes katsuki actually grabbing him hard by the shoulder, braced to hit at the slightest flicker of intent, to stop him in his tracks.

"hey, asshole, i'm talking to you! are you out of your goddamn mind?"

where he's stopped now todoroki's one eye catches the moonlight, big and dark and eerie. he blinks slowly like he's coming out of a trance.

"oh, i-" he pauses. his pulse is sluggish under katsuki's hands, skin fire-hot. feverish, maybe. shit. feverish, very possibly. he'd had no layers in that shitty bookshop. "sorry."

he says it like he's not sure he means it. katsuki doesn't let up with his grip.

"how long you been sick, icyhot?"

"sick," todoroki repeats, processing it. his gaze sharpens. "days. i think maybe- what day is it?"

"wednesday. thirteenth."

"six days, then," todoroki says, quiet. their gazes catch, more consciously now. "i'm fine. the adrenaline helped."

"sit still," katsuki warns, and then pulls up quickly, shrugs his backpack off, digs out the medical kit. he has a decent stock of medicine in the apartment, enough that he only hesitates a beat before pulling out the advil bottle, unscrewing the cap to fill it. he knows the dosage by heart. "drink."

he nearly drops the whole bottle when todoroki just obediently sticks his mouth to the rim of the cap instead of taking it himself, hot breath fanning over his fingers as he drinks. it makes his own pulse go skittering with discomfort when he fills it a second time, brandishes it back. the cap is sticky and wet when he screws it back on; todoroki is still half-sitting where he told him to when he's done his bag up and slid it back onto his back.

"why'd you tell me about your dad just then?" katsuki asks, despite himself, if only to fill the silence.

"did i?" todoroki asks, on an exhale, visible eye swivelling to him. "i don't know. i was thinking about the cold, i think. he wasn't cold in the end."

he resists the urge to check his temperature. probably it got worse once he tried to go to sleep, all the residue adrenaline gone. it can't have been peaking all day, or they'd have never made it out in the first place. and it's not from a bite. just a fever. he's medicated. he'll sleep it off.

"i'm not crazy," todoroki informs him, suddenly cool, not so hazy. "just sick. i could hear you tossing and turning. that's why i came."

"why're you in my bed?" katsuki shoots back, on the edge of combative, not really. maybe he's a little relieved. he's a lot pissed off, even though he knows todoroki probably genuinely didn't realise what a state he was in the last week, might have actually been trying to make sense of his fluctuating mood himself. no shit he'd been so weird when they first ran into each other.

"i'm not sure," todoroki admits. "it seemed important at the time."

this makes him want to laugh, though he doesn't. the cracked-open raw part of him that still smarts loudly whenever he thinks of jeanist thinks he missed him somehow.

"glad we solved that mystery. get out now."

todoroki makes to move, stops when they're facing each other, blue eye white-pale on his. "actually i remember now, i think."

"i swear to god, half 'n half..."

"you're cold," todoroki repeats, factual, then back to floaty. "and i couldn't hear..."

he doesn't expect him to do what he does, which is why he doesn't stop him when he puts a too-hot palm directly over his heart, doesn't even pull back when he pushes, knocking him onto the bed.

"todoroki-"

"it's fine," todoroki says, scratchy, sweat-warm. he slides onto his own side in a heavy, graceless motion. face to face, half an arm between them, palm stuck to his chest. "it's fine."

it's the scratchiness that wins him over, or maybe the fever flush of him. todoroki may be fucked in the head but he's not, which is why he knows full well he's being insane by not shoving him out. it's just that on some extremely uncomfortable and deranged level he gets it, because he's been tracking his pulse like a shark since they first ran into each other. there's something less insane beneath it too, pragmatic acknowledgment that it is actually a great deal warmer when there's body heat to share, but he knows full well he'd have toughed it out, six months ago, sent him back to bed and spent the night half-awake in spiteful resignation.

it's six months later, though, and somewhere along the line he's been rewired wrong. he thinks it's not unlikely that he's just this desperate for a full night's sleep.

it doesn't really matter why, though. he lets him stay. in the morning if todoroki is back to himself he'll see right through whatever he says, and on balance he doesn't fucking care.

he's so fucking tired. two months and five days, six months and three. the last time someone touched him for more than a second without trying to kill him it was a crying intern, this bespectacled guy whose name he'd never bothered to learn choking on his own blood as he clutched katsuki's wrist for comfort. before that he thinks it was his mother, exchanging their usual routine of brusque ruffling before he got on the train. he hasn't cried since the start of this, but he feels like crying now, hot throbbing behind his eyes. he sucks in a breath, forces it down. time and place. he's said it like a mantra since the start, like there's ever going to be one.

todoroki is fast asleep, but his hand's still there. his fingers have curled into the wool.

two months and five days, he thinks again, remembering other hands, clutching his face, pinning his arms. that's changed now, he realises. still marks the date, but not the last time he's spoken to someone.

ten minutes, thirty seconds. he reaches to pull the covers higher over todoroki's shoulders, feels his stomach constrict when his hand brushes medicine-sticky lips in passing.

maybe todoroki can sail. that's a rich kid thing to do. he'll have to ask in the morning.

he falls asleep within fifteen minutes, forty seconds of todoroki, and doesn't wake until the sun rises.

[amarantine-amirite]

It's Not Up To You

I never once had any peace or rest. There was a persistent threat that resources and places would vanish without a trace. Even though I never got my ass handed to me daily, I could never anticipate when I would be able to catch my breath.  

I had to adapt. I had to be able to alter my expectations faster than the circumstances would change. It forced me to abandon having a set image of what I want in my mind. It took away my ability to visualize. I had to anticipate resources disappearing in the future, so I had a hard time with long-term planning.  

Going into the week, I had it all figured out. I had found an iron-clad way for me to have my cake and eat it too. It may not have been ideal, but at least I still had the resources available.

My mother planned to drive me to my piano concert. Because she had a stressful day at work yesterday, she went to the bar. She neither came home nor returned any of my calls, so I assumed she was either crazy hungover or still passed out. I now had to hitch a ride with Jackie and her sister, Henrietta.  

Henrietta drove like she had lead feet. “Uh, Ettie,” Jackie asked, “you just blew through a traffic light at” 

“Don’t tell me how fast I’m going; I need to know where I am!” she snapped. 

“Can we at least stop and get lunch?” I asked. I last ate at 7:00 AM. Bad things happen when I try to function on an empty stomach. My temper gets worse. My impulse control goes to Hell. I bounce off the walls.  

“Hell, no!” Henrietta snarled, “If we stop to eat, we’ll get stuck in a traffic snarl!”

“OK, what’s your problem?” I whined. I had no idea why Henrietta got so upset. 

Henrietta sighed angrily. “Do you wanna know why I’m so fucking pissed off?" she barked, "Those fuckers moved up my fucking interview by a fucking week. I was supposed to get married today! All that money I spent on the venue, the photographer, the catering; that’s money I’m never going to see again!” 

I don’t know how Henrietta could say that without bursting into tears. “And what about Jasper? He’s going to think I broke off the wedding because I don’t have feelings for him anymore. I’m worried. He doesn’t handle rejection well. What if he tries to kill himself again?” 

What happened next felt like being in the desert and coming upon an oasis, only to discover it’s a mirage. When we arrived at our destination, everything went up in smoke. Before we left, Henrietta told me that she would drop us off first, then head to the interview. She looked at us and said, “Nobody's leaving until I finish my interview. Understand?” 

I nodded. Inside, I wanted to smack her. Hard.

Today has been nothing but hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. I fucking hate being jerked around like this. The constant stop-and-start made me feel like someone drained of my life force. I can’t deal with it anymore. 

Jackie and I came up with a plan. The plan was simple, like Henrietta’s would-be husband, Jasper. Unlike Jasper, the plan stood a chance of working. When they let her in to do the interview, Jackie and I would duck out and go to my piano concert. We’d come back when I finished my set, and that’d be that.

Problem. We made a huge tactical error. 

It’s a long story. At the beginning of the school year, the cheerleaders thought it would be funny to nominate Anna Rose, the head of the chess club, for prom queen as a joke. Anna didn’t know about this, but the principal did. On Halloween night, we got something really scary in our inboxes: an official email with the school's letterhead saying that due to “bullying", prom would be permanently cancelled until measurable snowfall in July. A lot of the anxieties that kids channel into what they’re going to do at their prom got redirected elsewhere. 

The kids at school got offended. By everything. Like, a lot.

Remember how I said that school has been so hard for me because I have no idea what to expect? Well, this piano concert thing was a perfect example. I had to make a list of not just one song, but for possible songs that I could play at this concert. I need to be ready to switch out songs in case the band teacher changed his mind. He always did stuff like that. One day, you could pick whatever song you wanted for school concerts, and the next, they would say that it had to come from a pre-approved list. So that meant I had no idea what song I was going to play. When people asked me, the best I could say was, "I’ve got a lineup." Lineup was not a good choice of words; a better choice of words would have been revolving door .

This brings us to our mistake: the same reason that I had to keep a revolving door of songs in my mind for the concert was also the same reason why we should have called the hotel where the concert was to be held ahead of time to double-check to see if the school had not cancelled it. We did not do that.

That brings us to right now. We are smack dab in the middle of what appears to be a campus recruitment event. Everyone in the room except for us is wearing cheap suits that fit somebody else, nobody looks familiar, and the atmosphere consists of a general air of anxiety and lack of preparedness.

Five minutes after we arrived, a woman wearing a pantsuit that made her look like a pool table, pineapple earrings, and a name tag that read “Megan Mulroney“ approached us. “Excuse me, ladies," she said, “are you students at The Fletcher School?”

“No, we go to Arthur Vandelay high school," Jackie said, “I’m here with Margaret because she’s got a piano concert to go to.” 

I stood up and looked at Megan. “So is that in the Gold room, because I got a copy of the flyer here and it says Hall B, and I don’t know where that is, and…”

Megan cut us off. “I don't know what you’re talking about,” she said.

I handed Megan the flyer. “I’m talking about this.”

She didn’t look at the flyer. She gave it right back to me. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, but that’s a piece of blank paper." 

“It’s not blank!” I chirped. 

“Yes, it is; and I don’t appreciate you wasting my time like this.“

“We’re not wasting your time.”

“Well then, why am I dealing with two overdressed high school idiots when I have new grads to check in for a networking event?” she said, doing her best impression of a bratty 12-year-old.

“Why are you so stubborn?”

Megan shrugged at us and rolled her eyes in a cocky fashion. “I'm not stubborn all the time. I'm only stubborn when I’m right.” 

Big red flag. If someone says I'm only stubborn when I'm right , it means they're putting up a front, either because they don't want to but they're wrong or they're trying to bullshit you. 

She continued to puff herself out. “Listen, you’re not special. What happens to you happens to other people, too.”

“Not helpful,” I said as I rolled my eyes.  

She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, sorry you feel that way.”

“What does that even mean?” I blurted.  

She ignored us. Rather than explain what was going on, she instead attempted to have phone sex with Idris Elba and got the wrong number.

It didn’t stop there. One look out the window told me we’d have to get someone else to pick us up, as Henrietta got arrested. I’m guessing she found out that the job she applied for was posted as an April Fool’s Day joke and she either trashed the office or beat the crap out of the hiring manager. Based on the black eye, I think it was the second thing. 

Terrific. Now we have no plan, no ride home, and no idea what the fuck is supposed to happen next. 

I’m devastated. I feel gutted. But beyond that, I'm spooked.

This isn't something you'd consider typically scary. It felt like that last photo taken before a disaster. This looming sense that something catastrophic is coming down the pike continues to hang over me.

@writers-are-writers

[if-you-built-yourself-a-myth]

Check Ignition: Part VII

That Sobbe fake-dating Hogwarts AU that one person asked for and I dove into headfirst

First part // Previous part // Next part

Requests/asks are open. Give me your opinions, your ideas for this fic, your additional fic ideas. I love hearing from you all!

Robbe didn’t want to get out of bed on Sunday. This week marked the last before exams set in, then everyone would leave for winter holidays. Jens and Aaron lived within a ten-kilometer radius of Robbe’s apartment, but the distance might as well be five hundred with how often they saw each other. Jens called this week in the term “Live It Up Week.” It was their final chance to have some big fun before two weeks’ isolation at home.

No one else knew what Robbe heard last night. He didn’t know what he would tell them. When Jens tried to pull the curtains open to get a jump on a day of mischief, Robbe bound them shut with a simple spell.

“You’re not that tired,” Jens taunted. “C’mon, my sweet Robbe, the world is wide and open for our consumption!”

Aaron joined in. “We have so much to do!”

“Sander can come along, if you want.”

“Oh, no, he met someone else. Sander’s not—”

“The someone is Sander…”

Their voices softened into harsh whispers outside. Robbe clamped his pillow over his head and prayed they’d go away. He didn’t think he could handle anything else today.

It was never anything, what he had with Sander. Nothing that would last. Robbe found it funny, in a kind of morbid way—he wasn’t really upset. Did he want to leave the cocoon of his blankets? No. Was he happy with how anything turned out? Also no. But he wasn’t going to cry over it.

He remembered when Jens and Jana broke up. Jens was in pieces for weeks afterward, although he tried to hide it. Robbe didn’t feel that caliber of heartbreak. If anything, it felt like his speculations were proven true.

He wasn’t happy, he was right. Those emotions were close enough. A comfortable numbness.

Damn, what was he going to tell Aaron and Moyo about his someone else?

The boys rustled about the room, throwing clothes and dropping their belongings. A door opened and shut, and Jens put his mouth right against the seam in the bedcurtains to talk to Robbe.

“Aaron’s gone,” he said. “What happened?”

Robbe didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say.

“Did you end things with him?”

They were never a thing. What was there to end? If Sander was back with Britt, their relationship returned to what it was before the fake-dating started. Stolen glances across a table. If he wasn’t, well, Robbe would let himself be dragged along for the rest of the term. It was only meant to last a month. He could handle another month.

Robbe kind of wanted to pick Jens’ mind on the subject: what did Sander’s statement mean? Was it an echo of the joke they had on their first date, but serious this time? I could never fall in love with Robbe. Was it an assurance to Britt that Robbe wouldn’t get in the way of their rekindled relationship? Was it something simpler than that, no more than an acknowledgement that things were moving too fast between them?

He didn’t know how to unload all of that on Jens in a decent amount of time, and even if he did, it probably wouldn’t make much sense. Robbe was a shit storyteller.

“You know you can tell me things, right?” said Jens. “Anything. About anything. About… other people.”

“I know,” said Robbe, because he didn’t want Jens to be worried. “It’s exams. I’m stressed out.”

He could hear Jens exhale and relax on the other side of the curtains. “Ah, right. You have to be the smartest out of us. Yasmina got you in a study group?”

“Yeah, I spent the night in the library.” Why not say something like that? It was better than what he’d actually been doing, which was getting his heart broken in a hallway by an overheard conversation.

“Cool. I’ll let you sleep, then.” Jens left the dormitory.

Now that he was alone, Robbe opened his bed to the scene outside. Light streamed in from their window. He knew he’d have to get up if he wanted to have even the slightest chance of appearing casual about this whole thing. Sander didn’t know he overheard.

Robbe wasn’t that unhappy, either, and that should be a sign that things never would have worked.

Yeah. He was fine. It was one night of making out for real.

He dragged his feet out of the blankets and to the floor. It would have been cold, were it not for Aaron’s stray clothing covering most of the wooden planks. Fuck this. Fuck everything. Robbe kicked aside his Potions textbook and watched it slide into the no-man’s-land under his bed. Fuck Potions. He didn’t need them.

He got it back out.

His trunk was a mess of overflowing shirts and trousers. He dug a Hufflepuff sweater from the mix. When he arrived back at the dormitory last night, he hadn’t the resolve to peel off the Quidditch uniform and hang it somewhere to dry. As such, it smelled like wet dog and clung to his skin in all the wrong places. Dumb fucking rain. Robbe stripped down and changed as fast as he could. He left the soggy uniform dangling from one of his bed’s pillars, then removed the dampened sheets from his mattress and tossed them to the ground with Aaron’s shit.

See, functioning like a normal human being. Nothing had changed from yesterday into today.

New plan, since clearly he was an idiot, and no plans he made worked. He would go downstairs for breakfast, spend time with Jens and Aaron, and patrol tonight with Jana as he had neglected to do for much of this week. He could study for his exams in the library, and maybe, if there was time, get in some pleasure reading.

He thought about Sander’s hands stroking his hair. Not the library, then.

After that, Zoë and Yasmina might help him with whatever else needed doing. Zoë knew his relationship with Sander wasn’t going anywhere, so she wouldn’t take much effort to be around. Yasmina had no clue. He didn’t want to have to tell her about it.

Fuck this. Fuck everything.

Robbe surveyed the room one last time, trying to muster the will to head for the Great Hall. This was his last week to be free before the end of term, before he entered the second half of sixth year and had to start thinking about his future. He should go have fun with everyone else.

He flopped back on his sheetless bed and shut the curtains.

***

Weekdays did not bring relief. Sander and Robbe shared no classes, but Robbe didn’t even see Sander in the corridors during transition periods. He almost made himself attend Potions on Monday. No dice. Britt sat in the front of the classroom, and he didn’t want to see her stupid smug expression. She knew about him, he thought, even if the fake-dating arrangement wasn’t technically over.

What would he do if he saw Sander? Would they kiss again? Would it be the normal fake relationship activities, except unburdened by Robbe’s belief it could be more? He would put up with it, of course, for a little while, until the opportunity to end it presented itself.

On Sunday night, Robbe was still haunted by Friday night’s kisses and caresses. Dreaming about them. Craving them. Missing them. On Tuesday morning, he just wanted to see Sander again. A glimpse through the railing of a changing staircase. A flicker of movement across the Great Hall. Anything.

Fate had other plans on Tuesday night. Robbe carried his textbooks to the farthest section of the library, the section that would block his view of where he and Sander sat a week ago. One fucking week. How could he have expected Sander to feel anything for him after a week or two? He whipped around the corner a little too fast and ran right into someone else, also carrying a stack of books. They collided, and their materials fell to the floor. Robbe was too caught up in his own thoughts to offer a simple apology. One fucking week.

“Ow!” the girl exclaimed. “I’m so sorry!”

“Happens to the best of us,” said Robbe. He brushed off his trousers and began to gather his things again.

“I wasn’t watching where I was going, it’s totally my mistake.”

“Now you know better for next time.” Robbe wasn’t sure why he was being so cruel. He wasn’t even that upset about Sander, not enough to channel it onto other people.

“You’re Robbe, aren’t you?”

He looked up. The girl had brown hair and a Hufflepuff tie. He didn’t recognize her, per se, but she did give off an air of familiarity. “Yes, why?”

The girl smiled and extended her hand to help him up. There was a gap between her two front teeth. “I met your boyfriend the other day. At the Quidditch match. The nosebleed section, y’know?”

Robbe remembered now. This was the girl that Sander was talking to instead of paying attention to the action unfolding in front of him. In retrospect, it was so obvious Sander was never as all-in as Robbe was. Go figure. Robbe probably looked like an idiot, what with his stupid fall-from-the-air-and-kiss-Sander plan.

“Right. You seemed to get along well,” said Robbe. There was venom there. He knew she could hear it as she pulled him to his feet. He did his best to soften the blow—it wasn’t her fault that he wasn’t good enough. “Did you enjoy the match?”

“I didn’t really get to,” she laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“I asked your boyfriend to explain things to me. Mistake, huh?”

That was unexpected. Robbe felt a surge of protectiveness for Sander. Sander was never boring, never once, not in all the time that Robbe knew him. Robbe would have killed to be there in the stands instead of this girl, talking to Sander, lavishing in his attention.

“How?” he asked.

“What?”

“Why was it a mistake?”

“Oh.” The girl blushed. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe. “He didn’t talk a lot about it, if you know what I mean.” Outside in the corridor, the clock began to chime dinner. Robbe could never go to a Great Hall dinner again, not without Noor staring him down, not without Britt’s air of superiority hovering over him.

He did not know what this girl meant. He hugged his textbooks tight against his chest.

“He kind of focused on one player.”

What player? Sander was bisexual, or pansexual—he said as much to Milan on that one date. It could be anyone on Robbe’s team. It could be Jens, Aaron, heaven forbid Yasmina— and it didn’t matter. Robbe already knew.

“You,” the girl said, almost exasperated. “He wouldn’t shut up about you. Merlin’s beard, I don’t know what it is with you boys. You never understand anything.”

“Everyone under the age of twenty is a certified idiot,” Robbe recited. It was the first thing to come to mind.

“The whole game, it was all, Him there? That’s my boyfriend. That’s Robbe. Look at Robbe. Last time I try to flirt at a Quidditch game.” She reached out and gave Robbe an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Sorry to bombard you. I should get back to studying…”

“Nice to meet you,” said Robbe. She was already leaving the library by the time he realized he hadn’t gotten her name.

He passed the remainder of the evening hiding with his books in various degrees of focus. Jens stopped in at one point to bring Robbe a slab of turkey that he stole from the dinner table, and sat down for a while to chat. Jens was not in Potions. Robbe was the only bitch in their friend group who could handle Potions.

The information buzzed inside Robbe’s head. All he had to do was open his mouth, and he could get everything off his chest at once. This was so stupid. This was his whole life.

What he knew (because making a list always helped):

1. Sander was not in love with him.

2. He was in love with Sander.

3. Sander talked about him to other people.

4. He didn’t much talk to others about Sander.

5. He’d meant to taunt the boys with relationship information, and ended up lying instead.

6. Britt and Sander were probably back together.

There wasn’t any way to cover that much in the amount of time they had. Robbe let Jens quiz him on magical history. They were on the last chapters right now, the ones that covered the most recent wars.

“What was Lord Voldemort’s real name?”

Robbe blanched. “Is that a real question?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Tom Marvolo Riddle.”

“Good. What caused his death the first time?”

“True love or something. I don’t know.”

Jens made a face. “Mm, close. It was actually sacrificial love.” He looked up from the textbook and right at Robbe. “Speaking of love—”

“Don’t say it.”

“I was just wondering,” said Jens, treading carefully, “about how you two left it.”

It wasn’t the time. Robbe hadn’t even had his sexuality crisis yet—still postponing. Let him have that, and they could talk. He couldn’t bear to hear more about Sander today. He wasn’t that upset about it, though. He wasn’t. There was a large, large difference between being upset about it and just not wanting to dish the story onto other people.

“Because I talked to Jana,” Jens continued, “and she said—well, it’s actually kind of weird because she said—she said that Britt’s…” He trailed off.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

“Whatever.” Robbe kept his composure. “I remember now. Lord Voldemort was maimed by Harry Potter’s mother’s sacrifice. She put herself between them and the curse rebounded. That right?” He raised his voice a little too much for the library standards; a few other studying students shot him dirty looks. They could suck it.

Jens put the book back on the table. “If I were you, I’d want to know, so…”

Absolutely not. Britt and Sander were not back together. Absolutely not. Robbe knew it before, but fuck, hearing it basically confirmed made him want to throw up. He felt his eyes watering—some fluke, considering this was always going to happen and he wasn’t that upset. The word “upset” lost all meaning as he repeated it in his head.

“That makes Harry Potter the first and only person to survive a killing curse,” he said. “His parents were James and Lily—”

“He told you, right?”

“Nothing to tell,” said Robbe tightly. “Keep quizzing. I’m going to fail my exams.”

Jens shook his head. “Something happened on Sunday.”

“The Potters were given up by their close friend, Peter Pettigrew. People thought it was Sirius Black.”

“Robbe, you can talk to me.”

“We’re talking right now.”

Jens grabbed Robbe by the arm. It wasn’t that they never touched each other, because they did, but the intensity in a gesture like this took Robbe a little bit by surprise. He shook his friend off. Jens held fast. He seemed to consider a thousand different comforting phrases in a moment. Finally, he settled on, “I want you to be happy.”

The slab of turkey was going cold in its napkin. Robbe would get in trouble if the librarian happened by his table and saw it there. He picked at it with his hands, because what was the use in manners? The student closest to their table grimaced as she watched.

The clock chimed nine; the library had extended hours during the week before exams. It was time for Jens to leave and hang with Moyo and Aaron, who planned to prank the Gryffindors by moving everything in their common room two inches to the left. Jens made no effort to leave his chair. He opened the book to the bookmarked page. “Fine. Okay.” The stars glittered through the library windows. It was a wonderful night for the astronomy tower. Robbe didn’t want to go anywhere with Jana if she knew about Britt and Sander. “What role did Sirius Black play in the defeat of Lord Voldemort?”

And so the evening went. Stupid fucking weekdays.

***

It was Thursday before Robbe saw Sander again. He wished he hadn’t. For the first time, Sander had his hair styled in such a way that the deep brown roots were just as visible as his bleach blond. His robes were clean. Buttoned correctly. See, here was a person who wasn’t upset in the slightest. Like Robbe. Robbe was already over it.

He froze anyway.

Here was the moment of truth: if the arrangement were still in effect, Sander would run over and kiss him. Robbe waited for it to happen. Sander did not spare him so much as a glance.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t earth-shattering. Robbe did not go to Potions.

***

Friday night was a whirlwind of Quidditch practice and exam preparation. Moyo and Aaron put their moving spell to work again in the Hufflepuff common room, doing their best to scoot everything simultaneously. It gave them away on Tuesday when things moved at separate times.

“McGonagall’s gonna make us turn cockroaches into shot glasses or something,” Moyo lamented. The couch slid a whole foot to the left, taking Jens and Robbe with it. A good five seconds later, Zoë’s chair by the table slid, too. “We can’t turn shit into shit.”

“I can turn your girl into mine,” said Aaron. Moyo smacked him in the back of the head.

Robbe ignored them to the best of his ability. There was so much he didn’t know, and only a few short days left to cram it into his head. He wasn’t sure there was space to fit it in beside Sander.

He wasn’t worried about Transfiguration—the real assignment was turning a bug of choice into an article of clothing. Moyo would be fine. They always were. History of Magic would prove slightly more difficult, if the questions were as hard as the professor bragged they would be. Charms was a breeze if he focused on it, and Herbology was easy enough that he hardly thought about it. There was only one class left to bite him in the ass.

Senne descended the stairs. “Prefect stuff, going out,” he declared. “Robbe, coming with?”

Going with Senne would mean seeing Britt. No thank you. Robbe didn’t answer. He could take Jana later, if it came down to it, but his nightly plans involved sleeping for the rest of forever. Or going to astronomy tower.

It was ages since his last trip. Surely the memory of Sander couldn’t taint the stars over still waters.

“Cool, so I’ll see you guys later, then.” Senne kissed Zoë on the forehead as he walked by. “Stick around if you want to. I won’t be long.”

The door closed behind him, and instantly, Zoë whirled to Robbe. “Isn’t that your job?”

“No,” said Robbe. He read about a Wolfsbane potion for the forty-millionth time and remembered none of it. All his other textbooks darted across his lap and off the couch, coming to rest underneath Zoë’s feet. Moyo and Aaron high-fived. Five books at once was a pretty okay feat.

“Got plans tonight, huh?” Moyo said.

Jens perked up. “Plans? Fun plans?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. With his someone else.”

This got Zoë’s attention. She glanced at Robbe, incredulous.

“I can’t believe you’d dump Sander,” said Aaron, not really to Robbe. “He’s hot.”

“He’s a bleach-blond,” Moyo pointed out.

“That’s what I said.”

“Boys,” interjected Jens. “You’re not being subtle. Shut up.”

They returned to their studying. The common room during exam season was a new locale: several people sobbed right out in the open as they paged through books. Students sat on rugs and in the large windowsill. A group even claimed the stairs to the girls’ dormitory as their space, and cast levitating spells on a handful of marbles they’d thrown out into the air.

Robbe read the page on the Wolfsbane potion yet again and thought of Sander. All he did was think about Sander. It shouldn’t mean this much to him—he wasn’t going to cry over it. Jens’ leg pressed up against his own on the couch. Not a year ago, they were sitting on this same couch as Jens fell to pieces over Jana.

He should tell them. They had that poster board upstairs, an honest-to-God muggle poster board, with that dumb stupid plan on how to get Robbe and Sander together. Operation Sobbe. Obviously it was that. They would be okay with anything he told them, and maybe they could help him through—

There wasn’t anything to get through. Wolfsbane potions are extremely difficult to make on account of their poisonous ingredients and the expenses involved.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Moyo said, out of the blue.

Jens didn’t look up from his book, Hogwarts: a History. “Do enlighten us.”

“Robbe. It’s really not fair.”

Robbe should tell them he should tell them he should tell them—

“Sander’s head-over-heels for him, beautiful specimen of a human being, and he gets someone else on the side.” Moyo cleared his throat to continue. “Noor wanted him, Sander wanted him, hell, half the school probably wants him. He’s flicking them off like flies.”

Now’s the moment, Robbe thought. Tell them.

Moyo’s brow furrowed. He faced Robbe, just as Robbe’s quill lept from his hand and shot three feet to the left. “Kind of weird you didn’t tell Sander. I liked him. I mention it in the hallway, and—”

“You talked to Sander?” Jens asked.

“I want to do some homework,” said Zoë. No one listened.

“No, I mean, everyone overhears things.” Moyo waved his hand in the air to clear that topic away. “I don’t think it’s fair that you get all the action and the rest of us study for our exams.” He laughed like it was funny, and, unsurprisingly, Aaron laughed too.

Say something and fucking tell them, Robbe screamed at himself. The Wolfsbane potion was invented by Mr. Belby and tastes awful.

“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” said Robbe.

“Clearly.”

“I think I hear someone at the door,” Jens said. He jumped up from the couch to answer it. Robbe felt the air get heavier between himself and Moyo, in a way he didn’t much like. The acid from the Quidditch match, from watching Britt and Sander, from Sunday morning came flooding back into his system.

Lighthearted conversation. Steer it back into lighthearted conversation.

“So—” Robbe began.

Moyo cut him off. “You had it really good.”

“Can someone help me with this Charm?” Zoë attempted. The snowball was already rolling.

“We were rooting for you,” said Moyo. “You were good together. And he clearly adores you.”

Even Aaron was uncomfortable by the shift in tone. “Moyo—”

“Hang on, hang on. The way you kissed each other, I mean, obviously.”

“We’re good at fake dating,” said Robbe, aware it sounded dumb.

“Usually when people fake-date, they don’t use tongue. You’ve been dating him. This whole time. It’s cool, it’s fine. He knew what you thought about it, and whatever. But you really believed that whole Britt excuse?” Moyo took Robbe’s silence as an answer. “Zoë says he gave this whole fucking monologue when she asked, and when he was drunk—”

“Are you slut-shaming me?”

“No, if anyone here’s a slut, that’s my title.”

“Then what are you getting at?” Robbe was three seconds away from his boiling point.

“We’re your friends, and we’ll support you no matter what. I’m trying to. I’m trying.” Moyo sighed. “That’s just… well, it’s shitty. And as a friend, it’s my job to call you out. Illuminate us, please.”

Robbe couldn’t do it. He had a whole list in his head of things to say—things he needed to say. He spent no more than two weeks kissing Sander, only one day of it real, and he missed it like a hole torn in the center of his chest. He wasn’t going to cry over it, no. He wasn’t going to be Jens right now. But fucking hell, Sander must be somewhere making out with Britt at this very moment, and all Robbe could think about was whether Sander drank coffee in the morning, the number of creams and sugars he used. Robbe was so goddamn upset that it was killing him from the inside out.

Hear that, universe? He was upset. You win.

He said the next closest thing. “You think it was my choice?”

The common room went silent. The levitating marbles clattered to the floor. Zoë and Aaron became interested in an illustration of Gillyweed in Zoë’s book.

A painting on the wall released itself from its hanging and moved one inch to the left.

“Uh, door for you,” Jens said. He reappeared, pointed back at the entrance. “You might want to… um. Yeah.” He rushed past Robbe and ushered the boys upstairs. Moyo held Robbe’s glare for a second longer. Aaron took his time, loitering at the base of the stairwell, still trying to puzzle through the conversation he witnessed. Zoë looked briefly between Jens and Robbe, concerned, and followed them out. She brought with her six or so first-years who were using the carpet to spread out all their notes. It was going to be a party in the boys’ dorm tonight.

Robbe didn’t budge from the couch. He didn’t want to see who it was. Probably Britt. Or Noor. One of them.

“Uh, Robbe?”

That wasn’t Britt’s voice. Shit. Robbe pretended not to hear. With luck, Jens hadn’t left the door open, and Sander would be stuck outside the common room for a little while. Robbe needed time to gather his thoughts after everything Moyo said. The remaining students scurried away like mice. Robbe scanned down a page of his History of Magic textbook without reading any of the words.

“Robbe, I—we should talk.” It didn’t sound any closer. Sander must be staying near the doorway. Stupid, respectful Sander.

“Busy!” he yelled back.

“It’s important.”

“So are exams.”

“Robbe, please.” This was more nervous than Robbe had ever heard Sander speak.

“Come in, then,” he invited.

“Um, I think you should come here. If that’s okay.”

It blossomed in Robbe’s chest, for a moment: the oddest sensation of irrational hope. Sander was here to admit his feelings for him. They’d go back to the workshop and kiss ‘til their fingertips burned with magic. The fake-dating thing never officially ended, Robbe thought. Therefore, everything he’d felt over the past week could just be his own taste for dramaticism. Sander didn’t want things to move to fast. It wasn’t a guarantee that he never would love Robbe—

Overthinking. Stop overthinking. “Yeah, okay, one second.”

He rose from the couch, threw open the door, and there was Sander. Eyes trained on the floor.

Fuck.

Sander was a cutout from those Hogsmede dates. He was there, but not really. Cold. He picked at something dried on the hem of his sleeve. Robbe felt himself sitting down across the Three Broomsticks table, wanting without realizing, losing without ever having in the first place. Unattainable. That always was the most important part.

No one ever looked like this when they came with good news.

Sander launched into a pre-prepared speech as soon as Robbe was in front of him. “I imagine you’ve heard by now.”

“I’m doing well, how are you?” said Robbe.

“Sometimes I make impulsive decisions, and they hurt people.” Sander sounded like he came straight from a script. Robbe wanted to pitch himself from the top of the astronomy tower. “I really don’t mean to. You didn’t deserve it. But you have to understand, I don’t—you don’t like me.”

“Are we gonna have this talk here?” said Robbe. Hearing the words from Sander’s mouth only cemented a different truth in his head. He loved Sander with everything he had.

“I mean, we could be friends, or…”

Robbe jumped in when it became clear there was no more to that sentence. “I’d rather it be over, if you don’t mind.”

“Right, over.”

They both stared at their shoes.

“I’ll go,” said Sander. And he went. No more than that. It wasn’t going to be dramatic. It was over.

Just like that.

[albatris]

ok ok alriiiight ok so the plot of ATDAO

this post is not, like........... well, it’s not gonna be a blurb or a summary or a nice neat synopsis, this is not Professional Writeblr Business, this is, this is, uhhhh

this is like drunk house party logan rambles

works best if you imagine ur just like “hey man how’s it going” super casual and I grasp you firmly by the shoulders and look you dead in the eye and just ramble all of this without taking a single breath

could I have explained in a nice neat concise "elevator pitch" sort of way? probably. mind ur business. that’s not how we do things here at albatris.org

anyway the purpose of this post is “hey people seem to know a lot about the characters and the worldbuilding and the premise but have no clue what happens in the actual story” so I’m not going to be talking about said characters and worldbuilding and premise in depth

in terms of rambles, that stuff’s been covered! this post assumes you know what Ports are, n what the nature of the ATDAO apocalypse is, vaguely what the MCs are like as people......... though I can fetch this info for you if you like

but yeah if you are coming into this post with zero prior ATDAO knowledge........... deeply deeply from the bottom of my heart: sorry

also if this is your first time experiencing One Of These Rambles

also @safe-in-the-steep-cliffs​ and @siarven​ I am tagging you because you said you would like to be tagged and also hi and also I hope y’all knew what you were in for

anyway without further ado

(visual representation of my approach to this rant, not of how complicated my plot actually is)

(my plot is not that complicated)

ALRIGHT

there are two viewpoint characters! and two plotlines which converge near the end of the story, but honestly there’s a very real possibility I will decide these are two separate books meant as companion stories to each other because I love making things difficult for myself yeehaw

ATDAO’s co-protags are Tris and Noa, best buds four years and counting. their friendship is one of the single most important aspects of the story, n the ongoing love and trust they have for each other despite the way unfolding events force their relationship to change is integral to the themes and making the heart of the story what it is. I will now proceed to not mention this friendship for the entire remainder of this post. they’re bros. that’s all u need to know. listen. listen. I have a lot to cover

so yeah, ur first key player is Tris Greer, whose parents are dicks but whose siblings are chill. most notably of said siblings there is Jacob, older brother by thirteen years, whom Tris believes is just about the coolest person on the entire planet. this plotline kicks off when Jacob gets caught in the midst of a freak car accident that kills a dude and wrecks a street corner and also somehow causes Jacob to just kind of................. blip out of existence entirely and without a trace?

n Tris is understandably horrified and distressed by Very Much All Of This, but hey, at least there are responsible adults who can look into this obviously Port-related weird disappearance and figure this mess out, right?

INCORRECT

the relevant interdimensional authorities are brought in to suss out the situation and these authorities are kind of like “hmmmm idk about this” but are all set to take Tris at least somewhat seriously until they learn the following:

that Jacob had already been reported missing to police in his home state three days earlier

that Jacob was in the midst of several ongoing personal crises and at least one nervous breakdown

that Jacob was allegedly tangled up in some real weird shit that would more than account for a disappearance under suspicious circumstances

that Tris is schizophrenic, prone to hallucinations, confusion, memory issues and quote unquote “letting his imagination and anxiety get the better of him”, and precisely zero people can actually corroborate his story that Jacob was even there are the time of the accident to begin with

and after some back-and-forth and Looking Into The Evidence pretty much everyone in any position of authority comes to the conclusion that this is just Ordinary Regular People Crimes and whatever happened to Jacob had nothing to do with weird apocalyptic energies, and that Tris is (at best) stressed out and delusional or (at worst) lying through his teeth because he knows more than he’s letting on

so Tris is forced to hop pretty quick from “I’m sure someone will handle this” to “no one believes me but I’m sure if I can find some concrete proof they’ll listen and someone will handle it” to Well Fuck I Guess That Someone Is Me

cue bizarre reality-hopping fantasy quest, which is ten times easier said than done when most of the time Tris is terrified enough just, like, going to the supermarket

he enlists the help of his new classmate Shara, amateur paranormal investigator and professional weird-bullshit enthusiast, who agrees to help him puzzle out what the fuck happened to Jacob in exchange for his assistance in mapping out Adelaide’s interdimensional “fault lines” as part of her ongoing quest to track down the source of the apocalypse

she’s got big fuckin dreams, ok, go hard or go home

slso worth noting at this point that there HAS been an uptick in Ports and their related reality-bending strangeness in Adelaide recently which is why this is of particular interest to her currently. gotta find out What Makes The Weirdness Tick, gotta find out Why The Sudden Extra Weirdness

..........and also Kai is there

Kai has no nice neat reason to get involved with the plot, Kai just likes drama and being all up in people’s personal business. Tris brings them on board for one single afternoon like “hey I will pay you some money to come to my house and fix my fucked up phone so I can listen to an interdimensional voicemail” but forgot the apparently key addendum “and then leave”

their first three chapters of knowing each other is basically Tris being like “stop inviting yourself into my house we are not friends” and Kai being like “that’s a rude thing to say to your friend. also your sister gave me the netflix password and I used your kitchen to bake pastries feel free to help yourself”

but yeah so Tris’s story mostly focuses on his quest to figure out where Jacob got yeeted to and how to get him safely home (y’all probably know a bit about The Unreality already maybe?), whilst also dealing with rising family tensions, whatever shifty stuff Jacob was involved with prior to his disappearance, and his own creeping doubts about his perceptions of reality

n I’m also saying flat out it’s not a plot that’s going the “oh the whole thing was just a delusion all along” route because ew

his psychosis is a fairly involved part of his character but the explorations around it are more to do with, like......... the difficulties he has in trusting himself and whether he has the luxury of letting himself get swept into some Big Weird Implausible Adventure when this has extremely different implications for him than it would someone else. n eventually to how his success and survival is not ~in spite of~ but specifically because of the different way he understands and interprets the world and the skills he’s developed

THAT TANGENT WAS A PERSONAL RANT IT WAS NOT RELEVANT I just have words to say on the subject of how psychosis is treated in fiction and didn’t want people jumping to the “none of it is real” conclusion anyway ok moving on

ur SECOND key player is Noa Yun, who has rather a lot on her plate right now. she’s broke as fuck and her mum is sick and her car is making Noises and she’s not getting enough hours at her job at Not-IKEA and everyone is on her back about her failing studies as if that’s a thing she has the energy to care about. feeling rather backed into a corner by life’s bullshit and her financial situation, she blatantly lies her way into a field job at the Department of Interdimensional Instabilities, because A) surely it can’t be THAT bad, and B) what does she have to lose?

so more or less what she’s doing is the equivalent of emergency services for Port-related weirdness, it’s going out and dealing with highly unstable otherworldly energies head on, navigating Weird Phenomena and bendy patches in reality......... it is, among other things, a job that’s relatively easy to get into because no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole unless they absolutely have to

n the DII is a whole other post, this shit has lots of different functions and levels and branches and corruption and secrets and a tendency to view workers who have to go out and deal with the brunt of the apocalypse head-on as vaguely expendable and I’ve talked about it a bit before and in more Serious Words

things kinda kick off for her when in true Noa fashion she hurls herself into a dangerous situation to help out a coworker, n enters a pretty standard issue “overlap” where the barriers between universes are a little fucky, but hey, she seems to come out of it with nary a scratch, so it’s reasonable to assume everything is fine, right?

INCORRECT AGAIN

she basically gets some whacked-out otherworldly energies latched onto her that are now following her through her everyday life, and it turns out she’s starting to bend the reality around her the way certain types of Ports do, which is! obviously not ideal! she’s not exactly a Port herself, because she’s pretty sure that’s impossible, but it’s clear capital s Something happened to her in that overlap, and she doubts it’s good news. and to make matters even more disconcerting, she’s now being dogged at every step by strange visions of a child who speaks in an unfamiliar language and who seems Real Fuckin Pissed at her

so her thing is basically “I acquired fucked up reality-bending powers against my will and they might be lowkey killing me ‘cause Ports are notoriously unstable like that and also I’m haunted for some godforsaken reason” which all somehow ended up being, like, the least interesting part of her plotline for me lmao

oh and Noa also enlists the help of Shara, Because Ghosts

anyway yeah so her search to find out what’s happening to her re: Weird Children, being a Port-adjacent something-or-other, and whether there’s a way to stop her own unravelling leads her to (rogue computer programmer? mad scientist? general shifty bastard?) Laurence Marrick Thiele, who claims to have suffered a similar affliction in the past and now does some real interesting research on the subject. n this guy. well. he’s got some fuckin stuff going on

he definitely knows more about the nature of Ports than he should. also is he actually researching what he says he’s researching? also what’s with all the weird tech? also did he just straight up murder that guy Avery? all will be revealed later, maybe, if I feel like it

but yeah at about the same time as Noa goes “actually fuck this you’re shady as hell I’m out” she stumbles into, like, The Actual Reality of what Marrick is up to re: manipulating Ports and interdimensional doorways for his own gain, and the various ways this spells bad news not only for her but potentially for the entire city and anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire, and she shifts gear to “actually you know what I’m gonna kick your ass”

there are various reasons for this, but first and foremosterly you have to understand that Noa’s got a fuckload of pent-up rage and she will bring it in full force the moment you say some stupid shit like “some people are expendable” or “it’s inevitable for the greater good”

(there’s also a fun ongoing subplot with her work at the DII where she and her team are investigating a string of strange illnesses with bizarre symptoms that appear to be spreading via obscure radio stations so that’s. happening. I guess?)

but yeah the main story here mostly follows Noa’s attempts to undermine Marrick, bastard supreme, and find a way to fuck him up before he goes, like, Full Cartoon Supervillain, n also like........... her attempts to keep up her work at the DII despite her rising paranoia that the teammates she’s growing to care about will notice her increasingly unstable state and the fact that she’s all tangled up with the very forces they’re meant to be thwarting. n along the way discovering the reality of what happened to her in The Aforementioned Overlap Incident and about her visions and such

so that’s all that. did that make sense

n she’s got a whole arc going on about trust and learning to lean on others, like, she comes into this story as a very standoffish person with lots of paranoia, she’s spent much of her life feeling like she can only rely on herself, n she’s. well. yeah, like I said, she’s got a lot of anger at the world and at the various systems that have failed her and her loved ones, n the story puts her in a position to become even more isolated

and her plotline isn’t so much “you have no reason to be angry or afraid” or her learning to Not Be, It’s more, like........... yeah you have every fucking right to be furious and of course you’re afraid! but there are people around you who love you and who will jump at the chance to defend you and who will help you carry the weight of your anger and grief and none of this needs to be yours to bear alone which is extremely cheesy

which applies to both her Weird Supernatural Goings-On as well as her regular ordinary life goings-on

I feel like Alice and Jet deserve a mention for Noa’s plotline but also this went on and on too long already so. well. Alice and Jet exist! yep. they work with Noa at the DII. I have things to say about them. I will not be saying them today

and uhhhhhh

in general, for Tris, his plotline, you wanna think, like, fantasy/adventure vibes which veer pretty sharply into horror, and for Noa you wanna think...... kinda, sci-fi mystery conspiracy vibes with a dash of some superhero bullshit maybe except not really

and that

pretty much is it I think

also the fact that Kai just invites themself into the plot for funsies and then is dragged kicking and screaming into caring about themself and making positive changes in their life means there was no convenient place in this post to be like

"oh there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop"

but there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop

goodnight! thanks for coming to....................... whatever this was! have a nice saturday everyone

[marshmallowprotection]

You've probably received an ask like this before, but do you have any specific thoughts/headcanons for Ray Route AE, in regards to the twins, as well as Saeran and MC's relationship? And what I mean by that is... do you think Saeran would have an easier time (even just slightly) getting over his hatred for his brother than he does in 707 Route SE? How would they interact? Would it be similar to how many people interpret their interactions for after the SEs (brotherly love-hate type deal), except maybe toned down a little?

And as for Saeran and MC, I'm not so much referring to the contents of their relationship, but Saeyoung's reaction to it, how he feels about it, etc.

I hope this makes sense, because I love the way you explain things and I would love to hear your thoughts on these ^^

[417]

Hopefully, Cheritz will give us a canon answer soon. I’ve definitely had the time to compare the two of them since I spend so much time in Saeran’s headspace playing around with this and that. Now, if we compare the events of the Secret Ending and the events of Ray Route, Saeran is in a very different headspace by a long shot. His place in his life is also drastically different. Unknown spent two more years in Mint Eye than GE Saeran did. There’s a vast difference between 6 months of being trapped and two years of being trapped. 

Both Suit Saeran and Ray were long buried in Unknown’s consciousness with no MC around to keep them tethered to the front. It was only a matter of time until either of them couldn’t function with what Rika did. I view Unknown to be another personality that split from Suit Saeran after some point during that two year period. Unknown and Suit Saeran have some things in common but they don’t read to be the same person to me. 

SE Saeran is just Unknown post-therapy and confrontation with Saeyoung, so I don’t see them as separate people, but the same person just in different eras of life. I’ve got a whole other people I could make about how it’s possible that Ray could flood back to the surface in therapy, as well as Suit Saeran, but they may not have the same names by that point. That’s more so just a big post on the way that their system works and how all of them cope with their trauma. 

But that wasn’t your question, but I’d be glad to answer that too at some point if you’re curious! Some people are torn on if Saeran has DID or OSDD specifically, and that’s a whole other topic. Anyways, back to the task at hand, SE Saeran in question went through literal hell for a very long time. He is fraught with so much anger and pain. He physically lashed out at Saeyoung and took weeks if not a few months to truly come to terms with what happened. He has to live with blood on his hands as well. 

We all know that SE Saeran tried to get rid of himself and Saeyoung, too. His emotional crisis is a strong one. He’s hurting so much until Saeyoung can get through to him and they can start to heal. It wasn’t easy. It was a fucking mess and that’s how life is. After what they went through? It’s wrong to assume that it would be simple or without pain and tears. Even after the Secret Ending comes to a close and we see Saeran with everyone, he looks so tired. His emotional state isn’t healed. He’s going to be dealing with panic attacks and much of the lingering PTSD for years to come. Saeyoung will as well. 

It’s going to be a constant battle for them. 

But, they’re both trying and the MC, as well as the RFA, are going to be there to help, which is great. A good support system is important but that’s also going to be messy because... well, you know, the truth wasn’t completely revealed to all of the RFA and that’s a ticking timebomb in itself. Saeran’s got issues trusting and being around much of the RFA. He can’t be around Yoosung or Jumin for obvious reasons. 

Either way, the Secret Ending has a lot of weight to it and it’s going to hurt just as much as it can get better for the Choi boys. Saeyoung believes that things can get better, and he’s willing and ready to stand by his brother to fight for their happiness. You know how much turmoil Saeyoung went through because we watched it. We know that he’s willing to do whatever he has to do for the ones that he loves. 

Even if it feels like pulling teeth. 

Now, thinking about what happens in Ray Route, we see the boys past revealed to the world with a direct attack. Saeran is able to realize that he was lied to and manipulated by the people that were supposed to take care of him. He is able to find out on his own that he needs to leave Magenta if he truly wants to be happy and free from his chains. We watch him be so damn strong and turn against the brainwashing and gaslighting. What he did should not be glossed over because going against your abuser is not easy. 

I was so proud of him for learning that for himself. He says himself that MC isn’t the one that got to him completely. It was a combination of factors that allowed him to see it. From how Ray was treated to how Saeran is treated, how they are promised things, and how those things are taken away. How it just didn’t make sense that Rika was disrespecting him and taking away everything. Nothing at all made sense anymore. She said one thing and did another. He decided to fight it even though it made him feel sick. 

You can watch his actions on the last day. How talking about Mint Eye as a bad place makes him gasp and choke, and whenever he tries to give his brother a chance... well, you see how he acts when you’re still holding onto your phone so tightly, asking him to take a chance on the RFA. He nearly has a panic attack when he tries to even say that he should look into it, much less talk to the RFA about it. He knows that he’s been tricked but he’s bouncing between what he has been told and what he’s trying to learn. 

That’s not an easy process. Saeran is going to be dealing with a lot after the events of his ending that we know of. The sudden fusion of Saeran and Ray can actually happen, I know some people feel like that was out of the blue but that can very well happen whether they make the conscious choice to do that or not and it was the best thing for the body at that time. GE Saeran isn’t Ray and he isn’t Suit Saeran, he’s not the two of them smashed together and he’s not one or the other. He’s someone made up of those parts but also his own person. Again, that’s a whole other thing that I’d have to get into here. 

Saeran has a lot to deal with as far as his trauma goes but you know what the difference is between GE Saeran and GE Saeran? GE Saeran had the choice to set himself free and SE Saeran had no choice. He was cornered like an animal and just... exploded. He was put in a position that he couldn’t decide. GE Saeran had the choice to leave Mint Eye on his own. That already makes the world of difference in his recovery. If we’re talking reasonably here, he definitely needs to start seeing someone to talk about what happened as soon as he feels ready to open up. 

So, he’s going to be spending a lot of time working on his problems and God knows how long it’s going to find Saeyoung so he’s likely to be making some good progress on his own. His relationship with the RFA is already pretty good compared to his counterpart as well. He gets along with everyone in the RFA, and he’s particularly close with Jumin, which makes sense given their natural wits. 

Now, therapy and getting a support system is good for Saeran. He’s got his MC as well with him. However, that doesn’t mean that he’s ready for Saeyoung to be back. When they find his brother... he’s going to need time and space for this to work. But, I imagine that he’s in a better headspace to handle it. He will tense up if Saeyoung hugs him and gets overwhelmed to see that his brother is alive after whatever he went through. Saeran will have to gently stop him and let him know that he needs time, he can’t handle all of this at once. Saeyoung needs to take it easy too. 

He’s got to react to the fact that he’s no longer bound by the agency and that he can live a life not hiding behind a mask. That’s going to be his own journey in itself that we could talk about for a while and I hope it doesn’t get glossed over because Saeyoung’s got a lot of his own woes to work on. So, don’t expect it to be perfect or anything here either. 

Saeran is able to breathe through the unease this time, but his MC will be there to hold his hand and help him speak to his brother about it. That first meeting is going to be a lot. It might trigger him, too. That would be the first time that Saeyoung is able to see that Saeran has someone that cares about him and that would be the selling point. If his brother is overwhelmed and scared and the one with him holds his hand and gently calms him, and removes him from the issue at hand, he’s sold. 

No hesitation. 

You protect Saeran, you show Saeyoung that you love Saeran, and that’s all he needs to see to trust you. He may not know all the details at that point but you can fucking count on him to be on board. He knows how to spot liars and people with bad intentions, and you don’t have that. 

He wouldn’t forget to tell you that, either. 

I think even more than that when he’s around the MC, he will notice how they just know when to touch Saeran’s hand and calm him. Saeran and his Mc have this silent communication. They don’t even really need words. They just look at each other and understand. That’s not something that is easily found in any relationship and when you see people that work in harmony you can’t help but smile. Saeyoung has hardly ever seen Saeran smile and you know when he sees it, he feels grateful that someone was there for Saeran when he couldn’t be there. 

There’s going to be guilt and other feelings in that but he’ll swallow that down. One more thing to add to his list of things to talk about when he’s ready to get his own help. 

Saeyoung and GE Saeran are going to interact slowly but surely. They’re going to be awkward... tense... maybe not angry, but there will be tight moments that feel overwhelming for both of them. Saeran might get angry and Saeyoung might be upset so there’s no avoiding a fight here and there but it may not be as violent as with SE Saeran and Saeyoung. Them getting to know each other is like getting to know a stranger... it’s been nearly a decade, they really don’t know each other at all. 

Sad as that is, it’s fun to get to know each other again. Saeyoung gets to learn things about his brother all the time and he writes that down, trying to make things right and make up for the past... Saeran swallowing back his shame and telling his brother that he’s not mad, and them just looking forward. It’s not always easy but I do think that GE Saeran and Saeyoung will have a different kind of relationship given purely from the fact that Saeran was allowed to choose recovery instead of being forced into it. 

[chessdaze]

Three Wishes Institute: New Locations part 2

I realized I forgot a few locations in my last post about new locations, so I decided to write out the rest here! Under Read more for Length

Crystal Woods:

The crystal woods is a beautiful place, so much so that beautiful seems like a lacking term. The area is full of crystalized trees and nature, yet it’s all entirely organic and the animals who live in the woods have adapted to the environment, eating crystalized foot or grass like it is nothing. Some animals even have crystals growing off of them - it’s an entirely strange and beautiful phenomenon that modern science is still trying to explain.

The woods might be out of the way from a lot of places (the closest city being around two hours away), but it’s not a tourist trap or even a place people visit often. There are people who come to research, people who come to buy land, but they’re all eventually turned away by the residence. The people here are almost all dwarves or descendants of dwarves, and take pride in the land they stand on. There is also a mine, like in the old stories about dwarves serving a princess, and a lot of the residence work there on a normal basis.

It’s a hub of history and tradition, and thanks to modern technology some people have gotten together to properly document all about their land and it’s history - they don’t mind it they simply didn’t want outsiders to do it, not trusting them to really understand or take everything they talk about seriously.

They do however allow new people to move in if they intend to work in the mine or on the fields to pick and sell crystalized crops (this is their major trade item with other cities / countries, and how the town has reminded in good shape for so long). Though it’s rumored that there is an...extensive interview process.

Emil and Otto are from here, and are one of the bigger families within the small town. Not just from the fact that have a lot of younger siblings, but the fact they have a lot of extended family as well. Most of which, are still pure blooded dwarves, while the twins themselves and most of their siblings are only a quarter dwarf, only having pointed ears to show for it.

Thieves Den:

The thieves den is located in a canyon, where ‘houses’ are carved into the side of the canyon wall. If it wasn’t filled with the worst people imaginable, It could be a popular tourist or vacation spot. Sadly, that is not the case. The people who live here are the worst of the worst, stealing from anyone or anything - sometimes even eachother, which starts brawls that could last all night. While they all sort of agree to follow one ‘king’ or ‘queen’ of thieves, there is no honor here, at the end of the day it’s every thief for themselves.

Still, the way they have crafted the homes in the canyon walls is both beautiful and functional. Magic and minor electricity keeps the place let up and functioning with the basics, rooms are filled with gold and other treasures gather Instead of doors there’s normally walls of beads and jewels, or expensive looking fabrics and tapestry that close off areas.

No one from the land of hot sands goes near the Thieves Den, lest they rob you blind and not even leave you with the clothes on your back. Some people from the slums seek refuge here if they have been kicked out for their ‘bad behavior’ and have no where else to go. Sometimes criminals are thrown in here by the guards of the surrounding cities as punishment for their crimes - either those criminals end up joining the den, or they aren’t heard from again.

There are two people who have connections to the den that are correctly At three wishes. One of them is unaware of the other, but the other is all too familiar with the former and occasionally tries to offer advice that only a thief could...

Sand Dune Slums:

A place that is exactly how it is described - a slum area within the Land of Hot Sands. It’s technically in the shadow of the major city (Modern Agrabah, cause idk what else they would call it honestly), so another name for the location is Agrabah’s shadow. People here are sometimes former criminals that can’t get a paying job in the city thanks to their previous record, or just people who had tried to make it big in the city and gave up at some point, or simply those who can’t afford to live in the extravagant city. Their homes are built out of layers of tarp, wood, and stone blocks - and they have to build within a certain area or else the guards from the city get mad at them, saying they’re ‘ruining the scenery’ since the city is a popular tourist spot. This is why the slums are contained to the back side / shadows of the outer city walls.

There’s a bit of a barter system in place of money, as no one really has a decent amount, ad any they’re going to spend would be spent in the city getting better quality things if that could afford it. However there’s still thugs and lowlifes here who try to steal from others without bartering at all - they only get stopped half of the time - the guards tend to turn a blind eye towards crimes that happen in the slums, focusing more on if any of the population of the slums makes trouble within the city, or throwing people out too the slums.

But, overall, the people here are pretty kind and try to welcome everyone with open arms. There’s lots of community events to keep people’s spirits up and they try to share what they get with anyone they can afford to.

Ozan is originally from here, but after stealing one too many things, he was thrown out of both the city and the slums. Left where no where else to go (other than the thieves den, but they wanted to avoid that place at all costs aswell), they wandered until they found a mirror to transport them somewhere else for them to live - which is how he came to steal items from Three Wishes Institute, and later be accepted into the headmaster’s family.

Underland:

(a big thanks to my friend Freya @twstriddle who let me use this idea that they had come up with and make a few tweaks to).

Underland is the organized crime capital of Twisted Wonderland. It is not a place you ever want to be caught in if you don’t know the unspoken rules of the place. Crime happens 24/7 here, you can barely take a look around without catching at least 3 crimes going on around you.

Having mostly been a dumping ground for the Country of Roses in the distant past, the city itself isn’t too modernized but instead has a more steam based system. This is someone’s Steampunk paradise on the surface; clock towers, exposed machinery with  running gears all day and night, Crazy new inventions being made - and thrown out - every single day. Steampunk fashion is also popular and the most sold (legal) items in the city.

Among the crime families, there is one that practically rules over them all, the Pillars. They practically have a monopoly over most of what comes in and out of the city. They maintain a decent, working relationship with the other families, but they are also the most targeted because of their status. (and funfact the leaders of the Pillars are two husbands. I would say I don’t make the rules, but I very much do in this scenario).

Some say that there has been an uproar in Underland ever since someone stole items from the Pillars and disappeared without a trace.

Chronos Gate:

A stretch of land between the Country of Roses and Underland, which is a famous tourist destination. The land has been touched with time magic, now pretty much forbidden over all of Twisted Wonderland, and while efforts were made in the past to try and correct this area’s disrupted time, no success came of it and soon people founded it as a tourist destination instead.

Different areas of the land have different time zones and seasons, as time does not match up over all of the land. One step you’ll be in summer at noon, the next it might be a dark and cold winter night. The biggest attraction is at what is considered the ‘center’ of the land, time is completely stopped. A special walkway had to be made so that people wouldn’t get trapped here as they traveled through.

Each time one enters a different time, it’s considered walking through a ‘gate’ of time, hence the name of the location.

There are also research facilities set up in multiple areas of the land, studying the time magic and how to dispel it. There are people who live here aswell, but they tend to stick to the outer edges of the land - the ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ gates, the ones closest to Underland and the Country of Roses. These are the two gates that are the most accurate as far as time goes, even if they are a few hours ahead or behind the mentioned areas.

Someone in Three Wishes is very familiar how the Gates work.

Rosa Castletown:

A mysterious castle-town that only few have heard of, and even fewer been to. Apparently it used to be an entire country, but has been dwindled down to just the castle and the surrounding city - all enclosed within large stone walls.

Silas Rosamund is from here and often praises the castle town for persevering through the times, but also has slight criticism for the town as they have not all decided to keep up with the latest technology or trends. A lot of senior citizens move to the castle town because of this, wanting a nice and simple place to retire and relax. They have the basics at least, so at the very least they aren’t entirely in the stone age.

The castle town is said to be rolled by a beautiful and powerful queen, who only shows herself on special nights of the year. International holidays being a few but also a few holidays specific to the town, such as the rose viewing festival - as the castle town, if known by anyone, is known for their roses - they even have vines of roses encasing the walls of the town.

Silas actually lived in the castle as a servant, and tended to the Queen personally, so he’s one of the only ones who has ever seen her face up close.

[pokedash55]

Acronix X Coffee Robot Crack AU

SUGGEST READING MY ECHO MEETS ACRONIX FIC BEFORE THIS

IT BUILDS ON THIS WACKY WORLD OF MINE

Click for Echo Meets Acronix Fic

To summarize//TL;DR: Acronix falls out of the time vortex at the light house a befriends Echo Zane, learns empathy and put Echo on Social media so everyone knows he exists now. 

-After he leaves echo zane with a borg watch he finds himself back in Ninjago

-Stalks borg and his fam like a creep

-Jay introduces Echo to the dyer family

-Echo and unagami are siblings now

-Acronix is kinda like Echos big brother

-But no one else accepts this

-Zane and Pix give skeptical and menacing, “if you touch him” glares

-Unagami is confused babi and likes their new brother echo

-So Like One day it’s Borg, Pix, Zane, Jay, Unagami, Echo, and Milton dyer, and Acronix in a room together  (Fic on that later :3 )

-The whole fam

-Nixie just lingers around borg tower saying random junk sometimes

-Acronix : “You either die a villian or live long enough to see yourself become…”

-Pix: “A very annoying customer who is about to be escorted out of the building?”

-“UH NO. Wrong answer Pix (“dont call me pix”). REDEEMED. Cause I’m like… totally redeemed now”

-Just holds up a high five for the room and left hanging by everyone

-Jay’s like :Yeeeoree not part of our group”

-So like Acronix and Echo Zane are bro’s now cause I said so??

-Everyone: Nix is part of the Borg Family

-Me: Well YES, but actually no

-This isn't really a Future thing

-In this they're mostly frenemies kinda??

-But Acronix does really like him and borg tower and Borg is too nice to throw him out XD

-Acronix has zip money and doesn’t FEEL like looking for Krux rn

-Gets his morning coffee everyday bro

-Starts crushin on the Coffee manager (naming her shannon after the voice actor)

-His routine is basically wake up, coffee, Shannon, stalk borg, watch memes, think about looking for kux than fall asleep on phone

-Posts bout his lil bro alot (echo)

-Posts about Shannon ALOT

-Many many selfies of him an his coffee

-Realizes he may need to get someplace to live since he had yet to venture for krux

-Shoot money is a thing he doesn’t have

-Borg be super kind like, “You can stay at my Newly renovated highly advanced Borg Hotel but you must get a job.”

-Acronix gestures at being one of those technology intern clerks at borg industries. “Is for me?”

-”Must get a job AND leave my family alone…. For now… please?”

-Borg is too nice to the guy who kidnapped him and is infatuated with living at borg tower

-Does borg live in borg tower?

-Gunna say he does

-Cause Acronix just LOITERS in borg tower 24/7

-Like its like hours after closing of the downstairs shop and Pix is like getting her suit on and forcefully escorting Nixie out of the premises

-So anyway Nix has to get a job

-Ugh entry level Jobs are SO beneath him.

-Pouts uwu

-Gets a job as a barista to at least have fun with someone cool

-Ronin notices that sales have gone up in the coffee shop since Acronix has started hanging around there, because the girls think he’s pretty and he posts a lot on social media.

-Ronin wants this, but doesn’t want to have to actually pay Acronix for being a faceman.

-Hires him “as a barista”. Basically he hires Acronix to sit at the counter and look pretty, while giving the joint free advertising.

-Acronix totally doesn’t notice this and is fine with being completely exploited and underpaid.)

-Acronix X Coffee Bot! (In this she’s named Shannon)

-Shannon is like… chill and rude, but never offensive

-Cheats in chess

-Smug about it too like deamn she mean

-Epic moves (Both spinny sign and juggling. And makes epic coffee)

-Unflinching at a fire

-Complete apathy

-Throws "Floyds"  teapot plan away immediately cause she doesn’t get paid enough for this sh*t

-Says she doesn’t drink coffee but than is seen drinking coffee that lier

-Bad habit of Ignoring stufft. Ignores the upgrade, ignores her lie detector, ignores the fact the -machine is literally ice frozen

-She wears a miniskirt and a crop top/bra thingy to WORK. On the clock! savage

-Nixie is confirmed to get crushes easily and like powerful/ mean woman (Machia)

-Also he has no shame in liking nonhumans

-Love technology so would totally vibe with her

-Robotsexual for sure

-Powercouple

-Since she is still A.I, so Nix’s outgoing and I don’t care i'm great loud personality would really surprise her and she’d be inspired/impressed by his lack of chill and lack of care

-She has a bit of sass and goth hot topic to her but also still has that robot innocence that would blend nicely with Acronix since he is also Abrasive and rude on the outside, but is a tad of a softy coward (He hugs his bro and cowers behind him and gets adorably defensive when he snarks at him)

-He’d teach her so much about being more alive… maybe a bad influence but she’d dig it

-He calls her Shay almost constantly

-He hates being called Nix

-Like he is a prideful warrior who expects people to use his full name in respect

-But Shannon is too cool for that

-Calls him Nix sometimes anyway

-Respects her boldness

-The audacity to do so without permission!

-Shannon owns a motorcycle because come on

-Ridin home on a sick bike together

-Stealin stuff when people aren’t looking

-Banned from Ronin thrift shop for sure (they're lucky they weren't fired after that night. But he literally can't fire shannon)

-Chill on friday nights at Laughys karaoke.

-Not singing, just laughing at how stupid other people look singing drunk kareoke

-So a jock dork egotist and a apathetic punk bot walk into a bar

-Dareth honestly doesn’t know this guy was the one sending snakes after his trophies so he just treats him like a normal costumer

-Neither of them care about Dareth’s attempts at small talk.

-Too busy loving themselves like idiots

-She kicks his ass in strategy video games and he destroys her in battle royal stuff

-Both are equally bored by like Animal crossing and other fake life games YAWN so much work

-Shannon enjoys the thrill of racing games

-Nixie plays em but it’s not his best game

-Both GEAMMERS (but in a frighteningly cool way. They somehow both avoid nerd status… nixie still a dork tho. Jock dork)

-She makes coffee art of her hubbies face.

-He gives her so much social media attention

-Acronix gives her coffee shop media rep and he loves the petty feeling of beating Wu at something

-She doesn’t quite get his excitement in it (cause she’s on neutral terms with Wu) but loves the media attention

-She doesn’t get his phrases and he finds that both aggravating and endearing

-“Um I’m Aconic”

-Shannon: “So you’ve been lying about your name this whole time?

-Acronix: “...?”

-“That's honestly sick”

-Acronix “… “

-One day they joy ride on a motorcycle

-End up loitering around borg tower

-Borg officially meets Shannon and is interested in her origin

-Her design is not like he has seen but it also seems familiar

-She says she doesn't remember much other than working for ronin

-"Ronin" borg mutters spitefully

-He has a history of y'know.. Messing with his tech (dismantling pixal and selling zane hmmm)

-Does a diagnostic code scan

-Acronix worried bout his bae and hyped he was actually invited in for once.

-Progress on that "friendship"

-He discovers her model and general code is similar if not almost exactly the same as pixal’s code

-Ronin scrapped together with some mechanical help from his friends the walkers to make a functioning robot manager with borg tech he scrounged up and a stolen copy of pixal’s blueprints ( maybe he took pictures of them when he sold her to chen) and specs so he wouldn't have to pay for multiple employees. Just having the one really efficient one would save him thousands

-So shannon is pixals sister

-And her parents are The walkers, Ronin, and borg

-The family tree only grows people

-So Acronix is apart of the ninja family now if he marries Shannon

-Here's a chart if you're as confused as I am here:

-Anyway Shay doesn't really care much

- Her expression doesn't change

-She had never really gone out of her way to worry where she was from so it wasn't a huge revelation

-It was to nixie tho

-As the extravert he was (and has extensive experience of being a sibling) he had to make sure she got to know her new family NOW

-Like in the middle of the night now

-He never waits for things to happen

-Pix is first and she is about to power down for the night when...

-DOOR SLAMS OPEN

-"Hi SIS!!" Acronix just screams

-"hey. I'm like your sister now." Obvi shannon is more lowkey about it

-Shannon and pixal mildly get along

-Questions her taste in men alot

-Acronix chills in the back already bored and ready to move on.

-Although he's annoyed by them, the ninja were next up

-Zane and Jay are both family now

-Shannon starting to think he's using all this to fill the void of his brother being gone.

-Cause she has no interest for or against meeting these people but Nix sees it as urgent

-But he seems happier than usual so she'll let him throw her name around for a while. She did mooch off his social media so it was only fair

-Anyway eventually Acronix does find his brother, and tries to explain this whole mess to his less-than-thrilled twin

-God once Krux gets back tho

-“Hey bro! I married a robot she’s amazing!”

-He’s just taking selfies with her in hot topic outfits both of them

-“God no my brothers Robotsexual. My worst nightmares have been realized”

-Krux can only stare in horror at the people his brother now considers “family”

-Wu’s students?!, Robots!?, what EVEN IS AI?!?!?

-He eventually gets over it

-eventually maybe

-At least he can admire her attitude

-Will still mess with his bro tho.

-This is the worst timeline imaginable.

-But I can't apologize for art

[sepublic]

The Unspoken Story with Representation & Diversity

           Y’all ever have this feeling, where you see a character… And their experiences just immediately resonate with you, and you just feel and KNOW exactly what they’ve been through, without them necessarily having to say or present it aloud within the text? Like you can tell this character borrows exactly from this specific experience, and so while others unfamiliar with it may not get the idea, or need clarification… For the kind of audience that really gets and understands how it goes without saying, it’s an almost clever, implicit show-not-tell way of conveying to those who get it, exactly what’s going on? AKA subtext?

           An example would be this one time in Fullmetal Alchemist, where we have characters Jerso and Zampano, who’ve been experimented on and given the ability to transform into monstrous chimeras, and then back. Despite being able to function as both regular human AND chimera however, Jerso and Zampano differ from their teammates Darius and Heinkel in that they’re not big fans of their new bodies… They actively hate them and feel uncomfortable with them, and want to go back to being regular humans. And to me, I never got this at the time as I was a young and inexperienced kid- I made up in my head that maybe Jerso and Zampano’s alterations caused them chronic pains, or something like that. Otherwise, I had to wonder if it was just insufficient writing…?

           But then I met someone, a trans woman and a fellow Fullmetal Alchemist fan. And she explained how she immediately understood Jerso and Zampano’s experiences, and how it connected to her own dysphoria. There wasn’t anything wrong with the body she used to have, it just… wasn’t her, and that’s why she felt so much more liberated when she recognized her true identity! And when I heard this from her, it just… clicked. It suddenly made SO much sense, and I never again questioned Jerso and Zampano’s dilemma, never tried to justify it in my head by providing headcanons of downsides to their chimera forms. 

          I was reassured that this kind of experience and feelings were real and valid, that the story didn’t have to justify them to me because they already tangibly existed in real life- This WAS something that happens, in a sense. I didn’t have to worry about confirming it for myself when I knew that others got the idea, since just because I didn’t understand, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I didn’t personally relate, but I knew it existed, and thus I could feel sympathy and believe in this by trusting the experiences of others... My experiences are not universal, and this of course has an effect on how I engage with media, ensuring my knowledge and analysis is always limited.

          I’ve heard real-life anecdotes about how dysphoria can make someone feel like a monster, and while this hasn’t been outright confirmed within Fullmetal Alchemist itself… There’s always the potential of subtext. Unintentional, or otherwise- Given the series’ recurring themes of finding a body you’re actually comfortable with, or coming to terms with it, as part of the whole disability experience with characters such as our titular protagonist.

          It’s a sort of implication to a specific experience, a metaphor for it, that allows those who get it to instantly fill in the gaps. To get into a philosophical tangent, it reminds me of how stories are really defined, a lot, not just by the author; But how an audience engages with them, how stories are defined in different ways by different people. Now, obviously there are examples where some parts of the text are outright indisputable and not up for debate, such as Star Wars being Anti-Fascist for example. But my point is, writing a story can involve a lot of thought as to the type of audience you’re writing for… Especially when it comes to representation.

          When it comes to representation, when someone is writing for a marginalized group, the writer doesn’t need to lay down much within the text; Because they KNOW that the people they write it for will get it. Others not of that group and not familiar with its struggles can still generally get by, but for those who really engage with the material, or share that same experience that is being alluded towards… There’s an added depth, a bonus facet to the story that only adds to and enriches the experience, even more than it already is.

           And, sometimes it can be a little frustrating, to trying to convey this to someone who doesn’t quite get it, and you start to wonder if maybe you’re just projecting a bit. Maybe this is all in your head, it’s not really there, or that wasn’t necessarily the author’s intention at least. You know there’s something that’s supported by how this characters shares this experience; It’s not stated within the text, but you can tell it’s there, because that’s such an integral part of the experience you’re used to, and the character is clearly a part of that as well. And when you apply this consideration, it just suddenly puts everything into a new light, adds that additional depth as I mentioned earlier…

          And you really can’t ignore it, because you feel it just adds so much enriching layers to the media, that maybe you’re doing it a disservice to not openly acknowledge and defend this take as if it were real. You feel you have to defend this interpretation of yours, because you feel that this character really, clearly is meant to connect to that experience that resonates with you and others; And it can be a little frustrating if others just don’t get it, even if you can’t necessarily blame them for not doing so. It’s because you know the text is talking about people like you, so it feels like you really are more of an expert on this matter, that you’ve got a lot to add that needs to be taken into consideration, if the author is setting up your group to have an inherent advantage in understanding what’s going on.

          When asked to explain yourself, you feel a little embarrassed because maybe you’re relying too much on your own experience and not the actual text… And it feels almost silly to cite yourself as the main, if not the only necessary, point of evidence. You start to question and doubt if what you and others have gone through, is worth considering. What you’re saying sounds stupid at face-value because it lacks context, and a lot of things without context sound flimsy… Aloud, from a ‘rational’ standpoint I suppose, it sounds foolish to rely on such personal emotions, because surely the author doesn’t know you specifically and wasn’t drawing from what you went through.

          Maybe you’re unloading a bunch of stuff that isn’t necessarily relevant to the subject, maybe you’re asking too much for people to connect your experiences to what’s in the text, and thus you’re really stretching things… And handing out waytoo much information as well. It can feel like you’re boiling down your reasoning to, “Because I said so,” and that doesn’t sound right nor fair to the person you’re conveying your take towards, insisting they take you at face-value without being given their owed explanation, because anyone should be questioning and critical of what they’re given.

          Perhaps you just need to ‘detach’ yourself from things, look at it objectively… But what is objective, what is the default perspective? I don’t think there actually is one. So when you have to approach the text as JUST the text, you remember that that text is being written by someone, and that someone has a lot of things in their head that influences them, but not everything can be explicitly written down. A lot of the inspirations and experiences that this creator draws from aren’t shared amongst everyone who engages with their story.

          And if you feel this creator is resonating with that specific experience of yours, you become a lot more confident that this is where they were drawing from, and thus this is being alluded towards between the lines; Because it just makes so much more sense this way! You might be wrong- But what if you’re right? You don’t want to discourage people from finding stuff that could be out there, anything is better than nothing, creation and discovery should be enabled, even on the off-chance that there’s nothing there, because at least not you know for sure there isn’t anything, and thus your curiosity has been sated to an extent.

          Even if the creator hadn’t intended it to be this way, the experiences of others can reassure them that there’s nothing more that needs to be said, because they alone can fill in the gaps… And it kind of ties into how a lot of media intentionally leaves stuff open for interpretation, or at least allows certain takes. It’s kind of like how a lot of fans resonated with Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot, as her struggles feel so topical to that of a trans person; And while the creator confessed to never intending this, they could recognize the similarities between what they’d written and what trans people go through, so maybe there IS a connection there to consider!

          TL;DR Diversity and Representation IS in fact important, and a vital part of not only engaging with media, but just with the experiences of others in general. It can reveal meaning that isn’t immediately obvious to others, and/or create it by recognizing the fundamental similarities within the text to real life experiences, and how that piece of media’s themes both contribute towards and are supported by what a person or group has witnessed. Your experiences DO matter, even if they’re a minority; Perhaps especially because of this, as it gives you a new and rare angle that is not often known, and this piece of media’s connection to that experience can be used as a medium to convey it to others who don’t resonate the same way.

          It is through media that people can learn about the experiences of others even if they’ve never went through such things personally… An experience so intimately conveyed that you may as well be there, you can imagine yourself there, and so you don’t exactly have to have gone through it in real life to now understand- Especially since making someone go through that experience in real life has both logistical and ethical concerns. It encourages empathy, where you may not necessarily know what this person is going through; But you’re willing to open your mind, consider, listen, and change and/or add to your current knowledge and understanding.

          It’s also important to remember that even people within the same group have different ways of engaging with that specific experience, and that these diverse takes are all valid and worth considering; So if a person from that same group as you differs, perhaps consider listening? Of course, if someone believes there’s depth and the other insists there isn’t, perhaps hearing out the former option provides more room for discussion and thought, that while not canon, can pay off and inspire in other ways regardless, and thus be meaningful and worthwhile in the end.

[idreamtofthereaper]

Kim Jungwoo (Clarity Oneshots)

NCT 127 // NCT DREAM // WAYV // Clarity Main Masterlist

A series of oneshots for different groups, for each member, wherein instead of them being your boyfriend, how they will be as your ex.

Jungwoo + YN

Oh man Jungwoo was the epitome of sunshine and flowers and butterflies

you couldn’t live a day without seeing him or hearing his voice

he was your little puppy

and you were his, end of story 

for him, you were his world

his best friend, girl friend, prank buddy, teacher, rock, wife

whatever it is, you were his support

he was your other half

and you were his

nothing could ever break you two apart

and that remained true

well, not really

What Happened?

“Mark? Why are you calling from Jungwoo’s phone? He said he left 15 minutes ago, is he still there?”

“Noona, there’s been an accident. Jungwoo-hyung is, he’s not doing good, noona. He, the doctors, they’re uh, they’re operating, they’re operating.”

“This is not funny Mark, where is Jungwoo?”

“Jaehyun-hyung is on his way, he’s going to pick you up.”

You dropped the call

it was too late for pranks, it was 2 am for goodness sake

but with his serious and shaky voice

this was far from a prank

and Mark isn’t one to join in pranks like this

and jungwoo wouldn’t pull a prank this far

“Yn?” Your head snapped to the side and rushed to Jaehyun, who opened the door of the house which wasn’t even locked, as you were expecting Jungwoo anytime soon.

“Please tell me you guys are joking, please.” You sobbed, phone clutched tightly on your hand as you walked towards him lifelessly. 

Jaehyun couldn’t answer you, and could only take you in his arms. You sobbed on his figure as he held you close, tears that you couldn’t form earlier now streaming down your face.

Jaehyun’s tears on your shoulders and silent cry didn’t added the comfort.

The Beginning

You never left the hospital, you didn’t have the guts to do it. 

His parents came and soon after, yours paid a visit too

no one could talk to you

you were unresponsive as you sat beside Jungwoo’s body

you didn’t want to hear what they said

you can’t

“Is this the family of Kim Jungwoo?” You immediately shot up from your seat, the couple of his members sitting down stood up at the news.

“I’m his girlfriend, yn, his parents are on the way.” You answered immediately. “How is he? Is he okay?”

The doctor let out a heavy sigh, then begun to remove his glasses. “We tried everything we could-”

“I asked one question, is he okay?”

“We did everything we could, but the force he received was too much. He is brain dead.” You let out a shaky breath, knowing what the term meant and even hear some people behind you sniffled louder.

“Wh- no. He could still be saved then, right? He’s okay, he still has a chance.”

“No, Ms yn. People who are brain dead are, they’re dead.” The doctor answered, even saying the words silently, and with a hint of wincing. “I’m so sorry, we did everything we could. But the force he received at the accident was simply too much. We put him on life support for the mean time, but, there is no chance of him ever waking up again. His brain isn’t functioning anymore, once we take him out his life support-”

“I KNOW. I GET IT. I KNOW.” You yelled, feeling all emotions at once. It was obvious you weren’t taking the news lightly, no one is really, and you weren’t in the state to listen to anyone. 

Instead, Taeyong stepped in your place and held you by his side as he listened to the doctor, asking a few questions but you really couldn’t listen to anything. The doctors words repeating over and over again.

Brain Dead. Death. 

Jungwoo is dead

Day 4

“Yn, dear, grab something to eat.” 

“No, eomeonie it’s okay. I’m not hungry, you should eat.” You answered, managing to give her a small and lifeless smile as you continued rubbing your thumb across Jungwoo’s. “I’ll be here in case he wakes up, I don’t want him to be alone.”

You buried your head back to the bed, feeling your eyes drop. Feeling the fatigue and weariness getting to you, your head shot up and shook your head slightly to wake yourself up.

And after opening your eyes, you saw both of his parents still standing but now, looking at you with pity. “Yn, we have something to discuss with you. We have been talking about this and uh...” Jungwoo’s mom, who has been yours as well, looked at his father. Both of them met each other’s eyes and it was then you noticed how they were also looking pale and withered. 

“What? Is there anything wrong?”

“We thought about this for a couple of days, and it’s not an easy decision, but we talked to the doctors and uh, we, we want to remove Jungwoo from his life support.” You sat straight up and looked back and forth between them, then let out a chuckle and laid your head back to the bed.

“That’s really funny, but I know you guys wouldn’t just give up on your son like that.”

“Yn, Jungwoo is dead. He can’t come back to us-”

“You see that?” You pointed at the heart monitor, which is showing ups and downs lines as it beep. “That means his heart is still alive, don’t give up on him just yet.”

“We’re not giving up on him!” His mother whaled, clutching closely to her husband as she explained. “We want him to rest, that’s all we could do for him. Yn, let Jungwoo rest-”

“He has been laying down for 4 days, he hasn’t opened his eyes for 4 days. Didn’t moved, didn’t flinched, didn’t talked. If this is not considered rest I don’t know what is-”

“It’s death, yn.” 

Day 6

“Noona, can we please talk-”

“Donghyuck, I know his sister put you up with this. It’s still a no, why are you guys so eager to give up on him?!”

“Noona, you’re making things harder for you, and for everyone else. No one could grieve properly because hyung is still here-” Hyuck said and looked at Jungwoo briefly, before his eyes dropped back down. “I couldn’t grieve properly because he’s still here, there will always be that lingering feeling that he’s going to wake up even if it’s clear he wouldn’t.” Donghyuck said, sobbing as he let out his words.

Still, you shook your head towards him as you clutched Jungwoo’s hand tighter. “Donghyuck-’

“Noona, everyone is hurting a lot more. Nobody wants to act like he’s gone, even if he is. Noona, Jungwoo-hyung deserves to rest and be in peace, he suffered enough.” It’s noticeable how after his words from earlier, you’ve neglected everything he said after.

You were making coffee on the table as Donghyuck approached you. “Noona, please think about this. You deserve some peace too.”

Day 7

After getting little to not sleep for the past 7 days, you decided to take a quick trip at the vending machine 3 floors down to get some sweets and coffee to get your alertness back up.

While walking back to Jungwoo’s room, you stopped on your tracks when you saw Jungwoo’s mother sitting down beside him. She was caressing his face and his hands while looking at him dearly. “You’ve grown up so well. You were such a great man, for your friends, to the random people you meet, to your family and especially to yn.” She let out a faint chuckle. “I think that’s just one of the reasons why it’s so hard to let go of you, Jungwoo-ah. You’ve created such a great impact to everyone you crossed paths with. Yn, she’s going to be fine with us. You don’t have to worry about yn, I know she’s taking this one harder than everyone else, but I will assure you she’s going to be fine.” His mother said, leaning down to brush a hair away from his face as she placed a kiss on his forehead.

You step back and sat down on the chairs at the hallway.

Your teared up as you finally realized the reality of the situation.

You lost Jungwoo.

Day 7, 9:14 pm

“Yn, please think about this-”

“I understand, noona. I want to spend some time with Jungwoo for a while.” His sister nodded before the both of you shared a tight hug, rubbing each other’s back in comfort before she pulled away.

She gave you a quick kiss on the top of the head before walking away, even with her back facing you, you noticed how she was wiping tears away from her eyes. 

You closed the door as you took a deep breath, stabilizing your thoughts and breathing before facing Jungwoo. 

You took a sit by his bed as you grabbed his hands and intertwined it with yours. “Hey baby snoopy.” As the nickname fell from your lips, all composure was lost.

It’s been a while since you called him that.

“I know you hated how I called you Jungwoo I’m sorry I’ve been calling you that for an entire week.” You said, followed by a chuckle as you wiped tears from your cheeks with your free hand. “Baby snoopy, I want you tell you that I’m so sorry. For everything I said that caused you, us, sleepless nights and days where we couldn’t talk. I’m so sorry for doubting you at times, I’m so so sorry. I’m sorry for keeping you here, in a very boring and caged room.” You said, lifting his hands up a bit, now resting on top of your lap.

“I just really couldn’t let you go. We’ve known each other for more than a decade and we’re together for almost half of it. I just couldn’t remember a life without you anymore.” Your hiccups appeared  as these words left your mouth, wiping your face with your shirt. “I just couldn’t, I don’t know what will happen to me, baby. But I can’t be selfish, after everything you’ve done for me, for us. I’m willing to let you go now, baby. Just give me a little reassurance that what I’m doing is the right thing, just one last thing.”

You pushed your hair back after saying this, and then took a deep breath and after you calmed down a bit, you realized how stupid you sound.

That until a specific smell, a smell you memorized because of Jungwoo, surrounded the room. 

You are not the best cook. That’s why when you managed to do some amazing  Samgyetan, a korean soup dish with a whole chicken in there, Jungwoo fell in love instantly. To the soup and fell in love with you more. 

Ever since then, you need to always have chicken and soup ingredients in store as he would ask you make some at the weirdest times, either 4 am on 7 pm. 

You personally weren’t really a big fan of soup, but ever since you served it to Jungwoo you learned to love it.

You laughed softly as the smell of freshly made soup and ginseng filled the room, looking at Jungwoo’s face as you nodded. You lifted his hands and placed the back of it on your cheek. “You really love that medicine soup? I thought you were just joking.” You said, now the tension, heaviness, doubt and worry was lifted from you.

After a few minutes, his hands still connected to you and the smell lingering, you opened your eyes and nodded. “Okay baby, I understand. I want you to know that I will be okay, I’m going to be okay. But if you ever think I will forget about you, or that I wouldn’t miss you every second of the day, you’re wrong. I love you. I love you so much, and I always will. I will never forget you baby snoopy, I will love you forever, I’m yours forever.”

A month later

the night you finally said goodbye to Jungwoo, you still didn’t left his side

but you did finally get some sleep

and when you woke up, his parents was inside the room

and with ease, you finally agreed with removing his life support

you helped with everything, with every preparations

his family, yours and mutual friends were there to be with you

and after his body was finally put to rest

you decided to visit Ukraine

it was the main country the both of you talked about wanting to visit a lot

the trip was okay, to say the least

you couldn’t enjoy it fully as your other half wasn’t with you

but everytime you would feel sad

random bursts of cold or hot air would surround

as to maybe scold you for being sad at such a beautiful country

you came back 3 weeks later

stopping by at his family’s house before going back to yours

the only time you’ve been there was when you packed your stuff 

and while on the trip, you thought about selling the place

you didn’t want to let it go as all of the memories with Jungwoo was there

but you couldn’t live in it and be okay

and you promised him you will be okay

after talking with his family, his older sister decided to take the place

you already found a place by the city

you didn’t remove the luggage from your car as you stepped inside the house, the boxes you asked from your family already inside 

the first thing you packed was Jungwoo’s stuff

some of it you’ll keep for yourself while the rest will be to his parents

you laughed at the memories of every item you’ll touch

the snowglobe he bought because he said it looked vintage but turns out was just bathed in mud

the hoodie that would always go missing and always magically appear on you

the memories was overwhelming, but it was okay

as you finally cleaned out the place, you look at it one last time

the boxes already in your car and on your hands was the photo you first took with Jungwoo upon buying the house

as you scanned the place, a sense of clarity came to you

a house was just a house, jungwoo was your home

[k-writer1998]

Black, White, Grey (3/3)

Having Bang Chan as your best friend is great cause he’s literally the best but not so much when you’ve had a crush on him for a majority of the friendship.

Angst

w.c: 2.1k

Part 1     Part 2

A/N: Depending on the reaction on this last part, I may or may not make an extension/alternate ending thing but don’t get your hopes up 😅

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

      It’s been a week and I’ve just been swamped trying to finish up my schedules while my manager finalized the details on the new project. Because of this I hadn’t had any time to see or talk to any of the boys much, but without a doubt Chan has just been super weird all week. He’s been checking in more often and has been more attentive to my responses than normal, what's with him lately? I shook the thought from my mind as my manager pulled up to the JYP building. Don’t dwell on it. If the weird vibe is still there when you stop by then you can worry, if not then you’re over thinking.

“After this last photo shoot you’ll have a few days off to pack. We could be there as long as half a year so make sure you have everything. You sign a few papers on my desk then you get some free time while I get everything organized and faxed over okay? ”

“Got it, I should be around the dance practice rooms but if not I’ll text you.”

“The plane ticket is already settled. Once it gets closer to the date I’ll send you the full details but it should be an evening flight.”

“Okay we can go over it later, let’s go in first.”

      As we turned to the building my feet froze in place as my eyes connected with Minho’s. Shit, no one was supposed to find out. My manager looked between the two of us before telling me that he would meet me inside. Minho’s eyes narrowed at me as he came up. I avoided his gaze, instead taking notice of the drinks in his hand and tried to deflect.

“Did you lose a game and have to go buy everyone drinks?��� I smiled.

“Yeah, but what was that about? Where are you going?”

“... do I have the option to withhold that information?”

“I mean you can, I’ll just ask Chan-hyung.”

“Wait, don’t! I kinda… didn’t tell him either…”

“Okay now you have to spill if not even your best friend knows. Does it have to do with Chan-hyung?”

“No, I’m not that dramatic,” I rolled my eyes, “I’ve actually been planning this for a while and I finally got the opportunity to do it. I’ve never brought it up because nothing was set in stone yet.”

“Well how long have you known?”

“Since last week…”

“A week? So you’re going overseas for six months for whatever and you didn’t plan on telling any of us?”

“I mean I’ve had to finish a lot of things and we both were so busy-”

“Were you going to tell us today?”

      He knew it was all excuses and he was calling me out on my bullshit. I wasn’t planning on telling then until probably the day before the flight because I can’t do goodbyes. I knew they would all be happy for me, even encourage me, but there was something about all of that that made it harder for me to go. I was already dealing with a heavy heart about Chan, I didn’t need another thing weighing me down when I’m barely functioning as it. It was selfish I know but I needed at least some mental stability intact if I was going to be doing this.

“I wasn’t… but I have my reasons okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” he scoffed as he turned to the door.

“Minho wait,” I called as I grabbed his arm, “I’m sorry okay? A lot has happened in such a short period of time and I’m trying to deal with it all but my brain can’t catch up and I don’t know how to put everything into words right now. I’ll tell the others on my own terms but please keep this a secret for now.”

      I saw his jaw tense as he kept his eyes closed for a moment before he turned to glare at me. His eyes scanned my face for a moment before he sighed and I relaxed a bit.

“Fine. But you better hurry up about it. I’m not keeping it for long.”

“Thanks Minho, I will. I’ll meet you at the studio in a bit okay?”

      He shooed me away and I gave his arm a brief hug before meeting my manager inside so I could sign what he needed then left to go meet the boys. Hanging out was pretty normal minus a bit of extra attitude from Minho and Chan being less weird but still not himself. The next two days were filled with me figuring out what to pack while fighting the little voice in my head that wanted me to just stay in bed and never leave. I’m currently staring at my phone, living room strewn with things that need to be packed, as I tried to figure out how to text the boys I’m leaving without everyone getting mad… especially a certain someone. As I erased yet another failed attempt at trying to tell them, my door chimed as my door code was being inputted. Before I could think of who it was, Chan bursted in and I got up to meet him halfway. He was breathing heavily, looking quite the mess but the troubling factor was his eyes. They were red and filled with confusion, betrayal, pain… God damn it Minho couldn’t you have given me more time?

"Why didn't you tell me you were leaving? What happened to no secrets? Why is it that I had to find out from Minho?!"

“Chan calm down… I was about to tell everyone, no one was supposed to know before. Minho only knows because he overheard it while I was talking with my manager. He wasn't supposed to say anything though..."

"Why? Did you just want to disappear before I could say anything?"

"I didn’t mean to keep a secret okay? I have my reasons for hiding it just like you have your reasons for hiding whatever has been making you so weird lately," I countered.

      I wasn’t the only one who was going to be confronted. I mean his reaction was a bit extreme just for an overseas trip, even if it was an unannounced one, but if we’ve already reached this point might as well get some answers. 

“What are your reasons then? And I haven’t been weird.”

“I’ll tell you once you tell me because we both know that you aren’t being yourself. You’re treating me like glass, as if anything you do will hurt me,” I narrowed my eyes at him.

“I'm not, I just don't know how to act when- It's just when Minho-" he ran a frustrated hand through his hair before he asked, barely above a whisper, "Are… are you leaving because of me?"

"What? Chan, why would you-" 

      My heart stopped. As the pieces fell in place, the color drained from my face. It makes sense. Why he’s been so weird lately and that nagging feeling that I’ve been having that something was wrong… 

"How long?"

“I-”

“Chan don’t act like you don’t know what I’m asking.”

"Since a week and a half ago..."

      A week and a half ago? The only time I would have talked about it where he could catch it was…

“… you weren’t asleep were you?”

“I was! But I woke up because of Minho and I was trying to go back to sleep when…” 

      Panic flushed his face as he explained himself and I just numbly nodded in understanding. I couldn’t help but sigh at what was unraveling right now. I’ve been getting away with it for so long that I wasn’t careful. That’s on me. 

“Can we just go back to normal, please? This whole treating me like I’m porcelain, being super careful about what you do and the constant glances,I hate it.” 

“I- I just… I don’t know how to act. You’re my best friend and I love you but-”

      I cut him off before he finished. The pure confusion written all over his face reminds me why I’ve hidden this for years. The frustration at myself boils beneath my skin, I’m trying not to let Chan’s actions get to me… but it does. It fuels my anger more, I don’t need pity and I don’t need protection.

"Chan, there is no option where I’m not hurt in some way. Would you leave Eunhye to be with me, break two hearts at the price of one? Or would you just not date anyone to protect my feelings at the price of your own? Do you think I’d be happy or even okay with you doing that?!” I snapped.

      He was shocked at my sudden fire of questions. He stayed silent, trying to find an answer but the growing conflict that spread across his face was the only answer I needed. I let out a sigh, so much has happened. Him finding a girl he likes, me getting that overseas audition, him finding out about my feelings… it’s overwhelming. I take a moment to collect myself before I speak again.

“Sorry… I just… I hoped to never have this conversation.”

      The lost look in his eyes broke my heart because I know that look. He’s nearly perfected hiding his feelings from his facial expressions, but his eyes always betrayed him. They held fear and slight panic as they darted around my face, trying to figure out my next move.

“I’m okay Chan,” I offered him a weak smile, “We’ve known each other for far too long and that’s how I know I was never an option. If there was a chance for an “us” I of all people would have caught it, don’t you think?”

       He averted his gaze, the guilt washing over him as he shrank back and started to fiddle with the hem of his hoodie sleeve. I took a step forward, placing my hands on the sides of his face and gently brought him to look back at me. I’ve done this countless times when I found him in one of his lows, where doubt and uncertainty had found its way into his heart. Something so intimate that belonged to us, at this moment, was yet another grey area that was finally finding clarity. I know that after this things will change and neither Chan or me want that… but we’ll have to learn to live with it. 

“Your heart's too big Chan, and I can't blame you. It's one of the reasons I fell for you, but you know what's in your heart. It’s obvious you really like her and that’s okay-”

“But I’m hurting you…”

“Deep down I’ve always prepared myself for this. Even if it hurts now, it won’t hurt forever and I’m wholeheartedly overjoyed that you found someone that makes you happy. So let’s stop this already okay?”

“Then why are you crying… stupid…” Chan questioned with a soft voice.

      Damn it… I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. Chan removed my hands from his face as he drew me in for a hug. I rested my forehead on his shoulder, taking in his scent as his warmth encased me. I couldn’t stop myself so I succumbed to the wave of tears that spilled from my eyes, his hoodie balling in my hands as I clung to him. It was a while before my tears stopped but Chan still rubbed circles on my back like he always did whenever I broke down. Once the tears dried and I took a moment for myself to remember this feeling… the feeling of him… I pulled away.

“I wasn’t running away from you. I got a call for a Hollywood film I auditioned for… I have to go to LA for a call back and if it works out I stay. I didn’t want to tell anyone yet in case I don’t end up landing the role you know?”

“Oh my gosh that's amazing," he responded excitedly before the remorse set in, "I’m sorry. This was a big step for you and I made it about myself… I may have thought a bit too much when I found out,” he awkwardly laughed, rubbing the back of his neck.

“You and Minho both. I’m not that dramatic to run away because of a broken heart. Do you not know me Chan?” I tease.

“My bad,” he smiled, “but we are good still… right?” 

“Yes and since you’re here did you want to stay and help me pack?” I asked, poking his side and returning the smile.

“I mean I kind of just bolted out of the dorm so why not, I’m getting in trouble anyways.”

[pinkysfaultorbrainsfault]

pinky and the brain - s1e2: of mouse and man

episode summary: brain needs money to build a perpetual answering machine to occupy everyone in the world for long enough for him to take over. to do that, he needs an absurd amount of money, so he decides to get a job in an office!

and then fake a nondairy creamer accident that turned him into a mouse, because as we all know, brain has to take the most dramatic path he possibly can in life, or he dies.

the rundown:

we open with pinky showing off his ass.

PRODUCED BY PETER HASTINGS. i assume that means the episode, and not the ass. the ass was initially produced by pinky’s parents and then helped along by the warner brothers’ dietary experts for their. mouse actors.

brain isn’t feeling it right now.

instead, as he plucks a rib from the lab’s anatomical model of a human being, and uses it to unpick his cage, he angsts - WRITTEN BY PETER HASTINGS - he angsts over the Dark Side Of Man, that has built war machines and pollution spilling factories and

VOICEMAIL.

😱

as pinky continues to stick his ass out (though onlyfans wouldn’t be launched for another twenty one years) brain runs through his latest plan, which, of course, involves voicemail.

look at those wiggles. this is a rough draft episode.

anyway brain intends to reroute all telephone conversations into his confusing, recursive, voicemail service that, he claims, will keep the human race occupied for “at least seventy two hours.”

“more than enough time for a well prepared mouse to seize control of the planet.”

“i see! so all we need now is a well prepared mouse.”

I???????

HOLY FUCK

brain is unhappy. i am not surprised.

“i am a well prepared mouse, pinky.”

“oh. well. there you are, then.”

unfortunately this plan comes with the pitfall that it will cost.... one million, six hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. which is a lot of money, or, as pinky puts it, “a lot of money!”

as brain wonders about how to raise these funds (”without running for congress”) pinky pinkys off to watch some tv.

HAVE YOU BEEN INJURED IN AN ON THE JOB ACCIDENT

YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS, EVEN ONE MILLION SIX HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS IN COMPENSATION

LENNY PARVIK GOT ME TWO HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DOLLARS

EVEN THOUGH I’M NOW NINETY PERCENT FUDGE, IT’S OKAY BECAUSE LENNY PARVIK GOT ME ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTY TWO DOLLARS SIXTEEN CENTS AND SOME CHANGE

<LOUD, INCREDIBLY DISTRESSED CRYING>

hm.

“pinky, are you pondering what i’m pondering?“

“i think so, brain, but i get all clammy inside a tent.”

anyway so brain’s new plan is to get a job, stage a

HIDEOUS ACCIDENT

and then sue them for one million, six hundred and fourteen thousand dollars in workers compensation.

this episode also has a lot of faces. god, but these mice are so bloody cute. youtube has not yet been invented, but one day it will be, and all brain has to do is sit in front of a camera and nom some corn and go O:O with his face, and everyone will be crying over him within minutes.

it’s so sad that he doesn’t know that.

but for now, he has a job interview to go to. good luck, brain! can’t be any worse than that time allsaints forgot about me and the manager acted like it was my fault.

“impressive credentials. you’re certainly qualified. are you married?”

“oh, yes, i have a lovely wife and two beautiful young children.”

“oh that’s too bad. we’re looking for someone who has no life. thank you.”

as family man walks off, dejected, in comes a completely unsuspicious fellow looking for an honest living honest living, just like in rent the musical.

his arm is acting up, a bit, but it’s fine.

“very impressive resume. princeton, harvard, six years in the industry-- tell me, mr brain, what are your long term career goals?”

“i plan on taking over the world.”

“you have drive! i like that! but confidentially, taking over the world is my job, hahahaha.”

”yes. haha. ha.”

”now. brass tax - are you married?”

“i do have a roommate. but he’s very busy with his own activities.”

HA HA HOO HOO HOO

<muah>

HAHA

“but. one more thing. about your head. isn’t it rather small?”

“no. not for my race.”

“no! no, of course not-- and your people are such... good... cooks... with their tiny heads, uh. please. excuse me for one second.”

“carol! send everyone else home! i got myself a minority person!”

BRUH I?!??!?!?!?!

anyway. brain gets the job.

“mr brain! welcome to the world of re-reinsurance!”

he’s delighted.

back at the labs, he plots his untimely demise at the hands of re-reinsurance,

stating the accident “could be bluffed by altering the mollecular matrix through a substrate platform of microwaves.”

pinky’s response to this is “look brain, i made a choo-choo.”

“oh, and me without my video camera!”

in simpler terms, he explains to pinky that he will stage an accident, “utilising the microwave oven and the non-dairy powdered creamer.”

“because”, to pinky’s apparent horror, “nobody really knows how a microwave works.”

“but why the powdered creamer, brain?”

“nobody knows how that works either.”

(and then, i guess, there’s a scene where some guys jump him on the train for some reason,

i’m only putting it here because this guy is like “oh, you’re funny, you’re a regular gallagher”

and brain’s like “you think gallagher is funny?”

):

anyway then he ties the dude into a pretzel and throws him off the train.

bonk. it adds nothing, but it’s very funny.)

“this is your cubicle right here. if you need any office supplies, ask the office manager and she should have them over in two or three months.”

it’s brain’s first day at work! his boss reads him the company policy on

vacations, personal phone calls,

and sexual harassment.

“don’t worry about it. you’re safe if you avoid all contact with other humans.”

“my goal in life.”

as brain unpacks the things that pinky has packed for his “home away from home,

awwwww.

his nosy cubicle neighbour inquires about brain’s “pet mouse,”

elaborating that he keeps mice! haha! to feed to his pet snake!

to be fair this is also me around snake people. more understandable in brain’s case, being that he is, actually, a mouse, and i am a human person who may be slightly obsessed with tiney small flofys.

;u;

(they play tennis on their lunch break and brain sets him on fire, so it’s not too bad.)

upon his return from the office, pinky, who has dolled himself up to the nines, presents brain with a Yummy Dinner of Food Pellets With Food Pellets.

i will say i think it’s really cute how this show keeps pushing the narrative that pinky just really, really wants to be an old timey housewife. he just spends his time watching i love lucy (when Fish TV isn’t on) and stuff like that and he’s just obsessed with the idea of dusting something alluringly but ineffectively and making brain little dinners.

and it’s so fucking cute!!! what??? it’s adorable. as soon as they get the world pinky better get a little dollhouse kitchen room with lime green everything and a functioning oven.

“please, pinky. i’ve had a very tough day.”

“oh, you have? you’ve had a tough day?”

“what about my day, brain? we always hear about your day, but what about mine?!”

“DO YOU EVER ASK WHAT I DID TODAY???!”

“very well pinky. what did you do today?”

“i don’t remember.”

“anything?”

“not a thing.”

“well, now i know how american gladiator stays on the air.”

the next day, at work, brain is vexed by the fact that nobody has refilled the coffee machine.

“sorry. that’s my fault. hey, you’re cute.”

“you know what they say. big ears. big earmuffs.”

.....okay.

unfortunately brain’s mechanical arm chooses now to malfunction.

she’s into it?

brain maintains that it was a mistake, and he doesn’t find her attractive at all, because brain knows how to talk to women.

she is no longer into it.

horrified by his semi-accidental fuckboy behaviour, brain heads out as quickly as he can, only to be immediately called into his boss’ office.

despite brain’s claims that “the young lady appears to have misunderstood me,” which i’m sure will hold up well on twitter,

mr boss man reveals that he has done some fact checking, and there is no record of brain attending harvard or princeton.

“oh.”

he is given the ultimatum that he either produce his diplomas, or HIS CAREER IN RE-REINSURANCE IS OH OH OVER!!!

very sad!

looks like it’s time to stage a workplace related accident.

he pours the creamer everywhere, discards his suit, and runs up to plonk himself merrily into the pile.

ahem.

HELP, HELP. A TERRIBLE  OCCUPATIONAL DISASTER. I’VE BEEN MAIMED BY AN ON THE JOB ACCIDENT REQUIRING MASSIVE WORKERS’ COMPENSATION.

as others in the office crowd around to look, brain makes his dramatic reveal.

“i’ve been turned into a mouse!”

COLLECTIVE GASP.

obviously mr boss man won’t pay that kind of money.

so, as brain emphatically tells him, I’LL SEE YOU IN COURT.

conclusion:

as the goodfeathers sit on justice’s head, and bitch about jury duty,

The Man From Washinton asserts that brain’s claim that he is a mouse is preposterous.

good thing brain has xrays to prove it! they “clearly” define his “mouse skeleton!” wait a sec and he’ll grab them.

oh shit! where they go?

(”there really is only one conclusion here.” says a local doctor.

“this man is a mouse.”

“then i’m afraid the only conclusion here, doctor,”

“is that you have never seen these.”

“i trust this might keep you quiet.”

“it might.”)

(BRUH/???????????????) (if boss man is out here bribing people with lingerie, he could have tried that way before this got to court.)

egged on by the lack of evidence in Mouse Corner, christopher walken produces the artefacts from brain’s office cubicle.

“i ask you, when was the last time you heard of a mouse winning a bowling trophy?”

“ugh. pinky.”

“yes?”

turns out pinky is here because “they’re not covering this on court tv,” but does advise brain that “it’s a good thing they didn’t find the mechanical suit, eh, brain?”

oh shit.

“pinky, you must go to the office and get that suit from the kitchen closet. do you understand? if they find that we’re sunk.”

“oh! brain! you want me to help!”

off he goes!

fall mouse. bonk.

(he sneaks into the snack delivery.)

(poit.)

(unfortunately, he gets delivered straight to the vending machine.)

(”narf? ):”)

“well. yes. i had noticed his... small, furry head, but i assumed that was normal for his people.”

“and what people would that be.”

“i’m not sure? i think they’re from europe?? maybe france.”

“the size of my head and whether i was a man before the accident is not the question, here. the fact is i am now a mouse.”

(meanwhile, at fiero:

“try the fruit rollups. they’re yummy.”

“oh, i am doing well. poit.”)

“so how exactly did the accident happen, mr brain?”

“some bizarre thing involving a microwave oven? i don’t know exactly-- no one really knows how they work.”

“incorrect! in the oven, a magnetron produces microwaves which cause water molecules to align, and reverse alignment, producing heat, and not mice.”

“the accident also involved a.... nondairy powdered creamer.”

“ah. um. oh.”

(meanwhile,

pinky attempts to drive.)

“mr brain, in your experience with other mice, are they intelligent?”

“no.”

“exactly. your honour, i contend that mr brain is simply too intelligent to be a mouse.”

oh dear.

(meanwhile,

pinky tries not to get hit by a car.)

“but-- no, noo, i’m not intelligent.”

“i am a simpleton! yes. like any average mouse!”

“um. narf.”

that’s mean, brain, considering the aforementioned narf is on his way to save your gay little ass right now, but whatever.

“so you would have no problem with me saying that albert einstien was a champion surfer.”

“what-- i mean, no.”

“or that the temperature of the sun is a comfortable seventy degrees fahrenheight.”

“i wouldn’t know--”

“or that the fermi-dirac’s distribution function is a soup kitchen?”

“that’s preposterous! your honour, the fermi-dirac's function is, for any system of identical fermions in equilibrium,”

“the probability that a quantum state of energy -- E -- is occupied!”

“my word, man! don’t you know your quantum statistics!”

heck.

bonk.

“oh, blunder.”

and what a blunder indeed! the judge decides to rule that brain’s intelligence proves that he is “not a mouse, and that being the basis for your claim, i now dismiss charges against fiero and company.”

“.....very well. i’ll go now.”

“i’m afraid not. i find you guilty of fraud, perjury, and appearing naked in a public place. take him away.”

good thing they have human man sized handcuffs for this human man! brain looks incredibly perturbed, despite the fact he could probably swim in them. and also that he... kind of lives in a prison anyway, if you think about it. oh, cool, can’t wait to evade that cage so i can go live in my other cage.

hm.

luckily, pinky arrives to save us all from that particular moral quandry.

“i got the suit, brain! i got it!”

“pinky--”

the police attempt to intercept pinky,

so he knocks them over. hoo hoo.

brain falls over,

attempts to enter the suit through the shoe,

and is squoshed for his crimes.

faced with a veritable army of police, at this point,

pinky activates the emergency protocol,

says blue lives scatter,

and fucks off out of the courthouse.

we stan a legend.

unfortunately brain got a fair few ouchies during his prison break, so pinky bandages him up. it’s very cute.

anyway, i’m giving this one to brain, on account there were, yknow, a fair few ways that could have been mitigated. fiero fucked him over, though, so i’ll give him that.

brain: 5 ½ pinky: 6 ½ outside influence: 10

 “egad, brain! brilliant!”

“but isn’t that horribly illegal?”

“............yes.”