#i was like oh is he gonna say he was looking for catharsis or closure on neptune? objectively what lf was about?

[planet4546b]

oh the saint line about osiris finding a purpose and it being mentoring is the funniest thing destiny 2 has said to me in a LONG time. you mean the mentoring that makes me legitimately angry in real life when i play lightfall? the mentoring that permanantly gave ikora the weirdest set of issues in the world? That one?

[verobatto]

Destiel Chronicles

Vol. XCV

It was a love story from the very beginning.

And You Are Not Here... (Part. III)

(13x04)

Hello my friends! This is another meta from season 13. We are still mourning with Dean...

I'm gonna focus in just one episode, because I have a lot of things to say about this one. Obviously, the majority of the things have been already analyzed by the meta community.

But, let's see what we find...

Move on

Remember how the last episode ended, with Dean blowing out his feelings and pain to his brother, so, this episode starts with Sam trying to talk with his brother about that. And by that I mean: Cas.

SAM: Hey. How you feelin’?

[DEAN is working on his laptop. He looks up at SAM, but doesn’t reply.]

Sam understands now that fact he had always suspect, what really means to Dean losing Castiel. But Dean sees it coming and doesn't answer, because he knows he let his pain and mourn talking by themselves, and now he wants to come back to hide behind his walls. But Sam won't let that goes so easy. Another heated discussion about Jack brings the topic back.

SAM: Dean, we can’t hide him forever. And, you know, just keeping him cooped up here isn’t working.

DEAN: Yeah, it is, actually. You wanna know why? Because as long as he’s here, he’s not out there doing God knows what. So what, does this mean that your plan for bringing Mom back isn’t working? ‘Cause I’ll say it again—Mom’s dead, Sam. Lucifer ripped out her freakin’ heart. Now, the sooner you can wrap your head around that, the sooner we can all move on.

(Gif set credit @demondetoxmanual )

Look at this, Sam takes Dean's words and immediately repeats the ask but with another different meaning, aeaning his brother gets immediately. Sam tilts his head, and his eyes are searching for the answer in Dean's face, because he knows he won't have the answer in words from him.

These exchange of gazes is so so important, because Dean is saying "Are you really asking me if I can move on... From CAS?" Because is obvious Sam was implying that, for Dean, losing Cas was more painful and unbearable than losing Mary. "You want to move on, from mom?"

The pause, the coma, is pointing Sam is referring Castiel, not mom. Is not mom the one you want to move on, right?

Dean's silence is priceless, both men talks without talking, and both know what they're talking about. Of course Dean can't move on from Castiel. And Sam knows it. Because he experienced the same with Jess.

And Dean changing the subject after that is saying HE WON'T TALK ABOUT IT.

Lies and Toxicity

We have a beautiful scene between Jack and Sam, in which Jack snaps all the bad things he heard last night. But Sam explains to him, they need his help to bring Mary back, and Jack can connect again with S through the pain of losing their moms. And he gives the kid a tip to conquer Dean's sympathy.

SAM: (...) Listen, if there’s one thing that Dean respects, it’s effort. So come along. Help us out. Let’s go be the good guys.

So we'll see the kid really giving everything in this mission.

Another quote that caught my attention was Jack saying this:

JACK: I thought lying was wrong.

Just came to my mind episode 14x19, when Jack is sick of so much lies and turn the world into 'just truth's real madness!

And another foreshadow in the same episode we will have Cas coming back, they're talking about this ...

DEAN: (...) why’d she come back from the dead and knife his ass?

JACK: People come back?

SAM: When a person dies and their soul can’t move on…

Talking about this in this specific episode has a meaning: the wife, the woman that man loved coming back from the death, is a reflection of Castiel coming back at the end of this episode. Souls that can't move on, is talking about Dean and Castiel's decease.

Another thing that is pointed in this episode is Sam seeing the bad things of John Winchester in his brother.

Castiel in the Empty

As the preamble to Castiel in the Empty, we had this dialogue here...

JACK: My mother… could she be a ghost?

SAM: No, we, um… we burned the body.

DEAN: That’s right, and what gets burned… stays dead.

Dean is saying this to himself because they burnt Cas' body too, but this scene is cut and we jump into the next one: Castiel walking around the Empty.

Then, again, Dean goes with this quote here...

DEAN: So, aside from getting dead, what do Gloria and Wes have in common?

And the scene cuts to Castiel again, emphasis in loved people that was dead, and now comes back from it.

Another interesting scene is Dean finding Gloria's diary of mourning.

SAM: More of the same. Um, he really was into the whole catharsis thing.

DEAN: Yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, it’s like another word for “happy ending”.

Dean shows here he knows exactly what that is, and how you can feel when you lose the love of your life. The "happy ending" is a reference of a suicidal thoughts as another way out from the pain. And as we will see in the next episode, was a way out Dean was considering for himself. Also, the journal was made by John after Mary died, and was made by this widow, after his wife died. Is important because in the interview with MIA (the ship shifter therapist) she will ask Dean if he has a diary.

Sam talks about catharsis, as an important way to process the pain, and he really tried to make his brother to do that at the beginning of the episode. Failing.

MIA: Mm. Most of the people I see are in the same boat. No warning, no goodbye, no closure.

These words play an important role for Sam, Jack and Dean, in loosing their mothers and loosing Castiel.

They exchanged heated words again in front of Mia, Sam accusing Dean because he is not carrying well with the deaths, and we'll have again an indirect question, with second meaning. Sam will be talking about Castiel again. But then, and just like Dean did at the end of the previous episode, Sam will have his blow out about losing Mary. Is a blatant comparison between Romantic Love (CAS/Dean) and Family Love (Sam/Mary).

Sam leaves, and Mia points at Dean. Dean drinks from his flask. He was doing that and eating a lot, as he always does when he loses Cas.

MIA: (...) You’re angry, Dean.

DEAN: And?

MIA: And if you don’t want to do anything about it, that’s your business. But you’re aiming it at everyone in your life.

Dean will take these words and do something about it, at the end of the episode. But, I want to talk a little about visual Narrative here, because while Mia was talking with Dean, there was a picture behind her, with BLUE/GREEN AND RED COLORS (Destiel).

The scene between CAS talking with the empty that had taken his shape is intertwined with the shape shifter that took Dean's shape. This is very meaningful bc both creatures decided to take the protagonists of this love story shapes.

So, the Empty explains where Castiel is, and also, is baffled by the angel that woke him up. Is the first time someone wakes up in the Empty, and the entity is really mad at it.

But Castiel doesn't know why he woke up, so, he went with the first idea: Maybe the Winchesters did some deal or spell. But they didn't.

The Empty represents all the darkness inside of Castiel: his doubts, his depression, his fears, his weakness. So, the only way to keep him there SLEEPING (as the image of depression) is to point at the lack of faith in coming back, or in feeling himself loved or needed.

The following dialogue shows us how smart is our angel.

CASTIEL: Having me awake causes you pain.

COSMIC ENTITY: If you can’t sleep, I can’t sleep. Yeah? And I like sleep. I need sleep.

CASTIEL: Then get rid of me.

COSMIC ENTITY: Oh, should I, should I?

CASTIEL: Send me back to Earth.

Castiel immediately detect the point of it, and tries to give a resolution for both of them.

COSMIC ENTITY: Or I throw you so deep into the Empty that you can’t bother me anymore, hmm?

CASTIEL: Except you know that won’t work, or you would’ve done it already.

COSMIC ENTITY: Pretty smart. Pretty smart, dummy.

CASTIEL: Send… Me… Back.

The first conclusion CAS arrives is by his side. The only way the Empty can get some peace is sending him back to Earth. What Cas doesn't know is, the empty won't come back to sleep, ever again after this.

COSMIC ENTITY: That’s not part of the deal. No, no. Besides, you don’t want to go back.

CASTIEL: Yes, I do. Sam and Dean need me.

COSMIC ENTITY: Oh, save it.

When the Empty says SAVE IT, is because he knows the excuse is making CAS to come back, is not the real one he has in his heart. Oh, save it is not because of that, is because ONE MAN NAMED DEAN WINCHESTER.

Because immediately after this, the Empty mocks him about it...

(Gif set credit @petercapaldi )

Look at Castiel's face when the Empty refers to his feelings as TULIPS, because the tulips represents the perfect lover, passion and romanticism. The tulip is a symbol of sincere love. It is an incredibly romantic flower that when giving it you express infatuation, passion, unconditional love, pure love.

So, the Empty is saying here: save it, you are in love, you want to come back because you are in love.

To the Empty, is very disgusting, aberrant, and it annoys him. He qualifies it as "little feelings"

Because he's trying to erase the hopes in Castiel. So, he shows him he knows everything about him, and if he didn't understand at first with the tulips reference, he makes it clear now I KNOW WHO YOU LOVE.

And seeding again the depression, because he needs CAS sleeping or defeated, he continues...

Unrequited Love. The Empty exposes right in front of Cas' eyes the fear of being unrequited. With this, he is trying to show him WHY WOULD YOU COME BACK IF DEAN DOESN'T LOVE YOU BACK? He needs to cut any hopes in the angel.

And after this, he shows CAS l his mistakes, and fears, and regrets, and guilts. All the bad things, all his darkness, to put him back to sleep.

But then, Castiel gets it, he is already saved. And with more energy and hopes inside his heart, he faces the empty again:

CASTIEL You can prance and you can preen and you can scream and yell and remind me of my failings but somehow, I’m awake. And I will stay awake and I will keep you awake until we both go insane. I will fight you. Fight you and fight you for…ever. For eternity.

COSMIC ENTITY No. No.

CASTIEL Release me. Release… me.

Symbolism again! Castiel asking his own darkness and depression, and regrets to release him in that moment, he release himself from all of that and he returns stronger than never.

Lack of Faith

Back to Dean, Jack and Sam with the shape-shifters we can see another interesting visual element, next to Dean: Sunflower.

The sunflower is the symbol of the Sun and symbolizes love and admiration. But also happiness, vitality, positivity and energy. ... For some religions it is a symbol of the one who permanently seeks God, the divine, since the star king symbolizes God.

This could be linked to what Dean means to Cas, but I think is mostly what Cas means to Dean.

But jumping into the dialogues and the symbolism and parallel of having two Deans as we had two Cas, there's a little clue for a foreshadow...

Look at this, the scene is pretty blatant, we have Buddy, Mia's ex, obssesed with her, jealouse of her life, intertwined with the dialogue between Dean and Jack, showing how important Jack is.

So, Buddy is the Empty, Mia is Castiel. And the most important thing in there, is Jack... These are the ingredients and this is the dialogue...

BUDDY: I never stopped looking for you.

JACK: I can’t.

BUDDY: And when I found this place, when I saw all that…

DEAN: Yes, you can.

BUDDY: …warm, fuzzy good you were doing. I couldn’t let you have that.

Buddy is the Empty saying to Mia, CAS, that he will search for him in a future, and he will see his happiness, one of the most important persons to CAS is JACK, that's why the dialogues are mixed here.

DEAN: Sammy believes in you, and when he believes, he’ll go Hell for leather…

BUDDY:

So I took it all away, and it was fun.

DEAN …but you gotta try.

Again, the Empty mirror talking about taking all away from Mia, Castiel's mirror, and we have Dean talking to Jack. This is the foreshadow of 14x08, when the Empty will come for Jack in Heaven.

MIA You’re… you’re a…

BUDDY: What? A monster? Well, so are you. And it’s about time you embraced that. So I’m not gonna kill those boys. You are. You end them, or you die, courtesy of Tweedledee’s silver bullets. So what’s it gonna be, princess?

MIA: Shoot me. Shoot me!

And now we have Castiel's mirror giving her life in exchange for Dean and Jack. Just like CAS will do with his deal with the Empty in 14x08 and his ultimate Sacrifice in 15x18.

Now, the last scene. Sam is ready to move on from having faith but Dean will take the advice that Mia gave him. But in this attempt of stopping Sam from being like him, he will show again one of his deepest feelings...

(Gif set credit @aborddelimpala)

Dean had lost faith, hopes, because he lost Castiel. And Castiel represented all of that to him.

Sam is worried, and Dean just realized he said it. He had just showed his brother part of his depressive thoughts. And the sadness in his face is all over.

Miscellaneous: The address in Mia's office door was 219, this is a very interesting visual element, is a reference to episode 2x19, "Folsom Prison Blues", in which Sam and Dean were two prisoners, trying to show their innocence. Finally breaking free. As a foreshadow of the emotional prison we will see in Dean's possesion in episode 14x09.

To Conclude:

This episode is full of symbolism and is centered on Castiel and his storyline with the Empty.

The episode shows us too the pain carried by Dean, Jack and Sam in loosing the people they love and how each one of them walks through it in different ways.

Hope you like this meta, see you in the next one!

Tagging @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @weird-dorky-little-d @michyribeiro @whyjm @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @savannadarkbaby @dea-stiel @poorreputation @bre95611 @thewolfathedoor @charlottemanchmal @neii3n @deathswaywardson @followyourenergy @dean-is-bi-till-i-die @hekatelilith-blog @avidbkwrm @anarchiana @dickpuncher365 @vampyrosa @authorsararayne @mybonsai1976 @love-neve-dies @dustythewind @wayward-winchester67 @angelwithashotgunandtrenchcoat @trashblackrainbow @deeutdutdutdoh @destiel-shipper-11 @larrem88 @charmedbycastiel @ran-savant @little-crazy-misha-minion @samoosetheshipper

@shadows-and-padlocked-hearts @mishtho @dancingtuesdaymorning @nerditoutwithbooks @mikennacac73 @justmeand-myinsight @idontwantpeopletoknowmyname @teddybeardoctor @pepevons @helevetica @isthisdestiel @dizzypinwheel @jawnlockwinchester @horsez2 @qanelyytha

@destielle @spnsmile @shippsblog @robot-feels @superlock-in-the-tardis @superduckbatrebel @2musiclover2 @madronasky @anon-non2 @cea1996 @lisafu02 @asphodelesauvage @destiels-canonahhhhhhhhhh

If you want to be added or removed from this list just let me know.

If you wanna read the previous metas from this season here you have the links:

Vol. XCIII, XCIV.

Buenos Aires, January 3rd 2021 6:46 PM

[rocket-bear]

shinsena ghost fic outline

SO. on my last list of shinsena fic ideas I had written "shinsena ghost AU (yes, like the patrick swayze movie) but with an actually happy ending". I have decided that I'm not actually going to write this fic because 1) it would take forever and I have other ones that are bigger priorities for me and 2) the inspiration for it was really the MOUNTAIN of IT fix-it fics I was reading in early 2020 because I was Going Through It where I then shunted that inspiration over into a fandom I was actually comfortable writing for, and at this point I have moved past that stage and no longer need the catharsis,

BUT! I do really like the bits that I did already write for it, and I still love the idea, so I'm just going to go ahead and post the WIP bits that I did get finished, and then flesh out what the rest of my plan was after!

The fic takes place in Sena's second year of college! It's a ghostfic so, y'know, warning for major character death and copious discussion of grief, haha, but it gets better!!! Also, in addition to ShinSena there's BG mentions of HiruMamo in both the fic excerpts and bulletpoints for the rest of the planned plot. Text below the cut is about 6k words!

---------

"Aw, beans," is the first thing Sena hears after he dies.

He doesn't really process it in the moment, too busy blinking up at the bright, unclouded sun and distantly noticing that it doesn't hurt his eyes. He sits up, running through the last few moments in his mind-- a bouncy ball dotted with pink flowers, skipping merrily over the sidewalk into the street, a girl in her school smock tottering on chubby legs after it, a car unavoidably close, his view of everything blurring as he throws himself forward without even thinking about it--

Oh.

"EHHHH," he shrieks, and scrambles away from his body, and it doesn't come with him.

"I'm going to be in ;so much trouble," that voice says again, and Sena whips around because it's the only thing he can actually hear clearly, even though he's pretty sure he should be able to hear-- the other people around him, looking at his body without looking at him, everyone unharmed but most of them in tears, and he doesn't want to think about that.

So he looks, and sees-- something. It almost looks like an afterimage, at first, the kind of light-dark luminescent spots your eyes put up when you look away from a light you've been staring at too long, but it stays put as Sena stares at it, a kind of void of shifting light just stamped in the way of his view of the bushes lining the sidewalk.

"Um," he says, and the Thing kind of goes more dark-light than light-dark for a moment as it… sighs?

"Yeah, sorry, you're not getting me at my best, this wasn't supposed to happen," it says, and Sena feels like he would be hyperventilating if he had lungs, but he doesn't anymore.

"No, listen," the Thing says, and it starts to get bigger, which Sena belatedly realizes is because it's moved closer to him. With the way it doesn't actually seem to take up space, it's hard to tell. "Let's move away from here, okay? It's going to be hard for you to listen with all this going on."

And, well-- Sena casts a glance back behind him, to the people with their hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes and the pointless things they're doing to his body to try to bring him back to it, and he scrambles up to his feet and follows the thing.

"Okay, here goes," the Thing says as they move further away from the-- the scene, and then its voice changes. "Fear not, mortal, for your time on this plane has elapsed, and you have accomplished all that you were intended for. Your current form--"

"Wait," Sena says, fighting against the mesmerizing effect of the Thing's shifting lights in combination with its new, multilayered voice, high and low at once but somehow soothing. "I thought you said this wasn't supposed to happen??"

"Well, okay, yeah," the Thing says, its voice reedy and thin once more. "Your time actually isn't supposed to be up, but-- okay, did you know you're like, really fast? Like crazy fast. I was just supposed to nudge the driver once they stopped the car in time, you know, typical near-death experience stuff, but you jumped right through me before I was in place."

"You kill people by touching them?!" Sena skitters away from the Thing, and gets the distinct impression that the silvery flush it pulses in response is decidedly unimpressed.

"I can't kill you again," it says. "And we don't kill things, anyway. We just… mark them as finished. I got you out of the oven too soon, that's all."

That sounds a lot like it was only different from killing things in terms of word choice to Sena, but he doesn't say so.

"C-can-- can we fix it?" He asks instead, the first shards of ice-cold realization sinking in at last. He's dead. He's dead?

The Thing flares sigh-dark, and says, "You know this kind of thing has only happened like, four times before? Ever! Since the dawn of humanity! It's been like 20,000 years since the last time! I don't know off the top of my head, kid, I'm gonna have to look it up."

"Then-- there's a chance? How long will that take? What if-- I mean-- they're gonna take me to the hospital--"

The ice shards sink further into his body, but the Thing's voice is dismissive.

"If there's a way, that's not the body you're going to be coming back to; there's no way we're gonna be able to do this without rolling back the clock. So don't worry about the morgue, okay?"

Which-- was a relief, but Sena feels an empty sensation at the word "morgue" that he's pretty sure would have been nausea if he had a working stomach left to experience it.

Some of that must show on his face because the Thing comes to an abrupt stop, and its voice is more gentle as it says, "Okay, gameplan. If there's a way to get you back, it's gonna have something to do with the energy left over from your presence among the living. So go see your friends and family and see what you can figure out. Right now, you're a ghost, so there's got to be some way to tap into that energy."

Sena nods a little numbly at first, working on auto-pilot, and then nods more firmly as he actually processes the Thing's words. A plan! That means-- there's something he can actually do, while the Thing goes to-- "look it up." That's good! A plan!

And then, the Thing goes yellowish, and its tone turns apologetic.

"And… Speaking of ghost stuff, I didn't get to finish this part before. Your current form will let you move around this plane to visit your loved ones and grant yourself any closure you desire, but you won't be able to interact with the living world, and if we're not able to fix this in time-- when the time comes, you'll have to make a choice. Move on completely to the next plane, or stay here with your loved ones until there are none left who remember you."

Sena blinks, going still, and the Thing glows even more yellow.

"So we've got about [a month] to figure this thing out. I'll do what I can, kid. You hang tight."

And then it's gone, and Sena is left alone on the sidewalk.

He does all that he can do, and goes to find Mamori.

------

He doesn't think through the consequences of that until he gets to her apartment and finds her in tears and Hiruma on the phone, calling them an escort to the hospital. Every awful minute of that first day feels like nothing more than a smear in Sena's memory by the time his funeral comes around. He spends the time in-between trying his best to do something, anything, that will let his friends and parents know that he's still there. He does his absolute best to go full Hollywood Haunting on everyone he knows, trying to knock over pictures or rattle windows or flick lights on and off, but nothing works. Every once in a while, when he's flopped beside Mamori on the floor as she goes through photo albums, he almost thinks she hears him as he talks about the photos she's flipping through-- but it always just ends up being a fresh round of quiet tears that brings Hiruma over to her side.

The funeral seems to be no different. He'd hoped, somehow, that maybe having so many loved ones gathered in one place to think about him would somehow give him the energy to make himself solid-- and there are so many people there, not just Sena's family and closest friends, but people from nearly every team in the Tokyo American football community, some of them who he only ever remembered seeing across the field.

All of the original Devil Bats are there, of course. Kurita sobs his way through the service. The Ha-Ha Brothers stand stony-faced, and Juumonji scrubs a rough hand across his eyes, but Sena never sees any tears. Suzuna clings to Monta's arm as they both cry openly with Riku in the row behind Sena's parents, Mamori, and Hiruma.

His parents cry. Mamori seems too exhausted to, just sitting quietly and taking in the service with bruised red eyes. Hiruma puts his arm around her shoulder at one point, and Sena finds himself surprised by how much tenderness he's seen between them in the last few days. Hiruma had handled almost all of the arrangements, actually-- Mamori and Sena's parents making the decisions, and Hiruma diligently rising from each discussion to make the appropriate phone calls.

In the middle rows, Sena finds himself looking at Shin and Sakuraba. He shouldn't have been surprised to see them-- and he really wasn't, not really, he knew he would be devastated and would definitely show up if the situation was reversed-- but something on Shin's face startles him into looking again.

He looks tired. Sena doesn't think he's ever seen Shin tired, before, not even after playing full-out through an entire game, not even after the most intensive of training. But Shin's face is undeniably drawn, and the skin underneath his eyes is bruise-dark.

Sakuraba tears up, and Shin doesn't, but it's Sakuraba who lays a comforting hand on Shin's shoulder. [UNFINISHED SCENE-- also I had intended to go back and make this scene more accurately reflect Japanese (vs Western) funeral traditions but have not done that since, I'm not finishing the fic]

----------

He finds himself seeking out one of his and Shin's old training routes from high school, when they lived close enough that it made sense to share. It's been years since he ran this route, but it makes sense, he figures, that he would be revisiting old memories like this. It was a good route, anyway-- at one point it ran alongside the river, and Sena remembers reaching it on hot summer days, and noticing that even Shin tipped his face into the breeze when the sun was really beating down.

He walks along the path at first, but before long finds himself jogging, the force of memory and habit alike drawing him into those quick strides. It doesn't feel the same without the sensation of the wind on his face, or the heat of the sun on his body, or even the sweat beading up stickily between his skin and his clothes, but it's something.

Without fatigue or fear of obstacles to keep him vigilant, Sena finds himself startled before too long by the sound of steady footfalls coming up behind him. He automatically shifts his path to make way-- though it doesn't matter much now, he thinks with a frown-- and looks up as the lone jogger makes to pass him.

It's Shin.

Sena's not-heart squeezes painfully at seeing him unexpectedly, and Sena gapes.

"Shin-san--" He gasps, and of course Shin doesn't respond or look his way. Sena swallows the painful reminder and adjusts his pace to match Shin's.

They run together, and of course it's quiet, because Shin doesn't know that he has company. Not that companionable silence was atypical for their runs together before-- running was for focusing on technique, including breathing, so they would save the chatting for before and after.

Sena wonders if Shin had kept to running this path all along-- he was so sure that they'd both abandoned it when they'd made their way to university. Or at least, Shin had apologetically told him so, when he'd moved on to Oujou University and Sena was still in his third year at Deimon.

Maybe Shin's feeling nostalgic too, Sena thinks, and then shakes his head. He doesn't want to be sad, and it's nice to have Shin at his side, even if Shin doesn't know he's there.

He tries to sink into the feeling of running. It's still hard-- he can't feel much of anything, after all-- but with Shin there, it's a little easier to fall into old memories and let those guide him. He can pretend-- to feel the gentle breeze off the river cooling the sweat on his face, to feel the push of the sidewalk under his feet launching him into his next step, to feel how the sun is hotter on his back and shoulders than anywhere else as it crawls its way up the sky.

It almost feels like normal, finding that rhythm alongside Shin that has their steps striking the pavement in tandem, Sena's extra stride to make up for their heights a little accented half-note; that peaceful, focused haze that has them inhaling and exhaling in synch. It's so perfectly familiar that Sena can almost imagine a lump rising in his throat and the sting of tears in his eyes, nearly overcome with the twin sensations of having and loss--

--when Shin startles hard beside him and skids to a stop, with a gasp that has Sena's blood running cold before he even looks back for him, the image of the oncoming truck flashing through his mind.

But there's no truck here, of course. They're on a running trail, on a totally separate level than the road, but it's obvious enough what drew that terrifying, uncharacteristic noise from Shin's lungs when Sena looks back, and his eyes meet Shin's.

Shin sees him.

[UNFINISHED SCENE, this is the last of the actual fic that I wrote!]

---------

FROM THERE here was the plan:

- Shin being able to see him only lasts a split second. Shin's super shaken and keeps looking around and rubbing his eyes for a couple moments, and then he turns around and walks back to the train, and Sena-- thinking, like, "holy shit, Shin never skips training"-- follows him back, because even though it's super heart-breaking seeing Shin so shaken up it's also the closest he's gotten to making any progress the whole time

- Shin gets back to his dorm and just like. sits down at his table with his head in his hands. Sena's motivation to keep trying to get his attention kind of dries up so he pokes around Shin's dorm room instead and notices, like. a bunch of half-eaten meals/snacks in the trash, "Practice" scratched out on his calendar for the next few weeks, unmade bed, evidence that Shin's only really gotten dressed to go out jogging over the last few days and is only wearing his pajamas otherwise-- he's just not doing good.

- Just as Sena's like, really starting to grasp this, Sakuraba shows up at the door-- Shin gets up to answer the door with his back to Sena and like, whatever Sakuraba sees on Shin's face just stops him in his tracks and he immediately pulls Shin into a hug, which Sena is kind of shocked to see that Shin totally sinks into

- Sakuraba sits down with Shin at the table and they talk. Shin admits that he thought he saw Sena while he was jogging, and both of them are just brushing it off as like, a grief-induced sensory memory, stuff like that happens, etc. Sakuraba comforts him and encourages Shin to take it easy, it's okay to take time off of even his own personal training, it's okay if he needs more time, and also like fusses about Shin not getting enough to eat especially if he IS going to keep training

- Sena meanwhile is like, feeling awful with guilt but also just kind of overwhelmed with the realization of how important he was to Shin, and this is where I would've like, laid the groundwork for how they'd gotten closer during the rest of high school/early college but Sena still never rrreally understood how much Shin cared about him because 1) he's got self-esteem issues baybee, and 2) Shin is not exactly, like, super forthright about his feelings,

- but, while Sena DOES feel awful about how much Shin was shaken up about seeing him, it's the only thread he can think of to pull on to try and bring himself back, and he ALSO feels guilty about having to watch everyone grieve for him, so, well,

- he starts haunting Shin!! Shin does not listen to his good and helpful friend Sakuraba and goes jogging again the next day, but it's obvious that he's still feeling Off and he's having a hard time getting into a rhythm, and Sena isn't able to tap into ~whatever it was~ that made him visible the previous time and is feeling super defeated about it, UNTIL,

- Shin takes a break at the midpoint of his normal route, which is a thing Sena knows he does not generally do from their own training together, and is basically just slumped over on a bench with his head in his hands again and Sena's also feeling awful and helpless and does the same thing,

- and then Shin tenses up beside him, his breath getting shallow, and Sena notices and tentatively calls out to him. Shin slowly, slowly looks up, and they make eye contact for just a second again, before Sena can tell he's not visible anymore because Shin's eyes kind of unfocus and he looks away, and just gets up and goes home.

- This kind of refreshes Sena's determination, and over the next few days (IT WAS GONNA DEPEND ON HOW LONG I WANTED TO TORTURE SHIN) they repeat the same pattern, with Sena going on Shin's jogs with him and occasionally achieving small flashes of visibility(/audibility, though Sena isn't ever able to get out anything helpful before the universe mutes him again) which Shin seems to be determined to just brush off as grief illusions even as he gets more and more tense each time

- Until finally as they're jogging, Shin sort of tersely asks "Are you there?" and instead of saying anything Sena just tries to barrel into him for a hug because clearly auditory-visual haunting only isn't WORKING and we've gotta get some TACTILE FEEDBACK in here,

- and it works. He knocks Shin off of his stride, and Shin grabs for him in turn, and there's a moment where they both stare at each other in total shock and relief before Sena starts trying to frantically tell Shin the whole story and disappears out of his arms like, three words in.

- Shin has a little tiny mental breakdown in the middle of the sidewalk where he cycles from devastation at Sena disappearing again to trying to pull himself together like, "okay if this is real then this isn't my last chance because it's happened a lot over the past few days" to a kind of giddy catharsis because it's real Sena's really here to kind of shutting down over the idea that maybe it's STILL not real and he's just going REALLY crazy to actually pulling himself back together and going to find a bench to sit down on, and just like,

- talking things out, out loud, in hopes that Sena can hear him. He can only see Sena when they're running, which is something they used to do together, so maybe recreating old memories is what triggers it. He's noticed that even when running, he usually sees Sena in moments when he's feeling least conflicted/emotionally complex-- either pure grief or pure nostalgia or pure just-zoning-out-running, not as much when he's really struggling to process and has a lot going on internally at once. Maybe the stability of the emotion is part of it.

- Sena meanwhile is having his own meltdown from sheer overwhelming relief over FINALLY FINALLY making contact and Shin FINALLY FINALLY believing he's there and also just like making hearteyes at Shin for immediately going into full methodical Ghost Scientist mode after getting his own meltdown over and done with

- speaking of going full Ghost Scientist, Shin announces his intention to do exactly that by saying he's heading back to his and Sena's old running trail to test out the "recreating memories" theory right that second, and they head over.

- They jog, and Shin talks out some of his memories with Sena from his own perspective, which is a surprise for Sena because he doesn't even remember some of the things that Shin does and also it lets him actually understand what Shin was thinking in those moments.

- And most importantly: it works. It's not constant, but the longer they practice, the longer they're able to keep Sena in view for longer stretches of time, more of an unsteady flicker than the total off-or-on that it was before. They stay out for a long time (and in the process discover that other people still can't see Sena when Shin can as he continually gets weird looks for talking to thin air) and Shin actually eats a real meal when he finally goes home.

- Sena and Shin keep practicing over the next few days, which makes Sakuraba SUPER concerned because Shin spending hours and hours jogging every day looks like Shin further depression-spiralling from his perspective, but he's somewhat mollified by the fact that Shin's actually getting back to eating and getting dressed etc. normally, even though he's still not going to practice.

- During this time, Sena and Shin bond when they're actually able to communicate. Sena notices that Shin's parents haven't checked in on him even once despite the fact that he just lost a friend, and Shin confirms in one conversation that he basically doesn't have a relationship or emotional connection with his parents at all. (But watch, hang in there, I'm gonna fix it,)

- In the meantime, Shinigami-san tracks Sena back down and they both share what they've learned. Shinigami-san says that Sena has to gather energy from as many of the people he's formed bonds with as possible to chain himself more strongly to life, and gives him a pendant to wear around his neck that will store the energy. When Sena talks about his and Shin's experiments, It says that it makes sense that being emotionally and physically in-sync would help bolster the connection between them to the point where other people would be able to see him, and that if they practice enough they might even be able to just use one or the other (emotional sync or physical sync) without needing both.

- After Sena laboriously relays this to him through flickers, Shin gets a metronome and they both practice tapping their fingers to the rhythm, and they're finally able to see each other at Shin's dorm room vs having to be on a run and actively reminiscing together. They develop a system where when Shin wants/needs to see him, he'll tap his finger against the side of his leg and Sena will do the same thing so they can actually talk.

(- There is at least one moment in the development of this that, when Sena successfully appears in front of him, Shin smiles fondly and very softly says, "There you are," and Sena immediately disappears again because he's so shaken to his disaster bisexual core that he can't even handle it.)

- During this process they find out that Sena's pendant glows when Shin is reminiscing or otherwise talking about his feelings (but not the capital-L feeling) about Sena, which lets them know how to go about "gathering energy" from Sena's friends.

- With the clock counting down on Sena's deadline, Shin starts approaching Sena's friends to "check on them," or, to sit down with them and talk about Sena. It's a little awkwardly sweet on both sides, because no one expects Shin of all people to be making sympathy housecalls and Shin's not very good at talking about feelings, but the conversations are surprisingly genuine and cathartic for all parties (including Shin, who is still processing some weird sideways grief even with his new connection to ghostSena, and Sena, whose self-esteem issues have a hard time standing up under a deluge of people talking about how much they cared about and miss him), PARTICULARLY:

- Monta and Suzuna, where the reminiscing works a little too well and they actually see a flicker of Sena sitting at Shin's side during the conversation and freak out. Shin immediately changes tacks and tells them that Sena is there and that he's trying to bring Sena back and he needs their help, and at first this makes them freak out more because what the fuck but by virtue of Shin being… Seijuurou "Overly-Serious-Stoic-Never-Overreacted-In-His-Life" Shin, he convinces them to try the tapping technique to bring Sena back into view.

- Sena has Shin describe a memory involving the three of them while they tap along to Shin's rhythm, and the combination of reminiscing and tapping works well enough that they're able to get frequent enough flickers of Sena to believe Shin. Yes, they do get a least one good long group hug out of the flickers, I'm not a monster.

- Shin still has to do most of the communication for Sena because it would take a lot of practice for the Sena-Monta-Suzuna combo to get enough in-sync to be able to communicate effectively, but he explains the whole situation and all the information they've gotten from Shinigami-san. They decide that it still makes the most sense for Shin to field the energy-gathering housecalls for the same communication-based reasons-- Sena can guide Shin through the conversations by suggesting memories to bring up with his friends-- but all the same, Shin suddenly finds himself with two tiny new best friends who want to hang out with him all the time. (And not even just to talk to Sena! Suzuna and Monta become pretty attached to and curious about Shin after he shows them more of his vulnerable side in the conversation leading up to the point where they actually see Sena themselves.)

- I was going to go through little flashes of Shin's conversations with a lot of Sena's friends across the football world, but the other Big One was going to be Mamori, of course. (And a little bit of Hiruma, who refuses to sit down for an Emotional Conversation with fucking Shin, but will gladly peanut-gallery Mamori's out of his own repressed desire for catharsis and also to make sure with guns loaded that Shin doesn't fuck up the fragile acceptance Mamori's been building since Sena's death.)

- Having learned from the experience with Suzuna and Monta, Sena wisely sits out of view during the conversation because he actually doesn't want to put Mamori through the rollercoaster of seeing him again, especially if his and Shin's efforts fail.

- Shin does not fuck up his conversation with Mamori and so Hiruma doesn't have to murder him! It's actually the most honest-- and healing-- conversation he has with anyone. Mamori finds herself feeling very fond of Shin, who she didn't know was so close with Sena and could be so supportive and empathetic under all that stoic strength, and Shin finds himself immediately adopted by another one of Sena's loved ones.

(- In their conversation, Mamori also mentions that just after Sena passed she kept finding herself thinking she heard Sena's voice, because that seed in the actually-written bit above was in fact foreshadowing ohoho.)

- I was not going to Go Into It because not even I have the strength, but to continue the theme of Shin finding a new family via his bond with Sena, there was going to be a brief scene referencing that Shin's visit with Sena's parents went much the same, with the addition that Shin was surprised Sena's parents already knew so much about him (because as it turns out Sena talked about him FREQUENTLY.)

(- Also within the housecalls there's a comedy scene where Shin makes Sena solid just long enough for Sena to log Shin in on Skype so he can talk to Panther without sacrificing a computer, and they discover that international friendship energy gathering does in fact work.)

- AND THEN: SAKURABA. The fic would switch to Shin's POV from here! In Shin's energy-gathering conversation with Sakuraba, things are going well at first, with Sakuraba reminiscing about Sena and then turning the conversation toward Shin himself to talk about how he's noticed Shin's seeming a lot more steady and like he's been doing some real healing lately. Shin obviously does not explain the ghostSena situation, but does honestly say that his conversations with Sena's other friends have helped him process his feelings a lot. And Sakuraba, being a supportive friend, very gently says that he's proud of Shin for reaching out, and for doing so well when he's going through something so hard, because he can't imagine losing the person he was in love with.

- Shin freezes up, and Sakuraba tries to reassure him that it's okay, he's known for a long time, he's so sorry that Shin never got to actually process those feelings with Sena, and Shin doesn't have to talk about it but if he ever wants to Sakuraba's there for him-- and Shin very stiltedly deflects the whole conversation because he doesn't want to totally shut Sakuraba down when he's just trying to be supportive but also Sena is right there

- After finally, awkwardly shooing Sakuraba out the door, Shin sits back down and tries to Talk About It with Sena, but he's so emotionally frazzled that he's not able to get a stable connection. Since they can't have a two-way conversation, he just launches into apologizing-- he's sorry, he understands if it makes Sena uncomfortable, Sena doesn't need to feel obligated to respond to it and of course Shin is going to help him finish getting what he needs regardless--

- Sena's just RAPIDLY flickering in and out of view, with the time he's not visible getting longer and longer as Shin keeps talking because they are incredibly emotionally out-of-sync, and with Shin only able to tell that Sena looks upset whenever he's able to see him, he makes some Assumptions about Sena's feelings about his accidental confession.

- Things don't get better over the next day or two. They try to do their synchronizing exercises, but even reciting memories doesn't help because Shin is too anxious and ashamed (and sleep-deprived from stress) to connect to them emotionally, which is only compounded because he realizes that Sena's deadline is fast approaching and they won't be able to finish in time if he can't get his shit together but that anxiety Does Not Help with relaxing enough to synchronize when he's spiralling over the thought of losing Sena again because of something that he "did".

- Finally, Sena apparently gets desperate and snatches up the metronome during one of the moments when he's solid for just long enough to do it.

- Shin doesn't see him for a while after that, and assumes (correctly) that Sena has taken the metronome with him to try and sync with Monta and/or Suzuna instead, and also assumes (incorrectly) that this is because Sena is extremely disappointed with him at best and totally hates him at worst, and that either way Sena probably doesn't want much to do with him anymore even if he is able to be brought back.

- He spirals for like, A Day, after which he does in fact break and go to tear up very stoically on Sakuraba about how yes he was (is) in love with Sena and it hurts him that he'll never get to express that properly (now that Sena wants nothing to do with him) and how he feels like he let himself (and Sena) down by not being able to act on that earlier (when it wasn't a literal life-or-death situation) and how maybe he's just not cut out for emotions and connections with other people actually, just look at even his relationship with his parents???

- Sakuraba comforts him and very gently tells him he's being a catastrophizing dingus and shows him, like, a mountain of texts on his phone not ONLY from concerned fellow Oujous, but also from a bunch of the people that Shin's talked to about Sena over the last few weeks, all of them expressing the general sentiment of "wow I was super surprised when Shin came around to talk to me about Sena but I'm so glad he did, it looks like he's doing well, keep an eye on him for me" in varying levels of transparency because after all they are Manly Footballers, but regardless: look at that, Shin is actually perfectly capable of forming relationships with other people, and they like and care about him.

- This results in some decidedly less stoic tears, and Sakuraba and Shin successfully patch things up after their previous awkward discussion about Shin's feelings for Sena. When Shin leaves he immediately heads for Enma to try and find Monta, because even if Sena and his friends don't want to see him he absolutely can't just shrug and sit back and just wait to see if they manage to save him.

- When he's like halfway there, he comes across Monta and Suzuna heading in his direction, and they cut off his questions by just being like NOPE SHUT UP COME WITH US and dragging him over to like, a park gazebo for some semi-privacy.

- Suzuna gets the metronome out of her bag and sets it on the park table and turns it on. Monta pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and starts reading.

- It turns out that after he left Shin's, Sena ghosted up into Monta's room and just plopped the suddenly-appearing metronome down on Monta's desk, scaring the shit out of him but also giving a very clear signal of WE NEED TO TALK. Monta called up Suzuna and the three of them had spent the last day and a half working on synchronizing non-stop, and while they still aren't nearly as good as Shin and Sena had gotten with weeks' worth of practice, they got far enough along that Sena was able to have them slowly write out some of his memories with Shin, this time from his perspective, through the unsteady connection.

- Suzuna and Monta take turns yanking the paper back and forth between them to read out the description of Sena and Shin's memories, and with Shin tapping along to the metronome, he's able to see Sena more and more clearly over time until he's solid more often than not.

- As it becomes increasingly clear, even to Shin, that these specific memories Sena has chosen to share are a record of him coming to realize his feelings for Shin, Sena is eventually able to take Shin's hands and hold them without disappearing, tapping not needed. He interrupts Suzuna and Monta to try to finish off the confession himself: Shin didn't need to be scared when Sena found out about his feelings, because--

- Absolutely overwhelmed by everything about the last 36 hours and having no ability to process any of it in words ANYMORE but moved by the SPIRIT OF COMMUNICATION regardless, Shin gambles on the pretty sure bet that he and Sena are in-sync about this, and kisses him.

- It connects. (And connects, and connects...) Sena's pendant starts to glow brighter and brighter until he's totally enveloped, and--

- Switch back to Sena's POV! He wakes up on the street in front of the truck again, scraped up but otherwise totally unharmed. So are the little girl, who he successfully pushed out of the way, and the driver of the car, who stopped in time regardless. Shinigami-san is also there, and Sena tells It to leave the driver alone because It owes him one, and Shinigami-san congratulates him and tells him that hey hey that was the plan along!! (The onlookers assume that he's confused from the near-accident when he starts talking to thin air.)

- Sena waves off all the concerned onlookers and runs off to find somewhere to sit where he's not going to be gawked at so he can text literally everyone he knows. By the time he finds a bench, he's already gotten HOLY SHIT WE JUST TIME-TRAVELED ARE YOU OKAY??? texts from Monta and Suzuna, which he responds to and incites a flood of emoji-based cheering. Everyone else he texts is politely puzzled by his "are you okay???" message, including Mamori and his parents to his intense relief, except--

- He gets a call from Sakuraba, who sounds very confused as he tells him that Shin wants to talk to him. Sena reassures Shin that he's okay, and tells him to meet him at the park that they left off at, and also that he loves him because he can't restrain himself after not getting to say it before. Shin says it back, and Sakuraba therefore sounds both confused AND delighted when he gets the phone back from Shin to say goodbye.

- Sena texts Suzuna and Monta to meet him at the same place, since it's about halfway between Enma and Oujou, and starts running.

- Shin and Sena, being… Shin and Sena, get there before the other two, and there's so many tears and so much hugging and so many I Love Yous and also some apologies. Monta and Suzuna eventually arrive and there's another round of tears and hugging and I Love Yous, and when everyone is less punchdrunk off of trauma and catharsis, they sit down and figure out that it's only the people that actually saw Sena as a ghost that remember the other timeline.

- With the group understandably not ready to be separated under the circumstances, but also with Sena desperately wanting to see his parents, Mamori and Riku, he comes up with a thin excuse for an impromptu dinner party at his parents' place later in the day (celebrating passing a tough test? beat the Cupids in a football game? national pancake day?? doesn't matter!!!), clears it with them, and invites Mamori+Hiruma and Riku over as well. (Shin lets Sena arrange takeout for everyone on his dime so that Sena's parents won't have to cook for an unplanned dinner party.)

- Fic ends with the group heading toward Sena's parents' house, Shin and Sena holding hands, with Sena feeling content and confident in his relationships as his phone continuously blows up with people responding to his check-in text, and Shin admitting that he's feeling pretty hopeful about the idea of getting to form connections with Sena's family all over again.

END. Thanks for indulging my "I'm too lazy to write this but NOT too lazy to bulletpoint each plot detail beat-by-beat" post, haha!

[real-jaune-isms]

RWBY Volume 8 Chapter 7 Review/Remix

Last episode before the holiday break. The long long long holiday break. And here I am only posting my review the night before we come back... I was having a lot of fun playing my new video games, okay? Let’s just get right into this with the joke everyone has already made. War: What is it good for? Actually a lot, if you can believe it. Only in this specific context though, because the warfare in the American streets these last few days is disgusting and emblematic of what has been wrong with the country for a while. A government leader sending his followers into the nation’s capital on a mission of rage and personal catharsis? Ick. At least in RWBY the tyrant isn’t attacking members of his own population... Oh wait, Mantle. :P

For a moment you might be fooled into thinking we’re starting back in the farmlands of Mistral, maybe getting another look at Oscar’s earlier life or seeing a little more of Nora’s mysteriously tragic past before she and Ren met. But no, these are the wheat farms on the outskirts of Atlas and Sabyrs are charging through like raptors through the tall grass in Lost World. A battalion of Atlesian soldiers, human soldiers I might add, stand armed to meet them. But even if they’re armed they are by no means ready. Monstra keeps coughing up a new wave of Grimm, and I do mean a wave, every minute or two and Atlas is pretty damn whelmed in the face of it. There are some big bots with guns standing in straight lines, but the majority of the defense put up by Remnant’s supreme authority on military power and strength is mortal men with fear in their hearts rather than expendable robot soldiers. And the big bots seem to be lined up in a way that the ones in the front block the ones in the back, so that’s just poor planning too. It’s just a concerning sight all together, and they are not efficiently handling the coming enemy. We cut up to Ironwood in his office, and it seems he is not dealing with this situation well at all. We know he’s under a lot of stress from all the recent events, but they are in fact mostly his own fault due to his poor decision making skills in times of crisis, and his single minded drive he calls a Semblance. Speaking of the eternally expanding list of Ironwood’s bad ideas, he decides to evacuate all the civilians into Atlas’ below ground subway tunnels. Fun fact: There were Apathy among the Grimm Monstra has been spitting out. Second Fun Fact: Apathy were last seen thriving and murdering in an abandoned underground tunnel system beneath a well. If one is familiar with fantasy television pop culture of the last decade, the Crypts of Winterfell might pop into your mind as a similarly poor place to hide all your unarmed women and children. Y’know, cuz in Game of Thrones they were facing a guy who could raise the dead as his minions and crypts are just tunnels full of corpses. Just saying, this could end up being a non-birthday massacre. Whatever captain of lieutenant Ironwood was talking to is hesitant to go along with this idea, but Ironwood puts his foot down by putting his fist down. And so his voice comes on over the city-wide PA system to tell everyone they need to get down into the subway for their own safety. Compared to the organized marching and relative calm of the poor folks down in Mantle, these rich fat cats practically trample each other to run and scream down the stairs. A father is concerned his daughter is going to get snatched up by a swarm of Lancers, but seems even more upset by the squad of airships swooping in to combat them. 

Speaking of airships, we cut to the one Marrow and Harriet are flying. The Ace Ops have arrested YRJ, because of course they did, and they all hear radio chatter as pilots are reporting in about how Monstra is too tough for them to pierce from the outside with any of the weapons available to them. Winter checks in over comms to report her team’s limited successes, and Ironwood tells her to stay on jailor duty for a bit. Yang snarks at Winter for continuing to follow orders despite the circumstances, but conversation is stifled by Monstra coming into view for the group. Jaune laments that the beast now serving as Oscar’s confinement is larger than they had imagined from a distance, and Vine continues to be rigid in his assertions as to just what Grimm can and cannot do. “Grimm don’t take prisoners” he says, as if that’s an irrefutable fact. It’s not like any Grimm have done anything new or unheard of recently, like talk or grow wings or exist within a river of evil sludge or shoot up miles into the air as a geyser or have gravity Dust crystals in their underbelly to fly, or as you are witnessing right now belch out ponds worth of sludge from with waves of Grimm are emerging to fight your ground troops. Yep, we definitely know every single thing a Grimm does, especially one brought here by the mistress of the entire Grimm collective who is commanding most of them here. You sure are smart, Vine... Yang continues to be riled up and ask they be let go to help, but Elm and Vine hold her in her seat. Ironwood is heard giving the Manta jets new orders and reveals Command is working on a solution for Monstra. Winter, naturally wanting to be kept in the loop, asks what that might be. He reveals the science team is putting together a bomb that might be able to take the whale out if detonated inside it. That means Winter and the Ace Ops will be delivering it into the literal belly of the beast. I don’t know if he intends for it to be a suicide mission with the bomb going off as soon as they’ve got it inside, or if it’s just incredibly risky to try and get inside Monstra at all, but Winter pales at this news and her eyes go wide before sadly drooping closed again. She composes herself and grows determined again as she accepts the new marching orders. Jaune and Yang are again audibly against these plans due to the risk to Oscar’s safety, but they are subdued as needed, though we see Winter’s act isn’t absolute and her hands are shaking.

Meanwhile, Salem is having the time of her life doing her best Mickey Mouse impression. Classical music plays as she conducts the waves of Grimm sludge out of Monstra’s mouth like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice playing conductor to the stars themselves. Emerald watched from a distance, and seems less than thrilled about the whole thing. She heads down the halls and has to use her Semblance to keep a Seer from noticing her and potentially reporting her going where she doesn’t need to be to Salem. And where she’s going is the door outside Oscar’s torture room. He’s coughing up blood, and Hazel is still insisting he start telling the truth before Salem loses her patience and just kills him despite how futile it’d be. Instead Oz starts asking some questions of his own: Does Hazel know why Salem sought to recruit him in particular? It turns out she approached him with the promise of making a new world order where there won’t be any kingdoms or Huntsman Academies. Oz just has to laugh at that naiveté. When Salem gets the 4 Relics, there won’t be a world at all. She’s been around for so goddamn long, all she wants is for it to end, and she thinks taking the whole world down is the only way to get it anymore. This just frustrates Hazel, and we learn why. He’s pretty damn sure Salem can’t die at all, because when she first approached him about working together he spent the better part of a day killing her over and over and over again. This man, whom we know from the Battle of Haven to have massive reserves of Aura and strength to endure and keep fighting, kept fighting until he was too worn down and exhausted to lift his fists again. And in that time of weakness and awe at her power, Salem made her sales pitch that even if he couldn’t kill the one leading the Grimm he could at least have vengeance on the establishment sending young people to their deaths against her. Oz points out that that’s exactly why she went to him, because she could make him believe this was the right way, that it would bring him closure. It’s what Ozpin deserves, Hazel argues, and Oz does not disagree. But does Oscar deserve it? Do the innocent people who haven’t been affected by Salem or Ozpin yet?  No, this isn’t for justice, this is personal. Because Salem said it would help Hazel. Has it?

We don’t get an answer to that, instead going back up to Weiss’ room in Schnee Manor where she’s reapplying Nora’s bandages. Still mostly unconscious, Nora mutters “Now what... am I good for?” I can think of a great many things Nora is useful for outside of her great strength and straightforward approach to combat, but its a damn shame no one has actually bothered to tell her that before now. Before Weiss has a chance to offer any, Blake and Ruby enter the room with cups of tea. I’m not ashamed to admit I initially thought they were hot chocolate cuz I’m not used to tea being that sort of amber color. Weiss admits that she’s done the most her limited medical knowledge can offer, and Nora needs more than that. Blake expresses her concern for the other half of their group, but almost slips up and says... well we’re just not sure, but we like to assume she was gonna say she’s especially worried for someone in particular. The shippers can fill that in how they like. Their moping is interrupted by May entering the room with some less than stellar news from Fiona and the others down in Mantle. They haven’t seen Yang’s team in a while, and with everything going to hell like this a search party is at the bottom of the priority list. She’s about ready to get back on the airship and head back down to Mantle, but Weiss protests and this sparks a debate. May points out that Mantle doesn’t have the luxury of the Atlas military protecting them so Ruby’s group and the Happy Huntresses are the only thing keeping the people safe from the chaos of the invasion, but Weiss argues that there are still people suffering up her and I have to agree. Just because a police force is around doesn’t automatically mean they’re doing the best job of keeping everyone safe. But Weiss pushes the wrong button by asking about May’s family. The Marigold’s were ashamed of the way their “son” acted, wanting to help the suffering down in Mantle. And so May would no longer let herself be called that, she became a woman proudly working as part of the Happy Huntresses for the service of the people. She kicked her Marigold name and reputation to the curb and her cousin Henry stepped up as the socialite snob instead. 

This cannot have been an easy scene for Kdin to record, but we all need to give a standing ovation for her performance in it. Powerful words that likely hit very close to home. What a queen.

May is sure Weiss gets where she’s coming from with their families casting them aside in favor of a more obedient heir, her being replaced by Whitley after her outburst at the charity concert. Weiss wants to voice her disagreement, but May questions whose side she’s on in all this. Blake doesn’t like that, they’ve heard this talk about taking sides before and judging by her tone she’s none too happy to be hearing it now. May is about to give her a strongly worded piece of her mind too but Ruby stands between them to remind everyone there are no sides. All of humanity needs to be united, and Salem is the one creating the tension that’s dividing them so their real enemy is her. The only question now is how do they get out of this problem? The solution might be hiding just around the corner, literally. Whitley has been listening from behind the door, and he seems a little inspired.

Meanwhile Oz seems to have just finished telling Salem’s dark cursed backstory to Hazel, and it seems her final plan really is to have the world so divided and ruined that when the gods are brought back to judge it they will deem Remnant a failure and destroy it and hopefully her with it. Hazel seems less than inclined to believe this story though, he still holds a damn hard grudge over his sister. Oz is getting nowhere so Oscar asks to be put back in the lead, and so he is just as Hazel is about to wallop them again. Oz is willing to trust him so he can earn Hazel’s trust in return. So he goes right ahead and tells the big guy Jinn’s name and that it’s how you summon her for one last question. Hazel seems mad that Oscar gave up the info so effortlessly after all that, but Oscar asserts that he’s not telling Salem. He’s telling Hazel, and letting him decide what to do with the knowledge and the chance to gain deeper knowledge still. Pretty rad strategy. Wouldn’t you know it though, Emerald is still listening outside the door and heard everything. She goes to tell Mercury, but he’s busy packing a duffel bag for a trip to Vacuo. Guess Salem doesn’t need him here right now so we’ll get to see him again in Volume 9 or 10. He’s less than convinced that they should try and use this behind the scenes knowledge to go against Salem, cuz if Hazel couldn’t do it then why would he change his tune now? And why would they risk their necks too? It’s not like Oz was telling the truth, right? Salem isn’t really gonna destroy the world! But the teens get another surprise lecture from Uncle Tyrian: Of course Salem plans to destroy Remnant!! You couldn’t tell from the start? Everything about her screams end of the world, and it is beautiful! And if you thought she’d do anything different then you must really be crazy... Bold worlds from a psychotic serial killer, but we already know he’s unhinged. Mercury doesn’t much like getting this rude awakening though, especially since Tyrian will be the one going with him to Vacuo. Merc and Em share one last sad look, but he’s made his bed and now he’s resigned to lie in it. Bye bye Mercury, see you after Emerald has probably switched sides and will have to face you as an enemy...

Speaking of ships soaring through the air, we go back to the Ace Ops and YJR heading for Monstra. Yang is protesting the bombing plan since Oscar is still inside, but Vine insists they can’t afford to wait and risk further death and destruction. Jaune offers a side plan, send the three inside Monstra ahead of the bombing squad to scope things out for them and try to rescue Oscar while they’re doing recon. Marrow is shocked that they’d be willing to go into the literal belly of the beast alone, but Yang asserts he’d do the same for one of his teammates if they were in this position, right? He doesn’t have an answer for that. Elm argues that trading their lives just for one other person is stupid, but amazingly it is Ren who objects. Oscar is their friend, and they will do whatever it takes for someone they care about like that. A real turnaround from his attitude of closing himself off emotionally, but I guess he’s realizing how ridiculous it sounds coming from other people? Harriet gets out of her seat to do what she does best and start talking down to someone as naïve and wrong. Feelings are stupid, the job is what matters. When you lose someone you just replace them and forget about them. We find out that Winter is indeed meant to be the new leader instead of Clover, and before Marrow there was apparently a member of the team named Tortuga, but Ren is not about to let anyone tell him that someone is replaceable. You don’t say that to Team JNPR, and we definitely don’t say that about Ren... Not now. In his outrage, Ren suddenly finds... clarity. He starts seeing the world a little differently. In less cryptic terms, his Semblance seems to have evolved and he now sees people’s emotions swirling around them as colorful bursts of flower petals. Harriet is actually furious about losing Clover, she’s lying to herself and trying to suppress her feelings. She does not like being called out like that, but the rest of the squad needs to be put on blast. As opposed to Hare’s red petals Marrow is surrounded by blue that I guess would mean sadness or depression, Elm has orange and some red, and Vine is clouded with green. The meanings of the last two are a little less clear, but they’re all definitely feeling some strong things that they’re trying to hide under a calm façade. This is the reason the Ace Ops lost to RWBY, they’re all held back by trying not to connect with each other so unity and team bonds never formed. Elm does not like being told she’s a loser because she won’t make friends, but at least it’s a a reaction, which means he’s absolutely right. She’s about to deck Ren in the face but Winter steps in to get everyone calmed down. She looks these three “fugitives” over, and makes a decision. She’s going to trust her sister’s friends. They will get the teens in close and give them a small window of time to try and get in and out before the Ace Ops need to bring in the payload and blow it all away. Harriet is pissed Winter is giving these “traitors” a chance, and questions her decision thusly. But you’re outranked, you boob, and you can’t do a damn thing to stop her from showing human decency. They have a very tight schedule to attempt this rescue, and Jaune accepts that fully. The three get uncuffed and are given their weapons back as the ship lands at the front lines. Ren tries to appeal to the doubt and regret he can see in Marrow to get him to switch sides while the getting’s good. Marrow wants to, but he sticks to the job for now. Yang and Jaune head out first, while Ren lingers to tell Winter he knows she doesn’t want to be a part of all this anymore either, and we see a rainbow of many emotional petals around her head. Either she has a balance of many emotions in check and is the most levelheaded of the Ace Ops, or she has the most emotions repressed and her mind is a tempest of feelings that aren’t being addressed and may spell her end... take your pick.

As this militant Schnee considers her options, we go homeward to see Weiss and the others heading for the front door. May isn’t keen to stay her any longer than needed, and the kids need to make a choice about where she’s dropping them off. Either they go to the front lines here in Atlas or back down to Mantle to help with the chaos there. No other options, and especially no breaking their jailbirds out for an assist. May doesn’t have the optimism and heroic hope that Ruby still holds dear, she won’t entertain the idea that this can become a complete victory all around. This isn’t that kind of world. Either they help one place, or they help another. And even then, that’s no guarantee wherever they go will be successful at stopping the invasion. It’s very depressing, and it’s on these kids to accept the facts and make the hard decisions. If you take a look at the last few Volumes, Ruby does seem to have a bit of a habit of ignoring the dreadful possibilities/facts in favor of pursuing a hopeful and bold plan that could fix everything immediately so she doesn’t have to cope with reality and actually grieve her mistakes and losses... I’m not saying it makes her a bad character or that she’s wholly wrong for trying to see a bright side whenever possible, just that this is an unhealthy strategy for a leader with so much on her shoulders. But before anyone has time to make a decision right now, there’s a hard knock on the front door. Everyone draws their weapons and approaches slowly, before Weiss cautiously opens the door. In a most definitely welcome surprise, she is greeted by Klein!!! She missed him dearly, and apologizes for whatever fault she had in his being fired, but while cycling through personalities he assures her she has nothing to be sorry for since it’s all Jacques’ fault, the bastard. Turns out, Klein is here to use his medical knowledge to treat Nora. What, didn’t you know all butlers to heroic millionaires have field medic training? Alfred Pennyworth set the gold standard, I dare say~ But of course, Weiss didn’t call him and none of her friends know his number so who told him to come?... Would you believe it, Whitley is responsible and we could not be more proud of him! Weiss certainly is, and she gives him what might be his first genuinely loving hug in years. Klein heads upstairs to begin treatment, while the rest of the group share a hopeful moment. But this silence too comes to a crashing halt as there is further ruckus outside. This time Ruby answers the door, to see a smoking crater in the front driveway. RWB rush outside and kneel at the edge of the crater as the smoke clears. Penny has crash landed, and lies there in a pool of what we can only presume to be her green synthetic blood. All she has the strength left to do is apologize before she passes out and the screen darkens with her. There lies the end for the next 6 weeks, and we were left to panic and speculate all the while. Too bad I’m a lazy bugger who only got this review out now and there’s no tension left before the thrilling continuation comes tomorrow morning. So lets all get one last panicked sleep in before the living nightmares come for our girls! Penny is totally gonna be under Watt’s control, the Hound is coming, it’s all gonna be a huge damn mess... Can’t wait, can you?~

[conversationswithmyself]

bring on the supernova

i woke up crying this morning.

i opened my eyes to find tears already staining my cheeks and i thought "there's something wrong with me."

well you've known that for years

"or theres something wrong with the world"

you've known that for years too

there is so much balled up baggage festering inside my chest i think one day its just going to burst of out me and i'll explode into a supernova of anger and misery and catharsis.

it will be beautiful.

let some of it out then! oh, i couldn't possibly. go on, you deserve it, get it off your chest! well okay maybe one or two or three or four things...

one.

friends leave you. or they become one step removed and leave you with a lingering 'what if...?'

you cant have that kiss back. its mine. you gave it to me. no returns policy i'm afraid.

so you ruin it beyond recognition. if i get to keep it its sure as hell not gonna be pretty.

two.

i have not forgiven him. i will not forgive him. he doesn't even know he needs forgiveness.

oh, but he's already recieved the ultimate absolution from the great big man in the sky! he's a bonafide born again christian! he redeemed himself and now you don't get to be angry.

he didnt kill her but he may as well have.

three.

you were alone and you are alone and you will be alone. its better to accept this now.

dont tell them and dont even entertain the idea. you know its better this way, don't you?

four.

what do you do when every memory in your life is intertwined with something you now despise? can you hack it out? get rid of the problem at its root? let me get my axe, honey, i'm about to destroy half of myself in the name of closure.

its a messy divorce, its an unfair eviction, its a baby bird too small to fly, its not you, its me. except its you. my god, its always been you.

i've unpacked my suitcase, spilled my dirty laundry on the floor. i thought i was home but i don't think i have one anymore.

i dont understand how this washing machine works. does anyone understand how this washing machine works? no?

so i'll hand wash it then. but oh! oh no now look what i've done. i've ripped my favourite shirt, and that one's shrunk as well, and my hands are are all red and pruney, and i have all this dirty water right in front of me. my brain says drink it so i do.

i havent exploded yet. this was just a solar flare. there is worse to come, but i think i'll like being a black hole. at least then i can consume things and not feel guilty about it.

bring on the supernova.

[catie-does-things]

Happy 10th anniversary of that time Zuko ran in front of a bolt of lightning for Katara, here’s a very important list I wrote during my hiatus earlier this year and sent to @iamfitzwilliamdarcy:

reasons for scream

“That’s something we have in common.”

“Maybe you could be free of it.”

That little nod when he lets her touch his scar, which he’s never let anyone do before

She lays her hand on him so gently. She touches him to heal, not to hurt.

But also “I’ll save you from the pirates” lol who are we kidding here

“You rise with the moon. I rise with the sun.” ALL THE BALANCE SYMBOLISM I MEAN COME ON

They were so evenly matched that whether it was night or day is all that made the difference in who won

She freezes him but leaves air inside the ice so he can breathe. He uses the air to taunt her while he explodes his way out of the ice. Your otp could never.

The sad eyes when she looks back as she leaves the cave. Kill me.

“I thought you had changed!”

That water whip when she refuses him as a prisoner like damn that is some righteous fury, his betrayal cut her so deep, so personally

“I’ll make sure your destiny ends, permanently” and he’s just like “...welp, that happened”

That scene where they argue under the full moon as the waves crash violently against the cliffs and she shouts at him “I was the first person to trust you, back in Ba Sing Se!” and the wind whips the long grass and they stand there with so much emotion between them while a shooting star passes overhead. I feel faint.

That’s definitely how you handle two characters whose relationship isn’t important and won’t affect anything after the war tbh

He waited outside her tent all night though? To try to make it up to her? This boy.

He’s the only one who understands her specific need for closure and catharsis over a traumatic memory that made her feel powerless because they’re the same

He seemed to be all anger and fury but in his heart was hope and goodness, she seemed to be all hope and goodness but in her heart was anger and fury, neither could find balance without the other, WHICH WAS A MAJOR THEME OF THE WHOLE FREAKING SHOW LIKE COME ON

(“Perhaps in return I can restore something you’ve lost” lol ~*foreshadowing*~)

That look of awe when he sees her bloodbend like respect

“You look her in the eye and tell me you don’t remember what you did” like woah that is some projection of guilt right there he needs her forgiveness so badly

and she’s finally able to give it thanks to him

“I am ready to forgive you” like what a life-changing moment honestly

And then she throws herself into his arms and they embrace as the sun is setting but like in a super casual way that in fact doesn’t even mean they’re friends or like each other at all I’m sure.

When he’s scared to face his uncle and she reassures him he’ll be forgiven there too though? Lowkey scream.

Also when he like shoves Suki out of the way to run to her and save her from the falling rocks lol.

And then she plucks him out of the air when he’s falling with such determination like “no one kills him but me” lol

He! Asks! For! Her! Help! The proud prince humbles himself instead of trying to do it alone! They were perfectly matched opponents, now they will be the perfect team! Dramatic reversals and character development and narrative payoff, oh my!

Literally any shot with the two of them framed against the red sky during the comet is super gorgeous just saying

He...he ran??? In front of a bolt of lightning??? For her????

This boy! Outran lightning! To save her!

LIGHTNING!

The dramatic slow mo as he realizes who the lightning is aimed at and the horror dawns on him and you know like in that moment nothing mattered, nothing existed except her

And then the Big No and he runs

He takes like a billion volts straight to the chest for her (in an extremely nonchalant way that I’m sure means nothing)

The way she cries out his name when she sees him go down though?

Also that single hand reaching for her helplessly while she fights Azula, like he’s lying there on the ground literally dying he’s still only thinking about trying to protect her

Seriously, that desperate, trembling hand reaching out for her! Which means absolutely nothing at all, of course.

~*AND THEN SHE HEALS HIM*~

She heals his heart like what kind of extra romantic symbolism is this shit that in no way indicates they mean anything to each other

He’s gonna have that scar on his chest for the rest of his life as proof of how far he’s willing to go for her but I’m sure neither of them will ever think about that

He thanks her in that husky whisper because he almost died y’all

“I think I should be the one thanking you.” PAYOFF! EMOTIONAL AND NARRATIVE PAYOFF! It’s so beautiful.

They stand together, triumphant. I cry.

And then yeah I’m sure they just go on with their separate lives and don’t actually even get along as friends and certainly never think about each other at all because they didn’t fundamentally shape each other’s coming into their own or change each other in irrevocable ways, that is totally believable and very good writing.

[rorykillmore]

ok haha relevant to ur field: top 10 tv episodes of all time?

i finally sat down and tried to do this and it’s taken me all of like, an entire evening, and i’m STILL not sure i haven’t forgotten something,

that being said i tried to the best of my ability, and also big disclaimer: some of my favorite shows are just straight up not on this list. determining my favorite shows overall would be MUCH different than determining my favorite individual, stand alone episodes of something. and with that being said...

(also i gave up trying to number-rank them. they are maybe like, ROUGHLY ranked, but i could flip flop a lot of them especially towards the middle so like, whatever)

lost - “the constant”

there are so many good, defining episodes of lost that it was kind of hard to pick one but... for me this was a good example i could think of that summed up the show at the height of like. how weird it could be and how emotional it could be. it also may be one of the best stand-alone episodes of the show objectively, i think. for those who are familiar but can’t remember, this is the one where desmond is kind of jumping around through time and the one with That phone call between him and penny at the end (which frankly should earn it a spot on this list by itself). okay i rewatched that and made myself cry so we’re off to a great fucking start!

hannibal - “mizumono”

mizumono is honestly one of the most like... perfect culminations of disaster i’ve ever seen. and i mean that in a good way!, but really, it brings seasons worth of tension to a head with near-flawless execution, it’s one of the most beautifully and artistically shot episodes of an already beautiful and artistic show, and the last fifteen minutes are like... kind of beyond description. i honestly have yet to see a season finale that’s as brutal to like, its ENTIRE MAIN CAST, and because of the impact it had at the time i felt like i had to put it on here. 

true detective - “form and void”

the first season of true detective as a whole was honestly incredibly influential to like... the modern tv landscape we have today and how highly regarded television as a whole has become. it’s really important and really worth seeing. the finale, “form and void”, is if i recall correctly perhaps a little divisive because of how the mystery ultimately ended up being solved (i won’t give spoilers) but it was beautiful and surreal and creepy and for me, just the right amount of satisfying. actually for me, i’m not gonna lie, it was... and still is, very important to me personally. specifically in regards to the culmination of rust cohle’s character arc and the hopeful, compassionate note it ended on. rust was essentially a deconstruction of the “bitter edgy nihilistic main character” trope, much of his characterization was about how that mentality just ate away at him, but he found this essential moment of peace in the end that just... still really stays with me.

alias - “pilot”

i had to include this because alias has, literally my favorite pilot episode to date. in general alias has a few episodes i considered putting on this list (the finale of season 2 also being one for... Reasons) but i just had to go with this one because it’s a fucking pilot. in the television industry, pilots are notoriously difficult to get right. there’s so much establishment and exposition that needs to happen all while making sure you hook your audience that it can be... really tough to pace it correctly, and i have never seen anyone fucking nail it like alias did. of everything i’ve put on this list i think this is probably the episode i’ve watched the most times. sydney bristow in that bright red wig. still iconic.

westworld - “the bicameral mind”

westworld season 1 almost felt like it could have... ended with that finale, period. i mean naturally it did not, but in some ways if you weren’t so attached to the characters and didn’t want to see how they’d evolve, you almost wouldn’t NEED more than the bleak (well, for humanity), inevitable note it ends on. there are so many gratifying answers to the questions the season spun, so much emotional catharsis and satisfaction in dolores’ awakening and self-realization and maeve making her first real, free choice in returning to the park... idk it’s a lot. and it’s executed wonderfully. there are tons of moments that never lose their impact no matter how many times i revisit them. not much more to say than that.

 buffy the vampire slayer - “restless”

possibly a controversial choice even among buffy fans? i remember at least at the time people were mad that such an unconventional episode was used to top off season 4. but let’s be real, season 4′s overarching plot was, not that great. for me, i never minded that it tied up early and that we had something really... different for the finale.

it also helps that i’m a huge sucker for like, surrealism, character studies, symbolism and significant imagery, foreshadowing, that kind of thing, and this episode is thick with ALL of that stuff. look i hate joss whedon but this was him at his best. restless is still... one of the most haunting things i’ve ever watched, and such a bold choice, and people are still dissecting it today and i’m like, “how did they manage to foreshadow some of this stuff this intricately this early in the show’s run’. i could probably go back and rewatch it easily even though i haven’t really delved into buffy in forever. “once more with feeling” also gets an honorable mention to being the best musical episode of a show to date.

black mirror - “nosedive”

okay i was really tempted to put uss callister on this list because i enjoyed that so immensely, it’s one of my favorite things ever, but uss callister is so... almost movie-like that it almost feels unfair to put it on this list with more traditionally structured television episodes. so apart from that, i have this inexplicable fucking soft spot for nosedive. i think about it all the time. it’s the black mirror episode i’ve rewatched the most. i’m not even sure if i can articulate why i love it so much except that... well, firstly it is another character study (with bryce dallas howard giving a wonderful and moving and vaguely unhinged performance), but also like. i think it is perhaps one of the most insightful episodes of black mirror overall. the point isn’t to be... bleak, necessarily, but its message is important. it’s less about ~the dangers of social media~ i think and more about how people relate to one another (or don’t, and how painful it can feel to not really emote or connect or find sincerity) and just, the social media app being a vehicle for that. stories about emotional suppression and catharsis always hit me hard. 

oh and since black mirror is an anthology series with all standalone episodes, you can watch this even if you’ve never dabbled in the show before! go see it if you haven’t!!

grey’s anatomy - “losing my religion”

so i knew i wanted to put a grey’s anatomy episode on this list but i wasn’t really sure... how to go about picking just one, because grey’s has so many iconic individual episodes that have really. permeated television culture at this point. i don’t know, how do you just pick one? but i went with losing my religion because 1) i do genuinely feel that it contains some of the shows best and most poignant and memorable to date, i mean, even like 13 years later people remember the culmination of the denny storyline,  and 2) i distinctly remember this being the point when i was watching the show for the first time that i really... consciously, vividly, felt myself falling in love with it and appreciating it for all that it was.this is really the point where you can’t write off grey’s anatomy as a one-dimensional quirky medical drama anymore no matter how hard you try. so it’s on here for nostalgic reasons too

also, this was the episode that launched “chasing cars” as the song that reduces literally everyone to tears, so there’s that,

ahs asylum - “madness ends”

for all the shit i’ll give ryan murphy, i truly still believe that ahs asylum was his masterpiece. it is perhaps the most sincere and tender and brutally real i’ve ever seen his work get. and madness ends will always be... one of my favorite season finales ever, and something i’ll always remember so fondly and emotionally. it also, and maybe this is an unconventional opinion, but it is also the most hopeful the show has ever felt to me. the most forgiving, the most kind. the closure it grants lana, kit, and jude, and even MARY EUNICE (wait was this the episode she died in? i think. i don’t remember) was just... i don’t know if you can get more satisfying than that. jessica lange’s performance in this episode specifically, and the ending of jude’s story, is something that’ll stay with me forever (there’s a reason that i consider jude to be one of my favorite characters, like, ever). i actually haven’t rewatched it in full, let alone this specific episode in so long but... yeah that shit stays with you

and last but incontestably not least... 

the leftovers - “international assassin” or “certified”

guess what! for the leftovers, i actually COULDN’T pick just one! and if there’s any show on this list that deserves two episodes... well,

“international assassin” is a lot of people’s favorite episode, from what i understand. at least, its usually the critics’ favorite episode. and it wins a lot of points with me for the same reasons “restless” does (it’s basically another instance of like, the show taking a break to do a completely different kind of surrealist episode) and it marked the first time the show really like. completely abandoned all pretense of reality and went all-out mysticism. and it fucking worked. everything about this episode is a masterpiece. to give you a basic premise if you’re not familiar, basically. the main character, kevin, has spent the entire season behind haunted by... either a ghost or a hallucination (you’re not sure at that point as an audience member, but kevin is leaning towards ghost) and is told by someone that in order to get rid of her. he essentially has to die, go to purgatory, and confront her. the end result is... something you couldn’t even imagine and i don’t think i could fully put into words, but as most things in the leftovers are, it ends up being startlingly insightful and compassionate and is 100% guaranteed to make you feel very deeply for a character that most people hated up until that point

“certified” isn’t as much as a standout but for me it is one of the most powerful episodes in an already incredibly powerful show. it’s essentially devoted to giving closure to one of the characters (who happened to be one of my favorites) and her longstanding pain and her struggles with being tied to realism in this world where you increasingly need to believe in something to survive. it’s hard to give much context beyond that but it is heartbreaking and wonderfully performed and i actually haven’t been able to revisit it many times since because it affected me so much

idk i could really put every episode of the leftovers on here, honestly. it is incredibly special.

[tommyhagen]

Five Percent Of A Fairytale : Things Could Be Better Pt 1

Meant to post tons of stuff before this but oh well skipping way ahead, seriously send asks about what you want to see because my interest here is waning. And as always references to Charles and Tony being best friends. Sorry bout it but it’s basically canon. And idk if you got my subtle little hinting but Charles’ college Alpha was Sherlock

Tw: Slut Shaming

—————————————————————-

They were sitting on the couch, cross legged, giving the girls their bottles when Steve finally brought it up. Tony had been the one to put the rule in place but was just as relieved as Steve to have it broken. It worked for a while, hell, for a while it was the only thing that kept it going. No Talking About Our Past. But turns out that was a lot easier said then done when they spent almost every moment with two little beings that were the embodiment of it.

It was sudden as it always was when something was weighing heavily on Steve’s mind. “Did I make you happy, Tony?”, he blurted out. Tony would never understand how even an Alpha could be so serious while making silly faces at a baby. Not even Virginia’s contagious giggles could crack him when he got like this. “Before, I mean.”

Tony considered waving him off but knew better than to think that would work much longer. It would only get more difficult as time went on. Steve and Tony were fine now, even good. He’d forgotten how much he liked their friendship. It was like someone had hit a reset button on their relationship and they were getting to know each other all over. Things were going well but they could be going better.

It was obvious that there was still something between them. How could there not be? There’d been no closure, no catharsis. Tony had just chosen not to think about it. He’d thought that was what was best for the babies but now he realized it wouldn’t be fair to them. Sarah and Virginia weren’t going to have a childhood like his. No one would grow up walking on eggshells. They wouldn’t suffer because of their parents’ issues with each other.

It took a moment but Tony finally replied, “It wouldn’t have been so hard on me if you didn’t.” It was the truth. As much as the end of things had sucked major ass, it’d been a great ride down. Everybody needed a whirlwind romance at least once in their life. Even if they usually ended in one too.

“Good.”, Steve sighed, already on to burping Ginny. She was a big eater just like her dad; Sarah on the other hand was already getting picky. “Good. At least that something. Of course, I’m sorry if it made things harder on you but I’m proud to have made you happy.

I know it might be hard for you to believe now but I really wanted to.”

Tony considered that. “I know.”, he decided, finally moving on to burping Sarah. At Steve’s suspicious side glance Tony laughed if for no other reason than to break the tension. “Really! I do! I mean for awhile there we were really good together, weren’t we? And I’d been completely obsessed with you since I was a kid. You’ve seen my childhood bedroom. I couldn’t help it when you were practically all Howard ever talked about. He’d lose it if he saw us now. I was in love with you since I was five years old.”

In the past Steve would have laughed at the irony in that. Howard had spent all that time and money just to create his son’s first Alpha. But now Tony had barely finished speaking before Steve was asking, “Do you miss me?”

Tony blinked owlishly him. Well then, they were gonna be jumping right in the deep end, huh? Oh boy, this would take some consideration and very precise wording. Unfortunately, he wasn’t known for being particularly good at either. “I guess I miss certain things about you. I think that’s just how it is with your first love.”, Tony mused.

“I was your first love?”, Steve interjected.

“Well, duh, obviously!”, Tony laughed. Then at Steve’s blank look he continued on, “Really?! You didn’t know that?!”. Steve shook his head.

Tony sighed and wondered if it would have made a difference if he’d shared this earlier. He thought not. It didn’t stop him from admitting it now, though, “Well, you were the only one before T’Challa. I mean, clearly I’ve got plenty of experience. I’ve been passed around the scientific community like a bong. You know that stretchy guy, Reed Richards? Well, I can tell you for a fact that’s the most interesting thing about him. His work is so derivative it should be in a fucking science fair but he makes up for it. So long as you can get him to keep his stupid mouth busy with something else it’s quite an experience. Yeah, slept with him, that uber hot wife of his and her Alpha brother. Never the big guy though. Kind of a shame too, bet that would have been interesting.”. Tony’s laugh this time was completely genuine and bright.

“Tony!”, Steve gasped, horrified. “You are holding our little girl!”. So much for precise wording.

“What?”, Tony protested. He’d missed this. Steve was the sort of the man who wasn’t your friend once he was your lover and Tony was the type who couldn’t have any sort of meaningful relationship that was just one.

It turned out that Steve had been right. Tony really had missed him. Even if he was just missing the man Steve had been before becoming Tony’s Alpha. That guy had been pretty great, after all. Tony wondered if it was okay to feel so natural interacting as they once did even after all Steve had done. Was he being too soft?

Despite the concerns Tony continued to joke, “She doesn’t even know what I’m saying. Watch.” Tony laid Sarah on his lap so she was looking up at him. Then, very sweetly, he said, “Motherfucking cocksucker!”

Sure enough, his daughter just cooed delightfully in response. Steve was still covering Virginia’s ears. It’d been mostly an attempt to get a rise out of him, anyway. Tony chuckled at how easy and predictable Steve was even after all they’d been through. “They can only pick up a few words at this point and it’s all just stuff like their names, really only the things important to them. It’s pretty much just about positive and negative sounds right now. I’ve only got a month or so left of this so you better believe I’m gonna take advantage of it. They’re only babies.”, he explained.

Steve gaped at him. “You know so much about them...”, he wondered.

Tony was a bit uncomfortable under the Alpha’s gaze but figured Steve was most likely just baffled that he had somehow created life with a person like Tony. And how could he hold that against him? The girls had been inside him for close to 9 months and sometimes even he could barely believe it. How had he ever gotten so lucky? “Well, I did give birth to them.”, Tony replied. “You try keeping literally anything inside of you for 9 months and not having it become your main interest.”

He’d meant for Steve to laugh but he didn’t. To fill the awkward silence Tony tickled Sarah’s round little tummy. At least someone laughed at his jokes. He pulled his girl close and peppered her face with kisses. “Give me Virginia. I’m terrified of them thinking I play favorites.”, Tony said and that had only been half a joke.

Steve finally did chuckle as they switched their little girls out, so caught up in the pure bliss of having their children close. It was still an easy feeling to have when they were so small and cute. And hadn’t learned the word ‘no’ yet. “You just said it yourself, Tony. They’re only babies. But they won’t think that when they grow up and become young ladies either. You’ll see.”, he reassured.

“Now how would you know that? Both of us were only children. And my parents still managed to play favorites so long as the kid wasn’t me!”, Tony teased.

Steve still frowned deeply as he always did whenever Tony talked about his less than stellar childhood. Meanwhile, Steve’s own had been a low budget, single parent version of the Brady Bunch. They were a real Dickens novel, the two of them. The loved poor boy and the lonely rich boy, living in the same city only separated by a few decades. Maybe they hadn’t worked out in real life but someone could probably make bank off a movie where they did. But real life was more complicated than a romcom. And Tony wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I just know.”, Steve insisted, forcing Tony to stop thinking about who would play him in that movie. But probably Johnny Depp, right? Yeah, he was an Alpha and all but he’d played Omegas before.

“They’re my little girls, after all.”, Steve continued. “Only natural that I should understand them. They already know how much their mom loves them. Everybody does. You’re an amazing mother, Tony, incredible actually. Gosh I- I wish you could see yourself with them it’s just so...beautiful to watch.”. Steve looked too enraptured to really process what he’d said.

Tony sure as hell had. “Thank you.”, he replied stiffly.

And now Steve had too. “Oh! I’m sorry. Don’t know what came over me.”, he exclaimed, suddenly becoming incredibly fascinated with Sarah’s feet. In his defence, they were adorable.

“It’s okay.”, Tony reassured him a bit nervously. “Old habits and all that.”

“Yes. Old habits.”, Steve murmured before lapsing them back into awkward silence. Their daughters cooed and wiggled between them, completely oblivious. But soon enough they wouldn’t be. They had to fix this. All the same, for now, Tony would let Steve struggle with words for a bit. Mainly Tony was just happy to have not been the one making things awkward for once.

When Steve finally did land on something to say it was forced and too far back in the flow of their dialogue. He’d never been any good with uncomfortable situations. “Have you...been with Doctor Xavier too?”, he asked.

Odd and totally off topic but Tony’d take it. “With Charlie?!”, he practically gasped. “Man, I wish! If I could fuck only one Omega for the rest of my life it’d be Xavier, any day, anytime! Not that he’d ever let me. I had a chance back in college but his college boyfriend beat me too it. Didn’t stand a chance against an Alpha like that. Since then, I think Charles has turned me down more than anyone else. That’s a part of it though, isn’t it? The unattainable one.” Steve just went right on staring. So in fear of yet another awkward silence, Tony kept babbling, “But he’s no pure little lamb. Don’t let his sweet old man act fool you; he’s a dirty slut through and through! I’m pretty sure he’s even got me beat.”.

Tony’s nervous babbling slowed as he frowned telling the next bit, “He’s not like that anymore. Really he’s not even like himself at all these days. Hasn’t been for awhile. And I thought my first romance ended badly. His Alpha completely ruined him. That’s why he’s in the wheelchair, you know? That guy was a complete psychopath. I met him a few times and his college Alpha was no sweetheart but at least he didn’t disfigure him. Still completely crazy, though. He was big into drugs and and got us into a lot of trouble. If his brother hadn’t been in like a British version of S.H.I.E.L.D or something I probably would have been charged with a felony. Poor guy just has the worst taste. If you wanna go for him, I get it, he’s hot as fuck. Just warning you now though, you’d be wasting your time. Charles hates Alphas. Who could blame with what he’s been through.”

Steve was smiling again at the end of his nervous rant. Tony tried not to let that make him feel uncomfortable but it was hard to do given some of the things he’d said. A smile? Had Steve been listening to him at all?

“How can you just say things like that, Tony?”, he laughed. So no. No, Steve had not.

Virginia was yawning and Tony decided not to get himself worried over Steve instead focusing on putting her down for a nap. He kissed her sweet little button nose. “I’m not telling you anything he wouldn’t tell you himself if you asked. Charles doesn’t have secrets. Never did, even before.”, Tony shot back in what he hoped seemed like a casual manner, rocking his youngest gently.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. It just amazes me how freely you speak.”, Steve clarified.

Eventually Tony returned the smile Steve was offering. “Well, not all of us came over on the Mayflower with the puritans, Gramps.”, he teased.

They sat in companionable silence for awhile, Tony softly humming a lullaby. That only lasted a few precious moments before Steve made things even worse than before. “And Bruce? Have you been with him too?”, he demanded, looking far too invested in the answer to even reign casual conversation.

[nancygduarteus]

Transplantees Find Catharsis in Holding Their Old Hearts

Kamisha Hendrix’s heart lay on the table between us. Seventy days ago, this heart had been beating inside of her, back behind the dark scar that plunged into the neckline of her blouse.

“No—my heart didn’t beat,” Hendrix clarified. “It trembled.”

The chemo used to treat her non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had damaged her cardiac muscle irreparably, reducing its strength to 15 percent. She regularly lapsed in and out of consciousness. “I felt like I was moving through mud,” she recalled.

Hendrix looked at the heart on the table, the organ she had carried for 44 years, and spoke in its imaginary voice. “You wanna live?” She gave the heart a whimpering intonation. “Okay, I'll give you another beat.”

She switched back to her own voice, “Thank you, heart. Thanks a lot, friend.”

Three months ago, Hendrix’s mother, Carolyn Woods, had already written her obituary and tucked it away in a drawer. The theme, Woods explained, was For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It was about everyone coming to pay their last respects—and the people are the bell. All that crying and wailing would be the people tolling for her.”

Ultimately, the story of Hendrix’s heart did end in a funeral. Somewhere, on a clear May morning, an organ donor died. Within hours, Hendrix received a new heart.

The transplant saved Hendrix’s life, and yet—it would also be technically true to say that in the process, a part of her had died. We were in Dallas, Texas, at the Baylor Heart and Vascular Center to reunite Hendrix with her native heart and reflect on what it means to live without it.

The idea for this kind of encounter originated with William Roberts, Baylor’s chief cardiac pathologist. In 2014, Roberts began the Heart-to-Heart program, inviting cardiac transplant patients to see and hold their former organs. The primary objective was education. Roberts delivers a health lecture with the patient’s own heart as Exhibit A.

For transplantees, compliance with doctors’ lifestyle instructions is critical to recovery and longevity. One recent study found that in the domains of diet, exercise, medication, and tobacco avoidance, noncompliance ranged from 18 to 37 percent. Furthermore, compliance was observed to decrease over time.

While Hendrix’s heart failure was primarily due to another cause, her condition was exacerbated by unhealthy lifestyle choices—a factor that impacts nearly all heart-transplant patients. With Heart-to-Heart, Roberts has found a way to clearly demonstrate the effect of these choices on the heart itself. According to a study co-authored by the cardiologist, 75 percent of program participants reported that the experience has changed their health-related behaviors “to a great degree.”

James Murtha's heart (Roc Morin)

Roberts begins each session with raw statistics.

“In the United States, there are 6 million people living with heart failure,” he lectures in a honeyed Georgian accent. “Every year, only about 2,200 of those people receive heart transplants. So, you are very, very special. You’ve been given a second chance.”

Unceremoniously lifting the surgical cloth that covers the heart, Roberts describes what he sees. The history of the heart is there, incontrovertibly embedded in the organ. Most are cocooned in hard yellow fat.

“If you dropped this in the Mississippi,” Roberts opines, “it would float all the way to the Gulf.”

“Oh my god!” Hendrix gasped. “Look at all that fat! I guess those chips have gotta go.”

“That’s right,” Roberts replied. “And those cows, chickens, and pigs on your plate.”

In addition to education, the reunion also provides an opportunity for closure—a benefit that Roberts didn’t initially expect. After facing death—what transplantee John Bell prefers to call “the abyss”—survivors are frequently left traumatized. That reality is apparent in the standard warlike medical rhetoric, with doctors and patients alike speaking the language of soldiers. Together they fight their battles, target the enemy, eradicate and annihilate. With the focus on winning, dedicated opportunities to stop and reflect are rare.

Tina Sample’s ordeal began with a massive heart attack that was misdiagnosed as a gastrointestinal issue. After days of breathless agony, she was finally correctly diagnosed at a different hospital. “I had what they call ‘the widowmaker,’” she recounted, “100 percent blockage. I had a massive amount of blood clots throughout my heart. The doctor had never seen anything like it in his 24 years of practicing medicine. He called me a miracle.”

In the months that followed, Sample lived in constant fear of death. “I was just so scared every night,” she confessed. “I had this terror that this could be my last night on earth, so I’d try to keep myself awake. I would keep myself awake until 4 or 5 a.m. I wanted to see my son graduate college. I wanted to know my grandkids. There were so many things I wanted to see.”

James Murtha had been healthy his entire life. “I’ve never broke a bone in my body,” he insisted. “I’ve never really been sick at all, except for the flu once and chicken pox when I was a kid. So this—when it hit, it hit hard.”

Murtha had been driving home from work when he began to shiver and sweat. It was a heart attack. Later, he recalled being in a hospital bed, on life support, his liver and kidneys failing. He says he had a vision of his mother, lying in a similar bed half a century earlier. It was one of his earliest memories.

“I basically went back in time,” he began. “I was five. They brought us all in, the night she passed away. I remember her telling me, ‘You’re gonna be good for your dad now, aren't you?’ There were five of us kids, and she made my dad promise that he'd keep us all together.” She died in that bed, at the age of 25, from a rare cancer.

As Murtha lay suspended between life and death, the visions continued. His wife grasped his hand as he described what he called an out-of-body experience: “I was in this place looking for my older brother Mike. We had been talking about getting together. He was a dreamer. Oh, it had been over 30, 40 years since we’d played together. And then he died. But, I was in this place, like a green forest, meadows, and there were these bright figures all around. And, there was this one figure, I couldn’t—it was just really bright, and he was in a robe like Jesus. And, he told me, ‘Your brother is home, you need to go find yourself.’”

Murtha awoke in an intensive care unit, with a new heart bounding in his chest. His old heart went first to the pathology lab for an autopsy. At that point, Roberts claims, “99.5 percent of hospitals throw the hearts away. They just don’t have the space to keep them.” Baylor is different, however. Their lab contains thousands of hearts in permanent storage, making it one of the most extensive cardiac research facilities in the world. The availability of these organs creates a unique opportunity for a program like Heart-to-Heart. Each transplant patient at Baylor is routinely informed about the option, which is promoted as an educational opportunity.

On the day of a viewing session, clinical coordinator Saba Ilyas carefully retrieves and prepares each organ. The patients come in, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families, all eyeing the tray with the bulging surgical towel.

Hendrix had expected to see something “black and shriveled, probably three times the normal size, and just jello-like.”

Bell had expected a big red ideograph, “like when you open a Valentine’s card.”

“It wasn’t like that at all though,” he continued. “What it reminded me of, was a piece of roast beef.”

Under the glaring examination lights of the Baylor pathology lab, the visceral reality of what had actually happened to these people was an abstraction. I was there, holding a lump of raw meat in my hands, trying to feel the life that had once pulsated through it. Across culture and time, the heart has been a metaphor for love, for valor, for the soul itself—for everything we can sense but never touch. Here too, at the viewing, it was evident, by the gentle reverence it inspired, by the tender way in which it was held—the meaning of this organ transcended its mere function and form. Each transplantee was left to interpret the significance of this experience for themselves.

James Murtha holds his own heart. (Roc Morin)

“The whole time you’re holding your heart,” Bell described, “your brain wants to have a little conversation with you—like you shouldn’t really be doing this. This is not normal. And, you’re like—well, but here it is. I have my heart right here in my hands, and it’s normal to me.” Bell later recalled opening his eyes for the first time after his operation. “In a very poignant moment, I told my new heart that I’d take care of it as best I could for as long as I could.”

Hendrix speculated about the identity of her donor. Based on the frenetic surge of energy she reports experiencing since the transplant, she mused that “it feels like a tennis player.” Afterwards, she spoke again about the borrowed life source she carries inside of her. “It’s like the donor, in some way, is still alive. I think, if the donor was a happy person, they’re still a happy person, it just manifests itself through me.”

For Sample, the heart in her chest feels palpably foreign. She has dreamed about her unknown donor—envisioning him kneeling before her, offering up his heart with his own two hands. She has stopped using the common phrase “my heart” to describe her feelings. She has replaced it, sometimes haltingly, with “my mind.”

Bell held his former heart in front of his chest, with hands that shook from the drugs he must take for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting his new organ. The survivor found himself unexpectedly smiling. “To see my native heart, this thing that had caused so much pain and heartache, and to be able to walk away [from it]—I felt victorious.”

Hendrix thought of God, and of all her mother’s fervent prayers. “It made me feel how truly blessed I am to be here.”

Sample’s emotions overwhelmed her. “When something is gone that’s been a part of you—the thing that gives you life—there’s a sense of loss. There’s a grieving process that you have to go through. It’s crazy, but it’s like a person. It’s dead. My heart is dead, and there it is, lying on the table right there. If your mind goes to that place, then you can’t help but feel that loss. I told my heart ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t take care of you better.’ It brought tears to my eyes, truly. I needed to say goodbye.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/heart-to-heart-transplants-therapy/537504/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Transplantees Find Catharsis in Holding Their Old Hearts

Kamisha Hendrix’s heart lay on the table between us. Seventy days ago, this heart had been beating inside of her, back behind the dark scar that plunged into the neckline of her blouse.

“No—my heart didn’t beat,” Hendrix clarified. “It trembled.”

The chemo used to treat her non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had damaged her cardiac muscle irreparably, reducing its strength to 15 percent. She regularly lapsed in and out of consciousness. “I felt like I was moving through mud,” she recalled.

Hendrix looked at the heart on the table, the organ she had carried for 44 years, and spoke in its imaginary voice. “You wanna live?” She gave the heart a whimpering intonation. “Okay, I'll give you another beat.”

She switched back to her own voice, “Thank you, heart. Thanks a lot, friend.”

Three months ago, Hendrix’s mother, Carolyn Woods, had already written her obituary and tucked it away in a drawer. The theme, Woods explained, was For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It was about everyone coming to pay their last respects—and the people are the bell. All that crying and wailing would be the people tolling for her.”

Ultimately, the story of Hendrix’s heart did end in a funeral. Somewhere, on a clear May morning, an organ donor died. Within hours, Hendrix received a new heart.

The transplant saved Hendrix’s life, and yet—it would also be technically true to say that in the process, a part of her had died. We were in Dallas, Texas, at the Baylor Heart and Vascular Center to reunite Hendrix with her native heart and reflect on what it means to live without it.

The idea for this kind of encounter originated with William Roberts, Baylor’s chief cardiac pathologist. In 2014, Roberts began the Heart-to-Heart program, inviting cardiac transplant patients to see and hold their former organs. The primary objective was education. Roberts delivers a health lecture with the patient’s own heart as Exhibit A.

For transplantees, compliance with doctors’ lifestyle instructions is critical to recovery and longevity. One recent study found that in the domains of diet, exercise, medication, and tobacco avoidance, noncompliance ranged from 18 to 37 percent. Furthermore, compliance was observed to decrease over time.

While Hendrix’s heart failure was primarily due to another cause, her condition was exacerbated by unhealthy lifestyle choices—a factor that impacts nearly all heart-transplant patients. With Heart-to-Heart, Roberts has found a way to clearly demonstrate the effect of these choices on the heart itself. According to a study co-authored by the cardiologist, 75 percent of program participants reported that the experience has changed their health-related behaviors “to a great degree.”

James Murtha's heart (Roc Morin)

Roberts begins each session with raw statistics.

“In the United States, there are 6 million people living with heart failure,” he lectures in a honeyed Georgian accent. “Every year, only about 2,200 of those people receive heart transplants. So, you are very, very special. You’ve been given a second chance.”

Unceremoniously lifting the surgical cloth that covers the heart, Roberts describes what he sees. The history of the heart is there, incontrovertibly embedded in the organ. Most are cocooned in hard yellow fat.

“If you dropped this in the Mississippi,” Roberts opines, “it would float all the way to the Gulf.”

“Oh my god!” Hendrix gasped. “Look at all that fat! I guess those chips have gotta go.”

“That’s right,” Roberts replied. “And those cows, chickens, and pigs on your plate.”

In addition to education, the reunion also provides an opportunity for closure—a benefit that Roberts didn’t initially expect. After facing death—what transplantee John Bell prefers to call “the abyss”—survivors are frequently left traumatized. That reality is apparent in the standard warlike medical rhetoric, with doctors and patients alike speaking the language of soldiers. Together they fight their battles, target the enemy, eradicate and annihilate. With the focus on winning, dedicated opportunities to stop and reflect are rare.

Tina Sample’s ordeal began with a massive heart attack that was misdiagnosed as a gastrointestinal issue. After days of breathless agony, she was finally correctly diagnosed at a different hospital. “I had what they call ‘the widowmaker,’” she recounted, “100 percent blockage. I had a massive amount of blood clots throughout my heart. The doctor had never seen anything like it in his 24 years of practicing medicine. He called me a miracle.”

In the months that followed, Sample lived in constant fear of death. “I was just so scared every night,” she confessed. “I had this terror that this could be my last night on earth, so I’d try to keep myself awake. I would keep myself awake until 4 or 5 a.m. I wanted to see my son graduate college. I wanted to know my grandkids. There were so many things I wanted to see.”

James Murtha had been healthy his entire life. “I’ve never broke a bone in my body,” he insisted. “I’ve never really been sick at all, except for the flu once and chicken pox when I was a kid. So this—when it hit, it hit hard.”

Murtha had been driving home from work when he began to shiver and sweat. It was a heart attack. Later, he recalled being in a hospital bed, on life support, his liver and kidneys failing. He says he had a vision of his mother, lying in a similar bed half a century earlier. It was one of his earliest memories.

“I basically went back in time,” he began. “I was five. They brought us all in, the night she passed away. I remember her telling me, ‘You’re gonna be good for your dad now, aren't you?’ There were five of us kids, and she made my dad promise that he'd keep us all together.” She died in that bed, at the age of 25, from a rare cancer.

As Murtha lay suspended between life and death, the visions continued. His wife grasped his hand as he described what he called an out-of-body experience: “I was in this place looking for my older brother Mike. We had been talking about getting together. He was a dreamer. Oh, it had been over 30, 40 years since we’d played together. And then he died. But, I was in this place, like a green forest, meadows, and there were these bright figures all around. And, there was this one figure, I couldn’t—it was just really bright, and he was in a robe like Jesus. And, he told me, ‘Your brother is home, you need to go find yourself.’”

Murtha awoke in an intensive care unit, with a new heart bounding in his chest. His old heart went first to the pathology lab for an autopsy. At that point, Roberts claims, “99.5 percent of hospitals throw the hearts away. They just don’t have the space to keep them.” Baylor is different, however. Their lab contains thousands of hearts in permanent storage, making it one of the most extensive cardiac research facilities in the world. The availability of these organs creates a unique opportunity for a program like Heart-to-Heart. Each transplant patient at Baylor is routinely informed about the option, which is promoted as an educational opportunity.

On the day of a viewing session, clinical coordinator Saba Ilyas carefully retrieves and prepares each organ. The patients come in, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families, all eyeing the tray with the bulging surgical towel.

Hendrix had expected to see something “black and shriveled, probably three times the normal size, and just jello-like.”

Bell had expected a big red ideograph, “like when you open a Valentine’s card.”

“It wasn’t like that at all though,” he continued. “What it reminded me of, was a piece of roast beef.”

Under the glaring examination lights of the Baylor pathology lab, the visceral reality of what had actually happened to these people was an abstraction. I was there, holding a lump of raw meat in my hands, trying to feel the life that had once pulsated through it. Across culture and time, the heart has been a metaphor for love, for valor, for the soul itself—for everything we can sense but never touch. Here too, at the viewing, it was evident, by the gentle reverence it inspired, by the tender way in which it was held—the meaning of this organ transcended its mere function and form. Each transplantee was left to interpret the significance of this experience for themselves.

James Murtha holds his own heart. (Roc Morin)

“The whole time you’re holding your heart,” Bell described, “your brain wants to have a little conversation with you—like you shouldn’t really be doing this. This is not normal. And, you’re like—well, but here it is. I have my heart right here in my hands, and it’s normal to me.” Bell later recalled opening his eyes for the first time after his operation. “In a very poignant moment, I told my new heart that I’d take care of it as best I could for as long as I could.”

Hendrix speculated about the identity of her donor. Based on the frenetic surge of energy she reports experiencing since the transplant, she mused that “it feels like a tennis player.” Afterwards, she spoke again about the borrowed life source she carries inside of her. “It’s like the donor, in some way, is still alive. I think, if the donor was a happy person, they’re still a happy person, it just manifests itself through me.”

For Sample, the heart in her chest feels palpably foreign. She has dreamed about her unknown donor—envisioning him kneeling before her, offering up his heart with his own two hands. She has stopped using the common phrase “my heart” to describe her feelings. She has replaced it, sometimes haltingly, with “my mind.”

Bell held his former heart in front of his chest, with hands that shook from the drugs he must take for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting his new organ. The survivor found himself unexpectedly smiling. “To see my native heart, this thing that had caused so much pain and heartache, and to be able to walk away [from it]—I felt victorious.”

Hendrix thought of God, and of all her mother’s fervent prayers. “It made me feel how truly blessed I am to be here.”

Sample’s emotions overwhelmed her. “When something is gone that’s been a part of you—the thing that gives you life—there’s a sense of loss. There’s a grieving process that you have to go through. It’s crazy, but it’s like a person. It’s dead. My heart is dead, and there it is, lying on the table right there. If your mind goes to that place, then you can’t help but feel that loss. I told my heart ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t take care of you better.’ It brought tears to my eyes, truly. I needed to say goodbye.”

Article source here:The Atlantic