#idk if you can tell folks but I am Unwell

[youvegot-timetogrow]

I'm still reeling but I don't think we're talking about the second kiss enough.

The first kiss is a leap into the unknown, the culmination of something that's been a long time coming, now with the added thrill of uncertainty of the not knowing, a dive into uncharted water hoping the other will be right behind you.

The second kiss though...

Laudna spends the first few seconds after Imogen kisses her talking herself down to her. Utterly convinced that she's a monster, an abomination past the point of no return, fully expecting Imogen to take a step back once she knows the whole of it. Trying to convince her of it. Let her let her down easy (hah!). "I'm a bad person", and Imogen does not even flinch.

And this is the thing: the smallest rebuttal from Imogen is all it takes, really. It's simple, it's decisive, it's spoken as a holy truth revealed. "You're not a bad person", and Laudna clings to her for dear life.

The second kiss is an affirmation more than it is a confirmation. It's a different kind of leap, both elated and desperate. It's a prayer, a pleading, a gods please let me have this if for but a moment. Let me be what she believes I am. I love you. "I'm a bad person". I don't deserve this. I will destroy you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

[unchartedcloud]

Okay, first off, I am a huge fan. I have absolutely fallen in love with your writing and have read legitimately all of it. I’m not the most interactive fan, but I’m branching out here because, again, I cannot get enough of your work. The serotonin levels I get make my brain go brrrrr.

That said, idk if you guys like to get suggestions/ideas for new chapters, but I have one idea that I would kill to read in your style bc I think you guys write possibly the best domestic Clexa I’ve seen, and I think this would be absolutely mint.

For the modern Clexa AU, a chapter where Lexa isn’t feeling well and Clarke takes care of her while Lexa stresses bc she’s not used to being cared for. You guys seem to have alluded to the fact that she had a rough childhood already, so I think maybe her feeling awful because of her period would be interesting. Maybe she’s extra tense about it bc she was always chided for showing weakness like that? Idk, I’m spitballing. If it’s before the break up, maybe have it so Clarke comes for one of their normal flings and then, when she realizes Lexa is struggling, instead spends the night taking care of her. A little sign that their rules are starting to break about keeping it casual. If it’s after, maybe she notices Lexa struggling in a meeting and Clarke is the only person able to convince Lexa to leave work and take care of herself. In my head I see them arguing over it and Lexa only caving when Clarke calls her “baby” or something similar (maybe for the first time).

I’m sorry for the rant lmao, I’m just obsessed with yalls work and need more vulnerable/flustered Lexa fluff.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this, and to write what you do. You genuinely have fans and I hope this doesn’t make you feel like you have to rush.

When I tell you I could not SLEEP last night because I was too busy brainstorming different versions of this scene. Maybe our fics make your brain go brrrrr but that's precisely what this idea has been doing to mine for the last ohhhhh 48 hours or so.

We don't necessarily take requests, insofar as we're not in a place to guarantee any kind of timely turn around, but suggestions and ideas are always, 100% welcome. Please send them. They're a super quick way to get the creative juices flowing, and interaction from folks who like our stuff is a surefire dose of dopamine - so thank you for reaching out! And please please please don't ever apologize, we live for this shit.

(Tabby edit: we certainly take requests, we just can’t promise we’ll actually do the thing or do the thing in a timely manner — but getting a request from a reader makes the odds of us writing it about 200x better :P)

Brain rot (and spoilers?!? maybe??) under the cut.

EDIT: link to the fic here, fic is rated E.

Full disclosure: I haven’t had a chance to work this out with Tabby yet, which I emphasize because she always finds a way to take my humdrum ideas and add a twist to make them ten times better (cough cough grilled cheese cough cough) BUT I think my favorite version of this so far is a post-break up situation. I like the meeting setting, I like Lexa refusing to slow down until Clarke pulls the Power of the Petname on her. (There are so many things to love about this pairing, but seeing Lexa's world-shaping will bend to Clarke's affection is one of my absolute favorites. I'm sure that doesn't show in any of our fics at all.)

I'm seeing it as a pale, somewhat spacey, just visibly (to Clarke) unwell Lexa sitting in Arkadia's offices for one of their regular meetings, trying to force herself through her day while patently avoiding the Looks Clarke is trying to give her. She gets up to use the restroom and Clarke follows a few minutes later to check in, leading to Lexa stubbornly insisting she's alright to a Clarke who can see through her like wet tissue paper. They bicker, the temperature rising, until Clarke (who always has a Doctor Mode tm, even in a universe where Abby isn't a medical professional) goes to touch her forehead to see if she has a fever, and Lexa - who is a) very unused to touch in most situations, b) very unused to the idea of being taken care of, and c) is now extremely overstimulated - recoils and snaps at her. Enter that fun moment of realization as her overreaction breaks the tension, and though she stubbornly sees out the rest of the Arkadia meeting, Clarke catches her quietly calling Elena to cancel the rest of her appointments for the day.

Of course, Clarke doesn't trust Lexa as far as she can throw her when it comes to stopping work, so she heads to Lexa's apartment after work. she now has a key of her own it's fine. Commence domesticity and hurt/comfort.

I should be doing work, but instead I'm losing it over this idea.

I can make no promises that a version of this will ever see the light of day - and if it does, it'll probably be so far in the future you'll have forgotten you sent this, lmao. (though you will, of course, be credited) But I am positively buzzing about this and am about to go bother Tabby about it again. Might even have just the right title for it...

The idea of having fans is so beyond me, but we remain incredibly grateful for all of y'all who a) read our stuff and b) let us know that you've found it meaningful in some way. That's what makes all the work worth it!

The best domestic clexa. I am cry omg

[pinkpaganofficial-blog]

Content and trigger warnings for:

- eating disorder[s] (eds), i.e anorexia, bulimia

- me talking about my suicidal thoughts and venting (I'm ok i just need to like... "word vomit" i guess)

- abandonment by friends

- feeling repression

~~~\\

So i doubt most people on here who follow me know that I suffer from mental illness but I do and have for a very long time. All of the symptoms and effects really came out after my grandfather/best friend passed away when I was 11, 12 years ago. I fell into a hole of depression, anxiety, and disordered eating. From the time I was 11 until I was around 14 I had a very hard time with food. I was suffering from bulimia and I would do the routine binges and purges I had set for myself through the day. I'm surprised my teeth survived all of the stomich acid assaults on them honestly.

I was lonely. I felt so fucking alone in the world. I didn't have many friends. The friends I had were pretty fairweather at the time, as we were kids. They'd hop to the coolest person in their opinions on sight and leave me in the dust, and then come back when they were done, or something happened, whatever. It wasn't stable, and I was always afraid of just being deserted again. My friend who stuck with me, my grandfather, was gone. My grandmother was so in shambles that she doesnt even remember the year after he died at all. My mother is chronically ill, and even though she is and will always be there for me as long as is possible I just couldn't tell her how bad I was feeling. Maybe it was guilt because she has problems that I felt far outweighed mine (haha oh god there's the tears that actually stings).

And my dad is... well.. a dad. Sometimes dads just don't understand things like mental illness, or being an unwell person. My dad loves me. I know that, and I love him a lot too. But he can't understand how these things affect me as he's basically neurotypical in every way. He tries. But I can't find empathy there, and a lot of the time there's misunderstanding when we talk about mental illness. So I didn't tell him anything then either.

I would stay in my room a lot, or be out in the woods a lot. I would scratch up my arms with my nails until they would bleed and I would cry. I felt like I didn't care if I died at that time. My parents raised me religiously in the church and I tried very hard to have a relationship with their concept of a god. But I couldn't because to me in was just emptiness. For me, in that sense, there is nothing there. So my loneliness was running even deeper than just the physical. It was spiritual as well. And idk if anyone reading this has experienced spiritual emptiness, or even is a spiritual person, but please believe me when I say it's Hell.

When I was 14 I rode my bicycle out to a bridge near my home out in the back woods type country. The old train bridge kind with the big cement blocks at the bottom of the pillars holding them up. I remember sitting on the very edge of it just looking down at the cement. I really wanted to jump. Honestly the only reason I didn't was because of my mom. She's the reason I stepped back, got on my bicycle and rode home. Albeit I was crying the whole way home, stayed out in the garden to finish crying, washed my face in the creek and went inside and straight upstairs to my bed and I slept until the next day.

When I was around the end of being 14 I tried repression. I started trying eating normally (which has wrecked me internally, I have major digestive problems as I've always refused to go to a rehab centre, which in itself is not good for me). I started pretending to have a relationship with "God". I tried the whole "cool hip Christian kid" spin from when I was that age until 17 or so. I pushed back my depression, my fears and anxieties and eds to see if I could be happy. And I pretended to be happy for a while. And I fooled a lot of people.

Things weren't by any means okay though. My school work was suffering as it always had, but since the work was harder it was also suffering harder. I picked up smoking cigarettes. I also picked up alcohol more and more. I dated a 21 year old and lost my virginity to him at 16, after much coaxing from him. That was an extremely bad 8 months.

My saving grace and my recharge at the time was a Bible camp I'd attend in the summers. I went for 12 years. Now that I think about it.. that camp was my only constant thing for a very long time. It was always there. And even when it wasn't camp time, the place was so close I could just go talk to the live in managers when I had questions. While my relationship with a god I don't believe in was strained and a facade, the people I met are amazing and have helped me a lot.

In fact, at that camp I spilled a lot of my struggles to my group of close friends. We were just a few girls, only 17 or so. But they had all been through things just as bad as me. Some so close it scared me. I felt accepted by those girls who are now beautiful strong women. So I opened the flood gates of what I had been through. All of my dark times and feelings, thoughts of dying and plans to do it, the bulimia and how it hurt my body, my 21 year old ex and what had happened to me, my struggles in school, my guilt towards my mother as her pregnancy with me put her in her wheelchair, my panic attacks and the anxiety that I'd felt for so long, my loneliness and my desperate want to not be alive. Basically just like, ALL of it. I don't really think that was a gate I could've closed even if I tried at that point. It was just a lot.

It took a while to talk about everything, and by the time I'd covered everything even more young folks like us had come over to sit. I was sobbing. My friends weren't very far behind either. Someone was rubbing my back and another person brought me tissues. I finished and everyone was kinda quiet and sad. One of my friends said "Hey can we all just kinda sit together and pray?" and I said that I thought that was a good idea. So we sat. And we just prayed. Even if they were words floating up to an empty space where I see no god, the solidarity that I felt with my friends and those around showing that they cared about me was overwhelming. I wasn't alone. I had friends. REAL friends who weren't looking for the next best thing. And I didn't feel as empty anymore. Knowing that I had people who genuinely cared for me and everything I'd been through and everything I was made me feel so much more worthy of living, it showed me I wasn't nothing.

A lot has happened since those dark times. I've had other dark times. Anorexia claimed me at 18 as a sufferer, and I still struggle with it to this day. I had a physically and emotionally abusive sociopathic partner in the Autumn of my 21st year. I had a whole 2 year ordeal with someone that I'm not even going to talk about, as this person and I have BOTH put it behind us and forgiven each other and are now friends. I alsp dropped out of high school in grade 11.

But I've had a LOT of light times. I started actively loving my body at 21, which was the first new constant in my life. I took action and got a breast reduction from G to C cup for my health at 18. I left the church and started understanding science better. The spiritualist in me called for more, so I delved into research on Paganism and Wicca. What I found was what I needed. It was the second new constant I needed. So now instead of 1, I had 2.

I live with my fiance now. He's someone who I was schoolmates with in highschool. After a few years of not keeping in touch, we hung out. We got close again. And after a few years we started dating. We've had bumpy patches. 1 break up due to his mental illness (again, it rears its ugly head). But that was short lived. And we are actively improving ourselves while being there for one another. Last March I asked him to marry me to which he said "Well, I was gonna ask you when we got our own place, so obviously yes." (I've dated a lot of people, so I am so happy that it was him I'm going to be with, no offense to any of the guys, girls and other folks I've been with and am friends with). He's my third constant.

I have so much more now than I ever dreamed I could in those dark times, friends.

Moral of the story is:

Friends come and go. But you'll find someone, or multiple people who will care about you enough to stick with you as much as you wanna stick with them.

Don't give up on yourself. You're gonna have a lot of bad times. Life happens and we can't do shit about it. But life also has a lot of really good times worth looking forward to and holding close to heart. You can love yourself no matter who you are or what you look like because you're more than a name or a number on a scale. You're a complex person with real feelings who is worthy of self love. And love from others too.

Pain sucks. Life can suck a whole fucking lot. So much you want it to end. But through all the struggle, the hurt and the mental illness, you still very much deserve a good life. If not more, because you're actively trying to enjoy being alive in a very hard time.

So yeah. Thanks for reading this. I just needed to talk. I felt like I was going to explode and my Instagram isn't really the place to put this.

Take care of yourselfs. Cherish yourself and your time here. Make the best of your situations as much as you can. Hold your loved ones close in mind and heart. And don't be afraid to talk.