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phantalgia · 1 month

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Another Day of Feeling Sick...

Perhaps I should just use dates as journal entries. I’m not sure. Every thing I post feels more like a journal entry than anything else.

Is this chronically ill or will this just pass? That's something that is taking up my mind right now. So I made the booboo of staying up late last night and part of that was working on that last post. I don’t know why I needed to. I could have canned it for later.

Good Afternoon

I woke up at around 1 pm or just before it. I went to bed late as hell and I have to be up tomorrow early for my ultrasound. I really don’t feel good this morning. Maybe not the worst. But I just don’t feel good. I’m nauseous, slightly feverish, my body feels very sensitive (I don’t know how to describe it), and a little shakey.

Again, Ive been stuck like this since surgery earlier in the year and I think it's an extention of the Long Covid and possible long term POTS Ive had before. I’m still reluctant to call it POTS, it's just I don’t have any other way of calling it. I don’t have an official diagnosis. Long Covid is a yes for sure.

And now with getting Covid again I don’t know what to think. My mind just keeps doubting how I feel. Some days are good, some days are bad. Some hours are good, some bad. It's driving me nuts.

I just keep wondering what if this just blows over? What would it all have been for?

I Can't Stand the Medical Industry

I really cant. I mean when I feel sick it's just kind of like Ive been through this song and dance for two years with no end or answers in sight. I have a basic understanding of how the medical industry has been shaped by capitalism. Essentially reducing humans to how effeciently can we get people back to work. Frankly, this entire system has not even been able to do that for me, ever.

I Never Worked

I never worked and never managed to get my diploma. It's a long story, but I couldn't do it. Being institutionalized for mental health issues hasn't produced any results for me. In fact, insurance didn't want to pay anymore so I had to leave in the middle of being in out-patient programs. At that point I was left to my own devices. Pretty much stewing in my own frustrations and angst.

I think now that these health things that have happened it became clear that whatever they diagnosed me with is not a complete picture. It feels that way for me.

Getting Tested

I was given a full psychological evaluation by probably the worst person you can think of. Essentially I was tested for ASD, Bipolar, Depression, Anxiety. It wasnt anything new. I was depressed and anxious. There was apparently a blip I guess you could say of ASD, but it wasn't enough to call it ASD, whatever that means.

And then finally I got lectured by this guy about how I probably need to be put in a "home" somewhere against my will. A place where I can finally reintegrate with society. I got asked what I was going to do if my Dad was gone. Essentially making me more nervous and scared. So, learned nothing new, a little blip of ASD, but it's not ASD, and get lectured and scared shitless for a few thousand dollars. Amazing...

Maybe Not ASD but ADHD and or OCD?

But what they didn't test me for was ADHD and OCD. A waste of like thousands of dollars. Because as soon as me and my psychatrist looked into ADHD and OCD, something started to become much more clearer. In fact, I kind of tested highly for ADHD and some OCD when I did a self assesment with him. I took that paper home and even did it twice to make sure I still felt the same way about my answers weeks just before my next visit.

But a lot of that was lining up with what was happening to me in school. Anxiety, trouble concentrating, obsession with perfection and proper study habits, a very fixed mindset, my mind would wonder, I couldn't focus by the time noon hit especially during math, I would pace around the house at home, my mind would just keep moving and moving non-stop.

Where I Stand Today

I pretty much self diagnosed myself as ADHD/OCD. Unfortunately I cant be medicated yet for reasons I have explained in prior posts. I think it's quite possible I may be on the Autism Spectrum as it's very hard to diagnose in adults from my own research and you need actual expertise and they can cost you a lot of money. I mean if I've been masking this entire time, of course I’m not going to "look" Autistic.

Obviously, that's an ableist way to put it. But the reality is we live in a very ableist society, there's no getting around that. If you don’t fit the "norm" you're left out of economic system and society at large. In a lot of ways to me, Good! I don’t want to be around you people and this economic system. You fuckers decide who gets to be called abled or disabled and even then it's still tearing us apart regardless!

We're going to have many more disabled people coming as Covid continues to cause mayhem and destruction. On team Red with Trump, they call it a hoax, just a flu, or tell you to drink bleach. On team Blue, they gaslight you by saying the pandemic is over. Which is sort of true, just that it's fucking endemic now. So it's two sides of the same coin of Covid denialism just to keep business as usual. And let me tell you:

COVID SHOULD HAVE BEEN EVIDENCE THAT CAPITALISM IS INCAPABLE OF RESPONDING TO CRISISES LIKE COVID. IT WILL CONTINUE TO DISABLE MORE WORKING PEOPLE. WE NEED AN ALTERNATIVE NOW!

That won’t happen, instead Covid became a culture war issue of course.

Anyway, that was a side rant. I'd love to talk about how Covid didnt become a tool to create class conciousness and instead became a culture war issue some other time.

ASD Makes Sense to Me But Also Doesn't

I don’t know, when I look at what accounts for ASD. I see a pattern. Some sentitivity to certain stimuli (especially water and groups of people and hugging), obsessions over interests, trouble with social cues, stimming, trouble responding to people's emotions. I don’t know, it just also doesn't make sense to me because I don’t have an issue with eye contact and I'm more able to respond to other's emotions. Maybe not too well and it gets overwhelming for me at times. But I do like to be around people that like to show some vulnerability. I think the opposite is just...oh don’t get me started XD.

Perhaps I’m not understanding the Autism Spectrum as concise as I can. I probably just butchered the entirety of what it is in the last paragraph but I don't know. I hate this desperation for answers to your woes. It's nuts. And I got other things to worry about that complicate it like...

My Physical Health Makes It Harder to Tell If I Have ADHD/OCD and or ASD

I mean I can't sit upright or concentrate generally, I’m fatigued by the end of a school day, get a throbbing headache. I mean it's nuts. So there was that in the mix of all of this. And if I do have dysautonomia or POTS then it would make sense why it feels like I have ADHD. You get adrenaline surges. But I also start stimming? I mean I stim a lot and pace and ruminate all the time non-stop.

The only way to really know is to have this holistic understanding of myself, look at each thing and see where they fit in the bigger picture that makes up me. I just want the peace of mind, the relief to know anything at all. Just nothing feels right. Mentally and physically. And it's making me lose my mind.

I Don’t Like Labels...*

There's a little weird paradox amidst all of this. I’m not too crazy about labels*. I'll let Alexander Avila take this away. It's a long video so maybe watch it when you can:

youtube

Really, the video just kind of says that labels, mental health, and maybe even disability in general is just a thing we call amidst a capitalist society. As with any society, there's new ways of reframing human phenomenon. Whether it be you were possesed by the holy spirit or affected by a chemical imbalance or told you may not work again because of a physical disability.

But there's a good point at the end...the labels are useful in modern context and are needed to get the care, what little there is, people need. So they're inescapable much like how capitalism feels inescapable.

I’m More Than Just a Label and Don’t Want to Be Reduced to It

So theyre useful, necessary even. And I may even crave them, especially in this moment. I can't really live without the labels because that's just how the system is designed right now. But I can at least acknowledge that I’m more than just my labels. I don’t want my labels to create a black and white world. I want the labels to make me feel empowered and get the agency I need.

Perhaps in another world...

Perhaps in another world we would acknowledge that everyone is different and may require different needs than others and we can get rid of this black and white thinking that comes with the moniker "disability". Where the disabled may be able to find where they can fit amongst the world and not be babied or treated as some pathetic class of people. This, in my mind can only be done under some form of libertarian socialist model. It just can't be done in any other way.

Libertarian socialism would free each individual and each will be able to realize their fullest potential and get the assistance they need to fully understand themselves and their needs. They will mingle amongst their minds, connect with their bodies, and connect with others and communicate in ways never before imagined.

Healthcare wouldn't be reduced to black and white thinking, and production and turned into a real system of care and humanity and a sense of belonging. It would go along with the individual in their journey of self discovery as the healthcare system learns itself at the same time.

The disabled individual would be free to decide how they can and can't work or participate in how they see fit. They would get the assistance they need from the community, the creative ideas from them, and feel like they're a proper member of the community.

The disabled individual would neither be seen as pathetic or as some "poster boy" of inspiration when they "go against all odds". They would just be like everyone else, a human being with unique needs. They will retain the autonomy they need as much as anyone else.

Final Thoughts

I don’t know what's going on with me yet or if there will be an end in sight for me. I don’t know what's going on with me mentally and probably won’t because of how expensive it is to know. But I can say is I just don’t want to live in this type of world anymore. I want a better one that sees me as human.

I think I'll meet people eventually where we can get together and help each other out and find out how we can live amongst the chaos. I have faith. I have faith in anyone reading this that you too may find that place and the right people who have the same mindset.

We're in this together, we'll find our way, we'll do our best...

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creatingjaemi · 5 months

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Health Problems

I have tinnitus and my ears keep clicking when I focus on my finances. I can't help but think it's because of how my accounting professor molested me. My abuser is also a teacher and would tutor me in math. It causes such an aggressive feeling. When my ears click, crackle, or ring, it gets so annoying. I am praying I can get hearing aids that help with tinnitus because I literally don't think it's a joke. So many things in my past that were literally just aggressive illnesses were distorted and twisted by sociopaths. Today I cried about it but honestly crying doesn't do anything but make me feel bad so I stopped crying almost immediately. I know the physical illnesses were real. Jesus knows they were real and no matter what people say, Jesus and God know what happened. My memories fade, but God and Jesus never forget. That's another reason why I don't cry as much anymore. I know that they 'hate' what happened to me, if they can even hate I don't know, but I know they hate what happened to me even more than I do, and that's... not only is that real, but it's a legitimate 'hatred' because I was tortured, humiliated, and degraded. The holy spirit is the enemy of that. A spirit, like a loving spirit can't fathom people could be so evil because they could never be that evil but God and Jesus aren't like spirits, they can completely accept the evil in others without letting it consume them. That's why I know they hate what happened to me, and I give it to them and trust they're going to make things right. Only when I'm reminded of the physical vulnerabilities of exactly how sick I was, am I consumed by a indigestible sadness and anger toward humanity. I think there's a level of envy... I always say they don't know how blessed they are, they don't know what that hurt feels like. They're so blessed in their ignorance, they don't know the fear that consumes you when the doctors don't have answers for what's wrong with your body, it's pure hell. Screaming in agony and being blamed for it... as I get healthier, I forget just how inhuman that is. I was ridiculed for calling them out. So many times, but if I had to go through it all over again, I wouldn't change what I said. They are blessed in this country and I did feel like I was living in a war zone and being tortured like a prisoner. They act like I was insane but today, all I can see is that I was abused beyond comprehension and I won't stop until everybody knows what they do to people. I'm not the only one. An alcoholic doesn't just wake up and decide to only knock over a liquor store. He has a trail of alcoholic disorganized and illegal chaotic choices before that and they don't just wake up without a conscience either. That's the difference between addicts and sociopaths. Addicts feel bad about what they do until the drug numbs them, a sociopath is just numb all the time until you disagree with them. But my original subject about the ears is getting lost again now and I don't want that to get lost. I challenged my abuser to get hearing aids, then I got bullied by them for having whiplash, my hearing was affected pretty bad, and I was called so many names, my being balanced and oriented was in question, all things that hearing affects. So when my ears click or crackle or ring, I just feel like they're abusing me without even being here. Me and my volunteer were talking about it this week. Abusers go to insane means to be the center of attention - silent treatment, harassment, to rape and all of these things have physical implications, and we were talking about how the psychological abuse is actually worse. It's easy to diagnose a black eye, but it's not as easy to diagnose emotional abuse, and they affect victims for more years than just being hit or punched. PTSD. Health problems. That's what I go through, that's what my child goes through, and I made a promise when I got pregnant to protect that child, and I haven't been able to sleep at night but I can't sleep until she's safe here with me and believed by our peers about what she originally tried to tell me years ago.

#child abuse prevention #stop the violence

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atlabeth · 3 years

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fever - sokka x reader

this has been sitting in my drafts half finished for 3 weeks so i thot it was prime time i actually finished it

this is kinda based off the song w dua lipa and angele so you can listen to that if you want

summary: sokka's convinced there's a mystery illness keeping you from focusing, but somehow he's completely oblivious that the only 'sick' you are is lovesick, and he's the reason you can't focus.

a/n: i have never written a sickfic. but this is like. a fake sick fic. its an idiots in love fic. i mean this is coming from mr "is he taller than me? is he better looking?" himself so. it makes sense. as usual, this is not proofread bc im a lazy mf

also im sorry for being vague with the calc but i was NOT about to do math during summer who do you think i am? ??

wc: 1.7k

warning(s): mentions of being sick and 🤢calculus 🤮 but otherwise tooth rotting fluff

How could the smartest man you knew be so, so incredibly stupid?

You thought that you were being obvious, so obviously that you were sure he knew. It was embarrassing how obvious you were.

You had met Sokka in your calculus class at the start of the new semester after you ended up sitting next to each other, and it wasn’t a stretch to say that you were immediately smitten. With eyes like the ocean and a face that had to have been crafted by the gods, you were almost too distracted to respond when he asked you for a pencil. But when he winked at you after giving his thanks, it only solidified what you had already suspected: you had known this man for all of five minutes, and you already had a crush on him.

Little did you know, it was going to turn into the most infuriating crush you had ever experienced.

You and Sokka became fast friends even though calculus was the only class you had together. Unfortunately, it was also something that you completely sucked at. Bad news, it was required for your major. Good news, Sokka was some sort of genius and offered to tutor you — Wednesdays in the library turned into a weekly occasion, and served as an opening for your calculus skills, your feelings for Sokka, and your exasperation to all grow stronger.

You normally weren’t someone to beat around the bush. If you started to like someone, you told them and dealt with whatever happened after, but something about Sokka just kept you from spilling your feelings outright. You knew that if he didn’t feel the same way, your relationship likely wouldn’t change, but there was still that tiny voice that said it’s better to stay like this in case things do go wrong — and this was the first time you listened to that voice. You simply valued your friendship too much.

But that didn’t mean you were going to be completely quiet about it — you hoped that if you did enough, he would be able to realize you liked him and do the whole process for you. A bit of a dim hope, but crushes make people do stupid things.

Things like bringing an extra coffee to every session, laughing at all his jokes (even the bad ones), sitting a little closer to him than usual, not dropping out of this wretched class so you could spend time together (it might’ve been required, but you still counted it). He didn’t make a point to object to anything, so you knew you weren’t making him uncomfortable — but you had concluded after nearly a whole semester of working and studying together that he was the most oblivious person in all of Ba Sing Se. He could teach you all kinds of formulas, but had no idea that you liked him. Grand.

Today was arguably the most important session out of any of them, seeing as your next class was the final, so it was only fitting that Sokka unknowingly made himself more interesting than any material you could’ve been working with. His arms were going to be the death of both you and your calc grade. You swore that the heat rushing to your cheeks was actually emanating off of you.

“Hey, Y/N!” Sokka grinned as he saw you and raised a hand in greeting, a sentiment you would’ve returned had it not been for the coffee cups in your hands. You settled for mirroring his grin and settled down in the seat across from him. You slid his coffee cup over, set your own down, then shrugged your bag off all before taking a seat.

“You ready to study ‘till your eyes bleed?” he asked, prompting a nervous laugh from you.

“You jest, but my eyes might actually start bleeding depending on how long we go,” you sighed. “There’s a reason I got an extra shot of espresso today.”

“Come on — by now you should know that you have nothing to worry about! I am the best teacher there is, and you got me all to yourself.”

Your eyes widened momentarily and you coughed, purposefully averting your gaze to give yourself some time to recover. Okay, he was going to make it really hard to focus today. “Let’s just get into it.”

He nodded and flipped open his notebook, beginning to talk as he rifled through his bag for a few extra things. “Okay, we’re just gonna start with going over the basics, then we’ll work our way up. There’s a couple practice problems on that page, so you can go ahead and answer those as a warmup.

You slid the notebook over in front of you and after approximately five seconds of looking at the first problem, found yourself studying Sokka rather than the material. Who could blame you? In the battle of cute tutor boy versus calculus, he was going to win every time.

He turned around and you immediately averted your eyes once again, trying to appear extremely involved, but you found that your mind was empty on anything to do with math. “Hey, uh— how do you do this first one? I’m totally blanking here.”

“We use limits in everything — this is actually something you’re really good at!” He studied you intensely and frowned. “Are you okay? Like, you’re not sick or anything, are you? You seem kinda out of it.”

You choked out a laugh and shook your head. “No, no — I’m fine. I guess I’m just a little tired.” As if to demonstrate your lie, you took a sip from your coffee and cringed internally. Love had turned you into an idiot.

He seemed to buy it as he nodded and picked up the pencil, scribbling a couple of notes as he explained the first problem to you. “Does that make sense?” You nodded and he handed the pencil back to you. “Okay — the other ones follow the same kind of process. It should be easy enough.”

You managed to get a little further in the second problem, but your lovestruck mind would not stop focusing back on Sokka every time you tried to do, well, anything. Curse him and his perfect arms, and eyes, and hairstyle, and everything.

You shook your head and set the pencil down once more, letting loose a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” Yes, you did. “I just can’t focus at all.” Because of you. You picked up your cup once more and took a sip, hoping it would do something to get you back into the math state of mind.

Sokka frowned once more as he put the back of his hand against your forehead. “God, you’re hot.” You nearly choked on your coffee as your eyes practically bulged out of their sockets — he had to know what he was doing by now — how could he not? “Like, you’re completely burning up. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, I swear— I just…” you set your cup down on the table and heaved a sigh that was a touch more exasperated than necessary. “Are you telling me you seriously haven’t noticed? Like, not a single thing this whole year?”

“I’ve noticed a lot of things this year,” he chuckled. “It’s kind of our whole job, so you’re gonna have to be a lot more specific.”

You finally couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Sokka, I’m not— I’m not sick! Haven’t you noticed that I’m only ever flustered, or running into things, or forgetting info, or— or just a complete idiot when I’m around you? I like you, like, a lot, and I have for an embarrassingly long time! The reason I can’t focus is because I am hopelessly attracted to you in every single way.”

His brows creased for a moment and you clamped your mouth shut, worried that you had just ruined everything. It was only after a pause that felt like a century that he finally responded, the hint of a smirk on his lips.

“Well, why didn’t you just say something?”

You stared at him, eyes wide and lips slightly parted in pure surprise before the annoyance set in. You set your jaw as your brows furrowed and you hit him lightly on the side of his arm with the back of your palm. “You can’t be serious! You— you’ve gotta be messing with me by now. I really can’t believe that you can be that smart but this oblivious!”

He finally let the grin play across his lips in full force and he shrugged nonchalantly. “I mean, I don’t know how you don’t expect me to mess with you when you scrunch up your face all cute like that every time you get mad. Besides, I started liking you after that fifth class; I offered to help you out so I could spend more time with you! I didn’t realize you felt the same way. I kinda just enjoyed the free coffee and getting to look at you all the time.”

“I can’t believe you!” you cried as you hit his other arm. “You’re telling me that I had to deal with this- this mental turmoil about whether you liked me back, while you were just enjoying the free eye candy and coffee the whole time?”

“You have nothing to worry about! I enjoyed the company far more than the coffee,” he joked, a certain twinkle in his eye. “But, you are probably out a couple twenties after all of that. So, what do you say about this Saturday, the cafe by the shoe store? My treat.”

“Damn right it’s your treat,” you shot back, though you couldn’t stop the smile forming on your face. “You owe me a lot — you have to make up for those coffees and all the emotional distress you caused.”

“Oh, I think I’ll have plenty of time to make up for lost time. After all, we do have a lot of coffee dates to get through.” And when he winked at you just like that first day, you remembered just how impossible it was to be angry at Sokka. “But first, we kinda have to get through this study date. The final’s still happening tomorrow.”

You responded with a raised brow. “This is a study date?”

Sokka shrugged and grinned. “They’ve all been study dates. You just didn’t know it.”

idiots in love idiots in love idiots In LOVe

perm tag list: @dv0412 @siriuslyslyslytherin @maruchan77

atla: @marianne1806

#sokka x reader #sokka x you #sokka x y/n #sokka fic #atla #avatar #avatar the last airbender #avatar the last airbender fic #avatar x reader #reader insert #sadie writes

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sullustangin · 4 years

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Not a disaster spy.

Note: I speak in lawful/neutral/chaotic alignments as seen in D&D. I’m not getting into good, evil, or neutral, nor “Dark Side” or “Light Side” activities.

There were more than a few reasons why I commissioned a piece of art that depicted some pretty gnarly scars on Theron Shan (and on my smug, Eva, but you don’t care as much about her, let’s be real). It’s part of a story I’m telling. It’s part of my headcanon. Also, it’s my own sort of protest against the habit of writing Theron off as a hot but inept spy. He’s an impulsive fool despite being intelligent, which is why he ends up in bizarre situations. He always gets hurt because of this (but he’s always magically healed up in time for any smut).

To be clear: Theron totally has issues due to his early life and an inability to play well with others; you can label him with attachment issues, intimacy issues, whatever keeps him a bit of a lonely character (which he admits). Personal life -- disaster. That’s canon, explicit and implicit.

What I object to are his skills and abilities being discounted because of that. His professional life is far from being a disaster. Director SIS Marcus Trant brands him as one of the best field agents, and long term, he ends up being operations manager for a covert base for an upstart independent government.

Reasons:

In the book Annihilation, Theron runs around in his boots and briefs trying to destroy the Ascendant Spear. Hot, funny, and strangely effective.

But why?

Because Jace Malcom and Marcus Trant were ok with sacrificing a few planets of people “for the greater good.” They let Ruan be attacked. They planned on letting Duro be attacked, because they wanted the Pub fleet to focus on the Ascendant Spear, the Empire superweapon. They watched a planet get wrecked and planned on doing it again. It’s war. It’s a lawful action, for the greater good. It complies with society’s expectations -- the Republic leadership’s expectations -- in a time of war. Lawful neutral, probably. Maybe lawful good if you squint and do the math about the Spear’s potential fatality rate, galaxy wide.

But Theron isn’t a lawful character -- he doesn’t just do stuff because society says it’s ok. That’s why he goes off and does impulsive stuff because sometimes, society is wrong. Theron is a neutral, leaning chaotic character -- he mostly follows the law, but also relies on his own intuition and gut feeling about what is right. Neutral characters balance what society says is right and what a person internally thinks is right. Chaotic characters -- like my oc smuggler -- don’t rely on society’s views at all; it’s all about her gut and moral compass. Theron at least considers lawfulness and order in his response, which is why he is (mostly) not a chaotic character. He has his moments, though - no character is pure. In contrast, Lana is a Lawful character in the context of the Sith Empire. She does things that her society approves of. She does like to think of herself as ‘her own woman’, but her behavior patterns are heavily informed by the Sith upbringing and training - she is Lawful but leaning Neutral on occasion due to her own sense of pragmatism. She does not go by her gut alone.

(Please remember I’m not addressing good/evil, Light/Dark side in this post.)

That’s why Theron ends up dehydrated with cramped leg and half naked. He didn’t want people to die "for the greater good” when he personally could stop it. So he and Gnost Dural fool Darth Karrid into participating at Duro, which means the Republic Fleet has to defend the planet, since its target is the Ascendant Spear. The only way that happens is that Gnost-Dural is tortured, and Theron has to manually slice into the nearly uninhabitable bowels of the ship. Hence the whole strip tease by the end of the incident.

Consequences:

In the example above, it’s mostly situational embarrassment for Theron, and the Jedi gets tortured.

In an earlier part of the book, Theron is beaten up to keep his cover and acquire important information (and loses a few teeth in the process) and leaps off a building and probably fractures a few things -- he dislocated a shoulder too. Still didn’t blow cover, and he is able get off Ziost with Gnost Dural.

Every SWTOR player knows about Rishi -- it’s easy to argue that Theron doesn’t give up Lana because that could burn his Republic ally. But if you’re playing Imp side, what’s stopping him? Flirting is nothing to this point. Why not burn all the Imps down? He could save his own skin, infiltrate the Revanites that way and save the Republic Fleet -- to hell with Darth Marr.

Because it’s not just “ooo rah Republic” informing his choices -it’s not Republic society saying it’s ok and lawful that makes him sit there. It’s his own moral compass that says it’s wrong to burn Jakarro and the operative, even if Lana did give him up. So he holds out under torture, even as Revan tries to make his descendant his ally.

Theron had been in SIS for about 12-13 years by the time we get to Rishi. We know he’s fallen from high heights and survived worse falls than leaping between buildings on Nar Shaddaa -- survived, not gotten out unscathed. He was a swoop racer for awhile -- that’s a risky hobby. As an agent, It’s reasonable to assume he’s been shot at with blasters and possibly slugthrowers (if he came across a Mando), stabbed with traditional blades or vibro-blades, got burned if he was in an industrial area or a hot engine room or a chemical lab -- the list goes on. After Yavin, we know that the one agent possibly more chaotic than he is, Jonas Balkar, ends up giving him a few broken ribs in the name of busting up an implants ring.

So Theron does have very real consequences for his decisions, in all likelihood. That’s what I wanted to reflect in the recent commission; although it happens shortly before the torture session on Rishi, it shows the viewer that this is a path he’s been on before, and not by accident.

Cutting here because boy, did I have a lot to say about what happens AFTER SoR in terms of alignment/characterization.

The KotFE and Beyond: Consistency Issues

Theron registers his approval and disapproval on certain decisions in later xpacs, and he often takes the more benevolent “light side” end of things -- whether that’s based upon his societal expectations or personal moral compass is not as clear. But he still does disagree with the Commander (one of the more obvious examples being storming out of the room if there are too many Pub casualties on Corellia when the player is Imp side). While it remains a touchy topic, the Traitor Arc does reflect his neutral-chaotic tendencies. He goes with his internal moral compass.

Electrocuting the Commander on Iokath was part of Theron gaining the Order of Zildrog’s trust. Theron’s smart enough and probably familiar enough with the Commander’s bio data to know how to make it happen and look bad enough without serious ill-effects. This is part of what he does as a spy, and there’s likely a guide on double agent sabotage somewhere in SIS -- how to look like you’re doing bad stuff without actually doing as bad stuff as requested. This is also part of what he personally believes to be a better path -- certainly not by Alliance “what to do when bad things happen” book, which was to tell his Commander.

Does Theron fail at Nathema? Yes; there is a major loss of war materiel (the Gravestone and the Eternal Fleet). But what would he have considered more important? The loss of the fleet or the loss of the Commander and others if the Fleet was unleashed? The loss of life or the loss of stuff? That’s where Theron’s neutral-chaotic alignment comes in.

It also does matter how the player views the entire situation -- Theron’s boss also has a say in ‘success,’ which is why Trant matters in judging Theron’s previous actions. At the end of KotET, some people had been miserable that they HAD to either be a ruler or a peacekeeper instead of just getting on their ship and riding off into the sunset for more class-specific adventures. By the end of Nathema, some people were mad about losing the weapons and the power. Some people were relieved that they weren’t so OP anymore; the writers had written story/character development into a corner, and ending the whole Throne/Fleet thing had to happen. (It’s still not fully out of a corner, in my personal opinion.)

Theron doesn’t get out of the Traitor Arc completely clean, no matter how many stans we write about it -- the writing is what it is. He assuredly gains a new scar. But it is player choice as to the severity of the failure -- and the consequences: Theron can end up married, still in love with the Commander, dumped by the Commander but in the Alliance, exiled, or dead. Those were the consequences for what he believed was the right thing to do -- this was probably his biggest leap into the chaotic alignment in terms of decision making, and this was the most dramatic spectrum of consequences.

As a side bar, the latter xpacs suffer from writing issues; there’s a lack of nuance compared to the vanilla stories and even Hutts and SOR. Although the writers did promise that characters would leave if there were enough negative actions, only Koth actually left because of something we did; Lana never leaves, and Theron leaves regardless of prior actions -- because he’s doing the double agent thing. (I thought the opening speech on Umbara was ill-fit for most classes, frankly -- the writing got better as we got closer to Nathema, but there are plotholes that make me fume.) Lana and Theron never leave because the player makes too many LS or DS decisions. I honestly wish that was a consequence, because not having a consequence for decisions hallows out both characters and makes them lackeys rather than the stronger, distinct characters they were prior to Popsicle Time. Lana never leaves no matter what. Theron ultimately remains gone by player decision, not by his own. Koth was at least granted that autonomy, for which I respect the writing for Koth.

Theron Shan is a good spy that accepts consequences.

Theron is good at his job -- the best at his job, around the time of SoR. Because of how Theron approaches the world, he takes risks so others don’t -- so others don’t get tortured, so other planets don’t get blown up. It doesn’t mean that he’s some inept idiot that fumbles his way toward mission success. He knowingly suffers for his choices that are a combination of by-the-book training and his instincts. He doesn’t complain about it, even when the player points it out on Rishi. It is the job. Spies do really, really strange stuff to keep their covers. He also doesn’t complain as he’s limping around after Nathema, nor does he object if he’s exiled or dumped. He knows what he did. He can live with it (if the player lets him).

Spies that remain alive and get back to their home nations without giving anything important up to the enemy are successful spies. We see this in pre-SWTOR media. Rishi is a success for Theron -- although he is exposed, he remains alive and uncooperative. The temporary Alliance between Marr and Satele gain massive amounts of intel, including Revan’s base on Yavin. Later, Theron is able to keep the Odessen base functional and secret. We even get to do some infiltration work on Zakuul -- the Alliance’s spies don’t give anything up while surviving and making it home with gains. He succeeds overall at Odessen. He fails at Nathema, though that failure is mostly interpreted by the player in terms of severity.

Few spies are perfect and survive to become old men. Even if Theron is killed at the end of Nathema, he did make it further than many; if we consider that Theron was about 37 or 38 at Nathema and he started SIS at 16, that’s upwards of 20 years in the field. That’s a long lifespan for an active field agent, even in real world estimates.

For those of us who let Theron live, then he still has potential for more spy escapades, though probably with some serious oversight. We can leave that to headcanons, since Lana and Theron have taken a step back in prominence since Onslaught. Theron will never be orderly like Lana; if you favor lawful characters, you will rarely see eye to eye with Theron. He is not a by the book spy, and even Trant complains about that. At the same time, the instinct, the skills, and personal conscience is there, which is why Theron is successful all the way up to Nathema -- and depending on the player, arguably still is.

Personal life -- sure, a disaster. No doubt. But as a spy? I don’t think disaster is an accurate assessment.

#theron thursday #theron shan #swtor #alignment #good spy

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theheartsmistakes · 4 years

Text

The Last Night Part XIII

More author’s Notes at the end because it may contain spoilers!

But if you’re just joining us... where the heck have you been?

Here are the previous parts vvv:

Here is Part I

Here is Part II

Here is Part III

Here is Part IV

Here is Part V

Here is Part VI

Here is Part VII

Here is Part VIII

Here is Part IX

Here is Part X

Here is Part XI

Here is Part XII

Part XIII

They had moved Cordelia to the best guest room in the Institute, small but comfortably furnished with a narrow oak bed and a simple writing desk, but pleasantly decorated with blue striped wallpaper and flowery chintz curtains. A lace-skirted sink, with running water, occupied one corner, and a large window stood open to the night and the fragrance of the garden. In the distance, a shimmer of silver indicated the sun on the Thames.

James walked in carrying an impressive stack of literature he’d taken from the library under his arm and in his free hand he carried a lantern illuminated with the soft bluish glow of a witchlight. He saw Cordelia first, her red hair vibrant against the white pillow case. Color had returned to her skin and the thick black veins that ran underneath it were now gone. The thick top quilt was pulled up and tucked around her chest so that her shoulders and arms were out and rested by her sides. She was modestly covered by an ivory cotton gown. Every once in a while, her fingers would twitch against the fabric of the top quilt and it felt as if the weight of the stack of books weighed on James’s chest.

He set the books on the foot of the bed and sat on the wooden stool beside Cordelia. Wishing more than anything, that miraculously, she would open her eyes and turn towards him with a smile.

“Dickens, Chaucer, Wilde, Homer, Sophocles,” said Jem as he sifted through the books James had brought. “Interesting choices.”

“I brought things that might encourage her through the darkness,” said James.

“Nothing like a good epic to encourage one through dark times,” said Jem, as he set The Iliad back on the stack. “She was administered medicine not long ago, so she is peaceful and still, but do not be alarmed if she cries out. If she begins to sweat or claw at the blankets, come and find someone immediately. If you find yourself growing tired and in need of some rest, you will also need to find someone to take your place.”

James remembered his father and the fierce devotion he had shown his mother when she had fallen ill after transforming into her clockwork angel during the war. He never left her side, not even to eat or drink, or so James was told by relatives and maids. And any time Tessa would fall ill, succumb to an injury, or give birth, Will remained by her side until she made it back on her feet again. His parents remained his highest example of love and devotion. After nearly twenty years of marriage, they still seemed to illicit in one another the emotions of young love: a bit reckless, always public, possessive, but demure, and full of endless patience. James hoped to one day find a love as eternal as the one his parents shared, and he thought he had when he met Grace Blackthorn. To learn that his feelings were simply the product of an enchanted piece of jewelry left a sinking feeling in his chest. Not because of the loss, his feelings for Grace always felt burdened, troublesome, and lonely. He grieved for the love that had the potential to burn as brilliant as his parents.

A sharp pain burst across the center of James’s forehead. He leaned forward, his eyes shut tight, and tried to rub the pain away.

“James?” Jem came beside him and placed a light hand on his shoulder. “What is it? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” said James. “It’s nothing. Just a bit of head pain is all.”

“How long have you had it?”

“It comes and goes,” said James, and waved his Uncle’s concern away. “Thank you, Uncle Jem. For allowing me to be here with her.”

“It is what is best for Cordelia,” said Jem. “She needs the familiar voices of the people she is closest to in the world. Your sister was in here not long ago. While I admire Lucie for the incredible talent that she possesses, someone should warn her about her overuse of adverbs.”

“Are you volunteering?” asked James.

Jem scarred mouth twitched.

“Coward,” said James and turned to look at Cordelia. “Can she hear us talking? Even now?”

Jem nodded. “Yes, I believe she can.” Jem placed a hand on James’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “When I return to administer her medicine, I will bring you a vial for your headache. I’d also like to examine you tomorrow, to be sure it’s nothing serious.”

Jem left with a quick click of the door when it closed behind him. Now alone with Cordelia, James felt as awkward as he had when he was a fourteen year old school boy attempting to speak to his crush.

With a sigh, he moved the stool closer to Cordelia and the witchlight that flickered on the nightstand. Her fingers twitched against the bed cloth. He picked up the hand closest to him and held it in both of his. Her skin felt so soft. Had it always been so soft, he wondered. Memories of her finger tips grazing his skin in the orange light of the Whispering Room made his mouth run dry. Unsure what possessed him to do such a thing, he brought her hand up to his face and pressed his cheek into her cool palm.

“Daisy, my Daisy.” The name he’d given her didn’t seem to match her anymore, but there was a familiarity in it that he clung to. He hoped that maybe she could cling to it too. “If you’re able, will you grant me the smallest reassurance that you’re alright in there? When we were young, Math and I would communicate through small signals in class when our Instructor would be droning on about the history of runes, which I should have paid closer attention to, but my mind was otherwise detained on some personal dilemmas at the time… Forgive me, I’m rambling.” He brought her hand down.. “Squeeze my hand once if you can hear me?”

His eyes went to her face and watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. He waited for the coveted pressure of her fingers gripping his with the desperation of a sinner languishing for forgiveness.

When it never came, he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a quick kiss to her knuckles. “That’s all right. Your focus should only be on healing. I brought some books to share with you. Personal favorites from the library that I thought you might enjoy. Mostly classics, because I thought you might like something familiar and those damned contemporary authors and their quest for enlightenment; squandering on about transcendentalism.

“I thought we could start with…” When he reached for his father’s beloved copy of Great Expectation, he caught a vibrant red leather bound book with gold lettering on the spine that glistened in the light beside the bed.

Layla and Majnun

He picked up the copy and stroked the letters with curiosity. He recalled Sona and Alastair calling Cordelia, Layla, but never understood the reference; being so enamored with another woman and his personal throes, he didn’t think to ask.

Cordelia expressed a desire to read it together some day, but under the circumstances, he didn’t think that she would mind.

James kept Cordelia’s hand in his own. With his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, he propped the book against his thighs and opened the cover and found a small inscription on the left hand corner. It read:

Dearest Layla,

I hope this book brings you pleasant company during your travels. You have always wondered and asked why I call you by the name that this most divine tale is titled after, this may bring you some clarity. Please believe that my absence from your life is in no shape your fault and do not burden yourself with trying to understand it. Please know and forever keep in your mind, that I love you and your brother and your mother. Nothing is forever, my darling, we will be together again.

Be omide khodâ,

Bâbâ

The words were slightly smudged in some spots, as if water had dropped onto the ink. The pages were all wrinkled and torn in some places. For a moment, it felt to James like he was opening something sacred: a journal, a personalized letter, a love note, but he couldn’t help himself from turning the page. He turned until he found where one should always start a new story— at the very beginning.

As he read, he smiled to himself when he approached the part about when Layla and Majnun first met. It reminded him something of the first time that he saw Cordelia. When he really saw her. Away from the blinding manacle around his wrist. She was beautiful, but more than that, she was pure light. When he approached a passage, his tone slowed:

[His soul was a mirror for Layla’s radiance: how could he keep such reflections to himself? She shone in him like the sun at noon in a cloudless sky: how could such light be concealed? How could he turn away, even for a second, from the only thing that gave meaning to his life? Kais’* heart was out of step with his reason, and however hard he tried to hide his love for Layla, he failed miserably. Without her, he felt the arrows of reproach from a thousand bows; without her, the pain of separation cut into his heart like a knife.]

When he finished reading it aloud, he felt the faintest flutter from Cordelia’s hand against his, and when he looked up, her mouth was slightly open. The book nearly tumbled out of his lap as he leaned closer to her.

“Cordelia?” He picked up her hand in both of his again and tightened his hold, bringing it to his chest. “Cordelia, can you hear me?”

Her eyes fluttered back and forth underneath the hoods of her eyes.

“I’m here,” he whispered and climbed into the small space on the bed beside her. Carefully, he tucked her head underneath his chin and straightened the quilt around her again. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

___________________________

The cottage of Cecily and Gabriel Lightwood was a low, thatched building standing amid the fields in an arrangement of a perfectly tended garden. Ivy grew on the green-painted windows, and the eaves and the plastered walls. The front gate hung open, slightly distressed on its posts, and a bicycle lay carelessly toppled against the porch, where two large glazed pots, of the most intense blue, foamed with flowers in hues of Mediterranean pink, orange, and red. The cottage should have inspired only disdain for its tumbledown air, but instead Grace Blackthorn, who was raised to despise her adopted uncle and aunt, found it strangely romantic.

From the rough stones of a back hall, she emerged into the kitchen where a most egregious ruckus was coming. Since arriving at the Lightwood cottage, she’d spent most of her time either in the garden reading or in the kitchen talking to the housemaid who seemed to be the most interesting individual in the house and who didn’t seem to mind Grace’s presence especially after recent truths had risen to the surface like bloated dead fish. The kitchen was always orderly. On a wooden table in the center, a tea urn hissed above its small burner, a stack of old blue and white china teacups waited to be filled. A cake stand held an assortment of the usual small sandwiches and the plain rock cakes that were popular now. Only today, atop the counter, kneeled someone in tweed trousers, one leg bent on the counter and the other outstretched for balance as they reached for something in the cupboards above. She quickly recognized him as the young, illusive Christopher Lightwood.

She leaned her shoulder against the door frame and crossed her arms over her chest.

Since her arrival at the Lightwood’s, she’d rarely seen Christopher. They’d pass each other in the hallways or sit across from each other at meals, but he would be scribbling in a notebook, his face covered in some type of grime. She never attempted a conversation with him considering her relationship with his friend and cousin James. She had the impression that he didn’t care for her so much.

She could hear him whispering to himself. “Where are the damn tongs?”

“Bottom drawer,” said Grace, “to the left.”

There was a terrible clamber as Christopher looked over his shoulder at Grace, resulting in his leg slipping off of the counter. He reached for a ceramic bowl for stability but ended up taking the kitchen utensil down with him. She could not prevent a cry of fear as he hit his back upon the impact.

“Are you all right?” she cried as she ran around the wooden table. “I’m terribly sorry.”

His glasses were askew, as were the dark brown tendrils of hair that mirrored his father’s, fringed at the ends as if burnt. “Fine,” said Christopher after shaking ceramic out of his hair. “I’m fine.”

“Allow me to help you,” she said. Christopher, she had noticed, had the kindest eyes out of all of his friends. She reached her gloved hand out to him.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Christopher, not unkindly, but rather sheepishly. He grabbed a hold of the table’s edge and hoisted himself back to his feet. He brushed his hands off on his trousers, but seemed otherwise unscathed. “Sorry if I disturbed you. I was looking for the—“

“Tongs?” Grace pointed to the drawer by Christopher’s left hip. “They’re in the top drawer. And there is no need to apologize. I was the one who startled you.”

“Not at all.” He turned and opened the kitchen drawer, moved things around a bit, and finally retrieved the tongs from the far back. “A-ha!” He clapped them together several times. “Wonderful. Thank you. Our housemaid likes to hide them from me.”

“Why is that?”

“Possibly because I’ve melted the last several,” he said, and though she could not detect any note of humor, she couldn’t help but laugh into the back of her gloved hand. Christopher looked at her perplexed, his cheeks turned a soft shade of pink.

“Melted them?” she asked. “How on earth did you manage something like that?”

He examined the tongs in his hand. “Uh, it’s difficult to describe.”

“Could you show me?” she asked, shocked by her own bravery, or her desperation to escape her lonely isolation. “I’ve heard so much about your experiments and I really admired your discovery of the cure for demon poisoning.”

“I conduct most of my experiments in my Uncle Henry’s basement,” he said. “He’s not really my uncle, but I’m close enough to Matthew that he might as well be. I have a few experiments in my bedroom, but I don’t think that it would be appropriate for us to be alone in that regard.”

Grace hesitated, but there was no hint of condescension in Christopher’s tone, and his blunt face showed worry in a single vertical crease between his eyes. He was trying to treat her well. She understood that in the past couple of months, or years, she had lost some trust in how people would treat her. She blinked her eyes and nodded once without a word.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m embarrassed for suggesting it.”

“That’s quite all right,” he said, as he examined the tongs. “You must be terribly bored here.”

She was, but she felt it rude to say it. “It was very kind of your parents to allow me to stay in their home considering the grief my dear mother has brought to them.”

“Lucky for you my mother does not share my father’s grudges.” He meant it in fun, but he noticed the dubious look on her face. As she ran her finger through a spilt pile of flour on the counter, he wondered how all of the time he could have mistaken Grace for being so cold and plain when she looked saddened and lost. “Perhaps you could help me with something.”

Her gray eyes lit with curiosity. “With what?”

“I need an assistant to conduct one of my experiments,” said Christopher. “Since Thomas is spending time with his family after their recent loss and the four of us are not meant to be spending too much time together as punishment, but perhaps we can conduct some sort of arrangement for you to be my assistant of sorts. If it’s not too forward to ask.”

Grace fought to keep her emotions respectful, but inside she felt the quick bubble of anticipation that she had not felt in some time swell in her stomach. “As long as I wouldn’t be in the way and your comrades wouldn’t mind us spending the time together.”

“There’s no need for them to know,” said Christopher, straightening his glasses up higher on his nose making his eyes appear abnormally large. “Besides, they don’t seem to take much interest in my experiments anyway. Thomas is with his family. Matthew is under Charles’s watchful eyes, and James is—“ Christopher flushed.

“Is what?” she asked.

She already suspected that they all knew the truth behind the bracelet that she had given to James, but no one cared to ask for her side of the story. Why she did what she did? It was probably for the best. She wasn’t entirely sure she could tell them the truth of it anyway.

“James is with Cordelia.”

“It’s all right.” She pressed her lips together, and began to wonder if it was a mistake to have entered a conversation with him. “What I did was terrible and I won’t pretend to see it otherwise. I understand if you are disinclined to trust me.”

“Can I ask how you did it?” he asked. “How did you enchant the bracelet?”

The question took her off guard. Most people that have approached her with the question asked her why she felt the need to do it. James Herondale was more than inclined to give her his affections on his own; there was no need for an enchanted bracelet. Her answer was often some variation of the same lie.

“I would prefer it if you didn’t ask me that question,” she said. “Only because I cannot answer it. But would it help to know that it wasn’t me who did it?”

“It would,” said Christopher. “It does.

Grace folded her hands in front of her and felt a strange weight removed from her shoulders; grateful that while her truth remained hidden, some of it could be shared with someone else. And while she didn’t believe herself to be entirely innocent, there was some relief in not being entirely guilty either.

The housemaid entered through the swinging doors from the servant’s quarters, humming a Irish melody, which was cut short when she found the two of them in the kitchen. Her cheeks flushed as her watery eyes drifted down to the tongs in Christopher’s hands.

She switched her basket of fresh veggies over to her other hip. “Are you doing the cooking for supper tonight, boy, or are you just polishing the silver again?” she asked. “Because I know you’re not taking my good pair of tongs to use for your little experiments.”

(Author’s notes: Hello! Thank you for reading. I appreciate each and every one of you for indulging me through this quarantine while I pine and wait for Chain of Iron to be released. So a few things, I think everyone knew the book James reads to Cordelia would be Layla and Majnun... it would have been insulting if it was anything else. If you’re not familiar with the story (here is a link if you want to check out a preview), Majnun’s name at the beginning of the story is Kais. SPOILER: when Layla and Kais separate, he becomes mad with sadness and the town people call him Majnun, which means ‘madman’, so that’s why in the passage he is referred to as Kais... in case you were wondering. It’s such a beautiful story. I highly recommend everyone to read it. It gives me strong Romeo and Juliet vibes. There are so many variations of the story, but I really liked this one, and I believe it’s mostly accurate to the original source-- correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, I’m not sure where that Christopher and Grace scene came from. I wanted to experiment with their characters in a friendly way and I wasn’t mad at it, so I thought I’d share. There is a purpose for it in the story. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you liked it, please give it a heart, give me a follow, pop in with some comments about what you liked and even what you didn’t. I really appreciate you all. Next update will be Sunday, 7/26. Cordelia is waking up and things are about to get messy.)

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stevemoffett · 4 years

Text

A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

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klove0511 · 5 years

Text

Enough

Title: Enough

Link: AO3

Square Filled: Pups

Ship: Sam/Castiel

Rating: T

Tags: infertility, alpha!Cas, omega!Sam, married couple, implied sexual content, implied mpreg

Summary: Sam stared at the negative pregnancy test and tried to curb his disappointment. He’d thought that this time—No. He hadn’t. He’d hoped, maybe, but he hadn’t expected a positive test in years. It didn’t make it any easier. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and ignored the burning behind his eyes as he rinsed out his mouth. It only helped dissipate the sour taste a little. He thought about brushing his teeth but decided it probably wasn't worth the effort when he knew he was going to be puking again in an hour.

Word Count: 1632

Created for @spnabobingo

Sam stared at the negative pregnancy test and tried to curb his disappointment. He’d thought that this time—No. He hadn’t. He’d hoped, maybe, but he hadn’t expected a positive test in years. It didn’t make it any easier. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and ignored the burning behind his eyes as he rinsed out his mouth. It only helped dissipate the acidic taste a little. He thought about brushing his teeth but decided it probably wasn't worth the effort when he knew he was going to be puking again in an hour.

“Sam? Are you ok?” Cas’s voice carried through the door.

If Cas was checking on him then he must have been in the bathroom longer than he thought. He threw out the test and checked himself in the mirror. He looked like shit, but the stomach flu did that to a person. Splashing some cool water on his face helped, and so did running his hand through his hair. It made him feel more normal, less like the person fucking up his marriage one heat at a time.

Opening the bathroom door revealed a haggard Castiel. One look and they were on the same page. Sam hated it, but it was a familiar dance by now. He brushed past his mate, hoping he could lose himself in a book for a while until the sting of yet another negative test passed.

“Sam.”

“No.” Sam didn’t turn around to face Cas, but he stopped walking toward the stairs. “We both knew it was the stomach flu. There’s nothing to talk about.”

God, Castiel stank when he got upset. His scent turned bitter, acrid with anger and frustration. Sam suspected he did too, though he couldn’t smell it. No wonder their friends didn’t come over much anymore. The whole place had to smell like rot and death.

“You’re wrong; we do need to talk.” Castiel had followed him to the living room. Sam just wanted to disappear inside himself for a few hours, maybe puke some more. He didn’t reply. Cas sighed. “Fine. Another time. This can’t go on forever, Sam.”

Sam squeezed his eyes shut as he listened to his mate leave the room. He was a broken, worthless omega that couldn’t even get pregnant, and Cas thought they needed to talk. The rational part of his brain said Cas was probably just worried, but the rational part wasn’t driving the bus right now. It had been drowned out by all the feelings of worthlessness and failure that bubbled to the surface every time another test came back negative.

Two days later, Sam was feeling mostly normal again. The vomiting and fatigue had subsided, and with it, his disappointment was starting to fade to its usual level. It was always hardest in the moments after a test, but day to day Sam felt like he compartmentalized his grief well. He kept busy with work or chores or reading, anything to avoid looking to closely at the pup-shaped emptiness in their family. At the moment, he was just starting to chop vegetables for dinner, and the quiet felt peaceful for once instead of oppressive.

Of course, Castiel chose that moment to confront him with the conversation they’d been avoiding. “Sam.” It was quiet but firm, and Sam knew he wouldn’t be able to evade this discussion anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said, equally quietly.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I promise I don’t. I know you, though, and I’m certain you are apologizing for something that is not your fault. So, please. Tell me.” Cas’s voice carried his frustration, and Sam’s nose flared as the air turned sour around them.

Sam couldn’t help his grim smile. “I can’t get pregnant.”

It was the first time either of them had said it out loud so bluntly.

Gently, as if afraid he would spook Sam into bolting, Cas took one of Sam’s enormous hands into his own. “We don’t know that.” Cas paused, and Sam struggled to keep his protests to himself. It was the only explanation. He was broken. “The doctors said—"

“That we just needed to keep trying, I know. But. Cas, we have. For six years.” Sam shrugged. “Maybe we just need to try a little longer.”

Cas shook his head furiously. “This is killing you, Sam. I can’t—I—It’s enough. We’ve done enough.”

Sam felt cold fear settle in his stomach and thought his stomach flu might be making a comeback. “What are you saying?”

Cas winced. Sam tried to relax his grip on Cas’s hand, to calm his scent, anything to take that expression off his mate’s face, but Cas held on tighter, refusing to let go. “There are options.”

“You want to stop trying.” He’d heard stories of this happening to other omegas who couldn’t ‘perform’ to expectations, known this issue was straining their marriage to the breaking point. Nothing could have prepared him, though, for Cas abandoning him.

Cas shook his head vehemently. “Not like you mean. Sam, I will never turn you away from our bed. I want—I want us to stop obsessing. To stop seeing every illness as a pregnancy symptom. If it happens, then wonderful. If it doesn’t, then there are other ways to grow our family. Adoption, for example.”

“Adoption.” Sam scoffed. Adoptions almost never worked out with alphas. Their instincts were usually just too strong to accept a strange pup into their pack.

“Think about it, please?”

Sam nodded stiffly, and Castiel squeezed his hand before finally releasing it and leaving Sam to his thoughts.

Dean flopped on the couch beside his brother, reaching for his beer before lifting his feet on to the coffee table. Sam tossed a glare at him, then turned back to the game on TV. They sat in companionable silence for a minute or two before Dean cleared his throat. Sam glanced over and silently groaned. Dean had his “serious conversation” face on, and Sam thought he might punch the next person who asked how he was.

“Cas said you’ve been sick.”

Sam sighed. He loved Cas so much, but now he was sending Dean to check on him? “It was the stomach flu.”

“Yeah, he said. He, uh—” Dean grumbled and sighed. “Look, you and Cas ever actually talk about having kids?”

“What the hell, Dean?” Sam glared at his brother.

Dean threw his hands out defensively. “I’m just asking, Sam. It’s not like you talk to me about this crap. Look, I saw a test in the trash when I went to the bathroom. Cas said you’ve been sick. I did the math. Cas know you don’t want pups?”

“You think I don’t want kids? Dude, we haven’t used birth control since the night we mated.”

Dean looked around, as if he might see a gaggle of kids he’d somehow missed running around. “What? You’ve been married six years! I always figured you two just didn’t want any. I mean—”

“I know.” Sam stared at his hands.

“Have you tried—”

“We’ve tried everything. I just…can’t. There were a couple times I thought—But then I went into heat, so—”

“Sam.”

“Don’t.” Sam shook his head and swallowed hard.

Dean worked his jaw for a moment or two before nodding. “How’s Cas?”

Sam shrugged. “Wants to try adopting.”

Dean grimaced. “You think that’ll work?”

“I don’t know, but he’s right. What we’re doing, what we’ve been doing, isn’t working.”

Dean paused, thoughtful, then smirked. “Well, if adopting would work for anyone, it would be you guys. Wouldn’t be the first time our family picked up some strays.”

Sam chuckled. “Dude, we were the strays. Bobby took us in.”

“Exactly.” Dean grinned.

Sam laughed and sipped his beer. Maybe. Maybe it could work, despite the statistics. In any case, finally talking to Dean about everything had made him feel better than he had in a long time.

Cas was reading in bed, and Sam thought he looked adorable. Even when he read for fun, Cas focused his entire being on what he was doing, studying the novel in front of him with an endearing intensity.

Sam leaned on the doorframe, smiling softly to himself. “Hey.”

Despite his intense focus on his book, it only took one word from Sam to get Cas’s attention. “Sam. Is everything all right?”

“Thanks for siccing Dean on me today.”

Cas’s forehead crinkled in confusion.

“We talked. And…I thought about what you said.”

This time, Cas closed the book and set it on the nightstand.

Sam stared at his feet for a minute, then lifted his eyes. “If you think we can make it work, then I’m on board. But—”

Cas nodded. “I know. The statistics regarding successful adoptions are discouraging. Alpha instincts are difficult to fight. But, Sam, I know us.”

Sam smiled. “Ok then.”

The delight that lit up Cas’s face was beautiful, and Sam couldn’t help pressing a kiss to his mate’s lips. Cas let out a small moan and tugged Sam onto the bed with him. Sam growled and allowed Cas to flip them.

Cas latched onto Sam’s shoulder, sucking and biting over his mating scar. Sam groaned and pushed at Castiel’s clothes, trying to get some skin contact. Cas detached himself long enough for Sam to remove his shirt, and he took the chance to strip Sam. It was good, and it was easy in a way it hadn’t been for far too long.

After, they lay together, panting and sated and melting into each other. Sam drifted in a state of lazy satisfaction, basking in his mate’s affection. Tomorrow, things would still be difficult. Sam would still feel broken. Their marriage might never get back to where it used to be. But now, maybe, things could finally start getting better.

#spn fanfic #spnabobingo #Sastiel #alpha!cas #omega!sam #cw infertility

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artnerd1123 · 5 years

Text

Nettles’ Character Sheet

it’s been 500 years since i did one of these, but! undercut it goes~

Character Chart Character’s full name: Nettles Nimue Willoweep Reason or meaning of name: Nettles comes from the plant! Since nettles sting, I was originally planning on having her be a lot more prickly. She still is kinda pokey now, tbh. “Willoweep” is just “weeping willow” but smashed together. It’s for the Aesthetic™. Nimue refers to the “lady of the lake” in the legend of king arthur, and because I thought it sounded cool. important to note is that she made up her current name herself, for story reasons Character’s nickname: none (aiden calls her various pet names later), though some people might attempt to call her captain willow. it doesn’t end well. Reason for nickname: she just doesn’t care for nicknames much, (Aiden’s the exception because they’re overly sappy/joke around a lot with each other later) and she used to be a pirate captain- but isn’t anymore Birth date: March 28th Sexuality: queer Gender/pronouns: genderfluid, she/her (occasionally they/them)

Physical appearance Age: 37 How old do they appear: probably around that. Maybe a smidge older. Weight: still have no clue how weight works! She’s got plenty of muscle mass tho :V Height: 5’11” Body build: thinner frame but with plenty of muscle. She’s strong as frick, and more like a steel rod than a stick. plenty buff :3 Shape of face: i still don’t know how to answer this question lsdkjfs, but she’s got a longer face w/ a sharpish chin Eye color: pale green! Glasses or contacts: neither Skin tone: light brown (african american?) + seafarer’s tan on top of it Distinguishing marks: she’s got so many scars. So many. The most notable ones being “ligature” marks on her right wrist, and a burn on her neck/left shoulder. Predominant features: her hair is p eyecatching for sure Hair color: emerald/leafy green Type of hair: curly coils Hairstyle: currently has it in dreadlocks (they look a lil vinelike!), parted to the right Voice: Jess Glynne - Thursday (but can also sound piratey) Overall attractiveness: strong ex-pirate plant lady,,, pretty in a rugged kind of way,,, ough,,, Physical disabilities: none Usual fashion of dress: pirate, but make it shades of brown/green and a bit less flashy Favorite outfit: dark brown “vest” (actually a dress top she tore the skirt off of) with green accent around front laces, cream off-the-shoulder shirt w/ green accent trim and flowy sleeves, dark brown pants, tan boots w/ straps and gold buckles, large belt w/ gold buckle Jewelry or accessories: black hoop earrings, an emerald leaf shaped cloak clasp, and a staff made of woven grass (which can turn into a sword)

Personality Good personality traits: generally levelheaded, unafraid to tell people things when needed, determined, patient, ‘do no harm but take no shiz’ mentality, not usually quick to judge, generally easygoing, v dedicated to those she considers family, thinks well under pressure, gives good advice (most of the time), can be p charismatic Bad personality traits: tends not to have much foresight, can come across as aloof, really bad about opening up, keeps too much to herself despite tryna get better abt it, can sometimes overlook traits in favor of just being allies/friends, a lil too willing to get into a fight sometimes, can be too headstrong, lies easily to get out of things Mood character is most often in: contemplative Sense of humor: very dark, likes to playfully tease those she cares about, loves really long jokes, can get a bit crass on occasion Character’s greatest joy in life: currently her forest (teaching journal comes close second some days) Character’s greatest fear: her past coming back to bite her Why? She’s not so much scared of people finding out who she used to be, more uneasy about people using it against her. She doesn’t want people to walk out of her life, but like, if they do, she wouldn’t blame em. She just doesn’t wanna get thrown under the bus for what she did back during pirate days, and accused of being something she isn’t (at least, not anymore.) What single event would most throw this character’s life into complete turmoil? Losing journal, tbh. She already lost everything- including family- once. She’s not willing to walk down that road again. Character is most at ease when: out among her plants, or chillin in a tavern Most ill at ease when: near the ocean in any capacity Enraged when: people threaten her loved ones/home/etc, people hurt others due to prejudice, people cause destruction in her forest Depressed or sad when: thinking of her old crew, ruminating in her memories for too long, near the ocean, an old tree dies Priorities: keeping the forest safe, producing enough lucrative plants/herbs so she has on hand pocket money, making sure journal’s alright/settling in/has the help he needs if she’s not around to give it Life philosophy: everyone gets their comeuppance eventually, but that doesn’t mean you sit back and wait. Go knock some sense into em if they need it. Take care of people worse off than you, too. A bit of help gets people a long way. If granted one wish, it would be: to have turned back in that storm instead of charging on. Why? Half her crew wouldn’t be dead. She could’ve actually retired instead of stepping down due to catastrophic failure. Her familiar would be alive. Y’know, normal reasons. Character’s soft spot: plants, gold, shiny things, kids Is this soft spot obvious to others? Plants, definitely. The other things you’ll notice if you’re around her long enough Greatest strength: making a decision and seeing it through Greatest vulnerability or weakness: absolutely hates/has a really hard time opening up to other people Biggest regret: rushing headlong into a storm she had no hope of conquering Minor regret: not travelling inland more when she was a pirate (not a huge deal to her, but it woulda been nice) Biggest accomplishment: either successfully maintaining a ship/captain’s title for ten years, or nurturing her forest from a wildfire charred landscape into a thriving woodsy landscape. Minor accomplishment: finding out how to return gold (if she stole it on accident) without being too weird about it Past failures they would be embarrassed to have people know about: she likely has a ton from her early pirating days. Learning to be a pirate wasn’t super easy all the time Why? She likes to think she’s a competent pirate now, don’t bring that stuff up, thank u v much Character’s darkest secret: dark magic has tempted her many, many times. It still does sometimes. And she almost gave in on a few of those occasions. Does anyone else know? No. they won’t, if she has anything to say about it.

Goals Drives and motivations: moving on aka shoving her past in a closet, being able to keep her forest/new loved ones safe, gold Immediate goals: keep up with her trade partners and her “cash gardens,” check the forest for abnormalities, make sure journ doesn’t need anything that day (and help if he do) Long term goals: keep the forest healthy, keep journal on the right track, continue expanding her budding network of plant trading, hopefully make some more actual progress with her issues How the character plans to accomplish these goals: keep up the “forest guardian” role, send letters to journ/visit him, meet more people, and learn to properly open up. And. y’know. Maybe steal some gold here n there as needed. How other characters will be affected: positively for her loved ones/partners! And maybe possibly probably negatively for those she doesn’t like. Perhaps.

Past Hometown: didn’t have a “town.” lived on ships/ports for her whole life till pirating Type of childhood: unstable, tbh. She was the kid of some merchant questors. Thus, she was always travelling around. Not much time to make/maintain friendships, bond with her parents, or do much besides help out. Any goofing off probably got her yelled at. Her headstrong nature meant she didn’t take kindly to that, so she ran away at 15. Pets: none First memory: the sound of waves. It’s something she’ll never forget, no matter what. Most important childhood memory: seeing pirates in the distance during a trade route! Scary, but she was also in awe of em Why: those pirates inspired her runaway swashbuckling plans when she was a teen! They also showed her an alternative to the dull merchant’s way of fulfilling questor urges. Childhood hero: probably some super well known pirate from a legend a book she smuggled onboard Dream job: anything that wasn’t being a merchant (turned into pirate tho) Education: really good at math, reading, keeping records, and reading the ocean. All thanks to her parents/seabound life! She taught herself plant magic rlly early on, and also learned a lot more things pirating (swordfighting, how to manage a crew, which quests are the most profitable, etc) Religion: Finances: parents took care of childhood finances. She was treasure/stolen loot funded until pirating crashed and burned in her late teen/early adult years~

Present Current location: forest outside Journal’s town. It spans many miles. Currently living with: herself :V Pets: none Religion: Occupation: forest guardian, plant merchant, magic mentor Finances: merchant life pays well enough when she needs it. And, like, she still goes and loots places from time to time. Just keep it quiet, m’kay?

Family Mother: Danielle Chamelea Teritip Relationship with her: though she was v busy, her mother always did her best to keep her daugher on track. She’s the one who pushed nettles really hard to learn, and to focus on becoming a better merchant than entertaining other fantasies. Their relationship wasn’t terrible, but nettles never felt her mom’s approval of her personal goals- just the future her mom wanted. Father: Albus Troise Teritip Relationship with him: he was also very busy, but always took the time to teach her little tricks and tips of the trade. He was also sorta pushy about her becoming a merchant. He never even seemed to notice her pulling away to other fantasies. Why would she? After all, your kid’s gotta carry on the family business. What else would she be doing? Siblings: Relationship with them: Spouse: Relationship with them: Children: Relationship with them: Other important family members: if found family counts, which it does, that’ll be journal! Later in the plot, it expands to fit aiden/roo/seraph/ruffy. In her past, her crew would all have been here

Favorites Color: green. Any shade. Surprising, i know Least favorite color: beige. Boring color, no thank u >:V Music: sea shanties!!! Also likes metal, some pop, and has a fondness for violin/flute music Food: a p p l e s. Also fond of any produce she can eat raw. And crabs. Lov the cronch. Literature: prefers oral stories to reading. But like, history is super interesting to her. Form of entertainment: oral storytelling, showing off (or watching someone show off) magic, stupid tavern karaoke Expressions: loves that devilish smirk of “oh no, they’re up to something bad, hold onto your valuables.” also enjoyable is that eyebrow raise of “did you really just do that? Really? That?” with a deadpan face. Peak expressions. Mode of transportation: swinging/parkouring around through the trees via plant magic and vines, like tarzan, except the vines yeet him instead of swinging sometimes Most prized possession: her staff. She’s had it for years, through good and bad, and it’s not going anywhere. May or may not also have a feather in her cloak clasp for… reasons.

Habits Hobbies: gardening, swordfighting, people and/or birdwatching, storytelling, being extra as all frick every so often so people don’t forget u can and will take them the frick out, applepicking Plays a musical instrument? nope! Plays a sport? Does swordfighting count? How they would spend a rainy day: either inside a town building, tavern, or little canopy of leaves in the forest. Depending on the setting, she’ll just have casual conversations or peoplewatch. Or, if she’s in the forest, she’ll entertain herself with vivid storytelling. Sometimes she’ll jus watch whatever crawled into her dry canopy with her. Or bug journal with excessive letters. Anything chill slkdfjs Spending habits: if she can grow/make/wash it herself, she’s not buying. Spends more gold on trips to town restaurants/taverns than anything else, but it’s chill. ‘S not like she has rent to pay :V Smokes: nope Drinks: rum, of course. What kinda pirate do u take her for??? Also wouldn’t mind whiskey. Drinks a lot less now than she used to. Other drugs: nope What do they do too much of? Being a local cryptid What do they do too little of? Opening up to other human beings instead of plants Extremely skilled at: reading a room, cutting to the chase, sword-and-regular-fighting, plant magic, teaching, stealing/pickpocketing, thinking on her feet Extremely unskilled at: planning ahead, knowing when she should really let things be instead of starting smth, letting her loved ones fight their own fights (she’ll try and step in at least once) Nervous tics: going silent, putting a hand over her mouth, staring really hard at nothing, holding her staff close, squeezing anything in hand (usually her staff end) Usual body posture: holds herself loosely but confidently. Has the air of someone who knows what’s going on, and is at ease wherever. Mannerisms: usually blunt, teases those she cares about (unless told not to), makes hand motions when explaining things, speaks in a more “normal” voice most of the time but can occasionally slip into a piratey accent when angry/upset, tends to unconsciously mimic the accents of those around her if she’s in a new setting, likes to sit back and watch until she judges herself to be “familiar” enough with what’s up Peculiarities: the smell of a lotta salt can sometimes upset her, she’s an extrovert but spends most of her time in the woods/outskirts of towns, she’s still very superstitious from her pirate days

Traits Optimist or pessimist? Tends to err on the side of pessimism nowadays Introvert or extrovert? Big extrovert! She’ll spend time just hanging around places people are if she feels too drained, and really loves spending time with those she cares about Daredevil or cautious? Daredevil with an air of caution about her Logical or emotional? Likes to think she’s more logic based, and acts it, but she’s very emotional driven when it comes down to it Disorderly and messy or methodical and neat? Very neat, actually! You wouldn’t know it unless u got her to live inside tho ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Prefers working or relaxing? Mix of both. Enough work so she’s not bored, but enough relaxing so she’s not stressed :V Confident or unsure of themself? Confident for the vast majority of the time. Animal lover? She’s definitely fond of em!!! :D

Self-perception How they feel about themself: eh, she’s alright. It fluctuates some days, but tends to rest firmly in the “I’m fine, and if I’m not, I’ll fix it for tomorrow” realm. If it does fluctuate, she either feels like a traitor/liar, or a cunning bada$$ One word the character would use to describe self: survivor One paragraph description of how the character would describe self: “I’m Nettles, Nettles Willoweep. I’m a thirty seven year old sorceress who likes plants more than people. Well, that’s a lie. But it is easier to deal with foliage sometimes. I used to be a pirate a long time ago. Not so much nowadays, but that’s not to say I won’t bend a few rules in a pinch. I do what I need. After all, who’s gonna miss a few coins here and there? Certainly not the other families I slip em to. But uh, hey, don’t go spreading that around. I’ve got a reputation to upkeep.” “I guess I’m a bit of a benevolent local cryptid? Whatever that means. Journal tells me it’s a good thing, and I’ll believe him for now. I’m certainly doing what I can to take care of people who need it, and I’d give my right arm to help those I’m close to. Yeah, my blood runs a little hot sometimes, but that hasn’t changed my whole life. I just wanna see my plants and people prosper, and maybe get some gold on the side.” “... ah, right, hobbies. Gardening, forest guarding, fighting with swords, birdwatching… lots of stuff. As long as I’m not spending all my time slogging through old wounds, i’ll call it a good day.” What does the character consider their best personality trait? Her dedication What does the character consider their worst personality trait? How easily she brushes off concern What does the character consider their best physical characteristic? Not sure! She likes her body, and has no complaints abt it. Maybe her hair or how limber she still is :V What does the character consider their worst physical characteristic? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ How does the character think others perceive them: she thinks the general public perceives her as shady but mostly benevolent. She thinks her loved ones perceive her as blunt, but caring. Both of these are fair analyses, by her thought. What would the character most like to change about themself: make it so she could forgive herself easier, and admit to others that she needs a hand

Relationships with others Opinion of other people in general: people are easily tricked and dumb. Individuals can be p nice tho. Does the character hide their true opinions and emotions from others? She’s one of those people where, in certain situations, you’re never gonna be sure if she’s being sarcastic/truthful or not. She does it more regularly than she would like, but less so with close friends Person character most hates: i could put some old rival of hers here. Unfortunately, ‘herself’ works better :( Best friend(s): she’s very good friends with several bartenders, but especially the one in journ’s town. She’s hit it off quite nicely with a nomad who passes through every couple weeks or so, too. Journal is also a “best friend,” but like, in a mentee/kid kind of way Love interest(s): aiden, later ;3 Person character goes to for advice: bartender bffs Person character feels responsible for or takes care of: journal journal journal journal jo- Person character feels shy or awkward around: nobody :V Person character openly admires: *insert several pirates/legendary sorcerers/questors/casual hard workers in towns here* Person character secretly admires: eh. Probably aiden for a bit. Wink wonk lskjdfs Most important person in character’s life before story starts: technically journ counts here? But if not, just herself. After story starts: journal for sure

#nettles willoweep #afw #a familiar world #pirate nettles #character description sheet #this took me all evening; but!!!#worth it :D #and now i've got all this in one spot~#easier to keep track of characterization this way lsdkjfs #anyways; she's a fun gal; even if she's sad sometimes...#nettles i love uuuuuuu #arty writes

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mydarlingvioletine · 5 years

Text

‘Just a Puppy Crush’

Ship(s): Violet/Clementine

Media: The Walking Dead Game (Season 4)

Summary: a zombie-less modern AU in which two dorks finally get together with the help of their friends.

Chapter 1

It started out with an invitation Violet found on her desk. A light purple envelope, her name written on it in beautiful calligraphy.

Well, it started a little bit before that.

Violet missed her alarm. And six of the backup ones she had set in advance. Her mother had left early for her shift at the diner and her father didn’t come home last night, so she slept peacefully and uninterrupted.

Until she lazily stretched out with a yawn, eyes opening and landing on the alarm clock across her.

7:20

She hardly had time to register what it said before the alarm started angrily beeping again.

“Holy shit… Fuck… Shit!” Violet scrambled to get up, smacking the top of the alarm clock to silence the robotic screaming. She threw her sheets to the side, grabbing her jacket off the door hook on the way out.

While vigorously brushing her teeth, she looked down at her phone.

15 missed messages from Pain in My Ass.

[ur uber is Here… am outside]

[got your drink & bagel, where are u?]

[viiiioooooleeet]

[ v i o l e t ]

[did you put the key in a different spot?]

[coward.]

Violet scrolled through the herd impatiently, getting to the latest messages, about 15 minutes ago.

[violet please fucking get up i didnt do my english homework i need to copy off of you marlon won’t let me copy his anymore]

[fuck i have to go i cant be late to pre-session but I’ll have brody come check on you to see if you can make the late entrance with her! ill keep your breakfast with me im sure mr. everett wouldn’t give a shit if you ate in class. i do it all the time]

As if on cue, there was a faint, nervous knock on the door. God bless Brody.

“Be right there!” Violet shouted, quickly throwing her work messily into her backpack. She grabbed a couple dollars off the kitchen table for lunch, threw on her boots, and booked it towards the door.

"Hey,“ Brody grinned at the shaggy-haired, droopy-eyed messy Violet in front of her. "Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Violet grimaced, mumbling to herself as she ducked into the passenger seat of Brody’s truck. She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, and pulled up the hoodie of her jacket to cover her shame.

The drive felt like forever, with Brody’s insufferable choice of music. Who still listens to Coldplay? In 2019? Violet was too grateful to complain, and clenched her jaw to hold her tongue.

Brody tried to hold a conversation, but Violet was too out of it to contribute anything other than nods and the occasional “mhm.”

“Then Marlon was mad at me! I can’t believe that guy. I swear, if he wasn’t my best friend I’d…” Brody’s voice petered out as she pulled into the school parking lot, backing into her spot next to Louis’ car.

Violet immediately jumped out, gave a quick “thankyousomuchioweyouone,” and booked it towards the front doors of the school. The front desk ladies were distracted, so Violet was able to sneak past them and make her way down to the math wing.

106… 108… 110!

Relieved, Violet peeked through the window, seeing Marlon’s pathetic excuse for a haircut as confirmation that she was at the right place.

She tried her best to quietly open the door as to not interrupt the class and draw attention to herself, but wasn’t surprised when the door noisily creaked open, everyone’s heads turning towards her.

Really, Ericson? Ever heard of WD 40?

Violet shyly ducked her head, placing herself between Louis and Aasim. Before she could say anything, Louis placed her coffee and bagel on her desk, a patient smile on his face.

Violet was able to manage a “thank you” while she was scarfing down the bagel. Cheeks full and a dab of cream cheese hanging on her top lip, it’s safe to say that she did not expect Clem to approach her desk at that moment with the worksheet she’d missed.

“Hey, Vi,” Violet’s head jerked up, meeting eyes with Clementine. Embarrassed, she took a tissue and wiped her face, swallowing before she took the worksheet from Clem’s hands. “Grabbed this for you.”

“Thanks,” Violet managed to stammer, giving a sheepish smile while pulling her pencil case out of her pocket. Clementine hadn’t moved.

Violet tensed up, waiting for Clem to make a comment on her appearance or tease her. Instead, she placed an envelope on top of the worksheet, uncertainty embedded in her actions.

"Uh, that’s for you. I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night at my house.“ Clem pushed the envelope towards her with emphasis, and cleared her throat nervously. "You don’t have to come if you don’t want. It’s on a Friday night and I know you probably have pla-”

“No,” Violet interrupted her, her voice louder than she anticipated. She received an exhausted look from Mr. Everett. “I’ll totally be there.”

Clementine immediately perked up, a dorky smile on her face. “Awesome. Oh, and it’s gonna be a sleepover. You don’t have to stay for that.”

Violet frowned, cocking her head and looking at Clem under a suspicious lens. “You don’t have to invite me, y'know.” She sighed, placing the envelope back into Clementine’s hands. “I get it.”

Clem froze up, visibly upset. “No, fuck. I really want you to come. I just didn’t know if that was your kind of thing.”

Violet, unconvinced, lowered her eyes and took a sip of her coffee. Cold. The heat of Clem’s hand covering her own was a nice contrast to that.

Wait.

“I want you there,” Clementine insisted, squeezing her hand between her own. The heat from the touch quickly flushed to Violet’s face, her pale skin unable to mask the blush that covered it. “Please come.”

Louis and Aasim exchanged an annoyed glance at the useless sapphics. Mr. Everett had stood up and taken an interest to their conversation at this point.

“Clem, go back to your seat please,” Mr. Everett cleared his throat, to which Clem recoiled, dropping Violet’s hand. “Violet is more than capable and doesn’t need hands-on help.”

Clem, face red and flustered, ducked her head and moved back to her seat in the front of the classroom. “Sorry, da- I mean Mr. Everett.” She squeaked, glancing over her shoulder one more time at Violet, uncertainty and sadness on her face.

Mr. Everett continued the lecture, but Violet was too busy staring out the window. She was completely zoned out. She figured she’d just get the notes from Aasim later. She saw Louis give her the occasional worried glance out of the corner of her eye, and kept her focus on the kids playing in the courtyard.

The class couldn’t have gone any slower, but eventually the bell rang, and all the tension that had built up in Violet’s muscles was relieved.

She didn’t know why this class stressed her out so much. She was pretty good at math, only the second highest grade in the class behind Aasim. Mr. Everett made her feel uneasy.

He wasn’t a bad guy. Quite the opposite, really. He was a fun teacher who had gone to great lengths to help Violet out with her work. A little by-the-book, but a big sweetheart.

Plus, he picked on Louis a lot. So he was pretty likeable in her eyes.

Clementine had gone up to Mr. Everett and they were now talking, Clem dropping the classroom decorum to tug on his arm and take a $5 dollar bill out of his wallet for lunch.

Violet didn’t realize she was staring until both of their gazes landed on her. Startled, she pulled her hoodie back over her head and started gathering her books as quick as she could. She could hear distant murmuring, but couldn’t make anything out.

Her panic was interrupted by Louis swinging an arm around Violet’s shoulders, holding an almost identical envelope up in front of her face, but it was green.

"If it’s about transportation, I can pick you up. C'mon, the Vi I know and love would never miss out on a chance to get her ass handed to her in Super Smash Bros.“ Louis teased, earning a playful punch on the shoulder from Violet.

"Yeah, right,” Violet rolled her eyes, looking over at Aasim to see he also had one, but orange. “You going?”

"Nah, my moms are taking me camping this weekend.“ Aasim chirped, a glint of mischievousness in his voice. Noticing the curious glances from his two friends, he cracked an evil grin and spoke one word. "Campfire.”

“Smokey the Bear, Aasim,” Violet giggled, shaggy hair falling in front of her eyes. “What can you do to prevent forest fires?”

Louis laughed while Aasim rolled his eyes, picking up his backpack and swinging it over his shoulder. “I’ll see you guys at lunch.”

Aasim was gone for what seemed like half a second when Clementine appeared at her desk again, followed by Mr. Everett. Violet froze, her grip on her books tight.

“My dad wants to introduce himself. Not as Mr. Everett, but as ‘Cool Dad Lee.’” Clem raised her hands to make air quotes, while Le- Mr. Everett held out his hand to shake Violets’.

Bewildered, she shook his hand.

“Hello, Violet,” Mr. Everett looked happy, glancing between Clem and she. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

That line earned an elbow in the stomach from Clementine. Violet, still frozen, gave a robotic laugh.

“Oh, I wanted to tell you to ignore that part of the envelope where it says 'presents mandatory.’ My mom is a bit of a smart-ass.” Clem snorted, before cocking an eyebrow over at Louis. “Not you though, rich boy.”

Louis gave her some finger guns, a big, goofy smile on his face. “Respect for that.”

The second bell rang, interrupting the conversation. Violet threw her backpack over her shoulder, and shot a glance towards Louis. “Fuck, Ms. Martin is gonna be so pissed.”

"I’ll write you a pass. Don’t worry about it.“ Mr. Everett pulled a notepad out of his pocket and took the pen that was perched on Clementine’s ear. "Just.. try to make sure he actually gets there.” Mr. Everett gestured to Louis, who gave a mock gasp at the implication.

“Will do,” Violet promised, grabbing Louis by the neck of his coat. “I’ll uh.. see you two tomorrow night.”

“You’re coming?” Clem squealed, her eyes giving away how happy she was. Violet nodded sheepishly, looking back at Mr. Everett before dragging Louis out of the classroom.

“I like that girl,” Lee stated, capitalizing on the blush that had taken over Clem’s cheeks. “Reminds me of someone.”

Clementine rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, tapping her foot impatiently as he made up a pass for her. “That’s good…”

Lee tore off the front page of the notepad, and held it high before giving it to Clem. “You have my blessing.”

Clementine’s flustered state turned into a fit of anger, as she jumped up to try and grab the pass out of his hand. “Shut. Up.” Clem grabbed onto the slip, wrenching it out of his arm. “I introduce you as my Cool Dad and this is how you repay me?”

Lee chuckled, putting the pen back behind her ear. “If you think I’m bad, just wait ‘til Carley sees her.. Oh, boy.. Her cheeks are gonna be red from all that pinching.”

Clementine huffed and stomped out of the classroom, putting all of her weight onto her prosthetic foot, so it noisily clattered. She kept up the noise until she knew she was out of ear shot, and smiled to herself, bunching the bottom of her sweatshirt up in her hands.

Her seventeenth birthday was going to be perfect.

#twdg #the walking dead game #twdg violet #twdg clementine #twdg louis #twdg aasim #twdg ruby #twdg brody #twdg spoilers #twdg s4 #clementine x violet #violet x clementine #violetine #violentine

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singledarkshade · 5 years

Text

Accidental Hostages

Part Two “So,” Nora asked as they walked into their apartment in a celebratory mood, “Are we opening that bottle of wine?”

Gideon laughed, “Well, we were just paid by our first real client. And that is what we earmarked it for.”

Nora closed the door and asked again, “So, are we opening the bottle of wine?”

Shaking her head amused, Gideon grabbed the bottle of red wine they had labelled, ‘First job paid’ and put it on the breakfast bar before heading into her room. They had worked so hard over the past year to build their business, and it had finally come to fruition. Their business had taken off. Not only had they been paid by their first client, they had three more jobs already lined up. Changing into her pyjamas, Gideon thought back five years when she had nervously moved to a new country for university and met her new roommate, Nora Darhk.

Despite the fact they were so different, they had become friends quickly and when they graduated decided to go into business together. With Gideon’s genius in computer, maths and organisational skills plus Nora’s magical artistic talents they started a party planning business. Not exactly what Gideon expected to be doing but she was a people person and enjoyed working with them, besides she always liked to subvert people’s expectations of her, and everyone expected her to work with computers hidden away from the world.

Nora’s father had offered to help them get going but before Gideon could even take in the offer, Nora had refused. She was going to do this on her own. Gideon would never forget how proud the man looked while he hugged Nora, reminding his daughter that he was always there if she needed him.

Gideon took a seat on one of the couches in their living room, Nora handed her a glass of wine, putting the pizza they’d picked up on the way home on the table before stretching out on her couch.

“I can’t believe we did it,” Nora laughed, taking a long drink, “I wish Dad was here so we could show him.”

Gideon winced, Nora’s father was on what he called a ‘Relaxation Trip’ and was incommunicado for the next month. Nora was a little worried, because usually these trips were only a week long.

“By the time he gets back,” Gideon assured her, “We will have finished several jobs and he’ll be able to see how much you’ve achieved without his help.”

Nora grinned, finishing her wine before refilling glass and topping up Gideon’s. As they sat eating and drinking Gideon began to feel sleepy. Curling into her comfy sofa, on top of her big pillow and wrapping the big fleece blanket around her she snuggled deeply into the warmth. Sleep pulled her down and Gideon was barely aware when Nora dropped her glass as she slipped into unconsciousness.

Gideon jumped awake hearing a pounding on the door. Her mind felt strangely foggy like someone had filled it with cotton-wool. She felt sick and every bang was like a knife being jabbed through her brain. Forcing herself to a stand Gideon grimaced feeling something wet and sticky at her feet.

Looking down Gideon saw she was standing in a pool of blood covering their carpet, slowly she followed the blood back to its source seeing the familiar man on the ground, leaking blood with a blank stare in his eyes and she screamed.

The door bursts open and police flooded their apartment.

*********************************************

Rip stayed silent as Gideon and Nora finished their story, Nora’s hand was gripping Gideon’s as they talked. Glancing at Ray who was sitting staring at them Rip knew that they had persuaded Ray to help them, but he had never been one to take things on face value.

“Okay,” Rip said softly, “You drank some wine, fell asleep and the next thing you knew Eobard Thawne was dead on your floor?”

Nora nodded, “There were two bloody knives beside him, from our kitchen and our fingerprints covered them.”

“We were both still groggy when the police pulled us out,” Gideon added softly, “Neither of us knew what was happening.”

“Then what?” Rip asked.

“Mr Merlyn, my father’s lawyer appeared. I have known him almost all my life, so I was relieved to see him,” Nora told him, “And the next thing we knew he had us pleading guilty for murder and we had apparently signed confessions.”

Rip frowned in thought musing over this, “Were they your signatures?”

“Yes,” Gideon said softly before adding, “But they were too perfect.”

“You think they were forged?” Ray spoke up.

Nora nodded, “Mine had a flourish I only ever do on birthday cards.”

Rip thought this over for a few more seconds, he studied the two women for a few more seconds and asked, “Why?”

Nora frowned, “Why what?”

“Why frame you?” Rip expanded his question before noting, “I am assuming that your father would be a reason to implicate you, Nora but why Gideon?”

Grimacing Nora glanced at Gideon before replying, “Because Thawne was obsessed with her and she turned him down.”

Rip folded his arms in thought, “Explain what happened there.”

Gideon shook her head, “It was nothing. He asked me to dinner once and I told him I was flattered but not interested.”

“What you didn’t see was the flowers, chocolates and other little presents he sent,” Nora told her, “And at my Dad’s birthday dinner last year…”

“What?” Gideon demanded when Nora trailed off.

Uncomfortably Nora told her, “He put something in your drink,” at Gideon’s horrified look Nora caught her hand, “My father saw him. Father is a lot of things but made it clear what he would do to Thawne if he went anywhere near you. You know Dad thinks of you like another daughter.”

Anger flitted through Rip, but he took a quick breath to calm himself. He believed they were innocent now.

“Okay,” Rip said, “We’ll help but firstly I need to check on my son.”

Gideon shook her head, “They’ll trace the call.”

“Give me my phone back and a laptop, I can scramble any trace they try to do,” Rip told her.

“Aren’t you just an IT technician?” Nora asked a little surprised.

Rip shrugged, “These days.”

“What does that mean?” Ray demanded but Rip ignored him focussing on Gideon.

She nodded and motioned him to follow her.

Gideon nervously led Rip to the small office so he could use the computer. Finding out what Thawne had tried to do to her had made her feel even more ill than she already was about this entire thing.

“You can use this,” she motioned Rip inside and handed him her spare laptop she’d picked up from the office, “But I’m staying and listening to every word you say.” Gideon told him hoping he didn’t hear the quiver of fear in her voice.

Rip nodded, “Alright. Phone?”

Pulling out his mobile she handed it to him. He logged on to both the phone and the laptop, she watched him type surprised by what he was doing.

“I never would have thought to do that,” Gideon noted softly.

“You obviously have not needed to do some of things that I have,” Rip replied with a slight smile before shrugging, “Besides one of my previous job requirements was being able to hack anything.”

Stunned she didn’t get a chance to ask anymore as Rip dialled a number, and she watched the signal bounce around the country several times before it was answered.

Rip tapped his fingers against his leg as he waited for the phone to be picked up.

“Michael?” his mother answered, worry filling her voice.

“Yes,” Rip replied shortly, “Are you alone?”

There was a pause, “I am but I have a feeling our call isn’t private but I’m assuming you’ve taken care of that.”

Rip smiled, “You know me well, Mother.”

“Michael, what’s happening? Jonas is looking for you and the police told me you’ve been taken hostage by two women who murdered a man.”

Rip glanced over at Gideon before replying, “It’s not a lie but there’s more going on than you were told.”

“Michael,” his mother said again.

Rip interrupted, “Let me talk to Jonas.”

There was a moment of silence before a little boy’s voice came, “Daddy?”

“Hi, Little Man,” Rip smiled, relief filling him to hear his son’s voice, “Are you being good for Grandma?”

“Uh hu. When are you coming home?” Jonas asked.

Rip grimaced, looking up at Gideon again, “Soon, Jonas but first I need to help someone who is in trouble.”

“Okay,” Jonas sighed.

“I will be home as soon as I can Little Man,” Rip promised, “And we can do something fun.”

“Like the zoo?”

Rip laughed and Gideon smiled at the sound.

“Yes, exactly like the zoo,” Rip told him, “Give the phone back to your grandma now and be good.”

“Should I be worried?” Rip’s mother asked after a moment.

Rip sighed, “Trust me, mother. I know what I’m doing. Just look after Jonas and I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

Hanging up the phone, Rip let out a sigh. He had promised himself that once Jonas was born he would never go back to doing anything like this. Except he couldn’t leave these two women to try to fight this on their own.

“What?” he asked the woman standing watching him.

Gideon tilted her head asking, “Who are you?”

“Excuse me?” Rip said confused.

“You told me when we met that you’re an IT technician for Ray’s company,” Gideon stated, “That is not what an IT technician does, and you got out of a pair of handcuffs without a key.”

Rip shrugged, “My previous job was a little more involved than IT technician. I decided to change careers when my son was born.”

“Can I ask about his mother?” Gideon said softly.

“She’s gone,” Rip sighed wistfully. He was a little surprised when she reached out and took his hand, but he squeezed it gently, “It was a few years ago.”

“It doesn’t mean it can’t still hurt,” Gideon replied.

He pulled his hand back, “Let’s focus on your problem just now.”

*********************************************

Nora was surprised when Ray helped her clean the dishes, but it appeared his reputation for being a ‘good guy’ was not exaggerated.

“Are you okay?” he asked, bringing her out of her thoughts.

Nora jumped slightly, “Just worried about Gideon. My dad and I made sure she didn’t know how far Thawne had gone. I didn’t want to scare her.”

“That’s…” he hesitated, “Nice?”

Nora shook her head, “It’s just everyone who meets Gideon falls in love with her.”

“Really?”

“The moment I met her I adored her,” Nora laughed, “And my Dad basically adopted her from day one. Even Rip from the moment he met Gideon had eyes just for her.”

Ray smiled, “I didn’t.”

Nora laughed disbelieving.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ray said quickly, “She’s beautiful but doesn’t quite have your charms.”

A blush covered Nora’s cheeks at his words but considering everything this was not something she could pursue, even if she really wanted to.

“I’m hoping whatever Rip is doing will help us,” Nora said softly, “And I really hope we’re not trusting you both for us to be betrayed again.”

“Nora, we’re going to help you,” Ray promised, “As long as you assure me that you’re not spinning a story.”

Nora looked up at him, “We’re not. If my dad was here then I would go to him but he’s not and that scares me more than I can say.”

Ray frowned, “Why would your father stay away if you’re in trouble?”

Shaking her head Nora sighed, “I don’t know.”

“He wouldn’t,” Rip’s voice made them turn to see him and Gideon walk back in, “I’ve some experience with your father and his business, Nora. Damien Darhk is a lot of things but if you were in danger then he would be here unless…”

“Unless something happened to him,” Nora finished.

Gideon hugged her friend close, “So what do we do?”

All eyes turned to Rip who folded his arms answering grimly, “We find Eobard Thawne and prove your innocence.”

#fic #legends of tomorrow #rip hunter #gideon #ray palmer #nora dahrk

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relationshipcrimes · 5 years

Text

The other day I was on an interview committee to find a new associate director for graduate students career advising at the university I'm currently at. Talking to this guy, he's talking the language of capital--if you want to get a job in this economy, you have to prove to the institution that you're applying to that you can create value and revenue for them. You have to prove that you can generate and create something for them that they want. This is the sort of language that's frequent among career counselors, whose job it is to make sure that people get jobs--especially students, who sometimes suffer when making the jump between their degree and the workforce. Like most career counselors, he focuses only on the very next job you’re looking at, only one move ahead and no further.

The committee is larger than is maybe necessary. It includes everyone in the Career Center who’ll be directly working with him, but also every dean on the planet earth, plus every director and associate director, plus department heads who honestly will never speak to this person again. I’m a single graduate student with two other grad students who have a very minor say in hiring the person who’ll be advising us on how to get a job when we graduate.

I’m the only Masters student in a group of PhD students: I’m getting a Masters in Education, while the other is getting a PhD in Theatre (the poor thing), and the other is getting a PhD in biomechanical engineering with a focus on robotics, because she’s apparently a fucking genius on top of being built like a brick shithouse and sincerely wonderfully nice about everything. This poor white man applying for this job, trying to make friends with us graduate students, makes the mistake of asking me about my career.

I was a classroom teacher for a while, I tell him. I taught in the classroom all through undergrad in a “student resource center,” which was a literal basement jailhouse where they put all the mentally ill kids who they didn’t want to educate anymore so they could wait for these students to fail out of public schooling and no longer have to spend tax dollars on their education, then shuffle these mentally ill and usually traumatized/abused children of color into prisons, where their black and brown bodies in jailhouses will instead generate prison tax dollars. Then I graduated and was a classroom teacher at a ritzy middle school teaching English, Social Studies, and Math. Now I’m trying to make the jump to being an office worker in higher education.

He launches into a “get rich quick” spiel about how to hunt for a job: convince everyone that you have the skill sets and competencies to be able to do the job that you want to do in higher education. Extol your abilities to talk to children. Talk about the individual skills that you have to complete papers on time, meeting quick deadlines, perform under high pressure situations. (“Perform” being not inaccurate, in the sense that I sure did manage to function as a classroom teacher, provided I was able to relentlessly indulge every eating disorder behavior on earth all simultaneously. It was a very long year, as a classroom teacher.)

I’m like, okay. That’s fine. I know that. (I work in the Career Center. The Career Center is all about helping college students sell their own resume. I might just be an administrative assistant/secretary in that office right now, but I fucking know how to whore yourself out to an employer. I know how to talk Corporation.)

Theatre Grad Student asks me why I’m making the switch. I say that I want to make a bigger impact on students. Well, what’s your measure of “bigger impact?” she asks. If you’re in the classroom, then you’ll have a profound effect on the individual student, won’t you? I tell her: I know that. The relationships that I had with individual students were some of the most meaningful experiences I ever had in my life. The ghosts of those students still show up in my writing to this day. But here I am, just as a secretary, and I’m having a far wider effect on students that I ever did just in terms of breadth; I decline unpaid internships all day long, promote better opportunities, forward students to resources, answer their questions—I get a say on policies that affect the university as a whole, like declining U.S. Borders and Custom Control and ICE internships. As a classroom teacher, I just lived with the policies that other people made about me. As a secretary in a higher education office, I’ve got a small seat at the table.

But it’s bizarre, I tell her. I spend all day long making minor decisions that will affect hundreds of students, and I do it all from a computer screen. I never see a real face. I never see the whites of my student’s eyes when I tell him, I’m sorry that you live in a school where your value as a human being depends on how well you can comprehend To Kill A Mockingbird. I know you did your best. Your work was C work at best, and I’m going to give you a B+, because if I don’t, you won’t go to a decent high school after eighth grade, and your future will be ruined instantaneously because you have dyslexia and some administrator in a corner office threw To Kill A Mockingbird into your curriculum.

So why the switch? She asks. (Grad career counselor candidate is still there, listening to all this.)

Because school is hell, I tell her. School, as an institution, is a made-up society that values human worth by their grades, by their ability to jump through a completely arbitrary set of rules, your ability to meet the parameters and qualifications that someone else decided for you. And we put everyone through this hell-sink. (At this point I’m physically shaking.) Every day, school inflicts untold levels of psychological, spiritual, and even physical damage upon the people who go through it. School isn’t just toxic, but an active system of abuse against every student who walks through it, and must be changed, and I will not die until I see it disfigured to the point of unrecognizability, until its corpse gives way to some place where human beings can live without being culled and pruned into unrecognizable shapes to meet the demands of curriculum requirements.

Theatre Grad Student nods. Bioengineering Grad Student nods.

It’s bad business policy when schools don’t deliver what they promise, says the counselor candidate.

This morning I don’t do anything. I wake up at eight on a Saturday and just laid there. I use Todoist, so I have a to do list that autogenerates itself every day: Here’s exactly the separate steps that you need to do in order to stay on track and hit all your project deadlines and all your project goals. Today, the things I have to do are: Read 25 pages of a book about admissions policies, Duolingo (50 XP, 25XP of Korean and 25XP of French), pay off your credit card, pick up half and half from the corner store, watch one (1) TED talk, clear your AO3 inbox, answer fanmail on tumblr (I’ve been putting this one off for three weeks), reorganize your ePub library, record one (1) journal entry, reach inbox zero, write five-hundred words of Stag Legs, read what Aryashi wrote for Stag Legs yesterday, write 500 words of original novel.

I go for a run instead. The gym is closed. I get sunburnt. Then I listen to one song on repeat for four hours. I’m still dehydrated because of the ongoing fight against the eating disorder got me hard last night. I have no idea if I’m tired because of too little sleep, too much sleep, not enough calories, too many calories, too little caffeine this morning, caffeine overdose from drinking six cups every weekday and adrenaline burnout. Maybe I’m just not motivated. I lack a thing that I sometimes call “conviction.” Tumblr self-help says that I should be more sympathetic to my situation, but if I were just motivated, wouldn’t I pick myself up again and keep going? I’ve done it before.

This to-do list seems pretty pointless. It’s a collection of several larger projects that’s been distilled down into doable bite-sized tasks that I can do in a single day, larger goals like “Learn about the education industry,” “Become fluent in Korean,” “Finish Stag Legs according to the decided deadlines,” “Publish a novel,” so on and so forth. Some of these tasks are just sundry things to make sure that finances don’t implode—there isn’t a goal involved, so it’s just general life maintenance.

The to do list is a fractured mess, really. There’s no really good narrative there. Bouncing in between each of those little menial tasks, there’s no sense of accomplishment, no sense that you’ve done anything that means anything.

I was a pretty stereotypical eating disorder patient. High achieving. Played a sport. White-passing, even if I’m half Korean. I was never the lead player on the team, mostly because I was too weak—that honor went to the girl who was recruited alongside me for the same class year. But I was a pretty damn close second. Sports season rolled around, you didn’t think about anything else: your life was golf. You lived and breathed it. You thought about it all day long. You ghosted through classes and enjoyed homework and classes as a minor distraction from your real purpose on this earth, which was to go to the golf course and get the ball as close to the hole as you could. They used to say, a good round of golf is a thing you play. Nobody has a “good round of golf.” A good round of golf isn’t “a round of golf”; it’s seventy-two excellent shots in a row. So what you should do is hit every shot, individually, by itself, as best as you can, being nowhere but right where you are, over the ball, with one club in your hand, without a single thought about the shot you just made or the shot you’ll make next, looking at the distance between you and the hole, thinking about what you can do right then and there to get a little closer to the hole. Coaches have a hundred and one tips on how to play a better round of golf, but the truth is that none of them really help if you don’t have your eyes on the goal, which is to hit the best possible shot you can in that moment. The same thing goes for eating disorders. There’s a hundred and one different tips for how to starve better, but none of them really matter if you don’t have your eyes on the goal: to be as hungry as you can possibly stand in that single moment. The instant you start thinking about anything else—things like “eat well, not less!” or “focus on vegetables and leafy greens!” or “hit the nine o clock position on your backswing”—everything goes to hell. No road plan, tip or trick, no special technique can possibly replace a single-minded, headlong sprint straight towards your goal. The point of you isn’t to make a good golf swing, or have nice clubs, or even make friends with your teammates. The point of you is to get the ball in the hole. The point of you is to shrink. Even the most well-meaning of swing-fixes or advice from your coach is just a distraction.

When you’re hungry, you can hear it. You always know exactly which direction to go. Following those guiding lights, you’re never, ever lost. You always know exactly who you are and what you’re about. The golf coach told me that I couldn’t play on the team if I didn’t recover. Three months later, I quit the team. I did everything the therapist asked—ate the right foods, ate enough, talked to a nutritionist, did the weigh-ins, quit the calorie counting. A collection of disparate, fracture to-dos, incomprehensible to a whole narrative, that I did because someone else told me to.

People ask me in the Career Center all the time: what kind of work do you want to do? What’s your skill set? Do you want a people-facing role? How do you want to live your daily life? Do you want a nine-to-five, or more freedom to set your own hours? What are you interested in? What’s your curiosity? They tell me: don’t be afraid to switch careers, to move in and out of roles, to rely on your resume and live like a homeless person with no real function in society, no real trade to speak of.

What’s the point of these questions? What do I care about these nitty-gritties? Are you intentionally shoving weeds at me to get lost in? Are you trying to ensure that I can’t see the forest for the trees? I won’t get up in the morning for a nice office space with a couch and free coffee. I won’t get up in the morning for a nice writing studio where I can feel free to indulge my bad habit of writing thousands of words into a word document.

“Why don’t you become a professional writer?” some people tell me—like “a writer” is a thing you can be, or even a thing that you do, when instead writing is just the unfortunate task of making something that should exist actually start existing. You think I put words on the page for fun? Writing is the singularly most unpleasant experience I know of. I put words on the page because they’ve got to be said. I do work because it’s got to be done. I’m getting a degree in Education not because I’m interested in it; I’m getting a degree in Education because I need to know everything that I can about education in order to fix it. It’s not about what you’re doing or how you’re doing it, it’s about the why.

“Build your resume,” I tell students all the time, as if a resume is a real thing. It’s a sales pitch more lies than truth loosely based in the real work you did. It’s never the resume that matters. It’s never the reputation or the awards. It’s about the work, the thing that drives you, the thing you couldn’t stop doing if your life depended on it. Your resume is not a real thing. You are a human being who will wither and die if you do anything else than what you love. Can you tell me one or two sentences about the help you’re requesting from this career counselor? I ask when booking appointments. Can you tell me in one or two sentences what you’re about as a human being? Can you explain yourself to yourself? Do you have something that drives you, a thing that calls you that only you can hear? When you don’t know what to do next, do know which direction you’re heading, and never feel lost? In one or two sentences, what do you stand for?

Well, what kind of job are you looking for? career counselors ask. Office space? People facing? What kind of benefits? Physically demanding or mentally-oriented? What sort of work motivates you to get up in the morning?

Where’s the job that will let me raze the university to the ground? When will I have the power to stop playing by someone else’s rules and remake the rules altogether? If in twenty years time and I’m the director of some university office with the power to fix the university but I’ve spent so long stringing one day after another that I no longer remember what I’m working in that office for, what will be the point? I didn’t ask for a job. I asked for a cause. If I don’t know why I get up in the morning, I won’t.

This post is 2.8k words long and I still have to do my to-do list. Having a goal is one thing; but you’ve got to break it down into a series of tasks that you feel that you can accomplish. Journey of a thousand steps and all that. It’s not about the journey, it’s about the steps, one after another, until you’ve got a thousand in a row. It turns out that the individual steps are more important than the overall whole, in the end. There’s a lot of benefit in putting your head down, closing your eyes, and focusing on only the immediate. Like they say, if you write only five hundred words every day, you’ll have 182,500 words after a year—enough to fill three books, at least. You’ve got to focus on what’s directly in front of you, distilling every far-off goal in the future into what you’re doing right now, right this second.

How awful.

#mine #cw reflections that involve a discussion of mental health

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mbti-notes · 6 years

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Hi! Hope you're doing well. I think I am INFJ but feel free to type me if I am wrong. Recently, I realised I am doing immoral things and I did not realise it causing serious damage to my happiness and life. I have asked before but I feel I had not been honest enough for you to be able to help.I am sixteen years old. My school life ended last week but I can't remember a single person who I was friends with. Before two years ago I was rejected socially and that took a huge toll on me, along with

[con’t: mental illness, and that made me depressed and I seeked refuge in writing. I invested a large amount of time writing poems and stories, and my grades suddenly dropped from excellent to poor, and I broke the trust of my mother that I am responsible without realising it. Next year I dreamt of an ideal work life and invested all of my time fantasizing about a career in science research; I repeatedly got bad grades and ruined an important test of my life. Now my parents have hired tutors for me and I am studying well. Recently, I have been getting very interested in mathematics. Though I enjoy it as a hobby and I don’t think doing it is inherently bad for me, I do feel my motivations behind the activity are somewhat awry. I am proud of liking it, probably thinking of it as validating me being ‘special’. Only recently is it dawning that nothing is useful unless it can be applied to the real world to do good, but I don’t think I’ve uncovered the full reason behind me doing it yet. The education system here is genuinely bad, but I still have to take part in it to be successful, and I do not realise that even though I pretended so for a long time and even disagreed with my math tutor over how I should study. When someone says I do not like math, or I am not good at it, I feel hurt. I don’t know how I came to rely on this thing so much for my self-esteem. I feel annoyed and irritated, and am constantly searching for ‘solutions’. Recently a very big relief to me has been when I stopped using Type Development as ‘life rules’ and rather tools for awareness. But I still feel I rely extremely on external standards to make me fulfilled. I pound other people with my problems and whine about my life, but am never genuinely interested in them; I get angry when I get criticized. This is making people around me fed up of me and I hate myself for doing this but don’t know why I still continue. I have trouble with introspection. I literally can’t think, whenever I think about my myself or my problems I just repeat obvious things or what I ‘should’ do according to external standards. I am not able to imagine a ‘better’ future. Because I have ended school without friends, I have no opportunities to socialise anymore. I am extremely clingy because of this but whenever I start to think why I’m clingy my mind goes blank. Do you have any advice?]

To recap: you experienced some kind of social trauma, withdrew into yourself, and your life has been stuck if not a downhill slide since then? Basically, you’ve failed at Fe development and now you find yourself stuck in Ti loop and Se grip patterns. You’ve encountered a negative experience that could stunt type development for the rest of your life. Instead of processing that experience and getting proper closure on it so that you learn and grow, you ran from it and used it as an excuse to live irresponsibly? Many people in this situation just continue on repeating the same pattern of negativity and withdrawal for life, so what are you going to do to change the pattern? What are you waiting for? What do you expect to happen?

When a repetitive pattern doesn’t work, DO something different. There are always opportunities to improve yourself and there are always opportunities to contribute something positive to the world around you, but you haven’t yet understood that there is more than one way to live a meaningful life (since you keep grasping at external standards to blindly follow). You cannot grasp any opportunities when you are egocentric and blind to everything except your own momentary pains and pleasures.

Ti loop and Se grip equals wasting a lot of time with: 1) Pettiness: egotistical attempts to avenge your emotions which leads to inauthentic, self-sabotaging, and morally harmful behavior, and 2) Stubbornness: fighting to reinvent the wheel because of believing that you “know better” or that you must “do it yourself”, thereby ignoring (even disrespecting) people who actually know better than you and failing to learn from your mistakes.

When some people can’t get validation for being praised as good, they go the opposite direction by rebelling and pretending to fight against fake enemies. Your mindset is still childish and consumed with attempts to get superficial validation, often through pretending to be stronger, better, or smarter than you really are. This is misuse of Ni and Fe (trying to live up to fake ideals for the sake of feeling superior), as well as Ti and Se (living life as a mere slave to negative emotions in terms of always trying to avoid the pain of criticism and running from the helplessness of being a nobody).

When you indulge ego, it gives you momentary pleasure and satisfaction. Momentary. For a second you can feel self-satisfied, for a second you can feel “strong”, for a second you can feel “smart”. Then it’s gone, and the reality of your insecurity, your weakness, and your ignorance creeps back in. The tangible results of not living life well cannot be denied no matter how you pretend. As with most unhealthy INFJs, you probably keep doing it because you don’t want to face up to the reality of what it takes to get your life in order. The more you ignore reality, the louder reality shouts back at you -> Se grip.You cannot “imagine a better future” because you are running from it.

To live a life of authenticity and integrity is HARD FUCKING WORK. Are you up for it? 1) For authenticity, you have to acknowledge the truth of your flaws and shortcomings in order to discover the right strategies to improve yourself, seeking help whenever necessary. 2) Out of self-respect, you have to set tangible long term goals to improve your well-being and realize your potential, always maintaining focus on the bigger picture and being disciplined in continually moving towards it. 3) Out of love and compassion, you have to look for opportunities to put yourself to good use, to humble yourself so that you can learn well and be of service to the world, which would naturally create good interpersonal relationships. 4) For integrity, you have to will decisions that abide by good moral values, especially when your egotistical desires would lead you astray. In other words, you have to stop whining and making excuses and get to work.

It’s easier to run away from responsibility by being stubborn or relying on empty external standards for validation, isn’t it? No, it isn’t. The more you run, the more pressure you feel, because you cannot deny the facts forever: that you haven’t grown, that you have no friends, that you haven’t been respectful and true to your best self, that time is passing and doors are closing as you sit idle. Whether you choose to run from or accept responsibility, you will have to endure pain and suffering - that’s life. However, when you run, the pain never ends and never bears any fruit except constant self-loathing; whereas when you accept the pain of being fully responsible for your life, you get to gradually become a better person and live a meaningful life. One choice is clearly better than the other, but you can’t understand that when you’re really more interested in being petty and stubborn.

#infj #auxiliary fe #ti loop #se grip #meaning of life #petty #stubborn #ask

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the-skooma-den · 5 years

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threw together a couple headshots of Syke cause i wanted to do a proper profile of her, so anyone curious about the character i spend so much time ranting about and drawing thats gonna be under the read more

Part 2 here

directory to all posts about her and her siblings are here

Real Name: Ava Aurelia Cassia Camoran Tharn Latona. she has an untold amount fake names and identities for a wide variety of purposes, Nowadays she mainly goes by Syke Ivywood, and thats what most of the Dominion knows her as (and is also her in game name)

Age: turned 28 right around when the main plot started. I assume years pass through the DLC’s, including one year where she does the mages and fighters guild quest as well as a bunch of quests.

Race: Imperial. Her father was a bosmer and she takes heavily after him. Her grandpas a Khajiit, which is only relevant here because her dad took heavily after his dad. Hence syke’s weirdly golden eyes and slightly to sharp teeth.

Class: Nightblade, focus on siphoning magic

Personality: One might look at her usual scowl and her serious demeanor and assume she's the typical lone wolf edgy assassin, and they’re only really half wrong. She’s not a loner by choice,she doesn’t hate people really, shes just not great at interacting with people. Anyone who knows who she actually is tend to be scared of her (even other members of the brotherhood) and that's not great for ones self confidence. In a few words, she’s just awkward and extremely introverted. That being said she is kinda grumpy, but if an evil god stole your soul you would be to.

As for the series Demeanor, that really just her face. She’s just not a smiley person ya know? She just as an incredibly flat affect and it either takes really strong emotions or a lot of effort on her part to break it. She’s actually pretty damn nice, even if she doesn’t really “get” a lot of social norms.Being raised in a assassin cult worshiping the void can do that to a girl.

What also does not help the usual perception of her, is her Bad temper and very very low bullshit tolerance. She’s not hard to piss off and it can be explosive. Usually not the yelling and screaming explosive but the getting right up in your face out of nowhere and quietly informing you that if you say one more word she’ll individually break every bone in your hand type way.

She’s what her mother would kindly call “strong willed” and what everyone else would call debilitatingly stubborn . Keeping in mind this is a woman who was wronged by what is essentially the demon god king of domination and then decided “I’m going to kick his ass” and then did. For good or ill she rarely if ever gives up.

Due to the fact she is technically a noblewoman, she tends to be extremely private as well. The other Cyrodilic nobles know of her and her family, but just know them as the family that for the most part gave up their titles and have no intention of trying to get them back, they have no idea that theyre a whole family of assassin in the Dark brotherhood. That does not mean that they ignore her or her family as even if her family doesn’t want the titles the fact they exist can mess up others claims to the throne.Especially Ava who suffice to say has a pretty decent claim to several very important titles. This has lead her to take on a variety of different fake names and wearing different masks to avoid being recognized both in her daily life and in jobs for the brotherhood...at least at first.

As it turned out she's a natural actor with one hell of a flair for the dramatic. She may have issues interacting with people as herself, but she finds it easier when pretending to be someone else. She got so into it that she has whole characters that she pretends to be for all kinds of purposes, like say if she needs access to mages or fighters guild resources or if a particular job for the brotherhood calls to act as a maid for a little bit.

as for how the Dominion crew know her, well they actually come closer to knowing her then most. When Raz dragged her out of the ocean at Khenarthis roost she was so out of it she was barely able to come up with a fake name let alone a whole character, so they all end up genuinely knowing her as she truly is. Turns out she doesn’t mind that as much as she thought she would.

Backstory (before the main plot): She’s a third generation member of the Dark brotherhood, and most of her direct family (siblings, parents, aunt and one set of grandparents) are apart of it. Her grandmother, A Bosmer noble named Cassa, married an Imperial nobleman when she was pretty young. Cassa wanted to get out of Valenwood and her husband was looking for a way to rebel against his family and found it in a hot bosmer lady. They ended up having one kid together, Lara

A few years later Cassa ends up falling in with and getting pregnant by a khajiiti baker her husband hired, and her husband is not to happy about that to say the least. He fires and sends the Khajiit away and Cassa is less then happy about that as well. She kills her husband and so convincingly makes it look like an accident that if the brotherhood hadn't already had a contract out on him no one would have ever known it was murder.

So Cassa ends up joining the brotherhood after her second kid by the khajiit man was born. She never really connected with the bosmeri pantheon or the Green pact, and she ends up taking to Sithis real well. She also as soon as she was able went to find her love and they were married as soon as possible. They all lived in Valenwood for a number of years and both her kids grew up in the brotherhood as well.

Eventually the younger one son, Tanis, marries an Imperial woman,Livillia. Also a runaway noblewoman,her mother was friends with Cassa and she was seeking sanctuary with her. Livillia is specifically one of Abnur Tharns kids, who no longer wanted to deal with the Tharn family drama.

They have a kid together (That is of course Ava). Tanis’s older sister and Cassa’s first child, Lara, has a one night stand with an Altmer and has her own kid who she names Ceryneian (or Nia for short). And they all live pretty happily for a while, as far as anyone knew the family was just a bunch of nobodies, rich nobodies who kept all hours but still just nobodies. They had for the most part completely abandoned all noble titles, even if the nobles weren’t done with them.

When Ava was about 10 years old her great aunt Cilvia tharn found out that Livillia was still alive. She was well aware that if she tried to do anything to Elsweyr Livillia would likely act against her. Livillia may be a member of the brotherhood, but she wasnt completely evil. Cilcvia sent assassins after Ava’s parents, they missed her but her parents were taken by surprise and sadly killed. None of her family felt right staying in valenwood anymore, So Lara took Ava in and moved to the Gold coast where she had spent her early childhood and had inherited some estate. Her grandparents Moved to Elsweyr and both Ava and Nia would spend summers there as kids.

So Ava ends up “officially” a member of the brotherhood ,after toddling around the sanctuaries her whole life, at about 15 years old, and was never prouder. Normally they wouldn’t have let someone so young in but once again, she had literally been toddling in sanctuaries, they figured it was fine.

On one of her first genuinely dangerous missions, to kill a necromancer in Northern Elsweyr (chaperoned by her grandma of course), she came across one of said necromancers future sacrifices. This sacrifice happened to be a 13 year old khajiit boy named Thera (later going by Jo’Thera) with some odd fur patterns, and fuck man he was just a kid (granted shes only a couple years older then him) and Ava couldn’t just leave him there alone. Ava saved him and took her back to Anvil with her after she killed the necromancer as according to the kid, he didn’t have a family or anywhere to go. Lara hears the kids story and is just like…. Welp… guess i got a 3rd kid now. (as Thera grows up if there's one thing he gets from his adopted family its a love for drama and dramatic irony. He takes to necromancy pretty quickly)

That peace continued for a few years until she was about 19. At 19 years old she got the offer to join the Psijic order, Not because she was particularly powerful or even all that good at magic (at the time of course, she gets much better later), but due to her lack of formal teaching she had her own odd way of casting and working with it that caught their attention. Basically imagine that she did a really complicated math problem wrong, but ended up with the right answer and somehow accidentally discovered a new much easier formula to that particular problem, she did the magic version of that and showed a lot of potential even outside of that.

Then she said no, she was happy in the brotherhood and her current life and she saw no reason to leave

When Ava was about 20 years old, Nia ran away because, well she wasn't as fond of the brotherhood as her mother or cousin, and its not exactly something you can just quit and walk away from. It broke the whole families heart of course but Ava took it particularly hard. She had considered her and had been referring to her as her sister even before her parents death

What really set it all off though was when Nia popped up again alive and well in Valenwood using the last name of their grandmothers family. She didn’t send them a message or anything, it just got to them by word of mouth because Nia had disowned them and been talking shit about them. After she ran away she went back down to Valenwood to claim the title that was rightfully hers, it turns out that she had found proof of her birthright and between that and her uncanny resemblance to her grandmother she barely had to be questioned.

So Nia is in Valenwood with her relatives and had completely disowned the entire rest of her family. Her grandmother, Her mother and her (now deceased) Aunt and Uncle, and Ava and their brother as well. she never made any concrete statement as to why per say outside of “Not wanting to go down the same path as the rest of her family” which most people assumed meant completely abandoning their noble heritage and titles, not to mention their bosmeri heritage as well (which was partially true, but it was mostly about the whole murder cult thing). So yeah, Lara was heartbroken and Ava was pissed off to oblivion and back and Jo’thera....he was just hurt, but all decided that if that was where Nia wanted to be they weren’t going to drag her back.

At about 23 Ava met her first real significant other, A Dunmeri noble. It didnt go well for either of them really, lots of drugs, lots of unhealthy coping mechanisms, lots of secrets. not a good time. 2 years later, The Dunmer actually proposes to Ava, and Ava not only says yes but Ava tells her everything about the brotherhood, her own noble status, all of it. The Dunmer seems okay with it at first, and admits she kinda suspected who Ava’s family was based on the little she spoke about it, The brotherhood was the real surprising part there. The knife in Ava’s stomach later that night Makes it clear what she thought about that. So it was a messier breakup then most.

Ava doesnt like to speak much of the relationship, but it hurt her more then she lets on and makes her more nervous then ever to be in a real romantic relationship

Well after that mess Ava threw herself back into the brotherhood hardcore and also into hardcore drugs and alcohol.for about 5 years. Over those 5 years between the Dunmer incident, a lot of self reflection, and all sorts of anxieties she’s an unstable mess. Like verge of a mental breakdown type of mess.

When she was kidnapped and later sacrificed by the wormcult many who knew her assumed that she had offed herself for good. She was gone for long enough that even her own family started to assume the worst

#my art #syke #eso #somehow she's ended up one of my favorite characters ive ever made #tes or no #i honestly just like her #playing through the game thinking about how'd she react to events and characters #its just a blast #is she a mary sue?#dont know and couldnt care less #i just love her

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toosmallinabigworld-blog · 5 years

Text

Just What the Doctor Prescribed, Literally

I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a really long time and it means the world to me that so many of you have read the blog and been supportive. Hearing from everyone that read my last post confirmed for me that starting this blog was a good idea. I received a lot of compliments and anecdotes from people telling me that they appreciated my candor and willingness to talk about issues that they hadn’t heard talked about or weren’t able to talk about themselves. So, thank you for reading. I was struggling for a very long time with writer’s block, I would start something and then immediately criticize it and not know how to continue. It felt like I was running full force into a brick wall. I think that happened because I was trying to write fiction. When I was a kid and in middle school, I could write fiction like nobody’s business. Now, I realized that I struggle with fiction because I can’t relate to it anymore. I don’t want to write about made up characters that deal with real life scenarios. I want to write about real people that deal with real scenarios. So, let’s chat about a real life thing, shall we?

Mental illness. It’s a phrase that people spit out of their mouths like it’s rotten. A phrase that makes people uneasy and nervous, ironically. The real life equivalent of saying Voldemort. This is a topic I’m nervous to discuss because it is incredibly personal to me. And I have reservations about talking about my experience with this due to the controversy surrounding it. But I feel that it is important to talk about, regardless of how weary it makes me. Mental illness is no joke and if talking about this could potentially help someone then feeling anxiety about this is worth it. According to The National Institute of Mental Health, in 2016 it was found that nearly 1 in every 5 adults in the U.S. lives with a mental illness. If you’re bad at math like I am, that’s 44.7 MILLION people. Almost 45 million people in the U.S. have a mental illness and yet we still treat those people that are afflicted like lepers. Like they are lesser human beings than us because of something that they can’t control. Now, not everyone who has a mental illness is treated like shit. Because some are more accepted than others and by accepted, I mean acknowledged. Such as ADD and ADHD. Those are illnesses that are more commonly accepted because they are less scary to think about. I don’t know anyone who has thrown a bitch fit over someone that has a hard time sitting still, concentrating and overlooking things. They’ve gotten frustrated but not immediately assumed that they were unstable and broken. Let’s face it those are the easiest to wrap the mind around. But when things start to get complicated is when people tend to start getting judgmental and scared and hateful. And hate stems from fear. I can’t remember where I heard that but it’s pretty damn accurate. For example, I’ve heard those who have Schizophrenia blatantly referred to as crazy. And why are they called crazy? Because of Schizophrenia’s most popularized symptoms, delusions and hallucinations. We’ve all heard tales of people seeing animals or people, hearing voices that tell them to do horrific things and those are legitimate things that happen. But those are all we hear about. And because we don’t necessarily understand why that happens, we get scared and demonize them. Which is bullshit. If we immediately got scared of everything we didn’t understand nobody would ever leave their houses. I don’t understand how concrete is made but that doesn’t mean that I don’t walk on the sidewalk or get in a car and drive on the street. I would venture to say that Schizophrenia is probably the most controversial of the mental illnesses, but it is not alone in illnesses that make people uncomfortable. Take OCD for example, people just think it’s obsessive organizing and that it is a choice, something they can just stop doing. But it is infinitely more complicated than that. It’s uncontrollable thoughts and actions that they feel they have to repeat over and over again. And in extreme cases, they think something bad is going to happen if they don’t carry out those behaviors. People’s reactions to those illnesses are what facilitate such negative thought processes about hyper common maladies such as depression and anxiety.

Nothing pisses me off more than hearing someone say to a person with depression, just be happy. When you have clinical depression you don’t get to choose to “just be happy” because guess what? It isn’t that easy, it’s out of your control entirely. Clinical depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. The brain isn’t producing enough serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine neurotransmitters. Causing feelings of sadness, hopelessness, lack of interest/motivation, guilt, low energy, etc. I could go on for pages and pages but at the risk of sounding like a commercial for an antidepressant I’ll stop. I think you get the point. I am one of those people who has been told to “just be happy”. I was diagnosed with depression coupled with seasonal affective disorder, anxiety, insomnia, and OCD like repetitive thoughts when I was in 6th grade. As if being 11 and in middle school wasn’t hard enough, let’s throw a mood disorder in the mix, that should be fine. Right? Wrong. Being told you have a mental illness is like waking up one morning and realizing you have a tattoo that you’ve never seen before. You don’t know how you got it, you’re scared that it’s there in the first place, anxious about what other people are going to think about it, it will never go away, and all you can do is take care of it and hope that it doesn’t get infected and fuck up everything else in your life. Depression can be immensely polarizing. I’ve heard a million and one people say that it gets better, but when your brain isn’t doing its job, it inadvertently convinces you that you are utterly and inconceivably alone. And it’s not a constant feeling either. It comes in waves, sometimes I can go for days without feeling like complete ass and sometimes I can go for days feeling like a dead slug. It’s not something you can predict. And it’s a difficult hole to try and dig yourself out of when you find yourself there. Now depression, just like people comes in all shapes and sizes. And most people’s experiences with it don’t mirror each other, and it’s that lack of sameness that breeds the loneliness that is so common in depressed people. I know all too well about that feeling of loneliness. I’m going to take you on a journey through what a bad day looks like for me, which will be really easy to do since I’m having a bad day today. When I wake up I don’t usually know right away that my brain has hit the off switch on functioning. The first indicator is this ever present feeling of heaviness. Like someone dipped my whole body in molasses. Getting out of bed is physically difficult and I don’t even want to. Because even something simple like walking is just fucking hard. My body aches and I feel like a zombie and in reality I probably look like one too. Next on the shit list is the mental fog. And it genuinely feels exactly like it sounds. I can’t think clearly or focus on things that aren’t generally mindless and easy. I isolate myself and even though I’m feeling lonely and sad, I don’t want to be around other people. And I have no desire to eat, I just lose my appetite all together.

Anxiety does the same thing. I’ve been anxious, worried, and habitually stressed out for as long as I can remember. I’ve had teachers, friends, previous therapists, and even my parents call me a worrier. Which couldn’t be more accurate. I have a terrible habit of worrying about other people so much that I start to take on their problems. Stressing about my dad not having a girlfriend and hoping that he doesn’t end up dying alone. Worrying about my mom every time she gets sick, even if it’s just a cold. Taking on issues my friends are having with their families and trying to use my knowledge from many years of therapy to help them overcome their problems. Worrying and stressing that much can lead to panic. I remember the first time I had a panic attack, it was freshman year and I was in my 6th period Spanish class. Describing what a panic attack feels like is akin to trying to explain what the color red looks like. Especially because it’s subjective, no two people have the same experience. But because it’s important I’m going to do my best to explain. It feels like the world is crashing down on me for no particular reason. It’s terrifying. It legitimately feels like my skin is turning inside out. I get shaky, sweat like a whore in church, scared. It feels like I’m trapped in my own body and all I want to do is run away and hide. From myself. Panic attacks are something I still struggle with. They’ve decreased in prevalence since I found a medication regiment that works for me but even that doesn’t eradicate them completely. Most of the time I have no warning as to when one is going to happen. But there are some specific triggers, for example when I hear an unexpected loud bang or noise. I have PTSD and that sound sets off a fire in my brain that causes me to panic. Or when my stress level gets too high and I get overwhelmed. My mind doesn’t know whether to fight or flee so it gets stuck in the middle and I shut down. There is nothing that I know of that compares to that feeling. And when it’s over I’m left exhausted and weak. It fucking sucks. There’s no other way to say it. It fucking sucks.

When I was first diagnosed, I was paralyzed at the thought of telling anyone that I have d&a (depression and anxiety, it’s getting annoying writing out the entire words). I was scared of being judged by my peers, and looked at like a freak, like I was different; even more different than I already felt. I didn’t want to get bitched at by everyone for being the emotionally broken girl, which is what I thought I was. I remember my first appointment with my psychiatrist, I was scared. I was adamant about not wanting to go on medication, but my parents thought otherwise. Which wasn’t a bad thing. In reality going on medication was the best thing that could have happened. Because I don’t know where I would be without it. I’ve had the discussion with multiple people about how I shouldn’t need to be on medication anymore. That I should be able to just learn how to deal with my depression and move on. But it isn’t that simple. Like I said before, depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. The medication helps rebalance me. But it isn’t an exact science. Since 6th grade I have been on 8 different medications, some of which I still take. Why so many you ask? It comes back to it not being an exact science. Sometimes the medication will work for a while and then just stop. Which, speaking from personal experience, is a bitch and a half. It’s so aggravating when you can feel that something isn’t right but should be. That being said, finding the right medication, or medications in my case can be immensely helpful. I’ve gone from regular panic attacks and depression so bad that you can’t complete simple tasks to what I refer to as, being at ground zero. Ground zero is a great place to be, no extreme highs and the absolute lowest of lows. Just level. There is no joy in the world that can compare to finally feeling normal when you’re used to feeling like your emotions are exploding.

I have been really lucky to have a family who completely supports me and is always there when I need them. And they understand when I’m having a shitty day and what that means. I have been spectacularly lucky to have that. Others have not been so lucky. And that breaks my heart. Nobody deserves to be looked down upon for something that they can’t control. It’s like getting mad at someone for the color of their eyes. They didn’t choose the color, genetics gave them that color. So, who are we to judge them for that? This post is jam packed with facts and personal testimonials and if you gain anything at all from it, I hope you gain some understanding and empathy. That the next time you see someone on the street talking to themselves or one of your friends is really sad or stressed out for no obvious reason. Don’t judge. Try to understand. Try and wrap your mind around the concept that their brain is, for lack of a better phrase, rebelling against them. You don’t choose to have a mental illness, just like you don’t choose to have legs. It’s what life has bestowed upon you. So, I challenge you to try and change your frame of mind, you may find it enlightening.

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