#im feeling maudlin tonight i guess

[wolfeyedwitch]

You're supposed to have good reasons for killing off characters, right? Is "my best friend who made this character for our DnD game is now dead and writing the character without him feels like sacrilege" a good reason?

[sonicenvy]

I don’t want to think about tuesday, and everything after, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m really, really scared for the future y’all, and I don’t know what I’m going to if he wins re-election. I mean, what can I do? I’m broke as fuck (had an anxiety attack because the pharmacy denied my coupon for my meds and I had to pay full copay price today. Thanks american healthcare!) and have no real ability to go anywhere. I say this all the time, but I think I’ve been thinking it more and more lately as we get closer and closer to Tuesday: I hate, emphatically hate 2020. I mean, 2016-2019 also sucked for various reasons, but I think we can all agree that 2020 is the worst. The fact that Hillary lost in 2016 despite winning like, 3 MILLION more votes than Tr**p still infuriates the hell out of me. The fact that america is still incapable of voting for women for higher offices, no matter how qualified and experienced they are still infuriates me. Why, why, are we never, ever, ever, good enough? What is the point? I keep coming back to that a lot this year, which is not exactly the best place to be when I’m in a downer.

I want to be optimistic, because I think if I lose all hope, it will be much easier to slip back into being actively suicidal. I’m scared, and I’m sure a lot of y’all are too. I don’t really believe in any gods, but I don’t not believe in the possibility of gods I guess. I’m planning on lighting some candles and praying to the great wide somewhere that things get better, that biden/harris win, that Tr**p finally gets prosecuted for something. Maybe it’s a lot to ask of a seemingly unfeeling and indifferent universe, but I just want to believe that there is something, anything, good to look forward to. I cast my vote already last week, and I got the email from the BOE that they added it to the count pile, and I’ve been doing my best to make sure that all the people I know that can vote are voting, and are voting for biden/harris. All I can do now is wait I guess. I’m not all the way into melancholy or grief tonight, just, like, deeply maudlin thought amidst a drowsy haze.

tldr; Tuesday terrifies me, and I can’t stop thinking about it, even though it is making me anxious AF.

[hermannsthumb]

Please do holiday prompt 85 (unexpected apology)!

85. we haven’t been friends for years but we both end up at a mutual friend’s holiday party and you apologize for how things went down between us (which I wasn’t expecting in a million years)

from winter writing prompts here

it’s that time of year again everyone.....ive been so busy with school and zine stuff that im taking a little break to write this today ☺️ set very late 2019, before the Events of 2020

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It occurs to Hermann as he stands amongst a handful of society’s most monied and high-ranking—mulled wine in hand, stiff suit buttoned too-tight around his neck—that he is not only completely out of his element, but residing at a level of desperation that he cringes to even consider. Hermann does not schmooze; Hermann has never had the capacity to schmooze; in all of his previous attempts at schmoozing (typically at the bequest of his father, who would tote Hermann around as a conversation piece at fundraising events), Hermann would come across invariably as disingenuous, uptight, and arrogant, and certainly not someone with whom one would entrust large cheques made out to the PPDC for.

Yes; desperation. To borrow the cliché, desperate times call for desperate measures. To borrow another, war changes man. Robots wage war on monsters from another world, the UN wages war on the jaeger program’s budget, and Hermann must wage war on prospective PPDC donors if he wishes to still be employed by the New Year. He can’t decide which sounds more horrendous, really.

“Would you like more wine, Dr. Gottlieb?” a passing waiter asks Hermann, and Hermann shakes his head.

“No, thank you,” he says. Hermann has always been a maudlin drunk; he doesn’t fancy risking over-drinking tonight, and making an embarrassment of himself by confessing to perfect strangers that his parents never loved him or that he fears he’ll never make a true human connection.

“Dr. Gottlieb?” someone says, incredulously.

Oh, bugger. He’s been found out. Hermann sighs, flattens down his cowlick, and plasters on a fake smile: the time has come for him to, er, lie back and think of the PPDC, so to speak. Hopefully it’ll go fast.

But when Hermann turns, it’s not to find some acquaintance of his father, or a perfect stranger familiar with his work, or even a distant colleague; it’s to find one Newton Geiszler (who Hermann may have considered a colleague, once, but certainly not anymore), dressed in a horrendous eyesore of a gold (gold) suit, nursing a large red cocktail in each hand, and staring at Hermann like he can’t decide if he wants to say something or turn and run. Hermann mirrors his stare. A pin could drop between them, and Hermann reckons, despite the undercurrent of music and chatter, they would be able to hear it.

Hermann is the one to break it. “Newton,” he says. Then he amends, quickly, “Dr. Geiszler. I wasn’t aware…” He coughs. He suddenly wishes he took another mulled wine, and wonders if it’s too late to summon back the waiter. “You are…here.”

“Uh,” Newton says. “Yeah.”

The last time Hermann saw Newton Geiszler, they were standing under an awning outside a Starbucks while a torrential downpour of rain pounded against the sidewalk and soaked their shoes. Hermann was shouting. Newton was shouting, too, and he may have also been crying. They had been asked to leave the building on account of it. That was nearly three years ago. “Er,” Hermann says. “Business? Or pleasure?”

Newton has hardly changed in the almost-three years; his hair remains thick and unruly, his jaw in bad need of a shave, his glasses smudged and slightly crooked. The suit is a bloody eyesore, though. Hermann imagines Newton thought it was festive. “Business.” Newton snorts. “God, you think I’d come here for fun? I haven’t had the money for a new sample in months, it was either this or, I don’t know, sticking mutated fish under microscopes. Kaiju blue poisoning. Been there done that, and not what I need to be doing now, you know? And you can thank your dad for that too, not having any fucking samples to work with, I mean, and his stupid wall—but I guess that’s why you’re here too. I heard they’re talking about pulling the plug on the jaeger program.”

Newton speaks quickly, and with a bewildering tendency to leap between topics like a game of hopscotch, something Hermann had quite forgotten. (They’d only met the once, after all, and Newton disguises it better in writing.) He follows it nonetheless. “Yes, well, they’re still only just rumors,” Hermann says, though he knows (with a certainty) that one more major failing of a jaeger might spell the end of it, “and I certainly hope they stay as such. I take it you’re with the PPDC now, then?”

Newton jerks a thumb towards the waistband of his gold suit, spilling a bit of his cocktail on the floor; Hermann at last notices the PPDC badge clipped to it. Newton’s grin is identical to the one in his photograph. “Hell yeah, dude,” he says. “They finally hired me about a month after we—” The corners of his mouth twitch down, ever so slightly. “—uh, got coffee.”

It had been a long-standing complaint of Newton’s, back when they wrote each other, that the PPDC was perfectly happy to use his research but turned a blind eye whenever he submitted yet another application for their k-science research team. Personality conflicts, Hermann always presumed. He and Newton certainly had plenty. Perhaps Hermann’s not the only one who’s grown desperate—a thought he scolds himself for the unkindness of a moment later. Newton is a brilliant scientist despite his difficulties and their past. “Of course,” Hermann says. “Well, congratulations. I hadn’t heard.”

“Wine?” a passing waiter asks them.

Newton shakes his head. Hermann takes one this time, gratefully.

“It’s been alright,” Newton says. He downs the entirety of the red cocktail in his right hand. “Like I said. Not many samples to work with. They had me stationed over in Vladivostok, but I got leave for the holidays. And for this I guess.”

“I’ve been in Seattle,” Hermann says. “I reckon they’ll be transferring me soon, though I haven’t an idea where.” More rumors, of course.

For a moment he allows himself the brief fantasy of being transferred somewhere with Newton, or perhaps it’s more of a fear than a fantasy—year after year of this sort of insufferable awkwardness? Being forced to work together? It’s something Hermann had longed for in the past, spending every day with his marvelous penpal at his side. It instills a sort of nausea in him now. Newton touches his arm before Hermann has the chance to excuse himself hide in the loo. “Hey, dude, listen,” Newton says. “About us getting coffee. I feel like I owe you an apology.”

Hermann can’t help it; he snorts, though he immediately regrets it. Newton, at least, does not look offended. “Do you?” Hermann says. Two and a half bloody years too late.

“I mean it,” Newton says. He blinks earnestly at Hermann, and squeezes Hermann’s arm. “I screwed it all up that day, and I could’ve—I don’t know, written, or texted, or anything to apologize, but I didn’t. And that was shitty of me. So I’m sorry, I really am. And…yeah. That’s it, I guess.”

It’s the last thing Hermann expected to hear today. It’s the last thing he expected to hear from Newton. The radio silence following that disastrous day at the coffee shop had been awful—and it’d been infuriating, too. Where had they even gone wrong that day? Hermann can’t remember anymore. Probably a fight over something inconsequential. “I see,” Hermann says. “Well. Er. Thank you, Newton. Your apology is...appreciated.”

“Cool,” Newton says.

He stares at Hermann expectantly.

“Oh,” Hermann says. “And I’m sorry, too, I suppose.”

“Cool,” Newton repeats.

He smiles at Hermann, and Hermann is momentarily suffocated by it, and the sudden reemergence of feelings he thought he’d quashed years ago. Newton is still very attractive. Very, very attractive. Hermann’s arm is warm and tingly from where Newton touched him, and he realizes the warmth is spreading up to his neck and cheeks—he’s blushing. “Hey, wanna check out the snack table with me?” Newton says. “I love the rich people food at shit like this. The last one I went to had oysters, which is totally weird. Like, it’s a gala.”

Hermann decides to accept it as the strange peace offering it obviously is meant to be. “Alright,” he says. “Though, I insist you explain your monstrosity of a suit first.”

“It’s classy,” Newton says. “Anyway, you’re one to talk, buddy.”

[harrybridgers]

im listening to the playlist for hita (which is so fucking good i love all of the songs since i grew up listening to a lot of the artists) and i was wondering that if some scenes were inspired by a song and how you decided on the order of songs

i’ll gladly talk about this all day so thank you for asking first of all :’) all the songs are either mentioned in the fic itself, or they inspired me in some way while writing whether that be lyrically or through the music itself!! the order mainly follows the flow of the story and as they’re mentioned, so for example sunshine of your love/white rabbit are together, but between mentioned songs i sometimes fill the playlist in with songs that kind of set the mood of the fic/scene for me, or remind me of the characters or the feeling i’m trying to make for a scene (eg hiding tonight/glass in the park)

the only song that isn’t in order is shine on you crazy diamond, which i put first. that’s the song that i think really sets the entire tone for the fic ((it’s also my favourite song of all time)) so i put that first, i think symbolically it’s so important for the story and just in general that song means a lot to me!! and then i followed that with idaho by gregory alan isakov, which i see as almost the curtain coming up on the story, and you see that first image of louis riding through town i guess?? SOYCD is sort of this opener to this world im creating, it brings in all the ideas and the colours and the tones and bundles it up (esto perpetua, grainy blues, louis’ daydreams about the lagoon and the pines, harry as a boy in san fransisco, mental conflicts, small towns and growing up, a really maudlin kind of nostalgia, that’s just what it takes me to) and then the transition into idaho sort of neatly brings things into the beginning of the fic, almost like you’re waking up from this hazy blue dream along with louis and the town and starting this journey with him, seeing where all these ideas and feelings from SOYCD begin to overlap and interweave with each other??? i could honestly talk about this for an eternity so if you’ve got more questions feel free to ask!! 💖💖💖