#its not entirely like a visceral discomfort but its a sort of like. its unpleasant to think abt this for too long

[waywardsalt]

was going through my blog trying to track down an old post i made talking abt my feelings on jolene and it was. much longer than i remembered it being. and haha yeah i still agree with it. i need to fucking. sort out my feelings on that character and that subplot

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Ten Sides (Part 33)

I don’t exactly know how to tag this but a warning on this chapter as I feel like some of the language can be unsettling for mental abuse survivors and, though the chapter doesn’t contain sexual harassment, some of the language might be similar? Maybe the best way to but it would be to say that there’s a CW for objectification. 

Normally tears don’t come easily to her, not when she has to induce them herself. It only takes thinking back to the not so distant past to coax them forward. She hates the feeling of his hand on hers as he leads her down the hall. She worries that she is appearing too lucid so she lets herself stumble. The man sighs deeply as though she is an inconvenience. As though that isn’t exactly what he wants. “This way he mumbles.”

She knows the way, he has forced her to walk it so many times now. She knows the way though she hasn’t been down this hall in ages. She didn’t expect to have such a visceral reaction to trekking it once again. It comes like nausea. Her stomach drops and her throat runs dry. This time when she shakes it isn’t drug induced.

He chuckles, “keep walking, it isn’t that hard, we’re almost there.”

Which is all the more reason to come to a standstill but she lets him drag her into the room regardless. He leads her to the surgical table, she can smell the vines, their musky, freshwater odor. It leaves her stomach heaving. Agni, she hates the smell of sea plants...

“Get yourself comfortable.”

He knows well that the chill of the table’s metals offer no comfort at all.

“Since you’ve been a good girl, we won’t use the straps today.”

She waits for him to turn before letting out her sigh of relief. She lays herself back upon the table, staring at the ceiling. The same ceiling she’d been forced to stare at before. She shudders, feeling entirely queasy. For a moment she wonders why she is doing this to herself. For a moment she forgets that this is the only thing that will drive the nightmares from her mind once and for all.

Control. She will let old scenarios play themselves out. They will end the way that she wants them too.

They will if she can stave off the panic that comes with such familiar discomforts. A tear slips from her eye. She hadn’t meant for it to do so.

“You’re pretty when you cry.” He purrs as he fixes the first vine to her forehead. “Do you know that?”

And he will be pretty when he is a smear of blood on the floor.

“You’re better off this way. Trust me, you are. You’re more likable when you’re mindless.” He drums his fingers upon the side of her head. “When I’m done with you I’ll let you go back to your friends. I’m sure that they’ll appreciate my work; they’ll find you much more agreeable.”

It shouldn’t, but somehow it still stings. She realizes then, that she has made a mistake. She has made progress, sure. She has begun to rebuild old friendships and make new ones. But, Agni, she is still riddled with her own innate insecurities and the man has seen enough of her mind to exploit those.

If only she could reassure herself that he is wrong beyond a simple awareness that, even if he isn’t, that she’d rather be resented for her stubborn and unlovable personality than to have it wiped clean to make room for an uncannily sugary one. At least if she is unlikable, she knows that she is still Azula through and through.

“Don’t look so forlorn.” Sangyul chuckles. “You aren’t complete yet. But don’t worry, you will be. I’ll fix you.”  

Her breath hitches in her throat. She needs someone to fix her but, spirits, not him. She needs to fix herself. She will fix herself.

“Now I’ve watched the Avatar do this many times and I think that I’ve found a way to use electricity to activate the vines without the Avatar’s help.” He declares. “We’re going to test that on you. I anticipate this hurting.”

She goes tense.

“If you don’t squirm too much, we won’t need the restraints.” He pushes her back onto the table.

She wonders if she should put a stop to this now. But no. No, that wouldn’t be good enough to drive off the nightmares… She can’t keep her breathing level not when lightning sizzles on his fingertips. She hadn’t realized that he was a lightning bender. She hadn’t realized that he could bend at all. Thank Agni, he doesn’t know that she can also bend again.

The lightning surges through the vines, it tickles her head in the most bitingly unpleasant way. She gives an involuntary whimper and his lips curl into a wicked grin. She closes her eyes and works the current away from her head. She hasn’t exactly mastered redirection yet--it still stings terribly. And the vines on her head glow. He sends a few more bolts before withdrawing a long thin metal stick with a clay handle.

“See, this is going to help me guide the electricity. In theory, the lightning will do for me what the Avatar could do with spirit energy…” He mumbles.  He presses the stick to her forehead and drags the current along. The sensation is tingling, agonizingly so. She can feel tiny fingers of lightning touching the strings of her mind.

She closes her eyes. Eyes that water reflexively. The charge dancing in her mind is much more chaotic than Aang’s touch. When he had entered her mind he had entered with clarity, purpose, the ability to gauge how the colors of her aura were reacting to him. The electrical charge has no such ability. It is erratic, touching the fearful muted blue strands of her aura and dying them an even duller grey a sad grey--the result is anxiety inducing. It bounces back and strikes a different strand green. Guilt and self loathing trickles in.

She squeezes her eyes tighter. Her breathing becoming increasingly erratic. She needs control. She needs to take it back. The electricity has none of the guilt and compassion that Aang had, had. Aang...he no longer needs to touch the threads to dye them shades of red and pink. She takes several deep breaths. It is hard to relax with currents running through her mind, harder still with an enemy in such close proximity and damn near impossible with her mind left so vulnerable. But her mind is still hers. She lets herself burrow back in her mind, retreat into a familiar place. She can hear the rush of water as it slaps against the side of the boat, can feel the wind tugging at her hair. Mostly she can feel the flame of her chakra lapping at her belly, hear it crackling in her ears… It is hers, her chakra, her fire, her mind...

The lightning dances around in her head, but it doesn’t reach any further. It no longer corrupts. It can’t corrupt. Sangyul withdraws the metal rod and steps back. Her body jerks and convulses. Only twice--maybe it has been jerking this whole time. She isn’t sure.

“Now sit up.” He demands.

Dizzy, pained, she obeys. She tries to shake the daze from her head. Spirits, it hurts so terribly. Sangyul brushes a curtain of her hair out of her face. “Good girl.” He comments again. Her ears are ringing. “Now stand.”

She isn’t ready to stand, she thinks that her legs will buckle if she tries.

“Stand.” He growls.

She forces herself to her feet. It takes everything she has to remain upright. “Now,” Sangyul smiles. “Your hair has gotten quite long again…”

She swallows, her stomach lurches. Her tears are very real now and it only seems to delight him more. She knows what he is going to ask of her next. He presses a blade into her palm, it nips her skin and several dots of blood blossom upon it. But this time when she raises the blade, it won’t be to her own face where her scar is tingling with more fury than ever.

.oOo.

He finds her in the corner of the room, legs drawn up to her chest, cheeks stained with tears. Aang stoops down and touches her cheek, she doesn’t move an inch. Her eyes are hollow, dim. He takes her hand, her bloody hand and squeezes it. He runs his free hand over her locks. Locks that are clumped together with drying blood. It is smeared upon her face, her chest. It soaked through her shirt.

“Azula?”

She looks up, wordlessly. Her lips part.

He knew that this whole thing was a bad idea.

She souches forward and he expects her to begin crying into his shoulder. But she doesn’t, despite the soft tremors of her body, she remains quiet. He rubs her back as he takes the blade from her hand.

“Aang, what’s going on?”  Zuko asks.

“It’s over.” Aang replies as he hoists Azula upright. She holds her own weight but still leans very heavily into him. “Sangyul is…” He gestures to the body. Its throat is carved into a smirk as wide as the one that never had a chance to leave his arrogant face.

“Is Azula okay?”

“Azula is fine.” She grumbles.

Zuko clears his throat, “I guess I should have asked you directly, huh?”

Aang squeezes her tighter. “Are you sure that you’re okay you just...you know…”

“Killed a man.” She elaborates. “He needed to die, Avatar. I just…” She pulls back and seems to study his face.

He is fairly certain that he knows what she is looking for and he won’t let her find it; he is afraid but he fights to keep it out of his eyes. He knows what else she is looking for, “I love you, Azula.” His lips brush against her ear.

She swallows and finally she returns his hug. Holding her feels like holding a dragon; dangerous, unpredictable. Unstable. He wishes that he wasn’t afraid.

She won’t hurt him. He knows that she won’t and so he scoops her into his arms. “Are you ready to go home?”

“I can walk on my own, Avatar.”

He wants to remind her that she just went through some sort of hell. Wants to tell her that it isn’t a good idea. But he can’t, not here. Not in this room. “Is that what you want to do?”

She nods.

It is instinctual to ask her if she is sure. But he remembers what she had requested quite a while ago and he resists. Instead he offers, “if you get tired of walking, let me know.”

She nods again. He has a pretty decent feeling that she will end up letting him carry her at least part of the way to the airships.

“I’ll send the imperial firebenders to make the rest of the arrests and I’ll meet you on the airships.” He glances at Azula. “Take care of her, please.”

“She can take care of herself.” Aang replies. He just hopes that she’ll let him help for a change. Her hand tightening around his is it’s own reassurance.

[tumblrwrites]

Portraits of Silhouettes

<p>Low-angle sunlight arrived tap dancing along trails of reflected shimmer, describing the chaotic topography of a seasonal creek. My alarmingly orange vest smelled vaguely of urine: this I knew to be true. However this objective certainty (derived from having witnessed Mach the doggy piss all over it a day prior) produced only the peripheral discomfort a funeral goer may experience at the fleeting awareness that they stand, mourning, at approximately their own height above many anonymous corpses, each its own putrid rainbow of decay: I smelled nothing. Responsibility for a recent arbor-theft* was boastfully taken, and received with no more than entirely non-disingenuous (by at least two of our three, as it were) chuckles and grins: Adam would only grin deviously when asked <i>How?!</i> and then mirthfully when asked <i>Why?!</i>, so Paul and I had learned not to ask. Dark planes hovered beneath beneath fluffy anvils of cumulus, conspiring placidly before a deep eastern horizon. Crows cawed, somewhere. All seemed in order.<br></p><p>*(Paul’s general condition is based upon a particular sort of wildly unsubstantiated self-assuredness that’s equal-parts amusingly absurd and troublingly sincere, and he really just rides out human interaction from someplace very distant from the others involved, whereas Adam resides in a place murky and dim with congruously unsubstantiated self-doubt; yet, somewhat incongruously, he is the brother who steals trees.)<br></p>“You think <i>Native</i>’s caught on yet?” I said.<br>After a pause, “Not impossible…” began Adam, his spine arched convexly and elbows locked tense between shoulder and pocket: his posture’s profile impersonating either a sail operating on heavy tailwinds or a sideways grin; “…definitely plausible, considering.” We chuckled and grinned.                     <p>Paul pointed emphatically at a patch of moss on a rock who’s shape he’d found to resemble that of said rock and was enthused: “Dude we could totally write a song about that dude. Adam could play drums so I could play ‘keys. We can’t find Adam’s bass amp so we’ve just been jammin’ Stevie tunes on drums and ‘keys. We got mad good at it so far, you know if there’s an open mic tonight?” <br>“Nah I doubt it man. What happened to the amp though?”<br>Paul’s answer was unironic: “What amp?”                                                       But his face really sold it, so I too fell perplexed and said nothing. <br>“Caw,” announced a crow.                                             <br>“Nah yo, let’s at least run through the set with The Gends a couple times. At least you know… get like, the hits and shit… together. Work out the various like, particulars, before we play out.” I accepted Adam’s deflection regarding the unknown whereabouts of his borrowed equipment, as it aligned with my own position w/r/t an open mic.</p><p>I reminisce upon these times and feel many things, complex melancholy their sum. Impetus to reconcile and return emerges and recedes like an ominous toothache; a floater’s ghostly presence within the eye itself.</p><p>The bedrock was fairly close to ground level on Mount Signitt, so snowmelt endeavored downward toward both The Glen and <i>Native Garden Solutions</i> in puny radial trickles not long after a thaw began, and the thin smear of pebbly soil gave way to saturation. Paul grinning madly beside me, I’d cocked my head like a dog, looking lazy or intrigued, perhaps, being severely impaired-–dare I say <i>transfixed</i>–-at least in part by the chatter of several of these frantically dispersing creeks. The season prior, our own anecdotal observations of The Glen’s stream’s northwest bank had established that there’d been fewer tributary-trickles than there were radial-trickles, meaning the many seasonal creeks must have either converged at some collection of hillside points, or that some of the streams’ warbling flows had been inexplicably halted en route–-<i>or</i>–-as I’d later opine both aloud and to only myself in downward transit from the Signitts’ (“Mount Signitt”) on more than one occasion–that about their own paths of least resistance, the least fortunate of The Mount’s descendants had fallen stagnant, caught up by forces beyond–though not excluding–gravity and the their own momentum, in one of those shallow ruts that run alongside County Roads and unpaved driveways.</p><p>A small thing scuttled somewhere, surely oblivious to the scuttle’s ramifications.<br>“Yo <i>yo</i>, yo, Paul, keep that down a sec.”<br>“Dude we’re <i>good</i>, me and Adam blaze here all the time.”<br>“I definitely just heard footsteps just now. And did you hear that low like rumbling before? I think I heard a car, dude.”<br>“Dude, trust me aright, nobody but us would come down here, man. And yo, besides, if they do they totally must burn dude, or at least are chill, otherwise who else would even come here?”<br>“You hear it Adam?”<br>“Probly nothin’.”<br>“Yeah you’re probably right. We’d have heard something else by now, probably.”<br>Adam stared stonily at the ambient space to my left, nodded slightly in a silent gesture of agreement, then stood still and considered the ground before him with great intent. There are at least two things to consider in the event that one categorically finds the voice of reason to be the voice they hear the least, I thought.</p><p>A sudden fog.<br>“A spruce this time, was it?”<br>“Still is, last I checked.”</p><p>The doob (“cannon”) hissed and shimmered beneath the cheekbones of Paul, who’s entire upper-spinal region would periodically find itself canted forward, in the manner of a wilting houseplant, by the weight of I guess his head. Dark nights and crackling white cones accentuated his face’s bony contours with a dull orange glow; today’s immaculate Fall-turning-Winter sunlight does the face no such favors. Another sudden fog; an exhalation’s whisper from the north-northeast. Paul Signitt, as observed by Aaron D. Gendler, ~2:30 PM EST, 12/03/2012, appeared to resemble a street-fair caricature of himself in terms of both physique and conversational demeanor: you could’ve almost pictured his head line-drawn on taut canvas, its shape so exaggerated as to resemble that of a stretched eggshell and its bucktoothed smile ghoulishly distended, portraying a manner of enthusiasm equidistant from that of Newman’s Own’s Paul Newman, Kool-Aid’s (The) Kool-Aid Man, and your any-given spree-killer: an extravagant face drawn in eccentric curves of opaque ink, two-dimensional and inanimate.<br>“Yo Gends so I’ve been learning mad Petty songs lately and dude, he is a fuckin’ genius at lyrics man, like, his music just isn’t fake like all the stuff that’s out there now that’s just bullshit dude…” I briefly considered how a moment’s image of my own face’s fraudulent good-cheer could have resembled the climax of a viscerally compelling advertisement for High-Strength aspirin, whilst it nodded reflexively with the spastic vigor of a paddle-ball on a very short string like an aggressive parody of common politeness. Paul’s left hand met Adam’s right, then both hands receded, and I nodded. Paul continued, “…but yo, they’ll never be able to really know that again because he won’t even be there to tell them <i>how</i>, dude, like, <i>no</i>body will ever be as good as Tom Petty again, man, they <i>can’</i>t be.”<br>Seemed I’d missed something: “Yeah dude, I hear tha–”<br>Paul continued: “Like, yo, I mean we’ll never really <i>know</i> what happened with the<i> Egy</i>ptians,–”<br>“Extraterrestrial Assistance, perhaps,” Adam interjected, looming at a cedar’s attention behind his own dissipating cloud.<br>Paul said “Ex<i>act</i>ly dude its im<i>pos</i>sible! And I mean like Taylor Swift and Fergie and all them, they’ll never even <i>know</i> what real music is, cause we’ll never know who made the <i>Py</i>ramids.”</p><p>An interval occurred. Its onset was abrupt and unpleasant, and seemed to span it’s duration entirely. Not unlike that bounded by a fall and it’s landing, the interval between Paul’s speech’s halt and its echoes’ total evacuation from the given airspace. The exchange’s backdrop of vacuous silence bloomed blackly as a sudden sinkhole, and certain norms demanded it be plugged by somebody or other. Who this was, however, was always unclear: Paul, in conversation, offered none of the linguistic or even subconscious body-language-type cues one looks for to distinguish a true invitation to reply from a brief rhetorical pause, thus I was guided less by intuitive reasoning than a sort of Fight-or-Flight-or-Don’t instinct in determining if and how I should fashion my response toward (‘in the direction of’) him. A hair’s-width of time passed, and no crows cawed. Gears began to whir. Adam inhaled–-that’s Two: another factor to consider: In no more than fifteen seconds… the Doob, it’s milky veil–-crackling light damn it, for this dark ground urgently approaching… each all my own; and Twice, no less.<br>“Hhhhahhuhaahh…” breathed Adam, no more than nine seconds later, then: “Yo, Gends… ’s yours.”</p><p>Branches nodded and leaves quivered, sparse and autumnally brown; roots held their ground, as roots do; trunks’ curvatures varied complexly from tree to tree at the wind’s behest as my eager right hand began the southeastward ascent toward its rendezvous with Adam’s hovering left-. “-or-Don’t it is, I guess…” I shrugged internally, wearing the same clever smirk I would’ve had I said the words aloud. Nobody appears to smell the day-old piss, or at least no one comments. I produced an ‘O.K.’ signal with my right thumb and -forefinger, raised my head to a cannon’s angle, and kissed my fingertips; my eye’s own middle-distance angled toward the clouds’ wafted edge, but concerned only with the space between, and the distance vanishing upon its ends.

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