#lets talk dementia

[doesephs]

jinx was not up for supporting league of lesbians round two, action had to be taken

[happyk44]

jason walking into a building and if he can't immediately see the people he's looking for, he howls until they yell at him

[dearest-sapphics]

When Nagito’s dementia gets worse there’s a slightly high possibility that he’ll call Hajime “Izuru” since forgetting who you’re talking to or thinking someone is someone else is a common dementia symptom

(This really only works if you hc that Nagito and Izuru knew each other or had a relationship during the tragedy but arguably it could happen regardless since Nagito knows Izuru in canon anyways. They just don’t talk except for chpt. 0 and the gun scene)

[angeltannis]

Oof this decision about Shadowheart’s parents 😰

[tratserenoyreve]

like i am "fortunate" insofar as not being in an immediate situation where people are rationalizing exploding sheltering children into bits and to have a gender identity that is None which prevents people from retaliating strongly against me when i already don't feel strongly about it and you can't misgender someone whose pronouns are "whatever dude" (which pales in comparison to the daunting nightmare that is people rationalizing exploding entire sheltering displaced families into smithereens)

the problems i do have (longstanding unattended health issues, surgery included, not especially stable housing) are still very much present and quietly compounded by me witnessing friends and neighbors also struggle more and more. i may not be in immediate danger but many people i've known are and in my compassion for them i sit on a precipice and im witnessing others in similar positions getting shoved abruptly and unceremoniously into the ether

i care! a lot! about a lot of things! so, im not doing particularly good!

[truecorvid]

my grandma is kind of an unpleasant woman and has become more unpleasant in her old age but i also think that all of her children are like. regularly a little mean to her and kind of hate her. which is also not fun.

[spenglercore]

tfw your GP is concerned enough about your mental state to bring up the possibility of being admitted, but you've worked in the local psychiatric ward before and know exactly how horrific things are in there.

[amarantoestrella]

Was venting to my family about a very unpleasant person whose verbal assaults and belittling I had to deal with for two days and I was trying to get my point across to let them know how bad it was so I called her a cunt and the gasped they gusped. These people really think I don't have a mean bone in my body. They are right, but I hate being underestimated like this

[draconym]

Since you all had so many kind things to say about my spouse on this post, I will provide you with ten Spouse Facts:

He has a pet rabbit that we found as a stray, which he has clicker trained to do various tricks. He also wrote the rabbit a theme song which he frequently sings to him (when he is not baby talking at him). The rabbit loves this.

He plays the guitar, piano, and dizi (Chinese transverse flute). When I got very sick a few months ago, he wrote a song for me and has sung it to me nearly every day since. He also wrote a (beautiful, heartbreaking) song for his mother who has dementia and whom he visits every day, because music is retained much longer than other kinds of memories.

He doesn't have a car. He is anti-car. He has two bicycles: a Raleigh Record Ace (with a custom paint job featuring a rabbit) and a Lightspeed. He has a lot of biking gear that makes him look like a Pokemon trainer.

He eats raw onions whole like they are apples.

He got serious about baking as a hobby a few years ago, when he was irritated by the imprecision of bread recipes for not stating the optimal temperature of warm water to proof yeast. He created a gas displacement chamber out of jars and aquarium tubing and ran a series of experiments to find out the answer himself. We ate a lot of bread that month.

He taught himself tablet weaving in an afternoon. He also knits, and one time he sewed himself an entire ballroom gown for a Halloween costume because they don't make ballroom gowns in his size.

He's conversational in Spanish, French, Japanese, and Mandarin.

He learned to beatbox in his college a cappella group. (I also beatboxed for my college a cappella group, but my parrot prefers his beatboxing over mine.)

The first time we met in-person was at a Humans vs. Zombies nerf gun LARP. I asked him out to dinner a few weeks later and at the end of the evening I said "let me know if you want to do this again" and before I even finished the sentence he said "I want to do this again."

The last time he ate eggs was about twenty years ago, when he ruined a batch of chocolate merengues and then tried to recombine them with the yolks, creating Chocolate Scrambled Eggs. Apparently it was terrible.

[the-acid-pear]

Ppl complain about others who will act like female characters are utterly evil and irredeemable for things their male counterparts do too but when others UNDERMINE THEIR ACTIONS (<- THAT'S WHAT I WAS TRYING TO SAY LAST NIGHT FUCK DEMENTIA: CURED) to be like they're just a victim 🥺 is just as fucking annoying to me. Neither party is treating them like people they're treating them like being a woman makes them a different species and that's annoying.

[homunculus-argument]

I remember this story mom told me and my sister when we were little. Two frogs fall into a milk churn, and start swimming to stay on the surface. After a long time, one of the frogs tells the other that it's tired of swimming, and is just going to give up now. The frog sinks and drowns, while the other frog keeps swimming. Eventually the surviving frog that never gave up has been swimming for so long that the milk has been churned into butter, and the frog can hop out. The moral of the story is that life feels hopeless a lot, but if you give in to despair, you fucking die.

I had two aunts from my father's side. I don't remember anything about one of them, she died when I was three years old. We were never lied to about how it happened. She killed herself, jumped out of a window. She gave in to despair. My paternal grandmother lost her mind over the grief, developing dementia overnight. I never knew her as a sane, coherent person. She gave in to the despair. That's what I was taught, that's how I was raised. Life is pain, but if you give in to the despair, you fucking die.

I am an optimist. Always have been. I had to be. Indulging in pessimistic fatalism was a luxury that I could not afford. I'm not an optimist out of some naive lack of awareness that life can be bad sometimes. I grew up very familiar with how bad life can be. I was an optimist in believing - against all the proof of the contrary - that life could be other things, too. That it's possible that there could be a life that doesn't hurt all the time.

I can't afford to be a pessimist. I don't pretend to believe that things will never get bad, but I have no choice but to believe that no matter how bad things will get, there can be good things in life, no matter what. I don't talk to my family anymore, but I did survive being raised by them. The ones who give up hope don't make it. If you let the darkness seep in, and give in to despair, you die.

[nereidprinc3ss]

hourglass

in which spencer disappears from fem!reader's life entirely for three months, right as it seems they were finally about to make things official. when he comes back they reunite, all the while knowing things can't be the same as they were.

18+ (smut, angst) warnings/tags: oh god so many. NOT canon compliant in the slightest, i make shit up, softdom!spence, nipple stuff prob, fingering, oral f receiving, piv sex, unprotected sex, pet names, tara mentioned, depression, mentions of trauma cause its the prison arc duh, passing mentions of alcohol, mentions of spencer losing weight, reader mistakenly thinks spencer tried to kill himself BUT ONLY FOR A SECOND, where is diana reid, nobody knows or cares, probably filming glee, optimistic ending a/n: haven't posted smut in forever but this wip required it and the angst was so angsty i just had to finish it. it was started in jan or feb and subsequently added to and changed months apart and then edited so the writing quality varies from section to section which i apologize for. originally based on good guy by julia jacklin... also the odyssey by homer? can't really explain that one you'll just have to see for yourself anyway byeeee ilysm!!! PLS tell me if you liked it! or if you hated it! but preferably if you liked it! MWAH! wc <12k

It’s been about three months since you last saw Spencer Reid.

About three months since you had an early Valentine’s Day celebration (even though you weren’t a couple) complete with champagne (even though he doesn’t usually drink) and slow dancing (even though you swore you’d be terrible and he spent the first ten minutes laughing at you as you stepped on his toes.)

About three months since you finally settled your head on his shoulder and let the warbling vinyl carry you somewhere distant as the two of you danced slow circles on the parquet floor for what felt like hours.

You’d have liked him to stay later that night. You’d have liked him to stay all night if you were being honest with yourself, but at 11:45 he gently pulled away and told you he had to go.

“Curfew?” you joked, the corner of your mouth lifting a little and you hoped you were hiding your disappointment well.

“Actually, I’m going down to Texas for a few days to speak with one of the leading doctors in experimental Alzheimer's and dementia treatment. I’m going to see if he can get my mom into a clinical trial. I leave early tomorrow morning.”

“Oh my god, that’s amazing, Spencer! What are you doing still here? You should be at home getting ready to go!”

A rosy blush stains his cheeks and he looks down at the ground, laughing that little self-deprecating laugh of his. It makes your heart dance to see him so happy, makes you want to wrap your arms around him and never let him go so that he knows how much you absolutely adore him—but you settle for an affectionate squeeze where your hands have come to rest on his biceps.

“I wanted to see you tonight because I won’t be here for Valentine’s Day... but I still really wanted to spend it with you,” he admits meekly.

If before your heart was dancing, it is now melting.

The dreaded ‘what are we’ talk has been lurking in the dark corners of every conversation you have with each other lately—at least, in your mind it has. What you have with Spencer is not easily defined, and near impossible to explain to your friends—you act like a couple, you go out on dates, he introduces you to his team like you’re his girlfriend without ever putting it into so many words—but this validation that your pseudo-relationship might be evolving is better than any flowers he could have gotten you (although the peonies he brought will look very nice on your bedside table.)

“Four whole days... what will I do without you?” you whisper, brushing a hand along his face, and your chest aches with the heavy truth of it—despite the fact that he often is gone for stretches about that length. They don’t ever start to feel shorter.

“Well, you can start by reading that copy of The Odyssey I annotated for you.”

“Depressing,” you admit. “And a little ominous, considering you’re about to embark on a hero’s journey.”

“I think you’ll like this one,” he smiles.

You chew on your bottom lip, looking up at him as you think.

“Give me something to look forward to,” you say, earnestly.

“I—well, honestly, I just really want to kiss you and I’ve wanted to for a long time now and, you know, if that’s something you’re maybe also interested in then we could, uh, figure out a time to—”

“You want to kiss me?”

“Wh—you couldn’t tell?” Spencer says, like he can’t believe it.

As if on reflex, you lunge up and capture his lips with your own. It obviously catches him by surprise, but when you lower from your tiptoes he follows you, pulling you in closer and holding your face in his hands.

It’s too natural, too right, to be exhilarating. There’s no rush of adrenaline—it's more like stepping into a hot bath or warming your freezing hands at a fire. Like pieces clicking into place. It’s a relief.

You breathe into it, letting more and more of yourself melt against him. He keeps coming back to you deeper and deeper like a rising tide, and you want more than anything to keep getting closer to him—but then he stops. He stays close enough for you to breathe his air, but dodges your kiss gently before supplanting it with a gentle one to the corner of your mouth.

“I really have to go,” he breathes, before moving away from your mouth to kiss your forehead and speak softly against your skin. “If I don’t leave now I’ll be here all night.”

Which is exactly what you want, and the implication does little to make you want him less. But you care about him too much to be so selfish.

At some point, his hands found their way into your hair, and you gently grab his wrists.

“Incentive for you to come home.”

Nearly three months since that night.

At first when he stopped answering texts, you’d assumed he just had too much going on down in Texas. Which you could understand—you knew how stressful this situation with his mother was.

Even when four days came and went without even an alert from him that he was back in town, you thought, okay, maybe he’s been called away on a case. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s disappeared because of his work. But even then, he’d at least text you enough information so that you would know he was alive. Now, radio silence.

So you tried not to be clingy. You tried to act like an adult, to focus on school and your life outside of Spencer, but when Tara Lewis cancelled your weekly meeting due to an “unforeseen work-related emergency”you called her immediately. Tara was something of a mentor, and it was she who had connected you and Spencer to begin with. You had met the other members of his team by that point, yes, but none who you knew as well as Tara.

When she had informed you that Spencer had been arrested in Mexico and was now facing prison time for murder, you laughed.

Laughed until you realized her end of the line was silent.

Realized it was not at all a joke.

In a catatonic state of tranquility, you asked her for more details. Beyond assuring you of his innocence, she couldn’t (or more likely, wouldn’t) provide them. Asked where he was now. Asked all the right things that made sense to ask.

Then you hung up and had a panic attack because Tara said something about 25 years and you saw Spencer evaporate from your future like an apparition.

Slowly, you felt him evaporating from your past, too. Those memories from the night he left, became visions of you swaying with a ghost. Holding nothing but light between your hands as you kissed the peony air of your apartment.

He doesn’t want to see you, she had said into the phone one night, her tinny voice cutting in and out. You’re not on his list of approved visitors.

“You asked him about me?” you had whispered, curled up on top of your made bed in the dark.

I tried. I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I know more.

All your days melded together like a muddied smear of paint. Suddenly you felt you had nothing to look forward to. No anchor, no goal. Yes, a PhD... and then what?

The only thing that punctuated one 24 hour period from the next was the time you spent crying because Spencer was in prison and he didn’t want to see you and by the looks of things you may never see him again. When you weren’t crying, you were thinking about how your life was a big cosmic joke. An unfortunate statistical anomaly that didn’t mean anything to anyone else, and that you couldn’t do anything about.

That copy of The Odyssey, which wasn’t even bound and instead was a thick stack of printer paper organized by a single black clip, became something of a manifesto for you—a tome that your poured over, reading and re-reading each note in the margins, each word beautiful and imbued with meaning because you knew Spencer had selected every single one specifically for you. You traced the letters reverently, because in a way this was the last thing he had said to you—about Lattimore’s faith to the original text, Merrill’s strict use of dactylic hexameter, the stylings of Wilson and Lombardo, and how he thought you would enjoy Hammond’s prose just as much as he did.

Day by day it was becoming more prophetic than fictional, and you allowed yourself to sink into madness. You would rather be a deluded zealot than be nothing at all.

He didn’t want to see you.

He might as well have been dead, for all that you were grieving him. And you started to hate him, because he wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t do you the kindness of proving it. Like a festering wound, scratched open day after day so as not to ever heal, you had to live knowing he was less than an hour away. So no, you weren’t exactly over it. You lived day by day, waiting for the occasional call from Tara to keep you updated on Spencer, but either she didn’t want to share much about how he was doing, or he had specifically barred her from doing so, because she was always sparse on the personal side of things. That thought actually lifted your spirits, because it meant he was at least acknowledging your existence in some tiny way.

But your routine was becoming more regular, and so you staid on top of your classes and your non-Reid related meetings with Tara once a week, and you learned to dip your toes into existential dread and the oily black pool of depression every night without ever fully submerging yourself. You learned hope, because it was pretty much all you had, and the BAU had confidence that they would get Spencer out one way or another so you did too.

So you didn’t really think about it when you missed a couple of calls from Tara some evening in May. You were preparing for finals and had way too much on your plate academically to think about anything else which was a welcome relief so you fully embraced it. I’ll call her back tomorrow, you think, as you clean up from dinner before going back to the living room where your textbooks and papers are completely covering every available surface. Maybe I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life after school, but I’ll be damned if I don’t even make it that far.

Hours later, well into the night, you’d all but forgotten about the calls. A knock at the door takes you a bit by surprise, and you frown as you stand again, tugging your Georgetown sweatshirt down over your shorts as you shuffle to the entrance of your apartment. You’re not expecting anyone, so you crack the door, peering around the edge of it.

And you couldn’t even consider trying to hide that shaky inhalation of dead air when you see Spencer standing on the other side.

Surely you’re hallucinating.

Surely this man in front of you who looks like he just got back from a day of work didn’t spend three months in prison pretending you didn’t exist.

He looks the same. Hair a bit longer, maybe—and gaunter even more than is normal for him. 

But it's him.

You can’t think about the apprehensive look on his face—you can’t think about the impossibility of him being here. You can’t think at all. Without your explicit permission, your body surges forward into his, and he’s real, and alive, and warm, and he is an anachronism in the hallway as he accepts everything you pour into the embrace, doesn’t flinch when you move your arms from around his waist to loop around his neck and back to his waist again with crushing force because you just can’t get him close enough.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer mutters into your hair, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, he keeps saying, rubbing your back as you try to find a solid grip on the sleek material of his suit—try to gather all the pieces of him, already afraid he might fall apart and float away again.

“You—dis—disappeared,” you hiccup after an eternity, pulling away enough to look up at his pretty face. Tears blur your vision and darken the front of his jacket, bending the florescent lights so they form a kind of halo above his head.

Through the surreal haze you can see his throat bob.

“I know.”

He knows?

He knows?

You scoff.

“You have no fucking idea, Spencer. What the fuck is wrong with you? I—I'm—”

The hot anger is such a relief for a second, boiling the oceans of your despair into a wrathful, scorching fog, but as soon as you try to tell him how you feel, the barbed wire cuts into your throat again. You shove him away, skin burning where his hands had been.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, hands hanging uselessly at his side. There’s that kicked puppy look about him—and it’s familiar, but now there’s more damage. You don’t know anything about his time in prison, you haven’t heard a damn thing, but beneath the glassy desperation in his eyes there is an unfathomable void that seems to be preventing him from being fully present—and you realize for the first time that he is different.

It chills you.

Before, you and Spencer shared everything. There wasn’t one part of his internal machinations that you didn’t understand, nothing you kept from each other. But as you study him now from a few feet away, you realize there might as well be a yawning chasm between the two of you.

He is so different.

Those eyes look deeper. No gears turning just behind the slashes of gold and brown anymore—only an endless dark corridor that goes places you will never go.

Gone is the perpetual boyish up-turn at the corner of his lips that always made him look slightly vacant in a way that you found incredibly amusing. Something you had been so fond of, even if you teased him.

He seems to have aged ten years—if not physically, then in demeanor. And now you feel like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

You cross your arms, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.

You’re embarrassed. And pissed. And relieved. Everything is worse and better. You want to fall back into his arms, but you have been jarred by the revelation that this might not be the same Spencer. It might not be the same relationship. You have no idea where you stand.

He says your name gently, with so much familiarity you’re briefly jerked into the past. It makes you wish you could look up to find him as he was three months ago. Wish this was just a bad dream. But that’s not fair to him.

“Sorry,” you mutter, studying the grey carpet fibers instead of looking at him.

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says immediately, “you’re right. I don’t—” he clears his throat— “I’m being incredibly selfish. I shouldn’t have just shown up, I’ll just—I'll leave. I’m sorry.”

A silent moment passes.

You don’t look up as he turns and swiftly begins to move down the hall toward the stairway, leaving as quickly and silently as he had come, like a few bars of a song sighed in and away on a fleeting breeze.

Your bare feet are concretely planted, imagining him jogging down the steps and speed-walking away from your building—

And suddenly you’re sprinting after him, feeling like you might puke because Spencer was just here and you let him go again—and even though you’re still so mad and confused and hurt, the realization that he is leaving again makes the entire building spin and lurch.

“Wait!” You yell, almost wiping out as you run down the stairs and whip around corners in your slippery fucking socks. “Please, wait!”

The lobby is already empty as you spill out into it, and cold dread tightens around your neck like a fist as you shoulder your way through the double doors and right into Spencer.

“Please don’t leave again, you just—I'm sorry, I really need you to not go—” you blabber, lachrymose once more, gripping onto his forearms for dear life.

“I’m not going,” he breathes shakily. “I tried to leave because I think you were right and maybe I should and maybe it would be better for you but I can’t.”

“You can’t,” you agree, more sob than spoken word. He cups your jaw, then your cheeks, wiping tears and brushing away hair like he can’t figure out how to hold enough of you between his hands. The wild kaleidoscope of his eyes, bright and alive and real as he scans you desperately captures your attention enough to slow the tears to a trickle. He notices this and stares back, entranced.

A silent agreement is made, or maybe an inevitable fate is accepted—either way, something was set in motion three months ago and it matters to see it through. Spencer kisses you and you’re ready for it. You don’t need slow or tender. You need to feel how he feels. You need to know what he knows.

You sling your arms around his neck and he pulls you closer until you almost tip backward, chasing the bruising kiss even as you regain your footing. You want to drink him in and you do your best, breathing deeply as he kisses you deeper, backing you inside and toward the elevator.

“Is this okay?” he manages, only after blindly reaching for and mashing the up button on the wall panel.

Ideally it wouldn’t happen like this, but the world you live in obviously isn’t ideal and your personal situations as they coincide are far from ideal, so this is how it has to happen. But it’s hard to explain, and you’d rather not admit that this is so far from what you wanted for both of you and follow up with the fact that despite that you need him like you need water. So you don’t say a word as the metal doors slide open promptly. Instead you pull him in and let him press you to the chrome wall as he hits your floor button, and that very hand comes back to grab your ass like you didn’t think Spencer Reid capable of. It almost aches as his fingers dig into the flesh, but it’s a good ache because it means he’s real and he’s there.

You gasp as he hitches your leg up, arching into him. The shorts that you’re wearing leave very little to the imagination to begin with, but they become downright indecent like this.

Quickly the elevator stops and the doors hiss open. You don’t hesitate to pull Spencer by the hand down the hall. When you notice you left your door wide open, you don’t even care. Neither does he, apparently—once you’re inside he slams it shut, flipping the deadbolt while his eyes are glued to you like you’re already naked. Now Spencer is shameless in the way he drags his eyes over every curve, every place your clothes and hair are disheveled from his touch and eye-fucks you so obviously it makes your face warm. Three months ago Spencer would have at least been bashful about it when he met your eyes again, but this Spencer is far from apologetic as he pins you with his burning gaze once more. His hand stays stuck to the door like he’s holding himself back.

“Is this what you want?”

There’s an undercurrent of sorrow below the gravely arousal, like this isn’t what he wanted for the two of you either. But you’re both at the mercy of fate. This is all you have, and it might be all you can do for each other anymore. So you don’t need to say that, because he understands.

“Yeah. Yes, this is what I want.”

For just a second more he watches you from his place by the door, and there’s an unexpected softness to it. He looks at you the way he would have looked at you before. Like as long as he stays there he can entertain the idea of being that person again.

Need wins out quickly, though, and he surges forward. Immediately you’re caught in the riptide of him, helpless as he kisses you all the way to your bedroom.

He’s never been in here before. You find yourself glad it’s relatively clean—one of the pastimes you’d picked up in his absence was keeping everything tidy. It was something you could control.

A lamp glows at your bedside. You lean against the footboard of your bed, hands timidly behind your back and suddenly shy to have in him in your intimate space. Both of you set aside the heaving desperation long enough to catch your breaths, and for him to scan the room like he too is being forced to reconcile with the innate and unexpected intimacy of the moment. He cuts a harsh, dark gash in your sweetly decorated bedroom, radiating something wild and powerful and unsure of himself like a chained bull as he takes in the soft, pale bedding, the paintings and photos taped to the walls, the woven rug and the sheer drapery. His breathing slows as he studies it all—eyes eventually catching on something behind you. Looking is unnecessary. You’re sure he’s spotted the dried peonies in their ceramic vase. Or maybe the now worn stack of papers that is his Odyssey, marked up and soft around the edges from constant flipping-through.

Then Spencer looks at you, and that softness seeps in again. Along with something like... fear? Grief?

In some other universe your first time with Spencer is sweet and giggly and kind and he smiles at the decor in your room and looks around with wonder because it’s another way he gets to know you. It’s a different way to learn you from the inside.

You sense that he’s caught in between universes right now as well, painfully aware of what he would have given you that he can’t anymore.

He breathes your name like an apology, and foolishly you let a second go by in which you think he might offer you one. But he doesn’t. Not with his words, anyway. His eyes tell a different story.

“It’s fine,” you say unprompted on a whispered exhale, then a little louder as you push off the footboard, crossing the space until your hands are on his chest. You focus on his tie, not making eye contact as you rush to undo it. “It’s fine.”

He lets you do this for a few seconds before finally covering your trembling hands with his own. You still can’t meet his eyes.

“We don’t have to do—”

“No! No, please. I want to. I need—I need us to be okay.”

“Hey,” he murmurs, catching your chin and forcing you to look at him. “We are okay. Me and you are fine.”

It’s a pretty thought, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s a hideous and abject affront to the truth. Sure, maybe you’re fine in comparison to last week. Maybe anything feels fine compared to an eight by six cell. But it would be impossible for you and Spencer, for your relationship, whatever that relationship may be, to be fine. It’s especially impossible for him to make that claim, after all he did or rather didn’t do while he was gone. What you need is for him to stay anyway. What you need is to find a way to be with him, to exist with him, even when you are so clearly not fine.

“I just need you to stay,” you whisper, and he’s already nodding, wide-eyed like he’d do anything for you. You ignore all the bitter venom rising in your throat. You pretend this isn’t all happening after he cut you out of his life with a dirty switchblade. Instead you focus on his hands on yours, the familiar smell of him, which invites you to let go of each and every thought and worry. He must’ve showered before coming here, you realize. How long has he been out? What happened? 

“Okay. Okay, I can stay. What else can I do? How do I make it better?”

You sniffle and look back down.

“You can untie that for me.”

He hesitates, then nods some more, fingers working under yours to undo the tie around his neck.

“Okay.”

A moment goes by and after that final whispered word, the tension begins to build again. Spencer senses it in the way your fingertips linger on his chest and you step even closer, dragging them down to his belt. The metallic sound of it unbuckling, despite being your own doing, still manages to flip your stomach. How many times have you pictured this? When was the first time you realized you wanted it? You’re sure you haven’t stopped wanting it even once since then.

Spencer tosses the tie away and is shrugging off his jacket now, then before you see it coming he’s kissing you again, ducking down to do it. He feels taller this close up, and especially in your bedroom, where he just seems rather out of place. But you want him here. God, you want him here.

You break the kiss, forced to look down as you fumble with his belt.

“Sorry,” you gasp, embarrassed by your lack of dexterity. The light is barely sufficient to see what you’re doing, especially when he’s wearing black on black and your eyes are still bleary.

“You’re okay,” he assures you, and it’s so Spencer a fresh round of nerves electrifies the tips of your fingers. That thing is happening—the thing you’d hoped to avoid if you hadn’t lost momentum partway through, where you’re allowing your actual feelings for him to get in the way rather than getting swept up in the pathos of the moment and letting everything be easy and mindless. “Here, can I help you?”

But he doesn’t actually wait for an answer before he’s finishing off the belt for you, tugging it loose from his hips till it’s a leather coil in his hands. Your fingers brush the material and he lets you take it as if it were your prize. It’s heavier than you thought it’d be, and you just feel the weight of it in your hands for a moment, your dropped head brushing his chest.

You have a terrible feeling that if you do this now, it doesn’t mean everything will be alright. Because it can’t just go back to normal. Spencer has told you nothing of what must be an enormous trauma, and you haven’t spoken about it at all, but you sincerely doubt that after this he’s going to be ready to just jump into that committed relationship the two of you had been toying with for months before his absence. You’re almost... scared of him, now. Scared of where he’s been and what he’s endured—things you’re sure you couldn’t have taken. What that does to a person, you can’t imagine. He seems so solid and real in front of you now—but you know that’s not always enough. Maybe you’re just scared that somehow whatever he’s been through will have made him care for you less. That you were too far removed from the whole ordeal, and now you’ll never understand. If you could understand, maybe you could fix it for him. Maybe he’d stick around.

Still—even if you do end up pushing him further away in the long run—won't it have been worth it to have had him so completely, even just once?

You toss the belt to the ground, compressing all of these very complicated thoughts and feelings into a few seconds so short he can’t ask you any questions about them. Instead you find his top button, and just as you manage to undo it with relative ease he’s gently grabbing your wrists. You look up at him, immediately surrendering.

“If we’re going to do this I need you to relax a little bit.”

Gears grind in your chest. You feel need and anxiety comingling in every square inch of your body. It’s a sick buzz—a high on an empty stomach.

“I can’t,” you admit.

“Yeah, you can,” Spencer gently disagrees, slowly lowering your hands. When he’s sure you’re not going to try ripping his clothes off again, he releases, and his eyes lower to the zipper of your hoodie. His fingers follow, warm against the soft triangle of revealed skin at your chest as he grips the small piece of metal between barely shaking fingers. “You can.”

You match his eyeline, breathing shallowly and watching as he slowly drags the zipper down. You wonder if that sound has haunted his fantasies the way the sound of his belt has haunted yours. If he’s seen this hoodie on you and wondered what’s underneath, staring at you and daydreaming during movie night with you none the wiser.

Both of you have your eyes glued to the span of skin as the zipper parts. Spencer stalls with the zipper at your sternum, just below the band of your bra.

Right. No shirt.

You look up and find his eyes already on you, tinged with a curious kind of humor.

“I wasn’t expecting guests.”

The words come out shy. Spencer’s chuckle has its own nervous airy quality as he resumes tugging on your zipper, leaning down until your noses bump.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

Then he kisses you again, a little sweeter now. Sweet enough to give you butterflies and for them to flutter right out of your stomach and spill from your lips in a little whimper against his.

It comes as a surprise when he pushes the fabric from your shoulders without looking or asking. Not that you’d have said no—you're just underprepared for how assertive he is in this foreign context.

Left just in your flimsy shorts and your thin bra, you feel quite exposed—but Spencer’s hands are as demanding and hungry as his mouth. They skim up your sensitive sides and sweep lower, suggesting less proper placement over your ass and pulling at your bottoms until you gently put a stop to their wandering.

“Wait. We’re... we’re uneven.”

It’s a struggle to get any words out at all when he keeps chasing your lips, nipping at you like he physically can’t stand not kissing you, but they catch his attention and he laughs airily, pulling back to let his gaze pour over your less clothed form. It lingers and catches and lights you up everywhere it touches, drops of heat soaking into your skin and making you feel all fuzzy and needy.

“We are,” he acknowledges, tone low and colored with the faintest smile. “You’re a lot prettier without your clothes on than I am.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The challenge comes immediately and thoughtlessly. Spencer’s golden eyes flash up to yours. He’s breathing a little harder than usual.

“You want me to show you what I mean?”

If that means getting him naked, then yes, absolutely.

You nod, but rather than immediately stripping, he takes your hand and holds his own open next to it. A thick pink scar bisects some pretty significant palmistry lines, but you don’t mention that. Instead you swallow—your thoughts, your words, your nausea.

“That’s new.”

You wonder how you hadn’t noticed it earlier.

He nods.

“A lot is new.”

It sounds almost like he’s challenging you—there's a kind of tremulous force in his voice, despite the perpetual softness there, like he’s inviting you to say it’s ugly. And you realize he’s referring to more than just the glowing scar cutting an asteroid trail against the flesh of him palm. The scars he obtained in prison must form a constellation over his body.

“I don’t care. I wanna see you.”

Spencer swallows, cupping your face with the scarred hand once more. You can’t feel it against your cheek but you know it hasn’t gone away.

“I’m sure you think you do,” he permits, and that’s where the conversation ends for the moment—with his hand on your face and his lips back on yours. “For now why don’t you let me worry about you?”

Obediently, you breathe, “okay.”

This is, for whatever reason, amusing to him. The brief levity dies as quick as it comes like a snuffed-out brush fire as soon as he lets his hands fall back down to your hips.

“I want... I want to give you slow. But...”

But slow is for people who didn’t lose three months of their life. Slow is for people who don’t know what it’s like to be starving. Slow is not for the desperate.

You understand the feeling.

“I don’t need slow.”

You’ll let him use you up like quick-burning fuel if that’s what he needs. You’ll go as fast and as bright and as hot as he tells you.

“But you want slow,” he murmurs, a secret acknowledged into your own waiting mouth. You’d keep it there forever. You could be the object he hides his soul in. “I know you do. You deserve to get what you want.”

“I can go fast. I want whatever you can give me.”

Spencer’s shuddering exhale is like a drug, dizzying as you inhale it and your eyes flutter at the high, pressed head-to-head with him. For so long you’ve needed him so badly. It’s overwhelming to have him now, all over you. If only your walls could breathe him in the way you are, if this room could remember what it feels like to hold him the way you will, if any inanimate object could bear witness to how you’ll give yourself, any part of yourself, over to him, so willingly.

“I’m going to try.” Spencer’s voice is hoarse as he walks backward to the bed, taking you by the hips as he goes. “I want to do it right. I want to do this the way I... the way I imagined it, before...”

Now he’s sitting, and you’re standing between his legs as he finds the clasp of your bra and undoes it, his fingers a comforting pressure where they ghost down the slope of your back. Your heart is pounding at the confession, at the way his tongue darts over his bottom lip and his fingertips journey back up to your straps, looking up at you with haloed irises as if he’d find anything other than the most dangerous kind of smoldering devotion in your eyes—the kind cult-leaders seek and spend years nurturing, and he’d earned with a mere brush over your bare skin.

The fabric slides down your arms, and as it falls to the floor, you watch something like despair flash-flood his eyes. It is a deep, distinctly human grief. The ineffable kind where something is almost too beautiful; so perfect it offends the mortal senses because it should be permanent, but nothing is, and the clash of divine beauty with unstoppable time which oxidizes copper and covers marble with vine is almost as grotesque as metal rending delicate flesh. It is the grief that drove the first poet to write and the first parents to press their baby’s painted hands to the walls of a cave. It is the desire to do the impossible—to capture ephemeral perfection and make it eternal, and the knowledge that it is hopeless. You recognize it because you’ve felt it for him.

“I thought about you all the time,” he whispers, doesn’t bother calling you beautiful but you don’t mind because he’s telling you with his hands and his eyes and the waver of his voice. “When I was gone, I thought about you—”

You’re just as quiet, just as soft.

“Don’t, Spencer.”

He doesn’t get to tell you about when he was gone. Not now. Not after he acted like you didn’t exist.

“Okay.” He swallows the things he’d wanted to tell you like you choked on the things you needed to tell him for three months. “I’m sorry.”

But his hands—his hands are perfect over your waist and his lips are perfect where they kiss your ribs like they’re his homeland. You could forgive a thousand wrongs for each kiss he puts to your skin. Light from the full moon stretches over the room like a blessing from the cosmos, and you have every intention of making the most of that gift, how the silver gilds the planes of his face and highlights curls like they were carved, and invites you to search for something in each shadow.

Some of his kisses land over the sensitive skin of your breasts though you doubt he has much intention or that there is any sort of end-goal with the trail he blazes—in fact, you have to root your hand in his hair and pull gently back when he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s making you wait again. His eyes are glassy and cheeks slightly pinkened—you weren’t expecting this wave of fondness to knock you on your ass but here you are, falling all over again.

“You don’t have to go that slow.”

A slow smile splits the heart of his mouth at your bashful tone and he’s emboldened to bring his hands higher for a moment, thumbs brushing particularly delicate though not downright indecent spots. Nonetheless, your breath catches.

“Impatient girl,” he scolds, and though it’s lighthearted it still inspires heat to dance across your face. Oh, I think I’ve been plenty patient, you itch to say, but you bite it back because it’s only sad and true and unkind.

Still, he gives you the beginning of what you want, really only the tip of the enormous iceberg that is your desire for him, by slipping his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts and tugging them down. His hands slide up the fronts of your thighs, tracing the trim of your underwear, and you’d swear he’s not even breathing. The moment one of his hand loops behind your knee and pulls forward until it’s pressed to the mattress and you’re half-kneeling, half standing, desire begins to truly cloud your mind. Manhandling never seemed like Spencer’s style, but when paired with how softly he reveals your hip, pulling gently down on the fabric of your underwear just to admire you up close, you don’t mind it.

More kisses are littered over your stomach, and he takes you by surprise a second time with a quick maneuver landing you on your back and him on top of you.

“I wasn’t doing you justice with my imagination,” he murmurs against your mouth. “I couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t have known what?” you pant as he shamelessly digs his fingers into the plush of your ass. You almost hope it bruises.

“How pretty you would be,” he coos like he means it, and you dissolve, slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. “You were holding out on me.”

It’s a tease, not at all serious, but you manage to hit him with a, “Was not, asshole,” and he chuckles, placating your little hurt with another sticky kiss, and you get another disorienting glimpse of some other timeline where you’re both a little less damaged. Where it’s a little easier.

But in this timeline, his touch becomes starving and ragged and urgent, and you accept the drag of his thumb up your thigh and between your legs, gasping when he runs his knuckles up the center of you. This touch is metal on screeching metal. It does not pretend to be anything more than what it is—brute, powerful, executed to elicit sensation. You get the sense that Spencer’s never touched anyone this honestly, and while you do envy the girls who got to have him gentler, you’ll take this as the compliment that it is. A kind of vulnerability that is nearing primal.

His lips, though—always his lips—are kind when they brush and land on your skin guided by some invisible map. A dip down your neck and chest and then a plunge, his tongue dragging over your hips, chasing the fabric of your underwear as he almost pulls it off and then reroutes, making room for himself between your legs and pushing lace aside to mark the hinge of your inner and upper-most thigh. Your chest heaves and you don’t dare move for fear he’ll stop leaving signs of himself on your body and you won’t be able to reassure yourself that it was real and he was here and it was not another dream.

Because something in you knows, if only consciously recognizing it for the first time now, that he will disappear again. That this may be your only chance.

The desire to make the ephemeral eternal. An impossibility.

He’s clearly losing himself to something, eyes shutting blissfully. You wonder when the last time he let his guard down even a  little was. You’re okay with being the thing he gets lost in, even if you’re not exactly okay with him—something you are becoming more acutely aware of as each touch makes a part of you want to cry. Maybe you still have some things in common. A strange pain that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to you, for one thing.

You slam back into your body as his nose nudges against you through fabric, and his lips catch on cotton as he drags himself up, eventually settling a kiss against the little bow at the waist of your underwear. There he stays, eyes closed, mouth pressed to you.

“Is this okay?”

You swallow, buzzing. Is this really what he wants? After everything?

“You don’t have to...”

“But is it okay with you?”

Nothing more than an airy whisper, you reply, “Yes, if that’s what you want.”

Being emotional at this point seems wrong, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that you have thought about this before and it’s finally happening but it’s not exactly as you’d imagined it. There is an indelible sadness to it, to the way he’s so hungry for you because he’s been deprived, to the desperation with which he touches you because he’s had everything taken from him.

For a moment, before he tugs your underwear down, he pauses, and you wonder if he’s freezing one moment in time, this moment, and grieving all the other ways it could’ve been, and accepting that this is the way it is going to be. You are.

These higher realms of thought abandon you as he finally pulls the last barrier down your legs and encourages you to spread them further. You don’t have time or energy to be embarrassed, not even by his staring, or the way his eyes dart up to yours and back down again, wide and shining, as if to say, have you seen yourself? Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?

All you feel is the lack of him on you, the pull to have him closer so strong it’s almost sickening because he could be gone at any second. Maybe he understands that because he doesn’t waste anymore time before he’s kissing the most sensitive part of you. The drag of his tongue has you loosing a shuddering cry.

His mouth wanders, making connections you wouldn’t have realized the value of until you feel them on your skin. Your hips buck as he traces you and you’re unable to stop yourself from tangling your hands in his hair. Speech fails you—hell, you can hardly breathe as you watch his with a furrowed brow and parted lips, only expelling air from your lungs in the form of little cries and gasps and failing to hold your hips down to the bed.

The tip of his tongue teases around your entrance and he catches your leg as your foot rises off the bed, slinging it over his shoulder and consuming you more fervently until you have no choice but to moan though you’ve never been one for theatrics. Nobody has done this for you like he’s doing it for you. Locks of hair fall in front of his face and you hold them back for him, shuddering as he shifts his weight and presses the tip of his finger to your cunt.

“Ah—please,” you manage, your first words since he started. Spencer groans against you and the sound is so wonderfully unexpected, so much better than in your dreams. You cant your hips up in further invitation, chirping as he takes it, pushing two fingers into you at once. Your eyes screw shut and you bite back a whine at the slight stretch, unconsciously writhing your hips either to get further away or take him deeper, you’re not sure.

Spencer pulls back, kissing your hips and thighs and pumping his fingers very slowly as you adjust.

“’M sorry,” you pant, “it’s been awhile, I...”

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says like it’s simple, his own breath coming quicker. “How’re you feeling? Need me to stop?”

“No! No, it feels really good, I feel good.”

He holds your burning gaze, matching it with his own, and his hair is tousled and his cheeks are flushed as he continues to move his hand.

“Yeah?”

“...Yeah.”

This little show of obedience, of call and response, has him smiling before he occupies his mouth with something else once more. It’s a different smile than you’re used to from him, but you decide you don’t at all mind it.

Like that, with his tongue and fingers working tirelessly, your orgasm comes on quickly. The feeling is rare but not entirely foreign, and in that brief moment of utter disconnect between your brain and reality, of sheer white-hot pleasure, you don’t feel you’re missing out on anything at all. How could you be, when you are here and Spencer is here and for a moment all your neurons are lighting up and flashing neon? How could there be anything more to life than the searing feeling of him slowly withdrawing his fingers from you, than your hips between his hands like he’s cradling the world, and his lips, indiscriminate with where they kiss because every part of you is worthy of attention?

You’re reeling, and your legs are gelatinous as he so affectionately sucks the darkest mark yet onto your inner thigh like a parting gift, like he’s signing his trembling work. If you could clamp your legs shut around the almost painful aftershocks you would, but he’s climbing back up your body, so all you can do is wriggle against him and release delayed, stunted little moans. He stops to kiss your neck before he makes it to your mouth and drinks down all your sounds until you’re gentle and pliant for him like you haven’t been yet.

His voice is soft and sympathetic when he speaks. “Better?”

Wordlessly you nod, both comforted and unsettled by how well he knows you. What, exactly, has been made better, you’re not sure. Not trust. You don’t trust him anymore. Something cheaper, but temporarily effective. A sense of permanence, maybe, however fleeting it may be. You’ve completed something with him now, and he’s still here, still sweet.

He looks into your eyes, then, for a moment—and there is just enough light in the room for you to tell yourself that the shadows dancing there as he looks at you are love.

They morph as you watch into haunting, wild hunger. Pained even now.

He sits up abruptly and so do you, scooting back against your headboard and pulling your knees to your chest to protect your pounding heart as Spencer takes you in with darting eyes and quick breaths. His fingers find the collar of his shirt and he begins to unbutton.

“I need you to remember it’s all going to heal.”

He swallows, and you hardly have the wherewithal to study the way he unbuttons his shirt, a way he exists in the world that you had previously not been privy to. The words are too distracting.

“What?”

Sometimes he reminds you of a deer, with those big brown eyes that can’t help betraying anxiety. Moreso in those old pictures he’d shown you from his early days at the BAU—but it shines through occasionally even now. It’s reassuring to know that something inside of his has remained soft.

“Just...” his fingers don’t stop at their task, and you come to the disturbing realization that his knuckles are bruised. “Please don’t freak out, alright?”

Your mouth goes dry, eyes glued to the lengthening span of revealed skin.

And before he even has his shirt fully undone, something isn’t right.

He’s like a Pollack of bruises—starbursts and watercolor blots of discoloration blooming over his side and stomach.

You’re glad the light is off for two reasons: one, being that you don’t think you could handle the bruising in all its glory, and two, you hope the look of horror painted on your face is at least partially obscured from Spencer.

But you can’t. You simply don’t have the gas in the tank to freak out, as he’d said—at least not externally. Those bruises shouldn’t be there, but 96 days is a long time to be gone.

You drag your eyes back to his—nervous, deeply insecure and mistrustful. A deer. Just like those pictures of a 24 year old Spencer in an FBI jacket that was too big for him.

It’s enough to have you scooting on your knees across the mattress to him. Those big eyes stay glued to you as you draw near, falling as you carefully push open his shirt, cautious not to bump any tender spots as it falls to the bed. A flash of white gauze wrapped around his forearm that makes your stomach flip. How? You want to ask. Why?

He doesn’t seem to know what you’re going to do, and neither do you, until you’re grabbing his hands, bruised knuckles and all, and just... holding them for a minute.

“I lost weight,” he says quietly, as if that’s the most shocking thing about his current appearance, though it is noticeable.

“You’re still pretty.”

He smiles at this—a true Spencer Reid smile. Flattened lips, eyes tinged silver with sadness, voice quiet and anxious and wavering.

“I didn’t have a lot to spare.”

A moment goes by.

“I’m not going to ask you about them,” you promise, though you care so much and you want to know but you already understand that he won’t want to tell you.

Another moment. It doesn't surprise you to watch the shiny vulnerability in his eyes to freeze over completely. But he squeezes your hands once in thanks, and you know it’s still the same Spencer.

“Lie down.”

Oh. Right.

This.

You do as he says, taking a deep breath to try and exhale the concern twisting your stomach like a poison. Somehow your room feels so unfamiliar, so new with him in it. Even the whorls on your ceiling look different as you study them, trying to time the pattern of your breathing with the pattern of the paint and plaster and not let the sound of Spencer further undressing quicken your heartrate too much.

Soon he’s coaxing your legs apart again, reverently, and kneeling between them, studying every part of you—lingering not on the parts you’d expect. He traces the scar on your knee with his thumb, follows a line down your thigh to the freckle on your hip. The scrutiny is unnerving and warms you everywhere. Perhaps he senses the microscopic clench of your thighs as you imagine pushing them together, if he weren’t in the way.

“You alright?” He asks, still stroking your hip. Tender again. It’s so hard to keep up.

“I...”

Suddenly your heart beat is a deafening echo in your own ears. The tide of your breathing is too powerful, too in and out and whooshing, leaving you always too empty or too full but never comfortable.

Maybe he’s changed, and he’s harder to know now, but he is the same Spencer. He is the Spencer you’d fallen in love with. The hard part is knowing that now you may never get a chance to tell him that. You don’t know if he’d be able to hear it.

There are things you can’t have with him anymore. Not now, at least. Maybe not ever. But you can have this. It will be different, but you’d rather him be different and here than the same and only in your memory.

You swallow.

“I’m good.”

Tangling your hand in his hair once more, you pull him down into a kiss. It’s hesitant, at first—maybe he can taste your thoughts, where they’d been balancing just on the tip of your tongue. But the uncertainty fades and he kisses you deeper, harder, in a way that is hard to keep up with. You like the messy overwhelm of his lips, teeth, tongue. That’s the only way he knows how to want you.

When you go to wrap your leg around his waist he catches it, running his hands over the soft plush of your thigh. The hard line of him presses against you like memory foam and you gasp and he breathes it in deeply as your brain short-circuits, as you realize this is really going to happen, that you’re going to have him like you’ve never had him before and in ways you’ve only imagined and immediately felt ashamed for.

“Spencer,” you whisper. He ducks to leave open-mouthed kisses along your neck and your eyes flutter shut, craning your neck but not losing sight of your objective as you reach down blindly. When you find what you’re looking for he freezes, groans against your neck at the same time as you breathe the tiniest whimper. Just in your hand he feels impossible, hot and imposing and hard. Your heart palpitates.

Without thinking, you angle your hips up and encourage him closer, until the tip of him is smearing through your folds, and you both go utterly silent like the breath had been stolen right from your lungs. The moment crystallizes, time around you hardening like preserved amber to keep you frozen there forever.

And then he rolls his hips, catching the underside of his cock on the crux of you, and then he does it again, and you choke out a moan and so does he, and it’s beyond perfect—it's nirvana, more than you could ever have conceived of, with his weight pressing you into the mattress, arms caging you in, his heavy breaths hot against your neck and vice versa as you twine together like serpents on a rod, your foot floating in the air as you widen your legs to make more room for him.

And you’re not even fucking yet.

“Oh my god,” you whine, just for him, barely audible under the heavy cloak of night, the thickened air in your bedroom and the sound of panting and fabric shifting. It’s like your heart is trying to reach through your chest to his own where they’re pressed together—that is how hard it’s beating.

Spencer only breathes a long, low curse and shifts so he can grasp himself. Your fingers drift down the shaft of him as he slots himself at your entrance, notching half an inch in and you hold your breath, and you brace yourself—and then he’s kissing you again, but gentler this time. Reassuring. You soften, you can’t not, releasing all your air in a soft gust through your nose, and then he’s pushing in.

Your lips part at the stretch as it fuzzes your mind, but he stays right there, nose pressed to your nose, lips ghosting over your own. He’s not going anywhere, you think, and you’re glad for it, when it burns ever so slightly, and the tiniest whine escapes your open mouth.

“Shh,” he soothes immediately, low and soft, only fractionally louder than you had been. “You’re okay.”

Spencer. Your Spencer.

For a moment, you’re living in that alternate universe. The kinder one. The flash of pain you feel then has nothing to do with the way he’s opening you up.

This is the closest you have ever been, and in some strange way, the furthest apart.

Together, fingers brushing, you guide him until he settles at not quite your deepest point. You can feel that he’s not giving you everything yet, but you’re okay with that, as you adjust to the full feeling. Spencer again senses your desire to close your legs against the deep intrusion, and gives you the best he can by encouraging you to wrap your legs around him.

“Good girl,” he whispers tenderly, nudging at your jaw with his nose and dragging kisses along the ridge of it. Your stomach flips at the moniker and your brain turns to warm sludge as your eyes flutter shut. It makes you feel all light-headed and you flutter around him. Spencer chuckles into the junction of your neck and shoulder and the vibrations send a chill down your arching spine. “I thought you might like that one.”

“Mhm.”

“Mhm. How are you? You okay?”

“’M ready.”

“You’re ready?” His tone is dripping sarcasm and faux-disbelief as he pulls back the slightest bit only to push right back in deeper, this time. Your toes curl, one thigh sliding higher up his waist as you cling to him.

“Fuck,” you manage, a pitiful, high pitched curse tossed to the wind. He echoes the sentiment.

“Oh, my god,” he groans, continuing with that slow pace, “you feel so good, angel.”

You grapple at his back, searching for purchase as your brow knits. “Faster.”

This inspires another breathy chuckle, but he obliges, and you cry out softly. It’s almost unreal, your head buried against his neck, drunk on his scent and the drag of him like a shock felt in the far reaches of your body, again and again.

There’s nothing you can say that will accurately demonstrate what you’re feeling, so you elect not to speak, to remain silent and try to get a grip on this cacophony of sensation and emotion. But it’s too much to be alone with. You feel you have to get it out, to seek understanding. You can’t do it alone.

“Spencer.”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know...” the sentence trails off into a gentle keen. He moves to kiss you, speaking against your lips.

“You don’t know?”

Shyly you shake your head. Spencer sighs wistfully.

“Do you know how much I missed you?”

It’s like he can sense your need for comfort. For something grounding.

And while this topic was off-limits earlier—you're softer now. The stone walls that form your boundaries have been chipped away and lowered.

Spencer continues unprompted.

“I thought about you every day. Every night while I was falling asleep. You were always on my mind, angel girl.”

You whine. Whether it’s pleasure or distress is anyone’s guess—including your own.

“You were gone so long,” you whisper, eyes shut.

At this, Spencer slows again, and the tension that was building settles back to a simmer.

“I know. I wish I could—I wish I could change that. But I’m here, okay? I’m right here with you.”

Then he makes sure you feel every last inch, and it takes your breath away. If your thoughts were any more coherent, they’d be something along the lines of: but for how long? How long until you leave again?

“You’re here.”

You say it like a mantra, once out loud, and then again and again in your head, timed with every clash of your hips. With each repetition he becomes more real. Every little ache, every tingling, head-emptying brush against that most sensitive spot inside proves to you that he could not be any closer. This can’t be faked. It can’t be another dream to wake up in tears from.

“You’re here,” you gasp as it hits you, as it truly sinks in.

“I’m here,” he breathes.

There’s so much you want to say—three months of words you need him to hear, of things you need to talk to him about, things you need to yell at him for and things you can only say crying in his arms and things you can only say laughing or whispering or drunk or half-asleep—and in this moment you can’t manage any of it. Every word condenses into one drop of salt water, drifting away from your eye and down your cheek. Spencer doesn’t tell you to stop crying. He only kisses the tear away, and murmurs I’m here I’m here I’m here over and over again against your skin until he’s not even speaking it out loud anymore. But you feel it. With every brush of his lips, every breath, every movement, you feel it.

Soon he’s adjusting his angle, gradually picking up the pace but retaining that unforgiving depth, and your nails bite into the skin of his back as your jaw drops. Spencer hisses, pressing impossibly closer.

“I’m sorry!” you squeak.

“Do it again.”

“Wh—what?”

“Please,” he begs, low and hot against your jaw, just beneath your ear. “Do it again, honey.”

Honey.

You’d do anything for him if it meant he calls you that again.

When he shifts his weight to one arm and reaches down between your bodies to play with your aching clit in exactly the right way, you don’t really have a choice. You arch and moan wantonly enough to feel embarrassed as your nails scratch down his back. At the same time he’s making noises of his own, and you almost feel guilty for marking him up like this only you think he likes it. The most perfect and troubling tension is building in your core, so taut you almost fear the inevitable rebound when it snaps. But you’re driven to be exactly what Spencer needs right now, and to let him try and be what you need. Even if it scares you. Even if you’re not sure how.

Spencer groans, head tucked to the bend of your shoulder. “I’m not gonna last.”

Any response you might’ve been about to muster is annihilated by a sudden, deep bolt of pleasure.

“’M gonna cum,” you mewl like it’s a secret.

“Are you?” he asks, coming up breathless. If your eyes were open, you’re sure you’d see him above you.

“Mhm.”

“Look at me. Look at me.”

It is unmistakably a command—one you fight to follow.

You cry out as you meet the intensity of his gaze, those shadowy corridors suddenly ablaze and alive. They are not unending, like you’d thought. They are a door thrown open to let the light in, or maybe to let the fire out. They’re open in this moment for you.

No more words are spoken after that—you cum hard, gasping as you fall and spin. Spencer follows very shortly after, like he was holding it together just for you, and your eyes are still locked though everything is a bit bleary.

“Fuck,” you whine as he continues to fuck you for as long as he can, despite your writhing hips, but you’re entranced by him, unable to look away now that you’re hooked. Until he slows to a halt, glances down at your mouth, and you just have time to pray that he’ll kiss you before he does. You whimper against his lips—a plea for understanding. A plea for him to stay, even though this is over. He kisses back so soft and sweet it’s like he can read your mind. Echoes of I’m here I’m here I’m here still buzz across your skin. His eyelashes tickle your cheek. Your heart stops beating quite so quickly, melting and warm like the rest of your body.

Soon the kissing ceases and you’re just breathing together, trapped and faced with the knowledge that it must end just the same as you had waited for it to start.

Eventually the air between you becomes mostly carbon dioxide and you let your head fall to the side, dizzy and giggling breathlessly as you nearly avoid asphyxiation. Spencer laughs too, letting his head fall to your shoulder once more, and you finally let your eyes flutter closed. To do something as simple as laugh with him again is its own small euphoria. It’s unexpected, and a soft landing once all that tension breaks underneath your combined weight.

It can’t last forever, you know that well. But the slow fade of it makes the next parts a little easier.

Spencer presses a kiss to your neck. “Is your bathroom through that door?”

You hum a confirmation and are only slightly disheartened when he pulls out and rolls off of you. You’re further disturbed when you see there’s gauze around his thigh, matching what’s around his arm, and you wonder how you missed that. Spencer scoops up his clothing and disappears into the adjoining restroom, assuring you he’ll be right back and leaving you alone with your thoughts and the whorls on the ceiling which have seemingly shifted into entirely new constellations.

He leaves the door cracked which is oddly reassuring—the sliver of warm light and the sound of the sink running. Only a few moments pass before he’s returning clad in boxers once more to sit on the edge of the bed, pushing away the sheet you’d just pulled over your chest and pulling one of your legs over his lap. Your face warms as he brings a washcloth between your thighs. As soon as he glances up at you and catches your eye you’re looking back to the ceiling.

“I should’ve asked first,” he says quietly as he cleans up the mess he’d made of you.

You speak just as softly, like you’re both afraid of disturbing some peace, of waking some sleeping giant. “It’s okay. I would’ve told you if I didn’t want it.”

His reticence, his unreadable face, make you nervous.

When he’s done, he rises to toss the dirtied cloth in the laundry bin, and with his back to you (as scratched up as it might be) you feel braver.

“Are you gonna, like... hate me now?”

It was a mistake. That’s clear by the way he turns around, brow knit deeply and grimacing slightly like even the suggestion offends him.

“Am I going to hate you?”

Again you pull the sheet up, and again you look away, studying the pattern of moonlight stretching out over the floor and scooting to make room for him when he steps in it.

“Not hate, I just...” the bed dips beside you and you are indescribably glad he’s not immediately running out the door. “I’m not dumb. I know what this was.”

He pulls you into him and you settle against his chest. It feels good. “I never thought you were dumb.”

This is your first real conversation since he’s gotten back, you realize. And how quickly you’re falling into familiar patterns, familiar syntactical beats. You know when to speak. You know when to bite your tongue and keep him talking.

The silence goes on longer than you’re used to. Maybe he got good at not speaking while he was away.

Eventually your eyes wander, falling to the white strip over his thigh where it is parallel to yours on the bed, only over the sheets.

“What happened?”

You said you wouldn’t ask, but that was then, and you’re upset again. You almost want to hurt him. To piss him off. You don’t know.

But it doesn’t work.

“Do you really want to know?” There’s a note of something heavy in his voice, and you look up at him. It’s a privilege to have him this close—his beauty is a constant surprise that you’d become unaccustomed to over the months. You say nothing, and he takes that as the yes that it is. “I... I did it to myself.”

He may as well have reached down your throat and grabbed for fucking heart for all its clenching. Tears well almost immediately, though they’ve been waiting in the wings all night.

“What? Did you—were you trying to—”

His eyes widen.

“No! No, honey, no.” You wilt as he gathers you closer, a deeply confused frown still contorting your features, too heartbroken even to cling to him, or to appreciate the ease with which honey slips past his lips again. “No. I was—it's complicated. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hurt myself, but I had to—I had to do it before someone else did something worse.”

The bruises covering his abdomen.

You sniffle and pull back enough to look up at him tearfully. “Why would they want to hurt you?”

Mist fills his eyes even as he’s looking down at you, a layer of separation, as if he’s two places at once. Even as he goes to brush your hair behind your ear, to stroke your cheek.

“I’m... not... the same, as I was.” It’s not an answer to your question—but it’s the beginning of the answer to a question you’d been too afraid to put into words.

“Don’t say that,” you beg, because you know where this is going. He keeps smoothing your hair like it’ll make this easier.

“But it’s true,” Spencer says gently, the slightest waver betraying his own emotion.

“You’re just going to leave again.”

And you’re losing to the tears.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you will,” you insist, like a child crying to a parent come to comfort them after a bad dream.

“Not right now. Right now I’m here.”

I’ll stay until you fall asleep again.

For now, maybe that has to be enough. 

You cry on his shoulder. He kisses your head and doesn’t tell you to stop. 

Eventually, you sniff and wipe your eyes. 

“We were so close. Before you… we were almost there.”

You’re sure of it. You’re sure that if he hadn’t gone when he did you would’ve been a real couple. You would’ve told him you loved him. 

“We’ll get there again,” he promises, rubbing your arm. “I just… I need a little bit of time. I think you do too. But we’re going to get there again.”

Maybe it will never be like it was. 

But as so often is the case—Spencer is right. Difference doesn’t mean it won’t ever be good again. 

You have to believe that, just as you had to believe you’d see him again. 

You look to The Odyssey on your bedside table. 

The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world. 

But the sun has a habit of rising, time and time again, after the longest nights, after the darkest storms. 

You feel the beginnings of its rise, see the golden tips of it lighting the room as he holds you. Even now. 

[rixsjwb]

MY ROOMIEㅤׂㅤ𐙚 ࣪ ⭒ suguru geto x fem!reader

roomie geto who would always wake up before you, wearing his baggy grey sweats with a tight t shirt gripping his well built body. sometimes on facetime with satoru talking about literally anything as he eats his breakfast.

"Your roomie awake yet? still sleepin' her head off?" the speaker blared. suguru shifts his phone so the camera would catch your face in view, you stare at the phone groggily, your hand itching your stomach which revealed abit of your middriff. but you didnt seem to care, gojo lets out a cheerful greeting at this early time asking you typical question like 'how are you?' and throwing in occasional flirting that you didn't really register due to lingering sleepiness.

you stand up from your seated position next to suguru at the dining table, as suguru munches on the fruits his eyes drag over your body as you stretch. a tattoo peaking from just under your shorts, causing suguru to graze his finger over it. lightly tugging your shorts down to see the tattoo. "getting worked up this early in the morning suguru?" satoru teases with his charming smirk. his camera catching his face as he seams to be lying down shirtless in bed.

"no, s'just curious." he says withdrawing his fingers, he watches as you look around cluelessly, causing a slight chuckle to slip from his baritone voice. his hand snaking around your waist pulling you closer to his body. positioning the camera back to him witch also catches you leaning into sugurus soft touch.

"pretty y/n looks tired." satoru says his keen eyes staring at you through the camera. watching as you rub your eyes underneath your glasses aggressively. before reaching over the phone to grab something. the camera doesn't fail to pick up your breast spilling from your low cut tank top and in your drowsy state you don't even realize what your doing.

suguru notices this and can smell from a mile away a cheeky remark satorus gonna day, "don't even say it." suguru says a smile, breaking out onto his tired yet handsome face, watching as satorus face breaks into airy laughter. "I wasn't gonna say anything!" satoru says, rolling his eyes. Both him and suguru know he was gonna say something to ruin the intimate yet tranquil mood that was going on. so it was better left unsaid.

roomie geto who always refill things without your knowledge, you could run out of your favorite moisturizer and suddenly it feels shallow and empty to heavy and full. and you'd always ask if he bought it but he's so good at gaslighting and manipulating you into thinking it was always full.

your current moisturize had been full for the past 2 months, and you're starting to think you're going insane.

every time you try to recall going out to buy one or even a bunch, it never comes to mind. and here you are making your way to the bathroom, taking your glasses off being met with blurry vision but still able to see, you go in to grab your moisturizer that had been pretty much empty since yesterday. fully expecting the container to feel light but taken aback when it feels heavy yet again.

you screw open the cap to be met with a brand new looking moisturizer and your quick to confront your roomie about it.

"suguru, did you buy me a new moisturizer?" " nuh uh, didn't you buy yourself one like a couple days or weeks ago?" he questioned and you actually start to think about it, but every day is just as blurry as your vision so you genuinely have no idea. you watch as suguru continues scrolling on his phone not at all phased at your question.

and you start to question if you have dementia. because you have so little memory of what you did this week, you cant press him any further so you reside to the bathroom as you continue to ponder on how your moisturizer suddenly just regenerates its product again along with your favorite snacks suddenly being refilled, too.

roomie suguru who's whipped for your touch and melts innit.

being in close contact with you is something suguru loves, taking pictures with the friend group he automatically moves over to you so he can slip his hand around your waist and get a whiff of your sweet natural perfume. which sends heat into his pants. feeling your plush breast push against his chest makes him feel like a shy boy, suddenly reduced to a stuttering and jittery mess.

when taking pictures with you he doesn't even know where to put his hands anymore, and making eye contact with you just worsens everything.

you're just as calm as him,aloft and more composed, yet he's losing his shit over a girl around the same age as him. whether it's you doing simple tasks like reaching over him to get something, the arch of your back just hovering over his lap as he gets a whiff of your scent. and how close the curve of your ass is to his body.

he has to use his hands to gently push down on your plush hips to sit down while he gets what you need before you notice the growing bulge in his heavenly gray sweat pants.

any chance he gets, to lay his head on your stomach, breast, lap he'll take it.

roomie geto who goes on regular bike rides with his friends and alone and always asks you if you'd like to come.

the first time you found out suguru had a bike was when you were sitting outside on a sunny day enjoying the vitamin d from the sun while scrolling on your phone outside of the building complex you and suguru live in. you're listening to music as you play with the ruffles on your tank top before staring at your cargo shorts while ajusting your hair curling inwards to your face.

but your trance was snapped out of when you heard loud revving of a car or bike nearing. at first you were annoyed because it's irritating hearing cars revv their loud engines in a quiet residential neighborhood. but when you see 2 bikers pull up one biker accented with blue and the other completely black you noticed their sature looked familiar.

as the man on the black bike hits the stand up on the bike before turning the ignition off. he hops off the bike seemingly typing something on his phone.

the other one on the blue bike was goofing off laying on his bike like it was a bed, before his head flicks in your direction. he lightly revs his bike which catches your attention as he waves you over lifting his viser up and your met with all too familiar cerulean blue eyes.

you stand up heading closer to the 2, before being engulfed in a hug by satoru. "I didn't know you rode a bike." your voice flowing like the wind soft yet velvety at the same time. "you tryna go f'a ride?" satoru says excitedly as he adjust his seating on the bike, moving back more so you can sit in his lap. you lightly slap his hand at his insinuation before turning to face the all black biker.

his viser now up and you're met with familiar purple eyes, "suguru." you say before giving him a hug for a greeting. his hands automatically wraps around your waist. "I sent you a message, wanna go on a ride?" he says his eyes crinkle hinting a smiles on his face. you don't reject the offer as you wait along side satoru while sugurus fetched for a bike helmet.

satoru kept you close his hand over your shoulder, while he had conversation with you. and when suguru came back he was quick to help you put it on. buckling the strap underneath. and knocking on your helmet to ensure it's sturdiness, and just like that off you go!

roomie suguru who sometimes suffers from nightmares and tends to stay up at ungodly hours, because he can't find himself wanting to go back to sleep.

you've never caught suguru up at an ungodly hour because you were already dead asleep. but due to your now heavy schedule at college, you'd end up waking at 5 am still night preparing for a class.

you'd always see the tiredness in sugurus eyes, bags showing how much sleeps he's missed out on.

as you get ready after taking a shower, you leave your room, heading to the kitchen that was completely dark, but because you're still abit tired you sluggishly move through the dark clumsily before finding a light switch. when you turn it on, you jump back startled by suguru sitting on the couch manspread as his head is thrown back.

he seemed still for a second before his head lifts making eye contact with you. your quick to come by his side wondering why he'd ever be awake at this time. "shouldn't you be asleep?" you ask sitting down next to him.

"m'yea but can't." he says wryly. you stare at him with concern in your eyes. your hand coming to caresse his arm to sooth him."do you want tea maybe? it could maybe help with your sleep." you say not even sure about your own words, but suguru doesn't answer his eyes closed like he's resting them.

you rise from your seat eventually packing your stuff, and once you were ready it was 5:46 am you still have time to eat breakfast so you cut up some fruits to munch on before coming back to meet suguru on the couch with a hot brewed tea in your left hand.

you place the plate down as quietly as possible before gently shaking suguru to open his eyes, giving him the tea which seems to calm his nerves.

"do you wanna talk about it?" you watch suguru as he takes a small sip of the tea before placing it down. suguru's heart melts at your question, you're to sweet for your own good. "just had a nightmare" he says plain and simple.

you grab the plate of fruits eating them one by one as you rest your head against sugurus shoulder and as time flows you feel his head limp right onto yours. when the clock hit 6:30 you carefully slipped out of his grasp before grabbing your bag and headphones. you grab a blanket nearby, throwing it over sugurus body, fluffing a pillow so his head could rest on it before you took your leave.

roomie suguru who enjoys your cooking so much, that he craves it like a pregnant woman craves food

sugurus not sure what you're cooking, but it smells good enough to lure him out of his room. he chats with his friends on facetime as he sits at the dining table with the perfect view of you in his sight. he watches as you move throughout the kitchen, putting and taking stuff off the shelves.

he could tell the dish is definitely not a Japanese dish.

"not gonna lie. Your roommate is a pretty girl, suguru." toji says blatantly on call. "I agree with toji. she's hot as fuck! I never thought I'd be into girls with calm and aloof personalities. and her glasses just makes her the more attractive!" satoru says shamelessly letting out a moan as a joke as he moves around his house ploping on the couch. suguru sends satoru a dirty look causing satoru to cackle like a maniac.

sugurus holds back a scoff before he answer. "you'k she's right here right?" he says showing you in view. you top the pot with a lid to let the food simmer before coming over to suguru to say hi to a couple of his friends.

"hi toji, hi guys" you say, waving to the camera. you seemed almost bashful at their comments, which was pretty rare considering you always have this reserved personality. "y/n, I love you! mwa mwa!" satoru kisses his phone repeatedly as you come in view. causing you to laugh at his antics.

"Hi sukuna," you say, remembering his face from one of your classes, "Hello, woman." "That's not how you talk to a lady!" yuji is heard from chosos phone. "You have the brat with you, choso?" sukuna asks gruffly, staring at choso through the corner of his phone, eventually seeing the salmon haired brat.

you take a sip of cold water as you listen to the conversation everyone has on the phone. but sugurus gaze seemed fixated on you.

"suguruuu! should I host a party? maybe toji and sukuna can finally get some bitches." "suck my dick you albino bitch" sukuna says aggressively. before toji speaks up "aren't you a virgin?" and eventually the call goes crazy with satoru, toji and sukuna arguing with one another you briefly see nanami join the call for 5 seconds before he leaves, shoko coming back into the cameras view. you wave towards her in the mist of the argument.

you eventually leave to go check on the food which was done from how most of the liquid had evaporated from the rice yet still enough to make it soft and moist to eat. you plate the brown rice and chicken on the plate for both you and suguru adding some pickled cucumber on the side with a small salad.

turning off the stove top you check the cookies you were baking that almost looked ready, grabbing a knife to poke into it seeing very little batter on the knife before closing the oven.

you hand suguru his plate before putting yours down, getting cups to poor some juice into, handing sugurus his cup while taking a sip of yours.

you watch as sugurus head subconsciously nods up and down almost like he's aproving how tasty your food is, letting out a hum of delight. suguru ends the rowdy call before powering off his phone to enjoy his meal in peace. to say this was the best meal of his college life, it is the best.

"what is this?" he asked curiously still taking bites of the food. "it's called pelau my mother always made it for me when she felt like cooking for little."

suguru would for sure continue buying ingredients for the house just so he can try the multitude of dishes you have in store.

[leclecsposts16]

"I never open the radio or talk to the media"

Hmm sure buddy lets get a quick recap back to the memory lane of mexico gp 2024.

Dementia hitting early??

[sleepymccoy]

Per one single request (and that is all I need to carry on) here is an expansion of my tags on this post

What even is dementia?

Basically, it's an umbrella term. It describes a set of common symptoms, primarily worsening cognitive loss.

It's kind of like saying you have a cold. A cold is not a diagnosis, it's a grouping of different illnesses, like rhino virus (the most common), influenza, covid, the list goes on.

So, you can have dementia and Alzheimer's, but you wouldn't describe yourself as having both. You'd say "I have a type of dementia, Alzheimer's disease." In the same way you'd say, "I have a cold, I think it's just a rhino virus but it's a whopping my ass."

So why'd you pick Alzheimer's for that example?

Well, Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia. It's where all the stereotypes you'd know about it come from. This is gonna be a text heavy post, so have a graph

University of Queensland

Before I talk about them in more detail though, what's a brain?

Your brain is made up of segments that control different specific bits of your body.

I always knew that if you hit the back of your head you might go blind, cos the eye and sight stuff happens at the back of the head. This is true.

I love a copyright warning on a photo. This post constitutes personal use

Alright! An important thing about dementia is that it moves through the brain steadily, going piece by piece. It doesn't do it all at once. So you have a starting spot, and a progressive loss of cognition as it kills your neurons. We figure out the dementia type by the symptoms, cos the brain is so defined

So if you hit the back of your head, the green occipital lobe in that picture, you mess with your sight. If you lose cognition in the back of your head your eyes are seeing fine, but your cognition loss makes you process that sight incorrectly. What you see can be completely different to what other people see. This is posterior cortical atrophy, and I bring it up because we know someone who died from it, this is Terry Pratchett's dementia subtype

It's not on the above graph cos it's quite a rare type

Where's Alzheimer's start?

In the kinda middle bit, the temporal lobe. Memory, ya know. And once it takes your memory it'll move on, but it's not always the same, so people living with Alzheimer's disease will developed varying symptoms as the disease progresses, which takes many years. Sometimes people get a diagnosis of mixed dementia cos it's doing a few lobes at once. Or they have another quite different type of dementia at the some time

I'm not gonna talk about Alzheimer's much cos if you know anything about how dementia goes, you probably know it from Alzheimer's disease.

Let's go through a few others

Vascular dementia is the next biggie!

It's a curious one, this is stroke related. So, when you get a stroke you often lose cognition in the affected area of the brain. That's not dementia, that's a stroke!

But if you get lots and lots of strokes, constantly, that's a type of dementia. Cos you're getting steadily cognitively worse

(this is a good time to remind people that dementia is not a diagnosis or even a type of illness like cancer, it is a descriptive umbrella of common symptoms. The underlying causes can be wildly different)

Vascular dementia doesn't follow our moves steadily though the brain model, cos the strokes can and do happen anywhere. It's rough

What am I talking about, they're all rough. It'll get rougher

Lewy bodies dementia

Often cross diagnosed with Parkinson's disease dementia, it just depends if you get the physical or cognitive symptoms first.

Lewy bodies doesn't tend to have any memory loss. I know, no one thinks that's possible! But this is a dementia without memory loss! Cognitive loss is not the same thing as memory loss, theres other cognitive thing you can lose. That's why they're different words I guess

Of course, in all dementias eventually everything goes. Cos it's progressive, it keeps progressing

Lewy bodies is more likely to cause physical impacts like shaking and shuffling gait. You'll also hallucinate, have delusion, sleep badly, and experience mood swings.

From a care perspective, the people living with Lewy bodies disease are vastly more likely to be violent than any other person living with dementia

Robin Williams had this one, but he never knew. They confirmed via autopsy. So I'm gonna add a fun gif of him cos he was lovely

There's a lot of other disease/illness induced dementias

Huntington's turns into dementia eventually. HIV too. If you have down syndrome you have an extra gene that will always turn into dementia if you live long enough (that's one of our few 100% rates). Alcohol related dementia. So on and so forth. There's a shit tonne of types

Anyway, thats enough about disease progression. I'll talk out a few more common misunderstandings and then post

Is dementia fatal?

Sure is. Most people will die of something else while they have dementia, cos age often comes with comorbidities, but if the only thing you have is Alzheimer's disease it will still kill you. It's taking out your brain cells, eventually you'll forget how to swallow and choke.

Honestly tho it's more likely you'll die 'by accident' due to doing something you didn't realise was dangerous, like going for a walk wearing nothing at night and developing hypothermia. That is a dementia-caused death, I think we can all see that, but it'll be written down as hypothermia. So reported deaths are lower than what's true

Alzheimer's takes 10 - 30 years for the neuron loss to be extreme enough to kill you outright. Lewy bodies is more like 5 - 7 years. There's a range and the ranges are poorly defined, quiz your GP if this ever comes up in your life

It's an old person disease, right?

Overwhelmingly yes. It's considered younger onset if you're less than 65. But from the graph above you can see that's a big enough proportion to get its own slot

But kids don't get it

Sure they do, childhood dementia is a whole thing. It's awful. People are born with it. Again, dementia isn't an illness type, it's a symptom grouping. Kids can be born with progressive, worsening cognitive loss. So while it's not Alzheimer's disease, it is dementia. It's like 1 in 3000 kids have some kind of childhood dementia, and most die before they reach adulthood.

It's untreatable

It is incurable (but they keep researching!) but we have treatments for the early stages. If you or a loved one is experiencing confusion and memory loss, get moving early and you might be able to delay the worsening of symptoms for a few years. It's not a cure, but it's better than nothing. And it's all we've got

How do you, op, know?

I have a master's degree in dementia, and I work in the field. Not naming my job cos I'm not speaking for them rn, I'm just presenting what I know personally

Gonna end the post there. Send me asks or questions or whatever, I'll try and answer. If I get enough asking the same thing I'll do another post expanding on that ❤️❤️❤️

[silentmagnolias]

Uninvited

Choso

Wc. 2501.

Summary: Sweet, utterly down bad Choso finds a pair of your panties falling out of your tote bag that you’d left in the bathroom floor of his apartment. What happens when you return unexpectedly to find him in the most compromising of positions?

Cw. Panty sniffing, masturbation.

“Ah, fuck I forgot my bag up at your place.,” you whined and cursed a little at the realization you’d left your bag—with your phone and clothes up the at the apartment Choso and Yuji shared.

Yuji snorted in response and Megumi raised a brow at your forgetfulness. You’d spent the majority of the summer with the trio (and occasionally, Yuji’s older brother, Choso) beating the heat in the complex’s ample swimming pool or galavanting around Tokyo on days you all weren’t on missions. Being an older, more experienced grade-one sorcerer, the trio had kind of unofficially adopted you as a mentor-turned-friend.

“I’m positive you’re going to have dementia by the time you’re 35.” Yuji joked from his place in the pool, attempting to swim on his back, earning a swift flick to the Adam’s apple from Nobara.

“You’re one to talk, you dunce.” She spat and Yuji instantly choked, righting himself in the water to throw her a petulant glare and rub a hand over the sore spot where she’d flicked him. You shook your head at the resulting banter that broke out between the two and snorted at the ‘please-god-make-it-stop’ glance Megumi threw in your direction. You snagged Yuji’s beach towel from the off-white deck chair and wrapped it around your middle, giving Megumi a sympathetic mock salute.

“I’ll be back!” You called over your shoulder and set off toward the apartment to grab your bag— and hopefully sneak a bite of whatever Choso had been cooking whenever you’d arrived earlier.

══════════════════

From the moment you had left to the pool with the younger sorcerers, Choso’s mind was on you, wandering to the way you’d stood so closely to him in the kitchen when you’d first greeted him— like you always did when you’d visit. You looked out for his little brother after all, so naturally he’d like you too. Maybe more than like. It was a warm, pleasant closeness that bloomed slowly over time, always casual. Always sweet. As he finished up in the kitchen, he allowed himself to think of something he’d shamelessly found himself indulging in as of late when he was alone.

A vision of domestic bliss— a sweet thought of you in the kitchen with him, wearing one of his T-shirts helping him learn to bake some horrendously sinful American recipe you liked to talk about.

Biscuits? Yeah, those.

Those are good. His eyes glazed over as he could practically see you in his T-shirt, smiling sweetly like you always did and talking to him as you sat on the countertop. He knew he was in trouble but he knew better than to jeopardize the friendship you’d built together. So he allowed himself to just stand there, head cocked to the side with his eyes glazed over, daydreaming of the things you’d talk about together sitting on that countertop.

He was so lost his reverie, he’d almost let the soup he had simmering boil over, but he fumbled and caught it just in time before turning the burner off and setting the pot to the side. He figured everyone would be up soon anyway, so might as well leave it out anyway.

His thoughts wandered once more to the way his T-shirt would probably hit just at the middle of your thighs and would ride up revealing the faintest slivers of the plushest parts of your upper thighs. He shivered at the thought.

God, he loved your thighs. Especially the way they looked in that bikini earlier... He cursed himself slightly for being too shy to join you at the pool but he couldn’t risk…. That happening. His gaze traveled down to the way his cock hung heavy in his pants, half hard already just thinking about your thighs. Thinking of the way they’d feel beneath the palms of his hands. The way the tops of them would pleasantly squish and give with every firm squeeze of his hand.

He swallowed thickly at the thought.

That was one physical aspect of his humanity he held immense disdain for. He felt pathetic popping a boner at the mere thought of your body and what made it worse, is lately it had become something that would be impossible to ignore until he relieved himself. Often, the nights you visited ended that way, with him in his bedroom whining and fucking his hand until he made the biggest mess of himself.

But even that wasn’t relieving. No.

No.

He needed more— something To make himself feel better.

How frustrating.

With a shaky sigh, he made his way to the restroom to grab the new bottle of lotion he’d purchased just for this purpose only to stop in his tracks at the sight of your tote bag on the floor. Your tote bag that had your clothes haphazardly falling out of the bag— including a pair of skimpy grey, rib knit panties.

Oh.

Choso’s breath quickened at the litany of impure, very human thoughts running through his mind coupled with an undertone of deep shame that almost made him leave the bathroom and opt to jack himself off with spit instead.

It wouldn’t hurt to just look, right? To feel them..

His hands twitched at his sides in the open doorway of the bathroom as he contemplated his actions.

But he couldn’t stop himself from wondering as he stared at the skimpy fabric of your panties— how you smelled there. He loved your scent, always lingering for an extra moment when you’d hug him just to breathe deeply and relish the soapy, vanilla vibe you filled his nose with—The smell of you permeating his soul when you were near. That had to be nirvana.

He gulped down the remainder of his trepidation and decidedly stepped inside the bathroom, shutting the door in a hurry and sitting himself down on the closed lid of the commode.

He reached down gingerly to grab the ruddy old tote bag and carefully sifted through its contents as if he were performing the most delicate task. He pulled out your T shirt and instantly brought the soft cotton to his nose, inhaling deeply, a low rumble of pleasure emanating deep from within his chest.

The smell of you was like an instant balm to his nerves, drowning out remaining apprehension he had in his mind. He could always wash everything, making sure you came back up from the pool to a warm meal and fresh-out-the-dryer clothes.

He inhaled greedily again, his cock now aching and his heart bounding in his chest from the excitement of the situation. He’d never done anything like this before.. but you smelled so good.

Eager for more, and more than a little high from his actions, he reached straight for what he’d really been curious about— the panties. They were surprisingly light and soft between his fingers, the lace trim and rib knit material providing deliciously contrasting sensations against his fingertips. He let out a shuddering breath as he held them up, inspecting them, taking in and imagining the thought of them snug against your hips and ample bottom. Against the space between your legs. It was enough to make his mouth water.

Without thinking about any further, he brought the material to his nose to inhale and he was most definitely not disappointed. His eyes rolled back in his head at the musky, heady scent of you that enveloped him. This felt like an entirely different level of wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. He was curious and completely down bad for you, that he couldn’t deny.

His breath came in gasps as he practically jerked his pants down to free his rigid cock from the fabric’s confines. He was already practically oozing pre-come from his flushed tip and his hips twitched and rolled of their own accord from excitement, a broken rhythm that demanded him give into his desire. So he did.

Choso bargained with himself that he’d do what he needed to do and rush everything straight to the washer so that you’d have fresh, warm clothes waiting for you by the time you got back. You’d be none the wiser.

Hopefully.

He spit quickly into the palm of his hand, wanting to waste no time and wrapped his hand around his cock to give himself what he craved. He set the pace, rotating his wrist in a way he knew would bring him to the heights he wanted to reach and crushed your panties against his nose once more, groaning low in his chest as the scent of you overtook him.

Something about adding the smell between your legs to this shameful little routine of his made him feel like a complete mess in no time at all. He was filthy for this but he didn’t care. He wanted, no, needed you in any way he could have you.

Your scent pushed him forward in an almost animalistic way, driving the tension in his belly to an almost unbearable level. He never knew he could feel this good by simply smelling you while he did this..

Choso fucked up into his hand aggressively with nothing but you on his mind, his toned abdominals flexing with exertion as he chased his high. He let his head fall back, still holding the fabric of your panties to his nose like a man possessed. His jaw had fallen slack now and a series of desperate, pathetic whimpers fell from his lips as he greedily inhaled you, committing your scent deep into his memory.

Pathetic. He was pathetic.

But so, so close.

A part of him was ready to get this over with, just so he could be in the clear from potentially getting caught so he could wallow in shame in peace but another part of him.. another sick, twisted part of him wanted this moment to never end. He wanted to feel good and he wanted YOU to be what made him feel good— even if this was all he could get.

Choso’s chest heaved and his cock leaked with every bounding pulse of his excitement. The pleasure was building white-hot deep in his belly in a way that was almost overstimulating.. but he couldn’t stop. Not yet.

So close.

In a split second moment of filthy desperation and bid for closeness he’d likely never get, he brought his other hand— and your panties down to wrap around the aching head of his cock. A dark splotch quickly bloomed against the grey fabric from where he practically dripped and he pulled his bottom lip through his teeth imagining himself making a mess of those pretty panties while you wore them. Yes. That’s what he wanted. He imagined your eyes heavy lidded and you staring down at him, whispering the filthiest things to him as he jerked off against your clothed cunt. He envisioned your hands touching him instead of his, the way your delicate little fingers would wrap around him. If only..

The tension continued to mount until it was unbearable and his breath came in ragged gasps. He almost missed the sound of the front door to the apartment opening and the hurried footsteps that stopped in front of the bathroom door.

Almost.

But he was too far gone to stop himself— with one more heave of his chest and jerk of his hips, Choso’s orgasm barreled through him with an intensity unlike anything he’d ever experienced and he was lost. Ruined.

It was euphoric.

His eyes rolled back and his cock filled your panties (and his hand) with an inhuman amount of sticky cum. Just when he’d think it was over, another thick, pearlescent spurt oozed into the ruined fabric of your panties. He bucked into his hand a few more times in a bid to prolong things, carrying himself through the remaining haze completely oblivious for a split second to the wide eyes that now watched from the open door.

You stood there utterly speechless at the sight before you when you’d opened the door. Your throat went dry as you studied the way Choso’s hips bucked out the remainder of his orgasm against his hands, the flex of his biceps and abs, the way his head was tilted back and his face contorted into something utterly sinful. The way your panties were now bathed in the most obscene amount of cum you’d ever laid eyes on— panties you’d been wearing just an hour before.

It was a few seconds that felt as if they’d stretched an entire eternity. A moment that left you feeling as if you were under water, unable to breathe. If Choso had felt that way about you, he’d never made any indication— sure, he was warm toward you, but Choso was that way with everyone he allowed into his inner circle. Ever enigmatic he was, no-nonsense a fair majority of the time in every day life, sprinkled in with that unmistakable softness and warmth in private. He’d always welcomed you into his home and had become someone you confided in. He was easy to talk to.

Choso’s eyes fluttered open and locked onto yours, having finally taken notice of you and his stomach instantly dropped at the sight of you in the doorway. He started to say something, to protest but you shut the door before he could call your name, effectively cutting him off. You stood there for a moment wondering what the fuck you had just hallucinated— it had to have been a hallucination, right?

Right?

You opened the door again to confirm that you had not been hallucinating. He was still there, your come-soaked panties still in hand staring at you like a deer in the headlights.

Of all the things you’d walked in on Choso doing, it had to be this. It wasn’t like you could judge though— in some sick way, you actually kind of understood.

It wasn’t like you weren’t similar or anything, after all. Like you hadn’t hoarded the one T-shirt he’d let you borrow months ago beside your pillow to sniff every night because he just smelled that fucking good. An intoxicating mix of soft earthiness, clean skin and something unmistakably sharp.

Okay, so maybe you really understood. Fuck.

You were interrupted from your brief inner monologue by the sound of Choso’s voice tentatively calling out your name. His cock had softened enough to be partially obscured by your panties, but the copious mess remained and stood out more against the fabric and his fair skin now that his cock wasn’t at attention. In any other circumstance, you’d be impressed with the sheer amount of cum that could come from one man, but all you could think of in the moment was the fact that Choso— your friend had pleasured himself with your panties.

“I’ll wash them. I’m sorry. I— I couldn’t. I just. I—.” He started trying to explain himself but you shook your head in response, effectively shutting him up again.

“You don’t owe me an explanation.” You finally managed hoarsely after a few moments of careful consideration, trying with all your might to keep your eyes on his and not the mess between his legs. You opened your mouth to speak again when you were jolted by the sound of the front door abruptly opening and Yuji’s voice calling out your name.

In a split second decision you stepped inside the bathroom, shutting the door behind you and locking it. Choso looked like he was about to short circuit, sitting there wide eyed thinking of where he’d even begin trying to explain this to Yuji..

“Of course..” You hissed under your breath, knowing that there was only one thing to do. You weren’t about to let Choso be found in such a compromising position (and you weren’t about to throw him under the bus either) so you turned to him and put a finger to your lips, a silent request to keep quiet.

“I’m in here! My stomach hurts…” you called out and flicked the bathroom fan on in hopes of muffling any extra noise that may give the two of you away. You back up slightly away from the door and immediately recoil when you step in something wet, your expression screwing up into one of silent panic when you realized what it was.

What a fucking situation to be caught in.

Part 2??