#like on one hand he’s an absolute freak (/neg) and i can’t stand his abuse towards ness

[getosugurusbangs]

honestly my feelings towards kaiser are so convoluted at this point to where i don’t even know how to feel about him anymore 💀

[kitthepurplepotato]

Chapter 9 - I could get used to this.

Summary: Y/N and Shouta gets outed in front of the whole gang. Katsuki and Megumi looks way too comfortable around each other. The last day is approaching, but the mood is too good to ruin it with negative thoughts. Megumi tells the gang about her past.

IMPORTANT: I know I said this will be the last chapter but it is NOT. The story ends with chapter 10, I wrote too much again 😂😂😂

Warnings: Suggestive, swear words, mentions of child abuse and neglect.

FIRST CHAPTER MASTER LIST

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

The next morning you wake up with Shouta’s arms around you; everyone is asleep in the room, tiny little noises filling the space as the two men sleeps deeply, content and safe. You smile to yourself for a second; when you were a kid you’ve never had the chance to have sleepovers so this kinda feels like you are finally able to feel the joy of it, at the humble age of 29. Present Mic sleeps in his sleeping bag, absolutely ignoring your shuffling; you can’t say the same about the grumpy hero next to you who starts to frown just as you try to move out of his warm embrace. Oh, did you forget to tell the audience that Shouta is a terrible sleeper? Well… Shouta is literally like a cat. He wakes up to everything. Cuddling with him is actually an absolute nightmare because every time you move your arms to get comfortable you wake him up by accident. He tries to fake it, bless his little ass; he continues to look asleep but the sudden change in the way he’s breathing makes it obvious that you ruined his sleep with that one, minuscule movement. Now it makes sense why is the guy always sleeping in the classroom.

“Where are you going?” Shouta mumbles, like you are just about to leave the country without him.

“I’ll start working on breakfast. You sleep some more, yeah?” You whisper into his ears, your hands caressing his head soothingly.

“You don’t need to whisper, Mic can’t hear too well and he’s a heavy sleeper. You could scream into his ears and he wouldn’t wake up.” Shouta mumbles while his arms snake around you again cheekily.

“I kinda want to try that.” You giggle, your eyes focusing on the snoring blonde on the floor.

“Don’t. You’ll freak out the kids.” He murmurs but you can’t miss the little smile on his face. “I’ll come out in a few minutes, try not to burn the house down.”

“Excuse me?” You giggle with a surprised look on your face.

“Sorry, autopilot. When Hitoshi tries to do breakfast he usually ends up burning something.” Shouta says fondly as he lets you go. You would like to say “finally” but that would be a lie. You really want to stay here and enjoy his warmth for longer, but no one wants to take care of a bunch of hungry, sleep-deprived kids.

“I’ll let you off this time.” You murmur into his mouth, leaving a wet kiss on his lips as you stand up from the bed. He grumbles a bit more before he finally finds the perfect position to sleep for a few more minutes.

When you arrive in the kitchen/living room area you are surprised to see an almost empty room; the kids are outside on the beach already, Eri is probably still sleeping in her room and the only two people in the kitchen are Bakugou and Megumi, both reading a book next each other in complete silence. Bakugou is rocking his reading glasses, completely comfortable with Megumi being in the room with him. Whoever said Bakugou is an aggressive person is an absolute idiot. The boy might be loud, but right here, right now, he is the chillest fucking dude on the face of earth.

“What are you two up to? It’s barely eight.” You smile at the two kids. Katsuki jumps up at the sudden noise, looking at you with pure fright in his eyes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” You say, feeling guilty for scaring the poor boy.

“Nah, it’s all good. My therapist says I have PTSD or some shit, plus my hearing isn’t the best so I tend to miss people sneaking up on me when I’m not wearing my hearing aids.

“Wait, you wear hearing aids?” Megumi looks up, utterly surprised.

“It’s a part of my hero uniform, yeah.” Katsuki says like he’s talking about the weather. No biggie. Now that you look at the blonde up close, the poor boy has so many scars on his arms and on his face, it’s kinda heartbreaking. “I only use it while I fight and when I’m out alone.”

You are not sure what to say to that and neither does Megumi so you just give him a nod and move towards the kitchen to make some coffee for everyone. You put the cups down in front of the two bookworms. Katsuki murmurs an almost silent “thanks” and takes a big gulp of the freshly made coffee then spits the whole thing out when Aizawa snakes his arms around you from behind and leaves a tiny kiss on your temple, still half asleep. Megumi can’t stop giggling as he offers a tissue to the pink faced boy, who’s still choking.

“I know, right?” Megumi mutters between to fits of giggles.

“So you knew about this?” Katsuki ignores the both of you for the sake of Megumi.

“Bro, I made this happen.” Megumi answers proudly.

“That’s… really nice of you?” The blonde… asks? Says? “You’re quite mature for your age.”

“I’m STILL only a year younger than you.” Megumi rolls her eyes but takes the compliment. “I haven’t been through a war the way you did but I had my own battles when I was young.” She smiles and for everyone surprise, Katsuki smiles back. Or does something like that. Calling it a smile is an overstatement.

“Okay, can you guys go back to reading your stupid manga and act like normal teenagers before I start bawling like a new born child?” You grumble under your nose with eyes full of unshed tears.

“Get used to it, Y/N.” Shouta says and pulls you towards the kitchen. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

“Why is she so sensitive.” The blonde murmurs under his nose but does his best to look busy with his manga again while your daughter stares at him with zero shame. Honestly. You two are like two peas in a pod; if you want something, you work your ass off for it, even if it hurts. It’s not the best family trait, but with the right people it’s certainly useful. Hopefully, you won’t need to tend Megumi’s broken heart in the near future because swear to fucking god, you are not an aggressive person but you’ll make sure this explodo-boy has no willy to make kids with if that ever happens. Katsuki looks up after feeling your sudden death stare on him and sighs; for some reason, his face scrunched up like he’s in pain when he looks at Megumi after that.

“Don’t do that. He gets enough shit from the media already.” Shouta reprimands and you mumble a little sorry as you crack a few eggs into a bowl. “I’ll be out for a while today, I need to sort out some things.”

“Can it not wait?” You look up at him with your best puppy eyes but Shouta only sighs.

“No, it can’t. I want to take care of these things before we go home. It will only take a couple of hours. I’ll be back for dinner.” Shouta leaves a tiny kiss on your forehead and all the fight leaves you right away.

“If you are even five minutes late, you’ll sleep on the floor next to Mic tonight.” You retort jokingly.

“You’ll be a terrible wife.” Shouta rolls his eyes and needless to say your whole face flushes from his words. It takes him a few seconds to realize his own mistake but it doesn’t take him long to become a stuttering mess; funnily enough, while his whole face resembles a tomato his facial expression is still just as deadpan as always. “… I mean, you don’t need to be… my wife I mean. If you don’t want to, that is. It was a joke. Yeah. I’m gonna go so I’m not late.” Shouta takes a plain toast from the counter and puts it in his mouth as he jogs towards your room to change.

“At least put some butter on it!” You yell after him, giggling like a schoolgirl but you let him do his own thing for now; you haven’t even had a conversation about being in a relationship yet here he is, the guy you thought you have no chance with, thinking about you as a wife. Life is so fucking good right now, goddamnit!

“Mom, you are being disgusting, stop that.” Megumi retorts with a cheeky smile on her pretty little face.

“Shut up and keep staring at your cute little crush in his nerdy little glasses.” You wink and needless to say, you won the round with that; Katsuki almost chokes on his own saliva, Megumi yelps so loudly Kirishima runs in from outside, thinking someone is dying and you can’t help but laugh like an absolute madman while the eggs get burnt on the stove.

If this is how the rest of your life is going to be, you are absolutely thrilled for the future.

~•💜•~

“Tadaima!” A grumpy Shouta comes in through the main door, his prosthetic leg thrown to the side like it personally offended Shouta’s mother on the way home.

“It’s almost 8.” You pout, stepping closer and closer to your loved one to help him get to the sofa, even though you are supposed to be really angry right now.

Well, not really, you have no rights to be offended just because he left you with the kids for the whole day, most of them are almost adults anyway, but you are definitely not a big fan of the fact that he didn’t even send a message about being so late.

“Sorry, I had a long call from the principal. Apparently, he started a new fur-care routine and it’s magical and I need to know everything about it.” He sighs, his arms snaking around your waist automatically. “Where are the others?” Shouta looks around with his chin on your shoulders; his hair tickles your neck in a really pleasant way. Damn, everything this man does just makes you feel things you shouldn’t feel while surrounded with a class worth of children.

“They are playing a board game in the room. I stayed behind to clean up after dinner.” You answer, silently hoping that Shouta takes it as an invitation to… well… enjoy each other’s company…?

“Hmm… I missed you.” Shouta moves his head so he can leave a tiny kiss on your neck, then another and another. You sigh heavily as he keeps peppering kisses all over until he reaches your lips; it starts with a small kiss first but it doesn’t take too long for you two to forget about your surroundings; the kiss gets heavy and wet and you are not sure if Shouta’s clinging to you for balance or for something else.

“I can feel it.” You snicker between two deep kisses, your fingers deep in Shouta’s hair.

“Wait until I get my hands on you in the bedroom when no one’s around.” He murmurs to your lips while his hands wonder under your shirt; the touch is warm and needy, hands grabbing your sides possessively as he pulls you impossibly closer.

“Jesus, stop.” You literally moan while you pull on the hero’s hair without realizing it. Shouta’s barely audible moan doesn’t help the situation.

“Fuck.” Shouta yelps, teeth biting, hands wondering; he’s completely lost in the moment, not even stressed about the fact that anyone can barge in to the living room and see this.

“Language.” You smirk while you lead him towards your bedroom, which is quite a hard task when there’s a man with half a leg missing clinging to you like a koala. Your back hits the wall with a loud thud, right by your bedroom door; mistake of the century as all the kids run out of the other room, ready to fight with whoever made the noise. There is a scream coming from Mina’s direction, Kaminari yells “yes!” like he’s the one being kissed, Hitoshi tries his best to hide the massive grin on his face, Kirishima and Sero stares with a pale face while Bakugou covers Megumi’s eyes jokingly, saying she’s too young for this. Thankfully, by the time little poor Eri comes out the room, declaring the hallway safe and villain-free, you two manage to jump off each other, both of your faces red as a ripe tomato.

This… is not how you wanted to let them know you two are a thing but… oh, well.

“Sorry, I tried to tell them there is no danger.” Present Mic mutters but he’s also incapable of hiding the shit eating grin on his face.

“Dad, why are you hurting Y/N? Stop it! Bad dad! Really bad!” Eri yells as loud as she can; the poor little girl tried her best to sound confident but her voice managed to waver by the end of her sentence. Oh, she’s so precious.

“They weren’t fighting, Eri. They were… uhm… kissing.” Katsuki pulls Eri to his side; it doesn’t take long for her to hide her face in Katsuki’s belly, tension leaving her tiny shoulders from the human contact.

“But the noise…” Eri mutters into Katsuki’s shirt.

“They just stumbled and she bumped into the wall, honey. It happens.” Hitoshi ruffles Eri’s hair.

“I want to stumble and bump into the wall too.” Kaminari says way too loudly; he slaps his hand on his mouth right away. Hitoshi’s face is the same color as yours now. Hah.

“So Y/N is still going to be my mom?” Eri looks at Hitoshi with hopeful eyes.

Nevermind, your face is probably way more red than Hitoshi’s now. The boy looks up at his father with a questioning look and Shouta only nods; Hitoshi whispers something into the little girl’s ears and she perks up right away.

“It’s a secret though!” Hitoshi adds with a wink; Kaminari looks like he’s not even in the room anymore by the way he’s gawking at the purple haired boy after he finished talking. Hitoshi catches him in the middle of the act and winks at him with a shit eating grin on his face; Kaminari’s soul leaves his body and the boy falls on the floor with a loud thud.

“Did he really just faint?” Mina mutters while the attention goes from you two to the boy laying on the floor.

“He’s such a himbo.” Katsuki rolls his eyes but Megumi uses this opportunity to stand right in front of the blonde boy to wink at him seductively. Katsuki’s face almost catches on fire. There is a sound of explosions coming towards the boy’s clenched fists.

You two decide to use this time to sneak inside your room; you both start laughing as the door closes behind you.

“I don’t know what you think, but it was hundred percent worth it for that show.” You giggle to yourself, your face hidden in Shouta’s neck.

“Absolutely.”

~•🩶•~

“So how did Y/N end up to be your mom, Megumi?” Kirishima asks at the dinner table. Shouta tenses next to you, but only for a second; the reassuring hand on his thigh is enough for him to know you are more than okay with the conversation.

“Well, it’s not the nicest story, but I’m more than happy to share if Ma is okay with it.” Megumi looks up at you. You nod, but you do put your chopsticks down, because there is no way you can eat while she tells the story. “My blood parents were always busy.” Megumi starts up. “I’m probably not mature enough to completely understand what was going on in their heads when they had me but if I can tell you my opinion they… weren’t ready for a child. They probably never will be. Their whole life revolved around their jobs and when they had a tiny bit of spare time they preferred to party it away. I’m quite sure I was a mistake…”

“Megumi…” you retort right away, jumping into the middle of her sentence. “I told you not to say that. The fact that my sister is the shittiest mother the world has ever seen has nothing to do with you.” Your words sound a bit harsher than you expected them to be but hopefully, she gets what you are trying to say.

“I was an accident yet my parents still managed to get their shit together and be happy for me, even if it took them a few years.” Katsuki says nonchalantly. Megumi gawks at the blonde next to her. The boy shrugs, mumbling “no big deal.” Under his nose and looks at Megumi with eyes that tells her to continue the story. Megumi takes a deep breath and does just that.

“After my parents decided they can’t give up on their free time for their child they asked Y/N to take care of me while they are out. First, it was once every two weeks, then every week, then when I was around 4, it was almost every day. There were weeks when I didn’t even see them at all.” Megumi takes another deep breath. “The time went past and things got even worse. My mom couldn’t bear seeing me cry, but I was so lonely and sad, so confused by the whole thing… it all started with one slap then it continued until they came home drunk one day and she tried to hurt me right in front of Y/N.” Megumi looks up at you with nothing but gratitude in her eyes. “ She yelled at them then put all my stuff - I barely had any by the way - in one bag and left with me. They didn’t say a word about it and didn’t even ask if I’m alive…”

“Fucking shitbags.” Katsuki retorts with a face full of fury.

“Y/N took me in and didn’t even ask for any money first, down right refused to take a single penny from my parents but we struggled so much she eventually had to. Hence why I still need to talk to them when they call me just to tell me how happy they are that I’m gone.“

“Not for long.” Shouta mutters, looking right into Megumi’s eyes. You can’t help but nod; you are so close to be able to get those papers done. A few more months, maybe a year… “I had a meeting with some people who work in this area today. This case is easier than I expected. We will talk about this later. Let’s enjoy our last two days here then we can do all the paperwork when we get home. I asked a friend of mine to take your case, he’ll get you out of this by the end of the summer break.”

“Shouta, I appreciate your help but don’t give her so much hope. I don’t have enough money to guarantee I can take care of her which is stupid because I’ve been able to for the past few years now but the law is the law…” You retort a bit angrily; Megumi looks down at her feet, heartbroken. Fuck.

“I’m aware of the law and I still stand by my opinion. I wouldn’t say it if I wouldn’t be so sure.” Shouta answers with a straight, confident look. The sound of a sniffle hits your ears; Kirishima leans on Bakugou’s shoulder to hide his face there and for everyone’s surprise, the explosive blonde lets him.

“That’s so manly, goddamit. Both of you. I want to be your friend, Megumi!”

“I don’t want any of your saliva on my shirt this time, fucker.” Bakugou grumbles but he snakes his fingers into Kirishima’s un-gelled hair to soothe him. Hitoshi looks at the two boys, his hands twitching on the table; Katsuki gives him a silent nod and Hitoshi reaches out to pet Kirishima’s back. He looks like a frightened animal, bless him. Kirishima looks up at that and starts crying again.

“Toshi! You touched me! Willingly! Oh my god!”

This really must be a big thing because Shouta can’t even fake nonchalance as he gawks at his boy.

“Toshi has a hard time with affection. We couldn’t even touch him when he moved in first. Eri and Denki helped a lot with that but him reaching out for anyone else but them is a first.” Shouta mumbles to you.

“Gimme a hug you whiny stack of meat.” Hitoshi gives Kirishima an unattractive grin and it doesn’t take long to the redhead to barge into Hitoshi’s personal space to give him the tightest hug in the century. “Jesus, you are suffocating me.”

“Toshiiiii! I’m so proud of you.” Kirishima wails dramatically. Honestly, this friend group is ridiculous.

“I want a hug too!” Kaminari whines, but the gang only rolls their eyes at that.

“You are the only person who gets to hug him on a normal day, shut the fuck up and let them have their moment.” Sero reprimands. The amount of drama should be overwhelming; the room is loud and busy but somehow, it’s more soothing than annoying.

“I could get used to this, you know.” You mumble under your nose to no one in particular.

“We can come over sometimes.” Katsuki mutters with a red face. Even though he’s technically answering you he looks at Megumi instead; she smiles and nods happily at the blonde, completely over the moon.

Yeah… you could definitely get used to this.

“You’re welcome anytime. Thank you.” You smile at the boy and you can only hope he can feel that he has your blessing if he wants to approach your daughter. By the adorable blush on his frowning face, he did get the message, loud and clear.

Someone giggles right by your side; you look up at Shouta, who tries to cover his lips so no one can see him giggling like a school boy but he doesn’t do it quick enough; the teens gawk at him like this is the first time Aizawa did something so human and to be fair, it probably is.

“Tell anyone and you are all dead meat.” Aizawa snickers and while his grin isn’t the most attractive thing in the world, you still can’t help but be completely infatuated by it.

“I want someone to look at me the way Y/N looks at Sensei.” Kaminari mutters to himself.

“I don’t think my face is capable of such a thing.” Hitoshi mumbles under his nose.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I love you guys so fucking much.” You grin at the gang.

“Language.” The answer comes, yelled in unison and the whole table starts laughing like maniacs.

Life is good. So fucking good.

I know… “language”, but fuck that right now.

… Last Chapter!

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Potato ramble:

- I know, it has been 9999 years. Life got in the way, what can I say. I hope this long ass chapter helps with the pain! 😂💜

- So okay, here’s my Aizawa theory; Aizawa is a terrible sleeper but usually gets so tired after a restless night, he ends up being able to sleep in class anyway. Thank you for listening.

- I feel like Present Mic definitely has an issue with his hearing thanks to his quirk. I don’t think he’s actually deaf as there is probably some kind of protection in his ears to prevent the loss of hearing but he’s probably not the best hearing hero in the world. Katsuki also must have some issues for the same reason. He also has a lot of face-to-face fights and even a small accident can make the poor boy deaf, so.. yeah.

- Can we talk about how fucked up all these kids are? Because I want to give them all a hug. They are so broken but they still have enough strength in them to smile and do silly teeny things and I really respect that.

- I hope the next chapter won’t take as long but my life is still a mess so please be patient with me. I’m also working overtime during the Christmas period to get some money for cheeky figurines. Like this one I bought in London. Look at him. He’s perfect 😭

Likes, comments and reblogs are more than appreciated 💜

TL: @cheesenmax @bobcar1 @ginevraxrogers @garfieldthomas @venuseuripedis @mrsyixingunicorn10 @millerworld @keeri-vents @pwinglez1 @desired-realitea

[hamliet]

I think your blog is one of the best out there. Maybe becuase of this , maybe because of your awesome takes... I find it hard being in the fandom. And I wanted to share this very unpopular opinion. The more it goes on the more I wonder : how did Enji turned into this? Most of all in fandom tends to justify touya because he’s the result of Enji’s abuse. However Enji isn’t a natural born abuser. I’ve read and saw plenty: he has not manias of control. He accept easily his wife to leave him (he wanted to build an house for her and since Shoto’s accident he hadn’t forced himself on her). He wanted an heir, true and he was more neglecting (which is a form of abuse). But many time were found evidences in studies neglecting parents have issues of their own. Which can be found in their original family and / or society (if no mental illnesses are implied).

This made me wonder. I love Japanese culture , novels and society. And one of the most recurrent theme , especially some decades ago, is the high pressure people are exposed. It was and sometimes still is a nichilist model in which you die or fly and sometime you can’t hope to Rise once again when you fail. For example the concept of “you need to go at a go prek to get in a good university and find a good job” is often depict and put to extreme in many media. This inspire even books in which families are up for anything to push their children and they are under great pressure. Since Enji seems a not so bad man per se, has no mental illnesses , the only thing left is his immense obsession that must come from something. And the fact that in society a man must be successful... I think here it is.

The fact he can’t express his feeling correctly for the most of MHA , neither he can’t read them at the point of being perceived “with no compassion at all” comply the stereotype of the father with way too high standard , this can’t come from nothing. It’s not hard unreasonable thinking he was most likely pressured as much when younger , and that broke him at some point (which is a recursive theme in many others novels). This doesn’t justify him, but it might explain why he ended up like this.

But while everyone seems to be able to... forgive dabi , justifying his doings becuase of how he was raised while condamning 100% Enji. However the lingering theme of my hero’s villains is that they aren’t a monster , they’re turned into one; and society played a huge role. I don’t stand for Enji’s actions (who would) but ultimately? If all villains were broken by society at some point (being AFO the only exception for now) why can’t be him too? Broken by a society that demands from heroes to be perfect , to never be weak, even through total desperation? Society even made a joke of all might who gave his life entirely and part of his organs for Japan. Rather than only condemning Enji for his doings , much like is doing with Dabi, the spotlight should be society again.

He did wrong. Terribly wrong. and now everyone is ready to crucify him. But how society taught him better ? How society perceive heroes as humans , how far they can be weak and fails and not be blamed? Like father , like son. Touya is the result of his family , I think it should be considerated Enji was the product of a corrupted society. Which never correct itself , never tries to change... they just discard heroes and villains alike just for not being “perfect”.

Hi! Aw, thank you for your kind words <3

So, I’ll break this down a bit, because I think this discussion needs a lot of nuance. I agree society affected Enji, but I don’t quite think that a victim of society is remotely comparable to being a victim of parental abuse.

To start with, I fundamentally disagree with the notion that abusers are born, and hence don’t buy that Enji is somehow different (or better) because he wasn’t born that way.

To note, I talking specifically about physical/emotional/spiritual domestic abuse, not about sexual abuse (and I don’t wanna talk about that because it’s not relevant here, so no one send me asks about it, thanks).

Abuse is a description of an action and its affects. I’ll quote @linkspooky’s meta on Hawks last week: abuser is not a bad word, it’s not just something that bad people do. It’s an unhealthy relationship dynamic that even good people, even sympathetic people can participate in. It’d be great if we could just do a genetic test and determine if someone is an abuser (actually it wouldn’t be great; it’d be dystopian and terrifying), but that’s not how people work.

However, “abuser” is seen as a bad word, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (nuance/abuse is horrific and takes such a toll on people that I’m glad it is given serious weight in some respects, although imo it’s overemphasized in fandom places and underemphasized in real life) and I’m not getting into good/bad/pluses/minuses of linguistic connotations here.

Hence, I would actually categorize what Rei did to Shouto as abuse, and I do think the story indicates she was neglectful towards her other children. However, I have never labeled her an “abuser” because of the negative connotation as is clear she is not a repeat offender and Shouto doesn’t even blame her--he blames Enji, and I don’t think that’s an incorrect assessment either. It’s complicated. Abuse victims can be abusers at the same time as they are victims (ask many a kid of an abusive dad what their mom was like; at best if they didn’t intervene it’s usually neglectful and often people go no contact with both parents). People we love and care for can participate in abuse.

Mental illness is also complex in its relationship to abuse. Mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators, and  mental illness doesn’t make someone predisposed to being a bad person. Mental illness does affect how I see Rei’s actions, because she was clearly out of her mind at the moment she burned Shouto’s face; at the same time, mental illness doesn’t erase harm done even if the person can’t be held super culpable. Enji on the other hand was not mentally ill in the same way; he was able to think logically and separate right from wrong even within society (because society clearly still views beating your kids as bad).

It’s actually not really accurate to say that Endeavor didn’t try to control Rei and just let her go--he put her in the institution to keep her away from Shouto, which may have been motivated of course by trying to protect Shouto, but was more likely “trying to protect his masterpiece.” Rei instantly regretted what she had done; Enji didn’t show regret until after Kamino. Also, Shouto himself views it as taking their mother away, not as protecting him. In fact, he sees it as removing his protector and leaving him with just the abusive dad. Plus, Rei’s doctors probably wouldn’t have let him see her. So I absolutely do think Enji is a control freak.

For Enjii, there’s no indication of prior trauma besides just not getting what he wanted. But, as you say, I do think Enji was absolutely a product of society--culturally, though I’m not qualified to comment on that, and within the manga’s own framing of that culture. However, while Enji is a product of society, he is not framed with the child framing that is present around Touya; hence, why he’s not a victim in the same sense. He was an adult when he started doing bad things, capable of reason, as far as we know and there’s no indication this isn’t the case. He was ~20 when Dabi was born, so that means he was looking for a quirk marriage at the very latest by 19. That’s like starting your career as an administrative assistant and being pissed you’re not CEO like, a year after starting! That implies that he had a sense of entitlement at a very young age, entitled to the point of believing kids were not full people but instead extensions of himself to ignore, beat up, and cast aside as he pleased. Every aspect of Enji’s personality screams of toxic masculinity as well.

Also, almost every person who has ever done something wrong (and those who haven’t!) is a product of their environment as well as of their genetics, but I wouldn’t classify everyone as a victim--even though technically I suppose they would be, but the connotations are just not particularly fitting--and I wouldn’t call Enji one. Enji might be a product of society, but his kids are victims of a deliberate choice he had to be a terrible parent. Society sucks, but we don’t choose it and it doesn’t choose us in the same sense a parent chooses to treat their kids a particular way.  So, rather than saying Enji’s a victim of society, I think it’s more of society reaping what they’ve sown in terms of their #1 being revealed as a mass abuser; it’s karmic.

So to return to his character and Enji is also a representation of toxic masculinity--that is why for me personally, his crying this chapter  actually resonated. Like, I think it was well-framed in that his victims didn’t feel sorry for him and he cried before he knew they were coming, and while I get that people think he has no right to cry (as Rei and Natsuo said!). I see why people interpret that as manipulative, and while I absolutely think it was self-pitying, I also personally see it as human and realistic, and perhaps as a slight chipping away of the toxic masculinity that he embodies. We’ll see. I’m still no fan but that was the first moment in his redemption arc that struck me as sincere.

[lizzielikeborden]

Little JJ

Request: can you do 2 “please don’t cry” and 5 “can we stay like this forever” with jj please??

Authors note: I honestly got very creative with this one, I try to make my content as original as possible and think outside the box when writing. So please enjoy :)

4 tests, 4 different tests sat on the floor in front of you. All of which clearly were positive. Only problem with the idea of it being positive was everything else about the situation was negative. How would you tell JJ? How would you ever take care of a baby? JJ was still a child at heart, and still acted like a child. Plus he had costant night terrors from the abuse his dad gave him. He was absolutely so damaged from years of that. You had just gotten him back on his feet and happy and with a new start. Now you had a whole new situation to deal with. One that you were absolutely sure he would freak out about. You hoped he wouldn’t have the worst reaction. You especially hoped he wouldn’t leave. You had grown so incredibly close to him, he was becoming a massive part of you. And now there was something that was really apart of both of you growing in your uterus. There was nothing you could do about the situation and even if there was you couldn’t commit to doing any of those things. You didn’t have the money or parents around to get a signature for certain things. You were so lost and sad alone the floor, the hardest part was you had many questions your self. But you had no one to ask and no where to go. You sat on the cold solid ground staring at each and every one of the tests. Then you heard the screen door open and hit the wall. You heard JJ yelling your name, and he sounded scared and upset. 

“Y/N!” He knocked on your bedroom door harshly and then on the bathroom where you sat. 

You whiped tears off your face and stood up panicked about the test you put the tests in a drawer,

“I’m in here JJ.” You slowly opened the door to see him standing there. He had a gun in his hand, blood dripping down the side of his face. His eye was purple, cheek swollen, blood coming out of his mouth as well as the cut on his face. His fist was discolored and he was shaking like a leaf.

“JJ...” You stepped closer examining his poor face and embraced him into a tight hug. He pulled away and sat the gun down on a small table next to a pair of keys. He sat down and started to cry and stutter, attempting to tell you what the deal was with the blood and gun. You just hushed him and hugged his head into your stomach stroking his soft blonde hair, 

“Please don’t cry.” You kissed his hair and he pulled you down gently into his lap and kissed your face. You cupped your hands and put them on his cheeks and kissed his forehead.

He put his clunked his head up against yours and whispered,

“Can we stay like this forever?” You smiled and held his hands, and you began to break down into tears. You wrapped your arms around his neck and started crying into his neck. He moved his arms from your shoulders and placed them around your back concerned. He rubbed your back up and down, and then pressed a gentle hand to the back of your head. 

“I know it looks bad, but I didn’t kill or shoot anyone. And i’m okay, i’ve been through much worse.” You began to shake your head and lifted up off of him,

“No, JJ it’s really not that.” You reassured him, he reached up and whiped tears off your face. 

“Tell me what it is. Please?” He gave you beautiful puppy dogs eyes. 

“JJ..Go look in the bathroom drawer. 3rd one on the left.” 

“Is there like a spider in there?” He got up and began to walk in there, and you got one of his hoodies off the bed and wailed into it. 

“Y/n... are these real?” He picked them up one by one and looked at them, “Y/n?”

You didn’t even hear him, all you could hear was the pounding of your heart and white noise from the hoodie sleeves pressed against your ears. You couldn’t breath, and then you felt arms wrapped around you. 

“Hey, baby, it’s alright.” He held you close to his chest in shock, but he wasn’t completely upset. 

“It’s not. We can’t afford a baby, and we can’t even take care of ourselves.” You cried harder and harder the more reality hit you. 

“Hey we can figure it out, and you’re right we can’t take of ourselves. But we take really good care of each other all the time. We might not be able to give him or her all the most expensive things, but we can give them all the love in the world. Just so you know, I won’t find you any less atractive the more your body changes. Cause you’re smoking hot” He tried his best to give you comfort even though he was scared himself. But he knew he could never leave you. No matter what. Plus you had each other a blood promise to always stick together. And now more than ever he knew that’s what you needed. 

You smiled lightly because with those words a ton of your worries blew away in the wind. You could see the fear in his eyes, but you could also see hope. You didn’t even wanna ask your questions, because in that moment the panic stood still and all that was left was you and JJ against the world.

“You still need to tell me why the gun and blood JJ. Don’t think my surprise would trump yours.”

He let out a small chuckle and laid back down and you laid in his arms as he told the tale....

[magaprima]

Part 2 Episode 6 Analysis (4/4) i.e the horrendous final Lilith scene of the episode that causes me so much pain it’s took me ages to get around to writing about it

The scene literally starts with her vomiting, and we get the vibe that she has been vomiting for a while and this is coming to the end of it. There’s no score initially, meaning all we hear is her retching, and the lack of score just makes the scene feel as raw as Lilith’s emotions, and it’s only when she starts expressing her feelings aloud for us that the music properly cuts in.

But the fact is we have seen Lilith ‘feast on male flesh’ twice in the series already and we’ve also see her proclaim it proudly and use it as a threat (towards Blackwood). This is not something Lilith dislikes doing, and the fact she does it infrequently and refers to it as ‘feasting’ suggests she views a male flesh buffet as being a treat, it’s something she indulges in, it’s not her regular run-of-the-mill meal. And, though I hate to say it, before she knew the steak was made of Adam, she stated how delicious it was, enough for her to think Adam was an very talented chef for serving that meal. She liked the taste, Lilith truly enjoys this particular feast. The fact that she is now vomiting it all back up, that the thing she openly admitted tasted delicious is now so vile to her she is bringing it all back up, really tells you all you need to know not just about how intensely she felt about Adam, but also about how horrific this punishment was for her. The Dark Lord hasn’t just made her suffer, he hasn’t just upset, he hasn’t just broken her heart, he has made her physically sick. And that is something visceral, guttural and primal in it’s emotion.  

It’s just so heartbreaking to watch that moment, the way she throws up, and when she’s done, collapsing into her own hand. She looks absolutely brokenhearted and in that moment where she’s leaning on the toilet, crying while she covers her eyes with her hand, she looks so small, so hurt, so fragile and so utterly human. She looks so human in that moment. She could easily be the real Mary Wardwell right there if you’d just tuned in. She felt a positive human emotion in her relationship with Adam and now she is feeling a negative human emotion in her loss of him; she is feeling pure, unadulterated grief, and you can just see it’s that kind of grief where you keep going over in your head what you could have done differently to avoid it. This was not a natural death, obviously, and we also know Lilith haa the power to bring back the dead (as she did Mary), the fact she can’t with Adam suggests the Dark Lord’s killing of him, taking of his soul, perhaps, has put him far beyond her reach, meaning it’s a complete death for her. This is not a death that can be undone or fixed, it’s not even a death where she can see the soul herself, it is a permanent, complete death, done with, and it’s that that she’s grieving for as well, I think; the absoluteness of it.

She is genuinely crying here. It’s like a human cry. And I say that specifically, because up till now, we’ve mostly only ever seen Lilith behave outside of the normal human realm of emotion. She reacts differently to things (like how she’s bewildered by Adam’s kindness or how she showed no sympathy for Daniel Webster’s grief; it’s all typically different to how humans react to certain things) but here she is reacting just as any human would. She is crying, she is grieving, she is in physical pain from that grief at a loss of someone she loved; there is nothing more human than that. I mean, you would never see Lucifer have this emotion, or the Plague Kings, or even Caliban etc. But you could see Zelda reacting this way, Hilda, Sabrina etc, because they’re human (well witch-human, which is slightly different if the 13 month of pregnancy is any indication. But the point still stands). 

“I don’t understand...I don’t understand...” When she’s muttering this and trying to find a reason why Adam died, that desperation to find logic and reason in a tragedy is also so tremendously human. I think, honestly, this i why this scene hurts so much; it’s not just the loss and suffering and grief, it’s the fact we’re seeing Lilith be entirely without defence, we’re seeing the human part of her entirely, without cover. 

“How did the Dark Lord discover us?”

Discover us. She is referred to her and Adam as an us. There’s something so tragically romantic and affectionate in that. It’s not ‘how did he discover my mortal play thing?’ it’s not ‘how did he discover adam?’ it’s not even ‘how did he discover i didn’t kill him?’, it’s ‘how did he discover us?’. She is identifying her and Adam as unit, an official couple. It wasn’t Adam that was discovered, it was the both of them. They were happy, they were leaving for Tibet and they were discovered. Even though he’s dead, she’s still speaking about him through couple-language and that’s just heartbreaking. Added to the way she holds the ring and repeats that it should have hidden him....she calls herself a grieving widow in the next episode, and you can’t deny this is exactly how she sounds in this moment. The fact she’s wearing black like a funeral outfit only adds to the effect.

The only moment her sadness disappears from her expression is when she realises what happened and she looks at Stolas. And you can see how it doesn’t take her long to get to that conclusion and you know how certain she is that she’s right, and it’s the kind of certainty that comes from knowing betrayal. Lilith has known disloyalty and betrayal so much that she knows she’s right when she looks to her familiar as the culprit. 

And it’s while she’s confronting Stolas that we cut to a bird’s eye view shot (interesting pun of a choice, perhaps) and we see how Lilith is sat. She is just on the floor, in the corner, with her legs just out. There’s none of her usual grace, elegance, sensuality, sexuality, none of it. We’ve only ever seen Lilith sit the same way she stands and walks; with purpose, everything in place, utter sensual perfection, always on, never wavering....but here there’s none of that, all of that glamorous air she maintains is gone. She is utterly vulnerable and broken on the floor, with no care for how she looks. Again, it emphasises that look of humanity in her. 

“You’ve been reporting back to the Dark Lord ever since he brought you back to life, haven’t you?”

This is a really horrible thing for Lilith to realise. Her familiar, the one she has called her trusted companion, who has been with her since the very beginning and (according to the passion play) even before she met the Dark Lord himself, has chosen the Dark Lord over her. He decided loyalty to him was more important than Lilith’s happiness. It’s the ultimate betrayal; she knows Lucifer pulls some serious shit, but Stolas is meant to be someone she can rely on, someone who is loyal to her no matter what (familiars are bound to their witches, after all) and yet he is the one who brought about this utter heartbreak. And, by the way he stands on the ledge and replies to her, we presume he feels justified in his actions, that he wasn’t forthcoming with any apology. She has discovered that not only does the Dark Lord not care what she wants and decides things for her, but so does her familiar. Even her own familiar doesn’t honour her or her wishes. This is her oldest friend, they’ve been through highs and lows together, they’ve presumably fallen out and made up (I sometimes wonder if killing him has been as much a pattern as Zelda killing Hilda was) and yet when the cards were down, he chose her abuser over her, and prompted the killing of the person she loved....and then doesn’t even have remorse over it. 

It’s another loss and I think that shows when she screams and causes him to burn to ash (which, side not, is an extreme display of power. So much so that in the Part 2 trailer, they edited that moment to mislead us into thinking Sabrina made it happen as they say ‘she keeps getting stronger’ so even the writers and editors know that that is as bad ass as it’s gotten so far in the show. That moment does remind us just how freaking awesomely powerful Lilith is) and she cries again. No, actually, it’s more a wail. Because in that moment of destroying Stolas permanently, with no chance of resurrection, it’s confirmation that she has lost both Adam and Stolas in one foul swoop. It’s two deaths (though Stolas’ is more death by betrayal than by his literal death). She thought she was surrounded by people who cared about her, she probably felt her life was very full and supportive, and now suddenly there’s nothing; she’s lost the person she loved and she’s lost her oldest friend, all in the space of an hour basically. 

And then after that expulsion of loud, raw grief, Lilith turns to her natural instinct; plotting. She rallies herself, she takes strength in a plan, and I think it’s so interesting that her plan isn’t ‘kill the Dark Lord’ it isn’t even ‘Lead a coup’, it’s a plan to make him feel the pain she feels, because to Lilith, right now, that’s the worst thing you can have happen to you. She is feeling such grief and agony she can’t imagine anything worse to suffer, to feel what she’s feeling would be worse for the Dark Lord than death (though as I said above, I doubt Lucifer can feel this sort of raw emotion, as he was never human). 

“But the Dark Lord doesn’t know all. He’s not omniscient. He’s not omnipotent. Which means...he won’t see what’s coming next”

Our first hint/foreshadowy reminder that Lilith knows the Dark Lord’s weaknesses. Everyone else in the show refers to him as their God, they speak of him as knowing everything, that he’s everywhere, that he answers everyone, that you can’t hide from him etc. But we see hear that Lilith knows better, that Lilith knows he can’t see everything and that he can only be in one place at a time. She has been with him since his fall and she knows both his weaknesses and limitations. She’s able to plan around that. 

When she decides to wear Adam’s ring, not only is this her making a conscious decision not to forget him but to keep him in her mind (and her heart?), but you also see her consciously decide which finger to put it on. She could have put it on her right hand, or on her middle finger of her left hand, but she actively picks the ring finger of her left hand. The wedding finger. Lilith knows what this means, and as I said, she calls herself a widow in the next episode, and here Lilith is consciously, purposefully and willingly choosing that designation for herself. This ties into what I need to write about on a bigger post, about how she was created in the Garden and her core being in those early days, has an effect on her choices and reactions even today, because she was a wife in the very beginning, that’s how she started out, so there’s a sense of coming full circle on her own terms here, that in the Garden she was forced to be a wife, but here she’s choosing to be one, because this Adam earned it, he earned her love and mutual respect, while the first Adam didn’t. 

“He took away the one thing I loved. Now I’ll do the same to him”

The fact there is no denial here, no room for interpretation, this is full, out-and-out confirmation that she had fallen in love with Adam, which is not only impressive considering her general disdain and dislike towards mortal men, but it also shows Lilith has a huge capacity for emotion and affection and love, reminding us that she’s not simply a demoness, but something much more complicated and nuanced, and it also shows us that she’s not closed off. People can win her over, she isn’t closed in her heart or her mind, she does listen, she does consider, she’s not static in the way she is, and she can grow and change and experience new things. And I think this moment is one where she changed irrevocably, the Lilith we see from this moment on is not the same Lilith we’ve seen since Part 1. And you do see, in future episodes, how she reacts differently to situations to how she did in the beginning (for example, when Sabrina fails to tell her Lucifer is free and says ‘I had other things on her mind’ Lilith does not get hateful, she doesn’t even attack Sabrina for it, and then when Zelda turns her away, Lilith does nothing more than insult her, whereas she would have once actively plotted her downfall and/or murder). 

[makoto-nanami]

Miraculous Rewrite: Origins Part 1 (Chapter 1)

Hi, this will be my first Miraculous fan fiction, while I love the show, I most definitely have my gripes with it, how they treat their characters is something that infuriates me, and while this fic may get salty sometimes, I do love the characters, it’s just because of the status quo that the writers are instant on maintaining, they can’t grow or act sometimes completely out of character. So I’ve decided to have a try at writing a fic with my own OC in, to act as the voice of reason when Marinette starts going overboard/borderline cringy or when Adrien is a innocent baby who doesn't understand the world or when he thinks it’s okay to have a tantrum or flirt with ladybug. I’ll be following the episodes, so they won’t be too different, just told from a different perspective. Again I apologise in later chapters if I seem too have ingested a ton of salt, but know if I salt on a character I plan to resolve it at the end of the episode. I hope you enjoy!

- Also, if anyone could suggest which tags this needs because I blanked when I tagged this... (-_-’)

Origins Part 1 - Chapter 1

Many millennia ago, concepts of life were born, however, these beings realised they had too much power, a power that could easily be abused. So, they gathered to a kind human who had chosen to live in isolation from the rest of his kind and protect the world when needed, a bestowed their blessings in hopes that the human would help them. The human was confused by the seemingly god-like beings’ request, how could they trust a lowly human such as himself, a coward who turned his back on the rest of the world after witnessing the corruption such power brought to his brethren? These gods simple smiled upon this man and said you are no hero, you are no villain, you are simply an observer, a helper, someone who despite his hate to the world, chose to protect it in its time of need.

So, the man heeded their call, creating magic jewels embedding them with extraordinary blessings from these gods, the Kwami, binding them to the jewels restricting their powers. These were… the Miraculous.

Throughout history, heroes have used these jewels for the good of humanity. However, The Creator of the Miraculous realised, that two of these jewels were more powerful than the other despite his efforts of balance; the earrings of the Ladybug, which provided creation; and the ring of the Black Cat, which granted the power of destruction. The Creator knew that whoever controlled both blessings would achieve absolute power, a power that the Kwami had feared would be manipulated with malicious intent. After realising his mistake, The Creator promised that no matter what, he would observe the Miraculous, personally in their times of use, as he could not stop humanities tragedy on his own; leaving the Jewels with his disciples allowing them to distribute when humanity cried out in suffering.

However, no one can live forever without a cost. Many have tried, all of them have failed with various degrees of success. Immortality is a fickle thing. Wishing for eternal youth, cursed to never grow, burying loved ones and always begging for an end to your torment. The Creator had witnessed this, one of his many mistakes, one he most definitely wanted to learn from. So, he wished to be reincarnated, to watch the miraculous in humanities time of need. Unfortunately, souls and memories of humans are just as fickle as the body. While he would reincarnate he would inherit the life his successor, cursed to watch as the loved ones drift away, fade and die, cursed to watch with red eyes.

But that’s just a silly story my mother would tell me as a child. She would tell me how maybe I could be the next reincarnation of this strange man; I’d laugh when she would tell me that. Then suddenly out of the blue; I started having strange thoughts, dreams of another time, voices of people crying out for help. My mother, Evangeline, a woman who raised me, a woman who while not connected to me in blood, still cared for me as if her own, one day told me this story again, this time… I did not laugh, I cried. I looked at my mother; realised… she had not aged a single day since the day I had met her all those years ago, she smiled and told me I was ready. She told me of her friend who trained to protect the Miraculous and how she housed and protected him in his early days after the temple was destroyed. She then explained how it was time for me to fulfil my promise to the world and how I would be going to Paris, France to work with her friend to protect the Miraculous.

Why though? It wasn’t my responsibility; I never made any promise to the world! All I wanted to be was slightly successful, hanging out with friends and working towards achieving my dreams as a P.I! I never wanted this! But as I was on the plane to Paris, I couldn’t deny it… I felt the pull of that man’s promise; I won’t give in though, no matter what I will not be that man! I will observe but I will not change myself, I will not become him, not while I still have my dreams of friendship and life.

Once in Paris, I find myself outside of a massage shop… this looks shady. Why the hell would Eva send me to a massage parlour? Well, I need to figure out what’s going on and figure out my living accommodations, so might as well bite the bullet on this shady place.

Knock-knock.

The door opened at the force of my knock; that’s some security for world-ending jewels. I make my way into the shop and spot an old man meditating… this is just getting weirder. As I’m about to announce myself, he speaks. “Welcome, Young Creator.” He opened his eyes, widening as he took in my appearance. “Well… this was not what I was suspecting at all.” Rude. “But worry not, come and I shall explain the gaps in your memory.”

“Excuse me, but I am not that man, obviously. I am my own person, while I intend on helping him fulfil his promise… I have no intention of becoming him.”

“But…”

“I’ll help you but know that I am not him.”

He stared at me considering my words before gesturing for me to sit down. I sit as he pours green tea into cups.

“I understand. Now allow me to introduce myself, I am Wang Fu, Evangeline has told me a lot about you.”

“Likewise. However, I am a little confused about the situation here in Paris. There is no media mention of any Miraculous holders, so obviously neither the Ladybug nor Black Cat is in circulation as the powers they hold are less than subtle when used, so why am I here?”

“I see, you are correct in your deduction of the state of the Miraculous’, however, you were drawn to Paris, correct? We believe that that pull indicates humanities potential ruin. As soon as you started to have visions of the past, Evangeline contacted me, I was already here in Paris so we decided it may be best to let you settle in and learn about your role and responsibilities hopefully before the path to ruin forms. Of course, due to your age as well, we have been forced to enrol you in a local school high school.”

I blanched at this, having already graduated from a high school for the gifted where it wasn’t considered strange for children to skip grades depending on their academic standing. Great… just freaking fantastic… Fu looks at me as if looking for my opinion, I simply sigh and shrug, excepting my fate, begrudgingly.

“So… Where exactly will I be living? I mean, not to be rude or anything, but this shop/apartment isn’t exactly big.”

“Yes, my home is only so big, and I already have a littler of picky roommates. Evangeline and I have decided to let you stay at her old home while she lived in Paris many years ago. She assured me that it would be to your tastes and it isn’t too far from your new school.”

Eva’s old home? I kinda worried now, she’s the sort of person who loves antiques and old dollies, sure she grew out of it when she adopted me but if this is her ‘old’ home… It’s not exactly a place I want to be, surrounded by creepy dolls and old stuff, at least I didn’t have to pay rent… wait…

“What about money? If I live alone, won’t I have to buy food and stuff?”

“Ah yes, Evangeline told me, that while she is more than happy to supply money for food and essentials, it will be sent to an account that will record what you buy, she stressed that I tell you that money is for essentials only.”

“Sounds like Eva… did she mention anything else?”

“Oh, she told me to give you this note when you asked about money.” He hands me a small note.

-       If you want games, junk, comics/books, anything not essential… GET A JOB!

-       Love you, Eva!

Yup… that’s definitely Eva. I laugh weakly, thinking who would hire a 13-year-old kid for more than a paper-round. Suddenly a flash of green whizzed around the room, I instinctively tensed ready to defend myself but quickly feeling foolish, seeing a green Turtle like creature.

“Wayzz…” I find myself muttering, having no idea of where the name came from… perhaps one of his memories.

“Master, Master! Master, the Moth Miraculous, I felt its aura!” Wait, what?

“I thought it had been lost forever!” He lost a Miraculous?! What?!

“But Master, it’s a negative aura. I fear it may have gotten into the hands of a dark power!” Oh just great!

“We must find Nooroo and his Miraculous. If it has gotten into the wrong hands, it means the path to ruin has formed and there’s no telling what evil will come to the world!” He stands raising his fist hand to the ceiling, a green turtle shell charm bracelet reviling itself. I find myself stammering.

“Hh-hey wait a sec- “

“Time to transform! Wayzz- Hack!” He doubles over in pain. If I wasn’t so confused, I’d find this almost comical… almost. Wayzz floats over to him almost exasperated.

“Please Master. Be reasonable. You are- “

“Still young! I’m only 186.” Only?! Then again, I just found out the woman who raised me is an immortal child, so what do I know. “But you’re right, Wayzz. Young One, I can no longer do it alone, it is time… We’ll need some help.” He walks over to the gramophone and revealing a box with symbols I somehow knew all too well, a box that housed the most powerful jewels in the world, the Miraculous.

As we roam the streets of Paris, I notice a school. Other kids making their way inside, chatting about their summer vacation. I feel myself dread at the idea of enrolling during the second year, everyone already knows each other, it’s gonna feel weird, dammit. We get to a crossing and I see a short navy haired girl rush out of the bakery across the street with a box in her hands, as I am about to dismiss her from my thoughts, Fu started to walk forward acting frail and old despite the light still being red for pedestrians. “Hey, wait!”

“Uuuhhaawh?!” The girl rushed out and grabs him by the hand, taking him to the other side of the street, dropping the box in the process. The light changes and I rush over, noticing people stepping on the baked goods that fell out the box.

“Thank you, miss. Oh! What a disaster.” Yeah, I wonder who’s fault that is, old man. I pick the box up and hand her it back.

“Sorry about your macarons, he just walked into the road suddenly.”

“Don’t worry, I’m no stranger to disasters, besides, there are still a few left. Would you like one?” She said kindly, offering the box to pick one out. Fu reached out and took one before eating it.

“Mmmh. Delicious! Do you attend Françoise Dupont? My friend’s child here is enrolling today for the second-year class.” Wait, what’s he doing?

“Oh really? Welcome to Dupont then! Do you know which class you’ll be in?”

“Erm, I believe Miss Bustier’s class?”

“Same here! Would you like me to show you the way?”

“Oh no, there’s no nee- “

“Oh thank you, it’s reassuring that this little one will have such a friendly face in class.” What the hell old man!? As if reading my thoughts, he looked at me innocently. “After all, it’s normal for a child to attend the first day of school, right?” Ack… he goddamned planned this! I don’t know how but he definitely planned this! Aren’t I supposed to help you find the holders for the Miraculous, Fu? Again, he simply smiles as he looks at me. “I’ll inform you of my progress when school finishes.”

“Oh no, we’re gonna be late! Ah, have a nice day, sir! Come on!” She cries as she pulls me along. “Oh, how rude! I don’t think I’ve asked your name!”

“My name? Oh, it’s Alice.”

“Alice, eh? Nice to meet you, and I must say, what lovely red eyes you have!”

[thewhumperinwhite]

FBI AU: Intravenous

Art Knows Things, And People Need Money.

Previous: Rescue / Interrogation / Awkward / Painkillers / Father / Flashback / Visitation

TW for: hospital, needles; blood; self-harm (kind of); references to suicide and destructive behavior; dislocated joints; drugs, including IV drugs; references to self-medicating; negative self-talk; abuse of power; attempted murder; referenced minor character death.

@whumpitywhumpwhump

----

Simon has been cleared to leave the hospital for roughly twelve hours now, and he has spent eleven of those hours asleep. Then he took a shower, drank three cups of coffee, and came straight the hell back to Art’s hospital room.

He was gone for half a day; in that time Rona has let Karim Mun into Art’s room as an experiment, and Art himself has refused medication for hours and then almost died again, and Simon wants a drink so badly he can’t think straight.

“Explain it to me again,” he says to the RN, fighting very hard to keep his voice level. “How is it fucking possible that he could be hooked up to that many machines and you still not know he’d taken no painkillers in fucking six hours?”

The woman’s eyes dart toward the door, and Simon makes himself step back to give her space; even if the fuckup is hers she’s doing her best at a hard job, he doesn’t want to corner her, he’s not a monster. “S-sir— Agent Blake. Our policy is that pain-management is patient led where possible to... to reduce the risk of over-medicating—”

“Over-medicating?” Simon says, and reels himself back in, makes himself lower his voice back to reasonable inside levels. “Nurse, the kid had his leg torn out of its socket, you didn’t think it was suspicious that he hadn’t taken anything all—”

“Ma’am!” Simon recognizes the nurse calling from the hallway from the reception desk; she’s young and pretty and looks nervous as a cat, very conspicuously not looking at Simon. “There’s a call for you at the front desk,” she says, and the RN sags with relief and scurries with a perfunctory apology to Simon. Simon steps aside to let her go; if it was just a fuckup there’s nothing he can do about it.

The nurse from the reception doesn’t leave. She looks at Simon nervously, and then away, like she wants to say something. When she doesn’t, Simon sighs and moves to brush past where she’s standing in the doorway.

“I think someone paid them off,” she says very quietly when Simon passes her. Simon freezes.

“You what?” he hisses, and she looks up and down the hall, sees no one, and grabs him by the sleeve to tug him back into the empty room. “Who? How do you—”

She looks at the floor, chewing her lip. “I don’t— I don’t know for sure. But I heard one of the doctors on the phone, and— I don’t think they were supposed to hurt him, but I think someone told them to— to leave him alone, not watch him. When the other boy started yelling for help they all came running, I don’t think they meant to— to—”

Simon— can hardly see, he’s so angry. “I’m sure,” he hears himself say. “I’m sure they all thought someone wanted to sneak in to leave the key witness some flowers—”

“I don’t,” the nurse says in a small, miserable voice. “I don’t think it was— that man.”

Simon blinks, trying to clear the red fog in his head enough to see her. “What are you saying,” he says, his mouth running on autopilot.

“I— I knew the voice,” she says very quietly. “I heard the man talking on the phone. I don’t think it was the man on the news, the, the cult leader.” She finally looks up and meets Simon’s eyes. “I think it was Senator Lange.”

Simon stares at her, his ears ringing. Then he says stiffly, “Thank you,” and turns to walk out of the room.

He’s read Michael Lange’s file at least a dozen times now. He has the address memorized.

——

There was a solid year after Michael died when Art was high more than he wasn’t— when he did a lot of things with the few assets available to him, in pursuit of getting high and staying that way, that he will never, ever tell Karim, not because Karim would judge him— Karim has made it inescapably clear by now that he has terrible judgement— but because it would be too fucking humiliating.

Anyway. If you had tried, at that point, to explain to him the difference between being high because you wanted to be, and being high because you couldn’t be trusted to know your own pain threshold, he would half told you that it didn’t matter, and to pass the fucking pills.

The difference is, back then the point was not to think, and now he wants to think so bad it’s killing him, and his brain will not work because they have taken away the little hand-pump he wasn’t using and switched to injecting shit straight into his IV tube.

Which is still in his arm, by the way. He fucking hates needles.

Also he’s almost certain Karim was here, and now he isn’t, and if Karim was here when he— when his body did whatever horrible thing it seems to have done, then Karim will be upset, and at the very least Art would like to know that Karim is not being allowed to lay there stewing in guilt and self-recriminations and oh-this-is-all-my-fault-for-getting-kidnapped-and-brainwashed.

The nurse who comes to dose him this time is new, with a shaved head and a tattoo on the side of his neck that prickles something in the back of Art’s stupid drug-addled brain. Which, whatever, the previous one didn’t listen to him at all but he figures it’s worth a try.

“I don’t need anymore,” he says; he wants it to be a snap but his stupid stitch-and-bandage lips are too clumsy. “They fucking— just gave me one. Hey—” He tries to flail at the man with his non-elevated arm but the wires and tubes are too complicated to reach. “I don’t want it.”

The man looks at him, and Art stares at his eyes, the pupils blown wide and dark circles underneath. “Nobody ever does,” the man says in a blown out croaking voice, and pushes the needle into the receiver on the tube and presses the plunger all the way home.

Art looks at him, and then he raises his arm to his mouth and pulls the IV needle out with his teeth.

The sudden tear sprays a small amount of blood into his mouth and across his cheek; seeing the look of absolute shock on the face of the man who is not a nurse, Art thinks, no one’s gonna fucking believe I wasn’t trying to kill myself this time.

The man blinks, looking kind of disturbed. “Jesus,” he says. Then he pulls up the hem of his scrubs and reveals a small knife poking out of the waistband of his pants. He shakes his head. “That was fucking stupid,” he says, perhaps reasonably.

Blood and IV fluid are going everywhere, and Art can hear several different machines giving distress signals. The man who isn’t a nurse looks helplessly around at it.

“Lost... lost your window, fuckhead,” Art says thickly. "Now you're... wasting your getaway time."

The man looks at him. Presumably they are both hearing swiftly approaching footsteps.

“Fuck you, you fucking freak,” the not-nurse says, and he stabs Art in the stomach.

——

Rona is in the hall, trying to get the cute nurse to describe to her in exactly what tone Blake told her “thank you” before storming off to probably commit a felony, and then suddenly the hall is filled with women screaming. 

Rona turns, and sees a man with a shaved head barreling out of Art Lange’s hospital room, past several panicking nurses, knocking one straight to the ground. She has time to see blood on his hands and scrubs and the big tattoo on the side of his neck, and time to see the small knife in his hand, also bloody.

He’s looking over his shoulder while running. It’s very, very easy to trip him. She doesn’t even need training for that. It is useful for swinging a leg over him and pinning his arms behind his back, though. 

“Hey, does anybody fucking work here?” She snaps. There are several people hovering in doorways up and down the hall; one of them is a 6’5” guy in a labcoat that’s obviously hiding huge biceps. “You,” Rona says, pinning him with a glare. “How much can you deadlift?”

“Uh,” Dr. Muscles says, startled into compliance, “400?”

“That’s enough,” Rona says, she squeezes the tattoo-man's wrist brutally until he drops the knife onto his own back. “Come grab this guy. Hold him exactly like I show you and don’t move until I tell you.”

“What?” Dr. Muscles splutters. “Ma’am, I— I’m not—”

Rona looks up at him, watches him see her eyes and teeth. “Did it sound like I was asking?”

Dr. Muscles is heavier than Rona, so he won’t need any particular skill to hold Tattoos down, just weight; Rona installs him and then runs back and— 

They are moving Art onto a gurney; a pale-faced nurse has her hand pressed over his stomach and there is blood pumping out through her fingers. A big wad of gauze has been taped over his wrist where his IV tube should be. His eyes are squeezed shut but he is obviously very much awake.

Rona jogs next to the gurney. There will be time for— there will be time later. “Kid! Did he say anything useful?” Some of the nurses stare at her; she ignores them.

Art cracks one eye open. “No,” he croaks. Then his face breaks into a wide, shaky grin, and Rona stops; he looks like a little kid. “I think Micah is scared of me,” he says, and then she watches them wheel him down the hall.

Rona thinks Micah isn’t the only one.

[letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked]

Words On My Skin (Part 13)

Bucky Barnes X Reader Soulmate AU

A/N: Without further ado, I present to you PART 13! WOOHOO! Also, happy 2200 followers to me! You're all the best! SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG! I had a great vacation! I’m at my bff’s house, now, and we’re gunna be writing all week, so part 14 will probably be done fairly quick!

Warnings: Feels, swears, and all that shit……… Mentions of sexual abuse as a child (googling ‘childhood traumatic memories’ and all that). I do talk about it a lot in the first half of the chapter, so if this is something you can’t - or don’t want to - read about… you’ve been warned.

Main Masterlist // WOMS Masterlist

Splashing some water on your face, you sighed in relief – the major feelings coming from Bucky through the bond starting to fade. You could still feel guilt, self-loathing, and hurt… but the feelings were starting to dull into an ache, versus a sharp pain.

As if he’d accepted the feelings.

That was almost worse than the heightened emotions.

“Friday?” You called out hoarsely, after drying your face, “Is Bucky out of his meeting, yet?”

“Yes, Ms. L/n.” The AI replied, “He is in the gym. Would you like to inform him you are seeking him out?”

“No thanks, FRIDAY.” You sighed, shoulders sagging. He must be beating his frustrations out on a punching bag, again. You could go see him in the gym… but it was kind of a little too public. You wanted to have a real talk with him, not something that should be talked about in the presence of other people. You didn’t want that, and you were pretty sure Bucky wouldn’t appreciate it. “Just… let me know when he’s in his room.”

“Of course, Ms. L/n.”

You leaned against the counter, staring at your reflection. Your face was blotchy from crying, nostrils raw from wiping your nose so much, and your eyes dull. God, you looked like absolute shit. You grabbed the towel off the rack, patting your face dry. You had taken a shower already, before Bucky had arrived back at the compound, but you felt dirty, again.

It’s your damn emotions. You just feel like shit, you don’t need another shower.

Ugh, maybe you should take a bath and relax.

Looking away from your reflection, you ripped open the cabinet under the sink, so you could procure your handy first aid kit. You needed to take care of your hand before it got infected, or something. Unzipping it, you looted around until you found the liquid bandage. You ran your injured hand under some water, cleaning the cut and the area around the wound. Luckily, it wasn’t that large, but it was going to be a bitch to try and hold closed while applying the liquid.

Somehow, you managed to apply it – wincing as the stupid liquid burned against your open wound. You held the skin together, waiting for it to dry.

Okay. What to do, now?

You could get some work done, clean your room, look at random Buzzfeed articles online, scroll through social media…

You should probably look up ‘traumatic childhood memories’, or something, and get to the bottom of your weird aversion to guns... and that weird dream… or memory… whatever the hell that was.

You had the time. Why not?

Because you probably wouldn't like what you found.

With a slow exhale, you poked at the adhesive to make sure it was dry. Once it was, you left all your belongings on the bathroom counter, making a mental note to have the handkerchief that Tony gave you dry cleaned, and exited the bathroom to flop onto your bed with your laptop.

Could one just Google ‘why did I see a memory of my father’s face after shooting a gun’?

Probably not.

You stared at the little Google sign, wondering what the hell to type in the search bar. Traumatic childhood memories? Random memories resurfacing as an adult? Were they even memories? What would be so bad that you’d forget seeing your father’s face and a bunch of blood? What was so awful that it took you years to even understand that something happened?

What happened?

You started with the first one, googling ‘traumatic childhood memories’. A bunch of random articles popped up, but most of them had to do with childhood sexual abuse and dissociation. One of the articles about sleep paralysis and childhood memories talked about how, when a child is sexually abused, they could dissociate and block out the memories in order to protect themselves from pain, but the memory still could affect them. The article talked about ‘recovering’ your memory of the original experience to help with the current problem…

But your current fucking problem was that you had the damn memory in the first place.

Plus, you were pretty sure that you were never in a situation that you could’ve been sexually abused… right?

You remembered going to the cabin… but… what about specific details? You remembered getting beers for your dad and his friends, you remembered fishing by the river, you remembered the trees… and… you remembered having fun? You remembered one summer when you got stung on the arm. There was a small memory about sitting under the stars by the campfire making s'mores while your father's friends told stories about ‘the good old days’…

What about the specific summer that the memory should’ve occurred?

What summer would that be?

What the fuck? Why were you blanking on this?

You shook your head, moving on to an article about ‘Signs You’re Repressing A Negative Childhood Memory’.

Well, get straight to the point, apparently.

“‘Specific places or situations freak you out.’” You read aloud, a frown forming on your face after.

Well… yeah.

You freak out over guns, and the sound of the gunshot triggered you into a damn episode.

‘It’s difficult for you to control your emotions’… Now, that one was a toss-up. You were actually able to control yourself pretty well, in your opinion. You really only snapped if there was reason to… right?

Oh god, now you’re second guessing everything.

‘Keeping a job has always been difficult’. Nope. You were quite good at keeping jobs, actually. Next.

‘You’ve always struggled with fears of abandonment’. You had your father to thank for that one. Emotional abandonment. Next.

‘Friends often say you’re ‘acting like a child’’. Nope.

‘You always feel anxious or emotionally exhausted.’ If they had your damn life, they’d under-freaking-stand.

You clicked off the article, looking for a more professional article to read. You should’ve done that in the first place, you moron.

Wasn't the internet supposed to be helpful?

Shoving your laptop off away from you, you hopped off your bed and over to your closet in search of a specific book. The stupid DSM-5. You only called it stupid, because you hated trying to find anything in the book. It was a good reference, though it was not something you’d ever actually use. You’d just bought it for a project when you were in college.

You threw it on your bed, diving back on and readjusting your position to get comfortable.

You could look up stuff about dissociating and go from there?

You flipped through the book, looking for ‘Dissociative Disorders’ for a bit of a reference about trauma and memories. Once you found the page, almost halfway through the giant book, you started reading.

Dissociative Amnesia? Seems promising.

As you read the passage, it started to sound somewhat like what you were going through. Localized Amnesia? ‘A failure to recall events during a circumscribed period of time… is the most common form of dissociative amnesia’. That sounded close to what was going on… but it still didn’t sound completely right.

Maybe look up PTSD?

You slid your computer back towards yourself, getting back on the Google search engine.

There were a few different articles about emotional trauma and memory loss, but you were starting to become frustrated with the topic.

Maybe you should just ask your parents?

Yeah. Right.

After today’s events, your mother was likely to never speak to you, again.

“Ms. L/n,” FRIDAY startled you from your thoughts, “Mr. Barnes is back in his quarters.”

“Thanks, FRIDAY.” You sighed, laying back against the bed and flipping the book closed with your foot. “This is going to be fun.” You muttered, staring at the white ceiling.

You tilted your head, straining to see the clock on your nightstand from your awkward position.

TWELVE THIRTY IN THE MORNING?! HOW IN THE WORLD?

Apparently, your search lasted longer than you thought.

Closing your eyes for a moment, you inhaled through your nose for five seconds – holding it for a moment.

Huffing an exhale, realizing that your breathing did nothing for your growing anxiety, you rolled yourself to the side to slide off the bed.

Okay. You can do this. You jumped up and down a few times, trying to hype yourself up, before padding to the door of your room. It’s just Bucky. Even if he was mad at you, he’s your soulmate. You can talk this out.

Your door clicked shut behind you, sealing your fate. You were doing this. You were going to knock on the door.

Before you could chicken out, you knocked quickly – anxiety starting to skyrocket.

Oh god. You couldn’t do this. What could you say to him?

The door was thrown open, before you could run away in fear, and Bucky was standing there – a confused frown on his face.

He must have just showered. The ends of his long hair were damp, he was dressed in a plain tee shirt with basketball shorts, and the smell of his body wash permeated the air around you.

“Y/n?” His eyebrows pulled together, eyeing you warily, “What are you doing awake?”

“Can we… talk?” You cleared your throat, crossing your arms over your chest nervously.

He nodded, opening his door wider and granting you entrance to his bedroom. “Come on in.”

As you walked in, you were immediately surrounded by the smell of him. It was warm in his bedroom, unlike yours. The walls were the same white as your room, but – unlike your own room – the walls were basically bare. Only a television decorated the wall, looking like it was collecting dust. His bed took up a lot of space – though, it didn’t look slept in. The black bedspread was perfectly made to army standards, not a wrinkle in sight. One side of his desk was littered with paperwork, some of which you’d sent over to him, and post-it notes filled with reminders. The other half contained various guns and knives, which he looked to be in the process of sharpening. You smirked when you saw a picture frame in the corner of the desk, containing the photo of the two of you at the sushi restaurant.

“This is my favorite picture.” You murmured, tilting the frame to see the photo better.

He remained silent, continuing to stand by the door. His arms were crossed over his tee-shirt clad chest – demeanor defensive, though you could feel the guilt through the bond. His face was neutral, even though you knew exactly what he was feeling. You wanted nothing more than to run up and hug him, but you knew that it was not the best idea – after what happened in the kitchen.

You sighed, moving to his bed and sitting on the corner, wrinkling the bedspread. “I’m so sorry about what my mother said to you.” You gulped, looking down at your bare feet and trying to think of the right thing to say. “I… It wasn’t… it wasn’t right what she said.”

He scoffed, prompting you to look up from the floor. His face was scrunched up in a confused grimace, “You don’t control what she says.”

You picked at your fingernail, staring at your exposed tattoo, “I should’ve defended you more. I should’ve-”

“Wait…” He took a step towards you, feet entering your peripheral vision, “Why are you the one apologizing to me?” You glanced up at him, biting your lip in confusion as he continued, “I should be the one apologizing to you. You warned me that she was… judgmental… and I still let her get to me.”

“So… You’re not mad at me?” You asked quietly, biting your lip and not meeting his eyes.

“Darlin’…” He sighed, moving forward once more, and crouching down in front of you, “You think I’m mad at you?”

“Well… you did… kind of snap at me… and gave me a big ‘fuck you’.”

“Y/n, sweetheart, I’m not mad at you.” His voice was soft, and his hand moved to your face, gently turning it so you were looking at him. His eyes had softened, eyebrows pulled together with a look of guilt. “That little ‘fuck you’ was at your mother, regrettably. I should’ve never snapped like that.” He sighed, closing his eyes, “I should’ve never left you in the kitchen like that… I should be the one apologizing to you, not the other way around.” He took your hand, noticing the freshly dressed gash on your palm and examining it. “I am so sorry, Y/n. I’m sorry for snapping at your mom, for being rude to you, and for leaving you to clean up that mess.” He glanced up, blue regretful eyes meeting yours, “I’m sorry for letting you believe I was upset with you. I was… I was upset with myself.”

“I’m still apologizing.” Your lips lifted in a sad smile, fingers entwining with his cold, vibranium ones. “I’m sorry for, after being an asshole and ignoring you all week, I let my mother say those awful things to you.”

“I’m used to shit like that, sweetheart.”

“Well, I want you to know…” You pulled your entwined fingers to your chest, pressing your chin against the cold of the vibranium, “I don’t think anything she said is true.”

“You don’t?” He asked quietly, blue eyes shining. His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed thickly.

“No.” You replied softly, with a small smile. “I never have, and I never will.” You reached forward with your free hand, gently laying it on his bearded cheek, “I remember when you first showed up in the news reels, after The Accords. I remember how hearing what happened to you made my heart hurt.” You gulped, tears filling your eyes and blurring your vision, “It still breaks my heart.”

He leaned his head into your hand, beard scratching against the palm of your hand. “It’s in the past, darlin’.”

“That doesn’t mean that you aren’t affected by it, every day.” You sniffed, tears sliding down your cheeks, “I hate that this happened to you. I hate that people don’t understand. I hate that people like my mother say and think awful things about you.” Your eyes closed, tears continuing to streak your hot face.

You were suddenly engulfed in warmth. He had stood, arms wrapping around you and burying your head in his chest. His face pressed against the crown of your head as he whispered, “Sweetheart. Don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry.” You sniffled, wrapping your arms around his middle, breathing in his body wash and fabric softener, “I just… I don’t like that people don’t see you the way that I do.”

He stayed silent, running his hand along the top of your back, trying to comfort you. It should be the other way around, you idiot. You should be comforting him, you jackass. You pulled back, moving so your arms were wrapped around his neck, chin resting on his shoulder.

“Enough emotions for one day.” He finally responded, pulling back and standing up fully. “Scoot back on the bed.”

“Wh-what?” You raised an eyebrow, blush warming your tear-stained cheeks as you wiped the evidence away. “Why?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, sweetheart.” He snorted, moving to the desk and sheathing his knives with ease. “We’re watching the Netflix thing.”

“‘The Netflix thing’?” You snorted, scooting back so you were leaned up against the headboard, pillow behind your back. His bed was comfier than your bed. “I told you before, it’s just Netflix.”

“I knew that.” He grinned, grabbing the remote from the edge of the TV and moving to the bed, flopping down on it. “I just wanted to see that pretty smile.”

“Shut up.” You muttered, blush spreading to your neck. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“You’re in my bed, aren’t you?”

You scoffed, slapping him on the chest gently, “I thought you said you were a gentleman.”

He laughed, getting himself comfortable on the opposite side of the bed. He held the remote out to you, “Pick what you want.”

“Do you want scary, or do you want cooking shows?” You asked with a small grin, signing him in to his Netflix account, “Because we still have to watch season three of The Great British Bake Off… but I saw that The Conjuring is on Netflix.”

“What’s ‘The Conjuring’?”

“That answers that question.” You quickly flipped it on, scooting down so your head was leaned against his shoulder – as you usually where when you watched Netflix on the couch. Though, you’d never been on a bed together. The thought was… intimidating.

“Am I going to have to protect you from the imaginary demons?” He joked, moving his arm so you were tucked into his warm side, warmth seeping into your bones as you snuggled into the crook of his arm.

“I’m not that big of a baby.” You scoffed, rolling your eyes as the Annabelle doll’s face flicked across the screen. “I’m a grown woman, you know.”

“Remember when we watched that other movie? You made me walk you back to your bedroom, and you clutched at me when it was dark.”

“Okaaaay.” You cut him off, slapping him on the chest with a small chuckle, “I’m a little bit of a baby. Just shut up and watch the movie.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Part 14

--------------------------------

TAGLISTS:

Forever tags (OPEN):

@bettercallsabs @itsanerdlife @luckynumber1213 @sassyandclassyx @mrsnegan25 @impossiblepizzapeace @glitterquadricorn @pigwidgexn  @iamnothereimnotlistening @saltymaddiee @ladyxred @pabegay1 @kgbrenner @nataliehasgrace @mellorine-paprika @i-just-wanna-run-hell @igiveupicantthinkofausername @goshdarnitthatsalongname @trashimaginezblog  @ssweet-empowerment @thefridgeismybestie @wildefire @httpmcrvel @geeksareunique @whatmakesmebeme-tblr @breezy1415 @saltyy-fresh @artemis521 @usetheforce3434 @aparadoxsstuff @iamwarrenspeace @gaining-confidence-for-life @come-with-me-and-imagine @courtneychicken @impalatobakerstreet @tbetz0341 @softlysgtbarnes @castellandiangelo @churchs-little-girl @sophiealiice @jurassicjosie @punkrockhufflefluff @thatoneboredkidhelp @riseabovetheexpectations @revivedrumble @cordelia-sagewright @readeity @fuckthatfeeling @greeneyedsuccubunny @theglowstickofdestiny @krazyk99 @demonspawn2468 @randomfangirl101things @iamzion-therealhabesha @wildlingsandcoffee @the-criminal-soldier @purpstraw @daynight-dreamer-stuff @wordlesscaptain @ilovetvshowsblog @a--1--1--3 @karanliginkizilovato @pheonixfoundation @xxxunluvablexxx @ilovetvshowsblog @bojabee @supernatural-strangerthings-1980

WOMS Tags (OPEN):

@fangirlinacoffeeshopweshare @lucky-fic-recs @artemis521 @darkheartvamp @buckyflippinbarnes @sawdustandsugar @lovemarvelousfics @jadepc @importanttimemachinenerd @sebtrashcan-stan @markusstraya @redcresent @bookdragonhere @shitty-imagines-95  @901seconds @slender--spirit @loving-life-my-way @wantingtobekorra @sebastianstandoms @polarbearnamedpanda @learisa @1stladyofhell @lovemarvelousfics  @bowties-and-wallflowers @fandoms-who @writing-in-winter @bitchy-ginger-1 @vechkinfan @amidblogger @iamwhoidecidetobe @winterquicksilver @bluethingsandmagic  @ineedsleep-help @beckieandhertardis @mala-firebringer @this-is-happening  @rosep16  @lovethroughthemiles @carrietoddrick @reallyfuckingangrylatina @vxidnik @attentionseekingprincess @charlotteannvogt @marvelouspottering @buckyssxxhair @absolukeyrh @tiasun897 @youtxbemusic @viioletdelights @part-time-patronus @falloutboywifey @drinkingwhileblogging @scarecrowsragdoll @elizabeth-rose771 @unicorntrooper @avenisselina @growingupnrealizing @rainbowkisses31 @darkblueeyedperson @buckysrcse @ani808 @cutiepiemimi13 @mariekoukie6661 @embarrassinqly  @sweetboybucky @bookluver01 @yellow--springs @mad4oak  @emilylovesmusic14 @fallenaristocat @niall2017 @imfuckingnoone @classy-sassy-enjolrassy @aekr @idakohlen @tildaharoldsegna @coffee-laced-with-poison @lilmissperfectlyimperfect @wordsonapagexoxo @iamtrashsry @reddiebichie @lanavintagez @love-you-more-than-starlight @meganpringles8 @ptvrnike   @lynnskata @introverted03tiff @musicfreak180  @4-a-m  @thorslovechild @n7siha @fadingculturemuffin @stonecold-witharmheart @bucky-to-my-barnes @zombienaomi @uwu-sebastianstan @the-crime-fighting-spider @maddieisaacs @solarbarnes @adrd-n @i-know-i-can @dafnouche @adri200189 @jujurandy @angieptt @literallyjustshipping @dafnouche @bringmetoawonderland

[shadow-light19]

The Wolf of Lilac Lake: Dr. Redwood and Mr. Hyde Act 2

Summary: David unleashes Hyde and soon realizes the mistake he has made.

Notes: There is one last part to this story. It became longer than I thought so I downsized it to compensate. Also, have some more Preston and David interaction as well as more dadvid! Just in case, David is capable of partial transformation. He elongates his nails and teeth as Daniel but the audience just thinks its special effects.

Previous Chapter: https://shadow-light19.tumblr.com/post/174324549652/the-wolf-of-lilac-lake-dr-redwood-and-mr-hyde

 Songs used in this act

Better Than You from Camp Camp (Daniel’s part only)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb1Ai9-r8FA

 Confrontation from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oECK1dNbuho

 Act 2

“-ntermission! We will begin again in 10 minutes. If you have yet to visit the concession stand, please do so. All proceeds go to funding the camp. Thank you!”

Preston ducked back under the curtains. He walked past the stagehands setting up the next scene and sought out David and the trio.

“Beautiful, David! Absolutely stunning! I can just feel the disgust and distress from you.”

Max rolled his eyes.

“That’s because he is disgusted and distressed.”

He gestured to David who was sobbing and being comforted by Nikki. Preston frowned and walked over. Neil looked up at him and gestured for him to fix this.

“David? Why are you upset? You were amazing!”

David looked up from where he was sitting.

“A-All of those p-poor children! I know it’s fake but it hurts to imagine any of that happening to you kids.”

Max, Nikki, and Neil looked away. Preston patted David on the shoulder.

“Come on, David. I know it makes you sad but that’s because you have so much heart. It’s amazing to see because half of your acting is the real you! That’s why the audience loves it! Now, come on. I need you to get mean. What would you do if you ever encountered such abuse and neglect in real-life?”

David wiped his eyes. He looked at the ground before looking back up with a determined expression.

“I would make sure the kids are away from such an environment and I would give my last breath trying!”

Max, Nikki, and Neil looked at him in surprise.

“That’s right! What would you do to anyone who tried to stop you, to people who condone it?”

Preston continued to rile him up. David stood and smacked his fist into his palm.

“I would like to see anyone try to stop me! You can’t mess with me when I get hard!”

Preston raised an eyebrow at him. Max smacked his face with his hand and Nikki and Neil started snickering.

“Oh-kay… I can work with that! Now get ready, David, because I want you to funnel that emotion into the next act!”

David marched to the stage.

“Don’t forget to partially transform when you become Hyde!”

Preston called out before turning to the trio.

“You guys did astoundingly as well! You all are great singers but Max, I am especially impressed with you. The father-son dynamic you and David have going is so natural.”

Max raised a brow at Preston.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Preston smiled and held a hand to his heart.

“There’s something about the way you two interact that can’t be faked. I don’t know what it is but if I didn’t know you two, I would’ve assumed you were family.”

Max glared at Preston.

“That has to be the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. Get away from me before I choke you with the cords for the stage lights for even suggesting that David and I could along like that.”

Preston shrugged his shoulders and went back to the stage to announce the next act.

“EVERYONE! Get to your places! We are beginning the next act!”

He walked back to the side of the stage.  David looked at him and he gave a thumbs up. Preston returned it before signaling for Nurf to dim the lights.

 *Evening in the laboratory

David looked at his notebook that contained another set of observations on Cassandra. She had come in with a broken wrist. The bruises on it looked like a hand. He could see that she was uncomfortable around her Aunt, who had brought her in today. David figured she was responsible but he needed more proof. The kids were hanging out in the living room, already fed and relaxing before bedtime. David had gone down to the lab to test the serum.

“Hey, little guy.” He grabbed the cage that had the mouse he had saved.

He tested the serum on it. David slipped a picture of a cat into the cage. The mouse ignored it.

Perfect. Next up.

He took a second serum and gave that to the mouse as well. When he slipped in another picture of a cat, it fled to the corner of the cage.

I think it works. Seems safe at least.

He grabbed the two serums and pocketed them. Then he walked out into the town.

*Night outside the Midler Residence

David pulled out the first serum as he approached the house.

If God, can’t stop them, I will.

He drank the serum. His convulsed as his hair turned bleach blond, his clothes turned white, his teeth sharpened into long canines, his fingernails became sharp claws, and his green eyes became icy blue.

“Well, well, well.” He looked at himself under the moonlight.

“This worked better than I hoped. Now, let's go find Alison’s father. I’d say he’s escaped justice for far too long.”

Daniel picked the lock. He silently pushed the door open and looked around.

 *Inside the Midler’s residence

He found the master bedroom and walked inside. Midler and his wife were asleep. Daniel unsheathed his knife, a long-crooked thing, and approached the man. The man shifted and woke up to the sound of footsteps. He screeched but Daniel muffled him with the blanket. The wife quickly woke up and huddled in the corner of the room.

“Good evening Mr. Midler. How does it feel to feel the same fear that your daughter, Alison, felt before you killed her?”

Midler sputtered and shoved Daniel’s hands off of him.

“Now listen you, I don’t know what’s going on but that was a freak accident! The stupid brat injured herself. Now get out of my house before I call the police!”

Daniel cut the cord to the phone that was by the bedside table.

“Oh-ho, sir. I must say I don’t take kindly to liars. All that negative emotion your releasing is poisoning the good people around us. It poisoned you, it poisoned your wife, and it poisoned your daughter.”

Midler backed up until he fell off the bed, then continued backing up until he was against the wall. He looked down at the knife in Daniel’s hand then back to the madly-grinning man.

“What are you going to do to me?”

Daniel spun the knife in his hand and cracked his head almost completely horizontally.

“I’m going to rid this world of your poisonous filth. You’ll never taint the purity of others around you EVER again.”

Midler shivered at his drawl.

“It wasn’t my fault! She made me do it! That piece of shit disobeyed me!”

Daniel tsked at him.

“You really are a monster. What a shame I couldn’t save that poor child.”

Midler bristled.

“You’re the monster! Breaking into my house, threatening me, torturing me like this!”

Daniel whipped the knife up the Midler’s neck. He pressed firmly enough to draw blood but not enough to kill.

“Sure, I am a monster by your standards but I’m just doing Zemoog’s work. Who’s the better man? The man who killed his daughter or the man who killed a murderer?”

Midler spat in Daniel’s face. Daniel let out a snarl of disgust before breathing deeply to calm himself down.

“You won’t get away with it, freak!”

Daniel let the pressure of his knife slacken. His chuckled slightly before it morphed into a loud cackle.

“Oh, you filthy, pathetic cretin.”

He caressed Midler’s cheek.

“You seem impressed by all your lies,

But I don’t find them that compelling.

You left her to her own demise,

And well, I think that’s pretty telling.”

Midler shoved Daniel away and lunged to attack him but Daniel side-stepped and tripped him. Midler landed heavily on the floor.

“And while we’re on the subject of,

How it all went from push to shove,

You, ought to know your you’ll pay your due.”

He pulled the man to his knees by his collar and got in his face.

“I know that might be hard to swallow.

This won’t take long and then I’ll leave.

You’re gonna die and soon this town will know what,

Child abusers will receive.”

He threw the man against the wall. He hit it forcefully. The man groaned and raised a hand to his head.

“You’ve been outdone,

Now you see who really won,

But it was fun.

Your end’s begun, and

Soon they’ll know I’m better than you!”

Daniel grabbed his collar and slammed him to the ground. He slashed his throat and stabbed the man multiple times, smiling as blood sprayed everywhere and the man gurgled a scream.

“And I’ll prove it to them too!

I’ll cut you up so gruesomely,

And then they’ll know that it was me.

You’ll rot in hell where you belong,

And join the screaming, writhing, throng,

Of sinners where justice is done.”

The man stopped struggling. His eyes stared sightlessly off ahead, wide in fear. Daniel cleaned the knife on the man’s shirt and sheathed it.

“They’ll know I’m better than you.”

The wife sobbed in the corner. Daniel turned his attention to her. She flinched.

“Now dear, don’t be afraid.” Daniel crouched in front of her.

“I know you had nothing to do with her death. This had to be done.”

The woman stopped sobbing but didn’t stop shaking.

“Did you know that you can be purified? Cleansed of your sins and the taint of negative emotions that surround you? What if I told you the world didn’t have to be so cruel and unforgiving?”

 *Afternoon at the clinic

David was preparing a room for his next patient with the radio on.

“The latest on the news is the recently discovered death of Joshua Midler, the principle of Sleepy Peak Elementary. The man was discovered brutally murdered this morning in his own home. Police on the scene could not find any information on this assailant. Barbara Midler was found huddled in the corner, dressed completely in white, while smiling and mumbling about purity and negative emotions. At the moment the police do not consider her to be a suspect. She has been released from police custody and allowed to return home to aid in her recovery from this traumatic event. Her daughter Alison Midler died two days ago from an accident. Barbara Midler is the last surviving member of her family.”

David turned the radio off.

It looks like my serum worked a little too well. I hope Barbara is alright. It sounds like she was traumatized.

David heard the bell ring for the clinic door and turned to see his newest patient, Harrison.

“Good afternoon, Harrison, Mr. Sanders.”

He saw Marshall enter with his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“Good morning, Dr. Redwood! How are you today?”

David smiled.

“Please, call me David! I’m doing well thank you. If you will step right this way, I’ll give you a checkup. Do you want your father to come in with you, Harrison?”

Harrison nodded.

“Okay, right this way then.”

David led them to the room he prepared and sat Harrison down on the chair. He gave him a quick check-up, noted down the healing bruises and cuts on his arms and back, and used his stethoscope to listen to his breathing.

“You’re breathing seems a little irregular, Harrison. Does it hurt to breathe deeply?”

Harrison tried to breathe deeper but he winced. David wrote that down as well.

“I got punched by a bully at school yesterday,” Harrison admitted shyly.

David went and grabbed a bottle of children’s Tylenol.

“I want you to take this if it becomes too painful, alright? Follow the directions I’ve written here for you. Other than that you’re good to go.”

They thanked him and left. David looked over his notes.

Too many cuts to be clumsy. I’d say some were intentionally made. Some bruises were varied in shape as though hit by different objects. I’d say maybe something blunt since there were rarely any cuts on the bruises. Maybe it really is a bully? I’ll ask Max when he gets home.

David sighed and locked up the clinic.

 *Evening in the house

David set his keys by the door and started on dinner. Neil was spending the night at his mother’s house today so he set the table for three.

“Hey, Dad! We’re home!”

David knelt down with his arms out. Nikki and Max ran up to him and hugged him. He guided them into the kitchen and brought them a snack.

“How was your guys’ day?” David asked.

Nikki started rambling about something funny that happened in math class. David listened as she talked and laughed when the story was over.

“And you, son?”

Max started working on his homework.

“Nothing really special happened today. Harrison left class early though.”

David nodded.

“He had an appointment with me today. That reminds me, does Harrison get bullied?”

Max looked surprised but nodded.

“Yeah but Nurf hasn’t been at school this week. He caught the flu.”

David frowned.

Okay, so Harrison lied to me. But why? Maybe there is more truth to the abuse case than I thought.

David helped the kids with their homework and once it was night time again, headed down into the lab. He pulled out a binder with the file on Cassandra in it and added his file on Harrison to it.

Two kids who are likely being abused. I’ll take care of Harrison’s father tonight since I have proof.

David grabbed another pair of serums and left the laboratory.

 *Afternoon of the next day in the house

David didn’t have many patients today and welcomed the relief of finishing work early. He wanted to hear the news to know what happened last night.

“There is belief that we have a serial killer in Sleepy Peak. Police are on high alert for a blond man that was seen leaving the Hayes’ residence last night. When police arrived, the aunt was brutally murdered and the daughter Cassandra Hayes was dead. It seemed she died by drinking juice containing rat poison. Cassandra did show signs of child abuse and the parents exhibited similar symptoms to Barbara Midler. Both we dressed completely in white and going on about negative emotions and purifying the innocent so that they may be saved. The man also visited the Sanders’ residence last night. Harrison Sanders was found dead by the same method as Cassandra and his father was brutally murdered. Harrison also showed signs of abuse.

In other news, there is a new religion rising in the town-”

David covered his mouth with his hand.

That isn’t what I wanted! Why are the kids dying?! Why did I visit Cassandra’s house too?!

“Because they needed to be saved!”

David froze.

Why did I just say that?

The strange feeling came over him again.

“If I didn’t save them, they would’ve continued to bathe in a negative rich environment all their lives until they died as tainted as the people who hurt them.”

David was paralyzed in terror. He ran into his bedroom where he saw his appearance on his full-body mirror. He was conscious this time as Daniel took over the body and David saw his other form fully in the mirror. He changed back to David.

“This is insane! What’s going on? I’m not supposed to be able to change without the serum!”

“Oh, my poor David. You really don’t realize? I’m getting stronger. Soon, I will control you and continue my God’s work!”

David snarled.

“You murdered children! I only wanted to kill those who were absolutely guilty but escaped justice!”

He tugged his hair with his hands.

“I never wanted this!”

“Yes, you did. Face it! What better way to save children, than to make sure they can never be hurt again? Zemoog will protect them. They have been saved from the negative emotions that clog this wretched world. We are down here suffering and clawing our way through the darkness of life. This is no life for innocent children! That’s why some people hurt them. They know how clean and pure children are and want that respite for themselves.” David clenched his hands into fists.

“What madness are you talking about, you monster! None of what you say makes any sense to me!”

Daniel smiled and cracked his neck.

“What a mean thing to say to yourself, David. After all, you are the one who created me remember? Daniel Hyde is your disguise! You wanted to murder those people, I just went through with your desires.”

David ran down to the lab and drank the second serum. He was terrified and panting harshly. He created and drank the second serum one more time to make sure it counteracted the effects of the one that created Daniel.

Never again will I take the serum. I do not like what I have become.

He dumped the serums together and then poured them down the drain. He took the recipe he created for the first serum and burned it.

Let this be the end.

 *Next night at the Laboratory

David finally calmed down. All day he worried about Daniel somehow getting out but nothing ever happened. David sighed and bent over his desk, hands in his hair. He was thankful this whole mess was over. Max, Nikki, and Neil were suspicious that something had been upsetting him and had done their best to cheer him up. He smiled as he thought of his precious kids. However, he didn’t want them to ever find out how low he had fallen.

All I heard on the news today was the continued investigation into Daniel’s murders and about some new religion that seems to parallel the beliefs that Daniel spouted.

David sighed and looks at the newspaper front lining the murders.

I never wanted those poor kids to die. My twisted sense of justice has caused so much pain and suffering… but now…

”It’s over now I know inside,

No one will ever know,

The sorry tale of Daniel Hyde,

And those who died…

No one must ever know.”

He closed the notebook and left it on the desk. He made his way over to the mouse in the cage. The little creature ran up to him and nuzzled his hand.

“They only see the tragedy.

They’d not see my intent.

The shadow of his evil,

Would forever kill,

The good that I had meant.”

He turned to his desk and picked up a photo of him and Max.

“Am I a good man?

Am I a madman?”

He hugged the photo close.

“It’s such a fine line

Between a good man and a…”

“Do you really think?

That I would ever let you go?”

David jumped.

No, but I-!

“Do you really think I’d ever set you free?”

David whirled around and ran to a bookshelf by the stairs. He tossed items aside as he looked through a drawer for a mirror.

“If you do I’m sad to say,

It simply isn’t so.

You will never get away from me!”

David gave up and slammed it shut.

He turned to his left and stomped to the center of the room.

“All that you are is a face in the mirror!

I close my eyes and you’ll disappear!”

He felt the change take over and suddenly his body was facing the right.

“I’m what you face when you face in the mirror!

Long as you live I will still be here!

David grasped control again and rushed to his desk. He started writing own ways to get rid of Daniel.

“All that you are is the end of a nightmare!

All that you are is a dying scream!

After tonight, I shall end this demon’s dream!”

Daniel resumed control and picked the book off the desk.

“This is not a dream my friend, and it will never end.

This one is the nightmare that goes on!”

He ripped the page out and shredded it.

“I am here to stay no matter what you may pretend,

And I’ll flourish long after you’re gone!”

David snarled and snatched control back. He plopped the book down and started writing on a new page.

“Soon you will die and my memory will hide you! You cannot choose but to lose control!”

“You can’t control me I live deep inside you!

Each day you’ll feel me devour your soul.”

David started grabbing chemicals and pouring them in beakers.

“I don’t need you to survive as you need me!

I’ll become whole as you dance with death!

And I’ll rejoice as you breathe your final breath!”

He felt Daniel hurl his consciousness from control.

“I’ll live inside you forever!”

“No!”

David tried to gain control again.

“With Zemoog himself by my side!”

“Nooo!”

David could feel his strength fading. He tried with all his might to grasp control.

“And I know that now and forever,

They’ll never be able to separate Redwood from Hyde!”

David felt relief as he took over his body once again.

“Can’t you see it’s over now!

It’s time to die!”

He added the last ingredient to the solution. He backed away from the desk and gripped his head as Daniel forced his control again.

“No, not I! Only you!”

David felt a strong rush of fear. He didn’t have the mental strength to regain his body.

“If I die, you’ll die too!”

“You’ll die in me, I’ll BE you!”

If David could cry, he would.

“Damn, you Hyde! Leave me be!”

“Can’t you see? You are me!”

“No deep inside-“

“I am you! You are Hyde!”

“No, never!”

“Yes, forever!”

Daniel walked out of the lab.

“God damn you, Hyde! When I get my chance, I will end you!”

He threw the front door open and stalked out into the town.

“You will never break through. Ha-ha-ha… Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

[amorluzymelodia]

Supernatural Storytime

In November of 2017 I went to the Supernatural convention in Honolulu Hawaii. It was my “treat yourself” trip for the next 10 years because, let’s be real I’m a broke college student who can barely afford rent so saving for a trip to Hawaii took me a long f*cking time. It was my fourth Supernatural convention so I knew what to expect and I’d met the cast before so I wasn’t all that starstruck—still a fair amount but hey…can you blame me? The weekend was absolutely incredible, more than I could’ve hoped for. There were a few reasons for that, but I’m going to share one moment in particular that will stay with me forever.

One thing I was looking forward to all weekend was showing Jared Padalecki my anti-possession tattoo. I got it as a sort of reward to myself after I’d been clean from self-harm (specifically cutting) for six months. Jared’s openness with his own mental health struggles and the Always Keep Fighting campaign were a huge part in helping me overcome my own self-deprecating tendencies so the tattoo seemed significant. It serves a reminder of what I’ve overcome, and a boost of confidence that I can continue to keep clean. Not to mention it looks pretty freaking awesome! So, I got the tattoo on top of my self-harm scars on my left forearm and wanted to show Jared when I got my autograph.

 I didn’t expect anything, truly. I just wanted to show Jared my tattoo and let him know how much he and the AKF campaign had helped me. I know stories like mine can be draining to hear and when he’s talking to so many fans in one day I didn’t want to add any more negativity on him ya know? And honestly, I didn’t even bring up the tattoo, but I was wearing short sleeves and when I handed him my hat to sign he noticed my tattoo. He asked me if it was real and I told him it was. He then noticed the self-harm scars that the tattoo is placed on top of. From there our conversation went something like this.

 Jared: “Are those what I think they are?” *indicating the scars*

 Me: “Yeah, they are, but thanks to you and the AKF movement I’ve been clean since I got the tattoo.”

 Jared: “That’s great! How long have you been clean?”

 Me: “Going on two years now.”

 Jared: “Two years?”

 Me: *nods*

 At this point Jared doesn’t say anything, he just runs his fingers lightly over my arm, over the scars and the tattoo, almost like he was in awe of it. I mentioned how much he, and AKF has helped me stay clean and that the tattoo is a reminder of what I’ve overcome.

 Jared then stood up, leaned over the table and kissed me. Granted, he kissed me on the cheek but still, I didn’t expect a handshake let alone a kiss! He hugged me real tight and pulled back, put his hand on my chin and said “You have a strength I will never know. I’m so incredibly proud of you and you inspire me.”

 CUE THE INTERNAL SCREAMING!

 My own family—blood family that is—didn’t react like that when I told them I’d been clean for two years! And this complete stranger was nearly moved to tears by my story! He took the time to listen to me, let me know I’m loved and show he actually cared! I pride myself on being pretty calm and collected when meeting celebrities, but I won’t lie, I started crying when he hugged me again, and told me to Always Keep Fighting. It touched me to know that he is just as inspired by us as we are by him.

 I know there are many stories like mine. I mean Jared is known for being kind and open and empathetic, but coming from someone who was abused for most of her life, I didn’t expect anything more than a “Good for you!” so getting this experience was unexpected, incredible and unforgettable.

 I doubt Jared will ever see this post, will even remember me, but I just wanted to share my experience because it meant so much. This man is an actor on a television show, and I am a fan, and yet he took the time to look into my eyes, hear my story, and connect with me on a level I never expected. It could’ve been so easy for him to brush it off, tell me something offhand about how he’s proud of me and that could be it, but he made me feel heard, validated and empowered.

 I won’t say Jared saved my life, or even that the AKF movement or Supernatural did, because it isn’t true. But, what all of those things did for me was give me the courage to stand up, face my demons and fight. I was plagued by abuse, self-harm, depression and suicidal thoughts for years. One of those things alone is enough to cripple anyone, but all together it seemed like a mountain I could never overcome. But I did. I can’t really put into words what AKF did for me but I’m going to try so bear with me…and had I been less caught off-guard and more coherent this is what I would have liked to tell Jared in that moment.

 “Jared, and the Always Keep Fighting movement helped me realize that the strength I so desperately longed for wasn’t something an outward source could provide. It was and is something I need to find within myself. AKF did not provide me with the strength I needed. What it did was show me that I was always strong enough, I just needed a reminder.”

 To anyone struggling with anything I listed above, or any other mental health issue, please know you are not alone. You are heard and loved and stronger than you think. If I can take anything from my experience with Jared in Hawaii it is that there is so much good in the world and I strive to show the love Jared showed me to those around me.

 Please, take care of each other, take care of yourself, and above all…Always Keep Fighting.

 Abby

[activatingaggro]

It's been a couple of days, but I totally missed people reblogging memes, so: B, C, H, K, and S?

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

Enemies-to-lovers! Enemies-to-friends. Anything that hugely and dramatically changes CR.

Friends to enemies is a huge favourite, but only if they kiss. Sorry.

“These two characters are romantically inclined, but not admitting it, and oh no, now they have to share a bed / pretend to be married / publicly flirt or make-out, and O O P S, FEELINGS.”

This only never appears on tumblr because I’m classy. You’re welcome.

Platonic soulmates! Or those sitches where characters just click, instantly, with someone that they really, really, /really/ should fucking not have. I want the drama, the self-loathing, the spirals of mutual distress, because you just fell in love with the spy you’re supposed to capture and you’re still going to shoot him in the face, rifp.

Blood swaps. I don’t do magic anons, but please let it be known that I absolutely would write a long, massive thread with either of the birdrails having to successfully impersonate seadwellers, or with another character having to pretend to be a wildly different caste. I want the cultural shock, the privilege gain/loss, the struggle of looking in the mirror and seeing something totally wrong - or delightfully right, per society’s standards of behaviours - and the intricacies of caste behaviour.

“You’re incredibly important to me, but now I’m going to have to betray you, because MORALS.” Or vice-versa! Any situation where a character’s morals come up against their preferences, basically, and morals win out, and everyone has to deal with the backlash. GIVE ME CHARACTERS STANDING BY THEIR CONVICTIONS AND PAYING THE PRICE.

H: How would you describe your style?

HOW GROUCHY AM I TODAY IN DESCRIBING THIS is the real question. uwu

I put a lot of focus on narrative, and a lot of focus on minor details! I like to note what characters are paying attention to, and letting it (hopefully) say something about themselves: ID rarely notices people’s appearances unless they’re violet, or unless it’s in his face, and he misses a lot of details period. Sipara is constantly assessing if she can kill someone, and how. Riccin is constantly speculating on what quadrant they can fit someone in. Pheres is constantly assessing if he’s about to get killed.

My main focus while writing narratives is ensuring that you can strip all the names and still, hopefully, tell which character is telling the story! This is in roleplay. In writing, I try to put a lot more focus on the actual scenes, and a lot less focus on the narrative: my absolute ideal of style, for individual stuff, has to be WATCH THE ROOTS by Lionpyh, or pretty much any story of Isozyme’s.

Individual stuff where the focus is on a story rather than the characters, I really like crisp, clipped lines, and in roleplay stuff, I like longer, narrative-focused ones.

K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with?

Back when Pheres had gills as his default: he gets found out by a seadweller who collects mutants, and yanked into her collection, so he starts off a long-haul plan to escape that involves wooing her flush, but accidentally ends up genuinely falling for his own ploy in a fucked up stockholmian sitch. So Sipara finally manages to yank enough strings to get the info to come and rescue him, a year or so in, murders her way through the facility, collects Pheres -

- and he’s a mess, because oh, no, don’t kill her! She can be fixed! Don’t, don’t don’t -

And Sipara kills her, anyway, and they have a pile in the middle of this awful, bloody facility, and everything is terrible, and everyone is crying, and I think it eventually results in an incredibly ace, weird blur of , where the two of them dissolve into even harder codependence then they started off the blog with.

I have art of this somewhere on this blog, actually!

B: Any of your stories inspired by personal experience?

Pheres is directly inspired by the fact my definitive memories of my teenage years included a lot of my friends being exploited/harmed by significantly older men at 13-18 under the guise of ~*relationships*~, and our flailing attempts to figure out how to navigate romance/relationships in a context that was defined by that kind of abusive fuckery.

Pheres is subsequently a trashfire in a way that’s meant to examine and prod at that in a different context! How do these situations happen and exist in Alternian contexts? And if the foundation upon which you’ve learned to build relationships was fucked up from the get-go, how does that affect you as you grow older, and how do you learn to fix it?

And a lot of Pheres’s general encounters with his customers reflect negative experiences that I have had with folks, or that my friends have had with people, just amped up to fit the Alternian context. Someone who’s previously been civil getting in your face shrieking because WAS THAT DISRESPECTFUL, ARE YOU BEING UPPITY – gets twisted into a customer shanking him over something equally minor.

C: What character do you identify with most?

I deliberately don’t really identify with most of my characters, haha. It’s part of my IC-OOC barrier: I love them, and I love writing them, but the majority are morally incompatible with my own viewpoints, or have done horrific shit that can’t be overlooked in the name of identification.

With that said, the specific traits I put in that I hook onto the most:

ID’s general ennui towards strong emotions is something I relate to! ID finds it detrimental to himself, at points, and gets delighted over having strong emotions on the rare instances it happens - I, on the other hand, am just thoroughly disinclined towards them completely when it comes to myself. HARD LOGIC ONLY.

Which has led to interesting character gaps between my portrayal of ID and others perceptions of him, I think? I personally view his largest flaws as his lack of empathy and his history of fucking over everyone around him on a whim - a lot of people view one of his largest flaws as not emotionally connecting to his romantic partners. Different writers view different aspects of a character as relatable, and it’s neat to see.

Sipara’s temper issues! She’s got a (physical) parallel of my anger issues from when I was a baby, and the same levels of “I MUST CONTROL EVERYTHING”. She’s totally a feral goblin of a hellchild, but I find it #relatable, even while I’m like “yeah, girl’s batshit”.

Pheres’s general control freak issues, and his inability to disengage from people that he really should, because what if they feel bad? =:( Also, his general desire to take responsibility over everyone and shove them into his nest to be mothered, lbr here.

Riccin’s desire to just roll with the fucking blows when it comes to their interpersonal relationships.This has come up with Orivar, it’s come up with Videle, it’s come up with Gliese - if you push them, they’ll fold, because their focus tends to be more on “keep the peace” with friends and quads, moreso than “keep my own personal interests in mind”.

[lunzmoonliteteaparty]

*Mini Story* The Haunted Hospital {One I came up with} On Halloween ice cold and windy night a group of college students stands outside of Bludsteined Hospital. The group leader, Jason, turns and looks at his three friends. Will stands holding his camera equipment. One of those large cameras that sets on your shoulders almost like what the news people use. Jason and will have been friends since second grade so he knows Will is very trustworthy. Then there is Ami and Hellen. Both girls hold different types of cameras to record any supernatural events legends said in the hospital. Ami uses a special night vision camera to record the outside of the building. Hellen messes with her infrared camera, making sure everything is working right. "Alright. Let's get started on this. Ami and Hellen, you guys will take the North and West wings. Where they had the medical experiments and the morgue. Will and I will explore the East and South wings along with the tunnels underground." Jason takes his bag and hands out walkie-talkies. "Use these to keep in check with everyone. Don't separate okay?" He explains while pulling out his bag from the car. "Yeah, yeah." Ami rolls her eyes and takes her walkie. "You know all of this legend stuff is a bunch of bullshit." Will scoffs annoyed at Ami. Hellen looks at her a bit freaked out. "Girl are you serious? Don't you remember 12 years ago when they found the remains of that one girl? She had bite marks all over her and parts of her limbs were bitten off. BITTEN! There's like some kind of demonic thing in there eating people!" Hellen exclaims. Rolling her eyes again Ami gets on her phone and starts texting. Jason clears his throat at her. "Ahem." Ami looks up catching his attention. "Ami, this is a project we all agreed on. Now please get off that phone and participate. Or you can leave. Up to you." He threatens her. Ami rolls her eyes again and puts her phone in her pocket. "Just a load a bullshit." She mumbles to herself. Ignoring her remark, Jason pries open the front door and steps inside. Will and the two girls follow behind him. "Okay Will. Right here would be a good spot." He stands in the middle of the lobby. The hospital is completely run down. Covered in many spider webs and dust from neglect. Black mold covers the walls from the many years of rain and moister seeping in. A haunting atmosphere sets uneasy feelings in the group. Will faces Jason and starts recording. "We're here in Bludsteined Hospital on Halloween night. A brutal and unforgiving hospital that says holds too many horrible memories of abuse and neglect. Built in the 50's, this hospital held over 1,500 patients. Patients struggling with mental illnesses. Completely understaffed many patients were neglected and abused. Doctors experimented on these poor innocent people. Many died and hardly any got better. The only escape from this hell was on a stretcher to the morgue. Now we're here to see if we can find any paranormal or leftovers from the horrific past." Jason narrates. Will gives him the thumbs up and stops recording. "Oh, my gosh Jason. Are you for real? That was one of the most cringy narration ever." Ami scoffs and continues on her phone. Jason pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. "Ami, just go up the stairs over there with Hellen and get started. Don't forget to do some EVP sessions. And check with us every half hour." He orders. Hellen nods and starts walking to the stairs. Ami follows still texting on her phone. "I swear that phone will be the death of her." Will finally speaks out as the girls leave out of sight. Jason chuckles and points to a doorway. "We can go through there to get started." He starts walking and Will follows soon after. They go into a room at the top of the stairs. "Alright start recording," Jason suggests. Will starts recording as Jason pulls out a notepad with a pen and an Ouija board with a wooden cursor. "We are here in room 743 where most of the experiments took place. There are rumors that there is a dark shadow man that walks through here. So we're going to use this Ouija board to hopefully communicate whatever is here." Jason also pulls out a few candles and lights them for a creepy effect. Placing his fingers on the cursor he starts calling out. "Hello. My name is Jason. Is anyone here?" The cursor moves to the 'hello' word. Jason looks at the camera in shock. "Already got a response. And I'm barely touching it." He looks back at the board. "What is your name?" He questions. The cursor moves to the following letters quickly which Jason writes down after each one. "H...e...n...r...y. So your name is Henry. We're you a patient here?" It moves to the 'no' word. "Okay. What were you here?" It then spells out "d...o...c...t...o...r. Doctor?" The candles flicker out all at once and Will looks around scared. "Dude! It just got really cold in here. Like more freezing than outside." He admits to Jason out of fear. Jason looks at Will with terror in his eyes. "I feel something really negative here." The candles relight by themselves and the board is covered in blood. Jason and Will jump up. "Oh shit! What the fuck?!" He yells out. "Are you serious?! Where the fuck did the blood come from?!" Will exclaims showing absolute fear. "Will...the blood spells out 'evil here'!" Jason points out. Will facing Jason sees a dark shadow mass appear in the doorway behind him. "Jason...turn around!" Will warns. As soon as Jason turns around the mass grows glowing red eyes and opens its mouth showing hundreds of needle-pointed teeth and gives out a high pitch screech that sends both boys in a huge panic. "Run! Run!" Jason yells and takes off running down the hall with Will right behind him. Both of them run, with the mass right behind them, not paying attention where they're going turn down a hallway to the right. Another right. Then they turn to the left and go into a bathroom, quickly shutting the door behind them. The mass bangs on the door and yells but the boys don't budge. "What the fuck was that?!" Jason yells into the camera. --Hellen and Ami-- The girls walk into the West Wing part of the hospital. They see many empty and dusty gurneys against the walls and in the rooms. Along with rusted spiderweb infested medical equipment that has been neglected for decades. Hellen records as they walk around. "This must be the morgue. Where they took care of their dead." She explains. Ami rolls her eyes as she uses her camera. "Oh yeah? Do you have any other 'spooky tales' to talk about?" Ami asks as she walks into the embalming room. "Just a lot of people came through here. I read at one point they were so backed up some bodies had to stay on the floor for weeks at a time rotting because they had no more gurneys to spare." She narrates. Hellen looks up at her in horror. "Are you serious? It was that bad here?" Ami nods with a sigh. "Yeah, unfortunately. They were really understaffed here. So you had one maybe two people if you were lucky to do all the paperwork, embalming, autopsy, organ harvesting, and cremating. But cremating wasn't often because they had to spend hours digging holes to bury them. All for two people. And you had like six to eight patients die a day on average." She explains more. Ami shakes her head out of disgust. "How can people be that inhuman?" She questions. Ami sighs as they continue walking around. "I'm going to do some EVP sessions to please Jason." She hits record on her camera and starts asking questions. "Are there any ghosts here?" She pauses each time to allow time for anything to respond. "Are we alone here?" Hellen continues recording with her inferred camera. She notices some strange markings on the walls. They don't look human one bit. "Hey Ami. Come look at these markings over here." She calls over. Ami walks over and records the wall. "That's...odd. These look like giant claw marks. I'm not an animal expert but my guess is there's no type of animal that big around here. Bears don't live around these parts." Ami gently touches it and feels a jolt of real uneasiness. "Hellen, let's call the guys." As soon as she finishes her sentence they hear both the boys screaming and not far. They both look at each other in fear and quickly run to the screaming. "Jason! Will!" Hellen yells out. They reach the bathroom door that has nothing there. "Guys?! What happened!" She cries out. Jason opens the door panting and shaking along with Will who is trying not to puke. "Th-there's was something ch-chasing us. We don't know what it was! It was a huge black mass with red eyes and teeth! Sharp teeth and it screamed at us! It wasn't human!" He sobs a bit. Hellen tries to comfort him. "Look let's just go okay? We need to leave before we hurt ourselves." Ami orders. All of them agree and quickly make their way to the lobby. Jason works on getting the door opened again. Ami hears someone whisper her name. She turns and sees a faint orb float in the middle of the lobby. Ami walks towards it trying to catch it on film. "Ami?" Will turns the camera on her. Ami looks up at Will. The floor breaks open as a giant gray long arm grabs Ami's leg and pulls her through the hole making the floor tear open even more. Ami lets out a loud scream as she's dragged down below. "AMI!!!" Hellen screams and they all rush over. "Something just grabbed her! It pulled her down!" Hellen screams. "Jason isn't that where the tunnels are?!?!" Will yells out. "I think so! We can't go this way! The hole is too big and we don't have anything to use for a rope!" He runs over the doorway which is supposed to lead to the basement and the tunnels. Jason frantically tugs on the door but it doesn't budge. "Oh shit! No! No!" To his horror, the door has been welded shut. "Shit! Fuck! The door is sealed! There's no way to get to her!" "Dude can't we go to a different door?! There has to be!" Will panics. Jason goes to the main desk and frantically looks through the old scattered papers. Finally, he finds a map of the building and his heart drops. "That's the only door. Th-they only had one so patients wouldn't go down there. Fuck!" Jason runs over to the hole. "AMI!!!" He screams echo to the deep pit below. Nothing but silence. 3 Days Later Jason sits on the park bench outside the main school building. Looking over at the hospital almost hidden from view. Hellen and Will walk up to him feeling a dark dread going through them. "Hey Jason...what did the police say when we told her she fell through the floor?" Hellen asks fearfully. "They searched the entire basement and tunnels. Had over 60 men and they only found her fucking cell phone...they said the floor had rotted away so bad they're surprised it hasn't collapsed sooner." Jason holds up Ami's phone that has a small crack on the edge of it. "How can that be?! We saw something grab and drag her down there!" Hellen cries. "The police wouldn't believe us, Hellen. We are lucky we didn't get into too much trouble for trespassing. We just...I don't know...but for right now let's just think about finding her." Jason stands up and sighs. As he goes to walk, Ami's phone beeps and vibrates. A picture text message comes through. "Ami's phone. Wh-who would text it? They know she's missing." Will questions it. Jason hits the button and goes completely pale in complete horror. The picture sent to Ami's phone is the picture shown below.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this mini story! It wasn't requested I thought of it myself lol

[tumblunni]

I had some sudden more ideas for npcs in the monster petshop game, and a bit of worldbuilding and stuff!

I was just consideringwhether maybe this should be a fantasy setting with different non-human races, or one that’s just all humans. I dunno, games with catchable monsters seem to ALWAYS be just humans, that’s weird now I think about it! I guess its so the line between sentient magical beings and the pet ones isn’t blurred, but in my petshop idea the monster pets can all talk anyway so that’s not an issue. Tho I dunno if it’ll be to the same degree as in the Monster Rancher anime where monsters are all so similar to humans that they can live their own entirely separate lives without a human partner, and like.. start shops and hold property and stuff. Seriously that worldbuilding is so surreal and cool, you get to see stuff like a giant golem running a little metalwork jewelry store in the background of a crowd scene. I wanna see the story of that guy! Tho it gets a bit confusing cos some monsters can’t talk, and some monsters seem to have more petlike intelligence, and those two things don’t often coincide. I still cry forever about that episode with the guy who abused his giant worm monster, and how with its design and how it doesnt talk you’d probably assume its a mindless evil monster but its actually just a quiet sad good guy and like.. how its full sentience level is revealed by it choosing to refuse an offer from the bad guys to join them, and dying trying to save the life of its abusive trainer. And how it actually does succeed in making him realise how wrong he was to treat it like an animal, and to treat animals like mindless toys! And how he breaks down crying and then how he cradles the lil baby worm and promises to do better this time, and then how his original worm comes back to life way WAY at the end of the series and I CRY FOREVERRRR ... Anyway, sorry, where was I before I got distracted?

OH YEAH! Fantasy races! Which really should be called species, but I guess it stuck cos they’re often used as metaphors/replacements for actual racial diversity, especially in traditional fantasy. IM GETTING DISTRACTED AGAIN!!! So yeah that thought led me to an idea for a particular fantasy “race” I could add. But then it somehow developed into... I dislike designing overly humanlike fantasy races, like seriously what is the point of even bothering if they look identical to humans except short or with weird ears? So I thought.. what if this “race” is actually a disease instead?

MORE LONG THOUGHTS BELOW THE CUT!

So, I was thinking they could look like just normal humans but with a greyish skin colour, odd coloured eyes, and some sort of flower growing on their head. They’d be like ‘flower spirits’ but in kind of a negative way? They look like humans because this is a sort of magical genetic condition that turns humans into this. Though they still get predjudice because people are afraid of ‘catching’ a disease that isn’t actually contagious through touch or anything, but people are happy being ignorant fucks and excluding them from society ‘just in case’ their paranoia comes true.

But anyway! The details! At any moment an inherited carrier could manifest symptoms, and rather literally manifest a glowing flower from their forehead. It grants you enhanced magical powers, but at the cost of your life being tied to that magic. The flower is like if your soul has been forcibly pulled outside your body in a very fragile form! You have to tend to it like a normal flower, and you also have to sorta feed it by doing enough magic or absorbing the energy from magical objects. (So these guys’s magical power is to negate other magics.) If left untreated it will eventually be fatal, and if the flower wilts it’ll also kill you even faster. If you fail to take care of it, it drains energy from your soul instead, which leads to the grey skintone and general weak health. But even if you keep the flower alive it’ll eventually grow too big and you’ll be unable to drain enough magic to keep up with its energy consumption. By the time the story begins, medical technology has actually advanced enough to find life extending treatments for this, even if we don’t have a complete cure. You can’t get rid of the flower but you can take medicines to slow it’s growth. I mean, really the problem is just that this thing outpaces its host, its a really impractical parasite! It ends up killing itself by getting too greedy! (Which makes me think probably the predjudiced slurs around these people would be like... ‘you got that disease cos of your greed/sin/etc’. Even though its just genetic.) And then I think the final breakthrough to save people from this disease wouldnt really be a perfect cure, just to regress it to a budlike inactive state. You’ll always be physically marked as a victim of this disease, and you’ll always have the ‘demonic’ magic-draining powers. And it’ll probably be a long time before people stop treating the sufferers like shit, even after this...

So umm.. yeah. Its kinda gonna be like an analogy for the horrible HORRIBLE way the AIDS outbreak was handled by the government, and how it happened because the victims were ‘undesireables’. And how in this post-outbreak world the whole thing’s practically been covered up, lessened, forgotten. And people still deny it, and still treat gay people like shit, and its taken so damn long to make all this progress and just... gahhhh... How pretty much every LGBTQ person who’s that old lost a dozen friends, how people got so desperate they used to hold ‘die-ins’- protesting by literally saying ‘leave me here on the doorstep’ when they were about to die. Make the politicians see exactly what they’ve done! And similarly the massive MASSIVE quilt full of patches commemorating everyone who died. God... And seriously just HOW LITTLE EDUCATION there is on this subject! Even amoungst modern LGBTQ communities! How eager we are to sweep things under the rug, even if its LITERALLY a rug made of dead queer folk! *sigh* umm.. sorry for the heavy subject matter there.

So yeah, this would be a ‘race’ in this setting, or rather a minority group, but in fantasy terms its a ‘race’ but.. whatever. Dumb language rules! Very small community of flower disease folks, treated like demi-humans. And this leads to a bunch of new ideas for npcs that could deliver this plotline! Of course, the main one would be an actual member of the flower disease folks.

I’m imagining her as just an absolute sweetheart shy gentle giant sort of lady. She’s introduced being this terrifying presence walking into the town, your protagonist being the only one who doesnt understand why everyone else is being all hushed whispers and closing all their shops. Since you come from a sheltered rich kid background, you’re very out of touch with common issues and had no clue this disease even exists. (Even though rich folks are the ones who had the power to help them, are the ones who refused, are the ones who spread the propeganda and then tried to cover up all their own failures...) So you’re the only one who treats this seemingly terrifying vagrant as a normal person, even though it’s (initially) just because you didn’t know the situation. Because of this, she ends up seeing you as a friend and coming back again. And then its up to the player whether you fall for all the predjudice and decide to cut all ties with her from here on, or whether you continue to stand up for her rights and try and change the way society treats her.

ANYWAY, her personality once she opens up to you would be the total opposite of her imposing appearance. She’s a chronic sufferer of self-hate issues, who’s been living completely alone in the forest for a long time, after being kicked out by her family and having no-one to turn to. I’m thinking she constantly speaks like... shy equivelant of Fuujin from FF8? One word sentences, but whispered instead of yelled. And like.. “.......ah..............s-....sorry........?” *questioning inflection of silence* “......uhhm........?” *unfurls hand hesitantly from under cloak and points at loaf of bread* *counts out coins meticulously, making sure to spread her hands and show she’s wearing gloves, she’s keeping them in a pouch, she hasn’t touched them* *places them on the very edge of the counter and backs away slowly, assuming you’re thinking the worst of her* *won’t take the bread directly from your hands, just in case* *struggling to speak again* “... th-.... ah-...... t-thank....... you.....” *mumbles her way out of the store quickly and awkwardly* This is kinda how she’s had to deal with buying supplies from EVERYONE EVERYWHERE. This tends to happen with like the one store in town that’ll take pity and throw her some food, at a greatly inflated price. She’s just had to like.. keep trying. Wear them down. If she keeps coming to a town repeatedly they’ll eventually get frustrated enough to give her what she wants.... or they’ll call the sheriff to chase her off. Either way she finally gets a yes or no answer on that place, and can tick it off on her cross country map of spots to find actual supplies. So she like.. CAN NOT function in a regular shop environment anymore. Probably the first hint that she isn’t really scary is how she’d totally freak out at you treating her normally! She’d be TERRIFIED!! There’s no way she’d actually agree to talking normally, she’d adamantly refuse to taking anything for free, seriously WHAT IS YOUR DEAL, ARE YOU A DEMON??? *sobs into the complimentary bread* It’d be a few visits before she actually opens up to you, and even then she’s very monosyllabic. She literally hasnt talked to anyone for years, she’s become so hardened to loneliness and cruel treatment that she can’t remember how to react to kind people anymore. And her voice is so hoarse both from this and from.. well.. the disease. She hasn’t even had the minimal treatment that’s available nowadays... for the rich, at least. So along with her sidequest being to help everyone understand her, you’re also searching for a doctor who’d treat her, and trying to save up the ridiculous amounts of money it would take. Its far easier if you succeed at destroying enough of the town’s ignorance, and make at least a few friendship links between her and your other sidequest pals. You can start having a town-wide fundraiser to get her the lifesaving medicine! Tho probably that leads to its own sidequest of having to track her down after she runs away, worried that she doesn’t deserve it and she’s just gonna cause more problems for her new friends. NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Anyway, the general structure of her as a customer is that she kinda accepts ANYTHING, and doesn’t have much money to do it with. She’s very lonely, and only built up the courage to come to this town on that first day because she heard about your petshop that sells to lower class citizens, and the idea of getting her own monster friend was like a ray of hope in her life! If you decide not to chase her away from the town, she settles in the nearby forest where all the stray monsters live, and becomes like the scary local cryptid. “I totally saw an eight foot tall woman feeding the crows!!! What the fuck!!!” She has a problem with sacrificing herself to protect all these wild animals, they’re just SO BEAUTIFUL and MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING!! She’s always going hungry cos she gives all her food to them, and then they start to love her in return and she gets a veritable army of feral pals that’ll defend her from anyone who tries to burn her tent down again. So she starts off desperately trying to buy a monster from you, any monster, and then after she gets her first one she starts befriending the forest monsters with its help, and becomes your biggest customer of monster supplies instead. She wants to give all these wild babies the closest life to a normal pet as possible! But she also still will buy literally any monster from you, ever, anytime. Doesn’t matter that she already has fifty, she can always take care of more! Though you do get better results if you give her ones high in defense stats and etc, cos its tough to live out there in the forest, even if your trainer is going hungry to ensure you get the best snacks. Oh, and she’d probably be ABSOLUTELY OVER THE MOON if you could sell her a monster that also has flowers or flower patterns. (Tho i think protagonist would be worried it would be insensitive, but she actually does like them cos they make her feel less lonely) She’s also an incentive to help out with your cookery crafting skills! Cos initially she’s having trouble being able to access any of the other shops in the town, she’ll just buy whatever spare food you have lying around. Even your absolute worst failed dishes are like heaven to her! So you can get more exp from cooking and also make a profit from it, thus helping you get better at crafting fancy dishes for your sweet monster pals. (And your strange tall pal!) Oh, and it’d probably also be an element that people in the town try and ‘politely’ advise you that you shouldn’t sell to her ‘for your own safety’. Because of the flower people’s magic draining powers, there’s the very real worry that one of them could be buying monsters from your store just to drain them dry and slow down their own death. But it sucks to assume the worst of her before you even know her, and honestly even if someone was doing that it’s dishonest to frame them as evil and predatory when seriously they are only committing a crime TO SLOW DOWN THEIR OWN DEATH! I bet that would be the most terrifying depressing situation for them, having to kill a small animal cos you’re having an attack of your symptoms and you just desperately don’t want to die...

And now on to the other supporting npcs I thought could be useful to this plot!

I thought of maybe there being bakers cos... well, the first scene I thought of while planning her personality was her trying to buy a loaf of bread. SIMPLE BRAIN PATHS! WOO! But somehow these bakers ended up gaining a way bigger plot role than I intended O_O I’m imagining them as some sort of Super Duo, just cos this plot idea requires one who starts off sympathetic to flower lady and a boss that provides an obstacle in this. I’m thinking maybe the good guy baker sneaks bread out to flower lady, and their greedy boss is all like ‘no! There are laws in place! Food waste must be destroyed! No giving to the homeless!’ (THIS IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS. Almost every major fast food company does it! You can get arrested for stealing food from the bins, or for being an employee who tries to give the food to someone, even if it’s excess food that would just be binned anyway.) But then I ended up humanizing the grumpy boss instead of having them JUST be an enemy. I started imagining this as a family business, and the grumpy boss is their grandma? And then i thought maybe that would be a good vehicle to deliver the backstory worldbuilding about this disease, and now I am REALLY SAD about this grumpy grandma! I was thinking maybe she’s actually someone who lost a lot of friends in the initial outbreak of flower syndrome, and used to protest against it, and became all bitter and depressed after what happened, which is why she’s such a cynical mess nowadays. I think maybe the plot would work better if its like.. the grandkid baker just THINKS that grandma would object to serving a flower disease customer, and then when grandma actually sees who’s been ‘stealing’ her profits, she breaks down crying. Nobody in her family even knew she was so close to the tragedy, she’s been keeping it secret cos even though she isn’t infected she could still be ostracized for being part of that community and all. I’m thinking its gonna just be a very direct analogue, I’m gonna say that LGBTQ people were demonized as the ‘cause’ of this disease back when it was poorly understood. ��Its caused by greed and sin’ = people pick whichever subjective ‘sin’ they wanna blame... So grandma shows you all her quilt that she’s been keeping secret, full of patches commemorating everyone she knew who died, and tells you about how the tragedy went down and how she got her start as such a cold and untrusting person out of the fear of ever loving anyone again in case she lost them. And everyone gets to have ALL OF THE HUGS, even though hugs can’t erase what happened :( But finding a family that can support her can help flower lady right now, grandma is determined to find a way to save this one person and make up for everyone she couldn’t save! They help you on your quest to track down a doctor, and they give flower lady a place to stay as part of their family, no matter what anyone thinks! And then i think maybe after flower lady manages to get her medicine, grandma actually leaves on a journey with the doctor, to learn how to become a doctor too. She was in medical training when she was younger, before she had to drop out of education due to all that happened. And she just ended up inheriting the family bakery, even though she personally sucks at baking and hates it. (Which is why employee/grandson does all the work and stuff) So now she sees this as a chance to redeem herself, you help convince her that its not too late! She’s gonna use however many years she has left to help people! if she has to be cursed with outliving everyone, she’ll use this long life to make a difference! So its sad cos grandma has to leave on her journey, but grandson takes over the shop and flower lady is employed as an assistant. And they keep in touch with grandma in the mail. (You can sell them a good carrier pigeon monster to help!)

Another npc there could be is... another greedy guy!! I started thinking him up cos i was just wondering about who could be a friend to the grandma. I mean, the npcs have to have relationships and rivalries between each other, its not like the protagonist is the only one who matters, lol This idea i have is (for some reason) someone who looks like a younger AZ from pokemon, wearing a cowboy hat. Kinda? He’s a travelling merchant and ssssssort of the same greedy archetype as grumpy grandpa, but sort of not? He’s an even more huge penny pincher than her, but he doesn’t seem to have his heart in it. He’s constantly desperately wringing any potential money out of anything, overcharging as much as he possibly can, getting himself hurt doing silly get rich schemes. But then he’s not really a jerk about it. He’s very friendly and cares about his customers, unable to actually scam them even as he announces his intentions to do it. He’s constantly betrayed by his own kindness, and ends up giving away free stuff to anyone who has a sob story! He also never seems to actually really spend his money on himself, its not like he actually has any of the luxury he’s always rambling about. I mean, he does indeed seem to have a genuine greed and a few lofty dreams, but then he just puts all his profits in his savings no matter how much it hurts him to do it. *crying over a fancy hat as he dumps his purse in the Swear Jar*

So anyway, his connection to this plot about the flower disease is that his Secret Reason For The Greedy is only revealed if you befriend both him and the flower lady. After you progress the story enough to get her first Happy Ending of getting adopted by the baker family, her second Happy Ending of finally getting the medicine, and her third Happy Ending of becoming the new assistant baker after grandma moves away, the plot still stubbornly continues because really no ending is an ending, yknow? I’m thinking this sort of formula could work really well with a game that has no real overall plot, and is more of just a slice of life theoretically endless thing. When you’re playing Monster Rancher there’s never really any huge changes in the town you still always have the same shopkeepers and nobody even ages. And even though Animal Crossing has villagers moving in and out, its also kinda the same, there’s never any real character development or shifting of the status quo. So I’m thinking having changing generations of the town and continuity between them could be a good way to keep stuff engaging even as you keep playing the same sort of gameplay forever. Maybe some people move away, maybe some people move in, maybe some people get married or have kids, who knows!

So yeah, after the status quo change of the baker grandma moving away and flower lady leaving her homelessness tent to become a full time resident, thats’s when this new sidequest starts. Stuff still isnt instantly perfect for her, she’s still facing predjudice from some people, especially now she’s in a rather public position as an employee. All the controversy over having her work with food, even though SERIOUSLY, DUDE, you can’t catch it from just touching someone who has it! I think she’d feel absolutely terrible, she’d be worried that she’s causing her benefactors to lose business because she’s here. And she’d also have just normal social anxiety adjusting to doing her first job ever, and having to do so much talking. She was homeless since she was very young, she even has trouble with complex mathematics cos she never finished school. Another reason merchant guy could be a good friend of the family, he could help tutor her on this stuff! And general shopkeeping techniques, cos both her and grandson are both super good guy pushovers and all. (”Don’t worry, I’m a wimp too, and even I can manage to be greedy with these five simple steps! ....that’ll be 50 dollars.”) But the main plot for him and flower lady is how he finally reveals his secret reason for being so greedy. One day he just comes along leading a little girl by his hand, and lifts her up so she can see the lady at the bakery counter. “Daddy, she’s got flowers like me!!” He’s been sending all of his profits home to pay for his kid’s medical bills, and he finally decided to let you know once he met someone else with the same condition. He’s been keeping it a secret because people hate flower sufferers so much, and he desperately needs to keep up the trade route with this town otherwise he can’t afford to look after her. he’s so damn relieved to be able to stop lying to you, and to finally introduce his lil bundle of joy! And to let her see someone else with the same condition, for the first time in her life! And then the lil girl could become friends with tall flower lady, and be all like ‘you look so pretty!’ which is something nobody’s ever said to her since she got sick, and just... HEARTWARMING TIME And it could help flower lady keep hope even though predjudice hasnt completely stopped in the world. At least now she’s found some good people, and she can see that her bravery in working at this job is inspiring young sufferers to feel that their life isnt completely over. So they all send off another letter to grandma together, and have a nice family dinner with this other family, and with yours too. :3 (...also, merchant guy apologizes for lying to his close friend grandma for so long, and they laugh at how they both had so much in common and never found out until now! And she is HELLA EXCITED to meet his daughter when she comes back ^_^)

[ladyembers]

Hand Shakers_review_ep_11&12

( This review contains a whole bunch of negative and harsh criticism towards the anime Hand shakers if you like this anime, I advise you skip this.)

Y’know I just love the cliche of the villain giving his whole life story to everyone before, deciding to kill everybody and the main characters just patiently stand there and listen, until it’s over. 

Kyoyori’s sister is named Mayumi by the way. 

Makihara and weird-glasses-kun worked together with Kyoyori’s parents on gathering information about hand shakers. Apparently, their parents were also hand-shakers. 

So, Mayumi and Kyoyori were naturally born hand-shakers, because they were born in the ziggurat, where the hand-shakers fight and battle. 

And because of their parent’s asinine decision, poor Kyoyori and Mayumi keep getting hunted and attacked by other hand-shakers, to the point where they don’t want to live anymore. 

And the side effort of them being born in the ziggurat is that must always hold hands or their power will drain and they die. 

Lovely parents,they practically gave their kids a death sentence, see this is why you don’t experiment with your kids, bad things happen. 

Okay, the father just took, a hard screeching left turn into being a serial killer......and is now evil, apparently. 

So, it seems that the parents were killing opponents before they get to their kids. 

and now the father is being verbally abusive to his children for not darn good reason. And Not it’s God’s fault that you’re kids became the way they are, it’s yours. 

And secondly, the father’s turn into being kind of deranged lunatic is so poorly written. There’s no build, no tension, in fact the father barely has any screen time, before he makes the turn, so I don’t care. We don’t seem suffer, we don’t see him finally get to his breaking point, there is no progression of character, so it just watching a bag of tasteless,corn chips trying to act like you everyday, stereotypical shonen antagonist. 

Or the fact that the mother, just sits there  wallowing in self-pity as her husband starts yelling at her innocent children. any sane mother would have back handed him and when over and comforted her babies. 

Worst parents of the year.

Yes, I know the parents are frustrated, but that gives them no right to treat their kids like the plague, just remember you gave life to them. 

and Unfortunately for the anime, I don’t care about Kyoyori and Mayumi’s relationship with their parents, seeing that we don’t see them interact with each other. Heck, Makihara and Weird Glasses guy were more parents to the girls then their actually parents. 

exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition. 

I don’t care anime. 

anime antagonist spends more time bragging about how powerful they are, then they do actually fighting.

I can’t take weird Glasses-kun seriously, when he sounds bored out of his mind through this whole exchange. 

And on to the finally episode.  pop, your bottles of champagne, folks.

Wow, just wow, I have never seen, such a horribly sloppy, executed climax in my entire life. And after, just finishing this, this final episode, I only have one question to ask, what was the point? There is none, there is absolutely no point to this pile of mediocre, garbage. You guys, wanna know how this ends, after all this build up, what very little there was, the climax ends as quickly as if came. 

The final fight between Kyoyori , Tazuna and Mayumi, weird glasses-kun, was awful, just plain awful, you can see where the budget took a spectacular  nose-dive and then raises back up,as soon as the fight ends. Characters make 180s all over the place left and right. 

Remember, Mayumi and Kyoyori are sisters,remember that they were seperated from each other for years, that they bother suffered together and basically wen through hell, yeah, that had as much impact as a smack to the wirsts, they barely have any lines together, even more so concerning interactions. 

Weird Glasses-kun is built on be the big bad and will stop at nothing to fight Kyoyori and Tazuna, to the point where Mayumi, who is by the way  drugged by Weird glasses guy for years and emotionless, is draining her energy and about to disappear, and then the next minute he’s telling her not to fight and worried about her disappearing when a moment ago, he seemingly didn’t care. 

And then magically, Mayumi just comes back to her senses, to protect, weird glasses from Kyoyori and Tazuna, she starts to vanish and Tazuna and Kyoyori stop, Mayumi from dying by some mystically, convoluted, BS that the creators pulled out of their butts. And the climax ends. 

Weird Glasses has a sudden change of heart and he and Mayumi just walk off. 

Mayumi and Kyoyori have zero moments together. 

Tazuna and kyoyori start working at Boss-lolicon’s restaurant. 

Weird glasses is dying, somehow. 

Edgy wannabe shadow the hedgehog also has a sudden change of heart, and is rooting for Tazuna for some stupid reason, yeah because I’m so glad he and tazuna made up, seeing that they never see or talk to each other after episode 1 oh, and his human doormat is with him too. 

We see Incest siblings again-but I’ll talk about them later in another post. 

And it seems this steaming pile is getting a second season. 

and that’s the end. Its over, it’s finally freaking over and I can get my life back again. I’m free, free!

-Mrs.Kohakusato

[ruffoverthinksthings]

What would Mal and bens kids be like

Warning: Heavy Bias towardsBal, skewing EXTREMELY towards negative realism.

Two general trends:

Emotional, unstable individuals with heaps of problems inherited from their parents and their inherent genetic/magical weaknesses to mental illness and emotional issues; or

Completely normal, healthy, pleasant people who just happen to be EXTREMELY out of the norm and challenge Auradon’s established norms and beliefs by the simple virtue of existing.

You have to understand: Mal and Ben are an incredibly volatilecouple just waiting to have all manner of issues come boiling up tothe surface. They’re also an AK Royal and VK couple, the veryfirst, actually, and any children they have will be subject to allthe criticism, the scrutiny, and the intentional and unintentionalscrutiny that comes with being a VK in Auradon and being a Royal inAuradon.

Think of it as the worst of both worlds.

On your VK side, your peers consider you “diluted” in that youare an Auradon Villain Kid (AVK), not nearly as “evil,” “rotten,”or “cunning” as any of them simply by virtue of your bloodlineand where you were born--they needn’t even be Evil Evil,just otherwise Good kids that get into mischief most days of theweek. You don’t just become an Isle Kid without growing upin the Isle and even if one of your parents were from there, becauseYOU didn’t live with the discrimination, the desperation, and therampant psychological and physical abuse.

Think of African Americans from “The Hood” and the sense ofshared anger and outrage at “Gangsta” being co-opted by peoplewho never experienced their hardships, oftentimes as a gimmick formoney and attention.

(I actually have a headcanon that Robin Hood’s kid and the restof his Merry Men and Maidens consider themselves AVK already, whichbrings a lot of hatred and conflict between them and the authenticVK’s, but that’s a different topic altogether.)

On your AK Royal side, you are on an even tighter rope than theoriginal Royals, as now you don’t have immediate support and loveof the heroes and beloved monarchs that the original AK Royalshave--in fact, there will be a LOT of (mostly unjustified) racism anddiscrimination simply by virtue of you having “Villain” in yourblood, and most of Auradon being heavily racist and bigoted.

You’renot invited to all the fun parties, but you’re expected to show upfor all the major, boring events.

People do not give you the benefit of the doubt, will rail againstyou on the slightest of mistakes, and will treat your doing thingsright as “exactly what is expected of you, nothing that would earnpraise” or since they can’t say it out loud, “I’m stunnedthat you managed to do this right because I expected you to failcatastrophically, and I don’t want to say anything else for fear oflooking even more racist and bigoted than I already am.”

You seeyour pure AK and VK peers belonging with their respectivegroups,  while you stand outside their groups by virtue of yourbirth, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And these kids are the KING AND QUEEN’S CHILDREN, so you know,they’re also inherently considered a class all their own, separatedfrom their own AVK peers, and constantly watched by the media andsociety because BOY HOWDY does Auradon love itself some eagerlywatching the 1%’s lives.

There’s two ways that their kids would develop in a society thatoffers them no stability, no community, and all the discriminationand the hatred because they’re an entirely new class of demographicaltogether and that is instinctively terrifying to everyoneelse:

One, you learn to carve out your own niche, take pride in yourdifferences and rally with your other exiled peers, and join or make your owncommunity where you let your Freak Flag fly proud, such asthe slurs being used against your community and turning them into anaffectionate nickname for your group.

Or Two, you forever remain an outsider, and come to terms with thefact that you’re always going to be an outsider, no matter howloved, popular, or invaluable you make yourself to the people thatshun you, and that’s just your lot in life.

Example OC’s of both groups are the following:

“The Knight in Sour Armour” Jacques “Jack” Maurice

Usually, Fairies come to bless newborns, granting them wisdom,strength, and cunning that will serve them well all throughout theirlives. As Jack will tell you, being the biological son of a fairydoes not make you blessed right from the starting gate, it saddlesyou with an awful, terrible curse.

1/4th Fae, 3/4th human; incapable of magic of any sort; naturallyresistant to most poisons, pharmaceuticals, and drugs both good andbad; cursed with both the supercharged empathy of his mother and hisfather and grandfather’s capacity for volatile, explosive rage.

Jack was always capable of experiencing exactly what otherpeople were feeling--their joy, their sadness, their anger, theircuriosity, their disgust, their fear--everything. It was a delight inthat he would happily lose himself in celebrations, literally lettingthe other’s enjoyment flow into him and lift his mood along with itlike a tide, but it was a nightmare when he could also be easilyknocked over and drowned in a sea of gloom, anxiety, and anger.

His parents were blissfully unaware of his distress, Ben thinkinghe was just a particularly emotional child, and Mal evenaffectionately referring to him as a “Cry Baby” because theoverflow of any sort of emotion oftentimes made Jack cry.

Then the panic attacks started.

Mental health STILL being terrible in Auradon, Jack being amagical-hybrid, and the public’s perception that he’s just beinga “yellow-belly who needs to toughen up and grow a thicker skin”whilst they laugh at his latest public emotional breakdown, he’sunable to develop properly or regulate his emotions in healthy ways,and in desperation, turns to Stoicism, using the anger and the ragehe feels at himself to tamp down on ANY emotion he feels or picks upin others.

By his teenage years, he’s an extremely logical and reservedman, eyes decades older than his actual age, a wizard in mathematics,programming, and behavioural economics, one of the foremost expertsand poster boys of rational thought and the study of emotional andpsychological biases, and frequently involved in numerous HIGHLYunpleasant tasks such as reforming the mental health system, fixingthe numerous systemic racism and biases that still exist in his time,along with not only opening the closets that contains theirskeletons, he breaks the doors down so they may never be able torecede where they won’t be noticed and will go unfixed.

When he ascends to the throne, he gains a reputation for being ahighly unpleasant and overtly practical king who has “no respectfor tradition,” just the rule of reason and hard statistics.

He will happily be called callous, cruel, and cold.

But don’t EVER imply that he is unfeeling, that he doesn’tlove his country and its people, or that all of his decisions aren’tmade with the needs of his people above that of his own interests.

Because the one thing that keeps him getting up every morning,that keeps him soldiering through the constant deluge of emotionsthat threaten to sweep him away and overwhelm him once more, is thepain he feels everyday, his rage that they aresuffering, too, and his determination to make it better, comehell or high water.

In his words, "Being a fairy's child is a three part curse:one, you feel exactly what everyone else is feeling; two, you feeltheir suffering extra hard; and three, you literally cannotstop yourself from trying to make them feel better."

His most iconic feature is his left hand: permanently curled into a claw, because of his childhood habit of constantly gripping things so tightly his knuckles turned white.

Rosa “Mel” Melantha

Mel is the spitting image of her grandmother, Belle: intelligent,compassionate, and brave. She even has her exact shade of lovelybrown hair, if her mother’s striking green eyes.

She’s funny. She’s an absolute darling in words and deed,whoever you are. She reads horrific, gory, personal accounts of thepolitical prisoners the likes of Grimhilde kept in dank, inhumanedungeons before bedtime.

For you see, Mel is obsessed with “Evil.” She wants to knowwhy people are so distrustful of her mother for being a “Villain”Kid even if she long stopped being a villain, and in some generousinterpretations, never really was. She wants to know why Auradon heldthe values of being a perfect society with all “Good” people, buther father Ben decided to bring back the “Bad” people to actuallymake it a better society. She wants to know exactly what makessomeone evil, with the ultimate goal of making an objective“Evil-O-Meter” scale, of which the official unit of measurement will be “Mal,” after her mother and grandmother.

In short, she wants to know, “Why?”

As Queen or one of the crown princesses, she becomes a prominentphilosopher, moralist, and attorney of law (and later, judge) whocompletely changes all of Auradon's standards on crime, “Goodness,”and “Evilness” along with earning the ire of most every religiousleader out there when she never stops questioning “What exactly ISGod's Will?” among other probing questions made in good faith andwithout the hint of malevolence, just childlike curiosity that stayswith her her whole life.

And no, she doesn't mind being completely ostractized by hercommunity for being so smart, intellectual, and asking no shortage ofuncomfortable questions, either--”I'd rather be the minority thatis right than the majority that just assumes they are right.”

Belladona AKA “Bella”

From the very beginning, Bella was an artistic soul, drawing andpainting with whatever she could get her hands on. Malenthusiastically bought her a giant collection of finger paints, anextra big canvas for her to unleash her creativity, and left her toher own devices, wanting to be surprised by whatever it was herdaughter was going to create with proper tools.

What she got was a mural of the Circle of Life, with all the gruesome, violent, bloody detail that a two-year old is capable of.

Throughout her life, Bella has always been accused of beingshocking, gruesome, and offensive for the sake of it. And while shewill never deny it, she prefers seeing it as her “portraying lifeas it really is—confusing, messy, and oftentimes horrifying, butbeautiful—always, always beautiful.���

She has donepolitical pieces of the kind of racism and discrimination that AVK'slike her can experience, complete with all the unhealthy copingtactics and the sheer depth of despair they can reach. She has doneinnumerable album covers for heavy metal, punk, and rock bands,hoping to do the artists before her justice as she crafts thecontroversial, graphic, and oftentimes littered with more femalenudity than is strictly necessary faces of the new generation. Shehas made tattoos and art for friends, and especially people who wanttheir very first tattoo done right—her favourite is that of awriter literally bleeding their lifeblood onto their magnum opus.

She curses in sixdifferent languages without a second thought. She will not hesitateto tell you that you suck to your face, that what you said was stupid,or that you look terrible in her iconic getup of ballet skirtsand combat boots. She walks through life ignoring the whispers andadmonishments of the royals and aristocrats of which she willeventually have to rub elbows with full time when she becomes Queen;she also isn't bothered in the slightest about the criticisms of herpeers about her not being “punk” enough or just being a really good “Posey.” (An Auradon Kid or Auradon Villain Kid trying to be more Rotten than they actually are.)

She does what shewants, and what she wants is to live a life where she and everyoneelse is free to do whatever they please, so long as they do not “stepon someone else steel-toed boots.”

She's a Goodperson, who loves hanging out with the Evil crowd, challenging bothof their ideas of if you really are just one or the other.

[vertigokrp-blog1]

SUBMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL:

The case of one Cho Namgi, youth lost in the depths of countryside quaintness and simple delights. A 20-year-old spending days in the small suburbs of Muhan as a student at Jeosung University and part-time busboy at K&J, an upstanding citizen like many others in town. An unremarkable little story that takes odd turns when you take a second look. Because, in Muhan, nothing as it seems. In Muhan, you must trust no one.

        Cho Namgi is one with the vertigo.

CONTENT WARNING.

Suicide.

THE STORY.

i. cho namgi was always the center of attention. there was never a time in his life where he felt as if he was never unsatisfied with the amount of attention he had received because it was never too low for him. he was the favorite son, student and friend that anyone could have asked for back then. growing up, he always aimed to please as long as it gave him the attention and love he deserved. it was a mix of greed and pride that he was sure every child had whenever they were told they did well. at least, that’s how namgi took it anyways.

never was there a time where he did not have the attention on someone else. on the first day of preschool, a bunch of other kids went up to him and were eager to play. even after his little sister was born, he still got the most love and attention and probably the most respect from his parents. and to be honest, as a child, namgi thought there would never be a time where he didn’t have to get his spotlight taken away. he thought he had already made it obvious to everyone who was the main attraction wherever he belonged.

perhaps, if he had prepared himself for such an event to come, all of this would have never happened.

ii. it’s a day he remembers so vividly. the day he becomes second in everyone’s minds. rather than being the first to everyone and receiving all of the attention he loved so dearly, he gets it all taken away thanks to him. he’s another ten year old boy in namgi’s class and he doesn’t know how, but said boy seemed to have gotten lots of love and attention from the teachers and the classmates that namgi felt a fire in him. he’s read books about how sometimes, a fire ignited in someone could be good.

little did he know that this fire had no good intentions at all.

iii. throughout his time with the new kid, the fire only began to grow. to his benefit, this other girl in his class didn’t seem to fancy the other boy either. with the fact that the both of them disliked them, they both got a group of people together who had no opinion on the new face to make them all dislike him in order to make them not feel alone in general.

these kids weren’t exactly the best people to be around. though they acted nice to everyone else they knew, the fact that they disliked said new boy gave off an unsettling vibe to everyone. they knew that every child that was affiliated with them didn’t like new boy despite his shine and kind heart. to said kids, the new boy was like the sun: annoyingly bright and absolutely irritating.

they began pranking said boy, putting his stuff in places he had no knowledge of. there were “accidental” pushes and trips that were blamed on the boy that occurred way too many times to the point that he visits the principal’s office for his “cruel behavior”. it sits the aura for the both of them. namgi wasn’t sure how the other boy felt to be the victim, but he felt great. powerful, even. he felt as if he was doing the whole class a favor and that he was getting gain from this.

for the next few years with this boy, the same group of people still pick on the new kid until the first day of his third year in high school when he never got to see him ever again.

iv.. throughout his years in high school, he thought second year would be the worst year for him. it turns out, his third year takes the cake.

the friends who were in said gang turn against him. they didn’t move on. no. in fact, leaving him, they were far from mature. not only did they expose him for his cruel treatment to that one said student, but they also brought him the same kind of treatment. at the time, he thought it was unfair because they were also apart of said actions and they didn’t do anything to help the victim of namgi’s frustrations.

he’s heard some people make rumors that didn’t bring a positive light to him at all. he looks around and there are faces looking at him in disgust, discussing how he was abused at home and that was a reason as to why he picked on the one kid. he could confirm that at home, his life was great. he had a loving mother and father and a bratty sister that was only a few months younger than him. they weren’t the ones to have caused this and he hated to hear how his family was brought into this because of his own mistakes.

it got out of hand to the point that namgi had to find a university away from seoul. he needed a reason to move out of the town he’s lived in for years just so that he can get away from all the attention. he wanted to get away from all the negativity even though he knew it was directed at him and that he deserved it.

he tries convincing himself that he’s doing it for the better and that he wasn’t just a coward running away from his problems.

he doesn’t know how long such a mindset will last, though.

v. now a sophomore in jeosung, cho namgi finds himself in the suburban wonders of muhan. it’s quite a large difference to being in seoul, but he was sure he could adjust to the difference of it. it wasn’t like he was getting out of the country. though the lack of good reception bothered him a little bit when he moved in last year, he doesn’t let it affect him so much.

he still lives with his family, as family is still important to him. he doesn’t really know if he’ll ever move, but that’s for another day and another time. the new atmosphere is a change and he wasn’t sure if he is 100% comfortable after being there for a year.

but it was the best he could get. hopefully, he’ll get a better life here than he did there.

THE TWIST.

he remembers it vividly.

he remembers the events leading up to that one particular event and how he felt because of it. all of the feelings and all the self-hatred in himself that he couldn’t stand looking into the mirror because every single time he did, he would question who the person on the other side was. he often wondered if the person on the other side was just like him: a monster.

he remembers when it started.

he remembers him and his friends talking one day when all of a sudden, they go to a topic that had needed to be discussed. “say, where’s sunshine boy?” namgi asks. everyone in the circle answered with “i don’t know”.

“didn’t you hear?” a random classmate who overheard asked the group of friends. “he moved out of seoul.”

“what?” namgi asks, sounding perplexed. “why? he’s lived here for the past few years. why did he decide to move out now?”

“maybe you’re the reason why,” a friend in the group says.

after that, it was the moment everyone began to act cold towards him.

they began pranking namgi, putting his stuff in places he had no knowledge of. there were “accidental” pushes and trips that were blamed on him that occurred way too many times to the point that he visits the principal’s office for his “cruel behavior”. it sits the aura for the both of them. he felt lonely. powerless, even. he felt as if suddenly, the whole world was against him.

one day, the principal had a talk with him. he hears the mention of bullying and teasing that got out of hand. he says that the boy needs a suspension and when his parents hear that, they freak out.

throughout his third year, he keeps a calendar. after may 4th, he rips out the following days, weeks and months after that.

he has a date. well… he had one.

he had it all planned out. he would go to the closest bridge and jump over it after praying to god one last time. that if he dies, he would go right where he belongs and that he would rot there.

but he hears footsteps in the distance and to that, he turns away and walks off, pretending he was not going to do it at all.

after that, he burned the calendar, leaving out any track of him having suicidal thoughts. he keeps it to himself and doesn’t tell anyone in his family, nor does he tell it to any of the people he meets in muhan the following year. he gets accepted into one university out of the city and that’s how he finds himself in said city.

though his past as a bully is one secret, his failed attempt is the biggest one of all. his family already knew he was a bully, but they’d be shocked to know if he wanted to kill himself.

that’s why he can’t let anyone else know. they knew, word would spread and eventually get to them and he could never imagine their faces to the realization. he didn’t want them to think he needed help when he did. he didn’t want to burden his family any more than he already had.

it’s for the best. it’s for them.