#living in stasis of expecting abuse

[furiousgoldfish]

being around abusers:

high alert: you never know when the abuse is coming

hyper-focusing on the abuser's mood, you're only allowed to feel relief if the abuser seems to be in a good mood, distracted, or focused on somebody else

constant vigilance because they might decide to focus on you any second and you need to be ready

unable to focus on your tasks because you're tense and waiting to see if they'll want something from you, want to do something to you, or start to verbally abuse, provoke, insult, taunt, criticize or humiliate you

always aware of the physical distance between you and how much it would take them to cross it; reaction of panic if they turn your direction or show intent of approaching

quickly forced to think of an escape plan or a fight plan if they do keep approaching you because it is already an intimidation and likely to escalate in violence

anxiety if you're prompted to speak; you are not allowed to say anything positive about yourself or it will be challenged and mocked, you are usually asked to volounteer information and you will be attacked if you refuse. But if you do give info, it will be used against you.

constant effort needs to be put in controlling the amount of rage, or alternatively, helplessness you feel in their presence. You are not allowed to show any symptoms of it, or symptoms of panic

desperate use of logic and rationality in the face of senseless and cruelty of the abuse; you're trying to explain why the abuser should not say and do horrid and cruel things to you, and why you don't deserve it, only for them to do it worse and insist that they're 'saying the truth' or 'listing the imaginary reasons you do deserve it (you are not a person to them)'

attempts to defend yourself from the abuse or exploding and attacking back, only to immediately be accused of abuse and cruelty and 'lack of self control' while the abuser is not even affected by your attempts

the abuser getting anyone in the vicinity to side with them and to participate/enable the abuse, making you feel like your entire environment is hostile and dangerous, and like you are not a person to anyone

All of these can feel normal when you're used to living like that, or if you've grown up in this environment. Having to constantly defend and prove yourself and to have be hyper-focused on those around you and anxiously anticipate their every move, can feel like a normal experience if you haven't experienced any other home environment. This is not normal. If this is how you live, you are living in abuse. None of this should be inflicted at you.

[puppetwoman17]

Instead of the years in the time bubble going by like 🫰, what if their lives went on in their heads. What if their bodies were all still kept in unaging stasis, but their minds played out the most perfect versions of their lives.

Billy and Mary got to grow up with their parents, and they lived with them and their uncle and cousin in a by mansion, always happy.

Freddy never lost his parents, and his grandpa never died. Despite not letting his disability get to him, he lives in this mindscape with two functioning legs. Kit is alive.

Ibis and Taia are in ancient Egypt, living out their sublime love life together, with no trace of the memories of their messy relationship.

Ebenezer’s son lived. He isn’t dying of old age in his bed. He’s healthy. He has more money than he could ever want.

Susan Barr is alive. Jim and her raise their daughter, continuing their crime-fighting partnership.

Mr. Morris has his whole family with him. They all live in Fawcett, and he gets to see them whenever he wants.

Sivana’s wife never left him. In fact, he’s a free, good man with all four of his children.

Ibac has never been Ibac. He’s only Stanley Printwhistle, and every insult bounces back on him. He’s sure of himself.

There are others.

The widow from the 1800s who dances with her husband and plays in the courtyard with her children.

The caveman whose family died, crushed under their own home, now with him as he runs to slaughter another bull.

The girl who ran away from her abusive foster home, now reunited with her parents and older sister.

The boy whose war veteran father was a picture perfect cutout, and not an abusive monster who needs to rot in jail.

Over the years, slowly, so very slowly, it all begins to collapse. Because perfection feels wrong, even if you aren’t aware. Because memories can overlap, and they can intersect.

CC Batson is alive, but Billy remembers looking in a mirror and seeing blue eyes instead of green (why does he look in a mirror and see his dad’s face?)

Freddy’s leg feels funny. Always has. He can walk fine, but there’s always a tingling sensation there.

Sivana doesn’t expect all four of his children to be home.

The boy watches his father’s hand carefully in case it speeds toward his cheek. He doesn’t know why.

Over time, their minds break free from their perfect prisons. The real world shows its disgusting face. Fawcett looks just like it always has, but so much…heavier. The leaves have overgrown, and the sidewalk is chipped of its paint.

The dead are dead.

Those trapped in time are still trapped in time.

Some relatives don’t get better.

And Fawcett City’s people must grapple with the fact that their perfectly curated reality was all a lie.

Almost simultaneously, there is an unspoken promise. What happened here will never be spoken of.

They will rebuilt their city. Their lives. And they will move forward. And they will forget what their minds conjured in an attempt to keep them pliant.

It is a closely guarded Fawcett secret, hidden behind their bright smiles and eagerness to move on. They don’t want to think about it.

Sometimes they dream though.

Billy dreams of going to a coffee shop with Mary and mom and dad.

Sivana dreams that he kissed his wife good morning and hopped off to his respectable job.

The runaway girl dreams that she’s only running toward her new home.

But when they wake up, it’s never spoken of again.

[lurkingshan]

Japanese QL Corner

This week we begin our farewell to two brilliant shows and welcome a newcomer. Of the shows airing now, all but one are streaming weekly on Gaga and the other is available via fansub.

Takara's Treasure

gif by @my-rose-tinted-glasses This was the final week for the main story (don’t despair, we get a special episode next week), and the show wrapped up our core romance arc beautifully. At its heart this is a simple story between two boys seeking connection and working up the confidence to pursue what they want without fear. We spent the first half of the show grounded in Taishin’s country mouse in the big city journey, and the second slowly peeling back Takara’s layers until we understood just how mutual their affection is. I was so impressed with the show’s steady, patient approach to revealing this character to us, and I love that through knowing and liking Taishin (perhaps even more than 100%), Takara is getting more comfortable with himself, reaching for what he wants, and having genuine moments of joy. I’m also excited for him to get to know Taishin’s family and feel some of the warmth and support he’s been missing. Looking forward to whatever glimpse of their future the show gives us next week.

Happy of the End

gif by @putterphubase

We knew this one was going to be dark, and hoo boy is it. Content warnings for the first two episodes:

Assault, child abandonment, childhood sexual slavery, domestic abuse, family violence, human trafficking, rape, sexual exploitation

We meet our main characters this week and learn the basics of their backstories (though there are still gaps that I expect will be filled in later on). Both of these men have lived hard lives, and it shows. They are not particularly good people, neither of them responds normally to the situations they find themselves in, their emotional wavelengths are often odd, and there is a recklessness to their behavior that speaks to a kind of ambivalence about survival. They recognize something in each other that draws them together, but even as they share their stories and spend time together, there are barriers between them. This story has a fairly bleak worldview, so I don’t expect it will follow the usual romance beats and I’m not counting on a happy ending. @bengiyo pointed out that the show seems to be narrated from a future perspective after the relationship ends, and @illgiveyouahint said the show feels “gently hopeless” which I think is a rather apt description of its tone.

This show is beautifully shot and feels steady and clear about its subject matter, but its themes are not for everyone. Proceed with caution, and ask for content warnings if you need them—I expect there will be difficult content in every episode. This one is dropping two episodes a week on Gaga, and there is also a fansub ongoing from @isaksbestpillow. Siiri’s subs will likely be more accurate, but I recommend at least background streaming on Gaga to make sure the show gets the official views.

I Hear the Sunspot

gif by @heretherebedork

I have already talked plenty about my current feelings of frustration with this show, so I won’t belabor the point. This week Taichi dropped out of university to go work full time at his new job despite his friends’ protests, we got a long Maya flashback and another instance of her clashing with Taichi, Kohei and Taichi continued to not say anything honest to each other as they said their goodbyes, and Kohei confessed without Taichi processing it yet again. The final episode appears to include a time skip, and then maybe they will have the conversation we’ve been waiting on for six weeks. Fingers crossed the finale makes all of this time spent in stasis feel worth it.

Note: I have to get this up early today due to my travel schedule, and at time of posting episode 7 of Mr. Mitsuya's Planned Feeding was not yet available with English subs. I imagine @isaksbestpillow will post sometime soon and I will share when it goes up and include final thoughts in next week’s round up.

Tagging @bengiyo for the anime update.

[eruhamster]

Anya tried to tell Curly about Jimmy, and he didn't do anything.

No one protected her.

As the nurse of the ship, she was expected to perform mental evaluations of everyone else. Even Curly comments on his own failing to say he never thought about her own mental health.

She gets pregnant. She tries to tell Curly. He fails her again. He fails all of them by trusting Jimmy, who already does not have the capacity to care about the bodily autonomy of others. He dooms them all in an act of selfishness.

They say the same thing that people always say to defend rapists; arguing their lives shouldn't be judged by 'a few minutes' of a 'mistake'. But that mistake is how their lives all end.

Jimmy pulls Curly out of the wreckage to paint things in a different light, and Curly becomes the new Anya.

Anya saves Curly's life, even when he's burnt to a crisp and should by all accounts be dead. She's a great enough nurse that she managed to stabilize him, but he remains in constant pain. All because Jimmy wanted to keep him alive.

His bodily autonomy is stripped from him. Jimmy shoves whatever he wants down his mouth. Curly's punishment for his mishandling of Anya's rape is that he goes through something similar, losing all power over Jimmy and becoming nothing but his toy to be abused.

As the nurse, the pills are Anya's job. But she won't do it. Jimmy calls her a bad nurse and useless for it, but she saved Curly's life; she's phenomenal. She just can't do it because giving Curly the pills is akin to experiencing her trauma through the other. She'd be acting out the part of Jimmy. She can't do it.

When things get worse, she can't take it anymore. She tries to protect both herself and Curly from Jimmy. She locks themselves in the medical bay. Curly didn't protect her, but she wants to protect him.

She probably wanted to put Curly out of his misery. But couldn't bring herself to do something like that, when he can't even speak to say if that's what he wants.

So she just takes the pills. She can finally end this and kill herself rather than continue to suffer, and now Jimmy can no longer continue to shove pills down Curly's throat. It was an act of kindness.

Jimmy finds another victim to abuse since he lost immediate access to Anya and Curly. He can't go a minute without abusing someone else.

And once the door to medical unlocks, Anya is shoved off in a corner, out of the way, blocked out in Jimmy's vision. Even in death, he can't view her as a person. Her bodily autonomy mattered least of all to him.

Jimmy raped Anya and impregnated her. There was the initial act of the rape that took away her bodily autonomy, but also the removal of bodily autonomy that comes with months of an unwanted pregnancy. No one on that ship can offer her an abortion. They're there for 8 more months. Once they're off the ship, it's too late to have an abortion. She will be having that child. And then it's essentially two decades of stasis, of her life being put on hold for a child she never asked for.

Jimmy has a "few minutes" of a mistake by crashing the ship. That "one mistake" left Curly suffering for months with no bodily autonomy. No way of saving himself. No way of saying no. No out. Months of having his bodily autonomy stripped of him, reliving that trauma. Months. And at the end of it, as one last insult, Jimmy shoves him in a stasis chamber, where Curly will remain for two decades. He never asked for it. But Anya never asked for it, either. And in the end, neither of them could truly protect the other from Jimmy.

[the-fallen-six]

*You approach a set of six glass cannisters. Each one holds a glowing, floating heart, each one a different color. They appear eager to see a new face, if a bit apprehensive. Will you speak to them?

Yes No

>Yes No

Then let's begin.

Character Introductions!

"Hello!"

Name: Elizabeth-Alice Thompson

Age: 6yrs

Gender: Female (she/her)

Ethnicity: British

Soul: Patience

POD (Place of Death): Outside the Ruins door

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Hey!!!"

Name: Jabari Okafor

Age: 9yrs

Gender: Male-aligned/masc (he/they/xe)

Ethnicity: Swahili (biracial)

Soul: Bravery

POD: Outside Snowdin

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Hello."

Name: Dharma Widowo

Age: 11yrs

Gender: Lunarian (she/they/it)

Ethnicity: Indonesian

Conditions: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), Alexythymia

Soul: Integrity

POD: Waterfall

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"...hi."

Name: Robyn Belmont

Age: 12yrs

Gender: FTM (he/they)

Orientation: Queer

Ethnicity: British-German

Conditions: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

Soul: Perseverance

POD: Waterfall

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Hi! Nice to meet you!"

Name: Amani Okafor

Age: 14yrs

Gender: Female (she/her)

Orientation: Bisexual

Ethnicity: Swahili (biracial)

Soul: Kindness

POD: Hotlands

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Howdy! 🩷"

Name: Justin(e) Shepherd

Age: 12yrs

Gender: Genderfluid (she/they/he based on presentation, all neos)

Orientation: Unlabeled

Ethnicity: American Texan

Soul: Justice

POD: Asgore's Castle

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FAQ/Rules

"What is this? Who are you?"

Call me Phoenix or Blaze! This is an ask blog I decided to make with my Undertale ocs!

"What kind of things can we ask?"

Feel free ask the characters whatever, from simple things like favorite food to deeper things like family or thoughts on their current situation! In my mind, this takes place in a sort of stasis in-between the sixth soul and Frisk/the game you play, but feel free to ask questions about both as well! You can ask me questions too!

"What kind of things can we NOT ask?"

Considering these are children, what you will NOT be doing is writing anything remotely sexual or anything above PG-13, really. Seriously. The youngest is 6 years old. Use some common sense.

"Will the asks have art?"

I'll try to do what I can but I can't guarantee they all will! Maybe I'll reserve drawings for specific asks

Trigger Warnings

Considering all of these children are deceased as per the lore of Undertale, as well as there being underlying trauma in each one's backstories/lives, I feel like proper trigger warnings are necessary. Here's some you can expect that I can think of off the top of my head (not an exhaustive list):

Child death

Death in general

Self-harm/Suicide

Injuries

Blood

Transphobia

Abuse

Panic attacks

Dissociation/derealization/depersonalization

Tags

Each character ask will have the tag #thefallensix (no spaces)

Depending on the ask, each post will have the appropriate soul and child's name

Posts containing trigger warnings will contain the appropriate tags

Asks to me specifically will have the tag

#the fallen six (with spaces) and #ooc

(Main blog is @phoenixablaze666)

[ink4spots]

RYOMA TW BACKSTORY

⚠️ TW FOR PARENTAL NEGLECT + PHYSICAL ABUSE OF A MINOR + SUICIDE ATTEMPT⚠️

Brief summary! A lot of details are skipped… I may go on about it another day

EARLY LIFE

Born in Puerto Rico, Ryoma was dealt a poor hand by life. For most of their life they believed themself to be unlovable - burdensome, yet they never gave up on searching for it. Their want for love and attention colours a lot of their actions moving forward in life.

Ever since Ryoma was young, she knew her parents expected nothing of her. Romeh, Her brother, and her senior by 17 years, had already hit lots of milestones by the time she was able to realize it. She had huge shoes to fill, and she knew she never could, in her parents eyes. Feeling so unwanted has disastrous effects on people, especially in their formative years.

Ryoma started seeking attention elsewhere, by other avenues. They signed up for choir, drama, even sports. Anything that would put eyes on them, and it worked to some extent. For Ryoma, it felt amazing to be seen, even if it was just for a moment… That was where they found their love for music and performance.

When they were 14, her parents shipped them off to Kyoto, Japan to live with their uncle, who had a six figure corporate job. It started off? Well? The transition was rough for them. Starting off at a new school, and having to adjust to a whole new language and culture. Kids were still cruel, and they felt like they fit in even less than before. However, their homelife was better. Her uncle and his wife were kind, and they paid attention to her, moreso his wife.

THE HORRORS BEGIN

It all went downhill with the loss of her uncle's job. He had gotten into some dicey business behind the scenes, and it was a huge scandal. He didn't get penalized legally, but he lost his job, and his massive wealth in court + He was completely blacklisted from ever working in the industry. To add insult to injury, his wife learned he was having an affair with a work partner, so she divorced him too.

Ryoma was suddenly thrown into a whirlwind of uncertainty. They had no part in it, but they were forced to leave everything behind and start anew once more in a cheap residence in Morioh. Her uncle took up an office job, and they enrolled in school.

THE HORRORS

Her uncle began to stew in his anguish. Irrational as it was, he blamed Ryoma for his downfall. He deteriorated majorly, drinking excessively, which led to him taking his anger out on them.

Due to the poor conditions at work and at school, Ryoma really began to struggle. So much that they failed 10th grade (they were held back a year) and dropped out. Things got worse yet. At age 16, they saw no hope for the future and they decided to end their life via jumping off the roof of an abandoned hospital.

The DIU AND TSKRLA continuities divert here!!!

In DIU:

Ryoma Is saved by Gadzooks after she accepts the contract allowing Gad to become their stand.

In TSKRLA:

Ryoma dies from the fall, but Gadzook's “repairs” their body and ties their soul to their body using its own soul - after they also agree to a contract. Gadzooks replaces their broken bones with rebar from the hospital wreckage and gave them scissors inside of their body so they could defend themself.

Ryoma's body is in a state of cryogenic stasis since it's unable to recover. They are essentially a reanimated corpse with a metal armature/skeleton and CSM style scissor blade forced alive¿ courtesy of Gadzooks. I'll make another post explaining this lol.

16

A lot happens when Ryoma is sixteen. After the attempt, they continue to live with their uncle for another few months. During a particularly bad alteration, Gadzooks severs their uncle's arm. The aftermath results in him being unable to work, so Ryoma picks up the role of moneymaker.

They quietly accrue a secret fortune so they can afford to escape, at least physically. That plan goes down the drain because they are caught, but Ryoma still decides to leave.

Unfortunately Ryoma's uncle has access to their banking since they weren't an adult, so he begins to spend irresponsibly so that Ryoma would be forced to return.

But they don't give in, instead they make do with a storage container and a gym subscription. They are miserable, but they decide to play the waiting game until they are a legal adult- that doesn't get to happen though because…

FOUND FAMILY

When they are still 16, they are taken in by Tomoko and the family. They were already familiar with Tomoko when she approached them on a winter night. Ryoma was found sitting behind the place they worked at and Tomoko asked them if they were going home, because the place had closed. They explained their situation, and Tomoko offered to take them in for a while until they could get on their feet.

Spoiler alert! They never left. The Higashikatas became the family they never had, and Ryoma was happy with their new younger brother, grandpa, and mom. They grow to be very close :3. They sue Ryoma's uncle for abusing Ryoma and he gets successfully locked away!! Life goes on..

Originally planned to have a lot more horrors but I think I'll keep it this way since there is no shortage of angst 👁️👁️

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for leaving my friend to die?

I know the title sounds bad, but this is a specific situation, so hear me out. I (26+ thousand, M) ran away from my family and home planet with my sister, who we’ll call WC (12+ thousand), to a neighboring one when I was 16 thousand and she was 2 thousand. My mother, who was the queen of my home planet, was emotionally abusive to us and my father blindly followed whatever she said. I ended up working as a bartender at night and pursuing my dream as a racer to make ends meet. It wasn’t much, but it put food on the table, a roof over our heads, and kept my sister in school, so we didn’t complain. 

One night, while I was at the bar making drinks, I met my friend, who we’ll call Sal (26+ thousand, M). Now, I’d like to mention that Sal was built and not born into a family like I was. He grew up in, what you humans call, an orphanage, and never really understood how to interact with others. He and I disliked each other at the time, but we couldn’t stand to be away for a long time. 

Looking back, I realized how… toxic(?) our friendship was. I used him as my punching bag whenever I was angry, and since he was taller, bulkier, and way stronger than I was, I never paid any attention to it. He yelled at me every chance he got and criticized my choices when it came to my life. Despite all that, he still had my back and I still had his. When he came up to me and said he got a job transporting cargo to a planet called Terra Firma, which is light years away, I immediately quit my bartending job and started attending flight school. It was at this time I was getting attention for my incredible speed through my races, so I kept that job. After I finished flight school and Sal got confirmation to leave, I asked WC if she wanted to join us, to which she said no. She said she wanted to finish her studies, which I respected, so I left her with a friend and promised to come back.

Now, I’ll get to the situation at hand. 10,000 years ago, Sal and I crash-landed on Terra Firma. We got to where we needed to go, but we had no way back. We met some humans, who we now know are known as cavemen, and stayed with them for a while. Then, there was a meteor shower, and it was threatening the lives of those humans. Sal and I agreed to save the humans, with some hesitation on my end. We built a raft for the cavemen, but then Sal realized that one of the cavemen was missing, so I offered to go find him. 

This is where I may be the asshole. Instead of looking for the cavemen, I decided to go back to the ship. I figured Sal was going to get himself killed helping those humans, and I needed to get back to my sister. I promised her I would come back. As I was trying to power up the ship, Sal came in and asked what I was doing. I didn’t expect him to come, so I was startled and replied that I didn’t think he’d make it. Sal got angry with me and punched me, making me drop to the ground. He hit me a couple more times on my abdomen, legs, and arms, and the entire time I was pleading with him to stop. I was tinkering at the edge of unconsciousness when I heard alarms. I saw Sal’s panicked look before he shoved me into a stasis pod and I blacked out.

Then, 10,000 years later, four emergency responders from the planet I moved to, which we’ll call the Rescue team, found us and took us out of stasis. They live with a human family, who are also first responders. Salvage had lost his memory of that night, so to make him not hate me, I spun the story and told him that I was the one who saved the cavemen. I know I probably shouldn’t have, but Sal was all I had, and I didn’t want to lose him. Eventually, the leader of the planet, OP (9 million+, M) found the true story through the ship’s security cameras. I tried apologizing to Sal, but I don’t think he believed me. OP doesn’t want to give up on me, and neither does one of the Rescue team members nor the youngest of the human family. But three of the members of the Rescue team called me a liar, a rogue, and that I “ran out on my partner,” which I admit I did do, but I truly do care for Sal. I think that was their way of calling me an asshole, so am I?

[afteas2003]

next for oc questions! what type of discipline was your character subjected to at home/growing up? strict? lenient? were they overprotected as a child? sheltered? how has this effected them as they've gotten older or gone out on their own?

Another fabulous question!

This got, waaaay longer than I anticipated so read at your own risk lol. Really good question that brings up a lot of their lore. Thank you for the ask! I love talking about them :}

For Fern, he was subject to a rather abusive home in his early childhood till he ran away at 12. A lot of emotional, mental, and religious manipulation was used, and they were expected to be perfect. After he ran away, he was found by Peter and brought to Neverland, an Island built by Peter in another plane where thoughts and imaginings can become concrete and Peter is particularly adept at this. Neverland has become a haven for traumatized children who never had much of a home or support or family in their lives before. They have created a community where each person's needs are heard and validated. People don't age in Neverland so Fern is still 12, and time passes differently there so it's hard to say how long he's been there. His upbringing obviously gave him some serious trust issues and trauma, low self esteem, etc. He feels much safer and has warmed up quite a bit to Neverland, but can still get triggered and deals with CPTSD. He often goes non-verbal and prefers to communicate using the sign language dialect that has developed on the island. He hasn't gotten older though.

Peter understands that Neverland is a sort of stasis in some ways and since they cannot grow there, they cannot fully heal. For now though he is there to help them feel safe and loved and give them a family and childhood they deserve.

Okay I know that's a lot but BAM here's even more for Enriel, sorry.

So with Enriel, he belongs to a different plane where where spirits of different concepts are formed as humanity gets more complicated and those concepts become a significant part of their lives. The spirits embody that concept and often make others around them feel that way. The health of the spirit is partially tied to the existence of that concept, but the existence of that concept is not tied back to the health of the spirit if that makes sense. And the spirits are capable of change and growth, their nature is just very tied to what they embody.

All that to say, Enriel and all the spirits do age but hey never exactly went through a childhood as the form fully formed. Enriel would have been part of the third wave of spirits and most spirits tend to avoid him. It can be annoying and irritating to be around someone who cares about almost nothing. He doesn't much care, due to his nature, but though he ignores it, as the centuries press on, there are some muted feelings of depression and loneliness that he shrugs off and pretend don't exist.

He gets along well with Bartimeas, spirit of Fear. Bartimeas is quiet and shy, and people also avoid him because anyone around him gets their greatest fears brought up in ways that make them terrified in their minds. Bartimeas cannot control that. But Enriel doesn't fear much and doesn't care much when he is afraid and never presses Bartimeas to speak, so they spend some time together, often in companionable silence that Enriel won't admit he enjoys slightly.

He also gets along with Morbius, spirit of death. Morbius is rather kind, but inevitable, all things die eventually, including the spirits. That makes most people uncomfortable. Enriel couldn't care less and at his more depressed sometimes wouldn't mind if it came sooner rather than later. Most of the spirits ignore and avoid him, so he ignores most spirits. The only one he actively avoids though is Bliss, spirit of joy. Everyone around her feels incredibly happy, even Enriel. After he leaves her presence though he feels rather uncomfortable with that strength of emotion and sees it as invasive and unpleasant.

I know that was long, does that answer the question for him?

[eurekavalley]

I fell into a little Gilmore Girls hole when I wasn't sure if I had COVID a few weeks ago and rather than make it everybody's problem, I'm going to make exactly one (1) post about it.

Tone aside, the show has so much in common with prestige drama family dynamics (like maybe this is my Succession). Everything is motivated by trauma responses and family cycles. Every family that gets any focus at all - the Gilmores, the Danes, the Kims, the Haydens, the Huntzbergers, the Gellars, the Stiles - is incredibly fucked up. No one really escapes.

I have zero patience for 'Mitchum Huntzberger was right about Rory'. First of all, how brave to agree with alpha male corporate capitalist figure! But also, he is obviously transferring his fears for his son onto Rory, who he set up in a subservient role to take his abuse. And we never talk about how Rory was right about Mitchum when she called him out for how he treated his son.

AYITL was in desperate need of another edit for taste and length, but it has good bones. Rory's burnout and career low point, Lorelai basically happy but also stuck in some ways, Emily finally changing in ways no one would have expected - it's all so good. I love the theme of change in the face of others' expectations - Emily wants Lorelai to change in specific ways and expresses that at therapy, and they both want that from Rory, even though Emily can say it and Lorelai really can't. But none of them can change for each other, even though they are all undergoing great change.

Seriously, the way Lorelai finds something that makes her feel secure (a house, a car, a relationship stasis) and then tries to maintain it exactly as it is, even replacing the guts of her car and keeping the shell of it, is so fascinating.

I never really cared about Rory's relationships, but I do think the future the revival is pointing toward is interesting And Luke and Lorelai aren't a huge pairing for me, but I like the way that they love matches up. Luke has a need to make grand gestures and do more than anyone even wants from him - except Lorelai, who needs exactly that. It's a little toxic and it's why they are the right match for each other. And it also reflects Emily's need to maintain a role in Lorelai's life with financial entanglements.

Lane's lifepath is great. So many comments are about why Lane never got her big break, but she could have left Stars Hollow multiple times, she could have tried to find another band to play with, and she always chose to stay and play with *her* band (more family enmeshment!). She is where she wants to be, and in the revival she seems happy and grounded, and she is still living an artist's life. Lane is better than fine. And like Rory, the ways she imagines breaking the cycle (becoming a rockstar and getting out from her mother's thumb) and the ways she actually ends up doing it (having a marriage where she enjoys sex and running her mother's business) may not align, and it's still okay.

The pro-birth agenda is real, there are so many unplanned pregnancies, and the only one who says, "I cannot have this baby" is Lane, but it is never mentioned again. The pro-choice poster in Rory's dorm room is a red herring.

[sahib-can-do-it-better]

OOC post

If you didn't see the first post (Sahib's playlist), you can find that here. I recommend looking through that one first, as it provides a little bit of context for this one.

Jewel is Sahib's childe. She has a permanent technology score of zero and will never have her own blog.

So, I will talk a little bit about each of the song choices under the cut!

Stalker's Tango by Autoheart - Explained in the last post, a shared song between the two playlists.

Etimasia by Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch - An instrumental vibe, which is unique to her playlist as I didn't both to put any of those on Sahib's. This one, to me, is being groomed into her Embrace. The gentle nostalgia, warped and obscured and discordant after so many years. Are her memories accurate, or did she create them to justify her hunt for retribution?

Side Character by Cloudfodder - Jewel's perception of the situation between her and her sire is very different. Sahib has grown distant and cold over the years, become controlling and easy to anger. Fifty years ago, she thought he would sacrifice everything for her. But she knows that he's grown tired of her and moved on—some day he will kill her and she needs to make sure she makes it out of his iron grasp alive.

Home by Cavetown - A dual meaning choice, again. On one side of the coin, Jewel giving up her eyes, her hair, and her life, all to meet the expectations of the two kind men who promised her eternal life. On the other, she reconnected with a childhood friend a few decades ago and found out that they had dedicated their life to hunting down the monsters that took her away. They could save her, they could free her from her fate. They could kill Sahib.

Witchcraft by Vian Izak - A cover of a Frank Sinatra that I've had memorized for years and that I used to be able to play on the piano. Jewel tends to have this sort of "new age" occult vibe that she actively uses to lure in new pets.

No Children by The Mountain Goats - I'm not sure this one needs much explanation, on a surface level, but I'll give you the deep cut. She has complicated feelings about Sahib, but even more so about the rest of the polycule. She will escape him even at the cost of her life, but it would be better to be rid of him and survive it. And then what? And then continue living with the other two? If Sahib is her abuser, are they as well? Or are they enablers, loved ones who watched her get burned over and over and did nothing to help?

Valeris she could do without. Jewel would miss her, but losing her along with Sahib would be only one more drop in the ocean of grief. Losing Etienne as well, though, would be the tsunami that broke her. In the end, though, he didn't save her either. Is he worth keeping in her life, and is he even safe to keep in her life after breaking free? Would Etienne turn against her in the wake of Sahib's murder?

Rule #34 by Fish in a Birdcage - Like father like daughter.

Mad Hatter by Melanie Martinez - She is actively leaking her humanity all over the place and will run out quite soon. She, however, does not see it like that. Jewel is embracing the darkness she's been given.

Venus in Gemini by DEZI - I don't think this one needs a lot of context. The lyrics do all the work for me, really, with the context I've already given you about how she views her situation.

THE ONLY TIME IT RAINS IN HOLLYWOOD by Red Leather - Jewel was an actress, once upon a time. She was on the fast-track to fame. And then she met two strange men at a party that ended up changing her life. Not only did they take her life, but she couldn't go back to that life of stardom in a million years. They made damn sure of that when they took their claws her eyes, scissors to her hair, and needles to her skin. She was told she was beautiful like this, permanently altered in the stasis of death, perfect for the role she would play.

Villainous Thing by Shayfer James - The narrative spun by her sire in those early years, a pretty little story of power in the dark of night.

Pretty Lavinia by American Murder Song - What goes in Lavinia's drum? One part kisses, three part rum. Northern girl with a Southern tongue; Pretty Lavinia. Another body was combed from the Ashley bank, tied with cat tails and stones until it sank. But Lavinia, breezing corners past the mourners... pretty pretty pretty Lavinia.

Hunting song.

Unlucky Lady by TROY - Something about this one makes me think about Sahib's sire and his opinion of Jewel. He has a much more... optimistic view of what's happening to her.

Dead Inside by Younger Hunger - What Sahib's little love affairs look like to Jewel.

Miss Jackson by Panic! At The Disco - This is me, talking about her succumbing to madness as she chases freedom like a dog chasing cars. You, Jewel, are one fucked up little lady. Keep going, I wanna see what happens to you at the end of all this.

Alternatively, Sahib watching her plan his demise and thinking "Damn, that's actually really clever."

Echolocation by Don't (a duo featuring Cosmo Sheldrake and Flora Wallace) - I'm funny, actually. I'm funny and very mean.

I Want to Be Bad by Helen Kane - Minimal explanation needed. A very childish sort of silly song, but the sentiment stands. This is the facade she puts forth into the world to garner sympathy.

The Dismemberment Song by Blue Kid - Remember when Sahib posted something like "RIP to whoever I just scraped off the ceiling in J's room."? :)

you should see me in a crown by Billie Eilish - Jewel's ambition is "Kill Sahib". What says overthrowing your sire more than Billie Eilish's hit song you should see me in a crown?

Sex with a Ghost by Teddy Hyde - Looking back at a previous sentiment of Sahib growing tired of her (Side Character by Cloudfodder), this is another song to express that same idea. Sex with a Ghost is about being intimate with somebody who isn't emotionally present, having sex with someone who looks right through you or maybe even sees someone else in your place. There is a miscommunication happening at all times between Sahib and Jewel and I would be hard-pressed to list all of them. They are built on misunderstandings and lies and manipulation.

But there's something uniquely devastating about realizing the person you take to bed doesn't want to be there. Especially if you don't realize it until thirty years in. Has Sahib grown disgusted with the image he himself created from her component parts, or was he disgusted with her to begin with?

Did he ever love her?

Foreign Object by The Mountain Goats - She wants to stab him in the eye with a foreign object. You know, like what he did to her.

Disclaimer: Information presented in this post may be inaccurate to reality. This is all according to what she perceives and remembers.

[bluejayblueskies]

can i be gentle?

Words: 7.1k

Relationships: Jon & Tim, Tim & Martin

Tags: Canon Divergence, Tim Lives, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Post-Unknowing, Injury Recovery

Warnings: suicidal thoughts/ideations, blood, injury, hospitals and hospitalization, survivor's guilt, body horror, minor gore, gun and knife violence, mentions of death, mentions of canon-typical worms, implied child abuse, meat, alcohol, swearing, crying, smoking

Ao3 link in source

.

Tim aches. It’s full-body, radiating through his arms and back and legs, and he wishes more than anything that he could go to sleep, to chase away the pain for at least a little while. It feels like he’s been hit by a bus.

 Or been on the receiving end of several kilos of C4 igniting all at once. But that metaphor’s a bit too on-the-nose, in his opinion.

 He should be dead. He should be dead. 

 (Does he wish he were dead? He hadn’t cared, in those few moments of clarity before he pushed the button on the detonator and the colors solidified into black nothingness, whether or not he would wake up when the smoke cleared. It’s hard to tell. He’d attached so much of himself to revenge, before, when it was easier than feeling everything else bubbling up underneath, and now that it’s been ripped away from him, he doesn’t know what emotion should be filling the gap. Probably relief.

 He doesn’t feel relieved.)

 The nurse is speaking to him. Her lips are moving, but he can’t hear her. His ears ring and ring and ring, and it sounds like spirling, mocking laughter.

 They do some tests. Blast-induced hearing loss, the pamphlet they give him proclaims. Prognosis is good. Most patients recover in 6 weeks. Hearing aids can help with high frequencies.

 His ears ring and ring and ring, and he’s alive.

 He’s alive.

 Jon is not.

 .

.

.

 “It’s because of him, you know.”

 Martin startles badly at Tim’s voice. Tim wonders if it had been too loud; the ringing in his ears is incessant, and every word spoken sounds as if it’s coming from a very, very far distance. He moves a bit further into the room that they’ve placed Jon in, his hands shaking where they grip the wheels of the wheelchair they’d given him. Hard to walk when your leg is shattered. And some ribs as well. 

 Martin says something, Tim thinks, as he’s turning. His eyes are wide and rimmed with red, and he’s looking at Tim expectantly. Tim sighs, then winces as the motion sends tendrils of pain through his ribcage. “I can’t hear you, Martin. Either speak up—way, way up—or just… move your lips more or something. I don’t care.”

 “What?” Martin enunciates, and it’s so ridiculous, Tim wants to cry.

 He answers anyway.

 “Me. Being here. I’m alive because… because of him.”

 It was stupid, thinking he could protect Tim from an entire building collapsing on top of them. But his hand had gripped Tim’s wrist and he’d pulled him to the floor and he’d covered Tim’s body with his own, so when the shock wave had hit, Jon had gotten the worst of it.

 Tim refuses to feel guilty about it. He does anyway. Because they’d argued, and Jon had stalked him, and Tim had cultivated his anger and fear into a simmering ember deep in his chest, but at the end of the day, Tim wasn’t supposed to survive.

 Jon was.

 Tim swallows, hating the bitter taste in his mouth, and says, “Do you… do you think he’s going to wake up?”

 Martin says something, too softly for Tim to hear. His mouth twists into something small and pained, and he looks at the floor.

 It’s answer enough.

 Tim doesn’t ask again. 

 .

.

.

 They arrest Elias a few hours later, after Martin’s collected himself enough to bring his plan to completion. Tim’s only regret is that he isn’t able to see the look on Elias’s face as he’s dragged away.

 Knowing Tim’s luck, he’d probably have just looked smug.

 The name Peter Lukas crosses Martin’s lips, spelled out in exaggerated motions when he visits Tim again. Tim thinks, absurdly, of the hydra. Cut off one head, two grow back.

 Lukas probably won’t be better. Knowing their luck, he’ll be much worse. But Tim thinks of the way Melanie had shaken after she’d come out of Elias’s office, of the haunted look in Martin’s eyes when Tim had asked how his plan went, and can’t find it within himself to care.

 .

.

.

 They release him from the hospital with a hefty prescription of pain meds, small plastic hearing aids tucked in each ear, and a thick folder of discharge papers. Martin’s there when they do; the bags under his eyes are dark and smudged, and he nods mechanically as the nurses talk to him, outlining Tim’s care regime for the next few weeks. His eyes keep flicking to the side, to the corridor that leads to the long-term care section of the hospital. Wordlessly, Tim reaches over and takes Martin’s hand in his, giving it a single squeeze before holding it tightly.

 Martin lets out a breath through his nose and squeezes back.

 “Do you want me to, er. To take you back to yours?” Martin asks once they’re out, his voice on the softer side of muffled and overlaid with that constant ringing but audible enough now that he doesn’t have to shout. 

 Tim feels something almost like embarrassment curling in his stomach. “I, uh. I don’t have a place anymore.” Tim drums his fingers on his thighs, looks at the ground, and says, “I canceled my lease. About a week before we left for Great Yarmouth.”

 There’s silence between them—or at least, as close to silence as Tim can get right now. Tim thinks Martin says something, a word or two brushing up against the edges of what the hearing aids allow him to hear, but he can’t grasp any of it. So, Tim looks up at Martin, at the pinched, pained expression on his face, and says, “Don’t pretend like you didn’t know.”

 “Know what?” Martin says bitterly. “That you never expected to come back? Yeah, I got that part. I even got why, you know? Doesn’t make it better, though. I didn’t want to lose you, Tim.” Martin pauses, then says, so quietly Tim can barely hear it, “I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

 “Yeah,” Tim says. But that’s not how this works. We were never going to all survive. Everything is fucked, and it still is, and it always will be.

 “I’m sorry,” he says and finds he means it. Then, to clarify: “For hurting you. And… and for Jon.” He doesn’t elaborate on that point. He doesn’t know what he would say even if he tried. “But I’m not sorry for going, and I’m not sorry for pressing that button. If I would have died, I wouldn’t have been sorry for that either.”

 “Right,” Martin says slowly. “But you didn’t. And the Circus is gone now, so do you…?”

 “Do I still want to kill myself?”

 Martin winces.

 “Hey, your question, not mine,” Tim says, holding his hands up in a defensive gesture. After a moment, his hands drop back to his lap, and he gives a small shrug. “Don’t know. I knew I would do what I needed to in order to destroy the Circus, and I did. Thought I would die in the process, but I didn’t. I’m still trapped in the world’s shittiest job, and I don’t really…”

 Tim shrugs again. “I don’t know,” he repeats. Then, because it feels true: “It was never… it was never the dying bit I was chasing, you know. I didn’t do this because I thought it would be a good way to get killed. I did it for Danny, and that’s it. Plain and simple. So if you’re asking if I want to die, the answer is no. But I can’t guarantee that I won’t make the same decision again if I have to.”

 Martin’s quiet for a long moment. Then, calmer than Tim expects, he says, “Okay.”

 “Okay,” Tim echoes. Then, with a levity that only feels slightly forced: “I suppose it’s back to your place, then. Just be sure to buy me dinner first.”

 Martin doesn’t smile at that like he used to, but his face does soften a bit. His voice is lighter when he says, “Oh, I will. Within your dietary restrictions, that is. Which means no alcohol.”

 Tim groans. “You’re no fun.”

 “Uh huh.”

 They begin the commute back to Martin’s flat, and the atmosphere between them grows more lighthearted than it’s been in months. Tim feels something warm and familiar curl in his chest, and he realizes just how much he’s missed this. It’s not quite easy conversation, not like it used to be, but it’s nice all the same.

 Tim’s ears ring, and his entire body aches, and he still feels a numbness in his core in the shape of suspicious glances and calliope music and a face he can’t remember, but for the first time in a long, long time, he allows himself to smile.

 .

.

.

 Tim doesn’t visit Jon often. At first, it’s the guilt, acute and cloying and weighing him down. Then, it’s old hurt and stale anger, resurfacing and driving away any passing thought of Jon that isn’t tinged with bad memories and broken trust. After that, it’s just habit.

 It also hurts, if he lets himself admit it. To see Jon lying there, motionless and clad entirely in white, the heart monitor attached to him reading out a constant horizontal line even as his eyes move in small, jerky motions behind his eyelids. 

 See? a part of him whispers. He’s not human. Maybe he never was. Maybe he was always a monster, and you just never noticed. It wouldn’t be the first time.

 A newer part of him, one that gets more prominent by the day, recognizes that even if Jon isn’t human anymore, he never would have chosen this. This stasis, this half-death. Not what came before, either. That part of him remembers the way Jon’s hand had gripped his tightly as they’d opened that trapdoor, and how it had continued to do so even as the worms had begun to bite into their skin. He’d tried to protect Tim then, too, putting himself between Tim and Jane Prentiss. For all the good it did, when the worms began to come from all directions. But Tim remembers the way the terror and pain in Jon’s eyes had been tinged with sadness, with a silent apology as he gripped Tim’s hand hard enough to bruise and they both accepted that this was it.

 It hadn’t been, in the end. And now it is, with Jon all-but-dead and Tim still here, wheeling his way into Jon’s hospital room for the first time in weeks. 

 He’s halfway in before he realizes he’s not alone.

 “Oh,” he says. “I… I didn’t know you’d be here.”

 Martin lets out a sharp, jagged laugh. “Where else would I be?” he says, and it’s tinged with something bitter and broken that takes Tim a bit off-guard. It’s become almost routine now, for Martin to visit Jon, and usually, he comes back looking drained but otherwise fine. Sometimes, when Tim asks him for status updates on our resident medical mystery, Martin even manages a small smile and responds, still dreaming.

 Martin scrubs a hand across his face, and Tim realizes belatedly that he’s crying.

 “Martin?” Tim says carefully, moving a bit closer to where Martin’s sitting. “Are you… did something happen?”

 “No,” Martin says, his voice catching in a way that indicates that something very much did happen. “It’s fine.”

 “Is it…?” Tim pauses, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “Is it about Jon?”

 Martin’s laugh this time is more like a whimper. “Nope, he’s- he’s the same as always. Still asleep.”

 Tim moves closer but doesn’t say anything. The clock ticks rhythmically in the background, and he waits. Patience has never been his strong suit, but it’s been something that’s been required of him as of late, and he’s getting better at it.

 He likes to think he’s getting better at a lot of things.

 Martin doesn’t speak again for a few minutes. He stares at his hands where they rest just shy of one of Jon’s, his fingers restless against the sheets, coming up occasionally to fiddle with the thin black ring that rests on the middle finger of his right hand. Then, so quiet Tim almost can’t hear it, he says, “My mother died today.”

 Oh.

 “I’m sorry,” Tim says. They’re empty words, but they’re better than the good riddance and about time and you’re better off without her sitting on the back of his tongue, begging to be released. He doesn’t think they would be appreciated right now, no matter how true they might be.

 “Yeah,” Martin says. He’s still staring at his hands. “They called me a few hours ago. She… she passed away in her sleep. Natural causes. From- from her illness.” He falls silent for a few moments, his fingers twisting in the sheets. Then: “I… I think I should be sad?”

 Tim studies Martin’s face—the tear tracks down his cheeks, the unhappy set to his mouth, the way he’s shaking ever so slightly where he sits. His face is one of grief, but Tim doesn’t ask. He waits for Martin to continue, and after a moment, Martin says, “She was the only family I had left. She- she was my mother. I took care of her, I- I did my best to be a- a good son.” He takes in a shaky breath, curls his hands into fists, and says, “I haven’t seen her in months, you know. I- I visited at first, but she… she never wanted to see me. So I just stopped going. I’d call, every Saturday, but it was the same every time. She’s resting. She doesn’t feel up to talking right now. Call later, and we’ll see what we can do.” 

 Finally, Martin looks at Tim, and the guilt in his eyes is so acute Tim can feel it cut through him to his core. “I should be sad that she’s dead, but… but all I can feel is relief. And that hurts. I- I don’t know… why am I relieved? God, she was right, I- I’m horrible, no wonder she- she never wanted to see me, I- why can’t I- I can’t—”

 Martin cuts off with a wet sob, and all at once, Tim understands.

 “It’s okay,” he says, and he collects Martin’s hands from the sheets, holds them tightly in his own. “You can feel however you like, it’s- it’s okay.”

 He squeezes Martin’s hands, just once, and repeats, “It’s okay.”

 He knows Martin won’t believe him. But still, he sits, and Martin cries, and he says, It’s okay.

 It’s okay.

 .

.

.

 The hearing aids are a permanent fixture in his ears now, as most people have full hearing restoration after six weeks apparently doesn’t include him. The tinnitus is still particularly bad some days, but they help with everything else. It’s not perfect, but it’s a small price to pay for living, he supposes.

 He’s not sure when, exactly, he decides that he’s glad he’s alive. But he does. 

 He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear at all, when the Flesh attacks. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear the wet, sticky sounds of things that shouldn’t be able to move without bones slipping through the vents, shattering the relative peace they’d begun to cultivate. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear the pops of Basira’s gun, bullets burying themselves in things that barely flinched at the contact. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear Melanie’s screams of anger, the responding screams of pain from things with too many eyes and teeth and limbs as her knife carved a violent path through them.

 There are yellow doors and hands slick with blood and a sudden quiet as the last of the twisted, mangled creatures falls, sliced neatly in two in a way that’s just a bit too clean. 

 Melanie is breathing heavily, but her hands are steady and her eyes are hard with something raging and violent. When Basira reaches tentatively for her knife, saying, “It’s over now, Melanie. We’re- we’re safe,” Melanie stiffens but doesn’t resist.

 “This isn’t right,” Tim says after Melanie comes back to herself in bits and pieces, enough to shudder at the blood coating her arms up to the elbows and mutter something he can’t quite catch before disappearing into the toilet. “None of this is. God, can we ever catch a fucking break?”

 “We can deal with it later,” Basira says. She’s calm, but she can’t quite hide the tremor in her voice. Her Al-Amira is splattered with viscera. “Right now, we need to make a call. Get this cleaned up.”

 “What,” Tim says bitterly, “so we can continue hiding away in the Archives? You’re the one who said we should start sleeping here. Should have known it wouldn’t be safe. It’s not like it was before.” 

 He rubs at one of the small circular scars on the back of his left hand, his skin crawling with a phantom itch that makes him vaguely nauseous. 

 “We stay here,” Basira says, leaving no room for debate. “We make the call, and we stay here.”

 Tim makes a low, frustrated noise, and bites out, “Fine. Because Basira always knows best. Whatever.” He unlocks his wheelchair and says shortly, “I’m going outside for some fresh air. The smell of rotting meat is making me sick.”

 Basira doesn’t follow him.

 Martin does.

 They situate themselves just outside the glass doors, and they don’t say anything for a long time. Martin still looks vaguely ill. His face is pale, and his hands are fidgeting at his sides. His fingers are resting on his ring, twisting it back and forth, agitated. His shoes are stained a glistening red.

 Finally, Martin tilts his head back so it hits the wall behind him and says to the air above him, “Is it horrible that I wish Jon were here?”

 Tim snorts, anger still bubbling under the surface of his skin. “Because we’d have done so much better with our own flavor of spooky bullshit?” He bites out a bitter laugh. “Maybe he could have compelled them to explain exactly why every single monster out there has a personal vendetta against us. Working for an eldritch horror of voyeurism doesn’t give you much in terms of an offense.”

 “Stop,” Martin says sharply. “You know what I mean.”

 Tim does. He’s just not particularly inclined to wax nostalgic about the power of friendship and comradery when he’s got bits of meat stuck in his hair. 

 Still, he finds that he means it when he says, “I wish he was too. For what it’s worth. Which isn’t a fucking lot, but it’s what we’ve got.”

 “Yeah,” Martin says. His hand brushes against Tim’s, and they fall back into silence.

 The police arrive, followed closely by the ECDC. It’s a messy affair, even messier than the last time Tim had been in this situation, and Tim wants nothing more than to get away. Forever.

 He doesn’t make any jokes this time. He just nods in the right places, and when they’re finally released and he and Martin return to a flat they haven’t seen in weeks, he can feel weariness cutting through him to the bone.

 When he wakes the next day, Martin’s gone. His note, stuck to the door of the fridge, says, At the hospital. Be back around noon.

 It’s ten in the morning, and the sunlight is bright as it streams in through the kitchen window.

 Tim digs out the bottle of rum that Martin keeps tucked in the back of his cabinet and pours himself a drink.

 .

.

.

 “Peter Lukas wants me to be his assistant.”

 Tim looks up from what’s turning out to be quite an impressive doodle of the little figurine of a frog in a top hat he’d purchased back in research from a charity shop and says, “Absolutely not.”

 Martin sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, holds it there for a moment, and then says, “I don’t know if I have a choice in the matter, really. It’s… it’s not safe here anymore.” Quieter: “He said he can help. Off- offer protection.”

 Tim audibly scoffs at that. He sets down his pencil and notepad and crosses his arms across his chest. He can already feel a headache coming on. (More than the usual, that is. He’s almost able to tune out the constant ringing in his ears now.

 Almost.)

 “What’s he going to do, isolate them to death? It’s not like the Lonely’s any better of an offensive force than the Eye. We’re doing just fine without involving him.”

 “Are we?” Martin’s voice is hard and a bit choked when he continues, “We’re living down here because it’s not safe to stay outside for too long. We’re still finding bits of- of flesh in- eugh.” Martin shudders and folds inward on himself. Quieter, enough so that Tim has to watch the motion of his lips to make out the words, he says, “Jon’s not waking up.”

 Tim feels something inside of him twist. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what’s happening with him.” A touch bitterly—old habits die hard, he supposes—he says, “Maybe he’s just not done going through his monster metamorphosis yet.”

 “Tim.”

 Tim sighs. It’s a profoundly weary sound. “Yeah, yeah. I… I miss him too, you know.”

 He’s surprised to find that it’s not a lie.

 “Right.” A small, shaky smile crosses Martin’s face, and he says, “I- I suppose they’re right, then. Distance does make the heart grow fonder.”

 “Somehow,” Tim says, “I don’t think whoever coined that phrase had this situation in mind.”

 Martin’s smile fades as quickly as it had come, and Tim feels a pang of guilt. “Sorry,” he says, pushing away from the desk and wheeling across the room to where Martin sits. He hesitates, just a moment, before placing his hand on Martin’s where it rests on his knee. “I… I suppose I’ve forgotten how to be lighthearted about all of this.”

 Martin nods. It’s a small motion. He’s silent for a long moment; Tim squeezes his hand and says nothing. Finally, Martin looks down at his hands and says, “It’s been four months, Tim. Nothing’s changed.” He pauses again, his mouth pinching around the edges. “I… I visited him today. I begged him to wake up, to- to do anything to indicate that he’s even still there. I don’t know why I expected him to answer. It’s not like anything’s different now. He- he’s never going to wake up, Tim.”

 Martin’s voice cracks, and he repeats, wetly, “He’s never going to wake up.”

 Then, Martin’s crying, heaving sobs that overtake him completely and have him hunched over, dripping salty tears onto the back of Tim’s hand. “Hey, hey, hey,” Tim says, leaning forward as far as he’s comfortably able to and wrapping Martin in as hard of a hug as he can manage. He rubs his hands in circles across Martin’s shoulderblades, feeling Martin’s shaky breaths against the side of his neck, and says, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

 He repeats it, again and again, as Martin cries into his shoulder and says, over and over, words thick with grief, “He’s dead, Tim. He’s dead.”

 “It’s okay,” Tim says. Maybe if he says it enough times, he’ll start to believe it.

 Eventually, Martin’s body stops shaking and he pulls back, the tear tracks on his cheeks already beginning to dry. His eyes are red-rimmed and glistening, and he looks tired, grief apparent in every line of him.

 “I said I’d think about it,” Martin says, in a voice rubbed raw and hoarse. “When Peter called me. I- I said I’d think about it. I- I don’t know why…” He cuts off, makes a small, distressed noise, and says, “What do I even have left? If- if this can help, what- what do I have to lose?”

 Tim feels a pang of hurt flash through him, but he suppresses it. He squeezes Martin’s hands, gives him as wide a smile as he can without breaking, and says, “You have me. And I’m not leaving—you’re stuck with me. So don’t think for a second that if you take Peter’s deal, I won’t be there still. I’m like a bad penny, or, I don’t know, a- a fungus or whatever. The point is, you’re not going to get rid of me. Whether or not you decide to work for Lukas—which you shouldn’t, by the way, in case I haven’t made that abundantly clear—you’re not going to be lonely, okay? Not on my watch. I can be very persistent when I put my mind to it.”

 Martin looks at Tim, eyes wide, and another small, hiccuping sob escapes him. “You really mean that?”

 “Yes, Martin,” Tim says, exasperation and fondness filling him in equal measure. “Christ, just because things got… rough for a bit, it doesn’t mean I stopped caring about you. Honestly, don’t know if I could. You’re a very lovable person, you know. It’s not like being your friend is a hardship.”

 Martin laughs a little at that, his voice still thick with tears. “Well, when you put it like that…”

 Tim gives him another smile, and this one feels easier. Like it would be harder not to smile. Still, he’s careful with his words when he says, “So, then. What are you going to do? I’ve made my opinion more than known, but…” Tim swallows around the lump in his throat and continues, “It’s your decision.”

 “Yeah,” Martin says, barely more than a whisper. “Yeah.”

 Peter calls again. And when Martin hesitates for a long moment before giving a quiet yet firm no, the relief that sweeps over Tim is enough to make him feel weightless.

 .

.

.

 Two months later, as a man who smells of death shuts the door behind him, Jon takes a rattling breath and finally opens his eyes.

 .

.

.

 “Tim?”

 Tim raises the hand that’s not holding a rather large bouquet of white daisies and baby’s breath in a half-wave. “Hi, boss. Been a while.”

 The look Jon gives him is half-shocked, half-nervous. “I… I suppose it has. Six months, apparently.”

 Tim makes a sound of affirmation before wheeling himself fully into Jon’s hospital room and letting the door swing shut behind him. “You know,” he says, allowing a blanket of levity to fall over him, “when we said you should get more sleep, this isn’t exactly what we meant.”

 Jon just stares at him for a moment, face blank and eyes wide. Then, a laugh escapes him, a small hiccup of amusement. “Yes, well. I can’t say that I feel particularly well-rested.”

 Tim imagines what it must have been like, to be locked in a dreamscape stasis for six months. He can’t say that the idea sounds particularly relaxing. “Yep, sounds about right. Guess we can cross ‘spooky coma’ off our list of possible cures for sleep deprivation.”

 Jon folds inward on himself a bit, hugging one arm to his chest and gripping the other tightly. “Right,” he says, his voice small. He looks away from Tim, focusing on the small window in the corner of the room, and says, “I… I’m sorry, Tim.”

 Right. Jon still thinks Tim hates him.

 Tim lets out a long, weary sigh and makes his way to Jon’s bed. He practically shoves the flowers into Jon’s hands; Jon takes them, more out of surprise than anything, white petals tickling the bottom of his chin. “It’s been six months, Jon. You’ve been… honestly, a bit dead? No offense. And I’ve been alive. And we both know it was meant to be the other way around.”

 Jon opens his mouth, and Tim holds up a hand. “Don’t. I know. I already hear enough about it from my therapist, I don’t need to hear about it from you too. The point is that I’ve… I’ve had time to think. And some of the things you did, I can’t forgive you for. But some of it…”

 Tim shrugs. “Martin would always go on about how it wasn’t your fault. About how you were suffering just as much as us. And maybe I didn’t believe it because I was already angry, or maybe I didn’t believe it because all I could think about was finally getting a chance at the revenge I’d chased after for years. But then you were gone, and the Circus was gone, and I just… didn’t have anything left for the anger to hold on to.”

 Jon clutches the flowers tightly in his hands, looks down at the petals. “But you were right,” he says quietly. “A- about me.”

 Tim casts himself back six months and sifts through a metric ton of bitter remarks and angry assumptions. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

 Jon lets out a slow, shaky breath. “About me not being human.”

 Oh.

 “Jon—”

 “Do you know what I was dreaming about?” Jon cuts in before Tim can say anything else. “I- I don’t remember, not really, but… but I can guess. I… I Know, somehow, that- that they were the same dreams, over and over and over again.” Jon takes one of the flower petals between his fingers and rubs it back and forth, a nervous gesture. “I started having them soon after I took this job, you know. Naomi Herne was the first one, and I- I didn’t understand why. Every night, she was trapped in the fog, forced into her own grave, and I would try to move, because it- it felt like I should have been able to, but it- it never worked. So I… I stopped trying after a while. I would stand and watch as she relived one of the worst experiences of her life, every night, and I- I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

 Jon crushes the petal between his fingers. “She was the first one, but- but there are so many more now. Lionel Elliott and Jordan Kennedy and- and, Christ, Georgie—”

 Jon makes a small, unhappy noise. “I don’t know when I realized that they could see me in their dreams too. That in trying to help, I- I’d just made myself another source of terror.”

 Jon falls silent for a few moments; the quiet is filled by the familiar tick tick tick of the clock in the corner. Then, so quietly Tim has to focus on his lips to catch the words, he says, “I… I think I made a choice. Before I woke up. I don’t… I don’t know what it means for me, not really, but I know it means that I’m worse than I was before.” He lets out a bitter laugh, devoid of any humor. “So, you were right. I’m just- just even less human now.”

 Jon falls silent again, and for a few moments, there’s just tick, tick, tick. Tim rolls the words over in his mind, looks at Jon’s pinched, unhappy expression, and says, “Okay.”

 Jon looks at him then, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Okay?”

 Tim shrugs and repeats, “Okay. You’re not human. I’m not going to pretend like that thrills me or whatever, but it’s… honestly, it’s a lot less of an issue for me now than it was back then.”

 “I- I don’t…” Jon trails off with a frustrated noise. “What?”

 Tim sighs. “A lot’s changed, Jon. Things have… well, things have kind of gone to hell. Honestly, we could use a few monsters who are on our side for a change.”

 Jon blinks at him in stunned silence for a few moments more before saying, bewildered, “... Right. Uh, I- I suppose I shouldn’t ask how you’ve been, then.”

 A wry smile cracks across Tim’s face. “I’ve been just peachy, thanks for asking. Blow up one Circus and suddenly every spooky monster out there wants to kill you. It’s been one big, long, horrible sleepover in the Archives. But hey, at least Elias isn’t there! Now we’ve just got Lukas, and if one or two staff members disappear every once and a while, well—that’s just how it is at the Magnus Institute. Nothing to be concerned about. Sometimes, we still go out for drinks.”

 “Tim,” Jon says flatly. The exasperated expression on his face is so familiar—so Jon—that Tim feels a tension he hadn’t known he’d been holding slip away. 

 “Yeah, yeah,” Tim says, waving a hand absently in Jon’s direction. “Point is, I’m not disappointed or angry or whatever that you’re back in the land of the living.” He pauses, and then, more sincerely: “Martin’s not the only one who’s missed you, okay?”

 Jon’s lips part into an O. Then, his mouth twitches up into a smirk, and he says, “Mm, you’re right. Basira did stop by earlier, and then of course Georgie, and I bet even Melanie—”

 “Unbelievable. And here I was nice enough to come all the way over here, to bring you flowers.”

 “Mm, they are very nice flowers.”

 “Damn right they are.”

 Jon smiles then, a fragile thing, and says, “Thank you, Tim. I… I’ve missed you too.”

 Tim could point out that Jon had been asleep for the majority of the time in question. But he knows that’s not what Jon means. So instead, he offers Jon a smile in return and says, “Be honest: more or less than the Admiral?”

 Jon shoots Tim a flat, unimpressed look. “Tim, don’t be ridiculous. Of course less than the Admiral.”

 .

.

.

 Tim’s been out of the wheelchair for a week when he finally manages to make his way to the roof of the Institute, still learning how to maneuver the crutches he’s moved on to. He swears he can feel every motion of the pins and the rods in his leg—skin covered with even more scars for the collection—as he finally heaves himself through the door and into the cool night air. 

 The view is just as good as he remembers.

 There’s the faint smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and Tim’s entirely unsurprised to see Jon silhouetted against the glow of London, leaning against the wall that rings the roof with his back facing Tim. The cigarette glows a dull red as he raises it to his lips and breathes in.

 Jon doesn’t say anything, even as Tim painstakingly makes his way over to where he’s stood. Tim props his crutches against the wall before leaning his weight heavily against it, arms crossed atop the wall in a mirror image of Jon as they both look out onto the city below, humming with life and light.

 Finally, after a particularly long drag of his cigarette, Jon says, “I’m going to get Daisy.”

 There’s no room for argument in his voice. But that’s never stopped Tim from trying anyways. 

 “I thought you were done doing stupid shit that’ll get you killed,” Tim says, turning his head to look at Jon. Jon’s staring forward, but Tim gets the distinct impression that Jon isn’t looking out at the city at all.

 “It won’t kill me,” Jon says quietly. He moves his hands as he talks, surprisingly competent sign language that he’s begun using tentatively in his conversations with Tim. When Tim had asked him where he’d learned it, Jon had been quiet for a long moment before telling him that he hadn’t.

 Well. At least the Eye was being useful for once.

 “Yeah, whatever,” Tim says. “Dead or not, you’ll still be gone. You know people who crawl into that coffin don’t come back.”

 “I don’t—” Jon cuts off with a frustrated noise. After a moment, he continues, “I have a plan. I- I read a statement, and it said that I would need an anchor. A- a piece of myself to keep here. I can find it when I’m down there, and- and use it to guide me back.”

 “Right,” Tim says dryly. “Because our plans have always gone so well.”

 “What would you have me do, Tim? I- I can’t just do nothing.”

 “Why not?”

 Jon affixes him with an expression that’s half-affronted, half-stunned. “Tim.”

 “What? Jon, we barely know Daisy. She tried to kill you. No, don’t give me that look.” Tim jabs a finger in Jon’s direction. “You know I’m right.”

 “I…” Jon trails off. After a moment, he hugs his arms to himself, his snubbed-out cigarette still smoldering slightly on top of the wall. “I know. But I… I still have to go. I… I’m still going to go.”

 Tim exhales slowly and says, “Right. Suppose I should have expected that.”

 There’s silence between them for a moment. Then, Jon removes his hands from his arms and signs as he says, quietly, “Why don’t you hate me?”

 Tim stares at Jon for a long moment before saying, “What?”

 Jon sighs and repeats, the motions of his hands larger and more emphatic, “Why don’t you hate me? Basira and Melanie, they- they keep looking at me like I’m some… thing, and- and maybe I am. No, not… not maybe. I’m not… I’m not human anymore, and I- I know what you said, but what happens when I—?”

 Jon cuts off with a small, choked noise, like the air’s been sucked out of him all at once. Weakly, he signs, “I’m so hungry, all the time. What happens when I… when I can’t take it anymore? When I- I become dangerous, a- a monster, will you—?”

 Jon’s fingers curl into fists, and he drops his hands to his sides, angling himself away from Tim and staring at an arbitrary point in the distance. “It’s better this way,” he says, loudly enough that Tim can make out the words above the hum of London at night and the ever-present ringing in his ears. “I… I don’t want to go. I don’t want to lose this, to- to lose you and- and Martin. But maybe it’s better than becoming something that will hurt you.”

 Jon won’t meet Tim’s eyes. Carefully, Tim reaches across the space between them and takes Jon’s hand in his, uncurling Jon’s fingers gently in an attempt to release some of the tension. Slowly, he says, “You know, I… I shouldn’t be alive right now. Back after the Unknowing, when I woke up in the hospital, I… I didn’t want to be. It was supposed to be whatever it takes, and to me, that was always going to mean my death. Revenge and poetic justice and all of that. I should have died, but I didn’t. And… and you did. And it’s not something I feel guilty about, because we both made the same choice in the end, but that… that doesn’t stop me from feeling, sometimes, like it was my fault somehow.” He lets out a sharp laugh and says, “Well, I was the one to actually blow the place up in the end, but, you know.”

 Tim holds Jon’s hand carefully in his like it might break otherwise, the mottled texture of the scar tissue firm against his fingertips. His eyes find the thin white line slashed across Jon’s throat, the stark white bandage poking out from the collar of Jon’s shirt where it covers a fresh scalpel wound in his shoulder, the pale pink spots that pepper Jon’s skin in a mirror image of his own. He can’t see the splash of jagged scars across Jon’s back, a memory of shrapnel and white-hot explosions, but he knows they’re there. “You asked why I don’t hate you?”

 When Jon nods mutely, Tim says, “I just… ran out of reasons why I should. I still wanted to, but…” He shrugs and gives Jon a wry, humorless smile. “We’re all just stuck in the same shitty situation. And I guess at some point, I just decided that you hadn’t chosen to be here any more than I did.”

 “Oh,” Jon says, barely audible. 

 Tim takes Jon’s other hand in his, squeezes them firmly, and says, “And I’m sorry. Not for- for how we used to be, because I think the blame for that falls pretty evenly onto both of our shoulders, but… but for everything else. For what’s happened to you. Figured I’ve spent enough time feeling sorry for myself, I might as well extend you the same courtesy.”

 Jon’s fingers tighten around Tim’s, and he mumbles something Tim can’t quite catch. Then, he extracts his hands from Tim’s and signs, shakily, “I’m sorry too. For everything. But for what it’s worth, I… I’m glad you’re here. That you’re not dead. I- I know it’s been bad and- and I wish I could fix that, but I… I don’t know if I can.” Jon’s eyes when they meet Tim’s are sad but determined. “But I can fix this. I- I can get Daisy back. I can find my way out.”

 Tim looks at the firm set to Jon’s mouth, the furrow of his brow, and says, “Okay. But I’m going to hold you to that. Otherwise, I might have to go in after you.”

 Jon looks horrified. “Tim.”

 Tim holds his hands up in a placating gesture. “Hey, come back in one piece and we won’t have to worry about it.”

 Jon opens his mouth, then closes it again. There’s a long pause before he finally says, decidedly, “I will. I- I promise.”

 Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tim wants to say. Instead, he shuffles closer to Jon and leans against the wall again, crossing his arms on top of it and looking out over the city. “Good,” he says softly. 

 After a moment, Jon shifts to face the city as well. His arm brushes against Tim’s, and Tim lets that point of contact ground him as he looks up and up and up at the stars above, pinpricks of light on a satin black sky. 

 “Thank you,” Jon says, just loud enough for Tim to hear. 

 Tim moves his hand to cover Jon’s where it sits on the wall and squeezes once. “Yeah.”

 They stand there until sunlight begins to tickle the edges of the horizon. And when Jon gives Tim’s hand one last squeeze, the other holding the lid of the coffin open, and says, “Be back soon,” Tim believes him.

 .

.

.

 Three days later, Jon climbs out of the coffin with dirt caked underneath his fingernails and a thin, sharp hand clutched in his. “Tim,” he says, and Tim ignores the pain in his leg as he lets his crutches drop to the floor and hugs Jon tightly.

 “Looks like I’m staying above ground after all,” Tim jokes, his voice light even as his words come out wet and choked.

 Jon’s laugh vibrates against Tim’s chest. “Yeah,” he says, burying his face in the fabric of Tim’s shoulder to hide his smile. “Yeah.”

[kittenshift-17]

Hi! I've really been craving some snamione fics, and your writing has made me picky 😬 do you have any fic recs or authors you go to when you're wanting something good? (the spicier the better)

Girl, you came to the right place. My Snamione loving heart is all aflutter. MY TIME HAS COME!! 

*scampers off to fetch list to all her fave Snamiones in no particular order*

Self Slain Gods on Strange Altars by scumblackentropy What do you want me to say, Granger? That you are mine and I am yours? You are. I am. Let's not fuck around.

Pet Project by Caeria Hermione overhears something she shouldn't concerning Professor Snape and decides that maybe the House-elves aren't the only ones in need of protection.

FALLING FURTHER IN by kaz2 Hermione begins to learn something of the man behind the dark sarcasms of the classroom.

Chasing The Sun by Loten AU, from Order of the Phoenix onwards. Hermione only wanted to learn Healing; she discovers that Professor Snape is a human being after all, and his actions dramatically shape the course of the war as events unfold. Complete.

Pride of Time by Anubis Ankh Hermione quite literally crashes her way back through time by roughly twenty years. There is no going back; the only way is to go forward. And when one unwittingly interferes with time, what one expects may not be what time finds...

Inkspots by mezzosangue When you are a double spy with two masters, no one is a friend. But the war ended last May, and Severus is now his own man. An owl brings a letter of change, but is it a good change? Canon Compliant, disregards Epilogue. Eventual SS/HG romance.

Splintered and Broken by A plus He had watched as the thin wood snapped across her knee with a violence he had not known she possessed. He had been her teacher for seven years and had never seen this girl give up at anything. Voldemort wins, Hermione leaves, Severus waits.

The Tattered Man by Aurette I was once asked to write a Marriage Law Challenge fic by someone who loves a sad tale. This short story is it. Angst, Character Death. Tissues recommended. COMPLETE

Saving your life by lilmisblack  When Hermione is captured by Death Eaters, Severus knows there's only one way to save her. 'What are you doing? ' she asked, her voice shaky. 'Saving your life,' he said, just as he started kissing her neck.

A Murder of Crows by Hogwarts 91 14 yrs post-war: Hermione’s teaching at Hogwarts when an un-aged Snape awakens from stasis and returns to the school. Sparks fly when they meet. Can they learn to trust and love in time to defeat an evil plot bent on changing the wizarding world forever?

Advanced Floriography by Viridiantly Snape's first question to Harry about wormwood and asphodel in the Language of Flowers means 'I bitterly regret Lily's death'. Harry never gets the message behind the question, but what if Hermione does, years later? Mostly set in HBP, DH and after. A story of messages with flowers, the wizarding war, and different kinds of love. Slow-burn. Not canon-compliant, but canon-inspired.

Looking for Magic by Hypnobarb Severus Snape and Hermione Granger deal with traumas past and present and find they have more in common than they realize as they prepare for the ultimate confrontation with Voldemort. SSHG pairing. Not HBP compliant. This is a novel length story.

Synergy by Laurielove Hermione is being followed, and she suspects she knows by whom. But when they come face-to-face, how will she react to him and his startling request? SS/HG. M readers only, please. Written for the 2011 LJ SS/HG Exchange.

Post Tenebras, Lux by Loten "After Darkness, Light." A chance meeting ten years after the war may not be just a coincidence, and may prove to have very far-reaching consequences. A story of many things, but primarily of healing. SS/HG; rated M for later chapters. Complete.

For the Potions Master's Amusement by snape.submiss Now Complete! Severus Snape is not a kind man, but Hermione Granger is past caring. She wants his approval and will do anything to get it. How far will she go? Even she has no concept of the depths to which she will fall in her quest.

Latent Loveliness by Ladyreason Bellatrix gets in one last curse before her defeat which causes Hermione to fall into a deep sleep... She'll only awaken to one man's kiss. And boy, will she awaken. eventual SSHG pairing

Babble On by Aurette One person's nervous tic, is another's nervous joy.

Liminal by Cybrokat Severus Snape keeps running into a student playing piano. Why does he stop to listen, and how does she respond when she is asked to invite him when she plays? And what about Voldemort? Here there be fluff, romance, drama, and angst.

Sins of the Father by Emmaficready 9 Months after the end of the war, a destitute Severus Snape, practically living rough, gets news that will change his life forever. Severus Snape Lives! / POST DH / EWE WARNINGS: Abuse, Neglect, Character Death, Rape, Sensitive/taboo topics.

The Marriage Law by teshara 020 rewrite and update! When Hermione Granger and Severus Snape are thrown together by the ill-conceived Marriage Law, no one doubts they'll make a good undercover team for the Order. No one suspects that they'll find mutual respect, love, and a plot to destroy the world. A story in 3 parts.

A wizard s trial by snapeophil Hermione is out after curfew when she witnesses something that will change her relationship to her DADA professor forever.

The Prisoner and the Occlumens by duskywolfdaemon Hermione's plans to spend her seventh year on the run with her friends are shattered when Severus Snape shows up with a proposal she cannot refuse. *AU 7th year with Hermione attending Hogwarts. Eventual SSHG. M for reasons. ***COMPLETE***

Unintentional Inveiglement by onecelestialbeing Takes places during the summer after OoTP, the Golden Trio is forced to stay in hiding at Grimmauld Place. Hermione (who is of age!) begins gravitating towards Snape without knowing why, and he attempts keeping her at arms length, but will be able to remain doing so? AU

Innocent Shadows by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse "You'll sort everything. Gods, Hermione, you fought five Death Eaters to a standstill *and* defended and saved Snape."/ "Professor Snape."/ Harry rolled his eyes. "Yes. That." He waved his hand at the bed. "So this? Piece of cake." /Marriage Law /ss/hg HEA...always *grin*

Turned Over by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse Severus Snape inherited Hermione Granger at three o'clock on a rain-soaked Saturday morning in March. SS/HG HEA...Always :) COMPLETE

The Irony by awakethelion Hermione Granger gets stuck in her Animagus form and is put in the care of the only one strong enough to control her - Severus Snape. The over-achieving know-it-all Gryffindor, is, in the eyes of Hogwarts student body, home taking care of her ill parents, while in reality she is now living life posing as Professor Snape's familiar. J.K. Rowling owns all the characters.

Camerado by MillieJoan Hermione seeks knowledge from a reluctant Snape in order to help the War effort. What she receives is more than either of them expected. Set beginning in Hermione's sixth year, continuing into a slightly AU post-DH era.

Unto Their Own by CRMediaGal The Light has fallen, Darkness abounds, and Hermione Granger is struggling to survive in a far more sinister Wizarding world. When she is sentenced into Snape's charge, Hermione begins to wonder if everything is truly as it seems. For better or worse, their worlds are about to collide, perhaps even unite them against a common enemy. AU, Post-Hogwarts, Rated M.

Vixen by SLovingLecter After her parent's deaths Hermione is bound and trapped in her Animagus form, first for her own safety, then to ensure the safety of others during the war. Who is she bound to? Severus Snape, of course.

Another Dream by dragoon811 Due to his injuries, Severus is unable to resume his old life. He's determined to be lonely and miserable, but the yearly Order Christmas party becomes a bright spot, thanks to Hermione Granger. Complete. 

The Prisoner and the Occlumens by duskywolfdaemon Hermione's plans to spend her seventh year on the run with her friends are shattered when Severus Snape shows up with a proposal she cannot refuse. *AU 7th year with Hermione attending Hogwarts. Eventual SSHG. M for reasons. ***COMPLETE***

Entangled by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse No doubt, she'd been showing off obscure spells she found in the archives, again. Apparently, she did that whilst drunk. Hermione never yet had any memory of it. / SS/HG HEA...Always :)

Time Immemorial by FawkesyLady Hermione loses it after the Battle of Hogwarts. Unfortunately, she still had that time turner and she uses it, sending her back in time, a mystery for the denizens of Hogwarts, circa 1976. OC's are important. Please note, chapters 21-26 could be considered crossovers with JRR Tolkien's Return of the King. In for long haul, y'all. Nominee for Marauder's Medal 2018, Best WIP.

The Offer of Just One More by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse The feeling in her chest twisted. Tightened. Ronald Weasley didn't want children. SS/HG HEA...Always :) This one's a slow burn.

Time's Hammer by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse She was about to break the time stream. Not just break it, but take a bloody hammer to it. SS/HG HEA...Always :)

Clash of the Conjurers by llorolalluvia In a world where the mere flap of a butterfly's wing can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe, can one simple glance save a man's life? When Hermione and her professor are forced together against their will, can they overcome their differences, find order amidst the chaos, and save the Wizarding World? not Cannon compliant. Rated M for sexuality and violence. DUBCON!

Turned Over by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse Severus Snape inherited Hermione Granger at three o'clock on a rain-soaked Saturday morning in March. SS/HG HEA...Always :) COMPLETE

One Step Forward, Two Decades Back by corvusdraconis AU/AO: [HG/SS] What-if Story. Hermione Granger gets erased due to a badly phrased, vague, and bitter wish. She is Hermione Granger no more. Now, thanks to Ron, she is Hermione Ankaa Black, sister of Sirius & Regulus Black, & member of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Now what is she going to do? Multiple pairings in later chapters, and JP starts out as a rampaging jerk.

Absinthe by Aurette A dark deed on a dark night sends two lives spinning out of control. To forge a future, both must confront their pasts. AU, EWE, SS/HG, HEA

The Love You Take by Subversa Hermione is cursed by the Death Eaters, and Dumbledore believes Professor Snape is the only one who can help her and keep her safe. Hermione is 18 years old in this story, but she is still a student.   

[jostenneil]

how do you feel about people shipping toxic ships?

i think this depends on a few things. primarily, that fandom tends to conflate the terms abusive and toxic with each other. . . a lot. toxicity is inherent to abuse, but the reverse of that isn’t necessarily true. you can have a toxic relationship with someone without it being abusive, esp since, to me at least, abuse specifically arises from a person taking advantage of a power dynamic within what should normally be a mutually supportive relationship to deliberately hurt the other person. an example of an abusive relationship to me would be (from the grisha trilogy) alina and the darkling, who uses alina’s trust and sympathy towards him to manipulate, isolate, and threaten her to the point that it emotionally debilitates her and threatens her other relationships with people. there’s a clear power dynamic being manipulated there to the advantage of one person and to the harm of the other

a toxic relationship to me can involve intentional behavior but it can also involve a lot of unintentional behavior, esp that driven by trauma or a non-ideal upbringing, and then i also think a lot of toxic relationships are simply. . . between people you would never expect to get along to begin with. a lot of enemies to lovers ships have their initial basis in toxicity bc the people involved are enemies. they’re not supposed to actually like each other (or value each other’s lives) in the beginning, and usually if you write such a dynamic well, then certain political events and revelations eventually help those stances evolve to where the toxicity is addressed and overcome (and the same process can apply to rivals to lovers situations as well, albeit along softer parameters usually since politics aren’t necessarily involved). i personally like to see toxicity explored if writers give it direction. toxicity is off-putting if it’s static bc then it serves no other purpose than to scream in big neon letters “omg these ppl are sooo toxic it’s so sexy blah blah blah” and that’s incredibly boring to me. what well explored toxicity does is analyze how the people involved are impacted by that toxicity. whether being toxic invokes remorse, isolation, misery, etc. that’s what interests me

sometimes, it goes the ideal way, wherein characters realize their toxicity only hurts themselves and they express a genuine desire to change and grow. sasuke (from naruto) is a fairly obv example of that phenomenon to me, in that, yes, he’s absolutely right to be distrustful of the villages’ ulterior motives and to want justice for his family’s massacre, but driving away the people he loves and who love him doesn’t ultimately help him in attaining that goal or vision. post canon naruto is an absolute mess, but i think most people would agree on the general premise that in an ideal world, sasuke opening himself back up to naruto, sakura, and kakashi could have helped him enact change bc he would have a support system behind him, and he wouldn’t have to further isolate himself or render himself so prone to manipulation via trauma if he was able to rely on people he genuinely cared about

other times, toxicity can go the tragic route. the characters may be aware of their faults but fail to figure out how to fix them, or they may not be aware of those faults at all and continue to indulge in them until their ultimate downfall. as miserable as that sounds, i think there’s a value in narratives like that, too. it teaches you a lesson, and it can also garner sympathy from you as a reader in some circumstances bc you may realize that some toxic behaviors of a given character were inadvertent and they didn’t have the resources or environment that would make them conducive to change. that’s like the epitome of wuthering heights to me. most of the characters are absolutely terrible to each other, but there’s something to learn from that, and with heathcliff esp, you see that a lot of his toxicity stems from trauma and abuse that he didn’t really have the emotional resources to ever recover from, so you can’t entirely render him into a villain bc it’s a flat reading

toxicity can also exhibit a blend of the two above scenarios. wuthering heights also feels like a good example of that to me. heathcliff and catherine’s ends are tragic, but hareton and cathy junior’s ends are far more hopeful in comparison. some people don’t learn, but others do, and it’s a good insight into the nature of human dichotomy as well as cycles of toxicity and abuse within context of class and race relations

so ultimately, i think i personally find a lot of worth in exploration of toxic relationships bc it can really get to the heart of analysis of the human psyche and how real world relationships are often non ideal. but that being said, how i feel about the phenomenon as it goes in fandom is. . . tricky. i’ll be straight and say i don’t think most people are sensible enough to really get to the root of what makes toxic relationships interesting and are instead content to rely on toxic stasis bc it’s easily marketable and readily appealing. you don’t have to deal with the real questions contending with toxicity demands of you if you don’t care, and that’s unfortunately a mindset that pervades fandom at large

[catrasredemption-moved]

catradora+shadow weaver's broken mask

“Why did you go back for it?”

“I don’t know.... it felt right?”

Adora looked at Catra, then down at the mask sitting on the bed between them. “What... What do you want to do with it?” Adora asked after a moment. Catra hid her face in her hands, making an aggravated noise.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’s still fucking with my head and she’s dead.”

“I’m sure she’d be happy to hear that,” Adora muttered darkly. They were still unpacking a lot of the damage Shadow Weaver had done to them. They weren’t sure they’d actually be over it.

“I’m so proud of you.” Catra scoffed into her hands. “What the fuck was that? She waits until she knows she’s going to die to say that. Manipulative bitch.”

“It’s probably the first nice thing she ever said to anyone without expecting something in return.” Adora shook her head. “I wonder if she always covered her face.”

Catra looked up from her hands, eyes fixing on the mask again. “I’d cover my face too if I looked like that horror show.”

Adora bit down a laugh. “She had the lower half of her face covered when she was teaching at Mystacor, too. I don’t get it.”

“I do.” Catra reached up to brush her fingers through her short locks of hair. “It’s easier to function when you have something to hide behind.”

Adora opened her mouth to argue - then stopped. Catra’s missing headpiece was a bit of a touchy subject, just because of how closely its lose was connected with Horde Prime and his abuse. She never knew how to bring it up.

“You didn’t hide,” she said instead. Catra laughed humorlessly.

“Yes, I did. Constantly.” She hesitated, eyes flicking around before focusing on Adora. “Can I... tell you something?”

“Always.”

Catra nodded, playing with her hair. “Sometimes I’m glad Horde Prime took it. It’s so stupid, but that mask was a part of me for so long, part of the person I don’t want to be. It was something comfortable, though. Like it... I dunno. Wearing it always made me feel better. Stronger. Sometimes I miss feeling secure with it, but... I don’t know if I ever would have been able to change otherwise. It’s dumb, I know-”

“It’s not,” Adora said quietly. “We never had anything that belonged to us when we were living in the Fright Zone, so we had to keep whatever we could get. Your mask, my jacket, that poetry book Rogelio found I have no idea where-”

“I completely forgot about that.” Catra giggled. Adora felt a rush of victory; getting Catra to laugh was always a win.

“If you feel like the mask became too much of who you were as a person you didn’t want to be, then... leaving it makes sense. Leaving that part of you behind is probably the best thing you can do.”

Catra met her gaze, giving her a small smile. “When did you get so wise?”

“I have some good influences.”

“You and Sparkles have a lot of philosophical conversations?”

Adora rolled her eyes, hitting Catra with a pillow. She grinned, grabbing it and throwing it back in Adora’s face. Glimmer appeared in the room, covering her eyes, before Adora could retaliate.

“I’m here, please be decent.”

“Why don’t you just knock if you’re worried about walking in on something?”

“Also, you walked in on us kissing once. I have absolutely heard you and Bow doing more-”

“Okay moving on!” Glimmer squealed, waving her hands wildly. “This is what I get for coming to see if you want to visit Bow’s dads with us...”

Her voice drifted off when she saw the mask on the bed. “Am... I interrupting something?”

“Not really.” Adora followed her gaze. “We’re just...”

Moping. Over Shadow Weaver. Again.” Catra gathered up the pieces of the mask and jumped off the bed, heading for the bed.

“Where’re you going?”

“I’m getting rid of this stupid thing, and then we’re going to see Bow’s dads because I definitely stole like five books last time I was there.”

“You stole - wait up!”

Adora hurried after her, Glimmer close on their heels.

No one had touched Shadow Weaver’s garden since their return to Bright Moon. They weren’t really sure what to do with it. The garden itself was in stasis, from what they could tell, perhaps waiting for a caretaker that would never come back.

Catra hesitated on the threshold of the garden before taking a deep breath and walking in. There was a small shovel beside one of the flower beds; she grabbed it, knelt down, and began digging. If this place wanted to act like a tomb, then it wouldn’t mind if part of Shadow Weaver was buried here.

Glimmer stayed back while Adora walked in. This was something they needed to do together - the two lost girls who had been terrorized by Shadow Weaver their entire lives, even after her death. They would be dealing with the ramifications of her actions for the rest of their lives.

This was their moment of closure, no matter how small it might be.

Adora leaned on Catra, watching her work. She took the mask when the hole was big enough, and arranged the pieces to lay them in. “Rest in pieces, hag,” Catra muttered before filling the hole again.

“Do you think we’re ever going to be okay?”

It was the first time either of them had said something like that out loud. The first time they acknowledged the real damage. “I don’t know,” Catra admitted. “But she’s not going to keep me from being happy anymore. I’m not giving her that satisfaction.”

Adora smiled gently, getting up on her tiptoes to kiss Catra’s temple. “Same.”

Shadow Weaver wasn’t there anymore. She couldn’t keep them apart or turn them against each other. She was gone. They were still there.

And she couldn’t stop them from living.

[lligkv]

what the world will look like when it’s over

Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.

Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.

This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.

And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?

I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:

How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?

Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.

The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.

Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?

It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.

Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.

Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.

Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.

In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?

Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.

[fandom-necromancer]

A little Distraction Part 7

This was prompted by the amazing AO3 user a fool! Enjoy!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900 | AU: Reverse AU [Read full on AO3]   [Part2]   [Part3]   [Part4]   [Part5]   [Part6]

‚I’m off to work!‘, Nines called from the door and Gavin shut the dishwasher to join him in the hallway. ‘Be careful’, Gavin just said, as he always did. Richard smiled at him and nodded. ‘I’ll try my best.’ Visibly unable to refrain from it, he dove in for a kiss, hesitating just the tiniest moment to allow Gavin to duck away. It hadn’t been necessary for weeks now, but apparently old habits died hard. The android grinned into the short peck and half-heartedly pushed him towards the door. ‘Come on, Fowler will kill you if you are late once again.’ ‘And whose fault is that?’, Nines chuckled, but quickly left for the car. ‘See you in the evening!’ ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

Gavin watched how Nines drove out of the garage and onto the street, waving him once again before driving off. A routine much like waking up, cuddling, eating breakfast and then waiting until Nines came back. As the car disappeared, Gavin stepped back inside and closed the door. Waiting until Nines came back. It wasn’t like Gavin was trapped in the house, he could have gone outside and investigated the city a bit. Maybe go to the riverfront and see Cyberlife tower being slowly reclaimed by Jericho. Or he could meet with other androids at the several centres set up just for that very reason. Or he could continue watching their current series. He knew when they continued with it in the evening, he would have someone far more interesting at his side, causing him to miss half of it anyways.

But somehow all of that felt dull compared to when Nines was there. All he could really do was wait. And he was growing sick of it now that he had accompanied to being safe and a person. Thinking about what he could possibly do today, he walked through the house. Surprisingly, it was at the table in the living room that his eyes were caught by something: A tablet. It was left behind with a half-emptied glass of water and Nines had likely forgotten to put it away. Curiously Gavin sat down and unlocked the small device. A police case was still open, and Gavin immediately tried to find a date somewhere. If this was something recent it was likely confidential and he shouldn’t know of it, right? But he couldn’t find any, so he assumed it had to be an old one if Nines left it easily accessible on their dinner table. If Gavin had to find something negative about Nines it would have been that he really seemed to love his rules, following them to the last word if needed. He wouldn’t let confidential data accessible to some random- Well, he wasn’t some random android anymore, was he? Maybe Nines trusted him enough already to be sure such information would be safe with him. He really shouldn’t look at the file.

But…

Gavin didn’t have anything else to do and he was extremely curious about what exactly Nines did at work. They spoke about it sometimes, but mostly to just blow off steam about co-workers or relax after a long day. Nines rarely talked about the details. And if anything, Gavin could keep it a secret if he needed to. And really it was Nines’ fault to leave it there. If he would be angry about it in the evening, Gavin decided to focus on that aspect.

He grabbed the tablet and stood up to throw himself on the sofa. This would be an interesting read. It was a case about a murdered husband. He was killed by poultry shears being stabbed into his heart in the bedroom, no DNA-traces or fingerprints except for the husband himself and his wife. The scissors themselves were noted as having no fingerprints at all. Suspects were the wife herself, and a few friends, none of them could be pinned down due to lack of evidence and interrogations brought up no new leads. Gavin was a little disappointed as that was about all he could get from the written reports. Apparently, this had been a dropped case. Maybe that’s why Richard had left it on the table. Maybe he was revisiting old cases.

Gavin sighed and put the tablet aside to unload the dishwasher but couldn’t help but think about it while taking out the plates, pans and silverware. Somehow his thoughts were stuck to the unsatisfying case left unsolved and went over the information again and again.

So much so, that once he was finished, he returned to the sofa and took the tablet once again. He interfaced with it, searching for more raw data in the file. He was surprised to find they actually saved the reconstructed imagery from the countless photos and had made the effort to convert it into a form androids could access in their zen garden. Gavin grinned as he waited for the data transfer. Even if it was an old cold case, playing detective a little was certainly more entertaining than watching old buddy cop shows on TV.

-

‘Gavin, I’m home!’, Richard called as he closed the door behind him and untied his shoes. He had expected Gavin to come to greet him, but as he had kicked them off his feet and stood up, he was still alone in the hallway. Frowning, he went to investigate. He found Gavin in the living room, laying on the sofa motionless except for a yellow LED circling slowly, sometimes speeding up a bit. Nines crouched down to gently shake the android a bit. ‘Gavin? Can you hear me? Are you alright?’

The GV opened his eyes and sat up in a purely robotic motion. Immediately Nines stepped back, knowing he had startled him out of stasis. ‘Gavin?’ The android looked at him and seemed to relax. ‘N-n-n-nines. Yoooou s-s-surprised me, that’s all.’ HE shook his head, frowned and stood up blinking irritated. ‘I-I-Is it evening already?’ Nines huffed in amusement. ‘Just came back from work. Are you sure you are alright?’ ‘Yes. Yes, I am. Just didn’t thought to get lost this much.’ Richard cocked his head inquisitive. ‘What had you so hooked?’, he asked, starting to walk over to the kitchen as Gavin took a step in that direction.

He was already starting to prepare dinner and the android just leaned against the counter seemingly still in thoughts. ‘You left behind your tablet, Nines’, he started. ‘I was curious, so I had a look at the open case. And before you get angry, it was your fault leaving it in the open!’ Richard laughed. ‘Hey, don’t worry. As far as I know you are not the one to kill that guy, right? It was the Jensen case, right?’ Gavin nodded. ‘Yeah, I checked it in the morning and couldn’t help but get into it. I didn’t have much else to do once you were gone. It’s probably not important, but I think I know who it was.’

Richard nearly dropped the pan he was holding, put it down on the counter and turned towards Gavin, staring at him very intently. To say Gavin was a little creeped out by that wouldn’t be an understatement. ‘Why do you think it wasn’t important?’, he asked. ‘I-I-I don’t know. Thought it was an oooold case?’ Nines nodded and leaned back, blowing air through his teeth. ‘Alright. Shoot. Who was it?’ ‘The wife’s sister.’ ‘What?’, Nines asked, apparently not expecting that answer. ‘Why?’

Gavin sighed and hopped on the counter. ‘Okay, so first you would think the wife, right? She wasn’t too bothered in the interview and let’s be honest, being killed in the bedroom it kinda is the cliché. But I looked at the reconstructed material and I found a different pair of poultry shears in the knife block. So unless she went to the lengths of specifically getting a new pair just to murder someone, I thought it unlikely she was the killer. I mean if it was some sort of personal argument it would have been a heat-of-the-moment decision. Unless the wife was somehow kept at his side by force and had time to plan, she would have taken whatever there was at hand.’ ‘And you are basing that on what?’, Richard asked, still listening intently. ‘Personal experience?’, Gavin shrugged. ‘I was the victim of domestic abuse if you so will, even if I didn’t care about it as a machine. Had there been a longer issue in the relationship one of them could have divorced. There were no children involved after all. Therefore I would have bet on a quick decision, not planned. So I sorted out the wife for now.’ ‘And why the sister?’

‘I went through the interviews’, Gavin answered. ‘The wife openly told you her husband was cheating on her with the neighbour. That’s why she wasn’t too bothered, the hate was still fresh as she learned it only a few days prior to the killing. I looked into who else could have killed him. The husband’s friends didn’t strike me as the type to kill him for whatever reason especially since they had grown rather distant over the years after moving away as most of them stated.’ He watched as Nines nodded and fidgeted with the pan. ‘That’s all I got from the file, too’, he sighed. ‘So why the sister?’ ‘She is family and has a good relationship with the wife. I guessed they would have talked about the fact that her husband cheated on her. And she had history with the police for beating up school-bullies and whoever looked at her sister wrong really.’ ‘How do you know that?’

Gavin grinned. ‘I might have asked Hank to see if a certain person had a criminal record. And I might have lied that the reason was that I was concerned because that person was around our house.’ ‘And Hank allowed that?’ ‘I c-c-can be veeeery co-co-convincing’, the android smiled and Richard laughed. ‘Fooling Hank? That’s a new one.’ ‘Well, it brought me the information I needed. Solved your cold case. Or at least found you more evidence for what it’s worth.’

Nines smirked and looked at Gavin with a proud expression the android couldn’t really place. ‘What?’, he asked finally as the silence went on for too long. ‘Well, Gavin, that wasn’t a cold case. I’m currently working on that and I was stuck in a dead end. I mean I knew she had a sister, but so far there wasn’t enough evidence to question her, besides that her sisters husband was murdered.’ ‘Wait, it wasn’t?’, Gavin asked in surprise.’ ‘Nope.’ He went to the fridge to get some butter for the pan. ‘And you figured that out just because you were bored? In one day?’ ‘I’m sitting here on my own until you come back from work’, Gavin nodded with a shrug. ‘No offense, I’m grateful to have a safe place to stay. But I am bored, and that case file was a welcome challenge.’

‘I mean, I could bring you some files home if you’d like. Not that it’s legal, but I could sneak something past surely.’ ‘You don’t have to’, Gavin immediately assured him. ‘But you clearly have talent for that kind of work. I could speak to Fowler and-‘ ‘That truly isn’t necessary, you don’t have to-‘ ‘You could work with me, I can try to convince Fowler.’

Gavin watched the overly excited human start cooking and think out loud. His first instinct was to decline, but the more the thought about it… he clearly wasn’t qualified to work as a detective but staying with Nines and helping him in the workplace didn’t sound too bad. And he would have something to do finally. A new purpose maybe. He had rounded up with his past life after being brought to his new one and getting accommodated to it. Wasn’t this the logical next step? Finding something for himself and really starting his new life? And what better was there than to start it with Richard?

‘Oh, I will ask him next morning if you could start as a police adviser or hell an intern if he wants to be an ass. I think that should work out perfectly.’ He turned around the first time to look at Gavin. ‘I mean if you want it that is.’ Gavin thought about it but the more he did the more he could see himself getting used to that thought. ‘I think I would like to try that.’