#maybe ill extend this more into a proper drawing later

[wcr0agi]

neighbour!human!simeon

no spoilers in tags/comments please

[hobidreams]

october 1864.

but nothing gold can stay.

pairing: joseon king!yoongi x reader genre: angst words: 1.3k contains: historical au, descriptions of accidental parental death and blood, grief a/n: for ease, Yoongi’s father is referred to as King Min even though it’s not technically correct. 

moonlit throne index. this is drabble 11. start from the beginning?

They said it was an accident.

She had slipped reaching for a precious herb around the side of the cliff. It had been raining the night before so the stones had still been damp. Too damp to support the weight that had been placed a smidgen too far, a tad bit wrong and then mother was just… gone. They couldn't stop the bleeding in time. And even though you told her to be careful with a warm smile that morning, even though she said she would be back very soon with a pat of your head, none of that means anything anymore.

You stare at the empty, unused bedspread beside yours and feel the warm wetness slide down your numb cheeks. You barely register the tears. Not when they've become so commonplace.

It's been three days since they gave you the news; it's been three days since you've ventured outside this room. It hurts so much to stay here but you are afraid it might hurt more to leave. If not for the kind person leaving meals outside your door (you managed to make out a swish of green robes once; one of the eunuchs it seems), you surely would have starved. But even the heat of the rice porridge doesn't seem to spread through your body, your fingers stiff and cold from lack of use.

Mother would absolutely scold you if she saw you like this.

It was she who always insisted on being independent, regardless of the strict rules that society placed on your gender and your rank. She taught you how to make the best of the resources you had, but also never to take any opportunities for granted when they came by chance. She is the best person you will ever know, and you… you owe it to her to take care of yourself.

Borrowing her strength, you push up from the blankets. You've relied on the mystery benefactor enough. You can get yourself a cup of hot water, damn it. Wrapping your mother's coat around your hanbok, her scent hugging you in comfort, you pad down the halls towards the kitchen with your head bowed.

It's a bit of a walk down, but the air helps clear some of the fog in your mind, even if you know it'll soon return in the end. Having a goal helps move you forward. That's all you need right now. To just keep going.

"Jeonha has issued a full funeral procession for her?"

Your quiet steps hesitate just as you cross the closed door of one of the tea rooms. The words worm directly into your brain. The voice is vaguely familiar, one of King Min's concubines maybe? But there is no chance that they would be talking about...

"Yes, for a mere uinyeo! Who would have thought?" A second speaker, this one harsher, sharper. She punctuates with a laugh.

With a frown, you move closer. Pretend to inspect a piece of the building tile that has come loose.

"She did help deliver the crown prince all those years ago. That would buy her some favoritism."

"Hmph. That wouldn't warrant such a fuss as this. But... I did hear that jeonha picked her off the streets himself, and that's how she first entered the palace. Imagine that — a cheonmin coming to live here!"

"How vulgar."

"But that’s not all one of the maids told me. That cheonmin…” Her voice lowers so you barely catch it. “She gave birth not long after to her daughter."

Another low laugh. "You don't think it’s the king’s bast—"

You rip away from the door, desperate not to hear the end of that sentence.

You’re going to be ill. Violently so. Or burst into the room and do something you’ll heavily regret later. Your feet move so fast you nearly fall over as you back away from the room, clutching the jacket before turning. You run back the way you came, water forgotten, the fresh sting of tears in your eyes.

Is that what they have thought of your mother all this time? Twisting her hardships and the kindness of the king into something so dirty when they knew nothing of the truth. Speculating so wildly when it was your father had abandoned you both. The truth: mother had been near death when the king happened upon you. She used the resources he allowed her to teach herself literacy, and then proper medicine to repay him with a lifetime of pure, untainted loyalty.

You throw aside the door to your room with a furious slam. You’ve never wanted so badly to break something, anything as you scan the place. Your temper flares hotter when you think of all the times mother refused to come to bed and rest because she was too concerned about the concubines and women like them who came so frequently to her for help. She talked to them, hand-fed them, cared for them. She sacrificed so much and this is how they thank her—

You make a wild grab and your hands land on unfolded laundry.

The first smack of it on the floor feels good. No permanent damage but the exertion of grabbing and hurling towards the ground is a like welcome release.

You do it again, again, again, something so deeply satisfying about seeing everything precise rumple and come undone before you as a result of your own actions. Not anyone else’s. Not even the universe’s. You snatch up another handful and prepare to throw.

“You’re packing? You’re leaving?” It’s a sharp voice, bordering on frantic.

You whirl.

It’s the prince, holding a pastry box, his eyes blown uncharacteristically wide with surprise. If this were any other time, you’d probably laugh at his thinking this scene has any semblance of proper intention and order.

“No,” you snap. But then you consider it.

You… You could leave, couldn’t you?

After all, there’s nothing tying you here any longer. Being in the palace will only remind of you of life before she was ripped away. The memories of her smile and her love have yet to scab over and you’re so terrified that they’ll always be there as festering, chafing wounds. You could still serve and be loyal to your king from within the town walls. Maybe open that clinic mother often talked about as a wild dream. It’d be difficult, so difficult, but you could maybe run it yourself, with a few helping hands. Yes… Yes, you could!

The more you think about it, the more you want to do it. An escape from this suffocating place. The easy way out.

“Actually, yes,” you hear yourself saying. “Leaving.”

No one would miss you, a cheonmin’s daughter. The thought of those women and their poisonous words makes you scrunch your fist, only to find you’re still holding clothes. Your heart catches when you realize it’s mother’s blouse. Yours now, you suppose. Yours to take with you and never look back.

“Don’t.”

Your heart leaps as you jerk your gaze up.

“Don’t go.”

You shake your head. “The uinyeo will be fine. All of them are more experienced than me.”

“No, they won’t be.” He grits his teeth. “They need you.”

“Seja-jeonha, I—I don’t belong here.”

“Bullshit.” Always stubborn to the end. “Stay.”

“I can’t—”

“Please.”

The way he looks at you now… you’ve never seen it before. The wobbling of his lip. The irregularity of his breath. It’s like he is truly, completely uncertain. Almost to the point of fear. As if he knows that your paths won’t cross again if he lets you leave now.

“Stay,” he says again, and you think of mother. You think of how much she loved living here where it was safe. How much she loved helping the women even if some of them were undeserving of it in the end. You think of the queen, and the affectionate kindness she always extends to you without fail or question. Then you look at Yoongi. At that charcoal storm in his eyes, and you think maybe there’s more left here for you than you thought.

You draw in a deep, quiet breath.

“Okay.”

[thebeautyofdisorder]

The Undone & The Divine (BBC Dracula) - Chapter 3

A/N: Okay, here’s finally a third chapter to this. Thank you to everyone who liked/reblogged/commented on the first two parts! This one is fairly short but it leads to somewhere more fun, I promise. 

First two Chapters Here

Fanvid I posted earlier also right HERE if you want to see

Rating: T, for blood and maybe language

Pairing: Dracula & Zoe/Agatha Van Helsing

Can be found on AO3 - Right HERE -

Chapter 3

“Has anyone ever told you what horrible taste you have?” 

Frank startled out of an already fitful sleep, his vision blurry as he squinted into the dark at the tall shadow looming in front of his wardrobe, hearing more than seeing the disappointed frown that no doubt graced his face. 

“Actually, yes,” He replied with a nervous chuckle, blindly grasping until he found his glasses atop his bedside table, and flicked on his lamp as well, flooding the room with warm light. 

The vampire, now looking far more like his normal self despite being stark nude and dripping water on the rug, let out a soft tut of disappointment, rifling with audible impatience through the contents until he finally seemed to be settling for a pale grey button down and a pair of rather expensive trousers that he had tucked away in the far back of the closet. 

“I could go fetch some of your clothes from your flat, if you’d like,” he offered brightly, though immediately regretted speaking, as Dracula turned on him with a stern expression. 

“No.”

“Of course,” Renfield squeaked in response, suddenly feeling cold despite the duvet still covering his lower half.

“You are not to go there. I will do that later.”

Truth be told, the count wasn’t sure if he would. His first instinct, the instinct that had kept him alive all these years was telling him he should cut ties with the place and not go back, much as he had done before when he’d been exposed for what he was. But given recent developments – was there even anything worth running from? Honestly, an illegal research facility and a love-sick doctor in training – he’d dealt with so much worse. 

No, he supposed, as he pulled on the trousers, not bothering with rifling through Renfield’s underwear drawer - god only knew what he kept in there - what he was really dreading had nothing to do with existential fear. It was going back after a week of sleep and finding Zoe’s corpse rotting on his dinner table. What a maudlin image. Tragic really – a waste of a mind. Two minds, it would seem. Or worse, finding that she had woken up, only to become some incoherent waste of flesh as well, and having to kill her again. It was never any fun, the second time, even in the best of circumstances. 

There were ways to check, of course. He could usually feel them, his brides. When they woke, when they fed. He had been out of it for days however. He could’ve missed it, and the curiosity was gnawing at him almost as much as the hunger. Renfield had been bringing him sustenance, of course, but nothing could compete with getting it straight from the tap, as it were. He had a hankering for something young and hopeful, usually did the trick when he was out of sorts – though he had a feeling he needed to venture outside of London proper to find it. First thing first, however.

“I’m going out, I’ve called someone in about the mess, they should arrive bright and early,” the count assured the wary man still huddled in his bedclothes. “Don’t concern yourself with an explanation, I informed them that there had been an unfortunate accident and that you really didn’t want to talk about it.” He gave a conspiratorial, if half-hearted, grin as he pulled on the shirt. 

“No guarantee they still won’t assume you’re a murderer, but you should be able to get to work without an interrogation.”

Renfield looked both shocked and relieved. “Oh master, that’s so… kind of you.” He practically winced even as the words left his mouth. Would that be considered an affront to a vampire? 

Dracula’s brows lowered over his eyes. “Hm,” he breathed,  taking that development into consideration. “Yes, yes it is, isn’t it? Goodnight Frank.”

—–

For a while, Zoe felt shockingly normal. As normal as she could even remember, anyway. Given her entire life had been a extended familial nightmare that she’d inherited from her very abnormal family, she supposed the least she could expect was better than nothing. She didn’t feel like she was about to throw up (yet), a ghost (if that’s what she was) wasn’t currently trying to dictate her actions, and her whole body didn’t hurt. Ignoring the fact she’d recently died, all was going very well. 

At least that’s what she thought, up until she felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise, despite the otherwise warm air. 

The logician in her immediately checked her surroundings, observing every individual within ten feet of her and yet found nothing of alarm. Still, the feeling lingered on the rest of the afternoon, keeping Zoe ill at ease all through sundown, and beyond. 

Something was different, and she thought she might know what it was.

Excusing herself from the presence of her colleague, who despite her clear concern did not protest, Zoe hurried out to the street and began walking until she saw a cab.

She sincerely hoped they took credit cards.

——

As someone who only breathed when he had a season to, it took a certain level of effort to draw in the first dreaded inhale of air through his nose once Dracula got off the elevator and approached the door of his flat. If there was one thing he knew well, it was the scent of decay. It was a distinctive, sickening sweet aroma in the early stages that devolved as time went on into an all-encompassing miasma. It didn’t nauseate him anymore, not for centuries, but he felt himself recoil in preparation for it nonetheless.

He let the breathe out slowly. Nothing. 

Even with the modern joys of air conditioning, he would smell a corpse - undead or otherwise. Even if it had been removed, there would be traces. And yet…

He pressed his nose into the crack of the door frame, sniffing in earnest now, like a hound trying to pick up a lost trail. 

There was still a lingering hint of the sharpness of blood, but death was not a house guest of his this evening. His lips twitched at the corners, a perplexed smile flitting over his features. 

The door was unlocked, and he pushed forward with no further hesitation. 

Inside all was dark and quiet. Exactly as he’d left it, blood stains and all, but any trace of Zoe was gone. He traced his hand over the table, feeling the raised rust colored smear where, by whatever means, the half-drained woman he’d left there had pushed herself up from death and, from all evidence presented, walked out of his home. 

“Have you lost something?”

—-

I’m going to do a taglist once more, of some people who’s stuff I’ve been nerding on and who showed interested in the first parts. Thanks much. If I missed you and you want to be added, let me know!

@my-fanfic-library @ohveda @imagineandimagine @wannabebloodsucker @hoefordarkness @mymagicsuitcase @crazytxgradstudent @itendedbadly @theplumsoldier @gatissed @allfandoms-writings @littlemessyjessi @punk-courtesan @vampiregirl1797 @gleefullyselfishreblogs @break-free-killer-queen @desperatefrenchwriter @bellamortislife

[knifeshoeoreofight]

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Sidney’s wedding day dawns iron grey, the sky heavy and threatening. Far out on the horizon, there are already misty curtains of rain painting the sea underneath the thickest cloud banks, as the storm drags itself closer and closer to land.

Sidney tries not to be susceptible to belief in omens and ill portents, but he cannot help but wish that it was sunny and mild today. As Jake fusses with the last touches to his wedding attire, Sidney comforts himself with the thought that it’s not unfitting that as he arrived in a storm, so shall Evgeni be joined to this place, and to Sidney, in a storm as well.

As Sidney descends the stairs he can see that Evgeni is already waiting in the foyer. He’s pacing a little, cutting a striking figure in the new bottle green coat and snowy white linen shirt and cravat Sidney had insisted he accept. He’d sent him to his own tailor’s shop in Truro with Letang, who had an eye for these things, and Letang had outdone himself. The green of the coat looks well against Evgeni’s pale skin and and brown hair, and he looks like a gentleman from the toes of his polished boots, to his close-fitting breeches, to his beautifully embroidered waistcoat. Letang told Sidney that it was the only article of clothing that Evgeni had chosen explicitly for himself, without self-effacing reluctance.

If he wants it. Sidney will buy him a hundred waistcoats, each more brilliantly decorated than the last. Sidney himself was unable to resist a lilac waistcoat under a more subdued grey coat. He enjoys the color, and seldom has the excuse or opportunity to wear it.

Evgeni spots him when he reaches the bottom of the stairs. His shoulders relax and he smiles at Sidney. It relieves Sidney more than he can say to see it. The cold weight of guilt has not left him entirely since the moment he first claimed Evgeni as his fiancé.

“Are you still willing?” Sidney has to ask, for his own peace of mind.

Evgeni’s brow furrows. “You?”

“Of course,” Sidney says quietly. Evgeni’s eyes search his face, but finally he nods.

“Yes,” he says, and ducks his head, pink blooming on his cheeks. It is an arresting sight, and Sidney, to his chagrin, gapes at him until broken from his reverie by the noisy arrival of Baronet Letang and his family.

Letang gives Sidney a long, assessing look as Evgeni goes to say hello to Alex and little Victoria. Sidney knows his friend likes Evgeni but is not certain that Sidney is being wise.

Sidney gives him a firm nod. His friend shrugs, and says nothing more.

***

It is strange to be in the church on a weekday. Their words echo against the stone as young Father Murray gravely shakes their hands and precedes them to the front of the church. They’re early, but Julie and Caro are already there, as well as a goodly number of those servants and villagers not needed in preparing the wedding breakfast.

He feels a pang at the absence of his sister. There had not been time, however, for her to make the journey, and truthfully, he wants to wait until all is said and done before he tells her of it. Maybe she will forgive him for it in time.

The importance of their haste is underscored by the late arrival of Magistrate Bettman. Uninvited, he nonetheless sits himself in a back pew to scowl at the proceedings. Sidney sees Evgeni’s eyes dart nervously to Bettman, and he squeezes his soon-to-be husband’s hands. When Evgeni looks at him, Sidney leans close and says, too low for anyone else to hear: “I promise you. I will not let him touch you.”

Evgeni closes his eyes for a moment, but nods.

The sun comes out from behind the clouds just as the vicar calls out the words, “dearly beloved.”

Later, what Sidney remembers most from the ceremony is that soft morning light, falling in shafts front the clerestory windows, and odd little details, like how the sun made a glowing shell of one of Evgeni’s ears, and threw glimmering reflections from the font onto the grey stone walls.

Evgeni’s hands tremble a little in his own, or maybe Sidney’s hands tremble, he isn’t sure.

Father Murray pronounces them married in the eyes of God, and Sidney blinks away sudden tears from some indescribable emotion. His wedding. His husband. He’d tried to imagine this day in the past but those boyish fancies have nothing in common with the reality: Evgeni’s dark eyes fixed on his, the soft, hesitant brush of his lips when the vicar tells them that they may kiss each other.

They sign the register, Sidney’s narrow, looping script above Evgeni’s blocky Cyrillic.

“Congratulations, Lord Crosby, Lord Evgeni,” Father Murray says, and Sidney has to laugh softly at the startled look on Evgeni’s face.

“Had you forgotten that you’d gain a title today, my dear?” Sidney says. His face flushes— the endearment had slipped out without his permission, quite naturally. For Evgeni is already dear to him.

Evgeni shakes his head, wonder writ across his expressive face. “I’m forget.” He shakes his head again, and offers his arm to Sidney. Sidney takes it.

“It’s going to be very noisy in a moment, are you ready?” he warns, and they step outside into the late morning chill as cheers break out from their assembled people, and rice is flung with cheerful abandon into their faces by the children.

Sidney had elected to walk to the church, in concession to Evgeni’s discomfort with horses and his own dislike of the fanfare and ostentation of a coach. It was not a far distance, but their way back leads them through the village, where everyone is assembled in gleeful enjoyment of their holiday, all work in the mines and fields halted in honor of the day.

The wedding party is met with shouts and cheers. Every woman and girl in the village, it feels, wants to come curtsy at them and extend their well-wishes, every man and boy to earnestly doff their caps to Sidney and “‘is new Lordship.”

They shake hands and bow and accept congratulations nearly all the way to the gates of Ydhyn Dhu, where a hubbub of a different sort awaits them.

Long tables have been laid, decorated with fragrant fir boughs and and bright sprigs of holly. If they’d been married only a month or two from now there might have been early spring flowers but Sidney finds he likes the greenery just as much.

A busy swirl of guests and servants enliven the ofttimes quiet rooms of the great house, with Mrs. Bullano presiding over all. Sidney had told her to try and enjoy herself but she remains convinced some calamity will befall the family silver and hovers vigilantly, keeping a weather eye on the serving maids as they work.  

Dumo has outdone himself, somehow managing a wedding cake of sorts in so short a time, white with costly sugar on the outside and rich with dried fruit and brandy on the inside. He’d been cautioning everyone all morning that it wouldn't keep like a proper wedding cake, since he hadn’t had the time for the usual days and days of tending and soaking it in spirits.

“We will just have to enjoy it all today, Dumo, and give out any remaining to our tenants,” Sidney had placated him.

Sidney can hardly believe it, sometime later, that he’s sitting at the head of his table with his husband next to him. He keeps finding himself staring at Evgeni’s profile- his strong nose and generous mouth, his sharp jaw, the tiny scar high on his cheekbone.

Caro has to say his name a few times to get his attention at one point, resulting in laughter and much sly teasing about how taken he is with his bridegroom. Sidney turns scarlet and attempts to move the conversation on as quickly as possible. He cannot allow their perceptive teasing to make Evgeni uncomfortable.

“So, Evgeni,”Julie says, leaning forward, eyes sparkling wickedly. “Tell me. What is your favorite thing about your husband?”

“Is it his a-” Letang gets out before his wife elbows him to remind him of his manners.

Evgeni is blushing now as well, but he doesn’t duck his head or mumble anything noncommittal. He turns in his seat to regard Sidney steadily.

“Heart,” his says simply, and Sidney’s friends coo at them.

But Evgeni isn’t done. “Never meet anyone like Sidney,” he continues, drawing himself up as if to defend Sidney from the teasing. “Where I’m come from, no дворянин like him. They use-- “

He pauses, and turns to Sid, hand patting at his own waistcoat over his heart. “What’s part you can’t see, vicar talks about?”

“A soul?”

He turns back to the others, tone deep and serious. “The знать use people bodies and souls like wood.” He makes a motion like throwing kindling on flames. ”On a fire.” He shakes his head. “Sidney is different. He’s take care. Like whole village is his family.”

He reaches over and takes Sidney’s hand where it lies on the table. Gazing at him, he says firmly,”Want to be good family for him, too.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment, then Caro says, “Here, here. To Lord Crosby and Lord Evgeni, may your family be happy and blessed indeed.” There are sincere murmurs of agreement from all. Sidney cannot speak, his heart too painfully full.

***

It feels like the sky darkens and the day dwindles much faster than Sidney is ready for. He nurses a glass of port in the library with the other gentlemen until Letang kicks at his chair and jerks his head towards Evgeni.

“You should see to your husband, before he falls asleep right here.”

Sidney ignores the ribald waggling of Letang’s eyebrows and looks over at his husband. Evgeni is leaning against the high side of the wingback chair he’s sitting in, eyelids drooping as he gazes into the fire. His glass of Madeira looks ready to slip from his fingers.

Sidney feels a fresh stab of guilt join the rest that has taken up permanent residence in his stomach. It has been a long day. Heaven knows he feels as exhausted as Evgeni looks.

He stands, and rests a hand on Evgeni’s shoulder. “It’s late,” he says quietly, and Evgeni starts, turning wide, velvet-dark eyes to Sidney’s face. He follows Sidney from the room in silence.

***

Jake is waiting outside the door to Sidney’s private rooms, knuckling his eyes and yawning. Sidney sends him away to bed, and they go in alone.

After Sidney ushers Evgeni inside, he turns to close the door. When he turns back around, Evgeni has not moved, so close Sidney can smell his sandalwood shaving soap.

He reaches for Sidney’s hands, raising them to his lips and pressing a warm, lingering kiss to his fingers. Shame and heat flare together in Sidney’s middle. He wants that soft mouth all over his body, but he would never be able to forgive himself if he allows Evgeni to do this for him. Out of some sense of gratefulness or duty.

“Good day,” Evgeni says softly. He slides down one of Sidney’s cuffs and Sidney has to bite his lip to hold in a wanton sound as Evgeni kisses the sensitive skin of his wrist. “Nice party.”

“Yes,” Sidney manages, hoping his want isn’t conveyed in his voice. “Evgeni.”

Evgeni hums, fiddling with Sidney’s cuff and eying his cravat as if he’s strategizing at a chess board.

“Evgeni.” Sidney says, and something in his tone makes Evgeni’s hands still, and his gaze meet Sidney’s.

“I don’t. I do not expect this of you. Your-- favors, I mean. I would not. Tonight we must share a room so that the marriage is considered legitimate and unable to be annulled, but. You will not have to in future.”

Evgeni’s hands fall away. “You...don’t want?” He asks.

“I—“ Sidney shakes his head. What he wants is immaterial. His wants have been indulged enough.

Evgeni nods sharply and turns, striding to the glass to start tugging at his cravat like it will strangle him if he doesn’t get it off immediately.

“Here, let me,” Sidney says, and moves to untie it for him. He makes the mistake of looking up into Evgeni’s face. His eyes are intense as they bore into Sidney and his mouth is set in a firm line. Can he tell how badly Sidney wants him? Sidney wills his hands not to tremble as he unties the white linen from around Evgeni’s neck, his eyes not to linger on the sweet hollow at the base of his throat that he wants to—

No.

“I would never do anything to hurt you,” he promises, hoping Evgeni believes him.

“Can’t hurt me,” Evgeni says shortly, and Sidney shakes his head. The type of power he has over Evgeni has nothing to do with physical strength, but of birthright and wealth. And, even, Evgeni’s own sense of fealty or honor.

“Yes,” Evgeni says darkly after a long moment, as Sidney moves to the many tiny buttons of his fancy waistcoat. “Maybe, you can.”

Sidney masks a flinch. But it’s good that Evgeni is being reasonable.

“As I said, I will strive with everything in my power to see that you are protected.”

Even from myself, he thinks.

“Thank you, мой господин” Evgeni says woodenly, and the stiff address falls upon Sidney’s heart like ice.

“I said, you can call me Sidney,”

Evgeni just nods, and Sidney leaves him to undress the rest of the way himself.

As he rinses his face at the washstand. Sidney catches sight of Evgeni in the mirror, the fine cloth of his nightshirt made sheer in front of the firelight.The breadth of his shoulders, the graceful lines of his torso, the startlingly sweet curve of his ass. It’s almost worse this way than seeing him naked. He turns to hang something or other over a chair and Sidney’s breath catches at the pronounced swell of—

He tears his eyes away and splashes his face again. Enough.

Sid banks the fire, and goes about the room extinguishing all the candles his servants had lit in an endearing but unnecessary effort to make the room softly lit for a wedding night spent in the more traditional way.

Evgeni is hovering near the bed, glancing between it and Sidney. It pains Sidney to see. Only one night, he tells himself. Evgeni may not like it but it has to be done.

“What is it?” Sidney asks, keeping his voice low, as though soothing a nervous horse.

Evgeni’s face is still set blankly as he motions to the bed. “Which side you like?”

Oh. Sidney hasn’t gotten to the point of considering the practical details of two people sleeping in the same bed.

“Left?” He indicates the side nearest the door. Evgeni nods, then turns down the coverlet on the right. He curls up, surprisingly small for so large a man, with his back to Sidney, as far to the right as possible.

With a painful throbbing of his heart, Sidney gets into bed as well, doing his best not to disturb his husband. He takes his cue from Evgeni, and turns away.

He can still feel Evgeni’s warmth at his back. Evgeni’s breathing is slow, and Sidney can hear the moment it deepens into the unconscious rhythm of sleep.

He closes his eyes, but it is a long, long time before sleep claims him, too. Just before it does, he dimly hears the storm out to sea make good on its threats, heavy rain beginning to pour outside the curtained windows as it makes landfall.

Part 7

[novantinuum]

A Link Beyond Memory (ch 2/4)

AO3

Fandom: Trollhunters, 3Below

Rating: T (for minor language in future chapters)

Words: 600~

Pairings: Jim/Claire, but not focus

Summary: Shortly after the events of the Eternal Night, memories of a day that never happened somehow resurface in Jim’s mind in his sleep- and upon recalling the friendship he and Aja formed, he decides to pursue that connection again. Slice of life, and kinda a slow burn friendship reunion. A hybrid of prose and chat fic (to be seen in later chapters.)

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Note: Unfortunately, fic circulation online is getting harder and harder as the months pass. Please, if you read to the end and enjoy, consider helping me out by reblogging this post, or even commenting/giving kudos over on AO3. Thanks! :D

Chapter 2: Transit

Transit- The instant when a celestial object crosses the meridian, thus reaching the highest point in the sky.

~

T: hhhh miss ya already. tbh i dont know what im supposed to do this summer now ahah

T: i was all looking forward to hangin with you and claire and everyone else in trollmarket and now…

T: i mean i still have aaarrrgghh. and darci and eli too i guess but

T: really starting to wish i came along.

T: i know you said to watch over the town while youre gone and i know thats a good point but honestly i just wanna be with you

T: jim?

T: yoooo ? did u die

T: god i hope not after all the end of the world chaos thatd be really anticlimactic

J: Sorry no I lost signal for a bit!! Miss you too gahhh.

T: pls know if you so much as say the word ill crawl on the first airplane i can find and launch myself directly at your face

T: jim liSTEN jim im not even kidding

T: screw arcadia

T: if you need me im there

J: Omg I’ll defo keep that in mind

T: ..jk dont screw arcadia tho i love this place. also its already screwed enough at this point so

T: hey but you think merlin could make me another warhammer for my growing arsenal?

J: Yeah I think he could be easily convinced.

J: He’s kinda sucking up to me now hahah

J: He already made Claire a sorta necklace amulet to store her armor so a magic hammer should be no problem

T: awesomesauceee

J: Any particular reason lol?

T: i dunno i just think itd look wicked cool to double wield, like general orzan from gun robot three. also lets be real after all the crap he put us through we deserve S W A G

J: I’ll ask tomorrow. Hey quick Q for you though

J: Well okay not exactly quick  

J: It’s actually a long story but-

T: ye?

J: Do you happen to have Aja’s number or anything?

J: We took her and her bro down to the Janus Order, lightning in a bottle, remember her?

T: ye i know- lively! and uhhh don’t think i do? havent really talked to them since why

J: I get the strangest sense we’re supposed to know them more than we do. Had a really weird dream but it felt more like a lost memory. Think it’s an amulet thing, like that alternate timeline it made me live through once?

T: huh funky

J: Also supposedly according to the dream/memory both Aja and Krel are… not from Earth?

T: dude no offense but are you sure it wasnt just a normal dream

J: Seriously.?

J: Merlin turned me into a fucking TROLL and aliens are where you decide to draw the line

T: okay yknow thats fair

T: i take that back  

T: okay so,, aja and krel are MAYBE aliens. got that. go onnn

J: What I saw honestly felt so real, I swear. It was two weeks ago, at the science fair. We were fighting a troll in the planetarium with them, and the troll kept combining magic with some alien tech, which kept reversing everyone back to the beginning of the day, like a time loop or something. But I could remember everything bc of the amulet. Aja remembered bc of some energy shield she had. We lived through the same day almost a dozen times.

T: whoa…

J: And get this- in some of those loops we even went to their house and got to look around inside their spaceship! But none of us are supposed to recall any of it bc technically the entire day never happened? It’s how we defeated the troll, that bit’s a little fuzzy. A lot of technobabble sorry.

T: goddd out of all the days to forget huh

J: Right??

J: I guess… if she remembered all of this before I’m kinda curious if she still remembers now too. If it really happened. We were friends in that memory. It’d be nice to maybe get to know her again, y’know?

T: okay you’re prob gonna hate me for suggesting this but i THINK steve has her number

T: bc i was talking to darci and she said that mary told her that aja and steve are like, a thing now

T: a Thing thing

T: i believe her exact words were ‘staja’ ?

J: Oh my god how’d that happen is he even capable of proper flirting

T: well if shes an alien like you think then maybe she doesn’t know what human flirting looks like

J: Haha maybe indeed. I’ll go talk to him thanks

J: G’night Tobes love ya

T: night buddy <3

(my notes from ao3:)

Admission, I had far too much fun with the text format. I've never attempted anything like it, but I especially wanted to create unique "character voices" that extended into the way they each type- which was a cool challenge.

I imagined Toby as the sort of person who types out his thoughts far too quickly to care about punctuation, and IMO if Trollhunters was set just a year later (I generally just imagine it all set in 2016) he'd be keymashing. Jim is more of a full sentence type of guy who never turned off auto capitalization.

ALSO, a note on the contact photos- (Jim's which I directly took from a screenshot from Claire's phone, and Toby's which I edited from some 2D concept art)- That's the photo Jim uses for Toby's contact, and I imagine there's probably some inside joke where Jim took a really derpy photo of him at one point and they laughed so hard about it that he immortalized it as his contact. Jim's personal contact photo is... well, as this all takes place post s3 of course, a rather sad reminder of his loss of humanity. He can't bother himself to change it currently.

Future chapters will likely be a mix of text AND prose, instead of one or the other. Hope you enjoyed!

[terresdebrumestories]

We were always gonna be forever

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Digimon Adventure 01/02/Tri RATING: General Audiences. WORDCOUNT: 2 431 words PAIRING(S): Taiyama (brand new) CHARACTER(S): Taichi Kamiya & Yamato Ishida, with background cameos from zombies. GENRE: It seemed like the right thing to do. TRIGGER WARNING(S): - SUMMARY: Taichi seems willing to risk his life for the weirdest things. NOTE: I honestly wish I could have done a 10k + fic digging into the how-s and why-s and how much-s of this whle fic (where zombies are, really, more of an excuse than anything else) but alas, I neither have the time nor the energy, so have this instead <3

DIGIOTPWEEK 2017: [Day 1: Coffeeshop AU] [Day 2: Fantasy AU] [Day 3: Profession AU] [Day 4: Mythology AU] [Read on AO3]

“Crap!” Taichi swears once they’ve left the zombies behind them and shoved themselves into an empty alley, “we need to go back!”

He’s patting at the pockets of his ill-fitted cargo shorts, hands growing more restless each times he comes up empty handed, and Yamato’s throat constricts in apprehension.

“Did you lose you Digivice?”

There’s nothing else Yamato would ever consider going back to a compromised zone for, but for this...he’d walk in more dangerous situations than that for a Digivice, no matter whose. There’s the sentimental value, of course—that alone would be enough to make him risk a lot of things for them—but also these things haven’t even begun to lose power after sixteen years of extended use without battery change. They’re the only way they have to help their digimon partners digivolve, act as distress signal, maps and, with a little mastery of the Morse code, communication devices.

They’ve gotten Yamato and the others out of more than one delicate situation, allowed them to rescue Mr. Inoue and Mr. Kido out of a horde of corpses, and generally greatly contributed to their camp’s safety.

Sentiments aside, the Digivices are just too essential to lose.

“Who do you take me for?” Taichi hisses with a look of indignation to make a shier man cower, “Of course I didn’t lose my Digivice!”

“Then what are you making a fuss for? We’re not going back there.”

“But we’ve got to!”

Taichi’s face looks pleading, twisted with distress at the idea of leaving whatever it is behind, but Yamato refuses to be budged. There are at least fifteen corpses in this grocery store. They’re both black and brown with grime and blood as it is, breathing short and heartbeats fast after escaping by the skin of their teeth. Even assuming they survive a second run in the shop, which is a big assumption already, getting this late would mean skipping on their pharmacy run and risking being out of camp at night anyway.

There’s no way Yamato is going to let either of them go back there, especially with Weregarurumon and Greymon stuck at camp to help with the repairs.

“Taichi,” Yamato insists, hoping it’ll be the end of it, “we’re leaving.”

“No!”

They wince at the same time when Taichi’s voice echoes against the buildings on either side of them, the tone of his despair lingering against neatly parked but abandoned cars. It only takes a glance for them to move out of the alleyway, one rattling corpse already moving toward them, and Yamato doesn’t bother repressing a sigh of relief when Taichi moves away from the grocery store and toward the old commercial center their community chose as a base of operation.

They jog rather than run, keeping their strength even as they put some distance between them and danger, slipping into practiced synchronization without needing to think about it. Their hands find each other as they run, the comfort of a familiar gesture easing the knot of fear in Yamato’s guts.

Even through the end of the world, they still have each other, if nothing else.

“We really—” Taichi has to pause so he can gulp more air, sweat drawing lines in the layer of dirt and blood on his forehead before he can finish: “We need to go back. I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to let go,” Yamato interrupt, waiting until he’s done hissing to breathe in, “I’ll knock you out and put you on my back if I have to but there’s literally nothing in the world I’d be willing to let you risk your life for!”

“But it’s for you!”

Yamato’s too stunned to reply immediately, and the long, plaintive sound of a dying animal punctuates the silence that follows, Taichi’s harsh breathing too loud between them as he tries to get it back to normal. In his chest, Yamato’s heart feels like it’s holding its breath, making itself tiny to leave Yamato’s brain enough space to process the declaration.

“What do you mean, ‘it’s for me’? What was it?”

The emotions warring over Taichi’s face are so intense it’s almost like watching a movie in stop motion: anguish, fear, crimson embarrassment flicker over his features in rapid succession, then something like intense resignation and a deep breath for courage before he says:

“It’s a ring.”

Well. You have to give it to Taichi: he neither stuttered, nor muttered.

Yamato’s brain, on the other hand….

“A what?”

“A ring,” Taichi repeats, face still redder than Koushiro’s hair but head held high, “with your crest on it. Had it custom made and everything.”

There’s Yamato’s what on the what now?

What?

“Why would you even buy me a ring?”

Taichi shrugs, like he’s fully accepted that this is the moment he dies—whether he thinks the cause will be embarrassment or Yamato is still unclear—before he gives a rueful little smile and asks:

“What do people usually buy rings for?”

Oh, okay! There’s something wrong with Yamato’s ears.

Or his brain.

Or maybe the past three months were nothing but a massive set of nightmare, and this is the part where something so weird happens that Yamato wakes up.

“Were you gonna—”

“Yes.”

“Are you—”

“You know me,” Taichi challenges, the red slowly going out of his cheeks, “you tell me if I’m serious.”

Yamato would answer that, he really would! It’s just that his brain doesn’t quite remember how to make his mouth work.

Of course Taichi wouldn’t joke around about proposing, especially not with Yamato. The guy knows what his issues are, how uptight he can be on making words match the exact and real nature of a relationship. Taichi wouldn’t just step all over that with a joke on that topic.

Somehow though, knowing that doesn’t help.

Today should have been an ordinary day, okay? Run into an abandoned store, take what they can carry to help the group survive, run back, try not to get eaten. Rinse and repeat as long as it’s necessary. Instead Yamato is stuck in place in a part of town they’ve got no business in, feeling like a certain bushy-haired someone just drop-kicked him into the Twilight Zone.

“Are you okay?”

Yamato got to the ground, somehow. He can feel the cold of it seeping into his ass, the harsh solidity of a wall with peeling paint at his back. Taichi, crouched down to put their eyes at the same level, has a hand on his shoulder, partly for comfort and partly as a way to keep himself upright.

There’s really no proper answer to that question.

Well. Yamato could go for the familiar route and swear until the static’s gone from his brain. Or, you know, just ask what the fuck is wrong with Taichi.

There’s so much vulnerability in Taichi’s eyes now, an incertitude he rarely ever unveils in front of anyone, Yamato can’t bring himself to do that. Taichi has been the most important person in his life for over sixteen years now, after all, so Yamato knows exactly how much of a gift this level of emotional openness is.

Still….

“We’re not even dating!”

Yamato’s voice pierces at his own ears, too high and strangler to be fully intelligible, but Taichi must get it because he winces, the ‘yeaaaaah, about that….’ written all over the tight tilt of his mouth. At least Yamato isn’t the only one freaking out here.

“I know, it’s stupid,” Taichi apologizes at last, hand moving away from Yamato’s shoulder, “let’s just forget it.”

“Wha—oh no you don’t!”

It’s easy to snatch Taichi’s wrist out of the air and hold it tight, a lifeline as much as a shackle destined to keep him right where he is. It’s an old dynamic between them, this tug of war between their respective brands of emotional constipation and their mutual desire to know what goes on in the other’s head.

It makes it easy to give Taichi a hard stare and warn in a low voice:

“You don’t get to drop a bomb like that and walk away! Start explaining, Yagami.”

Taichi rolls his eyes at that, but his shoulders unwind a little and, to Yamato’s relief, there’s a small smile playing at the edge of his lips.

“Remember when we had dinner with the Russian ambassador?”

“Uh, duh?”

To be fair, it’s Yamato who offered to come along. Taichi was nervous about misstepping or appearing too conciliatory or weak, and since Yamato lived in Russia for a year, he figured a little bit of a cultural bridge couldn’t hurt. It’s not like he minded people thinking he was Taichi’s boyfriend, anyway, so they marked him as a plus one.

Four hours of painfully stiff attempts at polite conversation later, Yamato was about ready to strangle Taichi right then and there if it meant getting out. Also they heard the news about the very first case of Zombie sickness that evening, but it wouldn’t be relevant until the real outbreak three months later.

Anyway. Yes, Yamato does remember.

“You were perfect,” Taichi smiles, as impervious to Yamato’s sarcasm as he ever was, “I swear I’ve heard about you being a perfectly delicious person enough times after that night to last me a lifetime. Your behavior was impeccable through and through.”

“What else was I gonna do? Tap dance on the table?”

Taichi blinks, then snorts at the remark, laughing for longer than the joke truly warrants, but it’s not like Yamato’s about to complain. It’s always been easy for him to make Taichi laugh, but it never got any less rewarding.

“There’s my favorite asshole!” Taichi wheezes after the worst of his laughter has passed, “I missed that.”

“I never stopped—”

“No, I mean...during the meal. At the embassy. Everyone was so charmed and fascinated and I kept thinking it wasn’t you. I wished you’d say something kind of offensive or start making sarcastic quips or whatever. I couldn’t wait until we went home and we’d spend an hour bitching about how ridiculous the thing was.”

The way Taichi’s expression goes from amused to wistful, eyes never leaving Yamato’s before he starts his next sentence is so fascinating, Yamato couldn’t look away even if he tried.

“It took a while before I remembered ‘home’ didn’t mean the same place for both of us.”

Yamato remembers that, too. Not the ‘home’ thing, but he remembers looking at Taichi somewhere just before dessert, hoping for comfort and finding him lost in thought instead, melancholy etched in every inch of his face as he looked down at his hands.

At least now he knows what brought that on.

His voice is more gentle than it normally would be when he asks:

“So you decided proposing was the way to go?”

“To be fair,” Taichi says with a small smile and a helpless shrug, “I did consider offering we shared a flat first, or at least asking you out.”

“Good to know you remember what normal people do.”

Yamato makes sure to squeeze at Taichi’s wrist as he says it, relieved when Taichi’s eyes drift skyward in answer.

“Yes,” he says with the obnoxious patience of one trying to explain something really simple to someone who’s being unusually slow, “I do remember. But I thought about it and I figured...we’re past dating now, aren’t we? I mean. Maybe I’m wrong but...going to restaurants and sitting there like awkward idiots while we ask each other surface-level questions? Really? You already know what I’m looking for in a relationship. I know the things you hate. I know about your messed up brain, and the things that make you cry and everything. So I just—dating’s temporary, you know? And I guess I just…I wanted us to be forever, you know?”

“We were always going to be forever, you idiot.”

Taichi’s mouth goes slack at that, and Yamato snorts as the flush returns to his friend’s cheeks, moisture shining at the corner of his eyes. Taichi wasn’t wrong, with his little speech: they do know each other better than anyone.

They’ve known each other for seventeen years, have been facing death for just as long. They know each other’s ticks and quirks, like how Taichi knows what angles to use to get Yamato to budge out of a position his stubbornness would normally keep him into, or how acutely aware Yamato is that he can leave Taichi gutted with a well-timed bout of emotional straightforwardness.

It’s just as well they care about each other too much to ever intentionally use the other’s weakness to hurt.

“I’ve known that since we first got Omegamon.”

In his more emotional moments, Yamato almost feels like he got his first inkling of it when he realized he could trust Taichi with taking care of Takeru. It wasn’t even a judgment of Taichi’s ability to care for a child, really, more of a statement of Yamato’s ability to trust anyone other than himself.

He’s learned to trust other people since, of course. At least twenty-four of them. It’s just not the same, though. Building Omegamon isn’t like in the fantasy books, where the protagonists get cut open and someone else’s heart is shoved next to their souls, but it does require the knowledge that, should this kind of things happen, it’d be okay.

Yamato would never want what he feels to bush Takeru so closely, for many reasons he couldn’t name if his life depended on it, but with Taichi...yeah. He thinks he could deal with his soul touching Taichi’s.

He’s not sure how to convey that exactly but, lucky for him, he doesn’t have to. Taichi...he’s not always the most emotionally perceptive person in the world, but he gets Yamato in a way no one else does, and they rarely ever have trouble communicating.

Being able to put what he’s feeling in a simple squeeze of his fingers and know he’s been heard is one of the many perks of that.

“So,” Taichi says after a long, pregnant but somehow comfortable silence, “not that I want to ruin the moment or anything but, with regard to what I said….”

On impulse, Yamato leans forward to plant a kiss on Taichi’s cheek, warmth curling in his belly before the words are even out of his mouth.

“I’m sure we can find someone wiling to perform some kind of ceremony.”

Technically, same sex marriages aren’t legal in Japan yet but hey, it’s the zombie apocalypse, and they’ve saved the world three times already.

The law can suck it.

[2whatcom-blog]

The way to Save $45 Billion on Well being Care Prices Every 12 months

Of the various methods to die within the trendy world, few appear as perverse as this: you stroll into the hospital with a minor sickness and go away in a casket. But such a destiny is turning into an more and more prevalent actuality, at the same time as medical applied sciences advance. That is primarily resulting from drug-resistant infections--infections brought on by strains of micro organism and fungi which have advanced to be proof against nearly all of trendy medicines. Increasingly more of those organisms have developed over the previous many years because of a systemic overuse and misuse of antibiotics and antifungals. They trigger infections hospitals haven't got the know-how or sources to take care of, and might unfold quickly between sufferers inside well being care services, and between well being care services themselves, sickening and killing many. Drug-resistant infections are half of a bigger drawback the American well being care system is dealing with: that of well being care-associated infections (HAIs). Yearly round 72,000 individuals die from infections contracted in American hospitals and well being care services. An extra 615,000 individuals handled in these institutions--Three p.c of all hospitalized patients--find themselves sicker than if that they had not sought out assist in any respect, in line with the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC). This situation is greater than only a matter of life and demise; additionally it is one in every of dollars and cents. The overall annual value of HAIs has been estimated to run as much as 45 billion dollars--more than the GDP of most small nations, and a few giant ones as nicely. This value is shouldered by well being care services and hospitals, bleeding out onto the federal government, and taxpayers, by way of applications like Medicaid and Medicare. The $45 billion value evaluation would not even embrace oblique prices, like a hesitancy amongst potential sufferers to participate within the well being care system. Why would you go to a hospital in case you thought you'd solely come out sicker? And why would you need to pay for providers at that hospital? The excellent news is that almost all well being care-associated infections are preventable. Easy issues like correct hand sanitization, waste administration and cautious sterilization at pores and skin injection websites have minimize the charges of HAIs--and the prices they incur--by greater than half over the previous decade. All the identical, these steps haven't been sufficient. The issue stays, looming, and threatens to worsen sooner or later. Because the American inhabitants ages one of many biggest risks hospitals face is the potential of HAIs--and particularly drug-resistant infections--to unfold with sufferers as they transfer from facility to facility. Present value calculations do not take this motion into consideration, however as well being care services bend to accommodate a rising variety of excessive danger sufferers, transfers between hospitals will turn into extra frequent, and the chance of a brand new lethal an infection being launched will enhance. As an instance this drawback, in a 2014 TED Discuss, Ramanan Laxminarayan--senior analysis scholar and lecturer at Princeton College--said: "We don't consider--and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems--do not consider the costs on others by the way antibiotics are actually used." Every time an antibiotic is misused and a brand new pressure of micro organism evolves with an immunity to that antibiotic, scientists should develop a distinct antibiotic to deal with the brand new an infection brought on by the brand new micro organism. Then they have to distribute the newly developed antibiotic to hospitals, by which era sufferers may have gotten sick and died. It is a race to evolve, primarily. A race towards nature. And we will lose. "This is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead," stated Laxminarayan. "We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down." Recognizing this, the federal government has not too long ago centered extra sources in direction of the prevention of well being care-associated infections. In 2013 the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers (HHS) applied a "national action plan" to coach well being care suppliers about prevention measures. A big a part of this plan, which was added in 2018, consists of an "antimicrobial stewardship" program to purvey info on methods to most safely use antibiotics. The federal government has additionally turned in direction of financial incentives as a doable method to lower charges of HAIs. As a result of the emergence of a hospital-born an infection in a single hospital is an issue for all different hospitals, punishing well being care services with the best variety of contaminated sufferers may have a optimistic affect on the complete American healthcare system. The Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Providers (CMS) began a program in 2014 beneath the Reasonably priced Care Act to just do that--take cash away from hospitals with the best charges of HAIs. This system reduces Medicare reimbursement for these hospitals by 1 p.c. This will likely not sound like lots, but it surely provides up. Complete Medicare spending on sufferers in hospitals was $142 billion in 2016. The CMS's program has been criticized for drawing an arbitrary line between which hospitals get punished and which do not. The underside 25 p.c of hospitals--determined by a holistic metric--get their Medicare funds decreased, whereas these above that line are totally reimbursed by this system. Some questions are then raised: How ought to we incentivize hospitals to extend an infection prevention measures? Whose habits needs to be punished, and whose habits needs to be rewarded (if in any respect)? Does the CMS have it proper? A latest paper co-authored by Sarah Drohan, Simon Levin (James S. McDonnell Distinguished College Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton College) and Laxminarayan, printed within the Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences (PNAS), discovered that though subsidies might be able to scale back circumstances of HAIs, the present authorities strategy doesn't accomplish that in a productive method. Authorities subsidies work, however not as they're applied now. The paper compares, in a mathematical financial framework, the impact several types of subsidies have on the variety of infections acquired in hospitals. The present CMS policy--to primarily tax hospitals with excessive numbers of contaminated patients--was proven to be solely a fraction as efficient as a subsidy that offers an extra greenback to hospitals for every greenback spent on an infection management. "The fundamental reasoning for that is somewhat simple," says Drohan. "It's just that is a more effective way of tying the amount hospitals receive from the policymaker to their own spending. It's the most effective way to encourage them to spend more, because the more money they spend, the more money they get." As an alternative of punishing hospitals which have a excessive charge of HAIs, Drohan, Levin and Laxminarayan advocate for the other: rewarding hospitals with the fewest HAIs. It is a easy perspective shift--from a detrimental incentive to a optimistic one--but it may make all of the distinction. In actual fact, Drohan and Ramanan go even additional within the paper, suggesting that authorities subsidies needs to be, paradoxically, given virtually solely to hospitals with the bottom charges of HAIs. "What we found was that the subsidy, or the majority of the policymaker money--in fact all of it for the best possible outcome--should be given to the institution with the lowest transmission rate, which means the least infectious institution," Drohan says. In different phrases, all cash needs to be given to the hospitals that least want it. Hospitals with the bottom numbers of contaminated sufferers. This appears, to place it bluntly, unfair. It stands to motive that hospitals with the fewest contaminated sufferers would want the least assist from the federal government. What Drohan, Levin, and Laxminarayan discovered, although, was that after they factored within the motion of sufferers between hospitals they had been not attempting to attenuate the variety of contaminated sufferers in every hospital however decrease the variety of contaminated sufferers as a complete. It grew to become a distinct sort of economics problem--a query not about particular person sufferers, however of the frequent good. "From a simple economics point of view, the marginal return on your subsidy dollar is a lot greater when you give it to the hospital with the lower transmission rate," Drohan says. Every greenback given to the hospitals with the fewest contaminated sufferers, due to the best way sufferers transfer between services and the financial forces behind the well being care system, goes additional in decreasing the general charge of HAIs. Wanting on the complete well being care system, that's one of the simplest ways to make use of the federal government's cash. And though giving extra assist to these services with the fewest individuals in want is completely counterintuitive, maybe it's simply one thing we have to attempt to wrap our heads round. We as a society are used to trying on the individual--the particular person hospital, the person household, the person patient--but generally we have to take a look at the difficulty as a complete. "When I was writing other drafts of this, I kept wanting to say it's the opposite of what we think our moral argument should be," Drohan says. "But in a way I've sort of convinced myself that you have to sort of step above that, and think: But what's actually best in the long term?" Read the full article

[wallkickswillwork]

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/lifestyle/a-woman-her-best-friend-and-a-quick-walk-down-the-aisle/

A woman, her best friend, and a quick walk down the aisle?

Smartelli always wanted a “big Italian wedding.”(Cassidy Araiza/The New York Times)

Vincent M Mallozzi

Lilly Smartelli dreams of marrying her best friend on Valentine’s Day. “Bernie and I have been looking for just the right wedding venue to stage our big Italian wedding,” said Smartelli, 55, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Smartelli marks February 14 on her calendar, not as a romantic holiday, but as a day defined by comfort, happiness and a different sort of true love.

She found all of those things in Bernie, who happens to be one of the main characters in a book she self-published last October called “The $5 Dog Wedding.”

He also happens to be a dog.

“I love Bernie to death and I know he’s going to make quite a handsome groom,” Smartelli said. “But there is one problem where our wedding is concerned.”

The fact that Bernie is a dog?

“No,” she said, laughing. “The fact that we simply cannot afford the wedding we have planned.” Smartelli, a former travel nurse, is terminally ill with a form of pulmonary fibrosis, a respiratory disease in which scars are formed in the lung tissues, leading to serious breathing problems that worsen over time.

“My doctors tell me I have maybe one or two good years left,” she said, “so Bernie and I are racing against the clock.”

Two years ago, Smartelli was enjoying life in San Diego aboard her two-bedroom boat, a 47-foot, 1980 Hatteras long-range cruiser, with Bernie, a hazel-eyed, sandy-haired, 9-year-old mixed breed cocker spaniel poodle; and her other dog, Spinner, a cream-colored, 8-year-old Maltese-Shih Tzu mix who will serve as Bernie’s best man. She had rescued Bernie and Spinner a week apart in October 2011, from the annual Riverside County adoption fair hosted by the Humane Society of the Desert in Palm Springs, California.

Lilly Smartelli with her dog, Bernie, in Surprise. (Cassidy Araiza/The New York Times)

She eventually began suffering from shortness of breath, dizziness and fainting spells, which led to a diagnosis of pulmonary diffusion defect,a subcategory of pulmonary fibrosis. She sold the boat and moved to Phoenix, where she began evaluating her life, not knowing how much of it she had left, and came away with one final wish: to know the joy of a wedding day.

“By marrying Bernie in a symbolic way, I could draw attention to organ-donor groups and local animal welfare shelters that lack proper funding,” Smartelli said between labored breaths. So her potential big day will serve as a fundraising awareness moment for the two causes close to her heart. “It’s all in good fun,” she said.

“I know I will never be married, but I would still love to experience the kind of wedding, even if it’s a fake wedding, that I’ve been dreaming about since I was a little girl.”

Smartelli chuckled when she said, “I’ve been involved in just 1 1/2 relationships my entire life,” and sighed when she added, “I’ve been single for quite a while.” She needed a significant other to make her a bucket-list item a reality, so she turned to Bernie, her best friend, to play the role of groom.

“I can’t think of anyone in the entire world who loves me more than Bernie does, anyhow,” said Smartelli, who said she dated a man in Palm Springs for two years before the relationship ended in 2007. (She refers to that experience as “only half of a relationship,” she said, “because he wasn’t half the man I expected him to be.”)

Smartelli grew up in Detroit, where 12 years ago she spread some serious love of her own, coming to the rescue of a childhood friend by donating a kidney to him.

“I thought, if I could do something to help this person extend his life, then why not do it,” she said. “He’s doing pretty well today, and he sends me a card once a year thanking me for what I did for him.”

Lilly Smartelli with her dogs, Spinner, left, and Bernie, in Surprise, Ariz. (Cassidy Araiza/The New York Times)

Chris Stewart, the manager of the Sun City Pet Market in Sun City, Arizonia, has seen her kindness and unselfishness in his store. “She’s really no different than anyone else who comes in here and treats their dogs like members of their family,” he said. “When she’s with Bernie and Spinner, I can see the love she has for them just pouring out of her.”

Smartelli graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, and holds a doctorate of chiropractic medicine from Cleveland Chiropractic College in Kansas City, Missouri, as well as a nursing degree from Excelsior College in Albany, New York. She says the experience of sacrificing a kidney “really, truly highlights the importance of donor organizations.”

Before her illness, Smartelli was working as a travel nurse throughout the country, taking eight-week assignments in such cities as San Antonio, Dallas, Albuquerque, Palm Springs, Los Angeles and Denver.

Though there is no cure for her condition and no sacrifice that will put time back on her earthly clock, Smartelli said she still hopes to help save the lives of humans and dogs by raising awareness, and money. She has already been donating a portion of her book’s proceeds to Donate Life America, a nonprofit organization working to increase the number of donated organs, eyes and tissue.

“Any ‘wedding gifts’ I receive,” she said, “would go straight to both of those causes.”

She began considering a faux marriage to Bernie in October 2017, when she brought him to a dog groomer in Phoenix and mused: “I may as well marry Bernie. He’s always there for me. He listens, and he loves me no matter what. What more could a woman want?”

The groomer took note. When Smartelli returned later that day, she found Bernie wagging his tail, freshly blow-dried and fluffy, and sharply dressed in a sequined blue bow tie, with a blue ribbon on his collar and a plastic wedding ring and engagement band attached, along with a note that said “Marry Me.”

Wedding rings and a necklace charm belonging to Lilly Smartelli. (Cassidy Araiza/The New York Times)

The moment inspired her. “Just because I didn’t have a fiancé didn’t mean there couldn’t still be a groom,” she wrote in her book. “It might be a little unorthodox, but so had many other choices in my adventurous life. I don’t need to find a man, not when I have Bernie.”

“It was the perfect plan,” she wrote. “How could I have been so blind?” The reality, however, is that there will be no actual event, as Smartelli is barely able to keep up with the costs of her own medical bills.

With her parents deceased and no family members or friends to turn to for financial support, she has managed to keep a sense of humor as she copes with her debilitating disease. “People who see only a headline that says I want to marry Bernie will think I’m totally insane,” she said, laughing. “So I hope they take the time to learn more about my whole story, and the reason I want to do it.”

In the meantime, Smartelli said, she will continue to dream of actually walking Bernie down the aisle, with Spinner as best man, and celebrating with virtual family and friends.

But no matter how the reality of her Valentine’s Day unfolds, Smartelli will ultimately find the true meaning of the day in the company of Bernie and Spinner, just as others who do not necessarily mark February 14 as a romantic holiday on their calendars might instead choose to spend the day in the company of a good book, or by watching a sunrise, or visiting loved ones at a cemetery.

“It’s kind of ironic, but Bernie and Spinner, who are just a couple of rescue dogs, have actually rescued me from a life of loneliness,” said Smartelli, who began to cry.

“I really love those two guys,” she said. “It wouldn’t be Valentine’s Day without them.”