#me: what if talking to the universe gave you Space Scurvy. would that be fucked up or what

[mumblesplash]

the universe doesn’t want to hurt you, but it will

(inspired by an au by @droidofmay and @definitelynotshouting)

[loxare]

Harm

Chapter 4 -  Alice in High Definition and an Aside

Sniping was a waiting game. And while he waited, he was texting a contractor. Normally, meeting with contractors was a face to face thing, but in Bludhaven, a reclusive property owner could get anything he wanted, for the right price. Of course, he had also hired overseers, people to ensure the contractor didn't do a mediocre job and pocket the profits.

His target, one Johnny Grey, wasn't a drug lord or murderer or any of his usual targets. No, he was just an animal smuggler. He smuggled cats and dogs across the border, surgically implanted with certain chemicals that, when combined, formed compounds explosive enough to take out a major shopping center.

Fortunately, Grey was incredibly suspicious of his underlings, something Red Hood had been working on for a few months. As such, no one but Grey knew the names of the buyers, or who was stuffing small animals full of volatile chemicals. The entire organization literally relied on Grey to continue breathing. Unfortunately, he was about to disappoint a whole lot of people.

But first he had to show up. There was an exchange tonight, Grey paying off a harbormaster to maybe not look too closely at the animals the next ship was bringing in, and Red Hood had gotten here a whole hour early.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes. Ten minutes to kill and the contractor hadn't texted him back yet, so he had nothing to do. Without his permission, his mind started wandering back to his confrontation with Nightwing.

Pulling out his rifle, he started prepping it. “Who does he think he is?” The action opened with a click and he took a look down the barrel to make sure nothing was in it. “Family? Yeah right.” The magazine went in and the action closed with another series of clicks. “Why can't they all just leave me alone?” He laid down on the rooftop, lining up his sights. Red Hood sighed. He was going after a stuffed animal smuggler. Dangerous stuffed animals, but still. Not much choice though; all of the worst crooks were either fled or dead. Pretty soon, he would have no job.

By the time Grey and his posse showed up, he was very much ready to shoot some people. And he did. “Screw you Grayson.” Headshot. “I hope you get scurvy.” Knee, then headshot. “Get scurvy and all your perfect little teeth can fall out.” Knee, knee, elbow, shoulder, lung. “Fucking Nightwing.”

“Momma says that's a bad word and if I say it, she'll wash out my mouth.”

Immediately, Jason's rifle pointed straight up into the air. He rolled into a sitting position, staring at the little girl behind him. “And she's absolutely right. Swearing is a bad habit. Use big words, so whoever you're mad at feels like an idiot.”

She was about six, and wearing bunny pajamas. “Really? That works?”

“Yup.” Jason walked away from the edge of the roof and started putting his rifle away. She turned so she could keep facing him and, thankfully, not facing the horror show on the docks. “Plus stuff like malodorous dunce is just fun to say. What's your name?” He pulled off his helmet and started stashing his rifle.

“Alice. And Tammy said you ask if we need help, but I don't. I just wanted to say hi.” She rocked back on her heels and smiled at him, the tiny kid's purse at her side smacking into her thigh.

Jason smiled. Magazine out and away, eject round from chamber. “Hi Alice. Come on, let's get you home, before the angry men down there call for help.”

Alice nodded, holding her arms out in the universal sign for “carry me”. So Jason swung her up onto his shoulders, making sure the rifle slung across his back wasn't poking her, and handed her his helmet to carry.

She lived in an apartment building across the street, one he had considered for sniping on top of, but decided the pigeon wire would get in the way. And also really hurt. He couldn't really swing to her fire escape, not without risking dropping her, so he started climbing down his fire escape. “So Alice, how are you doing in school?”

“Not great. They keep talking about boring stuff like shapes and numbers and I just want to play outside.” She was using his head to balance his helmet on, and she kept turning it. “The thoranist said that I might have attention defo... defin...” She huffed in frustration.

“The therapist said you might have attention deficit disorder?” Jason guessed.

“No, there was another word in there.”

Ah. “Hyperactivity. It might be easier if you just call it ADHD.”

She gave out another frustrated huff. “Why couldn't he just call it that then? That's a lot easier to remember. And hey, what's that thing you said earlier mean?”

“Malodorous dunce? It means stinky dumdum. If you want, I can write it down for you.” They'd reached the bottom of the fire escape, Jason grabbing both of her ankles with one hand so he could climb the ladder. She grabbed his hair so she could hold on better.

Once they were at the bottom and starting across the street, she released his hair and went back to playing with his helmet. “Yes please. I wanna call the therapin that next time I have to go see him. I think he's right because a lot of stuff he said ADHD people have is stuff I have, but he's also a stinky dumdum and I don't like him.”

Jason laughed. “Yeah, people who are right all the time are like that.” Pulling out his grapple, he used it to grab the ladder to her fire escape and bring it down. “Hold on again Alice.”

She did, and they scaled the ladder. “Yeah. And! He said I need pills to focus in class, but then I saw Mom and Dad looking at the bills and being sad. So I don't think we can afford it.” There was a squeaking noise coming from somewhere.

Jason hummed, thinking. “Maybe... ask your Mom or Dad if they'll quiz you when you get home from school. But while they do, play a game. Catch or something. That might help it stick better.” He'd try and see what he could do about their money troubles. Jason had a thing about drugs, understandably, but something like Ritalin could help Alice focus in school, so he'd help out. After he made sure she did have ADHD and it wasn't just some crack shrink who diagnosed every kid because they had energy.

Alice laughed, swinging her legs as much as she was able with him holding her ankles. “That's a good idea Red! Thanks! Oh, and this is my window! Um. I decorated your helmet.”

Confused, Jason set her on the fire escape in front of him and yup. It was decorated alright. There was an empty sticker sheet in her hand, probably one she had kept in her purse. The stickers, a variety of star, butterfly, car, dinosaur and heart ones, were all over his helmet, as well as some drawings of dogs and cats in sharpie. Also, a drawing of Jason's helmet. On his helmet.

“I love it!” Jason said honestly. “But I don't want it to get damaged when I'm working.”

Alice nodded solemnly. “Yeah. This is art and Daddy says that art should be protected.”

“Protected but seen.” Jason added, and she nodded again. “I'll put a picture of it on the website. Sounds good?”

“Yes! Goodnight Red!” He wrote malodorous dunce on the back of her sticker sheet, as well as a few other insults. Then, she climbed in through her window and bounced into her bed. Jason smiled, put on his newly decorated helmet and grappled away.

On the RedKids website, the user Red added another photo to his profile page, for a grand total of two. The first one, uploaded a month ago, was of a cast, covered in names and drawings in a rainbow of permanent marker ink, leaving almost none of the original white visible. The comments on it were of kids claiming them as their own. The second, and newest, was of a shelf, and on the shelf was a interestingly decorated Red Hood  helmet.

When he realized he was chewing on the inside of his cheek, Dick stopped, firmly pressing his teeth together. It was a really bad habit, one that could lead to him biting the inside of his mouth really badly, especially if he was in a fight, but it's one he had never been able to shake. Luckily, it only came up if he was particularly conflicted.

Because Jason was a murderer. And that wasn't ever something he could excuse. But was Dick any better? He had let Tarantula shoot Blockbuster. Then again, not stopping someone from shooting someone else was a lot different than the murder and torture and general bloodbath that Jason was causing in Bludhaven. Wasn't it?

No, it was. And besides, comparing their situations wasn't fair or right. Dick had been emotionally devastated for weeks, months, after the incident. Dick had seen Jason, looked into his eyes, and Jason didn't regret a thing. The kid he had seen as a little brother had died and come back a sociopath.

Maybe Jason was right about one thing though. Dick hadn't seen him as a brother, not when he'd been alive. It had only been regret and melancholy that had him remembering it differently. And guilt. Which was the entire reason he was trying so hard with Tim. Not just because Tim was a great kid, but also because if something happened, he didn't want the survivor to be left with no good memories. Which was a morbid way of thinking, but kind of necessary in his line of work.

Jason had threatened Tim. Tim was safe for now (as safe as one could be on a deep space mission with his team) but as soon as he got back, he'd have to be told that Jason was dangerous. Because he didn't know. Because he'd told Dick that Jason was alive and then blasted off in a rocket with the Teen Titans. Because he had been so excited to meet Jason he would have skipped the mission if it wasn't galaxy-saving.

And Dick was chewing his cheek again.

“Again.” Bruce said in that tone he used when he doesn't want to demand but he's also not asking.

Dick's lip curled into a snarl. He was getting tired of this. “We go over it every time I visit Bruce. Do we have to do it again?” Bruce just leveled a flat stare at him. “Fine! Jason looked older. About the age he would be if he had never died. Massive. Almost as tall as you, with muscles to match.” More muscles than Dick anyways. But Dick tried to keep on the lean side so he could continue his acrobatics. “His gear was as good as it could be without access to our resources. The grapple gun was definitely a few generations down, so he probably built it himself from memory. Didn't see his eyes, he had a domino under his helmet. And he'd dyed some of his hair green and blue and pink.” An odd choice, not one the Jason he'd know would ever make.

Bruce took all that in, changing his report by a word or two. “Anything else?”

“What does it matter?” Dick stood abruptly, his chair crashing to the ground behind him. “Jason is dead, and a serial killer came back in his place! We should just go and take him down before he hurts anyone else!”

Standing slower than Dick had, Bruce saved and minimized the file he had on Jason, revealing the rather large graph in the window behind it. For all they two of them had been working around the clock to figure out a way to arrest him without him spilling their identities, it was a pitifully small file. And while neither of them had ever though their identities would come under threat from someone in the family, they also hadn't thought someone in the family would become what Jason has become. “It matters Dick. You should know more than anyone, the more information you have on someone, the more power you hold over them.”

Dick flinched. Either that was a reminder of his lessons of when he was a Robin, or it was a reminder of what had happened when Blockbuster found out who Nightwing was. “And the more time we sit down here, the more people die. He killed six people in the past two days Bruce. And tomorrow, it could be a dozen, or a hundred, and you would be down here twiddling your thumbs and trying to get information that doesn't exist!” Better to leave now then to let them continue pushing each other's buttons. Better to leave now than after one of them punched the other. With a sharp wave, Dick stalked over to his motorcycle and roared out of the Cave.

Bruce watched Dick leave sadly. He wished things were different. He wanted to be able to have a conversation with his son without one of them stomping off mad or coming to blows. But they had made up before and they would again.

He sat down again and looked at the graph on the screen. Either Dick didn't see it or he chose to ignore it. It was a murders in Bludhaven versus time graph, and if a criminal psychologist saw it they would swoon.

The first few months of data had been gone over so many time that Bruce could probably draw it free hand from memory. It's while Jason is in hospital that things get interesting. A week of nothing, then the murders spike. Overlaid with a violent crime graph and a drug related crime graph, and it's easy to see that the crooks of Bludhaven are running wild. The numbers rival the ones from the first month, the ones Bruce suspected were Jason's alone. But where Jason had tapered off, become much less violent in the months following handing out his cell phone number, the criminals of Bludhaven kept the numbers high.

The night Dick had gone to Bludhaven there was one murder that was confirmed to be Jason's. After that there was chaos. Murder went up drastically, violent and drug related crimes plummeted. Reports naming Red Hood as the shooter skyrocketed, more than there ever had before. But within two weeks, Jason settled down and went back to his pre-hospital numbers. A jump every week or so when he took out a gang, but he didn't kill every member.

Bruce sat with his elbows on the console, fingers laced under his nose, staring at the data. Specifically, the spike. Was Red Hood making up for time lost, killing the criminals who had rampaged in his absence? Or was it because Dick had come to Bludhaven? How stable was Jason? Most non-specific methods of resurrection messed with the mind. Magic either left the resurrected a zombie, slave to the whims of the resurrector, or neglected to revive the soul, leaving the resurrected a fraction of a person.

And he couldn't really think of another way for Jason to have been revived, not without triggering the sensors on his coffin. The only reason they didn't go off was because Jason came back to life inside his coffin and dug his way out. Any sort of tech would have had to have been inside the coffin, either added later (not possible without tripping the alarm) or in the coffin before he was buried. The Lazarus Pit was a possibility, but again, one would need to get Jason out of the coffin to expose him to one. And all other methods of resurrection were specific to the person. Kryptonian birthing matrix, Spectre, escaping Tartarus, caught in an eternal cycle of birth and rebirth, et cetera.

With a huff that was as close as he got to a sigh, Bruce quickly checked the incoming reports from Bludhaven. One murder and sixteen assaults, five of which were critical, were attributed to Red Hood. The crime rate in Bludhaven had once again plummeted to where it had been before Superman decided to take matters into his own hands.

Dick was right in some things. This could never be excused. But Bruce would also never give up on the idea that he could someday bring Jason home. Under twenty-four hour watch and severe restrictions on his activities until he could be trusted again, but home.

For now though, Bruce pulled on his cowl and headed for the car. There was crime in Gotham that had to be stopped, and while Batman would never stoop to Jason's methods, he would also never give up on Gotham either.

AN: Hooray! Some of Dick and Bruce’s thoughts on the matter! 

No news besides that. Read and enjoy! Loxie out~!

[fashiontrendin-blog]

The Psychology of Ghosting and Why People Can’t Stop Doing It

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-psychology-of-ghosting-and-why-people-cant-stop-doing-it/

The Psychology of Ghosting and Why People Can’t Stop Doing It

My ghost is named Tom.

He’s persistent, this ghost. He likes haunting my dreams, catching me off-guard in the milk-sweet land of sleep, slipping into my unconscious and rattling the cage of my brain. I dream he’s back in my life, unapologetic and unreformed, still cheating and gaslighting and drinking too much. In these dreams, I am still desperate for answers, asking him over and over why he vanished, why he gave up his flesh-and-blood self and became this ghost that — even after seven years, three new cities, countless dates and the love of a good man, the best I’ve ever known — I still can’t shake.

Ghosting (the term we’ve assigned to the sudden disappearance of a romantic interest) has become synonymous with modern romance: A 2016 Plenty of Fish survey revealed 78% of users had been ghosted. When I did my own Insta-investigation, I received dozens of responses, ranging from righteous indignation to extreme chill. “Rude but inescapable” seems to be the general agreement among those I spoke to about ghosting in the age of online dating.

It’s not that the dating “slow fade” is new (one girl told me she had a friend in high school who called it “two-weeking”: After hooking up with a girl, he’d ignore her entirely for two weeks — just long enough, he said, for her to get the picture), but technology has shifted the landscape by presenting a version of the world that feels both impossibly small and intoxicatingly large. One unreturned letter in the 1800s and you could warm yourself at night with the strong odds that he perished of scurvy; now, we’re able to see our ghosts out in the world, eating brunch, Instagram Story-ing the weird bird they saw on the walk to work. Combine that with the inherent dehumanization of online dating, in which complex individuals are reduced to swipeable avatars, and what we’ve created is a flourishing breeding ground for people for whom honest, direct communication feels not only unpalatable but unnecessary.

F. Diane Barth, a New York-based psychotherapist and the author of the new book I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women’s Lives, says that while ghosting as we understand it isn’t new, the way we have pathologized it is. “In the past, a person could stop calling or dropping by,” she says, “but now we have so many more ways of disconnecting from a person, like being unfriended or unfollowed.” Online dating also provides the comfort blanket of partial anonymity: There likely aren’t mutual friends to call you out on your callous behavior, nor shared physical spaces that force interaction. “Our communities are larger now,” says Barth, “so it’s entirely possible you might never, ever run into them again.”

The Anatomy of the Ghosted

Modern ghosting can impart a distinct and isolating feeling of shame for those who experience it. “People who have been ghosted often feel that they are the person who has done something wrong,” says Barth. “You’ve been dropped off the edge of the earth, which is very traumatic. You don’t think about how many other people this has happened to, but rather that there must be something wrong with you.”

Barth notes that shame is the brain’s natural reaction when “something or someone interrupts us in the middle of doing something we are enjoying.” Our natural instinct is to “undo the situation” so we can get back to that feeling of happiness. When we can’t — when we are, in fact, cut off completely from the source of the good feeling — we look for ways to explain away the bad feelings: She didn’t want to commit, he didn’t like my laugh. “No matter how you explain it to yourself, though,” writes Barth, “your psyche is trying to undo the sense of disruption of the good feelings. Shame is a reaction to having a circuit in your emotional system broken.”

Am I not funny? Do people not get my jokes?

It’s a very particular wound and one that is becoming inescapably familiar. Former online dater and ghostee Kelsey says her primary reaction to being ghosted was the feeling that she must be the problem. “We’re obsessed with fine-tuning and laboring over our superficial appearances (both in-person and online),” she says. “So when we’re ghosted, I think we often jump to trying to figure out what in that outer shell wasn’t well-received, and we let that disapproval soak into our inner layers that define us. We cycle through our insecurities. … Oh shit, did he not think that was funny? Am I not funny? Do people not get my jokes? Oh crap, is that what I’m giving off?”

The shame is compounded by a feeling of being duped. Alexandra was ghosted by a guy she’d been dating for a few weeks. “On our first date, we talked for six hours straight and ended it in a moonlit make-out,” she says. “He talked about cooking together after we had sex in my kitchen. We went on mini field trips — to the beach! to the cliffs! — and had after-work check-ins where he’d call me on his way home to hear about my day. And then, one day, he went from telling me he was addicted to me to only speaking if spoken to. He would weasel out of committing to a plan. He would hit me with a ‘Hey!’ on the Sunday evening of a weekend where he’d assured me he would be seeing me.”

Eventually, she says, she’d had enough. “I told him I was an adult and needed planning, that I couldn’t just keep my schedule endlessly open for him on the off chance he was free. He apologized, promised he’d do better, promised we’d see each other with more regularity. But it dwindled until our interactions were reduced to him watching my Insta Stories while I was halfway across the world on a hiking trip.”

She’s now happily cohabitating with someone else but still has trouble shaking the experience. “I think he was dishonest about how he felt about me, which made me feel like a fool. And yet he didn’t have the strength to just tell me.”

The Anatomy of the Ghoster

To state the obvious: It’s rude, plain and simple, to fail to consider another person’s feelings. We’re talking preschool lessons, the golden rule. We all learned this. So why do the ghosts ghost?

“For me, the motivation was rooted in a strong aversion to being honest about my emotions, usually for fear of hurting feelings,” says Andy, reforming ghoster. “I found that it was easier to let silence do the talking than force myself to utter, ‘I had a nice time, but I don’t feel a connection’ or whatever you’re supposed to say.”

Others, like the man I have decided to spend my life with, are less apologetic. “It was the path of least resistance,” he says. “It was often because I’ve met someone else [Author’s note: It me.], and I’m just anticipating that awkward conversation and want to avoid it. When it’s someone you haven’t been dating long or you’ve been casual with, I think that there is this emerging establishment of a new norm, which is just — that’s now the way we break up with people. I do think that it’s kinder than telling someone you’re not interested in them or that you met someone better.”

He’s not alone in this; numerous people I spoke to said that in our dating universe, ghosting is both acceptable and even considerate. “It’s almost polite if the relationship was casual enough,” says Aubrey, a former ghoster and ghostee (now married). “There is something humiliating and patronizing in a dude I’ve gone out with twice ‘breaking up’ with me.”

Ghosting seems like a cop-out for people to avoid adult conversations.

Andy, turning over his new leaf, says he gives himself a pep talk before communicating his emotions to keep himself from ghosting. “The question I ask myself when the situation arises is: What’s the absolute worst thing that can happen after telling someone you don’t want to go out again? Maybe they’d be like ‘Fuck you!! You’re a sad pathetic loser! Boy bye.’ I can live with that.”

Barth agrees that some explanation is (almost) always better than none at all. “People say they ghost because ‘they didn’t want to hurt feelings.’ And yes, people who are broken up with directly will likely experience some hurt, but the thing about ghosting is that there’s no closure.” Ghosting, she says, leaves the person who was ghosted with the humiliating impression that whatever relationship they believed existed was all in their head, that they were not worth so much as a farewell text.

Julia, happily single and dating, made it a practice to always offer an explanation after a blind date called her out at a party six months later for not responding to her texts. “I had to sneak out of the party because she wouldn’t drop it,” she says. “I have a hard rule now that I always send a text to say if I don’t want to hang again. It’s awkward, but it saves the drama.”

When I was first dating in New York, I found myself making up excuses and dodging calls to avoid telling guys I didn’t want to see them again. At the time, I was terrified of seeming rude or unlikable, and the attention I received (whether wanted or not) felt like an affirmation that I was worthy and wouldn’t be alone forever. Eventually, the stress of trying to be likable while simultaneously dodging contact became absurd. A few friends and I collaborated on a standard text we’d send when we didn’t want to see someone again (please feel free to borrow, copyright not necessary, works for all genders, just trying to do the lord’s work): “Thanks for a great night! I didn’t feel any romantic energy between us, but I wish you all the best out there.”

Some (again, I’m MARRYING this man) argue that silence is, in fact, an answer of its own. “If you text someone once, twice, and they don’t respond — I mean, that is a response. That speaks very loudly. You just don’t want to hear it.”

The Anatomy of Closure

But the problem with silence is that it leaves a deep, dark hole — one it is all too easy to fill with a foggy combination of insecurity, self-loathing and confusion.

Lauren was platonically ghosted by someone she considered one of her closest friends. “I literally did almost everything with her,” she tells me. “And then one day, she just quit calling and texting and responding to me. And then she unfollowed me on all social. … It was heartbreaking.” There were signs, in hindsight, that this woman had a callous streak; still, Lauren said, she’s unable to come up with any explanation for her behavior, and years later, it still feels like a betrayal. “I feel like I’m a pretty nice and reasonable person, so if something were wrong, I feel as though she should have discussed it with me,” she said. “Ghosting seems like a cop-out for people to avoid adult conversations.”

In the absence of closure, what we are left with is a bewildering array of questions — questions that, it’s important to remember, might never be answered even if the relationship had ended on our own terms. “Relationships are always two-sided, and we can’t know everything that is going on in the other person,” reminds Barth. “If you’ve asked for closure and they haven’t been able to provide it, you’re going to stay stuck if you keep asking. You need to give up the idea that it can be solved.”

Barth recommends talking openly to friends about your experience. “Keeping [ghosting] to yourself increases the feeling of hurt and pain and isolation,” she says. “The more you can talk about it, the more you can get feedback that will help you process it.” Building this support system can also remind you of all the connections you do have: strong, beautiful friendships, a loving family, coworkers who respect you — relationships that rely not on superficialities, but on another person seeing you fully and embracing who you really are. “You need to work really hard to remember that it isn’t about you,” says Barth. “The reason that someone [ghosted] — it’s their difficulty in having to be honest.”

After multiple ghostings through online dating, Kelsey deleted her apps. Getting over being ghosted was going to require a new outlook, she realized. “It took some time and a lot of distraction, but I was finally able to ask myself the underlying question — why were these strangers making me feel bad about myself? Why was I giving up my sense of worth as a companion entirely to this pool of bachelors? Why was my vulnerability extending to all aspects of self, instead of just limiting it to what it actually was — the viability of compatibility with this particular individual?”

When she did start dating again, she says, it felt completely different. “I wasn’t checking the app constantly. I wasn’t eager to swipe and double-tap and labor over the wittiest retort. I didn’t feel the need to calculate the perfect time between responses and, most importantly, I didn’t fill the idle time with all of the reasons I had come to believe he thought I wasn’t worth it. I went out on dates and gave myself one rule of my own — hang out with guys if it sounds fun, and if it doesn’t sound fun, then don’t.”

And when she wasn’t interested? “I would tough it up and politely decline a follow-up date,” she says. “I did that both in-person and over texts, and both are uncomfortable but important. And every guy I did that to replied with appreciation and understanding.”

My ghost and I dated for eight years, and then we didn’t. Tom stopped coming home at night, stopped answering the phone and moved all of his belongings out of our apartment while I was out of town. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course — he’d call crying or show up unexpectedly and then disappear again over the course of a few months — but when he finally did leave for good, when I found out he had been sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend, the closest I ever got to an explanation was, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

He’s still out there — married, balding, in the city where I left him — but we haven’t spoken since. I do not imagine he ever thinks of me. I hate that I am the one left with these questions, although maybe what I am really left with is simply my own obstinate feeling that I was owed more than what I got. I have filled the space he left behind with narratives I wrote to suit my own purposes, but the truth is, humans are just bad sometimes. We do bad things — things we said we’d never do. Sometimes, the simplest, kindest thing you can do is try to explain why.

Illustrations by Gabrielle Lamontagne.