#none of the people in my life have ever been isolated to this degree and having almost nobody or actually nobody for years

[be-good-to-bugs]

it actually kinda sucks that nobody in my life has any idea the loneliness ive been feeling for the past 8 years. im glad they havent experienced this but it sucks to not have anyone to relate this to.

[engeorged]

The Bear and the Mountain

My life has always been defined by achievement. I sailed through university, completing a master’s degree in less than six months. I was confident in my intelligence and my looks—black hair, green eyes, and a constant carefully trimmed stubble that suited me. People often called me attractive, and I believed them, but I tried not to let it turn into arrogance. I just knew I had what it took to succeed.

After sailing through university, (I know I sound douchey but I’m just stating the facts) I launched a startup that took off almost immediately. In a few short years, I’d built it up and sold it for an eight-figure sum. I should have felt on top of the world, but instead, I felt empty. I had achieved everything I set out to do by the age of 27, yet something was missing. My life was a series of successes, but none of them brought me any meaning or satisfaction. Life was just a bit to easy.

In search of meaning, I tried everything. I spent time in Buddhist retreat lodges, seeking enlightenment through meditation. I pushed myself to the limits with extreme sports, hoping the adrenaline would fill the void. I even subjected myself to the intensity of sweat lodges, enduring the heat and discomfort in the hope of a breakthrough. Nothing worked. I was left more frustrated than ever.

Eventually, I decided to take a different approach—one that involved solitude and nature. I planned a solo trek through one of the most remote mountain ranges in the U.S., thinking that maybe the isolation would force me to confront whatever was missing in my life. The trek was challenging, but I was used to pushing myself. That was, until the seventh day, when everything changed. I was faced with a ravine and I definitely should have known better, but halfway up I slipped on a loose rock and tumbled to the bottom, breaking my leg badly and covering myself in deep cuts. I tried to move but I was trapped. I tried calling for help but I was literally in the arse end of nowhere. Stranded, in pain, and utterly alone, I realised just how precarious my situation had become.

After nearly a day of lying helpless, my hope dwindling with each passing hour, I heard heavy footsteps. Relief washed over me as a figure emerged from the dense forest. He was tall, powerfully built, and had a thick, bushy beard. There was something imposing about him, yet his presence calmed me. He introduced himself as Bear, and despite my dire circumstances, I couldn’t help but notice that beneath the wild exterior, he was remarkably handsome. His eyes, sharp and clear, held a depth that suggested he understood far more than he let on.

Bear turns out to be a man of very few words and after a few minutes of observing the situation and without a word, he lifted me onto his back as if I weighed nothing and began to carry me through the forest. I’m not gonna lie, it was actually pretty hot! The guy smelt so good too.

We arrived at his cabin, a beautiful structure powered by wind turbines and surrounded by the raw beauty of nature. Inside, the cabin was cozy and welcoming, filled with handmade furniture and intricate wood carvings. Bear set me down on a bed, and the exhaustion from the pain and stress overtook me; I passed out almost immediately.

When I woke, the first thing I noticed was the room. It was rustic yet comfortable, with wooden beams running across the ceiling and a large stone fireplace on one wall. Soft, natural light filtered through the windows, casting a warm glow over everything. The bed I lay in was firm but comfortable, and the smell of pine filled the air. But what truly stunned me was my leg. It was expertly set in a splint, immobilized with a level of precision that was astounding. My head and arms, too, had been carefully treated, stitched up with surgical skill. I traced the stitches on my head and arms with my fingers, marvelling at how neat they were. There was more to Bear than he was letting on.

Bear had not only saved my life but had done so with an expertise I hadn’t expected. The man who appeared so rugged and wild had the hands of a surgeon. I wanted to thank him, to ask him how he’d learned these skills, but when I looked around, Bear was nowhere to be found. Instead, next to the bed, there was a tray filled with food—a hearty stew, freshly baked bread, and fruits. My stomach growled, and though I was puzzled by Bear’s absence, I couldn’t resist the urge to eat.

As I ate, I couldn’t help but feel content. The food was incredible—rich, flavourful, and comforting in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Each bite seemed to melt away the tension I’d been carrying. The bread was warm and soft, perfect for soaking up the thick stew. The fruits were sweet and refreshing, a perfect complement to the savoury dishes.

Yet, as I savored the meal, something nagged at me. It was strange that Bear had disappeared so suddenly. I hadn’t heard him leave, and there was no indication of where he might have gone. Still, the cabin was secure, and the food brought me so much comfort that I pushed the thought aside. I was too content, too satisfied to worry about where Bear had gone or why he hadn’t said anything.

As the last bite of food settled in my stomach, a wave of exhaustion washed over me, heavier than anything I'd felt in days. The warmth of the cabin, combined with the fullness in my belly, made my eyelids droop uncontrollably. I didn’t fight it; the soft bed beneath me was too inviting. Within moments, I drifted off, my mind lulled into a deep sleep by the rhythmic crackling of the fire.

When I awoke, the room was bathed in the soft light of early evening, and the fire had been stoked back to life. I blinked a few times, trying to shake off the lingering grogginess. It took a moment for my eyes to focus, but when they did, I saw him—Bear, standing near the foot of the bed, a tray of food in his hands. His presence, so solid and quiet, filled the space, and I felt a strange mix of relief and unease.

“Feeling better?” he asked, his voice a low rumble, almost like the sound of distant thunder. He set the tray on the small table beside the bed. The smell of warm, hearty food wafted up to me, making my stomach gurgle in anticipation, despite the fact that I had eaten only hours before.

“Yeah… a bit,” I replied, still groggy but slowly coming back to full awareness. I shifted slightly, wincing at the dull ache in my leg. It was then that I noticed Bear's gaze was softer than before, though just as unreadable. He was watching me closely, assessing my condition.

“I’ve been thinking,” Bear began, his tone even, as if he were discussing the weather. “With the way things are right now—snow, ice, unpredictable winds—there’s no safe way to get you out of here for at least six weeks, maybe more. The mountain’s too dangerous to navigate, even for me.”

His words hung in the air, and I felt a knot of anxiety tighten in my chest. Six weeks? I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I’d be here that long. But before I could react, Bear continued, his voice calm and reassuring.

“I know it’s not what you expected, but I’m happy for you to stay here with me until it’s safe to leave. You’ll be well taken care of, I promise.”

There was a certainty in his voice that made it hard to argue. Despite the odd circumstances and the isolation, something about Bear’s offer brought me a strange sense of comfort. The idea of staying here, under his care, didn’t seem so bad—especially after everything I��d been through so far. My leg throbbed again, a reminder of how helpless I was in this situation. Maybe, just maybe, staying wasn’t the worst option.

I glanced at the tray of food he’d brought—another generous helping, more than I thought I could manage. But the smell was intoxicating, and I found myself reaching for the fork without thinking.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, accepting both the food and the offer with a mix of apprehension and gratitude.

Bear gave a small nod, then turned to tend to the fire, his broad back facing me as he stoked the flames. I couldn’t see his face, but something in his posture told me he was at ease with the arrangement, perhaps even a little pleased. As I took the first bite of the new meal, I couldn’t help but wonder what the next six weeks would bring.

The days blended together as I continued to recover. Bear’s presence was elusive—he was rarely around when I was awake, but every time I stirred, there was more food waiting for me. It became a routine of sorts: I’d wake up to find a fresh meal by my bed, eat my fill, and drift back to sleep. I began to wonder if I was imagining him, but the expertly prepared food and the meticulous care I received were real enough.

Over time, I started noticing changes in my body. At first, it was subtle—my clothes began to feel snug, especially around the waist. I told myself it was just temporary, a result of being bedridden and inactive. But as the days passed, the changes became more apparent. My belly, once flat and firm, was now rounding out, pressing against the fabric of my shirt. It felt strange, yet I tried to convince myself that it was nothing to worry about. After all, I was healing, and once I was back on my feet, everything would return to normal.

Despite these thoughts, I couldn’t deny the pleasure I found in the food. Each meal was a masterpiece—perfectly seasoned meats, creamy potatoes, and desserts that were impossible to resist. I found myself looking forward to the meals, eagerly anticipating the next dish that would appear beside my bed. My appetite grew with each passing day, and with it, my belly grew too.

One evening, after another large meal, I decided to investigate. I ran my hands over my stomach, feeling the firmness of my belly beneath my skin. It was rounder, fuller than it had ever been before. The sensation was both unsettling and oddly comforting. I couldn’t deny that I was putting on weight, but I wasn’t ready to fully accept it either. It was easier to tell myself that it was just temporary, that it was a side effect of healing, and that soon I’d be back to my old self.

But deep down, I knew something was changing. The combination of solitude, indulgence, and the strange, almost mystical care I was receiving from Bear had set me on a different path—one that I wasn’t sure I was ready to confront just yet.

I woke up one morning feeling strangely energised. The routine of waking, eating, and sleeping had begun to feel monotonous, but today something was different. As I sat up in bed, I noticed something new at the foot of it—crutches. Handmade, with sturdy wood and comfortable grips, they were unmistakably Bear’s work. The craftsmanship was remarkable, each detail carefully considered, and I realised that Bear must have spent considerable time making them for me. I looked at the handles and saw a small family of carved bears catching tiny wooden salmon jumping from the curves of the crutches.

Excited by the prospect of moving around on my own again, I carefully swung my legs over the edge of the bed. My leg still ached, but the splint held firm, and with some effort, I managed to stand using the crutches. It felt good to be upright again, to be able to explore beyond the confines of the bed.

The cabin, as I saw it for the first time beyond my bed, was a work of art. The walls were adorned with intricate carvings and paintings, depicting scenes of wildlife and nature. The furniture, all handcrafted, exuded warmth and comfort. There were shelves lined with books, maps, and various trinkets that spoke of a life lived in harmony with the wilderness. The fireplace crackled softly, filling the room with a gentle warmth.

As I hobbled around, taking in the surroundings, I couldn’t help but notice how my body felt heavier, more cumbersome. My belly, once flat and toned, now hung over the waistband of my pants, a soft and unfamiliar weight. I caught my reflection in a window and was startled by the sight. My midsection had undeniably thickened, the result of a week of indulgent eating and inactivity. The roundness of my stomach was undeniable, pressing against the fabric of my shirt in a way that felt foreign and uncomfortable.

I tried to push the realization aside, telling myself it was just temporary. But there was no denying the evidence. The steady supply of rich, hearty food had left its mark on me. I felt a pang of discomfort, not just physically but emotionally. I was a man who had always been in control, and now, control seemed to be slipping away.

As I explored the cabin, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. It was a strange sensation, as though Bear was there, observing me, but I couldn’t see him. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, and I turned to look around, but the cabin appeared empty. Still, the feeling persisted, a silent presence that was both comforting and unnerving.

Eventually, I made my way to the kitchen. It was as beautifully crafted as the rest of the cabin, with a large wooden table at its center. To my surprise, Bear was there, standing by the stove. His back was to me, but I could see the muscles in his broad shoulders working as he stirred something in a pot. The aroma that filled the room was mouthwatering, a rich blend of spices and roasting meat.

This was the only the fourth time I’d seen Bear since he rescued me. He was still the same imposing figure, tall and powerful, his beard thick and wild. But there was a gentleness in the way he moved, a careful precision as he prepared the meal. I watched him for a few moments, marveling at how effortlessly he commanded the space, how naturally he seemed to belong here.

Bear turned slightly, and for the briefest moment, our eyes met. There was something in his gaze that I couldn’t quite place—an intensity, a quiet watchfulness. He nodded toward the table, indicating that I should sit. I obeyed, lowering myself into one of the chairs, the crutches propped beside me.

Bear brought the food to the table—a feast that made my mouth water just by looking at it. There were roasted vegetables, a thick stew brimming with chunks of meat, and freshly baked bread that was still warm from the oven. He served me generously, filling my plate to the brim, before sitting down across from me.

We ate together in silence, the only sound the clinking of cutlery against plates. The food was, as always, incredible. Each bite was a burst of flavor, and despite my earlier discomfort about my weight, I found myself eating with gusto. The food was just too good to resist.

As we ate, I felt Bear’s eyes on me, watching my every move. It was unsettling at first, but as the meal progressed, I began to feel something else—an unspoken connection between us. It was as if Bear was studying me, understanding me in ways that I hadn’t even begun to understand myself. The silence wasn’t awkward; it was charged, filled with an unspoken bond that was slowly forming between us.

By the time the meal was over, I was full to the point of bursting. My belly, already swollen, now pressed even more insistently against my shirt, but I couldn’t bring myself to regret the meal. Bear cleared the dishes with the same quiet efficiency, and as he worked, I realized that my feelings toward him were shifting. There was more to this man than I had initially thought, and I was beginning to feel drawn to him in ways I hadn’t expected.

After the meal, Bear disappeared into another room, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I sat there, feeling the weight of the food in my stomach and the weight of the growing connection between us. Something was happening here, something I didn’t fully understand yet, but I knew it was important.

As I made my way back to bed, my belly heavy and full, I couldn’t help but wonder what the next days would bring. The cabin had become more than just a place of recovery—it was becoming a place of transformation. And Bear, the enigmatic man who had saved me, was at the centre of it all.

The days turned into weeks, and the cabin, once a place of temporary refuge, became my entire world. The outside world seemed distant, irrelevant, as I settled into this new rhythm of life. My leg was healing slowly, and with Bear’s crutches, I could move around more freely, though I still spent much of my time resting. But it wasn’t just my leg that was changing; my body was transforming in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Each morning, I’d wake up to the smell of something delicious wafting through the cabin. Bear’s cooking was exceptional, and I found myself eagerly anticipating each meal. There was always a generous spread—thick, savory stews, roasted meats, freshly baked bread, and rich, decadent desserts. The food was comfort itself, warm and filling, and I couldn’t help but indulge.

As I ate, I became increasingly aware of my body’s changes. My once-flat stomach had now grown round and heavy, a firm dome that swelled more with each meal. My shirts, which had fit me perfectly when I first arrived, were now stretched tight across my midsection, riding up to reveal a line of soft hair trailing down to my belly button. The waistband of my pants dug into my sides, leaving red marks on my skin, but still, I ate. I told myself it was just temporary, that I’d shed the weight once I was able to be more active, but deep down, I knew I was lying to myself.

I couldn’t deny the growing attraction I felt toward Bear. It was an attraction born not just from his rugged good looks or his self-sufficiency, but from something deeper, something about the way he carried himself. Bear was a man of few words, but his presence was commanding. There was an intensity to him, a quiet strength that I found irresistibly compelling. I began to crave his approval, his attention, though he never said much.

Bear watched me closely during our meals, his gaze intense and unreadable. At first, his silence made me uneasy, but as time went on, I began to interpret it as a form of attention, a sign that he was observing me, even if he wasn’t speaking. I found myself wanting to impress him, to catch his eye in some way. I started to eat more, pushing myself to finish every last bite, hoping that he would notice.

In those moments, I felt a strange satisfaction as my belly grew fuller and rounder. There was something about Bear’s quiet attention that made me want to show off, to prove something to him, though I wasn’t entirely sure what. I’d stretch after a meal, subtly arching my back to accentuate the curve of my stomach, hoping he’d see how much I had eaten, how much I had grown.

It became a game of sorts—an unspoken challenge between us. I’d eat until I was uncomfortably full, then stretch or shift in my chair, allowing my shirt to ride up and expose my swollen belly. Each time I did, I could feel Bear’s eyes on me, though he never commented. The tension between us grew with each passing day, and I found myself increasingly drawn to him, eager to elicit a reaction, even if it was just a lingering glance.

One evening, after several weeks of this routine, Bear prepared an especially large feast. The table was laden with food—platters of roasted poultry, glazed hams, bowls of mashed sweet potatoes swimming in gravy, freshly baked rolls, and a massive apple pie that filled the cabin with its sweet, spiced aroma. I couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement as I sat down, the sheer amount of food both daunting and thrilling.

As we began to eat, I could feel Bear’s eyes on me, watching as I loaded my plate with more food than I thought I could handle. I dug in with enthusiasm, the flavors rich and satisfying. The chicken was tender and juicy, the potatoes smooth and buttery, and the rolls practically melted in my mouth. I ate and ate, determined to finish everything on my plate and then some.

With each bite, my belly expanded, pressing harder against the confines of my clothes. I could feel the tightness increasing, the fabric straining as I continued to eat. I was full—painfully so—but I kept going, motivated by the silent presence of Bear across the table. I wanted him to see how much I could eat, how much I could take in, how much I was willing to grow for him.

When I finally couldn’t eat another bite, I leaned back in my chair, my stomach round and bloated, pressing up against the edge of the table. My shirt had ridden up completely, exposing the full expanse of my swollen, hairy belly. I stretched my arms overhead, feigning a casual movement, but really I wanted Bear to see—to take notice of the way my belly jutted out, heavy and full.

Bear’s eyes were on me, his gaze intense as ever. He didn’t say a word, but the way he looked at me, I knew he was watching, taking in every detail. I held his gaze for a moment, my heart pounding, then slowly lowered my arms and settled back into my seat, feeling the weight of my bloated belly resting on my thighs.

Bear remained silent, his expression unreadable, but there was something in his eyes that made me think he understood. He got up slowly, clearing the table as he always did, and though we didn’t speak, I felt as if something had shifted between us—an unspoken understanding that this was about more than just food.

As I made my way back to bed that night, my belly aching from the sheer volume of food, I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of satisfaction. I had pushed myself to the limit, and though Bear hadn’t said anything, I knew he had noticed. That silent connection, the way he watched without speaking, was enough to keep me going, to keep me wanting more.

A few days later and after a particularly heavy lunch, I felt the familiar pull of sleep. My belly was stuffed to capacity, swollen and heavy from yet another feast, and I couldn’t resist the lure of an afternoon nap. I made my way back to bed, sinking into the soft mattress, my body surrendering to the weight of the meal and the warmth of the cabin. As I drifted off, the last thing I thought about was Bear—his quiet presence, his intense gaze, and the way he watched over me without saying a word.

I woke up a few hours later, the sun hanging lower in the sky, casting long shadows across the room. My stomach still felt heavy, the remnants of the meal sitting comfortably in my gut. I stretched slowly, wincing slightly at the tightness in my midsection, before sitting up and realizing that the cabin was unusually quiet. Normally, I would have heard Bear moving around, cooking or working on something. But today, there was nothing—just the sound of the wind outside and the crackling of the fire.

Curious, I decided to get up and look for him. Using the crutches Bear had made for me, I carefully made my way down the stairs and into the main room, but there was no sign of him. The kitchen was empty, the stove cold. It was strange—I had grown so accustomed to his presence, to the idea that he was always somewhere nearby, that his absence felt almost unsettling.

I wandered around the cabin, checking the other rooms, but still, there was no sign of Bear. Finally, I decided to venture outside. The late afternoon sun bathed the clearing in a warm, golden light, the air crisp and fresh. I felt a slight chill as I stepped out onto the porch, the cool breeze brushing through the holes made by the buttons on my shirt as my protruding stomach pushed them out.

That’s when I saw him.

Bear was standing in the clearing, a few yards away from the cabin, chopping wood. He had taken his plaid shirt off leaving his torso fully exposed and I was not disappointed. His broad, muscular back glistened with a thin sheen of sweat that caught the sunlight. His powerful arms, thick with muscle, moved with precision as he swung the axe, the blade slicing cleanly through the logs with effortless power. Each movement was fluid, controlled—his body a study in strength and grace.

I stood there, transfixed by the sight of him. Bear was a man of imposing size, and seeing him like this, shirtless and in his element, made him seem even more formidable. His chest was broad and thick, covered in a mat of dark hair that trailed down to his stomach, which was flat and defined, a stark contrast to my own soft, rounded belly. His biceps bulged with each swing, his forearms corded with veins as he gripped the axe handle.

His entire physique was the embodiment of raw, primal strength—his torso a canvas of hard muscle, honed by years of living off the land, working with his hands, and surviving in the wilderness. There was no doubt that this was a man who had mastered his environment, who thrived in the harshest conditions. His beard, thick and wild, only added to the ruggedness of his appearance, framing his strong jaw and emphasizing the sharpness of his features.

But it wasn’t just his physical power that captivated me; it was the way he moved, the way he seemed so utterly in control of everything around him. There was a quiet intensity in his movements, a confidence that came from knowing his own strength. It was mesmerizing to watch.

As I stood there, watching him work, I felt a wave of emotions wash over me. There was admiration, certainly—how could anyone not admire such a powerful figure? But there was something more, something deeper. I was drawn to him in a way I hadn’t expected, an attraction that went beyond the physical. It was the combination of his strength, his self-sufficiency, and the quiet way he cared for me, even as he kept his distance.

Bear hadn’t noticed me yet, and for a moment, I considered going back inside, letting him continue his work undisturbed. But something kept me rooted to the spot, a need to stay, to watch, to be near him. I took a few steps forward, careful to be quiet, not wanting to break the spell of the moment.

As I moved closer, I could see the details more clearly—the way his muscles tensed and relaxed with each swing, the droplets of sweat that slid down his chest, the rise and fall of his breath. There was something almost hypnotic about the rhythm of his movements, a primal energy that seemed to pulse in the air between us.

Finally, as if sensing my presence, Bear paused in his work. He turned slowly, his eyes locking onto mine. For a moment, neither of us moved. The world seemed to hold its breath, the only sound the rustle of leaves in the wind. His gaze was intense, penetrating, as if he could see right through me, straight to the thoughts and feelings I tried so hard to keep hidden.

I swallowed hard, suddenly feeling self-conscious under his scrutiny. My shirt was stretched tight across my belly, the fabric straining to contain the fullness that had developed over the past weeks. Compared to Bear, I felt soft, weak, but the way he looked at me made it clear that he saw more than just my physical appearance.

Bear didn’t say anything—he never did—but there was something in his eyes, a quiet acknowledgment of the connection that had been growing between us. He nodded once, a small gesture, before turning back to his work. I watched as he resumed chopping wood, the moment passing, but the feelings it stirred in me lingering long after.

I stood there for a while longer, letting the sight of him burn into my memory, before finally turning to go back inside. As I walked back to the cabin, my heart was pounding in my chest, a mixture of excitement and something else—something deeper, more profound, that I wasn’t quite ready to name.

The following morning, light filtered softly through the cabin windows, casting a golden glow over everything. I had become accustomed to waking up this way—slowly, with the warmth of the fire in the hearth and the smell of breakfast already beginning to waft from the kitchen. But today, something was different. There was a heaviness in the air, a tension I couldn’t quite place. Bear had been quiet, more so than usual, and as I made my way downstairs on my crutches, I found him standing by the door, staring out into the clearing.

I hesitated, feeling a knot of unease tightening in my stomach. “Good morning,” I said softly, trying to read his expression. He didn’t turn to look at me, just kept his gaze fixed on something far in the distance.

“The weather’s changing,” Bear said finally, his voice low and rough. “Conditions will be good for travel soon. The day after tomorrow, I can take you back down the mountain.”

His words hit me like a punch to the gut. I knew this day would come, but hearing it out loud felt like the ground was shifting beneath me. I had been so consumed by the strange, quiet life we had built here that I hadn’t fully considered what it would mean to leave. To go back to my old life, to a world that now felt distant and unimportant.

I forced a smile, trying to hide the turmoil I felt inside. “That’s… great,” I managed to say, though my voice sounded hollow, even to me.

Bear finally turned to look at me, his dark eyes unreadable. For a moment, I searched his face for any hint of what he might be feeling—relief, sadness, anything—but there was nothing. He was as stoic as ever, his expression giving nothing away.

“Is that what you want?” I asked, the words slipping out before I could stop them. I immediately regretted it, feeling foolish for needing reassurance, for wanting to know if he wanted me to stay as much as I suddenly realized I wanted to.

Bear’s gaze lingered on me, his eyes glistening in the low light. But he didn’t answer, just gave a slight nod as if the decision had already been made. Then, as if the conversation hadn’t happened, he turned and went back to the kitchen, leaving me standing there, feeling lost and dismayed.

I spent the rest of the day in a fog, trying to process what was happening. The idea of leaving, of going back to a life that felt meaningless in comparison to what I had found here, filled me with a deep sense of loss. But even more than that, I was confused by Bear’s reaction. Did he want me to stay? Did he feel anything for me at all? The thought of leaving without knowing the answer gnawed at me.

That night, as I lay in bed, my mind raced. I couldn’t just leave like this, not without some sign, some acknowledgment of what had been growing between us. An idea began to form in my mind, reckless and desperate, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If words weren’t going to get through to Bear, maybe actions would. Maybe if I pushed myself, showed him how much I was willing to do, I could finally get him to react.

I decided that the next day would be my last chance, and I would make the most of it. I would eat as much as I possibly could, more than ever before, until there was no way Bear could ignore me. Until he had to acknowledge what was happening between us.

The next morning, I woke with a sense of determination. I had a plan, and I was going to see it through, no matter what. When I made my way downstairs, Bear was already in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. The smell of sizzling bacon and fresh pancakes filled the air, and my stomach rumbled in anticipation.

Bear glanced at me briefly, his face as blank as ever. I could tell he sensed something was different, but he didn’t say anything. He just placed a plate in front of me, piled high with food—eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and pancakes dripping with syrup. It was a feast in itself, more than I would normally eat in a day back home, but this was just the beginning.

I dug in, eating with more enthusiasm than I had in weeks. The food was as delicious as always, each bite rich and satisfying. I ate quickly, shoveling food into my mouth as fast as I could, determined to finish everything on my plate. My stomach started to fill up, the familiar tightness building in my midsection, but I didn’t slow down. I kept going, piling more food onto my fork, swallowing each bite with determination.

Bear didn’t say a word as I ate, but I could feel his eyes on me, watching. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed, concerned, or something else entirely, but it didn’t matter. I had committed to this, and I was going to see it through.

When I finally finished, my stomach was already distended, pressing against the waistband of my pants. But I wasn’t done. I pushed my plate forward, giving Bear a determined look.

“More,” I said, my voice firm despite the fullness in my belly.

Bear raised an eyebrow but complied without a word. He piled more food onto my plate, another helping of everything, and I started again. This time, each bite was harder to take, the food sitting heavily in my gut, but I didn’t let that stop me. I could feel my belly swelling, the fabric of my shirt stretching tight, but I kept eating, determined to show Bear just how much I could take.

When breakfast was finally over, I was stuffed beyond belief. My belly was round and bloated, pushing out so far that it felt like I could burst, but I also felt a strange sense of pride. I had done it. I had eaten more than I ever thought possible, and I wasn’t finished yet.

I spent the rest of the morning resting on the couch, letting my stomach settle, knowing that lunch would be just as big a challenge. Bear kept his distance, but I could feel his eyes on me every so often, as if he was checking to see how I was doing.

Lunch came all too quickly. This time, Bear served up a spread of sandwiches, thick slices of bread stuffed with meat, cheese, and vegetables, along with a side of crispy fries. My stomach was still heavy from breakfast, but I didn’t let that deter me. I attacked the food with the same determination, forcing myself to eat every last bite, despite the growing discomfort.

With each bite, my stomach expanded further, the tightness in my belly increasing until it was almost unbearable. I could feel my shirt riding up, exposing the swollen curve of my gut, but I didn’t care. All I could think about was eating more, showing Bear just how much I could take.

By the time dinner rolled around, I was in a daze. My stomach was so full and heavy that I could barely move, but I knew this was my last chance. Bear had outdone himself for dinner—roast boar, roasted potatoes and vegetables gravy, rolls, pies and a huge chocolate and custard brioche for dessert. The table was groaning under the weight of the food, and I knew I had to finish it all.

I ate slowly this time, savoring each bite, even as my stomach protested. I could feel every inch of my belly stretching, the skin taut and aching, but I kept going. Bear sat across from me, silent as always, but I could feel his eyes on me, watching my every move.

Finally, after what felt like hours, I finished the last bite of cake. I leaned back in my chair, my belly so full and distended that I could hardly breathe. My shirt had ridden up completely, leaving my swollen belly exposed, round and taut like a drum. I could feel the weight of it pressing down on my thighs, the skin stretched so tight that it felt like I might split open.

Bear stood up slowly, his gaze fixed on my bloated stomach. He walked around the table and stood in front of me, his expression unreadable. My heart was pounding in my chest, a mix of fear and anticipation, but I didn’t say anything. I just looked up at him, waiting.

Then, without a word, Bear reached down and placed a hand on my belly. His touch was firm but gentle, his fingers pressing into the firm, swollen flesh. I sucked in a breath, the sensation of his hand on my overstuffed stomach sending a shiver through me.

Bear didn’t speak, didn’t ask if I was okay. He simply took a piece of leftover bread, slathered with butter, and brought it to my lips. Without thinking, I opened my mouth, letting him feed me, my body responding to his command. He pushed the bread into my mouth, his fingers brushing against my lips as he did, and I chewed slowly, feeling the food settle heavily on top of everything else.

But Bear wasn’t done. He kept feeding me all the leftovers he could get his hands on, piece after piece, each one pushing me further beyond my limits. My belly was so full that I could feel it pressing against the table, the skin stretched so tight that it ached with every breath. But I kept eating, swallowing every bite he offered, my body trembling with the effort.

is eyes never left mine as he continued to feed me, each spoonful a slow, deliberate act. My belly, swollen and heavy, lay like a massive weight on my torso. I could feel every inch of it, tight and firm, my skin stretched to its limit. I shifted slightly, trying to ease the pressure, but it only made me more aware of just how full I was. Yet, despite the discomfort, or maybe because of it, I found myself craving more.

Finally, when I thought I couldn’t take another bite, Bear set the spoon down. His hand moved to my belly, resting on the roundness of it, his fingers splayed across the taut skin. I inhaled sharply at the touch, feeling the warmth of his hand against the coolness of my overstretched stomach. He didn’t say anything, just traced his fingers over the curve of my belly, as if admiring his work. The sensation sent a shiver through me, a mix of pleasure and something deeper, more primal.

Without a word, he helped me to my feet, guiding me outside into the crisp night air. The sky was clear, the stars bright and endless above us. I felt the cold against my skin, a sharp contrast to the heat that radiated from my overstuffed belly. We lay down on the soft blankets he had spread out, my belly rising like a small hill between us. I could hardly move, every breath a reminder of how full I was, but I didn’t care. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

Bear settled beside me, his arm draped over my swollen stomach, his touch reassuring and solid. The night was quiet, the only sound the faint crackle of the fire inside the cabin and the slow, steady rhythm of our breathing. As we lay there under the stars, the night stretched out before us, endless and full of possibilities.

I thought back to how I had ended up here—how the search for something more had led me to this remote mountain, to this man, and ultimately, to myself. I had sought out the wilderness to challenge myself, to find meaning in my achievements and push my boundaries. But in the end, it wasn’t the extreme sports or the spiritual retreats that had given me what I was looking for. It was this—lying under the stars, my belly stuffed to the max, feeling the warmth of Bear’s body beside me.

I had found something here, something I hadn’t known I was searching for. Not just in Bear, but in the quiet, unspoken connection we shared, in the way he had cared for me, fed me, pushed me to my limits in a way I hadn’t expected. I had found a peace I didn’t know I needed, a contentment that came from letting go of control and simply being.

As the stars twinkled above us, I let out a slow, satisfied breath, feeling the weight of my belly press down against me, grounding me. I had come to the mountains looking for something, and I had found it, even if it wasn’t in the way I had imagined. And as sleep began to take hold, I realized that I wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything.

[amazinglyashy]

the emotional seeing parents and kids post... very beautifully written. I hope all of us from broken and toxic families can experience what you wrote one day 🩷

I have a distinct core memory of standing in my bf's dad's kitchen with his mom after him and his dad had just gotten back from a 2 week Japan vacation, and his mom had helped me out with an art event I was selling at. It felt more like a family, scrolling through their photos and eating Japanese candy his dad had bought me than my own ever had. My mom has never once been to one of my events even just to see me to this day, after ive been at it for nearly 2 years and selling even closeby to where she lives before i moved out. And I ran for my life away from my dad with the rest of my family when I was 21, after he had isolated us my entire life to the point we couldn't go to school or outside without him chaperoning us. I wasn't even allowed friends.

I try my best to write from my heart, what I need or what I needed during a situation. And if I don't have the experience, I try to relate something to it while doing research.

I think it's also important to note just how many notes some of my more intense posts get-- none of us are alone. We've all been there, to varying degrees. Sure, most people probably can't relate to being Rapunzel in a house for 21 years, but they do understand why I get anxiety whenever a parent or authority figure talks to me or texts me. And if anyone ever wants to talk, I hope they know both my dms and ask box are open. I'm not a therapist, nor am I solely a vent corner. But I am a friend.

We got this.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 21 - A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

I honestly entirely forget who recommended this to me, but I owe them a thank you. Absolutely not something I would have ever picked up on my own, but a really enjoyable read. My exposure to Novik’s work is extremely limited, which is to say I’ve read Spinning Silver, but I’ve been vaguely meaning to give more of her stuff a try for a while. Didn’t enjoy this as much as that on a few levels, but that’s just the YA/adult genre jump as much as anything, probably.

It is very much a YA book, more than anything I’ve read this year (even more than Iron Widow, probably). From the entire plot being about making friends in high school being a literal life or death struggle to El “most powerful mage ever but only for evil things she tries to avoid so only a half dozen people ever realize how special she is’ Higgins to the booklength awkward teenage ‘literally unclear whether we are dating or not’ romance. So! Broadening my genre horizons some, I suppose.

El’s internal monologue was a bit of a trial for the first half of the book or so, I’ll admit. Not to say that it didn’t ring true to life, but she was just so incredibly fifteen, you know? Generally became significantly more tolerable once she started actually acting and coming out of her shell instead of devoting herself entirely to angsting about how much everyone hated her and trying to convince herself that she was a machievellian villain in waiting.

Though, to pick a nit that probably annoyed absolutely no one but me – I’m willing to accept El’s magical savant-ness as the price of admission, but the whole gradual reveal with her mom actually being world famous felt...odd? Cheap? Like in the beginning she’s very firmly characterized as this kind of head-in-the-clouds well meaning but not particularly perceptive or effectual hippie type, and then it’s gradually revealed that she’s actually the best healer in the UK and has set the global standard for a lot of spells and-. And it’s not like the reveal was actually doing anything dramatically, except making early book El’s isolation and lack of friends even more self-imposed, which was hardly necessary at that point. (Honestly ‘supporting cast go from being nobodies to retroactively being world-famous in their fields’ is the sort of decay I tend to associate with long running serial fiction. Weird to see it happen over the course of one book.) But that’s really just a minor pet peeve.

Orion was a great character, or at least a well-done example of an archetype I adore. ‘Selfless, heroic and dedicated to the point of it being kind of offputting/creepy Chosen One type who is (and I can’t emphasize this enough) not the protagonist. Partially because ‘there’s a much more conventionally heroic adventure story happening 5 degrees to the left’ just makes most stories a little bit more amusing, but also because someone really earnestly believing ‘my entire life is a means to a higher end, a fine tool set to a magnificent or at least a necessary purpose’ reliably drives me absolutely insane about them. That said the only reason I’m not absolutely certain he turns out to be either secretly evil or destined-to-be-the-antichrist is because the end of book cliffhanger makes that almost too obvious and on-the-nose.

Taking a bit of a step back, it’s interesting that the book didn’t really have any individual villain? Like, some other students are antagonists at times, sure, and there are plenty of horrible gribbly monsters (I adored basically all the horrible gribbly monsters), but none that really last as antagonists? Either defused or convinced to step aside/help or brutally murdered with magic. The entire finale was basically extreme high stakes facility maintenance. So yeah, interesting, not my usual expectation of YA.

I mean more broadly the actual villain is of course the entire fucked up system, both social and metaphysical, underlying the school. The role of a brutally competitive education system as recruitment method allowing particularly competent or promising immigrants and members of the lower classes to join a ‘meritocratic’ elite while also filtering out the most troublesome or incompetent children of that elite and using their failure to legitimize the easy inheritance of all the others is, perhaps, a slightly on the nose analogy. But, again, kind of the price of admission.

[pottedplant53]

I had a thought I can't decide whether I like or not

(Mild chapter 7 spoilers)

At the end of the Diasomnia arc, Silver leaves his position as Malleus’s bodyguard. He doesn’t leave the school with Lilia, and there’s no bad blood whatsoever between him and Malleus, but he actively makes the choice to leave the only life he’s ever known. This chapter is about how change and partings are inevitable, and I feel like this would be an incredibly hopeful ending for Silver’s story.

It’s been shown to us plenty of times how content he is with his current life, how badly he wants to stay by Lilia’s side and how deeply he wants to continue serving Malleus, but half of that is about to go away whether he likes it or not. In writing, a common practice is finding the one thing that your character would rather die than do, then making them do it - for better or for worse, this will force them to develop. They probably won’t, but I think it would be really interesting if they did this for Silver. He’s absolutely terrified at the thought of anything changing, but in order for him to grow as a person, he absolutely HAS to go his own way. It’s possible that chapter 7 will end with him realising that, and making the most difficult decision of his life by distancing himself from the Diasomnia family. I love their dynamic, but for Silver’s growth it may be a necessary sacrifice.

As much as it pains me to say it since he’s my favourite, Silver is…kind of boring. His entire character is based around Lilia and Malleus, and almost everything interesting about him relates back to them in some way. All of his goals, aspirations, likes and dislikes, all link back to the Diasomnia gang. He’s been in training to be a royal guard since before he was old enough to choose, and was raised in an isolated cottage with only three regular companions – his entire life has been undeniably laid out for him, even if he’s quite happy to walk with the path that Lilia set him on.

It’s no wonder that he’s more attached to his family than most people, but like every other person in the world, he deserves to be more than just that. While the Diasomnia family is extremely closely-nit and have all shaped eachother’s personalities to some degree (Lilia raising Malleus and Silver, Malleus being an object of worship for Sebek, etc), none of them are quite as dependent on the group as Silver is. Take Malleus away and Lilia is still Lilia. Take Lilia away and Sebek is still Sebek. The exception to this might be Sebek without Malleus, but even if Malleus was removed from the equation Sebek still has a plethora of other character traits and struggles, such as his self-worth issues around being half human.

Silver’s character, on the other hand, cannot function without the rest of them. Take the group away and all of Silver’s aspirations, struggles, everything – it just crumbles. The reason he does everything is for them, never for him, and he doesn’t have enough independent personality traits to balance this out. The only things he has going for him aside from his strong relationships with the Diasquad are his sleepiness and difficulty displaying emotions, and as chapter 7 goes on we’ll probably find out that those are somehow related to Lilia as well.

As sad as it would be, I honestly think it would be great for Silver’s character to make the decision to focus on himself.

But yeah like I said this probably won’t happen, but I just think it would be sort of cool if it did? It would be unexpected, at least.

[mekanikaltrifle]

collision and see-no-evil for snakebite, seedling and mousetrap for the lt!

hee hoo you're going right for the fucked up weirdos today I see? lovely. :D

I'll need to keep one of the Guerrero ones fairly vague for in-game lore reasons but. I'll give you something to read anyway! But my players (I know you're looking): no reading into this. None.

💥 COLLISON - what emotions do they have trouble dealing with?

Snakebite will recoil as if you've stung them to a few things: sincerity, expressing gratitude in more than a few sentences, or trying to 'reward' them for something. Oh and familial affection. They don't kill monsters for anyone but theirself, and they do that entirely for fun. If you're saved in the process, and you wanna say thanks, they'll accept a thumbs-up but draw that shit out and they're going to mock the shit out of you or theatrically gag or something, really drive home how much they hate that shit. You wanna ass-pat some hunter hero, go talk to their old coworker in the 'hunter cops' as they call her. (Sorry Epa, you're not a cop but Snakebite is a dick)

🙈 SEE-NO-EVIL - whats a side of your oc that they don't want to show other people?

This is not something that they'll ever say and if you accuse them of it they're likely to kick you as hard as they can for even suggesting it, but...

Snakebite needs people. They act aloof and like everyone's either someone to be mocked, or something to be used for gain, but they abhor isolation even if it's bad for them to be in certain company.

Worst bit is, nobody really knows who they were before all this or why, so nobody can pinpoint why they're this needy and hiding it, or when it started. But being alone too long would do them more damage than any rude comment, or any vampire's claws. Maybe they'd go nuts too fast, if they were too surely alone. Or maybe they've done something they need to stay distracted from. Something people wouldn't forgive even a violent, hedonistic serial monster-murderer for.

And nobody knows, to ask. 'Snakebite' is so new to the world, there's nobody to ask.

🌱 SEEDLING - what is their most vivid memory from childhood?

Andrea's most vivid memory from childhood... she won't tell you that one, but she can tell you another childhood memory.

A grey sky the colour of a sidewalk she'd in future smash into head-on sitting under trees. Someone was calling for her. She'd heard a lot of screaming in the years since, but this was... lighter. Less scared. Not worried at all. Her blue sneakers' toe had scuffed out, and she blinked at the feeling of dirt on her bare skin. Weird sensation. Much later she'd run headlong through miles of dirt barely clothed, hurried and hunted like a goddamn pig, with the howling things behind her but here in this time before it all she'd spent a chunk of time watching a worm burrow into the earth.

She'd not know there were beasts that could become one with the soil until far later, things whose forms could claw out of the dirt at a moment's notice and shred skin as if it were paper. She'd cry out like a child then. It'd been a hard night, and she wasn't feeling herself.

Mom found her though, unharmed and scruffy, with a fistful of pine needles and a wriggling bug in her mitt. She told Andrea, half caring, half disgusted, that bugs could give you germs! gotta wash your hands!

And she was wheeled off out of the gentle wooded cluster, into a stroller, cause she was still small then, and unaware of how life would come to be. What the Messengers' call felt like in her skull.

🪤 MOUSE TRAP - what will always lure them into certain danger? a loved one in danger? a promise of something they are always searching for?

The nature of her work has led her to forget to a degree, what not being in danger feels like, real or imagined.

And yet, the mere sight of monsters pulls her inexorably into the fight, and she can't stop herself. The thing that pulls her into danger isn't something so rich as love, or insidious as knowledge. It's rage, pure and scalding, and utterly corrosive.

[shmreduplication]

there are many things i dislike about main universe Peter Parker as a character but tbh I just cannot stand how he's treated by the writers to the point that it's just not worth it to invest the time or energy or emotions into him because he's always going to be a sadsack. So tldr: the concept of canon events that are exclusively tragedies is just like the worst choice atsv could've made if they were trying to make the movie specifically for me

example one: there's an Avengers team that has Iron Fist, Power Man, Jessica Jones, Spidey, I think Wolverine is there and Daredevil is in for a few issues too. Luke Cage is the leader and he's trying to run the team in a new way and part of that is everyone is getting paychecks....Except Spidey because no one on the team knows his name and he can't open a bank account as "Spider-Man" and it's a funny enough in isolation to spend the few panels and word bubbles on it, but it also sucks that the character with the most financial difficulties can't get a payout when everyone else is. Iron Fist is a literal billionaire and he gets a paycheck but Spidey doesn't

Example two, and this is where I really tuned out of reading any Peter Parker stories: Scarlett Witch constructs the M-day universe where everyone is happy. Not everyone gets everything they want, but by and large people have gotten the things that they (or Scarlett Witch) think that they want. Daredevil wants to be with a woman who won't die and She-Hulk wants to be with a man who can keep up with her superheroing and lawyering, so they're married in this universe. Steve Rogers is old, Peter Parker is married to Gwen, and Scarlett Witch has twin babies with her robot husband. Things start happening, idk, somehow one hero figures it out and starts telling other heroes and they decide they need to shut down this constructed universe before it collapses in on itself and kills everyone. Or something, I don't remember. I read this in 2014 during the summer I had the worst insomnia I've ever had. They tell Peter that this reality isn't real and they have to destroy it, and then they tell him that everyone except for this group of superheroes is going to forget about this universe. And then they proceed to not really need Peter's help for the ensuing fights. They curse him with this knowledge, forever, for no reason beyond cursing him with this knowledge.

So yeah I know superhero comics are a soap opera and everything will return back to its norm eventually so in that sense nothing matters, but there's still varying degrees of things not mattering.

Like by baby boy, Daredevil, has been in jail and been the mayor and been possessed by a demon and moved to california and had his secret identity released and then put it back in the box and been a mentor and a ninja and gotten divorced and faked being his own twin brother and now he's back to lawyering in Hell's Kitchen so in one sense none of that mattered but there are threads of all of those things woven into the current run!

so to have all the spidermens' suffering be pre-destined canon events cements that suffering as not mattering in my mind. And Miguel and the rest of the spideys feel the same way, Jeff's life does not matter to them beyond being a point of suffering for a spiderman so it is just v hard for me to give a shit like it is just not worth the investment of my time and energy

[ialwaysknewyouwerepunk]

I was reading an article about most people not realizing that they are suffering from Covid PTSD to some degree. It said a lot of people are feeling unsettled with a mild sense of dread and don’t know why. Like they are “waiting for the other shoe to drop”.

Could be part of what you are feeling, without realizing it?

PTSD, cont’d ...Of course, I can’t find the article now, but here is a twitter thread that talks about it a bit.

i do think about this sometimes tbh. i feel a huge disconnect with my life from before 2019 bc it seemed like i was always running towards something back then, when the pandemic hit i came to a screeching halt and ever since it's been this stumble ig? a very meandering stroll? bc the idea of a "bright future" or whatever has been lost lol. i don't mind it, i like living each day and enjoying it without feeling like i have to sprint to make my future worthwhile like i did at uni, but it does all feel so... emptypointlessweirdbutnotinabadway? like. i like the fact that life is pointless instead of thinking i need to Be Someone and Make An Impact (still very much thinking the point of life is love and community so not pointless at all but you get what i mean). and ig i'm still getting used to living like that? maybe a lot of us are? that we're okay with this new idea about life, even tho we struggle to adjust to it and actually live it like it's real? and part of that is this all real feeling is def this remaining feeling from covid where it was such a fucking shock and almost none of us dealt with that properly? the isolation, the grief, the shifting worldviews. so yeah that might have a lot to do with it too, thanks for the insight :')

[resmarted]

don't say it. don't muddle my mind with your logic and crush me under the weight of what is probable or actual or real. have i not suffered enough? let me lucid dream my way through this tiny little life of mine and swim through the chaos with a seamless ease. i am still hopeful despite my world constantly being painted black, the curtains closing around like a tomb adorned with graffiti tags by reckless children, salt in the wound and pepper in the cut. and i know what you're thinking, i know i do that thing where i fall head over heels infatuated by the idea of someone, leaping without looking and freefalling into a dreamscape of my own making, but this time! this time i swear! i swear i will never move on again. i feel startled in my own body and enveloped by my obsession, my skin red hot and my heart skipping in such a restless way that feels like i am going to start screaming at any moment. i know i know i KNOW, what is WRONG with me. in my defense, i don't know that it's always as unrequited as much as it is so rare someone matches my own intensity and boundless ways of bulldozing into someone's life, hatching eggs in their brain and weeping at their door for mercy. but it truly is getting concerning at this point that i can't seem to move forward from here, and not even in that sort of, you know, that whole my life is so out of control that i need to escape into something warm and safe kind of way. i mean maybe there's a little bit of that, but not anywhere near the degree where i once was. this is more like, how will i ever see anyone again now that i have seen you? how am i supposed to sort of just wade through empty conversations with a deadened stare for the rest of my life now, what is the point of anything anymore? yes, very dramatic indeed.

what a strange turn of events this summer has been. the last twelve months alone have felt like a thousand years and i can't seem to make sense of any of it. the room is spinning and i feel drunk in a gaze that holds me captive long after the break in contact. i was so sure i would be happy on my own forever, that i would be young and free and wild until the end of my days, and i would never answer to or belong to anyone. no one has ever impressed me enough, and when they do they are safely at a distance that i can't reach, so there's often the comfort of anonymity behind the fourth wall. i once thought if i was with someone as isolated as i am it would somehow make me feel less lonely, but it wasn't a cure as much as a way to further alienate me, something that has taken years to undo. so rarely is there someone unafraid of the attention i receive or strong enough in themselves to not feel threatened by any degree of impact or influence i may carry. it is hard to differentiate someone's desire to control and manipulate you with seemingly normal reactions born out of genuine love. it took so long to realize a person's instinct to be jealous and possessive is more about their own desire for that same attention than anything else. and i do think it can be a normal reaction to an extent, one i would never provoke intentionally, but it can take a dark turn quickly and suddenly the person you thought was protective over you becomes someone you need protection from.

i have been made of stone for so long. my soul has been buried in bricks and my heart a dead weight under stormy clouds. it's so rare to see the sunshine, to feel the warmth of a real beacon of light and not just fluorescent imitation. you know the kind, too easy and real impressed with themselves, a glow disguising ill intent and vicious toward the open hearted. i have been attacked by so many fake smiles and artificial light i'd rather hunker down in my coffin until the weather changes again. we take the good with the bad and the rotten and the evil until it seems like there's none left, certainly not enough to thrive in this darkness. i wait on the back burner for people to decipher the lies they have been fed about me, to awaken to the reality or at least figure out the bare minimum of truth, and it feels like it will never fully emerge. and then you see someone good, like really truly good, with a light so pure and a mind so clean that it feels like the rest of it isn't even there. i can't see anything but this single flame bright enough to power a city full of skyscrapers.

and then you return to a pitch black vortex of greed. you are back to dodging emotional gluttony and toxic pleasantries on a nonstop basis but this time you can really see it, faced with it in a way so confrontational now more than ever because all you can think of is this person with the effervescent shine. now my days are filled with wondering what you're doing and what are you thinking and where are you going and what will you do later, i wanna know all of it all the time. tell me everything. tell me what it's like to lock me into your smile and how heavy the weight of being so deeply adored must feel on your shoulders. paint a picture of what it's like to be surrounded all the time by people so desperate for your approval, so sickeningly competitive for you to notice them, to feel seen by the unflinching gaze of someone so unapproachable and magnetic. the way they worship and fear you must be a passing breeze, i wonder if even makes a sound anymore. it's always been the opposite for me, everyone is easy to impress when they all underestimate you. people don't hold their breath when i walk into a room and it would probably nauseate me if they did. i don't command attention as much as i trip and fall into it, clumsy and clunky and never exactly sure what i'm doing there. you walk with purpose and i feel so much less sure of myself on most days, like i have to convince myself into a sense of confidence out of survival. i don't know that i'll ever feel whole, like there will always be a piece of me missing that i can never find no matter how many ways i find to fill it. i don't want to put that responsibility on anyone and have sort or just resigned to this idea that i will always be a little empty to some extent. and it's whatever, like i made peace with it long ago, i don't ever see it going away completely. but so strangely, so terribly eerie in its unavoidable contentment, i am awakened to the idea that there are parts of me i never thought would come alive again now tingling like a limb returning from a numb state. if i didn't know better, and technically i don't, i'd say you're rude for startling me out of such a dense slumber.

i wish people i am supposed to care about were able to do this, instead of these wishy washy conditional modes of affection where i am at the center of some endless game of does she deserve it? in which people decide on a day to day basis whether or not love should be available to me and if i am starved for it then it must be my fault and should i be so lucky to receive it i ought to be grateful and nothing but ferociously in debt to such emotionally generous aristocrats. i keep people at arm's length because if you saw what they did once they get close enough, even you would have a hard time trying to stomach it. no one feels remorse until they sense a rise in popularity coming and they don't want the shame of being discovered as less than pious. people seem to prefer me in the dog days and there's a discomfort in any sense of shine above their own. it's depressing. i've seen people reveal themselves time and time again to the point where old friends are a distant memory and new ones are locked behind several firewalls. i stay up at night wondering if i will die alone and untrusting, constantly fearful of everyone around me despite remaining safe behind steel barriers i built from the ground up. i get perplexed by these obsessive thoughts and ultimately ghost everyone because it's safer to be alone, at least i am used to all the ways i hurt myself and don't need to anticipate anyone else doing it for me. i think about what it would be like to know you the way your mother knows you, to learn each piece of your sweet mind, and there's this soothing quality to spacing out to these ideas of you. i wish i had better coping mechanisms, that i could be softer in the moment and not just in these fantastical versions of who i want to be after i've had time to process it. i want to be carried out of my own exhaustion like a burning building and to let everything that has ever hurt me turn to ash in a far off distance. i am so tired from being so deeply alone in this life and too scared to let anyone in close enough. we take turns freefalling into the unknown and i bounce off you like a safety net i didn't know i needed. i am the bravest i have felt in so long now like a soldier in a fever dream.

[triplecrocodilian]

as someone who was bullied in school, let me tell you the most evil shit that ever happened to me

i pretty famously did NOT have a lot of friends throughout school- obviously that's one of the things about getting bullied- and whatever friendships i did have didn't tend to last through us getting separated through having different classes or over the various breaks

i made good friends with someone in middle school, and we were literally connected at the hip. neither of us were popular, i was actively bullied, and both of us felt the pressures of everybody else's expectations due to various degrees of teen expectations and drama

we're going about our school year when suddenly one day, my friend (now considered my best friend) refuses to speak to me. won't look me in the eye, silent treatment, refuses to even acknowledge me in classes we share. having been a bullied kid with a history of losing friends, i took this with equal measures of defeat and despair. we had a connection!! we were besties!! i thought everything was okay!!!

about a month passes. winter break happens. my friend still won't speak to me. i give up on ever getting her back, but i don't lose fondness for people because at that point in my life, i'm way too sad and lonesome to actually become angry when i'm treated badly.

new class schedules come out, and we're in one of the same classes. i pick a spot next to her because, as i said, neither of us are popular and so she's got an empty spot nearby when everywhere else is taken. in any case we get down to it and get through the class together

break period comes around, and she comes up to me crying. she explains that she saw the binder i used for classwork- inside, in a little clear pocket, i kept a photo of the two of us together because despite how our friendship seemingly ended, i still enjoyed what time we had together and regarded her fondly

she says that people in our grade- famously shitty people to me but not her- told her that i was going around behind her back and spreading lies and shit-talking her. that i was laughing about her behind her back and the only reason i hung around was to get more dirt on her to laugh about. she says seeing the photo i kept of us together made her realize that none of that was true, that i really was her friend, and that she'd been giving me the cold shoulder this whole time based on nothing

we made up, of course- again, i held literally no ill will and i was elated to have her back again, but this is something i've never seen really represented in movies or television or most books

was this physically harmful? no. was it somebody shoving me into a locker? no, i was never really physically bothered in school

but this is what i mean by "the most evil thing" that bullies ever did to me. it took a day for my only social link to crumble into nothing, and over a month to make that connection again. my bullies in school were so offended to see two unpopular people happy in each others' company, they thought it was appropriate to destroy the only friendship EITHER of us had

the group of nerds hanging out together at lunch, chilling at the "losers' table"? a lot of school bullies won't stand for that. they will do whatever they can to make sure every one of those people is as isolated and miserable as possible because it's not a case of "they're not like me, so they don't deserve kindness", it's "they're not like me, so they don't deserve ANYTHING"

even now i wonder how many of my previous friendships ended because of these exact machinations, and it took a LONG time to get over the idea that i had nothing to offer, so i didn't deserve companionship

but yeah, bullying is all like. wedgies and spoiled milk.

no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life

[bigskydreaming]

I’m of the opinion that trying to rank the Batfam by intelligence is dumb as hell because they’re all conceptually the smartest person in the room whenever the plot demands it and put any single one of them in any other group of people and canon defaults to treating them as the smartest one there even when other heroes present have multiple PhDs, so like....source for:

“Tim is obviously the smartest except for Barbara and also Bruce but also Jason is smarter than Dick because he likes to read and let’s all collectively presume that Cass is so obviously the least smart of all of them she never even ranks when talking about the Batfam’s intellects even though this is a girl who became fully socialized within like two years after previously having spent the first fifteen years of her life in varying forms of complete isolation with her education deliberately stunted until she began thriving at literally the FIRST opportunity she got to actually be afforded resources for expanding her mind”.....

So yeah, my official stance is and always will be every single member of the Batfam is a LITERAL genius and when you’re talking intellects of that level its pointless trying to rank them, like, they’re all smart as fuck, who needs them numbered past that point?

So I have no interest in trying to present any of them, whether Dick or anyone else, as SMARTER than the rest, but I do still have plenty of gripes about how often he’s marked for comparison and singled out to be specified as not AS smart as Tim or the others.....when literally the only thing that people ever actually point to - other than Dick’s own self-image and self-assessments - as for why Tim’s obviously so much smarter than Dick is like....Tim figured out Batman and Robin’s identities based on the fact that he saw Robin do a move that he’d previously been situationally aware of Dick Grayson doing. That’s it. That’s like.....the essence of plot convenience. Even WITH Tim’s obvious intelligence, if not for Tim having happened to be at the circus to see Dick Grayson perform that flip....he never would have been able to connect those dots, not because he’s not smart enough to, but because he simply literally wouldn’t have had one of the dots needing connection!

And also like, there’s also the fact that in plenty of Dick’s origin stories Dick is the one who figures out Bruce is Batman himself, Bruce doesn’t actually tell him....so.....why does that never come up as proof of Dick’s intelligence, y’know? Fair is fair, right?

But anyway, Dick Grayson speaks tons of languages, has hacked freaking alien spaceships, has also been called Detective by Ra’s al Ghul’s manipulative ass for whatever that’s worth but just as significantly if not more imo, is regularly shown BEING a great detective, in his solo titles, in Titans, on the Outsiders, as Batman....he picks up new skills like trying out a new hobby and had the equivalent of multiple college degrees while he was still Robin in terms of applicable know-how and understanding of science, criminology, history, politics and multiple other fields of interest. 

He’s tech savvy, creates most of his own gear and even machinery, and this really can’t be underscored enough but seems waaaaay too often glossed over - he’s considered one of the preeminent tacticians in the entire DC universe, that’s like....not a small thing. That IS intelligence! That’s like the very essence of it, not just knowing things, but applying things, figuring out the most optimal ways to piece disparate bits of knowledge and information together in actionable ways to achieve desired end results. Stop sleeping on Dick’s tactical brilliance, guys!

And again, NONE of this is intended to try and elevate him PAST any of the other Bat characters, as you’ll notice nowhere am I making any claims that he alone can be described in these ways.....I’m not saying these things are limited or unique to just him, I’m just saying....they very much describe him. So.....stop acting like they don’t, y’know? Don’t be a Tom Taylor! Be better than Tommy T! I believe in you guys!

Just.....I don’t think many people realize that they’re not actually saying what they think they’re saying when they stress how much smarter Tim is than Dick, for example, because like.....that’s not a proven quantity, and so it just comes across as like, needing to erase large aspects of Dick’s character just to prop up a personal fave and that’s the sort of thing that births the sort of negativity a lot of people remark on. 

(And it also carries a loooooot of not great implications if you factor in things like their respective origins, marginalizations, classism, etc - like, I can not stress how eyebrow-raising it is in the WORST possible ways that like, people make SUCH a big deal about Dick dropping out of college, when nobody ever seems to want to comment on the fact that like....Tim dropped out of high school. If its so obvious that the latter has nothing to do with Tim’s intelligence whatsoever - and it doesn’t, for the record - then you really should take a little more care with how you raise the subject and context of Dick’s dislike for specific educational structures and not weave in implications that this has anything to whatsoever with his actual intelligence or aptitude in skill acquisition - I’m just saying).

[alberivh]

devotion (ROYAL AU) — pt.1 : realization.

Butler! Diluc X GN!Reader . Royal! childe (as supporting character), butler! Kaeya (supporting cast ; in pt2 story line)

contains : heavy angst, comfort/hurt, isolation, arranged marriage, major character death, mentions of blood, injuries, execution, abusive relationship, abandonment, ‘consumption’, false accusation, blades

summaries : arranged marriage has always been one of your family ruthless tradition. You were allowed to love them you couldn’t reach, yet the feeling of being abandoned once and for all by those who you truly treasured was more than numbness could ever describe. Diluc who’s your lover need to accept this tradition, yet he, himself need to get his life down for your future sake.

A/N : thank you for 100 followers!! It has been a wild ride since i’ve just joined this community. Thank you very much and as a rewards, here’s a token of heavy angst for y’all. I have a really bad writing block right now, so this might took more than you think hehe. So once again, thank you very much! ( i actually hate this, tyvm)

“Your majesty…please allow me to hold y—“

“No. I simply do not have time for people pleaser, please let yourself be out from here..” , you cursed your future-husband out of from your bounties. It startled all of the maids and butlers in your room, it even make your somewhat-fiancé looked awful. You were pissed by him, by the structure of his eyelids, the heavy breathe from who-knows-where and many more part of him you don’t even want to recognize.

There’s no reason to deny that you hate this, all of this, Known as the maiden of the family, you were nothing but their only pry. It pissed you, it really does. How come you are holding the throne at the age of 25? Aren’t you supposed to check your garden instead taking all of your well-behave throne and the awful arranged marriage your family has made? No? What an unlucky person you are, the butlers thought.

“Diluc please guide master tartaglia to the upfront door, i have no intention to see him now. If you already had brought him downstairs, get back to my resident immediately.”

“this is the main reason why everyone despis—“

“Please leave Immediately. My master have no further interest to speak with you, master tartaglia.” Diluc shouted your internal response to the group of scums in front of your sight. He heard enough of this small talk your future-husband has been talking about. Diluc wasn’t jealous, he was simply too disturbed with your disgusted face everytime tartaglia walks around your residence. just how much pressured you had been under to make you act so ruthless in front of the man you’ll called husband in no time?

he silently observing him down the hall. Not wanting to have a talk with a scum like him, he avoid any sights of his ‘particular’ interest. After all, in his eyes, tartaglia doesn’t deserve any part of you. He acts too normally, there diluc suspicion of your fiancé grown. There must be something behind his motive. Tartaglia have recognize diluc’s gaze for a while now. Though, he pretend none of those bothering suspicion triggered his rage. And so, he fired him up with a quick straightforward awareness. Or as the citizen say, A threat.

“mr. Butler..stop loving my future partner or tomorrow you’ll have the consequences..got it? And do not touch them..i’ve warned you when you were alive, i like my future partner to be a virgin ins—“

“master tartaglia i have no relationship with the majesty, how come you assume such a thing from a humble butler like me? I was just simply following orders, hope you could understand, master tartaglia.” , answering his rage. Tartaglia found his emotion drains wild. It look like those bothering emotions he hide finally show diluc their true intention to spoiled you. Diluc’s eyes met your fiancé terrifying visions, the murderous aura in it explains his true intention. Diluc could only plea inside, let my majesty be safe.

“don’t you dare say anything to your master, mr butler. My partner has been mine all along, stay away from our relationship or tomorrow would be your last day…”

“Though, i simply wouldn’t mind, ajax.” , he gurantees tartaglia’s eyes.

The night came. the breeze flew through your open windows, leaving chills through your spine. it was an unsurprisingly beautiful night, you quoted. Diluc was preparing your bed, as you humm through the southed area of your room. The melodical sound of your humming have always soothes his grudge from afar. It was always been his favorite sound.

“ your majesty, the bed has been done. You may rest peacefully now..so please excuse m—“

“Diluc…stop making it seems like i’m the only one who loved you..just stay here, i missed you a lot..” , in a sudden your arm was attached to his body, his dirty and ordinary body. You embraced him so tightly, as if diluc were going to some place you wouldn’t want him to cross. You were scared of losing him. You don’t want any of this marriage, you don’t want tartaglia to even acknowledge your presence. You just want diluc to stay by your side, even if you both have considered how selfish it is.

You clunge onto his chest, pressing gentle kiss on his cheeks. Not wanting him to leave nor to leave you behind. So desperate of you to feel this way.

“you’ve been doing great darling,i’m proud of you..”

“please stay like this for a while, i love you. So please, don’t go..don’t go..” , diluc watch your flattering smile turns into a small-sobs, it cracks him, he doesn’t want to let you go either. He was simply following your fiancé awareness, he doesn’t want anyone to harm you, even if it meant for you to see him in agony. Diluc Carries your figure into your bed in return, not wanting to bare any of his emotions. Feelings are fragile and so do he. giving soft and gentle kisses to your forehead as he wiped your tears, whispering a ‘goodnight’ before he left you again. If he was being honest, he wants to be more selfish, he wants to be with you, forever.

“hmm..i’ll be waiting for you, goodnight my beloved..”

“What’s with the inconvenience…?” The loud atmosphere greet you with chills. What time is it? You don’t even know. All you know is the sunrise have yet to grown out from the wave of the clouds. but why must all of your maids gather themself on your room, something important? But why must them gather at the edge of dusk..? Did your mother fucked up again? But actually, what happened?

At the same time, you mumbled a form of question. Where’s diluc? You asked yourself.

“Y-Your majesty! d-diluc have now been courted by the queen, i-i don’t know what happened but please stay put i shall help you! Yes! I-i—“ courted? In sudden, you dropped your glasses. The broken piece of the glasses shard scarred your leg. It was painful, but you didn’t care. The blood shed of your scars leave the carpet of your resident turn into a red motives of blood. What did diluc do to make himself courted by your own mother? All he did was to love me, mother. The maid beside you were in all panics, trying to brag your arm from leaving the room. Although you declined the embrace of it, you were still running in pain, it made the maids panics turn into vomits.

Rushing through the open corridor of your resident in sweats and blood shed, You found diluc. His hands tied with a rope, a slight red bruises covered his face. He was Courted by your mother because of an unknown letter that has been sent to the queen herself, it was dumb for her to court an innocent person like him. Though, at last, you found yourself screaming his name. The pain which hold onto your consciousness leave your body in a second. diluc was aware of this, Everything. His hands wanted to touch you and lead you to rest. but he couldn’t, the execution would be in front of his eyes in no time.

“you did harm my child don’t you? Look at those blood on their legs! How come a butler like you harmed my precious child..?! They are unconscious because of you filthy butler. Know your degree, h—“

“you abuse them, your highness. You abuse them, ever since their father die, you abandoned them and break them to pieces. How come you only care about them dying when their time to hold the throne came? They were dying because of you, those consumption they witness are all because of you. And you dare to tell me what to do when all i did was just to love them?!” He quoted every single words you wish you could say to your mothers face. You wished you have the audacity to tell her the truth, yet your weak body refuse it’s urge to make diluc out of the execution lines. I’m sorry, i’m really sorry.

silence fill the room. You were laying in pain, as you heard diluc’s defense and your mother’s lies. You realized once more, you were nothing to them. Just a pry for the throne. none of the guards have pitied you either, they are too focused on never-letting diluc’s eyes or hands meet your figure in this state of time. Those scarred glasses on your legs have made you lose too-many bloods, it scared diluc. After all, as a lover he is, he has devoted himself to protect you in all cost. let them be safe and take me away. It’s his last hope for you to stay awake for him.

“no execution needed. I have no reason to pay attention to fools like you. so isolation it is. This is all because of you, my child is dying and you’re the one at fault. Noticed how they haven’t even called your name again? They died because your lack of responsibility.” , spitting her mucus in diluc’s knees. You could barely saw diluc chills which you usually saw in his eyes. He’s about to cry..you think.

“Guards, please take my child away and let them rest in their bed. And so for this butler, put him in the isolation room, make sure to let him eat only once in a day, understood? Ah..don’t let my child see him, i don’t want them to see an abuser like him crawling out their life’s on my window.” , orders from your mother are none to first. They couldn’t be disobey and you understand them. You understand how ruthless it is, you understand it. But why must diluc? Why him? You saw the sight of him, blades are all over his neck. For what reason actually? To let him never see you again.

carried by the guards to your room and diluc was gone from your vision. He is not wrong, your highness. So why must those who loved me left my side, mother? Why won’t these bruises you add to my flawless skin never leave me? Is it because i’m a procession of your own sin? It was a cursed to fall in love with those you could barely reach.

PART 2 : COMING SOON

this is shitty, really shitty in fact. Though, thank you very much for reading this. Part 2 will come soon, if i had some energy to write the readers mother personality without getting pissed off. But anyways, see y’all soon at part 2 <3

[satansjit]

Reflections on the Color of My Skin

By Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

My colleague had other encounters with the law that he shared later that night, but his first story started a chain reaction among us. One by one we each recalled multiple incidents of being stopped by the police. None of the accounts were particularly violent or life-threatening, although it was easy to extrapolate to highly publicized cases that were. One of my colleagues had been stopped for driving too slowly. He was admiring the local flora as he drove through a New England town in the autumn. Another had been stopped because he was speeding, but only by five miles per hour. He was questioned and then released without getting a ticket. Still another colleague had been stopped and questioned for jogging down the street late at night.

As for me, I had a dozen different encounters to draw from. There was the time I was stopped late at night at an underpass on an empty road in New Jersey for having changed lanes without signaling. The officer told me to get out of my car and questioned me for ten minutes around back with the headlights of his squad car brightly illuminating my face. Is this your car? Yes. Who is the woman in the passenger seat? My wife. Where are you coming from? My parent’s house. Where are you going? Home. What do you do for a living? I am an astrophysicist at Princeton University. What’s in your trunk? A spare tire, and a lot of other greasy junk. He went on to say that the “real reason” why he stopped me was because my car’s license plates were much newer and shinier than the 17-year-old Ford that I was driving. The officer was just making sure that neither the car nor the plates were stolen.

Among my other stories, I had been stopped by campus police while transporting my home supply of physics textbooks into my newly assigned office in graduate school. They had stopped me at the entrance to the physics building where they asked accusatory questions about what I was doing. It was 11:30 p.m. Open-topped boxes of graduate math and physics textbooks filled the trunk. And I was transporting them into the building, which left me wondering how often that scenario shows up in police training videos.

We went on for two more hours. But before we retired for the night we searched for common denominators among the stories. We had all driven different cars—some were old, others were new, some were undistinguished, others were high performance imports. Some police stops were in the daytime, others were at night. Taken one-by-one, each encounter with the law could be explained as an isolated incident where, in modern times, we all must forfeit some freedoms to ensure a safer society for us all. Taken collectively, however, you would think the cops had a vendetta against physicists because that was the only profile we all had in common. In this parade of automotive stop-and-frisks, one thing was for sure, the stories were not singular, novel moments playfully recounted. They were common, recurring episodes. How could this assembly of highly educated scientists, each in possession of the PhD—the highest academic degree in the land—be so vulnerable to police inquiry in their lives? Maybe the police cued on something else. Maybe it was the color of our skin. The conference I had been attending was the 23rd meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists. We were guilty not of DWI (Driving While Intoxicated), but of other violations none of us knew were on the books: DWB (Driving While Black), WWB (Walking While Black), and of course, JBB (Just Being Black).

None of us were beaten senseless. None of us were shot. But what does it take for a police encounter to turn lethal? On average, police in America kill more than 100 unarmed black people per year. Who never made it to our circle? I suspect our multi-hour conversation would be rare among most groups of law-abiding people.

As I compose this, about 10,000 chanting protestors are filing past my window in Manhattan. And because of the intermittent looting and related violence, the curfew for this evening has been pushed earlier, to 8 p.m., from 11 p.m. in the preceding days. The most common placard was “Black Lives Matter.” Many others simply displayed the name George Floyd, who was handcuffed face-down on the street with a police officer’s knee on the back of his neck, applied with a force of at least half the officer’s body weight, resulting in his death. Curious irony that NFL star Colin Kaepernick offered a simple demonstration of care and concern for the fate of black people in the custody of police officers, by taking a knee during the Star Spangled Banner before football games. (One media outlet mangled the moment by describing him as protesting the national anthem.) The outrage against his silent act of concern for a national problem persisted through the 2017 season when, as a free agent, he went unsigned by any team to continue his livelihood.

So, we went from a peaceful knee to the ground to a fatal knee to the neck.

The way peaceful protesters and the press are being shoved, maced, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and tackled in the streets of our cities (when the police should have focused on arresting the looters) you would think the protestors were doing something illegal or un-American. But, of course, the U.S. Constitution has something to say about it:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Which amendment was that? The First Amendment. So, the founders of this nation felt quite strongly about it, empowering one to declare that protesting for redress of grievances is one of the most American things you can do. If you are the police, pause and reflect how great is the country whose Constitution endorses peaceful protests.

What do we actually expect from our police officers? To protect the peace and arrest the bad guys, I presume. But also, to be armed with lethal force that they can use when necessary. That part clearly requires training on how and when to use (and not use) the power of your weapons. The rigorous Minneapolis Police Academy training lasts 4 months. The slightly more rigorous NYC Police Academy lasts 6 months.

Yet to become a certified pastry chef at a prestigious culinary academy requires 8 months. The perfect croissant demands it. So maybe, just maybe, police recruits could benefit from a bit more training before becoming officers.

In 1991, Rodney King (age 25) was struck dozens of times, while on the ground, by four LAPD officers, with their batons, after being tased. The grainy 1990s video of that went media-viral, inducing shock and dismay to any viewer.

But I wasn’t shocked at all.

Based on what I already knew of the world, my first thought was, “We finally got one of those on tape.” Followed by, “Maybe justice will be served this time.” Yes, that’s precisely my first thought. Why? Since childhood my parents instilled in me and my siblings, via monthly, sometimes weekly lessons, rules of conduct to avoid getting shot by the police. “Make sure that when you get stopped, the officer can always see both of your hands.” “No sudden movements.” “Don’t reach into your pockets for anything without announcing this in advance.” “When you move at all, tell the officer what you are about to do.” At the time, I am a budding scientist in middle school, just trying to learn all I can about the universe. I hardly ever think about the color of my skin—it never comes up when contemplating the universe. Yet when I exit my front door, I’m a crime suspect. Add to this the recently coined “White Caller Crime,” where scared white people call the police because they think an innocent black person is doing something non-innocent, and it’s a marvel that any of us achieve at all.

The rate of abuse? Between one and five skin-color-instigated incidents per week, for every week of my life. White people must have known explicitly if not implicitly of this struggle. Why else would the infamous phrase, “I’m free, white, and 21” even exist? Here is a compilation of that line used in films across the decades. Yes, it’s offensive. But in America, it’s also truthful. Today’s often-denied “white privilege” accusation was, back then, openly declared.

The deadly LA riots associated with the Rodney King incident are often remembered as a response to the beating. But no. Los Angeles was quiet for 13 months afterward. Everyone had confidence, as did I, that the video was just the kind of evidence needed to finally bring about a conviction in the abuse of power. But that’s not what came to pass. The riots were a response to the acquittal of the four officers in the incident, and not to the incident itself. And what is a riot if not the last act of helpless desperation.

The 1989 film by Spike Lee “Do the Right Thing,” which explored 1980s black-white-police tensions in Brooklyn, New York, ends with a dedication to the families of six people. Eleanor Bumpers (age 66), Michael Griffith (age 23), Arthur Miller (age 30), Edmund Perry (age 17), Yvonne Smallwood (age 28), and Michael Stewart (age 25). All are black. One was killed by a white mob. The rest were unarmed and shot by police or otherwise died while in police custody. All deaths occurred within the 10 years preceding film, and all occurred in New York City. None of the police-induced deaths resulted in convictions, as continues to be true for 99% of all police killings.

We know of these events because they each ended in death. But even so, back then, it was just local news. Was this just NYC’s problem? I asked myself. But for every police-related death anywhere, how many unarmed victims are shot by police and don’t die, or are wrongfully maimed or injured? Most of those cases didn’t even make the local news. But if you lived there, you knew. We all knew. For what it’s worth, NYC now has the lowest police-caused death rate per capita among the sixty largest cities in the US. Is it that extra two months training in the Police Academy?

The corrosion and ultimate erosion of our confidence in the legal system in cases such as these, even in the face of video evidence, has spawned a tsunami of protests. With sympathetic demonstrations across the United States and around the world. If the threat of prison time for this behavior does not exist—acting as a possible deterrent—then the behavior must somehow stop on its own.

Some studies show that the risk of death for an unarmed person at the hands of the police is approximately the same no matter the demographics of who gets arrested. Okay. But if your demographic gets stopped ten times more than others, then your demographic will die at ten times the rate. I suppose we first have to get the bias factor down to zero, but then there’s still the matter of police killing unarmed suspects, white people included.

I talk a lot. But I don’t talk much about any of this, or the events along this path-of-most-resistance that have shaped me. Why? Because throughout my life I’ve used these occasions as launch-points to succeed even more. Yes, I parlayed the persistent rejections of society, which today might be called micro-aggressions, into reservoirs of energy to achieve. I learned that from my father, himself active in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

In a way, I am who I am precisely because countless people, by their actions or inactions, said I could never be what I am. But what if you don’t have this deep supply of fuel? What becomes of you? Who from historically disenfranchised communities, including women, LGBTQ+, and anybody of color, are missing—falling shy of their full potential because they ran out of energy and gave up trying.

Are things better today than yesterday? Yes. But one measure of this truth is a bit perverse. Decades ago, unarmed black people getting beaten or killed by the police barely merited the local news. But now it’s national news—even breaking news—no matter where in the country it occurs.

So how to change all this? Organizations have surely assembled demands for police departments. Here, I offer a list of my own, for policy experts to consider:

Extend police academies to include months of cultural awareness and sensitivity training that also includes how not to use lethal force.

Police officers should all be tested for any implicit bias they carry, with established thresholds of acceptance and rejection from the police academy. We all carry bias. But most of us do not hold the breathing lives of others in our hands when influenced by it.

During protests, protect property and lives. If you attack nonviolent protesters you are being un-American. And you wouldn’t need curfews if police arrested looters and not protesters.

If fellow officers are behaving in a way that is clearly unethical or excessively violent, and you witness this, please stop them. Someone will get that on video, and it will give the rest of us confidence that you can police yourselves. In these cases, our trust in you matters more to a civil society than how much you stick up for each other.

And here’s a radical idea for the Minneapolis Police Department—why not give George Floyd the kind of full-dress funeral you give each other for dying in the line of duty? And vow that such a death will never happen again.

Lastly, when you see black kids, think of what they can be rather than what you think they are.

Respectfully Submitted

Neil deGrasse Tyson — trying hard to Keep Looking Up.

Copyright © 2018 Neil deGrasse Tyson

[youwontlikethisblog]

Betty's New Look

Previously I talked about Armando's rivalry with Nicolas and how that also motivates him to continue the affair with Betty. I've also talked about how Armando displays signs of s. addiction. I felt it was important to break that down to really understand this post in particular.

By understanding what motivates Armando in his quest to have affairs and understand why the man is so obsessed with the beauty standards of women we can now understand his behavior towards Betty.

I mentioned in that post that I have an OC that is portrayed to have s. addiction and how much research I had to make so I could write it correctly. However I didn't mention or explain as much something vital that I see in Armando as well.

Seggs can many times not only be a form of escapism or control but many times for reasons of self-esteem/worth. If the person believes that the only way they can ever feel wanted or loved is by acts of s. than they will often participate in said behavior to feel that way.

With Armando he doesn't only do it to escape the chains of a pre-planned destiny by his parents and fiancé but because he also doesn't really feel loved and he uses these models as a from for him to feel that way or at least wanted,(I mean the only thing he has that keeps his relationship with Marcela together is their seggsual relationship.) he doesn't only do it to feel like he has control over that part of his life.

I mentioned in another post that women enter Armando through the eyes. He is a very physical man. He is superficial when it comes to the women he sleeps with. He grew up in the fashion world where the standard is tall and thin. The beauty of women can only be found in those types.

What does this have to do with Betty's new look?

Though we've established that Armando is attracted to her personality, he isn't of her physical appearance. Does that make him a bad person? No. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes we find someone's personality so much more attractive than their outer appearance but we still dare to date them. Women are often told "you're too pretty for that man" because of this.

Armando isn't a bad person for that and he accepts to a certain degree that he is attracted to her personality but because he is such a superficial and perfectionist with the body of a woman he denies this. He denies any and all attraction to her for this exact reason.

He finds it so hard to understand why he would still be attracted to Betty and why he likes her kisses when he doesn't look at her as a seggsual object like he does to all the women he has had affairs with and that's because unlike those women Betty isn't a seggsual object and that throws him off.

Lets considered the fact that when he repeated what Bertha told him about Nicolas, that he didn't even think of her with a bad thought(one could assume she meant a perversive thought.) as he tells this new piece of information to Mario he said so surprised and when Mario said that it made sense to not think of her in that way he agreed. In an instant he contradicted himself. In his tone he seemed surprised that a man wouldn't think of Betty so much even with a bad thought but that he understood that no one would? To some degree, to some far end distance, Armando does view Betty as a woman but not enough to actively desire her as one like he has in the past with the models.

(I'll talk more about this when we get to the B-Day episodes 😏)

In the past when Marcela got a new look he commented on it. It was the first thing he mentioned as he said she looked great(Betty was a witness to this). However when he see's Betty's new look he doesn't even comment on it. For one because he doesn't want to hurt her feelings and two because he doesn't want to lie so she keeps looking like that.

I think, in my very personal and humble opinion, that Betty looks fine. What ruins the fit is her hair but it is very 70's office chic. Like lets be honest if they took off the bangs, did a middle part, defined those curls, and didn't apply that much blush and lined her lips, she'd look so cute. Unibrow and braces with the glasses, Betty would slay. She'd look like a cute dorky person.

She IS very gorgeous to me!

I will fight anyone who disagrees with this and I will set up a time and date for it!

Now that we have established Armando's hesitation to accept Betty's physical appearance and why he doesn't want to comment on it lets begin.

In this episode Betty had just arrived to Eco Moda, her friends went to see her new look in her office as if she were the main attraction at the zoo and when leaving her office Armando over heard their commentary on it, once again being witness to the critique of Betty behind her back as none of them wanted to tell her how awful they thought she looked and they were her supposed close friends.

Marcela then enters his office and they talk about how Patty thought Marcela had caused those bruises on Armando, who tells her that the cuartel thinks the same and they start to flirt and then make out.

Just as they start to Betty exits her office.

Armando's reaction is a pissed off one. We see him roll his eyes and clench his teeth while he has his lips tight, even Marcela comments on it.

"My love you don't have to get so upset."

"No it's just embarrassing for all of us." He says and walks behind his desk and sits.

Betty struggles to speak for a second before grounding herself and saying that she just wanted to excuse herself to go to Marcela's office so she could sign the paper work for the loan they were giving Sofia.

Marcela only stared at her for a bit before she couldn't look at her without bursting into laughter right there and then.

Betty doesn't make eye contact with Armando he however stares at her with a concern look on his face, which is very different than his first reaction to Betty being in the room.

Now he watches Marcela sign the paper, he's got a crease between his brows that are furrowed, his eyes are saddened and his mouth slightly parted but still slightly tense.

This is a look of worry.

Betty excuses herself and Armando watches her leave while Marcela starts to laugh(Natalia really nailed the mean girl laugh).

As Marcela starts to make fun of her Armando asks her not to make fun of her and she tells him that whoever did her hair didn't curl it but stuck her into the electricity socket. Armando stares at her as she says these things with his lips pursed while squinting his eyes at her as she laughs.

He disapproves of what she's saying and it angers him that she is HOWEVER in a very classic manor he doesn't tell her any of this. Unlike the previous night that he literally started to hit the guys who were saying these awful things to her, saying that they had to respect her, here he stays silent. He doesn't even yell at her. Instead he turns around and goes to his computer.

I'm not saying that Armando should have hit Marcela lmbo! That would be bad and inexcusable! What I'm saying is that again we're shown the contrast and contradictions of Armando. While with complete strangers he demands for Betty to be respected and treated well he can't to that with Mario or Marcela. Not only because Marcela would get jealous and throw a fit about him telling her to be respectful but because he'd also give her cuerda(rope) to suspect and continue being controlling and with Mario because Mario would make him miserable if he shared even a fraction of his confusion or talked through his feelings about it all because he's tried it in the past but each time Mario makes a joke about it and he just shuts down. He's a coward to face the people in his life that really matter because he doesn't want to face the consequences of liking a woman like Betty.

The girls asked Betty if anything is wrong and she tells them no. Betty expressed her guilt and how she feels terrible whenever she sees Marcela and how she has walked in on them kissing and Armando making it obvious that he was angry that she interrupted them(It also explains his worried expression in the latter of said scene).

I've noticed many people just lump Betty as the insecure girl because of romance and that's really where her depth ends but Betty is a very complex individual here too(and I really want to make a more detailed post about it!).

She navigates a world that overall treats her poorly only because she's "ugly" but inside Eco Moda she navigates a world that actively prays for her downfall and who humiliate her in front of many only for the reward of laughing at her expense be their personal satisfaction. Yes she's dealt with bullying and people excluding her because they think she's ugly all her life but the cruelty that she faces in Eco Moda goes beyond and above.

These people are supposed to all be people of class, people she views as superior to her in all aspects. It isn't just humiliation that she faces for her physical appearance but she faces an over all humiliation for simply being a human existing and even then, even as she feels so terrible of herself, as she hates the way that they humiliate her, she still thinks of them superior to her and their opinion matters to her and because of this, despite their disgusting behavior, Betty still has some respect for them on the professional side. She still respects their authority inside Eco Moda and their vitality to the well being of the company.

Betty is such a sweet person at this stage of the novela that she still respect these people but it's so hurtful to see because she also does this because she thinks she deserves this.

Trauma affects a person in more than one way. Her life experience has been painful, isolated, grim, cruel, and lonely; add the traumatic relationship she had with Miguel to this, Betty doesn't have a self-esteem. She doesn't have a sense of self-worth. Betty, in such a terrible an awful way, believes that she isn't deserving of respect for simply existing, much less of voicing how it makes her feel when they treat her the way they do.

She doesn't understand why her father takes so much care of her. She doesn't understand why anyone would ever be nice to her. She's shy, timid, reserved, afraid. This is exactly why she was so impacted by Armando's behavior towards her. It wasn't just because she has no self-esteem. It's that someone treated her as a human being worthy of respect for simply doing her job and existing.

In the following scene, which is a parallel of a scene I previously talked about(post You Betrayed Me!) Armando's behavior is vastly different.

While in the past when he heard them making these crude jokes at the expense of her[Betty] boyfriend Armando seemed scared, angry, worried, and humiliated to a certain degree but this time his demeanor is different. This time he squints his eyes at Patty. He looks at Marcela with disapproval without hiding it. He visibly looks pissed.

"Did you see her clothes? No one would undress her with that!" Patty and Marcela laugh.

"Who would want to undress her?" Marcela says and they cackle, seriously, they cackle a lot. "I think Beatriz goes to the gyno and he tells her not to get undressed, that he'll examine her over her clothes."

"Obviously! She'd tell him "Doctor could I get undressed?" she mocks Betty's voice. " and the Doctor would tell her "No please, please! Don't do it! I beg of you!" she clasp her hands in front of her, pretending to be the Doctor begging. Armando had passed by her, squinting his eyes and now he's behind Marcela, far away, still hearing their conversation staring at them in disbelief and anger.

"Could you imagine what it must be with the boyfriend?" Patty says while Marcela laughs.

"No! See, she's so ugly that he doesn't kiss her, he hits her." they laugh. Armando stares at Marcela with disdain.

"Again with the jokes against Betty?" Marcela turns to him laughing.

"No. No they're not about Betty. They're about Betty's boyfriend." this time, unlike before, he doesn't change his emotions. He squints his eyes at Marcela once more. "and what he has to face tonight once he sees her." She covers her face laughing.

"Maybe he already saw her." to Marcela this line holds no meaning but to the audience it does and it isn't only for comical effects. Armando is now saying that her[Betty] boyfriend already saw her i.e. him. He is now out loud in his own way confronting the fact that he is her boyfriend to himself, while before he wasn't even able to say it to Betty or himself this time he's confronting himself about it.

Betty walks past Armando and he watches her as she walks towards Marcela and Patty who are still laughing, she bumps into Hugo who laughs at her, and they don't hold back at making it obvious that they are laughing at her and making jokes behind her back.

"Who is that creep?" Hugo voices loudly. Armando turns to glare at him. "Betty's cousin?"

"No Hugito that's the very same Betty but like a new version." Patty says.

"She went with the enemy so they could dress her and style her hair." Marcela says.

"What hairdresser? Because he didn't do highlights, he did lightning bolts." Hugo jokes.

The model and the rest laugh while Armando visibly controls his anger, but doesn't hide it or pretend to be unbothered as he shakes his head at Marcela and Patty and marches away from them.

Compare this to his previous reaction, while Marcela knew that Armando didn't like that she was making fun of Betty the other time he didn't actually voice his disapproval, he even laughed at one of the jokes that Patty made until he heard Marcela call him[Nic] a Multi-Millionaire. This time he finds no humor, he doesn't even feel offended that their making fun of Betty's boyfriend or hurt, he feels furious that they are.

However in the following scene all of that good behavior is squashed like a bug. He sits with Calderon talking bad about Betty's new look.

While Calderon tries to make him be a good boyfriend Armando scoffs and questions "praise her new look?"

"You haven't praised her new look?" Calderon whispers alarmed. "What are you? A beast? An animal? An ignorant!" he hisses. "Look there's nothing worse, nothing that humiliates a woman more, that tramples her ego, that ends her love for a man than you not praising her new look."

"What? Do I give her four hallelujahs for the hairdo? What?"

"No but Betty isn't the only woman that goes through that, my god. Almost all women are a disaster when they change their look but you still praise her new look! It's that simple." Armando sighs. "Look when a woman changes her look she changes it for A: her husband. B: the lover. In this case we have one true god." Armando purses his lips and rolls his eyes. "So then my dear god, praise the new look."

"She won't believe me. She won't believe me. The entire world has made fun of her for it. She'll think I feel pity for her, consoling her, or or worse that I'm making fun of her like the rest.

"Then the time for you to demonstrate to her that you're really serious[about this], that your love goes beyond the physical(goes on to list all of her physical flaws)" Armando looks pained to be the poor fool to have to "Accept" this. "well the list is long but if I were you I'd make love to her just as she is." Armando slowly, repeatedly blinking, turns to look at Mario. "well it's the only way for you to show her that you love her, that you desire her."

"Be very careful, Calderon, because with the simple fact that I already kiss her, with that fact alone, I'm paying in life what I should be paying in death." He whispers. "And besides I'mma tell something for me... to do that to her, never. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps." He stands up.

"Well you better start to prepare yourself. Where do you have Adrianita's picture?"

Yes I've talked about how women enter Armando through the eyes but that doesn't justify his behavior, it merely explains it. The objectification he has on women as seggsual beings clouds his judgement and blinds him to see past that. While he doesn't like that people make fun of Betty, he does worse. He doesn't make fun of her, he verbally humiliates her by the mere fact that he compares kissing her to a punishment, that he finds her affection to be a torment only for the fact that she's "ugly".

Armando continuedly flip flops from caring about Betty and her best interest to only caring about his. We're barely starting to see him take notice of Betty's interest but he still focuses mostly on what he wants and what he feels comfortable with. He doesn't once wonder if Betty does.

He finds her kisses a punishment because she isn't pretty. He finds her affection a torment because she isn't pretty. If she had the body and face of AA and the personality of Betty mans would proclaim it to the four winds and the seven seas. He would dump Marcela on the spot for her.

People are allowed to have types, we all have them. When do we draw the line between types and actively dehumanizing a certain group of people? When it no longer is based on preference but hatred and fear of said group.

Armando to this point hates that Betty isn't society's beauty standard. He hates that she isn't his idea of woman perfection but he lives tormented by the fact that he still cares about her. That he doesn't like it when people treat her poorly or make fun of her. That he hates it when they dehumanize her, (except he's a hypocrite because he does the exact same thing and he allows his best friend to do that exact thing.) and that he secretly enjoys her kisses and her affection. He hates all of this which is what truthfully makes him a miserable piece of ish.

These episode however are meant to help Armando accept Betty's physical appearance to a certain degree(lol I'm saying that a lot). He is forced to accept that he can't control the way a woman looks and that he can't change it either(I'll talk about this in the next post) Here he is faced with Betty's new look and he's forced to think about her feelings first than his own. He's confronted within himself that he is Betty's boyfriend. He is forced to find a way to tell her that her new look isn't it without tearing her confidence to shreds.

In other words Armando is forced to accept that Betty isn't a seggsual object but just because of that it doesn't mean she should get treated horribly. That the respect she deserves isn't only because of how good she is at her job but because she's a human, a person with feelings and with struggles of her own and that he doesn't like it that people don't see that.

But it foreshadows as well that he also has to accept Betty's physical appearance as it is and be okay with the attraction he has towards her, or at least prepare himself to accept that attraction.

Now as Armando and Calderon talk about how hot AA is Betty interrupts and leaves the office but overhears Armando call AA a mamasita and say that if she ever showed up that he'd throw everything away and marry her on the spot.

She seems annoyed by that as she shakes her head and walks away from the double doors.

Obviously our girl is hurt because not once has Armando mentioned her new look, not once has he made the effort to say anything about her physical appearance but there he is talking about how he'd end all his relationships without care of consequence if AA showed up and he'd marry her for the simple fact that she's hot.

Men really only have the audacity!

Here Betty is trying to escape her comfort zone(though she didn't get far from it) for the sake of Armando's ego. She's willing to face humiliation and ridicule if Armando likes her new look, even if she feels uncomfortable and knows how people are insulting her behind her back, and he hasn't said a single thing, instead he comments about how hot AA is.

I do want to note that Armando is behaving more like a boyfriend now. While in the past whenever the subject of his crushes or infatuation on Models was brought up he didn't reserve himself to express how hot they were or how he wanted to look presentable for them except now he pretends to show no interest in them when she's in the room. Better yet he pretends to be offended that(when the two models went to ask for their paycheck and tickled him) they'd flirt with him or try to play with him. Except this time he pretends like he isn't even aware of how hot she is and only is interested in her in a professional matter but as soon as she leaves the office she over hears how he truthfully feels.

She knows him well and because of this it does hurt her.

[shimmershae]

Some, okay a lot, of pre-mid season (tri? season) finale thoughts.  As if you actually asked for them, lol.

And no, I haven’t actually watched the last episode yet.  I’ve been putting it off all morning.  For reasons.  Reasons that I felt the inexplicable need to put on paper, er, screen.  

If you care at all to read the purging of my fatigued TWD fangirl mind, please look beneath the cut.  Fair warning.  It’s long so pull up a chair maybe, lol.  

I’ll admit it.  The spoilers indicating a significant lack of Carol/Melissa content has dampened much of my enthusiasm and there wasn’t all that much to start with.  

Let me tell you why--

The season, so far, has been woefully unbalanced in favor of the Reaper storyline and the Maggie/Negan conflict (which ties back to the Reaper storyline by the flimsiest of strings) and I’m just not invested.  

Why?  

Well, it’s multifold.  

#1 reason why?  Having a third of the last season ever of TWD devoted to going inside “the lions’ den” of villains I have no emotional connection to or curiosity about is a big fat fail.  

You might say “but there’s the Daryl double agent” aspect and I say “so fucking what” because it was so poorly conceived and has felt like such a WTF set of fraying puppet strings for this plot Angela was apparently jonesing to tell from the GO, damn the torpedoes she had to know where inevitably coming her way.  

Seriously.  I had talked myself into accepting that which I could not change, citing Daryl’s emotional brokenness after Rick.  Convincing myself he’d lost his anchor to goodness and hope and fulfillment in his years of self-imposed exile from Carol and what was left of his family and to a certain extent?  I can still by that explanation.  But really.  It’s the Leah of it all.  

Let me attempt to explain.  

To do that, maybe I should detail how I’ve always perceived Daryl.  

Daryl, IMHO, began this journey with us and the rest of Team Family with a figurative fortress erected around his true, core self.  

He was prickly.  Defensive to any overtures of kindness because he inherently did not trust them.  Loathe to form any real connection to anyone other than Merle, his blood.  

Daryl balked at the possibility of emotional connection and flinched in learned fear from physical touch.  

He did not recognize or accept affection or respect at face value because it was something rarely shown to him before.  

Anybody else remember that childhood abuse book from Consumed?  You know.  One of those first times the showrunners/writers dumped a character nugget in our laps and left it to us to do all the backstory in our own imaginations so they didn’t have to enrich their own characters beyond the scratch and sniff, wham bam this is who they are work?  

Anyway.  We were left to extrapolate from that what most of us h ad already suspected--that Daryl’s formative years were already a living hell before the ZA ever happened.  

So he was standoffish.  He didn’t form emotional connections lightly and physical intimacy was something light years out of his comfort zone.  

Until Carol.  

Daryl’s defenses started to crumble from the very start with Carol because she piqued his interest.  He looked at her, watched her withstand Ed’s abuse, and recognized something of himself.  

Against his will, Daryl started to care and when Carol lost the one good thing that had come out of her miserable life with Ed--Sophia--Daryl’s core identity started to be revealed to us and probably?  To himself after burying it so deep for so long.  

Long story short?  Daryl connected with Carol pretty quickly on a base level through the trauma of Sophia’s loss.  

The real connection, the emotional work it too to peel all those protective layers away took more like--like planting a flower from seed and tending it to help it survive and flourish.  

Simply said?  The work was put in and Daryl bloomed with Carol’s (and Team Family’s) care.  They all put in varying degrees of work but Carol planted the seed of his “belonging.”  

And the thing about Daryl?  Once he bloomed?  He grew strong.  He stretched toward the sun.  

He and Carol essentially bloomed and fought their way toward the sunlight together.  

And little by little, Daryl learned to accept the kindness, trust, and love he always deserved.  

From that newly confident man emerged a Daryl not so fearful of forming connections and none have ever been more powerful than his connection to Carol.  

I’ll spare ya’ll the paragraphs of how Daryl and Carol gravitated toward each other like magnets no matter the means of separation.  

I’ll just spell it out like this:  their bond supersedes all others, even Daryl’s bond with Rick.  And with Daryl only accepting affection from those he trusts implicitly, Carol and Daryl have been the only potential “romantic” pairing that has ever fully made sense for his established character.  

At least the character before Angela launched the grenade of Leah into the mix.  

Leah was a fail from the start.  

And you know what?  I’m thinking that was largely intended (for various reasons) but I still think they could have shown Daryl as receptive to having a “romantic” relationship to those willfully blind to the possibility that he’s actually been in a “romantic” relationship with Carol since Season 2.  Never mind that Carol and Daryl haven’t (yet) crossed certain physical boundaries yet.  Emotionally? They are already there even if neither is able to admit it out loud with the actual words yet.  But I digress.  The people that never wanted to “see” Carol and Daryl as “romantic” because they couldn’t fathom Daryl as seeing Carol in that light had already deemed that Daryl just didn’t feel that way about her, that maybe he didn’t feel that way about anybody (if they couldn’t have their way and have him feel that way about their preferred choice for him, they preferred him alone), and Angela wanted to show them differently.  To show them the light.  

That said, if Angela was so hellbent on doing Leah?  There were a multitude of better ways.  

Here.  I’ll give you one of them.  

Daryl isolates himself from his family after Rick’s “death” same as he did in Angela’s version.  

Carol’s been being pulled more and more to the Kingdom because Henry’s needing a mother figure is like catnip to her hurting natural-born, hurting Mama’s heart.  So Daryl’s anchor to the man he’d matured into, the one with all these earned emotional attachments, is reeled back in, little by little, leaving him unmoored.  

Dog literally runs into him just as before.  It hardly makes sense given how young and floppy and uncoordinated puppies are and thus vulnerable to danger, but this is the least of things we need to worry about suspending disbelief for right?  ;)

Dog and Daryl continue to have these run ins until Daryl decides to retrace the puppy’s clumsy trail and viola!  He finds Leah’s cabin and Leah inside.  She levels the same shotgun at him, they have a standoff, until---

Leah suddenly lowers the gun and incredulously says Daryl’s name.  

That’s right.  One simple change and Daryl and Leah have an undefined past already.  

Daryl doesn’t completely let his guard down because he’s Daryl, but he relaxes enough that we see he doesn’t immediately regard Leah as dangerious to his own well-being.  

From that point on, instead of tying Daryl up and threatening him, we could have been told the story of how they knew each other from before.  

My version goes a little something like this--

Daryl met Leah through Merle.  Merle, in turn, met Leah through the military before he got discharged.  He and Leah had an ongoing “I scratch your itch if you scratch mine” thing and Leah?  Well, she always had a bit of a soft spot/interest in Daryl that Daryl never really returned.  

The thing is, though?  With losing the chosen brother that filled the hole left behind by his lost blood brother Merle and losing Carol to her chasing after a chance of a new family (because she feels Daryl’s out of her reach too, our too blind and stupidly, silently in love idiots)?  Daryl finds himself embracing the shared memories however minimal of that brief past and his grief and loneliness leave him receptive to Leah’s eventual advances in ways he never was before.  

We’re still given hints of their unfolding relationship and we still don’t like it, but it makes more sense for Daryl to cling to the past when he feels he’s lost his future.  

Leah still gives her ultimatum (there’s a reason she gravitated toward Merle in perhaps his most toxic state, she’s more than a little fucked up too) and it’s not as much of a hard sell that Daryl might be pulled in Leah’s direction when he feels Carol is all but lost to him.  

Hell.  They could have even explicitly discussed Carol.  But wait!  Angela would have never allowed that because she doesn’t want to shatter all the crackship dreams in one fell swoop.  

But the story from that point on could have continued just as it has and probably I still wouldn’t have liked it but I could have at least bought it somewhat and understood it.  

Obviously, it didn’t. 

I don’t buy the Leah of it all.  Angela built that “relationship” with monopoly money and it shows.  

Because I don’t buy Leah period.  I don’t buy Daryl giving even giving a shit about trying to or feeling like there’s a snowball’s chance to redeem her so I’m not engaged whatsoever with this Daryl double agent story and him even givign her crumbs about his real family.  

That part rings false.  

So that’s a big problem right there and we haven’t even gotten to the other part I don’t buy.  

You know what else I don’t buy?  

#2?  

Why the hell are the Reapers so bloodthirsty for Maggie’s departure from this mortal coil?  

Without giving better reasoning than they’re just cray-cray, the entire faceplants and considering it’s taken up about 70% of 11A’s focus?  I’m pissed.  

Because, IMHO, they should go big or go home on this to give it any entertainment value because it’s all stale, recycled air if not.  

Maggie’s been established as a much darker character this season.  Which led me to believer the Reapers probably had a legit beef against her, but it seems Angela is reluctant to go all that way down the rabbit hole and doesn’t want to commit to what could be a more entertaining and potentially fascinating story than just Maggie’s in the right, the Reapers are just evil.  

Maggie is right about Negan, IMHO, but she’s also wrong in not listening to him when what he’s saying reeks of simple common sense.  Ignoring sage advice makes her seem more like an angry toddler stamping her feet in defiance than the leader they are so bound and determined to tell us she is.  

You know what?  The window for me to give more than the half a fuck I’m giving right now as they beat this dead horse to dust closed when Maggie decided letting Negan rot in the ASZ jail cell was enough and spared him when she finally had her best chance to end him once and for all.  

Maybe if they stopped having the same damn conversation and they didn’t take up 20% of the screen time left after the boring Reapers/Leah shit, I would be less resentful but I’m not and again, I’ll tell you why.  

BECAUSE.  We are in the last season of the OG TWD ever and this show has chosen to waste screen time on stories nobody cares about to the exclusion of the ones we’re yearning for more of.  

Like ASZ.  We’ve barely seen more than an hour of the eight hours devoted to Carol, Aaron, Rosita, Lydia, Judith, Kelly, Jerry and Co. in total.  Especially since they’ve been trying to establish the Commonwealth on the side, too.  

I mean, I never really expected to dig the Commonwealth so my expectations for it were lower than low so they’ve been exceeded at a miniscule level.  But I expected and hoped for ASZ and those characters we’ve cared the most about to receive much more emphasis and the fact that they haven’t in this last season so far has been the biggest FAIL.  

And okay.  Selfishly, I want more Carol.  She’s like salt.  She makes almost everything go down better.  

But really. Give me more of all the characters we actually care about, please.  The Reapers and the offshoots from that story wheel aren’t it.  I love Daryl but I hate this retread story for him.  Leah is a weak point that pressed upon?  Makes this weak ass arc collapse.  Maggie and Negan are giving us nothing new.  They are the definition of the word STALEMATE and that’s not what you want or need on the finale season of a show.  

Yes, I have enjoyed the majority of the episodes overall, but that was because the moments I loved I weighted more than the ones I didn’t and know they have the most impact on the show down the road.  

Probably 11A will fare better when all is said and done and the show can be binged but standalone?  It’s been an overall disappointment and that saddens me more than I can say.  

Anyway.  I’m going to stop rambling now and try to psyche myself up for episode 8.  I’ll be back with thoughts on it later, maybe.  

Sorry for the word vomit, but I felt maybe I could in someway give voice to some of the feelings floating around out there and let you know that you are not alone.  

Until later, lovelies.  

[nurseofren]

Keeping Your Promise - Chapter 29 (NSFW-lite)

Read on AO3 | Read on Wattpad

Read chapter twenty-eight (NSFW)

Title: ASSISTANCE REQUIRED

Words: 5.6k

Summary: I am very uncomfortable with the vibe we have created in the studio Infirmary today...

Warnings: mentions of abuse, suicide

ST Rambles: So... I graduated nursing school. And will be taking my licensure exam next month and start working as well...

In my time away, other than the above mentioned accomplishments, I've been reading a lot of books and even went to see an internet friend just last weekend. Life got insane and I needed to focus on school, and I do appreciate the patience and enthusiasm.

I hope this was worth the wait. I hope the next part will be even more so ;)

[MASTERLIST] || BANNER // @elmidol

Fucking, fuck!

“I know in academy you were told to pierce the skin at a forty-five-degree angle, but it works a lot better if you-,”

“Go in at a fifteen-degree-angle, go parallel to the skin. I know,” you huffed, embarrassment burning your skin. “That’s not the issue. I do that. The issue is-,”

“That is the issue,” Silver corrected, interrupted. Your preceptor-for-all-intents-and-purposes crossed her arms and stared at you with hard, unyielding eyes. “You won’t listen to me,” she spat. “You are the issue.”

Calliope Silvren, or “Silver”, as she’d informed you upon meeting, was everything you were supposed to be. And you hated her for that fact, hated her for that and so much more.

She was intelligent and concise and respected, she knew everything and made sure you were aware that you didn’t. During the past eleven hours, not with so many words, Silver had made it clear that you were never supposed to be here to begin with, that hers was the name in the original provider candidate pool and you were nothing but a fluke, a nobody, nothing.

Compared to Silver, compared to Calliope fucking Silvren, who’d graduated valedictorian, who had star-white hair and golden skin, whose eyes were a harsh sea of frozen cerulean, whose legs were long and lips were full and head was high and posture was perfect – compared to the program’s prototype? What were you other than a fluke? A whim? Compared to her, how were you anything more than the fascination you’d been labeled as from the very start?

As you stared up at her, her height almost that of Kylo’s, and felt the wrath of that frozen sea that resided behind her glare, you couldn’t speak. Every word of defense left you, and your mouth dried and your chest hollowed. Because her words not only rippled through your head but echoed through the unit’s halls so every nurse and physician and maintenance worker had heard them. Heard her and how superior she was, heard how incompetent you were.

Silver knew what she’d done, could feel the eyes of her coworkers gawking at her scolding; you knew by the smallest quirk to her lip, the slightest tick in her platinum brow. She had you trapped and on display, and all you could do was stand here and take it. The Board was watching, and so was Hux – CB-7070 always shadowing ten paces behind – you had no choice but to remain neutral-faced and silent.

She spoke your name and it was beautiful, a voice like sugar even when it slithered and bit like venom, “We’ll pick up tomorrow. If you absolutely need me, I’ll be organizing my report sheets for the oncoming shift.” When no one was looking anymore, her eyes narrowed and she leaned in. “Busy yourself for the next hour.” A sneer slipped past the benevolent mask she wore. “Don’t need me.”

With a steel spine, she whipped past you, stalking off toward her task, the white of her hair streaking from your periphery. And there you were, clutching an IV starter kit – missing the needle, much like you’d missed the vein – trying your hardest to keep from showing any emotion whatsoever. Less people were gawking now that Silver had left, but you still felt eyes on you. Whatever lay in those lingering stares, pity or humor or apathy, it all burned you, reminded you how temporary you were. Not only in this place – the “Infirmary” as the staff referred to it – but in your life, as well.

Smoothing the skirt of your uniform, you cleared your throat and turned to do as you were instructed, catching CB-7070’s visor for a second before peering around the unit. She faced you, and even though you couldn’t see her face, you knew she may be the only one around who was on your side. The white of her helmet glinted as she gave a small nod in your periphery. Yeah, she wasn’t so bad, no matter who she’d report to the second you got back to the Consulate.

The Infirmary was a large unit, and, unlike any place you’d practiced in since graduation, it was efficiently staffed and stocked. Safe nurse-to-patient ratios, sufficient supplies, and an allocated provider available for any emergent orders or treatments. It was a surreal representation of the “hospital utopia” you’d heard of all throughout school.

But, aside from its apparent perfection, some characteristics of the unit confused you, but you didn’t ask about it because no one else seemed to think it was weird, and Silver didn’t exactly foster a great learning environment.

What struck you first was the Infirmary’s construction and layout. It was all glass, floor to ceiling windows that offered full views of each patient in their respective rooms. You’d watched the sun dance across the sky as the day went on, nothing hindering you from the beautiful view of the sea beyond the fanned-out city below. The only thing that offered a semblance of privacy for each patient was the wall-spanning mirror positioned in front of their beds. None of them saw each other, but it was still odd that there seemed to be no concern towards the errant lapse in privacy policy the design created.

At the center was the nurses’ station, large and circular, a skylight fixed right above. The staff used the lack of patient privacy to their advantage, peering above the counter to make sure their assignments were doing alright. Their assignments who were all under the age of twenty. Some much younger, just grasping at adolescence, others kissing young adulthood – those seemed much worse off, something darker rimmed their eyes, ghosted behind the lifeless face all of them wore.

It was a strange environment to be in, even more so due to how vague the progress notes were, history and physicals extremely short and never too in depth, especially when it concerned anything related to the patients’ family history or living situations. Something seemed off, something that tugged at you and made you yearn to break past the flat affect each patient met you with.

So many were here for a few hours and then gone the next, a constant influx of admissions and discharges. But, so strangely, there was never any patient education given, never any parents or guardians for the younger ones to go home to. They were always escorted from the unit by two “official personnel”. And watching their faces as Silver told them they were done with treatment and could leave, it killed you to see the faintest slash of fear quiver their bottom lips.

Beyond that, beyond seeing these younglings so fearful and defenseless, what clawed at your gut the most was that none of them had a name. They had no birthdate information, no address listed, no family contacts entered or even offered. They were all in the system only by the letters “FL” followed by a code of eight numbers. The nurses would refer to them by their room numbers to make it simpler, but none of them shared your concern for the lack of identity these patients were plagued with.

Yes, something seemed off, seemed wrong here. Something waswrong here, but you feared you would be gone before you ever knew what that was.

From the corner of your eye, you saw a tray left on an isolation cart next to a door. Heeding Silver’s command, you approached it, discarding the IV kit and feeling CB-7070’s focus catch your every step. You’d passed this door frequently, never seeing anyone approach it for longer than a few seconds at a time, assuming it was a closet for extra supplies or scanning machines. But the meal card on the tray indicated differently.

This was a patient’s room. The room number matched, there were no other doors labeled with it that you could see. No staff paid you any attention as you peered around. The only one watching was your white-armored shadow standing against a pane of glass.

Shrugging to yourself, feeling you couldn’t possibly get in trouble for delivering a patient’s food, you said over your shoulder to CB-7070, “I’m taking this in. I shouldn’t be long. Don’t follow me in here.” More to yourself, you sighed, “Even if I am the only one here concerned about privacy, I’d prefer not to violate anyone’s rights on my first day.”

CB-7070 nodded. “Affirmative,” her modulator croaked.

A swipe of your new badge gained you access past the door, a whoosh of air whipping through your skirt as it closed behind you. It was pitch dark, the only light coming from a holo-chart programmed into the wall. It appeared you were in an antechamber, those that often came with isolation patients, but there was nothing indicating this patient had any infection or ailment that necessitated a gown or mask.

The air was stale, like nothing and no one had stirred it in a few days, and the only glass visible was that of a window peering into the room beyond – or, it would be peering, were there not closed blinds on the other side of it.

You saw yourself in that darkened pane, clutching the tray to yourself, the first glimpse you caught of your face since the start of shift. Truthfully, you looked awful. Hair frizzed at your temples, a sheen of oil had gathered on your forehead, and exhaustion was evident in the puffy bags beneath your eyes.

But it was an earned appearance, no matter what Silver wanted you and everyone else to believe. Today you did your best and you interpreted and communicated abnormal findings, you assessed every patient without bias and documented everything you did. There were things you were unsure of, not having performed many skills while being assigned to Kylo, but you always asked for help, even though you realized it would be met with disgruntled aggravation after the first few times.

You had done everything right, understanding the consequences if you didn’t. As far as you were concerned, and even as much doubt as she’s caused you in the singular day you’ve known her, Silver was the problem. Not you.

And, not for nothing, the IV you missed earlier… not entirely your fault.

Kylo Ren picked the wrong day to Force-edge you. Or maybe it was you who really initiated the torture, but he’d been the one to follow through with his threat. Every hour had been memorable.

The first three had luckily occurred when you were away from patients but did earn you a few wary glances from the unit staff, your jaw set firm as you gave them a reassuring nod, hoping they couldn’t see how badly you were shaking as your cunt spasmed toward orgasm, but never got there.

There was something vicious in the rate at which he was forcing you toward the edge. Even though you couldn’t see or hear him, you felt like he was tormenting you with spite in mind rather than pleasure, like something you’d said or thought had angered him.

You didn’t have much time to consider that, though, as the hours went on and you’d begged the stars that the slick slipping from your center wouldn’t go past the hem of your dress. A few times you’d cursed the damned uniform, but quickly turned to cursing Kylo Ren for the ever-so-slightly too high hem. It’d surprised you that he never acted on those silent curses aimed at him, that it hadn’t earn you another hour riding the edge of pleasure while choking down the gasps and moans he’d surely intended to draw from you.

During lunch, you’d found a corner and ate alone, speaking to the wall and scorning Kylo under your breath, spitting empty threats, telling him to stop, to slow down. When that hadn’t worked and the Force picked up in pattern and pressure, nudging your clit just right, your hands had clamped around a plastic fork as you held on for dear life. He was nowhere near you and you’d almost cum four times over the course of your twenty-five-minute break. At that point, you’d considered begging him to let you cum, but part of you knew that would only lengthen his schemes.

Other times during shift, when Silver was rolling her eyes when you’d asked for her help, you’d felt the light, teasing lance of the Force trail along your neck. When you were priming tubing for a new admission, you’d felt the strange, unseen presence caress your ear like Kylo’s tongue might. And one hour, right after the previous had left you wondering if you’d be able to stand the next time you needed to – that hour where you’d traded your curses for pleading, traded the harshness you were spitting for the simple, hushed breaths you needed to outlast the never-ending torrent of pleasure he kept surging through you – the Force was kinder, something sentimental in the way it’d weighted your body like Kylo would, draped itself along your shoulders as sweat dried on your brow and the shaking of your legs settled.

A delicate, “Thank you,” had breathed over your lips when the Force – when Kylo’s teasing – seemed it would let up for the remainder of your shift.

But, of course, that peace had been temporary, a strategy to lapse your guard, to make you vulnerable when you’d most needed a clear mind and a steady hand. It had started with the gentle lulls you’d been left with, a stroking tendril swift over the column of your neck, the tourniquet tight to the patient’s arm as you poked their forearm in search of a vein. And when you informed Silver you’d found one, the Force deftly switched its attention to your pussy.

Silver had been scrutinizing you before, but when your shaking hand and short, shallow breaths appeared as fear instead of the pleasure they were born from, her brow had narrowed that much more. When you’d anchored the vein and aligned the needle – at her all-important fifteen-degree angle – your hand had shifted, jumped as your thighs tightened and you fought to trap a moan in your throat. It was an accident that the needle pierced the patient – and, worse, through the vein – at a greater angle, and it wrought you with emotion. Guilt for hurting the patient, shame for screwing up under Silver’s icy appraisal, and unyielding anger for Kylo Ren for causing your fuck up and not being able to explain that.

So here you were, taking the brunt of criticism and punishment for a mistake you wouldn’t have made had it not been for Kylo Ren, and studying your reflection in the scant light offered from the holo-chart of a patient you hadn’t known existed up until three minutes ago.

“Kylo,” you breathed, reaching for the second badge-scanner, “I can’t look bad here. The Board is watching. Hux is watching.” You glimpsed the radar fastened to your wrist, directing your tired eyes at Kylo’s indicator like he could feel your attention on him. “Give me this last hour and let me be good. Let me do well. Let me prove that I can to everyone who believes otherwise.”

A few seconds passed by as you waited for a reaction. Nothing came. The Force remained absent from you, and your shoulders dropped in relief. With a final glance at the chart, noting the patient’s identifier and checking it against the meal ticket, you swiped your badge and the entrance rushed open.

Darkness met you once more, but this darkness was heavier somehow. Not in the way untouched rooms are usually heavy – not with dust or grime – but a heaviness that clutched at your heart. It pressed into you, taunted you even as you remained a step outside the threshold. It was only shadows, unmoving and unremarkable darkness, but it clawed at you. It writhed at your feet and stirred your heart.

This was the darkness that lived behind each of those younglings’ eyes, but here it was concentrated, like this was the very source of it. Like this was its home.

“Hello?” you croaked, still not daring to pass into the shadow-thick room.

No answer, not even a stir. Nothing but that unyielding darkness.

You cleared your throat. “I, um, I have your dinner.” You took a small step forward. “Sorry for the wait… if there was one.”

More of the same. More of nothing.

A light switch entered your periphery with your next step, and you reached for it, but before you could flip it—

“If I wanted it on, do you think I’d be sitting in here like this?”

The voice was weak, small, but not that of a child. Not even that of an ill person, or an elderly one. It was male, though. Boyish, but not a boy’s. Somehow, the voice was young and old at the same time, as if the boy had lived long years already, and those years had worn him down.

The voice was a singular stream against the dark’s thick, silent wrath, and it was hollow, empty like the shadows before you should be. As the question ended, you found that it wasn’t bitterness or pain that lived in its tone, but rather a broken apathy, like whoever this was had cared and fought for so long but had ultimately lost in the end.

“Not that anyone here is really concerned about what I want,” came the voice again, an edge weighting its words.

Finally, you stepped completely into the room. You had to swallow a gasp when the entrance at your back locked shut. The tray jostled in your arms, but you succeeded at remaining upright.

With a sugary tone, you asked, “How will you eat if you can’t see your food?”

A huffed laugh, tired and bitter. “You should work on that nurse voice. Not very convincing.” A long, deep breath filled a few otherwise silent moments. “Send that tray back. Give it to someone who wants it.”

Without your “nurse voice”, you said, “Why did you order it—”

“—I didn’t. I never do. I’m being kept here, why would I want to sustain myself to make my stay that much longer?”

“Kept?” you whispered.

The longer you stood in place, the more your eyes adjusted. The room was still suffocated by the swamp of darkness, but there was some light after all. Scant, but there, a beam of the setting sun speared the room, and from what you had begun to make out of the body in front of you – a small form curled in the center of a bed – you found he was staring out of the broken blinds from which it came, like he was looking at something. Looking forsomething.

“Kept. Held prisoner. Restrained but not restrained because thatwould make this whole operation illegal, right? Whatever way you want to put it, I’ve made it obvious I don’t want to be here.” A long pause and a sad sigh. “Starvation is a better fate than most here, anyway.”

The more he spoke, the clearer it became that his voice wasn’t hollow, but burning with quiet fury. For what, you weren’t sure, but you realized this was the first patient who had spoken all day. And his tone, his words, only solidified the fact that there was something very, very wrong going on.

You walked closer to him, past the foot of his bed until you saw where the small slant of light was focused, what he continued to brokenly fawn over.

“What are you looking at?” you asked, leaning down so you could match your view with his.

He turned his head from the mostly covered window, the creak of light only possible through a bend in the blinds, and he looked at you, a flash of realization spreading through his features before he reined his expression into a void of dull emotion.

He stared at you as you stared at him, appraising you just the same. He was young, but it appeared as though his youth had been leeched from him. Long dark brunette curls framed his face and teased his shoulders, heavy with oil inherent of unkemptness. An immense sadness lived in the downturned state of his mouth, a contrasting anger set in the crease of his brow. And when you finally found his eyes, you restrained a shiver, as the deep hazel burned with that cleave of sun and struck you with the anvil of pain and desperation that lived in them.

He wasn’t alarmed at your proximity but confused. With a shaky voice, and something of a weak sneer biting at his mouth, he said, “You’re a sick, brutal cunt, you know that?”

“What? What do you—”

“What am I looking at? Do not patronize me!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Are you stupid or just cruel?”

“I’m not either, I—”

“You’re both!”

“I’m temporary! I don’t work here! I’ve been here for one shift! I’ve been on this planet for one day!”

Without missing a beat, but less heated and more restrained, the boy said, “Just stupid then.”

He continued to glare at you, but your eyes wandered back to the break in the blinds, and with narrowed eyes you found something that resembled a racing track. It was far out in the distance, but you knew that was what he had been focused on, sure of it by the way his demeanor shifted when you looked back down at him.

“Help me understand, then, if I am so stupid,” you whispered.

“You aren’t any different from the others, no matter if you’re temporary or not. Whatever that means, anyway.” The boy’s jaw set so firm you swore you heard it crack. “You don’t want to understand. If you did, if anyone cared so much, the Infirmary wouldn’t exist.”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Help me?” the boy barked. He considered you for a moment, sun and shadow warring across the hollows of his cheeks as he did. Those pained eyes narrowed a fraction. “Who are you? What does temporary mean?”

You leaned away from him, straightening your posture and setting his tray on a counter off to the side. You offered your name, just the first, and dragged an absent-minded finger over the embroidery of your uniform. “Temporary means…”

Perhaps it was his already non-existent trust in you, but you did not think that informing him of the real reason you were here – telling him that your license and life were on the line and you were here so the Board of Physicians would have ease in their decision to end your life or not – would do much to foster his confidence in you, you took a second to frame it in a way that would appeal to him.

Clearing your throat, you kept his stare and said, “Temporary means that I’m here for less than two weeks, and I have no loyalties to any staff here. Temporary means that I do care so much, and I do want to help because temporary also means that I’ve seen some weird shit today, and I don’t understand it.” The boy’s brows raised for a fragmented second, but you knew you’d gained at least a small portion of his respect, so you continued.

With a lowered voice and an unbreakable stare, you said, “Temporary means that I am on your side, and if you let me, if you help me to understand what is going on, I will help you as best as I can.”

The boy shifted, ringing a hand around his opposite wrist, toying with the identification band secured there. He never stopped looking into your eyes, and you knew he was searching for deceit, but the longer he stared, the more he came up short.

You offered him your hand, observing how he flinched away from it, but keeping it extended as he considered it for another few moments.

“I told you who I am. Will you tell me who you are?”

It seemed like the darkness that surrounded you was watching with bated breath, watching in awe as the boy’s gaze remained on your extended hand.

He swallowed, and ever so slowly, with a hesitation that struck through your heart, he lifted his hand and clasped it around yours. The light from the broken blinds coiled around your matched hands, and for the first time today, you felt hopeful. And no matter how dim and breathless it was, a flicker of that same hopefulness played through his eyes.

“I…” the boy hesitated, so you squeezed his hand and offered a reassuring nod. His shoulders relaxed with his next breath. “I am Quynnland. With a ‘Y’.”

“Quynnland,” you parroted, trying it out and letting his hand go. “Do you have any nicknames? Like Quynn? Quynnie?”

“No one calls me Quynnie!” he roared. “Nobody calls me that except…” Quynnland shifted in bed, away from you, turning his face back toward that racing track. His bottom lip quivered, and he appeared as if you’d just lashed him with molten plasma.

“Quynnland,” you soothed, “nobody calls you that except who?”

He remained quiet, but he shuddered, and you saw the light glint off a stream that found its way down the slate of his cheek.

“I want to understand. I want to help you.” You swallowed against your throat, which had become markedly thicker since you last spoke. “Please, help me help you.”

Quynnland’s chin rose, his eyes fell shut, and he balled his hands into tight fists. He wasn’t angry, but in pain, and you knew from the sight of how broken he was that he’d been in pain for a long time now. Perhaps, it seemed, he had never known a day without it.

Just when you were about to speak, Quynnland coughed against a sob and whispered, “They won’t let me see him. He’s there on his own. He’s never been alone for this long.” A tight breath whipped into his chest. “They’re keeping me here so I age out. They’re keeping me away from him.”

“Who is he? What are you aging out of?” The more he offered, the more questions you thought of.

“I almost got us out this time,” he whispered. “I almost saved us both, but they caught me and dragged me away from him. He’s young, but that never stopped them before.” A wheeze of pain slipped from Quynnland’s lips. “They probably broke him just enough so he could still work.”

You didn’t know what to say to that, so you kept quiet.

After what seemed like an eternity, Quynnland spoke again. “My brother. That’s who gets to call me ‘Quynnie’. That’s who I tried to save, and that’s who is suffering because I failed.” He pushed an aggravated sound from his lungs. “The only way you can help me, is if you help him.”

“How do I do that?” you asked, watching as his fists relaxed at his sides.

Quynnland opened his eyes and bore the full weight of their pain into yours. He took a long breath and squared his jaw. “You get him away from the wardens, and then you get him out.”

“Where is he?” you asked, needing to know what that racing track he kept glancing toward was.

He went to answer, but a rush of motion sounded beyond his door, and just as quickly, the entrance to his room shot open. Quynnland ducked his head and balled his fists, and you turned to see that it was Silver who stood in his doorway. She wore an unfamiliar face, one of shock and terror, and you went to speak, but her hand whipped out and signaled that you would notbe saying a word until you left this room.

She stared at Quynnland a moment longer, surveying him like she’d never seen him before. “Eat your dinner. I won’t have you starving to death under my license, not now that this will be your last stay here.” Silver more so talked at him rather than directly to him, and her tone was hard and full of disgust.

It gave you another reason to hate her.

You wanted to reach out and take Quynnland’s hand, but Silver snapped at you before you could. “You,” she sneered. “Out. Now.”

The ice behind her eyes had seeped to her tongue, and her words froze the very blood in your veins. She watched you as you stepped around her and into the antechamber, and you glanced the final withering, aghast glare she shot at Quynnland as you did.

When you reached toward the door that opened to the hall, Silver caught your wrist just before your badge met it. She was eerily silent for a moment, and you swore she was practically shaking with rage, but then she settled herself and stared down at you with such concentrated antagonization that it knocked the breath right from your lungs.

“What made you think you could go into this room? I never went near this room with you today. Why would you be allowed to enter it alone?” She was seething, but she hid it behind something of a gnarled smile.

“There was a tray just sitting outside, unattended to. I figured I would find something to do and deliver it to the patient. No harm done.”

She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes on you. “Are you aware what this patient is here for?” she asked sweetly, but it came off as clear condescension.

Silver waited for you to answer, but you wouldn’t give her the satisfaction she wanted from humiliating you again. So you remained silent, and she sneered at you. “Exactly what I thought. So why would you interact with a patient you know nothing about? And did the double security not tip you off that you were somewhere you shouldn’t be?”

“Look, Silver,” you huffed, enjoying the disgust that smeared across her features as you said her name, “I saw a tray. I had nothing better to do. My badge had access to the room. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

She cast you an undying glare, and her eye twitched when she gave you a once-over. “This patient willfully tried to kill himself and his brother last week. Did he tell you that?”

Your heart blackened, and your ears rang with silence as she let her words sink in.

Silver was pleased with your shocked silence. She went on. “Oh, and did he tell you just how many times he’s tried to do this exact thing in the past?” You remained wordless, feeling betrayed for reasons you couldn’t understand. “No? Not even a guess? Well, he’s a unit regular, if that gives any indication.”

She waited again and was once more elated to be met with silence. “It’s the same story every time. The wardens say he takes his kid brother to the shore and plans on swimming out to the Falls and either drowning to death or dying from impact.”

You swallowed in vain, mouth drier than sand. A part of your knew you didn’t want the answer, but you still asked, “How old… how old is his brother?”

A sick, deathly smile creaked across her perfect face. “Of course, we don’t know exactly, but previous scans estimate that he’s no older than seven.”

Seven. A child. Quynnland had tried to kill his brother… had tried to kill himself and his kid brother…

“Next time, don’t poke around business you don’t understand,” Silver cut your panic short, her frigid tone icing your skin with gooseflesh. “Your shift is up.”

She shoved your shoulder on her way past, but before she could activate the door the room filled with bright red light, and a shrill alarm screamed through the ruby darkness.

It was your watch.

Endless, screeching notes sounded from your wrist. Your stomach dropped, and you couldn’t think for a moment, completely thrown back to that last hour on Starkiller Base.

Kylo was in trouble. Kylo was hurt. Kylo needed you and you weren’t there.

When you lifted your arm as your heart sank through the floor and you read the continuous scrawling message, your feet pounded the ground and carried you away from the unit to wherever he was, wherever your radar was guiding you.

All you could think of was him lying under you, his blood slipping along your skin, and his still, comatose body. And as you made your way to him, not seeing the world around you, hardly aware of CB-7070’s footfalls booming behind you, you kept rereading the message that raced along your watch’s screen, and as you turned corner after corner and fled down hundreds of steps and staircases, the simple, abbreviated message taunted you with the past.

ASSISTANCE REQUIRED ASSISTANCE REQUIRED ASSISTANCE REQUIRED

As it scrawled endlessly across the small screen, all you could think of was how this felt too familiar to the day Starkiller exploded. And the only thought that remained, the only one out of the thousand that flooded back from that day, was that you would fight for the future you’d realized you wanted then.

Only now did you admit the full truth of that thought: the only future you wanted was one where you could be with Kylo. The only future worth having, you realized, was the one where you would spend it with him.

So you ran toward your future. Just as you had run that day not so long ago, you ran toward Kylo Ren.