#not actually depressed i just keep comparing the engagement of the first version to this one

[streetkid-named-desire]

The relief and pride of posting a chapter and immediately checking your email first thing in the morning hoping to see AO3 notifs to depression pipeline

[atths--twice]

Soulmates

Soulmate: a person to whom you feel an immediate connection. A connection so strong and powerful, you are drawn to them in a way you will never experience again. They are your perfect other, the missing half of you, and no love will ever compare. No matter the distance, soulmates will find their way back where they belong. ________________________________________

The long believed alien invasion of 2012 never occurred. Since that fated night, Mulder has searched for answers to questions, but has come up empty handed. Scully has been standing by watching brokenheartedly, as his obsession has begun to tear them apart.

A heart can only stretch so far before it shatters and the pieces left behind must be put back together. Sometimes a shattered heart (or two) needs extra care, love, time, and help.

Sometimes it needs guidance from someone who understands grief and pain. Someone who will not give up or back down. Someone who will see a broken heart and not declare it unfixable, but grab the tape, glue, or whatever it takes, to fix it and make it whole again.

________________________________________________________

Okay.... I have posted about this before, but as I’m a bit, just a small bit mind you, more savvy with Tumblr, I am going to post it again. Before I only posted the link to AO3 and not chapter by chapter, as I had no idea how to do that at all. I have figured it out and all I can say is... get ready...

I have recently had the pleasure of meeting two incredibly wonderful and supportive fellow Philes, @prichan7​ and @scullybuck​, and their encouragement and love for this story has filled me with such a sense of pride and happiness, I am so thankful to have met them. Ladies... your kindness means so much to me, you truly don’t know.

I am going to post the first three chapters today and then one, or sometimes a couple, the next day.. and so on.

This is my baby and the one I am the most proud of... I hope you like it.

Chapter One 

The Origin of Maggie Scully

Maggie had been a romantic all her life. When she was younger, around 10, she began to read from the “grown up” section of the library, the young adults area. She was always an advanced reader and devoured books. She discovered Anne, the orphan girl adopted by a brother and sister. She learned new, big descriptive words reading about Anne.

Maggie fell in love with Gilbert, a sweet, romantic, caring boy who was “fathoms deep” in love with Anne upon first meeting. She yearned, despaired, and was elated when Anne and Gilbert were finally joined together in marriage. She read of Anne and Gilbert’s children. Of Rilla, their youngest who was in love with a family friend. He went off to war and her heart was broken. She cried and mourned along with all her beloved characters. When she finished the books, she began again. She became obsessed with the love the characters had for one another.

The words she read were poetry to her young soul. She needed more. The librarian observed how often Maggie was borrowing the same books. On one of her trips to the library, when she was 12, the librarian, a “kindred spirit,” showed Maggie to the literature section. She suggested a few new books she may find interesting and Maggie’s eyes lit up. She borrowed Emm a and Sense and Sensibility.

Oh … being lost in the stories of yearning love, hardships, misunderstandings, broken engagements, and true love realized, made her heart soar. She wished that she could live in her books, to know these characters, to attend balls and dance through the night.

She felt a thrill when she discovered the word ‘soulmate.’ A soulmate. It was a word she fell in love with immediately. She rolled it around and around in her mind. To think that there was someone out there destined for her, her other half, made her stomach do flip flops. She read when true soulmates had found each other, there was an unspoken understanding between them. They would feel unified to have finally found the one they had, wittingly or not, been searching for. They would be together in unity and no other happiness or joy could ever compare. Oh, how those words and thoughts had thrilled her, down to her very soul.

Reality came calling, however, no matter how a person may romanticize the world around her. Her father felt reading, especially books far beyond her age, was a waste of time. He found it “foolish for a girl to be doing, especially the books she was reading. Stories about love and romance filing her head full of frivolous unattainable things. A handsome man racing up on a horse to save her, or dying for one's true love.

Try as she might, there was no reasoning with her father. Her mother was a meek woman and she complied with her husband. Maggie’s trips to the library became obsolete. She was told to focus her attention on other things.

Her parents were devout Catholics and her time for confirmation was approaching. She was to attend the classes and study what her faith would prepare her for in her future- a life devoted to her faith, husband, and a family.

Although she obeyed, she felt that a part of her was gone without the chance to read her books and become lost in their stories. But after her confirmation, she began going to parties and meeting people. New girlfriends to gossip with, share lipsticks (of which none of them were allowed to even possess), even try out smoking, and laugh about which boys they would like to kiss.

She loved the thrill she felt being in a group of boys and girls, seeing if she might feel a spark with of them. She had not given up that she had a soulmate out there somewhere looking for her. There were boys she felt an attraction to, but it was not the same as that deep desire for a soulmate.

Then when Maggie was 20, her mother passed away. She was left with an empty hole in her life. Her father took her mother’s death extremely hard. He began to drink heavily. He was moody and depressed. But at times he was kind and emotional. During those times, he spoke of his love for his wife. How beautiful she had been, how she could light the room with her smile, how much he missed her, how lost he was without her, how he loved her from the moment he saw her, how he wished he told her more.

Maggie sat in shock. Of course she knew her parents loved each other, she was not stupid. But this ... especially from her father, left her speechless. He was tough, quiet, closed off. She had no idea he was capable of feeling that way. How naive she was, how childish in her thinking.

She was an adult, but she was still much like a child, believing love was something a person longs for, pines after, or has to suffer a huge loss to find. She saw and learned of true love, of actual soulmates that day. Not the silly little girl version she had imagined with music sounding and “happily ever after.” This was a love that ran deep and true and real.

She was emboldened by this revelation. She made a firm decision. She would not let her father drink the rest of his life away. Her mother’s memory did not deserve that disrespect. His love for her needed to be stronger than the ease at which he grabbed the bottle for comfort.

It was not an easy task, but she got him to quit. She learned things about herself during this time. Patience, understanding, and extreme empathy. Her grief was raw, but her father’s was devastating. Spending time with each other, expressing their grief, had brought them closer together. She always felt a disconnect from him, as though he did not care for her as her mother had. As they learned from each other, her heart warmed with the discovery that his love was simply quiet. He was proud of her, loved her, and wanted the very best for her. He did not say it with words too often, but his eyes and his smile told her every day.

When Maggie met Bill, she knew right away he was a good man. He was somewhat like her father-quiet, serious, stoic. Under his outward presentation, though, he was sweet, funny, romantic. He was rational and cool headed. He would be a good husband, provider, father.

She loved him, immensely, but it was not until she had Bill Jr. that she realized how much she needed and relied on him.

She was sick throughout her pregnancy, never truly gaining much weight. She could not get the baby to feed very well once they were home. She was not sleeping, had not showered, the house was a mess, and she could not stop crying. She felt like a failure as a wife and a mother.

One day, a knock sounded at the front door. Bill Jr. had just spit up all over her last clean shirt and also managed to soil his last clean diaper. Maggie felt like lying down and giving up. She did not care about the person at the door, she just wanted to sleep, cry, or scream. Maybe even all three.

The knock sounded again and a muffled voice called out, “Mrs. Scully? My name is Evelyn McCreary. Your husband works with my husband. He asked if I could look in on you. He wanted to be sure that you were okay and didn’t want you to be alone.”

Maggie began to cry. From exhaustion, embarrassment, but mostly from the caring her husband showed by asking for help for her. She would never have asked on her own. She was a navy wife now and needed to keep that stiff upper lip. As she cried, she caught a whiff of both herself and the baby. It was not a good combination.

Her pride worn down, she walked to the door. She did not look at her reflection in the mirror by the door. She knew she looked like death warmed over. If this woman was truly here to help, she was going to see how big her job would be.

Opening the door, she found not a young woman, but an older one. White hair set in a fetching style, clothes and makeup perfect. She even had a pair of gloves in one hand and her purse in the other. This woman? She was going to help?

Maggie almost closed the door in her face. Close the door before she ruined the clothes of this poor well meaning woman. She had probably thought that Maggie was simply bored and was looking for someone to gossip with and drink some tea, maybe something stronger. Well, Maggie thought, that sure ain’t the case. She stared at this immaculately dressed stranger with a look of defiance.  

The eyes looking back at her were soft and understanding. She took in Maggie’s spit up covered shirt and could smell the baby’s soiled diaper. She smiled kindly at Maggie and put her gloves in her purse with a snap as it closed.

“Well,” she said with a square set to her shoulders. “It looks like we have our work cut out for us. How about you invite me in and we can get started?”

Maggie was completely floored. She expected this woman to be aghast and walk away. When she did neither, she could not do anything but allow her in the house. Evelyn set her purse down on the crowded dining room table and turned to Maggie.

“First things first,” she said with determination in her voice. “You need to get cleaned up and I will take care of this adorable baby.”

“No,” Maggie said with more force than she actually felt. “First things first. You tell me who you are and why exactly you are here.” Evelyn smiled at her, just as kindly as before, and clasped her hands together.

“My husband and your husband have become friends. They have recently worked together and have taken a liking to one another. Your husband mentioned that you had recently had a child. My husband, Philip, had asked how you were doing. Bill was honest with him and said it had been hard. My Philip told me, and I knew I had to come right over. You see, Mrs. Scully,” she said with a brief pause as she took a breath. “I know how hard it can be. How you can feel ... alone and no one understands. I have had six children and I was unprepared for each one of them.” Maggie balked at her. Six children? God. That sounded exhausting.

“My husband and I married young,” she continued. “My mother had passed when I was a girl and I never learned about ... well many aspects of marriage.” She laughed and her cheeks flushed. “When I discovered I was with child, I was terrified. I had no idea what I would do.” She smiled at Maggie kindly and reached out to touch the baby’s foot.

“My husband was wonderful to me the entire time. He was tickled that we would be having a baby. He boasted to everyone how happy he was to be a father. How he loved that I would be giving him that honor. But then the babies came ...” she became quiet for a second, lost in her memories. Maggie shifted uncomfortably, aware once again how terrible she smelled.

Evelyn gave a little shake of her head and then smiled at Maggie. “Mrs. Scully,” she said kindly. “I would love to tell you my story when you have had a chance to clean up a little. I can imagine you don’t feel so wonderful at this moment.”

Maggie’s eyes filled with tears at the kindness in her voice. “I can’t get cleaned up,” Maggie said with a sob. “There is so much laundry to be done, and I don’t have any more clean shirts.”

Evelyn reached for the baby, and this time Maggie let her take him. She brought her hands to her face as her tears began to fall faster. Evelyn tucked Bill Jr. into her side and drew Maggie to her with an arm around her shoulder.

“My dear,” Evelyn said softly. “Please lead me to the bedroom and we will get you sorted out.”

Maggie tearfully led Evelyn toward the bedroom. She set the baby down in the bassinet that sat in the room. Evelyn walked into the bathroom and started the shower. When it was a comfortable temperature, she turned to Maggie and told her to take her time and get cleaned up. Maggie sobbed and began to unbutton her shirt. Evelyn walked out and closed the door behind her.

Maggie left all her clothes in a disgusting heap on the floor and stepped into the warm steamy shower. She let the water wash over her and cleanse her body and soul. She was so bone tired and this shower was the best experience she had in days. She stayed under the spray and felt her muscles relax. She cried and cried. Let all her anxiety out in that shower. Felt it wash away down the drain.

She washed her hair and body twice, exhilarated by the feeling of being clean. Erasing the stench of milky baby vomit and soiled diapers. She stayed in the warm cocoon until the water began to cool. Finally she had to turn the water off and return to real life.

A towel had been placed out for her and her disgusting clothes were gone. She had not even noticed Evelyn return to the bathroom. She grabbed the towel and wrapped herself in the fluffiness. God, she felt like a new person. She dried her hair with an extra towel until it was just slightly damp.

Maggie walked into her bedroom and found that Evelyn had put some clothes on the bed for her. A button down shirt of Bill’s was laid out beside a pair of pajama pants. She slipped them on, no underwear available to be worn. She did not care and she doubted Evelyn would either.

Once she was dressed, she walked out to find Evelyn in the dining room. She had cleaned up the clutter on the table and changed the baby. He was laying in the bassinet that she had moved from the bedroom.

She looked up and smiled as Maggie came in the room. She walked toward her and put her arm around her shoulder, leading her to the table. Maggie sat and Evelyn disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with a two cups of tea and set them down.

“Do you take cream and sugar?” Evelyn asked kindly. Maggie shook her head. “I was able to find one last diaper for the baby, but he will be needing more. I placed a call to a friend of mine and she will be dropping off some items for you as soon as she can,” Evelyn said as she sat and drank her tea. “I have also started washing some clothes in your washing machine. Such a wonderful invention. Things took longer in my day. Once those clothes are done, I will hang them for you and start more clothes.”

Maggie was silently crying, looking down at her teacup. She was overwhelmed by everything, but especially by the kindness this woman was showing her. She did not know her, but she was here and she was helping. She had already done so much in the short amount of time she had been here.

She lifted her eyes to Evelyn. She could not talk around the lump in her throat. She shook her head, trying to fight back her tears. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak.

“Before you say anything,” Evelyn said softly, setting down her cup and taking Maggie’s hand. “Let me tell you my story. Drink your tea and just listen.”

Maggie took another deep shuddering breath and nodded. She did not know what she was going to say anyway. That she was fine? She clearly was not. She did not need any help? It was obvious that she did. She just needed to say something. Instead she took a sip of tea and waited for Evelyn to speak.

Evelyn placed her hands on the table and folded them together. She told Maggie of her hardships with her babies. How she had been wholly unprepared for caring for them. She did not know anything about children and she felt like a failure every day. She cried more in that time than any other time in her life. When the babies cried, when they spit up, when dinner was burnt, when her husband’s shirts were not ironed, or worse, when they too were burnt.

But through it all, her husband had been there for her. He was always encouraging, always positive. He ate the burnt dinner, smiling through every bite. He hid his scorched shirts beneath jackets, kissing her goodbye and thanking her for seeing that he looked respectable and loved. He was her champion, her cheering squad and she loved him immensely for it.

They moved to a new base when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Two of the children were in school during the day at that time, so she was home with only the youngest child. She was thankful for that because the fourth pregnancy had been her worst. She was sick almost throughout. She could barely eat, she was not sleeping and the housework began to suffer.

There were not scorched shirts anymore, there were simply none ready at all. Dinners were late as they had to wait for her husband to cook them and he worked late shifts. She would cry as she sat holding the youngest one and her husband served the older children soup and toast, grilled cheese, eggs. Whatever was on hand and easy to make. He would make them laugh with silly voices and songs he made up. Then they would help him clean up and head to bed.

He would come to her and wipe her tears. Tell her he loved her, she was the only person he would ever love in this lifetime and the next. He would take the little one and bathe her, put her to bed, and come find Evelyn still on the sofa, crying. He would take her to their room, help her get her night clothes on, and brush her hair. He would sing to her as he did, telling her how beautiful she was. How her hair was like spun gold and it shined brighter than the sun. He would hold her as she cried when they went to bed.

It had been two weeks and this had become their routine, until she heard a knock at the door. She opened it to find a dark skinned woman with the biggest smile she had ever seen. She told Evelyn that her husband had run into her, literally, and helped her pick up the items she spilled.

He struck up a conversation with her and found she was looking for work, but no one wanted to hire her. He said that was ridiculous and he hired her on the spot. Said he needed someone to help his wife because he loved her so much and seeing her breaking down the way she was, was breaking his heart. He cried for his wife, cried for her suffering, and asked, begged, for her help.

Her name was Tanzie and she was a godsend. She helped with anything and everything. She washed, cleaned, cooked, ironed, and cared for the children. But most important, she became the friend that Evelyn needed. She cared for her. Cooking bland foods that she could hold down, offered up advice her mama had for pregnancy, remedies that were a wonder for Evelyn.

Tanzie helped her get back to herself and her family. She was the best friend Evelyn ever had. They shared secrets, dreams, and their lives.

“Mrs. Scully, without the love of my husband, and the care of others, I would have crumbled. I would have given up. I am a lot older than Tanzie was when she showed up that day, but I would like to be here to help you as she did for me.” Evelyn said kindly, looking into Maggie’s eyes.

Maggie sat in rapt attention, tears running down her face, through the whole story. Listening to Evelyn’s story of love filled Maggie with hope, with happiness and such immense love. She read of soulmates, saw it through her father’s eyes, knew she found it in Bill, but Evelyn’s story ... it was pure love and devotion.

And now Evelyn sat there, in a dirty house, with clutter and laundry piling up, offering her help because Philip heard about her need from Bill. A loving heart reached out to another loving heart. As a result, without hesitation, Evelyn came to help Maggie. To offer what she could, however she could.

Through her tears, Maggie smiled and nodded. “Please, call me Maggie,” she said as she grasped Evelyn’s hand, reaching out for the lifeline that had been sent to her.

I had posted all of this story here, chapter by chapter, but now… I’m not sure how to find it. So, I am posting the link to it on AO3. Happy reading… with perhaps some tears along the way. 💕

[mumblino]

My self discovery journey

Heyo!

This is not what most of my posts are gonna be like, but I felt like it was important to talk about, and pride month is a perfect time to tell my (summarized) self discover journey~

My name is Brandon, although I don’t care if you call me Mumble. My pronouns change a lot since i don’t really know myself that well, but currently, they are He/Him, They/Them and It/Its. There are also days where I don’t really identify with any 3rd person pronouns, I’m just me, and that’s what I mean when I say No Pronouns.

I have Depression, Anxiety and Combination Type- ADHD, which is why i am on the internet a lot.

This is a very long post, so buckle up

//TW: Transphobia, Enbyphobia, Homophobia, Anxiety, Depression, ADHD,  Disordered Eating, Racism (not a huge part, but there are mentions of it), Self Harm, Mentions of a Psych Ward, Medication

I am a trans-masc, afab teenager. I am a romance-neutral aromantic (my interpretation of that is that I don’t mind romance, but I don’t actively want one or seek one out), and a sex-repulsed asexual (I am completely repulsed by the idea of engaging in sexual intercourse with anyone). and I am currently out to my friends, my mother, and my step-father, and am in the beginning-middle of my transition.

 I started questioning my gender identity when I was in early 7th grade, after my friend Saturn (pronouns are They/It/Bun) first came out to me as Non-Binary, and asked me to use They/Them pronouns.

I’ve never really actively considered myself straight. I’ve always seen love as between two people, and while I usually thought of a man and a woman, I have always been open to same sex couples. My best friend in 2nd grade actually introduced me to the LGBTQ+ community (not directly, but she did talk about those types of things quite a bit), and while I don’t want to assume her sexuality, I am fairly certain she experienced attraction to both boys and girls.

Before this, the only thing I really knew about trans people was that they existed, and I didn’t really care that much. However, my brother and my father had the idea that most LGBTQ+ people are “snowflakes” and since I didn’t know anything else, I believed them.

However, I wanted to learn more about Trans people, and how to be respectful and supportive of them. I did, at the time, consider myself to be LGBTQ+. In both 5th and 6th grade I thought I was either a lesbian or bisexual, since I didn’t know the difference between aesthetic attraction and sexual attraction, and well, people are pretty!

I also had this need to be very masculine, and I always have. I’ve always wanted to be a tom-boy, to be the masculine one in the group, be the Buttercup of my friends! And during th grade, as I started to learn more about LGBTQ+ people, I wanted to be the top. I wanted to be the stereotypical lesbian. The one with the androgynous style, chill attitude, and the one that scares the shit out of guys.

I’ve even said to myself (not knowing that being trans was a thing) that I want to be a boy. I’ve always identified more with the guys at my school. Not in a pick me girl way, but in a “I relate to you a lot, and I feel like I fit in with you” way.

 And to some extent, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is because of how often feminine guys are made fun of. I would not be surprised one bit if this is because femininity has always been demonized to me, especially if a guy is being feminine.

Anyways, through this dive into the Alphabet Mafia, I found out about asexuality. It really resonated with me, because I always found sexual things gross, but that also confused me. If I was asexual, why did I want to be masculine so badly? Why wasn’t I like the other girls? I’ve always felt like an outcast around most people, but especially girls. I never related to them. I always related to more masculine people, and boys especially.

After this, I decided to start looking into trans culture, and FTM culture especially. Through this I found Kalvin Garrah. I know now that he is very much a toxic influence on the Trans community, but he taught me a lot about trans culture. I also found Sam Collins and Jammidoger through him, who also taught me a lot (and are much more positive influences.) These FTM youtubers taught me a lot, and I started to realize, that I might be trans.

Because of this, I decided to ask Saturn if they could refer to me by They/Them pronouns. I went with They/Them because I didn’t feel like I passed well enough to use them. My hair was still long, I wasn’t out to my family, I still acted feminine sometimes, etc.

I would also like to make note of the fact that at the time, I was not very accepting of most gender identities outside of the “binary” and didn’t consider it a spectrum. I had a very close minded and rigid view of gender, and this is mostly due to family influences. This view is why I didn’t want to use He/Him pronouns, because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I have since grown out of that viewpoint, reflected, and tried to do better when trying to understand other people’s identities.

This stress of my identity crisis, untreated mental conditions, toxic friends, and general struggle with school caused me to develop disordered eating habits. I have never been diagnosed with an eating disorder, however I’ve struggled with disordered eating for a long time. During 7th grade, I started to struggle with binge eating. The moment I would get home, I would immediately start a binge. It was uncontrollable, I felt horrible, and eventually, my mom had started to notice that I was eating an unhealthy amount.

A few months after this, I started to see a therapist, and at the end of my first session with her, I came out to my mom. I could not be more thankful for how supportive of me she is. She has only shown love, and care for me, and the only time she’d no to a step in my transition, is out of a genuine concern for my physical and mental health. She is also religious, but she loves me for the way that I am, and has a very loving and positive viewpoint when it comes to that.

I didn’t do much for my transition at the time (other than switching my pronouns to He/They at some point) and focused more on school, depression, and my romantic orientation.

This was a part that really confused me. I’ve never had a crush (except for one that came from peer-pressure) and I’ve never had an interest in romance. (Keep in mind I had no idea what ‘Aromantic’ was) So what was I? For the time being I decided to consider myself either bi-romantic or hetero-romantic, because like I said, people are pretty, and I tended to notice pretty girls more than pretty boys. 

There was also another hurdle. My (now ex) group of toxic friends. These friends weren’t toxic in the way that they wouldn’t include me, they were toxic in the way that they would talk shit about any minority group, a lot of which i was a part of. They were racist (I am not a poc but it still made me upset and uncomfortable) ableist (they threw the r-slur around a lot) homophobic (this was the biggest one, mainly making fun of them, callng them ‘pixies’ and would say they would ‘burn them’) and transphobic/enbyphobic (they didn’t consider they/them pronouns valid, they threw around the ‘attack helicopter’ joke, and they would dehumanize trans people, and call them ‘transvestites’)

Over the summer, I still spoke to them, and tried to ignore all of their behavior, because if I had cut them off, I would be completely alone. I have an extremely intense fear of abandonment, so the idea of doing that was comparable to death.

Through the first half of 8th grade (I was doing school from home) I didn’t talk to many people other than them. I stayed in my room a lot, and the first half of 8th grade was a steady decline in my mental health. My depression and anxiety had significantly worsened over that time, and I was extremely lonely. This was also worsened by the fact that I have ADHD, and at the time, it was undiagnosed, so I was failing almost all of my classes. 

The only way I was able to comfort myself was through my hyperfixations, and over the summer, I had a developed a hyperfixation on the Origins MCRP group. Because I had nothing else to do, I decided to pick up drawing again, and in October, I did an Origins version of Inktober. Every day, I would draw a different character from their series Fairy Tail Origins. I did not complete the challenge, however I did get through the first week, and I am proud of myself for that.

One one of the days, I had to draw a character named Brandon (partial inspiration for my name lel.) Brandon is a sky devil-slayer, and a co-guild leader of a guild named Divinus Magia. and I decided to draw him in a picture that symbolically showed his mental struggles with a devil named Jupiter. I posted it to the fan discord, and the actor and creator of the character (online username is ReinBloo) noticed my artwork. I was extremely excited about this, and decided to start drawing more and more. 

Because of this newfound motivation to pick up drawing again, I decided to create my own persona. I decided to make my main persona a revised design of my profile picture at the time. It was an improvised character, but I liked the aspects of it, and in late 2020, (yes i am 14 shut up) I created my main Oc, Jupiter. (at the time he didn’t have a name and I landed on Jupiter because I like it, and it fit him.) Jupiter is a space inspired demon, with dark grey skin, white star-like freckles, pure white eyes, white hair (that is slightly purple) and light gray ram-like horns with gray stripes on the base and tip. His color palette is that of the Asexual flag, and this was originally unintentional, but since I like the colors, and my Asexuality is an important part of my identity, I went with it.

I fell in love with this character, and he helped me figure out a lot about myself. I continued to watch origins, and draw for them (mainly ReinBloo’s characters lel) and on January 27th of 2021, in the premier chat of one of the episodes of My Hero Origins, I met MissyLea (She also goes by Lea, and Vesper). We instantly became friends, and moved over to discord to continue our conversation. By February 10th, we were already planning on being platonic valentines. We related on so many things, she was so kind, and loving, and understanding, and very quickly, I grew a strong emotional bond with her.

By the end of February, I developed an emotional attraction to her. I wanted to be with her forever, and while I personally wouldn’t consider it romantic right now, at the time, I did. After a few months of identifying as Aromantic (I had learned about it by now, through the Asexual community) I decided to change that label to Demi-Panromantic. I realized that I didn’t really see her gender, I didn’t care. I love her, and that’s all that matters to me. Now, I feel as though it was more of an emotional and somewhat sensual love for her, but even so, I love her to the edge of the universe and back, no matter what our relationship is.

I have told her things I’ve told no one else. When I was struggling, she was there for me, with kind words, and an endless amount of unconditional love. She is the type of person everyone deserves to have in their life, whether they are a friend, a family member, a partner, or anything else, everyone deserves to have a friend with the amount of love in their heart that she has.

On March 19th, I decided to tell her how I felt. When she said she felt the same way about me, I was happier than ever. To have someone who feels the same way about me as I do about them is amazing. We started dating later that day.

It’s only been 3 months, but I feel like I’ve known her for 3 years. Vesper has made me feel complete when I’m around them, but they’ve made it so much easier to stand on my own as well. 

Near the end of my 8th grade year, I officially cut them off, and came out to them (albeit in a very aggressive way) and I wouldn’t have been able to do this without Vesper’s support. Just one person has made it so much easier to cut off toxic people.

Vesper’s support also made it easier for me to be more open with my therapist. I began to tell her more of what I was struggling with, and it has made my mental health journey so much more bearable.

Over these past two months, I have finally gotten a diagnosis, and been able to truly know what direction to go in to properly treat my mental health.

I hope that by sharing my story you can better know me, and I also hope I can help create a safer environment for others to talk about their stories.

I hope one day people will be able to be themselves, and talk about their experiences, without the fear of judgement, or persecution, and if just this one post helps us get closer to that, I will be happy.

Happy Pride Month everybody! You are all amazing, loved and valid! 🌈💖

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

If you have sent me an Ask in the last thirty-six hours or so, This post is for you.

I was almost entirely done with answering all your beloved messages, when Tumblr decided to crash. Lost all the paragraphs of my rambling (which is why I’m no longer taking chances and am typing this on Google Docs) and even worse, the Asks seem to have been eaten by Tumblr’s great void. They’re gone, and nothing I’ve tried seems to work to get them back. Thankfully, I’m fresh off of responding, so I’ll try to summarize with one big epic post. Apologies for the inconvenience and unusual style, blame the Tumblr Overlords. 

WARNING: If you don’t read the data-mines and don’t want spoilers, do not go beyond this point. This mainly concerns The Quidditch Cup. 

There were a couple of Asks about Ismelda, someone talked about the head-canon that she’s secretly blonde and dyes her hair. Which I agree with, and really like. It would tie in to how Ismelda saw Penny as being no different from her sister. It would be a sign of her trying to spite her parents and distance herself from her family, to the point of even looking like them. I also think it would echo with Beatrice and how she changed her look to reinvent herself and be less of a “Mini Penny.” Another message was talking about her parents, wondering why they would ever visit her at Hogwarts given how they were portrayed. After all, they’re not about to be the next Ethan Parkin, are they? Not going to turn around and be well-meaning, but oblivious. I think it’s far more likely that they would visit her sister at Hogwarts, and it would be pure chance that Ismelda was there at the same time - if there was indeed any overlap where both sisters were at school. But that’s the real question of the hour - just what is the sister like? After all, it’s not her fault that she’s the favorite, right? Newt Scamander was estranged from his brother, who was engaged to his ex-girlfriend. From that description alone, we might think he was awful, but he wasn’t. Theseus was genuinely caring, he just didn’t know how to connect with Newt. We might have a similar situation on our hands here. Or, who knows, the sister might be the “Dudley” to Ismelda’s “Harry.” She was compared to both Emily and Penny, if memory serves. But until such a time that we meet her, we have no way of knowing who she’s really more like. Psst, Jam City, you getting this down? This would be a great TLSQ, to have Ismelda come face to face with her sister. Could perhaps end with, oh I dunno, befriending her? Just a thought…

I saw another Ask talking about how Beatrice would go back and forth between MC and Jae during their detention and how adorable it was to see her all flustered and excited, how it looked like she was gushing to MC “He’s so dreamy” and things of the like. It’s making me wish they would come back to this sub-plot because it’s funny as hell and a good way, again, to tie in Ismelda. She also fancied someone she had no chance with, she was also jealous of another person. (Chiara might not actually have a thing with Jae, but if memory serves, Beatrice is shown to be jealous of them talking anyway.) 

There was an Ask that talked about punching Barnaby’s father in the face. Or at least, the idea of doing so. But regrettably, he is in Azkaban and it cannot be done. Well, maybe not by MC, but someone who was already there could do it. New head-canon, Sirius decked him on his way out. It happened, I don’t make the rules.

@guppygirl I read the first chapter of your fic! Do you know what you’ve done to me, do you know how many feelz it gave me to see Rowan alive and well and acting so sweet? You nailed their character and I love the inclusion of their parents! Maya’s reactions make just want to give her a hug. Everyone should check out the fanfic on her page, seriously!

I believe there was an Ask lamenting that the Festival TLSQ didn’t come out this week, and believe me friend, I’m right there clowning with you. It seems like every week now, we think, “Okay, this time it will come out, they can’t delay it anymore.” And we’re always wrong. Here I am just starting to worry that my far-fetched theory about them shelving it until next year because it’s no longer “seasonal” isn’t so far-fetched after all…

But the vast majority of messages that were lost were, as I’m sure you can guess, about the data-mined House Cup for Season 2. I wrote a lot about it and I do indeed have some thoughts and feelings. 

Before I get into anything else, can I just say...that first scene with Ethan where he meets MC. I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever dislike Skye. All it ever takes is one vulnerable moment to erase any doubts and have me back in her corner. And you cannot tell me that Ethan knowing everything about MC because “Isn’t this the best mate you always talk about?” Didn’t melt your heart or at least give you feelz. Think back to how hurt Skye was when MC befriended Rath - to the point of snapping a broomstick in half. This is just proof of what I’ve been saying. She has no social skills and hardly any friends. Of course she sees MC as her bestie. The poor thing, oh my god, it’s adorable...

Ethan Parkin….I’m not a fan, even now. As I heard, he’s not as bad as we all feared he would be. He definitely has his moments. Still...he’s still pretty annoying. Ethan is basically a less obnoxious version of Lockhart, who actually has the talent to back it up. But I didn’t like how he involved himself in the practice and took over deciding who should be leader. Seriously, if he knows the game this well then he should know we already have a leader assigned. That’s what a Captain is. He was quite rude to Orion and while his pressuring Skye might have been inadvertent, it was still his fault. He’s also an extremely violent Quidditch player, which I’m not a fan of (Although apparently Penny is? The fuck?) I get that he would never cross the line into cheating, but I’m not impressed by how he lied. Didn’t give his team credit. And seriously...is cheating morally inferior to harming another player in a “legal” way? I guess it’s just a Quidditch culture thing, but I’m not here for it. 

Orion’s reaction to Ethan, though? God I loved it. He took everything completely in stride, had the maturity to say that no, he was happy to learn from a Quidditch master. His concern wasn’t about his ego, it was about Skye’s feelings. Because once again, he’s the only one with the empathy to realize what she might be going through. Orion’s response was measured and thoughtful and god, I love him so much. Side note: Were they seriously debating whether or not keeping Ethan around to learn his mystery move was worth it, even if it was stressing Skye out? My dudes, this is the exact same mistake you made during the Rath TLSQ. Involving someone who doesn’t need to be involved, just for the sake of a potential advantage in a meaningless sports game, regardless of how much it will hurt someone who is supposed to be our friend. Screw that. 

Folks were talking about Erika Rath. Someone brought up how hilarious it was in a previous chapter to see Andre actually tell her to be quiet, and for her to do so. And yeah, I agree. It’s a testament to how close their friendship must really be (Sorry, Depressed Erika Anon) I mean, most people wouldn’t dare say that to her. And I don’t think she’d have such a calm and passive reaction to just anyone. It’s unconventional, but their relationship is a sweet one. Overall, they’re involving Rath more and I’m quite glad of it. Seeing her proud of MC is heartwarming. Seeing her become more of a main character is great - I mean, she is one of the main four, after all. Face Paint Kid is a background character, as much as I love him. Penny is only here to develop Skye, and Andre is only here to develop Rath. There was also an interesting comparison made between her and Ethan, about how they both play pretty violently. Still not a fan of this. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that I’m mostly indifferent to Rath. But I’m coming around on her. 

This was a lovely place to cap off Skye’s character arc. Seeing MC stand up to Ethan (although I wish you could be firm without having to say that stupid “You’re off the team, Parkin!” line) was especially cathartic, and it’s clear that Skye appreciates it. She’s happier by the end, and has actually communicated with her father. I would sincerely like it if Season 3 focused on, say, Murphy a little more. He hasn’t gotten any development since the first half of Season 1. Even Orion got some development in this TLSQ. But...make no mistake, we’re not done hearing about Skye. I know that no one wants to hear this, but...they slipped in that line about her wishing she could play Rath. She still hates her. That hasn’t been resolved. Oh well, at least it’s an opportunity to further flesh out Rath. There’s also the possibility that, if they do give focus to Orion, it might be that Season 3 is his last hurrah. I hope he stays for the entire story, but even if they don’t want to confirm character ages...he could very well graduate. If he does, there’s going to be a story-line about choosing his successor. And again, I know that nobody wants to see this happen, but...the only candidates who matter in the story are MC and Skye. So they could be pitted against each other again. But I hope that won’t happen.

Curse you, Tumblr. Oh well, it should be safe to send in Asks again because I’m quite literally going to copy them onto a Google Doc from now on just to be safe. If I missed out on one that you sent in, please feel free to let me know or re-send it. I’ve also seen people taking screenshots of their Asks and then responding to the picture instead of just responding outright. Might do that too...thank you for your patience, this has been a doozy. 

[thisisthepartwhereyou]

BEASTARS MINI-STORY #4: “A Different kind of Charity pt. 5” (FIN) by JCL

---

We are back at the dining room hall, where we see that Georgette has returned to her table and is sitting across Dumas again.

DUMAS: "Anyway, I doubt he'll show his face again at the club anytime soon. I mean who would after being caught with his hand in the cookie jar? Or rather, caught with his hand in that caddie's blouse..."

Dumas voice begins to dwindle off as he notices something odd about Georgette.

DUMAS: "Georgette? Is something wrong?"

Georgette, in a stark difference to her usual, cool exterior now looks visibly shaken. Her eyes are staring off into space and she seems to be sweating, like she is in shock.

DUMAS: "Georgette!"

She blinks and meets Dumas look. She still looks a bit disoriented though, like she is uncertain of how she even got back to her seat.

GEORGETTE: "... What?"

DUMAS: "You're acting like you're a thousand miles away. I know you're not very thrilled about being here, but you usually keep an ear out for good gossip."

She puts her hands together, at which Dumas notice that they are trembling.

DUMAS: "You seem... Disturbed. Did something happen on the way to the bathroom?"

Georgette avoids his look by looking over her shoulder.

GEORGETTE: "No, nothing at all... I've probably had too much to drink. I'll stick to water for the rest of the evening."

Dumas look skeptical and confused, like he suspects that she is not telling the full story, which is correct. Over her shoulder though, we see that she has adopted a comically annoyed expression.  

GEORGETTE: (Why the hell am I not telling him? After what I saw, I feel like screaming it out to the top of my lungs!)

She thinks back to seeing Louis kiss Juno; the two manifesting in the background like a snogging apparition.

GEORGETTE: (Louis, heir to Horns Conglomerate and arranged to be married, is having a secret relationship with a carnivore!)

Shen then turns her head back towards the table and adopts a melancholic expression.

GEORGETTE: (What the hell is the matter with him?! I mean I don't know him THAT well, the only times I actually meet him is during these events...! I mean it's been that way ever since the first time I had to go here)

Staring down into the plate of soup that is in front of her, we enter into a flashback.   ---

In the flashback we see a 13-year-old Georgette, sitting at a table during a previous charity event. She looks smaller, wears a reserved dress and looks really insecure. She doesn't have her current, more expressive eyes here. They are more like a pair of black, doll-like dots.

GEORGETTE: (The 13-year-old me... I was such a grey and timid little creature back then)

Sitting around her is her family, which is largely composed of the peafowls male counterpart, the peacocks. Next to their much more colorful and regal appearances, the young Georgette looks more like a lost autumn leaf.

GEORGETTE: (As is typical of any peafowl surrounded by a bunch of peacocks... It's like a divine prank, with one half of an entire species looking like beautifully arranged bouquets of flowers, and the other half looking like wilting weeds...! Because of that, we fowls develop a naturally low self-image when compared to our male counterparts)

Zooming in on her face, we can clearly see her looking sad and uncomfortable.

GEORGETTE: (I was no different. When I first came here, surrounded by all this grandness, I just felt so small and mismatched, like a mud-cake staining a glass slipper... So it was kind of like home, except now even more people could see how unremarkable I was... Like it needed even more of a confirmation)

It is then that the table is approached by someone.

FLASHBACK-LOUIS: "Excuse me."

She looks up to see who it is.

GEORGETTE: (But then I met him)

It turns out to be a younger Louis, looking cool and impressive even as a 13-year-old. He extends his hand to a surprised-looking Georgette.

FLASHBACK-LOUIS: "Would you like to dance?"

The young Georgette blushes at this.

GEORGETTE: (So handsome. So cool)

She accepts and takes his hand, though she still looks really uncertain.

GEORGETTE: (I have no idea why he asked me, I've never dared to ask him)

Louis leads her out to the dance floor, and the two begin to dance.

GEORGETTE: (No matter the reason... When I danced with him, for the first time, I didn't feel like an inferior)

Zooming in on Louis face, we see that he is looking at her with a stoic and reserved expression.

GEORGETTE: (That stoic exterior, that reserved strength, that calm but oozing confidence...!)

Georgette on the other hand looks at him adoringly; her dot-like eyes glittering like two shiny pebbles.

GEORGETTE: (It inspired me. Instead of going around feeling sorry for myself, I would act strong and unmoved by the world around me, like he did) ---

GEORGETTE: (I would not be bothered by anything, betray no insecurity, not get knocked down by anything!)

We see Georgette in a montage where she aims to improve herself: exorcising by running on a treadmill, purchasing more womanly clothes, reading through several fashion magazines and a bunch of self-help books. Finally, we see her learning how to apply makeup in front a mirror.  

GEORGETTE: (I really took that to heart, and it worked)

She is looking into the mirror with the newly applied makeup, which makes her look look both beautiful and intimidating. Her eyes, which as her younger self looked like dots, has now gained the icy sharpness of the current Georgette.

GEORGETTE: (I didn't feeling inferior anymore) ---

GEORGETTE: (Even when I heard that he got engaged, I never showed myself sad around him... Though I do think it was around that time when I started drinking)

We see Georgette drinking from a glass of whine with an unreadable expression while Louis and Azumi is seen dancing past her in the background.

GEORGETTE: (As the years went by, we would meet again and again, but only here. It made it special somehow. But this...)

---

We return to the present, where we see her grabbing a nearby napkin. A shadow then begins to grow in her face; she looks like she is getting really angry.

GEORGETTE: (What the hell is this?!)

She begins to unconsciously shred a napkin into itty-bitty pieces. Dumas stares at this with an increasingly alarmed look.

DUMAS: "...!"

GEORGETTE: (It's not just not just a scandal, it makes no damn sense! Getting busy with some floozy canine! That she-devil...!) ---

We go into a scene that illustrates Georgette's imagination. There is even a text above it that spells: GEORGETTE'S IMAGINATION

GEORGETTE: (It's like she pulled him down from the heavens...!)

Georgette's imagination has given form to a scene straight out of a renaissance-like painting with a biblical motif, where an angelic-looking Louis getting pulled by the ankle down to a dark and depressing-looking landscape by a Satanic-looking Juno.

GEORGETTE: (... AND IS GETTING READY TO EAT HIM!)

The Satanic-looking Juno looks more and more like a monster, with glowing red eyes and drool flowing out of her mouth as she moves in to devour Angelic-Louis. ---

We return to present reality, where Georgette's napkin has been turned into a pile of confetti between her hands.

GEORGETTE: (Of course, she's a carnivore after all. That's all they ever think about!)

The cockerspaniel waitress that took Juno and Louis orders before walks by. Seeing the shredded napkin, she leans in with a civil expression and addresses a nervous-looking Dumas.  

DOG WAITRESS: "Would you like more napkins?"

DUMAS: "No." ---

We see that Louis and Juno are now walking into large room again. Juno is covering her mouth, like she is still feeling a bit queasy from the unexpected, garlicy assault.

LOUIS: "Are you sure that you're alright?"

Juno removes her hand from her mouth and gives him a reassuring look.

JUNO: "Yes, I am fine now. Just don't think-"

She stops talking abruptly as an older, snooty-looking couple of beavers walk past them. Once they're out of sight, Juno leans in and whispers in Louis ear.

JUNO: "Just don't think about planting another big wet one before you've had a Tic Tac or something...!"

Getting reminded of this seems to irritate him, prompting a grumpy expression.

LOUIS: "Okay, okay...!"

She leans in closer, her lips very close to his ear, and whispers with a more guttural, seductive tone.

JUNO: "Not that the gesture itself wasn't romantic though..."

Louis swallows, her hot breath tickling the inside of his ear. Then all of a sudden she gives him a hard blow into it, which makes him jump. He shoots her an annoyed glare, but Juno just laughs at this.

It is then that the lead singer of the band, a cockatoo (about 35, male, dressed in a red suit with a black shirt), addresses the charity guests through his microphone.

COCKATOO SINGER: "Okay people, time to put on some charm for that significant other around your arm, cause it's about time we got our first dance of the evening started!"

The band starts to play more romantic jazz-music. It is the Japanese version of 'La vie en Rose' as originally sung by Misora Hibari. This prompts dancepartners from all over the room, young and old, to start and gather on the dancefloor in front of the plesiosaurus-fountain.

As the cockatoo begins to sing, Louis turns to Juno and extends his hand.

LOUIS: "Do you know how to do a slow dance?"

Juno smiles and takes it.

JUNO: "Doesn't everyone?"

They both walk onto the dance floor, hand in hand. They soon find a spot, and after having positioned their hands, they start their dance. There's definitely some eyes on them, as the only case of a herbivore dancing with a carnivore being present. As they slow dance to the calm and romantic music, Louis begins a few internal musings about this whole situation.

LOUIS: (Why am I doing this? I am going to marry Azumi. It is expected of me)

Louis leads Juno to him and they make a little turn.

LOUIS: (Yet I can't push Juno away... That tactic doesn't work on her)

They continue with the slow dancing, their steps following the beats of the song perfectly.

LOUIS: (No... Of course it doesn't. I can't push her away... Not when I am the one getting pulled to her)

We go from Junos happy and content face, to Louis more thoughtful face. As we zoom in on it, we see a moth manifesting in his eye.

LOUIS: (Could this be what a moth feels like when it's close to a burning candle?) ---

In Louis imagination, we see this moth flying through an all-encompassing darkness towards a lit candle.

LOUIS: (Moths are attracted to the light, to the point where if you light a candle, they will fly closer and closer they catch fire and burn to death. Why they do this is a disputed question)

The moth circles around the candle until it's wings are set aflame.

LOUIS: (Is it the beauty, the guidance of the light, or simply the danger that makes it so attracted to the flame? Or is it all three at the same time?) ---

LOUIS: (The question is, would I mind-)

We return from this  daydream, where Louis and Juno performs a dip.

LOUIS: (-if she set my life on fire?)

In Louis imagination, Juno suddenly transforms into a flaming entity, like a fire-elemental. The flames from her catch onto Louis, engulfing him in fire and setting a pair of imaginary moth-wings on his back ablaze. ---

At a distance, we see Georgette and Dumas, still at their table. They follow Juno and Louis with their eyes. Dumas gives off a little humph.

DUMAS: "He does seem to dance well despite having only one leg."

Georgette on the other hand still look angry and upset, but also a little confounded.

GEORGETTE: "..." (What is she doing to him?)

She takes note of each of the expressions that Louis displays as he dances and talks to Juno. These expressions include annoyance at Juno teasing him, vulnerability as he looks down on his prosthetic leg, concern as he looks up at Juno and then, finally, a genuine smile.

GEORGETTE: (I've never seen him look like that. Annoyed, vulnerable, concerned and... Happy?)

Georgette looks softens a bit because of this.

GEORGETTE: (She managed to pull all of that out him?)

Dumas takes a sip from his own glass of whine.

DUMAS: "What do you know, that wolf-girl isn't a bad dancer herself. Go figure."

Suddenly, Georgette stands up. She has a look of determination evident in her eyes.

GEORGETTE: "You and me: We're dancing. Right now."

Dumas chokes on a bit of whine and then looks surprised by the sudden development.

DUMAS: "We are?"

GEORGETTE: "Yes. How are your dancingskills?"

DUMAS: "Uh... Fair?"

GEORGETTE: "Well then you'll have to help me out, cause I still got half the bar still in my system, and I don't want to look ridiculous. Is that something you can manage?"

Dumas blinks. Then he down his glass of whine and stands up, adjusting his tie.

DUMAS: "Well I'll be damned if I won't try."

The two walk over to the dance floor as well. ---

Meanwhile, at the another part of the dance floor, we see that Agata is dancing with his date, MINA (lioness, about 25, female, black dress and high heels, pretty but sulky-looking). Agata looks at her apologetically.

AGATA: "I swear, it's the honest truth!"

Mina replies with an icy tone.

MINA: "Right."

AGATA: "Really, she needed my help!"

MINA: "I believe you."

We can tell that she is being sarcastic. Agata shakes his head and gives off a hurt.

AGATA: "No-no, I don't believe you believe me. Your tone makes it unbelievable."

Mina rolls her eyes at this, though one can detect the hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth.

MINA: "Believe it, I believe you."

Agata sighs dramatically, like someone getting his heart broken in a soap opera.

AGATA: "Unbelievable, she doesn't believe me...!"

Mina snorts.

MINA: "How many times are you going to say that? Till it loses it's meaning or what?"

AGATA: "No, just until you see how bad I feel and forgive me..."

Agata gives her a sad-kitten kind of look, looking a lot like Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 (2004). This makes Mina groan, melting her cold front completely.

MINA: "Awww...! Now you're hitting under the belt, you adorable asshole!"

AGATA: "Well that's what you're gonna get from going out with a straight-down gangsta. There is no such thing as fighting fair."

As he says this, he accidentally steps on Mina's foot.

MINA: "Ow!"

AGATA: "Ah, sorry!"

She gives him a skeptical, but still jovial, expression.

MINA: "Not much of a dancer, are you?"

AGATA: "Actually I'm a champion, except this isn't my kind of music. I swear if they hade something wilder on, I'd own this floor."

Mina gets an excited glint in her eye as Agata says this.

MINA: "Really now?"

As they pass the band, Mina makes a psst-sound to a nearby lemur with an oboe.

MINA: "Hey, guys!"

The lemur looks their way, as does a few of the other band members.

MINA: "Do you take requests?" ---

We go back to Louis and Juno, who converses while dancing.

LOUIS: "What does one do at a beach anyway?"

This appears to wake Juno from some warm thoughts,  and she gives him a sporadic answer.

JUNO: "You know, the regular stuff."

Louis gives her a look, clearly relaying the message that he doesn't know what 'the regular stuff' entails. Juno quickly picks up on this and proceeds with giving him an answer.

JUNO: "Catch some sun, take a dip in the ocean, play some volleyball, hang out and relax... Guys your age usually look at pretty girls in bikinis."

Louis snorts at this.

LOUIS: "Yeah well that doesn't sound too bad."

He then looks a little self-conscious.

LOUIS: "But I can't help but to think that I'd feel a bit misplaced."

Juno gives him a patient look, like an older sibling dealing with an immature younger sibling.

JUNO: "Like me, at this place?"

Louis look a little surprised at this.

LOUIS: "That's how you feel?"

JUNO: "M-hm."

Louis leads Juno into another turn before returning to Louis arms.

JUNO: "Don't get me wrong, I am happy you invited me. I like the food, I like the grandness of it all, and above all, I like being with you. But it's not really ME you know."

As they dance past the frame, we see in the distance a few people sitting in the bar, looking at them. Some of them are the male admirers that came across Juno in the second chapter. They point at Juno and Louis and snicker; it is indicated that they aren't saying particularly nice things. A few seats away from sits Oguma, who is getting served a scotch on the rocks as he too observes his son and his dancing partner.

JUNO: "The two-facedness, the happy front and the deriding backtalk... I've discovered that I like it when people are straight with me, like you are."

Juno gives Louis a deep look.

JUNO: "You're a blunt person Louis. And this place... Well, now I'm just guessing, but it doesn't feel like a place where a blunt person would enjoy himself. That's why I figured that you would like to be with people who are used to your bluntness."

LOUIS: "... When did you become such a deep thinker?"

Juno smiles.

JUNO: "Someone recommended that I should try a bit of philosophy. I mean at first it made my head hurt, but now I'm really into it."

Louis stares at Juno tenderly.

LOUIS: "..." (So kind of like how I got into you?)

The song from the band finishes. Some clapping is heard and the dancing ceases. It is then that the cockatoo singer addresses the attendants yet again.  

COCKATOO SINGER: "Okay folks, I hope that that warmed you up proper, because now, we're gonna be walking on the WILD SIDE!"

The band begins to play a familiar song: 'Wild Side' by ALI. Juno and Louis looks at the band as they begin to play.

JUNO: "That song...!"

Louis turns to Juno. There's a challenging gleam in his eye.

LOUIS: "What do you say? Are you up for a something more fast-paced?"

Juno answers this by pulling her shoal down from her shoulders and ties it around her waist.

JUNO: "Bring it on, Richie Rich." ---

We see Seymour and Tom from the first chapter together with their dates, ARLA (cow, female, 18 years old, a little bossy) and DAISY (banker horse, female, 19 years old, a bit air headed). They look excited as the catchy song begins to kick into high gear.

SEYMOUR: "It's about time they played something with some swing it."

Seymour offers his arm to Daisy.

SEYMOUR: "What do you say ladies? Shall we cut a rug?"

Tom raises his arms enthusiastically, while Arla gives him a skeptical look.

TOM: "Yeah, lets party!"

They, along with several younger guests at the charity go over to the dance floor and join in.

We see that Juno and Louis are dancing swing-style, showcasing some impressive footwork and spinning like something straight out of an old musical, their moves matching the rhythm of the song like two gloves on two hands.

And they're not the only ones, with Agata and Mina doing pretty darn well in the background; showcasing that Agata wasn't kidding when he said that this kind of music was more his thing.

Tom and Arla dance nearby too, though their dancing is kind of mismatched with the music: doing more of a robot-dance.

Seymour and Daisy dance in a very hip fashion, though because of the height-difference, Seymour's head often end in her chest (not that he seems to be complaining about it).

Georgette and Dumas is a riot to see too. Georgette dances pretty good, though her cold expressions is a stark contrast to the catchy dancing. Dumas seems to awkwardly follow Georgette's lead, having a hard time keeping up, but does otherwise seem like he is having a good time.

The dancing reaches a fever pitch as it nears it's end, with Juno and Louis finishing with a dynamic pose in front of the plesiosaur-fountain.

COCKATOO SINGER: "And that's called JAZZ!"

The song then finishes. A chorus of laughs and clapping can be heard as people stop dancing and chatter starts. Louis and Juno appears to be out of breath, both looking like they're about to keel over now that the dance is done.

LOUIS: "Whew...!"

Juno fans her face with her hand.

JUNO: "Wow... My heart is still beating so fast...!"

Louis gives off a pained little sound and bends over, holding his knee. Juno notices this.

JUNO: "Are you okay?"

Louis instantly gets up, putting on a brave face.

LOUIS: "Yes. Don't worry. The leg is just a little strained."

He looks away, scratching the back of his head. Doing this, he notices his father sitting in the bar, holding a whiskyglass and observing the two with his usual, unemotional expression. Louis stares back with a similar expression, and then raises his hand and gives a little wave.

Juno notices this and chimes in, giving Oguma a smile and a more excited wave.

Oguma's expression doesn't change, but he does raise his glass, acknowledging their gestures.

Louis then turns back to Juno.

LOUIS: "... Shall we call it a night?"

Giving Louis leg a discreet look, Juno then nods. Louis takes her arm, and the two proceed to walk off the dance floor. As they do so, they pass Georgette and Dumas. Dumas looks exhausted, wiping some sweat off his forehead. Georgette stares at him rather critically, but then breaks into a genuine smile. She doesn't notice Juno and Louis passing her, though Juno gives her a curious look as they do.

Once they get a bit of distance from the peacock and the peafowl, she turns to Louis.  

JUNO: "There's something I've been wondering about all evening."

LOUIS: "Mm?"

JUNO: "When we first got here, that peafowl whispered something in your ear. What did she say?"

This question makes Louis look a little uncomfortable.

LOUIS: "It was nothing important."

JUNO: "If it wasn't, I don't see any problem with you telling me."

She says this with a slight edge. Louis bites his lip, realizing that Juno is not about to let this go unless he tells her.

LOUIS: "... She said: 'I can see why you would throw her a leg or two.'"

Juno raises her eyebrows at this. Louis quickly provides a panicky response.

LOUIS: "I tried to tell her of course that you weren't the one who ate my leg!"

Juno looks weirded out and stairs right ahead as they walk through the doorway that they came in through in the first chapter.

JUNO: "I'm not sure whether I should see that as a compliment or an insult."

Louis looks like he doesn't quite know what to make of it either. They now pass the Great Horned Owl from before, who is actually busy talking to the cockerspaniel waitress from before. They don't even notice Juno or Louis walking past them.

DOG WAITRESS: "I get off at eleven. I hope it's not too late for you..."

The horned owl smiles at her.

HORNED OWL: "I am nocturnal, so it'll be just fine."

Juno turns to look at Louis again.

JUNO: "What is her deal anyway? She seemed kind of close to you."

Louis closes his eyes and thinks back.

LOUIS: "Well close would be a bit of a stretch... You see the first time I had to go here I was like thirteen." ---

We see a flashback where the 13-year-old Louis is attending the UniFeed Charity.

LOUIS: "It was expected of me to be able to show proper etitiquette and manners, and to be able to dance with a girl if neccesary."

The young Louis look composed, though a bit of nervous sweat on his forehead suggests that it is more of an act.

LOUIS: "I had gotten plenty of practice, but I had never actually danced with someone my own age, and even worse, now everyone was about to see it. I was nervous, but I couldn't really show it."

He then spots the young Georgette, sitting at the table surrounded by her family, like in her own flashback.

LOUIS: "When I saw her, I thought it looked like it was her first time too. She looked on the outside like what I felt on the inside." ---

We then return to the present.

LOUIS: "It wasn't out of pity or anything. She just felt like the least intimidating girl to ask for a dance."

Juno looks skeptical and points a thumb back to where they came from.

JUNO: "Her? Not intimidating?"

Louis shrugs.

LOUIS: "She was quite different back then. I am not really sure what happened."

Juno smiles and gives Louis a loving look. Louis cocks an eyebrow.

LOUIS: "What is with that look?"

JUNO: "I just thought that was very sweet of you... Is that why you invited me?"

Louis gives her a deadpan look.

LOUIS: "No way, you scare the crap out of me."

Juno's eyes widen in a comical expression.

JUNO: "WHAT?!"

Louis waves this way, and he can't help but to smile in amusement at her reaction.

LOUIS: "Don't misunderstand me, it doesn't mean I'm not comfortable with you."

He looks ahead, with a little blush on his face.

LOUIS: "... You're pleasant and exciting. That's why I invited you."

Juno looks at him, accepting this answer. She grabs his hand.

JUNO: "Any other reason?"

LOUIS: "... Maybe."

Louis squeezes her hand in response, as they walk through the hotel lobby, now near to the exit.

JUNO: (Operation Good Moon Rising, phase 2...)

They leave through the doors, both of them smiling and hand in hand; their hurt hands being the ones locked together.

JUNO: (... More or less accomplished) ---

We return to Oguma, now sitting alone in the bar and taking a sip from his scotch. It is then that he is approached by his assistent, Shigure. She jumps up on the seat next to him.

SHIGURE: "Sir, I have done as you asked. As she's an active social media-user, I managed to find fairly comprehensive information about her online. For the rest I had to hack Cherryton's official website and call a few old contacts in the government, who provided me with more private information."

Oguma nods at this.

OGUMA: "Well done. Now who is this girl?"

Shigure pulls up her tablets and begins to swipe through several pages of information.

SHIGURE: "Name: Juno. Aged 17, goes to Cherryton Academy in the second year. Mostly average grades, with notably well-received activities within the drama club. She is quite popular, especially among carnivore-students. From what I can see she is one of the student's favorite choices as the school's next Beastar. At least on the carnivore-side."

Oguma listens to all of this with interest.

OGUMA: "What about her family?"

SHIGURE: "She has a single mother and three older brothers. Each child has a different father, none of which appears to have an active part in respective child's lives. The mother works at a pharmacy and has one noteworthy criminal charge, but is otherwise completely clean."  

Oguma turns to look at Shigure.

OGUMA: "What is the charge?"

Shigure meets his look.

SHIGURE: "Predation, but it's strange... Apparently the victim, a camel, had a few of his fingers bit off, but decided not to press charges."

Oguma seems to process this information.

OGUMA: "Hm... Anything else?"

Shigure gives him an uncomfortable look.

SHIGURE: "Well..."

She swipes rapidly through her tablet and brings up a video file that begins to load.

SHIGURE: "I ran a photo of her face through a recognition app to see if there were any noteworthy matches on the internet. And... I found this video from the local news."

She hands her tablet over to Oguma, who looks over the video file as it begins to play. It turns out to be footage from the interview that a reporter did on Juno after a predation incident. Juno's upset face is reflected on Oguma's glasses as she says her immortal line:

JUNO: "I'm madly in love with a male deer! If If I let the risks scare me, then he'd reject me!"

THE END... FOR NOW. ---

[vexedtonightmares]

with great power (elu spiderman au) - the final chapter

eliott has been saved by spiderman quite a few times for absolutely no reason. hopeless romantic that he is, eliott accidentally starts falling for spiderman somewhere along the way and doesn’t know what to do about it. obviously, there’s only one solution. he and his good friend lucas should pretend to date to make spiderman jealous. there’s no ulterior motives here, of course, just lucas helping a bro out.

aka eliott’s falling in love with spiderman, lucas is in love with eliott, and lucas is spiderman.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ao3

no. 11 “I never wanted you to get hurt.” 

**tw: mentions of violence, very brief allusions to abuse, gun use, mentions of bipolar disorder (particularly in reference to depressive episodes)**

Watching Lucas in the pale morning light was one of life’s small moments of magic. Sure, it wasn’t magic in the same way as Lucas having super strength and whatnot, but it was magic all the same. His face was buried deep into his pillow, drool slipping out from the corner of his mouth and hair askew, but Eliott had never thought he was more beautiful. 

It was rare for Eliott to wake up first of the two, but he knew that Lucas needed the sleep. The two of them had been through quite the ordeal, and sure, a little sleep couldn’t cure it all, but it was a good place to start. 

He was tempted to go down to the bakery on the corner and grab some fresh pastries for the two of them, but he didn’t want Lucas to wake up alone. Neither of them would be alone ever again, if Eliott had any say in the matter. 

Minutes stretched on but Eliott found that he didn’t mind the simple silence, Lucas’ breaths heard lightly as they ruffled the hair that had fallen across his face. If they could stay exactly like that forever, Eliott would have been the luckiest man alive. He already was, just to have Lucas in bed beside him, sleeping more comfortably than he ever had done before. Their relationship may have had its ups and downs so far, and Eliott was sure there were more to come, but as long as Lucas could sleep peacefully by his side, he knew that everything would be ok. 

Lucas’ eyes blinked open gently, bright blues adjusting to the light. When his eyes landed on Eliott’s soft, smiling face, he heaved a sigh of relief. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Eliott agreed.

“And you’re safe,” Lucas continued, “Alive.”

Eliott gently brushed hair from Lucas’ field of vision, twirling the silky strands between his fingers. “Thanks to you.”

Lucas’ face darkened and he turned away from Eliott, breathing stuttering. “Don’t, please.”

“L—” Eliott began, reaching a hand out, but Lucas shook his head. 

“I— I know what we talked about last night, but I’m not ready to act like a hero yet. Is that ok?” He turned his head, eyes searching Eliott’s face with a wide, pleading expression. 

Eliott nodded, folding their hands together. “Of course. Spiderman who?”

Lucas laughed weakly, squeezing Eliott’s hand gently. “You’re a dumbass, do you know that?”

“I’ve been told on many occasions,” Eliott conceded, “Good thing we’ve already determined that I’m your dumbass.”

“My dumbass indeed,” Lucas agreed, grabbing Eliott by the chin and pulling him into a kiss. Eliott dipped his head back and Lucas whined, leaning in closer to him. 

“You have morning breath,” Eliott said wrinkling his nose. In all honesty, he didn’t care one bit, but he did love seeing Lucas’ fake offended face. 

“You do too!”

Eliott shook his head, smiling a toothy grin that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to wear again. Leave it to Lucas to bring out the best in him time and time again. “My superpower is not having morning breath.”

Lucas snorted. “Well, it’s clearly a shitty superpower, because it’s not working.”

Eliott scoffed in faux indignation, leaning over and engaging Lucas in a tickle fight. Lucas squeaked in surprise, mischievous grin adorning his lips as he tickled Eliott back, grin turning into wild laughter. Eliott would have bottled the sound if he could, just to have on the days laughter felt like a distant memory.

Lucas must have noticed that Eliott had ceded the battle, even though he was the one who’d started it, and he flopped back onto the pillow with a soft breath. “We have to face the real world at some point, don’t we?”

“Unfortunately,” Eliott sighed, looking up at the ceiling. The curtains were only letting in a small stripe of light, and he followed it with his eyes. “What are you going to tell Manon, Mika, and Lisa?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas admitted. “Knowing everything will put them in more danger, but I don’t know how I’ll explain it without telling the truth.”

Eliott understood that, and he agreed. “I can try to come up with some excuse, if you want,” he offered. 

Lucas smiled minutely, but shook his head. “I have to tell them, I know I do. And if they kick me out, it’s probably for the best anyway.”

“They’re not going to kick you out, L,” Eliott reassured him, turning on his side, “They just might need a little time. Doesn’t mean they love you any less.”

“Yeah…” Lucas said, but Eliott could tell he didn’t actually agree. Eliott felt a pang of guilt at the fact that his reaction was the only one Lucas had to go off of at that point, so he’d be expecting the worst from everybody. 

“Hey, they’re much better people than I am,” Eliott said, trying to sound like he was joking but failing. “They’ll be there for you, ok? And if they aren’t, I’ll kick their asses.”

Lucas turned onto his side as well. “You’re not a bad person for reacting the way you did.”

“I just hate that it’s made you question your other relationships, think that they’ll abandon you like I did.” Eliott looked at the sheets between them, running his fingers in small circles to distract himself.

Lucas grabbed his hand. “You didn’t abandon me. You came back. Or, you would have, had you not been kidnapped and whatever.”

“‘Kidnapped and whatever’, very eloquent,” Eliott teased. 

Lucas shoved him. “Shut up, I’m trying to be sweet and genuine!”

“You don’t have to try, you just are.”

Lucas glowered at him as if daring him to interrupt again. Sweet and genuine was clearly his middle name. “Anyway, it’s not you, it’s really not. You know I’ve had experience with this kind of fear, and it just seems worse with Mika, Manon, and Lisa because they’re the ones who took me in when I had nowhere to go, when I was at my lowest. It would break my heart to lose them.”

“You won’t,” Eliott said adamantly. “I promise.”

“You can’t make promises like that, you don’t know—”

“I promise,” Eliott repeated. 

Lucas looked at him fondly, like he was the sun. “You’re a stubborn dumbass, aren’t you?”

“As if you didn’t know that already.” 

Lucas didn’t answer, just pulled him back in for another kiss, morning breath discussions forgotten as they lost themselves in one another. Eliott wouldn’t have changed a single thing about that moment, even if he was offered all the riches in the world. No amount of money could compare to the feel of Lucas in his arms, lips meeting purposefully and passionately.

“What, do you think,” Lucas began, punctuating each statement with a small kiss, “Our parallel universe selves are doing right now?”

Eliott raised his eyebrows and leaned back a bit, unable to think with Lucas so close to him. “Lots of things, probably,” he laughed, unable to come up with an adequate answer, Lucas was still too distracting to him.

“C’mon! Think about it.” Lucas bit his bottom lip, waiting patiently for a real answer, so Eliott mulled it over more seriously, thinking about all the possibilities the world had in store for them. 

“Well, in one of them Eliott and Lucas just moved in together. It’s Eliott’s first year of uni, Lucas’ final year of high school, and they figured it was time. Eliott had a rough adjustment at first, but he knows that Lucas will always be there for him, and that he loves him, so that’s all that really matters. I bet they’re on holiday with the gang and the crew right now too, a bunch of dumbasses rolling around in a bright orange van,” Eliott said, letting his mind drift. He definitely wasn’t projecting some of his wishes onto their parallel selves, definitely not.

“Moving in together, huh?” Lucas asked cheekily, and Eliott could hear his grin, even though his eyes were squeezed shut. 

“Shut up,” Eliott said, Please don’t, he meant. “What do you think they’re doing, then?”

“Have I told you about ballet elu yet?” Lucas asked excitedly, and Eliott peeked one eye open warily. 

“Ballet elu?”

“Elu, Eliott and Lucas, keep up!” Lucas said dramatically, resting his head on Eliott’s shoulder and wrapping their legs up together. “Anyway, these versions of us dance at the Paris Opera Ballet School, or something, but they’re the same age—”

“Is that how parallel universes work?” Eliott wondered aloud, and Lucas shushed him.

“Shh, it’s my turn. Where was I? Right, they’re the same age, but they hate each other. Well, Eliott doesn’t, because how could any Eliott ever hate little old me, but Lucas does, because they had a falling out when they were kids. Something to do with ballet, or with Lucas’ shitty family, because that much stays the same in most universes too, but for what it’s worth: they’re rivals. But then! In their last year, they’re forced to room together, and they slowly start to reconcile, and fall in love, all while preparing to dance in the school’s production of Swan Lake,” Lucas finished with a flourish, looking pleased with himself.

“Did you just… write an enemies to lovers meets ‘and they were roommates’ fanfiction about us in your mind?” Eliott asked carefully, laughter threatening to burst out. 

“Absolutely, yes,” Lucas confirmed, small giggles surfacing involuntarily. Eliott gave in as well, and soon the two of them were laughing thinking about the many different versions of themselves that were doing the same. 

Lucas got quiet after a while and turned his head up to Eliott. “It helps, sometimes,” he continued, “To think about all the things we might be doing in other lives. To think that in some of them, Lucas’ only worry is coming out to his friends, or what he’s going to study in university. To know that somewhere out there he doesn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders and a city to protect because he put on a stupid costume and decided he was more than the scared boy looking back at him in the mirror.”

“In the worlds I imagine,” Eliott began, “I’m not bipolar. I’m the type of person you deserve.”

“Eliott don’t say that.” Lucas’ voice was soft but determined. 

“I know,” Eliott said, because he did, he’d known Lucas would argue with him from the start. “I just wish I wasn’t me, sometimes.”

Lucas scooted up closer so they were barely a breath apart. “You’re incredible. When she was making you, the sun crafted you with so much brightness that you’re still afraid of burning people, but the people you burn are the ones that deserve to be burned, the ones that don’t understand what a gift your light is.”

Eliott was nearly moved to tears. Sure, Lucas knew exactly what he needed to hear, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t entirely genuine, words like sweet poetry. Sometimes Eliott teased him about how he had the makings of an L student, and Lucas would scoff in offense until they talked about a new subject. In all actuality, Eliott thought that maybe Lucas just didn’t know how brilliant he was, a brilliance that extended to all facets of life. 

“You have such a beautiful mind,” Eliott said, hoping Lucas understood the depth of the compliment. 

Lucas turned bright red, looking away. “Stop.”

“Never.”

Their hands found each other again, brushes of fingertips always so nice and gentle, holding each other with the care they deserved. Lucas interlocked his pointer finger with Eliott’s. 

“Well then thank you,” he said, “For always thinking the best of me.”

“I don’t, always,” Eliott admitted, but Lucas didn’t seem to mind. 

“You do when it matters,” he said, and they fell into easy silence. 

Eliott had no idea what time it was, though it was probably nearing noon, if it wasn’t already past then. He didn’t mind, he’d stay in bed with Lucas all day if that was what Lucas wanted. 

Lucas let out a soft sigh, and Eliott could tell he was working up the nerve to say something. He brushed Lucas’ hair reassuringly, and after a moment or two, Lucas spoke up. “Will you go with me? To tell Mika, Manon, and Lisa everything?”

“Of course. They can come here, if that’s easier.” Eliott didn’t think any of them would be returning to the colloc anytime soon.

Lucas glanced up at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eliott nodded. Lucas smiled and leaned over to grab his phone off the nightstand. 

“As much as I want to stay in here with you alone forever, I think Mika will kill me if I don’t explain what the hell is going on,” Lucas sighed, showing Eliott his lockscreen which had a total of forty two texts and twelve missed calls from Mika, and a handful of others from Manon. He snuggled in a bit closer to Eliott as he texted them, telling them to come over to Eliott’s place at their earliest convenience. Knowing Mika that meant they probably had roughly ten minutes left to themselves. 

Lucas groaned and rolled over until he was off the bed, pouting at Eliott. “Stop looking so pretty,” he said.

Eliott pulled the covers up to his nose, raising his eyebrows. “I’m doing no such thing.”

“Stoooooop,” Lucas whined, huffing a breath through his nose. “You’re very cute, and this is very unfair of you. My heart can only handle so much Eliott Demaury cuteness before it goes into cardiac arrest.”

Eliott cocked his head to one side, dropping the covers. “Oh no, that won’t do. Is there any way to ensure that doesn’t happen?”

“A kiss, perhaps,” Lucas suggested, holding a hand out. Eliott rolled his eyes fondly, smile overtaking his face as he reached out, allowing Lucas to pull him closer. 

Eliott was at the edge of the bed, Lucas standing above him, and Lucas’ hands were carding through his hair. He looked up at Lucas like he was the center of the universe, probably because he was the center of Eliott’s. 

“I love you,” Eliott said.

“I love you too,” Lucas said. 

A soft kiss, a gentle embrace, the warmth of their love nearly tangible in the air. Eliott sighed into Lucas’ mouth, wrapping his arms around his neck. “I never want to let go of you.”

Lucas broke away, shit eating grin overtaking his face, and Eliott narrowed his eyes in suspicion a moment before he was being hefted over Lucas’ shoulder. “Done!” Lucas said cheerfully, carrying him into the other room.

“L, let me down,” Eliott giggled, but Lucas just spun the two of them around. 

“You’re the one who asked for this, sir,” Lucas laughed, shifting to lift Eliott above his head with both hands. Eliott froze, eyes widening.

“L, L, L, let me down, fuck, seriously!” Eliott was nearly certain Lucas was a second away from dropping him.

Lucas just laughed again. “El, you’re fine, I promise. Lifting you is like lifting a book over my head.”

Eliott briefly forgot his current distress, dropping his head down to look Lucas in the eye. “Wait, seriously?”

Lucas nodded. “Did we not already confirm I haven’t actually been working out?”

Eliott rolled his eyes. “We did, but super strength takes some getting used to, you know.”

“Uh, yeah, I do know,” Lucas said with raised eyebrows. He looked like he was about to say something else but was cut off by the door swinging open, a confused Mika, Manon, and Lisa standing in the entrance to the flat.

“Someone let us in downstairs,” Manon explained weakly, the only one not focused on the fact that Lucas was lifting Eliott over his head.

Eliott found himself being deposited to a normal standing position, Lucas leaning against the wall like they hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. Mika looked back and forth between the two of them, eyebrows shot up to his hairline. 

“We’re not going to talk about what the fuck that was, then?” he asked, and Eliott turned to Lucas for his reaction. Lucas was looking at the ground, nose scrunched up adorably. When he looked up at Mika, his nonchalant demeanor broke. 

“I have to tell you guys something,” he said, voice little more than a whisper. Eliott stepped closer to him, grabbing his hand in a show of support. Manon, Mika, and Lisa moved further into the apartment each of their faces reflecting a mix of confusion, suspicion, and unease.

“I, um,” Lucas began, biting his thumbnail absently, eyes flitting around the room. Eliott squeezed his hand again. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes, then opening them. “I’m Spiderman.”

Mika burst into laughter, Lisa didn’t look fazed at all, and Manon widened her eyes like something was starting to make sense to her. When Mika realized Lucas wasn’t laughing with him, he faltered. “You’re serious?”

Lucas nodded, and launched into a full explanation, looking so incredibly uncomfortable, nothing like he had minutes prior, but Eliott held his hand through it all, a silent reassurance that everything would be ok. When he finished, a charged silence filled the room, one waiting to be broken, but it seemed no one could find the right words. Lucas had finished his story with the reason they were at Eliott’s place, details of his father and Chameleon and how they’d used Eliott to get to him and everything that had happened in the crossfire of it all. 

Manon took a step forward, extending her arms, and Lucas collapsed into her, crying. Eliott’s heart ached to see Lucas break down like that, but Lucas didn’t need his boyfriend in that moment, he needed his family. Mika joined, then Lisa, and soon Lucas was surrounded by a pile of love he’d been so desperately needing. 

Eliott was sure they’d spend the rest of the night figuring out where to go from there, but presently it was just enough to know that Lucas still had people that cared for him as much as they’d promised to. Eliott smiled, and was pulled into the hug. The world smiled with him, even if just for a moment. 

🕷🕷🕷🕷

Eliott was on his way over to Yann’s place with Lucas, and Lucas seemed nervous for some reason, more nervous than he had been to tell his flatmates the truth of everything that had been going down. Eliott kept their hands linked reassuringly, smiling at him every so often. 

Yann seemed to be in a perfectly happy mood, and he gave Lucas a look that Eliott couldn’t discern when he let the two of them into his house. To Eliott’s surprise, Imane was there too, which was weird. Sure, the girls and the boys were all friends, but Eliott had never gotten the sense that Imane and Yann were very close. 

Yann looked somewhat surprised to see Eliott there as well, which didn’t make sense, because Lucas had told him that Yann invited the two of them over to hang out. 

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever man, how you been?” Yann asked, giving him a high five. Eliott couldn’t very well just say ‘kidnapped, actually’, so he shrugged, glancing quickly at Lucas. 

“Fine,” he answered simply. That should suffice. Eliott didn’t know if Lucas was going to tell Yann and Imane about everything or not, but he figured it was Lucas’ story to tell if he wanted to, not his. 

Lucas narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. Instead, he turned to Imane, who was already looking at him and said, “Those new things you gave me? I might need more.”

Yann’s eyes were wide, looking between Lucas, Imane, and Eliott, but Imane seemed unbothered. She rolled her eyes and held out her arms. “Glad you’re alive dumbass.”

“Yeah, me too,” Lucas joked, and Eliott tried to meet Yann’s eye, who was suddenly very interested in the ceiling. 

“Hold on,” Eliott interrupted, trying to decode their ambiguity. He turned to Imane. “You know?”

She raised one eyebrow at him in turn. “You know?”

“We all know,” Lucas interjected, biting his lip. 

Eliott turned to Yann. “This whole time?”

Yann, looking extremely uncomfortable, conceded, “Yes?”

Lucas was watching him nervously, as if he’d be mad other people knew before him, but Eliott started laughing. The life that the two (or four) of them had stumbled into was already so absurd, not much could surprise Eliott anymore. 

“Welcome to the club, man,” Imane said, breaking up the small amount of remaining tension. Lucas breathed a subtle sigh of relief that Eliott wasn’t mad, and Eliott gave him an extra reassuring squeeze. 

“Happy to be here,” Eliott said with a wink, then a backwards glance at Lucas, “Well… I mean…”

Lucas interjected, “I have a lot to fill you guys in on.”

Eliott sat and listened while Lucas repeated his spiel, nearly the same as the tail end of the one he’d given Manon, Mika, and Lisa a few days prior. For the time being, Manon, Mika, and Lisa were staying with Emma because her mom was gone all the time, and Lucas was staying with Eliott because neither of them wanted to have the other out of their sight for too long. Sure, they’d stayed over together many a time, even before they started dating, but having Lucas live with him (in a sense) put a whole bunch of butterflies in his stomach, thinking of what it would be like if they lived together every day, not just when they were possibly in mortal danger.

Imane didn’t seem as concerned about any of the new developments as Yann did, but that made sense. She always had a calm, level head when the rest of them were freaking out. Thank god for Imane.

Yann stole Lucas from Eliott, pulling him into a bone crushing hug. “Fuck your dad,” he said seriously, ruffling Lucas’ hair. 

Lucas smiled weakly, eyes glistening just so, like he’d only at that moment realized the severity of the situation. “Easier said than done, I’m afraid.”

“Hey, look at me,” Imane said, standing beside Yann and placing a hand on Lucas’ shoulder. “You are not alone. You have me, you have Yann, you have Eliott, you have Arthur and Basile, you have all the girls, you probably also have Sofiane and Idriss too, and they barely know you. Ok? We’ll all figure this out together, because you may be a superhero, but we’re not so bad ourselves.”

“I know how to fire a gun and everything now,” Eliott chimed in, kissing the back of Lucas’ head as he laughed, a soft beautiful sound. 

“Yeah, you’re staying away from the fighting from now on,” Lucas said sternly.

Eliott scoffed. “What? But I’m so good at it.”

“Ha ha.”

“That wasn’t a joke Lallemant.”

Yann rolled his eyes. “Can you guys stop flirting for like, one minute?”

Eliott and Lucas exchanged a glance. “No,” they said simultaneously, each with a faux apologetic shrug. Yann rolled his eyes again, but this time he was hiding a smile. 

“Well?” Imane said, bringing them back to the topic at hand. “Dream team unite?”

Eliott smiled at the three of them shyly. “Am I included in the dream team?”

Imane opened her mouth but Lucas cut her off. “Of course. You’re my dream.”

“You guys are so gross,” Imane said, turning on her heel to go in the other room, Yann following dutifully. Eliott stood in the hallway with Lucas a moment longer, smiling at him in an intentional sort of way, the kind that said you mean just as much to me as I do to you. 

“You’re my dream too,” Eliott said. “Just you, my Lu.”

“Not the hot mysterious superhero?” Lucas asked like he was joking, but Eliott wasn’t sure if he was. 

Eliott shrugged. “Him too, but he’s not the soul I fell in love with. That’s all Lucas.”

“I was in love with you before I was ever more than just Lucas,” Lucas said, twining their fingers together. 

“You’ve always been more than just Lucas to me,” Eliott said, leaning down gently to capture Lucas in a kiss. Because he had been, even if it had only been as friends before. There was always something special about him, something that told Eliott they were soulmates long before that ever came to fruition. He was glad that it finally had, and that they wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives wondering what might have been.

Their moment was broken, however, by the one and only Yann Cazas. “Hey, assholes! You gonna help with this or what?”

Lucas groaned, leaning against Eliott. “We’d better…” he trailed off, nodding to the other room. 

Eliott sighed dramatically, running a hand through Lucas’ hair. “Love you.”

“Love you too."

Imane looked like she was trying not to smile at the two of them when they entered the room, and Yann looked like he was pretending to be annoyed with them, which was pretty expected from the both of them. 

Lucas sat beside Imane and looked at what she was doing on her laptop. She glanced up at both of them. “When’s the last time you’ve had contact with your dad?” she asked Lucas gently.

“Years ago,” Lucas said, looking like he’d been anticipating this conversation, but still didn’t want to be having it. Eliott understood, even in the years they’d been friends Lucas never talked about his dad beyond vague statements about not needing him in his life, being glad he wasn’t in it. 

Imane pressed on. “What does your dad… do?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t really know. I was too young to understand what he did when he left, and I never cared to figure it out once he was gone.”

“Can’t you just look him up or something?” Yann asked, watching Lucas carefully. Of all of them, he was probably the only one who knew anything about Lucas’ father aside from Lucas himself. 

Imane glared at Yann. “I did, I just wanted to cover all of our bases.”

“Well?” Lucas asked, biting his bottom lip and looking at Imane with wide eyes, like he was scared of what she might say.

She sighed, turning her screen to face them. “There’s not much about him, honestly. He has a high up position in his company, but that company looks pretty clean from what I’ve seen, no reports of manufacturing illegal substances or modifying human beings into whatever the hell you’ve encountered.”

“Chameleon and Vulture,” Eliott supplied, feeling himself shiver involuntarily. At least one of them was dead. 

“I don’t know,” she complained, “I feel like this is just scratching the surface, but I’m not sure how to dig deeper.”

Yann held out his hands. “Looks like you need Cazas for this one.”

“You really think you’ll be able to find anything I haven’t been able to find?” she challenged, holding her computer close to her chest. 

“I very much do think that,” Yann said with a grin, and she reluctantly handed it over. Eliott watched their exchange carefully, trying to figure out what everyone’s roles were in this operation. 

Lucas must have noticed his confusion, because he said, “They’ve been helping me this whole time. Imane designed my suit and everything, Yann is mostly there for moral support but he has some helpful skills.”  

“He means I’ll do illegal shit that Imane won’t do,” Yann interjected, typing away. 

It was hard for Eliott to not feel a little left out, even if he did understand why Yann and Imane had been roped in much earlier than he had. The three of them just fell right into a little rhythm, the likes of which somewhat relieved Eliott as well, knowing that Lucas hadn’t been going through this all alone. He had sort of been wondering about the technology involved with being Spiderman since he’d found out that it was Lucas, and there was no one quite as smart as Imane, so that at least made sense. 

A lot of things made sense, even things Eliott had never in his life even considered happening. Maybe everything was just the right amount of fucked up, the amount that made it all seem somewhat normal. 

“Hey, Lu?” Yann called over to Lucas, who raised his eyebrows in response. “Did your dad ever talk about working in a lab?”

Lucas scrunched up his nose, looking confused, then a sense of clarity overcame his features. “My grandpa worked in some government lab. My parents never really talked about it though, just mentioned it in passing once or twice.”

Imane and Yann shared a look. Yann continued, “Do you think that could have something to do with all of this? Is it some secret government conspiracy?”

“Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?” Lucas asked, but he didn’t argue.

That too, made sense, in the odd sort of way all of this did. Eliott thought of something. 

“That’s why no one’s doing anything. Sure, the police arrested Vulture, but Chameleon seemed pretty sure he would be free soon, and I haven’t heard any coverage on weird things happening throughout the city aside from a few Spiderman escapades. He’s working with the government, they’re in on this too.” Anyone else might have thought he was talking out of his ass, but Yann could always be counted on to suspect the government for any wrongdoings at all. 

Lucas blinked like he’d had an epiphany. “Imane, you keep track of all the news about Spiderman, right?” She nodded, unsure where he was going with this. He continued, “They haven’t reported everything, have they?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, holding out her hands to take the computer from Yann, typing away immediately once it was in her possession. Lucas looked at her like he thought she knew exactly what he meant. 

Yann looked like he knew too, because he added, “They haven’t reported on a variety of things you’ve dealt with, just the smaller, more low key things. They reported when you saved that store by Eliott’s place from getting robbed but they didn’t report a thing when you came across that random building a while back and saved some kid’s life.”

“That was me, Yann,” Eliott said, unless there had been another instance where the same thing happened.

Yann looked at Lucas accusingly, who shrank in his seat. “You told me it was some random person!”

“I lie about a lot of things, Yann,” Lucas said, folding his arms over his chest. 

Yann looked like he wanted to argue further, but Eliott cut in with a thought before he had the chance to say any more. “Your dad was there that night.”

Lucas whipped his head to Eliott. “He was? I didn’t see him there.”

“He left right before you got there,” Eliott said, “I didn’t know who he was at the time, just thought he looked sort of familiar.”

“I mean, it can’t be a coincidence,” Yann said, looking between Lucas and Imane pointedly. Imane sighed and shrugged like she had no choice but to agree, and Lucas seemed to be coming to a similar conclusion.

“But what does he want?” Lucas asked quietly, more to himself than anyone else. That was the question on everyone’s mind, it seemed, because no one had a concrete answer.

“I’m afraid there’s only one way to find that out,” Imane said just as softly, watching Lucas carefully. “But we can manufacture the entire thing.”

Eliott blinked a few times, catching onto what Imane was saying. “Hold on a minute… you can’t be saying what I think you are? No way are we putting Lucas in harm’s way for the sake of some fucking government conspiracy! No way.”

“Eliott—” Lucas began, but Eliott shook his head. 

“You can’t honestly be serious?” Eliott demanded of all of them. 

Yann stood and placed a hand on Eliott’s shoulder. “Lucas is the only one who has a chance. They’re after him for some reason, and they aren’t going to relent.”

“You don’t know that,” Eliott pleaded, begging Yann with his eyes to consider his point of view. 

“Eliott,” Lucas said again, more definitively. “I love you, but it’s not up to you. I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to play a superhero, and I have to accept the responsibility that comes with it. Especially if my dad’s involved. I’m sure I haven’t scratched the surface on all the bad shit he’s done, but if there’s some way I can help put an end to it, I want to.”

Lucas looked at him the same way he’d looked at Yann, and Eliott’s defenses crumbled. “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Eliott said. 

“I never wanted you to get hurt either,” Lucas said, eyes carrying more pain than they should have at his age. “If I do this we can be one step closer to not hurting anymore.”

Eliott closed his eyes, breathed in and out of his nose slowly. When he opened them, Yann, Lucas, and Imane were all looking at him hesitantly. He trusted Lucas, he did, more than anyone. As hard as this might be, Eliott had no choice but to agree with the rest of them. They had to do what they could to uncover whatever was going on and make it right. 

“All right,” he agreed, “What’s the plan, then?”

🕷🕷🕷🕷

Eliott hated the plan. He’d helped to come up with the plan, but he hated the plan. He hated it because he would have to wait, wait until things either went perfectly or horribly wrong. Imane had full faith in the plan, so that should have put Eliott at ease, but it didn’t. Not much did these days.

It had been so hard to pretend everything was the same at school around their other friends. Manon looked like she might have been having a hard time adjusting too, but Lucas, Imane, and Yann were pros. Eliott didn’t know whether or not he should have been impressed by it. 

Lucas had decided not to tell the rest of their friends about everything until after his confrontation with his dad, just to have less stress surrounding everything that would go down. He didn’t say it was because Eliott’s worry was more than enough, but he didn’t have to. 

They were still staying together at Eliott’s place, and the soft, domestic moments they were able to sneak in almost made up for the absurdity and secrecy of everything else going on. The night prior Eliott and Lucas had made a promise not to talk about what was coming the next day and pretend it was just another night, and it had been one of the best nights they’d spent together in recent memory. Lucas had been in such a cheerful, loving mood, and Eliott had been more than happy to follow suit. They made (or, more accurately, failed at making) a meal together, sat and ate on the kitchen floor, neglected to do the dishes in favor of spending some much needed time together in the bedroom, and they’d fallen asleep tucked into one another, whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. 

It was the perfect night, and Eliott tried not to think about the fact that it may have been their last one. 

He was at home, waiting by the tv, waiting for a breaking news broadcast. Imane and Yann were together, helping from the sidelines, but Eliott had been given no job other than to sit and wait. As if summoned by his thoughts, Imane texted him.  

Imane: I can sense your worry from here

Eliott: good

Imane: Eliott. It will all be fine, I promise.

Imane: You know the plan, we’ve orchestrated the whole thing, we have the power here

Eliott: i don’t trust his dad one bit 

Imane: None of us do

Eliott: i know you guys are smart, but what if he has people that are smarter?

Imane: No one is smarter than me

Eliott: i’m being serious, imane. i’m scared.

Imane: Trust Lucas, ok? He wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t trust himself.

Eliott: yes he would

Eliott: he’s a self sacrificing asshole 

Imane: Well, he’s your self sacrificing asshole

Imane: Trust him. And try not to worry so much, I’m sure he can sense it too.

Eliott: easier said than done. 

Imane: Do you want me to tell Manon & co to come over to yours? They might not know about the plan, but I’m sure they could take your mind off it

Eliott: no. i think i need to be alone.

Eliott: i’ll let you know though

Imane: It’ll be ok <3

Eliott: i hope so.

Eliott shut off his phone, not waiting for a response. He knew Imane was right, that he should just trust her and Lucas and the plan, but it was so, so hard to abandon his anxieties like that. 

The plan was for Lucas to bait his dad by busting a fake robbery, that way they could ensure news coverage without interference from whatever organization his dad was a part of. They weren’t certain his dad would take the bait, but they’d been doing small things over the past few weeks to draw more and more attention to Spiderman, make him out as the hero most of the city thought he was. The hero Lucas thought he was anything but, the hero Eliott knew he was, even without a mask. 

They didn’t know if it would be Lucas’ dad or if he’d send someone else after Lucas, but Lucas had made it clear that he would do whatever, go wherever, until he found his dad and got answers. They knew there was a risk of Lucas’ dad interfering with the news, so Lucas’ suit was equipped with a camera and an earpiece that doubled as a microphone as well, but only Imane and Yann had access to it. Part of the deal was that they’d keep Eliott informed, but he wouldn’t be in the middle of it all. 

Eliott was mostly worried Lucas’ dad would do something drastic right off the bat and they wouldn’t get any answers or Lucas would get hurt. Ever since Lucas claimed that his dad would have no qualms about killing him, it was all Eliott had been able to think about. Part of him still couldn’t believe it, but he knew Lucas would never lie about that. 

Eliott checked the time, then the tv, knowing that whatever was happening would surely be happening soon. He was right, just as he looked at the screen, a breaking news broadcast showed up, informing of a robbery halted by the local hero, Spiderman. There was some footage of Lucas sweeping in to save the day, but not much. There were cameras on him live as he waited outside the site of the “robbery” and Eliott could sense the tension he was carrying even from miles away. Normally he left the scenes of crimes he stopped immediately following the crime stopping, but the plan had called for him to wait for retaliation, so Eliott watched as he waited.

He was watching the tv so intently that his vision nearly blurred, and in that time he noticed a small glitch in the camera filming the scene, and when it came back into clear focus, Lucas was gone. 

Fuck. 

He dialed Imane immediately. 

“Imane, where the fuck did he go?” he demanded into the phone when she picked up.

“Eliott, calm down. He’s with his dad,” she answered. 

That didn’t really give him much to go off of. He switched off the tv, now that Lucas was gone it wouldn’t be much help. “Where?”

“We’re not entirely certain, but on the roof of some building,” she said distractedly. 

Yann yelled into the phone from where he was likely stationed beside Imane. “It’s ok, Eliott, Lucas knows what he’s doing.”

“What are they talking about?” he asked.

Imane sighed, “I’d be able to tell if I could hear him over you.”

“Sorry.” Eliott went silent, waiting for her to listen and fill him in. It felt like an eternity, but she finally spoke up again.      

“He’s asking his dad questions, but his dad won’t answer. It’s ok, though, he’ll just keep— fuck!” she swore suddenly, and Eliott’s blood pressure spiked. 

“Imane, please tell me what’s happening,” he rambled worriedly.

“I have to go, Eliott, I’m sorry,” she said, voice wavering a bit, and the call disconnected. Impulsively, Eliott threw his phone across the room, hearing the glass crack as it hit the wall, then the floor.

He stormed out of his flat, not bothering to grab his broken phone or lock the door. He ran and ran and ran, all the way to Yann’s place, where Yann and Imane were set to be stationed. Fuck waiting, he wouldn’t do anyone any good if he was going out of his mind with worry back at his flat. 

It was probably the fastest Eliott had run in his life, and he showed up on Yann’s doorstep panting and sweating. He knocked and would not stop knocking until Yann’s sister opened the door, looking confused. 

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Imane and Yann are here?” he confirmed, ignoring her. 

She frowned. “Yeah, they’re in his bedroom, what are you—” 

He pushed past her making his way up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He could hear Yann and Imane’s voices yelling but he couldn’t hear what they were saying, so he wasted no time in wrenching open Yann’s door and being met with two nervous faces. 

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, and thankfully neither one of them chided him for being there. 

Both of the large monitors they’d set up were completely black, fuzzing with static. Imane looked on the verge of tears and Yann was shaking. He repeated, “What the hell is going on?”

“Eliott—” Imane began, cutting herself off at his expression.

“Where’s Lucas? Why are the screens black? What’s he saying?” Eliott demanded, and still Yann and Imane were silent. His voice broke. “P— Please. I need to know that he’s ok.”

Yann looked up at him, pain so clearly evident in his eyes, and Eliott knew. He shook his head. “No,” he argued, despite them not having said a word, “You told me this was all under control, you told me not to worry.”

He turned to Imane, seething, tears threatening to run down his cheeks. “You fucking lied to me Imane! And for what? He’s— he trusted you. He trusted all of us. I fucking—- I hate you. Both of you. I’ll never forgive you for this, Lucas, he—”

Eliott stumbled, falling to his knees. His chest hurt so badly, he felt like he was having a heart attack. Hands wrapped around him holding him so tightly it almost hurt, but he didn’t want them to let go. He let himself sob openly the tears tasting salty as they fell in rivers. Yann was crying too, he realized, but in a quiet sort of way, like he didn’t deserve to cry. Eliott felt horrible momentarily, Yann had known Lucas longer than any of them, had been his best friend since they were just kids learning to tie their shoes.

Eliot lifted his head, gripping Yann and Imane back with equal strength. “I’m sorry.”

His voice sounded dead, it didn’t sound like his voice. He wasn’t sure it would ever sound the same again. “You didn’t— we all underestimated his dad.”

“I shouldn’t have. I should have known better,” Yann said quietly. “I was the only one other than him who knew his dad. I should have insisted on some sort of backup, I should have vetoed the plan entirely.”

Eliott shook his head. “It’s not your fault. I’m sorry for blaming you, I just…” He couldn’t find any more words, and the other two seemed to understand. Sobs were still heaving in his chest, but he needed answers, he needed to know where exactly it had all gone wrong. 

“Was he scared?” Eliott asked.

Imane shook her head, wiping a stray tear from her eye. “I don’t think so.”

“Can you please tell me what happened then?” He didn’t want to know. He did want to know. He didn’t know what he wanted. He just wanted Lucas. 

Yann too, was still fairly inconsolable, and Imane took on the task of telling the story. “He asked his dad some questions, just as I told you. He wouldn’t answer until Lucas took his mask off, so he did. He started asking Lucas questions too, and Lucas wouldn’t tell him anything until he got answers of his own. It’s not like Lucas had anything to hide, anyway. His dad took out a gun, told him that he’d kill everyone Lucas cared about if he didn’t give him what he wanted. Lucas refused, calling his bluff. He said he didn’t have anyone he cared about anyway, so it didn’t matter. His dad knew about you, though, and Lucas told him you were already dead, that you’d been shot at the warehouse and you two had escaped together only for you to die in his arms hours later. He said he had nothing to lose, and he’d rather die himself than give up anything for his dad.”

Eliott could picture it all, picture Lucas’ stubborn face, his fierce heart. One of the last things he’d done was protect Eliott, and Eliott hadn’t been able to protect him. His chest panged again, heart on fire. 

“Lucas whispered something, and then his dad shot him. Without another word. That’s when our screens went black and the audio went silent.” Yann’s voice was as cold as Eliott’s.

Hearing it stated so bluntly made Eliott feel like the floor had been ripped from under him, like he was free falling with no one to catch him. It was a sensation he’d felt many times in his life, but never this strong, never with so much depth to the hurt. 

Voice broken, he whispered, “What did Lucas say?”

Yann and Imane shared a glance. “He told us that it wasn’t our fault, and to tell you that he loves you more than he ever thought a single person could love another.”

“He knew,” Eliott said, rapid breaths rising, thinking about what Lucas had told him about his spider senses, how he could anticipate attacks better than anyone. “He knew his dad was going to kill him? And he didn’t try to stop it? Why didn’t he try to stop it?”

“Eliott—” Imane tried.

“No.” Eliott pulled away from their loving hold. “He let it happen. He let his dad kill him. He was a fucking superhero! He— he—”

Yann shook him by his shoulders. “Eliott. Shut the fuck up. I know you loved Lucas more than anyone, but I loved him too, for a much longer time. It all happened so quickly, I don’t think Lucas could have stopped it if he tried. I don’t think he let it happen, and fuck you if you’re going to blame him for being fucking muderered! Fuck you!”

Eliott could feel his temper rising and he was worried he might say something he’d regret, but Imane got between the two of them, pressing a hand to both of their chests. “We’re all hurting right now,” she said, her tone sharp and serious, like she was trying her best to hold it together, “You two know him more than me, but I know for a fact that he wouldn’t want the two people he loves most to fight, to blame each other—”

“To blame him,” Yann spat, and Imane pressed harder.

“—to blame him. Which I don’t think Eliott was doing. We’re all experiencing a lot of emotions right now, so I swear to god if you two don’t stop this I— I—” Imane broke off into sobs, clenching their shirts in either one of her hands. Eliott looked at Yann, a wave of understanding passing between the two of them. Yann was sorry, Eliott was sorry, but no matter how sorry they were, it didn’t change the fact that Lucas was gone.

They folded into one another melting into a circle of comfort and support, knowing it wouldn’t do much good but trying anyway. They let Imane cry, they let Yann cry, they let Eliott cry. It was all they could really do for one another at the moment.

The sun had gone out, but somehow they were the only ones who noticed. 

🕷🕷🕷🕷

It had been a month. Eliott wasn’t coping well, but none of them were. A car accident, they’d told the rest of their friends. Eliott, Lucas, Imane, and Yann had been going outside the city for the weekend, just to have some fun and get away, and there had been an accident. They didn’t have a funeral, but everyone came to Eliott’s place and they all drank themselves sick and cursed the world for being so cruel. He wasn’t sure that was what Lucas would have wanted, but funerals were for the living anyway. 

Eliott had one of the worst depressive episodes of his life, and Yann and Imane hadn’t left his side through it. Their sadness didn’t carry the same endless depth, but it was deep enough for them to be intimately aware of what Eliott was feeling. 

Everyone treated the three of them with extra care, like they might break with a single touch, and Eliott was too exhausted all the time to argue. Sometimes he felt like he might break with less than a touch. Something didn’t feel right, didn’t feel finite. 

There had been no news of Spiderman’s death, which Eliott had assumed would have been displayed for everyone to see, instead the world just went on wondering where he was and why he’d stopped being a hero. Lucas’ body wasn’t ever found either, though that wasn’t too weird. Lucas’ dad probably had more resources than Eliott, Yann, and Imane did, so they hadn’t really banked on finding him, and deep down Eliott could tell they were kind of glad they hadn’t. 

Eliott knew he had to start making an effort if he was going to pass his bac this time around, but he felt like nothing mattered anymore. Lucas was the one that deserved to be taking his bac, looking at universities, not Eliott. 

His phone buzzed, and he nearly ignored it, but then it buzzed again, and again, and he figured he’d at least look to turn it on silent. It was probably Daphné, thinking she was doing some good by “checking in” on him.

Unknown Sender: Is this Eliott?

Unknown Sender: If not, ignore this message

Unknown Sender: If yes, please let me know

Eliott: who is this?

Unknown Sender: I can’t tell you that. Is this Eliott?

Eliott: yes

Unknown Sender: Thank god.

Unknown Sender: I need your help

Eliott: i’m not sure how i can help if i don’t know who you are

Unknown Sender: You wouldn’t believe me even if I could tell you

Eliott: try me

Unknown Sender: Will you help me or not?

Eliott: what do you need help with?

Eliott was utterly confused by the whole exchange. Who would be reaching out to him for help? He left his room and went to the living room, where Imane was sitting doing homework. 

“Hey Imane?” he asked, and she indulged him with a hum. “I got a weird message, do you think you could track it?”

She looked up immediately. “What kind of weird message?”

He showed her his phone and she immediately glowered at him. “This is how bad things happen to good people Eliott. Why on earth would you confirm your identity to someone who refuses to tell you who they are?”

Eliott shrugged. He had nothing to lose at this point. “All the bad people we know think I’m dead.”

“Still.” She sighed, plugging his phone into her computer. After a few minutes, she gestured for him to look. The signal was coming from the middle of an entirely empty area on the map. “Do you know where this is?”

He blanched. “I don’t, but I have an idea of what might be there.”

It was all too similar to another space that a map claimed to be empty, and his gut was telling him that he was on the right track with this. It was also telling him he could trust the unknown sender, against his and Imane’s better judgement. The phone buzzed again. 

Unknown Sender: I need you, Imane Bakhellal, and Yann Cazas, if they’re willing.

Eliott: how do i know i can trust you?

Unknown Sender: Because I promise I’d never let anything happen to you, or to them. I swear it on my life.

Eliott: your life may not mean that much to me

Unknown Sender: Maybe it does, though

Imane took the phone, rolling her eyes. 

Eliott: This is Imane. Stop playing with him, tell us what you want and we’ll decide if you’re worth it.

Unknown Sender: You’ve tracked these messages already, yes?

Eliott: Yes.

Unknown Sender: I need you to come here, and to disable all the tech, and clear a path for me to escape.

Eliott: Excuse me?

Unknown Sender: I know it’s a lot to ask, but they’re not as sophisticated as you’d think. It’ll be easy for you.

Eliott: And how would you know that?

Unknown Sender: I can’t tell you

Unknown Sender: Not because I don’t want to

Unknown Sender: I just have to be careful

Eliott: Fine.

Unknown Sender: Fine as in you’ll help?!

Eliott: Fine as in I’ll think about it.

Unknown Sender: Thank you Imane. Thank you. 

Eliott: Don’t thank me quite yet

Unknown Sender: I swear, it will be easy for you

Unknown Sender: Minimalism Imane, minimalism.

Unknown Sender: Can I talk to Eliott again?

Imane handed the phone back over, looking conflicted, like she was thinking something she didn’t want to be thinking.

Eliott: this is eliott

Unknown Sender: I know, I can tell by the way you type

Eliott: its a gay thing

Unknown Sender: Wait, really?!

Unknown Sender: i mean, wait really?!

Eliott: you’re gay, then?

Unknown Sender: you tell me

Eliott found himself grinning, despite himself.

Eliott: i’ll convince imane to help. yann too.

Unknown Sender: i know you will

Unknown Sender: i can’t wait to see you

Eliott: do we know each other?

Unknown Sender: enough

Eliott: then i can’t wait to see you too

Unknown Sender: i’ll text you more details when i can, but i have to go now

Eliott: ok

Unknown Sender: goodbye, eliott. sorry i didn’t say it before

Eliott: what?

Unknown Sender: nothing. just goodbye for now

Eliott put his phone away, assuming the strange conversation was over. Imane was staring off into space and Eliott had to wave a hand in front of her face a few times before she focused on him again.

“Are you ok?” he asked.

She nodded dazedly, forcing a smile. “Yeah. Great. Just thinking.”

“About?”

“How to help this weird friend of yours,” she teased, but the usual bite wasn’t there, her mind was still elsewhere. 

“They’re not my friend, I have no idea who it is.”

“Right,” Imane said, like she was just appeasing him at this point. 

Eliott frowned at her. “Are you sure you’re ok?”

“I’m fine, I just need to talk to Yann. Will you be fine here for a little while?” she asked. 

He nodded, not understanding what she was being so weird about. She left in a rush, leaving most of her things behind, but Eliott figured she’d be back soon enough anyway. In the meantime he went back to the refuge of his bedroom, wrapping himself back up in a cocoon of longing. Lucas would have been so annoyed with him for texting a random person who refused to reveal their identity, but he wouldn’t have expected anything less. 

Weirdly, texting that person was the only thing that had taken his mind off how much he missed Lucas recently. He’d allowed himself to banter, to enjoy the conversation, because it felt so familiar to him and so comfortable. Almost like Lucas had been there with him. But, of course, that wasn’t possible.

🕷🕷🕷🕷

Eliott, Yann, and Imane were sitting in a van in front of a giant building that shouldn’t have been where it was. Their job really was simple, Eliott’s most of all. He was just their ride, but their mystery contact had wanted him there, so there he was. 

Yann’s job was to hack into their systems, Imane’s was to surveil the inside and provide a path for their contact to escape from, and if all else failed, Eliott’s other job was to cut off their generator, leaving them powerless. 

The thought that Lucas’ dad might be in that building living and breathing nice and comfortably made Eliott’s blood boil so much that it was probably a good thing he was just on getaway car duty. Their sender had made it clear they only had a window of five minutes before the people inside the building realized they were missing, and the sender had an undisclosed job to do in the meantime as well.

Helping whoever their inside contact was had been good for Eliott, actually, it took his mind off the pain he felt constantly. He couldn’t tell if it was doing the same for Imane and Yann or not, they were both as focused as he was but he thought their intention might have been different. That being said, he had no idea what that intention might have been. 

Even now, Imane and Yann were so tense that it was putting Eliott on edge. Just before they’d arrived, Imane had asked Eliott how he felt about being complicit in a serious crime and he hadn’t known how to respond. That seemed to be a good enough answer for her. The two of them were being a bit secretive too, but Eliott tried not to take it personally, he knew it was likely about things that would have gone over his head anyway. 

“You ready?” Yann asked Imane, then Eliott. Imane nodded curtly, laptop at the ready. Eliott had rented a big van for them to set up their needed technology in, and if Eliott was being honest, it made him feel like he was in a heist movie of some sort. He nodded at Yann as well, and the two of them got to work, Eliott waiting for word from the inside. 

Yann swore under his breath every now and then, but other than that, things seemed to be going well. His fingers flew across the keys faster than Eliott thought should have been humanly possible, and after nearly ten minutes of tense silence, he cracked a grin.

“We’re in.”

Imane took over from there, Yann monitoring to make sure they went undetected in the system. Yann nodded at Eliott, and he texted their informant, letting them know their progress. 

Eliott: we��re in the system, imane’s almost ready for you

Unknown Sender: i’m ready

“Hey, Eliott?” Imane called to him, and he looked up, awaiting instruction. She continued, “Can you wait up front?”

He furrowed his brows. “Why?”

“We might need to make a quick getaway, and I want you ready,” she said harshly, but nervously. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was trying to hide something from him. 

“Oh, ok,” he agreed, sliding back into the front seat. Imane and Yann exchanged a look, and Imane spoke up again. 

“Can we have your phone?” she asked.

He handed it over, but still questioned, “Why?”

“We need to talk to hi— the contact. We’re going to call them.”

Eliott nodded, not sure why he couldn’t have been a part of that. He’d probably been the one with the most contact to the mystery insider. Whatever, he was sure they knew what they were doing. He tried not to think about the last time he’d been left out of some details of a major plan, tried not to think about the consequences. 

Yann slid the dividing door between the front and back closed, cutting him off from them. Eliott could only barely hear murmurs of them talking either to each other or the phone. Inside the building, he saw a trail of lights go out, one by one, and he assumed their contact was on the move. He straightened up in his chair, hands tightening on the wheel. They had five minutes. 

Something bright went off in the upper corner of the building, far away from where lights were still blinking off leading a trail for their contact to follow. It was working, it was really working. There was stillness for a few tense seconds, then the building’s power shut off completely. Eliott hoped to god that was Yann’s doing.

Eliott knocked on the door separating him from Yann and Imane, wondering if he should be concerned, but they just knocked back without saying anything, so he assumed all must have been well, or all must have been terrible. He was hoping for the latter.

Lights started turning back on one by one and Eliott squinted to see what was happening inside. It looked like madness, from what he could see. People were running all about, some looked like they were frozen in place, and alarms were blaring now that the power was back. 

Yann slid open the door and placed a hand on Eliott’s shoulder. “Our contact is coming, but I don’t want you to try to look at them and distract yourself, ok? I’m gonna close this door, and when you hear me hit it twice, fucking gun it and get the hell out of here.”

“Why can’t I—” Eliott argued, but Yann clamped his hand down harder.

“Trust me, ok?” His eyes burned holes into Eliott’s resolve, and he nodded.

“Ok.”

Yann told him to rotate the van quickly and quietly so their contact could jump into the back and they could get going, then shut the door, leaving Eliott alone again. He did as he was asked, heart rate spiking involuntarily with all the adrenaline coursing through his body.

He waited five seconds.

Ten.

Fifteen.

Twenty—

Two knocks on the door. 

Eliott gunned it, driving faster than he’d ever dared to in his life. He had to admit it was kind of fun to be a getaway driver, just as fun as the movies made it out to be. He thought about Lucas again while he was driving, about how fun Lucas would think this was, how he would pretend he was Vin Diesel in one of the many Fast and the Furious movies. His heart hurt as it usually did when he thought of Lucas these days, but it was full of fondness. A tear slipped down his cheek as Yann slipped into the front seat beside him, shutting the door tightly behind him before Eliott could so much as hear Imane and their newcomer talking. Yann looked like he’d been crying too, but Eliott didn’t ask about it.

They stayed on the outskirts of the city until they got to the location they’d decided to ditch the van, just in case anyone was on their tail. It didn’t seem like it though, so Eliott allowed himself to hope that maybe they’d done whatever it was they’d set out to do. 

Just as the van came to a stop, Eliott putting it into park and taking out the keys, Yann clapped a hand on his shoulder again, imploring him with his eyes. 

“Please, Eliott, don’t be mad at us,” Yann said, face full of an emotion Eliott couldn’t place.

Eliott frowned. “What do I have to be mad about?”

Yann ignored this, continuing, “Imane didn’t even want to tell me, and we didn’t want to fuck with your emotions, let you get your hopes up, just in case everything went wrong.”

“Yann what—” Eliott tried again, and Yann opened the door to the backseat.

L🕷U🕷C🕷A🕷S 

Fuck, Eliott was breathtaking. Lucas smiled weakly as Eliott looked at him like he was a ghost, and Lucas supposed he was. No matter how awful the last however many weeks of his life had been, he was sure Eliott’s had been worse. At least he had the hope of Eliott, of the rest of his friends to keep him going. Eliott thought that Lucas left him, left him for good. 

“Eliott, I…” Lucas said, incapable of verbalizing all the emotions and thoughts running through his mind. With that, Eliott’s expression changed, shock mingling with hope, and he opened the driver’s door, hopping out of the car. 

Lucas exchanged a worried look with Imane, whose presence was reassuring as always, and by the time he looked away the back doors of the van were being ripped open and he was being pulled into a grip so tight that he didn’t think he’d ever be let go. Good, he didn’t want to be. 

Slowly, cautiously, he wrapped his arms around Eliott in return, and Eliott only held him tighter, small sobs shaking the both of them. 

“I’m so sorry El,” Lucas said, eyes stinging with tears shed and unshed. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you—”

“Shut up,” Eliott said, shaking his head, “I love you Lucas, god, you’re real?”

Lucas pulled away just enough to look Eliott in the eyes and nod. “I’m real.”

Eliott’s mouth didn’t so much meet his as crash into his, a needy, desperate kiss that Lucas was more than happy to return. The world wasn’t ending, not anymore, it was just beginning. A whole new world for the two of them with no secrets and no life threatening situations. Well, maybe some life threatening situations, but Lucas would try to keep them to a minimum from here on out.

Eliott pulled back, then kissed him again, long and hard. “I don’t,” he said between kisses, each of them yearning for another once the last was finished. “I don’t understand.” Another kiss. “How are you—” Kiss. “How is this—” Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.

Lucas placed a hand on either side of Eliott’s face. “Let’s go home. I’ll explain there, ok?”

Eliott’s eyes fluttered shut at Lucas’ touch, his head coming to press against Lucas’. He nodded once, breathing in and out deeply. “Home,” he repeated, folding his hands over Lucas’.

“Home,” Lucas agreed. 

They walked home, leaving the van where it was, though Lucas knew there was no longer reason to worry. He had a lot to explain, to all of them, but he hoped that by the time he did there would be no more reason for worry lines to crease their faces, no reason for sadness and hesitation. Yes, healing was in order for everyone, but healing would bring light for all of them. 

He looked sidelong at Eliott and smiled. He was pretty sure that finding light wouldn’t be too hard, not with sunshine incarnate by his side.

As much as Lucas wanted to take a shower immediately when they walked into Eliott’s flat, he knew there was a lot of discussion to be had beforehand. Still, he’d been wearing his Spiderman suit for nearly two months without washing it or himself, and he knew he didn’t smell or look the best. The flat looked lived in as usual, but in a new way. There were remnants of Imane and Yann everywhere, and there was a hum in the air that reeked of desperation and hopelessness. It made Lucas’ heart ache more than he imagined it would. 

“Don’t be mad at Imane and Yann,” Lucas said first when they sat down. He wouldn’t allow himself to be curled into Eliott’s side, not yet, but Eliott’s fingers were laced with his in a comforting and grounding way. “I told them not to tell you, not until we were sure everything would work.”

Eliott watched him steadily, not bothering to interject, and Lucas continued, “Our plan, our original plan, it wasn’t that it didn’t work, it was just that my dad is smarter than a couple of teenagers, as smart as those couple of teenagers are. I knew what was happening just before it happened, but I went with my instinct. I could have jumped out of the way, but I knew that wouldn’t have stopped him, so I let his bullet hit me, and as I suspected, it wasn’t a bullet at all. It was some sort of paralyzing technology. I couldn’t move or speak, and I knew the camera and audio must have gone out, so there was nothing I could do to reassure you guys I was alive. If there had been any way for me to, I swear I would have, but when I first contacted you Eliott was the first time I was able to contact anyone at all. I knew that by then everyone would have assumed I’d died, and I’d formed a new plan by then that I knew had a chance of taking me out for good, so I thought it best to only let Imane know it was me, because I knew she’d be the hardest to convince to help some random person stuck in a lab that didn’t exist on any maps.”

“I figured it out, though,” Yann said proudly, and Imane nudged him. Eliott didn’t seem fazed by any of this, so Lucas took a deep breath before continuing his story. 

“Yann figured it out accidentally. I really didn’t want him to know, because I didn’t want his hopes up either, but it turned out to be helpful for planning. During the time I was in there before I got ahold of you all, I would sneak out of where I was being kept at certain times during the day and night to map out the layout in my head and take inventory of the space, its weak spots, its strong spots, and what I might do to get out of there for good. And to make sure they never came after any of us again. My dad was with me most of the time and he—” Lucas broke off, remembering. He did a lot of things, mostly to get Lucas to talk about his transformation into Spiderman and how it had come about, and Lucas held out to the best of his ability, but he had limits. After he had all the information he needed, he used Lucas as a test subject for things he was working on, like whatever he’d done to the man who had become Chameleon to make him into a monster. 

Lucas shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what he did, but I knew that once he was done, he was going to kill me. I’m lucky I got out of there with a mind of my own, to say the least.” He almost didn’t, if Imane, Yann, and Eliott had been any later, he wouldn’t have. “My dad still underestimated me, though, he didn’t think about the fact that some of the things he was doing would make me more of a threat to him, so I used that to my advantage. I still had my suit, obviously, because what damage could some spandex do? Quite a lot, actually.”

He pulled out a near miniscule flash drive Imane had embedded into the suit long ago, never knowing if it would come in handy. “There’s enough information on here to burn that place to the ground, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. It’s the last step of the plan, and once we do it, I think this will all be over.” He let out a breathy laugh, reaffirming to himself that they were almost in the clear. “It needs to reach a global audience, though, just in case the French government is in my dad’s pocket. I’m sure you’re up to the task, Bakhellal?”

She smiled at him slyly, but with a hint of relief and affection in her eyes. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Wait,” Eliott interrupted for the first time, “What did your dad do?”

Lucas shook his head. “That’s not important.”

“It is to me.”

“Eliott—”

“All due respect, Lu, but I’m with Eliott on this one. I need to know that you’re ok for real,” Yann cut in, fixing Lucas with a stare that offered no way out of an explanation.

“He… questioned me,” Lucas said elusively. Maybe he’d go into detail someday, but he wasn’t ready to relive it for quite some time. He coughed. “And when he was done questioning me, he decided to experiment. The experimenting wasn’t all bad, but it did require some adjustment. I don’t know if I can call myself Spiderman anymore, because I’m not sure that’s what I am, but I’m still human, I’m still Lucas.

“The power outage, the one back at the lab? That was me. I’m not really sure how it works yet, but I have a newfound affinity for electricity, and I did my best to use it to my advantage while I was in there. I also, um, can turn invisible?” He figured if he voiced it as a question, it would sound less absurd. Clearly, it didn’t work, because everyone was gaping at him like he was insane. 

“Invisible?” Yann clarified, and Lucas nodded somewhat apologetically. Yann continued, “Can you…?”

Lucas laughed in an apathetic sort of way. “Not right now. I’m really, really fucking exhausted. I need a shower. I need to remember what it is to be a teenage boy for a minute, without worrying about the end of the world. I need Eliott, alone.”

Eliott’s eyes snapped to his and Lucas bit his lip. He truly didn’t even mean what Yann and Imane probably thought he meant. All he wanted was to melt into Eliott’s warm embrace and apologize for leaving him, and promise never to do so again. 

“I think that’s our cue to leave,” Imane said, pulling Yann up out of his seat. Yann mumbled something grumpily and Lucas stood to follow them to the door, squeezing Eliott’s hand to let him know he’d be back in a minute. 

“Thank you,” he said, “For everything, not just tonight.”

“I really fucking missed you, man,” Yann said with a tight smile, breath shuddering in small amounts. 

Lucas looked down. “I’ll never stop being sorry for that, and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but for what it’s worth, thank you for not giving up on me.”

Yann tipped Lucas’ head back up and shook his head. “That was never an option. No matter what we thought, we’d never give up on you.”

Lucas had so many more words, but sometimes words weren’t needed to say what you needed to say. He pulled Yann in for a hug, melting into the embrace he knew better than anyone’s, the hug that had helped him through all the hardest times in his life. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” Yann said, and ruffled Lucas’ beyond dirty hair.

“You too, Imane,” he said, turning to her, “I love you too. Thanks for making sure these two were ok, and I’m sorry if no one checked to see if you were ok.”

She smiled sadly. “Making sure they were ok made me feel more ok, if that makes any sense. I kept it together, because I couldn’t afford to fall apart.”

“If you ever need to fall apart, just let me know, I think it’s my turn to keep it together,” he said in a joking sort of way, but he was dead serious. “I’m here for you too, you know?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” he said, “I think we have a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people.”

Yann groaned, resting his head on Imane’s shoulder. “Everyone’s going to kill us.”

Imane rolled her eyes, shrugging him off. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

Lucas closed the door behind them softly as they went, letting them bicker all the way down the stairs and out of the building. Eliott was waiting exactly where Lucas left him, and when Lucas opened his mouth to speak, Eliott shook his head.

“Shower first,” he said, “You know where everything is.”

Lucas bit back his words, his apologies, and went to do just that, anxiety spiking. Now that they were beyond the initial relief of seeing one another alive and well, was Eliott mad? He had every reason to be, Lucas had inadvertently put him through hell, and there was no way to forgive that, really.

He let himself get lost under the water, smothering his racing thoughts and cleansing himself of the bad things that he’d done and had been done to him. His body was a canvas of cruelty, some scars would fade, some wouldn’t, and he was momentarily happy Eliott hadn’t seen him like this. 

Eliott had placed a large hoodie and a pair of sweatpants on the bathroom counter for when Lucas finished, and he smiled at the simple, domestic act of care. By the time he was dressed and went to the bedroom, Eliott was laying down, looking up at the ceiling. 

Towel drying his hair, Lucas realized how long it had gotten, especially now when he didn’t have any products to keep it from flopping in his eyes. Under any other circumstances, he and Eliott would be laughing about it, or Eliott would be braiding his hair and he would pretend he didn’t like it, but instead he just slipped silently into bed beside Eliott, laying on his side and waiting for Eliott to do the same. 

Eliott did, eyes soft and open. “I really missed you, you know.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Lucas said, gearing up to beg for forgiveness. 

Eliott shook his head, brushing a thumb across Lucas’ cheekbone. “You don’t have to be sorry. I forgave you the moment Yann opened the door and I saw you in the back of the van. I just want you to know how much I missed you, and how my love for you never wavered, not even for a single second.”

When Eliott’s thumb brushed his cheekbone again, it was to brush away a tear. Lucas hadn’t realized he’d started crying. Eliott continued, “I’m sorry for what you went through. I know I don’t even know the half of it, and I don’t blame you for that, but I’m here when you want to talk about it. I’ll be here forever, if you’ll have me.”

“In every universe?”

“In every universe.”

Lucas melted into Eliott like he’d been born to do so. “I love you more than the moon.”

Eliott smiled intimately. “That’s a bold claim to make.”

“It’s true,” Lucas said with a shrug. He promised, “I won’t ever leave you again. At least not without telling you where I went.”

“You can go wherever you please as long as you come back to me, some way, somehow.” Eliott’s breath tickled Lucas’ face as they moved closer into one another, wholly unintentionally. 

“Always and forever,” Lucas agreed, folding his arms tightly around Eliott. “Will you make me blueberry bacon muffins tomorrow?”

Eliott laughed, and god, Lucas had missed that sound. He felt like he might have just gotten high off it. “Let’s not think about tomorrow,” he said, and Lucas furrowed his brows. 

“No?”

Eliott shook his head. “Remember what you told me, all that time ago, when I was having that really bad depressive episode?”

Lucas did remember. “Minute by minute.”

“Minute by minute,” Eliott confirmed. “Now that we’ve clarified that we have forever, let’s agree to take that forever minute by minute. I don’t care what happens tomorrow, you’re here in my arms right now, and that’s all that matters. Deal?” 

Minute by minute. Lucas was surprised Eliott even remembered, but he was glad that he had. “Deal,” he said, then, “In this minute, can I kiss you?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Eliott said.

Every time they were together, their souls soared high enough to touch the stars, but that night they came back down to earth, grounding them in the sensation that this, Lucas and Eliott, was real, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

- after -

After began like this: Arthur and Basile and Manon and Emma and Daphné and Alexia and Mika and Lisa and Idriss and Sofiane and the looks on their faces, the relief, the shock, the hurt, the love. It was Lucas telling everyone his biggest secret and all of them promising to love him despite the things he’d hidden, happy to have him back, happy that they were right to hold onto their hope. 

After was Lucas getting food poisoning from Eliott’s muffins and laughing the entire time he was bent over the toilet because of fucking course. In that minute, he’d decided to be happy, even while his stomach felt like it was slowly trying to kill him. 

After was Imane and Yann working with Lucas while Eliott watched fondly, blasting the corruption Lucas had uncovered to a global scale, taking down the systems that tried to take them down, even if they never got answers to what they wanted in the first place. Some things were better left unanswered, after all. 

After was Eliott asking Lucas to move in with him, officially, after Eliott passed his bac and got into an art college in the heart of the city. They got a whole new flat of their own, decorated the kitchen with fairy lights and a handwritten sign that read ‘No Eliotts allowed’, because one could never be too careful. 

After was Spiderman continuing to save the city, using his newfound invisibility to his advantage and basking more in the shadows than the spotlight. No one ever found out that Spiderman had a boyfriend, which was a miracle, because the two of them weren’t very discreet. Some may wonder if Spiderman’s boyfriend was turned on by all the spandex. But again, some questions were better left unanswered.

After was Ouba Lallemant-Demaury, the beautiful little terror that she was. She reminded Eliott of Lucas more than Lucas even knew. Lucas finally got a haircut too, but not until after Eliott braided it and made fun of it and turned it into a giant spike in the shower. Somewhere along the way Eliott and Lucas had turned a house into a home, and a couple of friends turned lovers turned into a family.

After was Arthur learning to adjust to a new way of living, and finding love and support in his friends along the way. If Lucas happened to sign ‘I love you’ to him one time, accidentally activating the web shooters hidden up his sleeves and subsequently flinging himself into a nearby tree, they never mentioned it again. (To his face). Eliott was reminded of one of the first times he’d spoken to ‘Spiderman’ and he’d been so flustered he’d knocked a tree right out of the ground. So, maybe Eliott was laughing a little harder than everyone else, but no one needed to know why.

In some ways, after was just like before, and in some it was wholly different. Before, Eliott loved Lucas and Lucas loved Eliott, and after only made it stronger. The gang and the crew were more of a gang-crew (or grew?) and Manon and Daphné were closing in on Eliott and Lucas for the title of cutest couple. Eliott, Yann, and Imane still hung out, just the three of them, and remembered the hard times and how they’d gotten each other through them. Sometimes Eliott awoke in the middle of the night and forgot that those hard times were in the past, tears stinging his eyes until Lucas’ hand found his in the dark and Ouba jumped on his lap to comfort him. Sometimes Lucas awoke in the middle of the night screaming and all Eliott could do was hold him while he trembled like a leaf, promising that he was safe now. 

Sometime during after Lucas told Eliott what all the marks on his body meant, and Eliott promised to never look at him any different, though sometimes it was hard not to. After was therapy for Lucas and Eliott both, checking in and keeping one another on track. It was nice, and it wasn’t, because vulnerability was hard at times even in cases it should have been easy. 

After after, there was even more to uncover. Lucas graduating high school and going to his top pick university, Eliott and Lucas coexisting in the world they’d made for themselves with such ease they felt like their lives had been leading to this point. Eliott got a job at a video store and he and Lucas would sneak away to make out between the shelves on days the store wasn’t busy. 

Eliott graduated university, then Lucas, then all of a sudden they were adults, real ones this time, and they had real jobs. Spiderman was still Spiderman, but they didn’t know for how much longer. Was there an expiration date on superheroes? 

They went to see the ballet from time to time, imagining another version of themselves up on the stage and giggling in their seats. A new flat, another dog, because Lucas could never say no to Eliott no matter how hard he pretended to try. Time spent and plans made, waiting for the right moment for Eliott to get down on one knee and ask Lucas to spend the rest of their minutes together. 

After could have been many things, it could have been dark, Eliott without Lucas or Lucas without Eliott, and it could have been better, no exams failed or Spiderman rescue missions gone awry or food poisoning had because Lucas still put too much faith in a lethal combination of blueberries and bacon. It was all those things, technically, because in infinite worlds there were infinite versions of their lives playing out, just waiting for their next minute to come. Always Lucas and Eliott and Eliott and Lucas.

In its purest sense, after was this: not the end, just the next minute.

[your-guide-to-music]

Your guide to: George Michael

Welcome to your guide to: George Michael! This guide is designed to help anyone looking to explore his music with getting started. The guide covers his background and history surrounding both Wham! And his solo career, and also the music produced during these periods. It is a long guide, as is every guide that will go on this blog but it’s meant to give a very in depth view of the artist and help new fans get to know who they really are. I may update this in the future so if you have anything you want added or have any questions, just let me know!

Background and history

So first off, just like the last guide, I’m going to give a bit of background info on who George Michael is - George was a British pop star who found fame in the early 1980’s as part of a duo with Andrew Ridgeley, a friend he met during his teenage years. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, London in 1963 and moved to Hertfordshire in his early teens.

To date, George has had a combined 9 studio & compilation albums go to #1 within Wham! and his solo career. His first two albums inside Wham! - Fantastic and Make It Big both hit the top spot in the UK and although these are the only albums released in the UK, there is a third album called Music From the Edge of Heaven. Music From The Edge of heaven was not released in the UK, but it was in North America and Japan, where it’s peak position landed at #10. The album includes tracks such as the hit ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘Edge of Heaven’ which both hit #1 in the UK.

In terms of his solo work, these are all his albums to go to #1. LWP Vol.1 actually hit the top spot twice after its reissue in 2017.

The Wham! Era (1981-1986) - Wham were a pop duo formed by friends George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. The group began in 1981 and initially signed to Innervision records after the boys sent a homemade tape to record labels. George acted as Lead Vocalist, Composer and Producer with Andrew primarily acting as guitarist and backing vocalist.

Alongside the duo were backing dancers Shirley Holliman (Who would go on to become Shirley Kemp, the wife of Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp) and Dee C. Lee, though Lee left early on to work as part of the group ‘The Style Council’ with Paul Weller, and was replaced by Helen ‘Pepsi’ DeMacque. After Wham!’s split in 1986, the girls would go on to form their own duo called Pepsi and Shirley, spanning songs such as Heartache and Goodbye Stranger.

The first record released by Wham! was the upbeat ‘Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do)’ in August 1982, reaching #8 on the UK charts, it is arguably one of the band’s most well-known songs. The next single was Young Guns (Go For It), released in October 1982 and reaching #3 in the UK charts. This forecast further success for Wham! and in June 1983, they released their debut album - Fantastic. The album hit #1 and things only went up from there. Other hit singles from this album include the ever memorable Club Tropicana and Bad Boys which hit #4 and #2 respectively.

The second album released by Wham! was Make It Big, by this time they had moved to Epic Records after disputes with Innervision. The album was released in November 1984 and was accompanied by 3 #1 singles - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Freedom and Careless Whisper (That last one is actually a George Michael solo song as you all probably know but it is credited to Wham! featuring George Michael. George put Andrew on the writing credits so he wouldn’t have to worry about money as he’d always get royalties from that song.) They almost had a Christmas #1 in 1984 with their classic ‘Last Christmas’, but were beat to the top spot by Band Aid, a venture George was also a part of. The royalties from LC went to the Ethiopian Famine Appeal to coincide with the fund-raising efforts of Band Aid.

In 1985, Wham! became the first western group to have a 10 day visit to China on their world tour. They played a concert at the People’s Gymnasium in Beijing for 12,000 people and a further concert in Canton for 5,000 people. Footage from their tour was featured in the video for Freedom and the tour attracted mass media attention, keeping Wham! at the height of success.

In 1986, George released a second solo song - A Different Corner. This song is always bittersweet to listen to for me, and it was a big success just like Careless Whisper was 2 years earlier. It was around this time that breakup rumours began to circle and Wham! officially announced their disbandment after the release of Music From the Edge of Heaven and a compilation album of their singles called ‘The Final’. A sell-out 8 hour farewell concert by the same name of the compilation album followed and the last Wham! single ‘Edge of Heaven’ reached #1 in June 1986.

The solo years (1987-2016) - In January 1987, a duet between George and Aretha Franklin - I Knew You Were Waiting (for me) - was released. The song was another success for George and it hit #1 in both UK and US charts. This was the third solo #1 he’d had before his debut album was even released.

His debut album, Faith, was released in the UK on October 30th. The album has now well-known classics of George’s discography such as Faith, I Want Your Sex, Father Figure and One More Try. This album spent 12 weeks at #1 in the US and stayed in the UK charts for 92 consecutive weeks. Furthering it’s success, Faith won the Grammy for Album of The Year in 1989 and George embarked on a world tour in support.

It’s no secret (now) that George was unhappy during this time, and in fact at future various times of his career too. The very execution of Faith, including the promotion and touring for it, left him exhausted. At the same time, George was battling with his sexuality and had been for some time which only contributed to his opposement to promotion and the press in general in the future.

In 1990, his second album - Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1 - was released. This album is personally my favourite, George had moved away from the cute little teen idol image he was in Wham! and was starting to pursue a more serious image. The album includes notable tracks such as Freedom ‘90 and Praying For Time and George refused to do any promotion for it.

Freedom ‘90 is particularly notable for its music video, which featured some of the biggest supermodels in the world at the time. He didn’t appear in the music video at all and instead had Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz lip-syncing to the song, inspired by this photo from the cover of Vogue Magazine. George would work with Linda Evangelista again for the video of ‘Too Funky’, as well as other supermodels such as Tyra Banks.

The 90’s brought a lot of struggles with it for George, he entered a long battle with Sony over his rights as an artist and he lost his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, as well as his mother.

The battle with Sony was tough to say the least. George argued that Sony had failed to promote his latest album LWP Vol.1 properly as punishment for his choice to downplay his sex symbol image. Sony, on the other hand, argued that it was George’s refusal to appear in promotion for the album that caused the poor performance compared to Faith.

Sony ultimately won the lawsuit and George remained trapped in his contract, something he referred to as ‘professional slavery’. It wasn’t until 1995 that Sony sold George’s contract to Virgin Records and DreamWorks Records, freeing him from the confinements he detested so heavily.

In 1991, George performed Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me at his Wembley Arena show with Elton again, this version was recorded and released, reaching #1 in the UK and US.

That same year we sadly lost one of the best musicians I personally think we’ve ever seen. Freddie Mercury was an incredible man on and off stage, and in 1992 a tribute concert was held in his memory. George attended this concert as a performer and sang queen hits such as Somebody To Love and These Are The Days of Our Lives with Lisa Stansfield.

It was during this time that George discovered Anselmo had been diagnosed with AIDS, the same thing that took Freddie from us, and was feeling not only the hurt from losing one of his idols, but also distraught from understanding he was potentially going to lose his partner.

Anselmo died in March 1993 after a long battle with AIDS. This severely hurt George and led him further into a state of depression and grief. Because of the battle going on with Sony, George wouldn’t release another album until 1996.

Older is, arguably, his best work. After all the pain he had experienced and the struggles he had gone through in recent years, he came back with a strong album that included the hit song ‘Jesus To a Child’, dedicated to Anselmo. Other songs such as Spinning The Wheel and Fastlove Pt. 1 highlights the danger of AIDS and explore the notion of love without commitment.

Looking back, I think it is relatively easy to see the real messages in the music. I think back when these albums were released it probably wasn’t as widely considered and so few were looking for the real messages, just looking at the music but not observing.

In 1997, George also lost his mother to cancer, just 4 years after losing his Partner. I have to say, George created some amazing music during this decade and I believe he came out stronger for going through these things but it’s hard to deny that this was an incredibly difficult time for him and I often wonder how he did it.

1998 was the year George’s sexuality was finally revealed in a more than subtle way. He was arrested in Beverly Hills in April of that year for ‘Engaging in a lewd act’ in a public restroom located at the Will Rogers Memorial Park. The arrest was part of a sting operation using ‘Pretty Police’, the arresting officer involved in the incident was Marcelo Rodríguez and as a result of the publicity, it was soon known that George was gay (not that it was any of our business anyway).

1998 also saw the release of his first solo greatest hits album entitled ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: the best of George Michael’. The album included some new songs such as ‘Outside’, the first single which made fun of his April arrest, and a duet with Mary J Blige singing a cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘As’. The album had to be released through Sony as per the contract severance terms from 1995 and the album reached #1 in the UK, staying there for 8 weeks and making it one of the best selling albums of all time in the UK.

George’s next album came a year later - Songs From The Last Century. This album was completely covers with no original work, songs such as Roxanne (originally performed by The Police) and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (originally performed by Peggy Seeger) and hit #2 in the UK charts.

Now we’re getting into the 2000’s, the decade in which some of my favourite George Michael songs came to life. I’m 2000 he recorded a duet with Whitney Houston which was going to feature Michael Jackson instead of her at first. He began working on his 5th studio album this year and it was released in 2003.

The album, ‘Patience’, had its first single released in March 2002 and what a single it was. Titled ‘Freeek!’, the song was far, far away from the usual wham! Sound. Georgie had grown up and we were not allowed to forget it. Unfortunately I’ve hit the photo limit for this post but I suggest you watch the music video below if you want an idea of what I’m talking about.

https://youtu.be/VLnYPXTs9LY

The next single was quite controversial, it’s called Shoot The Dog and the lyrics criticise UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush in the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. He also recorded a version of Don McLean’s ‘The Grave’ and performed it on various music programmes, gaining further controversy but praise from Don.

In 2003, George resigned to Sony despite the history between them. Patience was released in 2004 and became one of the fastest selling albums in the UK, selling over 200,000 copies in its first week alone. A number of other singles were released from this album including Amazing, Flawless, Round Here and John and Elvis Are Dead.

The next piece of work from George came in 2006 titled simply ‘Twenty Five’. It marked George’s 25th year in the music world from the time Wham! begun and debuted at #1 in the UK. It was a compilation album, much like the greatest hits from 1998 but this time it included songs from Wham! as well as his solo work. It also debuted some new songs such as An Easier Affair and a new version of Heal The Pain featuring Paul McCartney.

To celebrate the album, George also went on a tour titled The 25 Live tour. The tour consisted of 80 shows and was watched by approximately 1.3M fans. A tour DVD was released featuring his shows at Earl’s Court, London and I definitely suggest watching it, it’s a very good show.

In 2008, George released what is considered to be his first Christmas song since recording Last Christmas with Wham! 24 years earlier. December Song was released to the fans free of charge with George hoping the fans would make a donation instead to a charity.

Now we enter the 2010’s, some of the last years of George’s life. He started his Symphonica tour in August 2011, singing mainly songs from his album Patience and Songs From The Last Century.

In November, the rest of the tour was rescheduled as he became dreadfully ill with Pneumonia whilst in Vienna, even going comatose at one point. Thankfully, he pulled through and even made an appearance at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

On August 25th 2012, George released a song called ‘White Light’, inspired by his battle with pneumonia and near-death experience during it. The song got it’s live debut at the 2012 olympics closing ceremony and reached #15 on the UK charts.

The Symphonica tour resumed and finished in October 2012 at Earl’s Court, marking George’s last ever concert.

Symphonica got released as a live album in March 2014 and became George’s 7th #1 solo album in the UK. George’s team announced in November 2016 that there was a documentary titled ‘Freedom’ that would be released in March 2017 but due to the sudden death of George, it was pushed back to October 2017 instead. I really suggest you watch this documentary as it’s very informative about his journey.

LWP got a reissue at the same time and Freedom ‘90 was released as a 7” single in limited numbers to coincide with the documentary and reissue. September 2017 saw the release of a new version of Fantasy featuring Nile Rodgers. At this time, we’ve not had any more new music but have been advised there is some coming. Georgie’s family and estate update us from time to time (see link below, this where all updates are usually posted)

In 2017 I and countless other Lovelies spent a week straight streaming and buying the Last Christmas single, we wanted to get it to #1 for George as it had been a year since he passed but unfortunately somehow despite our efforts, the song was a non-mover and stayed at #3. To this day I’m suspicious about that as there were so many of us streaming and buying etc. That I don’t understand how it could possibly have not moved. But anyway, we tried and George would be proud of us even if it didn’t work.

The music

Okay, well... that was the history of George Michael. Now all we really have left to do is go through the albums (I’m omitting compilation albums though, and giving special mentions to songs not on studio albums instead) and pick out some underrated and favourite songs. I’m going to include his Wham! days in this as it seems only right to, he was a brilliant solo artist but it’s important we recognise where he started.

Fantastic - Bad Boys, Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do), Club Tropicana and Young Guns (Go For It!)

Make it big - Freedom, Credit Card Baby, Everything She Wants, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

Music From The Edge of Heaven - I’m Your Man, Edge of Heaven, Where Did Your Heart go?, A Different Corner, Blue

Faith - Monkey, One More Try, Father Figure, Hand To Mouth, Faith, Kissing a Fool

LWP Vol.1 - Praying For Time, They Won’t Go When I Go, Cowboys and Angels, Freedom ‘90, Mother’s Pride

Older - Spinning The Wheel, You Have Been Loved, Star People, The Strangest Thing

Songs From The Last Century - Secret Love, My Baby Just Cares For Me, Roxanne, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Patience - Freeek! ‘04, My Mother Had a Brother, Amazing, Flawless (Go To The City), Shoot The Dog

Special mentions: An Easier Affair, White Light, Outside, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me (with Elton John, I can’t make you love me, Killer/Papa was a rolling stone, Somebody To Love (From the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert 1992)

And we’re finished! That was your guide to George Michael, if you have any questions or want me to add/correct anything then please let me know. Like I said I’ll probably update this in future so it’s worth checking back from time to time. Thank you for reading this far, if you have!

[atekasey]

My Top 5 Games of 2019

As I like to do every year, here’s some collected ramblings about my opinions of some games I played and really liked this year. While there were a lot more than 5 games that I enjoyed this year, I only had strong opinions about these 5. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on my top 5 games of the year of our lord 2019.

DISCO ELYSIUM

Full disclosure: I have not finished Disco Elysium; I am about three quarters of the way through the 3rd day. Regardless, I loved so much of what little I played that I consider it one of the best games of the year, based solely on the world-building and characterizations I’ve encountered so far.

Disco Elysium is an adventure game/RPG where the only stats you build up are personality stats and thought processes, which affects how you talk to people and interact with the environment. The main plot is about you playing as an amnesiac cop tasked with solving a murder at the centre of a labour dispute, but to be honest I couldn't really care less about the main plot. Not to say the plot is bad per se, it just didn't grab me like how the setting and individual characterizations did. The main plot was nothing more than a vehicle for me to explore and find out more about Revachol, its residents, and how all of them came to be who they are. The amazing writing that underpins every interaction is what makes the individual interactions so compelling.

When I woke up every morning (in the game world, mind you), the only thing I wanted to do is talk to people, conveniently ignoring the dialogue choices that furthered the plot until the end of the conversation. The pétanque-playing veterans who have some scathing opinions about communist theory, the paledriver who's mind is corrupted by nostalgia, the mysterious balcony smoker who I later learned was part of the homosexual underground, the Semanese race theorist who I wanted nothing more than to punch in the face if not for my low physical instrument stat, these are just some examples of the extremely varied characters you meet while you investigate some dead dude or whatever, I guess. Speaking of the paledriver, learning about the true nature of the pale from the White Pines rep was a pivotal moment for me personally, as it made the world feel both unique and existentially terrifying. All these little details and more create the rich tapestry that is Disco Elysium. Also, some dude was murdered??? Who cares about that, I need to make my sorry-cop sing depressing karaoke!

I should really get back and finish it.

CONTROL

I remember the first time I read SCP-087 back in the day, and it introduced me up to the horrifying (and sometimes comedic) world of SCP. For those who don't know SCP (which can stand for "special containment procedures" or "secure, contain, protect", depending where you look), is a collaborative fiction wiki about fake government reports on the supernatural and paranormal. It's the bureaucratic nature of SCPs that really drew me into reading them, making it feel like I was reading real government reports.

So imagine my delighted surprise when I first played Control, I picked up the first of many report-type collectible and saw that it was written almost exactly like an SCP entry. Control is a game that asks "what if the SCP Foundation was a real branch of the US government?" and goes off the deep-end with that premise in the best possible way. The bureaucratic mundanity of the Federal Bureau of Control really shines in these reports, as you read report after report of some other-worldly phenomenon while also reading reports about the monthly book club. Beyond that, actually playing control was fun and engaging... up until the end. Jesse is a great protagonist, and the characters you meet along the way have great personality and give life to the bureau. The Oldest House is a fascinating setting to explore, with it’s brutalist look and nooks and crannies that change and spiral off in otherworldly ways. Unfortunately, for all the build-up the story was leading to, it ends on a pretty lame whimper. But the lackluster ending did not sway my overall love for Control. No one makes games like Remedy at the AAA level, and I'm happy they are making games like Control. I cannot wait for the DLC for this game to get back into it.

Also, the PC version of control does a phenomenal job at showing off how ray-tracing really is the future of lighting and graphics. The real-time reflections alone, where the scene I was watching was reflected almost perfectly on a pane of glass like an actual reflection (in real-time, no less!) was a marvel to look at. And, not since Quake 2 did coloured lighting look so pretty. Suffice to say, Control justified my RTX 2080 purchase single-handedly.

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES

I have what one can say a love/hate relationship with the Zero Escape series. The first entry, 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, is one of my favourite games of all time (currently ranked 3rd, if you care at all, which you probably don't, sorry to bother you), and while the cliffhanger ending of the sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, made me excited to see where the series would go, Zero Time Dilemma ultimately did not offer a satisfying conclusion. Not only did ZTD barely resolve any of the threads started in VLR, but it was a very disappointing conclusion to the entire Zero Escape series as a whole (Junpei and Akane's story just getting a tossed-off mention after you beat the game about how "they lived happily ever after" and nothing else? THEY DESERVED BETTER!). So when it was announced that the creator of the Zero Escape series, Kotaro Uchikoshi, was making a new game called AI: The Somnium Files, I was cautiously optimistic. I hoped ZTD was just a one-off and not indicative of a downward trend starting to happen, and Uchikoshi still had it in him to tell a compelling story.

Very fortunately (for me at least), AI: The Somnium Files delivered in the best possible way, meeting and thoroughly exceeding my expectations.

It took some time before the game adhered itself to me as a truly great game, unlike Zero Escape. In the Zero Escape games, given the Saw-like murder games the characters were forced to participate in, there was an sense of urgency to the story that helped propel it right from minute one. AI, on the other hand, is more procedural, which makes sense given that you're playing as Kaname Date, a cop who has a fake eye that is also an AI named AIBA (trust me, it makes sense in context), trying to solve the murder of his adopted daughter's birth mom. Not to strip the act of murder from the seriousness it deserves, but AI ends up being more lighthearted than the Zero Escape games, which only made me enjoy the game more. AI takes its time to explore it's story and characters, letting scenes breath and focus on characters instead of the mystery at hand, allowing said characters to have more development and growth. I bring this up only so I can talk about Mizuki Okiura, Date's adoptive daughter, who quickly becomes the standout character from the game. A back-talking, street-wise 12-year-old punk who forces her way into becoming Date's "partner" as he unravels an ever-growing conspiracy of politics, missing eyeballs, and twitch streamers (again, please trust me, it makes sense in context).

She also has a lead pipe she likes to beat people with.

Mizuki is the best.

She is THE BEST!

Make an entire game about her YOU COWARDS!!

...Anyways, structurally, AI plays similarly to Zero Escape, but with more adventure game elements to it. You still follow a flow-chart that branches depending on story choices you make, and you need to see all branches to complete the story. Not to keep comparing AI to the Zero Escape games (that's why I'm playing this game, so that's the lens I'm analyzing this game through; this is my essay, I can do what I want, you’re not my real dad), but unlike the Zero Escape games, AI ends on a legitimate, no-fooling, unambiguous happy ending that couldn't have put a bigger smile on my face. Sure, it was corny, but the entire game was corny, and ultimately I didn't care! I was just happy that I wasn't uber-depressed after playing one of Uchikoshi's games! It even ends on a dance number consisting of the entire cast of characters!

AI is a good time all-around!

(Except for the murders. Those are bad...probably...)

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2

Yes, this game came out last year, but honestly I don't care. I played it this year and that's all that matters. However, as I am coming to this game later than most, most of what can be said about Red Dead 2 has already been said by way smarter people than I am, so I won't retread any of that well-trodden ground. So, I'll keep this short: Arthur Morgan's journey is one of the best told story in AAA gaming to date, and never have I felt more like a rustic cowboy wandering the the old west. People harped on the sluggish nature of the controls, but I honestly liked it, as it added to that feeling of being a wandering cowboy. I took my time meandering through the the forests of Roanoke Ridge, the deserts of New Austin, and the red earth of Scarlet Meadows. There was nothing more that I enjoyed in this game than gearing up, getting on my horse and just riding aimlessly until I encountered something that catches my attention, whether that be a 3-star animal, a legendary fish, or even a dilapidated church on a civil war battlefield. I put in well over 100 hours on PS4 earlier this year, and I've put in another 100+ hours on PC, and I don't see myself putting it down anytime soon.

Fucking superb, you funky little cowboy game.

OUTER WILDS

Outer Wilds is not only the best game of 2019, but probably one of my top 5 favourite games of all time. It's hard to describe what makes Outer Wilds a truly one-of-a-kind experience for me without spoiling the ending. It's a game driven purely by exploration and discovery. Knowledge of the world and how it works is the sole "progression" system in the entire game; so much so that you can beat it in your very first first session if you happened to have the discoveries spoiled for you. Go into as blind as possible, that’s what I did and it made the experience all the more special. Play this game, you will not be disappointed.

At this point, I will be spoiling the major parts of the story of Outer Wilds, primarily the ending, because it is the thing that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I first experienced it. Be warned that there be major spoilers beyond this point. Given that Outer Wilds is all about discovery, I highly recommend you do not read anything beyond this point if you haven't beaten it. Again, play this game, you will not be disappointed.

One of my earliest existential fears was when I learned about the lifespan of stars in the second grade. I remember it vividly: sitting in class, hearing my teacher describe the stages of a star's life, going from normal-sized star to red giant, then eventually to a supernova, then explaining that will happen to our Sun as well. The dawning realization that the Sun will grow to a size that will envelop the Earth terrified me beyond anything that has ever terrified me up until that point in my albeit short life. I couldn't sleep for days without fearing that the sun will expand, consume the Earth and burn everyone I ever loved alive. It didn't matter that my teacher said it would take millions upon millions of years before the Sun ever reached this stage, this was my single-biggest fear.

Fast-forward 23 years later to beginning of June of 2019, I pick up Outer Wilds based on the buzz the game was getting. I knew the game was based around a time-loop à la Majora’s Mask, but had no idea about one of it’s biggest “mechanics,” so to speak. My first few runs in that game resulted in premature deaths, so it took me a little bit to realize that the Sun explodes after 22 minutes and envelops everything in a fiery blaze. Seeing my childhood fear unfolding right in from of me just drove me to unravel the mysteries of the universe I inhabited, if nothing more so that I could find a way to stop it. As I learned more about the ostensible precursor race, the Nomai, whom were fixated on finding something called the Eye of the Universe but perished before they could find it, I got it in my head that, if I can just do what the Nomai failed to do, I could stop all of this from happening. Every time the time loop started, I would run out into space and unraveling the mystery further and further, each time being obliterated by the sun at the end of 22 minutes (or dying in a really stupid physics-y way), getting closer and closer to finding out what’s really going on.

Eventually, I discovered enough information to accomplish the task of reaching the Eye of the Universe: I found the coordinates of the Eye, a ship with the necessary warp-drive to get there, and a power source to make it all happen. With the keys in-hand to finally unlocking the answer to this mystery, I set off on what would be my final run: I performed the necessary tasks, said one last goodbye to the Solar System, and barreled into what I would eventually learn is the quantum singularity of time and space, a.k.a the Eye of the Universe. I stepped out into a vast, cold emptiness of quantum existence that was the Eye and wondered around, looking for something, anything. After falling through what seemed to be a quantum vortex, I eventually found a museum not unlike the one you find at the beginning of the game; a museum that is part of the tutorial for the game. This museum contains a picture at the entrance showcasing the founders of the Outer Wilds Ventures space program, the in-universe space program your nameless, faceless alien character is a part of. However, in this quantum facsimile of this tutorial museum, which is cloaked in darkness save for the sole light emanating from your spacesuit, you're positioned to see the same picture you saw at the beginning of the game, only this time a new caption appears when inspecting it:

"Outer Wilds Ventures was founded by Feldspar, Gossan, Slate, and Hornfels to explore a solar system at the end of the universe."

I'm not trying to be hyperbolic when I say that: reading that caption started to make me go through the 5 stages of grief. I was immediately in denial of what I just read. “How could the universe be ending? The Hearthians just started their space program! How unfair it is for them for the universe they were just about to explore to end like that! Also, this is a video game! You’re supposed to give me the feel-good ending of being the hero and stopping the universe-ending event from ever happening!” As I explored the quantum museum more, the fact that the universe actually ending became more and more apparent and harder to ignore. Then, I recalled pieces of information I encountered during my travels that hinted (or plainly stated and I was too deluded to acknowledge them) that the universe was ending, and transitioned to the 2nd stage of grief: anger. Anger at myself for missing something so obvious and deluding myself into thinking that I could enact change on such a cosmic scale. I quickly entered the 3rd stage, bargaining, as I tried to snap myself out of it. “The game was pulling a fast one on me,” I told myself, “I hadn't reached the "end" of the ending yet, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let’s not count all our chickens before they hatch!” I interacted with with the final prompt in the quantum museum, which transported me to a forest filled with galaxies. One by one, I watched these galaxies explode and fade from existence, until all that was left was darkness. It was at this point, I truly realized there was no stopping this, and I transitioned into the 4th stage: depression.

Through my depression, I stumbled across the dark, quantum glade to where I eventually found a quantum facsimile of myself, which no joke spooked me. Then all of a sudden, a campfire appears. The game asks me to settle, roasts some marshmallows, which I do, I guess. “What else can I do? It’s all pointless, the universe is over!” As I roast marshmallow after marshmallow, I'm eventually joined by a facsimile of the first Outer Wilds Ventures companion I met after launching into the stars for the first time: Esker. Esker  (”Feskermile? does that work?”) wants me to gather all the other facsimiles of the Outer Wilds Ventures folk I’ve met during my travels and have one last campfire jamboree. Still feeling defeated and hopeless, I begrudgingly set out into the darkness of the quantum forest to find Feldspar, Gabbro, Chert, and Riebeck, along with Solanum, the kinda-but-not-really-last-living Nomai I met on the Quantum Moon. Once everyone was gathered around the campfire, they started played the tune I've heard all throughout my travels in the solar system. A melody that immediately starts flooding my brain with memories of my adventures: seeing the islands of Giant’s Deep being flung into space by a storm of tornadoes; the asteroids of Hollow’s Lantern destroying the surface of Brittle Hollow, revealing a black hole core; traversing the endless fog of Dark Bramble while dodging giant eldritch anglerfish; watching the sand majestically trade places between the hourglass twins. All of these memories and more came rushing to the forefront of my mind as I listened to the characters I’ve come to know and love play the same blissful tune that propelled me on my journey up until this exact point.

As the members of the Outer Wilds Ventures space program and the both-living-and-dead Nomai finished playing their song, a new universe is born from the ashes of the doomed universe we're all currently in, which indicated to me that this is truly the end, not just for the universe, but also for the game in general. So, with a heavy sigh, I went around the campfire one last time and spoke with every character as a way to say goodbye. It was when I talked to Riebeck, the ever-optimistic banjo player, that I finally transitioned into the 5th and last stage of grief: acceptance.

"The past is past, now, but that's... you know, that's okay! It's never really gone completely. The future is always built on the past, even if we won't get to see it."

A wave of catharsis washed over my entire being. Grief is a feeling that I never truly felt while playing a video game before playing Outer Wilds. Sure, I've been sad when I character I liked gets killed and the like, but I never experienced grief so profound like the one I felt during the ending of Outer Wilds. It was grief for a universe still teeming with life about to end; it was grief for a species that just started looking at the stars not being able to fully explore their own domain; it was grief for a species that never saw the fruits of their scientific labour; ultimately, it was grief about the inevitability of death. Abject terror flooded my mind when I finally realized that the universe was truly ending and I was powerless to stop it. But that single line of dialogue from Riebeck allowed me to appreciate what was happening. I was finally happy, not because it was truly over, but because I was able to experience everything I did up until the very end. No ending, no matter the cosmic scale of it, can ever take away the memories I had existing in this universe.

With that, I collected myself, took one last look at everyone around the campfire, and collapsed the singularity, ending the current universe and giving birth to a new one, with the clearest sense of purpose I've ever had: I was finally able to confront and conquer one of my biggest fears.

[brianbraunduin]

The Daily Struggle

You ever go on a super prolonged losing streak in Magic? I'm talking months and months...maybe even years. It's happened to me a few times before. During those periods, everything is incredibly confusing. I play a tournament and lose repeatedly to the best deck. I play the best deck and lose repeatedly to brews. I follow the generally accepted best practice sideboard plan for the mirror match and lose repeatedly to my opponents all doing a different sideboard plan considered "inferior." I then adopt and try the "inferior" plan and lose repeatedly to people just doing the normal thing.

During this period of time it is incredibly difficult to figure out what is going wrong. Am I playing bad? Am I choosing bad decks? Am I getting unlucky? You isolate and correct one problem--I'll play the same deck as my buddy--and then they crush the next tournament and you fail. So then it must mean I'm playing badly, right? But when that same buddy watches you play he thinks you're playing great. So it's variance, surely? But how likely is it that you lose at your current rate for a super prolonged duration off of variance alone? Not particularly. It must then be a combination of factors, you say, but then how do you correct for something you can't isolate and work on to fix?

This is how I currently feel about my personal mental health. I've been depressed for about 14 months now. It ebbs and flows, but ultimately it keeps coming back. If anything, it's worse now than it's ever been.

I keep thinking I've pinpointed the reason for my depression and that if I correct for that thing, I'll start to get better.

I thought it was loneliness. I felt all alone in Virginia. I moved to Seattle with Brad and Amber and now I have roommates that I interact with regularly and daily. I'm not lacking for social interaction with humans if I want it. Yet I don't feel any less lonely than I did before. I feel trapped inside my own head; that nobody else but me will ever truly understand me as a person. That is a sobering and lonely thought.

I thought it was social media. I think social media breeds depression. There are two extremes to social media. One is that you see people posting about themselves at their best moments. It's easy to compare yourself unfavorably to the constant images of people having better moments than you do and become depressed about how your life sucks in comparison. Personally, I don't think this is the problem for me. I trained myself a long time ago to not compare myself to others but rather compare myself only to where I want myself to be. I think I am actually successful at doing this.

Because of that, I thought I was safe from this aspect of social media. But I was wrong, because it goes deeper than that. The next level for me was realizing how fake it all is. The internet is full of people rising to fame by potraying a fake and glamorized version of themselves and if you dwell on that reality it can breed into cynicism that poisons your mind. I'm incredibly cynical right now. My mind has been poisoned.

The other extreme of social media is the extreme negatives. You also see the worst of humanity. War, hunger, people tearing each other down, distrusting each other, yelling at each other, mocking each other, gatekeeping, abuse of power, mob justice, cancel culture taken to excess, are all also omnipresent online. This, I can say for sure, has definitely poisoned my mentality significantly. I don't think it's possible to be exposed to this level of negativity day after day after day and have it not affect your mindset in some capacity.

I had to get away from social media. I couldn't take one more controversy where everyone piled on to the point of excess, where all nuance was lost, and where people just screamed at and blocked each other at the first sign of tension. I just was not strong enough mentally to deal with watching it even if I didn't take part in it myself. I couldn’t take one more story where yet another massive injustice occurred. It had become too much for my mind to take.

I thought that was the source of my depression. It was not. I've been mostly off of Twitter for about 3 weeks or so now, maybe close to a month at this point, and while my day to day productivity has increased massively and while I no longer experience the extreme frustration I had at social media, it has not cured me of my depression...or really made a significant dent in it. My life is better, but my mental health is not.

In fact, like my initial analogy, it has only bred confusion for me. On one hand, I think it's valuable to cut ties with things that are negative influences on your life, and social media definitely is a huge negative. On the other hand, I've learned time and time again in my past that running from my problems is not a viable solution. Cutting off ties to the outside world around me or the Magic community that has been a huge part of my life for years is certainly running away from my problems. It's a temporary band aid and I'd be far better off in the long run just facing my problems and plowing through them, no matter how hard it is.

I think boiled down, I just can't seem to handle people's lack of empathy and base selfishness. I'm not even trying to escape blame here. I can be just as much of a piece of shit as everyone else is. The lack of empathy on social media is astounding. Even people who claim to be empathetic and care about making the community/world better mostly just do lip service to the idea and don't care about anything that doesn't affect them personally or are completely unwilling to consider things from viewpoints other than their own. Worse yet, people use controversy as a launch board for their personal brand. It's easy, even for well meaning people, to seek out and amplify controversy if it helps their bottom line. I’ve been guilty of all these sins myself, plenty of times. But still, seeing this play out day after day has completely eroded my faith in people and I don't know how to get that faith back. I question regularly whether humanity is redeemable in any way.

That brings me to my next point of confusion. I believe I'd be way happier in my life if I just didn't care about any of that and lived in my own bubble and never engaged with social media ever again. But I can't make myself not care, and I feel personally responsible to use my platform to stand up for what I think is right and try to create a better place. The guilt I feel from running away from it all adds up. I've spent weeks now trying to divorce myself from the problems of the world around me but I'm not sure I can escape it. I waffle daily between a desire to find happiness living my life isolated from the problems of the world and feeling an obligation to engage myself with those problems, even if it spits me out a bitter, sad, defeated man in the end.

On the flip side, I find myself simultaneously unable to care about things that I should be passionate about. I don't care about how well I do in Magic events, even though I'm currently at the peak of my Magic career. I don't care if I succeed or fail in my career. I don't know if I'm capable of caring about other human beings on the personal level that I see other people exhibit. Somehow I've managed to both care too much and not be able to care enough about things at the same time.

Another potential cause of my depression that I thought might be "the one" was my body. I've battled with weight my entire life. People who knew me 5 years ago will note that I've gained a lot of weight since then. People who knew me 10 years ago will see that at one point I lost over 100 pounds, and then over the course of 6 years, I've gained most of it back, with lots of ups and downs in the mix.

For two weeks now I've been dieting and exercising regularly, without breaking routine or slipping. This has greatly improved how I've viewed myself. I always feel guilty eating unhealthy food. Avoiding the shame and self-loathing that comes with shoving your face with junk food has been excellent. I feel better physically and I feel great about myself for finally mustering the motivation to do this. Hasn't lessened my depression, though.

Another potential cause for my depression is a lack of intimacy. I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about personal intimacy that comes with a close relationship. To be honest, I still think this might be it, or at least a massive factor, but as time goes on and all the other areas in my life I've changed fail to even put a dent in my depression, I'm growing skeptical. I want to start throwing myself into the dating ring, but I feel guilty, because I don't honestly know if I am capable of reciprocating caring about someone else anywhere close to the level they would potentially care about me. I'm also cynical about the chances of success in finding someone I'm interested in and not sure I have it in me to try and fail repeatedly in the process of getting there.

The last potential cause for my depression is a lack of a mission. I feel purposeless. I feel a sense of listlessness--that I'm just floating through life and not actually accomplishing anything or doing anything other than ticking down the days till my body eventually stops functioning and I die. I want a goal. I want something to work toward, something with real, true meaning, and the feeling that I'm actually doing something useful on my way there. Much like the intimacy thing, I also strongly think this might be "it."

The likelihood, however, is that my depression is probably a combination of a ton of factors. Loneliness, lack of intimacy, weight, abject despair at the state of humanity and the world around me, social media depression, no purpose, and so forth all factor in. But that brings me back to the initial analogy. At that point, how do I figure out how to break through the morass of it all? It's so confusing and daunting. I think about this all the time and I can never come to a meaningful breakthrough. My life is a constant shift between a state of giving up on everything and not caring about anything vs a state of caring too much about everything. I constantly bounce between the idea that if I cared less I'd be happier and the idea that if I cared more I'd be happier. This happens multiple times throughout each day, and it's all incredibly confusing to me.

Honestly, I think something is wrong with my brain. I don't know what it is, but I think my brain is straight up broken. I've been putting it off for a while now, but I made the decision earlier this week to find and go to a professional for help, assuming I'll ever be able to muster up the motivation to go. I'm honestly skeptical they can fix me, but it's frankly irresponsible for me to not try.

For what it's worth, I have no desire or thoughts of self-harm in any way. I also don't feel negatively toward myself. I don't blame myself for my current state at all. If anything, I have a fairly positive self-image. I know I'm trying as hard as I can to fix my life. I also remain optimistic that I can get out of this eventually.

But goddamn it's fucking depressing to go through every day with a sense of aimless hopelessness seemingly without end. My depression is fucking depressing me. I just want it to be over. I want to experience what happiness is like once again. I know it exists. It's been a while, but I've been there before.

[quibliography]

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Synopsis: This novel is about an in-between place where one can live all the alternatives of one’s life. Nora Seed decides that the life she lives is better off without her, which is how she ends up at the mysterious Midnight Library with her old high school librarian, Mrs. Elm. Here she’s allowed to undo her regrets one at a time, from big decisions like not breaking off her engagement to small decisions like keeping her cat from going outside. She’s trying to find the best version of her life but every time she settles into a new book, she can’t help but feel out of place and wonder if she’ll ever find the right book of Nora.

My Quibs: It’s very “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The protagonist is in a life slump and, in the midst of suicide, a deus ex machina occurs that gives them enough insight to trigger a change of heart. I adore the movie so I unconsciously started comparing the two. Unlike George Bailey, we don’t get a full and complete meet-and-greet of Nora Seed. Instead, we just get maybe a week’s worth of FML moments which does not cultivate the sympathy that I had for George. If anything, it makes me less sympathetic towards her choice to end her life. Now on the other hand, I read somewhere that the character was supposed to be suffering from clinical depression (like the author?). This was meant to be indicated by the anti-depression pills she keeps downing. But it’s not enough to tell me, he needs to show me. I need to feel and understand what’s happening in her head. But fine, I can muster enough sympathy when you lay it on thick with: she got fired and her cat died and her brother won’t talk to her, etc. The concept of the Midnight Library is obviously interesting. There isn’t a single person doesn’t think about “what if”s in their life. In the hands of another writer, the imagery and the mini-world building could have been grander. Haig is a bit too literal, which was a disappointment. And then...the entree, the many lives and regrets of Nora. Her first choice was kinda an easy one: she saw and dismissed red flags early in the relationship, they had divergent dreams, etc. Nora essentially implies to the reader that this is a failed life even before she starts it. Her third choice had a bit of a cop-out result. Haig doesn’t give us the real opportunity to see a potential life in Australia. The purpose was to be there with Izzy and her random death was dismissive, like “any life could always be (generically) worse, right?”. She goes through a whole series of lives that she won’t even acknowledge due to the deaths of various persons (and cat). And then by the end, what pulls her out of a life was starting to become more and more muddied. Rather than growing, Nora by her hundredth life was becoming the Nora we were introduced to. She’s directionless and fussy and she doesn’t want to put in the effort anymore. For someone who’d lived hundreds of lives, she didn’t seem to have learned much of anything.

Should you read it? If the concept interests you enough to see it played out.

Similar reads? Apparently “It’s a Wonderful Life” by Frank Capra was based on the short story “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Ster. I have not read the short story. Yet?

(Spoiler Alert!) As many reviewers mentioned, it was pretty predictable, which in some cases can be okay if the point was the journey. But the journey was so twisted and knotted, I don’t even know how we ended up at Nora’s magical change of heart. Suddenly, the job loss and the failed relationships and her meaningless life is sunny and fulfilling. It just wasn’t believable for me. If I had barged into her apartment before midnight and told her that the kid she teaches piano would be on the streets without her or that her neighbor would be abandoned at a retirement facility without her, would that change her mind? Unlikely since all her regrets were about her, and yet I never saw any self actualization in the library. Also. That cute and single (SURGEON) boy who once asked you out for coffee and lives next door is like the blueprint for ultimate love interest. But her “perfect” life was a little nauseatingly societally contrived - she’s a successful professor, married with a child and a dog, in an expensively designed and intellectually populated house. Ugh. And yet she’s not fulfilled, because it actually isn’t her life. We get to the ultimate message: there’s no shortcuts to life and you can’t cheat your way to happiness. This kind of simple proverb is as standard as any of Aesop’s Fables.

What did you think of The Midnight Library?

[wilhelminahanna-blog]

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[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #189 - Spy

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: Yes.

Was it a movie I saw since August 22nd, 2009: Yes. #358

Format: Blu-ray

1) So the movie starts by introducing us to a sort of typical white guy spy. A James Bond type, but without the British accent (for some reason). It starts with the familiar, the usual tropes, before really fucking them over when Jude Law (who for some reason is trying to do an American accent and he’s not doing it well) sneezes and accidentally kills a guy.

Which is an excellent joke to introduce is into the film’s wonderfully strong sense of humor. If you think you know how a trope is going to play out, you’re probably wrong. In fact, the entire opening sequence is a strong representative of how the film blends quality action with quality humor which will be consistent throughout the film.

2) Melissa McCarthy as Susan Cooper.

McCarthy is the foundation on which the rest of the film is built. From the very first minute we spend with her character she is established as not only good at her job but incredible at it. It is easy in spy spoofs for the main spy to be a bumbling idiot, but Susan’s continued competence is in fact one of the key factors which makes this film as incredible as it is. Especially considering the fact she does have some insecurities at the beginning, insecurities which are largely unfounded because she is fucking good at her job. McCarthy is able to have incredible warmth, heart, and vulnerability as Susan which she doesn’t always show in her film roles. But also when the script calls for it she can have this amazing brashness and humorous loudmouth/angry quality. Susan goes through an incredible transformation from the moment we meet her to the moment we leave her and McCarthy is able to play that absolutely perfectly. It’s HER story, it’s HER movie, and we are just along for the ride in an amazing way.

3) “Who Else Can You Trust?” is abbreviated in the film’s opening credits (I own the full version found on the album) but feels like a real Bond song with the opening credits feeling like a real Bond opening credits. This is part of the reason Spy is able to differentiate itself from other spy comedies like Austin Powers. It takes the genre, action, and stakes seriously throughout. This is real danger and true villains who are trying to get their hands on a nuke. It’s not like “oh, it’s funny because the spy is stupid and the bad guy’s want to kill all cats” or something like that. This sort of silly comedies can and have worked in the past, but Spy’s comedy is born out of its strong sense of characters and performances from the actor. Not by making fun of the genre, but embracing it in a wonderfully fun and funny way.

4) Jude Law’s Bradley Fine often times steps over the line which divides nice guy from Nice Guy™.

Susan: “Could you imagine me as a spy?”

[Fine, who has seen how badass she was in training, laughs at the idea.]

He’s an idiot and kind of a jackass. He may not actively be trying to belittle her but that’s what he does in pretty much 99% of their conversations. He’ll talk about how great she is but he gives her chores which she is overqualified for like picking up his laundry. It’s frustrating but then it’s supposed to be. It’s one of the key conflicts in the film that Susan is underestimated and belittled by all those around her because she’s not what a spy is “supposed” to be like.

5) This film is pretty freaking great, but it could’ve used a little more Morena Baccarin.

Honestly, everything could use a little more Morena Baccarin.

6) What the fuck is this bullshit? He’s secretly SLEEPING with this bad guy and yet…

Fine [upon being caught by villainess Rayna with a gun]: “An awfully big gun for such a little girl.”

7) Allison Janney is someone who I love in literally everything I’ve seen her in. Even when she’s pretty much the straight man in this, the CIA director, I am just drawn to her. I just really fucking love Allison Janney.

8) Jason Statham as Ford.

Holy fucking shit. Somehow Jason Statham is in a movie with modern day comedic legend Melissa McCarthy and ends up being the funniest person in the film. He is totally committed to Ford’s arrogance, jackass qualities, intensity, and hyper masculinity in a way which is 100% hysterical! It’s a tricky business because Ford doesn’t think he’s funny. Ford doesn’t think he’s weird or an idiot, and Statham plays it like that knowing it will derive the most laughs. Ford is basically the super testosterone filled action hero in every movie ever and Statham doubles that while stealing every single fucking scene he’s in. And his chemistry with McCarthy is off the charts funny! Melissa McCarthy is the bedrock this film rests upon but Jason Statham is the fucking cherry on top (I think I’m mixing my metaphors but whatever), he is absolutely amazing.

9) I love this because it makes me angry.

CIA Director Elaine Crocker [about why Fine pressured Susan to stay out of the field]: “Yeah, he sniped you.”

THIS IS REAL! THIS IS FUCKING REAL! MEN IN CHARGE KEEPING WOMEN DOWN BECAUSE THEY’RE WOMEN, WHETHER THEY KNOW THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE DOING OR NOT! GAH! I mean, the film including it is fucking awesome and handled really fucking well but holy shit it pisses me off that this is even a thing.

10) I find it endlessly frustrating (and I think I’m supposed to) that all of Susan’s aliases and spy gear are not the “sexy” stuff but things which could be considered “frumpy”. Why can’t she be a gorgeous baroness with a super slick ride and men on her shoulders? Have you seen Melissa McCarthy? She’s fucking gorgeous.

11) Melissa McCarthy has a very strong chemistry with Miranda Hart, who plays Susan’s best friend Chummy in the film. Their relationship in many ways is much more important than the ones Susan has with any other character in the film, including Fine. And you understand how good friends they are with each other as the movie continues. It’s really great.

12) Ugh.

Ford [after McCarthy points out he didn’t even like Fine]: “It’s called the rivalry of men!”

As a man I can say, “The rivalry of men,” is the equivalent of, “who’s dick is bigger,” because society has convinced us that we’re not a “real man” unless we’re the “biggest” man in the room. It’s fucking stupid.

13) One of the key things that makes Susan as strong a character as she is are her motivations. You understand what is driving her VERY clearly: her memory of Fine. It evolves into more than that as the film goes, it evolves into her just doing her job, but you understand why she does things which are outside of her norm. It’s because she is in pain over Fine’s (supposed) death and needs to make right by him. It’s clear and powerful and helps make the film as good as it is.

14) Aldo - as portrayed by Peter Serafinowicz (legendary character actor who can be found in Shaun of the Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy, the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I, and most recently “The Tick” on Amazon) is incredibly funny. Every overly sexualized moment with him & just his general chemistry with McCarthy makes him a worthy addition to the already stellar ensemble cast.

15) As I mentioned in note #10, I don’t understand why McCarthy is given all the frumpy gadgets and covers when she can pull this off:

She’s fucking gorgeous.

16) I’ve mentioned this with a few pairings before, but McCarthy and Statham have this intense/incredible comedic chemistry which is born out of their strong bickering. This is most plainly seen when they're both at the hotel/casino arguing and I think the fact I’ve mentioned it so often is just a sign of how well put together this fucking cast is.

17) There is an incredible sense of tension that plays through most scenes (for example: when Chummy is trying to kill power to the casino) which ties into what I mentioned in note #3: it helps elevate the film over silly spy spoof into this engaging and riveting action comedy.

18) Rose Byrne as Rayna.

Rayna was apparently originally written as a 19 year old girl (this according to IMDb’s trivia section), which makes a LOT of sense considering how much of a BRAT she is. Don’t get me wrong, Byrne is absolutely excellent at giving of the appearance of this elegant and sophisticated socialite. But that’s where the humor is from. The juxtaposition between what you expect from her (a refined Bond villainess) and what she actually is: a moronic spoiled brat. Byrne plays the humor and juxtaposition perfectly. The key part is that - like Statham - she’s not actively going for laughs. She’s not hyping up the stupidity or the silliness, acting like Rayna knows she’s stupid, but instead trusting the script and playing it in a way where Rayna takes herself seriously. And THAT’S the gag! And it’s great!

19) At this point Rayna has called Susan a child multiple times, compared her to a depress homeless clown, and insulted her ability to address herself.

Susan [to Rayna]: “Why are you being so nice to me?”

20) I’m starting to sound like a broken record but McCarthy’s ability to hold her own against how Byrne plays Rayna’s horridness is a testament to her talents as an actress and the chemistry between the pair. God, this movie is just so fucking funny.

21) I mentioned earlier that McCarthy gets the chance to play Susan as both more reserved and brash. It is when McCarthy is acting like “Amber Valentine” (the cover Susan uses to make Rayna trust her) that she gets to show off this aggression WONDERFULLY. It’s also wildly cathartic because a lot of people - including Rayna - have just been consistently putting Susan down for the ENTIRE film. Now she gets to go off on them and it’s amazing.

22) I’d like to point out that very few women die or get “fridged” in this film, not when compared to the men. I think during the entire movie only one woman dies but that’s a nice proportion swap to most male dominated action films. (How many women have died on Bond movies versus the men?)

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

23) The Budapest car chase scene is one of the strongest action set pieces in the film. It’s filled with this intense and enjoyable action, sprinkled with just enough jokes to make it hysterical, it’s well choreographed, and just altogether a fun ride.

24) But even the Budapest car chase can’t compare with the kitchen fight.

The action is INCREDIBLY well done. The fight choreography and energy throughout is just truly kinetic and it just grabs your attention and NEVER lets go. It’s just insanely well done and by far the best scene of the film.

25) I would like to point out - similarly as I did in note #4 - that Fine is kind of a jerk to Susan. He attributes her continued success to Rayna’s inexperience just casually, like it’s no big deal, not realizing he just undermined all the amazing things she just did in this film. Meanwhile the creepy sexpot of Aldo supports Susan and reminds her she’s been doing an incredible job in this film.

26) When Susan learns that Fine is alive, her entire initial motivation for going the distance of being a spy is gone. But that doesn’t matter because she’s not doing this for any man anymore. She’s doing this because it’s the right thing to do and because she knows she CAN do it. I love that. And when Susan embraces this and kicks some serious ass, Fine sees her for who she is.

27) Wait…I just realized that Ford didn’t actually DO anything in this film. He just kept getting caught and screwing up.

I love that! It’s so much funnier for me that way! :D

28) I love that it’s Chummy who saves Susan in the end. Not Fine, not Ford, but her best gal pal. Friendship over romance/sexual attraction is something I really appreciate.

29) And by the time the film ends, all three of the main guys - Aldo, Fine, and Ford - want Susan now. But she doesn’t chose a guy, she choses Chummy. She choses a night out with her girls instead of even Fine, the guy she’s been pining over FOREVER. I love that.

Spy is an incredibly funny and heartfelt film with a powerful message about competence/self worth. Melissa McCarthy gives an absolutely stellar performance and is surrounded by a just as strong supporting cast, with Jason Statham being a particular stand out. The action is crazy, the humor is spot on, the characters are well developed, and the relationships are pure. All in all, it’s just a really freaking good movie I think everyone should see.

[oceandetail06]

Where to find the Perfect Smartphone for your Young Adults

My toddler is going to be 2 years old, and his most liked plaything is undoubtedly my iPhone 10. I stash it almost everywhere: behind plush teddy bears, among books, inside boxes. He locates it each time and runs up to all of us, holding it in his very small fist and moans every time I said no, he falls onto the floor and cries. Maybe it's more serious, I believe. A few weeks back, was his turn to stash your cell phone. Right until somewhat recently, it was suggested that adults avoid showing children under 2 displays of any kind, including television, iPads, or phones. In 2017, it somewhat eased the guidelines. We violated this rule a long time ago. I do not keep in mind whenever we first cradled an iPhone before his face, but during the last couple of months, we've viewed in horror as my son has developed a full-blown dependence on phones, long before he's actually old enough to possess one. Over the last decade, very much continues to be written about the fantastic screen time debate: how often should our children come in contact with screens, and at what age? As recently as Oct 2016, a paper published an attribute that decorated a dark eyesight of children and screens, having a estimate from a Facebook professional assistant saying that only poor stuff lurks in our devices. Immediately after researching the story, we went into 100 % panic mode and implemented a rule inside our house where no one is allowed to give our boy a smartphone. For the time being, this has kept the devil at bay. Nonetheless, I understand there should come a period when I'll yield towards the inevitable and purchase my son his first mobile phone. The possibility already makes me stressed. Regarding to a 2014 record, 72 percent of children between the age groups of 13 and 16 possess their own phone, whilst a 2018 study signifies that nearly 44 percent of children get their own cell phone program between the ages of 10 and 12. In connected homes people with a lot more than 3 gadgets, kids get their first tablet if they are 6 years of age, and their first phone at age seven. Nowadays, many adults are having tech in youngsters' hands when they can hold them. But when it comes to what kinds of phones parents should actually buy their kids, the market offers hardly any options: There is no iPhone equal for children, and there by no means has been. Generally, kids are stuck with their parents' hand-me-down smartphones, as well as the responsability is definitely on the mother or father to install the required parental controls. Therefore, why hasn't the sector profitably produced a telephone for children? And if it did, what would such a device actually look like? Although couples tend to be shamed for utilizing monitors to amuse their little children or watch over them by proxy, many people will concur that giving their a child a mobile phone is also part and parcel of being a responsible parent in 2019. In a ideal world, a smart cell phone for young children ought to be mainly because strong as is possible, probably it would have some way to text when there is a school crisis or some other type of unexpected emergency, or not really allow them to carefully turn off their navigation or delete messages. Others claim that such a device should be social media-free. No photo no internet is the point we kept hearing from adults. Without a camera or connection, kids are unable to take selfies or engage with social networking, two activities parents are eager to control. Even though tablets have been effectively marketed to teens, efforts to develop cell phones for young kids have nearly universally failed. https://www.digit.in/top-products/best-nokia-phones-in-india-14.html We've seen a whole lot of mobile phones for children over the years and they're all junk. In 2014, one young kids' tech business unveiled the Kurio Android phone, that was designed to operate and appearance just like an adult cell phone, although with safety features and usage limitations to hide all scenarios. While pretty bland-looking, the telephone had almost everything an anxious mother or father would've dreamed of: it blacklisted 415 million internet sites, allowed parents to remotely view text messages and call logs, and provided period limits in apps long before Apple introduced similar features. It actually included a customizable in case there is emergency form, featuring the child's allergic reaction information and blood type. Later in 2017, VTech, a toy business, launched the KidiBuzz, a cellphone for kids between the age groups of 3 and 10 that allows kids to receive and send texts, photographs, and voice messages. The kids smartphone was a marvelous flop and it was forgotten the same year it was introduced. The machine was costly to manufacture, but as it was not top quality, it could not be marketed at an effective price, it was not Samsung or Apple, and the age group the cellphone was targeted at, pre-tweens/tweens, is very brand and look-self-conscious. In the mean time, the KidiBuzz provides 32 percent one-star reviews about Amazon, with 1 commenter noticing that it doesn't even make a fine paperweight. Area of the concern with child-focused phones is functionality: many of these devices occupy an amorphous grey space among a toy and tool. The KidiBuzz, for example, gives features like games and applications, but does not actually allow users place phone calls. Adults searching for wise smartphones for children on Amazon may also run into dozens upon dozens of nonfunctional play telephone items, gadgets that look like cell phones but are in fact toys that come equipped with different ringtones and blinking lights. One more added challenge is that products marketed mainly because kid-friendly, have an integral expiration time. There's not a lot of activity taking place in the child-specific space, because it simply doesn't scale well. You're discussing a very small segment from it: kids age range 5 to 10 or 7 to 14, etc. And it's really actually even smaller than that, simply because at a certain age I don't think children want the particular phone. They want the same gadget you are using. By and large, the truth is the devices people want to use are the devices from the big manufacturers. So why build some thing that is motive-built and a single model of these devices when you could fundamentally consider any manufacturer's design and work with a parental handles app to help control that? Still, there is true anxiousness around giving developing kids access to products that are nothing lacking addictive to grown adults. And even more research has surfaced linking unnecessary screen time for you to, among other things, depression, reduced sleep, and speech postpone in newborns. All which has pushed a small number of entrepreneurs to make option solutions for kids. The main issue with offering young adults phones, is that, for insufficient a better term, it's such an attractive, glossy device, you want to download games, open the web. That's almost natural to the telephone. I feel it even myself in my cellphone. It is a very powerful issue. https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-rolls-out-new-ideapad-laptops-chromebooks-budget-android-tablets/ The first iteration of the Light Phone was designed to be used less than possible: it might place phone calls, and mainly nothing else. The impending Light Phone 2 will also allow users textual content. It is among a small number of entries in the minimalist, or dumb telephone movement, which was spurred by an evergrowing concern about cellphone dependency. Although not designed for kids, the Light Phone has gotten significant amounts of attention from couples with children. Couples with children struggle with this problem: they want a smart phone so their child can contact them within an crisis, but Snapchat really scares all of them. The Jitterbug, which features a good sized screen and larger type, is another dumb cellphone typically cited as a good option for young kids - though it was developed for elderly people. The Jitterbug can place telephone calls and receive and send texts; at significantly less than $50 for the flip smart phone version, it is also considerably cheaper than the Light Phone 2, which includes not delivered out however but happens to be priced at $290. Some producers are bypassing cell phones altogether by entering the wearables market. GizmoWatch, for example, enables couples to track their children' specific location and provides alerts if they enterprise outside a specific radius; in addition, it lets young children text and make calls to up to 10 friends on the preprogrammed contact list, permitting parents in which to stay touch using their kids while curbing their screen time. Without technically a wearable (though you can hook it to clothes using a carabiner-like accessory), the Relay, an identical to walkie-talkie gadget, is an additional entry in the kids' technology space. The device presents itself being a middle ground for much less tech-savvy parents who are concerned about display period, but don't desire to navigate the complicated world of parental control apps. There's no way to watch an undesirable YouTube video or search for something unacceptable using the smartphone, because there's no display. Though devices just like the Relay and the GizmoWatch also appear to be exactly what they are: products for children. And that could be a issue. There's always some chance with wearables, but I am just a little reluctant to say they're gonna be a big seller. The demand compared to alternate options is such that the effect is commonly fairly limited. I could get my child a kid smartwatch, that they may or may not wear, or I can provide them with a phone. Smart watches, are not gonna replace mobile phones for teens. Kids want more. They are inundated with messaging to stay connected frequently. This is the world children are growing up in. With out better answers, couples with children are largely trapped passing off their worn out iPhones or Androids or buying an old mobile phone, which in turn still costs you hundreds of dollars. There's only a certain comfort level there because that is what father and mother have always used. Handing down our previous smartphones is normally low-cost and the parental settings work fairly well. Kids aren't some particular animal that want special tools with regards to cell phones. They may be little human beings, and I prefer to respect them when it comes to tech. And rather than creating services, producers have begun adding features to create their adult-oriented items more kids-friendly. Apple's new iOS 12 parental adjustments include a Display Time feature, that allows you to create period limits for particular applications and monitor how much period they're shelling out for their mobile phones. Google has introduced Google Family Link, a free of charge app that allows parents to monitor their children' screen time as well while remotely lock their gadgets if they are spending a lot of time using them. All these application work-arounds aren't perfect - kids are apparently hacking Apple's Screen Time simply by changing the time setting on their device, but they're a recognition that kids of a certain age want to possess a similar thing everybody else has. And if everybody else has an iPhone or an Android, many will not accept anything less.

Yet ultimately the anxiety parents experience around what sorts of devices to buy their teens and when can also be a means of projecting worries about our own complicated romantic relationships with cellphones. The answer may possibly not be finding the right device for our kids, but wrangling our own impulses, especially because plenty of experts say that couples with children who are overly distracted by their devices are establishing behavioral issues in their young kids. Little Children can do what you carry out, not everything you tell them to do. You must model great digital habits. In fact, a 2016 study found that although 77 percent of couples with children thought they were modeling great screen behaviors for his or her kids, these were spending typically nine hours per day with their displays, far more time than their young kids were. When I noticed that I had been spending far more time scrolling through my e-mail and Twitter than I was playing on the floor with my child, I understood that the problem wasn't with screens warping his vulnerable brain. It had been that I'd currently allowed my phone to bend mine. So these days, we do not use our phones at all before our son. This is a habit that can be easily designed for later years and really depends on the couples with children to keep our teenagers away from mobile phones before they understand responsibility.

[gethealthy18-blog]

337: Science-Backed Strategies for Happiness Even During Stressful Times (With Yale Professor Dr. Laurie Santos of The Happiness Lab)

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337: Science-Backed Strategies for Happiness Even During Stressful Times (With Yale Professor Dr. Laurie Santos of The Happiness Lab)

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This episode is sponsored by UpSpring Baby, a company making innovative science-backed products for moms and babies. And I want to tell you about one of their products in particular because even though I’m not even currently pregnant or have tiny babies, it’s been really helpful to me. I really like their Stomach Settle Nausea Relief drops, which are great for any kind of stomach upset from motion sickness, which I get and a couple of my daughters get, to morning sickness. which I thankfully do not have right now because I’m not pregnant, but any kind of bloating or digestive upset at all. I love to keep this on hand and my kids like them too. They help relieve nausea, motion sickness, gas, bloating, and any kind of digestive upset. In fact, I keep these in my car, in my kind of like emergency kit in each of my cars, and also in my purse just to have on hand because tummy aches can be a thing when out and on-the-go. Their lemon-ginger-honey flavored Stomach Settle drops contain not just one but three natural remedies for digestive upset, ginger, spearmint, and lemon. Plus, they contain vitamin B6 to help relieve occasional nausea, motion sickness, gas and bloating. Their ingredients are micronized, meaning that they provide faster-acting relief, and they have been really helpful, like I said, especially for motion sickness. They’re individually wrapped. They’re great for on-the-go, and I was able to negotiate a discount just for you. You can check this out at upspringbaby.com/pages/wellnessmama, and the code wellness10 saves you 10%.

This podcast is sponsored by BLUblox. That’s B-L-U-B-L-O-X, which is an advanced light-filtering eyewear company. You’ve probably seen pictures of me on social media wearing orange glasses of various types at night. And here’s why. In nature, we aren’t exposed to certain types of light after dark, specifically, blue light, because that type of light signals the body that it’s daytime. That in turn suppresses melatonin and can interfere with sleep. This is the reason that a really dramatic study found that camping for seven days straight with no artificial light at all could actually completely reset and heal circadian rhythm and help a lot of light-related problems, like seasonal affective disorder. This is also the reason that I wear orange glasses after dark to block these types of light and protect my sleep, which I am adamant about protecting. I also wear certain types of yellow glasses and anti-fatigue glasses during the day if I want a computer to reduce eye fatigue. BLUblox has orange glasses and yellow glasses. Their orange glasses for nighttime wear are designed to block 100% of the wavelengths between 400 nanometers and 550 nanometers, which are the ones that are studied to interfere with sleep and melatonin production, and circadian rhythm. My kids also wear these kinds of glasses at night. And I noticed a difference in their sleep as well, which is a huge win for a mom. This is especially important when we’re watching a family movie at night or looking at any kind of screen as the artificial light, there is a source of blue light and can interfere with sleep. You can learn more, they have a ton of educational content and check out all of their innovative protective glasses by going to blublox.com/wellnessmama and using the code wellnessmama to save 15%.

Katie: Hello and welcome to The Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellness with an E on the end, our new personal care line of completely safe and highly effective personal care products. I think this episode is extremely timely considering the dynamics that all of us are navigating right now. I am here with Dr. Laurie Santos, who’s a Professor of Psychology and head of the Silliman College at Yale University as well as the host of the critically acclaimed podcast, The Happiness Lab. And after observing a disturbing level of unhappiness and anxiety among her college students, she began teaching a course entitled “Psychology and the Good Life” which quickly became the most popular course in Yale’s history with over a thousand enrollees in the first class and has also reached almost 2 million people from all over the world through an online version, which will be linked in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm if you would like to check it out. And although she’s now best known as a happiness expert, her research also explores the broader question of what makes the human mind unique? And often includes comparing the cognitive capabilities of nonhuman animals to humans. And in this episode, we go really deep on not just the science of happiness and what we know about things that lead to happiness versus those that don’t, but also some research-backed practical strategies that we can all implement even during these uncertain times that lead to more happiness. It was a really, really fun interview, and I know that you will enjoy it and learn from it just like I did. So, without further ado, let’s jump in.

Dr. Santos, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Santos: Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

Katie: I am so excited to have you here. I think your research is incredible and especially vital right now. I think we have some great topics to dive into today. But for people who are not familiar, let’s start broad, can you tell us about what “The Happiness Lab” is?

Dr. Santos: So “The Happiness Lab” is a podcast that I host which is all about the science of happiness. And the basic premise of “The Happiness Lab” is that our mind kind of lies to us about the sorts of things that make us happy. So we all have these hypotheses about the sorts of things we should do to feel better. You know, we could change our job or switch our relationships or, you know, basically change our circumstances in some sense. But the science suggests that those things don’t really have the impact on happiness that we think. And so the podcast is all about the kinds of things you can do to really feel better in an evidence-based way.

Katie: I love that. And that kind of came from, you teach at Yale from what I’ve read, is that correct?

Dr. Santos: Yes. So I’m a professor at Yale. And a couple of years ago, I started a new class on Yale’s campus on the science of happiness, it was called Psychology and the Good Life. And the class emerged out of the fact that in my new role on campus as a head of college where I live with students, I started to see that students were, like, a lot more unhappy than I remember being in college. You know, students were incredibly depressed and overwhelmed and just kind of anxious all the time and that was really frustrating because these were, you know, students that I cared about who are in my residential college community.

But it was also frustrating because as scientists, we really know that there is evidence-based practices that we could engage in to feel better, you know, there are these incredibly simple interventions that all of us can be doing to improve our wellbeing. Again, like not incredibly but with, you know, significance and in ways that can really improve our functioning. And so I decided to develop this new class to teach my Yale students all about these different interventions about the science of happiness and what they could do to feel better.

What I didn’t expect is that it would become the largest class ever in Yale University’s history, over a thousand students enrolled in the class, which was really surreal and very surprising. But that made me realize that, you know, there’s a huge demand for this kind of content. And so the podcast was a reaction to that demand, it was a way to give the content of the class to folks who might not have time for an Ivy League course on their own.

Katie: I love that. And you have some incredible episodes, I’ll make sure I link to some of those in the show notes here. Before we jump into kind of understanding the psychology of happiness and practical ways that we can move toward that, how do you define happiness as a term? Because I feel like maybe there’s a lot of misconstrued definitions of that word.

Dr. Santos: So there’s, you know, probably as many definitions of happiness as there are, like, kinds of happiness and things. I think one of the ways we think about it in the podcast and in my class is to take more of a, like, nerdy social scientist definition of happiness, it’s kind of the definition that scientists use, but I think it actually works pretty well. And so we think of happiness as having two parts. So it’s being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is just the fact that things feel good to you on a day-to-day basis. You experience lots of positive emotions, things like joy and happiness and laughter, and you experience, you know, fewer negative emotions, so less depression and anxiety and sadness and anger and things like that. So that’s kind of being happy in your life.

But there’s a second component, too, to happiness, which is to be happy with your life. And by that I mean, all things considered, you’re kind of satisfied with how your life is going. And so what the research suggests is that maximizing those two parts, kind of happy in your life and happy with your life, is really the way to promote a really high subjective wellbeing. And you can get to associations between those. I think lots of parents have experienced at least one where it’s like, you know, when you first have a newborn baby, I think you’re really happy with your life, you know, you feel your life is so meaningful and you have this new child to take care of, but in your life, you know, it’s a lot of, like, not sleeping and dealing with the really dirty diapers. And so I think there are times when those things can split but if you really want to maximize happiness, the best way to do it is to make sure you’re experiencing lots of positive emotion and feeling really satisfied generally with how your life is going.

Katie: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. And I’m guessing with this next question, the answer will be that there is probably a very individualized and personalized answer for each person. I work on the nutrition side of health and more and more, I’ve come to find that, while there are some generalities, finding our own very personalized nutrition and health plan requires self-experimentation and that the answer isn’t the same for everybody. But I’m curious, so maybe the better way to word the question would be what common denominators have we found that separate people who have both of those kinds of happiness from people who don’t?

Dr. Santos: Well, there are lots of different factors and they’re not the ones we expect, you know, we assume that the people who have lots of joy and happiness with their life are, like, the incredibly successful people, you know, people with tons of accolades or really good circumstances. But the data suggests that our life circumstances matter a lot less than we think. You know, how rich you are, what job you have, if you’re in a relationship. All that stuff doesn’t matter as much as we think.

What matters more are a few things. One is kind of exactly what you were saying, healthy habits. And those can be healthy habits in regard to eating, those can be healthy habits in regard to sleep and especially in regard to exercise. There’s work suggesting that a half-hour of cardio a day is about as effective as a prescription of Zoloft, the anti-depression medication for reducing depression symptoms. So we forget that, you know, the way we treat our bodies can matter a lot.

But a second thing that we really need to improve happiness in our life and with our life is social connection. We think of happiness as being about self-care, you know, this idea of “treat yourself” sort of thing. But in practice, the truly happy people out there tend to be really other-oriented. You know, they’re worried about what’s going on with other people. You know, they really want to reach out and do random acts of kindness. They’re really grateful for the people who are around them and they express that gratitude.

And most importantly, they really prioritize time with the people they care about. Every available survey of happy people that I know about suggests that happy people spend more time with others, so they’re physically around other people more often and they often prioritize the people that they care about, you know, so they make time for, you know, their friends and family members and loved ones.

And so then a final piece of happiness I would say is generally sort of our mindset. You know, if we’re bringing a mindset of gratitude, of presence, of mindfulness, of noticing how we feel on a daily basis, those kinds of habits can really promote both the kind of the life satisfaction part of happiness but also the mood part of happiness, like feeling happy in your life also.

Katie: Got it. And I feel like there’s often an internal script, at least I know I can say this for myself of, “If only,” you know, fill in the blank, “then I would be happy.” And for me, it was like for a very long time struggling with weight, like, “If only I was this size, then I would be happy,” or, “If only my finances were this, then I would be happy.” And I think maybe we all have some version of that script that we kind of believe, even if it probably isn’t actually true. And I know for me, with the health and the body side, I actually had to completely shift that. And it was when I started loving myself and choosing to be happy and choosing gratitude that the weight stuff actually started resolving itself. But it took that getting rid of that script of, “If only this happened, then I would be happy,” and choosing, “I’m gonna be happy now,” and then that eventually resolved itself. But why do you think we want these things that don’t actually make us happier? What gets us in that script or that loop?

Dr. Santos: I mean, that’s the million-dollar question because I’m with you on every single part that you mentioned about like, you know, “When I’m skinny, I’ll be happy,” or, you know, “When my podcast gets to number one, I’ll be happy,” or whatever, right? Like we’re constantly putting our happiness on some circumstance in the future. And it’s wrong for two reasons. One is that, you know, we’re less likely to get there if we’re not happy actually.

So a lot of the research suggests that our causal arrow about happiness is backwards. We think success at reaching our goals will make us happy but there’s also a lot of research suggesting that happiness itself can help us reach our goals. So people who are happier tend to be healthier. You know, if you’re happier at time one, you’ll be less likely to catch diseases, you’ll be more likely to live longer. Happy people tend to perform better at work, you know, so happy people are those who get better performance reviews and so on.

Happy people are more likely to be in a relationship and more likely to be in happy marriages later on. And these are all studies that have been done longitudinally. So we can look at happiness at time one and see if that predicts, say, if you’re in a relationship at time two. And so I think that’s kind of part of it is that one of the biggest mistakes is that we get the causal arrow wrong. We think, “When I get, you know, X, Y and Z, I’ll be happy.” But actually for a lot of the things we want, focusing on being happy first will help us get the things that we want, the circumstances in life we want later.

But the other problem is that really, our circumstances aren’t the key to happiness, that’s really what the data suggests particularly with body image stuff. There’s lots of evidence suggesting that, you know, people who achieve their weight loss goals or people who get plastic surgery, you know, assuming that these kinds of things will make you happy. Like, they don’t make you as happy as you think or often for as long as you think. So then you can just kind of go back to those other random patterns.

Even if you get the things you want, if you’re stuck in that, like, bad loop of thinking, what happens is as soon as you get what you want, you just go back to thinking that but just for something else. And we’ve seen this, we actually have a whole episode of this on our podcast, an episode called “The Unhappy Millionaire” where we talk about this in people’s circumstances with money where people think, you know, “If only I could make $1 million, I’d be happy.” But then the research shows that as soon as people actually get that million dollars, then they’re like, “Well, now I need $50 million,” you know, “Now I need to be a billionaire,” right? “I can’t be happy until I’m actually a billionaire.”

And all the results suggest that, you know, once you get there, you’re still not gonna be happy. And so I think one of the things the research shows is that we need to break out of those thought loops and a way to break out of those thought loops is to realize the stuff that really does matter. Kind of exactly as you’ve shown in your story that once you got out of that loop and really focused on the stuff that mattered, like all of a sudden, the things fell into line anyway, all the circumstances fall into line anyway.

Katie: Exactly, that makes sense. And I love that you brought up, that’s a great episode I’ve listened to of yours, “The Unhappy Millionaire.” I’ll make sure I link to that. And I think we have a unique time to actually see that right now with all of the strange social dynamics and isolation that’s happening. And we have all of these celebrities that are stuck in their multi-multi-multimillion-dollar mansions and they’re not happy and they’re isolated. And we’re seeing this play out on social media and I know there’s been a lot of backlash against celebrity culture because of some of those factors.

But I think it’s also a really important time to talk about, you mentioned relationships being one of the big factors in happiness. And right now we’re kind of in this unprecedented time of isolation for a lot of people. So I’m curious if, A, if you have any just overarching strategies for dealing with a lot of the emotions that are happening for a lot of people right now that probably are interfering with happiness.

Dr. Santos: I think it’s really critical. I mean, I think just to kind of validate, like we are in a really incredible, surreal, strange, awful time in lots of ways. And so I think doing strategies that improve your wellbeing is more important now than ever. If in part because of the kinds of things I was saying and, you know, we get the causal arrow of happiness wrong. And there’s evidence suggesting that being happier can actually provide a little boost to your immune function. There’s studies where you introduce, like, subjects to respiratory viruses and you vary their mood and you look at who actually catches the respiratory viruses and you find that, like, having a happy mood or having a stance of being more positive actually makes you less likely to catch viruses.

Again, not like immune to viruses, obviously, like you should still be washing your hands, and socially distancing and all this stuff we know we need to do during COVID but, you know, it’s another way to kind of protect your body, too. So I think it’s even more essential now to be a little happier. But, you know, one of the main things I listed as relevant for happiness, social connection, is pretty hard in a time of social distancing. You know, many of us can’t do the social things that we are used to doing. You know, go out for brunch with friends or, like, hang out with our family members if they live far away. Like, those are the things that we’re not allowed to do because we’re trying to protect our physical health.

The good news is that social distancing doesn’t have to mean social disconnection. We can find ways to connect with other people, you know, through all kinds of technologies that we in our modern age are lucky enough to have. You know, you and I are talking right now over Zoom and even though you’re far away and, you know, we’re socially distanced from each other, we can really connect and have this really cool conversation. These are ways that we should be connecting with other people around us, using technologies from just, like, the good old fashioned phone to things like FaceTime and Zoom to talk to the people we care about just to see their faces, connect with them, that’s gonna be incredibly powerful during this tough time.

But we can also do things that are not necessarily as formal as we like to think with these technologies. I think lots of us know that we can use these technologies to connect, like, say, in like a work conference call or something like that or like you and I are doing, like for a podcast interview. But we forget that we can use these technologies to connect really informally, and that’s the social connection that we’re super missing right now. You know, like the chat with your friend at the water cooler at work or, you know, like having your neighbor stop by, you know, while you’re, you know, making dinner and she comes in for a couple of minutes or something. Those are the kinds of informal interactions we need to replicate over technologies, too.

And so I’ve been trying to do this myself of simple things like, you know, “I’m gonna do a yoga class online,” it’s like, “Well, let me just text my friend and see if she wants to do the same one with me.” Or I’m like chopping up, you know, vegetables for dinner or something and I’m just gonna be doing that for, like, a half-hour. And it’s like, “Oh, let me see if I can, like, Zoom call a good friend of mine up the street so we can just chat while I’m chopping vegetables,” or something. These kinds of informal uses of these technologies are gonna be really powerful for our wellbeing because they’re making up for the informal interactions that we’re missing during the day because of this crisis.

Katie: Those are great ideas. And my hope, I mean, like you said, this is completely unprecedented, we’ve never had to face something like this in our generation certainly before. My hope is that societally and then like as a group, we can keep some of the good things that might come from this. Like I’m hearing so many people gardening for the first time, for instance, or many people are learning or relearning how to cook at home and spending more time with their kids. And I think there can be good in a lot of the things that are happening right now. I also hope that as things start to open up eventually, it reminds us to have gratitude for those things we used to take for granted, for those quiet moments in the coffee shop or just getting to hug a friend or just getting to have those informal moments together, like you said. But I think from having listened to your podcast, another common theme when it comes to that, even while we’re still isolated, is gratitude. And you talk about gratitude in lots of different forms, but how does gratitude relate to happiness?

Dr. Santos: So there’s lots of evidence that gratitude is, in some ways, essential for happiness, like a completely free intervention you can take right now that will boost up your wellbeing significantly and for a really long time. We have a whole episode coming out in our second season of the podcast, which I don’t remember when you’re, like, you’re launching this, but I wanna say, we have a whole episode coming out in the second season of our podcast about the power of gratitude. And the problems with the opposite of gratitude, which is a great thing, right? Which I think is, like, very in right now culturally. Like everyone wants to complain and I feel like, especially in the context of COVID-19, there’s a lot of kind of complaining going around from, you know, sharing kind of memes about how stupid this is and complaining about socially distancing and all this stuff.

But the data suggests that really taking time to experience your blessings can be really powerful. There’s some work suggesting that the simple act of scribbling down three to five things you’re grateful for every day can significantly start boosting your wellbeing in as little as two weeks. And there’s also evidence suggesting that expressing your gratitude to the people around you can give longstanding boosts to your wellbeing. One study by the positive psychologist Marty Seligman and his colleagues show that the act of doing a gratitude visit where you, say, call somebody up and sort of share what you’re grateful for about them, with them, that can actually boost your wellbeing for over a month, so you see significant increases in wellbeing that lasts for over a month, which is kind of crazy and all we can all use right now.

But I think that the power of gratitude is that it’s just an emotion that makes you feel better and it also builds up resilience over time. And so right now the key is just to find, you know, blessings of our daily life or experience things that we’re grateful for. And I think kind of exactly what you said before is that this crisis has caused so many of us to realize all of these things that we should have been incredibly grateful for that we were just actively taking for granted. You know, for me, it’s like the weekly, you know, daily, even, like going to my coffee shop. Like, you know, I have my favorite coffee shop here in New Haven and I would go there and get coffee every day.

It wasn’t like every morning when I went there, I was just, like, incredibly happy and, like, savored that coffee and, like, knew that it was this huge blessing in my life, I just assumed it was something that I’d be able to do every day forever. But now in the context of this crisis, I realized like, “Oh, my gosh, I should have been incredibly grateful for that.” When I finally get out of this crisis and get to go get my favorite latte again, like, I’m gonna be ecstatic. And I think exactly as you were saying, there’s going to be so many things for which that is true. So many new habits that we can be grateful for but so many things we took for granted before that we’re going to really deeply appreciate once we get out of this.

Katie: Absolutely. I know, hopefully by the time this airs, maybe that’s starting to be in process in a lot of places, but even if it’s not, I think I’ve always thought, you know, it’s easy. I use the motto in my life quite a lot, “Amor fati,” which comes from Stoicism and it means basically “love of fate” or “love what is.” And I always think, you know, that’s an easy thing to follow when life was great and, you know, two months ago when life was normal and wonderful and I had so many things that were just, it was easy to find gratitude. And I feel like things like that or this is the actual measure of them and the test of them for us in our lives is, can we still find that gratitude when it’s hard?

So in some ways, this is a kind of a perfect time to practice gratitude because there are still many things to be grateful for, like you said, even in this crisis. And if we start looking for those now and develop that habit now, it’s gonna be even easier when things start to return, hopefully to more like they were before when we have even more to be grateful for. And in my own life, I know a couple of things that have really helped me is, like you mentioned, keeping a gratitude journal and I have a gratitude/art journal. So every day I just spend time jotting down things I’m grateful for and then also just doodling because that helps me just, like, mentally feel happy and I enjoy it and it’s kind of a therapy for me.

And then also with my kids at dinner, we try to make an effort to ask them, “What are you grateful for today?” Just to keep, even from a young age, have them start thinking of life through that lens of what are… And then they now look throughout the day to have ideas of things to be grateful for when we ask them just to start kind of framing their mind to look for the good and to look for the things to be grateful for. And I absolutely can understand, for a lot of us, it’s much harder than normal to do those things right now. But those are just a couple of practical strategies that have been really helpful for me personally.

Also, a lot of the people listening are parents and I feel like this crisis is maybe especially hard on parents who have kids now home 24/7 and who are now homeschooling with no notice whatsoever and who are taking on all of these extra roles and extra responsibilities and isolated for so long. So as parents right now and overall are there ways that we can improve our happiness or practical strategies specifically for parents? Because I think moms often get the advice of, “Oh, you just need to do more self-care. You need to find time for yourself,” and often that just feels like another to-do list item. So any advice specific to parents?

Dr. Santos: I mean, I think first is validating. Like, this is an incredibly challenging time generally. And it’s definitely not a time when we should start, you know, our new babysitting service or our new, like, math tutoring service for our kids but many of us are in this position. And so I think one of the pieces of advice for parents is just to employ some self-compassion here. And by that, I mean, like, don’t beat yourself up, you know, this situation is hard enough as it is without you feeling the, like, kind of social comparison of, you know, “That other mom is, like, teaching her kids about the planets and I’m just letting my kid, like, play Xbox.” Like, it’s fine. Like, this is not the time to beat yourself up.

And in terms of, like, how to do that because it’s one thing to say it, but it’s another to, like, actually do it, there’s some techniques that come from science that can be really powerful here. And so one of those techniques is a form of meditation known as loving-kindness meditation. It sounds a little cheesy but it’s a form of meditation where you really just try to experience compassion for the people in your life. So the practice is you literally sit down and you get in your kind of meditation seat or something and then think through the people in your life and wish them well. You know, so think about your kid or someone who’s really easy to feel compassion for and just say, you know, “May you be happy, may you be well, may you care for yourself joyfully,” these kinds of expressions of wishing the person well.

And then you kind of go through other people in your life. But the reason this practice is relevant for self-compassion is that one of the people you’re supposed to think those compassionate thoughts about is yourself. You know, so at some point in the meditation, you’re supposed to think, “May I be happy, may I be safe, may I care for myself joyfully,” and so on. And what the research suggests is that the act of doing these kinds of practices can really bump up the compassion you feel generally but it can especially bump up the compassion that you feel for yourself. It can make you stop beating yourself up a little bit.

These kinds of practices, they can also be really helpful against burnout because burnout is really about trying to do too much, either kind of not being compassionate for yourself or kind of just, like, so taking on the suffering of everybody else about, like, “What’s my kid gonna think?” or, “What’s my husband gonna think?” or, What’s my kid’s teacher gonna think?” and so on that you kind of don’t do the right things. You don’t end up protecting yourself. You take on more than you need to. And so through this power of self-compassion, you realize, like, the goal isn’t perfection, the goal is, like, “May I be well,” you know, “may I be happy,” and so you end up putting the right things into place. And so this is a practice that can be really powerful. It, too, is a thing that you kind of have to add to the to-do list, but it’s really part of the to-do list that is, like, a two-minute part of the to-do list.

You know, you can do a loving-kindness meditation by sitting on your meditation cushion for five minutes but you can also do it and think those positive thoughts, like, when you’re brushing your teeth or when you’re in the shower or when you have a kind of quiet moment when you’re first waking up in the morning. I’ve been trying to institute more positive thought meditation practices before I do the, like, pick-up-the-phone thing in the morning as the first thing. I’m like, “Wait, let me leave the phone and let me, you know, like, wish the people in my life a little compassion before I kind of pick up the phone and start checking email or panic-scrolling.” So, it is another thing you have to do, but it doesn’t actually take that much time and it can have huge, huge benefits.

Katie: I love that, that’s such great advice. I think anything practical right now is so helpful. To kind of loop back to something earlier, why, I know we talked about loops a little bit and that mental loop and focusing on happiness first. But why do humans, in general, want to pursue these things that don’t make us happy in the first place?

Dr. Santos: That is a million-dollar question. I feel like if we could just solve that one scientifically, we’d be such happier critters and, like, solve so much suffering in the world. One hint comes from the fact, I guess I’ll go with two hints, one hint comes from the fact that, you know, over evolutionary time, the goal of natural selection wasn’t necessarily to make us a happy species, it was to make us a striving species. You know, that got as many resources we could or as many reproductive partners as we could. And so, you know, our systems aren’t built to be happy, they’re built to, like, get more and more stuff and never feel satiated. And so that kind of comes a little bit from our evolutionary history.

We can fight it, of course, you know, we can be more mindful and come up with better strategies. But our natural habit, unless we put in some work, might be to kind of, you know, work and strive a little bit more than we need to to be happy. But a second insight actually comes from the way our brains are set up, which is one of the kind of annoying features of our own minds is the fact that we have different neural circuits for wanting things. So, like the things we crave are the things we seek out versus liking things like what we actually enjoy out there in the world. And so you can see these circuits dissociate most powerfully in the context of addiction.

So, say, if you have a heroin addiction and you’ve had a heroin addiction for some time, you’re gonna have incredible wanting for the drug. You’re gonna crave it like crazy and, you know, hurt people to get it. You’re gonna do all this stuff wanting this drug really badly, but when you finally get the drug, you’re so habituated to it that you don’t actually even enjoy it. Like it kind of just moves you to baseline, it doesn’t have the boost that it had before. And so that’s just one example that wanting and liking can dissociate.

But I think that this happens in all different contexts of our lives, you talked about body image and stuff. I experienced that myself where I could have many points in my life where I was, like, obsessed with how my body looked and really wanting to be skinnier and it would, like, my wanting system would get stuck on that all the time. But then at times when I actually had lost weight in my life, I didn’t even really enjoy it. Often, I wasn’t even really that mindful of it, it felt fine but it wasn’t, you know, the thing I was really looking for. And I think we can get that in all these different habit loops. “I really, really want a relationship,” or, “I really, really want this salary level,” but then you get it and you don’t actually like it, there’s this disassociation.

The same I worry is really true of the opposite, I’ve experienced this with a lot of wellness practices, right? Like, I really, really like doing yoga. I really, really like exercise, but I don’t have the same craving for it that I do for, like, a really unhealthy, you know, sugary food. Like even though I really like it, my, like, wanting system hasn’t gotten into gear. And so, you know, this raises a question of how you can get those two systems talking to each other, how you can link them up better. And the honest answer is, like, they’re just kind of separate and so it’s hard to do. But one way you can do a little bit better is to take time to be a little bit more mindful, is to kind of notice how practices really make you feel.

So if you have something that you’re really craving and you finally get it, take time to notice. Like, “Did I even really like that?” You know, like, I experience this a lot in my daily life with things like social media, right? Where I have this really strong urge to, like, check my email or, like, go on Twitter or something and I’ve been trying to take time to notice it. “How did that actually feel? Did I really like that?” Like, “No, like I felt kind of apathetic or a little gross,” or whatever versus things like, you know, healthier eating or meditation or yoga or something like that where afterwards I was like, “Huh, like I actually really liked that more than I expected, I feel resilient now, I feel healthier, I feel just calmer.” Taking time to notice and be mindful about what you like can sometimes help you update that wanting system where the wanting system can notice and be like, “Oh, that was pretty good. Like, maybe I should crave that a little more in the future.”

Katie: I love that. And I think you’re right. I think body image is especially a sticking point for a lot of women. Even women who have a lot of the other areas figured out and who are really, like, dialed in with their wellness practice or their kids or their career, I think that one is just, we’re probably evolutionarily wired because of those factors you mentioned in reproduction or, and also now society, there’s billion-dollar industries built on telling us we need to be and look a certain way.

And for me, I think it was realizing over time and then consciously changing that script in my head, it wasn’t that being skinny, I thought being skinny was gonna make me happy, but it was being skinny in my mind was a representation for feeling comfortable in my own skin and accepting my body and accepting myself. And I realized that was something I didn’t have to wait until I was a certain size to do. And so moving toward that, it was just amazing how I thought I was so laser-focused on the weight. And when I started changing the mindset, I realized I had the choice to have happiness right now. And that didn’t mean I wasn’t still gonna focus on wellness and I wasn’t still gonna try to lose weight and be healthier, but I was able to start choosing happiness to a large degree and accepting myself much more by switching the way that I thought of that in my mind. And certainly it was a long process. It wasn’t like I just woke up one day and did that. I just think women especially, that’s a really tough one to get through.

Dr. Santos: I know, I agree completely. And I think, I love this idea of, you know, change your mindset rather than try to change the circumstances because that can do a bunch of different things. One is it can make you grateful for what you have, right? Like it can make you realize like, you know, “Maybe my body is not totally perfect but it’s actually healthy, it’s doing what I want.” Like, you know, “It’s carrying me from place to place, it’s letting me take care of my kids.” Like it can allow you to realize that there are so many things to appreciate about your body.

And then what that does is it winds up, like, through the mechanism of appreciation, making you want to take care of your body, right? You know, so then you want to eat healthy or you want to sleep more, you want to exercise more. And doing those things is gonna wind up making you healthier no matter what your body size. You know, I subscribe a lot to these ideas of sort of health at any size which is that, you know, there’s a lot of things that control our body weight that are kind of out of our control, you know, your thyroid function and all this stuff.

But all of us, the thing we can control is what we’re putting into our bodies, how we’re moving our bodies, you know, how much sleep we’re getting and so on. And if you’re focusing on those things, then, like, the stuff you were really worried about with your body weight, you know, it’ll come into line naturally. Maybe because your body weight comes more into line with what’s healthy for you. But even if it doesn’t, like, the things you really wanted to get out of a healthy body weight, you’re gonna get anyway if you change your mindset.

Katie: That’s a great point.

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Another factor that I know you’ve talked about in your podcast and that people probably can understand leads to happiness is some kind of version of charity or helping others. And I know personally, like, some of the times I felt the best have been when I wasn’t self-focused at all but focused on other people. And we see it certainly like in, when there’s natural disasters. We live in an area that got hit by a hurricane a couple of years ago and the community came together and we all focused on helping each other. And I know, like, the feeling of that, even though it was exhausting and it was horrible to see people who had lost so much but I felt so incredibly happy being able to tangibly do something to help other people. So can you talk about that link between happiness and charity and how focusing on others can often help us shift as well?

Dr. Santos: I’m glad you brought that up because I think this is another one of the misnomers about happiness. You know, we think happiness is about, you use the term “self-care,” but even more things like, “Treat yourself,” you know, “Do for yourself,” like, “Focus on yourself,” like self, self, self. But the science suggests that happy people don’t do that, happy people tend to give more to charity than not-so-happy people controlled for income. Happy people tend to volunteer more of their time.

And there’s research suggesting that if you take not-so-happy people or just average people and you make them do nice things for others, they will over time get happier. There’s one lovely study by the psychologist Liz Dunn and her colleagues where she has people, she walks up to people on the street and just gives them some money so, you know, “Here’s 5 bucks,” or, “Here’s 20 bucks,” on the street. But she tells those subjects how to spend it, they either have to spend that money on themselves by the end of the day, so kind of treat themselves, or they have to spend the money on someone else, they have to do something nice for someone.

And what she finds is that at the end of the day, the people who did the nice thing for others are happy. And I find this work so striking because, you know, often when I think if I’m in a bad mood or if I’m stressed or even, like, in the context of this crisis and kind of feeling panicked or whatever, often my instinct is to do something nice for myself. Like, “I’m gonna buy something for myself.” Like, you know, “I’m gonna do something for my money that just benefits me selfishly.” But the data really suggests that if I took that intuition when I was feeling yucky and did something for someone else, that would be even more powerful for my happiness.

And I think this is a really important thing to remember in the context of COVID-19 in part because, you know, so many of us want to do stuff to kind of improve our wellbeing and doing nice things for others is a good route for it. But also because many of us are getting these tiny little financial and temporal windfalls that we don’t expect, you know. So if you’re socially distancing at home, you might not be paying money for gas or for that subway token to do your daily commute, you know, so you’re saving some money that way. You might not be buying that daily coffee or that daily, you know, whatever you bought at the restaurant, you know, up the street from work, like, and so those are the, you know, $5 here, $10 there, those are little financial windfalls that a lot of us could use to do something nice for someone else.

So could you take that money that you’re saving on your daily coffee and donate it to a local business that you want to make sure survives this crisis? Could you take that little bit of money and donate it to a good cause? Or even if you don’t have any money because realistically, a lot of us are out of work or in worse financial situations now than before, but a lot of people have extra time on their hands. They’re getting these little temporal windfalls either because you’re not at work or even if you’re just not commuting, you have those extra few hours that you’re kind of saving.

And so if you’re in a situation of having a time windfall, what could you do with that time to help other people? Could you call an elderly neighbor who might need your help or could you make a call to a political campaign that you really cared about or advocate for, say, health care workers and make sure they get protective equipment that they need? All those little 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there that we might be saving in the context of this crisis, we can put those to good use.

And doing so, again, doesn’t just help our community and do exactly what you said in the context of the hurricane where you’re really helping other people out, it’s also helping your wellbeing, you know, which is a lot of why we want to spend our money and want to spend our time in the first place. We want to use it in ways that make us feel good and doing nice stuff for others is one way to do that.

Katie: That’s so great. And especially finding those practical ways, like strategies you mentioned, even right now while we’re still kind of disconnected physically from each other, we can still do that and use that as a strategy for happiness. So you mentioned your Yale course that, it was extremely popular, I believe I actually read it was the most popular course in Yale history. And you had all of these college students who really probably were struggling with trying to find happiness and there were probably a lot of overachievers and type-A personalities.

A lot of the people listening probably have younger kids, so not quite to the college-age yet. But I know that’s, I think that’s top of mind for me, which is how can I give my kids a strong foundation for happiness from an early age so that they’re not getting to college and finding that they’re unhappy to begin with. And I would guess some of the same strategies that apply for adults also really work for kids. But do you have anything specific that we can nurture? Like you mentioned, gratitude was a great one, but with our kids, even from a young age to kind of set them up for that mindset of happiness?

Dr. Santos: Well, I think the recommendation that you gave about, you know, having your kids talk about the things they’re grateful for over their dinner table can be incredibly powerful. You know, building these habits in early, I think, are really essential. But another one is to kind of make sure that as a parent, you’re not focused on your kids’ circumstances to make sure they’re happy. And so by that, I mean things like how many accolades they get, whether they’re winning their games, whether they’re getting perfect grades, like all of those things are the kind of things that, culturally, I think we think of as perfect.

You know, as a parent, you have to make sure, like, your kids are setting themselves up as well for their futures as possible. But, like, the way you do that might be to teach them these strategies to really make sure they’re prioritizing time with their friends and time with your family and building social connections, that they’re really prioritizing taking time off and taking time to be mindful and savor and notice the things around them. I often think that parents who try to instill in their kids things like a strong meditation practice or a strong habit of gratitude, like, you’re almost doing better for your kids than getting them perfect grades. Because actually the data suggests that by high school, there’s an inverse correlation between good grades and happiness. In other words, the happiest students tend to have the worst grades or vice versa, the students who have the best grades are not necessarily the ones that are happiest.

There’s also an inverse correlation between grades and optimism, so the students with the highest grades are the least optimistic and there’s also an inverse correlation between perfect grades and self-worth. So the kids who have the best grades actually, statistically, have some of the lowest self-worth. And so, again, just kind of getting the balance right in the kinds of things that you as a parent prioritize and the skill sets that you’re building in your kids, I think, can be incredibly powerful if giving them these tips early on. You know, I wish that I had kind of taken this class and, like, learned some of these tips when I was a kid because then I wouldn’t kind of be, you know, taking the wrong path for as long as I had in adulthood before I started to learn some of these techniques.

Katie: That’s awesome. And another area, so in researching you for this episode, you study happiness a lot and you’ve taught this at Yale, but from what I’ve read, you also study kind of what makes the human mind unique and, like, the differences between humans and nonhuman animals, and this is a fascinating topic to me. So I’d love to hear just kind of what that study looks like and what are some surprising things that you found in that?

Dr. Santos: So this was kind of my day job before I became sort of a happiness expert is that I’ve always been a psychologist. But as a psychologist, I really focus on this question of what makes the human mind special. And I’ve studied that by both working with nonhuman primates who live out in the fields. I worked with a group of rhesus monkeys on this island off the coast of Puerto Rico. But even more close to home, I do a bunch of studies looking at how dogs make sense of the world.

Dogs are this wonderful analogue for humans because they grew up in similar environments to humans, you know, they’re also, are around learning in the same way as your kid is learning. You know, they’re picking up on language and they’re watching you do stuff and so the question is like, you know, why does your kid turn out to be a human adult and your dog kind of doesn’t figure that out, right? And so we do that by sort of setting up a bunch of studies with pet dogs, so people bring their dogs in from the community and we do little quick studies with them that look like dogs playing little puzzle boxes or playing games.

But it lets us test what the dogs know about the world. And so we’re really interested in whether dogs share the same strategies in terms of learning from people as humans do, whether they understand some of the same things we do, we were really focused on how they socially evaluate. So humans often don’t just, like, see people out there, but we evaluate whether somebody is nice or mean or, you know, helpful or not helpful or, you know, competent or incompetent. And so we’re interested in whether or not some of those ways of viewing the world are shared with dogs, too.

And there’s not that much overlap between the kind of studies of animal thinking and the studies of happiness. I think one of the spots where we’re seeing similarities is that we’re finding lots of domains in which some of the biases that we have as humans, particularly the biases that we have to, like, learn from other people, those kinds of things might be more ingrained than we thought. You know, they might be either, like, new in humans and animals don’t show them or even some biases that are so old that they’re shared with monkeys.

And I think once you see that these biases can be really built into our evolution, it makes you realize that things like, you know, the fact that we’re prioritizing the wrong things or that we have these wrong intuitions, in some ways, it’s not really our fault. Like, it’s kinda evolution’s fault that they kind of built us sort of crappily, but through understanding the right science and through the right interventions, we can really overcome the limitations that evolution gives us and we can become better decision-makers in ways that we’re using our decisions to lead us to even more happiness.

Katie: That’s so cool. I think this whole area is fascinating and I know that you have many episodes on “The Happiness Lab” if people want to keep going deep on this and it’s really, truly a fascinating topic. And I think even just sometimes learning about this, it just kind of rewires your mind to look for the ways, look for gratitude, look for ways to be happy and to shift that focus. As we start to wrap up, what do you feel like are a few of the most important takeaways? If you had to kind of distill the research on happiness right now, and especially maybe through the lens of the current crisis, what would be a few of the most important takeaways that you would leave with the listeners?

Dr. Santos: I think we’ve talked about some of these but I think one takeaway is just that happiness is really important. You know, we think that happiness is the outcome but happiness can make it easier to have good relationships, it can make it easier to be productive in your life, it can even make it easier to protect your immune system. So focusing on happiness first is important. The second big tip, and maybe a big misconception is that happiness isn’t what we often think. You know, it’s not built into our circumstances, it’s not built into how much money we have or the stuff we often assume. We need to do something different if we want to be happier.

And then I think the third takeaway is that those things that we can do to be happier are within our reach but they really take some work. You know, it’s just as simple as taking time for gratitude or taking time to get your meditation in and eat, you know, eat a little healthier, exercise. But those things, if we put the work in, can reap huge benefits. So it takes some work but the benefits are huge.

Katie: I love it. And lastly, I always love to ask if there is a book or a number of books that have had a dramatic impact on your life that you’d like to share and if so, what they are and why?

Dr. Santos: So many books. I think I’ll pick up, just to pick one book, I’ll pick up on your Stoic quote from earlier before, I’ll give a nod to Epictetus who is one of the famous Stoics and his old book, “The Enchiridion,” which is, it kind of loosely translates to the manual, but Epictetus starts his book with one of the important premises of Stoic philosophy, which is that there are kind of two things in life. The things we can control like, you know, our thoughts and our feelings and so on, and then the things we can’t control, which is our circumstances. And Epictetus notes that, you know, if you try to control this stuff that you can’t control, you’re gonna be miserable or you’re gonna suffer, everything’s gonna suck. But if you just focus on the stuff that you can control, which is your emotions, your mindset, and so on, no one can ever harm you, you’ll always be happy.

So I really, I think that, you know, there’s a lot of modern science on happiness and that’s mostly what we talk about in our podcast. But I think the Stoics and a lot of the ancients got it right and that’s just one of the wonderful manuals for how to, like, kind of turn your mind into a mind that is really good at focusing on the stuff that makes you happy.

Katie: I love that. Laurie, this has been such an awesome interview, I think extremely timely and important right now as we all navigate this kind of worldwide crisis together. And I really appreciate you taking the time to be here and to share all these years of research with us today.

Dr. Santos: Thanks so much. It was great to chat.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening and in echoing some of the themes of this episode, we’re very grateful that you did and that you were here. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/happiness-lab/