#one being I might come across spoilers lmao

[paranasloc]

Dear sweet Emma, happy birthday!

[callsign-rogueone]

alone with you - l.m.

Liam Mairi x reader part two of Liam and Spark's story. words: 3.0k 🏷: Fourth Wing spoilers (spark knows things that Violet doesn't lmao), sparring and a tiny bit of blood, reader gets injured but not to worry, someone takes care of you. no pronouns used for reader but Liam does call you a girl. Tuile being a bitch (wbk) and perhaps some answers about what happened in spark's first year at basgiath... I'm still not good at writing fight scenes, sorry lol

Another year, another round of challenges. Another opportunity to show the entire quadrant that you’re not here to fuck around, nor to make friends.

You loosen your muscles as Emeterrio discusses the rules of engagement, cracking your neck and stretching out your arms, taking mental inventory of all the weapons on your body -- even though it’s frowned upon to use them in these fights, you keep the array of knives at the ready.

“I see the general’s girl has survived the week,” Tuile muses. “I’m almost impressed.”

You cast a glance across the room, seeing her standing next to the cadet who was in front of her in line for Parapet, the one she’d traded boots with.

“It’s only a matter of time,” you mutter back. 

Even though Xaden had convinced the two dozen of you to leave her alone, it’s likely that somebody else is going to see how fragile she is and walk right up and snap her in two, to thin the herd -- not that she has a real chance of making it to threshing anyway, not without some divine intervention.

But she’s a perfect little Navarrian citizen, so she must pray to their gods every night before bed. Maybe they’ll help her, because you sure as hell won’t; you have a reputation to maintain, and there’s no rational explanation you could give her for why you would want to help her at all, not without jeopardizing the entire revolution -- she might not take after her traitorous older brother, who as far as she and everyone else in this death trap of a college is aware, is dead.

She seems to notice you watching her, locking eyes with you for a split second and quickly averting her gaze. She’s afraid of you and all of your friends, unaware that your respect for Brennan is what’s keeping her alive right now.

Fear is a requirement for survival here. Maybe she’ll make it longer than you’d thought.

It’s not a surprise to you at all that your name is called first, nor that you’re matched with the largest cadet in the class. It became clear to you last year that the professors aren’t making these assignments randomly. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they keep pairing you with the best fighters -- but never with another marked one, even though you’re all at the top of the class.

No, they’re probably entertained by all of this, betting on you like racehorses or wild dogs, placing wagers on who would come out on top. If anyone’s putting money on you, you’ve made them a killing -- you’re undefeated. 

But that would require someone else to bet against you, and while you may not respect all of the professors and leadership, or any of them, really, you don’t think they’re dumb enough to throw their money away like that.

“We meet again,” he says with a sick grin that makes the scar below his eye stretch and contort.

You don’t respond, taking one last survey of the seven blades on your body, but you’re not dumb enough to touch them, lest he see where they are and try to take them himself, like he did earlier this year.

He’d wrapped his fingers around the wooden hilt of the blade that Liam had given you before you left for Basgiath, intent on putting it through your heart, and you’d seen red.

“You should have taken his eye out.”

“I gave him that scar as a warning,” you reply evenly. “It’s up to him if he’s going to heed it or not.”

You’re at it as soon as Emeterrio says go, taking turns lunging at each other and blocking attacks.

You’re evenly matched, despite the size he has on you. He may be stronger, more intimidating, but you’re faster, and you know what you’re doing. You know where to hit and when, your strikes much more precise than his.

Still, Liam’s heart races.

It was one thing watching you mess around with Bodhi in the courtyard, but it’s another thing entirely seeing you fight as if your life depends on it -- and it does. There’s a very real possibility that one of you is going to be spending the evening in the infirmary, or the morgue, after this ends. 

You fight like Xaden, like himself and Bodhi and Imogen and everyone else his brother had a hand in training, but with an edge he’s never seen from you before.

He hesitates to put a name to it, but there’s something in your eyes akin to a wild animal’s as the pair of you stalk circles around each other, planning your next attack.

“It’s not polite to play with your food,” Tuile chides.

Fine. You’ll finish this, if only so she’ll shut up and leave you alone.

The other cadet has the same idea. 

You charge at the same time as he hurls a dagger in your direction, and you hit the ground at the last second to avoid being skewered. You start to press up to your feet, but he stomps a boot into your back, pain ripping down your spine. You swallow a scream, digging your nails into the sticky foam beneath you.

The mental wall separating you from Tuile crumbles, that familiar white-hot anger flowing through you. “Do something.”

You unsheath a dagger, reaching up and swiping it across his calf, and he hisses in pain, releasing you and taking a stumbling step back.

It’s easy enough for you to knock him off balance, landing three consecutive blows to his ribs and a swift kick to his stomach that sends him to the floor.

You’re tired of this already. It’s lost its novelty, and you really need to sit down -- there’s black spots clouding your vision, and the pain in your back has gotten impossibly worse.

“Do I have to kill you in front of the kids, or do you yield?” 

“I yield,” he rasps, still clutching his leg.

You lean down, wiping each side of the blade on his shirt before you sheath it.

“Sloppy, but satisfactory,” Tuile comments — that’s high praise from her. Maybe she’ll give you the evening off from her snide remarks.

You slot yourself between Liam and Bodhi, leaning against the wall as casually as you can; every movement has pain spreading across your lower back and shooting down your spine. 

You try to focus on rebuilding the wall she’d knocked down, brick by brick, taking deep breaths and forcing the anger out of your body.

Liam reaches for you, looking worried.

You speak under your breath, not moving your lips. “Not here. Not in front of everyone.” 

He pulls back without protest, understanding why you don’t want him helping you where the rest of the quadrant can see you, don’t want them to see the look of concern on his face and his hand on your arm and identify him as your weakness.

You may very well be the most hated person in the quadrant, being marked, bonded to one of Navarre’s nastiest dragons, and unafraid to draw blood in challenges. There are several cadets in this room who wouldn’t hesitate to go after Liam if they thought it would hurt you -- and it would. 

You don’t care what they do to you, what pain they inflict or what scars they leave on your body, but if anyone so much as touches Liam, they’ll lose the use of their hands. 

You breathe through the pain and keep your eyes on the fights unfolding in front of you; making note of who favors what side of their body, who gets sloppy after more than a minute, who yields because they don’t have the stomach to take things further.

Most of the cadets think this is the one class you don’t have to study for, but they’d be wrong -- there’s a reason you always come out on top, and this is it.

The class ends without Liam’s name being called, which is a relief, even though you don’t doubt his skill on the mat — it’s off the mat that you’re worried about. 

Almost everyone heads straight to dinner, but Liam hangs back, getting your attention with a barely-there touch to your elbow. You look over at him, and he nods in the other direction, toward the dorms. 

Of course he’s going to insist on checking your injuries himself, as he always did in the years you trained with him and Xaden. He doesn’t seem to think anything has changed between you in the year you’ve been away.

Sooner or later, he’ll realize he’s wrong.

You wait for nearly everyone to be out of the gym before you leave, leading him up to the second floor in silence and unlocking your door with a wave of your hand, gesturing him inside -- thankfully there’s nobody in the hallway to see you.

You haven’t been alone with him in a full year. A year and two weeks, if you want to be precise. The day you’d said goodbye, and nothing else.

You busy yourself with digging through your desk drawer to find the nearly-empty tin of healing balm, handing it to him before you turn away, gritting your teeth as you pull the shirt up over your head. 

If you weren’t pouring every ounce of energy you have left into keeping yourself upright, you might have it in you to be embarrassed about the amount of skin you’re exposing to him, the history of your first year at Basgiath on full display. But it’s Liam. Liam isn’t going to judge you, isn’t going to pry; he’ll just keep giving you that soft, concerned look -- which is somehow almost worse.

There’s a moment of quiet as he takes it in; the dark blue, nearly-black silhouette of Tuile that spans your shoulder blades and continues down your back, disappearing into the layers of thick linen wrapped over your chest, the full extent of your rebellion relic, winding down your arm to your wrist… 

Then he sees it, the nasty bruise starting to form on your back, below the hem of your bindings. The other cadet had hit you square in the spine, a blow that could very well have been paralyzing had it been delivered at a slightly different angle with slightly more force. That’s probably what he’d intended.

Liam isn’t particularly religious -- none of you are, which was a major reason why your parents had wanted to secede from Navarre -- but he still sends up a silent thank you to the powers that be that you’re okay, standing in front of him mostly unharmed.

You grit your teeth, keeping your eyes shut and gripping the shirt tightly as Liam’s hand rubs over your back, working in the healing balm. 

There’s something about the feeling of his skin on yours that is more uncomfortable than the aching bruise or any of the other injuries you’d sustained in that fight. 

You can handle the brush of your hands, a touch through layers of clothing and armor, eye contact and whispered words and smiles — all things that are acceptable behavior between friends — but the tenderness of this whole thing is overwhelming; being alone with Liam in your room, his bookbag on the floor, standing behind you rubbing a hand over your back, the other on your waist to hold you steady because you’re fucking trembling.

Maybe you are a little embarrassed after all.

The skin feels warm and tingly, a sign that whatever healing herbs within the sticky paste are working, soothing the aching muscle. Your entire body feels warm. It’s unbearably hot in this room, but Liam doesn’t seem to mind, still dressed in his flight jacket and full uniform. 

He moves his attention from your back to your side, murmuring a soft apology when you startle at the feeling of his hand smoothing over your ribs.

You take a breath, letting him work more of the balm into the spot where the other cadet’s fist had landed.

He finally pulls back, letting his hand linger on your waist until he’s convinced you won’t fall over. “Anything else hurting?” he asks gently.

“My head,” you admit to the wall. “But that never goes away.”

You pull the shirt back on as quickly as you can, done feeling exposed, and fight to maintain an unaffected expression as you turn back to face him.

He looks at you for a few seconds before it dawns on him -- the persistent headache, the flatness of your skin and your constantly racing heart, the way you’re bracing yourself with a hand on the desk, how tired you look and feel… “Spark, when was the last time you had water? Or anything to drink at all?”

Liam has always been too observant for his own good. 

You take a moment to think about it, another definite indicator that something is wrong. “Yesterday,” you answer quietly. “At dinner.” 

His eyes widen almost imperceptibly. It’s been a full twenty-four hours -- you’re supposed to be at dinner right now. It’s a miracle that you hadn’t passed out on the mat this afternoon.

He doesn’t scold you, doesn’t tell you how bad that is; he just squeezes your hand gently, taking the water bottle out of his bag and uncapping it. He can see you hesitating, knows something is wrong --  it takes a lot to rattle you, but you’re looking at the thing like it’s going to bite you.

“Three sips?” he asks softly.

That seems doable.

You take the bottle from him, holding it for a moment, feeling the weight of the metal and the energy flowing through the water inside it. It’s clean, calm, not murky and angry like the river water that Carr had made you practice with last year, but that doesn’t matter; in your hands, it’s the most dangerous substance on the planet.

And as fate would have it, it’s necessary for your survival.

You’re just grateful Tuile is off doing gods-know-what and not making her usual smug commentary -- she’d left after you’d won that challenge match, but she’ll be back soon enough. 

You raise it to your lips and drink, wanting to get it over with. The water is cool and crisp, breathing life back into your mouth and soothing your throat as you swallow, your body singing in relief as you give it what it’s been deprived of for months now. 

You take a moment to breathe, comforted by the air that continues to flow into your lungs and back out. Liam is standing in front of you. You’re okay. Two more. You can do this.

You bring it back up for another sip. You hadn’t realized how much you needed this, how much better it would make you feel. You take the next one in quick succession — that’s three. You’re done. 

You hate to admit it, but you feel better already.

Liam is still watching you with that soft, worried expression, though it’s less severe now than it had been earlier. You can see the gears turning, knowing he’s wondering why this was such a big deal for you; but there’s no judgment there, just genuine concern for your well-being.

You decide to tell him the truth, or part of it.

“I almost drowned when I channeled for the first time,” you say quietly, gazing back down at the half-empty bottle. “It was fucking terrifying. I couldn’t shower alone for a week. I needed one of the girls to come into the bathroom with me and face the wall, just talking to me the whole time. Then we realized Bo can counter signets. He’s been helping me control it, but…”

So that’s what Xaden had meant when he said that Bodhi was helping you deal with things. He wonders if there’s anything else his brother hadn’t told him, anything you aren’t telling him, but he won’t demand an answer from you -- he knows how difficult it must have been for you to tell him what you did, and he won’t push you further.

He takes the bottle back and caps it, gathering you into his arms silently, the way he’d wanted to back in the gym. He’s careful not to put any pressure on the injury, keeping his hands well above the bruise -- one between your shoulder blades and one on your ribs, on the side that you hadn’t been hit.

You rest your head on his shoulder, speaking in a whisper. “Thank you, Li.”

His lips brush over your hairline, where the ache is the worst. “Of course, sweet girl.”

You don’t want to let go of him yet, but you’ve already been holding each other longer than is appropriate for friends -- and that’s all you are, for the time being. 

He finally pulls away, and you could nearly cry at the loss of contact. 

“I need a minute,” you manage. “You should head down.”

You’re reminded again of why you love him so much as he nods in understanding, shouldering his bag and giving you a soft smile before he heads out your door.

All good things must come to an end. 

“Sweet? He must not know you at all.” 

“He knows me better than you ever will,” you snap back. 

At least she waited for him to leave, for you to be done with the water, or you would have some serious explaining to do.

You build up the wall again before she replies, and though it isn’t strong enough to block her out completely, she doesn’t push against it or knock it down -- she must not feel like getting into a pissing match with you right now. 

Good. You don’t either.

You notice he left the bottle on your desk. You manage another three sips before you finally head down to dinner, where you slide into the open seat beside Liam, silently pushing the empty bottle toward him. 

“I’m proud of you,” he whispers, not wanting to draw any attention from the group around you, who are all immersed in hearty conversation.

You haven’t heard those words from anyone in a long time. They mean more to you than he could ever imagine.

[diamondcitydarlin]

----LOTS OF SPOILERS FOR THE FILM BELOW BE AWARE---

The thing that's driving me kinda CRAZY about the sequel though is how perfectly it sets up a personal arc for Lydia to be intertwined with Beej's. Like I said in my reaction post after seeing the film last night, I feel like Lydia as a character doesn't really get much of an arc or a resolution by the end of the story, as most of the plot is focused on repairing her relationship with her daughter, with Delia, maybe even her ex-husband to a certain extent, and for as much as she's rid of someone actually preying on her (Rory) we have no reason to believe she's found inner peace or really discovered herself or isn't still constantly popping pills to help with the 'gift' of sight she still has to deal with. There's so much about her left unresolved that Tim is either going to have to make another film about or I will have to fanfic about. But again, what's also fascinating is the way the beats of Lydia's story become tangled up with Beej's by the end of this, and also the ambiguous suggestion that there might be some kind of red string of fate linking them together across life and death and centuries (my kingdom for Beej saying "I've crossed oceans of time to find you" in a deep sexy Dracula voice and Lydia being like "plz shut the fuck up" LMAO)

Like, the 'psychic connection'. The thing that makes Lydia able to see and interact with Beej in places other than the house/model in Winter River. At first I think we're led to believe these are genuine hallucinations she's having, but ofc that's debunked when Beej reveals he's aware of these sightings and has been participating in them on purpose. Does this suggest that their first marriage may have been binding in some way that didn't release him from death, but allowed him more range to manifest so long as he was attached to her? That's not really addressed or explained, but I feel like it opens the possibility of being a thing (as so many fanfics have had happen before, I LOVE it tbh)

Also, the parallel of them both having had predatory exes that tricked them into 'selling their souls' (one in a figurative sense, the other literally lmao). I'm honestly shocked more conclusions weren't drawn from that conspicuous parallel in the film itself, because it's VERY interesting. It seems almost to suggest they're both meant to safeguard each other's souls (which is why I'm still bitter we didn't get Lydia defending him from Delores, I think that would've been a nice follow up to Beej saving her from Rory, even if she was just doing it out of a sense of obligation).

And idk, on the whole I feel a lot of Lydia's personal struggle at this point in her life is defined by a need to feel 'normal'. I get how that can seem odd coming from the teen girl that confidently described herself as 'strange and unusual', but this is 30 years later, after several failed relationships, after becoming a mom and struggling with a strained relationship with her daughter because of her oddity, idk, I think it's a good case study on how society forces women to conform lest they be a bad daughter or a bad mom or a bad wife, etc, but I think it's obvious she's just fighting her 'strange and unusual' nature and the more she does that, the more difficult her life will be.

To me, that suggests her path to happiness has actually a lot to do with Beej, or very well could. Who else is going to understand her true nature the way he does? Who else is going to unashamedly encourage her to be balls to the wall weirdo like she REALLY is??? Who else can truly set her free that way??? Like I'm gnawing on wires here yall, if nothing else Tim gave us SO much fanfic material to work with on this one.

[yeyinde]

fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

[PREV] [NEXT] A03 MIRROR | PLAYLIST

an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex. 

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through. 

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you? 

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right. 

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it. 

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within. 

It's all wrong. It feels wrong. 

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon. 

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that. 

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream. 

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do. 

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment. 

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win. 

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust. 

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers: 

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell. 

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe. 

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them. 

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping. 

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way. 

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault. 

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery. 

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind. 

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown. 

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you? 

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being. 

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder. 

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours. 

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words. 

Can’t fix a broken man. 

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand. 

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help. 

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding. 

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught. 

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight. 

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down. 

You know all too well what it feels like to drown. 

You pull away. He clings tighter. 

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder. 

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.” 

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't. 

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle. 

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral. 

You can't be.

Won't be. 

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone. 

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty. 

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time. 

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?) 

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs. 

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known. 

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose. 

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty. 

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving. 

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm. 

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.” 

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed. 

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me. 

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.” 

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him. 

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this: 

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is. 

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this: 

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race. 

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality. 

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings. 

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy. 

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning. 

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter. 

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation. 

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings. 

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design. 

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent. 

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout. 

Threw it at the floor by his feet. 

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside. 

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia. 

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation. 

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable. 

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself? 

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe. 

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone. 

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss). 

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself. 

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place. 

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning. 

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch. 

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own. 

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his. 

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow. 

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts. 

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.  

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine. 

You have to be. 

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly. 

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be. 

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe. 

(Probably. Undoubtedly. 

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.) 

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless. 

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts. 

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk. 

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete. 

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?) 

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots. 

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded. 

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either. 

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for. 

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough. 

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that? 

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all. 

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages. 

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free. 

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again. 

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food. 

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies. 

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head. 

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too. 

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke. 

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway. 

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice. 

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand. 

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape. 

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever. 

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous. 

You're not ready to see Bear. 

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again. 

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe? 

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it. 

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.) 

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette. 

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens. 

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do. 

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual). 

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection. 

But it's moot. All of it. 

He doesn't come back to the bar. 

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty. 

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale. 

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking. 

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between. 

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you. 

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted. 

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so. 

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything. 

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems. 

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side. 

"Teach me how to swim instead." 

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up. 

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise." 

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?" 

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn. 

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole. 

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes. 

"Bet you were born in April." 

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close. 

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him. 

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces. 

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush. 

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone. 

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots." 

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right. 

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams. 

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt. 

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore. 

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead. 

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering. 

Considering. 

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't. 

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe. 

Sort of. 

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA. 

Drowning, of course. 

Or some fictive version of it. 

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise. 

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation. 

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach. 

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent. 

Or they're supposed to be. 

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers. 

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear. 

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them. 

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries. 

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point. 

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort. 

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap. 

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave. 

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off. 

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood. 

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable. 

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes. 

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it. 

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you. 

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda. 

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity. 

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion. 

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again. 

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day. 

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant). 

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window. 

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land. 

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close. 

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!). 

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing. 

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol. 

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations. 

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring. 

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs. 

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger. 

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from. 

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out. 

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all. 

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you. 

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards. 

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet. 

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with. 

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks. 

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse. 

Like most things when it comes to him. 

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly. 

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting. 

“...Bear?” 

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail. 

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre. 

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own. 

“Then why did you?” 

“You know why,” you admit quietly. 

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand. 

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia. 

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it. 

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead. 

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.” 

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve. 

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable. 

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage. 

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder. 

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out. 

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub? 

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile. 

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight? 

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions. 

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram. 

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again. 

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.” 

It quiets him, this soft confession. 

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind. 

“Doesn't mean you can't try.” 

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.” 

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.” 

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.” 

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery. 

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality. 

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again. 

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale. 

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too. 

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be. 

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass. 

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits. 

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest. 

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable. 

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture. 

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with. 

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret. 

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession: 

there's no one else. 

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?” 

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give. 

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home. 

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there. 

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear. 

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?” 

“That, too.” 

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch. 

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit. 

It would be so easy to just give in. 

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly. 

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow. 

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief. 

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible. 

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches. 

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination. 

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup. 

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm. 

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you. 

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say. 

Things like: 

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts. 

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky. 

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober? 

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back. 

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart. 

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously. 

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response. 

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise. 

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…” 

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close. 

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down. 

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone. 

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt. 

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.” 

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces. 

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works. 

Somehow, somehow. 

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something. 

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest. 

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed. 

It's odd, though. 

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start. 

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you. 

But something has to give eventually. 

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word. 

Though, not always. 

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other. 

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept. 

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?” 

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground. 

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions. 

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in. 

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must. 

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table. 

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering. 

You'd always had a weakness for men like him. 

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious. 

Still. Still. 

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it. 

And in all honesty, you are. 

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood. 

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given. 

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow. 

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste. 

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man. 

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own. 

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into. 

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway. 

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory. 

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.” 

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are. 

Pavlov's finest. 

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.” 

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort. 

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck. 

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one. 

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him. 

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer. 

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat. 

“...Not drinking as much helps.” 

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you. 

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run. 

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward. 

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres. 

Skingraft over the wound. 

“Proud, huh?” 

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms. 

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.” 

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat. 

You should.

But you don't. 

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man. 

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.” 

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.” 

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?” 

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside. 

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue. 

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one. 

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.” 

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

[alucardens]

Yeah though seriously- you might not ship Buck and Tommy and that's okay- everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as it doesn't harm anyone- what makes it not okay is when you say things like you're being queerbaited- in a show that *literally* has a canon lesbian couple (where one half of the couple is a main character) SINCE the first episode of the show, that, 1) consistently, as a couple, have storylines that get resolved in a way that shows the writers aren't brushing the characters away, and arcs that show character growth.

2) NONE. NONE. Of the canonically queer characters have been harmed in a way that resulted in permanent death. And when they do get in harms way (which is inevitable- this is the nature of the show), it's done in a thoughtful way- their actions and risk of death/ injury WOULD add something to the plot/ storyline. Their loss would have an impact on us as the viewer. They would not be meaningless deaths. And aside from death, even queer characters who 'exit the main storyline of the show' but are otherwise alive, are still done with thought and care. I mean, (and spoilers for the first few seasons of the show,) Michael's storyline lasted (iirc) about 3-5? seasons. (We are not talking about meta events such as why they removed the actor from the show). He and his (named AND on-screen) husband, David, move to help people. His husband is literally a neurosurgeon. There was literally an episode revolving around Michael's proposal to David. Even after they've moved away, they're STILL referenced and talked about. They're not pushed away or ignored like the way some shows treat characters who aren't there anymore.

Josh (my bby fr), who's also been canonically gay since his first appearance, also has a arc that's real and very very relatable to most of us. The show takes it fucking seriously as well. And Josh is GOOD. Even as a side character, he's not reduced to the 'gay best friend'. As I said, he has his own storyline and arc, he has his own opinions, he's good at his job.

Aside from the main characters, imo, 911 also does a damn good job of showing that queer people exist. You might not like it because 'oh they're showing queer people who are in danger/ not happy/ dying.' To which I'd respond by saying that you're watching a show about paramedics. As much as we like to say this is the gay firefighter show (accurate lmao), we need to remember that there's going to be dark themes in this show.

I don't remember every call they've come across that involved queer people, but we for sure remember the 'we ever only wanted to go together' scene, with the elderly husbands. Yes it involves death. That's why we're seeing this scene in the first place- the engine wouldn't have to respond to a call if there wasn't a call in the first place. But it also fucking shows queer people growing old together and making a life for themselves. The opening scene is literally a montage of the husbands' relationship over the years. I don't know how many mainstream shows put that much fucking care in queer characters.

And then there's also the wlw couple in that car accident thing- not as significant as the husbands but like, that's the point, is it not? Not all their calls are significant- we don't even see all of them. The point is that they just show queer people existing as a general thing. It's not strange that the two women who were in the same car in a crash are both gay. There's no weird over-sexualised kiss. There's no show or mention or even hint of homophobia or confusion by the firefighters. It's fucking normal. So yeah. Do I ship endgame Tevan? Not at this moment. Do I like them together as a couple right now? Fucking yes. My personal opinion is that I like Buck and Eddie together more (at least for now), but why would I not ship Tommy and Buck right now? It makes no fucking sense not to. Buck is in a happy (queer) relationship, he's still figuring himself out as a bi man in his 30s, he's dating a masc man, who's past is messy and has since grown (oh look at that, another character arc revolving around a queer person), and they're clearly fucking happy together.

Anyway. I have a lot of feelings about this lmao. You want proper bi representation? Bro. I don't know what to tell you but you're looking at it.

[deadboydetectives-confessions]

Maybe this'll be really unpopular (guess that's what this blog is for lmao), but with all the new spoilers dropping I'm starting to get a little glad we didn't get season 2. I'm sure they'd do everything really well, and I'd love to see the gay bar episode, but bringing back Esther and the Cat King? I had such a visceral negative reaction to both those pieces of news.

To explain myself: I think there is a massive problem in series', across a lot of different types of media, of having recurring villains, people who come back just because no one can be bothered to think up a new villain, and it ruins a lot of things for me. Imo Esther was really well dealt with in season 1; considering she'd technically immortal, I think they got rid of her really neatly and in such a beautifully appropriate way. She's being punished by the goddess whose gift she used to feed hundreds of little girls to her giant snake. That's such a wonderful ending. It's fanfiction's job to bring her back over and over, just like it's fanfiction's job to put Edwin in Hell over and over; it's the show's job to come up with a new villain.

I very much don't ship Catwin - I like the Cat King as a character but I am very strongly against the ship for reasons I have given before (the Cat King's loneliness means he needs friends, not a boyfriend, and I don't think it would set a good precedent for Edwin's future relationships to sleep with the guy who tried to coerce him into sex) - so that might be colouring my thoughts against his reappearance in season 2, but I just... I think he's served his purpose with the Agency. Maybe a spin-off or something about him, Monty, and Tragic Mick making friends and dealing with the fall-out from Esther's end would work, but I don't want him becoming part of the Agency or even really interacting with them much because, to me at least, it would just feel forced.

And also, it just feels like both Esther and the Cat King are very rooted in Port Townsend. They've been there for centuries. And now that Niko has 'died' and Jenny's considering moving to London, there's no reason for the Agency to ever go back there. I know a lot of people are attached to Port Townsend as a location because that's most of what we see in the show, but I'd love to see the Agency in London, where they've been already for years. They must have quite a large network of supernatural acquaintances, if not friends, in the UK and I think it would be a shame for the show not to properly explore all the potential that has.

Overall, I don't know. I think Dead Boy Detectives is an amazing show that deserves to have loads of seasons exploring lots of different characters and locations, and the number of characters that feel like they should have been a one-off in the first season but were apparently going to come back in season 2 suggests to me that it was only going to get one or two seasons anyway.

.

[kanmom51]

Jungkook W-live 28 March 2023

I knew it. 

I bloody well knew it.

I had this feeling in my gut that JK is going to show up for a live on that fateful eve of the 28th March.

You know, to announce the CK ambassadorship.

But then that could have waited a day, like after the actual company announces it.

Perhaps the CK thing was a good excuse. I mean, given the fact that he had a live for over an hour and a half and spoke about CK for about 5 minutes of it...

So yeah, JK came live and practically the full hour and a half was about JM, with a few minutes to whisper “Calvin Klein” and say he wouldn’t represent a brand he wouldn’t buy himself (do we hear a tiny little poke at a certain someone else here people?  You tell me).

I saw tons of posts about the live.  But I preferred to wait for the official translations, makes for a better viewing, not to mention better perspective – seeing the expressions when the words are being said is almost everything. 

Before I start talking about what was said and done in the live, let’s bring up once more the one thing that would have been a given to be talked about under the circumstances, but all we got about it was deafening silence.

Letter.

The song that JK was clearly oh so excited about that he had to give us a cute little spoiler to with his guitar all pre-prepared playing us the tune (which he had to learn especially as he did the backup voice not the guitar playing -  that was JM).

The one song that JK took part in on JM’s solo so exciting new album.

The  one song that was created ‘for army’, same army that JK has written several songs for in the past, same army JK loves oh so much, same army that thinking about them at times brings him to tears, same army that he was sitting with him right there doing his live for. 

The song that JM said in his Face live, one way or another (waiting to watch that one subbed and see the exact words he used) that was for Army (again, without playing it for army that are watching him do the live), and moving on, once again, without a single word about JK’s oh so loud involvement in this song.  On an album that is personal to him, in a song that is his supposed letter to army. 

Yeah.

That song and that JK and that army.

Not a single word about it from JK.

Not him bringing it up himself, nor him talking about it, mentioning anything about it, including when JM was speeding by the subject on Suchwita. 

You’d think he’d be piping up oh so proudly at that point saying “yeah, the song I helped JM hyung made for army” or something of that sort.  We’ve seen him do it many a times before. 

Nope. No piping up this time.

As a matter of fact, not a peep from him about that song nor it's meaning nor his involvement.

I wonder why?

NOT

I really don’t.

I know exactly why.

And you do too.

JK turns on the live 28.3.2023 at 2:53 am.

He asks what did he come to do today?  He came to watch JM on Suchwita with us. So, clear plan for the live this time.

He talks about starting to work again, working hard trying to find his own sound (me making happy sounds), using a straw because he’s been having trouble with his voice.  So, he’s doing exercises for his vocal cords with a straw, something he saw in videos, including seeing Sam Smith do the same.  He asks if it’s because of alcohol.  Ahm…JK… maybe it's that other thing you're suspected of doing that might be affecting your voice?

Please don't come at me, but maybe, just maybe, he has been doing that one thing that's not too good for his health, and maybe his voice either. And maybe, just maybe, the straws, in mouth constantly is for his vocal cords, but also a way to stop partaking in said habit...

He asks if it’s because of the alcohol, and then turns around to say he bought the straws because of his voice but it’s perfect for highball.  Lmao.

Ok, we are done with the straw explanations and we are all ready to start the actual live, lol.

He starts with a song he says he came across recently -  a cover Haize did of Still with you that came out a few days prior to the live. 

There is a reason behind everything JK does in these lives. The choice of song here, it has a meaning, it's not random.

So, we start a live that as we all know ends up to be all about JM with a song that we mostly believe to be related to their relationship. 

JK talks about Haize and hearing her in a radio interview saying she did the cover because this was the type of song she wanted to write for her fans.  Do I remind you that this is supposedly a fan song?  Do we all believe it’s just a fan song?

Interesting choice for JK to start the obviously JM heavy live with a song he wrote that we believe to be a Jikook song, a song about JK and JM but that army was given ownership over.

Do I have to remind that JK came straight out and said this song was written for army?

JK was way clearer than JM on this, no vagueness, no beating around the bush, writing this as a gift for Festa:

“I feel good because I was able to tell fans how much I loved them.”

And yet, Jikookers studying the song, the lyrics, in the context of Jikook and the rainy day fight, which JK himself brought up during that Festa, clearly felt this song was about those two. One of those songs, just like we feel Magic shop is, that army are told is for them, about them, but really has nothing to do with them. It might be a gift for army, a beautiful song as such, but it wasn't written about them, while coming from deeper, more private and personal feelings.

But did you see what JK did there?

He goes and writes a song about the rainy day fight, 'for army', 'about his love for army', a fight we would never have known about if not for him telling us about it during that very same Festa.

That shrewd little bugger (yes, I'm allowing myself to call him that), wanted those who know to know exactly what that song was about.

Kind of like Letter, don't you think?

We would never have known JM's initial lyrics and his use of dangshin if not for adding JM's journal to the album, for example.

I know I'm digressing here, but I just don't understand why it was so easy to take JK's story about Still with you with a grain of salt, side-eyeing it, attributing the song to Jikook with ease, all while with Letter it's all "if JM said it's for army then it must be..."

It just baffles me.

Moving on.

Before starting the main event JK gives us a couple of minutes talking about CK, that the video went up, smiling shyly, lol.  “if you look you can see that I only have CK underwear…you can see the sincerity”. – He talks about the difference between doing the advertising work with the group (company decision more or less) to doing it for himself, which is his decision, and he decided to do something he really likes, something he would really purchase with his own money.  He really loves CK.

“I can show you that my underwear is CK…but it’s kind of weird to show you.” 

Lmao.

A true ambassador he is.  Telling us he loves the clothes.  That he’s going to wear them often. 

He is really something else, lol.

Talking about how lately he threw out all his colourful clothes and wearing only black (well, we knew he was going through somewhat of an emo period), but he’s going to wear the CK denim now, lol.

That line of denim – I'm telling you, it's gonna be sold out in no time.  You just wait and see.

He laughs a bit about how embarrassed and shy he’ll be with the video, and he giggles saying “I think you’ll really like it.”

A-ha JK. You knew. Lol.

He goes on a little bit more about how he enjoyed shooting the clip, how he couldn’t eat during that period and how he really loves that brand, but then switches, says enough talk about that (not in those words) and gets back on track.  You know, for the actual reason he came live : “we need to watch Suchwita”.

14:08 more or less.  He’s looking to put on Suchwita.  Humming Jimin…,

then asking why doesn’t Jimin come up right away?

At first he can’t find it and he’s baffled by it, continues to look for it, actually kind of upset..

He finds it at last: “it did come out. Scared me.” Smile on face. 

Smiley happy.

The way his features soften when JM is talking.  Every single time JM is talking. 

JK said, I want to say promised lol, to tell us the truth about the dumpling fight, how serious it was, “scary” in his words.

JK stops Suchwita to tell us how much he likes Set me free pt. 2.  “it’s so my style.  He did such a good job.”  He also said how he likes the second part, we kind of see it later on as well.

So, we're back with Letter. Suga and JM are talking about the song.  Serendipity is playing in the background.  JK is smirking and humming/singing to Serendipity.  No stopping the clip like he did to tell us about SMF pt. 2.  No blink, no word, no humming or singing or bringing out the guitar to play Letter.  NOTHING.     

I can’t really tell if he’s upset, and maybe he isn’t.  It’s kind of a given that this would have to be passed off as a song for army.  An intimate love song they sing together, at the moment cannot be passed up as just that… A price to pay, I guess.  One they both understand ever so well.

I said this once and I’m going to say this again.  If Letter is indeed JM’s gift to army, a gift he is dedicating to army on his first solo album, didn’t he kind of move past it super quick?  All with Serendipity playing in the background (why not Letter, the actual song ‘for army’?).  And the body language.  Oh JM, how hard it is for you to lie you poor baby.  Well, you aren’t, not per say.  Because the whole thing was set up that way, wasn’t it?  The timing of the song on the album, the little references here and there, the PERFECT disguise.  So kind of what these two do all the time, what JK did with Still with you. Omitting and sharing half truths or little wittle tiny white lies once in a while (JK’s “I go to his room cause he’s the nearest to me”).  I was going to write “they kind of have to”, but there is no “kind of…” in this.  They have to.  Period. 

And yet they find their ways...

I mean, JM’s album, phew, the queer coding, the clear clues in the lyrics, in his Playlist video, WOW.  Just WOW.  And then he sits with Suga and is asked about the songs and he says outright that some of it is too much to share.  He’s sharing.  He’s giving us clues.  Those who are meant to understand do and will. Those that don’t understand probably weren’t meant to.

In any case, as per usual, the second you put me in front of a keyboard I start spewing shit.  This is not a post about a one Mr. Park Jimin. 

Or is it?

Because well, this is a post about JKs live.  The one he came to do after he told his boyfie that he missed him too (come on now, we all know it wasn’t us he is missing). 

But

Let’s do the math a minute. We do love our math, right?

If someone does a live but the whole live is centered around someone else, who is the post really about?

LMAO.

JK comments about JM’s hot food.  I guess that’s what happens when JK isn’t around to foo foo his food for him…

He listens attentively, he nods in agreement to what JM says. 

He giggles when JM’s giggling, with that look he gets, you know, that JM look.

He seems a little more serious, stoic, when it comes to Like crazy and the other songs on the album (other than Set me free pt. 2 that is).  I have a little theory about it. 

We are talking about the person closest to JM, his life partner, the person that spent the most time with JM during that 'darker' period the album is about. He knows what JM was going through.  He was there by his side when JM was struggling.  These songs, in a way, they might serve as a reminder of those difficult times.  As happy as he is for JM and as proud as he is of him, it might be hard for him to have this reminder.

Anyway, JM giggles, JK grins.

Our neuro divergent prince stimming  but focused on the show.

JK’s face when they show Black swan.

Proud bunny.

He finishes up with Suchwita and starts saying something about the way JM thinks but doesn't finish his trail of thought, noticing that he hasn’t really talked to the viewers during the whole episode – “I tend not to talk when I focus” (again, our neuro divergent prince). 

Yes, he was quite focused. 

As he continues to be throughout the live when JM’s on screen.

Next on the agenda, according to JK, was to play a song and “end now”.

Didn't really happen that way though.

The playlist during the live:

Love songs, eh?  Interesting…  Only thing missing was Letter.  But wait, he already played Letter on the guitar for us …

He comes back from the toilet (yes, he went for a wee, I assume), says he’ll end the live when he finishes his last shot.  Interacts a little with the comments, like reads maybe 3 and answers them, and back to sitting backwards on the couch and just listening to the song playing.  He’s not in the mindset of interacting with the comments.  That’s not what he’s there for.

6 songs  in (a couple not listened to till the end),  a couple of more comments read, intermission over and back to the JM show.

So, it seems, so he says, he’s curious about the lyrics of Set me free pt. 2.  And we’re off to watch the MV.  From his reaction at the end it’s pretty clear it’s not all the lyrics he doesn’t know, but more a specific word he wasn’t sure about – Maze.

He does know some of the lyrics already and part of the choreo too.

In that second part of the song he silences up.  Lyrics be damned.  I guess JM bare chest was something needed to be focused on. He’s literally mesmerized.  He did say he likes that part of the song…

Joke aside, I feel that the lyrics in the second half are more meaningful to him. We also notice that later on when he is watching the dance practice clip.

JK's scrolling and starts a video, JM centered video (members teasing JM), which he leaves on to watch.  Enthralled.  Enamored at parts. Giggly. Fully focused.  Again, barely talking to us.  And even when he talks it feels at times to be more to himself than to us.

Clip ends, he tells people to watch and stop sending comments, lol (I can’t help but wonder what comments were coming up at that point…and those that understand, well they will understand).

*Trigger disclaimer - this next paragraph can be a little triggering to some. If the subject of JK and alcohol is not something you want to talk about or here, move on to the next paragraph.

He brings up the question of alcohol again.  This is not the first time he talks about it.  Asking himself why he poured himself this last drink and is he addicted.  I don’t know JK. Well, not enough to say either way for sure.  But I do know that he’s an active functioning, now working again young man.  No, I don’t think he’s addicted.  I think he does use alcohol as a crutch of sorts, perhaps like JM told us he was a while back.  JM busy, while he wasn’t for quite a while.  I touched on it in length in previous posts.  I'm not sure he himself realises what addiction, actual addiction, means when he says those words. He seems to be getting back on track, but it takes time, and the drink it’s filling a hole that still needs tending to, but I really don’t think it’s an addiction, nor something to worry about, and him even asking that, in a way, also shows me that it isn’t.  His awareness is key here.

JK goes back to watch the TV looking for Jimin again.  He tells us he saw Pixid and it’s cool.

Guys, he’s clearly been watching JM content. 

When you can’t have the real thing, you go for second best, I guess.

He watched the dance challenge for Like crazy, commenting/ complimenting JM’s a good dancer.

Notice once again how he's not watching Like crazy.

Then he puts on the dance practice for SMF pt. 2 once again.  And super focused once again.

This is when we see him smirk when JM sings the line (in the second part of the song):

Look at me now, I won't stop, even if they mock me

And after this JK joins in to the choreo…

He clearly loved that song.  He did tell us there is something amazing coming when the teaser was coming out.

At this point he puts on upbeat music (Up all night by Kehlani and JB), runs to the closet to take out a lollipop to suck on, saying he’s bored.  You know what him playing with that lollipop reminded me off?

That Jinjikook live, you know, with the lollipops and the hickey selfie.

Let’s understand for a second what song he has on: 

Up all night by Kelani and Justin Bieber. Ahm…

He rewinds the song a little and he’s sucking hard on that lollipop with the song playing : “I think about all the ways you turn me on. And my bed gets lonely whenever you're gonе…”

And the man is sucking, real hard, all while these lyrics are playing:

But, baby, I'm a wreck without you (You)

All I do is fantasize about you (About you)

You're the light of my life, yeah, I mean it

Girl, you got what I want when I need it

And even when the sun don't shine

I'll be right by your side, holdin' you tight (Holdin' you tight)

And when you feel like nobody cares

I'll be right there to remind you that

You keep me up at night…

Then, a few more moments in, he’s done. 

He has to go work on his stuff (ahm… what stuff exactly I don’t know…perhaps the stuff the song was going on about), takes the last sip of his drink bids us goodbye, as he suddenly wants to go work, says he needs to do something and end of live.  There was real urgency there.

Hey, get out of that dirty mind of yours.

He could have just felt inspired by JB’s beautiful vocals singing about the ways she turns him on and how he fantasizes about her (whoever she was, that doesn’t really matter, cause we know exactly who Mr. Jeon there is turned on by and who he misses and fantasizes about)…

Yeah.

I’m going with that.

Inspiration. 

Good thing he was sitting down and the lights were dimmed.  We could have, well, seen said inspiration.  That would have been some spoiler.

Side note:

JM commented about JK’s live on Weverse and again later during his pre-recording on that day.

The man was watching JK. 

It’s clear from his comments.

And yet, he didn’t show on the live itself, comment during the live.  Not one word. 

Come to think of it, no one did (they could have been asleep, but they could have also just known when to keep away, lol).

So JM’s watching. 

You know, the live that JK was doing about JM.

JM is awake and watching. But he’s not commenting.

Only to leave a comment on Weverse that it was cute - letting both us and JK know he saw it.

Like he didn’t want to insert himself while it was happening

Not stop the flow.

Sitting and enjoying watching the love of his life, taking him in being so endearing.

Literally sitting front row view, seeing how much love the love of your life has for you.

He wouldn’t interrupt that.

And if I’m already talking about JM enjoying the view, well I guess I should also share my thoughts about JK’s live. 

You see, in my eyes Jungkook, he’s da man.

The man that told us he wrote us a song, all while making sure we know it's not actually for us.

He knows.  He knows us Jikookers have hundreds of clips with JK looking googly eyed at JM.

Do I talk about Karmy having a good laugh about JK’s YT algorithm?  How random it was for an unknown JM centered clip to just show up on his recommended?  Unknown channel.  How this clip showing up kind of means our man spends time watching clips with JM, probably Jikook too?

Anyways, man knows we see him.

Since 2020-21 he even tried to control himself more in professional surroundings, sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t.

So, he places the camera sits back and just lets us watch him react to seeing JM, JM interactions with the members, JM interactions with himself, JM talking, JM singing, JM dancing.

You think he didn’t know what we would see????

Man is far from dumb.

Man knows we see him, know his expressions.

Man knows he melts into mush when he’s looking at JM.

And yet, he decided to do exactly that – let us see THAT.

Man is precious.

[divorcingjimmatthews]

compiling my discord theories about the dead body in the trailers on a post!!!! these include both trailers we've seen, footage from all across S2 *AND* promo material from the show's insta (hanna's reels) so be warned for spoilers

what we know

jade and boyd are presumably rolling a dead body of a known character into town. we see a shot of their feet, a general shot of the wrapped body, and a shot of the funeral. from these pictures we can make a list of potential candidates

potential candidates

julie (white sole sneakers with white shoelaces in the costume as per hannah's insta reel, small build, light skin, her spot conveniently hidden from view in the funeral shot, death is hinted at all through the new trailer)

sara (costume shown in hannah's reel seems to match costume worn by the body under the wraps, small build, light skin, missing from the funeral shot, jim and ethan do not look too distraught in the funeral shot as you'd expect from julie or tabitha's death)

tabitha (white sneakers in the costume she was wearing at the end of season 2, small build, light skin, might have "died" in the town at the end of season 2)

from this information i'd bet my money on the body being sara's. but!!!!

my theory

i think it would be a little weird for them to kill sara off early in the season, and it also would be weird to spoil so much of the end of the season in an early trailer. we also get this scene in the trailer where julie is shocked to see someone who grabs her hand...

and that someone seems to be sara, not dressed in her usual style of clothing, telling her to keep quiet?????? idk i'm shit at recognising faces but adding up this information together i'm going to present the theory that boyd, jade and sara are for some reason faking sara's death. i think they dressed up a dead frombie or unnamed townsperson as her. what do y'all think

also it wouldn't even be the first time they fake sara's death or dress up a dead body in a yellow sweater to make it look like it's someone else LMAO (ellis finding trudy in fatima's yellow sweater)

edit: throwing in an additional sara shot where she's wearing another costume in the trailer, which seems to match the last screencap? (yellow sweather with white blouse underneath, similar neckline)

edit 2: coming back to this i think the costume in the reels might be from a flashback scene (her hair looks like it had more effort put in and like it's shorter, than we ever see on the show). the texture of the sweater in the picture of boyd holding the dead body also seems to match the sweater in that last picture rather than the one she's wearing in the reels

[oodlyenough]

dw empire of death

spoilers ofc

hm. like many RTD finales, a bit of a mixed bag. i feel less certain of my overall thoughts than last week (which i thought was a blast, tbh).

the good: i'm... pretty happy with the ruby mom reveal. this whole mystery box set up turning out to be "she was just a scared young woman who couldn't raise her baby", an ordinary woman mythologized by ruby and the doctor over the season, etc, is an extremely RTD solution. and as a fan of his stuff I liked seeing that... well... pivot to his roots as opposed to her being part of the pantheon or something (which I admit I did wonder about myself).

the *idea* of her pointing at the sign to name the baby is nice, I like the meaning of it and what Ruby takes from it, but it is a bit of a clumsy set up. very dramatic pointing, ms miller.

also as much as i was dying to see what the screen said lol i DID love the character moment of ruby stepping forward to offer the name to sutekh, only to smash it, and then clip his collar (lmfao btw). i thought that was a nice character moment for ruby. in that moment i thought perhaps we'd never find out the answer, and that would be something ruby sacrificed for the greater good. i wasn't sure how satisfying that would be and I guess I'll never have to find out bc it's not what happened lmao, but it is where i thought we might be headed.

i liked seeing the gloves and the rope from TCORR come back. i like surprise tools that will help us later :)

loved the memory tardis from the time window and the use of that tales from the tardis set. how cool.

loved the time window playing clips of classic who that's so fun. mel's moment with six's outfit awwww. and i'm sure i missed some of the namedrops of planets etc that fifteen was going on about but i liked the ones i caught. shan-shen! oodsphere!!

i thought the effects of the dust wave and the insta-crumbling was pretty good and spooky

i really like having mel around! i hope we get to see her cameo again

the mixed bag:

'the death wave is eating memories and going back through family trees in reverse' is pretty cool as a concept, i thought. where i think this hurts the resolution a bit is that in the moment i thought, "ok, well, ruby's "safe" because there's the Mystery, there's no family tree for it to climb!" but like... there was. does sutekh need to personally be aware of your family tree to kill you?

i really liked the moment of fifteen and ruby watching louise outside the coffee shop, and i really liked the moment where ruby sits down across from her and then the barista calls the name ruby and they have this look. i ... kind of found myself wishing that it would stop there? i mean, i'm happy for ruby, and i think "ruby found her bio fam and now ruby and her big family are together" is a nice ending for the character. but there was something so emotional and bittersweet about that split second of wondering and connection between the two, and ruby having that choice to make...

the goodbye between ruby and fifteen was lovely. millie gibson is so good her big watery eyes make me so sad. i've enjoyed the two of them together and i think they have incredible chemistry as characters and actors, like, what a team of besties. i'll miss ruby on the TARDIS. but ... only 10 episodes, a couple of which didn't feature them much at all... a bond that didn't get super developed on screen ... I dunno. Left me wishing we got more from them through the season.

I do know we'll see more of Ruby next season, so I'm excited for that. an s4 Martha situation. but then I also worry about Varada Sethu's character getting development time too...

the not so good:

killing off rose, kate, etc in the first minute removes stakes, because while you might worry about characters like cherry or carla who won't necessarily stick around when ruby leaves or whose deaths will impact ruby, you know rose and kate are not going to stay dead permanently. also very infinity war (derogatory) where there was the same issue -- no these characters won't stay dead and i'm not going to humour it lol

rose temple sweetie it was nice to see you stand in the background and not speak. what was that about. she FINALLY got all of two lines. it just felt like she didn't serve a lot of purpose in this ep. I mean I liked seeing her but she did not do anything to the story in either part of the ep

the solution of "death kills death" was a bit goofy lol but it's doctor who the solution is always goofy. i didn't care too much about that i guess. but it was goofy

i really think we could've used a more decisive scene with carla and ruby. carla seems to understand ruby's desire to know her bio fam and be supportive of it and that's lovely. obviously ruby loves carla and vice versa. but i think it would've been nice to have a moment of on-screen explicit acknowledgment between carla and ruby that there might be weird feelings there, that louise isn't replacing carla, something like that.

related to the above, the Doctor says Ruby redefined the way he thinks of family, which is a huge thing to say, but I don't feel like I ever saw that happening on screen. it COULD have. all the pieces are there with foundlings and foster care and adoption...

[vagabond-umlaut]

⁙ spick and span, ft. gojo and geto

or, how well they keep themselves and your home clean.

▸gn! reader; 0.65k wc; manga spoilers + fluff, fluff and fluff; gojo and geto in their twenties (mid to late, maybe) (couldn't find another image, sorry); established relationship (married in case of geto) ▸the classic 'wrote this instead of studying/sleeping' (it was one a.m. when i wrote this lmao). anyways, characters, image and divider used aren't mine. please don't plagiarize, translate or repost this. enjoy reading! ❤️

gojo satoru

at a personal level, the man is unbelievably spruce and tidy.

i mean, you've seen him, right?

designer clothes or clean ironed uniform, neatly trimmed hair with *those* bangs, clean shaved face - there's no way in hell he is not hygienic. i bet you, he also uses those costly af soaps, bath bombs & perfumes with citrus scents and woody undertones.

the literal king of self-care, if you will.

yet when the story comes to his surroundings...

umm, let's say you'll be a lot a little disappointed. and a little mad. maybe. definitely.

if the two of you live at an estate with servants at your beck and call, you'll have a lot less mess to yell about.

but if you both decide to stay in a place by yourselves - y'know, the way ordinary people do - well... friendly advice, keep a strip of aspirin handy. [you'll need it, trust me.]

from empty candy wrappers beneath the couch to dirty clothes in a heap outside the washroom to mission papers strewn across the dining table to bed unmade till the noon, this man just *does not* know how to clean up after himself.

initially, it isn't a problem. you're in love with him, he's in love with you - every extra chore you do for him doesn't appear a chore.

and gojo, being the oblivious busybody he is, continues leaving his messes behind for you to manage.

[not knowingly, of course. satoru loves you way too much to trouble you that way. but he does it all the same.]

years of being the spoilt brat of a loaded clan might do that, you reckon - so you excuse him, again and again and again - until it becomes too fucking much and you decide to talk to him.

cue hours of scolding countered by flirting, followed by a decision to sleep separately, followed by a terribly sad, terribly sleepy, terribly cute face begging for your forgiveness at three in the morning.

the next weekend and every weekend after that, satoru and you clean your house together. like the equal partners you are. [not that you've a lot to clean, though. your darling of a boyfriend turns awfully careful about keeping your home tidy after that night's drama. to your immense relief and glee. ;)]

geto suguru

another man who is perfect in personal hygiene.

being the leader of a cult, he has to meet many people throughout the day, so obviously he has got to keep himself presentable.

and yes, he is a worthy contender for the throne of self-care.

moisturizers, face washes, face packs, shampoos, conditioners, fragrant soaps, colognes - you name it, the man's got it in his self-care cabinet. [which is periodically updated to keep up with the trends, thanks to mimiko and nanako.]

now, with respect to his surroundings...

suguru is a pretty neat and organized person - a polar opposite to his ex-bff. [why do i always drag poor gojo into everything? smh.]

fruit peelings disposed into the right bin, worn clothes thrown in the laundry basket, papers arranged in stacks on the study table, bed made within minutes of rising.

no matter the stress he has to face from dealing with curses and monkeys, suguru never fails to tidy up after himself.

although there are times when he is too tired to do anything - in those instances, you always clean up after him with a soft smile.

your husband works hard day and night to provide for you and your daughters. the least, you think, you can do in return is lighten the weight on his shoulders, in whichever way you can.

though, i must warn you - be prepared to drown in a sea of his apologies and affections for the next day [or days - depends on how much work you've done for him].

one hell of an immaculate mass-murderer, and special-grade simp, if i must say.

▸ masterlist

[lynn-tged-posting]

tged webtoon ep 156 spoilers and thoughts below the cut yeah yeah yeah

.

.

.

.

I DONT KNOW WHY BUT I THINK THE WAY HE SITS BACK HERE IS REALLY SILLY HEEHEE

also if the panels are slightly blurry uuuuuh no they're not dont worry abt it

ok back to the top bc holy shit this chapter made me crazy again

OF ALL THE CHARACTERS I COULD HAVE EXPECTED A RETURN OF. IT WAS NOT LUPELLAN

HOLY FUCKING SHIT I REALLY THOUGHT WE WERE DONE WITH THAT GUY CAUSE YKNOW. DEAD. BUT HERE WE ARE AHHHH ITS ALL COMING TOGETHER

and ohhh god the restoration of fate kicking in alongside all of this is insane ,, , god it might even happen sooner depending on how quickly they kick their plans into gear ,,, also this guy (forgot his name LMFAO) looks downright terrifying

i wonder how they'll go about it actually,,, especially since alicia has already had a dose of that like, dark magic paranoia poison back when she raided targa's castle. will she be able to combat what their planning,,, do they know she had been poisoned before? probably not, right? ooohhh im so curious to know,,,,,,,

ANYWAY AHH LLOYD AND JAVIER AHHHHHH AAAHHHH

LLOYD GETTING. EMOTIONAL OVER FINALLY BEING CLOSE TO GETTING THE ANSWERS HE NEEDS BUT THEN IMMEDIATELY PUSHING PAST IT GGGHHHRRRRR GGGG IM BITING MY HAND IM BITING MY HAND

he's finally so close . he's so close to being able to permanently protect this place that he loves so dearly . ooohhhghhh hhhhh . he's gotta pursue and continue to the end god im shaking him

AND THEN JAVIER BEING FOND OF HIM

im so sorry i dont have a lot of brilliant things to say im just. KICKING MY FEET ROLLING ON THE FLOOR IM. AAAHHHH my singular Analysis braincell hasn't kicked in yet sorry

sorry okay if i just post panels and scream i wont actually get anywhere but i REALLY liked the oneliners/jokes in this episode specifically got me giggling my ass off

AND LLOYD BEING A FUCKING SCHEMER TOO YOU ASSHOLE /AFF

TOP TIER ACTOR WHAT THE HELLL HAHAHAHA HIS SMUG ASS FACE

i remember seeing a post on twt about the episode preview and it was this left frame of lloyd crying and i was like "WTF FULLY EMOTIONAL MOMENT WITH LLOYD??" BUT NO ITS JUST HIM BEING CONNIVING AS USUAL LMAO

and javier's reaction HAHAHAHAHAHAA

OH ANDNDD AND AND MY FAV PART OF THIS EP

shaking crying at the way they look at each other oh my god . javier fully understanding lloyd . that the outcome lloyd wants isnt just one that benefits himself or the estate, but one that satisfies everyone,,, theyre on the same page they want the same thing a good ending for everyone they love im gonna lose my fucking MARBLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE PROTAGONISTS EVERRRRRRRRRRRRRR

AND AND ANDD THE CALLUSES ON LLOYDS HANDS. IM. SHAKING CRYING AND JAVIER'S EXPRESSION AT HIS HANDS AAHHH AAA

lloyd saying this n that about being pragmatic and yet there's this blatant fucking evidence that he's been working so hard and so long for the most idealistic, best results for the people he cares about and the people he comes across no matter what . "pragmatic" and he's going about things in a long, constructive and taxing process all so that he can fight fate while also saving people instead of realistically accepting the permanence of it . this is so poorly worded but i hope u understand HOW INSANE THIS MAKES MEEE and javier catches this for sure the fucker im shaking him

AND THEIR GOD DAMN HIGH FIVE. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

"business relationship" I THINK NOT! Y'ALL HIGH FIVE'D!!! AAHHAFDLKJSDFHAHHAHAHAHAHA IM GONNA THROW UP /POS

THIS MADE ME SO FUCKING EMOTIONAL FOR SOME REASON I. GHGHGHHGHGHGHGHH the first high five they share im gonna fall apart into ten billion pieces

i said this on twt but like. if anyone suggests a high five irl i think i'm actually gonna just bawl in front of them i'm so serious llovier is a fucking plague

and their second one about the hellgate was really cute/funny LMFAOOO

this ep had me giggling and wiggling around like a fucking millipede i loved this so much HEHEHEHE

i think this is just abt the beginning of the end of the truth jewel arcs,,, god i wonder what the jewel will say!!! PRAYING that it says fate can be fought bc if it says "lol nah u cant" the devastation and anguish that would follow would be INSANE i wouldnt be able to take it. id stop reading right then and there /j

AND LUPELLAN AND THAT OTHER GUY WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO TO ALICIA OH GODDDD

anyway that's all for now ,,,, i will see u next week, ,,,, or whenever i make my next shitpost,,,,!!!! end post!!!!!!!!!!

[fumifooms]

Marchil crumbs part 5

Part 1 - Part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 6 - part 7 - part 8

The anime has come and since I have my shipping goggles on I am going to notice so much. This part will be less spoilery for anime onlys (tho if you want to see me talk about why I ship them and why they’re complementary this is not a good part to start with haha). Edit: After completing this part I can confirm it’s fully anime-onlys friendly and spoiler-free! For manga veterans though there are still some fun tidbits to be found, some recontextualisations and new extra content.

Holy shit guys they’re mirroring each other in the mural and reaching out to each other AND looking towards each other?!!!! Their pose is so striking and like perfectly align?! Which means it was so intentional and the staff wanted to highlight them (for an aesthetic and/or narrative purpose I’m sure but it happened)! I will never let this go we won so fucking hard let’s goooooo we are so back

Character foils!! Dynamic duo!!

Soulmates!!

In the opening at 1:16 he looks at her to see if she’s really going to it as the most critical of monster food & muster up courage to dig into it himself lmao… "Marcille doesn’t look too grossed out, she’s picky so this food must be fine then" Aka treating her as a poison taster/good cuisine judge lmao

Doodle from the animation director (source). I should translate it but I’m procrastinating on it so uh director’s brotp? Anyways they hanging out look at them :]

Laios is thinking to himself there (he’s the one saying the subs), and in the meantime Marcille and Chilchuck talk, likely figuring out the money situation. Strategizing duo back at it again not wasting a second

In the beginning of ep 1, when Marcille is rambling about where they could go to get food and what to grab, Chilchuck listens with a big smile & even closes his eyes as they walk. The implication is that he’s thinking about food, but man the scene hits different now that it’s voiced and I remember that indeed Chilchuck is closing his eyes to her voice and enjoying hearing her talk and ramble. I may be too far gone into the marchil pit

I feel like already they’ve come far from when Chilchuck dreaded being alone with Shuro and Marcille, waiting for the Toudens and Namari to arrive.

Ok this might actually be smth I’m gonna complain about but I feel like blushes have been drawn too vividly so far. Why does Chilchuck look like he’s confessing when he tells her she’s not a burden and he didn’t mean to make her feel that way. It almost comes across as "Woah she cares what I think?" 💀 The banter ensuing is of course also great

Ep 2 was an episode centered on them both that had the "Magic/Traps are my domain, don’t interfere!" parallel… And now with ep 3 we’re back to them being haters together. That’s her emotional support man

In ep 4, it doesn’t show well with a screenshot but when Senshi talks about his unmanned vegetable stand with a treasure chest, while in the manga Marcille and Chilchuck both think the same thing, "That’s why that treasure chest akways had money in it…", but in the anime instead they literally finish each other’s thought. Talk about being on the same wavelength.

Ep 5 is a marchil goldmine actually, it showcases perfectly how much of a package deal they are lol. Always sticking close to each other. Glancing at each other during meals… They literally nod at each other before they try a bite to steel themselves. They exchange a serious thoughtful glance when Laios talks about Falin truly being gone atm. They argue a bit but they go right back to sitting right next to each other after the meal <3 My god I can’t deal with them they are so…… "Hate this bitch, not my friend" 3 secs later "Heyy bestie!!" Also he’s worried he brought her mood down after mentioning Falin. Made a post about ep 5 collecting even more screenshots.

Episode 6 my hero my beloved… Again I made a post about the ep collecting all my screenshots here, and even a clip! But this IS the marchil crumbs masterpost thus I must collect the major ones here as well. First of all, fun staff drawings for the first screening!

I already posted a screenshot from the trailer of when Chil had his head on his knees sitting next to her, but after seeing episode 5 I think it’s a fun and interesting trend to notice that they sit next to each other way unnecessarily close wow. They continue to banter a ton, she continues to be very casual with touch, and they’re really cute! I love just how much Marcille blushed damn- It’s really cute too when you remember with the bicorn chapter that Chilchuck teases Marcille BECAUSE he enjoys getting a rise out of her, flustering her and seeing her reactions. I support the teasing -> laughing because her reaction is over the top all-Chilchuck economy. Also she apologizes for having let him go alone and be gone for so long by helping him with sewing his cowl… Cuties

She looked so happy when he opened up about his age!… And then seemed… Disappointed? When he "truly was just a kid". "So you really are a kid! How boring…" This implies that her intent was to tease him for funsies… Ok lads we reached 30 pics see you next post, I’m gonna cover the "wake up clumsy head" manga-anime differences and we’re gonna go back to our usual spoilers yummy schedule.

Here’s Marcille cosplaying as a succubus in the newest Daydream Hour… She may not be a half-foot or have deep-set eyes but let’s be real I think he’d explode

part 6 here!!

[offbeat-manga-ships]

I just came across my old volumes recently and wondered: have you ever read After School Nightmare? It's about an intersex guy who has been presenting as male for his whole life, but who comes to question his gender alongside a male and female love interest.

If memory serves I'm pretty sure it's the same sorta sexist 'am I a masculine boy who likes girls or feminine girl who likes boys??' stuff that uhhh isn't actually so progressive as the premise seems lmao. But it was a big eye-opener on gender for teenage me and idk, maybe it's more nuanced than I picked up at the time!!!

(spoilers)

yeah so i definitely know about this one because i decided to just never read it lol i've read about it being a character with upper body being "male" and lower body being "female" and the whole "being in a purgatory-like place and needing to pick the one true gender according to the love interest" ending and the notion is so repellent to me that i can't see myself able to get into a place where i can read it. when i started seibetsu 'mona lisa' no kimi he i thought it was going to do something different from this one i really thought vindication had finally come and it barely managed to go one step above not choosing a sex/gender to be straight. but what truly kills my spirit is the choosing itself.

it's the crude disregard for the simple notion that someone might not only choose to live this way but actually like their body. it's the pinnacle of unimaginative and ignorant character building of the "in-between" person so completely removed from any intersex or nonbinary mindset because the story was made by someone who was born in "the right body" and refuses to skirt even a little bit towards the world of these weird unfortunate people as to not impact with their run of the mill happy ending. it's the portrayal again and again of people with bodies "in between genders" being seen as incomplete, as a problem to be fixed, as a passing conundrum on the path to "an actual human adult body".

i thought about not framing this just through a lens that it feels invalidating and intersexist because it is true that i read stuff that are kinda homophobic, transphobic or sexist all the time as it is unfortunately par for the couse for manga. but i guess i can't. it just hits a little too close to home. it makes my blood boil with rage and makes me want to hurl in disgust from the thought of one more story out here being so completely disdainful of the kind of human nature as i know it and experience every day and so careless and shallow about a topic that could contain oceans upon oceans of depth that honestly if i were immortal and decided to check out every single thing ever produced by a human, this pretty much would be last.

[tragicvampireromanceisland]

id love to hear more of your dream prod thoughts! it was really funny reframing the fact that yeah, the emotions probably really do just have authority over everything and anger was Laser Focused on gettin rid of a director that put riley in danger

HIII yes i'd love to talk more about dream prod!! 😁 i'm gonna go ahead and put it all under the cut though, since 1) probably gonna be LONG and 2) i feel like it's too soon to talk about spoilers out in the open dhkjhkjgh. but!! yes anyways

YES god i really loved all of anger's bits in the show. loved how protective he got 🥺 one thing i always found interesting in the first movie was that the long-term workers did not really seem to...care that sadness and joy needed to find a way back to hq? might just be working in long-term that does that to you LMAO!! really fascinating that the guys working in dream productions do defer to the emotions to some extent. in a way emotions themselves are very integral to dreams! and i loved all the little things that showed this, like paula desperately looking for a happy memory to come up with a dream for, or how gigi's nightmares mostly consisted of green and purple orbs (sidenote SIGH i really wish we got to see disgust and fear interact more considering this. especially since even the sleepwalking memory was green and purple, iirc? buuut i digress. NOT just the disear brain talking i promise but maybe also a Little /lh).

also found it very interesting how the machine jean brought in to measure the. "excitement" of the dream is also a bit dependent on emotions i would say? i'm getting real technical here, but i'm wondering how riley could still react to the dream with other emotions who are not on dream duty (and even then, the ones on dream duty aren't using the console...) despite them being asleep...🤔 definitelyyy overthinking this LOLLL but it's very cool to look at the inner workings of dream prod overall! i love that they introduced daydreams in, too...and this sort of worldbuilding of how daydreams are constructed differently compared to dreams at night. really good contrast for the paula xeni rivalry!

SPEAKING of mannn i loved paula and xeni!! WHAT a fun duo. one thing i noticed was that paula's insistence on "fun" dreams and living in the past was an interesting mirror to joy's previous behavior before her character development across both movies...i thiiink this was intentional, and it's fun to see that riley growing up isn't something just the emotions have to adjust to, but everyone else in the mind word as well 🥲 i wasn't expecting to find the paula-xeni dynamic as funny as i did, either. the bit where he steals her boots made me laugh out loud LMAOO. ALSO going to mention mel here too GOD. THE PUPY. I LOVE HERRR...was talking with a friend the other day about how interacting with the personification of a hormone lets you be affected by that hormone...really cool annnd makes sense considering these guys are all brain cells LOL. makes me wonder if hypothetically this could affect emotions too...? hmm!

anywaysss i loved all the callbacks to things from the first movie...i kind of wish there could have been some acknowledgment of how joy and sadness literally broke into dream productions in the first movie since, well. that's a Pretty Significant Thing that happened. BUT it's fine HKJFHG i thought the callback to canadian boyfriend was real fun. i willll say, given both disney and pixar's....not so good reputation with this sorta stuff, i was concerned the romance! episode was gonna be. one of those "See we PROMISE riley isn't gay!!!" sorta things so i'm glad that's not the direction it went in, and that they kept the resolution for that vague. AND i love love that they really played into the romcom element with all the tropes like the love triangle. AND sadness and joy watching it together!!!! MAN. SO CUTE. 🥺 in general i adore how much joy and sadness are just. besties now. they hang out together!! they LIKE hanging out together!! AUGH. ANYWAYS. romance DID end up being my favorite episode of the bunch! joy and sadness appearances obviously. helped with this LMAO but i loooved how it really showcased paula and xeni's strengths as a team. AND I WILL NOT LIE. that sleepwalking scene did kinda stress me out and i am a grown-ass adult. i also always love when real-life phenomena get translated into the mechanics of the mind world. the camera suddenly moving on its own was sooo cool.

i ALSO found it interesting how the characters all seem to have different views of what's best for riley...jean is the antagonist obvs but! interesting that she had a rationale for the dream xeni wrote, kinda "shaming" riley into growing up...even more interesting when you think about how shame was eventually written out of the second movie drafts, AND how anxiety's original character was rewritten a couple of times because it seemed like both of them were "self-sabotaging" riley too much. interesting that jean could somehow fill this role...! i wonder if that concept was carried on into this show.

ALSO. THE LUCID DREAM STUFF!! very cool. i've always been curious about the reality distortion filters. also a cool way to have riley interact with the mind world! i wiiiish we could have seen more of how...the emotions viewed this dream, what they thought of it etc. since their reactions are present for all the other dreams...i'm honestly very curious about Dream Duty in general, especially since it's not mentioned at all in the second movie. i think it would've been cool to kinda explain the details of dream duty in parallel to the dream production process, sorta tie the whole relationship between the emotions and the mind workers at dream prod together a bit more...buuut overall it was fun to see more of dream productions! definitely my favorite place in the mind world out of all the ones we'd seen across both movies. had a fun time overall!! and honestly my favorite thing about worldbuilding in inside out is how many strange hypotheticals it makes you think about LOL. so while i still got criticisms i'm having a fun time with it 😁👍🏾

[set-phasers-to-whump]

seasick

prompt: motion sickness (alt no.7)

whumpee: river cartwright

fandom: slough house/slow horses

hii here's yet another sh fic for yall but this time with no spoilers for anything lmao. i saw the prompt and was like 'wouldn't it be so funny to do this to river considering his name' and so this was born. hope you enjoy!

This is one of the more bizarre assignments she’s been given in her tenure at Slough House. Go on a cruise down the Thames and look for “anything unusual” beneath the bridges. Totally normal thing to do. Definitely worth her time. 

Not that she’s complaining much. It gets her out of the office and there’s a bar on board. She’s sure there must be some way of getting a drink and snack paid for on the Park’s dime. 

She’s gone ahead and gotten them, in any case. She balances both items in one hand as she pushes out through a door onto the deck. The first bridge is coming up, and she supposes she’ll at least pay some attention to it. 

River is where she’d left him, having turned down the suggestion of both drink and snack. She’d assumed he’d been less assured of their ability to be reimbursed, and admittedly, the prices hadn’t been low. 

He’s leaning against the railing now, and he turns his head slowly towards her when she stops beside him. She offers up her bag of crisps and he turns away, swallows visibly. His skin has gone a funny shade, almost grey, and he’s sweaty although it’s rather cold and drizzly. 

“Are you ill?” Louisa asks, point-blank. He’d looked fine when she’d left him, and that had been all of ten minutes ago. 

River shakes his head, then stops very suddenly. He takes a deep breath which he aborts halfway through, and then leans over the railing and throws up. 

“Shit,” Louisa says, the pieces assembling themselves rapidly in her mind. She sets down her snack and drink, returns to River and puts a hand on his back. 

“Do you get motion sickness often?” She’s been in cars with him plenty of times, but, she supposes, cars and boats are quite different. “Or, seasickness, I guess?”

River shakes his head, vomits again. “I don’t—I don’t really go on boats.”

There’s something a little funny there, a jibe at his name she could make, but he looks all kinds of awful and she just feels sympathetic, more than anything else. 

He throws up again, coughs harshly, rubs a shaky hand across his face. “This fucking sucks.”

Louisa squeezes his shoulder. “I’ll get you some water. Why don’t you sit down?” There are empty benches behind them—in fact, the whole deck is empty, owing to the wet and the cold. Louisa’s suddenly incredibly glad for the weather. She knows how much worse River would feel if this was happening to him in front of a larger audience than just herself. 

River shakes his head. “I’m not—I might…”

Ah. Louisa’s not sure that she’d care all that much about the potential consequences of puking on the deck, their positions being reversed, but it feels very River, somehow, to not want to risk it. 

“Alright, just—hold on, then. I’ll be back soon.”

She heads once more into the covered portion of the boat and makes her way back to the bar, where she manages to procure a bottle of water, napkins, and some crackers. She’d been hoping for medicine or an offer to stop off at the next dock, but she’ll take what she can get. 

Louisa returns to the upper deck. River is still leaning over the railing and barely stirs at her arrival. He’s sort of crying, Louisa notices, which she supposes is down to the exertion of vomiting more than any truly severe distress. It makes her feel worse for him, all the same.

She wordlessly hands over the bottle of water, watches him struggle to open it with shaking hands for several seconds before doing it herself. 

He says, “thanks,” and his voice is noticeably rougher than it had been before. She decides she’ll hold off on handing over the crackers, not that she particularly expects him to want them, anyway. 

She watches with a critical eye as he rinses out his mouth and wipes his face with a proffered napkin. 

“How are you feeling?” Louisa chances to ask. 

“Shit,” River replies, not meeting her eyes. His sickly grey face has gone pink from what she guesses is a combination of embarrassment and strain. 

“You’re alright,” she offers. “You’ll feel so much better as soon as we get off this boat.”

“When’s—when’s that?”

She checks her watch. Fuck. “About an hour.”

“Fuck,” River echoes her thoughts exactly. He bends down, rests his head against the railing. He looks so fucking miserable and Louisa hates that there’s really nothing she can do. Unless—

“D’you think they’d stop the tour and let us off if I told them we were MI5?”

River shrugs. “Maybe.” He lifts his head briefly and gags harshly over the railing before promptly putting his head back down again. 

Yeah. She’ll go wave her ID in the face of whoever’s in charge here. 

Fifteen minutes later, the boat is pulling up to a dock somewhere beyond Tower Bridge. As they get off, both putting on their very best official-agent-on-official-business looks, River valiantly stopping himself from throwing up in front of the onlookers aboard, Louisa briefly remembers that they were supposed to be examining the bridges. Not that it matters much. She’ll just tell Lamb there was nothing of note—she’s sure there wouldn’t’ve been, anyway. 

The second they step onto the dock, River drops to his knees and throws up once more, unable to hold out any longer. Louisa stands behind him, doing her best to protect him from the suddenly very interested gazes of the people aboard the boat. 

When he’s done, she offers him a hand to his feet. He takes it, staggers upright, blinks hard, then breathes a sigh.  

“Alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I—I feel fine now, actually.”

Based on the scratchiness of his voice, she knows he’s not entirely fine, but evidently the nausea has left as quickly as it’d come. 

She wraps him in a quick side-hug and he leans into her in a way that reassures her, somehow, of his being relatively unhurt by the whole ordeal. 

“Thanks,” he says quietly. 

“Don’t mention it. Speaking of not mentioning it, actually, we’ve still got like 45 minutes to kill before our tour is supposed to end. I’m hardly going back to Slough House until I’ve got to. Fancy a walk?”

River nods, “yeah, yeah, that’d be nice,” and the pair of them set off together, just like that. 

thanks for reading! hope you liked <333

[ckret2]

I have a *mighty need* to know all about !!!COSMIC HORROR!!!

u got it zim

This is one of those files for things coming up in the far future: it's little chunks of multiple conversations wherein Dipper tries to ask Bill about the secrets of the universe, and gets told things that are gonna keep him up staring at the bedroom ceiling at 3 a.m. The snips will probably be spread across dozens of chapters; and like the snip I posted earlier today, this is just kind of my first pass at the ideas & concepts I know I want them to discuss, so it's written more in my voice than the characters' and it doesn't have any scene around the conversation.

I can't share the whole file because the farther it gets, the more it creeps toward Big Spoilers about where the story's gonna go, but here's about half. (Ironically, most of the cosmic horror is contained in the parts I have to leave out lmao.) It's 50% "why tf did Bill say the universe is a hologram" and 50% "oh shit it's axolotl time." Bill may or may not be saying things that are objectively true about the universe. Probably not. But he is saying things that tell you about his personal relationship with reality, which is more important.

"If being in the second dimension and seeing into the third is like seeing the cave wall that Plato's casting his shadows on, then being in the third and seeing the fourth is like seeing the film reel projecting the universe. You can see the present moment—the frame that the light is shining through—and you can see the next few frames coming up, how things are going to play out."

[...]

"Do you know what Plato's cave and a movie theater have in common?"

"... Sitting in the dark, staring at shapes on the wall."

"That's right, kid. And in both cases, the show on the wall is just an illusion."

[...]

"So what's in those higher dimensions? What's running the 'projectors' or whatever?"

"Higher beings. Think you met one once."

"I did?"

"Sure! Not here, but in a parallel reality. I don't know what you talked about, I try to steer away from that guy when we don't have business. Maybe you'll remember it someday."

"How can I remember meeting it if it happened in another universe?"

"When things like him speak, they leave vast echoes. You might hear one."

[...]

"There are things so far beyond us that even trying to understand how they think could drive you insane."

"I thought you said you ARE insane."

"Yeah, well, I met the same thing you almost did."

[...]

"I remember the Axolotl now. There was nothing insanity-inducing about him. He was just... nice."