#revision help

[milkiie]

yeah, quick question, how do i revise death?

[ducktracy]

sharing a very sage bit of advice from The Simpsons' own John Swartzwelder that i've been trying to hamper down in my writing and drawing alike. let your inner crappy little elf do his worst

[krussyarts]

Alt version & close ups under the cut

[cubbihue]

Does Chloe still exist in ur au?

She does! I've kept core parts of her personality, but retconned massive chunks of her history with Timmy.

Chloe never got fairies, and never shared them with Timmy. But she was his neighbor! They used to play a lot as children, but one day, Chloe wasn't allowed back at the Turner's house.

As a grownup, Chloe's a social worker! She's usually the Go-To person selected by the state to handle difficult public cases involving children. As in: cases involving celebrities, important figures, or the such where the child's identity is at risk to the public. She's an expert at keeping their life secret and away from social media.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[chara-55]

No doubt he's a Megatronus merch collector

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

---

ok, found some

---

I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

---

---

---

The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

---

The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

---

---

---

As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

---

---

---

Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[yuri-is-online]

Trey seeing you like his teasing and bullying, don't tempt the man. He's barely hanging on.

the following is a rough concept? warm up? from a long fic I have been writing on and off for months now. the context is that Trey is sick and Yuu has decided to bring him food before Riddle can kill him w/ Lilia on the assist.

Nothing too explicit... yet. yet

"Seriously." You sigh, focusing on the container and... quivering. Your arms are straining against the containers unintentional vacuum seal, did you run over here to see him as soon as you heard about him fainting? Or were you just too... he doesn't want to say stupid even though it catches in his throat along with his saliva when he sees you roll your lower lip under your teeth and grunt. "It's tight." Yes, something is, wound so tight it ought to snap.

"Need some help?" His voice is uncharacteristically breathy, as is the directness of the offer, and he thinks he can make out disappointment. A phantom strength allows him to sit up as his eyes narrow to let him see just that much better; he tries focusing on your teeth, it's the left canine that's denting your lip. It pushes in as he moves forward, threatens to pierce the flesh. The lump in his throat goes down as he floats more than moves up from the bed, resting his weight against his night stand.

"No." You bring the soup up to your chest before immediately bringing it back down. How silly of you, it must be really hot. "I keep telling you, I'm not doing this because I need you-" Trey moves his arm around to your other side, resting it on his desk and delighting in how clear your surprise is now that he has his glasses on.

"How kind of you." Your tongue peaks out to lick your canine and draws his attention back to your lips. Trey likes your lips, they're so... expressive. Uncontrollable, no matter how much you try to hide how much you want to have him around your lips always give you away. "But you've got to be doing this for some reason." Right now they purse, hooked on his bait and unaware of the line as he leans just a bit more forward crowding you closer to the desk. "That's just how this school works." Your lip trembles. Three more teeth peak out of your mouth and Trey can't even be bothered to list the numbers in his head to distract from where the blood leaving his head is going. He wants to bite down, sink in his own teeth in place of yours and suck-

"Trey!" Thank the seven you put thought to put the food behind you before you went to catch him, Trey's heavy even if you only have to push him back over to his bed which thankfully isn't that far. "You're supposed to be resting." You snatch his glasses from his head before he can even manage to react but he doesn't seem to upset. He wiggles his head back into his pillow, and looks in your vague direction as you finally manage to pop the damn lid off the soup and try to convince yourself the heat hurting your face is from the steam and not your own stupid feelings. "I'll set this over here and get some tea."

"Make some for yourself too." You think you hear him say as you walk on out in a daze.

Trey closes his eyes and tries to take a deep breath without hating himself too much. Something is wrong with him, that's got to be the correct explanation for this.

[marikodraws]

Carry you home

redo of this drawing from some years back :3

[huh-j]

“I can’t, I have to study~”

~Rory Gilmore

- Probably my most used excuse this year..

[redstringraven]

Fika

characters: don, klunk, leo, mikey and raph rating: g content warnings: n/a word count: 4288 relevant tags: sick fic, sick leo, post-episode: good genes

(n.) a moment to slow down and appreciate the good things in life a leo sick-fic, requested by @sakuradiva for @tmnt4p !

[ read on ao3 ]

You may as well have called the first sneeze an alarm bell. The instant it echoed through the reservoir station, each and every one of them in range perked up, heads swiveling like a bunch of prairie dogs.

Raph seeks out Don first. He scans the open first-level of the reservoir station until he catches Don’s eye--a second after Mikey does. Don glances between them, his expression at first wide. Then his lips curl downward, and he huffs. “—that wasn’t me.”

There's no attempt to hide the irritation in his tone (and Raph couldn’t blame him); a week or two of one helicopter sibling is annoying enough. Don had three. Plus Master Splinter. Plus April and Casey. Plus Leatherhead. Seven people in a semi-constant state of worry, hovering, asking questions, growing tense with anything that could be a small sign of 'relapse'. It had to get smothering at some point. And even Don had a limit to his so-called infinite patience.

“—Oh!” Mikey says. He pauses, his eyes darting from Don, to Raph, and back again--clearly scrambling to deflect from what Don had drawn attention to. “—Well. It wasn’t ME. My sneezes are a lot more… uuuuh…”

“Needy?” Raph offers.

“Yeah!” A beat. Mikey's eyes widen, then he shoots a squint at Raph. “—Hey, wait.”

“Sorry.” Leo moves out of the kitchen, mug in hand, having lowered the heel of his palm from his beak. “I, uh. I think I might’ve stirred up some dust while I was looking for the chamomile.”

Mikey relaxes, likely happy to accept this answer and move on, but Raph’s brow arcs. “Thought you’n Mikey gave the cabinets a good wipe-down earlier this week.”

“We did,” Leo says. He shrugs. “Guess… some of it must still be in the air. I dunno.”

...lying, Raph thinks, though he’s careful to keep the suspicion from reaching his eyes. He shifts his attention to Mikey just in time to catch the tell-tale signs of worry: a sudden stillness, like a deer in headlights, and the slightest strain around the eyes. It’s gone as soon as it arrives, and Mikey replaces any sign of it with an impish grin.

“Looks like someone was slacking on cleaning duty,” he jabs, knuckles propped on his hips. He tilts his weight forward and tuts his tongue. “For shame, Bronardo.”

Leo sends Mikey a passive smirk. He huffs and starts up the steps toward his room. His free hand finds the stair-rail and stays there. Raph locks onto it. He can't help but notice Leo's not resting his palm on the metal; he's holding it.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes with an idea of what we need to knock out today,” Leo says. There's a slight wilt in his posture—and now that Raph thinks about it, he realizes Leo's feet drag just enough to make his usual silent steps borderline audible. Raph shifts his weight and fixes his jaw, forcing himself to hold his tongue. Leo looks back over his shoulder after reaching the threshold of his room and continues, “Donnie, I’d appreciate it if you sat it out another day.”

Don sighs, but he waves a hand lazily over his head. “Heard loud and clear, boss.”

Leo’s door shuts, and silence settles back over the station. Raph remains by the weapons rack, and Don keeps his attention on the blueprints he has spread across the table he'd claimed as his temporary workbench. Only Mikey moves, plucking at one of his wrist bands, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the subtle rise in tension.

“...--you think I can squeeze in just enough Resident Evil 4 that I can get far away from a save point, and he’ll have to wait until I reach the next one to turn off the game?” Mikey asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer; instead, he flashes Raph a wide grin and bolts for the couch with a cackle. The televisions flash and hum to life, and Raph lets out a blend of a sigh and a growl. His eyes shift to Don.

Don’s already looking at him. Even with the faint purple stains under his eyes, the mild sag of his skin, there’s a sharpness in his stare. Raph recognizes it. He knows they harbor the same concern.

“Donnie?”

“Yeah, Mikey?”

Mikey huffs as he enters Don’s room, scratching at his cheek.

“Have you seen Klunk? He was snoozing on me like usual this morning, but… I kinda didn’t want to get up and give him his breakfast just yet." A terrible betrayal, if he were being honest. But he'd really just wanted five more minutes (which turned to ten, to fifteen, to twenty), and Klunk grew bored of swatting his face. Totally lost track of time after that. Mikey frowns, sending another short glance over his shoulder to eye the station. "He must’ve gotten cranky and left, but he wasn’t in the kitchen.”

“No,” Don says. He rotates a bit more in his chair to face Mikey and sets his pen aside. His jaw tightens, shivers as he points toward the door (an attempt to redirect attention as he stifles a yawn). “But--uh. I know he’s really fond of that one spot by the water?”

Mikey shakes his head. “Checked. Nada.”

“Oh…” Don’s brow furrows. “Well… --have you asked Leo? He might’ve seen where Klunk ran off to; he's been up a while.”

“Good idea. Thanks, Donnie!”

Don grunts a sound in place of a “you’re welcome”, and Mikey jogs back into the heart of their new lair.

There is, of course, a risk he ran entering Leo’s room: he’d narrowly managed to wiggle his way out of work yesterday, and he doubted he’d get similar results today. Leo may not be… grumpy anymore, but he was still Leo. A bit of a stickler—a: wet blanket, one might venture. You could only keep up a single ruse with him for so long.

Leo's door is open when he reaches it (a welcome sight, considering how often it’d been closed in the months before), and Mikey allows himself to cross inside. The space is rather bare--with little left to salvage from the second lair and a mutant outbreak to clean up, they found themselves back at square one in terms of decor. But Leo still found a way to make the few things he had feel clean and in order. Mikey could feel almost a rhythm in the way he'd stacked books on the floor, where he placed candles, and where Leo chose to sit when he meditated. He’s also quick to spot the ball of orange fur settled into Leo’s lap.

“Hey, Leo!” Mikey chirps, careful to keep his voice just low enough so as not to startle either of them. He waits a second for one of Leo’s eyes to open before continuing, “mind if I steal Klunk off ya?”

Leo smiles. But it’s… a tired? smile? Mikey can’t remember the last time Leo looked tired in the morning (y’know; like a normal person).

“I’m surprised you didn’t come get him sooner,” Leo mutters. He closes his eye again. “Sure.”

“Thanks!”

Mikey takes a wide step into the room and crouches. He digs around in his belt, locating one of Klunk's favorite snack-tubes.

“Oh Kah-looooonkkkk,” he says, putting on his best sing-song-I-totally-got-treats-for-you-love-me-please voice, “you want some tube~?”

Klunk lifts and tilts his head. Rather than get to his feet and trot to Mikey’s side, he shifts his weight, tucking his legs securely under his body. Mikey blinks.

That's weird. Klunk never turns down an offer for tube.

Even Klunk seems to acknowledge this; his tail twitches irritably, and his ears flatten out. It's like he wants to get up but…

“...hey, Leo?” Mikey props his elbows on his knees, frowning. “Has Klunk been with ya like this all morning?”

Leo’s shoulders lift in a half-shrug. “Guess so.”

“Huh.” Mikey pouts. Klunk hated a late breakfast. There hadn’t been scraps in his bowl, so no one had fed him yet. Why isn't he screaming for food? ...he's definitely still sending me dirty looks.

Mikey drums his hands on his inner knees. He opens his mouth—another question forming on his tongue—but snaps it closed when Leo suddenly sniffs. It's a wet, strained sound, and his posture rolls forward a little. Almost like he’d just gotten dizzy, or the breath had taken more effort than it should've. Come to think of it, it... did look like Leo was breathing through his mouth more than his nose. His lips were parted slightly. Mikey squints—glances from Klunk to Leo—and straightens up. “...your, uh... nose still bugging ya, bro?”

“A little.”

“...iiiis that all that’s bugging ya?”

Leo frowns, but he keeps his eyes closed. His brow wrinkles. “What do you mean?”

“I dunno,” Mikey says, “iiiit’s just… y’look kind of tired? And… Klunk super doesn’t wanna leave your lap. Which is weird! Because he hasn't had breakfast! And I offered him a tube! He ALWAYS wants tube.”

Leo opens his eyes and frowns as he looks at Mikey. Mikey shifts his weight and wrings his wrists in his lap. Leo didn’t have that needling look in his eyes like he had a few months ago, but… guess he’d started expecting a half-hearted glare and a growl.

Leo must have realized this, too. He winces, and his features weaken.

“Mikey, I’m okay,” he says. Mikey's lips twitch into a weak smile, but it must not have looked convincing. Leo sighs, "really, I’m just… Maybe I've just got a cold.”

“—a cold?” Mikey echoes, all at once alert. His throat tightens. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knows it's irrational, but he doesn't care. He searches Leo’s limbs—any visible section of skin. But nothing looks open, or irritated or… mutated. They'd gotten separated in Bishop's lab for a while after Don got loose. Leo hadn't said anything about encountering other feral mutants, but...

Mikey rolls his lips together, eyes snapping up to meet Leo’s. “You… didn’t get, y’know. Stung. Or anything and didn’t tell us, did you?”

Leo’s expression drops. “What? --no, Mikey. Why would you—”

“—I should get Donnie,” Mikey interrupts, springing to his feet. “Just in case!”

“Mikey, I didn’t—”

“—I’ll be right back!" He jabs a finger at Leo and shakes his head. "Don’t even think about going anywhere! Klunk's loafing on you for your own protection!! DON'T DISRESPECT HIM!”

And he bolts before Leo has the chance to respond.

Don hadn't been the only one tailing Mikey back to Leo's room. Raph followed close at their heels, but he took to leaning on the corner wall rather than hover at Leo's side. Something Leo, admittedly, found himself grateful for.

Quick to busy himself as always, Don took to checking Leo for scratches, bites, stings--any possibility Mikey listed off, thought about or began to fuss over. Klunk, his duty now fulfilled, had grown tired of Don's close proximity, and he swiftly sprang from Leo's lap, trotting to headbutt and rub against Mikey's heels instead. He still circles them now, a soft, steady purr vibrating in his chest. Leo wonders if all cats are like this: aware and attentive of who needs their comfort, and so eager to provide. Or if it's something unique to Klunk... like the little animal knew Mikey had given him a better life, here, and he was in their debt. 

He almost snorts at himself. Probably silly to think cats thought in transactional ways... and something he still needs to work on, himself.

“You’re SURE he's not sick?” Mikey asks suddenly. He fidgets with his mask-tails, unable to stop himself from glancing in Don’s direction. “Like..." he winces, but hints anyway, "sick-sick?”

Don huffs, keeps his eyes down.

Leo frowns, and he shakes his head. “I didn't get stung or bit by anything, Mikey. I promise."

Unless we’re counting that mutant the dragons had set loose. There's a brief second where the thought sends a wave of alarm through his chest, but it's quick to settle. That happened months before the mutagen outbreak in the city. Surely, if it was a similar kind of illness, it would have made itself known by now. He'd been bitten long before Don had been stung, and Don's symptoms began surfacing in the following weeks. His brothers must be thinking something similar; Mikey continues to send looks in Don's direction, and Raph remains oddly quiet. The silence starts to feel heavy, and Leo winces. “Sorry, Donnie.”

“—don’t,” Don hastens, frowning at him. “Really.”

"So," Mikey starts, "he's not sick-sick? He's just... siiiiick-sick?"

Don sends him a dull stare. "You can just say 'infected', Mikey."

"Sorry."

"It's fine. But, no. I don't think he is." Don glances at Leo and shrugs. "There aren't any 'entry points', like he said. And I doubt he ate anything at Bishop's."

Leo grunts and wrinkles his nose. Mikey shifts his weight, unsatisfied. "What... --what about that thing we stole from Karai? --he's the one who touched it first. Do you think it cursed him?"

"Mikey--"

"--don't act like it's not possible, Don!" Mikey interrupts, clenching his fists at his sides. "We've time traveled! Space traveled! There's a whole city under our feet right now! --And--what about that... that big, red alien-monster thing that almost got Angel's bro?! --That old guy--he was totally cursed and stuff!! What if--"

“--it ain’t that deep,” Raph grumbles, his voice low but sharp enough to cut Mikey off. He pushes off the wall, propping his hands on his hips. “I bet it’s ‘cuz this bozo got back from Japan and hit the ground runnin’. Ain't stopped since.”

Leo squints, and Raph holds up a hand, 'counting' off his fingers as he continues, “I doubt ya slept on the boat trip over. Y’came lookin’ for each of us—got us all back in one place. Fought Karai. Got us back on our feet, the station up 'n runnin'. The first few mutants start showin’ their ugly heads. We get sent back to the jurassic period—”

“—cretaceous,” Don mutters, and Raph scoffs.

“Whatever! --Look, my POINT is, y’ain’t stopped movin’ once. You probably went and wore yourself out! Even more than usual!”

“You were kinda training like crazy for a while,” Mikey adds, rubbing his neck. “Like. A lot a lot. All the time. I guess maybe you chilled while you were in Japan, but... also not really.”

“Raph… has a point, Leo,” Don says. He looks to Leo and shrugs. “April’s talked about this sort of thing before. Like, when she was in college? She said during the holiday breaks, she’d come home and not have anything to worry about, and it was like her whole body released a ton of tension all at once. She’d have a horrible stomach ache for that first day home. Maybe… this is your version of that.”

“This is the quietest it’s been since…” Raph pauses, growls, and shakes his head. “It’s the quietest it’s been in a good, long while.”

Leo frowns. He can't think of any kind of argument. Or, at least, all the arguments that were coming to mind wouldn’t help with anything. Either Raph would get irritable, or Mikey would get antsy and more nervous than he already was. And Don... while Leatherhead had been confident there wouldn't be a chance of relapse, they'd decided not to risk anything. Guess it'd be pretty hypocritical of him to go on insisting he was fine, when they'd all decided he wasn't.

What was it the Ancient One said about surrender? Leo almost couldn’t help but smirk and chuckle to himself. “Alright. I guess I could take a few days to do nothing. Join Don in being a couch potato.”

“Sounds ideal to me,” Mikey says.

Leo’s smirk widens. “I bet it does.”

“If anyone deserves a ‘nothin’ day ‘round here, it’s you two workaholics,” Raph says, pointing a finger interchangeably between Don and Leo.

“And Klunk will make sure you both stay sitting down!” Mikey scoops Klunk off the floor. The cat mews in protest, wiggling for a moment before tucking against Mikey's chest. “He’ll be making the best biscuits this side of Brooklyn. Aren't you lucky?”

 Raph snorts, and he thumps a fist against Mikey's shoulder. “Mikey and I will finish what needs t’be done around the lair for the day. Take a load off. Enjoy free biscuits from the stupid cat, and be ready for movies and a hot meal t'night.”

Leo could hear Mikey and Raph in the kitchen, but he couldn’t tell if they were bickering or just talking. Guess those were one and the same when it came to those two.

He and Don had taken to the couch, as promised. Don tinkers with his shell-cell while Klunk watches from his lap, and Leo, settled under a thick blanket, adjusts the book in his hand.

It'd been surprisingly difficult to pick which of his few books he'd wanted to start, and there was something bittersweet in the reminder that he'd have to rebuild his library a second time. He'd selected one of the fiction novels--an old fantasy, filled with mists, magic, and a winding world. He'd already read it a time or three, but the familiar pages were comforting and easy to get lost in. A small voice in the back of his mind still grumbled and tutted that there was work to do, things to check, responsibilities and tasks he'd been setting aside for higher priority items. But he ignores it (for now).

Klunk stands and arches his back. His mouth splits into a large yawn, and he gives his tail a lazy little flick before carefully padding out of Don's lap. Leo smiles and chuckles as the cat moves onto his legs instead, already purring loud enough to drown out whatever conversation fills the kitchen.

Don smirks. “Looks like it’s your turn to get cat-sat, Leo.”

“Yeah.” Leo opens a hand so Klunk can headbutt it, and he ruffles his head with the heel of his palm. “Guess it is.”

Don chuckles. He sits back against the couch again and sighs, letting his hands and the shell-cell drop into his lap. Leo slants his eyes toward him. His smile sinks a little as he watches Don tug one of the throw blankets higher over his chest. “...feeling alright, Donnie?”

“Yeah,” Don huffs, “my energy just gets totally sapped after a certain hour. It’s really annoying.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Mn. ...what about you?”

Leo’s brow furrows. “I… think so? I mostly just feel… heavy.”

“Yeah.”

“But not… --not the same kind of heavy I felt before, just…”

“I know,” Don murmurs. There’s something… different in his tone, now. Leo can’t quite put a word to it. Don continues, “I think Raph hit it right on the money. You get back from Japan and… we get you back… but you haven’t really let yourself have much time to breathe, have you?”

“I could say the same to you,” Leo says, “you’ve been working to get the reservoir station up, functional and livable since we got here. Even while you were getting 'sick'.”

“Maybe. But… I hadn’t just come back from a huge trip with a completely different timezone—a-and, I hadn’t been…" He pauses, cautious. "...I dunno. ...struggling...? At least not like you."

Leo frowns. “Donnie. Whether you’re drowning in an ocean or drowning in a puddle… it’s still drowning.”

Don blinks, glancing at him. There's a moment where Leo can't quite read his eyes, but he remains quiet. Then, Don smirks, and he lets out a weak chuckle.

“I guess you’d know about that better than anyone,” he says, “considering you’re the one who dove in after me when my toy car almost got me waxed.”

“It’d be a pretty embarrassing way to go out," Leo says. "Especially for a turtle.”

“You’d also know a thing or two about that, wouldn’t you? Embarrassing ways to go out.” Don’s eyes glint, and his smirk sharpens. “Big Foot?”

Leo lets out a laugh, ducking and shaking his head in attempt to mask any show of sheepishness. “—Jeez! A guy steps on a landmine one time.”

“It wasn’t just a landmine. It was a landmine in clear water.”

“Please don’t remind me.”

Don laughs. There’s a small pause as his smile softens, and his shoulders sink into a more relaxed position. “...it’s good to have you back, Leo.”

“Hey.” Leo shifts his weight enough to gently jab his elbow into Don’s upper arm. “Right back at you, bro.”

“Alright, sickos.” Raph rounds the couch, his arms held out flat on either side of him. Two large plates balance on either inner-elbow, and in each hand he has a second plate and bowl of steaming soup. Its warm, soothing smell somehow seeps through all the congestion in Leo's nose and throat, and he sighs, letting it fill his ribs. He sits forward and extends his hands, offering to take one of the sets from Raph's person. Raph shoots him a knowing smirk, and he leans just enough to let Leo lift a plate from his arm. “Grilled cheese and tomato soup: comin’ in hot.”

“Oh, sweet,” Don says.

“Think you mean savory, dude!” Mikey chirps as he vaults the couch (and their heads). Leo passes Don the first bowl and plate, and he looks Mikey’s way as his brother drops to his knees to slide the remaining distance to the television set. He spots a DVD case in one of Mikey’s hands and realizes he recognizes it.

“—wait,” he starts, sitting up, “is that what I think it is?”

Mikey turns, flashing him a toothy grin. “Iiiiiiif you mean Kiki’s Delivery Service?”

“Where’d you get that?!” Leo asks, unable to hide the excitement in his voice.

“April,” Raph answers. He chuckles and hands Leo the other plate and bowl, “figured it was time t’start usin’ her access to things to our advantage.”

Don arches a brow. “Like we weren’t doing that already?”

“I mean, sure,” Raph says, “but Kiki’s a classic! Gotta look a bit harder t’get your hands on one’a those; ‘specially a copy that ain’t totally trashed.”

“And because she’s totally awesome, she SPLURGED!!” Mikey says, jamming a finger against the DVD player's eject button. “This one’s got behind the scenes—interviews--storyboards even!!!”

“He’s real excited about the storyboards,” Raph mutters, though he fails to mask the fondness coloring his tone. He ambles back toward the kitchen, likely to retrieve food for himself and Mikey.

Leo settles the plate and bowl into the blankets on his lap. Klunk rises from where he'd curled between Don and Leo, and he pads onto one of Leo's knees in attempt to sniff the tomato soup. Leo gently nudges him away. “No, Klunk.”

“Let’s put you on the ground until food’s eaten, little guy,” Don says. He scoops a hand under Klunk’s stomach and lifts him off the couch. Klunk protests with a soft, but long, meow. He allows himself to be placed on the floor, but the look he sends Don—paired with a flick of his tail—is more than enough warning that he’ll be back before food’s finished.

Raph returns with a second round of plates and bowls, and Mikey finishes setting up the DVD. He sprints to the light switch as Raph eases their meals onto the coffee table. The lights shut off, and they’re left in the cool wash of the screen’s glow.

What comes next is a feeling Leo can’t quite put into words. Mikey slides into the open seat on his right, and Raph settles into the nook at Don’s left. The room fills with a familiar score—A Town with an Ocean View, if he remembers the track name correctly--and Don thanks Raph for dinner as the two pass down napkins. Mikey shifts his weight, taking care to move and tuck the blanket so it's evenly distributed between himself and Leo. Then, he curls up, bowl in lap, and lets himself lean into Leo's side. He takes a napkin when Leo offers it to him, and Don and Raph begin banter over who gets the remote for the movie's run time.

Leo has trouble putting a name to this feeling... and even more trouble recalling the last time it fell over him, warm and soft, like an old blanket fresh from the drier.

A sense of peace. Familiarity. Safety and home. He wants to wrap himself in it and stay. Let everything else sink away.

"Remember the first time we watched this?" Don asks. He fixes the plate on his lap and settles a napkin over one of the grilled cheese pieces.

"Feels like years ago," Mikey says.

Raph lets out a soft snort. "'Cause it was years ago."

"Think we were eight," Leo mutters. "It was the first and only time Mikey ever wanted to be near a broom."

"You're just mad 'cuz I won the race," Mikey sniggers. He wiggles enough to poke his elbow into Leo's bridge. "Totally left you and Raphie in the dust. Which you had to sweep up."

"Oh, brother," Don sighs, and Raph rolls his eyes, letting out a low growl.

"Leo? Smack him. I don't wanna spill my soup."

Leo smirks. He shifts his weight, gently jabbing one elbow into Mikey's arm. Mikey whine-groans at him, but the end of it is colored with a chuckle.

Raph (apparently having won whatever game he and Don were engaged in) lifts the remote and hits the center button. The town's melody quiets, and the room goes dark as the title menu fades to black.

[soldier-lodbrok]

"But Sephiroth, you don't have anything to prove."

[xenibenbb]

I'd rather be Free.

[realbeefman]

stacy is sooo interesting because she's in love with house but knows that they will never ever be able to have a healthy, stable, sane relationship because they're too similar so. she finds house-lite instead and marries him and. essentially moves on with her life! and is successful in this because she's a moderately well-adjusted person!

wilson, in contrast, never manages to escape the inevitable, in spite of his best efforts to find a house-lite of his very own, because he's an absolute fucking freak and ends up glued to house to the bitter. bitter end

[vldlance]

julance week two: goofball

gay crisis klance is my favorite 💙

[hraeesvelgr]

explosions are loud

[mrspotatoheads]

HOW TO REVISE!

What is revision?

Revision is when we change a certain thing/event that has already took place.

How to revise?

Revision is simple. All you have to do is accept that the thing you want to change has already changed, it happened exactly how you wanted it to.

Which method to use?

You can use any method for revision, this goes for when your manifesting anything. You can visualise the certain event going the way you desired, script, or say affirmations.; anything to get you in the state of the wish fulfilled.

Example:

The most common thing people want to revise are grades, if you want to change your grade from a D to an A you can visualise receiving the paper back and see the A on the paper, you can script having a conversation with your parents and telling them you got an A, or you can simply affirm things like “I got an A in my test” and continue to remind yourself whenever you find yourself worrying.

You can revise absolutely everything, every time you think of the event just remember it going the way you desire. Simple.