#so. my mom in about five years

[starry-bi-sky]

Stuck in the middle of a forest made of

Flesh and bones and they're all scared of

A lost little boy who has lost his heart

Fear's not enough, they have to

Tear him apart —-------

There are two things Daniel Fenton knows that his family knows as well: 

He’s adopted.

He can’t remember anything else before that.  

‘Adoption’ is a loose term, implying that they went through the official legal processes and troubles of adopting a child into their home willingly, and with the full intention of doing so going into it. That is not what happened. What happened is that Jasmine Fenton found a half-dead child, in strange clothing, in the middle of the woods at her Aunt Alicia’s cabin, and then she went and got her parents. 

What happened is that a twelve year old Danny woke up in the same cabin, wearing clothes much too big on him that didn’t belong to him, and with very little memory of before that moment. He wakes up like a spring being set loose, sitting up so fast he scares the daylights out of Jasmine Fenton sitting next to him. He wakes up, reaching for his sleeve for something that isn’t there, and when it isn’t his mind stutters, like he’s tripped at the top of a steep hill. 

When they ask him for his name, he tells them, clearing muddled thoughts from his mind; Danny. He’s twelve.

(He thinks that’s his name, at least. It sounds right; it feels right. If he thinks really hard about it, he thinks he can remember someone calling him that, utter adoration in their voice. So it must be his name.) 

The Jasmine girl convinces her parents to take him home with them, and they give him the spare guest room upstairs. He has nothing to fill it with.

It’s… a strange experience, to go to a ‘new’ home when he doesn’t even remember his old one. 

The official adoption process… happens. He can’t say it’s easy, or difficult. He’s oblivious for the most of it, Jasmine intends on helping him settle in and Danny can’t say he enjoys the smothering. He learns that he is stubbornly self-independent, that’s one new thing he knows about himself. 

His adoption papers say ‘Daniel J. Fenton’. Danny remembers staring at the name ‘Daniel’ for a long, long moment, something curdling sour in his sternum. His name is Danny, that he knows. But it’s not Daniel. But he doesn’t know any other way of saying it, so he keeps his complaints to himself.

(Jack Fenton boisterously claps his hand on Danny’s shoulder and jerks him around, grinning wide as he welcomes him into the Fenton Family. Danny’s mind blanches at the touch on his shoulder, an instinct snapping like the maw of a snake, telling him to cut off the man’s fingers for daring to touch him.) 

(He keeps the thought to himself, tension rising up his shoulders the longer Jack Fenton’s heavy hand stays on him.) 

They found Danny in the summer. It’s a perfect coincidence, Maddie Fenton says before she goes back into her lab with Jack Fenton. She says it’s enough time to allow Danny to adjust; that they’ll enroll him into the school year in the fall. Then she stuffs a canister of ectoplasm onto the top shelf, and disappears like the ghosts she studies back down the stairs.  

(There’s something eerily familiar about the ectoplasm sitting in the fridge, something unsettlingly so. Danny knows what that stuff is, but he doesn’t know where. When the house is empty, he takes a can from the fridge and inspects it.)

Jazz wants him to leave the house. Danny doesn’t want to step foot outside of the FentonWorks building until he has something that quells the feeling of vulnerability he gets whenever he does. He tried to once, and he felt exposed. Unsafe. 

He turned back around and went inside.

—-------

Where do we go

When the river's running slow

Where do we run

When the cats kill one by one

—------

One day, when the house is empty — or, as empty as it can be; the Fenton parents down in the lab, and jazz out with friends. Danny is making a sandwich, and he caves into the urge to flip the knife in his hands between his fingers. A childish impulse, but one he falls for nonetheless. It comes to him easily, like second nature, in fact. The slip of the blade between his fingers is seamless, flowing with an ease like water running down the wall.  

He’s almost startled by it; his body holds memories that his mind does not. Muscles that know which way to move and twist, limbs that know how to hold and how to throw. He continues twirling it, fascinated, as if he were a scientist discovering a new species of animal. 

It’s not for a handful of minutes when a new thought hits him; an impulsive thought that pops in the back of his mind like a firecracker; Danny moves without thinking. 

He turns, and throws the knife. The pull of his shoulder, the flick of his elbow, is familiar like a hug. He knows when to let go, and the blade flies through the air in impressive speed, embedding itself into the wall with a hearty, loud thunk. Sinking into the drywall like butter. 

Danny stares at it in shock, he feels relieved — about what? — before he feels the guilt. He scrambles across the kitchen to pull it out, heart racing in his chest at being caught, and prays no one notices the hole it left behind. 

(He runs up the stairs before anyone can find him, food forgotten, and hides the knife beneath his mattress like a guilty murder weapon.)

After that, he leaves the house more. It’s more out of fear of being caught than the desire to leave. But Danny is quickly learning that among all things, he is someone who was dangerous, before he lost his memory. Even with his mind in fractures, he is still dangerous. 

He’s not sure how to feel about that — he thinks he should be scared. He feels a little proud, instead.

—------

Hazel beneath our claws

While we wait for cerulean to cry

Unsettled ticks run through time

Enough for the hunt to go awry

—-----

There’s another thing he learns about himself. That he knows about since he woke up. He knows that he left someone behind. He doesn’t know who, but he knows they must have been close; he’s always looking down and finding himself surprised when the only shadow he sees is his own. 

He thinks that he must have sung to them a lot; he finds himself humming familiar melodies when he’s lost in thought. Lullabies lingering at the tip of his tongue, an instinct to turn and sing them to someone beside him. He can’t remember the lyrics, but his mouth does, it tries to get him to say them when he’s not thinking. He can’t. 

Danny’s found himself humming under his breath more times than he can count, trying to recall whatever it is his mind is trying to claw forward. 

(“That’s a pretty song, Danny.” Jazz tells him at breakfast one day, Danny screws his mouth shut. He hadn’t realized he was humming. “What is it?”) 

(Something mean and possessive rears its head on instinct, uncoiling like a snake from its ball. His shoulders hunch defensively, he bites his cheek to prevent himself from baring his teeth. He doesn’t know what song it is, but it’s not for her. “I don’t know.”)  

He misses his person. Dearly. He knows, the longer he is without them, that they must have been close. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel like he’s missing a chunk from himself. He wouldn’t be turning to someone who's not there; reaching for a hand that’s missing, birdsong on his tongue, a story to tell. 

A dream haunts him one night. Warm and familiar, he’s holding onto someone smaller than him, they’re tucked into his side like a puzzle piece. He’s humming one of his songs that is always playing in the back of his mind, an unfinished tale of a harpy and a hare. Danny can’t remember their face, not all of it. He remembers green eyes, hair dark like his own, skin brown like his. 

He loves them more than anything else in the world, a fact he knows down to his soul. He loves them so much it fills his heart with sunlight. Danny squeezes them tight, nuzzling into their hair; he makes them laugh. Then, he proudly boasts something. That when he takes something of their father’s, that his person — a sibling? That feels right — will be… the word fades from Danny’s mind before he can make sense of it. 

His person hugs him tight, his… brother? And their mother — a woman whose face he can’t remember either, but who he loves like a limb nonetheless — appears, smiling. Her hands reach for them both, voice calling them, ‘her sons’. There’s ticking in the distance, it sounds like the fastening of chains.

Danny wakes up cold, tears streaming down his face. The details of the dream already fading from his mind like the cold pull of a corpse.   

—-------

Harpy hare

Where have you buried all your children?

Tell me so I say

—-------

When school starts that Fall, Danny joins the sixth grade class, and quickly learns more things about himself. One of those things being that he’s smarter than the rest of his grade, whatever education he had before, it was better than the one he’s getting now. 

Everyone knows he’s adopted right off the bat. He tells them when the teacher forces himself to introduce himself, but it’s not like they needed him to tell them for them to know; he never existed in their little world before now, and the Fentons are pale as they come. Danny is not.

He befriends Sam Manson and Tucker Foley; they ask him about the scars fading up and down his arms, they ask him about the scar carved diagonal across his face.

Danny, as politely as he can, tells them he doesn’t remember. He thought kindness would come second nature to him, his dream burned into his mind where he hugged his brother so sweetly. Apparently, his sweetness is only second nature to people he considers his own. 

(It becomes even more apparent when Dash Baxter tries to bully him later that day, and Danny ruffles like an eagle threatened. His mind whispers, hissy and agitated, sinking like a shadow at his shoulder, several different ways Danny could kill him for talking to him like that, and fifteen more ways he could cripple him.)

(Danny ignores those thoughts, up until Dash Baxter tries to grab him. Then he breaks his nose on the wood of his desk. It’s easy how quickly the rest of his grade sinks him down to the status of social pariah.)

(At least Sam and Tucker still talk to him after that. When Danny goes to the principal’s office later, he wisely doesn’t mention the worse things he could’ve done than break Dash Baxter’s nose.)  

—--------------

It clicks and it clatters in corners and borders

And they will never

Hear me here listen to croons and a calling

I'll tell them all the

Story, the sun, and the swallow, her sorrow

Singing me the tale of the Harpy and the Hare

—-------

More dreams come, of course they do. Each one halfway to forgotten whenever he wakes up, ticking faint in his ears. He is many different ages. He is young, shorter than a table. He is older, holding onto his little brother. He is singing in almost every single one. He is singing to his brother. 

Danny can barely remember the lyrics, he’s begun leaving a journal by his bedside so that it’s the first thing he can write down when he wakes up. He’s a storyteller, he learns. He feels like a historian, trying to piece together a culture long dead and forgotten. 

His most vivid dream-like memory is not a happy one, and for once he’s almost relieved he barely recalls it. He is somewhere that isn’t home, but his mother and brother are there. He is dressed in black, blades keen in his hands. 

They are atop a moving train. They are fleeing something. His brother is struggling to keep up, he is small, and young. It’s beautifully sunny, they are somewhere green and lovely. 

It is a fast dream. 

His brother stumbles on something, and Danny, fast as a whip, snatches him by the back of his shirt and hoists him up to his feet before he can fall. “Watch your feet, habibi.” He murmurs low, a hand on his back. It’s hard to hear, there is wind in their ears.

His brother, face obscured in all but his eyes, which are green as emeralds, nods. 

The dream blurs, but Danny falls behind. His foot catches on air — impossible, it should’ve been, at least. He never trips. — and he lands against the roof with a thud and a grunt. His mother and brother stop, and turn for him. 

The train hits a turn before Danny can get up, and he shouldn’t have, something pulls on him, he swears, but he slips. He can’t find the purchase to pull himself up, cold fear hits him as his nails scrape against the metal. 

His mother and brother’s horrified faces are the last thing he sees before he disappears off the side of the train. 

(The ticking is at its loudest when he wakes up, pounding against his inner skull. He only manages to write down ‘train fall’ in his journal, before he’s flipping over to press his head into his pillow to get the pain to stop.) 

—---  

She can't keep them all safe

They will die and be afraid

Mother, tell me so I say

(Mother, tell me so I say)

—-------

When Danny is fourteen he is still humming songs he can’t remember, his mind still in a broken puzzle. But his room is now decorated with stars and plants in every corner. He has a guitar he keeps in the corner of his room, and he plays the lullabies in his head on the strings over and over again. 

The ectoplasm in the fridge still unsettles him, still reminds him of a past he can’t recall. The knife beneath his mattress has returned to the kitchen — he doesn’t need it. He found a box in the attic last year, it had his name on it, and inside he found familiar, strange clothes, and more weapons than he thought was possible to carry on one person. 

(Even without knowing that the Fentons prefer guns to blades, Danny knows, instinctively, that they were his weapons. He was — was? Is — a dangerous person. He takes the box down to his room to sort through. The weapons all fit into his callused hands almost perfectly — the grooves worn to fit his palm. They’re just a little small.) 

(He tentatively takes a small blade with him to school one day, and feels much more comfortable with it sheathed beneath his shirt. He’s kept it on him ever since, like he’s reunited a lost limb to himself.)   

Danny doesn’t have a name for his person, his little brother, nor does he have a name for his beloved mother. He’s haunted by dreams every few weeks, many of them repeating. He’s ingrained the words he can remember to memory, and the ones he doesn’t, he writes down in his journal. His little brother; Danny calls him a bird, he can’t figure out what kind. His little bird of some kind; when Danny takes something from their father — what, he can’t remember what — then his little brother will be a little bird. 

(He doesn’t have a name for his brother, yet, but he’s calling his birdie in his head. It’s better than nothing.)

—------

Seeker, do you ever come to wonder

If what you're looking for is within where you hold

Will you leave a trail for them to follow a path

You'll soon forget

Home

—---------

When he’s fourteen, Danny dies. It does nothing to fix his fractured memories, much to his consternation. It just confirms something he already knows; that he was someone dangerous, and that he still is. 

When the shock of death has worn off, Danny inspects his ghost in the metal reflection of the closest table. It’s blurry, hard to see, but shock green eyes pierce back at him, green like the portal. Lazarus, Danny’s mind whispers, and he blinks rapidly.

‘Lazarus,’ he mouths to himself. It’s familiar. Sam shows him with her phone what he looks like, joking that he looks like an assassin. Danny doesn’t think she’s that too far off. 

He doesn’t tell her that. He tucks the thought away with the rest of his secrets, and fiddles with the hood gathering at his neck, attached to a cape with torn edges swinging down to his ankles. He pulls it over his shock white hair. It shadows over his face impossibly so, until all you can see are his green-green eyes peering out like a wolf hiding in the brush.

He ends up calling himself Phantom. 

(Maybe now he can start putting lyrics to his lullabies; his memories may not have returned, locked away with the sound of a clock, but the dead can talk. One of them may just have answers.) 

----------

Home is where we are

Home is where you are

Home is where I am

-----------------

Dedicated to @gascansposts for being the one who introduced me to the band Yaelokre, and thus being the whole reason I was inspired to write this in the first place >:] Those lyrics at the line breaks are all from their album Hayfields.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 308

Honestly, Damian is so disappointed in his father right now. And his so-called siblings. The friends allies he had made over the years and he had been swapping multiple times, and still they hadn’t realized. Danyal was as pale as a corpse, closer to Drake for Pit’s sake! Jordan had red eyes! Elena was a girl! Respawn had white hair! Surely someone noticed- thank fuck, hello Todd, no he’s not on patrol, listen, listen, he needs you to know that Father? Blind. An idiot! The others more so! Yes yes, they’ve been doing their single-person trick, but surely someone should have caught on yes? And they haven’t- Oh? What a wonderful idea Akhi, he shall inform the others of this idea, the Lazarus waters do make dna testing quite hard to do. 

[ialwaysknewyouwerepunk]

the loneliness and sadness that creeps into you in a way that only growing up queer can cause. your parents can accept you and still make you feel like an outsider. your parents can love you and still reject parts of you. that old-fashioned kind of love where they think trying to mold you, make you tough, is better for you. or that quiet status quo where you just don't talk. and where everyone is accepted, though some are more than others. generations and generations it's just been easier to let it slide. to let it be. not cause a fuss. but then we sit there with a knot in our chests all our lives wondering how it got there

[thecryptidart1st]

When did alive au Mikey get kicked out? Was that rough for him, or was he back on his feet pretty quick?

William found out about Michael’s relationship with Jeremy when he was about 16. And by the end of the night, Michael stormed out of house. Though Evan kept in contact, William fully disowned him, and Elizabeth refused to speak to him. And months after the fight, police cars had arrived to the house, taking Clara with them; William soon after filed for divorce. No one knew the full story of what happened that night, but the rumors speculated that Clara became completely distraught over what happened to Michael.

Things were rough during the couple of weeks living on Jeremy’s couch, as Michael struggled with the guilt of leaving his family for what was essentially his own happiness, and later what happened to his mother because of his actions. And this internal fighting with himself led to Mike panicking and walking out of Jeremy’s apartment…

…But, things started turning up when Charlie came home to Hurricane for the summer and found Michael living in his car.

Charlie didn’t care about Mike being gay; all she cared about was that her pseudo-brother was safe and happy. And she forced Henry to let him stay in the Emily household with them while he worked on getting his GED. Though Henry was hesistant about the circumstances, he also knew he couldn’t sit aside and let Mike suffer because of his and William’s internal homophobia.

So he offered Mike a job at Fredbear’s. Mike got his diploma through community college and he worked nights as a security guard. And over the years, he worked his way to a managerial role in Fazbear Entertainment. Charlie worked her summers alongside him and when she graduated, she started training full-time with her dad. When Henry retired, she inherited Fazbear Entertainment. And the first thing she did was make Mike her financial partner and creative director for future restaurants and animatronics.

Jeremy and Mike continue to be off and on in a relationship during this time, but regardless of their status, Jeremy at least helps Mike embrace his sexuality and make more friends in the LGBTQIA+ community in Utah. And when Sammy came home from college and started his service in the Hurricane Police Department, suddenly people at Fredbear's continually witnessed three of the town's local bachelors be "very friendly" with each other.

Over time, Elizabeth begrudgingly lets Evan invite Michael back into her life. Michael finds his mother thanks to Sammy's connections with the police department and continues to keep in contact with her to this day.

And when William has his heart attack years later, it was the first time seeing Michael after their fight...

and then he has another heart attack finding out his son is married to two different men and they have a boy together.

[frogs-in3-hills]

i’m sure i’m setting myself up for failure here but genuinely i have such high hopes for the ranma remake…. the idea of a ranma remake has been my no.2 anime pipedream for years because i just think if they took out some of the homophobia transphobia sexism racism ableism etc it would be the perfect harem. lmao. (i can be your token “if only ranma wasn’t literally trash” ranma fan..) they just need gay kissing and they can double the complexity of the love dodecahedron so it can become peak camp. do you see my vision. plus i’m really interested in seeing a story that was so influential to anime romance/harem as a whole cycling around to being part of that wider genre discussion again. i mean i think modern harem is the epitome of anime content slop, but is it too much to hope that ranma can revolutionize the genre once more……..

[sysig]

Care for your sparring partner (Patreon)

Bonus:

[fleshdyk3]

god i fucking hate my dad

[snickerdoodlles]

Same anon: Pete's taste in decor doesn't improve as he figures himself out. If anything, it gets weirder.

(prev)

oh, absolutely! Pete is a funky lil guy and his tastes reflect that 😤👏 it gets worse even before he starts figuring himself out because Khun starts inviting him to craft nights again, because Pete's needs more PIZZAZZ in his life. Vegas puts his foot down on the kitchen jars having feathers, but we're talking sparkly kitsch to a whole new level. bedazzled lights. glittered vases. sequinned table runners. gold painted everything. nothing is of remarkable quality yet works bizarrely well with Vegas's luxurious velvet. Vegas is immensely irritated and delighted every time someone points this out, and takes it out on one (very delighted) Pete.

[krikeymate]

I'm thinking about a bigger age gap.

Sam's 10 years old and spoilt rotten when her mother discovers she's pregnant. She doesn't realise for the longest time, never really shows much signs until the end, and by the time she does, it's too late. She doesn't know who the father is, it could be her husband, it could be... well, there were others. The baby's small, comes out early, and who's to say when she was conceived. She has her mother's complexion, her dark hair and dark eyes, and Christina gets to keep on lying.

Sam's not sure about the baby at first, everyone made it sound like things would change so much once it got here. But things don't really change at all. Her mother still always has time for her, and she isn't kept awake all night from screaming. Her parents are a little more tense, but it doesn't seem to change anything for Sam at all.

One night, Sam can't sleep. She's awake thinking of all they learned in class. About pregnancies, and babies, and all their needs and how to look after them. She can't stop thinking about it, there's just this voice in the back of her head nagging her, telling her there was something wrong, but she can't quite figure it out. It feels important.

Her feet find her way to the baby's room.

It's cold, the window's open, the room lit up from a nearby streetlamp. The tiny thing is awake with its hand in her mouth, big brown eyes staring up at her. Sam finds she can't look at them for long, it makes something in her chest ache. She doesn't know why.

She reaches out to touch the baby instead, she's icy cold. Sam thinks of what they learned in class, how much babies cry to tell us what they need, how often they need to eat, how they can't regulate their body temperature. She drags her fingers down its chest and thinks of how quiet it always is, how it never cries. How little her parents seem to feed her compared to how much her teacher said they should.

The thing whimpers when she draws her hand away, and in an instant, her hand is back on its chest, fingers spread against the bare skin, the cold suffocating out her warmth. She doesn't know what possesses her to do it, but she picks the baby up, careful to support her head the way they taught her in class. It's so small and light in her arms, she almost feels like a doll.

She watches the way it suckles on its own fingers and wonders when she was last fed. Mother fed her at breakfast, and again at dinner. She wonders if there was anything in between, there's a heaviness in her stomach as her brain goes no. She doesn't know what mother does when she's at school, but something inside of her is certain she knows what the answer isn't.

So Sam carefully creeps down the stairs, baby in her arms, determined to feed it. She's watched her mother make the formula before, curious, she thinks she can manage it. She puts the baby on the armchair, and takes the blanket from the back of the couch to wrap around her, making a nest so the baby can't fall. It whines again when Sam puts her down, but Sam hushes her softly and tells her she'll be right back. The baby can't understand, but it felt right to say.

She makes up a bottle, and checks the temperature, and returns to the armchair. She picks the baby up and settles herself down and tugs the blanket over her lap. The baby drinks the bottle so fast that Sam's worried it might choke, the way she does when she chugs down her own drinks. But the baby finishes the bottle and it feels like there's a balloon in her chest when it yawns and nuzzles against her chest, tiny hand tangling in her t-shirt.

Maybe the baby isn't so bad, she thinks, curling herself into the seat. She doesn't want to take the baby back upstairs to her cold lonely room. No, she can sleep right here in her arms, safe and warm. It feels right. She'll tell her mother in the morning about what they learned in class, remind her the baby needs to be fed more and that she's too cold. Maybe she just doesn't know. She ignores the voice in her head that says she knows.

[kazumasougi]

it went over well with my mom :-)

[fooltofancy]

had the longest, most honest conversation about belief with my dad today and on the one hand god is it exhausting because they've gone to such an insane place christianitywise, but also? the fuckin growth this man has gone through just to be able to have that conversation is so. it's not comforting, but god is it something to be able to have that conversation period without shouting and tears and just. walking away from it so unfulfilled every time.

[bambiraptorx]

sometimes i forget that being depressed isn't normal honestly

[moinsbienquekaworu]

I just spent like 20 minutes thinking about soup

[king-spite]

.

[girlthativealwaysbeen]

sometimes my bestfriend is like an angel in disguise istg

[callixton]

oh i am on the Brink of a mental breakdown. and like a real one. i am going to feel so so fucking terrible and guilty if i don’t go to the first week of mac rehearsal bc i need to recover but i am also getting the sense that i Need to recover. i have never been this burnt out or genuinely terrified of starting a new semester in my life.