#sorry for this weird rant i am barely functioning

[vampiresinforks]

I was just about to comment how sad I am that all the Edward stans seem to be on the American continent so I miss all their posts and discussions (unless I'm randomly awake in the middle of the week at 3 am like an idiot, like r n)

and then that Carlisle and Jasper sex post followed right after and now I wanna go to bed

[quadrantadvisor]

Was desperate enough to use the search function to find posts about The Host by Stephenie Meyer and I just wanted to say, I love your takes and I agree with everything.

The love square never made sense. Jared and Melanie were impossible to root for because the sole basis of their love was that Melanie felt safe with him and Melanie was the last woman on Earth to Jared, and then neither of those things turn out to be true so all they have is intense sexual chemistry. And especially in contrast to Ian and Wanda, how and why am I supposed to care about them? And there is no reason for Wanda to love Jared. I get her falling in love with him through Melanie’s memory of him, but the reality ought to have shattered that illusion for both of them IMO. Especially for Melanie, because he’d rather scream at and hit her body rather than even entertain the hope she might be in there. Sure, he protects it from other humans, but then he abuses it, so that’s not in fact protection; it’s possession.

The gender bioessentialism never made sense. Sure, Wanda’s in a female body and can make the choice to reproduce, which is super cool. But given that her sense of gender hinges on that ability to reproduce and given that that ability is super rare, why would other Souls gender themselves? I think being agender or someone who just didn’t give a damn about pedantic human gender roles would have been super interesting for Wanda’s character and I think it would have added more dimension to her and Ian’s relationship. He barely had to struggle with the fact that the body she was in belonged to an attractive cisgender girl and he was a cishet man, in spite of Meyer’s weak attempts to call that into question. The gender question might have thrown him for more of a loop.

Contrast that to Jared’s very comphet interpretation of his relationship with Melanie, and ooh baby, we’ve got a stew!

Also would have liked more exploration on ethics in general. Why do the Souls care about the well-being of the organisms on the Fire Eater planet but not on Earth? Instead of stopping from eating them, do they steal their bodies too? And the humans killing other humans in an attempt to save them: Is it okay to murder them if they’re the ones doing the murdering, like before?

Sorry for the long ask. I just have a lot of thoughts. Please feel free to block and ignore if this is too weird. Genuinely no intention to bother or offend and I’m sorry if I have.

Oh man I'm always ready to rant about The Host with people!

Yeah I feel like Meyer thought she was saying something really deep about human nature and the way that our instincts drive us? And there is something there, like, your body having a reaction to another person and that affecting your behavior is interesting! In my opinion she just went WAY too far with it, and it makes the characters seem unrealistic and childish. The ways that both Melanie and Wanderer act around Jared are bizarre (this may partially be my ace spectrum talking but like, c'mon.) Jared just kinda sucks, also. The whole idea that there's this inherent magnetism between MEN and WOMEN and that that physical attraction is the most important thing in the world is so heteronormative and amatonormative and uncomfortable

And the book was SO CLOSE to having an interesting take on gender! Examing the genders and/or lack thereof of a body-snatching alien species could be so fun! There's even the mention of the alien species with three genders, and talking about their family structures. You would think that something like that would indicate a more expansive view on gender, but really it's just an extrapolation of more bioessentialism. Because that species has those biological sexes, their families MUST be steucturedin this way, because that's what's natural for them. There's no room for variability or different sorts of feelings. She completely equates gender with biology, even when that biology is being coopted by a hitchhiker.

You're so right about Ian and Wanderer, I would love more examinations of how different she is from humans, including in a gender sense, and them having to deal with that as a part of their relationship. Setting up Jared as someone very entrenched in social norms and Ian as a foil to him in that way sounds really interesting!

Soul society and ethics are SO fascinating. I do sincerely think that Meyer is an compelling fantasy and sci fi world builder, if nothing else.

It's late and I feel like I'm a little incoherent but I love getting to chat about this book, it's so infuriating but so fun, now I want to read it again.

[bylertruther]

no cause the last anón is so right. I scrapped a 50k byler fic because I actually got worried people might call me weird or a freak like they do others. I was on twitter when the whole fiasco went down and it pissed me off but if you even tried to speak there were so many accounts saying you were “speaking over minors” and calling you a predator/pedophile. So many of my moots deactivated bc of the hate- they eventually started attacking people for their ages alone saying it was weird that 20 year olds theorized and talked about byler. Literally word for word “you’re a freak if you’re 20 and read byler fics. Why are you fantasizing about two little 14 year old boys making out” if they would take a step back and think that maybe people are so interested in this relationship is bc they see their younger selves in these two characters then maybe they wouldn’t say such stupid shit. Anyway sorry for ranting I just have been fuming since that whole thing happened. I just wish they would take a step back and stop and think about why they see a kiss between two boys written and immediately shout creep.

oh no, anon! i'm so sorry to hear about your fic & your experience. i hope you feel comfortable enough to post it one day, if you still want to. 🥺 and don't ever apologize for expressing yourself!

not to be a cunt, but i am a cunt, so, ahem. from the bottom of my heart... fuck them kids. 🫶 i literally do not give a single shit about any of the ""discourse"" they inflict on us all. "speaking over minors" why are you even speaking to begin with, huh? 🤨 why are you buzzing into an adult's space and picking a fight when a) literally no one fucking asked you to, and b) you're just going to cry "waaaaah but i'm a minorrr :(" as if you're somehow the victim in this situation after they dare to defend themselves against your serious and unsupported allegations? be normal or piss the fuck off and do your homework.

and why do people take them seriously? disregarding the fact that anyone of any age can be a shipper & the awful homophobia laced in such rhetoric...

this is the internet. no one owes you shit & the wild web will never, ever cater to you. you need to curate your own space and protect yourself. this is, like.. basic shit. like, bare-fucking-bones basic shit. it's not anyone else's responsibility but your own. they taught me that in school, my parents told me that, and also i have a functioning brain that can come to that conclusion, too. people need to stop pretending like what these people are asking for—which is your silence and your shame—is reasonable. it's not. content gets tagged, there are multiple extensions to blacklist any tags you don't like, some of it gets put behind a privacy wall, block buttons exist, many websites have filtering options, and so on and so forth. there are multiple measures people can take to both find things and avoid them. and a lot of the time, content is something you have to seek out yourself. so, if you don't like it, why did you click on it? why spend any time on it when you could've just backspaced? how is your ineptitude anyone else's problem?

also, people need to stop throwing the words pedophilia, pedophile, and predator around. you're being an insensitive jackass when you do that. someone writing about two fictional characters is not abusive scum of the fucking earth. you're watering those acts down and showcasing your ignorance for the world to see when you throw their names around carelessly. a child predator does awful, sinister, repulsive things to real life people who did not deserve that. someone writing a first kiss or practice kissing fic is not anywhere near that and i'm tired of people pretending like this is an okay thing to say or even think. just shut the fuck up and stop saying those words if you don't actually understand the gravity of what they mean.

another thing: a lot of these people aren't just kids. grown folk fall for the same shitty rhetoric, too. it's all just groupthink and herd mentality. no one wants to get attacked so they just repeat the same shit without thinking about it beyond "protecting" themselves (which is senseless as well because conditional acceptance is not true acceptance, but i digress). this fandom would be in a much better place if people were willing to stand their ground and defend their friends when this stuff happens. it gets worse and worse if you just turn a blind eye to it and fall in line. we're all waking up and finally seeing the consequences of that now.

of course, this doesn't really apply to when you're getting attacked by hundreds of people. that's... just shitty and hard and demoralizing. i'm not victim-blaming, because no one wants to be on the receiving end of that and i know that you can't control what others do.

my argument is that it gets to that point because the fandom as a whole just lets it slide by never holding the right people accountable for their actions. they allow the needless bullying to happen. they allow the rhetoric to get crazier and crazier. they allow people to get fucking crucified for shit that isn't even remotely inappropriate. they reblog posts they don't believe in because they don't want to be the odd one out and get accused of something by someone with more followers than them. it's just... we, as a whole, need to support each other more and put our foot down when shit like that starts happening.

it isn't normal. it isn't okay. it hasn't ever been okay.

like... i KNOW that you KNOW that it isn't weird for them to kiss, for people to want them to kiss, or for people to make them kiss in their creations. i KNOW that you KNOW that it isn't weird for anyone of any age to enjoy a love story of any kind. we know these things. some of us just pretend like we don't online for whatever fucking reason. and i don't get it! i don't get why they would do that and willingly allow this place to become worse for it. you don't get anything good out of that.

also, a lot of those people are being trolls. they get a kick out of attacking people as a group, because that's the only time they feel brave and the only way they get attention in life. they don't think before they say things, because they don't see you as a human being—you're just pixels on a greasy screen. they use catchy social justice lingo to make what they're saying sound like something you should support, but at the end of the day, they're literally just gussying up the same right-wing shit we've been subjected to for ages. it's regressive rhetoric that's clear to see once you've allowed yourself to see it.

like, i agree with you. i do. you're absolutely, undoubtedly right in what you say, but... i just can't bring myself to argue that, because it's in response to what was a senseless attack to begin with. and we shouldn't need to defend ourselves and our communities against what isn't true.

homophobia, bullying, and trolling are irrational, illogical pursuits and i can't stand the idea of treating them with any ounce of seriousness in this context. to apologize would be to accept their absurdity and validate their accusations—accusations we know in our heart of hearts to be incorrect and baseless. and i won't ever do that! i won't give them that satisfaction and i wish others wouldn't either.

they keep doing this, because they haven't met any opposition yet, because we keep acting like we have any reason at all to feel shame for wanting stories about people like us, about something as basic and universal as love and connection. they don't care about our reasons. they don't care about our defense of ourselves. it's not ever about us. this is their cry for attention, good or bad, at our expense and they need to be starved out already.

like.. this is just unsustainable. it's mind-boggling and i remember kicking and screaming about it months ago in what felt like an empty room. and look at where we are now! we're already at the point where you can't win in any kind of way no matter what you do. you can't age them up, you can't leave them as they are, you can't ship them if you're older than eighteen, you can't write AUs, you can't write canon compliance, you can't write canon divergence, you can't make them kiss, you can't make them anything more than friends but you also can't make them not-friends, etc etc. we've officially been shoved into the "fuck it, we ball" stage, because this is a pissy fandom and you are never going to please everyone so you may as well just do whatever the fuck you want.

i sound soooooooo unbearably preachy in this response lol, but like... literally... all we have is each other! we all love byler and we're all here to have fun and find like-minded people. we can't keep acting like this in-fighting lunacy is reasonable and just a difference of opinion, or like it's based in any kind of sense at all. we know that it's okay to ship byler at any age. we know that it's okay to have fun and enjoy ourselves. these people want to make us feel bad. they want to silence us. why let them and give them that satisfaction? why is what they want more important than us and our happiness? i hate the idea of anyone ever feeling any kind of shame or fear over something as innocent as this. i hate the idea of them winning by getting into any of our heads like that. i just hate it.

now, this last bit is specifically for you, anon, but it goes for everyone else, too: please, please, please, i am holding your hand in both of mine and begging you to not let anyone take away the things that you love and bring you joy or your wonderful creations that you've put so much of yourself into. i promise you that there will always be people who will see you, understand you, and cherish what you have to offer, and they are the ones that matter most (after you of course hehe). we all have to find our people and just go crazy together and block out everything else. that's the only way to get through this without getting burnt out. 💛💙

[causticbicaudate]

Oh my god I am so sorry but seeing this just triggered my genetics autism (that I usually reserve for my obsession with rabbits) hardcore and I had gone on an hours-long rant about this with my friends previously and I am going to become an unskippable cutscene so please forgive me. (Also to note, we're not going to really bother with the miracle of spontaneous mutation with this because that's literally just when an individual has a gene that suddenly manifests on its own without input from a heritable source either in utero or later in life when their DNA does something particularly creative with itself. Psitanium exposure also has its own canonical hand in doing this to individuals who previously possessed no such aptitude whatsoever so we can actually just leave that as another option for genetic tomfoolery.)

So, genetics are weird. I know I don't have to tell you this, but I'm not sure if everybody knows exactly how weird they can get, especially when you have more than just one single locus at play that determines how something shows up phenotypically. And having multiple dominant and/or recessive traits in the same locus further complicates things to the point of madness. Not only that, but if you have specific modifiers or alleles that do the same thing but are on different parts of a chromosome, things get wack. AND there's also the whole bit where if you have a bunch of modifiers that affect a certain gene and if that specific gene is not present, then those modifiers are functionally useless on a phenotypical level.

First, let's pretend that psychic aptitude is wholly affected by one single locus with a common on/off gene coding with only a dominant/recessive and one wildtype gene present. Super simple. Either you have a dominant gene where you only need one to be psychic or you have a recessive gene where you need both to be psychic.

Psychic Locus: [Pˢʸ], [P], [pˢʸ] [Pˢʸ] - Dominant psychic aptitude [P] - Wildtype/No aptitude [pˢʸ] - Recessive psychic aptitude

In order to explore this, you have to work backwards like you were tracing a pedigree (I do this with rabbits all the time and this is where most of my autism is focused so bare with me lol). You fill out the genes that you KNOW would have to be present in the most recent generation and then you can start filling out unknowns in the parents and grandparents from there because they're the sources that these genes will have to come from. We know that Raz is psychic. So I'll fill this out two ways for hypothetical sake; dominant and recessive configurations will be notated together with the recessive configuration framed in a black box.

You can see here that depending on whether or not that the gene for psychic aptitude is dominant or recessive, it changes the requirements in the family tree for the genotype to be true.

If the gene for aptitude is dominant, only one parent needs to donate it and you either use it or lose it. If the gene is recessive, then it can be carried through in secret through generations until it matches up with another copy of itself.

Recessives are forever and those little buggers can get up to a lot of mischief over a prolonged period of time before they show up in a throwback/pop-out seemingly out of nowhere.

This is probably the most simplistic way to deal with this as far as inheritance goes. Now let's make this more complicated by adding another locus that affects intensity of psychic aptitude. :) Intensity: [Cʰ] - High aptitude [cʰ] - Low aptitude So now this means that any psychic with aptitude will now have a specific variance that their ability to use their powers will be set by as a baseline genetic talent. So an individual with the [pˢʸpˢʸCʰ_] or [Pˢʸ_Cʰ_] will have psychic powers with a high aptitude level. They'll be more innately powerful than someone with a [pˢʸpˢʸcʰcʰ] or [Pˢʸ_cʰcʰ] genotype who will have to work at it to attain the same amount of skill and will most likely be hard-capped by the amount of mental fortitude/stamina that they have.

This adds a whole other layer of nuance to how psychics are able to manifest and hone their powers. This also gives more cushion to non-psychic people where they can carry high or low aptitude modifiers while also being non-psychic like this [P_Cʰ_] or this [P_cʰcʰ]. They can totally pass those modifiers on to their kids or to even influence their own aptitude should they be exposed to enough psitanium to prompt a spontaneous mutation that would make them a psychic and not make them lose their minds instead. But we can make this even worse! Let's add another locus that affects the developmental age where a psychic's brain starts to actually hone and use its powers. Growth pattern: [Oⁿᵃᵘᵗ] - Early (0-12) [O] - Teen/Young adult (12-21) [oⁿᵃᵘᵗ] - Adult (21+) Now we're cooking with gas! This means that we can now fiddle with the growth rate of an individual's psychic powers. We can start notating psychics with early and strong growth (like Raz) as [Pˢʸ_Cʰ_Oⁿᵃᵘᵗ_] or [pˢʸpˢʸCʰ_Oⁿᵃᵘᵗ_]. This is also the way even the non-psychic members of a family will still possess the same modifiers as their psychic counterparts due to heredity. This even means that non-psychics who still have the modifiers for psychic powers as [P_cʰcʰOoⁿᵃᵘᵗ] or [P_Cʰ_oⁿᵃᵘᵗoⁿᵃᵘᵗ] or whatever where they totally would be one of the most badass, unstoppable psychics to ever live but they don't have any of those much-needed [Pˢʸ] or [pˢʸpˢʸ] genes and they're stuck with a whole lot of potential stuck behind the unmovable wall of non-psychic-ness that is [P]. Here's where we can actually complicate things even further by experimenting with loci that further modify the original [Psychonaut] genome that affect specific power affinities that a given psychic has. Or even to affect the color of their respective powers. Or the hard limits of their powers, perhaps! If you want to go completely off the shits, you could even experiment with introducing another locus that does the exact same thing as the Psychic Aptitude [Psy] locus but it's located on another chromosome so that opens the door to two psychic parents doing nothing but perplexingly producing kids who are ALWAYS non-psychic because of the dirge of heterozygosity. (In rabbits, there are THREE different genes that code for the exact same velvety-plush rex fur mutation but are incompatible with one another so if you breed two together with the homozygous [rex1] and the [rex2] genes, ALL of their babies will be normal-coated because neither parent has the required recessive in either of those loci to do anything other than pair them up with a normal-coated dominant gene. It's screwed up and weird.) Another layer you absolutely could go insane with is incomplete dominance and a lengthy dominance hierarchy. Most dominant traits will only use one code and leave its identical buddy gene alone but incomplete dominance means that they will layer over each other to strengthen the original effect vs showing up at a base strength when paired with a higher or lower tier dominant gene. There are also some recessive traits will also punch through certain dominant genes in their locus to show up in weird ways even though they're supposed to be covered up under normal circumstances.

But yeah, expand the genetic horizon as much as you dare to! Layer things and add as many modifiers as you want to explain stuff and make things interesting. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk I will shut up now lol

~PSYCHIC GENETICS~

So I keep trying to think about how genetics would work regarding someone being a psychic or not. It's obviously not super common to be a psychic but probably more common than people might expect in the world with stigma against it. I'm thinking like left-handed type percentage maybe which is around 10% of people.

But I'm using blue eyes as a reference point regarding looking into genotypes for psychic brain activity and I think I can make that work with that headcanon because around 8-10% of people have blue eyes.

So here's my concept for the psychic genotypes and phenotypes and how it plays into my character headcanons....(and I guess I'll see if any of my current headcanons are disproved by this theory too I guess lol!) Let me bust out some Punnett Squares and interpret the results. (I know that realistically to explain it better it wouldn't be determined by a single trait for the genotype and that a multi-trait explanation could probably type the phenotypes I created in a much more comprehensive way but I'd rather just go basic for right now ^_^)

Okay so here's the outcome of a homozygous nonpsychic and a homozygous psychic. All heterozygous outcomes. I choose to believe that the heterozygous outcomes can present in a number of ways, including:

Completely under-the-radar psychic presence that the individual is fully unaware of, functionally nonpsychic

Outright psychic with a psychic awakening from a young age like a homozygous psychic would typically have

"Weaker" psychics or psychics with a more limited skillset

"Spiritual" type individuals with some sort of psychic awareness without the outright presence of psychic "powers"

I personally think that the "strength" of a psychic's power has something to do with lineage, and not necessarily whether the genotype is purebred recessive for the psychic phenotype.

So here's an example with my headcanons for the Aquato lineage.

Zalto - the more "spiritual awareness" type psychic presence without actual powers

Mithra - fully realized psychic with very strong powers including visions

Lucrecia - fully realized psychic from a young age

Marona - functionally nonpsychic

Lazarus - fully nonpsychic

Augustus - limited skillset psychic / possibly just untrained

I like to assume that both of Donatella's parents are fully nonpsychic. This puts the kids' respective genotypes and phenotypes as:

Dion [NN] - fully nonpsychic

Frazie [Nn] - outright psychic

Razputin [Nn] - outright psychic

Mirtala [NN] - fully nonpsychic

Queepie [Nn} - psychic with limited skillset, fully unaware of psychic status

With the 50/50 probability, 3/5 kids with psychic presenting traits lines up pretty well!

But touching back on what I said about the intensity of the psychic abilities one may have based on lineage, I would draw it back to the previous homozygous genotype carrier of the family. Letting that person's psychic strength sort of have a determining factor on what the cap of their lineage's power might be. So for example I headcanon Mithra as being a very powerful psychic, and that was passed down to Lucrecia as being vey powerful. Marona wasn't a strong psychic, Augustus had a higher level of psychic activity than her, Frazie has about the same level as Augustus, and Razputin, while having the mixed genotype, meets the same level as his origin point Mithra.

Just for funsies here's some of my other psychic geno- and phenotype headcanons :]

Loboto's mother had the recessive psychic gene and didn't know it as she was the "functionally nonpsychic" genotype. She would be disgusted to know this about herself👍👍 Loboto had the psychic phenotype with a young awakening but due to his procedure cannot reach the cap of power he would have been able to otherwise, and now has a very limited skillset, lending mostly to telekinesis upon his gradual recovery

Morry's father was fully nonpsychic [NN] and his mother had a strange spiritual awareness that occasionally allowed her to accurately predict the future or have suspiciously accurate "gut feelings" [Nn]. Both of Morry's brothers are NN and he is Nn.

Sasha's parents were both Nn and functionally nonpsychic, and Sasha is nn.

Both of the Natividad sisters' parents are the nn genotype and consequently so are the daughters.

(Referencing my headcanon Zanotto family tree) Tia & Teddy were both Nn and functionally nonpsychic, Bob is fully psychic nn, Laurel was Nn and functionally nonpsychic, Jonny was Nn which explained his prophetic visions, Truman is nn, Delphine is NN, Lili is Nn.

Okay that's all for now, if you read my very long and incredible nerdy post then I appreciate it!!! And if you have headcanons about genetics and psychics please tell me abt them!!! Genetics is one of my big burner interests that I will occasionally remember and try to apply to fiction lol! ( I really should do more research on it though because my understanding of it all is still a bit elementary tbqh )

[chaotictomtom]

since i went through my old sketchbooks it amplified the feeling of not knowing who was more conscious drawing these stuff and. idk it's weird to try to figure out who did what zkfbskf it's really hard being on its own with this. i sometimes hesitate to put that tomtomsart tag because!!! might not been me but adam and!! damn!!!! i know i have my bf's support but i also haven't talked abt it since my prediag/therapy ending abruptly because therapist left and. damn!!!!! i truly am alone facing this. DID is kicking my ass every single day and im terribly alone and lost in all this. barely made any progress since discovering i had that in therapy and it sucks so bad. it sucks i hate not making progress and specially for smth that could improve my everyday life if i could like. figure out how to work with. im barely functional and feel like a burden and yet im CONSTANTLY masking and not letting my guard down and pushing through to make everyday life work. settings pushed to the max making me feel exhausted and yet i barely. do shit correctly. i feel safe and at home here and yet i cannot have any silly lil lads in my brain helping me figure it out this is so dumb. at least help a bit or smth lmaooo damn. sorry for the rant im so terribly alone in this and it sucks.

[fingertipsmp3]

Idk which pad company needs to hear this (actually I do, it’s all of them) but the reason I ‘don’t feel comfortable doing sports on my period’ isn’t because of the pad, it’s because my fucking uterus is shredding itself and I am in agony

[yandere-sins]

Hey guys,

I want to clarify some things in case I haven’t been clear enough about them before. Lately I have gotten masses on asks that are just plain weird and it’s making me uncomfortable and I am pretty fed up, so also sorry for the rant. But like I said countless times already, most people don’t really check for this anyway, I still think it should be said and are gonna include it in my FAQ.

1. I don’t want to roleplay with you. No matter how nice, experienced, careful you are, I have no interest in RPing, I never did it and never will do it probably. I don’t consent to being roleplayed at and it’s not okay to send me messages in yandere RP talking about how you’ll kill people that wrong me or adore me so much you want to kill my family and keep me to yourself. I am not sure where someone would get the idea from to think that’s okay to send to anyone, but if you don’t have the social maturity to know that you can’t just say that to someone, I pity you. I only write yandere. I don’t want to live in those fantasies and I especially don’t want people harrassing me to engage in their roleplay. Especially not without warning. No means no, also through messenger or on any other blog of mine, and I will not reconsider no matter how many asks I am being sent. Go to a proper roleplaying blog and interact with them.

2. If you are a minor and think you absolutely have to be on my blog, then don’t interact with me. I don’t allow you on my blog, so if you think this is where your internet rebellion needs to happen then leave me out of it. I am not responsible for you or your internet use and I don’t want to interact with, and I say that with all due respect, people who don’t match my age. I turn 25 soon, I have no reasons and no intentions to talk to teenagers. I will block you if I find out, but I don’t have the time and energy to go through every follower to check. It’s simply not that important to me to play parental supervision for kids that do what they want anyway and haven’t matured enough to understand they are not welcome. If you have to be on my blog, at least be quiet and don’t interact with me via asks and comments.

3. Stop telling me what to with my blog unless I ask for help. It has occured more than a couple dozen times now that people think they should tell me I should censor words because they don’t like them, cut my stories at points they think would make better endings, or change my layout? If I didn’t ask, who does anyone think they are to tell me what to do? I already relent so much whenever someone tells me to tag literally anything as if this is Ao3 and you don’t have an ask/warnings on top you should have read first. I even relent when people tell me to put a read more for barely 1k words, even though they don’t know how much that stops the post from being seen and acknowledged (no shit, read more’s actually kill engagement). And yes, there are the well-meant messages who alert me to problems with links or the like and I am glad to fix these, but otherwise, who asked? If someone is so unhappy with my posts then leave, I am not keeping you locked here. Same goes for my masterpost. I know it’s outdated. It haunts me every day, I hate it so much. Never wanted to do it, so leave me alone until I have time and peace to go through posts and add links to it. Use the search functions/tags, please be a bit more respectful to me and my time and do some work for yourself. It’s not my job to hand out everything on a silver platter.

4. I don’t do requests that obviously are OCs or compliant darlings. Seriously, why do we still have to go over this? Pay me when my commissions are open, or leave me alone. I just don’t like it. The internet is free, my time and sanity isn’t. I won’t create your OC for you just because you make your reader super detailed and ask me how reactions would be to them/from them. I don’t know how your OC would react, seems like a job for you to figure it out. And for the compliant darling, I understand that it can be a fine line between the two, but no matter if romantically, platonically, etc. If your darling is absolutely fine with all the yandere behavior then send the request to someone else. I don’t care for it. I’ll just trash it upon receiving. Maybe on that note, please don’t send me requests that aren’t yandere either. Don’t make me tap my username to remind you it’s a yandere blog. It’s not supposed to be wholesome and cushy and cute unless you feel a hint of dread and murderous intent.

And like always, don’t send requests twice, ask me for updates, tell me your negative opinion on my choices, ask for part 2′s and add unnecessary smut to your requests. I know not everyone has my sickness of overthinking things 7 times before sending them to someone, but? Treat me like a human and not your personal writing AI? Thanks.

[wikluk]

conversationalist—Mira, pre/during-movie ranting about not having a Gift, feeling useless, and genuinely being alright with that :)

Have Isa be the one to take care of her, and her for once being thrown off-guard at her sister's blatant thoughts of herself :D (no villainising, I swear, just caught off guard angst/(twisted??)humour)

(sorry... it spiralled out of control a little. I hope you enjoy it anyway :P)

conversationalist: [character] rambles in their sick state.   

it's hard to stay true

Mirabel woke up to the feeling of someone shaking her shoulder. "Stop," she mumbled. "I wanna sleep."

"No sleeping," replied a flat voice. "I have your medicine from mamá. Get up."

Mirabel opened her eyes, blinking in confusion. "Isa?"

"Of course it's me," Isabela huffed, brushing her hair away from her face and reaching with her hand towards a bedtable. "Who were you expecting, el Mohán?"

"What are you doing here? Where's mamá?"

"Mamá's busy."

"Papá?"

"He's helping tío Félix."

"Luisa–"

Isabela shot her a sharp look, a mug with something steaming held between her hands. "Nobody's here but me. Is there something wrong with it?"

Mirabel didn't answer. Having Isabela near, when Mirabel felt so weak and vulnerable, wasn't the best thing ever but she suspected it was better than having Abuela hover over her. At least Mirabel and Isabela talked sometimes, and as Antonio's gift ceremony was getting closer, Abuela seemed even more distant than ever, barely acknowledging Mirabel's presence most often.

So Mirabel really wasn't going to complain. It was fine. Isabela was her older sister, after all.

"Like the old times, hmm?" she mumbled while sitting up.

Isabela gave her a look as she handed her a mug. "What exactly?"

"You here, taking care of me," Mirabel shrugged, taking a sip. She couldn't recognise the taste or the smell, her nose was stuffy and her taste buds were probably not functioning as well at the moment, so she could only rely on her eyes, which wasn't possible now as well, since her glasses remained on the bed table and without them... She was quite helpless. "Like the old times," she repeated, inhaling the steamy mixture in hopes to unlock her nose a little. "When we were still kids and sisters, you know."

Isabela was silent.

Mirabel continued. "Isn't it weird?"

Once again, Isabela didn't say a word.

"We were once so close," Mirabel mumbled, taking another sip. "Hermanas, best amigas, I loved your flower crowns and our sleepovers with Lu were my favourite time. Don't tell Milo that," she added quickly, shooting Isabela, what she thought, was a stern look. "He'd never let it go."

"Sure."

Mirabel sipped on her tea (because she thought it might have been tea, though with her mamá... nothing was sure) and as the warmth spread all over her body, filling her every fibre, a pleasant feeling turned into an uncomfortable overbearing heat. She put the cup down on the bed table and laid back down, wincing.

There was a rustle of material. "Okay, so–"

"You know, I didn't mean to not get a gift."

"What?" Isabela sounded... weird.

Mirabel furrowed her eyebrows, staring at the ceiling. "I never meant to not get a gift. I wanted to be blessed as you all were. Sometimes, I still want a gift but aside from that, I'm okay. I accepted that I'm giftless and I'm fine with that, I really am," she coughed, massaging her chest with her hand. "But sometimes I wonder if things would be different if my door stayed where it was."

"Come on," Isabela replied sharply. "There's no point in thinking about it ten years later. Don't you have better things to worry about?"

"I'm not worried about it," Mirabel looked at her, confused. "Why would I be?"

There was a tilt of the head and Isabela crossed her arms over her chest. "You sound worried to me."

"I'm not."

"I don't believe you."

"You don't have to," Mirabel chuckled bitterly. "I'm telling the truth."

A scoff. "Of course."

Another short pause.

"Don't you have to be somewhere else?" Mirabel's voice cracked a little and she cleared her throat. "In town... Making flowers... Being useful in Abuela's eyes?"

"I was tasked with bringing you that tea," she replied simply.

"Yeah, and you did it."

"Yeah."

Another silence.

A deep breath. "I need to go," Isabela announced, her dress rustling with her movements. "Flower business."

"Gift business. Nothing I'm knowledgeable about."

"Mirabel..."

"Yeah?"

"Go to sleep, mamá will check on you before dinner."

Mirabel hummed, closing her eyes. "Gracias Isa," she whispered and Isabela stopped at the door. "For tea."

Isabela glanced over her shoulder. "De nada... Mira."

And with that, the oldest Madrigal grandchild left the room. And Mirabel stayed in her bed, still sick, her eyes slowly closing, her eyelids getting heavier.

She suspected the next time she woke up, it would be Luisa or her mamá next to her bed instead. And it was fine. It really was.

[hellonoblesky]

Happy Saturday it’s past 2am here’s Harbinger Angst. Because I’m up late and I’m havinggg thoughts.

So here’s my hcs about the Harbingers reacting to/dealing with the news of Signora‘s death :)

(CW For like. Mental breakdowns and guilt and general emotional instability because no one is having a good time here. Oh also cussing, anddd some familial angst in Childe’s bit? Also I am so sorry about any misspellings n whatever it is. Very late and I already have two other posts in my drafts collecting dust that are also HCs so.)

Dottore:

So if you don’t follow my art blog or haven’t seen my Harbinger hcs (which are under the process of some change with new info being released and whatnot), you don’t know this but I HC Dot and Signora to be like sorta just evil siblings

Now because death is such a commodity in Dot’s uh… specific line of work, he doesn’t register that Signora is dead until like two days after he hears the news

He picked up the phone (rotary perhaps?) to go call up Signora‘a office to see if she has any good gossip and then stopped halfway through dialing because it hit him that she’s never going to be there to pick up the phone on the other end. Ever.

He usually listens to music when he’s working but with the absence of Signora ranting he has to take up listening to the radio on top of the music

Problem is: the radio doesn’t have the same charm and cadence to it that Signora’s rants did, because normal people are boring and it’s going to drive Dot up the walls if he has to listen to one more commercial or one more anxious ramble about how cool and great the Fatui are from some stupid radio host trying not to overstep the Tasritsa’s favor like she listens to some boring ass radio station in her spare time!!!

HE HATES IT. But is forced to make do because if he shows weakness he will be torn apart (or so he thinks)

So this leads to him locking himself away in his office even more than he already did

Because he was already intrigued by the traveller after their actions in Mond and their victory against Childe, but them beating Signora in a duel before the Shogun? Oh now that kickstarted a whole new line of study

Especially because his only coping mechanisms are Be Destructive and Dive So Far Into Work You Don’t Think so within about three days he has a comprehensive analysis of everything he can possibly get his hands on regarding the Traveler (without interacting with other people) and is about to pass out because he hasn’t slept

Oh and the funeral was absolute hell for him.

Mainly because while he was barely conscious he agreed to play violin at the service and then promptly passed out and forgot about it so he woke up and was hit with the consequences of his own actions in the form of sheet notes

He endured, obviously, he’s not going to back down from playing something at the funeral of one of the few interesting people in the organization, that’s what tools and cowards do and this might be the Fatui but if he’d survived the wrath of dead gods he would make it through this

Went right back to locking himself away after that though

He actually got bad enough that the other Harbingers took notice of his state and MADE him come out of his labs and eat (mainly at demand of the Tsaritsa because she just lost the Crimson Witch as an asset, she wants the rest of her Harbingers in good health god dammit, the Traveler is becoming a genuine threat)

Broke down at dinner a week after the funeral

Swears that if any of the other Harbingers bring it up ever ever again he will kill their bodies and keep their consciousnesses trapped in a machine that he controls forevermore

Really he’s just glad that no one immediately pounced on one of his few shows of weakness

Maybe he’ll risk it again if it means he can cry it out for another hour but he wouldn’t dare say that out loud, won’t even finish the thought

But you know what he will do?

What he does best, of course

Look at an oddity in the world (in this case the traveller) and seek to pick it apart until he can put it back together without looking and still have it work

The only way he can actually get through his grieving is by finding something to take the edge off

And it just so happens that the traveller is a perfect candidate

Childe:

By no means has he ever liked Signora, in regards to personality or method, but her death still hit him

He had to travel back to Snezhnaya for the funeral, and it did absolutely cheer him up to see his family again and get to spoil them all silly, but with a mind whirling with thoughts it was genuinely hard for him to keep a smile up

Mainly thoughts about battle, because that’s really the only way he can interpret the world at this point

Like he keeps thinking about weather the Traveler was holding back with him, or if they had gained the strength to fight off yet another Fatui plot just in the month or so since Liyue? And if they had gained strength, how had they done it so fast? If they’d been holding back against him had he not shown himself to be a fighter worthy of their strength? Had Signora even faced the Traveler‘s full strength?

Overall his head is much too full of too many things, and it wears him out to the point that he ends up sleeping in late enough for his family to actually worry because usually he’s up before dawn training and they don’t see him until the afternoon

But he’s back on track as soon as he can, because the training helps him think, and once he can resolve most of his thoughts (or repress them so they don’t bother him too often) he’s absolutely alright and fine and ready to go! Totally. Fine. It’s fine.

The thoughts were very much There during the funeral, especially as the first harbinger read a (somewhat summarized version) of Signora’s life to the assembly of Fatui

(Oh and Pierro didn’t really care weather or not Signor wanted people to know her life after she died because she was dead now what was she going to do??)

The reveal that Signora had been fighting for the Fatui because her lover had been killed by the actions of the Anemo Archon, and she desired nothing more than to see him again… it got to Childe. It got to Childe more than he’d like to admit

Because suddenly the woman who he had always known as the embodiment of frostbite and frozen barbed wire fencing had someone she had cared about, genuinely cared about, to the point where she had become the Mondstadt legend, the Crimson Witch herself

And she had lost that lover to the actions of a fool of a God

He swore silently to himself that when the Tsaritsa‘s future came to pass he would make a little monument for Signora. Nothing big, probably a plaque on a nice stone where Mondstadt would have been before the Tsaritsa’s success, but a monument nonetheless

This promise was a spur of the moment thing, and later he would be like “Man she was a jerk, lost love or not why did I promise her that?“ but he doesn’t go back on promises

Besides, actually watching Dottore break down in a grief and sleep-depravation induced haze was also something that got to him because of course the two people he happened to simply Hate The Most in the organization were close that makes perfect sense but also wow it is weird to see Dottore cry and it feels Wrong because after murdering and tormenting so many people… Signora is gone and he breaks then??? What the fuck

Avoids most of the Harbingers after that, just heads home to Morepesok to spoil his siblings silly before going back to Liyue

Oh and his siblings can tell something is up, Teucer especially because when his brilliant big brother, the greatest toy salesman in all of Snezhnaya, is suddenly struggling to keep a smile even though they’re at home… he notices

Childe’s other siblings are all avoiding the subject, they heard about the death of Signora and all, they just assume the organization is going through it tight now and frankly most of them are a little afraid of him weather they‘ll admit it or not

Not Teucer though, he’s confused just because he still has grasped how Snezhnaya works yet, so he goes ahead and asks anyway

Childe just says he’s sad because he has to leave again so soon! And he hasn’t even been able to take Teucer fishing this time, isn’t that sad?

Teucer can tell that he’s lying

But Teucer is also beginning to sense the danger that lies behind Childe’s eyes, so for the first time? He doesn’t push it or say that they could go fishing now if they hurry

Just a grin and a “Next time!! Promise?” Makes it all better and he doesn’t have to think about why his big brother feels unnerving to look at sometimes

Childe is oblivious to Teucer’s growing awareness

He heads back to Liyue and makes himself focus on work

Scaramouch:

Now he didn’t particularly like Signora either, and didn’t really care about her life’s story, because blah blah blah we get it lady you lost someone, we all did, cry about it or whatever

But he does feel… he feels guilty for leaving her to face the Shogun

He had the Gnosis, he had finished Signora’s mission for her without even meaning to, and he had thought it would be funny to just let her face the Shogun without knowing that

To some extent, it’s his fault she’s dead

And it’s not the fact that she died because he didn’t go get her that weighs on him, it’s that he left her to the Shogun of all things

I don’t know if puppets like Scara can feel things like people and such do, but considering how the Shogun expressed frustration and stress when Ei disabled the majority of her functions, I’m going to assume they can

And because of the meddling of ‘some eccentric scientists’ his emotions are probably toned down a tad but he can still feel guilt all the same

And leaving Signora to the Shogun makes him feel guilty because he and the Shogun are essentially kin

Disowned and disavowed kin, but you know

He may have been able to easily counter the Shogun, or even help Signora prevail in her duel, but he. Ran. Off.

He happens to think that that was very cowardly of him

It causes a spike in his aggression which everyone unfortunately has to notice every time he walks by because the sheer static electricity that snaps in the air when he’s in the room now? Haha. Ouchie

Fun fact: he has no idea how to cope with guilt

He channels ALL of it into SHEER RAGE

Ever seen a couple hundred year old man go absolutely apeshit in the Harbinger‘s shared training arena? Well now you have!! It’s not a pretty sight!!

He’s crying and can’t tell why, which fuels his anger, which fuels stress as a fun side effect which just makes more tears and now he has to snap someone in half because he needs it to stop he hates it here he hates it here he hates it here

And in the beginning the guilt wasn’t even that severe for him, it was just so immensely magnified by his lack of coping skills that he very nearly broke himself down

He tried going to Dottore to get it disabled but Dottore had his doors all locked so Scara couldn’t even get a word through to him

Oh and the funeral was fine with him he just left early because he didn’t want to deal with looking people in the eye at the time because, again, his lack of coping skills with guilt magnified the whole feeling so it was almost unbearable

It’s a lot of fighting and breaking things before he’s able to resign himself to some semblance of how he was

[ectonurites]

My least favorite type of fic!Tim is when he’s portrayed as depressed/very mentally and emotionally unstable, but also at the same time as someone who is like lauded as being super dangerous/the most skilled or something like that?? Those fics where Tim is chugging caffeine and barely sleeping, but characters are still like “oh I wouldn’t wanna piss off Tim he is Dangerous” and that’s annoying enough but then there are fics that at the same time as that portray him as like on the edge of a breakdown. It’s very irritating even if I’m not sure I can articulate exactly why, it just really rubs me the wrong way. Like, I definitely do think Tim has some issues with depression and stuff, but in fics like those it’s treated more like a quirk sort of instead of a serious issue

LMAOO I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT i’m not a fan of that either. I’m apologizing in advance if I sound mean in any of this critique i’m about to give of that fanon version of him. I want to preface this by saying that people can write whatever the hell they want, like, they’re allowed to! And I’m not referencing/calling out any specific works here. Just trends. But I’m gonna bitch about some things I’ve noticed that annoy me, personally. (so again, not saying other people can’t enjoy this stuff! just. not for me)

so like sorry if im mean but this is just me ranting and also this is my blog anyways so:

(nobody take this as an attack on them please because it’s really not)

The problem is a lot of those fics seem to interpret Tim’s behavior in Red Robin (& especially like that last whole arc of his Robin run also by FabNic) as if that’s his normal, rather than the result of a few years of CONSTANT traumatic incidents pushing him to a breaking point (because while all the shit he went through with his Dad, Steph, Kon, Bart, and then Bruce dying was spread out over several years for us as readers, it’s regarded as like within two years in canon! It all happens when he’s 16 and 17. According to the Batman comic right after War Games, Jack was murdered only days after Steph died.

(Batman #634)

That’s a LOT to process for one kid jesus christ) 

I love Red Robin honestly, I do, but it is about Tim at the lowest points in his life. It’s the grand finale of Tim’s story, and everything crumbles, that’s kinda the point! The end leaves him in a position to either rebuild himself or fall apart. It’s all about how he chooses to continue after this point!

(Red Robin #26)

The way he acts and the things he does in that comic should be regarded as such. He can’t live the way he does in Red Robin forever or he will literally burn himself out/become something unrecognizable, like, jesus it’s kinda even acknowledged in the comic when he thinks about what his potential futures would be if he keeps it up like he’s doing:

(Red Robin #25)

He sees himself as dead, as Batman (which he has countless times said he doesn’t want to be and at this point in his history almost every time he’s seen a future he became Batman in he had become a killer), or needing to retire and taking over an Oracle-esque role, likely because he exerted himself too much to continue. 

When you look at him around this same timeframe when he’s not isolating himself/too deep into the mission and is instead working with his friends back on the Titans, you can see that he is starting to heal and work in a more positive direction. He’s choosing to work on coming out of this rough period by being together with his friends who he loves.

(Teen Titans (2003) #100)

Not to say that you can’t write about situations in which he doesn’t start to come out of it, but if you are doing so it’s something you should be taking seriously because that’s the idea you want to explore, not just acting like it’s perfectly okay or normal? (And again, there are a lot of works that do explore it in good ways, there’s just also a LOT that don’t)

Like, so much content I see just make any sadness and depression and tendency to over-work himself that’s rooted in his traumas (which! those do have a basis in canon!) into a quirky personality trait rather than a response to trauma. Acting as if he’s always been this way and it’s normal for him. That’s what bothers me. If people want to seriously explore the effects of all these incidents and how that plays into his ability to do his job as a hero, then hell yes do it! But when it all gets brushed off as ‘oh thats just tim, he just doesnt eat or sleep or feel any happiness but like its fine he’s just always been like that’ I feel my blood boil. 

This also often strikes me as related/tied to fanon’s seemingly never-ending quest to make Tim into this victim of so many things he really wasn’t. They make his childhood 10x worse than it actually was (yes he was lonely because he was sent to boarding schools rather than having his parents around, but he was NOT just left home alone all the time as a child. 

(Batman #441)

He snuck away during a school vacation week to follow Bruce one (1) time and to then track down Dick. This is established in his introduction story! PLEASE read Lonely Place of Dying!) and it just... going with those fanon assumptions as being true changes so much of how people characterize him! 

Some people will also (not to call out tim/kon shippers especially because I  literally am also one but) vilify the shit out of Steph and make their relationship out to be some abusive thing rather than just... a messy teen relationship between vigilantes because they had really complicated lives and baggage with one another? Which they both acknowledge they made mistakes in!

(Red Robin #10)

Or people will vilify the shit out of Dick in regards to the situation at the start of Red Robin, or literally just make anyone who Tim ever had a disagreement with out to be the bad guy despite the actual situations always being way more complex and multi-faceted than that.

And then on top of all that, aside from making him into this ‘im broken 24/7 and not doing anything to fix it also everyone around me is terrible to me’ type of character, because he’s a lot of people���s favorite, they also want him to be as cool and strong as he is at his high points. So they’re projecting all this stuff onto him that makes him what should be a barely functioning person but then also act like that’s fine and he’s able to be a dangerous badass on top of it. 

Like I’m sorry but someone who is going out and actively acting as a vigilante like that which is incredibly physically taxing is NOT surviving on coffee alone and no sleep. That’s literally not possible, he’d fucking collapse. (And like, again, if you want to explore him pushing himself to that point, that’s one thing! but acting like he can manage all of that for more than a few days at a time/maybe while working on one really tough case is nuts!) and like, even canon can be a little guilty of this type of thing particularly since the New 52 (Detective Comics 2016 had more than a few references to him barely sleeping, but at least they also made references to him eating normally/healthily and he wasn’t completely self isolating or anything) (and also that comic had him be so self sacrificial he was ready to die to save everyone and only didn’t die because of Mr.Oz’s interference, he’s definitely not in his best place there) but usually it’s still within some realm of possibility.

Also like. The fanon ‘chugging coffee to survive thing’ just annoys the shit out of me because, like, yes there’s a few moments in canon where he’s under a lot of pressure and pushing himself further than he normally would and had some coffee (one of the only times I can even remember him having it on panel is... oh... during that last Robin arc I just mentioned a little while ago shouldn’t be where you source your normal characterization of him because it’s a very difficult situation that pushes him further than he normally would go! huh!) But the thing is like, people play it off for laughs, or like it’s a normal thing he would do at any time in his life! If you want to explore him pushing himself and using coffee as a crutch, like, there’s ways you can write it that takes it seriously, but almost every time I see it come up in fics it is like a core part of his personality and just ‘oh haha silly tim always with his entire pot of coffee he must chug every morning or he’ll die :^)’ And that bothers the hell out of me. 

In general it’s just... people treat Tim so weird. They want him to be so many different things that he’s shown himself to be at different times for very specific reasons, except they want him to do all of it at the same time which just doesn’t work. A person can’t function like that, and it’s not even close to who he is in canon. 

Again, people can do what they want, and this is just my opinion obviously, but yeah. My two cents on the matter.  Read Lonely Place of Dying, read Young Justice, read his Robin run. Read his comics and get a feel for who he was before all the rest of his trauma, and see how he canonically reacts to it along the way. I know reading comics can be tough for some people but so much stuff just echo chambers and becomes barely recognizable in this fandom and it’s just... a shame when it happens with a character ya love. 

[galactichelium]

ahh sorry if this is kinda intruding but i wanted to add my thoughts to your post abt passing as neurotypical. rant following:

i have adhd, and although im unsure if im actually autistic, i do have a lot of overlap w my adhd and i also have other problems like a relatively severe anxiety disorder-- i have inattentive type adhd and ive been masking since a really young age, so we didnt even know i have adhd until fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, which opened my eyes to the reason why i struggled. i struggled (and still do) a lot with homework, focusing, staying on task, but because i present really nt and normal looking and omly struggle when i have no one keeping me on task (like being in a school setting. this was something i realized really impacted me when we had an all remote year.) most people didnt think i needed extra help. and yeah, i am mostly capable on my own, and decently intelligent, but teachers and school staff only cared when it was impacting my school performance. since passing as neurotypical made me appear like a normal, honour roll worthy student, they didnt even wonder if i struggled until my grades tanked during an all remote year, or my separation anxiety spiked during 3rd grade and i left early a lot during the school day. and i guess my point is just, like, it fucking sucks that nd kids who aren't visibly neurodivergent, or function well on their own, are suddenly like..exempt from having help. in 5th grade when i was assigned to the homeroom teacher that often got special ed kids, we were just happy because she was a really nice lady --but secretly i think the school thought i really was special ed, and just didnt have any paperwork, so just to be safe, they put me with an experienced teacher who handles a lot of struggling kids (a precaution made because id had 2 rough years prior). the school seemed really to only bother caring with that once it affected me -- because otherwise i was clearly fine on my own. and i guess partially, like, we just didnt even know i had adhd at the time, but it still sucks a decent deal that all because i looked normal and acted mostly normal, no one even tried doing anything. my brother, when he was a student at the same school, had to be tested for adhd because he struggled with schoolwork -- and then when i came along, (afab), all i was was a good, albeit quiet, student who struggled occasionally.

like. absolutely i think nd folks should be treated as capable -- we totally are! -- but also just. we need help sometimes. and its so sucky that we dont always have access to that, all because we Look Normal. hfhdjfhsh sorry this was really rambly, you dont have to post or answer this ask, i just wanted you to know that like. big agree on your post.

Yeah it's cool don't worry :O!

Seems like we had problems that were similar in some ways but different in others. Like for example, you said your school was pretty sure you needed special ed, whereas my school was the main one insisting that I didn't need it. My parents did agree of course, but you know. Also I was diagnosed with autism when I was 2, so they definitely knew something was up. It was just that later on when I got better at hiding it, they started thinking I didn't need any help. When they saw me struggling, they thought I was just being lazy. I was, up until grade 9, barely passing with my grades, so I guess because I was still technically passing, they didn't seem to think it was anything worth doing something about. I don't even think I present THAT neurotypically, like, I was always bullied for being "weird". But I guess I pass well enough that I was frequently told by adults that I "didn't seem autistic". But yeah, masking is a huge part of it too, which I completely forgot to mention. Masking never completely hid everything for me to be fair (despite my efforts), but I definitely did hide the most autistic parts about myself.

But yeah. I think what went wrong with this line of faux-activism (aside from it Being faux-activism) abled people tried to do was that like... they became afraid of acknowledging that disabled people were still disabled. Like I mean this literally, I remember being told several times that I wasn't disabled, that I was "differently abled". They thought that it was somehow offensive to acknowledge that we struggle with things, due to ableism often being in the opposite direction, saying that disabled people can't do anything. Not to mention, they constantly speak on top of disabled people about their disabilities without even listening to us and think they're helping us by doing so.

[hellyeahtrickster]

It occurs to me that I have friends here that I don't have contact with in other spheres, so ... life update: my mother passed away unexpectedly last Friday. I'm doing as well as one would expect. Been going through her things as both a walk down memory lane and a goodbye. I keep coming across things she never got around to using, and it hits hard that now, she'll never have the chance. And I can't stop thinking of the stories we watched together that now she won't know the ending to, or shows I wanted to try with her. And then there's all the things we used to do together on the regular -- all the places I can never go with her to again. And all the places we wanted to go to "someday", but now she never will.

We were two weeks out from our second COVID shots, and 4 weeks from being totally vaccinated. We were finally going to get back to EPCOT, to see the Flower and Garden show. Finally going to get back to the Florida Mall. Going out to lunch. That I won't be doing this things with her anymore ... it's unfathomable. I can't wrap my head around it.

Thanks, anti-mask / anti-vaccine Covidiots, for prolonging the presence of this pandemic -- basically stealing the last year of my mother's life. She was anxious to see her elderly mother again, because we don't know how long *she* has left ... and now she never go to see her mother again. I knew losing my mom would happen someday, but my mother was relatively young yet, so I thought it would be a while ....

It doesn't help that she died after the second night on a new bed. See, she slept on her side all the time, what with the couch being narrow, but with a twin mattress, the bed was much wider. She snored a lot -- I highly suspect she had sleep apnea. When I found her the next morning, she was on her BACK. The doctor agreed that her cardiac arrest could have been caused by sleep apnea. In trying to make my mom more comfortable .... Yeah, I know, it's not my fault, but I cannot shake that thought away, that she's not here anymore because we tried to do something nice for her. How cruel the humour of the universe can be.

(I'd put the rest of this behind a cut, but I don't see that option anymore? Sorry!!)

And it REALLY doesn't help that, not only have I lost the person I was closest to, but now I am stuck alone with the person I least want to be with: my dad. I'm pretty liberal, and he's pretty conservative. We fight a LOT. We haven't really since mom died (things got a little tense here and there, but not like we usually are) ... but I know it won't last. It can't -- not when he believes BLM are terrorists, or that gays have an agenda. And now he keeps wanting to do things with me, like watch my shows, and a petulant part of me is like, no, this is mom's territory -- stay out. I don't want to do anything with him. (Especially since I know he'll start ranting once the shows start talking about racism and homophobia.)

My parents always had a volatile relationship. Mom didn't know you could get pregnant the first time, and when she found out she was pregnant, her Catholic family bullied her into marrying him.* And he cheated on her at LEAST once (with a girl who was only a few years older than me at the time -- I was 15, she was 19, he was 33). My mother was far from perfect, so I don't blame all the marital problems on him. But my point is they were married "in name only" for about the last 25 years, so it's ... offensive to me now that he would dare to act bereaved.

I know he can be hella manipulative, make himself seem generous so as to be loved, and then turn on you like a viper, getting irrationally angry. I can't drive, we live in a very rural area with no public trans, there are no friends or fam less than an hour away, I've had next to no job for the last 17 years, I barely feel like a functional human being (am coming to seriously suspect I have ADHD and Dyscalculia; I have diabetes and suspect have PCOS and a thyroid problem; all these things having strong interconnections; and I have no insurance, nor do I qualify for aid, thanks to living in Florida), and I feel utterly trapped. There's a reason Rapunzel is my fave princess. I've had bad experiences with cabs, so using Uber / Lyft kind of terrifies me. Plus, he'd want to know where I'm going, and likely either insist on coming too, or insist I can't go, because his house, his money, his rules. The ONLY time each year I get away is when I go to Dragon Con (and I'm worried he might forbid that in the future -- he has once before).

And then there's the problem of ... he has no one. As much as I can't stand him, he lost his job because of COVID, he's lost his wife, he has no real friends (total homebody), and like it or not, he has supported me financially for so long. Even if someone else were to take me in, or I can get a job and save to leave ... how can I leave him (a person with severe rheumatoid arthritis / in not-great health)? I owe him too damn much, and I feel like it would be entirely callous of me. Yes, I realise that that's the abuse talking, but ... it's also true?

Anyway, I feel like I'm on Sliders, and keep stepping into progressively worse timelines.

* Let me mention that I have long suspected my mother is -- was -- on the autism spectrum, but when I mentioned it to one of her sisters, the sister seemed skeptical, saying that if anything, mom had a penchant for reading out loud, so they thought maybe she had a reading disability, and took her to a specialist, but "that's it". (Mom was in "remedial" classes through high school, so it doesn't sound like they did enough -- and maybe couldn't because the science just wasn't there.) I explained that mom frequently seemed to have trouble grasping concepts, especially humour. Like when a radio ad featured someone reciting a love-letter to a tomato, she was all, "That's stupid -- tomatoes can't read!" Try as I might, I could not get her to understand that the love letter was a playful way to tell US about what makes the tomato so good.)

Anyway, when I talked to my grandmother recently, she said that my mom "always had a special way of looking at things," and that she guessed mom was "what do they call it -- neuro-something? 'Aspie'? High-functioning, but still." And I told my cousin about it, and he said, "Wait, I thought it was common knowledge in our family that your mom was autistic?" (Note: we have other, officially diagnosed family members who are on different areas of the spectrum.) People always commented when I was growing up that it was like my mom's role and mine was reversed -- like I was the parent, and she was the child.

But to think my family had *recognised* that something was up, and left me, a child, to deal with it on my own?? To think they *pressured* someone who was "special" into having a child?

I know my mom loved me, but my whole life, she said she wished I'd never been born, and so she'd never have married my dad -- I know both can be true, that she loved me but wished she'd never had me (she'd have never known what she was missing). She only survived her marriage because I was there; I've always felt she'd have had a better life if she hadn't married him. When she tried to leave him, her mother would not take her in, because divorce was against her mother's Catholic beliefs (never mind that my uncle divorced twice)

I loved my mother, but were fought a lot, and she frequently exasperated me as we struggled to communicate. She frequently left words out, but did not believe that she did; when we met her last PCP the first time, he looked at me and said, "Is she always like this, or is she having a stroke?" And she would always angrily proclaim that I wasn't listening, when most of the time, it's that I couldn't get her to understand that she was working from a misconception or misunderstanding in the first place, because she would focus on ONE THING, to the exclusion of all else.

An example of an exchange (copied from a letter I wrote to a friend): We got into a weird argument yesterday. She had asked me for pain reliever, a glass of tap water (you're supposed to drink a full glass of water with the pills), and a "cold water" from the fridge (it's too cold to drink it all at once, but we both prefer ice water in general). Later, I was picking stuff up from her table-tray, including a bottle of pain reliever, and put a bunch of stuff away. When I passed by again, she asked for more cold water. I happened to look as see that she had the tap water glass still full, even though she had asked tor it half an hour before. I asked if I needed to bring the pain pill bottle back, because she hadn't drunk the tap water yet -- had I taken the pill bottle too soon, or had she forgotten to drink the water? She was all, "no, I said I need COLD water!" I said I knew that, and I would bring it; I was just asking of she had taken her pills already, or if I needed to bring the pill bottle back too. Her (again): "I said I need COLD WATER!" Me: "I know, and I will bring that -- I just want to know why you haven't drunk the tap water yet? Did you take your pills?" Her: "No, I'll take them at bed!" Me: "So I should bring back the pill bottle? Did I put it away too early?" Her: "YOU DON'T LISTEN! I SAID I NEED COLD WATER!" Me: "And I said I will bring that -- I'm just asking if you also need your pain pills?" Her: "You already took the bottle!! Did you forget that already?"

And then I finally spotted the white pain pills on the napkin under the tap-water glass, so I knew that no, I didn't need to bring it. But it's a frequent struggle to figure out how to phrase questions so I get the answer I need -- nearly every time, I get her screaming at me that I don't listen.

She loved me, but she was never mothering. She hated to be touched, so never hugged me; I was pretty touch-starved. I learned to read because she was a very slow reader when reading me stories; I got impatient and learned to do it for myself. She couldn't help me with my homework. She resented having to take me to school recitals and science fairs. She wasn't someone I could get advice from. I admit I was often envious of characters who had physically-loving, compassionate, wise mother-figures (who weren't so binary about morality -- and so weren't always screaming that this or that character should die, no matter how small the transgression).

But I wish she were still here to frustrate me -- that's so much better than not having her at all. And I wish I had been better at keeping my temper.

She was an atheist, and firm in that belief. Maybe she's right, or maybe her firm belief is affecting me, because I would dream frequently about others I have loved and lost, and swear I feel them, but with her ... nothing. Just a gaping hole in the fabric of my waking life, threatening to suck all the light and hope into it.

[dolce-peach]

Hi!! I love ur writing so much btw!💖😄 could do a Wanda x reader where he reader is bffs with Loki and always rants about her crush on Wanda to Loki and Loki is sooo done with the pining because Wanda also rants to Loki about y/n and in the end Loki is like so done lol. So basically they both have to go on a mission together 😏 and there is only one bed and and fluff ensues 😁

matchmade

pairing: wanda maximoff x reader

warnings: fluff

a/n: kinda going out of order with requests trying to push through some writer’s block, but i had a lot of fun writing this, anon!  hope you guys like it! ❤️

permanent taglist: @kaitlynmalikisnotonfire​

** TO MAKE A REQUEST -- please check the status in my bio **

masterlist

----

“She changed her hair.”

Loki looked up at you from his book. “I beg your pardon?”

Your eyes were fixed on Wanda as she greeted Steve and Nat across the room.  She had just come home from a recon mission in Sokovia to help with the disaster efforts.  Though she looked tired, her long hair was lighter than before, lightly curled at the ends.

“Wanda,” you clarified.  “She changed her hair.”

Loki sighed and went back to reading his book.  “Women happen to change their hair often, Y/N.  It’s a fact of life.”

“Now that’s just sexist,” you pointed out.

“You’re right.  I suppose Stark spends more time grooming himself than you and Maximoff combined,” he snickered.

You rolled your eyes as Wanda walked over.

Her eyes were bright.  “What’s so funny?  Did I miss something?”

“No,” you replied quickly.

“Yes,” Loki groaned without looking up.

Wanda raised an eyebrow before quickly brushing her thought away.  “Anyhow, Cap wanted me to tell you that we have a mission tomorrow overseas.”

You glanced at Loki before giving Wanda a concerned look.  “But you just came back.”

She shrugged.  “Duty calls,” she said.  “Besides, I don’t mind going if it’s with you.”

“Sounds like fun,” Loki drawled as he flipped a page and continued reading.

Wanda sent you the smallest wink before going off to file some reports with Steve.

You found yourself exhaling sharply, realizing that you were holding your breath the whole time Wanda was in front of you.  You tried your best to catch your breath, but you kept thinking about her smile.

Loki glanced over at you and scoffed.  “You are absolutely smitten,” he said.  “And incredibly lame.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve felt the same way about someone before,” you protested.

“Kitten, I invented love, but no one here is worthy of it.”

“Of course,” you deadpanned.  “You and your incredibly high standards.”

He shrugged.  “It’s true.”

“Okay, but what am I going to do?” you groaned.  “I’ll be going with Wanda to God knows where, and I can barely function when she’s around me!”

“Right,” he said, setting his book down.  “Allow me to make a suggestion.”

You leaned closer, partially curious as to what he had to say.

He sighed.  “You’ve had your eye on Maximoff, and I’m sure she’s noticed by now.  Maybe you should stop worrying about that and just be yourself.”

“Be myself...?”

“Well, yes,” he said.  “You’re a lovely human, the best I know.  She’d be a fool not to accept you.”

You bit your lip.  “Okay, but if I make a move and it turns out badly, then I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“A reasonable deal,” Loki said with a grin before going back to his book, leaving you to worry about packing for your impromptu mission.

--

You yawned loudly, causing Wanda to laugh as she drove your tiny getaway car through the narrow streets of Edinburgh.  

“Sleep much last night?” she asked.

“A little,” you admitted.  “Just mission jitters, that’s all.”

She hummed.

You rubbed your eyes tiredly.  Truth be told, you got absolutely no sleep the night before.  Usually missions included at least a few more people, but now that you were alone with Wanda, it seemed too good to be true.  You were excited, but you didn’t want to ruin the friendship you had with her.

After a full day of scouting, the two of you checked into a small hotel.

It was a cozy building, the last of its kind on the bright, modern street.  It spoke of a time that was long gone, giving off an almost whimsical feeling to passerbys.  

And the rooms were small.

Very small.

You stared at the one bed in the middle of the room, gulping nervously.

It’s okay.

It’s just a bed, and we’re just friends.

You sighed.  Be professional, Y/N!

“Something wrong?” Wanda asked, observing your inner turmoil.

“No, of course not!” you exclaimed.

She set her bag down.  “Steve thought it’d be a good idea to get a smaller room.  Lower profile,” she said.  “I could take the couch if you want.”

I should’ve thought of that!

You shook your head, trying to act as cool as possible.  “It’s fine!”

She smiled.  “Alright,” she said.  “I’ll shower first, if that’s okay.”

“Yeah,” you replied.

You found yourself looking out the window, and as soon as you heard the bathroom door close with a click, you sighed, sitting back on the bed.

“Maybe you should stop worrying about that and just be yourself.”

You nodded to yourself.  You hated to admit it, but Loki was right.  If you wanted to make it through the night without being completely incapacitated with awkwardness, you had to take a step forward.  Maybe you wouldn’t confess outright, but at least try to carry on a conversation without blushing madly.

You didn’t notice Wanda coming back out, drying her hair with a towel.

She sat down next to you, making you jump.  “You okay, Y/N?  You’ve been really weird all day.”

“I’m fine,” you insisted.  You felt your breath hitch as she stroked your hair gently.  “Just on edge, I guess.”

“I get that,” she said.  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have any sort of responsibility, you know?”

You nodded.  “But we’ve got each other, right?”

She smiled.  “Yeah.”

You smiled back, finding your body moving closer to hers until your lips brushed over hers.

You pulled back, your eyes wide.  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry!” you exclaimed before running to the bathroom.

You locked the door behind you, sinking to the floor.  Involuntary tears slipped down your cheeks as you tried to stifle your cries.  You felt your cheeks heat up with embarrassment.

There was a quiet knock on the door.

“Y/N?”

You hid your face in your hands.

“Y/N, can you please come out?”

You slowly stood, wiping your eyes before opening the door.

You barely had time to respond before Wanda backed you into the sink, her lips on yours.  Your eyes widened as she gently rested her hands on your waist.  

You caught your breath as she pulled back.  “Wh-what...?”

“I’ve loved you for the longest time,” she said.  “Just couldn’t find the right time to say so.”

Shock made you speechless.  You searched her green eyes for any sort of lie, but you found none.

“I always thought you and Loki would eventually get together, but after talking to him about it, he said that wasn’t the case at all,” Wanda explained.  She laughed nervously.  “I’ve ranted to him about you ever since, especially when I couldn’t necessarily contain my feelings about you.”

You thought you were dreaming.

“Sorry it took so long,” she said.

“No, it’s okay,” you replied.  “I’m sorry too.”

She laughed.  

You couldn’t help but smile like an idiot.  

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

And that was where you left it.  

The two of you cuddled comfortably on the bed, eventually waking up in each other’s arms.  The soft morning light made Wanda’s hair glow against the white bed sheets.  

It took a moment for you to remember what happened the night before, but when you did, you felt giddy all over again.

You just couldn’t believe it was true.

--

When you finally returned to the compound, the first person to greet you two was Loki, who was leaning against the door frame, smiling smugly.

“Shut up,” you laughed.

“I didn’t say anything,” he pointed out.

“You didn’t need to,” you said.  You held up your hand, which was holding Wanda’s ever so gently.  “You were right.  You happy?”

A smile grew across his lips.  “Of course,” he said.  “And now I get to stab anyone who tries to hurt you two.”

You and Wanda exchanged glances before laughing.

Loki chuckled along with you, watching the two of you laugh together.

He meant every word.

You had to be protected.

[word-addict-lisette]

Tell me, or better, tell us

What does make your crush special, for you

Is it his hair? His voice? The fact he may be the only person who can spell your name correctly?

Just go on a rant, the more detailed you make it the less time you'll focus on how bored you are right now

Ahhh! Thank you for the ask! And sure!

Warning: incoming rant! Entirely nonsensical. Written in a daze at two in the morning. Queued post. Apologies in advance.

This is written at the time my brain was non-functional. don't come at me for typos and trashy English. I wrote it in a rush. sorry.

So... We began in Class 1. You know how they always say it's always two guys and a girl... Always. It was the same with me. Like we were two guys and a girl. And he was like my first bestie. And my only true bestie that too.

And I think... He was the only one to give me a nickname that I could accept. The other nicknames I got were the epitome of silly. And knowing me... I used to be the tallest in my class and I still am, but now, when we recently got into touch he seems to have grown taller than me. And that's something new to me. I've always been taller than the boys here as well, so now he's basically the only one who can call me "shawty" and he's making complete use of that.

And yes, he can pronounce my name right as well.

I usually can't recognize him in crowds unless I can see his hair. Like his hair has to be one thing I'm addicted to. It's just so damn sooftttttt. And curly.

But that's not all. I think I started liking him because of the little things. He's been the only one to remember little things about me and notice things that I have never noticed.

Speaking in general... We knew each other for six years, in person. And then later we got into contact after five years of ZERO CONTACT. No contact at all. You'd think that is ridiculous considering he lives in the lane right behind mine. So... I found his number scribbled on the back of my class 1 English notebook, while I was shifting. So I just contacted him, totally not expecting him to even remember me.

He responds immediately with an, 'Ah! Yes... I remember Clianta.' And he asks about how I've been doing and how old is my sister now.

When we used to be close friends my sister was barely a year old, and the fact that he even remember I had a sibling rendered me speechless right there. And that was not all he remembered... He remembers how we even started talking to each other, and which school I shifted to, and all my weird quirks back then. Moreover, he also remembers how I showed up to school terribly injured with almost my knees and elbows and face all badly scarred when I was 7. And the time I was in the hospital for a damned week. The time I accidentally set my clothes on fire. And the time I got my hand burnt by a cloth iron.

It's usually me who remembers small things and quirks and silly details cause I've got a very strong memory. People usually think I'm creepy for remembering such small things but when he talks about them it just makes me feel so fuzzy inside. It's like someone after all remembers me.

The weirdest quirk he remembers about me is my obsession with the word 'like' and 'damn'. And in all honesty... I still have that quirk. People think that I'll be the type of girl to have a crush on some super-smart guy or something. This guy is like yeah... He's smart. But he's a dumbass all the same. He doesn't understand the simplest of things at times. But I kind of find that super adorable. Idk why but something about him just makes me feel warm.

Or perhaps... It's just me romanticizing things that hold no meaning at all.

-once again... Sorry

Lisette

[limjaeseven]

I'm so sorry 🙈 I must have remembered something incorrectly 🙈

I don't even know how my mind came up with the idea english wasn't your first language... I think it was around the same time I discovered your waifu speaks French... now I'm not even sure if it is her native language 😫

In conclusion my mind sucks and does nothing except for thirsting over idols and creating strange scenarios I can write about 🙈😅

This is really funny to me, it's totally chill love! My first language *should* be Malayalam since I'm from the state of Kerala but I grew up in the city of Bombay, which means, had I studied in a state school, my first language would have been either Marathi (language of the state Maharashtra) or Hindi but I studied in an English medium school with Hindi and Sanskrit as my second and third languages hence I'm the hot mess that I am when it comes to languages.

I can barely English properly, I speak a weird mix of Malayalam and English at home and one of Hindi and English with friends and Sanskrit is a dead language so there's that. It's totally understandable if you thought English wasn't my first language, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority of Indians who's first language is English (and also I cause absolutely suck at it in all capacities).

It's funny that I *know* three Indian languages but the only language I can function in is Ye Ol'English. I don't know if French is @heyitsmeee2's first language, but I know they are from there and know both French and Korean so you've got luck there.

Apologies for the long rant, I just don't get asks a lot so I jumped at the opportunity even though this is technically not an ask okay time to stop rambling.

TL;DR I can't language and am dumb as rocks. And also ily and you're a sweetheart, we miss you a ton at the net, you should join us in conversations and simping sessions sometime. Also don't worry, thirsting over idols (Read: JB) is all I do all day err day.

[apriorisea]

--Hello! First, let me apologize profusely that this has taken so long! I’ve been so busy lately, but I am so sorry that this has been put on the back-burner like this, especially because I truly, genuinely LOVE this idea. I think it is so wonderful that you got his name tattooed on your wrist---thank you for sharing this with me. I hope you enjoy my take on this scenario! 💕💜

You x Jimin “Thank You”

“Um, move!”      The elbow digs into your side before you have a chance to react, and the girl is past you before you can even see her face. You turn back to stare after her, one hand already rubbing your bruised rib. “Wow,” you say to no one in particular. “Excuse you.” But she’s already gone, melting into the growing crowd that’s busy going...somewhere.     Stepping out of the street, you pause for just a second, studying the scene around you. Why were there so many people milling around your street suddenly? It’s not like it was a happening place. Sure, there was the school just a block from where you were, but classes had ended 2 hours ago and there was no reason for the street to be this packed right now. You pull the straps of your backpack a little tighter and continue on your way to the convenience store; it had been a long day and the only thing you wanted right now was some sort of cheap, sweet, junk food snack.      You smile at the woman behind the counter when you walk in, noticing another wave of people outside rush past the store. Did I miss a memo or something? Ignoring it, you move deeper into the store, hesitating for only a moment in front of the drinks before continuing on to the snack aisle.      As soon as you turn the corner, you freeze, your brain not quite believing what your eyes were saying. Ah, says a removed part of your mind. This is what all the fuss is about...     5 feet in front of you, casually studying a package of chips, is Park Jimin. THE Park Jimin. He has the hood of his jacket up, but it’s a poor defense and, anyway, you’d recognize him anywhere. He senses your presence and turns uneasily; panicking, you turn yourself, suddenly becoming very interested in a no-brand chocolate bar in front of you.      After a second, he turns back to the chip selection, but you see him steal a glance out the glass doors of the convenience store; he seems disappointed to see how many people are still there.      He’s hiding out, you realize. Somehow, he must have gotten caught in this dead-end, boring little street, and now he was waiting it out and searching for chips. As much as you are dazzled by running into your literal idol, you can’t help but feel sad and angry, too. No one should be forced to hide out in a corner convenience store because it’s too unsafe to be outside. Why don’t people understand boundaries???      Boundaries. The exact reason you would not be talking to him, no matter how much you were dying to. He looked frazzled enough and you would not be adding to that distress. So instead, you stand in front of that stupid, no-brand chocolate bar, wishing there was something you could do or say to help.      At that moment, his phone rings and he fumbles to pull it from his pocket, lifting it to his ear immediately. Though he’s speaking softly, you can pick out key words: “fans,” “stuck,” “convenience store,” and “help.”      It makes you sad all over again. Really, how hard was it to give him some personal space?? You glance angrily out the doors. Who behaves like this? you think. Just be a decent human, you silently rant as you study the same chocolate bar. If I can do it, anyone can. Jimin was more than your favorite pop-star---he meant more to you than that. His music and dance and personality and example had truthfully saved your life, and you felt more gratitude to him than you knew what to do with. But still you were going to stand here and examine this ridiculous chocolate bar until it was safe for either him to leave or you to sneak away, because no one deserved to be tormented for simply stepping foot outside of the house. Especially him, you think fiercely, and finally turn to look at a different candy bar. So, no, you wouldn’t be ogling him. Wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t ask for an autograph, wouldn’t try to sneak a picture. Let the man have a tiny bit of dignity, for heaven’s sake---     In an attempt to put the phone back in his pocket, he loses control of the bag of chips; flailing slightly, the bag bounces from his hands, off the shelf, back towards his leg, and then, in a primal instinct to keep it from hitting the ground, he accidentally drop-kicks the bag of chips directly at you.      There’s a brief moment of silence while both of you stare at the bag, and even though you try to hold it in, you feel your face break into a huge smile. To cover the giggle you know is coming next, you bend down to scoop the bag off the floor. Straightening, you’re still grinning and, before you have a chance to think it through, you move to automatically extend it towards him. Halfway there, you freeze, realizing what you’ve done, and the humor evaporates, leaving you red-faced and flustered.      “Um,” you say. “Here.” There was no turning back now, better just get it over with and slink away while you still could. You reach your arm a little further, completely forgetting about the tattoo on the inside of your wrist as the sleeve of your sweater gets pulled back by your stretching.       He’s watching you carefully, probably waiting to see if you’re going to turn into one of the maniacs from the street. When you don’t, he nods to himself, resettling his hood before reaching for the snack. “Thank you,” he says politely, distractedly, but before you can answer, he does a sudden very obvious double take. Glancing at you again, he’s so surprised by what he saw that he forgets himself for a moment: without hesitation, he gently takes your hand in his own, turning it over to examine the inside of your wrist. After reading his own name, beautifully written in delicate hangul, he looks up and meets your eyes, his own full of wonder.      You exhale nervously. “Hi.” He’s still staring, so you just start talking. “I’m...I’m sorry, I know this is weird, but...I just...” You feel the emotion build in your throat as you look at him, remembering once again how much he means to you. “You changed my life. You help me be happy and you inspire me to keep working, to keep fighting everyday, and I’m so grateful to you and I love you and I just...I just wanted something to remind me to keep going, even on the hard days. Just...Just like you.” Your words eventually run out and you have to look away from his soft eyes. Your face is on fire and if you could melt into a puddle of goo and run away from this awkward situation, you’d do it in a heartbeat.     Suddenly, his grip on your hand changes, and you feel him squeeze your fingers tightly. Surprised by this, you look back at him, only to find his eyes full of tears.     “Thank you,” he breathes. “I...” He looks back down at your wrist and shakes his head. “This means...this means a lot, I don’t even...I can’t explain...”     You’re beyond shocked to find him as lost for words as you are, but you stay perfectly still, not wanting to ruin this awkward-turned-perfect moment.      He’s clearly touched beyond words, but every time he looks into your face, he seems to find more determination to express his gratitude. “I know it seems silly,” he goes on quietly, “But this is what keeps me going, this support that I’m not sure I’m worthy of---it means ev-everything to me.” Smiling at you with still-shining eyes, he clears his throat to say more seriously, “My only goal is to work hard enough to give back even 1/10th of this kind of love. To be worthy of something as beautiful as this.” He lifts your arm a little to indicate the tattoo.      The moment is broken as his phone rings again, and though his focus is taken away from you, his hand still holds yours tenderly. Though you’re screaming internally, you manage to stay (mostly) outwardly calm, willing your face to stop blushing, your heart to stop pounding. Park Jimin is in front of me, you think, And he is the sweetest man on the whole planet. This is unreal. This can’t be happening. You’re so wrapped up in your internal monologue that you forget to eavesdrop on his conversation, but you do hear the end: “You’re outside?” and “Okay.”     He ends the phone call and puts the device back in his pocket. Releasing a small breath, he meets your eyes again and the warm, sincere smile comes back. “This just made my whole day,” he says earnestly. “Thank you.”    “N-no,” you manage. “Thank you.” It’s so lame and you know it.    It still makes him smile. “I’m glad I got stuck here so I could meet you,” he says. “You take care of yourself, okay?” When you nod wordlessly, he squeezes your fingers again, then pulls your arm towards him. Before you can react, he presses a soft kiss to the inside of your wrist, just above the tattoo. “We’ll both keep fighting, right?” he asks intently, meeting your eyes.      You manage another tiny nod. “Right.”     He grins again, then drops your hand. “Thank you,” he emphasizes one more time, and then he’s gone, charging out into the waiting car while people attempt to swarm him. It’s loud and chaotic and there are actual flashes going off as everyone tries to get a picture.     You stay inside the convenience store, in the snack aisle, your gaze stuck on the ink on your wrist. There are so many thoughts racing through your mind that you can barely function, but as soon as you hear the door open, you realize it’s time to go. Grabbing the bag of chips from where it lay abandoned on the shelf, you head for the counter.      “How long have you been here?!?” one of the newcomers demands; she’s very much intruding on your personal bubble.      “I don’t know,” you answer calmly. “Why?”     “Ugh, seriously? You have to ask??” She gives you a poisonously pitying look. “You don’t even know what you missed outside, do you?” she asks condescendingly.      You feel your wrist burn a little and can’t fight the smile that crosses your lips. “Nope,” you agree, taking your never-to-be-eaten bag of chips from the counter and heading for the door. “I don’t know what I missed.”