#st synapse

[smalltownduck]

ptsd flashbacks, hyperphantasia and true sight - Max's drawings in 4x05 were too good, actually

cw discussions of ptsd

I was thinking about how, the morning after she escaped Vecna's lair, Max took upon drawing what she saw there. Mostly HOW she drew those pictures:

Separate elements, fragmented individual snapshots (like an officer taking pictures at a crime scene- by the way, check out @threemanoperation's post about other instances of weird puzzle collage-solving-seemingly-without-a-reference here; it was a major inspo for this post). Sure, nobody was expecting her to render a single 360° view of Vecna's mindspace, but her drawings are more than clear enough. This level of detail (the broken, scattered structures, trinkets, Chrissy and Fred's bodies in their current state, mixing the crayon colors available in Holly's box so they'd more closely match what she saw, the different angles) is more than quite accurate for someone who 1) hadn't previously been labelled as skilled in drawing and 2) might have been scared for her life to mindfully focus on her surroundings. I have two main questions, both quite connected to one another, but I'm afraid I won't be able to answer them fully: how and why.

how could max remember so clearly what she saw in vecna's mindscape and externalize her memories with such high fidelity?

some assault/attemped m*rder survivors have very vivid memories of the moment they were attacked -those memories might not even be limited to image and sound, but even smells, textures, etc.

When traumatic memories are retrieved, the physical stress response actually serves to strengthen them, to reinforce the memory in the circuits of the brain. The PTSD response makes these memories stronger and stronger over time. [Survivors] may not remember all of the details, but the things that they do remember remain sharp and consistent.

There's no clear-cut time frame for how long it takes for our brains to initiate and run this process, so I'd not rule out something of the sort might have happened to Max from the moment she came back and the next morning at the Wheelers' (plus she didn't sleep at all and probably saw those images any time she closed her eyes). However, I can't help but consider what I said above about Max's main focus probably being elsewhere in that moment, along with the fact that Max's drawings were beyond beginner (as in, not hobby) level (did you see how many different vanishing points she used for the 'floating' objects???), and a very important detail she mentions herself: her walking into the red mindscape wasn't Vecna trying to scare her per se -he did NOT want her to see that, so he probably didn't want her to remember that place either. Yes, he had seemed kind of... "peacock-y" when it came to the classic "serial k*ller leaves crumbs bc he secretly wants to be found out", but he has to call the shots on who gets to see what, like he eventually did with Nancy. Max managed to "infiltrate" his mind bc he did the same to her first, so would it be far-fetched to think that, if it was only up to him, he'd make sure to block or take away those memories from her to patch what ultimately becomes an exploitable vulnerability for the Party and co?

unless someone else, in a similar position to Vecna -or even higher-, was on the Party's side-

I want to explore two possible explanations as to why max was able to retain such clear images/memories, stemming mainly from @greenfiend and @/kaypeace21's posts about DID theory. One: with Vecna being Will's persecutor alter, escaping his claws might have 'granted' Max an ability that has a similar-ish equivalent on an irl condition that can influence memory processing: hyperphantasia.

Hyperphantasia is the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. [It] has been described as being "as vivid as real seeing" [...] Vivid mental imagery as observed in hyperphantasia impacts people's ability for "mental time travel", or the ability to remember past events as well as imagine future events. Hyperphantasics have reported more sensory details of episodic memories and future event constructions.

sadly, it's more of a curse that a boon:

Vivid imagery has been correlated to several mood disorders, particularly anxiety, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder, and having hyperphantasia may exacerbate symptoms of such disorders by subserving ruminating thoughts as well as acting as an "emotional amplifier" [...] The vividness of mental imagery has a key role in the development and continuation of intrusive memories, so for those with PTSD, having hyperphantasia is a substantial risk factor.

if this sounds a bit familiar, it's because it's tied to the second possible explanation: Max, being an alter of Will, acquiring/borrowing the host's artistic abilities/motor skills (to a degree*) and a flash of his True Sight so she could help the party navigate that part of the hivemind as if they themselves had been there. or, similar to Billy, she was 'activated' (re: influenced/possessed) to help the party with this particular task.

*at first I thought this detail was too much of a reach, but then I remember how similar Max's and El's -another alter- drawings were in The Piggyback (although El's had bigger heads both times), and how stickmen were either a deliberate choice by Max or just her back to default:

[smalltownduck]

found this post again and, while you've probably already talked about this, here's some stuff i caught in Brenner's crossword from 4x01:

oh, like the watered-down story people tell their children about how babies come into the world instead of telling them about stuff they think they aren't ready to hear because it's too "explicit"?

word 54 could just be a Kali reference, but also-

we don't get a glimpse at the prompt for word 59, but here's the definition of etiology, a.k.a the only word that intersects both 51 and 54. so much food for thought...

and in the center of it all, as a treat:

Mother is God, In The Eyes of a Child

This has got to be my farthest-fetched theory, and its more of a collection of observations that weave together than an actual theory. However...there's something distinctly weird about all this.

It started here:

Max steps on spider egg sacs in Vecna's mind lair, and the babies spill out.

"If there's a spider, you're never gonna find it 'till it lays eggs and the babies spill out"

Then Vecna killing Patrick while looking distinctly like a spider on a web, a direct comparison to those black widows.

And I talked in the discord chat talking with Em for a while like. They. They wouldn't. Right? And I've been sitting here thinking about the last time I said "they wouldn't...right?" So here we go.

"Of course you have a mother. You couldn't really have been born without one."

But Mama is dead...

just like One doesn't exist.

And whoever you are, either you aren't home (which, you're "Terry's daughter" in Terry's home which was decorated for you in hopes that you'd come home 🤨)...or you aren't Terry's daughter.

but wait: Mr. Mom? Perfect!

Mr. Mom...which leads straight to the lab going haywire:

Because of the Mind Flayer, who we know is (most likely) a version of Edward.

And "sleepyhead" is a parent thing...but it's specifically a mom thing, and it comes from the guy who's likely Edward. Why are you, as a man, so distinctly mother?

And so I'm looking at all of his God coding:

And I'm looking at his talk of spiders, particularly black widows, being the gods of our world:

There's also this particular dialogue parallel with Carrie's mother:

As well as Black Widow "God of Our World" 001 and Henry "Sensitive (Gay) Child" Creel, framed this way in back to back shots.

One of them has the rainbow flag and the other's got the black widow spider, makes sense...right? (Sure. Except not really.)

He also has a ton of God coding in his music choices:

Except, when we look at the songs he alone or he and El are overlaid with...Akhnaten is functionally a mezzo-soprano. In the pieces we hear specifically, Akhnaten sings in the same range or higher than Nefertiti.

Which then gets me thinking about the Silent Hill parallels (that Em has talked about here), and specifically this one line of dialogue from Dahlia:

And the fact that every single black widow spider reference regarding Henward/Vecna/001 has been about female black widows, never male ones:

As well as a good portion of his rant being about:

- Being vaguely broken (what's wrong with him is never said) - His kinship with spiders (specifically the female black widows) - Society's oppressive made-up rules - Being forced to pretend (unspecificed as to what, exactly, he's pretending about...all we get is "a silly, terrible play") - Reproduction

Then the fact that Vecna kind of has a thing for showing up as mothers:

And on top of all that...the fact that Vecna somehow lost his dick along the way. Where did it go????????

There's also all the birthing and reproduction imagery that goes along with the UD, most blatantly in the scene where El crawls out of the same hole the Demogorgon came through:

As well as these movies from the ST4 Movie Board:

Ace Ventura Pet Detective: Finkle has a sex change to assume a new identity and seek vengeance.

Let The Right One In: Vampire girl who is really a boy being forced to live as a girl

Sleepaway Camp: Girl named Angela who is actually a boy named Peter being forced by his aunt to live as a girl after his twin sister (the real Angela) was killed in an accident. (Wibble knows more about this one than I do, but I'm staring at Peter Ballard and all of our Angela's parallels to the lab)

Splice: Female Human-Animal hybrid "dies" (is actually in a coma) and undergoes a spontaneous sex change to male and proceeds to go berserk.

Silence of the Lambs: Main villain is a blonde, wavy-haired cross-dressing serial killer.

And then with the parallels to Room (even if it isn't on the ST4 Movie Board):

Plus Will's Alan Turing poster and the castration stuff that goes along with that..and the "Henry" that shows up behind him:

What in the gender is going on here?

[melit0n]

Nobody talk to me

📸: metalmusemedia on insta

[imperiuswrecked]

Hi there, I'm a big Pietro Maximoff fan and most recently I heard he has a new love interest. Like he's officially dating Penance. I'm happy for him of course but I'm kind of confused... What happened with Emily? The last time I saw her was in Quicksilver No Surrender and I'm a little disappointed their relationship didn't continue. They were kind of cute together.

I'm really disappointed at how Pietro has been treated throughout the comics and media so I really hope this new relationship lasts longer. He deserves to be happy..but I'm trying not to get my hopes up given how he's been treated and his past relationships.

Emily/Pietro was such a cute couple! I miss her and wish Marvel would bring her back but unfortunately it seems that Marvel refuses to do anything with the NuInhumans these days.

Monet was not someone I ever thought of for a relationship with Pietro but I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy it so far. Hopefully writers continue to develop it but yeah we Quicksilver fans have been disappointed a lot in the past so its hard to feel too happy about it.

The real issue is of course how Marvel refuses to give Pietro enough page time in comics, he was in comic limbo for years because Marvel doesn't think he's as important as Wanda or Magneto, the retcon really hurt Pietro's character the most because it killed his development as a character and his struggles with family/self identity. Hopefully the Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver series brings us more Pietro comics, even a stand alone series in the future.

[pietrodart]

I dunno if I'm right or wrong bout this but I feel like Emily and Pietro had an opposites-attract thing going on. Emily is extremely sweet and cheerful while Pietro on the other hand is more critical, smug, and boastful.

Monet is definitely a person closer to his personality and it's really nice to see. However I think there's something so fucking adorable about a nice gentle person falling for a more blunt brash person and I've seen it happen so much in stories and even real life. For some reason (I don't know why) I love opposites attract. I don't know if you get what I'm trying to say.

I don't know if it was you or someone else but I got another ask recently with something similar, so, warning: I don't want to come off as rude, but after this specific ask I'll avoid answering things that I have already answered.

But yes, I do get it. Opposites attract is a nice trope, but I don't completely agree with Emily and Pietro being that; sure, they have different personality traits, but they aren't complete opposites, and though Emily is sweet and more cheerful and optimistic, those are traits that are only really noticed because everyone else around her...are not. She's actually quite similar to Pietro. They are both paranoid(Emily worrying about Cable while the team was celebrating Red Skull's defeat) and very protective of the people they love(Emily wanting to reach for Wada when he was in pain even if she shouldn't).

Emily was also quite violent. Cable did go back to the past just to stop her from killing her literal grandfather, who apparently raised her and who she lived with and was really close; she also learned how to control people's minds so she could make them shoot themselves, and she wanted to kill the people responsible for Johnny's death. So while Emily was more of a "do without warnings" kind of girl, Pietro is more of a "warn but don't do" guy, since he constantly said stuff about killing others or threatening people but we don't get to see him do that(or at least, not as brutally). They worked because they were similar, in a way. Sure, not fully, but most of that difference came from Emily not being as socially awkward as Pietro and having a more stable home growing up(apparently). I think your point of view is nice, but I also think Emily shouldn't be stripped of her flaws and anger; her character is driven by that.

About Monet: I like her and Pietro. Sure, they are similar, but they also have different approaches to things and different life experiences, and from what we saw until now Monet is very sweet and silly around Pietro and he definitely needed someone with attitude -- Emily was perfect and I definitely prefer them, but she was very delicate and Pietro is kind of slow about those things if we're being honest. Again, I get what you're saying and I hope I'm not coming out as condescending or mean, but I also don't like stripping Monet of her silliness and kindness.

Both of them work pretty well, I guess(though I miss Emily a lot). Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me! And I'm sorry if this post is long, I just felt like it was nice to explain my point of view since I was keeping it very short in my last posts.

[smalltownduck]

tysm for your answer! The Promised Neverland was first published in 2016, and the anime adaptation in 2019 made it quite popular, so maybe someone in the writing room watched it and had a chance to incorporate some elements, who knows. That shot of Hopper with the nut cracker -and the whole supper scene- is a great fit it that was the case!

something else that @strange-anni pointed out (ss bc all of these tags are so good)-

"sometimes they can just eat and eat and it doesn't show." It got me thinking about both mike and will. While this is the case for many growing children, the whole 'alr, where did all that food go?' really depends on many other factors beyond the amount and size of meals, such as the quality of the food a child consumes, family genetics, how much energy they spend on their daily activities and even their psychological/emotional health, etc. emphasis on the last two factors here (also i'm no medical professional, so please take what follows with a grain of salt.)

Some people who have experienced trauma or have been in a state of constant distress for long periods of time (and who, of course, internalized their pain, didn't have access to therapy or any guidance towards healthy coping mechanisms) tend to develop somatization, i.e. their psychological anxiety is now expressed through physiological symptoms. Although the most common symptom of this in children/teens is immunosuppression (respiratory/digestive issues; constantly calling in sick), some could experience sudden weight/body mass loss or simply be unable to keep on weight. This is likely related to how anxiety, depression and PTSD pretty much wear out your body, usually damage your digestive system in the long run too, and redirect much of your energy intake (which, in will's case, might not have been much to begin with) to the higher neurological (esp. parasympathetic) activity caused by these disorders. This could also mess up other metabolical functions such as nutrient absorption and sleep patterns, which in turn exacervates the symptoms of the psychological disorders a person suffers. It's one of the ugliest cycles ever :')

adding all of the above to the fact that any other day and with any other show i'd be like 'ok the fatphobic/body shaming comments were said by the bad guys so wtv I know the audience is not meant to agree with them. we can talk about how wrong they are and the hurt it causes irl', but when some of them were said by a 'good guy' whose story contains some D.E-coding... yeah, these better be a Chekhov's gun for mike.

cw blood/gore

hi! saw some beautiful fanart that reminded me of the manga The Promised Neverland (heavy rec to look it up, at least the promo pics -you might find that the outfits look kind of familiar). if you haven't read it, the story follows a group of kids who think they're orphans, but in reality are being raised as human cattle to feed the demonkind (and they are killed by a spear in the shape of a rose, like in the aforementioned fanart). Here's the thing, tho: only children younger than 12 and completely raised in that farm can be sacrifices bc the premium meat is their brains, which is why they're subjected to rigurous mental, academic and even physical training (in their innocent minds, to be the first choice for a couple looking for a kid to adopt.)

besides a few interesting parallels in the setup of this story to hawkins lab, it made me think of something that might be an additional clue to DID theory: El was so notoriously frail in 1983, she even looked malnourished. The kid characters in the TPN farms were well-fed not only to 'taste nice', but bc a growing brain needs LOTS of nutrients to function, even moreso when it's being stimulated above capacity. With El being the only kid left in the lab, shouldn't Brenner and the staff have taken much more care of her health -if anything bc they wanted her to be 'a powerful weapon'?? sure, it might be possible that whenever she was thrown in the dark room she wasn't given any food for indefinite periods of time, as well as (maybe) the amount of drugs terry consumed during the pregnancy playing a part but, as i mentioned above, that would've been counterproductive to the lab's goals.

tl;dr: it makes little sense that el was that tiny and almost sickly-looking if she was supposed to be a well-kept weapon.

the small built overall, imo, rather makes me think of someone who grew up in poverty, who might have been denied meals depending on who was warding him -someone who continually didn't get enough nutrients for a very young age, i think. wbu?

Ahhh your brain!

CW/TW: Disordered eating and fatphobia

(Disordered eating has been a common theme within the show that we don't talk about enough.)

That manga sounds like it definitely could be inspiration for ST!

Being raised as human cattle to feed the demons... wowww. Thinking about how "Byers" means to live by a cattle shed, and of course the shed that Will vanished in. Also, all the cattle references throughout the show.

(Of course this makes me think of Hopper and the Russians being fed to be "plump" and "full of nutrients and protein that a growing monster might need".)

But yes yes YES, you're absolutely right! El was STARVING when we first see her I mean...

Why wouldn't they feed her enough? You're right it doesn't make sense. They have the funds to do so, and she's supposed to be a powerful weapon, arguably the most powerful!

El is small built just like... the boy who was explicitly said to be small. SO MUCH SO that they had him played by Noah Schnapp who is 2 whole years younger (!!!) than the other boys. They even tried to hide his muscles in ST4 to make him look less buff (sorry guys, Buff Byers isn't a canon concept...)

The Byers are poor, and this also isn't talked about enough. Joyce has been struggling with her mental health/working a lot. Jonathan also works and is forced to take on the role of a parent. And... Lonnie is implied to have an alcohol and substance use disorder and is obviously a neglectful parent (to say the least...)

Growing up, I think it's highly likely that Will was not provided with adequate nutrient...

(Hopper cracks open a walnut as he says this... walnuts resemble brains...)

Anyway, here's some likely ED references...

Why are all these references present? I'm not quite sure yet, but I do think it could be related to Will's warped view on food/diets (or maybe Mike's? Or both?). However, I definitely do think that Will was not cared for properly at times nor provided with adequate nutrition growing up... and that's why El (his alter) was starving when she appeared at Benny's Diner.

His parents forgot to feed him.

[sufrimientilia]

“You’ll feel all better soon.”

amputation | degloving | vivisection @augusnippets Day 4

cw: medical whump, vague gore, see above

The light above came down in a warm golden beam. Almost like sunlight.

He hadn’t felt sunlight in ages.

Everything was heavy, indistinct. Numb and throbbing in a way that wasn’t really there but distinctly was. Like pressure too vague to distinguish and pain too faraway to register.

Metal clinked together with gentle clicks. Murmuring came from somewhere above below or around him.

“H… h-hey…” His tongue barely moved, his eyes so heavy. Whatever sounds he made came muffled and soft behind plastic. “Wh… wha’s going on?”

The little metal clicks continued. Whoever was there wasn’t listening, not to him. The pressure shifted around and something became lighter— something about him, something visceral and deep just lifting away.

“The intestines are slippery. Be cautious when you hang them aside.” Something tugged hard. “Note the coloration of the liver here; quite a healthy subject.”

He tried to lift his head. There were restraints at every point across his body, but he also couldn’t move. Like his brain was cut off from everything else. All he could see was white, blank faces with clean masks, and an overabundance of red in the reflections of their glasses and goggles. “S-st.. stop…”

“Subject displaying signs of awareness.”

“Don't worry. The paralytic hasn’t worn off.” The pervasive sensation deep in his midsection shifted higher. “Do you feel that, Subject?”

"Mhh..." He wasn’t sure. Something felt heavy, tight. Like maybe he couldn’t breathe. He heard a squish and the feeling intensified. Darkness crowded the edge of his vision.

“That’s your heart. Right there in my hand. I can give it a gentle massage to calm you down.”

“Hurts…��� He tried. Even that was distant and hazy.

“No it doesn’t.”

Maybe if he thought too hard about moving, the abstract feeling of pain would creep in. Pain and agony and suffering crashing through every synapse, ripping fire down to his core, pulling him apart into pieces. But right now he only felt like he was floating. Intangible and weightless despite all his bare naked flesh, body pulled spread-eagle, limbs and skin all pinned aside to display him down to his core. He blinked as the ceiling blurred and distorted.

“What does it feel like, Subject?”

Dark spots scattered, thickened into blots. “Wrong…”

“Just relax. You’ll feel all better soon.”

[brokehorrorfan]

The Convent will be released on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray on October 8 via Synapse Films. Ralf Krause designed the cover art for the 2000 horror film.

Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers, Tales of Halloween) directs from a script by Chaton Anderson. Joanna Canton, Coolio, Dax Miller, Megahn Perry, Richard Trapp, Adrienne Barbeau, and Bill Moseley star.

The Convent has been remastered in 4K from the original uncut 35mm internegative elements, supervised by Mendez, with Dolby Vision and a 5.1 stereo surround mix. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by director Mike Mendez, cast, and crew

In-character audio commentary by Saul and Dickie-Boy

The Convent and Killers film location tour

Making-of featurette

Electronic press kit

Deleted scenes

Gore outtakes

Still gallery

Promotional trailers

Liner notes by Corey Danna

In 1960, a young woman named Christine enters St. Francis Boarding School for Girls and lays waste to the resident nuns. Four decades later, a group of college students head to the long-abandoned building late one night to tag it with their fraternity letters, little knowing that rumors of the place being haunted are terrifyingly true. Stir in a couple of disapproving cops and a band of unlikely Satanists, and the table is set for a feast of demonic infestation and bloodshed that only the grown-up Christine (Adrienne Barbeau) can possibly stop.

Pre-order The Convent.

[smalltownduck]

maybe Lucas moved to mike's street later on, but not by much, like in first grade? Some children skip kindergarden altogether, too, and considering the demographics in Hawkins and the Sinclair parents' attitude towards how their children 'should' interact with others in town (cannot reccomend enough @threemanoperation's commentary on Lucas on the Line), I could see them not exactly knocking on their new neighbors' doors for a potential playdate unless their children felt safe and admittedly eager to spend time with the children they befriend on their own.

i've also wondered about that picture of a blonde boy in 1x02 (my rb at the very bottom), but the gist is that in 1x01 we do see a few loose, not framed pics of Will and Jon, even one of them together, but the kicker is that neither of them was a towhead blond as a little boy (then again, it might just turn out to be a real pic of baby charlie heaton as an easter egg- i think the narrow eyes of the boy in the pic look like his lol)

byler swapping places... these two guys who happen to have feelings for each other are also much deeply connected by supernatural design from even before what we think was the start? i dont think that'd be outlandish in this show.

I have been thinking about @greenfiend theory about The changeling and the murder case where a son died and then another boy came in to take his place but the mother was always convinced that this new boy wasn't her son (and she was right).

Similarly after J. M. Barries (author of Peter Pan) brother died one day before his 14th birthday Barrie tried to emulate his brother because his mother was so heartbroken. He wore the same clothes as him and even whistled in a similar manner.

Source

Here is a thing I never understood. Joyce loves both of her sons so very much. We've seen it over and over again. So how come there is only one photo of a blonde boy on the radio? This is presumable Jonathan but there is not picture of a young Will.

We know the Wheelers are not shy of taking photos of their children. Nancy has an entire pin board full of photos and memories of her childhood. On the fireplace too is an array of family photos and of two baby girls in particular. One of which Mike identifies as Holly. The other one above Nancys teen photo is presumably also Nancy. They're big photos and are taking up lots of space. Yet there is no such photo from Mike. We get one with him being a young teen and there is another black and white photo of a baby which could be him but it sticks out like a sore thumb. Not only is it black and white while none of the other photos are, it's also notably smaller than the rest and you can barely make out who it's supposed to be. It could be Mike but it could also be anyone else.

Here is another thing which also leaves me puzzled. It's a very well established fact that Lucas lives very close to Mike. He's the one Mike mostly talks to on the Walkie Talkie as the signal is so weak.

Lucas lives so close to Mike and they've also been friends for along time and yet as Mike entered kinderkarten in 1976 he knew nobody. He had no friends. There is no mention of Lucas. He didn't even know him. Why?

Have Will and Mike swapped places sometime in 1976 after they first met?

[phoenixculpa]

breton

ghost boy, haunt a rumple

minze smooth solicitation,

vortex de obsidian ran-

dom meeting by chance,

without meaning it’s

a song and dance

to have guts and

feel faceless en-

dearing flautas,

forgetting diff-

erence in peace-

ful deference, did

you mistake hurt

for no preference

or it’s a flipped page

blotting ink with un-

resolved thoughts gone

gibberish, no window

from soul to vacuum,

trickle synapsed er-

osion to zaps like

a moth never

had gall to fight

a t rex, scrape

earth namek,

a thought of the

third person exi-

sts like god were

an exit or body

without essence

subsists, beaming

across your polar-

ized lenses as

though sunshine

should shy aw

-ay from light

[encompassed]

[lemonadecabaret]

🍋 OPEN NARCISSA STARTER

OPEN TO : m / nb PROMPT : based on THIS. maybe your muse and narcissa have been messing around in secret for a while but never really crossed that physical boundary yet. can be set in her actual hp verse or just modern normal. CONNECTION : tab*o, stepc*st, fiance's family member, fiance's best friend, someone she hates but the chemistry always has them like this, family member's significant other / friend, etc.

"No." The blonde's breaths are stuttered - trembling - as she straddles their lap, porcelain thighs split apart with the hem of her expensive dress bunched hopelessly around her waist. Each slice of their length through her plush, dripping folds is both torture and bliss — each synapse in her body tightly wound and begging for release, begging to finally just give in. "We - we can't," she whimpers and whines at the way their tip catches against her. Her pert nose and chiseled cheeks are flush with uncharacteristic color, glacial eyes darkened with desire. Normally she was a better thinker than this; her survival instincts were stronger.

[unknownjpegs]

benny

The loud crack wakes him up. His whole body flinches in the lecture hall seat, hands grasping the edges of the plastic desk as though clinging to it. When he comes into consciousness, Ben sucks in a gasp that gets stuck in his chest. The room is blurred together, a haunting mess of colors for a moment that resembles something from a Carpenter movie. Then it swirls together, dissolves into clarity.

His classmates—his professor.

“Sleeping again?” Dr. Langley stares down at him from behind her oversized, turquoise frames. Her pinched turtle mouth goes more thin when he doesn’t immediately respond. Ben can’t find his voice, though. His hand slips over the textbook (it’s cool and smooth, a sensation he’d always loved)—he envisions her plucking it from his desk and then letting it drop next to his sleeping head. The sound rings slightly.

The Air Force had not left him with the best ears.

Benny’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, dry and numb. His lips feel equally as dehydrated, chapped and raw. He hadn’t noticed himself nodding off; and he shouldn’t have anyway. The thermos on his desk (plastered in little stickers of video game characters he couldn’t name) is nearly empty of the acidic black coffee he’d poured into it that morning. He blinks a few times, his cheeks warming as his peers continue to stare—he prepares something to say—

“Jonathan,” the professor drawls out. Whatever he had dies in the firing synapses of his brain as the older woman tosses her shawl around her shoulders. Ben’s shoulders raise like instinct, curl up near his ears. She raises a brow ever so slightly higher on her wrinkled forehead. “Perhaps stop sleeping in the closet you do your work in and get a proper bed?”

A few snickers whisper through the lecture hall. Benny sinks further down the plastic seat, knees knocking against the underside of the desk. His hand slides the textbook toward himself, which feels oddly similar in that moment to a small child finding comfort in a teddy bear. The insult isn’t necessarily a bad one—he’s heard worse. Benny’s said worse to people. Graduate students often come equipped with nasty remarks and thick skin to withstand the volley of them back.

And yet, his eyes stay down for the remainder of the lecture. Open and awake, but still down.

—

When the room clears, Dr. Langley seems unsurprised that he’s still there.

She doesn’t give him attention right away, of course, but her pinched look says disappointed, not surprised. Benny stands in front of her desk as she flits about. Pretending perhaps to clean, to look at the white board, to examine her watch and then finally approach and sit down. She can’t weigh more than ninety pounds and yet she settles herself into the chair with the airs of someone who must rearrange to get comfortable. She crosses a leg and then uncrosses it and then tidies up the stray hairs of her bun and then she leans across the desk and corrects a photo of an ugly white dog on her desk.

“I f-filled out that section for a reason,” Ben says thinly. There is a headache forming behind his left eye. Something piercing and particularly cruel, something with teeth and claws. Something that threatens the rest of his day, when he has so much fucking work to get done.

“Elaborate,” Dr. Langley requests, looking at him from over her those oversized frames. Benny thinks they’re fake. They have that dangling, obnoxious chain so she can take them off and leave them hanging around her neck. He’s never been able to put a pattern together of when she goes without them—to read small print or look somewhere in the distance? He doesn’t like that it feels nebulous. That she just sort of wears glasses when she feels like it.

“Before the st-start of semester. I f-fi-f—” He pauses. She waits. “I filled out—I put down th-that I prefer Ben. You sent out that email—”

“Well,” Dr. Langley draws the word out, severing his sentence before he can finish it. She folds her thin, pale hands in her lap. Makes a triangle shape with them, like a mediation technique. “I ignored that, Jonathan.”

He’d prefer it if she just stood and fucking slapped him. It would be easier to handle. It would be less embarrassing. It would hurt less. He grinds his teeth together so hard he thinks he hears them creaking together. Benny slowly exhales through his nose and then holds up a hand. He makes a flat gesture with it.

“Are you asking me why?” When he nods, she laughs. It’s sharp and condescending, a quick burst of air. A little bit of haughty arrogance, as though he’s challenging her on something. Her ground, in her lecture hall (it’s shared, actually, he knows that, another professor gets this hall in an hour and maybe she has to put the fucking dog photo away when he does).

“I ignored it because it wasn’t for you.” She leans forward on the desk, putting elbows to it. Her shawl slips a bit across her bird like shoulders. She’s wearing a mostly beige ensemble today, something expensively soft looking. “When I ask my students their preferred pronouns, their preferred names, I’m not asking cis white men what their nicknames are.”

For a brief moment, he entertains the thought of leaning on her desk as well. He thinks of spreading his hands over the thin, pale wood, he thinks of how that might make her reconsider. Benny knows what the slightest shift of his heavy weight forward can do, what the reveal of tattooed hands can do, what his awful, sneering smile can do. What he looks like when he’s angry. What his eyes can do to people if they look at them too long. He imagines her shrinking back in fear, imagines her ugly dull brown eyes widening with it.

He imagines his father.

“Please,” Benny snaps out. His hands curl and uncurl by his sides. “It’s n-not a nickname. It’s what I go by.”

“As gender defiant as you seem to be—” her gaze flicks to his hands.

He’d forgotten that Nomi had painted his nails recently, some little swirling design because she was trying to get good enough that neither she or Matilda would have to pay to have them done. Hot embarrassment flashes across him for some reason, even though he’d been happy to let her. Had enjoyed watching her concentrate, had been pleased with the way it looked, had loved her leaning in and giving his knuckles small appreciative kisses. He isn’t embarrassed by any of that and he isn’t sure why Dr. Langley instills such a shame in him anyway.

“It stands. That section of the email was not for you.” Benny tries to remember to breathe. His face feels burned away, flesh peeled, vulnerable bone revealed. He blinks at her owlish expression. There is a hint of condescending pride underneath it all. What an ally. What a good person. What a win for the Transgenders (capital T) of their university, to have this woman on their side.

He thinks of his father again and in that moment of shame and humiliation, he lets himself take one trait from the tree as a vile little treat—Benny slams the door shut when he leaves, just like his father used to, all the time.

—

“You have to tell someone.”

“Nomi,” Ben moans the word out, head falling back like a cords been cut. He slips further in the office chair he’d stolen from the science department. One knee bounces in anxious rhythm as he flicks a page in one of his many notebooks. His messy handwriting, only legible to him, suddenly seems very illegible. Nomi lays on his bed, tantalizingly mostly nude, and not even remotely indulging him (she had, actually, an hour prior, when they’d fallen into that bed and she’d been yanking his jeans open with an excited laugh).

Only, Benny, post sex and in that wildly strangely raw emotion that sometimes came with good sex (and sex with someone who mattered, who cared, who made it good) had opened up about Langley. Had spilled the entire scene to her, word for word. Had imitated the womans delicate, purposeful gestures and her shrunken facial expressions. He sits there now, in the chair he’d stolen with just briefs and socks on and Nomi, there, in a stolen tank top that doesn’t fit laying in his bed.

“No, like, I’m bein’ serious, though? Don’t you have someone you can report her to? That’s heinous of her, Ben. Real heinous.”

He loves the way she clips her words out. Posh accent so cute, especially when she’s annoyed. He wants to think about that, instead of what she’s pressing in on. The wound. The insufferable, never healing gash in his side. The festering, infected, impacted wisdom tooth he’ll never have removed. Benny flicks another page in his notebook, not really looking at it. Fear crawls over his skin, like insects pricking their way through his body hair. He swallows a thick feeling in his throat.

When silence sits between them, Nomi realizes too quickly that something is actually wrong. Not that he was venting about a fucked up teacher or school. He did that plenty, he complained about classes to her constantly. Nomi was subject to non stop discussion of how academia was evil, soul sucking, miserable, for fucking idiots that were too smart. She stands from the bed and crosses to him.

Benny wants to look up at her and feel—like he feels so often—absolutely stunned that she was at all, ever, interested in him. He wants to feel awed and in love and happy and excited and horny and all the other feelings that she manages to make tumble out of his big, blond fucking head. Instead, a prickling sensation in his eyes makes his entire face fall. Instead, he sort of just feels pathetic and exhausted.

“Oh, baby,” she murmurs, brushing a hand through his hair. She pulls him in with arms around his shoulders. Benny’s head tucks into the softness of her stomach. She runs fingers through his stringy hair. “Baby, baby, baby,” she mumbles in mock imitation of him. It makes him shudder, and then Benny does what he probably really needed to do.

He cries for a while and she holds him and lets him.

—

“Nomi told me.” Maran’s voice is a little warbled over the poor connection.

“That fucking snitch,” Benny mumbles, around the string on his hoodie. It’s properly gross and wet with spit, chewed nearly flat between the meanness of his molars. The laptop screen is the only light on in his room, making his already sensitive eyes hurt. It’s bright outside where Maran is—eight in the morning. Benny had set his alarm, because for some reason Maran was an early riser. Liked to swing over to Benji’s mom’s for breakfast like the sneak he was. Benny rarely missed a morning call, even though eight was three his time.

And three am was either precious studying time, or a cat nap.

“Hey!” Maran reprimands. The screen goes briefly dark and then lights up again, with the short adjustment of outside to indoors. His heart flutters a bit to realize he’s started memorizing these places Maran’s at, over there. Kay’s house, a park he likes, his own room. “Don’t call her that.”

“Well she is a sn-snitch,” Benny argues, spitting the string out.

“I’ll break up with you,” Maran threatens. The display shifts around some more, because he simply can’t sit still and his phone isn’t always the best for these sort of long distance video calls. But Benny had needed to see Maran, not just hear him. He had needed to see him smile, to watch the way his freckles wrinkled in his cheeks. He wanted to see the new hair color, he wanted to reach through his laptop and pull Maran back to the US and kiss him.

Benny missed him so much it felt like an ever present migraine. A never ending when will you come back, I miss you, come back that just kept repeating inside the throb of that headache.

“Neither of you are ever br-breaking up with me. I know how t-to make nail bombs.”

“He is so kiddin’ Mr. CIA agent inside the laptop.”

“Fuck the CIA. Fuck the feds too, in case th-they’re also listening. And fuck—”

“Ben,” Maran interrupts with a loud laugh. He’s back outside, the dull, gray light of England spilling around him. It’s nice here, Benny thinks. Come back, where it’s sunny. Please.

“She’s right, you know,” Maran continues. He’s paused, leaned against a brick wall, to look at his phone. Benny can see a visage of himself in the corner and it’s none too flattering. He’s washed out even more pale than he usually is because of the computer light. The hood of his sweatshirt is up, but his blond hair peeks out around his face. He hasn’t been sleeping well—he hasn’t been sleeping—so his eyes are sunk in the sockets. Benny gets nervous looking at himself like that, knowing that’s what Maran is seeing. He scrubs a hand over his face.

“If we h-had a dollar for every time Nomi was fucking right, we’d b-be billionaires.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“You’re needling,” Benny snips back, with narrowed eyes.

“I’m worried,” Maran replies, with just as much edge to his voice. It makes Benny feel guilty, immediately. This wasn’t how he wanted the call to go. He wants to rewind, to go back to when Maran had picked up and said his name in that breathy excited way. He wanted to tell a funny story about Lark to make him laugh. He wanted to ask about how Maran’s mom was—who made him endlessly nervous, because she knew about him now and he wasn’t sure what to do with that info.

Benny’s eyes stray away from the laptop for the first time since Maran’s face had appeared on screen.

“Mar,” he starts. He has to clear his throat suddenly, because it feels tight and wet. “If I tr-tried to talk about it to someone—they’d ju-just ask—I don’t want to have to ta-talk about it.”

“But it’s—”

“Drop it,” he seethes between tight teeth. “I’m n-not explaining to s-some fucking admin that I don’t go by m-my first name because of my dad.” It feels strangely juvenile to refer to him that way. Sometimes, to Benny, his father was Jonathan. He was Jonathan Lee Benson, who went by both names professionally because he liked the way it sounded. They take a man seriously when he’s got a good name, that’s why I gave you mine, Jonathan Lee Benson Jr. has a ring to it and they’ll respect you for that.

His father was Jonathan, which was why he couldn’t be Jonathan.

Maran’s eyes look soft and unhurt. Benny’s bite had not broken skin, but his stomach still felt sour with it. He rubs palms across his eyes again, sinks further into the bed. He shifts the laptop so it’s closer. Benny wedges himself against the corner, so he can stay seated, without really putting in effort.

“I’m sorry,” he finally says.

“I love you, Ben,” Maran replies in such an honest way that it makes Benny feel golden all over. Worthy of that sentence, even when he’d been so nasty just moments before. He’s briefly reminded of laying in bed with Nomi, her hair messy and him feeling like he could say anything and she’d still feel the exact same about him. Benny sniffs and rubs his knuckles underneath his nose.

He repeats it back, even when it’s odd on his tongue and he can’t imagine it has that same effect for Maran. It can’t feel the same, like warm honey poured all over. But Maran still smiles at him, that blinding beautiful boyish smile that makes the world feel a little less dirty. England doesn’t seem so fucking gray with him there.

“Do you wanna come skateboarding?” Maran asks, in a gently fond voice. It makes Benny huff with something resembling a laugh. He nods and watches the image of the audio call go wonky. He feels disorientated for a moment as the view swings to the ground. Maran puts a foot on the board—and then shoves himself off. And then Benny hears the electronic crackle of wind against the mic. The rumble of the skateboard on sidewalk.

Maran brings the phone closer to himself. He must tuck it into a shirt pocket, because Benny can hear him breathing as well.

And Benny also doesn’t realize that at some point he falls dead asleep. That he’s pulled swiftly and blissfully entirely under, into REM sleep that is thankfully free of any dreams that he’ll remember. Because he’s asleep, he also doesn’t realize that Maran stays on the line, for as long as he can, sitting and watching Ben sleep. He has no idea that Maran has skated all the way to his favorite area. That he sits on a brick bridge, feet dangling pleasantly over bubbling water.

He has no idea that Maran is holding that whispered I love you inside himself and feeling that exact same warm honeyed feeling.

Maran only ends the call because Nomi’s face appears.

“I know who I can talk to,” she says when he picks up.

***

Dr. Sullivan stares at Nomi with the flat, unflinching gaze of someone entirely practiced in telling others to fuck off and die. She sits, with legs kicked up onto her desk, chair leaned back. One hand rests on her desk, while the other toys a lighter. Thumb smoothing over it and over it and over it. In contrast, Nomi stands there, in front of the professors desk with all the aura of someone who might crumble if pressed into too hard. That tears are definitely somewhere hiding behind her big, milk tea colored eyes. She tries to angle her chin to be slightly more imposing, since Dr. Sullivan is sitting and she is standing.

The effect does not work, and one of the professors black brows raises.

“Is campus security stuck on a child’s level crossword puzzle again—who the fuck are you?”

“I didn’t know this campus had security,” Nomi replies.

“Well you’re not a student, then.”

“Oh,” she blinks rapidly. Nomi glances down at herself. She’d tried very hard to wear something university appropriate. So she’d thrown on a skirt and tights and a large cardigan—she’d looked at herself in the mirror and felt like she was in a Halloween costume of a girl who maintained her Pinterest with an iron fist and had three study Intagrams. Nomi smooths her hands down the front of the cardigan. It has stars printed on it. “How can you tell?”

“Well, usually students are smart. Emphasis on usually. Do you need me to repeat the question slower?”

“Could I ask you,” Nomi’s words run right up along after Dr. Sullivan’s. “Why do they call you Bunny when you are deeply unpleasant?”

Bunnies make her think of Benny actually. His affection for rabbits was one of the first things about him that had stood out in her mind. People met Benny and knew him for many things; the dark scorpion tattooed on his neck, his double major in school, the parties he liked throwing at his apartment, that he was a little unnerving and sort of scary and very mean.

Nomi had equated Ben and rabbits before any of that. She had noticed the tattoo of one on his ankle by accident. She noticed that he had a baseball hat with a silhouette of one. The rare occasions people caught Ben in a photograph, he would make ears with his fingers above his head, stick his tongue out in a nasty smile.

“Where’d you heart that?” Dr. Sullivan doesn’t look fazed hearing the name at all. The lighter moves in her fingers smoothly. One of her feet shift on the desk. Nomi tilts her head and points over her shoulder. Her eyes are innocent, magnified by those giant round glasses that sit low on her nose. She has a messenger bag with a big fluffy rabbit keychain on it, slung over her shoulder that she softly adjusts.

“I heard someone say, Bunny Sullivan, that cunt—and I was like, oh, spiffy. That’s the Dr. Sullivan I’m looking for.”

The professor continues to stare at her. She taps her finger a few times on her desk. Dr. Sullivan has rather manicured hands, Nomi thinks. They look neither masculine nor feminine—not the way men sometimes have blocky, stubby fingers, or the way women will possess long, trim ones. Not necessarily the same way Lark can have those pretty, thin fingers and Mouse can have those square tipped ones either. It feels odd to focus on Dr. Sullivan’s genderless hand so much, but her eyes make Nomi nervous. The aura of being impossible to pin makes her vastly more intimidating than she’d ever imagined possible.

Nomi thinks she’d like to find a way to take that energy for herself.

“I don’t think I like you.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Nomi snorts. “You seem like a person to make a decision very quickly.” She steps forward and lowers herself down into the chair opposite Dr. Sullivan’s desk. The office smells like coffee and cologne and books, which is a smell Nomi finds comforting. It has a home like sense to it. Bunny, who does not live up to her name—or maybe she does, because bunnies are nasty, they bite—simply continues to stare.

“I’m Nomi.”

“Okay.”

“You know my boyfriend.”

“I can fucking assure you, I do not.”

Nomi leans forward, her hands curling over her knees. She doesn’t like having to say Benny’s full name out loud—isn’t that the point of it all? Isn’t that why she’s here? But who knows how many Benny’s exist out there in the world, on this very campus? To her, the name would forever be his and anyone else out there would have to find a new one. But to the professor? So instead, Nomi clears her throat and says the full name awkwardly, eyes flickering around the ephemera on Dr. Sullivan’s desk.

“If that’s your boyfriend, firstly my fucking condolences. And secondly, when the fuck was his name anything other than Benson?”

It makes Nomi lean back in the chair. She lifts her hands, as if grasping the very concept that Dr. Sullivan has accidentally landed upon.

“That’s where I need your help.”

—

The conversation is relatively short because Nomi is to the point and Dr. Sullivan doesn’t ask questions. She shifts here and there, rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Pockets the lighter and then yanks open a drawer to look inside it briefly. Once it’s closed, she makes a gesture with her hand. Nomi gathers that means they’re done.

As she stands, however, Nomi cannot help but say, “I know you and Ben slept together.”

She isn’t exactly sure where that statement comes from and why.

She had been thinking about it the entire time, which felt a little voyeuristic and weird. But thinking of the professor and Benny together was not the same as when they’d be at a party and he’d shift awkwardly and look at someone and she’d know that very someone was once a someone that Ben slept with. It was not the same as a pretty girl with artfully disheveled hair or even a handsome man with pretty eyelashes and it wasn’t really the gender either that mattered at the end of the day, especially to Nomi—it was simply that Ben had told her about Dr. Sullivan in a way that made it more like an enjoyable story.

Kind of the craziest encounter of my life, he’d said. No awkward guilty twist to his mouth, or big expressive regret on his features. Bunny is insane, I didn’t think I’d walk straight again.

Dr. Sullivan had been fairly nonchalant the entire encounter. The fidgeting had felt more prompted by boredom than anything else. Her button up was silky looking, open at her throat. She had a blazer on the back of the chair that looked comfortably expensive but worn, like it was a favorite. Her hair was streaked with the sort of gray that made someone look dignified and handsome.

Nomi’s statement made her twitch so minuscule that perhaps anyone else might not even have noticed. Whether it was embarrassment, amusement or respect, Nomi could not say.

“How the fuck did you get into this building?” Dr. Sullivan replies instead. It makes Nomi fish out the lanyard from her bag. She dangles it proudly. A badge swings back and forth.

“RFID is ridiculously easy to copy. I bought a reader from a hotel night auditor who was selling it cheap; we’d been friends online for a while, actually so it was fine. I took Ben’s badge and made my own—the photo is my passport photo.” She steps closer, in case Dr. Sullivan wants to look. She makes it evident that she does not by continue staring at Nomi. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the secret labs that he has access too. I just didn’t feel like being held up in getting to your office. And also,” Nomi loops the lanyard around her neck. She steps back and raises her arms in a sweet little tada! pose.

“I just love these things. Don’t they make you feel so, like, official, yeah?”

For the first time, Bunny smiles. It is just a simple lift of the corner of her mouth, but it is a smile.

***

Josie is having a bad day.

From the chai latte that had been prepared wrong at the local cafe she frequented regularly (and what was the point in going to a family owned business instead of a corporation, if they couldn’t get a chai latte correct? Which was what she’d said to the manager as they remade it, and she felt vindicated with that statement still) to the email she’d not opened yet, glaring at her from her phone.

The subject line had been simply “Ad hoc meeting” and the little preview line had been her name and “I believe this is a discussion best had in person”. It made her sweat under her arms immediately, which was awful for the cotton sweater that she’d selected that morning. Truman had kissed her on the cheek goodbye as he left for work, careful of the soft cream blush she used to make her sallow skin look a little more alive. He was truly the only good part of her day and she’d still been sad when he’d turned and she saw that little balding spot. Hair growth for men was a frequent Google search of hers these days.

She hip checks the door to her lecture hall open, foot steps a frantic pace as she starts for the desk.

That is occupied. That is occupied with none other than the long legged, cold eyed Bunny Sullivan.

“Oh,” she says in a voice far too surprised. That moment of unintentional weakness feels like an immediate target; and Bunny has the nose of a shark. Josie thinks of her that way. Like a giant hammerhead that keeps circling above them all, too much sway and too much ego. Josie’s steps slow as she gets to her desk. She notices a box on it. All of her things are inside. Her stomach starts to turn cold. Her fingers feel numb at the tips. Truman had so much hair when we’d first met, is an odd intrusive thought as she stares at Bunny.

“Dr. Sullivan. What a pleasant surprise.”

“You’re a bad liar,” Bunny replies, a fist tucked under her chin. She spins a stapler on the desk. “I’m taking this, by the way. I didn’t see anything else I wanted in your junk—but I owe Happy a new one. Broke the last, slapped it shut so hard it cracked. You know he parked in my spot for a solid month after I did that? He is such a cocky bastard, don’t you think?”

“Diondre is—”

“Oh, so it’s not just your students?”

“Pardon?”

Josie remembers accidentally finding herself in conversation with Bunny at a holiday party once before. Prior to that exact moment, she’d always thought people were lying when it came to Dr. Sullivan. Oh, not that she was an enormous, painfully rude bitch. Josie believed that—but she thought that people had to be exaggerating her wit. She thought a verbal spar with someone could be fun, because Josie was used to sniffing her way through them with her nose tilted up. She was usually the one winning.

And that holiday party had proved her so instantly, miserably wrong. Bunny spoke like she had daggers instead of words. She feinted in and quickly stab, stab, stabbed at things people said. She kicked the corpse of the conversation aside and started a new one. She made Josie feel small and wilting.

Bunny stands from the desk. Her hand closes around the edge of the box with all of Josie’s little things. It gets shoved to the edge. Josie has to reach out, to stop it from tipping over.

“When you’re back from your leave,” Bunny starts, straightening to a height that is far too willowy. She bends so easily over Josie, who is in ballet flats, who has always been shorter than everyone else and never found that a detriment until this precise moment. “You’re never fucking with one of mine again. And you’ll know which ones are my mine—you know which one is my mine, in your awful, boring, underfunded excuse of a course—”

“Dr. Sullivan, I’m sure—”

“You can call me Bunny,” she says, her smile like a threat. “And you call him Ben.” There is a long, stale silence that falls between the two professors. Bunny looks inside the box and then tilts her head, with raised surprised brows. “Actually, I’m taking this too.” She plucks a notebook free. CATS, COFFEE AND CURRICULUM is printed across the front.

Then Bunny walks away from Josie, the sound of her shoes clipped and loud on the lecture hall floor.

***

Nomi is panting into Maran’s mouth, their faces close as their bodies slide like puzzle pieces fitting together. Not yet kissing, the lingering taste of it on her tongue still. The concentration on his brow is so endearing it makes her heart twinge. His hands roam endlessly, like he cannot find one place to put them on her when he wants all of her. His body between her thighs feels solid and warm and good in a way that is making her dizzy. She breaks the nearly there contact of their mouths to tilt her head back and moan his name in the way she knows encourages him for harder.

“I missed you so much,” is how he groans, head tucked into her neck. Her hands draw up his back, the weight of him pressing into her, down on her, suddenly getting her right fucking there.

And when they’re done, messy with the blankets all sorts of tangled around them, she spends the same amount of time pressing kisses across his face. Maran’s deep, magenta blush only makes her continue. She kisses each brow and then his nose and pulls back simply to grin down at him. His hand nestles to her lower back, fingers soothing. She doesn’t usually like the tacky sensation of sweaty bodies like this, but she had missed him like a physical part of her had been pulled out from her ribs when he’d boarded that fucking plane.

She lays across his chest, both their hearts slowly calming down together.

“I missed you too,” she tells him. Maran’s hand cups her cheek. She leans against it. The eight hour plane ride had been worth it. Not just for the sex—but Jesus, did she realize how much she had missed sex with Maran, because it was a different breed than with Benny, it was this hungry romantic thing that made her feel like a paperback heroine in a romance novel, the kind of protagonist that always cums first. But for this, to be on him, to be close to him and seeing him.

And their moms meeting tomorrow, which felt awkward and funny at the same time. It had been a good excuse to take a holiday to the UK.

“Will you dye my hair for me tomorrow?” Maran asks, sleepily, his eyes shuttered for a moment. She leans in, breasts pressed against his chest so sensually that it makes his eyes snap open.

“Maran,” she says, mouth in a wide grin. Her lipstick has smudged in a way that is erotic. She’s left evidence of herself all over him. “I love you.”

She makes a soft squeaking sound when she is bundled into powerful arms and rolled onto her back and then the kisses are returned, all over her.

—

Sounds wake her up. Nomi is usually a heavy sleeper; Benny often was able to put music on in the background while he studied and she slept in his bed, curled around his pillows like they were him. He had an odd laundry-scent about him, like he was habitual about keeping things clean, and she liked that. But it’s not Benny’s bed she’s in, nor his pillow she has crushed to her chest.

She blinks a few times. Her hair is messy, in her face. She swats at it, groans and lifts herself up a bit. Sunlight pours across the floor from a window, but Maran smartly has his bed pushed against a wall so that light hasn’t touched them just yet. The sound of traffic outside is light.

“Sorry,” Maran whispers, fingers brushing hair back from her face and gently tucking dark blue strands into place behind her ear. Nomi blinks more, makes a sound again, because she hasn’t found words just yet. She looks at the phone in his hand, a call waiting screen there. Nomi forfeits the pillow to scoot closer and lean her head on Maran’s chest.

“Who?” she mutters. Sleep is just a moment away, she can feel it. Not really conscious, entirely. Her body feels bone deep tired from the travel and the sex they’d had…more than once her first night there. She yawns and scrubs her cheek against his soft skin. Nomi’s hand sneaks across his abdomen and finds a comfortable spot to rest, right underneath his belly button. His body hair is a little coarse, and it’s texture feels oddly soothing.

“Benny,” he answers softly. She makes a noise to prompt him further. “He always calls me at eight.”

“Why are you up at eight?”

“Because he calls me at eight.”

Nomi braces herself up a bit more to look at Maran. He’s bright when he’s awake. A morning person, for some reason. He looks unbelievably handsome in the dull wash of the phone light. Only he would be able to pull that off. She leans in and presses a kiss to his jaw. Moves it to his lips. They are as sweet tasting as they were before, when he’d kissed her in the airport. When he’d kissed her on the train, and in his bedroom. When he’d kissed her, their hips rolling together.

The call connects at that very moment.

“Wow, keep going.” His voice sounds wavy and distant. Nomi tilts her head, lips still pressed to Maran to catch a glimpse of the tiny version of their boyfriend on the screen. She briefly covers it with her palm, making exaggerated kissing sounds. “Fuck you, p-put Maran on.”

“Someone is in a bad mood,” Nomi sings, falling back into the comfortable spot she’s nestled into Maran’s chest.

“I’m h-having a good day actually.”

“What happened?”

“I bl-blew something up in th-the living room and made Xavier almost p-piss.”

Nomi doesn’t contribute to the early morning conversation. In fact, she falls asleep quickly again. Comforted that Benny, alone as he is without them, is having a good day because he blew something up. Comforted, really, deep down, by the thought that Benny without them is still Benny and okay. She falls asleep with her hand tucked onto the softest vulnerable part of Maran’s stomach and both of them talking.

***

“You look like shit, Benson.”

“I showered,” Benny explains, gesturing toward the abnormally fluffy hair on his head. It’s light and airy like downy duck feathers, maybe because he’d stolen Lark’s fancy hair products. It made him smell like cold, spring water which must drive hot art students crazy, or something. He jerks his hand back and forth over the top of his head in an attempt to make it the greasy mess it usually is. Bunny watches with flat eyes.

“Do that regularly and you might get a third significant other. Bit fucking greedy don’t you think? Have to start saving some of the cute ones for your other pathetic STEM peers.”

“Two is enough,” Benny replies languidly, throwing his legs out in front of him and getting comfortable. “She’s visiting him in the UK. I’m sle-sleeping better, believe it or not.”

“I didn’t ask, and I don’t care.”

“That reminds me.” He suddenly heaves himself up and out of the chair. Benny pats himself down, like he’s looking for something, when he knows exactly where it is. He holds up a finger. Bunny looks horribly unamused, in a way that actually means he should hurry. So he does. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls a card from it. Benny leans forward and slowly puts it on her desk. He uses one finger to slide it toward her.

“Does this look like a trash bin?”

“Sometimes. When yo-you’re really busy.”

Bunny leans over to look at the baseball card. It’s worn thin at the edges, the print on it dull and old. It’s yellowing here and there, because he’d never bothered to put it in a plastic sleeve. Benny feels suddenly like snatching it back and shoving it into his pocket. Nevermind, he thinks. Half out of embarrassment and half because…

“That was the f-first baseball card I bought with my own money,” he explains. Benny shoves the chair behind him so he can start for the door. “It’s Antonio Reyes. Yo-You don’t fuck with baseball, do you?”

“I reiterate, Benson. Does this look like the fucking trash bin?”

“Reyes wa-was my favorite when I was a kid. Batted so bad it was nearly fucking negative. He g-got caught with his head between a Brazilian models legs at a club.” Benny’s grin goes lopsided and amused. It doesn’t have his usual sneak to it, not the glint of meanness that he carries like a barrier. “The Brazilian model was a man—and the c-club was a gay club. His team had a p-press conference saying he wasn’t a faggot—well.” Benny tilts his hand back and forth.

“They didn’t u-use the word, Reyes did. He stood up and said, actually, I love sucking cock. And he got dumped p-pretty quick after that.”

Bunny stares at the card. He doesn’t tell her that it has survived nearly a decade in his wallet.

“Anyway,” Benny turns toward the door to her office. He yanks it open. “Thanks, Dr. Sullivan.” Then he closes it too quickly for her to reply, no matter what sort of reply it would have been.

—

The card goes into the trash next to Bunny’s desk.

She replies to a few emails. None of them get a nice response.

She sips her cooling, sludge like black coffee. She thinks about the cigarettes in her desk. Bunny looks out the window to the side, where fat, pink clouds slide across a dying horizon. She replies to another email, deletes a few more that aren’t worth even reading.

Then she leans over and quickly finds the card in the trash. She places it on the desk and stares down at Antonio Reyes. There is a thumb print in the corner. She can imagine a smaller version of the man who had just left her office—not thoroughly, mind, because she doesn’t have the mental fucking energy to truly imagine and nor would she really want to imagine Benson at fourteen, in a bodega, using whatever shit allowance he got as a kid to buy this card— but she can imagine.

The importance of a stolen piece of queerness, to someone like Benny. She can imagine, but she doesn’t because something in her heart feels maladjusted and thumping wrong, what that sudden filthy evocative, proudly loud statement had done for someone like Benny as a kid. The loss of an entire professional career, because Antonio Reyes had simply refused to deny what it meant to be himself. Even if himself was a fucking weirdo that sucked off models at gay clubs in the seventies. To each their own, or whatever.

She tucks the baseball card next to a stack of books.

Bunny keeps the card safe inside a hardcover copy of one of her favorites.

[toffeethief]

Top 5 Albums In The Year Of Our Lord 2023

1. Ryuichi Sakamoto - 12

2. Buggin’ - Concrete Cowboys

3. Aesop Rock - Integrated Tech Solutions

4. Bell Witch - Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Shadow

5. Zulu - A New Tomorrow

Honorable Mentions:

The Album Leaf - Future Falling // Amen Seat – Amen Seat // Andre 3000– New Blue Sun // Angel Dust – Brand New Soul // Aphex Twin – Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In A Room7 F760 // Baroness – Stone // BB Bomb – Practice Songs-Lesson Three // Billy Woods & Kenny Segal – Maps // Black Matter Device – Buckshot Mouthwash/Mr. Uncomfortable // Blonde Redhead – Sit Down For Dinner // Boris/Uniform – Bright New Disease // The Bouncing Souls – Ten Stories High // Boygenius – The Record //  The Callous Daoboys – God Smiles On The Callous Daoboys // Chat Pile/Nerver – Brothers In Christ // Clementine Valentine – The Coin That Broke The Fountain Floor // C.LS.M. – Infinity Shit // George Cosby – Talk // Covet – Catharsis // Deserve To Die – Deserve To Die // Dorthia Cottrell – Death Folk Country // Arnold Dreyblatt – Resolve // Ex Pilots – Ex Pilots // Explosions In The Sky – End // Felony For Existing – Felony For Existing // Fews – Glass City // Fishbone – Fishbone // Flooding – Silhouette Machine // Fotocrime – Accelerated // Peter Gabriel – i/o // GLAM – The Color, The Dark // Gridlink – Coronet Juniper // Headcheese – Expired // The HIRS Collective – We’re Still Here // The Hope Conspiracy – Confusion/Chaos/Misery // Khanate – To Be Cruel // Kilamanzego – Black Weirdo // Killer Mike – Michael // Kitba – Kitba // Lamp Of Murmuur – Saturnian Bloodstorm // Lankum – False Lankum // Kali Malone – Does Spring Hides Its Joy // Mary Lattimore – Goodbye, Hotel Arkada // Lucy Camp – Smores Vol. 1 // Lunar Creature – Lunar Creature // Mile End – Promo 2023 // Mil-Spec – Marathon // Milledenials – The Peak Of Youth Life // Model/Actriz – Dogsbody // Mystic 100s – On A Micro Diet // Narrow Head – Moments Of Clarity // The Necks – Travel // New Found Glory – Make The Most Of It // New World Man ­– The Beast Is Back // Noname – Sundial // One Step Closer – Song For The Willow // Ostraca – Disaster // Oxbow – Love’s Holiday // Bill Orcutt – Jump On It // Misha Panilov – In Focus // Paramore – This Is Why // Parannoul – After The Magic // Pere Ubu – Trouble On A Big Beat Street // Perfect Angel At Heaven – Imploder // Pile – All Fiction // Planet On A Chain – Boxed In // Powers/Pulice/Rolin – Prism // Protomartyr – Formal Growth In The Desert // Pulsatile Tinnitus – The Finer Art Of Heartwork // Radiator Hospital – Can’t Make Any Promises / Watching A Fire // Rat Cage – Savage Visions // Restraining Order – Locked In Time // Ringworm – Seeing Through Fire // Olivia Rodrigo – Guts // Sadness – April Sunset // Sadness/Abriction – Sadness/Abriction // Sam Goldberg – Some Songs Are Sung // Screaming Females – Desire Pathways // Samuel Sharp – Consequential // Patrick Shiroishi – I Was Too Young To Hear Silence // Shonen Knife – Our Best Place // Shunkan – She Nods // Sigur Ros – Atta // Sincere Engineer – Cheap Grills // Slant – Demo 2023 // Sophia Chablau e Uma Enore Pedre de Tempo – Musicia do Esquencimento // Spellling – Spellling & The Mystery School // Spirit Of Hamlet – Northwest Of Hamuretto // Spirit Of The Beehive – I’m So Lucky // Spy – Satisfaction // Marnie Stern – The Comeback Kid // Sunbear – Enjoy! // Suzie True – Sentimental Scum // Swiss Army Wife – Medium Gnarly // The Tallest Man On Earth – Henry St. // Teke::Teke – Hagata // Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 – These Things Remain Unassigned // TLOOTH – Wet // Unwed Sailor – Mute The Charm // Usurp Synapse – A Vile Contamina // Vivat Virtute – Hold Music // Widowdusk – I Know Where We’re At, Not Where We’re Going // Will Haven – VII // Witch Prophet – Gateway Experience

[hauntedjpegcollection]

benny

wc: 6907 au: college au ch: benny, nomi, maran, bunny

The loud crack wakes him up. His whole body flinches in the lecture hall seat, hands grasping the edges of the plastic desk as though clinging to it. When he comes into consciousness, Ben sucks in a gasp that gets stuck in his chest. The room is blurred together, a haunting mess of colors for a moment that resembles something from a Carpenter movie. Then it swirls together, dissolves into clarity.

His classmates—his professor.

“Sleeping again?” Dr. Langley stares down at him from behind her oversized, turquoise frames. Her pinched turtle mouth goes more thin when he doesn’t immediately respond. Ben can’t find his voice, though. His hand slips over the textbook (it’s cool and smooth, a sensation he’d always loved)—he envisions her plucking it from his desk and then letting it drop next to his sleeping head. The sound rings slightly.

The Air Force had not left him with the best ears.

Benny’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, dry and numb. His lips feel equally as dehydrated, chapped and raw. He hadn’t noticed himself nodding off; and he shouldn’t have anyway. The thermos on his desk (plastered in little stickers of video game characters he couldn’t name) is nearly empty of the acidic black coffee he’d poured into it that morning. He blinks a few times, his cheeks warming as his peers continue to stare—he prepares something to say—

“Jonathan,” the professor drawls out. Whatever he had dies in the firing synapses of his brain as the older woman tosses her shawl around her shoulders. Ben’s shoulders raise like instinct, curl up near his ears. She raises a brow ever so slightly higher on her wrinkled forehead. “Perhaps stop sleeping in the closet you do your work in and get a proper bed?”

A few snickers whisper through the lecture hall. Benny sinks further down the plastic seat, knees knocking against the underside of the desk. His hand slides the textbook toward himself, which feels oddly similar in that moment to a small child finding comfort in a teddy bear. The insult isn’t necessarily a bad one—he’s heard worse. Benny’s said worse to people. Graduate students often come equipped with nasty remarks and thick skin to withstand the volley of them back.

And yet, his eyes stay down for the remainder of the lecture. Open and awake, but still down.

—

When the room clears, Dr. Langley seems unsurprised that he’s still there.

She doesn’t give him attention right away, of course, but her pinched look says disappointed, not surprised. Benny stands in front of her desk as she flits about. Pretending perhaps to clean, to look at the white board, to examine her watch and then finally approach and sit down. She can’t weigh more than ninety pounds and yet she settles herself into the chair with the airs of someone who must rearrange to get comfortable. She crosses a leg and then uncrosses it and then tidies up the stray hairs of her bun and then she leans across the desk and corrects a photo of an ugly white dog on her desk.

“I f-filled out that section for a reason,” Ben says thinly. There is a headache forming behind his left eye. Something piercing and particularly cruel, something with teeth and claws. Something that threatens the rest of his day, when he has so much fucking work to get done.

“Elaborate,” Dr. Langley requests, looking at him from over her those oversized frames. Benny thinks they’re fake. They have that dangling, obnoxious chain so she can take them off and leave them hanging around her neck. He’s never been able to put a pattern together of when she goes without them—to read small print or look somewhere in the distance? He doesn’t like that it feels nebulous. That she just sort of wears glasses when she feels like it.

“Before the st-start of semester. I f-fi-f—” He pauses. She waits. “I filled out—I put down th-that I prefer Ben. You sent out that email—”

“Well,” Dr. Langley draws the word out, severing his sentence before he can finish it. She folds her thin, pale hands in her lap. Makes a triangle shape with them, like a mediation technique. “I ignored that, Jonathan.”

He’d prefer it if she just stood and fucking slapped him. It would be easier to handle. It would be less embarrassing. It would hurt less. He grinds his teeth together so hard he thinks he hears them creaking together. Benny slowly exhales through his nose and then holds up a hand. He makes a flat gesture with it.

“Are you asking me why?” When he nods, she laughs. It’s sharp and condescending, a quick burst of air. A little bit of haughty arrogance, as though he’s challenging her on something. Her ground, in her lecture hall (it’s shared, actually, he knows that, another professor gets this hall in an hour and maybe she has to put the fucking dog photo away when he does).

“I ignored it because it wasn’t for you.” She leans forward on the desk, putting elbows to it. Her shawl slips a bit across her bird like shoulders. She’s wearing a mostly beige ensemble today, something expensively soft looking. “When I ask my students their preferred pronouns, their preferred names, I’m not asking cis white men what their nicknames are.”

For a brief moment, he entertains the thought of leaning on her desk as well. He thinks of spreading his hands over the thin, pale wood, he thinks of how that might make her reconsider. Benny knows what the slightest shift of his heavy weight forward can do, what the reveal of tattooed hands can do, what his awful, sneering smile can do. What he looks like when he’s angry. What his eyes can do to people if they look at them too long. He imagines her shrinking back in fear, imagines her ugly dull brown eyes widening with it.

He imagines his father.

“Please,” Benny snaps out. His hands curl and uncurl by his sides. “It’s n-not a nickname. It’s what I go by.”

“As gender defiant as you seem to be—” her gaze flicks to his hands.

He’d forgotten that Nomi had painted his nails recently, some little swirling design because she was trying to get good enough that neither she or Matilda would have to pay to have them done. Hot embarrassment flashes across him for some reason, even though he’d been happy to let her. Had enjoyed watching her concentrate, had been pleased with the way it looked, had loved her leaning in and giving his knuckles small appreciative kisses. He isn’t embarrassed by any of that and he isn’t sure why Dr. Langley instills such a shame in him anyway.

“It stands. That section of the email was not for you.” Benny tries to remember to breathe. His face feels burned away, flesh peeled, vulnerable bone revealed. He blinks at her owlish expression. There is a hint of condescending pride underneath it all. What an ally. What a good person. What a win for the Transgenders (capital T) of their university, to have this woman on their side.

He thinks of his father again and in that moment of shame and humiliation, he lets himself take one trait from the tree as a vile little treat—Benny slams the door shut when he leaves, just like his father used to, all the time.

—

“You have to tell someone.”

“Nomi,” Ben moans the word out, head falling back like a cords been cut. He slips further in the office chair he’d stolen from the science department. One knee bounces in anxious rhythm as he flicks a page in one of his many notebooks. His messy handwriting, only legible to him, suddenly seems very illegible. Nomi lays on his bed, tantalizingly mostly nude, and not even remotely indulging him (she had, actually, an hour prior, when they’d fallen into that bed and she’d been yanking his jeans open with an excited laugh).

Only, Benny, post sex and in that wildly strangely raw emotion that sometimes came with good sex (and sex with someone who mattered, who cared, who made it good) had opened up about Langley. Had spilled the entire scene to her, word for word. Had imitated the womans delicate, purposeful gestures and her shrunken facial expressions. He sits there now, in the chair he’d stolen with just briefs and socks on and Nomi, there, in a stolen tank top that doesn’t fit laying in his bed.

“No, like, I’m bein’ serious, though? Don’t you have someone you can report her to? That’s heinous of her, Ben. Real heinous.”

He loves the way she clips her words out. Posh accent so cute, especially when she’s annoyed. He wants to think about that, instead of what she’s pressing in on. The wound. The insufferable, never healing gash in his side. The festering, infected, impacted wisdom tooth he’ll never have removed. Benny flicks another page in his notebook, not really looking at it. Fear crawls over his skin, like insects pricking their way through his body hair. He swallows a thick feeling in his throat.

When silence sits between them, Nomi realizes too quickly that something is actually wrong. Not that he was venting about a fucked up teacher or school. He did that plenty, he complained about classes to her constantly. Nomi was subject to non stop discussion of how academia was evil, soul sucking, miserable, for fucking idiots that were too smart. She stands from the bed and crosses to him.

Benny wants to look up at her and feel—like he feels so often—absolutely stunned that she was at all, ever, interested in him. He wants to feel awed and in love and happy and excited and horny and all the other feelings that she manages to make tumble out of his big, blond fucking head. Instead, a prickling sensation in his eyes makes his entire face fall. Instead, he sort of just feels pathetic and exhausted.

“Oh, baby,” she murmurs, brushing a hand through his hair. She pulls him in with arms around his shoulders. Benny’s head tucks into the softness of her stomach. She runs fingers through his stringy hair. “Baby, baby, baby,” she mumbles in mock imitation of him. It makes him shudder, and then Benny does what he probably really needed to do.

He cries for a while and she holds him and lets him.

—

“Nomi told me.” Maran’s voice is a little warbled over the poor connection.

“That fucking snitch,” Benny mumbles, around the string on his hoodie. It’s properly gross and wet with spit, chewed nearly flat between the meanness of his molars. The laptop screen is the only light on in his room, making his already sensitive eyes hurt. It’s bright outside where Maran is—eight in the morning. Benny had set his alarm, because for some reason Maran was an early riser. Liked to swing over to Benji’s mom’s for breakfast like the sneak he was. Benny rarely missed a morning call, even though eight was three his time.

And three am was either precious studying time, or a cat nap.

“Hey!” Maran reprimands. The screen goes briefly dark and then lights up again, with the short adjustment of outside to indoors. His heart flutters a bit to realize he’s started memorizing these places Maran’s at, over there. Kay’s house, a park he likes, his own room. “Don’t call her that.”

“Well she is a sn-snitch,” Benny argues, spitting the string out.

“I’ll break up with you,” Maran threatens. The display shifts around some more, because he simply can’t sit still and his phone isn’t always the best for these sort of long distance video calls. But Benny had needed to see Maran, not just hear him. He had needed to see him smile, to watch the way his freckles wrinkled in his cheeks. He wanted to see the new hair color, he wanted to reach through his laptop and pull Maran back to the US and kiss him.

Benny missed him so much it felt like an ever present migraine. A never ending when will you come back, I miss you, come back that just kept repeating inside the throb of that headache.

“Neither of you are ever br-breaking up with me. I know how t-to make nail bombs.”

“He is so kiddin’ Mr. CIA agent inside the laptop.”

“Fuck the CIA. Fuck the feds too, in case th-they’re also listening. And fuck—”

“Ben,” Maran interrupts with a loud laugh. He’s back outside, the dull, gray light of England spilling around him. It’s nice here, Benny thinks. Come back, where it’s sunny. Please.

“She’s right, you know,” Maran continues. He’s paused, leaned against a brick wall, to look at his phone. Benny can see a visage of himself in the corner and it’s none too flattering. He’s washed out even more pale than he usually is because of the computer light. The hood of his sweatshirt is up, but his blond hair peeks out around his face. He hasn’t been sleeping well—he hasn’t been sleeping—so his eyes are sunk in the sockets. Benny gets nervous looking at himself like that, knowing that’s what Maran is seeing. He scrubs a hand over his face.

“If we h-had a dollar for every time Nomi was fucking right, we’d b-be billionaires.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“You’re needling,” Benny snips back, with narrowed eyes.

“I’m worried,” Maran replies, with just as much edge to his voice. It makes Benny feel guilty, immediately. This wasn’t how he wanted the call to go. He wants to rewind, to go back to when Maran had picked up and said his name in that breathy excited way. He wanted to tell a funny story about Lark to make him laugh. He wanted to ask about how Maran’s mom was—who made him endlessly nervous, because she knew about him now and he wasn’t sure what to do with that info.

Benny’s eyes stray away from the laptop for the first time since Maran’s face had appeared on screen.

“Mar,” he starts. He has to clear his throat suddenly, because it feels tight and wet. “If I tr-tried to talk about it to someone—they’d ju-just ask—I don’t want to have to ta-talk about it.”

“But it’s—”

“Drop it,” he seethes between tight teeth. “I’m n-not explaining to s-some fucking admin that I don’t go by m-my first name because of my dad.” It feels strangely juvenile to refer to him that way. Sometimes, to Benny, his father was Jonathan. He was Jonathan Lee Benson, who went by both names professionally because he liked the way it sounded. They take a man seriously when he’s got a good name, that’s why I gave you mine, Jonathan Lee Benson Jr. has a ring to it and they’ll respect you for that.

His father was Jonathan, which was why he couldn’t be Jonathan.

Maran’s eyes look soft and unhurt. Benny’s bite had not broken skin, but his stomach still felt sour with it. He rubs palms across his eyes again, sinks further into the bed. He shifts the laptop so it’s closer. Benny wedges himself against the corner, so he can stay seated, without really putting in effort.

“I’m sorry,” he finally says.

“I love you, Ben,” Maran replies in such an honest way that it makes Benny feel golden all over. Worthy of that sentence, even when he’d been so nasty just moments before. He’s briefly reminded of laying in bed with Nomi, her hair messy and him feeling like he could say anything and she’d still feel the exact same about him. Benny sniffs and rubs his knuckles underneath his nose.

He repeats it back, even when it’s odd on his tongue and he can’t imagine it has that same effect for Maran. It can’t feel the same, like warm honey poured all over. But Maran still smiles at him, that blinding beautiful boyish smile that makes the world feel a little less dirty. England doesn’t seem so fucking gray with him there.

“Do you wanna come skateboarding?” Maran asks, in a gently fond voice. It makes Benny huff with something resembling a laugh. He nods and watches the image of the audio call go wonky. He feels disorientated for a moment as the view swings to the ground. Maran puts a foot on the board—and then shoves himself off. And then Benny hears the electronic crackle of wind against the mic. The rumble of the skateboard on sidewalk.

Maran brings the phone closer to himself. He must tuck it into a shirt pocket, because Benny can hear him breathing as well.

And Benny also doesn’t realize that at some point he falls dead asleep. That he’s pulled swiftly and blissfully entirely under, into REM sleep that is thankfully free of any dreams that he’ll remember. Because he’s asleep, he also doesn’t realize that Maran stays on the line, for as long as he can, sitting and watching Ben sleep. He has no idea that Maran has skated all the way to his favorite area. That he sits on a brick bridge, feet dangling pleasantly over bubbling water.

He has no idea that Maran is holding that whispered I love you inside himself and feeling that exact same warm honeyed feeling.

Maran only ends the call because Nomi’s face appears.

“I know who I can talk to,” she says when he picks up.

***

Dr. Sullivan stares at Nomi with the flat, unflinching gaze of someone entirely practiced in telling others to fuck off and die. She sits, with legs kicked up onto her desk, chair leaned back. One hand rests on her desk, while the other toys a lighter. Thumb smoothing over it and over it and over it. In contrast, Nomi stands there, in front of the professors desk with all the aura of someone who might crumble if pressed into too hard. That tears are definitely somewhere hiding behind her big, milk tea colored eyes. She tries to angle her chin to be slightly more imposing, since Dr. Sullivan is sitting and she is standing.

The effect does not work, and one of the professors black brows raises.

“Is campus security stuck on a child’s level crossword puzzle again—who the fuck are you?”

“I didn’t know this campus had security,” Nomi replies.

“Well you’re not a student, then.”

“Oh,” she blinks rapidly. Nomi glances down at herself. She’d tried very hard to wear something university appropriate. So she’d thrown on a skirt and tights and a large cardigan—she’d looked at herself in the mirror and felt like she was in a Halloween costume of a girl who maintained her Pinterest with an iron fist and had three study Intagrams. Nomi smooths her hands down the front of the cardigan. It has stars printed on it. “How can you tell?”

“Well, usually students are smart. Emphasis on usually. Do you need me to repeat the question slower?”

“Could I ask you,” Nomi’s words run right up along after Dr. Sullivan’s. “Why do they call you Bunny when you are deeply unpleasant?”

Bunnies make her think of Benny actually. His affection for rabbits was one of the first things about him that had stood out in her mind. People met Benny and knew him for many things; the dark scorpion tattooed on his neck, his double major in school, the parties he liked throwing at his apartment, that he was a little unnerving and sort of scary and very mean.

Nomi had equated Ben and rabbits before any of that. She had noticed the tattoo of one on his ankle by accident. She noticed that he had a baseball hat with a silhouette of one. The rare occasions people caught Ben in a photograph, he would make ears with his fingers above his head, stick his tongue out in a nasty smile.

“Where’d you heart that?” Dr. Sullivan doesn’t look fazed hearing the name at all. The lighter moves in her fingers smoothly. One of her feet shift on the desk. Nomi tilts her head and points over her shoulder. Her eyes are innocent, magnified by those giant round glasses that sit low on her nose. She has a messenger bag with a big fluffy rabbit keychain on it, slung over her shoulder that she softly adjusts.

“I heard someone say, Bunny Sullivan, that cunt—and I was like, oh, spiffy. That’s the Dr. Sullivan I’m looking for.”

The professor continues to stare at her. She taps her finger a few times on her desk. Dr. Sullivan has rather manicured hands, Nomi thinks. They look neither masculine nor feminine—not the way men sometimes have blocky, stubby fingers, or the way women will possess long, trim ones. Not necessarily the same way Lark can have those pretty, thin fingers and Mouse can have those square tipped ones either. It feels odd to focus on Dr. Sullivan’s genderless hand so much, but her eyes make Nomi nervous. The aura of being impossible to pin makes her vastly more intimidating than she’d ever imagined possible.

Nomi thinks she’d like to find a way to take that energy for herself.

“I don’t think I like you.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Nomi snorts. “You seem like a person to make a decision very quickly.” She steps forward and lowers herself down into the chair opposite Dr. Sullivan’s desk. The office smells like coffee and cologne and books, which is a smell Nomi finds comforting. It has a home like sense to it. Bunny, who does not live up to her name—or maybe she does, because bunnies are nasty, they bite—simply continues to stare.

“I’m Nomi.”

“Okay.”

“You know my boyfriend.”

“I can fucking assure you, I do not.”

Nomi leans forward, her hands curling over her knees. She doesn’t like having to say Benny’s full name out loud—isn’t that the point of it all? Isn’t that why she’s here? But who knows how many Benny’s exist out there in the world, on this very campus? To her, the name would forever be his and anyone else out there would have to find a new one. But to the professor? So instead, Nomi clears her throat and says the full name awkwardly, eyes flickering around the ephemera on Dr. Sullivan’s desk.

“If that’s your boyfriend, firstly my fucking condolences. And secondly, when the fuck was his name anything other than Benson?”

It makes Nomi lean back in the chair. She lifts her hands, as if grasping the very concept that Dr. Sullivan has accidentally landed upon.

“That’s where I need your help.”

—

The conversation is relatively short because Nomi is to the point and Dr. Sullivan doesn’t ask questions. She shifts here and there, rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Pockets the lighter and then yanks open a drawer to look inside it briefly. Once it’s closed, she makes a gesture with her hand. Nomi gathers that means they’re done.

As she stands, however, Nomi cannot help but say, “I know you and Ben slept together.”

She isn’t exactly sure where that statement comes from and why.

She had been thinking about it the entire time, which felt a little voyeuristic and weird. But thinking of the professor and Benny together was not the same as when they’d be at a party and he’d shift awkwardly and look at someone and she’d know that very someone was once a someone that Ben slept with. It was not the same as a pretty girl with artfully disheveled hair or even a handsome man with pretty eyelashes and it wasn’t really the gender either that mattered at the end of the day, especially to Nomi—it was simply that Ben had told her about Dr. Sullivan in a way that made it more like an enjoyable story.

Kind of the craziest encounter of my life, he’d said. No awkward guilty twist to his mouth, or big expressive regret on his features. Bunny is insane, I didn’t think I’d walk straight again.

Dr. Sullivan had been fairly nonchalant the entire encounter. The fidgeting had felt more prompted by boredom than anything else. Her button up was silky looking, open at her throat. She had a blazer on the back of the chair that looked comfortably expensive but worn, like it was a favorite. Her hair was streaked with the sort of gray that made someone look dignified and handsome.

Nomi’s statement made her twitch so minuscule that perhaps anyone else might not even have noticed. Whether it was embarrassment, amusement or respect, Nomi could not say.

“How the fuck did you get into this building?” Dr. Sullivan replies instead. It makes Nomi fish out the lanyard from her bag. She dangles it proudly. A badge swings back and forth.

“RFID is ridiculously easy to copy. I bought a reader from a hotel night auditor who was selling it cheap; we’d been friends online for a while, actually so it was fine. I took Ben’s badge and made my own—the photo is my passport photo.” She steps closer, in case Dr. Sullivan wants to look. She makes it evident that she does not by continue staring at Nomi. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the secret labs that he has access too. I just didn’t feel like being held up in getting to your office. And also,” Nomi loops the lanyard around her neck. She steps back and raises her arms in a sweet little tada! pose.

“I just love these things. Don’t they make you feel so, like, official, yeah?”

For the first time, Bunny smiles. It is just a simple lift of the corner of her mouth, but it is a smile.

***

Josie is having a bad day.

From the chai latte that had been prepared wrong at the local cafe she frequented regularly (and what was the point in going to a family owned business instead of a corporation, if they couldn’t get a chai latte correct? Which was what she’d said to the manager as they remade it, and she felt vindicated with that statement still) to the email she’d not opened yet, glaring at her from her phone.

The subject line had been simply “Ad hoc meeting” and the little preview line had been her name and “I believe this is a discussion best had in person”. It made her sweat under her arms immediately, which was awful for the cotton sweater that she’d selected that morning. Truman had kissed her on the cheek goodbye as he left for work, careful of the soft cream blush she used to make her sallow skin look a little more alive. He was truly the only good part of her day and she’d still been sad when he’d turned and she saw that little balding spot. Hair growth for men was a frequent Google search of hers these days.

She hip checks the door to her lecture hall open, foot steps a frantic pace as she starts for the desk.

That is occupied. That is occupied with none other than the long legged, cold eyed Bunny Sullivan.

“Oh,” she says in a voice far too surprised. That moment of unintentional weakness feels like an immediate target; and Bunny has the nose of a shark. Josie thinks of her that way. Like a giant hammerhead that keeps circling above them all, too much sway and too much ego. Josie’s steps slow as she gets to her desk. She notices a box on it. All of her things are inside. Her stomach starts to turn cold. Her fingers feel numb at the tips. Truman had so much hair when we’d first met, is an odd intrusive thought as she stares at Bunny.

“Dr. Sullivan. What a pleasant surprise.”

“You’re a bad liar,” Bunny replies, a fist tucked under her chin. She spins a stapler on the desk. “I’m taking this, by the way. I didn’t see anything else I wanted in your junk—but I owe Happy a new one. Broke the last, slapped it shut so hard it cracked. You know he parked in my spot for a solid month after I did that? He is such a cocky bastard, don’t you think?”

“Diondre is—”

“Oh, so it’s not just your students?”

“Pardon?”

Josie remembers accidentally finding herself in conversation with Bunny at a holiday party once before. Prior to that exact moment, she’d always thought people were lying when it came to Dr. Sullivan. Oh, not that she was an enormous, painfully rude bitch. Josie believed that—but she thought that people had to be exaggerating her wit. She thought a verbal spar with someone could be fun, because Josie was used to sniffing her way through them with her nose tilted up. She was usually the one winning.

And that holiday party had proved her so instantly, miserably wrong. Bunny spoke like she had daggers instead of words. She feinted in and quickly stab, stab, stabbed at things people said. She kicked the corpse of the conversation aside and started a new one. She made Josie feel small and wilting.

Bunny stands from the desk. Her hand closes around the edge of the box with all of Josie’s little things. It gets shoved to the edge. Josie has to reach out, to stop it from tipping over.

“When you’re back from your leave,” Bunny starts, straightening to a height that is far too willowy. She bends so easily over Josie, who is in ballet flats, who has always been shorter than everyone else and never found that a detriment until this precise moment. “You’re never fucking with one of mine again. And you’ll know which ones are my mine—you know which one is my mine, in your awful, boring, underfunded excuse of a course—”

“Dr. Sullivan, I’m sure—”

“You can call me Bunny,” she says, her smile like a threat. “And you call him Ben.” There is a long, stale silence that falls between the two professors. Bunny looks inside the box and then tilts her head, with raised surprised brows. “Actually, I’m taking this too.” She plucks a notebook free. CATS, COFFEE AND CURRICULUM is printed across the front.

Then Bunny walks away from Josie, the sound of her shoes clipped and loud on the lecture hall floor.

***

Nomi is panting into Maran’s mouth, their faces close as their bodies slide like puzzle pieces fitting together. Not yet kissing, the lingering taste of it on her tongue still. The concentration on his brow is so endearing it makes her heart twinge. His hands roam endlessly, like he cannot find one place to put them on her when he wants all of her. His body between her thighs feels solid and warm and good in a way that is making her dizzy. She breaks the nearly there contact of their mouths to tilt her head back and moan his name in the way she knows encourages him for harder.

“I missed you so much,” is how he groans, head tucked into her neck. Her hands draw up his back, the weight of him pressing into her, down on her, suddenly getting her right fucking there.

And when they’re done, messy with the blankets all sorts of tangled around them, she spends the same amount of time pressing kisses across his face. Maran’s deep, magenta blush only makes her continue. She kisses each brow and then his nose and pulls back simply to grin down at him. His hand nestles to her lower back, fingers soothing. She doesn’t usually like the tacky sensation of sweaty bodies like this, but she had missed him like a physical part of her had been pulled out from her ribs when he’d boarded that fucking plane.

She lays across his chest, both their hearts slowly calming down together.

“I missed you too,” she tells him. Maran’s hand cups her cheek. She leans against it. The eight hour plane ride had been worth it. Not just for the sex—but Jesus, did she realize how much she had missed sex with Maran, because it was a different breed than with Benny, it was this hungry romantic thing that made her feel like a paperback heroine in a romance novel, the kind of protagonist that always cums first. But for this, to be on him, to be close to him and seeing him.

And their moms meeting tomorrow, which felt awkward and funny at the same time. It had been a good excuse to take a holiday to the UK.

“Will you dye my hair for me tomorrow?” Maran asks, sleepily, his eyes shuttered for a moment. She leans in, breasts pressed against his chest so sensually that it makes his eyes snap open.

“Maran,” she says, mouth in a wide grin. Her lipstick has smudged in a way that is erotic. She’s left evidence of herself all over him. “I love you.”

She makes a soft squeaking sound when she is bundled into powerful arms and rolled onto her back and then the kisses are returned, all over her.

—

Sounds wake her up. Nomi is usually a heavy sleeper; Benny often was able to put music on in the background while he studied and she slept in his bed, curled around his pillows like they were him. He had an odd laundry-scent about him, like he was habitual about keeping things clean, and she liked that. But it’s not Benny’s bed she’s in, nor his pillow she has crushed to her chest.

She blinks a few times. Her hair is messy, in her face. She swats at it, groans and lifts herself up a bit. Sunlight pours across the floor from a window, but Maran smartly has his bed pushed against a wall so that light hasn’t touched them just yet. The sound of traffic outside is light.

“Sorry,” Maran whispers, fingers brushing hair back from her face and gently tucking dark blue strands into place behind her ear. Nomi blinks more, makes a sound again, because she hasn’t found words just yet. She looks at the phone in his hand, a call waiting screen there. Nomi forfeits the pillow to scoot closer and lean her head on Maran’s chest.

“Who?” she mutters. Sleep is just a moment away, she can feel it. Not really conscious, entirely. Her body feels bone deep tired from the travel and the sex they’d had…more than once her first night there. She yawns and scrubs her cheek against his soft skin. Nomi’s hand sneaks across his abdomen and finds a comfortable spot to rest, right underneath his belly button. His body hair is a little coarse, and it’s texture feels oddly soothing.

“Benny,” he answers softly. She makes a noise to prompt him further. “He always calls me at eight.”

“Why are you up at eight?”

“Because he calls me at eight.”

Nomi braces herself up a bit more to look at Maran. He’s bright when he’s awake. A morning person, for some reason. He looks unbelievably handsome in the dull wash of the phone light. Only he would be able to pull that off. She leans in and presses a kiss to his jaw. Moves it to his lips. They are as sweet tasting as they were before, when he’d kissed her in the airport. When he’d kissed her on the train, and in his bedroom. When he’d kissed her, their hips rolling together.

The call connects at that very moment.

“Wow, keep going.” His voice sounds wavy and distant. Nomi tilts her head, lips still pressed to Maran to catch a glimpse of the tiny version of their boyfriend on the screen. She briefly covers it with her palm, making exaggerated kissing sounds. “Fuck you, p-put Maran on.”

“Someone is in a bad mood,” Nomi sings, falling back into the comfortable spot she’s nestled into Maran’s chest.

“I’m h-having a good day actually.”

“What happened?”

“I bl-blew something up in th-the living room and made Xavier almost p-piss.”

Nomi doesn’t contribute to the early morning conversation. In fact, she falls asleep quickly again. Comforted that Benny, alone as he is without them, is having a good day because he blew something up. Comforted, really, deep down, by the thought that Benny without them is still Benny and okay. She falls asleep with her hand tucked onto the softest vulnerable part of Maran’s stomach and both of them talking.

***

“You look like shit, Benson.”

“I showered,” Benny explains, gesturing toward the abnormally fluffy hair on his head. It’s light and airy like downy duck feathers, maybe because he’d stolen Lark’s fancy hair products. It made him smell like cold, spring water which must drive hot art students crazy, or something. He jerks his hand back and forth over the top of his head in an attempt to make it the greasy mess it usually is. Bunny watches with flat eyes.

“Do that regularly and you might get a third significant other. Bit fucking greedy don’t you think? Have to start saving some of the cute ones for your other pathetic STEM peers.”

“Two is enough,” Benny replies languidly, throwing his legs out in front of him and getting comfortable. “She’s visiting him in the UK. I’m sle-sleeping better, believe it or not.”

“I didn’t ask, and I don’t care.”

“That reminds me.” He suddenly heaves himself up and out of the chair. Benny pats himself down, like he’s looking for something, when he knows exactly where it is. He holds up a finger. Bunny looks horribly unamused, in a way that actually means he should hurry. So he does. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls a card from it. Benny leans forward and slowly puts it on her desk. He uses one finger to slide it toward her.

“Does this look like a trash bin?”

“Sometimes. When yo-you’re really busy.”

Bunny leans over to look at the baseball card. It’s worn thin at the edges, the print on it dull and old. It’s yellowing here and there, because he’d never bothered to put it in a plastic sleeve. Benny feels suddenly like snatching it back and shoving it into his pocket. Nevermind, he thinks. Half out of embarrassment and half because…

“That was the f-first baseball card I bought with my own money,” he explains. Benny shoves the chair behind him so he can start for the door. “It’s Antonio Reyes. Yo-You don’t fuck with baseball, do you?”

“I reiterate, Benson. Does this look like the fucking trash bin?”

“Reyes wa-was my favorite when I was a kid. Batted so bad it was nearly fucking negative. He g-got caught with his head between a Brazilian models legs at a club.” Benny’s grin goes lopsided and amused. It doesn’t have his usual sneak to it, not the glint of meanness that he carries like a barrier. “The Brazilian model was a man—and the c-club was a gay club. His team had a p-press conference saying he wasn’t a faggot—well.” Benny tilts his hand back and forth.

“They didn’t u-use the word, Reyes did. He stood up and said, actually, I love sucking cock. And he got dumped p-pretty quick after that.”

Bunny stares at the card. He doesn’t tell her that it has survived nearly a decade in his wallet.

“Anyway,” Benny turns toward the door to her office. He yanks it open. “Thanks, Dr. Sullivan.” Then he closes it too quickly for her to reply, no matter what sort of reply it would have been.

—

The card goes into the trash next to Bunny’s desk.

She replies to a few emails. None of them get a nice response.

She sips her cooling, sludge like black coffee. She thinks about the cigarettes in her desk. Bunny looks out the window to the side, where fat, pink clouds slide across a dying horizon. She replies to another email, deletes a few more that aren’t worth even reading.

Then she leans over and quickly finds the card in the trash. She places it on the desk and stares down at Antonio Reyes. There is a thumb print in the corner. She can imagine a smaller version of the man who had just left her office—not thoroughly, mind, because she doesn’t have the mental fucking energy to truly imagine and nor would she really want to imagine Benson at fourteen, in a bodega, using whatever shit allowance he got as a kid to buy this card— but she can imagine.

The importance of a stolen piece of queerness, to someone like Benny. She can imagine, but she doesn’t because something in her heart feels maladjusted and thumping wrong, what that sudden filthy evocative, proudly loud statement had done for someone like Benny as a kid. The loss of an entire professional career, because Antonio Reyes had simply refused to deny what it meant to be himself. Even if himself was a fucking weirdo that sucked off models at gay clubs in the seventies. To each their own, or whatever.

She tucks the baseball card next to a stack of books.

Bunny keeps the card safe inside a hardcover copy of one of her favorites.

[thegreatobsesso]

Happy STS!

I'm having a tired brain day and failing at coming up with a good question, so just give me something you wrote recently. A few lines you think I'd get a kick out of, a few lines you got a kick out of, whatever. Share something tasty with me 💜

I love you! You've left me some amazing comments about Riley/Nauxial so here's an intensely spoilery, extremely tasty bit at comes at the very end of book one. 😈 It's more than a couple of lines but I kinda want you to know this happens. The context is that Nauxie has just finally gotten his wish and taken the body of someone close to Riley, with her help. So he's alive and outside her head for the first time in the story!

Riley POV

“You’re so quiet,” he said, looking into her eyes fondly. He reached up, caressed her face. “I’m no longer privy to your inner workings and I miss it already. Tell me what you’re thinking.” 

He spoke to her like a pet. He always had. She had no desire to share her thoughts for his amusement, so she reached behind his head and pulled his lips to hers. 

It surprised him; that was good. It only took him a moment to recover himself, and when he did he gripped her tighter. She opened her mouth and pulled him closer; let her magic out and sent it around him. He felt it as he slipped his tongue against hers. It drew a ragged breath from deep in his - Mark's - lungs. She moaned softly into his mouth before he could start to think. 

An echo of him was still inside her. She could still feel it. Just a single thread, ready to snap. His burning blood; his relentless hunger. 

His magic. 

She’d spent enough time hunched over Petri dishes the last few years to know what Extraction felt like, and had enough practice in shifting fields to know she could reach it on her own. She could probably only sustain it for a few seconds, but a few seconds was all she’d need. 

She clamped down and pulled. 

And when he jerked back, his lust already doused by the shock, it was too late. She was all through every cell in his body. He’d let her in, just like she did him, all those years ago. 

“You can’t,” he gritted out, even as his skin shriveled and greyed before her. “You need me.” 

“I need your power,” she said, setting the spell loose and tearing it out. 

It ripped through her, changing her into something like the monster he’d been - powers she’d never known and could never have imagined, running through her veins, shorting out her cells, overcoming her body. Her muscles threatened to burst with the strain. 

Maybe it felt like this for Callie; maybe just a little bit like this, with Peter’s solitary power. Nauxial had them all and more. 

He drained out of Mark’s eyes and the body that held him crumpled to the ground. 

In that sliver of a moment where his soul - or whatever it was that made a person alive - was suspended between life and death, she turned back to her own power, now buried underneath a teeming mass of stolen ones. She found his dying spirit, took hold, and flung it far beyond the in-between place where he might be able to reach her, into whatever lied beyond, into what she hoped was absolutely nothing or worse. 

The work wasn’t over; every power he’d ever gained was burning in her body, churning like a wild sea. She bent over, breathed, and directed it. She saw where it fit and led it to intertwine where it belonged; she drew in deep breaths and changed. 

An unnatural amalgamation. A monstrous mess. Everything he’d been, inside her now. Twisted. Violent. Wrong. 

When it was done, the air smelled different. The world around her looked small and malleable. If she raised her arms and let herself go she could reshape the earth, or break it beyond recognition. She was the monster now. 

That was for Mark, she thought, as her synapses fizzled and Nauxial’s mangled magic settled into her bones. It was made of pure spite; it tasted sweet, like revenge. 

She breathed in the new world and wondered, distantly, if it would be the last human thing she’d ever feel. 

[pietrodart]

I think the Monet and Pietro pairing is good but I dunno... Theres something that just feels so soooooo special about Emily and Pietro..you know what I mean? I like the contrast in personalities. Emily being sweet and kind while Pietro being more brash and smug. You understand what I mean right? And they looked so good together too.

i get what you mean! i do find monet and pietro a good pairing and i love them, they work really well together and their dynamic is interesting since they are so similar, but yeah, emily and pietro were something else.

like you said, it's probably the contrast in personalities. emily being a more inexperienced hero who is kind despite everything bad that happens, who tries being gentle and cheerful while also having the courage and urge to kill enemies, while pietro is more of a smug, rude at times character who knows what he's doing and talks about violence but doesn't proceed with it...it's an interesting dynamic and i miss them so much urrrgh