#suffering tw

[fortitudina]

*OOC. ------ I have exactly one week until my wedding and I am so burned out from getting everything sorted for it... Today has been my first chilled day and although I started my day off well, my body 180'd on me and brought upon me pain and suffering this afternoon. It better not do this next week, I swear.

[heirbane]

81. red <3

one word prompts.

He wasn't going to die. That almost made it worse.

Gaius had, throughout his years, faced many a foe - his own people included. Such a thing was not common, but to see soldiers attempt to turn sides and instigate violence came part and parcel with being in Garlemald.

It never ended well for them. Even then, it was a surge of instinct and decades of training that had him able to look his comrades in the face as he disemboweled them, a terminus est tearing them limb from limb. It was not until they staggered to their knees, the sound of blood bubbling into their throat, that the legatus truly realized he had bloodied his blade on his own countrymen.

Such a fate was deserved, he had once believed. Maybe he had gotten soft over the course of his own betrayal: their actions almost seemed pitiable, not damnable. One didn't defect without a reason, and he was no longer blind to the Empire's cause.

They were not perfect. Their ends did not justify their means, something he had once believed with ease. He knew that now.

This was the cost of returning to a land he had abandoned. This was the price for betrayal, he believed: the cold was no longer a friend but an ache in his bones, the corpses of those he left behind no longer stagnant and abandoned.

He hadn't heard their approach. The rustle of fabric was lost in the wind whistle; the slurred speech ignored in his deaf ear, softened under a thick woolen hat.

He was so ensnared with attempting to scrounge parts and pieces from the abandoned road machina that Gaius only caught 'Garlemald' - and by the time he turned his head, the rotting maw of a tempered soldier was upon him.

It was Hyur in form but not in reality. Blackened talons and sharpened teeth ripped through the fabric of his coat with ease, causing the man to stumble away from the machina he had been harvesting from.

Gaius pulled a knife from his waistband. He stared into the glazed, shrunken eyes of a soldier half his age, uniform baggy on his decaying form, and stabbed his knife into the man's throat.

He gurgled, blackened blood spilling from his frostbitten lips. With another yank of his weapon, the soldier's neck opens, sinew and muscle ripping apart against the serrated edge of the blade.

Gaius had scarcely caught his breath and gathered his wits when the corpse began to smoke and disappear, glittering, soot-like aether dissipating into the air.

He hoped the parts the Alliance wanted was worth the scare. He patted his pockets, ensuring the pieces were still there, and motioned to stand. It wasn't until he pulled his hand from within that he noticed the slick against his leather gloves.

The tempered man hadn't simply torn his coat. The blood on his glove was too fresh to belong to the corpse, and it took little more than him setting his sights on it for his adrenaline to wane.

He was back in a cot in Eorzea, a gray-skinned Elezen unwrapping the gauze from his wounded, misshapen arm, barely able to focus to truly be aware that the appendage belonged to him. The same coppery nausea crept into his throat.

A gloved hand peeled back what remained of his coat and underlayers, already wet with blood and beginning to freeze. The skin here wasn't red with burns but with viscera, a palm-sized strip of flesh ripped from his abdomen and weeping into the winter air.

( "Keep your hands out've it," Valdeaulin had snarled. "You'll make it fester."

What was it with wounds, he thought, that had sufferers wish to touch? What part of their mind saw their own body, bloodied and disfigured, and wished to ensure it truly belonged to them?

Gaius wasn't sure. But he was back there again, smelling of soot and ash and sickness, staring at the charred, half-there remains of his left arm and wanting desperately to ensure it wasn't his. )

It had been his. And this was his, too. How far had he fallen, he thought, to be wounded by one of his own so easily - and to be pulled into his ruminations by so little of a reminder. He recovered the exposed tissue, pressing his hand against the fabric in an attempt to slow the bleeding.

He had gotten the part. It was little more than an ignition for the engine, something they hoped to use in one of the dilapidated ceruleum heaters. And he would not return to become a nuisance to those who had been without for too long already.

He grit his teeth, swallowing down the bile at the memory of his broken body, and steeled his resolve. He would handle this himself.

He had to.

[uncanny-tranny]

Fat people deserve mobility aids, too. No matter if it's connected to their fatness or not, because having a mobility issue that is connected to one's fatness won't change that they're still fat and still have the issue at hand. Fat people don't deserve to "tough it out" because fatness should be this divine punishment doled out to those who "deserve" it. Fat disabled people deserve to have the peace of mind that they can exist in whatever way is most comfortable and accessible to them

[whydoihavetoart]

something lgbt is happening

[ruporas]

need to exist in your warmth (id in alt)

[ovegakart]

a new appendage appears (dun na nan naaan)

[ahotpeaceofshit]

[mintybagels]

finally got some time to make somethin :3

[sketchywasteland]

hollow knight in cult of the lamb style! just a lil thing ive been working on since january. almost all the chars are here lol

(def click for better quality, it got crunched badly)

[linoyes]

LEE KNOW + "JJAM" M/V

[heirbane]

Very few survived after they began to bargain. It was very human to look at death and plead, and the concept that Anima had done just the same as she slaughtered the creature made his mouth taste sour and his mind reel. Under it all, there was humanity there. Under it all, Varis was begging.

Emperor or not, he was human -- and he didn't survive, either.

[hinamie]

the same flame that burns you; birthed you first

p1

[thehealingsystem]

if you ever wonder why I don't interact with the traumagenic community as a traumagenic system this is why

[noughticalcrossings]

Astyanax

[adnrewminyard]

imagine being kevin day, son of exy, born and bred to be a cog in the well-oiled machine that is the edgar allan ravens. all you know being the routine of practice and practice and practice and performance and victory alongside those you call brothers.

-and then one day you wake up in your estranged father's apartment between a bottle of painkillers and a bottle of vodka and there is a knot of bandages where your future used to be. you don't wake up at 4am anymore. you sleep until noon and vomit the remainders of life as you knew it into unfamiliar toilets. you watch orange and white clash against each other from sidelines you haven't touched since you started growing facial hair.

your brother doesn't ask you to come home. you would come if he asked. the days are longer here and the food is too rich. the colors are too harsh, the language barrier is too much. you speak and no one understands.

they feel sorry for you, but not for what you have lost, instead for what you have suffered. you try to show them what belonging means, to sever parts of yourself to fit inside a uniform, but they don't understand the necessity of the blade the way your brothers did. they don't understand that suffering feels religious if you do it right.

the therapist tells you it's survivor's guilt but the only survivors you can see are on the court in black and red and they read your eulogy after the game at a press conference. you are not a survivor in any way that matters anymore. how treacherous your heart is for continuing to beat when you can't even hold your lifeline in your hand without dropping it.

you want to go home but your key doesn't open the same door anymore. you want to sit beside your brother but there is no space on his side of the table. you want to be a raven but you are a fox.

you grieve for connection until there is a knife where your neck guard used to sit. you grieve for your life until a boy offers to show you how it feels to survive. you offer to show him how it feels to live. he tells you he won't sever parts of himself to fit the uniform, but there are telltale bloodstains in the fabric from long before you asked.

you wake up at 4am again. you take turns vomiting in the toilet, you when the alcohol level dips too low and him when his smile runs out. he doesn't speak your language but he understands it. he keeps the car running when you visit the therapist. he keeps an eye on your back to watch the 02 on your jersey turn orange. the colors don't seem as harsh anymore.

he offers you safety. he offers you belonging. he offers you the only thing he knows how to give, the only thing you know how to take.

he offers you a lifeline. you pick it up with your right hand.

[alexassanart]

inspired by this post... happy iwtv ep5 day everybody and good luck to us all