#teenage solidarity
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
lolottes · 1 year ago
Text
Constantine the only one who knows about Shazam: oh hell no, he has two
DC X DP PROMT
Now you've probably seen this too many times than you can count but
Danny phantom and Shazam bullcraping the justice league about being thousands of years old. And them genuinely believing them and going to them for advise
Tumblr media
Danny Fenton (aka danny phantom) knew that the moment he stepped into the watchtower's meeting room he was f**ked. Atleast that's what he thought.
He had been working with the justice league for a few months now but had never been properly introduced so when he walked into the room and lay eyes upon the 'eldest' man in the room he knew that he'd have to make a plan, and quickly.
_________________________
Billy Batson (aka Shazam) knew that eventually the jig would be up amd he'd be exposed.
And he felt for certain that the eldrich God who had just walked through the door to the meeting room would be the reason it all went up in flames.
___________________________
They bothe tried to stall thier inevitable meeting, but it was very hard considering that they were expected to atleast once interact with each other.
So Danny did something stupid, it was a 50/50 chance it would work. When he finally greeted Captain Marvel he immediately dove in for a hug and said "Cap! It has been much too long!"
And Billy being the desperate child he is not wanting to be outed, huged back and exchanged his pleasentries.
An understanding passed between the two when thier eyes met. Please play along
2K notes · View notes
Text
main take aways from Halloween (1978) rewatch:
michael myers is canonically 21??? this bitch should be at the club
*sees tiddies* ***MURDEROUS RAMPAGE NOISES***
that's it that's the movie
outside of the fact that everyone who has sex is murdered by the narrative, this is a surprisingly chill portrayal of female sexuality? these teen girls are horny and actively enjoying Getting It On with their boytoys. no pushy boyfriends sneaking in through their bedroom windows--these ladies are taking the initiative to sneak out and GET SOME. one of them gets laid and then immediately orders her boyfriend to get her a beer. (yes she gets Slashered soon afterward, but so does the boyfriend so honestly, gender equality.) yes the Final Girl is the only one not having sex, but she's not bullied for that, nor are her friends slut shamed except possibly by being murdered by the narrative
actually the only character who is shown being morally condemned on-screen is michael myers. specifically FOR his violent overreaction to other people's sex lives. (people he is spying on). metaphorically, the villain is American Puritanism sticking its judgy nose into other people's business.
aka Michael Myers Is A Republican
but actually the real villain is the doctor. guy's a judgemental, shaming, pathologizing asshole. and he's been in charge of michael's care since he was SIX YEARS OLD? kid never had a chance. i'd go on a killing spree too
also the parents. where are the parents? it's halloween night and all the teenage girls are home babysitting their younger siblings? come to think of it, michael's first victim was his own older sister, whom he killed while she was babysitting him. teen girls are really shouldering a labour burden here. maybe parentification is the true villain
side note: mike commits his first murder wearing a clown costume...which is never referenced again? his 'iconic' costume is a generic mask and wig and jumpsuit, when we coulda had a Killer Clown Michael Myers??? travesty
i like how the Final Girl and her friend casually smoke weed in her car. yeah she's an honor student and her friend is the sheriff's daughter. yeah they smoke weed. so what it's 1978
(to reiterate, mike is 21 and should be at the club. im not saying he shouldn't be rampaging, im saying it's sad that he broke out, tasted freedom for the first time in his life, and immediately snuck back into his childhood home to go rampaging. let's have a remake where he goes to a nightclub and has a few beers. maybe some slutty dancing. then rampage)
oh no he's hot
Tumblr media Tumblr media
#HALLOWEEN#halloween the movie#michael myers#do you think he's a mike? mikey? to his friends? if slashers had friends?#i'll be honest i was expecting this movie to be way more of a bitch to its female characters#i mean yeah they died but so did some dudes#there's just a lack of cattiness compared to the way most later movies portrayed teenage girls idk#yeah the Final Girl is a Virgin and a Bookworm. but there's no bullying or any strong sense that's she's morally superior to everyone else#mostly she AND the other girls feel a bit sorry for her lack of a social life. one even tries to set her up with a date to the school dance#solidarity! trying to get your nerd friend laid!#overall it's just teenagers being teenagers and then a slasher comes in and ruins everything with his Lack Of Chill#like yeah dude sometimes teenagers have sex. get over it#also something to be said about how while the girl who survives is the one who isn't sexually active and dresses conservatively...#ultimately those things aren't ENOUGH to prevent her from being targeted#you could say that the other girls 'provoked' the villain (the same way women irl are so often accused of provoking their attackers)#but ultimately that doesn't keep the Final Girl safe. it just delays the inevitable.#because violent men never need excuses. no matter how eager society is to provide them.#ultimately she is at the mercy of the same violent whims because it was never her behavior that invited the violence.#gendered violence doesn't need an invitation.#also she doesn't save herself the doctor saves her#it's not her actions or choices that put her in danger OR save her from it--once again it is the whim of a man#no this wasn't intended to be a feminist movie it's just fun how you could argue it that way
4K notes · View notes
cyandocs · 7 months ago
Text
17th Century Gaydar
Tumblr media
With @canisalbus's characters Vasco and his QPR wife Ludovica. Consider this a Headcanon but I imagined they were likely set up as like, teens- maybe not fully arranged marriage, but marriage was heavily implied with their courtship. So here I imagine them as like 15/16 which is why they're kind of smaller and scruffier, as well as having their outfit colors a little lightened. Also Ludovica in cute ear bows moment. I THINK this is my first more or less official online artist fan art??? I hope I did them justice.
*edit forgot to color in Vascos hands consistently my bad **EDIT I CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO POST ART WITHOUT FORGETTING SOMETHING
2K notes · View notes
butterflyscribbles · 2 years ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Little did Jeremy know, he passed a test separate from the one Don was helping him study for.
3K notes · View notes
circusinarun · 9 months ago
Text
"Let's go outside?" WIP
Tumblr media
I'll finish it later
604 notes · View notes
p1nkgl1tterpr1ncess · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
217 notes · View notes
funkyplantguy · 9 months ago
Text
just a normal phasmaphobia stream
192 notes · View notes
jabberwockprince · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
magnolia, magnolia
219 notes · View notes
macaroonkitti · 11 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Some Mikey and Donnie doodles from a few days ago 💜🧡
116 notes · View notes
i-am-creacheur · 4 months ago
Text
banger (?) idea: roleswap empires season 2 where Joel is the sheriff and Jimmy is a god. And also they don't hate each other and are friends forever and ever. Give this to me please....
Also Joel and Old Sheriff fucking hate each other. And then Jimmy shows up and him and Old Sheriff can yap together for hours. Joel is very confused but it makes sense, Jimmy likes to be friendly with his allies and Old Sheriff did lead Tumblertown for a good number of years.
I'm just. Like. People calling Joel a toy... and for reasons he himself doesn't understand, Jimmy tells them to stop. When Joel asks why, he can't provide an answer- all he knows is that he doesn't want his friend to go through that. The statue of God Joel replaced with a much smaller stature of God Jimmy inside Tumbletown, part of a fountain, and a matching statue of Joel located in the gardens on Stratos. Jimmy becoming the "patron God" of Tumbletown, granting wishes and the like, because he just feels that much admiration for Joel's work and that much love for his friends empire. Joel knows the way around Stratos and can't figure out why, but chalks it up to spending a lot of time around Jimmy on the islands.
Something about everything they do feels wrong but also not, like its what someone else should have done... but they keep doing it! They're best friends and that's what best friends do for each other!... Right?
25 notes · View notes
alltimefail · 2 months ago
Text
Hello, CAOS fandom - I’m reaching out on behalf of Dead Boy Detectives! Please help our fandom!!!
Could you guys please sign our petition and help spread it by reblogging?
Yet another queer, diverse, supernatural show suffers an unfair fate at the hands of a streaming service and we’re bloody sick of it! We believe Netflix and Warner Bros. are making a huge mistake! This isn’t just about getting a season 2: we’re trying to get justice for the cast, crew, and writers behind this unapologetically queer show.
Dead Boy Detectives is very queer, full of magic, action-packed, hilarious, full of quotable one-liners, and emotionally provocative - I promise you guys will LOVE this show. Like REALLY love it! Please check out Dead Boy Detectives and don’t let the cancellation deter you; it genuinely is a phenomenal show that will have you laughing one moment and crying the next. The story is well-paced and self-contained, so there’s no gigantic cliffhanger to worry about either. Dead Boy Detectives has so much heart, please help us save our boys who defy heaven and hell with their love! 💜
Tumblr media
Thank you in advance to any of you who sign, and a HUGE special thank you to those who stream it! Netflix has gotten far too comfortable canceling shows, especially those with queer themes and diverse leading characters, in their prime. Your support means the world to our detective agency and we appreciate you so much!!!💀🔎💜
22 notes · View notes
tinystepsforward · 3 months ago
Text
ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".
like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!
on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.
returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body
literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence
#reblogs turned off because obviously i'm already bracing to be pilloried for saying one thing not quite correctly or whatever#and also bc i have zero interest in having this be boosted by trans dudes on their own transandrophobia agenda either#i'm just venting#but frankly the first time i got yelled at for saying that as an intersex person some of the immense violence i experienced as a child#was motivated by transmisogyny#i was a teenager and it was someone a fair bit older than me with more local clout so like. it's been a decade. how is it worse now.#intersex spaces have made SO much progress and yet#also yes i'm femme! i'm femme in a trans way! many dykes who aren't women are!#many of us got more comfortable w it as adults who had gender agency!#in literally the same way it took my wife ages after transitioning to work out she's also butch and doesn't actually want to do femme thing#bc that's a shared experience in how we've navigated the expectations of womanhood before opting out of the parts we don't want!#anyway the lawcomm shit was fucked bc honestl i don't give a shit if someone lost their gonads as an adult in an accident#they should be protected even if they don't consider themselves intersex#and we know that gender as an axis of oppression comes back to the reproduction of the nuclear family#and that cis women who can't have kids sometimes become the political football though ofc not as much by far and like#idk. y'all ever heard about solidarity? sometimes i feel like i'm back in the place where the loudest traumatised person at the party#is yelling at another young woman like “you'll never understand what it's like to be a victim”#when said young woman was assaulted the week before.#a politics that starts by defending and defining oneself w oppression kinda fucking sucks actually#and intersex people stopped policing intersexness by who got mutilated a long time ago#bc actually we want the generations ahead to not get that treatment#and when i see “trans elders” going on about how “if you pass and got on hrt before 18 you're not trans like i am” i'm like. why! what!#anyway. tired.#may regret this. we shall see#tony muses
28 notes · View notes
sea-jello · 7 months ago
Text
@nyaskitten tumblr ate your fucking ask uhh ignore how this is months later BUT i finally watched dr s2 AND
Tumblr media Tumblr media
I GET IT NOW. I UNDERSTAND.
38 notes · View notes
p1nkgl1tterpr1ncess · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
21 notes · View notes
merakimagic · 6 months ago
Note
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Thanks for the help Misa, the twins needed to get some sleep✨
27 notes · View notes
thetomorrowshow · 1 month ago
Text
Whumptober 22 - Bleeding Through Bandages
title: misfortune placed these worlds in us
fandom: limited life smp
welcome back to my bad boys au!! i never expected to write more of it lol now i need to name it
cw: blood and injury, implied/referenced abuse
~
A string of whispered curses is all that escapes Grian’s lips, as he clicks on the dim overhead light.
He isn’t usually the one who gets hurt on missions—usually, it’s Jimmy. Jimmy may be the best shot in all the gang, but he’s clumsier than anyone Grian’s ever known. It’s honestly fitting that the first time they met, Jimmy was bleeding to death from a bullet to the lung.
  But now Grian’s been hit, and if he doesn’t stop it from bleeding, the others will insist on calling the mission here and heading back to the manor, which cannot happen. He already had to let himself get captured—a bullet in the thigh isn’t going to stop him.
Before he does anything—thrown into this locked closet as he was—he spits out his ear piece from where he’d been hiding it in the back of his mouth. Hopefully it still functions.
Then he shimmies his trousers off and sets to taking care of the wound.
The closet they’d put him in is by no means empty—it’s a janitor’s closet, well-stocked with cleaning supplies and essentials, and Grian grabs a roll of toilet paper off the shelf and wraps it around the bullet wound.
The bullet hadn’t gone in far, buried maybe an inch deep into his flesh. If he doesn’t try to pull it out, he should be good to go in an emergency. He can clean it and remove the bullet later—for now, he just needs to staunch the bleeding.
Even wrapping it around five times doesn’t stop the blood that blooms through the paper, so he tosses the roll to the side and roots around on a shelf, digging through the cardboard box there for any sort of rag. There’s nothing there, but the box beside it has a collection of dirty rags, some kind of polish smeared on them.
Is it worse to put this on the wound, or let it bleed freely?
Screw it, it’s got toilet paper on it. Grian puts the rag atop the toilet paper, ties it around his leg. It’s almost tight enough to be a tourniquet, with how short the rag is, which maybe should help? Grian doesn’t know enough about wounds.
He doesn’t get hurt a lot, but when he does, it rarely affects him. Mumbo has always bemoaned his high pain tolerance, ever since they were in high school together and Grian could walk away from a fight without even noticing the bruises and cuts all over him.
That was how he’d gotten a place in the Bad Boys, actually. Sixteen years old, at a corrupt high school and living with an abusive roommate, Grian had fallen into gang fights too young and had eventually gotten picked up by one.
Too many kids got lost to violence like that. Grian was just one example, amid countless others. As soon as he had enough rapport in the Bad Boys, he’d helped to establish the standard that they didn’t work with anyone under eighteen. In the past five years, Jimmy has been the only exception.
Jimmy’s eighteen, now, and he’s chosen to stick with the Bad Boys in light of his recent adulthood, likely to get closer to getting his own apartment.
Everyone has a motivation for joining up—Grian’s had been protection. He’d made far too many enemies in high school, and he’s certain that his old roommate would have no qualms about killing him if he wasn’t associated with one of the most powerful gangs in the area. 
Jimmy’s reason is his sister.
The only time he talked about her was when they first met him. Grian and Joel were fleeing a successful mission, only to find Jimmy on the ground, struggling to breathe around the bullet hole in his chest. He’d mentioned his sister, how much she meant to him, how he needed to get her safe.
As far as Grian knows, he hasn’t managed it yet. Jimmy always looks like he’s carrying a bonfire in his chest, his shoulders weighed down by the logs he keeps feeding it. He’s angry and tired and frustrated, but he never talks about why he feels that way. He just spends hours shooting at practice targets and sparring and moping around the manor, a plastic flosser always jutting out from his mouth. He leaves on weekends, presumably to go home, and always comes back in a worse mood than before.
The only thing that softens the sharp edges of his personality is feeling useful—like being on a mission. That had quickly propelled him into the strike side of the gang, despite his youth. Grian and Joel, already a team, had decided to show him the ropes, and it had turned their team of two into three as they became the only people who would tolerate Jimmy.
He isn’t a bad kid. He isn’t a bad kid at all, he just doesn’t know how to keep a lid on his emotions. He probably didn’t get a lot of attention growing up, poor kid.
Grian shakes himself from his thoughts, checks his watch. Almost midnight. Joel and Jimmy should be doing the final sweep now—they’ll be able to let him out of this closet, then they can pick up any remaining valuables and head out.
It isn’t often the three of them get assigned to a stealth mission. Grian’s not bad at them, but Jimmy’s terrible at sneaking and lying, and Joel’s more suited for sniping, so they usually handle intimidation or company deals. Grian had been relieved for the change of pace—until he was spotted. Now he just has to sit in this closet, waiting for either his team to track him down or the enemy to move him somewhere more secure.
Hopefully his team arrives first.
Grian rubs his earpiece off on his shirt, tucks it into his ear. He’s only had to stick it in his mouth once before, and it had luckily still functioned that time. He can only hope he’s had the same luck.
“Hello?” he whispers, tapping twice on it to activate the mic. “Red to Green and Yellow. Do you copy?”
“We copy,” Joel crackles back immediately. “Thought you were gonna stay silent.”
“Yeah, well. Got myself into a bit of a sticky situation. Check any closets down the fourth hall, yeah?”
“Why, did you leave something?”
“Yeah. Me.”
Jimmy unmutes just to laugh at him.
“I’m flipping you off so hard right now,” Grian says, not actually flipping anyone off. He pulls his trousers back up over his bandaged leg, buttons them. “Yeah, they grabbed me and locked me in here. They thought I was leftover from the recon mission, though, and not the start of a new patrol.”
“So the cover isn’t blown?” Joel asks.
“Nope. They’re even less on their guard, actually.”
“Cool. I’m actually heading down that hall right now. Yellow’s on the second floor, still.”
“Almost done, here,” Jimmy announces. “I’ll be back down soon.”
Grian stuffs the roll of toilet paper into his pocket and stands up, shaking out his feet. It definitely hurts to put weight on his injured leg, but he can walk it off.
The lock clicks and the door swings open just as he’s reaching up for the pull switch on the lightbulb. Joel grins at him, eyes sparkling with mirth behind his lowered sunglasses.
“Little bird locked in a cage?” he asks innocently. Grian shoves him, follows him out. He grabs Joel’s gun from the holster and clips it into his own (where his gun was confiscated from him upon being shoved into that closet).
“Hey!” “Use your spare.”
Jimmy joins them in the stairwell at the end of the hallway, and together they go down the flight of stairs. The rub of his jeans against his leg chafes his injury, but Grian just grits his teeth and rolls with it. They’re almost done, anyway. Just a quick check of the ground floor, then off to the van.
Most of the lights in the building are off, but some reason, there’s one flickering light at the bottom of the stairwell. Grian glares at it, then moves forward to take point—but Joel stops him, grabbing his sleeve and turning him around.
“What’s this?” Joel gestures to his leg.
“It’s nothing,” Grian says easily, shifting to try and hide his leg. Did it bleed through his jeans already? Maybe it’s worse than he thought. . . .
“You’re bleeding, you idiot, did you get hurt?”
“It’s barely a scratch. Come on, we’re—”
Too late. Joel unbuttons Grian’s jeans (Jimmy wolf-whistles obnoxiously), tugs them down just enough to see the dirty rag—now soaked with blood.
“Did you get stabbed?” Joel asks, dumbfounded. “Why are you walking on it?”
“It’s fine,” Grian says. “We can finish the mission, don’t worry about it—”
“You need to get back to the manor, there probably isn’t anything down here—”
Grian casts his eyes around, looking for any sort of way to distract Joel—
Jimmy’s looking on, chewing on one of those constant flossers, and seemingly without his notice, there’s blood trickling down his arm. Perfect.
“Timmy’s bleeding, too,” Grian says, nodding toward him, and Joel immediately drops Grian’s leg to turn toward Jimmy. Grian uses that opportunity to pull his trousers back up.
“What? You too? Am I surrounded by self-sacrificing morons—?”
“What?” Jimmy glances down at his arm. His eyes widen for a fraction of a second, then he hides it behind his back. “No. No, I’m not.”
Joel glares at him. “Mate, I just saw it. You’re bleeding.”
“I—” Jimmy glances around, something almost panicked seeping into his expression. “I—yeah, but it isn’t from this. It’s just—it’s just a little cut, don’t worry about it.”
Joel isn’t having any of that. He tugs Jimmy’s jean jacket off, rolls up his shirt sleeve.
Just above Jimmy’s elbow is a white bandage, wrapped around the bicep. Even in the flickering light, it’s clearly soaked through with blood, some of it seeping out around and dripping down his arm.
“What? When did this happen?” Joel asks, confused. Grian wants to know the same thing—Jimmy didn’t report running into any trouble. Was he just carrying bandages on him?
“It’s from yesterday, I’m fine,” Jimmy says. He looks like he wants to talk about it as much as he wants to eat a lemon. He looks like a tiger trying to sleep that keeps getting poked. He looks like he wants to bite Joel’s head off.
“Sorry, but I’m gonna need more information than that.”
“I fell, okay?” says Jimmy. He rolls his shirt sleeve back down, slapping Joel’s hands away. “I tripped, tried to catch myself on a wall, and caught my arm on a door hinge. It isn’t deep. Let’s keep going.”
It worked as a distraction, apparently, because Joel just shakes his head and mutters something about needing to be careful, before leading the way into the basement. But, for all it got him, Grian just feels like something’s squirming in the depths of his stomach.
Jimmy’s lying.
He won’t meet Grian’s eyes, he would barely even look at Joel. His temper, usually subdued on a mission, had flared briefly, and his hands are still clenched into fists.
He’s lying.
He didn’t fall onto a door hinge.
He probably got into a fight.
You’re supposed to report if you get into any fights with rival gangs, but most people don’t do that. Sometimes it’s embarrassment, sometimes it’s out of fear of punishment, sometimes it’s because they don’t want to be stopped from retaliating.
With Jimmy, it’s probably the latter.
So when they get back to the van, and Joel’s driving them to the manor, Grian speaks up.
“Tim, who’d you get in a fight with?”
Grian sees him stiffen in the front seat. Usually, Grian sits there, but Joel had banished him to the back in order to put his leg up.
“I—I didn’t.”
He’s definitely lying.
“Sure, and I totally didn’t get shot in the leg.”
“Wait, you got shot?” Joel demands. “I thought—geez, Grian, you should have told me, I thought it was just a stab wound or something—”
“Timmy—”
“I didn’t get in a fight,” Jimmy says hotly, turning to look out the window. “I swore I wouldn’t, remember?”
“Yeah, well, that injury wasn’t caused by a door hinge,” Grian scoffs. “People don’t fall onto door hinges, what kind of excuse is that?”
“You weren’t there! And I said—I tripped, and—”
“Sure. You just tripped badly enough that—”
“Grian?” Joel interrupts, a note of warning in his voice. “Shut up.”
The surprise of the command is enough to cause Grian to fall silent. Jimmy keeps looking out the window, uncharacteristically quiet.
No one speaks for the rest of the ride. Grian gets settled into medical and Jimmy disappears, likely for his usual bed (or, perhaps, for the gym, where he can beat on the punching bag until he’s too exhausted to be angry).
“What was that about?” Grian asks, once he and Joel are alone (and he’s hooked up to some IV fluids, his leg properly stitched up).
Joel rubs a hand across his face. “Jimmy’s definitely lying,” he says. “But . . . I don’t think he fought anyone, either. Jimmy would tell us if he got in a fight, wouldn’t he?”
“I mean, maybe. You never know with Tim.”
“Look, Grian—” Joel sits down next to him. There’s something oddly solemn in his face, something that gives Grian pause. “I—I had a friend in high school,” Joel starts. Grian restrains the snarky comment that rises to his lips.
“His name was Oli. Every time I saw him, he had a new bruise. And every time, he made up some excuse—that he walked into a door, or tripped down his front steps, or . . . or tripped, and fell onto a door hinge. Things like that, you know? It was like that every day. Until CPS got called on his family, and I never saw him again.”
The letters CPS sink deep into Grian’s mind. He gapes. Joel shifts uncomfortably.
“He still lives at home, doesn’t he?” Joel says. “He’s just a kid. And whenever he ever mentions his sister, it’s about getting an apartment so he can get her safe. I just—”
“You—you think his parents . . . what, hit him?” Grian asks, cringing.
An awkward sadness weighs down Joel’s shoulders as he shrugs. “I think . . . I think it’s possible. Really, really possible.”
That isn’t rare. In this profession, it’s not a surprise to hear of child abuse.
But . . . Jimmy?
How could anyone hurt Jimmy?
It . . . it adds up, if he thinks about it. It adds up, because isn’t Jimmy always coming in after the weekend with new bruises? Isn’t he always grumbling about clumsiness and accidents? Hasn’t Grian confronted him several times about getting into fights, and each time Jimmy had just argued with him until they both stormed out of the room?
Grian feels sick just to think of it. If Jimmy’s not safe at home, how bad had it been to incite him to seek out gang protection?
“If you’re right—and I’m not saying you are—we should help him with that apartment,” Grian says. Joel nods his agreement.
“Yeah. And soon.”
8 notes · View notes