#the form which enabled him to act on the regret of a suicide attempt and save himself being used as part of a fantasy that’s entirely | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ephemeral-afterlight · 5 years

Text

Day 30: Recovery

(We'll bring you back to life.)

Whumptober 2019 Day 30: Recovery

Word Count: 5766

Relationships: D(LAMPR)/DR. PAL (platonic)

Warnings: Suicide attempt aftermath (it isn't really talked about much, but it is mentioned), not unsympathetic Patton but he is kind of an asshole in this and he sees the error of his ways (hopeful ending), Remus-typical disturbing/violent language, angry confrontation, mentions of a scar/violent altercation, mentions/implications of brainwashing, cursing

A/N: I AM SO SORRY FOR THE WAIT. i meant to get this out in time and then i had a really bad bit of writer's block and got super unmotivated, but... anyway, enough excuses! i really hope this makes up for the wait, if even a little bit. this is a direct sequel to day 1: shaky hands (bringing it full circle babey!!!!) and it is the longest one yet! pls enjoy hehe~

When Deceit wakes up, he realizes three things simultaneously. One, it’s fucking cold, so cold that he can’t feel his hands or feet. Two, his head feels like it was just run over by a truck, like his brain got melted into mush and now he can barely think properly. Three, he’s not dead. He knows he’s not dead, he’s not gone, because Logan is sitting in a chair across the room quietly reading a book. If Deceit had truly succeeded, Logan wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t have woken up at all.

Shit.

“Wh… What happened? Why’m I not gone?” Deceit asks hoarsely, words slurred and throat gravelly from disuse. Much of his existence has been defined by his innate ability to repulse people, to scare them and push them away, so it’s more than a shock for him when Logan glances up from his book and gives him a small smile. That warm look is always reserved for the others, the ones who actually deserve it, so seeing it directed towards himself steals the breath from his lungs.

“You’re awake, I see. Are you in any pain?” Logan asks as he strides over to stand in front of where Deceit is lying propped up on a stack of pillows. He raises his hand to check for a fever, the backs of his fingers a warm balm on cool skin. When he detects nothing unusual, Logan tucks a loose strand of hair behind Deceit’s ear, tilts his head and listens with rapt attention as Deceit describes his points of pain (throat, stomach, head). The care he’s being given is so unexpected, and surreal, and Deceit is almost desperate to keep receiving it. He doesn’t remember the last time he had any kind of affection directed towards him, the last time someone cared enough to ask if he was okay. It’s odd, yet addicting in a way.

“Why aren’t I… should’a died,” Deceit whispers as his brows pull in, an unmistakably sad look echoing in his distant eyes. It doesn’t feel like there’s much else to say when his legs curl up to meet his chin, when he gazes ruefully at the blankets in front of him, and yet Logan somehow knows how to quell even a little bit of the turbulence in Deceit’s mind. He just sighs and sits on the bed, adjusts his glasses, and clears his throat with restlessness barely hidden below a mask of indifference.

“Roman found you in the tub. We immediately got to work caring for you and attempting to keep you alive, however you fell into a coma, which is obviously irreversible when the injury is self-inflicted. You have been asleep for approximately three weeks, and it… has been, well. Chaotic, for lack of a better term. As you did not die, there was no replacement to act in your stead, but since you were not awake to properly facilitate your function, Thomas was unable to employ your trait at all. It caused a lot of havoc, you know,” Logan says softly, exhaustion clear in his face and voice. A gentle finger wraps around one of Deceit’s own, holding it in a gesture of comfort, a promise. “I’m… I apologize for not saying anything that day, for not stopping Patton. I should not have been so cowardly as to enable the casting away of such an important side.”

And though Logan’s voice is thick, his sentiment remains steady, a quiet regret laced in the atonement that’s just as heavy as the tears building in Deceit’s eyes. He never thought in a million years that Logan would ever apologize to him, that anyone would ever care enough about him to feel guilty. It tears through him like a whirlwind, switching back and forth between joy and grief so quickly it’s causing a migraine to poke tauntingly behind his eyes.

“Logan that’s… s’not your fault. You didn’t wanna get hurt, and that’s good. I’m glad you didn’t. I’m… ‘m self-preservation-- not just for me and Thomas, but for you sides 's well. You getting mistreated would be far more painful than anything I’ve had to endure,” Deceit mumbles, wet eyes shining as he finally raises his head to meet Logan’s sorrowful scrutiny. Logan swallows hard as he moves his fingers to thread through Deceit’s own, unusual tactility breathing in a space meant for rest. His posture is tense, a sure sign of discomforted remorse, and it takes all of Deceit’s effort not to reach forward and gather him in a protective hug.

“It’s not an excuse, though. I still shouldn’t have allowed them to push you out like that, should’ve tried harder to get them to understand how valuable and important you are to Thomas. Like you are to me,” Logan stresses, and Deceit’s breath catches in his throat. He… does he really care that much? He thinks Deceit is important even when Deceit doesn’t believe that himself? That he’s of value? That… that he isn’t worthless?

And Logan has never been one for brevity, has always been ready to go on tangents of information and explanations and reassurance. He always clarifies things, breaks them down to the true basics to expose them for what they really are. He teaches, and cultivates minds and knowledge, and he’s so incredibly fascinating to watch. His mind is mesmerizing, the way he forms his thoughts so clearly and concisely that it’s impossible to have things be lost in translation.

“You keep Thomas safe, Deceit. You are his verbal shield, of sorts, what gives him the ability to protect himself and others. You strive for him to better himself and to do things for himself. You allow him to treat himself kinder, let him live easier without so much stress and responsibility and exhaustion. Although I don’t agree with some of your viewpoints, you only want what’s best for Thomas and will fight for it despite everyone pushing back on you anyway. You’re the only one of us who is truly alone and yet you’re brave enough to face the scorn just so that you can do your best to help Thomas. I… I admire you, Deceit. You are much stronger than I could ever be. It’s why you can’t leave us. I know selfishness is in your nature, and wanting to disappear is understandable given the circumstances of your existence, but… Thomas can’t function properly without you. He’s almost lost three friends just this week, which would only be detrimental to his mental and emotional state. We need you to stay. I need you to stay.”

And, well, if an immeasurably vulnerable Deceit is only able to burst out into tears, bury his sobs in the fabric of Logan’s button-up shirt while they both rock soothingly back and forth, then maybe it was time to really, truly let go.

To Deceit’s surprise, the second person he sees after waking up is Virgil. Logan has apparently allowed Deceit to stay in his room throughout the duration of his slumber, but Deceit is seriously starting to miss his pet snake, Ethel, so he managed to convince Logan to let him switch to his own bedroom. It’s odd to walk after not moving at all for weeks, so leaning on Logan’s shoulder for support is crucial to making sure he doesn’t fall over and take a nose dive into the floor.

It’s in the hallway that they run into the anxious side, and where Deceit is sure he’s about to get yelled at or something. Although they had been close in childhood, once Virgil left them, his attitude flipped like a switch for no apparent reason. For a long time, Deceit wondered what he did, thought that Virgil’s hate was warranted, but now… although he still doesn’t truly believe he belongs with anyone, he’s done throwing a pity party for himself. He didn’t do anything wrong, has never done anything to purposely harm Virgil, and hell if he’s gonna let the other side's scalding remarks poke holes in his self-esteem.

“D… Deceit?” Virgil breathes when he sees them, stops in his tracks and hides further in his hood. Logan looks at Deceit questioningly, as if telling him that he will absolutely walk right past Virgil without a word if Deceit wanted him to, and it’s so reassuring that Deceit immediately feels a thousand times more ready to finally face this. “You’re actually awake.”

“Yeah. I am,” Deceit says, and then he realizes that he needs to say this now before he loses his courage again. A sigh escapes him as he rubs his eye tiredly, and Logan squeezes his waist comfortingly. “I’m not leaving, Virgil. I don’t know what your problem is with me, I don’t know why you hate me so much when we used to be best friends, and I don’t know what I did to you that was so awful that you have to fight with me every time I’m around. I don’t. But I’m tired of spending night after night crying to myself and wondering what I did wrong. I think… I think it’s time for me to ask what you did wrong, and I don’t know if I can really forgive you for the things you’ve said to me right now. But I’m here, and I’m staying for good, and you’re gonna have to learn to get over that because I’m seriously getting sick of feeling like I'm not good enough for you.”

Wow. That little rant made him feel the best he has felt in a long time. Although he’s pinching himself hard and using the pain as a way to be able to tell the full truth outside of their rooms, a certain clarity befalls him with each word. It’s immensely relieving to finally say the things he’s been wanting to tell Virgil for years, to finally let himself think that maybe it’s not his fault for once. And he can tell Logan is proud of him, judging by the way his eyes shine with respect despite his neutral expression.

Virgil looks miserable, and Deceit wants to feel bad, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t regret what he said a single bit, doesn’t wish to take back any of his words. The anxious side opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but aborts the action at the last second, instead going to stare at the floor while he chews on his lip. His silence means a lot more than Virgil himself likely realizes, meanings and intentions and unnamed thoughts spilling out in the space between them, and Deceit nudges Logan so that they can walk around him and into Deceit’s own bedroom.

They have a long way to go, but Deceit can already feel the tiniest bit of hope shining inside him.

A lot has changed in the four months since Deceit’s attempt. For one, Thomas has allowed him a more permanent spot in the group, after a particularly heated argument with Logan than ended with the three of them finally coming to a mutual understanding with one another. Secondly, Virgil is talking to him again. Not the passive-aggressive banter, not the scathing insults, not the glares and hostility that Deceit is so used to. Now, he’s really trying to actually talk to him, will speak about something that happened in the news with him at the dinner table or show him memes when they’re both chilling in the mindscape living room. There’s so much more there, so much more respect and care, and Deceit has a feeling that they might even be friends again sometime soon.

Thirdly, Deceit has barely seen and hasn't talked to Patton outside of filming videos.

Although Deceit doesn’t particularly want to speak with Patton, listen to him say that "he's a bad influence, Thomas is a good person, you can't be here", it’s still odd that he’s somehow able to never be in the room when Deceit enters. When he does catch him off guard, the older side only gives him an unreadable look and makes his exit as quickly and inconspicuously as possible, typically taking advantage of the twins’ commotion to slip out undetected. Deceit notices, because of course he does, and to his own surprise, it doesn’t bother him as much as he expects. He’ll just wait for Patton to come to him, whenever he’s finally ready to admit his faults and apologize, so there’s no point in fretting over it.

However, Deceit does need to talk with the twins, Roman more so than Remus, and it’s this need that leaves him standing outside Roman’s door at one in the morning, a fist raised to knock. It’s not like he has to worry about Roman being asleep, because he’s always awake into the late hours of the night, frantically coming up with new ideas just to veto them all anyway. His process is almost manic, completely self-destructive, and it garners a lot of sympathy from a part of himself that can sorely relate.

The three swift raps on the door evoke a surprised squawk from within the bedroom, and multiple loud thumps can be heard before the heavily decorated door swings open. Deceit just stands there with a judgemental expression, lightheartedly raising an eyebrow in amusement at the sight of the creative side. He’s covered head-to-toe in glitter, multiple colours sparkling when the plastic reflects the dim light coming from the hall. He looks ridiculous, with the flakes in his hair and eyelashes and clothing, but he manages to look confident even despite that. It’s fake, Deceit knows it’s fake, but he humours him anyway.

“What’re you doing in there?” Deceit asks, a sly smirk playing on his lips, and Roman has the humility for an embarrassed blush to spread across his cheeks. He fidgets with the bottom of his coat even as he puts on a brave face, and Deceit can see through him so easily. Maybe it has to do with his purpose, the fact that the very arrogance the princely side portrays is a lie in itself, or maybe it’s because Roman is just that transparent.

“Just-- Just creating art! None of your business! Why’re… why are you here?” Roman asks, initial loudness tapering off to reveal uncertainty and vulnerability, and it’s a wonder the others haven’t figured this out sooner. Roman is so painfully obvious in his insecurity, shows how much he truly doubts himself and his work like a flashing neon sign above his head.

“I wanted to talk. Come to an understanding, if you will,” Deceit hums, adjusts his trusty bowler hat on his head casually despite it actually being a nervous tic. He doesn’t actually know what Roman is going to say, doesn’t know if he’s going to fall back on yelling and accusations and swing out his sword just like he did before. Will Deceit be left with a scar this time, too? Will he gain another streak of raised white, another lightning bolt stretching across the expanse of his skin, marring the smooth surface just like last time?

“Oh. Uh, um. Come in, then, I-I guess,” Roman stutters, picks at a flake of shimmering chipped nail polish as he steps to the side. His room is just as much of a mess as Deceit expects if not more, but the vexation he feels as he scans the aftermath of a creative tornado is just as acute. Stacks of parchment paper are piled in high towers around the room, looming overhead like a thundercloud of loathing. Pens and pencils and fabric and threads are strewn about, placed in such an intrinsically accurate way that it feels like the chaos is almost organized. It’s meticulous in its frenzy, a passionate craze that seems to be woven into so much of how the other side functions.

“I came to ask you for a favour. I ask you to not whip out your katana at me any time we are in the vicinity of one another. We wouldn’t want a repeat of last time, no?” Deceit asks, smooth and suave and uninterested on the surface. Of course, underneath he isn’t faring as well, but Roman doesn’t need to know that. Deceit is just waiting for Roman’s congeniality to flip on its head like a switch, for the civil nature of their interaction to turn sour when he decides he’s done listening to him. He’s expecting for Roman to yell, or maybe even for a fist to come his way, and he’ll have to start back at square one again. That’s just how Roman is. Fiercely protective, headstrong even when that same stubbornness and fire causes him to stumble, to put his attention in the wrong place.

But he doesn’t. Roman doesn’t get angry, in fact, he gets quite a sad look in his eyes at Deceit’s words. The way his gaze probes far into Deceit’s own, pulls him apart and examines his intentions and thoughts and feelings, it all leaves him feeling incredibly vulnerable. And he is uncomfortable when against all odds, Roman just darts forward to pull Deceit into his arms, smushes his half-scaled face into a broader chest with a passion that has never, ever been for him.

“But of course, small snake! A true prince would never brandish his blade at anyone other than a foe, and you, my Daring Deception, are far from it,” Roman tells him with a full tone and bright eyes, and the way he looks down at Deceit with such compassion and care to completely contradict his usual regards leaves Deceit’s head spinning. The snake-like side looks up at Roman from where he’s snuggled into his chest, gives him wide eyes and a look of surprise that he forgets to mask, and Roman’s smile is so much more gentle than Deceit thought he had the capacity for. “You are a friend. You’re a brave, shining knight to protect Thomas, just like me! If you ask me, I think we’d make a pretty good team.”

The endeared grin Deceit gives him in return surprises both of them equally.

Deceit doesn’t expect much to happen when he rises up in Remus’ room. The place is just as messy as always, just as chaotic as Roman’s is but in a different way. While Roman can make sense of the chaos, search through the whirlwind with such accuracy as if rifling through a file cabinet, Remus simply takes a sniff and hopes for the best. He doesn’t bother with organization of any kind, doesn’t bother with making things easier on himself, and Deceit supposes that very tendency can account for a lot of the behaviour Remus has portrayed in the past.

“Double Dee! What’cha doin’ here? Wanna try the sandwich I made? It has strawberries and eel meat and tartar sauce! Here, have a bite!” Remus demands excitedly, childishly, and despite the disgust Deceit feels while looking at the absolutely abominable excuse of edible food squished between Remus’ fingers, he only shakes his head neutrally. He just needs to get this over with, make sure everything is okay between them.

“I’ve already eaten today, Remus. Maybe next time. Actually, I wanted to ask you something,” Deceit dismisses, waves a gloved hand as he clears away some garbage for a spot to sit on Remus’ bed. The owner of said bed perks up from where he sits cross-legged on the floor, a rigidly-postured Remus surrounded by a circle of discarded candy wrappers. Deceit only hopes Remus actually ate them, and didn’t do something stupid, like glue them to his legs or see how many he could shove up his nose. “Do you… do you hate me?”

“What? ‘f course not! You’re fun, Dee-Dee! Almost as fun as when rollercoasters go flying off their tracks and smash into a building and go up in flames with the screaming passengers still inside! Hey, what did dying feel like?” Remus answers, jumping and shifting from one topic to another so fast it’s giving Deceit whiplash. He doesn’t like to linger on a particular topic for very long with the exception of him being the one to bring it up, unless it’s immediately or inherently shunned by someone else for existing. That only adds fuel to the fire, gives Remus a reason to keep perpetuating the idea, because the more Thomas doesn’t want to think about something, the more he’s guaranteed to toil under it. “You wanted to die, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t’a ate all those pills. ‘cept I already know that we can actually die ‘n’ be replaced, since that’s what happened with our ol’e pal Lust. And the new one got thrown in the subconscious a week later, so. Are y’a wantin’ to leave? Wanna… wanna leave me behind?”

And Deceit doesn’t really know what to say to that. They didn’t talk much when they were still living together in the “dark” part of the mindscape, not even when they were three instead of two. They’ve never been particularly close, and yet Remus sounds genuinely upset at the notion of Deceit leaving for good. His impact must be much larger than he’s thought all this time, to cause such hurt and betrayal in someone he was sure was indifferent to his presence.

“Of course not, Remus. It was a mistake, and I won’t make it again. I’m staying, this time, and I’m not gonna leave you alone,” Deceit consoles, reassures despite the fact that Remus isn’t outwardly upset. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t lash out, he doesn’t scream or shout or yell. He simply sits there, stares with his wistful, bitter brown eyes, and it makes him simultaneously all too easy to read and yet incredibly difficult.

“Oh. Well, good! That means I can make y’a more sandwiches! Chef’s special!” They’re sure to be disgusting. But maybe Deceit can pretend to like it just to see delight burst to life on Remus’ face.

Confronting Patton is the scariest thing Deceit has ever had to do in his entire existence as a side.

Despite what Logan said the day he woke up, Deceit is a coward. It’s a direct result of his purpose; after all, what kind of self-preservation would run straight into danger with no regard to what might happen after? His caution is certainly warranted, given the situation, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t still difficult. It’s hard to be so distrusting of someone who’s supposed to be a helper, someone who’s supposed to be Thomas’ morality. And Thomas is a good person, at times dangerously so, which makes Patton’s actions that day so many years ago so confusing.

Despite how part of him rings a pulsing red alarm when he’s even within a twenty-foot radius around the patriarchal side, there’s an even bigger part that’s yelling at him to hurry up and instigate an apology already, because this is getting annoying. He just wanted to wait, to let Patton come up with the correct conclusion on his own, because how else will he truly learn? But Deceit can’t even be in the same room with him without the other side scampering away at the first opportunity, and he’s tired of playing these cat-and-mouse games. The worst part is, he doesn’t even know if he’s the cat or the mouse.

Having already made amends with all of the others, Deceit decides it’s time to stop putting this off. If Patton won’t suck it up and apologize, or if he really is just that oblivious to the point of all of this, then fine. He can be like that. Deceit will just come to him. And so he does, manages to sneak up on him while he’s in the kitchen, humming as he makes himself a salad. It’s late, so everyone else is either asleep or pretending to be, and it creates a space where Deceit can do this on his own. Although he’s embarrassed, Deceit isn’t too proud to admit that he is a little afraid, that he can see Patton turning on him and hurting him as a vivid mental image playing in a loop. He just hopes this doesn’t go that way.

“Patton,” Deceit says stoically, not exactly a greeting, but more of an accusation. Patton lets out a little shocked yelp and whips around, butter knife out as if he’s going to actually use it. Deceit may be scared, but apparently Patton is too, and he has no right to be. Before Patton can sink out and run away just like every other time, Deceit grabs his shoulder, gently but assertively pushing him down into the kitchen chair scooted away from the table.

Patton looks up at him with terrified eyes and an almost nauseous expression, and it takes a lot of personal control for Deceit to not be offended. Who is he to be afraid of Deceit? What has Deceit done to hurt and scare him so badly? What gives him the right to be so frightened, the nerve to seem petrified of this encounter after how he treated Deceit? Anger boils up in Deceit’s throat listlessly, a nebulous animosity that yearns to explode. It only builds when Patton cowers under the snake-like side’s unimpressed stare.

“We need to talk. No more of your running away,” Deceit demands, stern and obstinate, but he’s sure his firm demeanour appears much more inexorable to the fatherly side. Although Deceit really is trying his best to not be antagonistic, his ire is only fueling his volatility, leaving his self-restraint put through the wringer in the face of his almost overwhelming sense of betrayal. What took place that day should never have happened, the events seemingly a direct antithesis to Patton’s usual intentions and motivations as Morality, but it did, and he can’t go any longer trying to escape responsibility and repercussions while Deceit shoulders all of the stress it caused.

“W--W-What do you wanna t-talk about, kiddo?” Patton stutters, stumbles around a feigned ignorance as his eyes dart between everything but Deceit’s own steely gaze. His fingers tremble as he fidgets with them, attempts a distraction from the confrontation, and it’s so unfair that Deceit almost wants to turn and kick the side of the counter in an angry outburst. He doesn’t, of course, because he’s not that brazenly juvenile, but he sure does wish he could.

“I’m not your kiddo, not after what you did to me. Don’t you dare call me that,” Deceit hisses as he slams a hand down on the table right beside where Patton is leaning. The latter of the two flinches, jumps with a tiny scared squeal dying in his throat before it can even be released into the silence left after Deceit’s outburst. He swallows hard as tears prick at his eyes, shine in the dim light of the kitchen, and Deceit feels no sympathy at all.

“P-Please don’t hurt me!” Patton rushes out as he curls in further on himself, tries to make the space his body takes up as compact as possible. Deceit scoffs, pulling back to stand up straight once more. He may be the shortest out of all of the sides, but his dominant, authoritative fury lets him loom just as well. There’s really no point in drawing this out any more than it needs to be, and although Deceit certainly would take an immense satisfaction in seeing Patton squirm, he needs to be the bigger person here.

“Hurt you? What, like you hurt me?” Deceit’s words are simple, biting, but they accomplish their intended effect all the same, maybe even more so. Patton shrinks back as if he’s been slapped, and he kind of has, at least metaphorically. The only way he will truly understand the nature of his actions is by being blunt and upfront about it; no sugarcoating, no dancing around the subject, no room to make excuses or twist the imperative words. Guilt is a powerful thing, and when utilized correctly, it can be the one thing that truly shifts the interpersonal tide.

“I-- I… I’m sorry!” Patton blurts out, uncertain under Deceit’s withering glare. His admission feels fake, hollow, empty. It echoes in the room for a round, allows Deceit a moment to quell the curses that well up in his throat and dance on his silver tongue. “I didn’t mean to--”

“Yes you did, don’t lie to me,” Deceit spits, interrupting the fake reassurance and stopping it in its tracks before it can become bigger than it deserves to be. Patton’s mouth snaps shut as he looks down at his lap, arms slowly shifting to curl around himself in a mockery of an embrace. Fine. Let him garner all the comfort he can get, because he sure won’t be comfortable when Deceit is done.

“You made me think I was safe, that I had a family. I had existed in the mindscape for a total of two hours before you threw me out for something I couldn’t even control. And I’m half-snake, you know that-- did you know that snakes are cold-blooded?” Deceit asks, and he laughs humourlessly when he sees a dawning realization that turns into horror on Patton’s face. “I almost died out there. When Virgil found me, he had to literally bring me back to life moments before I would have fully faded away. Do you know how much that fucking scared him?

“You turned everyone who I ever thought could have been a friend against me. Roman was so happy to finally have someone to go on adventures with, and the next time I saw him, he hated me. I wonder why, hm? Did you know that after he switched his sword from plastic to metal, after you made him believe that I’m the evil villain he needs to slay, he tried to do exactly that? I still have the scar,” Deceit says bitterly as he lifts his hand up. He ignores Patton’s flinch in favour of pushing aside the fabric of his capelet and shirt, showing the paternal side the raised white line that jaggedly falls from the top of his shoulder to about halfway down his arm. A whimper spills from Patton’s lips, desperate and ashamed, and Deceit really hopes he’s finally starting to get it.

“Not to mention what you did to Logan. He was so fucking terrified to speak up about what you did to me that he stayed silent, went directly against his purpose as a side just to make sure that he wouldn’t be thrown out and ostracized too. Do you know how much that hurts me, as self-preservation? What’s even worse is that I’m glad he stayed quiet and kept himself safe, because who knows what could have happened if he dared to go against Morality.”

With the words shot from Deceit’s mouth like a bullet from a revolver, tears finally breach Patton’s lashes, roll over his cheekbones and fall in droplets onto his pants. His shoulders shudder under the weight of silent sobs, and even as Patton’s lips twist as he tries not to cry audibly, he still keeps his head held up while he listens. The action is peculiar, and Deceit knows what he’s trying to convey, but atonement is much more than just that. It’s a start, but there’s certainly a long way to go.

“Virgil was my best friend, you know. I cared about him so fucking much, and he was the only one who truly had my back when I was still recovering from what you did. But even he wanted to have a taste of acceptance, and it wasn’t a surprise in the slightest when he suddenly hated me the next time we were able to talk. Your brainwashing knows no limits, truly,” Deceit sneers, contempt in his eyes and pain in his heart. He doesn’t want to open up. He doesn’t want to be honest like this, doesn’t want to pinch himself until he’s numb just so he can focus long enough to finally show Patton the truth about what he’s done. He doesn’t want to, but he has to, because he’ll just regret it if he doesn’t.

“I wasn’t really ever close friends with Remus, but that doesn’t matter because Remus shouldn’t even exist. In fact, neither should Roman. You split Creativity apart, forced them apart based on your arbitrary set of rules for Thomas to abide by, and shoved him into a harmful, narrow mindset. And if that wasn’t enough, you couldn’t even let them properly be brothers and grow up together as siblings, like they should have. No, you shoved Remus out just like me, and it caused him to hole himself up in his room for nearly twenty years just so he could use his part of the Imagination to make a world where he wasn’t separated from his literal other half. He likes to act like he doesn’t care, but I know he does, and he shouldn’t fucking have to.

“You’ve only brought suffering upon me, and Remus, and Virgil at one point. To those who needed you the most, you scorned and demonized, and left us with no guidance or warmth simply because you don’t like our purpose. But we are all sides of Thomas, just as much as you are, and whether you like it or not, we are important and needed. I’m done trying to convince myself to be the villain, to play into your fantasy and the knowledge that I’d never get accepted or be listened to. I deserve so much more than you’re giving me, and I’m never going to make the mistake of inherently trusting you again. This time, you have to earn it.”

“I’m so sorry, Deceit,” Patton whispers, slow and thick and watery at the same time, and the soft, quiet words cause Deceit to completely deflate. He’s so tired, so fucking exhausted, and he knows that it’s going to be this way for a long time.

And maybe it’s too much. Maybe it’ll take too long, or maybe it’ll never happen. Maybe they’ll never truly fix this, mend and repair the cracks driven between them as a result of how Deceit grew up. Maybe Deceit will never work up the courage to forgive Patton, to be able to look at him without fear and anger leaping up into his throat. But none of that matters, not really, because Deceit finally has people who care about him, people who will stand up for him and support him when he can’t do it himself. And for now, maybe that’s all he really needs.

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absurdfuture · 5 years

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'How can I complain?'

An essay about mental health by musician James Blake, from It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (And other lies).

James Blake 09 OCTOBER 2019

It’s especially easy to poke fun at the idea that a white man could be depressed. I have done it myself, as a straight white man who was depressed. In fact, I still carry the shame of having been a straight white man who’s depressed and has experienced suicidal thoughts. And still, when discussing it with most people, I will play down or skirt around how desperately sad I have been; instead I emphasize how much happier I am now. I emphasize the work I had to do to get to a better place, and how it was hard work and fruitful work, and how I empowered myself by doing it. I usually focus on how I regained control and an enthusiasm for living (‘Nice one, mate!’), not on how I lost it. That is the last of my defensiveness.

I remember doing an interview with the New York Times where the interviewer asked me why my childhood was painful, and how I got to such a dark place in my late twenties. I told him, ‘You know, other kids, bullying, etc.’ – and instantly regretted my brevity. He said something like, ‘Right, so a pretty standard childhood then.’

Fuck. After all this public talk of depression and anxiety, and many albums of expressed pain, I felt exposed as a fraud, but I was relieved not to have shown my cards and revealed how pathetic and weak I must have been when I was younger. Maybe he was right. He’d probably been through worse and wasn’t complaining about it.

I picked up a resentment towards other people from school. My parents were very loving and supportive and, unusually for my generation, still together. I went to school completely unequipped to deal with certain kids who were taking their fractured and in some cases abusive home lives out on me. I know that now. I was ��too sensitive’, and I never learned how to act. I was a baby who’d been kept away from germs, and now I was getting ill from anything and everything. (I should say now that I have many happy memories of childhood, especially of my parents and of certain friends who I could count on, and that my inability to focus on those positives probably didn’t help.)

During my school years I spent thousands of hours walking on my own with headphones on or playing piano in the practice rooms, often going there first to cry in private and then occasionally with a mind to play. I was addicted to video games from the age of twelve, rarely going out to socialize. I had a few ‘best’ friends over the years who, looking back, I didn’t know well. But I’m grateful for having had them.

I put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, but only ever remained their friend. I fell in love many times and it was never reciprocated. I had no automatic right to them of course, but they kept me around for years and allowed me to be bullied and humiliated by their friends, accidentally betraying me out of awkwardness. I resented their understandable, youthful inability to know what to do with a sensitive boy who made them laugh and feel good about themselves, but whose body they did not want.

Boys would see my sensitivity as weakness and, while I was sharp and quick-witted, I wasn’t sporty, which was my first mistake with them, I think. Again, I didn’t know how to act. I wondered for years whether I had some behaviour disorder. I still wonder. In any case, year upon year of capricious bullying and humiliation followed.

These feelings of betrayal, persecution and rejection I kept to myself. In the crude gender stereotypes I was aware of at that age, I thought I had the sensitivity of a female but in a male’s body. I joked my way through it and made sure nobody ever saw me cry. I remained a virgin until the age of twenty-two, because I was awkward and unable to be natural around women. I was afraid of the vulnerability of sex after so many embarrassing attempts at it. (The song ‘Assume Form’ is, in part, about finding the ability to feel safe during intimacy.) It seemed to me that it had taken my success as a DJ for women to pursue me, and then I distrusted them for their sudden, transparent interest, so I pushed them all away. Slowly the face of every woman morphed into the faces of the girls who I felt had betrayed and humiliated me. And the face of every man became a bully who would underestimate me and try to kill my spirit.

Becoming relatively famous, my persecution complex turned into a self-serving narcissism, and my obsession with proving my worth to people who’d underestimated me was now being rewarded financially. To those ends, my first emotional language – music – had been the vehicle. I wanted to show everyone what they’d missed out on for all those years.

To some extent I succeeded in that, but I became so self-obsessed and isolated that I wasn’t the success I seemed to be on paper. And so the chasm grew between my alias – the guy with the ‘Pitchfork best new music 8.0+’, with the uncompromising and flourishing career, who seemed in control of everything – and the man-child who for many years was hurting, spiralling, never leaving the house, wasting away in an ego prison, refusing to collaborate, allowing himself to be bled financially and taken advantage of by his friends and their extended family, playing video games and smoking weed fourteen hours a day and not taking any care of himself what-so-ever until he was in a black depression, experiencing daily panic attacks, hallucinations and an existential crisis. I was asking questions like ‘What is the point of me?’ and saying I didn’t want to live. I became afraid of the growing fog of war outside my house because of what I knew people expected of me if I entered it: a normal interaction and, even more impossible, a new album.

I wanted people to know how I felt, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them. I have gone into a bit of detail here not to make anyone feel sorry for me, but to show how a privileged, relatively rich-and-famous-enough-for-zero-pity white man could become depressed, against all societal expectations and allowances. If I can be writing this, clearly it isn’t only oppression that causes depression; for me it was largely repression.

I’m still not sure I fully believe I am entitled to be depressed or sad at all, because I’m white and cisgender and male, and life for people like me is undoubtedly the easiest of any group. But my privilege didn’t make me want to stick around, and it makes me feel even more embarrassed for having let myself go.

When the delusional mental force field of whiteness finally popped (the ‘psychosis’ of whiteness, as Kehinde Andrews puts it, which most white people are still experiencing – I was still able to reap the now obvious benefits of being white, straight and male but without the subconscious ability to ignore my responsibility to the marginalized), I started having the uncomfortable but rational thought that my struggle was actually comparatively tiny, and that any person of colour or member of the LGBTQ+ community could feasibly have been through exactly the same thing and then much, much more on top of that. A plate stacked until it was almost unmanageable. For me it became embarrassing to mention my child’s portion of trauma and sadness.

Combining that thought with the normalized stigmatization of male musicians’ emotional expression in the media, I felt like I must be the ‘Sadboy Prince and the Pea’.

But my girlfriend verbally slapped some sense into me, saying it does not help anybody, least of all oneself, to compare pain. And that was good advice to hear from someone who’d been through what she has. I can only imagine how frustrating it was for this Pakistani woman to watch me – with all my advantages in life – self-sabotage and complain like I have. Fuck.

And then you look at the statistics: according to the Yale Global Health Review, ‘in 2015, the crude suicide rate [in the USA] for white non-Hispanic males aged 40 to 65 was 36.84 per 100,000 people – more than twice the rate in the general American population’. If it wasn’t already clear that we have more than enough representation, we’re huge in suicide too.

Given this, I think it’s worth examining why many privileged white men can end up feeling they have no legitimate claim to pain, and then never deal with what they can’t lay claim to.

Even while writing this I’m visited by the thought ‘Who even cares? There are much bigger problems in the world than white men who feel sad.’ (This is a bloody laughable thing to write your first piece on – get some perspective, arsehole, and put away your tiny violin.) But you know what? I’ll continue because I think we need to advance the conversation around mental health for everyone, and it’s the only experience I feel qualified to talk about.

From systemic toxic masculinity (‘Boys don’t cry’, basically) and an ostensibly homophobic fear of sensitivity being beer-bonged into us by our friends, family and the media from as early as we can remember (‘Chug, chug, chug!’) to the slow realization as we get older that the world is actually stacked towards our success, we end up thinking that our individual psychological decline is shameful.

I believe it is psychologically dangerous for our egos to be built up as much as they are; for the importance of success to be so great; for the world to open its doors more to us than to others (most of us willfully ignore that those advantages exist, though we feel them deep down, and subconsciously know that it is unfair and that we must capitalize on them).

It is dangerous for us to be made to feel we can do anything and be anything, to gain an understanding of women as a resource rather than a lesson in empathy and love – and then find in all our capitalistic and egoistic fervour that we have neglected to take care of that other muscle that enables our survival: the mind.

I for one felt like Donald Trump, starting with $413 million and ending up broke and lying about my tax records. Maybe then it’s no surprise that so many disaffected white men identify so deeply with him. (It should be noted that I absolutely don’t.) That and our shared love of doing anything we want and saying whatever we like without consequence to ourselves.

That shared love has rightly led to a debate about what white males are entitled to say and do. I believe we’re entitled to no more than anybody else, which at this point requires a lot of listening and rebalancing. I also believe everybody is entitled to pain, no matter how perceptibly or relatively small that pain is. I don’t want the shame around depression and anxiety in privileged people to become worse any more than I want it for the marginalized. Because without addressing that pain we end up with more cis-gendered white male egomaniacs who bleed their shit on to everybody (and some of them will write albums about it).

James Blake's essay is from It's Not Ok To Feel Blue (And Other Lies), a collection of writing about mental health, curated by Scarlett Curtis.

#toxic masculinity #james blake #mental health #depression #white privilege #awareness

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array-gem · 4 years

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Book Review: No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu

No Longer Human is more often than not called a masterpiece written by the Japanese writer, Dazai Osamu. Published in 1948, the story is divided into three notebooks and a prologue and an epilogue. The story tells us about the life of Oba Yozo, who has always been ‘afraid of humans’.

The story in one word is depressing.

In the first notebook, Yozo starts the first notebook with the words, “Mine has been a life of much shame.” I read this book quite some time ago so I don’t remember things as clearly now but he tells us about how he has never eaten out of hunger unlike others and how he was always conflicted with how human beings thought, worked and acted.

One part that stuck with me was when he was talking about presents.

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”

This part reminded me heavily of myself, of how I am always so disinterested in gifts — both giving them and receiving them — and shopping. Every time I go somewhere with my mom, there’s rarely an instance where I want to buy something. It’s usually them choosing whatever suits their taste and I just say yes. I have wondered about how nothing interested me, how nothing caught my attention and him saying that was relatable.

Yozo states he was abused by his family servants.

“My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of a mischievous imp. Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted. I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, crudest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it. I even felt as if it enabled me to see one more particular aspect of human beings. I smiled in my weakness.”

He said if he had the habit of telling the truth, maybe he would’ve informed his parents about it but since he was not, he kept quiet and he felt as if “he had to endure whatever came his way and go on playing the clown.”

The clown. That is what he refers to himself as. From childhood, he has always gone an extra step to make people laugh, to have them pleased in him, to be on their good side. In the second notebook, however, a boy named Takeichi sees through his facade and Yozo is terrified to the point he wishes death on Takeichi; but the thought of killing him himself never occurs to him. He becomes hell-bent on winning him over, to keep him close and under watch. Yozo befriends him.

One day, when the topic of ‘ghost-pictures’(which are nothing but self-protraits of famous artists), Yozo realizes some painters have seen such trauma that they began seeing the devils in broad daylight and drew them just as they saw them.

Takeichi makes two predictions about him. One, he will become a great painter someday and two, women would fall for him. Only one came true.

Yozo attempts suicide twice or thrice in the whole book, but failing to take his life every time. He tried living a normal life with a younger girl named Hoshiko and continues his life as a cartoonist but happiness doesn’t seem to be something that lasts long when it comes to him. He forms a morphine addiction after some events and gets admitted to a mental hospital in the end. He says how he has ceased to be a part of society, to be human.

I skipped a lot of events from the third notebook but there was a part where he talked about society. He realized it’s not society, it’s merely the other person you are engaging with. Society won’t tell you anything, it’s the other person who will. From then on, he lead a more self-indulgent life for some time. I don’t remember how the last notebook ends but it was him talking about how the old lady assigned to take care of him(after he left the mental institution) gave him laxatives though he asked for something else and how tried to kill himself with those but couldn’t.

The epilogue is of an unnamed narrator being given the three notebook by the madam of a bar Yozo left the books to. She says he might already be dead by then(it took place around ten years after the notebook was written, I think). She expresses her regret with “if only he hadn’t drunk” but adds, “Even if he did drink, he was a good boy. An angel.”

And I cried.

Throughout the whole book, I disagreed with Yozo on many aspects but there were times when I was so struck by his words that I had to take a moment to stop and think.

Two prominent thoughts I had throughout that story were:

1.”People sure do love feeling depressed.” It’s the second-best selling book in Japanese history, right behind Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro.

2. My maths teacher once told me and another student, “People don’t read a loser’s story.” I wondered what he meant by that. I realized I was indirectly calling Yozo a loser. As I couldn’t find an answer to that, I pushed the thought to the deeper parts of my mind and tried to forget it.

I had contradicting thoughts while reading it. One side of me said, “I don’t understand why this is considered a masterpiece,” And the other side said, “It really is a masterpiece.”

Dazai Osamu from the anime Bungou Stray Dogs is my current big-time crush and honestly, I wish the fandom would talk more about the characters’ personalities, the plot and the authors. That anime has introduced me to so many new authors, I’ll forever be grateful to it. I wish we get to see more of Dazai’s inner side.

Sad fact: Dazai Osamu committed suicide on 13th June, which is my birthday, and his body was found six days later on 19th June, which would’ve been his own birthday.

I’d recommend this book, No Longer Human, to anyone who can handle reading about drug usage, alcoholism, mentions of child abuse, suicides, a protagonist you might hate at times and just feeling that cold chill in your bones.

I don’t think it’s possible for a story to have the completely same vibe after it has been translated from its native language but you can get the PDF from here:

https://www.pdfdrive.com/no-longer-human-e189007211.html

See you next time~

#dazai osamu #osamu dazai #bungou stray dogs #book reviews #writers #tw suicide #i'm sad #this is a masterpiece #no longer human #dazai #i love him #i hope he is happy

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linkspooky · 7 years

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Do you think the baby is gonna die by kanou?

Alright I am going to attempt now, to answer the question of Kanou’s… methodology and morality, which I answered as a joke about two posts earlier. It’s actually quite complicated so it’s going to take a bit of disecting.

The question is, how much of a danger would Kanou be to Touka if he were to kidnap her and then assist her with the pregnancy. That answer in itself is not clear as we actually have no idea as to Kanou’s motivations even now, only his methods.

Looking at his methods alone it’s not particularly looking good. Kanou has most likely the highest body count in the series. Even if you were to assume the low end of the number of Investigators who had Owl transferred into them and say there were only about 100 who went missing and were kindapped by Aogiri. That would mean that in addition to the 1200 that were kidnapped and experimented on by Kanou, that would be a 1300 total.

Which gives kanou the highest individual body count in the series, possibly tied with Furuta at this point if you consider Furuta the accomplice to all of those deaths. Kanou is also more closely tied to Furuta than any other character in the series.

Furuta’s weird flashback could reveal that the only person that Furuta might cooperate, or even trust rather than simply dominate and manipulate is Kanou. The two of them share some similarities, they both are good at using rhetoric in order to put on acts and convince others to fight for causes that they themselves do not care particularly about.

He also created the birdcage metaphor that Eto adopts. However, Eto actually believes in it while it’s likely that Kanou doesn’t. Especially considering that he went immediately back to working for the CCG the moment that Furuta took over.

Kanou even muses for a moment that rather than having an assistant, he might simply be an assistant to someone else.It’s likely the person he’s talking about here is Furuta.

If you were to look at Furuta and Kanou as characters with similiar mindsets then and compare them, it would mean that at best Kanou finds his closest cooperation partner with an extremist whose willing to go to lengths far exceeding Eto’s in order to become a perfect villain to destroy the world, and at worst a complete nihilist who wants to bring an end to the fighting by motivating both sides into killing each other in an elaborate double suicide to give significance to his own death.

Either interpretation of Furuta, and thus Kanou however puts them ata great distance from most of humanity.

Kanou’s one small flashback connection to Ogura in 103 even hints at that. The omake gives us a little depth into Kanou.

Narration: Ever since Akki joined, the number of female members had increased…

Girls crowding around Kanou: Kyaa! Kanou-ku~n!

Ogura: Hey, the order in this club is falling apart! As the president of the Ghoul Research Society, I can’t keep quiet about this! I can’t turn a blind eye to you and your popularity with the ladies! Are you going to pick the meetings or the ladies? I’ll make it clear for you…Akki!

Ogura: The girls or the Research Society…which one are you going to choose!?

Kanou: You’re a pain in the ass.

Narration: It was then that I thought that this was the first time that I had ever heard his true thoughts.

Kanou has the charisma to attract people left and right, and yet at the same time he seems to have absolutely no regard for other people that do not interest him as well.

Narration: From the next day on, Kanou Akihiro didn’t show up to the Research Society. It seemed like he had finished reading all the valuable literature the Research Society had [on ghouls]. I graduated a year late from university, and several years later I ran into him by chance on the street. He went and left without a sign that he had recognized me. Later, I regretted not being able to speak to him then. I…I had wanted to keep being friends with him.

When he leaves the ghoul research society, it’s because he read through all of their literature and therefore they are useless to him. Despite spending time in college together, he completely forgets Ogura’s name and face too.

Falling in and out of relationships easily, and yet at the same time having a tendency towards total fixation of certain individuals. Which is how his obsession with Kaneki has always been portrayed. A fixation. Furuta says so plainly, there is absolutely nothing special about Kaneki, he was not chosen in any way besides pure luck.

Kanou’s obsession with Kaneki, especially in comparison to Eto who probably could have put anyone in the seat of the one eyed king as long as they were powerful enough to defeat Arima Kishou (it’s a nameless king intentionally named by her that way after all), is likely just the result of his own personality disorder.

Kanou falling in and out of relationships with others depending more on their usefulness to him, his tendency to hyper fixate then on certain individuals, his disregard for society’s rules and even total disdain for it, all of these are traits that are typical potrayals of antisocial personality disorder in characters.

However, even if we were to say that Kanou’s actions can be explained away by his sociopathy, that’s very much the antithesis of the story’s thematic insistence that monsters are created and not born. Even Torso so far has had a so called crybaby backstory in order to explain away his actions but why not Kanou? It is thematically a little weird to have Kanou as an outlier completely incapable of empathy in a story that is about human relationships, and the natural want for empathy in everyone.

My counter to that of course, is that Kanou himself is not really ever depicted as completely void of empathy. Even calling Kanou Frankenstein might be inaccurate, because Kanou never hated the monster like Viktor did. In fact he offered to help Kaneki, and fell in love with his creation from afar as soon as he heard about what it had accomplished. That’s pretty much the opposite of Viktor.

Kanou is actually nothing but kind to both Kurona and Nashiro when raising the two of them as a surrogate father. Even when Kurona fails entirely to repel Suzuya, Kanou himself does not seem particularly hostile towards them for their failure. He’s just entirely pragmatic.

She can’t be saved so it’s no use bothering to try. Which means, kindness, compassion, are all behaiors Kanou can demonstrate but it’s always up until a point. That point is usually just however long they remain useful to him. Kurona even comments so much after the fact, that both Nashiro and Herself came out being treated as objects by Kanou when they turned out not so useful as he thought they might.

Kanou strings people along with affection and charisma, and he almost never has any malicious intent towards those people. Which makes him quite different from a lot of the abusers in Tokyo Ghoul. At the end of the day though they ultimately end up being objects to him.

Even Kanou’s great abuse of Takizawa, was not done with any sadistic intentions in mind, it was pure pragmatism.

There are a couple of suggestions that Kanou might have a greater motivation than simply “science is fun.” Kurona makes a mention of a lab of his that burned down once, and also he seems to scoff at the idea that Kurona suggests he’s simply a mad scientist.

However, I think the true problem with Kanou might not arise from his own lack of empathy, but rather the system that enables him. After all, if Kanou had never been exposed to ghoulification, he would probably just be a normal doctor. In fact, his lack of empathy might have made him a better doctor as he would be able to withstand the wear and tear of hospital work much better without being affected much mentally by it.

It was the CCG who enabled Kanou, and the pulled the plug without any regard for what might happen to Kanou after the fact. The CCG has always shown to be careless with individuals like this, Goumasa Tokage, Kijima, Mado they are all allowed basically free reign to do whatever they please as long as they point those sadistic tendencies sometimes at ghouls.

Sure, Kanou has a body count in the thousands when it comes to humans but how many still alive ghouls has Chigyou taken in, in order to be most likely experimented on while still alive and turned into Quinques. Considering that the CCG has no ethical restraints when it comes to torturing ghouls I can’t see them even bothering to use sedative when the quinque is being extracted, and after it’s out they threw them straight into the grinder. What about Shiba who was willing to operate on a girl who gave no consent to having ghoul parts put in her, and instead had her parents sign a form for her for money.

It’s likely, Kanou, Chigyou, Shiba, all of them are exactly as Urie observed. They just want to work with pure science and be praised for their scientific skill, and this is enabled and taken to it’s absolute worse by the CCG’s methodology, of being completely unscrupulous towards the killing of ghouls.

What exactly does this mean for Touka? As I said before, it’s likely Kanou has no malicious intent for Touka at all.He would probably keep her safe as a fun science experiment, but the exact same way he treated Kurona and rendered her essentially an object, he would be abusing Touka as well.

What Kanou is likely to hold her in is more akin to an extremely comfortable prison cell, rather than a sterile operating chamber.

#metasks #akihiro kanou #Anonymous

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