#the life of a suburban black kid

[vegasvagus]

Life can feel a bit isolated and lonely when you can't relate to a majority of the things you are "supposed" to relate to and when others try to connect you gotta just awkwardly smile and say "I have no clue about the experience you are talking about" and things get weird because you can feel them think "then why are you here?" but you can't articulate yourself well enough to say that you want community but on god you just chillin and livin and don't relate to anything since you lived a life that's oddly sheltered (in a way) and isolated that doesn't make sense

[runthepockets]

Lets be honest with ourselves. Death Grips is pretty much only a meme band cus suburban white kids think black people are funny. Memes of MC Ride sitting and eating a fucking sandwich at Subway was soon as kooky whacky edgy stuff that you could post for a cheap laugh, photos of him painting with his cat were "surreal" for a lot of people. You never saw people circulating their interviews or sharing pictures and videos of him when he was younger and expressing really profound thoughts on art and music and politics, even though all of those things are very easily accessible online, cus that's not gonna get you clout.

I really don't get it. Like, yeah, Death Grip's sound is probably pretty jarring if you're not used to heavier music, but it wears off after a while. They're a Punk band with Industrial and Hip Hop elements, of course they scream and have politically charged messages and whatnot, so does every artist in each of those genres. Of course the guy has a fucking life outside of screaming on a stage, every artist does. You never see people making memes of Black Flag or Skinny Puppy for doing the same shit, you don't even really see memes of the other two members in the very same band doing the shit they do, despite being just as erratic and unorthodox as their frontman.

This is why I don't believe people when they tell me a song or band is a meme because people like the song / band in question, I think they are just making fun of people and treating art like a game solely because the art in question doesn't fit their scant little worldview. Shit's so lame.

[fear-is-truth]

How would Patrick react to you getting pregnant?

getting knocked up by patrick bateman .ᐟ.ᐟ

tw ; unplanned pregnancy (duh), intrusive thoughts, suggestive, not proofread at all

a/n: i finished writing this then forgot about its existence lol. anyways, safe sex is important !!

if you’re already married:

patrick’s reaction to the pregnancy would be shaped by his obsession with image. being 27 and married, he’d likely face pressure from his colleagues. he’s the quintessential wall street yuppie: the suit, the power, the status. kids? they’re just another box to check for the perfect american dream.

he’d flip from denial to forced enthusiasm, playing the role of the expectant father. he’d talk about starting a college fund, buying a bigger apartment, even hiring the best nanny money can buy. it wouldn’t be about the baby itself, though—it’s about appearances. patrick would treat the pregnancy like he treats his designer wardrobe: another accessory to show off.

in private, he’d still be unraveling. he’d resent the disruption to his routine, the messiness a baby would bring. but he’d also feel trapped. divorce or walking away isn’t an option—how would that look? his friends are your friends, after all. patrick would pour his insecurities into overcompensation, obsessively showering you with gifts and planning every detail of your life.

but behind closed doors, he would remain emotionally unavailable most of the time. he’d throw himself into his work, his gym routine, anything to avoid facing the reality of impending fatherhood.

he’d have a mental meltdown over your body changing—obsessing over how “the weight is distributed” while simultaneously marveling (inappropriately) at how your chest looks fuller. (“…better than any breast implants”), the way your skin glows, but also how your clothes fit differently. he doesn’t even try to hide his vanity. “you’re still beautiful, obviously,” he adds quickly, “but maybe we should talk to a trainer after the baby is born. just to make sure you bounce back quickly.”

he’d absolutely flip between moments of pathetic awkwardness and his usual cold arrogance. for example, he’d randomly caress your growing belly, but then suddenly blurt out “your… tits looks great, but do stretch marks happen to everyone?”

he’s constantly offering unsolicited opinions about your diet and fitness routine. he’s the husband who insists you on buying expensive organic groceries and then criticises you for craving something as mundane as ice cream. but when you do cry about it (because hormones), he panics and makes the whole situation awkward.

if you dare deny him sex because of pregnancy hormones, patrick would sulk like a child. but then quickly bounce back to showering you with gifts to stay on your good side.

patrick’s jealousy of your attention is borderline absurd. he starts competing with the baby before it’s even born, constantly reminding you of his accomplishments.

maternal clothes for you are only the best—chanel, hermès, and gucci maternity collections. he refuses to let you look frumpy. if you wear anything “off-brand,” he’ll throw passive-aggressive comments like “are you trying to look like a suburban soccer mom?”. also, he’d browse catalogs and stores for gucci, armani and burberry baby clothes.

the nursery is black & white and minimalist—think pristine white walls, sleek italian furniture, and splashes of gray for “warmth.” no toys that clash with the aesthetic. he insists on vitra rocking chairs, fendi baby blankets, and a custom crib.

patrick spends hours making sure the initials won’t spell something embarrassing and that the full name looks good on a business card.

he’d pick out names that scream “old money”. for boys: theodore, alexander, nathaniel. for girls: charlotte, victoria, isabelle, madeleine, genevieve, anastasia.

his obsession with control would bleed into the smallest details. he’d blast his favorite music at your presence—huey lewis & the news, whitney houston, or talking heads—arguing it’s “good for the baby’s development,” while monologuing about how these artists represent true genius.

he’d talk to your stomach, but awkwardly, fumbling over words in his usual detached, overly-rehearsed way: “your dad’s a very successful man, you know… i hope you inherit my bone structure.”

if it’s an unplanned pregnancy:

if you’re not married, holy shit… the stakes are different, but patrick’s reaction is just as selfish. first of all, the pregnancy is absolutely. his. fucking. fault. patrick hates wearing condoms (would sometimes straight up lie about wearing one) and he always tells you that nothing “bad” will happen—until it does.

his immediate response would be to downplay the situation. “are you sure?” he’d ask flatly, trying to buy time. his inner monologue would be a chaotic swirl of paranoia and blame—his mind races with possibilities: is this some gold-digging ploy? a mistake? could it even be his? and he even has the audacity to ask “are you sure it’s mine?”

the next stage would be denial. patrick doesn’t deal well with reality when it doesn’t serve him. he’d try to act as though nothing has changed, refusing to acknowledge the pregnancy in conversation. he might even subtly suggest that “it’s early days, we don’t have to make any decisions yet,” thinly veiling his hope that you’ll take care of it and spare him the inconvenience. but when it becomes clear that you’re keeping the baby, his panic would fucking escalate.

he might lash out, picking fights over nothing or disappearing for hours at a time to “work late” (read: spiral into his usual vices—drugs, violence, torturing sex workers).

he’d start compensating in weird ways. he’d lavish you with gifts—jewelry, designer clothes, a bigger apartment—anything to make you think he’s excited, supportive even. they’re attempts to placate you, to make the problem go away without addressing it.

in private, patrick would unravel. his inner monologue would become a torrent of rage, fear, and morbid fantasies. he’d think about running away, faking his own death, or worse—doing something drastic to ensure the pregnancy never reaches full term.

the idea of fatherhood would gnaw at him. as a child of divorce, patrick is deeply insecure, and the thought of raising a child dredges up unresolved feelings about his own father. the self-loathing buried under his narcissism rearing its head. he’d compare himself to his colleagues and realise that many of them already have kids—or at least talk about starting families. peer pressure.

this sense of competition would push him to overcompensate. he’d brag about how “ready” he is, throwing money at every conceivable solution: top-tier obstetricians, prenatal yoga classes, nursery designers. he’d try to mold himself into the perfect father-to-be, but only because he wants to win.

but patrick being patrick, his selfishness bleeds through. he bitches about your mood swings—“it’s like living with a completely different person”—but also refuses to acknowledge his role in them.

he spends hours staring at himself in the mirror, wondering if fatherhood will make him less attractive. he starts paying extra attention to his skincare routine, convinced that stress is causing him to wrinkle.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Heavy Topics: A Child's Vision of Evil

One of the first big “aha!” moments in my journey to retrofit d&d’s laughably bad lore was the realization that the way the game treated evil didn’t make much sense.  As a dungeonmaster I was asked to create dramatic stakes for my players but the out-of-the-box antagonists supplied to me were as laughably one note as the pollution loving villains in Captain Planet. Who would ever worship the demon god of killing everything that lives? Of torturing you for all eternity? Of being unpleasantly covered in slime? 

None of it really made sense until I started to understand the world and recent history through a political lens, at which point several things became clear: 

Despite how large a bogyman it played in the satan scare of the late 80s, the people who laid the foundations for the lore of d&d came from a background of conservative american christianity, and baked a lot of that ethos into the game. 

The conservative christian imagination can only see things in black and white. People who disagree with them can’t just have a different opinion, even if that opinion is objectively good, they need to be wilfully evil . In fact they must be trying as hard to be evil as the christian is trying to be good, because they’re a backwards person, a monster, a demon. 

This idea of the “Backwards Person” is the exact process that gave rise to the bloodlibel, to the witchpanics, to the redscare, and yes, the 80s fear that satanists lurk around every corner sacrificing babies and putting poison in candy because they love evil that much.  It’s the same thought that’s given rise to Q-anon and the groomer panic. “People who disagree with just can’t just have a different opinion, they must be demons.”

D&D’s classic enemies are similarly all “backwards people”, hardwired to do evil so that players always have an excuse to kill them.  While on the surface it seems harmless or even childish it leads to the default d&d world being one where peace is impossible and genocidal violence is the only correct answer.  

We can do better in our writing than a bunch of shut-ins who wanted nothing more than to play cowboys and indians while ripping off Tolkien. Whether you want to write a sweeping epic or a mindless dungeon crawler, there’s a way to reconfigure d&d lore. 

Join me below the cut for a discussion of different ways to use evil in your games.

Children cannot control their emotions nor their fear, they lack the life experience necessary to contextualize things beyond a surface level reading. If you ask a child to "imagine something bad" they're going to take something that scared them, something gross or unpleasant or threatening and imagine it blown up to cartoonish proportion. Tolkien got bit by a spider as a kid and the entire fantasy genre has never lived it down.

D&D is weird because it keeps these childish ideas about evil and drags them forward into an adult context. Those three demon gods I mentioned in the intro make a sort of sense when you realize they're fears of dying, pain, and uncleanliness made manifest. That said most of us having outgrown our childish simplicity understand that those things are neutral, Spiders might personally gross you out but we all understand that doesn't make them bad on a spiritual level. In the base d&d lore however that personal distaste is ALWAYS true: Evilness is synonymous with ugliness and monstrousness, drawing a thick crayon line between the good people and the bad things.

That's where we get our particular flavor of backwards people, because one of those fundamental (pun intended) fears d&d inherited from it's creators was xenophobia, fear of the strange, but also fear of the stranger. When the white, suburban, middle class, christian creators of d&d imagined the other they took all the bad things they had been told in their youth about people who were not them and made them into monsters: That's why the default thinking enemies of d&d are tribal primitives who squat in the ruins of greater civilizations worshipping demons while coveting the beauty and wealth of cultured people. It sounds hyperbolic, but there's a one for one parallel between between the weird sexual anxieties conservatives have about black men and orcs raiding human lands to kidnap women as breeding stock. Same fears about emasculation and race mixing and ethnic replacement, only d&d gives the good ol' boys a narrative vehicle where they can revenge themselves upon their imagined foe.

Most modern d&d is not like this, and I chalk that up to the demographic shift that's happened both because of time passing and the influx of new voices that came along with the 5e renaissance. We're all media literate enough to avoid the obvious racial pantomime... except in cases like the Hardozee when the devs port something almost word for word from an older edition and we get a thanksgiving uncle/facebook aunt screed about how the silly monkey people are really SO happy to work for the refined and civilized and white elves.

What's left behind however is that pervasive childlike worldview: Where perfectly natural things that creep us out (like rot) or frighten us (like pregnancy) are made universally villainous regardless of any themes that are going on in that specific story. Ask yourself why the creators of a piece of media made their badguys look and act like they did, rather than just accepting that it's that way because "the lore says so".

Anyway, that's my rant over, and I promised you guys some different versions of how to use Evil:

Classic demons or lovecraftian horrors make for good bossfights but are thin on character, one of the basic building blocks of story. To remedy this, pair your unremitting force of darkness and destruction with a troubled and nuanced mortal agent, someone who is trying their general best but has been forced down this low road by circumstances beyond their control. This gives your roleplaying focused players something to play off against while your combat focused ones battle a building sized monstrosity. Raw evil isn't interesting, it becomes interesting when we see what it makes morally grey people, even good people, do in reaction to it.

Extremity is one of the best ways to turn normal people into villains, a looming disaster or recent crisis that's putting the pressure on everyone and preventing anyone from thinking beyond protecting themselves and their own. Beyond the people acting rashly, you're also going to have a legion of opportunists offering to fix the problem as your higher rank of antagonists to overcome.

Similarly, if you're going to have your villain backed up by legions of faceless mooks you're going to need a reason for their loyalty. Your villain is offering them something worth dying for, which gives your heroes an alternate win condition for overcoming their numbers beyond genocide.

If you're willing to take a step into a more fanciful, cartoony universe, feel free to play with the idea of good and evil as arbitrary teams: It's the badguy's job to cause chaos and it's the goodguy's job to stop em, they're all working professionals and the dungeon is the workplace comedy. This is fun, but then lets you escalate the tension when someone doesn't play by the rules. What happens when a zealot starts executing evildoers who'd already surrendered? what happens when the villain summons something that is more interested in devastation than wacky hijinx?

Think of morality like a punnett square: There's the party, and then there's the villain who wants the opposite of what they want. THEN there's the villain who wants what the party wants, and the ally who wants the opposite of party wants. Suddenly rather than a simple binary, the party is forced to balance the interest of varying groups as well as their better judgment. This can be made even MORE complex by creating different categories of "what the party wants", which is generally how you get complex political dramas like game of thrones.

[aloysiavirgata]

Skinner POV on post-S5 MSR. I trust this to no hands but yours, empress.

It was in Baltimore. Kidnapping victim, some Congressman’s girlfriend dredged from the Harbor and up they all went, silent and shifty in a big Bureau Suburban.

***

He’s been touching Scully obscenely for years, Mulder has, but what’s always shocked Skinner is that Scully lets him. Her femme-fatale looks and her clear willingness to pistol whip the disrespectful have left him a bit at sea with her tolerance for Mulder’s wayward hands and gazes.

Mulder, like a half-trained Weimaraner. Mulder endlessly sprawling and sniffing and hunting and brilliant and exhausting.

Scully, like a tortoiseshell cat. Scully with half-lidded topaz eyes and eternal, quiet patience.

***

They’re dockside at the USS Constellation, Scully squinting with her hand curved along her brow. Mulder’s obnoxious black Burberry trench flapping like some kind of bespoke fruit bat. Mulder’s rich-kid arrogance.

Scully crouches over the weighted net the girl was wrapped in. There’s a clump of hair snarled in the mesh; it has been cut away to release the body. The girl floats upwards like a mermaid in a nightmare, crab-gnawed and a marbled green.

Mulder wrinkles his nose.

Scully’s hair more stylish now, Scully’s suits trimmer and her blouses more fitted. Everything about her is sleeker and shinier and more polished. She is beautiful, astonishingly beautiful, and it startles him sometimes that she should choose such a small life. That she should choose Mulder, frankly.

Mulder kneels beside her like a dark guardian angel. He skims a hand over her head nearly too fast to see. He thumbs her scrimshaw clavicles, her fine jaw.

Skinner knows, in an abstract sense, that Mulder is beautiful too; that Scully is justified. He still, in his deepest heart, does not feel that Mulder is justified.

He’d traded himself for her life that once because he was a Marine, because she is a rare creature, because he and Mulder had made her thus. Because, on more than one lonely night, he’d flashed on her white throat and bee-stung mouth behind his clenched lids.

Shamed, looks away from them, into the west.

***

He’s in love with Scully in a chivalric way. He’d lay his coat over a mud puddle for her ridiculous shoes. He’d challenge someone to a duel for her honor. But he couldn’t do what Mulder does; he couldn’t love her properly while she weeps and bleeds and dies of a thousand tiny cuts.

Couldn’t bury her daughter and keep sane.

Scully sighs, thumbs half a Subway bag from the corpse’s melting face.

***

The ME’s office at Penn and Pratt, because rank beats jurisdiction, because Skinner commandeered the decomp room when Scully asked. Scully’s regal face like the prow of that ship, Scully’s hair like Diogenes’s lantern.

Her hands like pale garden spiders moving lightly over the body, her steady voice speaking as he and Mulder watched and listened.

The girl was pregnant. Of course she was pregnant, of course she -

Mulder’s hand at Scully’s Bettie Page waist, somehow sinuous even in those boxy scrubs. Scully flinches, breathes, proceeds.

Scully dying, hypovolemic, hating him. Scully translucent as the votive candles she surely lights in her dark church, pale and flickering and full of temporary light.

Skinner looks upwards, at the cheap paneled ceiling, at the bad fluorescent light. He looks at the way Mulder’s hand is spread across her back with only support and not an ounce of possessiveness. He realizes, then, that it has never occurred to Mulder that Scully could belong to anyone else.

[dearsnow]

I’D HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT

- you still think about the man that broke your heart years later. (bradley “rooster” bradshaw x gn!/fem!reader, pure angst (sorry))

word count: 719

a/n - writing angst scratches a part of my writing urges that nothing else can fill lol. i prefer reading fluff, but writing is another story- funny, huh? anyways, enjoy. here’s to writing that doesn’t have a happy ending <3

When your boyfriend was deployed the first time, you thought it wouldn’t be too bad. It was just a few months, right?

You wrote letters, and you sent emails, and you called just enough to whet your taste for his voice before he was pulled away. You’d do anything for Bradley Bradshaw, and he knew it.

“I just don’t think it’s going to work out.” His words fell from his mouth and shattered on your floor like broken glass. You felt a lump form in your throat, choking you. He was saying the one thing you never wanted to hear. “You know how my job is. I’d never be able to treat you like you deserve. I’m sorry, but we have to break it off.”

A stinging set off behind your eyes, clouding your vision and pulling your eyes down to the floor. You could wait. You would take the crumbs of him that he offered like a starved animal, no matter how long you went without food. Didn’t he understand that you’d have waited lifetimes? That you loved him more than you’ve loved anything? You needed him like air, but he needed you like solid ground; if he was in the water, he could survive without you.

“But I love you,” you protested, “I’d wait.”

He shook his head. He loved you too, and that’s why he left you to fend for yourself.

It took three years for you to find someone else, two years for you to marry them, and one more before you had your first child. She was four when you had your second, a boy. He’s three now.

Twelve years. It took twelve years for Bradley to finally leave your mind. You’re reorganizing your old things, discarding everything from your life before your family. That’s when you happen upon a letter you wrote so long ago it seems like a distant dream, yet so fresh in your mind that you can recite a few lines by memory.

Dear Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw,

I will always love you.

You’re my Achilles heel. I want you so desperately it burns, it burns my throat and my eyes and my heart. I don’t think I can get over that kind of burn.

I’ll move on, though, as I’m sure that’s what you wanted for me. I’ll marry someone. I’ll have children. I’ll have that white picket fence suburban dream, the one where your new neighbors bake you brownies and the sun is just a little too hot all the time. I’ll have a stable life, a nice one. I’ll have a pool and a two-story house. I might even get a dog or three for my kids to play with– a golden retriever trio that came from the same stray litter.

But if you came to me, walked up to my home, and smiled at me through the window, it would be like nothing ever changed. I’m terrified even now that I’ll say your name when my boyfriend wraps his arms around my waist. If you asked me to leave with you, to turn in my divorce papers and lose custody of the children I’ll eventually have, I’d have to think about it. I would have to think about leaving everything I’ve built to elope with you.

What scares me is that I would probably end up doing it.

So, I hope I never see you again, because I don’t want to have to break the hearts of those who love me. And I also hope that if you knock on my door, I’ll have the strength to close it.

Yours truly,

The One Who Would Have Waited.

You set the envelope down on your desk with watery eyes. The worst part about finding the slightly crumpled letter is that it still rings true after all this time, even after you told yourself it held no weight. You’ll forget about the letter eventually, you tell yourself. You’ll forget about the person written in black ink, too.

You have a good life, no one can doubt that. You tell yourself that nothing could be better. But when you think about the love of your life, you don’t think about the person you married.

You think about the man with a mustache who broke your heart so many years ago.

[baronessvonglitter]

The Haunting of David York

Dave York x ghost!reader

Word count: 2.6K

Summary: It's a typical Halloween night for Dave. The last thing he expects is for you to come back and get your revenge.

(Spoilers below the cut, so resume with caution)

WARNINGS: Rated M; Dead Dove Do Not Eat; mentions of wet work, murder, brief gore, threats of violence towards family, major character death (don't hit me)

Author's Note: this fic is for @mermaidgirl30 Jamie's Halloween Writing Challenge 👻 thank you for hosting this lovely fic challenge!

The idea for this started out as a random discussion about why we're afraid of ghosts if they can't really hurt anyone.. then I wanted to add our favorite suburban murder daddy to a ghost story and got some inspo from watching old school stuff like Creepshow and early seasons of AHS. (I haven't written horror in a very long time, so gimme a little break)

Shoutout to @yorksgirl for the Dave chit chats-- there will be a sweatpants scene in another fic, promise!

"Dave, not again!" Carol whines from the front steps.

"What?" he asks innocently, hefting the human-sized 'body bag' consisting of garbage bags stuffed with leaves and tied up with duct tape to fashion a corpse decoration in the yard for Halloween. Dave has been working on them all day. He's now up to seventeen.

"The HOA is going to complain," his wife shakes her head. "We got away with a warning last year. This time they'll definitely fine us."

"It's worth it to see the looks on everyone's faces," he insists. "Besides, I'll have them picked up and out of sight by the end of the night. I promise."

Dave doesn't love Halloween, but neither does he mind it. People dressing up to be anything other than themselves for one night only? Try doing that 24/7.

He doesn't get to parade around the Mr. Hyde aspect of his life. He doesn't get to knock on doors while in tactical gear, sniper rifle resting in one arm while he sticks an orange jack-o-lantern bucket out to get a handful of tooth-rotting sweets. He doesn't get to wake up on November first and pretend it was all for fun.

It's a silly holiday, but he likes scaring the shit out of the neighbors with the decorations. And his kids love planning their costumes months in advance. Alice is going as a zombie cheerleader (he never understands where these ideas come from) and Molly is some type of Pokemon Dave thinks is a squirrel but she insists is something called an Evoo or Evie or something completely asinine.

Carol usually insists on taking them out trick-or-treating, dressing up herself in a last-minute Minnie Mouse getup, a red sweater and black leggings, and a headband with sequined mouse ears to complete the look.

"You'll be okay here by yourself?" she asks, putting the finishing touches on her mouse whiskers and nose with liquid eye liner in the hall mirror as the girls wait impatiently to leave.

She asks that every year, as if something bad will happen on his watch, as if he can't hack it alone for a couple of hours.

"Unless Michael Myers or Pennywise show up, I'm pretty sure I'll be fine," he says, giving the girls a quick kiss before they go.

"What's Pennywise?" Alice asks as Carol herds them out the door, and she shoots her husband an annoyed glance.

There aren't as many trick-or-treaters this year, and Dave regrets that he'd bought so much candy. He dips his hand into the large tub of mini chocolate bars and fruit-flavored chews that stick to one's teeth and selects some Nerds, eating them straight from the tiny box. With barely concealed disgust he finds the candy corn, plucking the small packets of the hated sweets out from the bowl. He doesn't know how anyone can eat these. These can go to the next kids who ring the doorbell. When the next round of costumed kids come around he gives out huge handfuls. The less sweets they have in the house, the less sugar-fueled meltdowns he's likely to experience from his kiddos.

When there's more of a lull he relaxes on the sofa, mindlessly unwrapping a chocolate bar as the Halloween song hums from the TV, The Nightmare Before Christmas playing where the girls had left it on:

Boys and girls of every age wouldn't you like to see something strange? come with us and you will see this, our town of Halloween

He finds his glass of Macallan pairs nicely with a mini Hershey's Special Dark chocolate that he knows the little trick-or-treaters won't appreciate. The candy rests on his tongue as he savors the lingering taste of the scotch while the movie keeps playing. He absorbs a little of it, a now thirty-year-old film that came out when he was his kids' age. He watches idly, letting the scotch lull him into a nice semi-rest.

This is Halloween, this is Halloween pumpkins scream in the dead of night this is Halloween, everybody make a scene trick or treat, 'til the neighbors gonna die of fright

Enough of the singing. He changes the channel. There's postseason baseball on TV, but his favorite team isn't in the playoffs, and the announcers are annoying. Click. Of course there's a horror marathon on every channel. All the Scream movies, which he can appreciate for their ingenuity, Psycho, Shaun of the Dead, the entire Friday the 13th franchise even though it's Thursday, the 31st.

He flips channels, mindlessly, watching tidbits of each, digging into the leftover candy once again when he hears a thud.

With feline alertness he mutes the TV and sits up straight in one swift move. He zones in on where the sound came from, waiting, his racing heart the most audible sound in his ears.

Most people listen for a sound and relax when they don't hear it again, chalking it up to the house settling, or a rodent in the attic. But Dave knows better. He's been on the opposite side of this type of situation countless times. He doesn't relax and just chalk it up to mundane things like other people, because he knows there are guys like him out there-- becoming one with the shadows, as silent as possible--

It's coming from the back door.

In stealth mode, he grabs his gun from the safe in his study and quickly, skillfully, loads it. Adrenaline sings in his veins, carries him towards the danger. He flips on the light switch for the patio and the lights glare into the dark, lighting up nothing. His gun is still in his hand as he slowly opens the door, listening for footsteps.

Quiet.

A little disappointed that he's gotten riled up for no reason, he sighs as the rush of adrenaline dissipates and leaves him weak for a brief moment.

He keeps the gun in the holster at his side as he returns to the sofa, a little more on edge. It could be just teenage assholes playing pranks out of boredom, but he doesn't want to risk it.

He shuts the TV off and the silence becomes the largest thing in the room, even louder than his thoughts. He's taut as wire, not allowing himself to relax just yet. He's listening for more sounds. Most are explainable: a slow drip in the kitchen sink that Carol told him about just yesterday, the notification pings on his daughter's tablet that she left on the dining room table.

"Fuck!" he curses in surprise as the TV turns on, The Nightmare Before Christmas still playing where it left off:

I am the one hiding under your bed, teeth ground sharp and eyes glowing red I am the one hiding under your stairs fingers like snakes and spiders in my hair

Dave quickly snaps the TV off, removing the batteries from the remote.

It's just some electrical glitch he tells himself. And then the power goes out completely.

"Shit," he mutters, using his phone to light the way to locate the real flashlight. It's not in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink where it's supposed to be left. Carol must have moved it. He checks the garage. Through the windows he can see the neighbors still have power, so he grabs the trusty flashlight and checks the breaker box. After fiddling with it, it won't reset. The flips do absolutely nothing.

Heaving a frustrated sigh, he pinches the bridge of his nose, taking out his phone from his pocket. The battery shows 1% before fizzling out to a black screen with the gray spinning wheel before dying.

"You've got to be shitting me," he grumbles. With another curse, he shoves the useless thing back in his pocket, letting the flashlight guide him out of the garage. He may as well get the keys and go try to find Carol and the girls, who are probably several blocks over by now, maybe get them to stay at her mother's place while he gets things sorted out with the power issue.

And then..

he hears the sound of his name spoken, a sharp. accusatory whisper, as if it's right next to him. It's so real he can feel the cold breath against his ear. It makes him jump out of his skin.

Alert, his body tense and ready for action, his eyes dart around the room as he begins to get his bearings back and his heart goes back to its normal rhythm.

Stupid.. he curses himself, sitting upright again. Annoyance colors his face.

But the sound of it.. of your voice still rings in his ear. And he'd know your voice among a thousand others.

Now he knows he's imagining things, because it couldn't have been your voice at all.

You're dead.

He doesn't want to think about that day, a cold autumn day just like this. In fact it'll be one year exactly on November 14th. The last day you saw sunlight, the last day you ever breathed.

It's not that you were bad, you were just in the way. There was no room for you in Dave's perfect, clock-precision life. He tried to make your end painless, make sure you didn't see it coming.

Some secrets don't stay buried forever..

Nobody knows he assures himself. It's impossible.. He'd even kept it from his teammates, and they knew nearly every damn thing about him.

No, this particular job.. the handling of you, had to be done on his own.

Casting a glance at the backyard patio again, the light from his neighbor's back porch glows eerily, spotlighting the patch of earth Dave had avoided until finally he'd caved and erected a bird bath with a small garden, a surprise for Carol's birthday. His wife never suspected that you were buried there, beneath her gift.

Without thinking, he's already walking outside, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, leading the way to your grave. He never comes out here anymore. The guilt has become too crushing and he's not a man who dwells on guilt. He does what he has to and revisits the issue if problems arise.

You won't arise, though. When he closes his eyes he can still see the bullet hole in your temple, the blank look as the light left your eyes.

Forgive me, he'd thought, unable to speak it aloud as he stuffed your body in a bag and placed you in the dirt on a moonless autumn night.

When he reaches the stone path that leads to your innocent-looking grave marker, he has to process what he sees:

there's a hole in the ground, where some of the rocks and flowers around the bird bath have been upheaved, and in the breeze his flashlight shines on a tattered, empty black body bag. The scent of death greets his nostrils as he pales, trying not to vomit.

He goes back to the house, immediately on the defensive, irrationally expecting to find you there, clothes dirty and hair caked with mud and blood, a specter of his own paranoia and guilt.

It's still shrouded in darkness, the home that is supposed to be his shelter from such dark things as yourself. It's his domain, his castle, and in this trouble, without his family, he feels like less of a king.

"There's no fucking way," he mutters, stomach roiling with fear and suspicion. He opens the patio door and steps inside.

The whole place smells of death, of the grave.

You're in every corner, quiet, waiting, watching. But not impassive.

He feels you everywhere, himself made small by your ubiquitous pall. The gun in his hand feels useless, and this makes him angry.

You feed off his anger. You love it. It's the only thing you can feel anymore. Pure, unadulterated hate.

You slither towards him, wicked grin growing bigger as you approach him. Dave gets the chills down his back, not knowing just how close you are to him.

"Boo" you whisper lightly, ghostly breath caressing the shell of his ear.

Your cackling thunders in his ears as he whips around, eyes wide with fright. You delight in the fear he's giving off. The scent of it it so intoxicating. It's the only good thing about being dead.

"I should make your death as nice and quick and clean as you made mine" your voice echoes all around the room. Dave looks equal parts pissed and afraid as he tries to track you.

"But I won't."

You've been waiting for this night, this one unholy night where you'd be allowed to come back, to gather the unearthly powers granted to you. Halloween: the one night of the year when the living come back to haunt the dead.

And the son of a bitch had the gall to kill you in November. You had to wait almost a whole year for your revenge.

Gonna make it sweet.

It takes a lot of energy to assume something of a human form, but as you grab onto the fear he's giving off, as you use the most ancient of forces to pull your corporeal parts together, it gets easier. You don't feel afraid. You haven't, not since he killed you.

"Consider yourself lucky it's only you I'm after. If I had my way your family's blood would be splattered on these walls along with yours."

Dave shivers violently. "Please, don't!" He's not used to begging or pleading. He's actually on his knees. He tries not to look at you; your visage is too grotesque. Your flesh is falling off your face and your eyes are sunken into your head, giving a ghoulish appearance.

You force his gaze upon you with the ice-cold touch of your hand. "Your family is safe. For now. Hell, there's always next Halloween."

With the cracking open of his ribcage and the spilling of his guts you reach into him, finding the fullness of the heart, the organ he uses the least.

All Dave can do is scream and scream and scream.

The next day Carol sits at the dining room table, two detectives with her. Her coffee has grown cold, barely touched. She still bears the remnants of the makeup she'd put on to complete her costume last night. The girls are upstairs. She couldn't bear sending them to school, having them apart from her. Not while Dave is missing.

"He was fine last night. Normal," she adds, shrugging as she dabs at her eyes with a Kleenex.

Because of his position as a government agent, his disappearance is being taken very seriously. Officers are en route, dispatched to start searching the area, especially the nearby woods, which Carol has always feared.

Dave's gun is there, his wallet, phone, and keys also left behind.

One of the field officers comes in (there have been many people coming in and out of the house today) and motions to the backyard. "Halloween decoration?"

"Yeah," Carol sniffles, smiling just a little. "Dave likes to shock the neighbors. He promised he'd put them away before the morning.. but he never puts them out back.."

Out of guilt, or maybe just to give herself something to do, she gets up and goes to put the decorations away. The detectives follow.

Funny. There's just one.. she thinks, looking at the lone body bag on the lawn, tossed haphazardly next to her bird bath.

It's heavier than she expects. She's too petite to pick it up. Sighing, she kneels, the crunch of the fallen leaves beneath her knees. She'll just take the leaves out and throw the bag away.

Ripping it open with her nails she's stunned a moment, not processing what she's seeing before she lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

Wrapped up in the duct taped body bag is what's left of Dave.

dividers by @saradika-graphics 👑

tagging @almostempty @itwasntimethatdidit40 @milla-frenchy @salingers @zascal

[chelledoggo]

okay, so... you know what i would LOVE to see?

a deconstruction of "conservative cartoons" like Mr. Birchum or The New Norm... BUT, it deceptively markets itself as a straightforward conservative cartoon.

like, here's what i'm thinking:

we got your white, old-fashioned, masculine husband protagonist, a centrist, openminded wife, and a couple of children. one of the kids would probably be a dudebro son who aligns more with their dad's beliefs, while the other would be your stereotypical "blue-haired nonbinary progressive activist."

you'd, of course, also have your token "non-woke minority friends" to the main character: the black conservative, the disabled veteran, the "not like the other gays" gay man, etc...

they all live in a suburban neighborhood. their kids attend a public school, where the teacher is your stereotypical "liberal soyboy wokie" (a la Mr. Karponzi from Mr. Birchum), and is presented as the "main antagonist."

episode one starts out straightforward, with no indication of it being a deconstruction or subversive, in order to lull the conservative audience into a false sense of security.

we get the introduction to these characters, their conflicts, etc... the husband complains about how "soft" and "woke" society is becoming and reminisces about "the good old days." the first major conflict would probably be CRT or pronouns in the classroom or something.

but starting from episode 2, we start seeing the MC deconstruct and question himself. the little hints of deconstruction would start out small and subtle, like he might just take pause at an opinion he had and think "hmmmm... this feels right to me, but... i wonder... was i too harsh?"

and then with each episode the MC starts to reflect on his upbringing with a strict authoritarian father and a meek, submissive mother who always seemed unhappy. he slowly starts to realize that he was manipulated and coerced into being "a real man" by his abusive father.

he starts to think to himself "okay, WHY do i dislike progressives? WHY do i have a problem with 'safe spaces?' don't vulnerable people deserve to feel safe, even though i never did? and WHY do i have a problem with trans and nonbinary people? yeah, it's a little odd to me, but they're not harming anyone."

as he reflects and deconstructs the outdated beliefs he had engrained in him, he finds himself growing a closer bond with his nonbinary kid, while also realizing he needs to start teaching his dudebro son to be a respectful and non-toxic man.

by the end of the season/series, he finally admits to those around him that he's not proud of who he'd been in the past, and although he still has a long way to go and will probably have to spend the rest of his life unlearning his old ways, he's going to try his best to do right by those around him.

someone should get on this. at the very least it would be funny as fuck to watch conservatives melt down, while at best it would be a beautiful narrative on how we need to examine our beliefs.

[jnnul]

five questions

a/n: and here is the first of the wips! i know this was supposed to come out on friday and now it's almost wednesday but it's out and that's worth something, right? i hope you love this little fluff piece + mark as much as i do!

word count: 5.1k

tags: finance bro mark and y/n, slice of life, mostly fluff, kinda your typical suburban modern day couple, idk they’re just good ppl who experience a slow and sweet romance, oh! and mark sucks at beer pong

sorry, is this seat taken?

you pride yourself on not being a very superficial person. you always look deeper into a person of interest and in the past, your friends have made fun of you because you never seemed to find the people they thought were attractive very hot at all.

he seems like he swears at his mom. they give off the impression that they are rude to waitstaff. i don’t care how hot she is, she’s literally fighting with a customer service worker for no reason.

did it mean that your ability to look past superficial identity led to you giving some pretty sketchy people second chances? maybe. but usually, it did more good than harm.

but for all of your in depth thinking, you realize that you’re just as superficial as every last one of your friends when the man of your dreams asks you to marry him.

what he really says is, “is this seat taken?” but it all sounds the same when you’re half in love.

with dark eyes that are bright and shine with innocent curiosity, slender lips with a slight pout, and tousled black hair that falls into his eyes, you realize this man looks like nothing short of an angel.

you stutter out a squeaky, "no, go ahead!" before moving your laptop a little closer to you so that the hot stranger could have space to put his things down. he offers you a sweet smile before sliding into the seat next to you.

"my name is mark, by the way," he says once he's settled into his seat. he's about to ask your name but he nods to the keychain that's attached to your lanyard. "i'm guessing your name is y/n? that's a cute keychain."

"yeah," you say, flipping the keychain so that mark could see it properly. "one of the kids i teach made me it a couple years ago and i've carried it around ever since."

mark's eyebrows furrow at that as he checks his calendar to make sure that he's in the right class. "you're an education major? what's an education major doing in a business statistics class? this class is an upper level business class i thought?"

you nod and close your laptop so that mark could see the sticker on the backside of your laptop. you point out the biggest one that has 'ucla - anderson school of management' written in bright yellow letters. mark's eyebrows knit as he reads it and you can't help but laugh softly at how utterly confused he looks.

"i'm a finance major. i just really like kids so i spent last summer juggling between an internship at apple and volunteering at a learning summer camp for kids who are underprivileged in education," you explain, watching as mark's confusion turns to awe, his dark eyes glinting as you explain.

"damn. that's so cool of you, y/n. i'm sorry i assumed you were an education major. turns out you're just an angel instead," mark says, almost offhandedly. you freeze at the last sentence and immediately, mark's ears turn bright red as he realizes what he had said.

you to turn to face forward as mark rubs the back of his neck awkwardly and if you weren't so damn flustered, you would take a picture of how incredibly cute he looks.

mark had pretty privilege, as far as you were concerned. if any other person said that, you would probably just laugh it off and thank them but a single comment from mark had you blushing and internally combusting. the worst part? you didn't even mind it.

the two of you are silent for another couple minutes before you turn to him once more, a corner of your lips tilted upwards, a teasing look in your eyes.

"you know i definitely don't mind being called angel by a pretty boy," you say casually. you try not to let your voice give away how nervous mark actually makes you but there's still a little shake when you say the word 'pretty'. because really, mark was so pretty. just...too pretty to be good for your heart.

it doesn't really matter though because mark looks at you like you've personally put the stars in the sky.

"you think i'm pretty?" mark says, his voice soft and tentative. you look at him strangely. surely he had heard that many times over the course of his life? why did he sound so surprised?

"i think you're very pretty, mark," you say matter-of-factly. mark wants to say something else but everyone has filed in and it seems as though the professor is starting the lecture soon as the lights begin to dim in the hall.

mark has heard that he was attractive many times before. in fact, he'd probably become synonymous with the word handsome, as his superlative in high school was 'most likely to become a famous singer' and 'most likely to win prom king'.

so why did his heart flutter so much when you called him pretty?

can you help me with this one?

turns out, mark is shit at statistics. he's great at the business part, as you have learned over the past three weeks of sitting next to each other and working on the practice problems together. but the actual statistics? you might as well be working with a victorian child.

"i still don't understand why you can't just assume that this condition applies in all scenarios," mark says as he reads through the question once more. the two of you had grown pretty close over the past month or so, and often, you would go to the library after class to work on the assigned homework or projects together.

mark was a good study buddy (he always brought good snacks) and he had a great work ethic that made you feel guilty about not studying when he was. not to mention that he was gorgeous eye candy to look at whenever you needed to take a break from your work.

which was pretty much all the time if it meant looking at mark lee a little while longer.

your friends had teased you when you described your encounters with mark thus far. although they never really crossed the line between platonic and romantic relationships, just the fact that you were practically dying of anticipation was enough to rile your friends up.

you had had a few partners in the past but most of them ended at the situationship stage - very few of them become actual relationships. so, you had put a pause on dating for good (much to the dismay of your gossip mongering best friends) and had been happily single for the past year or so. unfortunately, that was when you met mark lee and your heart decided to rebel against all sense of logic.

besides his pretty face (your friends were very surprised to hear that you had developed a crush on a good looking man for once; you had a seriously incriminating track record), mark lee had a pretty heart. he was so incredibly humble and kind to everyone he knew - which was a lot of people, as you came to learn. he was super friendly and great at remembering little details about people that made them feel as though he truly cared about them.

which he really did. it seemed like mark truly cared a lot about every single one of his seemingly thousands of friends and went out of his way to make them feel loved. for you, however, it seemed like he went above and beyond.

it seemed as though after mark (and you, really) had gotten over the initial shyness and awkwardness, the two of you were rarely seen apart. you weren't sure if the two of you were toeing the line of romantic relationship yet, but it just felt like you guys were having fun. even without a label or anything, you and mark tended to gravitate towards each other in social situations and even made consistent efforts to see each other outside of your respective friend groups.

for example, you really didn't belong in the frat scene. you had expended all of the energy and patience you had for frat house parties during your freshman year and quite frankly, as a junior in college, it felt kind of embarrassing to go to them without having any real connections to brothers themselves.

but mark was a brother in nu chi theta so within the first month of your friendship, you found yourself at the NCT house with a red solo cup and an uncomfortable top on.

"hey y/n! i'm losing over here! can you help me with this one?" mark calls out from behind you. you turn around to see him extending a ping-pong ball (that smelled like it was coated in beer, vodka, and...laundry detergent?) in your direction. you look to see if your friends, who you had dragged along to the party, were going to save you from death by beer pong but you're on your own when you see two of your friends making out with the same boy.

you would stop them but the image was far too gruesome and downright hilarious. and in their drunken state, you doubted you could really separate the lovebirds (?) anyway.

"alright, but it's gonna cost you, lee," you sigh dramatically, setting your cup down on the counter before accepting the ping-pong ball, your fingers brushing over mark's.

"name your price," mark says confidently as you line up your shot, ignoring the heat that radiates off of mark's body as you realize that mark was a lot closer than you had previously anticipated. his words sink into your skin and you involuntarily shiver when you feel his breath on your neck.

"hmm...i'll have to think about it..." you trail off, finally throwing the little ping-pong ball into the cup. you turn so that your chest was pressed against mark's front and all your thoughts have been replaced by the look of his eyes in the dim lighting. the words tumble out of your mouth before you even realize what you're saying.

"go on a date with me?"

your heart drops as you see mark's face turn from confusion to shock and then back to confusion. he rubs his neck awkwardly (a habit, you had noticed, that tended to present himself when he felt particularly confused) as he licks his lips nervously.

"was...was us hanging out everyday not...dating? i kinda thought we were already going on dates," mark mumbles, his cheeks flushed. you stare at him and a strange gurgling laughter rips out of your mouth before you clamp your hand over your mouth, your eyes wide in horror at the sound that came out of your mouth.

"does this mean you like me?" you ask, and once again, you're graced with the sight of mark lee looking just all too angelic under the strobe lighting as he nods before tentatively making eye contact with you.

"uh...if you asked me on a date, am i safe to assume that you like me too?" mark proposes and the way that he says it, almost like he was presenting a business pitch to a potential investor, makes you laugh once more as you lean a little closer to mark, your lips barely brushing against his.

"more than you realize, mark."

can i come inside?

the first time mark came with you to help out with the kids at the school, it was completely unexpected. another one of the student teachers had suddenly fallen ill (you found out a few months later that at his girlfriend's baby shower that he was not, in fact, sick) and no one else was available to help out.

your supervisor was a sweet old lady who was dedicated to helping as much as she could before 'her joints gave up on her' - which meant that oftentimes, she tried to take on more responsibility than she really could. and then that meant that she often didn't hire enough staff to keep the place running, hoping that she could do all of the administrative things herself so that all of the people who did come in could focus on working with the kids. needless to say, as one of the only volunteers who had been with the organization for more than four years, you knew more than well that the sweet old lady needed more people to help her out.

so, you forced your boyfriend of three years to help you out. well, not really forced. mark had the day off from work because it was the day before july 4th and really didn't have any plans for the day. so when mrs. varghese calls you frantically at nine o'clock the previous night, mark offered to come with you.

"we've been together for the past three years and we've been living together for the past one and a half. i lose my girlfriend every monday and thursday evening to kids. i gotta meet the little suckers who've been monopolizing my girlfriend." which was mark's stupid way of saying i love you. let me help you out a little bit. let me be part of your world. maybe in the disney princess way.

and you're a sucker for kids and your boyfriend, even after dating for three years, so you agree and the next day, you're piling into the passenger seat at seven in the morning to teach young children addition and subtraction.

not really how the two of you (mostly mark) were planning on spending on of your rare days off but you could never deny mrs. varghese of anything. especially if it meant more time with the kids.

mark always joked about how you should've become a teacher but as much as you loved the children and the interactions with them, you were not a fan of the underpaying salaries. so you made it a point to become successful in your career and dedicate a percentage of your paycheck to donate to the school you volunteered at instead.

which had caused some struggles when you first moved in with mark, given that it was only the two of you rather than you living with three of your friends and your share of the rent went higher. but you figured it out and mark definitely wasn't the type of person to hold it over your head that you weren't able to pay your full share of rent for the first two months.

because that's just who he was. he would cover for you, covering up all of the little parts of yourself that you didn't like. and you would help him see that those blemishes he thought he had were just things that made him more lovable to you.

so when mark steps into the little school and immediately, kids are swarming to the two of you, trying to find out who the attractive boyfriend was, you're not even surprised. mark had a natural, comforting air about him (not to mention the fact that the kids were overly invested in your personal life) that made people want to draw to him like moths to a flame.

in fact, he's so overwhelmed by the love that the kids are showing him, he's still hovering around the door awkwardly, semi-bowing to mrs. varghese, who's watching him with amusement.

"can i come inside?" mark asks, trying to take a step forward while not hurting any little kids. you snort at his awkward shuffle before clapping your hands together, taking it upon yourself to relieve your poor boyfriend from the possibility of death by enthusiastic children.

"can you or may you?" mrs. varghese says with a humorous smile and mark's eyebrows furrow as he contemplates the question. the kids are slowly making their way over to you, where you're starting to distribute fruit pouches as a morning snack and mark finally feels as though he's only carrying his own body weight - as opposed to ten other children's.

"it was 'can i' at first but now i think it's more of a 'may i'. mrs. varghese, i presume?" mark says, extending his hand for the old lady to shake. she just looks at it strangely before gathering mark in a tight, bone-crushing hug.

for such a frail old lady, she had a lot of strength.

"get out of here with those manners. y/n's told me a lot about. and anyone in y/n's corner is family here, alright?" mrs. varghese says, and mark has to blink furiously to push back the tears, although he can't really tell why her words are hitting him so hard.

"thanks."

you mean that?

mark was really easy to love. that's just the type of person he was. in everyone else's eyes, he was a good guy who just always tried to be better at the things he was already incredibly good at. he was always polite with strangers, babies cooed at him, and was the type to be the person to start a 'pay-it-forward' queue whenever he could afford to do so.

and for all of his perfectness, mark was a very flawed man. he was a little bit of a miser - he hated to spend money on himself, even if he would splurge a little more on you. he was a little bit on the insecure side, and no matter how many times you told him that you loved him all the more for his quirks, he still got down about it. mark was also really bad at communication when things made him upset. he was just so easy-going that he would let the smaller things accumulate and build until he's practically bursting.

and mark was kinda mean when he got angry.

he would never hurt you, of course. mark didn't think he could ever live with himself if he knew that he had laid a hand on anyone - but you in particular. and he really, really was trying to work on his communication skills so that he wouldn't let it build and then get so angry.

but when mark got angry, he seemed to just turn into a different person. it had only happened once in your relationship before, almost right after you had moved in together

it was about something incredibly stupid but the tension had been building for a while prior to that. technically, before you moved in, the apartment had been mark and one of his friend's, johnny seo from school, before johnny had moved out to move in with his own girlfriend. and mark and johnny weren't exactly...the cleanest people. you didn't really mind the mess but soon it turned into an unhealthy balance of mark leaving things around the house and you having to clean up after him.

not to mention that a lot changes when a couple moves in together. naturally, tensions were running a little high. for all your cleanliness, you had a really bad habit of leaving unfinished meals in the fridge until they went bad and started to smell, which made mark upset because that was a waste of a valuable meal. and so on and so forth.

one day, the tensions just burst and the two of you ended up in a screaming match going back and forth and back and forth about cleanliness and not eating properly and soon, it escalated from a conversation about living together to being together in the first place.

mark regretted it almost immediately, cursing himself out when he saw you just completely shut down in front of his eyes. he knew his anger got the best of him sometimes, and when he was in the moment, all he could think about was winning the argument, no matter what he needed to say to win.

that had been the worst fight you've ever had. after that fight, you got a lot better about portioning your food to eliminate leftovers and mark made a more conscious effort to clean up. you also started talking more to each other about what things did or didn't make you happy.

but even as mark was getting better at communicating with you, he still didn't know how to raise up issues with you. usually, you would tell mark what you were up to and then you would naturally ask him yourself if he was comfortable with what you were doing. he would then reply with a simple yes or no with an explanation and that would be the end of that. he always hesitated to raise up an issue with you though. he didn't want you to think that he was trying to control your life or be one of those possessive boyfriends.

one day, though, you were out clubbing with your friends (your friend had recently broken up with her fiancé and she really needed her girlfriends) and you had come home pretty late. mark had stayed up, watching a movie (barely), worried about you making it home safely because he knew that your friends were prone to trying to get you as wasted as possible.

mark never told you explicitly but you had a feeling that's how he felt. it frustrated you though that he never said anything to you and wait for you to bring it up to him instead. so that night, you decided to drink a little more than usual (but not as much as they tried to make you drink) so that you could finally, finally get mark to talk to you about his issues.

really, for your behavior, you were expecting to have a round two of what had happened when you first moved in with him. you were imagining a screaming match like no other but instead, mark just looks at you, sighs, and pulls you into a hug when you come stumbling through the door. confused, you begin to pull away, but mark just continues to hold you tight.

"i was so worried that you might not get home safe. and i promise we'll have a proper conversation about this when you're sober in the morning but i love you so much and...let's just talk about this in the morning, okay?" mark mumbles into your hair. you let mark just rock you gently side to side as he clings onto you, completely opposite from the reaction you were expecting.

"mark, i'm not drunk. i just...i'm tired of always being the one to bring up issues. i know that you don't like it when i get drunk outside because you're worried for me but i'd rather you tell me that than me having to guess that by myself. i can make my own decisions and i'm a big independent girl but you're the singular most important person in my life. i would never consciously do something to make you uncomfortable but i make mistakes sometimes. i need you to be open and honest with me when something makes you uncomfortable - because i know it takes a lot to get that far in the first place."

mark steps back to look you in the eyes, his eyes glittering in the shitty lighting of the apartment. "you really mean that?"

"i mean it with my whole heart."

do you promise to love me for the rest of our lives?

mark tries not to trip. he tries really hard to hold in his sneezes, tears, and any other bodily fluids that are inappropriate for the situation. but the nearly fifteen feet from the entrance to the where the officiant is standing is enough to make mark want to puke all over the very expensive carpet you bought for the wedding.

when you first proposed having a backyard wedding, mark was extremely opposed.

a wedding was a once in a lifetime day where you could celebrate your union together with your partner and start the journey to the rest of your lives together. in fact, it was mark, not you, who had the pinterest board (although, to be fair, it wasn't actually a pinterest board and was rather just a folder on his phone of screenshots from pretty tiktoks). he had a vision for the wedding - one that included all members of your friend circle, your families, and your family friends as well.

and well, that wasn't really in the budget. rather than spend 100k on a one day event, you proposed having a backyard wedding that would be significantly more economical and using that 100k to buy a starter home.

"you still get your expensive venue and we have a place to move into. a real home that we can start a family in, mark," you had argued as mark paced back and forth in the small, almost cramped apartment the two of you shared. mark stops when he realizes that it only takes fourteen steps to make it from one side of the room to the other side and back.

and that was the biggest room.

so mark agrees on one condition: there are no lacking traditional elements of the wedding. the both of you worked together on the pain-staking process of planning a wedding that included portions of your culture and his culture to put on the wedding of a lifetime. hopefully the only wedding of your lifetimes.

well, the only wedding for you and mark, at least. but that was about the future and in the present, mark can barely keep from keeling over right there at the beautifully decorated altar that you and your mother had spent hours on.

after so long of being together, mark can't help but feel just so incredibly lucky and overwhelmed to be finally marrying you. you. the person of his dreams. the person who taught him that love isn't always fireworks and euphoric thrills; that love can be huddling together when gas bills were too high to pay and wanting nothing more than to see your significant other when it's been a long day.

love was you and mark really, really can't wait to finally show the world how much he truly loved you.

unsurprisingly, mark almost cries when you finally enter, the picture of the stunning bride as you clutch your father's arm for the last time as y/n l/n instead of y/n lee. mark isn't sure the last time he saw you this nervous but when you meet his eyes, he can feel the rest of the world melt away.

just normal people with enough love to fill the world, is what you say in your vows. just a guy and a girl in the same business class who never travel business class because the two of you are such money minders - something that my soon to be husband has rubbed off on me.

"i will never forget the moment that i knew i was so irrevocably love with mark. it was two days after we fought for the first time. i remember that i was so incredibly angry and scared that that fight would be the end of y/n and mark. that i would have to move out and redownload tinder and just be miserable again for losing one of the best things in my life over a little sock in the wrong place and leftover pizza."

"but two days after we fought, mark came up to me, hugged me and just said, 'we're gonna get through this. i love you too much to not get through this.' and even though everything just seemed so uncertain, the moment mark said that, i knew instantly that we really were going to get through it. because mark had faith in us. and i have faith in us. i love you, mark lee. from the moment you sat down in that ucla business class. i have loved you for so long and i will continue to love you forever."

there isn't a single dry eye in the house (quite literally) after your vow. mark has to clear his throat four or five times before he can start his vows, too afraid that his voice would give out on him in the middle due to how much emotion he was feeling.

"y/n, you asked me one day when we were binging american horror story and pigging out with a family sized bag of chips when i started falling in love with you. and i couldn't answer then so i just said that for as long as i can remember. and that's true - i still don't know when i fell in love with you. i just remember that one day i woke up alone in bed (don't worry mr. l/n, i have never slept in a ten mile radius of your daughter...please don't make her divorce me) and thinking that i would rather wake up next to you instead for the rest of my life."

"but i do know when i realized you were my soulmate. five moments when i knew i found the one. when i asked you if i could sit down next to you in business class. when i asked you to help me with statistics because for being a business major, i'm horrible at math - go figure. when i volunteered with you for the first time with mrs. varghese. mrs. varghese! - where are you - mrs. varghese! may i marry y/n? then i'll be real family."

mrs. varghese blows into a handkerchief unceremoniously, waving mark off through her tears, making the crowd and you laugh a little. mark's smile grows when he sees you laugh and continues on nervously.

"and the fourth moment was the time when you gave me a reality check. when you reminded me that love doesn't work without communication. you've changed me so much for the better, y/n, and i truly could not thank you enough for it. so, i have one last question for you. one last moment for me to know that we're soulmates."

mark takes a deep breath, holding one of your hands in both of his as he looks at you with soft eyes, so filled with love that your breath catches in your throat. "i promise to love you and stand by you for as long as i breathe. can you - can you promise...do you promise to love me for the rest of our lives?"

it seems as though everyone in the venue is holding their breath before you press a sweet kiss to mark's cheek and say the words that everyone has been waiting for.

"i do."

and with those five questions, mark lee had found his soulmate.

[octopiys]

I've been listening to Lord Huron recently

human!John MacTavish, who grew up in the Scottish Highlands, raised by his grandma who was highly superstitious.

human!Simon Riley, who, as a young teen, moved to the highlands with his mother, and younger brother, after his father was arrested.

Neighbor!John who meets his quiet neighbor down the street, and talks his ear off on the way to schools every single day, and doesn't question the fading bruises on his new friend's skin.

Neighbor!Simon, who doesn't find John annoying in the slightest, and enjoys listening to John's stories of his grandma's wild tales of how her younger brother was apparently "snatched by the fae", or the stories of the horses that live deep beneath the waters, and seeing the little cottage down the road and feeling comfort and safety reverberate through the trees that separated the two of them.

Friend!Johnny who goes home "sick" one day after a rather nasty.... altercation between two larger students and himself, but comes back the next day, and none of those students were messing with him anymore.

Friend!Simon who, after Johnny went home, found those two kids after school and beat them senseless, the only time he's ever felt that violence was a good solution to something.

Young Simon, who goes to check up on Johnny, and sees the boy smiling through a black eye, behind a large woman who appeared as if she was going to salt him, then beat him with a wooden ladle. Luckily, Johnny boy stopped her from doing that, and introduces him and he sees the woman's eyes soften the slightest bit.

Johnny, who's house is full of wards, and hanging herbs, and salt, and cinnamon, who's known nothing else, who's friends with bugs because they're easier to talk to, befriends Simon, who comes from the suburban cities, who prefers to listen rather than speak, in a neat home, and a dreadful silence that is anything but warm.

After school, they explore the woods, and Johnny tells him more tales, of how not to step in certain areas, or follow shaking leaves, and to leave mushrooms alone. Simon believes he's never felt more at ease in these woods.

They happen across a fallen deer, who was long gone for the world, it's antlers and pale skull glinting through the muck it was covered in.

It whispers wordless sounds through lipless mouths.

Johnny calls for him to keep on the trail, and Simon gets up to follow him off.

Give me late teens Johnny, who's yelling at Simon for not telling him sooner. Give me Simon who feels guilt in the pits of his stomach for not telling his best friend sooner. But enlisting was the only thing he could see him doing with his life. He could be used for good, he could do something good with himself.

Johnny tells him he was good enough for him.

Simon leaves the next morning.

Nature conservationist!Johnny, two years later, finds Simon's mom at his doorstep. By the look on her face, she had bad news.

Simon went missing in Mexico.

Nature conservationist!John, who, for another six months, has dinner at least once a week with Simon's mum. She was from a further part of Scotland, but they understood each other well enough, and bonded over different memories of her son. It seemed to keep them both afloat.

Simon who returns after seven months.

Nature conservation officer!Johnny, who is busy trying to figure out why the red deer population is dwindling in his area. Not to mention the fact that the investigations office is on his back about missing people, and Simon comes back.

Something is wrong.

John knows what shell shock looks like. He knows what the horrors of war do to people.

This is not shell shock. This is not that.

Simon came back, but he came back wrong.

His honey eyes were muddy, and he blinked too hard. His head turned too smoothly when he responded to his name too late, like he was getting used to being called something new. The curve of his lips was off, his jaw too sharp. His kind eyes are.... the favorite part of Johnny's Simon is different.

It was unsettling. His skin prickled when he watched, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rising when Simon entered the room too silently.

Changeling!Ghost, who does not enter Johnny's house. Johnny doesn't know why he refuses the offer. He feels like he's being watched. He misses his friend. Obviously, his friend lives down the street, rationally, he knows that person is Simon Riley, the kid who beat up bullies, who fell fifteen feet out of a tree and got up unscathed. Simon Riley, who was afraid of scorpions and worms, who went to war and survived, and came home.

His instincts told him the opposite.

Johnny feels like he's being watched at night. He thinks he can catch whatever it is, lurking at the treeline of the woods. He sets harmless traps to catch and release, believing the creature is small.

When he finds the cage completely trampled, crumbled until it was no longer recognizable, he no longer believed this thing was small.

Nature Conservationist Officer!Johnny MacTavish who sees the creature looming from the trees, it's tall antlers tangled in muck and weeds, body slightly warped in the darkness, claws and all. It was tall, much taller than him, with scarred skin stained with the dyes of berries and dirt and clay. Moss grew off of the massive deer antlers, and the greenish eyeshine of a deer blinking from almost human eyes.

Honey colored and kind, and completely unrecognizing.

Johnny drops his flashlight in shock, the lens shattering, scaring the creature off.

Turned fae!Simon, who had no memories other than blood and war and pain, only wanted to figure out where the feeling of familiarity came from, in a world so unknown, and loud, cruel.

(this is inspired by Meet Me In The Woods by Lord Huron)

Ask box is open!

Find part 2 here

[ms-hells-bells]

Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. “He needs a long penitentiary sentence,” the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.

I’d been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years — all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison.

The most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of the state prison population.

When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: “She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow,” which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America’s racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary “13th,” which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and “Just Mercy,” a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn’t know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, “I need to tell you something.” We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

My mother’s words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word “rape” along with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.

The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother’s world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.

We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I’d never sung any further.

Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn’t persuade that audience that her experiences as a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.

Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. “I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me,” she said. This mattered for Harris because of the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. “I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death,” she said.

Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a Black woman’s doing this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she’d told her colleagues: “So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.” She continued: “You know that music you were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my car right now.”

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, about their sons. “The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them,” Harris said. “And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish.” They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. “My son is being treated like a statistic,” they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in this country: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe.

Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about Black people’s needing protection from us — from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.

Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by Black directors — “New Jack City,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood” — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that “we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear that they might be arrested” and “go to jail for the rest of their natural life.” Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court; and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions.

Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.

Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same. And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word “patina” and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board’s office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.

Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free, they’ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.

In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.

I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us — beyond that we’d served enough time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing that he should be free.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory.

I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.

After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” The host asked my mother about going to court for her son’s trial when he was facing life. “I was raped by gunpoint,” my mother said. “It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself.” I hadn’t forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating.

On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, “That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.”

Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Harris praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, “should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time.”

Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to “unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of being inhumane”; criticized the bail system; and called for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.

In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate “in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,” countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was not about to start telling them “about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country.” Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that “the very serious function of racism” is “distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: “As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd go to jail?” My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.

“In the criminal-justice system,” Harris replied, “the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’ and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individual who was arrested.” Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable. And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I’d represented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d be representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their freedom?

“We need to reimagine what public safety looks like,” the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. “Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don’t have a system that’s reactive?” The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills development, education funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started Back on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. “ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out,’” she said people told her.

It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men around them — to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — do far too much time in prison.

And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital; tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything.

The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in the city I called home raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should ever contact victims and their families.

Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target. But if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.

In light of Harris being endorsed by Biden and highly likely to be the Democratic Party candidate, I thought I would share this balanced, understanding of both sides, article in regard to Harris and her career as a prosecutor, as I know that will be something dragged out by bad actors and useful idiots (you have a bunch of people stating 'Kamala is a cop', which is completely false, and also factless and misleading statements about 'mass incarceration' under her). I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be criticised or that there is nothing about her career that can be criticised, but it should at least be representative of the truth and understanding of the complexities of the legal system.

[luulapants]

People talk big about structural leftist changes, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people haven't sat down to think about what aspects of their current life they're willing to change or compromise on in order to let that happen.

People say they're for walkable cities but still want to live in neighborhoods zoned for single family housing. They say they want more and better public parks but insist their kids need a house with a private backyard. They say they want cities focused on public transit but want to be able to drive to and park at all the places they want to go. They say they want integrated, diverse neighborhoods but they get nervous when there isn't a huge white majority in a neighborhood. They say they want affordable housing but still talk about safety and crime rates if there are low income people in their neighborhood. They say they don't want suburban sprawl but can't concede to the realities of urban living.

I had a family say to my face that they wouldn't look at a house in my neighborhood because it wasn't safe enough. I live there. I walk around there at night. "It's different, you don't have a kid," they said. My neighbors have kids. There are so, so many people raising children in this neighborhood. Just say your kids are too good to be raised in a neighborhood with Black and brown kids and go. This wasn't a wealthy family. They were in financial crisis and housing insecure and they were still too good to live in a neighborhood where families of color are raising their kids. They chose a rental house over their budget in a white single family zoned development on the edge of town.

[cloverdaisies]

NOWHERE TO RUN

tbz scream (1996) au

𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫 @: cloverdaisies

description: if the landline rings, remember to answer the questions 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭. you don’t want to be locked in a house with a masked killer. a tbz au based on & inspired by (scream 1996).

warnings: mentions of violence, murder, blood. this is a work of fiction !!! however, 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 … 🔪💀

member: tbz x you

channel: @deoboyznet

word count: 5k+

NEWS ANCHOR: “The murder of two high school students in the small town of Saltclover has led to the closure of their local high school due to an outbreak of pranks. Students wearing a costume sold as the grim reaper or as their calling it ‘ghost face’ have been heartlessly terrorizing this suburban school after the incident. This is Madeline Fox, Channel One News.”

♫ PSYCHO KILLER - TALKING HEADS plays faintly in the distance. ♫

🔪 10PM IN SALTCLOVER, 30th October 1996

“AGHHH!” A group of kids scream as a man adorning a ghostface mask whips his around from the corner of a tree. Then they scream again as they see another one behind them.

“Got ‘em.” Juyeon rips the mask of his face, high fiving Changmin as they both chuckle with enlightenment.

“Guys it’s not funny to be wearing those, nevermind scaring the little ones.” You sigh, stood on the front porch with a bowl of candy tucked between your elbow.

“They’re literally middle schoolers, too old to be trick or treating anyway. Besides what? You scared?” Changmin laughed, rubbing the mask in your face before walking inside, Juyeon chuckling shortly behind him.

The crackling of the log fire in the living room created a warm ambience, lighting up the room in an orange light. Duvets and pillows all messily lined across the floor as halloween played on the television on the opposite side of the room.

“And then she screams, the ghost is right behind her. She runs away he catches her and guts her like a fish. It was all a dream though.” Changmin burst into maniacal laughter before tucking himself into the sheets beneath him.

“What if, he caught her, bit off her fingers and became known as the finger ghost.” Juyeon adds with spooky jazz hands, crouched in front us, the both of them kept chuckling and watching your reactions, but nothing.

“You guys, two people we know literally died can you not take this a little bit more seriously?” You asked cocking an eyebrow towards the two boys who stared back blankly.

“The more fear you feel, the more you manifest the danger y/n.” Changmin sighed, grabbing the television remote began flicking the channels for another movie.

Eventually all the horror films that you’d all seen around 3 times over sent all 3 of you to sleep. As you slept soundly with locked doors, closed blinds, a black cat perched upon your windowsill looking out into the moon.

🔪7PM SALTCLOVER, 31st October 1996

♫ BACKSTREET BOYS - EVERYBODY, playing through the stereo system. ♫

Halloween was usually a time of harmless fun, where most normally functioning teenagers dressed in silly costumes and pretended they were in a movie as they trashed somebody else’s shitty house party. Unfortunately with a serial murderer running around it was hard for most of society to have fun, knowing someone in a grim reaper mask could show up any second and take your life from your hands. The boys didn’t seem to let such nuisance bother them as they all showed up to your home, wearing costumes from the classics to movie characters to musicians.

“Guys let’s play ring of fire!” Kevin suggested, suitably clothed in a ruby red leather outfit that resembled Michael Jackson’s from the iconic Thriller music video - seemingly he’d put a lot of effort into crafting the costume, that was much like Kevin. The boys each sprant to the kitchen to table, placing a huge cup in the middle of a circle of cards before each looking at Sangyeon hopefully, who wore a blue jumpsuit, in hand a Michael Myers Mask from the famous horror movie ‘Halloween’

“Oldest first.” Sunwoo, the green power ranger pointed towards the cards waiting for him to pick, a silly smirk painted on his face. “Youngest last.”

“That’s unfair but whatever.” Sangyeon grabbed a card picking up the 9 of hearts and flashing it to the table. “Nine is rhyme, so death.”

“Breath.” Haknyeon, wearing all black with a batman mask, quickly added as they began to go around the table reciting words that rhymed.

“Why’d you pick that? Because you’re breath stinks?” Hyunjae laughed pulling a silly face to the boy who hid behind a chuckle at the remark.

“I was actually thinking about yours.” Haknyeon replied cleverly, sticking his tongue out like a child and then looking at Sunwoo expectantly.

“Meth.” Sunwoo added bluntly.

“What I’ll be doing when I leave this place.” Chanhee, rolled his eyes taking a polite chug of his drink since he couldn’t think of a word that rhymed. He wore all red with glitter on his eyes, his skin glowed off the colour and his neatly arranged side part brought everything together.

The sound of the landline ringing and rattling on the kitchen wall interrupted the circle, Sangyeon sighed and got up as the rest of the boys chatted and carried on with the game.

“Hello Sangyeon. You know …”A mysterious low voice taunted him on the other end of the line, you could almost here the cheshire cat grin across the long eerie pause he left. “I think there’s a snake in the room, I see you’re wearing Michael’s costume quite appropriate for someone who is willing to stab their friends in the back.”

“Who’s this?” Sangyeon furrowed his brows and adjusted his posture as he awaited a reply from the caller.

“Answer the question right to survive, who said this ‘Changmin is so insufferable, I have no idea why we are still friends with him’? Little cut throat to say about a friend right?”

“Oh shutup, prank call another house.” Sangyeon almost let out a cackle at how pathetic the call was in his head, probably just one of their high school friends trying to scare him.

“If you hang up you die. I can see you smiling, how about I cut one into that face of yours smart ass.” The mysterious caller grew angry, spitting down the wire hating the ridicule and how unserious Sangyeon thought he was.

“Okay, listen I said it and what?” Sangyeon smiled, since he knew the answer even if this guy was going to kill him, he was going to be correct anyways.

“Incorrect.” The caller replied with a dubious snicker, the sound of him licking his lips grotesquely sounded crystal clear through the speaker.

“What?” Sangyeon laughed in disbelief, he definitely had said that to a few people before so there was no way on earth it wasn’t him - at least in his mind.

“Sunwoo said it, you agreed remember? Don’t you?” Suddenly, Sangyeon’s memory jogged, despite having repeated Sunwoo’s words he wasn’t the first person to say such a thing.

“Who are you?” Sangyeon demanded to know the caller’s identity, his anger made evident as he gritted his teeth and gripped the halloween mask between his fist damp with fear.

“You didn’t even get to the next round. It was horror movie trivia! Snakes don’t survive in this world and as they always say oldest first!” The caller laughed before the phone was slammed into the receiver by Sangyeon, who then stormed up to the bathroom to cool off.

“What’s wrong with him?” Sunwoo asked, as he looked around at the silence on the table, the boys each staring blankly at each other as if there was something he’d missed whilst he’d went to retrieve a beer.

“Well, I walked past and whoever was on the phone said he’d been talking about Changmin behind his back with Sunwoo.” Jacob replied talking a sip of his drink obliviously, wearing a red polo and green apron with a shitty cardboard prop that read “PIZZA DELIVERY” in his own hand writing.

“Listen Changmin, we didn’t mean it like that-.” Sunwoo tried to excuse himself before Changmin who had dressed as Chucky slammed his palms on the table and walked out, tears in his eyes, into the garden for some air, Hyunjae following closely behind him in his Boy George costume.

“Guys we shouldn’t figh-” Younghoon tried to mediate but ultimately failed, the white garments and halo clearly not doing him any favors in trying to play peacemaker in this little argument.

“Let’s not try solve this right now, quite frankly I can’t be bothered.” Juyeon slammed his beer down on the table next to you, picking up the lasso for his Indiana Jones get up and also walking out on to the patio to observe the night.

“Roger that.” Eric further got up, his blonde hair slicked back and an orange scarf tied around his neck. He made probably the most accurate ‘Fred’ from scooby doo you’d ever seen.

🔪 HEY Y/N, WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

🔪.

It made you happy to see everyone dressed up and get together at times like this, however you couldn’t bare to see everyone argue over such childish stuff like he said this? he that? bullshit.

Still the party is lively nethertheless, Juyeon appears from the patio seemingly having brought more beers from the garage in his hands.

Before he even began to speak a bloodcurdling scream bellows through the hallways, the sound of footsteps dashing downstairs and muffled tears getting closer to the kitchen.

“It’s Sangyeon, he’s dead! The front door is wide open, someone came in and killed him.” Chanhee screams, the palms of his hands covered in blood, trembling in fear with tears falling down his face. Juyeon gets up and dashes up the stairs followed by Sunwoo and soon Hyunjae as he hears the commotion.

Kevin calls the police, on the kitchen landline and you run to hug Chanhee and sit up down on one of the chairs as you shush and cradle him.

Soon sirens were arriving and red and blue lights flashed through the windows, who could of done this? It can’t be one of us? Surely.

🔪. 2.AM IN SALTCLOVER, 1st November 1996

News Anchor: “A killer is indeed on the loose, at a local house party where locals teens were celebrating the halloween season, they found their friend in the bathroom murdered. The police have advised no one to leave their homes until further notice.”

♫ SOMEBODYS WATCHING ME - ROCKWELL ♫ playing over the following scene.

“I mean how did he even get into my house? You don’t understand I’m terrified!” You fiddle with the wire of the telephone as the police search through your home. Eric on the other end of the line agrees, tries to calm you down a little bit, but at the same time he’s seemingly also chill about the situation.

You’d all been questioned on the scene, and whilst they tried to catch the killer who could be nearby, any extra evidence collection was postponed until further notice.

“We’re all done here.” A police officer pops his head through the crack of your door, you quickly ended the call, briefly saying bye to Eric. “Are you sure you’ll be okay tonight?” He further asked taking off his hat and giving you a comforting smile.

“Yeah I’ll manage.” You reply with a nod, knowing you were smart enough to keep everything under control on your own.

As the officer and forensic clean up team left, you closed your bedroom door feeling to ill to use the upstairs bathroom with the events of tonight. Before the landline began to rattle and ring on your bedside table again.

“What Eric?” You laugh picking up the phone expecting him to be there on the other end of the line again like he always was, yapping for hours and unable to control his talkative tendencies.

“Hi y/n.. how’s your evening.” A low unrecognizable male voice speaks through the line, you tangle your fingers in the wire and stand to look out of your bedroom window.

“Who’s this?” You ask with an eyebrow raised, a shiver tickling your spine at the sheer depth of his voice.

“How about I get to know you first, what’s your favorite horror movie?” He asked tauntingly, his breath heavy and menacing.

“Hmm.. Probably Friday the 13th why?” You answered the question before rolling your eyes, thinking a man had probably been looking for people to prank call in yellow pages and stumbled across you.

“Well answer me this question, I can see you looking outside but no one is there honey.” He spoke with a sly chuckle after pretty much every word he said and that’s when slight fear started to cross your mind.

“Exactly no one’s there, you’re just trying to scare me liar.” You laugh at him trying to scare you, after all there’s plenty of creeps out there and so many ghostface wannabes. He couldn’t possibly strike twice in one night.

“Oh but don’t you see I am.” With that a firework was set off on your front porch causing your breath to fall short, watching the red lights hit your window causing you to fall back on to your bed clumsily.

“What do you want from me?” You tremble slightly but assert confidence in your voice as he tries to taunt you from the outside.

“Oh I just want you to answer my questions.” You could hear the nature from outside, the trees rustling behind him as he spoke.

“What if I just hang up?” You asked before you heard him begin shouting down the line in a vicious tone about how idiotic you were being.

“Then I’ll gut you like a fish you clever bitch.” He spat clearly violently annoyed you were not taking him seriously, which irked him to the core. Covering your mouth, you realized he was being serious, this is what happened to Sangyeon on the phone? tears beginning to well as he begins to ask his question.

“In the movie Friday the 13th, what happened to the camp in 1958 that made it close?” He asked you a question about the movie you’d seen so many times, you can’t possibly get it wrong.

“Oh,I know this! Jason drowned and everyone thought he was dead..” You bit your lip anxiously, hand shaking, but you knew it ! That’s how Jason got away with it, they all thought he was dead!

“Incorrect. That was in 1957, there was a serial murder at the camp in 1958-” After he spoke those words you slammed the phone down, you should have thought more about your answer but you couldn’t help but think he would have killed you if you’d gotten it right anyway.

You almost wanted to crawl into a hole as the phone line ended, before you heard an immense crash echoing through halls and coming the front door. Footsteps creaking on the staircase, the end was near as the black fabric of his suit trailed the wooden floors.

You grabbed your star light, the metal cage that housed a bulb was the sharpest object in the room before creeping towards your bedroom door, locking it, ready to strike. You weren’t the dumb character in their horror movie, you were the smart one who put up a fight, you will be the one that escapes.

A knock at your door made your heart beat faster before a series of banging, splitting the wood of the door as the killer burst through in the grim reaper mask, gripping a sharp silver dagger.

You threw the lamp with every bit of strength and the killer fell to the ground with the metal wires of the light lodged in his stomach. You ran past him before he got up and chased you down the staircase, grabbing anything on your way and throwing it right at him. You tried to get out the front door but it was bolted shut and ghostface mask grabbed the back of your shirt holding you against him with the knife to your neck. Complying with him by putting your hands up before suddenly breaking free of his grip and pushing his hand away, it was clear he wanted to hear you scream and at least hear you suffer before being able to kill you.

After managing to escape you dash into the kitchen, throwing a chair to break the patio doors which were likely also locked and ran around towards the back gate, also bolted shut and nowhere near budging.

The killer stood at the end of the alleyway next to your house, slowly stepping closer as your back pressed against the back gate. Next to your foot there was a brick that prevented the gate from swinging open in the night, grabbing it you lobbed it straight towards the killer, hitting him square where he was already injured.

“How dare you kill my friends asshole.” You yelled at the top of your lungs before placing both feet on the metal bars of the fence and jumping over with a struggle, barely landing on your feet. You ran onto the street in front of your house and yelled for help, before you saw headlights driving towards you.

The worn down brick red car only belonged to one person you knew, Juyeon who stuck his head out of the window and called your name as you looked at him with fear in your eyes. Panicked with no other option, you ran towards the passenger door swung it open with the last of your strength and got in.

“Darling what happened?” Juyeon looked at you with concern, his eyes then scanning the wind mirrors and rear view as you told him to drive over and over again in pure terror that you wouldn’t make it out in time.

“He got in again, he was asking me about all these horror movies and tried to kill me-“ You rambled on out of breath, your body covered in tiny cuts and bruises from all the falling and colliding with things.

“Well you escaped, that’s the main thing.” The only words Juyeon could find were those, as he exhaled his smoke with the burning cigarette he held outside the car window.

“I guess so, why are you driving up here anyway?” You manage to gather your thoughts and slightly move away from the original problem at hand, since if you thought about it anymore you would force yourself into a heart attack.

“I was actually coming to check on you, I mean your parents being away is not exactly ideal in the current climate. Your phone line has been engaged for the past hour.” Despite this being a believable statement, you still couldn’t understand his suspiciously peaceful composure.

You looked at him observing his tranquil features as he looked back you with a pair of innocent doe eyes, almost a face you believed read “how could little ol’ me do anything wrong?” Perhaps you were overthinking everything.

“What?” He looked at you confused, making sure to do a double take at the face you were pulling. “You don’t think I’m the killer do you?” He added a slight chuckle of disbelief before pointing to himself with his other hand on the wheel.

“No. Obviously not. He was in the house, you’re here.” You shake away your thoughts and turn your attention to the view from out the window, the houses, the cars and anything else you could analyze but him.

“I think you’re suspicious, I can’t lie.” He took another puff of the cigarette and shook his head, the black streak of hair he kept gelled moving towards one side.

“I’m not! The more you say I am the more I’m going to assume.” You started to get a bit frustrated with his assuming accusations and and waved your hands to confirm your point just to end his train of words.

“Yeah well you know I wouldn’t to do that to you.” He sighed, flicking the but out of the window and returning both hands to the wheel with a sad face.

🔪5AM SALTCLOVER, 1st November 1996

🚔 COUNTY SHERRIF’S POLICE DEPARTMENT

“Deputy Lee I swear I’m telling the truth. He was there the phone rang, my patio door is smashed through because I was trying to escape.” You try to plea with the officer questioning you, seemingly not believing your story since the door had been smashed through the wrong way at the back.

“I mean look at her she’s all cut up, I don’t understand why you can’t believe her. It will be her next if you don’t do anything, just record it for your brothers sake” Juyeon chimed in, being a witness and also arriving just in time to save you from the mess.

“Look I’ll record it y/n, because it’s you and I know you wouldn’t do that to me. But if you are lying to me and giving false leads you’ll hear about it. Don’t bring my brother into this again.” Deputy Lee was unfortunately Sangyeon’s brother and having to work on a case that involved the murder of his little brother was clearly taking a toll on him, like the rest of us he looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.

🔪 LEE JUYEON’S HOUSE, FARMLAND OUTSKIRTS OF SALTCLOVER

“Did he wear the costume?” Hyunjae burst in with the rest of the boys, his first question being rather on brand for his lack of care about the situation since all he knew about murder was the movies. Maybe that was his coping mechanism.

“Did he threaten to slice your guts?” Changmin further asked in the parade of questions, not asking if you were okay first because in his eyes, ‘oh well you look fine.’

“Are you okay?” Younghoon asked, Kevin and Chanhee crouching beside the bed you were sat on and making an effort to hold your hand and smile at you bitter sweetly.

“She’s staying here whilst her house is investigated top to bottom for trace of the killer, plus she’s much safer here.” Juyeon stood beside you, his arms folded across the clean white tank top he was wearing.

Interrupting the chaos of the entourage that had come to visit you, the landline began to call again faintly heard from the down the stairs.

“y/n it’s for you sweetie.” Juyeon’s Mom stepped through the door with a smile, letting you know she was going out for the night with Juyeon’s stepfather to a salsa party.

“Hi sweetheart, it’s not over yet. Which door am I at? Guess right.” The same mysterious voice almost whispered down the line as your hands begin to tremble.

“No… No.. Stop doing this and leave my friends alone.” You yell as the boys watch you from across the corridor, shaking in fear of their own.

“Which door? you stupid bitch.” The killer on the line grows angry, he could be at any door at any time who knows? You had to get this right, you can’t lose anymore friends.

“The patio.” You blurted out thinking of the patterns in horror movies and how he would usually break in the past few weeks.

“Incorrect.” He laughed at your petrified screaming, making a fake buzzer noise across the line to taunt you. With that the bathroom swung open revealing ghostface, you began running into the bedroom and locking the door. Juyeon grabs a pistol from beneath his bed and aims at the door that was thrashing. Hyunjae grabs a chair whilst the others hide behind the bed.

The killer wearing the costume store ghostface bursts in, snatches the chair from Hyunjae and battles with him, eventually crushing him beneath the chair as the others scream. Juyeon guides you out of the room behind him and hides you in the closest closet whilst he stands outside telling the others where to hide.

You could hear Sunwoo above all the screaming seemingly battling with Juyeon to get him to move to his own hiding spot, whereas Juyeon insisted he had the weapon he had to be the one to get rid of the killer.

“Don’t kill me. Please this isn’t a god damn movie and I want to be in the sequel.” You heard a shrill voice from outside the closet, muffling your whimpers you clamp your hand over your mouth, until all falls silent on the upper floor and chaos sounds out downstairs. You burst out of the wardrobe to see that Juyeon is gone and on the floor lies Chanhee still breathing but barely, stab wounds oozing with blood across his body.

“Chanhee get in the wardrobe I’ll be back, I’m so sorry.” Tears of fear falling from your eyes like mini waterfalls, as you helped him into the safe place and closed it gently to not alert anyone of his whereabouts, he can survive this, you just have to be quick.

You ran into the kitchen where you saw Eric, knife in hand trying to fend of the murderer but clearly to scared to even use the weapon, you grabbed one of the tall breakfast bar stools and pinned the killer to the counter with its legs with all the adrenaline you had you were able to move quick enough.

“WHO ARE YOU?! TAKE THE MASK OFF.” You screamed at him as he was stuck, he surrendered and brought his hand to his head, gently tugging off the mask.

There stood Changmin drenched in red smudges of blood, smiling like a maniac and laughing at the scene as if you were nothing to him. These years of friendship were nothing to him, what happened? Why? Too many thoughts crossed your mind upon seeing him of all people behind the mask that you almost dropped the strength of the chair you were holding.

“What happened to you? Have you become a psycho, you’ve watched too many damn movies.” You spat with unreal fits of rage at how a friend could’ve done this to all of you, how could he kill his lifelong best friends? After just a few horror movies…

“Psychos are psychos y/n don’t you dare blame it on the movies.” He used the phone voice changer to taunt you. before pushing the chair and you to the ground and grabbing your arm twisting it behind your back and holding a black handheld gun to your head.

“Where’s Juyeon? Where’d you get that gun?” You panicked as you saw the item in his hand, struggling to release yourself from his grip as Eric stayed cornered in the kitchen not knowing whether to strike or not.

“It’s all part of the game y/n, you should have answered the questions right.” Changmin laughed cackling at how pathetic your fear had become to him, that sweet boy you knew years ago had lost himself to a few movies.

“Don’t touch her.” Another ghostface mask appears, there can’t be two, all along there was two? Who else would have done this to you? The mask is pulled off revealing Hyunjae?… “The deal was you wouldn’t touch her.”

“And the deal is off.” Changmin smiled with a cheerful voice, clearly being the mastermind of the situation between the two of them. Shock overtook your fear and you broke out of Changmin’s grip with a sharp snap.

They began to argue like children before Hyunjae snatched the gun out of Changmin’s grip with a struggle, shooting him to the ground.

“Princess don’t be angry. He made me do it, he told me we would be together and we could be happy just us two.” Hyunjae stepped closer to you wielding the gun in his hands, pointing it closer towards you without a finger on the trigger.

“No Hyunjae, you’re a fucking psychopath. You were apart of this all along.” You couldn’t hold back the tears of betrayal that fell from your eyes, as he took the gun and traced it down your jawline looking at you with bright proud eyes.

In the corner of your eyes, you saw Juyeon quietly sneaking into the room, his torso littered with stab wounds blood seeping through his white tank top, visibly and seriously injured. However in his hand, he held the dagger of the original killer, you stayed quiet, not looking at him and stalling Hyunjae who had you pinned against the counter.

“It’s almost over now darling, just Eric left! be my prize! Just me and you, everyone else is gone! They’re dead! Although you would look gorgeous with your guts loose too.” He looked at you with the same bright eyes he always did, as if nothing he was doing was wrong he was about to turn to kill Eric, however, that’s when he screamed.

Juyeon pushed him to the ground, the dagger slicing straight through his chest, blood seeping through the costume as Hyunjae groaned in the pain he’d been able to deal but not tolerate.

“It’s over for you, asshole. Who’s scary movie is it now?” Juyeon laughed before wincing, the hole in his own stomach bleeding profusely.

“Juyeon lie down.” You grabbed the back of his head as he began to fall to the ground, you had no tears left to cry and now you had to be the strong one. You lied him down and began putting pressure on his wound.

“POLICE!” Deputy Lee walks into to the kitchen, mortified at the scenes of the house, it was over, it was all over. The surviving boys were rushed into hospital to recover, for you and Eric it was time to heal emotionally together, because it was all you had.

🔪6AM SALTCLOVER, 5TH NOVEMBER 1996

And in the end, it was most of the boys that survived their injuries, having lost most of your childhood friends it was rough but after living a life of loss, you had to deal with what you had.

Haknyeon wasn’t doing well, he’d managed to escape the house that night but entered intensive therapy and you’d visit him sometimes but he didn’t seem to trust you guys since the entire thing. Fair enough.

On the bench seated outside the hospital, you held 4 bouquets of flowers, one for Juyeon who saved you that night, One for Sunwoo for being so brave and trying to save his friend, one for Chanhee who needed them more than anyone right now even if he wasn’t awake.

“Eric?” You asked kicking your legs waiting for the visiting hours to open on the hospital ward they were situated.

“Hm?” He hummed, listening to music through his walkman and looking up at you thoughtfully.

“Do you think we could have changed things?” You asked with a sigh, the question that had plagued your mind for weeks.

“Probably. But it’s over now, we’re safe.” He replied and brought you into his touch to pat your head comfortingly as the birds sang melodies of the early morning around you.

It was all over, but unfortunately you’d lost too much.

“I just can’t believe they’re gone.” You burst into tears as Eric brought you in for a hug immediately, trying to hush you back into composure.

That’s if you believe they’re dead, or is it all just a game.

🔪.

a/n: so guys ! happy late spooky season 🎃 here at cloverdaisies! this has been in the works for a while and i would love to thank @winterchimez for proofreading my plot and @kimsohn encouraging me to finish it ! 🤍 if you’re reading this remember to go support deoboyznet!! you’ll find plenty other fics and writers there if you don’t know about it already :) ! this fic may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it certainly is mine ! this is massive dedication to original scream franchise, one of my biggest interests outside of kpop… it’s a bit longer than usual for me as well but yk <3

[imsogonesposts]

steve harrington masterlist!

anything written in red means the fic is currently only on ao3, and will link you to the post on ao3. anything written in white/black will link you to the post on Tumblr. <3

🩷 = favorites

Series

I'm With the Rockstar (series masterlist): Modern!Musician!Steve x reader🩷

One Shots (kinda)

I love you: you tell Steve your first I love you

Memories: after being broken up for a while now, Steve shows up on your front door

Is This Just Fantasy?: you fall victim to vecna's curse🩷

Under the Mistletoe: the kids try to get you and Steve to kiss under the mistletoe

5 Times Steve Harrington Hated the Holidays and 1 Time He Didn't: Steve has a hard time believing any Christmas he has after the age of ten will be any good

We're Snowed In: You and Steve were watching Christmas movies together on Christmas Eve. Until you get snowed in.

We're Getting a Dog?: Steve surprises you with a dog for Christmas

A New Year's Kiss: You and Steve host a New Years Eve party for the kids, and later share a New Years kiss

Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Steve finally asks you out, and falls victim to Vecna's curse🩷

Oh No, I'm Falling in Love: Steve helps you move on after being cheated on

You Can See It With the Lights Out: A timeline of yours and Steve's relationship

All That You Ever Wanted From Me Was Sweet Nothing: Yours and Steve's long-distance relationship through college

The Other Side of the Door: Steve tries to make up after a fight

It Was Enchanting to Meet You: You and Steve meet at a party, but fail to exchange numbers before parting ways

Nightmare Fuel: Steve has a nightmare🩷

I Wanna Love Like the Movies: Yours and Steve's relationship felt like something out of a fantasy book. Until it wasn't

It Feels Like the Start of a Movie I've Seen Before: A timeline of yours and Steve's relationship

The Murray Treatment: Murray helps you and Steve finally acknowledge your feelings for each other🩷

Youre Losing Me: You and Steve have been through hell and back together, but it seems something as traumatic as the upside down isn’t enough to hold a relationship together, cause now they’re losing each other

Like a Never Ending Song: Steve gives you a call

Don't You Know You're My Lifeline: Steve ends up in the hospital

Right Person, Wrong Time: You're really into Steve. But he's really into Nancy Wheeler.

When Steve Falls in Love: Steve wants nothing more but for the two of you to last. Because when he falls in love, he falls hard. (first date)

I Never Thought We'd Have a Last Kiss: You and Steve weren't supposed to end like this.🩷

Have You Ever Thought That Just Maybe You Belong With Me?: You and Steve are best friends, and you have feelings for him. But he has a girlfriend.

I Do Anything But Hate You: You and Steve hate each other. Unfortunately, you also have to date each other (fake dating)

I Want You For Worse or For Better: Steve broke up with you, now he's trying to get you back

August Slipped Away: Steve thought he could have a summer fling. But now she's going to the same school as him.

I Made a Mistake and I'll Tell You I'm Sorry (Sorry): You miss Steve's 21st birthday

I Still Love You, I Promise: Steve broke up with you and has grown to regret it

5 Times Steve Tried to Tell You He Loved You, and the 1 Time You Beat Him to It: Steve loved you, he was just a little scared to say so🩷

Haunted House: You and Steve visit a haunted house

Suburban Legends: A tale of two star crossed lovers

Lovelorn (Nobody Knows): You and Steve skip your prom🩷

Every Line, I Would Write for You (But a Footnote Will Do): You like your best friend Steve, but he doesn't feel the same

Composed a Hundred Ways to Tell You-: You write a letter to Steve, telling him how you miss him.

I Said "I Love You," You Say Nothing Back: Steve is in love with his best friend. But she's under Vecna's curse, and is risking her life, playing bait in hopes that the others can kill Vecna.🩷

It's a Normal Thing to Fall in Love with Movie Stars: After meeting Steve at a restaurant, you learn what it's like to date a movie star.

A Cold Fall: Steve takes you ice skating

Now I'm Missing Your Smile: When you come home from college for your winter break, you find yourself missing your ex boyfriend Steve Harrington. 🩷

Sixth Times the Charm: It seems like every time Steve tries to kiss you, something or someone interrupts him. (5 times Steve tries to kiss you for the first time, and the one time he finally got to.) 🩷

Cold Night In: Cuddling with Steve on a cold night.

You’re All That I Wanted, Never Been So Sure: You and Steve settle in after moving into your new apartment. 🩷

[opennwindows]

HIII!!! Can you do masky as a father figure to emo/scene kid teens headcanons <33

A/N: OMG as i’m posting this i kinda realized i read the ask slightly wrong and wrote it as Dad!Masky with a emo/scene child and got carried away *sobs* but if this doesn’t hit the particular spot u need it to, i’ll totally rewrite it just for you!! just lmk and i’ll type away ( ◠‿◠ ) but i brought out my boy Suburban Dad Tim for this one.

Dad!Masky/Tim with a Emo/Scene kid hcs!

- tim’s a bit confused, but he’s got the spirit!!

- when he was in his teens he was around a bunch of trad-goth and punk friend groups, so he totally understands the importance of the alt community. i mean, dude was neck deep in mental trauma so he def wasn’t hanging out with the cheerleaders lol

“so i know this isn’t bring me the chemical romance or whatever, but this t-shirt is mine from highschool and i want you to have it. they’re called the cure-“

“dad i know who the cure is.”

“ohhh well aren’t you so dark and brooding.”

- will 110% pay for your hair dye and is always amazed with whatever styles you come up with.

- he can be quite sassy with his opinions though lol

“look, i’m just saying last time you did the blue roots with black hair it didn’t look like gerard way. it looked like gerard do not enter.”

“dad??????? what the hell”

- he’ll go to concerts with you pretending he’s just there to protect from a distance, but you both know he’s “secretly” vibing to the music. a true emo dad at heart.

- definitely will take vids to spam brian with.

- cannot understand scene genres like crunkcore to save his life though.

“why the fuck are they screaming over techno beats?????? put back on that pierce the veil band i like.”

- might have a mental breakdown when you ask him to take you to go get your first piercing though.

“YOU WANT A NEEDLE???? SHOVED THROUGH YOUR TONGUE???? slow down buddy, why don’t we start with a uhhh nostril or something.”

- he just wants to make sure that you can properly take care of it……. and he hates the thought of his little rockstar having to sit though any pain regardless of how small it is. will absolutely make fun of you if you cry after it though.

“haha you cried like a baby.”

“i got my septum pierced, it was a natural reaction”

“*already has brian on speaker phone* yeah dude they sobbed like a fucking LOSERRRR”

- you better pray no one dares to bully you at school, because masky and hoodie will be planning on scaring the compulsive normativity out of their boring teenage brains.

“dad why is brian by jacob’s car with a baseball bat?”

“don’t worry about it, he’s just gonna talk to him.”

“i’m literally watching him swing at the passenger side window-“

“it’s just a little chat, do you wanna go see a movie?”

- genuinely is invested in listening to all the emo band lore

“you can’t put the mcr poster next to your the used poster, why would you disrespect your wall like that?”

“i’m going to kidnap ryan ross and lock him in a studio myself if he doesn’t release some new music soon, i’m tired of hearing you cry about it every night.”

- tim knows how important it is to be fully accepted and loved for who you are growing up and he will fully embrace every part of it. he just really, truly loves you.

[homestuckreplay]

EOA1 ==> Media, Agency and the Suburbs in Act 1 of Homestuck

It is April 13, 1959. Mr. Egbert, Sr. has recently made the move out of the city into a newly built house in the suburbs, because clowning isn't paying so well after the recession. His son John hasn't seen his friend Rose since they moved. Staring out the window at 4:13pm and glimpsing nothing but the neighbor's wall, John goes downstairs to catch the second half of a black and white episode of Truth or Consequences, losing himself for fifteen minutes in their world of pranks, hilarity and emotional family reunions. Hopefully for his birthday, his dad will get him that cool new board game and its all-important hours of distraction.

We pick up the daily newspaper, and flip to the funnies to see John's new antics.

(Essay below the cut - about 5k words.)

==> I: John’s Suburb in Historical Context, or: Johntext

During the 1940s and 1950s, mass expansion of the American suburbs was accompanied by a ‘best of both worlds’ promise. Families who moved there could enjoy easy travel to the city via car for work and leisure, but wouldn’t have to deal with the ‘undesirable’ parts of city life, such as noise, pollution, or people from marginalized groups. Suburbs were characterized by detached, single family houses that guaranteed each family their own bubble of space away from neighbors, but also promised a community of likeminded people with whom to form neighborhood associations and PTA committees. Residents could enjoy independence from city governance and increased control over their own living spaces, but anybody who might push back against current social norms would be quietly excluded. Utopian promises and attractive prices encouraged many Americans to make the move, and many of them have never left. 

Here in 2009, it’s not uncommon for people to have lived their entire lives in the suburbs - often in a single house. Promises of progress and innovation within households have remained strictly cosmetic, while the values guarding suburban families and communities have changed very little. Although people of color comprise an increasing percentage of suburban residents, white people are still overrepresented. The same is true of married couples’ overrepresentation compared to other family structures. Suburban architecture remains centralized around the car as the primary means of transportation, and the separation of residential from commercial areas. Opportunities and reasons to leave the house are both minimized. 

With the growth of the suburbs came increased criticism of their designs and ideals. Their dream of a spacious home for each family has led to feelings of isolation, while the promised communities have primarily formed around churches and strict Christian ideals. Residents lack trust in their neighbors, and as such, children are no longer left to their own devices outside of the house. The suburban goal of easy car accessibility to cities has ended in highway congestion, air pollution and lack of public transport or pedestrian access. And while the percentage of Americans living in the suburbs continues to increase, not everyone has the luxury of choosing where they live - particularly children and teenagers. 

Homestuck’s main character John Egbert doesn't directly express a hatred of the suburbs - he seems more conflicted, showing fondness for the tire swing in a kid's yard (p.27), the fireplace (p.50) and the father smoking a pipe (p.74), while also expressing that he feels stuck in his home (p.30, 253), that he avoids his father's company (p.30), and that he feels something missing from his life (p.82). He doesn't seem aware of the source of his emptiness, just that he's always felt it, and we can only guess the source through incredibly subtle context clues, such as the work's title and the way John longingly gazes towards the outside.

It's certainly possible for someone with an otherwise privileged life to feel alienation in the suburbs, but those who differ from the white nuclear family ideal tend to have these feelings heightened, and may be ostracized by the community or threatened into conformity. Similarly, the gulf between John and his dad, and their separate perceptions of that relationship, could be simply generational, or could suggest bigger, unseen differences between them.

One interpretation I and others have discussed is that John is a transgender woman who has yet to actively realize her identity, but knows on some level that she can’t achieve the strict gender expectations of a suburban community. This loss of self-understanding would contribute to John's feelings of absence and lack of control, and strain her relationship with a father who expects her to fit a male gender role. 

This might be my favorite possible explanation, but there are lots of others, any or all of which could be true. John being queer in any sense would mean he might not fit into the nuclear family structure of the suburbs as an adult. John being a person of color in an otherwise white neighborhood would visually distinguish him from his neighbors and cause them to judge him based on stereotypes, and if John is mixed race and Dad is white, this distinction could highlight differences between them too, the absence in John's life marked by a disconnection from a culture he's a part of. John being neurodivergent could impact his ability to interact with other people in the neighborhood, or to replicate the rules and performativity of daily life. Single parent family structures are more accepted in 2009 than they were in 1959, but it's still possible that some past scandal involving Dad and John's family life is hanging over them, fresh in the minds of their neighborhood - perhaps one that just like Nanna's death, Dad 'never wants to talk about'. Any of these factors could lead to John being ostracized by his community and mean that even at a young age he didn't 'buy in' to the idea of the happy suburban family. 

I believe it is intentional that Homestuck hasn’t defined John’s location more specifically than ‘west of Kansas’. Although research has shown that different suburbs have their own individual characters, critics tend to emphasize their similarities. We’re supposed to think that John would have broadly the same experiences if he lives in Arizona or Colorado, Texas or Georgia, maybe even England or Belgium. The externalities of John’s life are the same as countless other kids in the Western world, not because of John’s choices or even his dad’s choices, but due to the larger structures that organize families into houses, houses into suburbs, and suburbs into sources of constraint.

==> II: If You Love Your House So Much, Why Don’t You Never Leave It?

The suburbs walk hand in hand with advances in technology. The 1950s saw a boom in the sale of household appliances, with devices for cooking and cleaning promising to lighten the housework load for women, and television providing entertainment for the whole family from the comfort of the living room. Various corporations created model homes to display the futuristic properties of their fantastical appliances, promising consumers that in the future, all homes would look just like this. This was a marketing tactic primarily benefiting the corporations - but in some cases, they were successful. General Electric’s ‘New American’ home in Denver featured a dishwasher as early as 1935, and these increased in affordability and domestic popularity across the 1950s and 60s. Disneyland’s Monsanto ‘House of the Future’ boasted a microwave oven. The house opened in real world 1957 but was ‘set in 1986’, and by 1986, one in four American homes owned a microwave. The Westinghouse ‘Home of Tomorrow’ contained the first ever portable radios - six of them, with radio outlets in every room to grant every family member a constant supply of media. 

This idea of constant, individualized media consumption may have been the greatest called shot of these houses. In 1959, John would be limited to a handful of TV channels on a fixed schedule, fighting over the tuning dials with his dad, but in 2009 he almost certainly knows the delights of Megavideo on top of having a video game collection, DVD collection and TV on demand service. 

Televisions were marketed to families in the 1950s claiming that they would keep families closer, as parents and children alike would want to stay home and watch together instead of going out to separate places, and many parents at first expressed relief at always knowing where their teenage children were, and consequently, being able to keep an eye on them. Television altered the boundaries between public and private space, allowing people to experience a public activity such as a trip to the movies, a performance from a live musician, even witnessing the moon landing, without leaving the home or interacting with strangers. 

Increasingly, media is marketed with the promise of interactivity and agency. Television provided a world to passively escape into, but video games allow the player to actually embody a character in that world. They present fantasies of control, of being able to explore a virtual map according to the player’s whims, and offering in-character choices that allow the player to control the narrative itself. Players are compelled by the possibility of media they can customize to their own specific tastes, and media they can master and bend to their will instead of simply observe. In this way, the Nintendo Wii isn’t so different from the fridge-freezer that promised greater mastery over the family’s diet, or the modern microwave oven and its dozens of settings and options for preparing food. 

As our society moves from home televisions to home computers and video game systems into an age of portable, all in one smartphones, we and the media become more dependent on each other, and we expect to have access to it more of the time. John Egbert has found connection with a close friend who lives multiple timezones east and stays in regular and real time contact with her. That friendship enriches his life, and wouldn't have been possible without today’s high speed internet and instant messaging services. John’s computer opens up an incredible social world, but - as we’ve seen with Rose losing power - if he lost that technology, he’d also lose that community. 

So, advertisers ask, what possible reason is there to leave? Why would you go somewhere mundane, like a park or a youth club, when you could go up on a plane surrounded by dangerous criminals and outsmart them all in time to save your friend? When you can bike down the highways from Missouri to Virginia to save the girl you like from natural disasters? You can be a hard boiled detective, a monster's best friend, a scientist making contact with aliens, an oil magnate turned savior of the world, a FBI agent surgically given the face of a terrorist, and a world leading expert on ghost slime - and you’ll never get dirty, you’ll never get hurt, and your dad will be right in the next room with a constant supply of fresh baked cakes and fatherly affection. What possible reason do kids have to complain, or to feel like anything is missing from their lives, when they can master reality from couches and computer chairs?

John Egbert embodies constant media consumption. Two of his five stated interests are consuming media - specifically movies and video games - and even when he’s not actively watching or playing something, he’s surrounded by media. His room is filled with movie posters, the television in the living room is switched on even when nobody’s watching, and the first thing he does after loading his computer is check for webcomic updates. Even his thoughts are consumed. He’s constantly replaying his favorite scenes in his head, which seems to bring him genuine joy, fixating on the next game he wants to play, and filling his social interactions with references to his favorite franchises. Even before actually entering Sburb’s virtual reality, John already wasn’t present in his material space. He’s digitally transitioned from what Lynn Spigel describes as ‘the home address to “home page”... computer generations rather than genders’. 

==> III: Kids These Days Just Don’t Respect The Cultural Idea Of Childhood We Created For Them

The suburban home loves technology, but the reverse may not be true. A significant amount of mass media depicts the suburbs as the place where creativity and individuality go to die, reflecting the cultural criticisms instead of the promises. Some of the earliest sitcoms, such as I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, predated widespread criticisms of the suburbs and presented an idealized suburban life. These soon gave way to the ‘fantastic sitcoms’ of the 1960s, including Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. These shows have implausible premises, featuring supernatural creatures, aliens or futuristic settings while still depicting mundane suburban realities. This juxtaposition opened up new questions about the real world, asking why we exclude certain people from communities and playing with the strict roles within the nuclear family. 

Media aimed at young people often presents a world where kids are in control and regular power structures are inverted. 1950s and 60s comic strips aimed at kids, such as Peanuts and Dennis the Menace, were also set in the suburbs - but an idealized version of the suburbs where kids could roam freely, not confined to the home and able to disobey the instructions of adults without consequences. Some parents restrict these from children, not wanting them to ‘get the wrong idea’ and copy the bad behavior they see in comics or on TV. Popular music is a site of rebellion amongst teenagers - The Kinks in the 1960s, Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, Green Day and Blink-182 in the 1990s and 2000s, and uncountable other acts have put criticisms of suburbia to music and created a cultural dream of escape by getting on the road, joining a rock band and never putting down roots again. 

In a time of rapid technological change, parents fear the impact technology and new media will have on their children, partly because they didn’t grow up with those technologies themselves. Television was feared because it gave children access to knowledge, different worldviews, and the realities of the adult world that parents wanted to keep from them, lessening parents’ control over their kids. It was also feared for its all-consuming nature, for making children want to watch constantly at the expense of homework, chores and family meals. More recently, video games have been feared for these same addictive properties, and for the belief that they negatively impact social interaction and cause increased aggression and violence. 

But John isn’t like other teenagers. His taste is striking for being exclusively movies that reinforce ideals of the nuclear family - usually suburban, with the exception of New York City-based Ghostbusters II - which suggests he doesn’t only want to escape his current life, he wants to legitimate it to himself. John’s movies end with family reconciliation, not with the kids getting one over on the parents. If John feels like he doesn’t fit into suburban ideals, he can try to connect with them by seeing them through the eyes of a character he likes. In a world where John’s primary source of agency is the media he chooses to consume, he could easily choose to reject his unsatisfying life altogether and live vicariously through outlaws and exiles, getting really into Westerns or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but he doesn’t. He chooses characters who are fundamentally conventional, despite their rough edges, suggesting he’d really like to just fit in and be content with what he has.

Sburb, however, is the game that actualizes parents’ worst fears, inverting the power structures of the house, giving Rose and John dominion over the space while Dad - formerly both the breadwinner and the homemaker - has been relegated to an unseen location. John has access to a physically dangerous inventory system and a strife specibus that encourages him to solve problems by hitting them with a hammer.

Media promises us an escape, and it undoubtedly has the power to teach us and open our eyes to new perspectives, but in many cases provides nothing more than a filter over our lives. Encouraging people to live in a state of distraction, a TV show or video game gives us an easy way to hide from reality. People look for a new technology to solve their problems instead of a social solution, placing parental controls over their children’s television and internet usage instead of having honest conversations among families about media consumption, and designing security systems to keep ‘undesirable’ people from trespassing in middle class neighborhoods without questioning why those people are excluded from suburban society in the first place.

==> IV: There’s A Fine Line Between Fantasy And Reality And My House Is Built There

In the 1935 movie Murder by Television, a money-hungry scientist manipulates the interference between telephone lines and television broadcast signals to create the ‘death ray,’ and murder somebody on the other side of a television screen. Released less than a decade after the world’s first television broadcast, this movie demonstrates our cultural obsession with the boundaries between electrical and real space, and our dream of making those boundaries permeable. The 1950s presented TV families (such as the Nelsons from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) as normal families whose lives just happened to be televised, but who behaved the same way on and off screen to the point of forgetting the cameras were rolling. To this day, reality television such as Big Brother and The Bachelor promise to show us contestants’ authentic private lives, and even when we as viewers know the show is staged, we choose to buy into the fantasy.

More recently, 1998’s The Truman Show literalizes our dependence on the media, its ubiquity in our lives, and the impact this has on our personal relationships by showing a man whose whole life has been orchestrated by a TV production company that broadcasts him 24/7. Through a lucky accident with a time portal I obtained a copy of 2023’s Barbie, in which a plastic doll lives the dream life promised by her marketing, but starts thinking about mortality and the ‘real world’ when her owner’s mother starts drawing pictures of her with typical adult problems.

In both of these movies, the characters are happy until they are forced to confront the constructed nature of their worlds. By understanding the production and design processes controlling their lives, they become disillusioned with the simulation of perfection and begin searching for something more authentic. Even though Truman and Barbie both escape synthesized worlds and achieve full human agency, their endings are bittersweet. Their ‘escape’ lands them in present day Los Angeles, with all the social constraints, local mass produced suburbs, and constant diet of blockbuster media that this implies.

Blurring these boundaries is an effective advertising strategy as well as a narrative one. Adverts invite players to ‘become’ the main character of a video game, such as a Kid Chameleon promotion inviting players to ‘change personalities faster than they’ll change helmets’ and ‘transform’ themselves into a variety of mavericks. A Mortal Kombat arcade machine advert showed real men bursting out of the machine to attack the player. Promotions for The Sims 2 featured real photographs of people with the Sims interface added digitally, presenting the controllable Sims within the game as more than just pixels.

Following in this grand tradition, Sburb takes the permeable boundary between electrical and real space and smashes a meteor through it. Sburb answers the question of ‘can technology transform our society?’ with a 'yes'  loud enough to shake the neighborhood houses from their foundations. Sburb represents the greatest and most utopian promises of technology, as well as the worst of our cultural fears around it. 

The appeal of Sburb as a game is that it promises teenagers control over their lives in a world where they’re otherwise powerless. It’s a way to speedrun growing up - alchemy mechanics offer the chance to manipulate space and create all the material goods the player wants, but the game also bestows responsibility for tackling a crisis, for maintaining the home, perhaps even saving the world. And the players who are going to want this badly enough to fight through the impossible challenges Sburb presents are the kids who really can’t wait, the ones who aren’t doing well, and who feel trapped enough in their everyday lives that they would risk it all on an experimental technology to escape. 

In truth, many scholars challenge the concepts of interactivity and agency in video games, arguing that these are players’ perceptions and not their realities. Games invite players to participate in the creation of art, but the relationship is never equal, with the creators always having the final say on exactly how much free will the player is allowed. Even a game that aims to be open world and allow for as much free play as possible is bound by the limitations of processing power and how many options a human can reasonably write and code for. 

Sburb also puts restrictions on its players. Most likely, there are limits on what objects can be created via alchemy, and Sburb would likely restrict any item that could be used to work against the game. Players being controlled by commands which are interpreted by a computer also ensure that only commands coded for in the game are transmitted to the player. When a command is incorrect, the narrator steps in to help the player (p.253). And so far, the game has dramatic ways of keeping John on a very linear path - first starting a clock so he had no choice but to focus on stopping the meteor, then cutting him off from the world so that he has to stay in his current location. It’s impossible to have agency while living within a game that can and will end your life with four minutes and thirteen seconds of notice.

The ‘homes of tomorrow’ discussed at the start of part II were designed as sentient spaces, responsive to their inhabitants and able to almost anticipate their needs. John Brehm said about MOMA’s 1999 Un-Private House exhibition, ‘one can prepare a meal with the help of a virtual chef from a favorite restaurant and have dinner with a virtual guest or friend through the liquid wall’ and suggested that the house was ‘an extension of the body or a transparency of the mind… that both protects and transcends the limitations of the body’. In 2000, the Microsoft Home in New York City showed a future where people could control the lights, thermostats, security systems and stereos directly from their phones, even from another location. The home of tomorrow promises it can be anything its owner wants it to be, without questioning the idea that the privately owned, individualized home should exist and be desired.

Of course, the houses of tomorrow are always singular, prototype homes built with no thought of neighbors and community, but perhaps sacrificing a whole neighborhood to build the perfect home is a tradeoff some people have to make. Far from the static, impersonal houses of the suburbs, Sburb allows players to create their dream houses, offering bigger bedrooms, additional floors, and an endless void to throw your father’s harlequin statues into. It’s another technology that offers transformative potential for the family home, but is ultimately still driven by it, forming an individualist utopian bubble within a larger, far more conservative and restrictive structure.

==> V: If I Die, I Wanna Die In The Suburbs

The remote control, the video game joystick, and the Sburb alchemiter all tell us we can master reality by mastering technology. If that’s the case, then John still has to master technology. A shattered window from stack modus failures and a desktop littered with enraged programming files show us just how far John is from mastering either of these things.

John’s lack of agency goes far deeper than being trapped in the suburbs. His simple choice to pick something up and put it down is controlled by external agents. Though he can choose to escape his father in the kitchen by going to his room, a variety of screens will follow him and keep him in his own personalized panopticon. Rose’s mastery over the cursor means that John can’t guarantee the objects in his room will be where he left them, and even John’s thoughts are surveilled, interpreted and transmitted outwards by the narrator.

The USA PATRIOT act of 2001 expanded the US government’s legal rights to monitor electronic communication, and the early 2000s saw increased covert network surveillance by governments and private corporations alike. John’s technological illiteracy means he probably doesn’t know how to use a VPN and might not have known as a kid that his internet activities weren’t private, but in Act 2, inside Sburb, he begins to realize. Just as parents fretted at PTA meetings, John’s media has allowed him to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and put an end to his carefully constructed childhood, all on the cultural milestone of his thirteenth birthday. 

Sburb has compounded the problem of John being surveilled and puppeted, but didn't invent it. The first 136 pages of Homestuck establish the meta-narrative restrictions on his life, from his inventory system to his being guided by commands, before he installs the game. There are layers of control over John’s life that he’ll need to break through one at a time. The first will be acquiring the Sburb server disc, which will give John greater power within Sburb, and the ability to use the full extent of its abilities. The second will be escaping the game of Sburb, which could be accomplished by simply winning the game (like in 1995’s Jumanji), or by using some kind of cheat or glitch to break out of it (2003’s Spy Kids 3: Game Over), but either way John will need to master the game mechanics. 

The final layer is Homestuck itself, and unfortunately for us, John escaping the player and narrator’s influence over his life would almost certainly mean the end of the comic. But in Homestuck the Earth is already being destroyed, and being a webcomic that doesn’t have the constraints of a two hour Hollywood movie, the story doesn’t have to stop at the level of escaping the simulation. It has the chance to go a layer further, and imagine a world where John and his friends are able to enact real and meaningful change.

John has clearly had an emotional dependency on media for a long time, and now, he has a physical dependency too. Sburb is the thing keeping him alive, and his only hope to save the rest of the world, but he’s not alone in seeing popular media as a sacred text necessary for his existence. Smethurst and Craps point out that the player reacts to the game as much as the game does to the player - if anywhere, agency can be found in players’ interpretations of a game. Increasingly we rely on fiction to shape our politics and our worldviews, while also reading texts at a surface level. While media itself is insufficient to give us agency, media literacy is a big step towards asking questions about what restricts our agency, how, and why. The way John discusses movies now isn’t too in depth, with reviews like ‘the applejuice scene was so funny’ and ‘cage is sweet. so sweet.’ But in a story about becoming part of a video game, media literacy could be a very powerful tool for John, and he could come out of this as a genuine movie critic.

==> Conclusion

While Homestuck is a distinctly modern multimedia experience, it exists in a much larger tradition of media that criticizes the suburbs, and depicts the fantasy of escape for young people. Like other metafictional works before it, it handles these themes self-reflexively, showing its main character combat the horrors of the suburbs directly, instead of depicting a fantasy where problems do not exist. 

Based on its first act, Homestuck is a story about John Egbert’s quest for agency in a world that constantly tries to restrict it. John’s life so far has been defined by the suburbs, by a single but unremarkable point in space that he’s been trapped in for the first thirteen years of his life. John is both physically confined to his suburban neighborhood, and socially confined into being the ideal of the middle class all American boy that has been presented as his only option. John’s taste in media reinforces the ideals of his society, meaning he has yet to question the status quo of his existence or examine the source of his depression. John is also controlled directly by his server player, the Homestuck players, and the narrator. 

John’s experiences playing Sburb show us that while the escape media provides for us is real and can change us in meaningful ways, it can only solve the first step of the problem - and isn’t without its own risks and drawbacks. In order to truly develop agency, John will need to question the existence of the suburbs themselves, and not only his placein them. He’ll also need to  - at some point - quit the game, return to reality, and use the skills he’s learned in the game to develop mastery over both the physical world and the story itself.

==> Sources

I wrote this essay after reading Lynn Spigel’s excellent essay collection ‘Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs’ (2001), which I would highly recommend.

Full bibliography

Filmography