#the paranoia and not being able to sleep because of fear is so me coded

[iambecomeafangirl]

I love me some mentally and emotionally unstable female characters who deal with anxiety and paranoia, who cannot sleep until they've taken their sleeping pills, and who can't tell reality from a hallucination.

[landscaping-your-mind]

howdy howdy howdy, some good words, mostly rambling, one (1) reaction image bc I'm Sad About Jon Constantly All The Time. Content warnings for like, most things in the episode because I'm pulling quotes, and also existential fear (the state of the world rn) because I went on a little extinction ramble.

@a-mag-a-day

Case 9550307 – Wallis Turner. Incident occurred at the North Point prisoner of-war camp, then later the sunken ship Nemesis in late 1942. Statement taken 3rd July 1955 at the Pu Songling Research Centre, Beijing. Committed to tape 9th October 2014. Gertrude Robinson recording.

Jon, I love you, but Gertrude's way of introducing statements is way better. Although she did intentionally leave the archives in disarray so...

Like, I mean, in an ideal world, you'd be able to search for statements by people who appear in them and places and notable things that happen, and then... idk I just, alright like, I want to just, learn how to code so I can make myself a little website and organize the statements and then my little rat brain who just wants to sort things out will finally be appeased

Even if it’s just sleep, just a quiet nothing forever, it’s not like you know enough to be bored, is it?

Fun fact about yours truly, that's one of the parts of death that scares me the most! I cannot handle being bored, it's just... no, I can't do it. And boredom forever? No end in sight? I hope there is an afterlife so that I don't have to deal with that.

Worse than that is just... nothing, just an end, and I don't really like to think about that.

Sergeant once told me it’s no different from killing a chicken back home, but people aren’t chickens, and the idea that war strips us all down to just a body that moves and kills, or falls and dies, makes me feel sick to my stomach.

Fear soup! This is pretty Flesh.

I could feel my pulse quicken, like it wanted to match the tempo, though I’ve no idea why. I should have been confused, scared maybe, and I guess I was, but I could also feel my fingers tap-tap-tapping away to the beat.

Right, alright, The Slaughter and music thing makes sense to me now. It's about the... I called it group project violence? That but serious. I know The Hunt was the mob mentality episode, but like... idk, I'm not sure. Something about the music in these episodes, Jane's song of the Hive, luring you in, entrancing you. The song of the Web, making you dance to its tune. The song of the Slaughter, getting caught up in the rhythm of it all.

There's something there, I can't exactly articulate it.

[...] just before the trumpet began to drift over the waters just a few yards beyond the walls.

woodwinds against trumpets 2023

And when they were lying still and the music stopped and night was quiet again, that’s when I heard the sound that really chilled my blood. All my comrades, my fellow prisoners, cheered. And it wasn’t the cheer of those glad for freedom, it was the sound of bloodlust and cruelty.

the slaughter feels like the least... spooky of all the fears to me. like, of course, there's a lot of war ghosts, and uncontrollable urges to do violence among other things, but the thing about the slaughter really feels like human and stuff. like, all of them are, not necessarily human, but influenced by the fear of mortals -- and probably those weird jellyfish, too -- but the slaughter feels different.

also, may I just say a thing? a few of the entities aren't really made manifest by that thing happening. like, sure, the eye is the fear of being watched -- among many other things -- but you know what really breeds paranoia? not being sure if you're being watched or not. the end is the fear of death, and yet victims of the end are commonly just told when the end will come for them. the slaughter is the fear of violence in a slaughter-y way and not a hunt or desolation-y way, and a lot of the slaughter's fear comes from witnessing the violence, or dreading it.

thus the extinction manifesting wouldn't end the world, because it would be a world without fear -- like maybe it would replace humans with spooky inheritors -- but honestly I think it would be enough just to give us the knowledge, the constant dread that there are people more powerful than us who can end the world with a decision, or trash the environment knowing full well what the consequences are. I think it would be enough to look at the doomsday clock and see that we're 90 seconds to midnight. but make it spooky.

woo! existential fear! hopelessness and helplessness! i know, i know, don't give up, people can cause change, but also I am one (1) tiny little guy.

Leonard was the first to dance. Well, I think of it as a dance, though I don’t know why. He reached over and grabbed another one of the former prisoners, a scrawny guy, I think his name was Milton. He gave a cry of anger that I could never have imagined coming from his gentle, smiling lips even in the head of battle. There was nothing Milton could do. Even malnourished as he was, it was easy for Leonard to snap his arm like a twig, twist his neck until his leg spasmed and his skull started to crack. Even when his victim was clearly dead, he kept beating it, tossing the corpse across the deck with as much ferocity as if it were the most hated man alive. The bloody crew of the Nemesis watched, their eyes riveted and their feet tapping to the music.

First of all, I love the way Jonny writes violence, it feels so visceral, I don't know, just the way he describes it. It's good. 10/10.

Secondly, I've danced in like a group but like a community sort of group not a lot of times, but I have acted, and it feels similar. Like, I don't know. Something about being on stage, the lights almost blinding you, it feels invigorating, it feels like you're being swept up in something. Idk, like that scene in Mama Mia where Sophie meets all three of her dads in one dance, and then passes out.

Yeah idk.

Few wars in my lifetime have reached anywhere the near the heights of fear I suspect this ritual would need, though I did spend some time a while back looking over some details from the Cuban Missile Crisis to no avail.

Nah, mate, the cold war's a feast for the extinction! (however, soup)

Anyway, point is, you can probably discount The Slaughter. It had its chance.

I forgot these tapes were supposed to be for her successor.

oh... hmnr. and they didn't help... this one told them outright how to stop The Unknowing, there was probably one going into more detail about it. The tape she intended the Archivist to hear as soon as they got the job... well, we all know what happened to that.

That's just... sad to me.

I feel like I’m on a deadline, like I’m running out time, somehow. And I don’t even know where to go, what to look for, or—

THIS! THIS IS WHAT SEASON 4 FEELS LIKE! Weirdly stressful, despite not clearly having a... point, something to... do, it feels like that feeling you get when you're so... bored or understimulated that you're just pacing around trying to find something to do, and you can't find anything to do! And it's like, aaaaa.

That's season 4.

(oh, also, for the last time the watcher's crown was in the past, the mass ritual doesn't have a canon name and when asked, Jonny tentatively said "The Magnus Archives" however of course that's word of god and the author is dead so take it as you will, however please do know that it's not the watcher's crown)

Daisy’s got me listening to The Archers. I hate it. But it feels nice to hate something that can’t hurt me. I don’t know. That’s it, I, I guess. End recording.

[ID: A drawing of someone sitting at a computer crying.]

I'M JUST SAD. "It feels nice to hate something that can't hurt me." HHHHH HES REALLY BEEN THROUGH THE WRINGER HASN'T HE D:

right, uh,

this is over ig.

[disgruntledspacedad]

in defense of Din’s subdued reaction to losing the kid...

gif by @quantam-widow

I know we were all thinking it. We got a 2 second reaction shot to the destruction of the Razor Crest (may she forever rest in peace), but then, Grogu gets taken, and... nothing?

What the fuck, Din? we all protest. That’s your baby on that ship! Don’t you care? Scream, curse, kick a rock, cry, make a fist, something!!

I will acknowledge that so far, the show has been excellent with giving us emotional payoff, am I right? I mean, just today we got Din laughing, twice. Twice in a row. I honestly never thought we’d see that. There have been so many excellent, precious soft!Din moments this season, and they all feel deliciously earned.

So, from a meta POV, I guess I’m saying that I have faith in the writers to get it right, and in Pedro to deliver. Duh.

In universe, though, I think it’s fair to point out the obvious - that Din is a pretty reserved guy. He’s much more of a thinker than a feeler. He’s used to keeping things bottled up, and I would even argue that his life often depends on his ability to dissociate from his emotions. Din’s entire journey so far has been about how one little baby yodito shakes his worldview to its very foundations. He’s getting there, but it’s a slow process. 

And also, consider this - we haven’t seen Din alone yet, not since Grogu was taken. For a guy who lives a guarded life literally encased in fucking armor, any display of emotion is going to be carefully protected until he’s in private.

But anyway, Din is detached, rational, a little emotionally constipated, and definitely comfortable in a stressful situation. A true ISTP if you ask me (yeah, I know you didn’t, but whatever). Often, it seems that these cool headed, logical types who have never ruffled a feather over anything in their lives are the least adept at handling genuine fear. In other words, when panic does strike, it strikes them hard. 

And guys, Din was definitely panicking during this episode. 

He’s clearly unsettled from the jump - that outburst of “dank farrik!” in the cockpit sells it, and his distress only becomes more obvious from there. Talking out loud, trying to convince himself that the best thing for Grogu is for him to be trained as a Jedi. Reminding himself of the creed. His overt caution as they approach the seeing stone. His impatience, “Are you seeing anything??”

Then there’s the effects of long term stress. Sure, a bounty hunter in the outer rim doesn’t exactly live an easy life, but Din is definitely used to the drama being on his terms. Compare Din’s body language in the opening scene of season one to when Boba confronts him in chapter fourteen. You can just feel the anxiety, the weariness, the frustration. Din has been on the run for months now, constantly looking over his shoulder, sleeping with one eye open. Notice how he even startles at Fennec’s voice? Season one Din would never have given that much away, regardless of the situation. Long term stress has clearly taken a toll on him.

So we have unsettled, stressed out Din in an emotionally charged situation. He’s exhausted, he’s scared, he’s desperate. This scenario is a recipe for even the most level-headed of adrenaline junkies to loose their cool, and that’s exactly what happens to Din. He panics, and he makes some pretty big fuckups because of it. Leaving Grogu unprotected, twice. Trying three different times to break through that “force field,” even when he knew he couldn’t. Dropping that jetpack and then just forgetting about it (I know we were all screaming about that one, or at least, I was).

So, fear is a positive feedback loop. Those neurotransmitters that do us good in a bad situation - raising heart rate, narrowing focus, shunting blood to the muscles - can also be detrimental if we get too high of a dose - tachypnea and tachycardia, inability to think critically and see the big picture, lack of blood and oxygen to the brain. Epinephrine, in particular, even inhibits the laying down of new memory pathways. In other words, stress leads to poor performance, and poor performance leads to more stress, which leads to... you get the idea.

Then, in the middle of all this chaos, they fucking blast the Razor Crest.

More epinephrine, more cortisol, more stress. 

By the end of it all, Din is a fucking shitstorm of stress hormones and pent up emotions. Notice how he seems to be on autopilot in the immediate aftermath, robotically scanning the ashes of the Crest for anything that might be left intact. Notice how empty his voice is when he says, “the child is gone.” This is a dead man walking. Din has nothing left. His whole life has just gone up in smoke, and he can do nothing about it. 

Guys, Din is holding onto his sanity by a fucking thread in this scene. “The child is gone,” he says, like he’s reminding himself, grounding himself in his shitty reality. He’s stunned. 

And helpless. There’s literally nothing he can do for Grogu. He has no ship, no credits, no resources, nothing to bargain with, nothing to offer. Din literally cannot allow himself the luxury of feelings right now. He’s just got to focus on surviving this very shitty day.

Then, Boba Fett upholds his end of the deal, and suddenly, Din has something to hold onto. An ally, a badass friend, some hope. I don’t think Boba shows Din that chain code in order to verify his claim on the armor - he’s already wearing it, for godssake. I think Boba shows him the code in order to catch Din’s attention - hey friend, I know you’re hurting, but I’m a man of my word. When I make a vow, I keep it. Let’s regroup and go find your kid.

And Din would totally latch onto that. A fighting chance? Din fucking leaps at it. There’s a job to do. A kid to save. All of those stress hormones are going to keep on stewing, because Din has never really come down from his adrenaline high. 

It’s like this in real life, too. There isn’t time to be afraid. There isn’t time to be sad, or second-guess, or say, oh how terrible, or wonder what if it doesn’t work? There’s just you and the job, and if you are the only thing standing between life and death, you will put everything else aside and do what you have to do, for as long as you have to do it.

And that’s where Din is at this moment. He’s running on the fumes of his adrenaline, all tempered focus, all strategy and no bullshit.

Emotional shock, my therapist buddy calls it. Apparently, it’s normal. Expected, even.

But guys, the fallout of this kind of crazy ass adrenaline high is insanely intense. I’m talking collapse to the floor, legs won't hold you, trembling, crying so hard you sling snot, shuddering breaths, stare dead-eyed and spent at the ceiling because you’re just too wiped out to even sleep kind of intense. 

And then, after the breakdown comes the angst. The detailed thinking. The oh god, what if this had happened, or, should I have done that instead? It seems like every emotion that gets put on the back burner in the moment comes back to bite you with twofold intensity when all is said and done. 

In other words, Din is definitely going to feels some things .A lot of very intense things. A reckoning is coming, my dudes. Trust me. It’s just not quite here yet.

That being said, here’s what I can expect from Din going forward:

Just like he’s is slow to acknowledge his growing parental feelings for Grogu, I think Din’s going to be slow at processing his grief at Grogu’s loss. In the next episode, he’s got plenty to distract him - getting together his hit team to take back the kid and coordinating an attack on the empire. 

However, I do think we’ll get a slow moment with Din, probably sometime at the beginning of next week’s episode if the pattern holds. I doubt it’s the full-blown breakdown that we’re all needing, but I’m willing to bet money that we’ll see Din grappling with the fact that his kid is gone. I also think that badass beskar murder machine Din from chapter three will resurface. Stress and desperation make us do irrational things, and anger is one of the stages of grief that Din will inevitably have to work through (I think he’s flickering between denial and bargaining for now).

But then, after Din gets Grogu back? I think that’s we’ll have our big, dearly earned emotional payoff. 

For one thing, Din won’t be able to deny his feelings anymore. He wants to keep this kid, it’s so very obvious. Losing him just forces it all to the forefront. 

And then the relief/joy/regret/guilt that Din is going to feel once he’s got Grogu back? Not to mention the physical exhaustion? All of the fear/terror/angst/grief that he ignored in favor of just going pedal to the metal, guns blazing, get the kid or die trying? That shit’s going to crash into him with all the subtly of a fucking tsunami. I guarantee you, we’re going to get some sort of confession, or adoption vow, or face revel, or other sort of profound softness from Dad!Din in the falling action of this season (At least, I hope we get it at the end this season but I wouldn’t put it past them to kick it into the premier of season three, just for pacing reasons, but then again, I obviously have trust issues).

Personally, I would love to see Din grappling with the long-term fallout of losing Grogu - night terrors, guilt, paranoia, etc. That’s probably the stuff of fanfiction - mandalorians don't have nightmares on screen, surely - but still, some lingering effects Grogu’s kidnapping would be realistic, and I would absolutely live for it.

[reginaldvonspiffington]

The Curse of Creativity by Richard V Kelly Jr

(disclaimer: This piece is edited by the author’s daughter posthumously. No new words were added, only passages deleted or rearranged)

1. The Wrong Kind Of Creativity

At the advanced age of 59 I found myself in a hospital psychiatric ward full of dejected people. I had reached the point of near catatonia, almost unable to interact with the world, unable to sleep, barely able to speak, spending all day in bed staring at the ceiling. My diagnosis was “Major depression with psychotic expressions”. 

Before this, I had composed symphonies and film scores. I had written textbooks, short stories, magazine articles, and half a dozen novels. I had sculpted in wood. I had written the code to create educational and artistic Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence applications. I had helped design a new school for creative kids. I had made educational films, created animations to teach Chinese, and written courses in every subject from neural networks to cryptography to architecture. 

Most of my existence had been spent in a world of ideas and imagination. My mind had been a sparkler, shooting off scintillas in every direction: fragments of music, lines of lyrical poetry, drawings, sculptures, computer programs, virtual worlds. But that life was gone. And here I was lying in bed fixated on the light of a bulb leaking in from an air vent.

I was still inventive at this point, but it was the wrong kind of inventiveness, the frightening unacceptable form. I had broken the membrane that separates playful imagination from gibbering lunacy. I still made up stories in my head, but they were all dark, bleak, lugubrious tales. The vent I was staring at obviously led to a parallel world where “they” were watching my every movement. I could feel the heat emanating from the wall, a form of thermal ray designed to cook my brain and mold my behavior. I had progressed beyond the creative person's liberation-from-the-mundane to the disturbed person's liberation-from-the-real.

There was no sense in moving from the hospital bed. Movement didn't matter. Nothing mattered. There was no future. And all the things I had created in the past seemed like a colossal waste of time. What was I thinking writing books no one would ever read and composing music no one would ever listen to? What was the point of that? Or anything else?

* 

The disease I was suffering from, depression, is astonishingly common. Almost 10% of Americans are taking anti-depressants right now. In fact, anti-depressants are the most prescribed drug in America. Almost 20% of women between the ages of 40 and 60 take them. And one in five people will eventually experience depression. So, pretty much everyone knows someone who has suffered from this illness.

But there is a level even deeper than the bottomless well of depression. 20% of people diagnosed with major depression (“major” in this case signifies acute, rather than chronic) also develop paranoia or other symptoms of psychosis including delusions and hallucinations. I was one of those people. I was terrified by my diagnosis, not because of the word “depression” – I knew there were treatments available - but because of the word “psychotic”. This was a term I had often used to describe crazy violent people for whom there was no cure. I pondered my possible future life as a babbling derelict. 

The new psychiatric resident assured me that the psychosis of depression and the psychosis of schizophrenia “are completely different disease processes originating in different parts of the brain”. And I knew intellectually that paranoia was misuse of my imagination. It was the dark side of the creativity that had sustained me my entire life. It was creativity as self-torture. But, even though I understood that my internal chemistry was creating false stories to misguide my thinking, I still felt hopeless, dejected, and persecuted. 

Staring through the fog of delusion, I realized that I had finally reached my secret goal of living in a world entirely of my own creation, but not in the way I had intended. I had hoped to spend every day reading my own novels, watching my own movies, laughing at my own animations, and listening to my own music, comforted by a sensible lyrical self-made universe. Instead, I was enwrapt in a vivid nightmare. My own creative thoughts were tormenting me. I couldn't wake up to escape them, and I couldn't sleep to avoid them.

*

The onset of depression is a slow process. One day I stopped reading. The flavor had gone from my favorite activity, so I dropped it. Then I stopped listening to music; it no longer provoked any feelings. I couldn't write anymore; creating worlds had lost its joy. I stopped watching TV and movies; they were pointless and unfulfilling. Everything I loved doing slipped away. I felt like crying all the time. The future turned black. I stopped working. And I hardly slept, so I became sleepy enough at the wheel of the car that I stopped driving for fear of hurting someone. This led to a shut-in's existence. I became what the Japanese call hikikomori – someone so tired of the world or sensitive to its vileness that they have pulled themselves inward and withdrawn from all contact, often never leaving their room.

Paranoia crept in. I thought the backyard garden was somehow being tended at night by persons unknown who were fertilizing and weeding it while I slept. I thought the morning bird calls were synthetically generated. I thought black and white cars were following me. I avoided my computer because I assumed it had been hacked by a malevolent villain who presented bad news to me in order to blame me for something I didn't entirely understand. And I all but stopped eating because I imagined that each food had a particular meaning, incriminating me in some crime. After 3 months I'd lost 30 pounds. 

As the disease progressed, I spent hours at a time in a swimmy somnambulance, as if I'd been drugged. Think of this predicament for a moment. Imagine being unable to read, write, exercise, work, garden, fix things around the house, chat with spouse or friends, eat, sleep, play cards, surf the net, or watch TV or movies. What would you do? Try it for a day. Eventually, I was reduced to pacing the living room, sitting for hours lost in rumination, or trying to sleep and being unable to. I had always thought of a person's mind as their only defense against a hostile world. Now that my mind had abandoned me, the hostile world came pouring in.

I began to develop severe cramps in my abdomen that curled me up like a baby at night. I felt as if I was giving birth. I developed headaches – a malady I'd never been bothered with before. And I became preoccupied with delusions. I imagined my wife had somehow been divided into different people: a 54 year old, a 40 year old, a 30 year old, and a 20 year old. I spent many nights awake, staring at her as she slept, waiting to see if she would switch to a different version of herself.

By summer's end, my existence consisted of getting out of bed, passing like a weary ghost through each day, void of joy or even interest, enveloped in rumination, miserable at the prospect of another excruciating night featuring nothing but heat, pain, and wakefulness. And it all felt as if it was being done to me. Eventually, I ended up just lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

I knew what was in store for me because my wife's brother had died by his own hand after a similar bout of depression. But, through the miasma of pain and woe, I insisted all was well. My family tried intervening to get me to a doctor, but I refused. And, eventually, my wife, conspiring with my doctor, cried as she urged me to go to the hospital for “just an evaluation”, which I assumed consisted of a casual chat in the emergency room followed by a prescription. I ended up in a locked ward in a hospital bed for a week having horrific nightmares as the medicine kicked in while listening to patients cry out at night for help.

I learned that there are three different psych wards in a large hospital: one for schizophrenics, one for depressives, and one for Alzheimer's/dementia patients. Because there were no spots open in the depression ward, they put me in the dementia ward with people twenty years my senior who had much bigger problems than I had. One woman had no family to look after her outside the hospital: no husband, no siblings, no kids, no living relatives, only a friend. Many people had lost all that was important to them in their lives, and were now losing the memories of their own life stories. The place was frightening, humbling, fascinating, and one enormous eye-opening lesson in appreciation for the wife, family, and friends who came to visit me every day or called me on the phone.

By studying the subject of depression, I learned that the trigger can be many years ahead of the expression, so I may never find out what provoked my downward spiral. Genetics probably had something to do with it. A difficult childhood was certainly a factor. But my guess is that trying to be a creative person in a world that consistently crushes or exploits creative people had the most to do with it.

Depression is like being anesthetized then dropped into a bathtub that slowly fills. The water rises to your back, then your sides, then your chin, then your eyes, then over your head, until all you can do is look at the surface above and blink. 

Depression is like having life peeled away from you layer by layer until nothing is left. Wake up one day and there is no literature. The next day music is gone. Then movies disappear, then working, then moving, then talking, until only breathing remains, slow, mechanical breathing.

Depression is like being overcome by an illness, as if a degenerative virus has taken control and sapped the strength of your muscles, then infected your bones, then infiltrated your nerves, and finally seeped into your head so that every part of you is diseased. 

Depression is like becoming a statue. A running animated active body slows down and finally stops. Arms, legs, and mind freeze up. The inner armature stiffens. Movement ceases. A shell forms and hardens until only an effigy remains that is gradually overgrown by vines and bramble. It starts with a slow numbing to the world, a withdrawal, a closing off to pleasure until the mind turns to marble, motion stops, the last spark of optimism is snuffed out, reason is suspended, rigid misery sets in.

Depression is like being a sun that slowly burns itself out, gradually losing the coronal fires, the heat diminishing, the plasma churning less and less every day, cooling to a smoldering ember, the flames snuffing themselves into smoke, and becoming quiet until all that is left is a burnt brown rock that gives no light or warmth, a cold stone floating in limitless space. 

It took time to recover. After the hospital, I went to a two-week out-patient group with other folks also recovering from anxiety or depression. And, a few months after the hospital visit, I was feeling much better. The two drugs they gave me – one for depression, one for psychosis - worked miraculously. The medicine and the realization that I was actually surrounded by people who cared about my welfare set me back on the road to health. The paranoia dissipated. I gained 14 pounds in two weeks. I started reading again. 

I came away with the impression that this could happen to anyone. There's nothing that separates me from the homeless people in the street except a simple exceeded threshold of neurochemicals.

And I received two great gifts from the experience. The obvious one was the realization that I had a wonderful wife, family, and friends who would help me, people I had formerly taken for granted. But the unexpected gift was the experience – because of the anti-psychosis medicine - of becoming a non-creative person for the first time in my life. That encounter with the non-creative worldview was as interesting an experience as the depression and paranoia had been. 

2. My Non-Creative Life

Within a month after starting treatment I had risen from a waking death. I was talking to people, reading, and watching movies again. But the chemical I was ingesting to stave off paranoia had the effect of preventing me from writing stories, composing music, scrawling art, scribbling computer code, building animations, or even thinking creatively. I could ingest the world again while taking the medicine – through books, movies, music, podcasts – but I could not actually produce anything. The portcullis gate had come crashing down. Access to the creative part of my mind had been blocked.

The disease of depression was about closing off inputs. I couldn't read, watch, or listen when depressed. The cure was about re-opening inputs, but closing off outputs. I could take in the world again, but I couldn't write, film, draw, program, or compose. Under the depression, I couldn't take in anything new, but I could still confabulate. Under the cure, I could absorb the world, but I couldn't create any new worlds in my head.

The mechanisms of the brain that allow someone to make up stories in order to become paranoid are the same mechanisms that allow someone to make up stories to write fiction. So, the medicament I took, designed to eliminate the alarming connections of paranoia inside my skull, also eliminated the lyrical connections of story-telling. For the first time in my life I got to feel what it was like to be non-creative.

No more five-new-ideas-before-breakfast. No need to keep a pen and an adding machine scroll of  paper beside the bed to jot down nocturnal inspirations. No more getting up in the middle of the night to write a paragraph that had evolved during the murky half-asleep state. No more days spent in animation development. No more running to the keyboard with a new melody in mind. I stopped composing music. I put aside my novels. I stopped thinking in the way a creator thinks. It was as if half of my mind had been carved away. It was as if I were grounded in the material world for the first time. I began to adopt what I imagine the life experience of most people to be. It was fascinating.

*

I've heard people say, “I don't have a creative bone in my body.” My response to that statement had always been mystification and a shocked wonder at what that must feel like. I thought turning off creativity would be like turning off hunger, joy, or reason. I had experienced exactly that - turning off hunger, joy, and reason - during the depression. But I was still creative then. With depression, I couldn't take in anything new, but I could still confabulate. With treatment, I could absorb the world again, but I couldn't create any new worlds in my head.

This was rather astonishing to me. Ordinarily, I'm only thinly connected to the palpable realm. I live so much inside my own head that the physical world is all but meaningless to me. I eat when I'm hungry. I get cold in the winter. It hurts when I step on sharp rocks in bare feet. But, beyond those links to the realm of atoms and sensation, I don't have much of a relationship to the tangible plain. All of my time is spent with ideas, words, interpretations, interconnections, the embrace of novelty, the prosody of life, everything that is above “the stuff” of existence. I usually live a sort of meta life – in the world, but not of it. For the first time, because of the medicine, I could experience only existence, only “the stuff”.

For a year, I woke up, washed, ate, evacuated, watched movies, chatted with people, watched more movies, poked around in the garden, and slept. Then I got up again the next day and did the same. I had no original thoughts. I wrote nothing. I composed nothing. I invented nothing. I began to wonder if I ever would again. I just walked through life, taking it in, but not putting the pieces together to produce anything new. I responded to the world around me as life happened, but I did nothing more than respond. I thought, “So, this is how other people feel? This is what it's like to not have a creative bone in your body?”

I figured my brain needed time to heal, so I let it heal. And I appreciated experiencing the mental life of an ordinary person. I would not want to live that way forever. But it was restful to live without layers of meaning. Everything was only what it was. I could pick up an orange and think only “orange”. There were no associations, no mental rambling, no blaze of connections, no desire to interpret experience, no wish  to create something new, only the requirement to react to what already existed.

Before I knew it, a year had gone by. I began to taper off the paranoia medicine. And then, one day, I stopped it altogether. The day after stopping, my creative mind switched back on. I returned to my usual state of entertaining 40 ideas at once, all jostling for space in a crowded little wet bone box. 

I'd pick up an orange and review in my head the discovery of sweet oranges in the New World as opposed to the sour oranges from India that Europeans had always known. I'd ponder the differences in the etymology of the word “orange” across all the European languages (many countries refer to it as a Chinese Apple). I'd consider the place the color orange fills on the visible light spectrum, the fact that cats and dogs don't eat the fruit – and don't see the color - because their bodies make their own vitamin C, the use of the peel in cleaning products, the vesicles holding liquid in pouches divided into segments to encourage sloths and mammoths to eat them in Pleistocene America. I'd dwell on the toxic coloring sprayed on the rind by growers who want all the fruit to appear ripe, the carnauba wax coating to seal out air and preserve freshness, our past family experiments with planting the seeds to grow indoor orange trees. And then thoughts would flow to kumquats and other indoor citrus plants we'd grown that were invaded by rancher ants that carried in aphids to suck the sap so the ants could drink their sweet excrement, to the plum curculios attacking the Asian pear trees outside, to the use of chickens to clean the ground of curculios, to ...

It was no longer just “orange” in my head. It was endless layer upon layer of simultaneous meaning. The word itself led in a hundred directions. The idea of the fruit led in a hundred more. The color led to yet another hundred. Everything intertwined. And I could see all the interlacing between the items. It was like looking at fabric that stretched to the horizon: the tapestry of past experiences, the rococo filigree of facts, the warp and woof of book learning, ideas knitted together by other languages, the mesh of mental images, braided databases filled with concepts. And there were countless sheets of this fabric, one of top of the other, each one interwoven with all the others.

With the medicine, an orange was a unitary experience. A thing was only a thing. An idea referred only to itself. A word had one meaning and no connection to any other words. Life was stark and simple.

Without the medicine, it was all a multi-colored rain of associations that poured, spat, gushed, spurt, surged, and inundated the landscape, tumbled, turned into braided streams, cascaded off cliffs, fed tributaries, swelled into rivers, and emptied into an ocean of sensation, memory, abstraction, fact, and imagination. And each raindrop was itself a kaleidoscope, a shifting hologram that held its own image in its separate pieces and recursed back onto itself and then out into the vastness.

Sooner or later, I'm going to long for the simplicity of “orange”. But when the medicine stopped, I leapt aboard ship and began sailing again on a sea of associations. The waves splashed me. I linked together the drops and began inventing things again, spinning stories, tying together melodies, inventing characters and worlds, re-immersing myself in the act of creation. 

Being non-creative meant holding only one thought in my head at a time. Being creative meant having an uncountable number of thoughts and tying them all together to make new thoughts that no one had ever come up with before.

Being non-creative was like listening to one radio station all day. Being creative was like listening to sixty radios at once and making up new songs by dipping into the individual songs being played and selecting out pieces that went together in new compositions.

Being non-creative was like being a lumberjack. I would wake up, see the trees, and cut them down. Being creative was like being both the gardener who plants the acorns and the furniture maker who uses the harvested wood.

Being non-creative meant engaging with the quotidian world on its terms. Being creative meant devising a new world on my own terms.

Being non-creative was like eating and sleeping. Being creative was like having children.

3. The Creative Life

Ride the bus to school and watch the kid drawing manga characters in his notebook. Visit a  grandmother's house and watch her sew a dress for her granddaughter. Observe the people who write stories their whole lives – for no other reason than to write stories. Watch the musicians alone in their rooms experimenting with new guitar riffs, new violins arpeggios, new piano chords, new vocal arrangements. Study the people who, unwilling to wait for a real-world teacher, learn from the internet how to make films, video games, and electronic art.

There are people who dance in their rooms at night, trying out new moves in the mirror. There are people who practice story-telling among friends. There are media artists who can't keep their hands off a new technology, who need to twist it to some artistic purpose as soon as they get their hands on it. There are people who make their own furniture to feel the lines of something that came from their own hands. There are people who blow and spin enough glass ornaments to fill the houses of their relatives. There are people who write the screenplays for the movies they want to act in. Creative people are everywhere. But most of us are invisible to the rest of the world.

*

I am one of millions of people who insert their art forms into the cracks of their daily life. They design and sew their own clothing at night. They compose songs to express their feelings. They draw comics and animations to make the mundane fantastical or the fantastical ordinary. They write books without any audience in mind just to create new worlds. They manipulate photographs because they have the urge to bend reality in a different direction. They fill their closets with water colors because no one will take any more of their paintings. They write fan fiction, invent electronic gadgets, build miniatures, construct robots, act in community theatres, slave over computer programs, and carve decoys, not because they see their obsession as the surest way to get rich, become famous, or entice sexual partners, but because they find a kind of joy and satisfaction in the act of creating that nothing else provides.

I am one of these people – someone who has sat at his sequencer, composing music on a Friday night after work, watching the sun set, dabbling at the keyboard, feeling joy, concentrating, and then looking up to see the sun rising again – so focused on the ecstasy of creation that no memory of time passing remains.

I am one of the people who, while getting paid to write software for financial applications at the state treasury, wrote miniature novels in the comments sections of the computer programs. I would adopt different voices – the cowboy, the cheerleader, the astronaut, the 1940s gangster – and write instructions to fellow programmers in those personae. 

I am one of the people who made up stories for his kids every night – a different story each night,  composed on the fly, weaving details of ordinary life into tales of talking animals and villains who always got their come-uppance.

I am one of the people who carved a wooden Christmas creche using penguins as models instead of people. I am one of the people who made enough money in the stock market one year to quit work and then spent his free time making animations, writing stories, and composing nocturnal jazz until the money ran out. I am one of the people who spent a lifetime choosing jobs, not for the money they brought in, but because they featured a creative element that could be explored. I'm also one of the people who got fired from jobs for being creative instead of political.

I am not famous. You have never heard of me. To the world at large I am invisible. But I am creative. In fact, the vast majority of creative people are invisible. And it's not because they are less talented or less dedicated to their craft than the famous people.

The famous people will certainly claim that talent, hard work, and persistence got them where they are, but there is an enormous amount of serendipity involved in becoming famous that no one talks about. For every famous creative person there are thousands of others with more talent and more dedication who are invisible. They are less pretty than the famous people. They are the wrong color, gender, persuasion, size, age. They live in the wrong place, in cultures that don't value their art, or among non-creatives who are mystified by anyone who spends their time having ideas or perfecting skills that do not lead to money, power, or sexual partners. Does that stop the no-names from being creative? Of course not.

These people are creative in ways that society does not value. But so what? Creativity is its own reward.

[tora-the-cat]

Baby Rin & Obito thoughts

-I don’t think people understand what it means that Obito and Rin were best friends since they were 5. Like. I just get the vibe that half the fandom can’t conceptualize that accurately.

-(I can though)

-5. 5! They were actual babies!

-When they’re super young and obviously pre-transitioned they still would steal each others clothes and try to confuse people over who’s who, like identical twins.

-They were child soldiers growing up during the war! By all likelihoods, they were drafted into the academy at all of 5 years old. They graduated at 10! Obito wasn’t seen as a ‘genius’ by any stretch of imagination, so we can only assume this was the common graduating age during the 3rd war. How much more harsh is the curriculum? How much more traumatizing? Paranoia inducing? propagandist?

-Me and my best friend since 5 both had relatively healthy home lives, none of the ninja brand trauma, and we STILL ended up basically codependent. These poor kids had no chance.

-There’s no way these two aren’t in each others pocket. Was there a single secret between the two of them? One topic that was forbidden? Probably not! To Both!

-the two of them could hold entire conversations, arguments, lectures, in a matter of moments with just micro-expressions. It often seemed that the only time Obito would shut up was when he and Rin were staring at each other and their faces would twitch, sometimes for minutes on end, as if that was as natural a way of communicating as speaking.

-It was very useful on covert operations! It was very frustrating during team building exersises, because neither of them were really used to trying to actaully get closer to people besides eachother.

-they had so many in-jokes that Minato and Kakashi sometimes thought they were speaking another language entirely. 

-Every time there was a foldable chair in Rin’s sight, she would obnoxiously clear her throat and shoot it meaningful looks, and Obito would seethe, looking seconds away from blowing up, but never would and never explained why.  

-Obito would dramatically throw himself in front of Rin and shout about protecting her whenever he spotted a squirrel, and act completely confused and annoyed when Minato and Kakashi didn’t acknowledge the threat and take it seriously. 

-Obito would collect four leaf clovers whenever he saw them and then when he braided Rin’s hair for her he’d weave them into it without her even noticing until hours or, on particularly hard missions, days later. Still, everytime she found one, no matter how bad the mission or the horrors she had just seen or was on her way to see, she would pick it out with more care then Kakashi knew anything could be done and gave it a look so soft it made Kakashi inexplicably angry and she'd smile, like it was the easiest thing to do, and her haunted eyes would clear just a little as she snuck them into Obito’s Kunai pouch.

-It was impossible to get one alone without the other. They orbited around each other, never further then a shout away, Joined at the hip. 

-They were always touching, be it the common hand holding, or Obito whining and hanging off of Rin, or Rin reprimanding him and squeezing his shoulders, or them dragging each other around the village, or Rin poking Obito in the nose to make him scrunch it up, or Obito squshing Rin’s cheeks until she stops pretending to ignore him or touching foreheads and promising everything will be alright or playing intricate handgames at recess because no one else will play with them or tapping out messages in their own mortified morse code or- it could go on forever. It should have.

-Do Not Mistake Their Undying Dependency On Each Other As A Lack Of The Ablity To Throw Hands, however. They would roughhouse, and they were visious. They would bite and pull hair and pinch and get close to each others ears to make high pitched noises and tickle and tumble on the dirt. They didn’t even need a real reason- or at least not one Minato could see. There would be a glint in one of their eyes, and then a flash of fear in the other’s, and it would start with no further warning.

-It didn’t matter where, it didn’t matter when. In public. At dinner. While Minato is in the middle of talking. Rain, snow, hail. Usually not on missions, thankfully, but worryingly often on the way back from missions. Kakashi still breaks into an anxious cold sweat everytime he goes to Suna, a ghost of the memory of the first time Obito and Rin saw the dessert remembered with surprising clarity. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

-Like wolf pups, Minato once said, and Kakashi didn’t talk to him for a week- wolves would never be so undignified. Rin would lick Obito to throw him off and Obito would use his inhumanely boney elbows to stab her (weapons were always discarded for these scruff- they weren’t spars, they were personal) and she would fling dirt into his mouth and he would spit it back into her eyes. They were disgusting. 

-If they worked together and fought half as dirty with Kakashi as they did with eachother, he would have had a bad time. But, somehow, there was just. Something that made them go rabid on each other in a way Minato was never able to fully provoke in them, even mid-war.

-(it’s the Cain Instinct.)

-They were of the naive but firm belief that they would never be without the other, and, horrifically, most could see it was true. Not because they were strong or because the world was too kind to kill one and leave the other- it was just so blatantly obvious that, should one of them leave, the other would follow without hesitation.

-Even Minato was resigned to the fact that if one of them died the other was just a ticking time bomb, despite all his efforts.

-(and he did make an effort. He knew there was a slim chance their story would end well, the way it was. Knew that codependent shinobi were liabilities. He tried to get them to spend time alone and practice more bounderies and make connections outside of each other, but it rarely worked and never for long. They got anxious and twitchy alone, constantly worried about the other. Obito reapplied Rin’s seals when she couldn’t and Rin taught him to get away with petty revenges, and they were all each other had.)

-But, because of this, they were convinced that if one of them was good at something the other didn’t really need to bother with it- expended effort, when they’re both right there anyway. Unless it was fun to practice together, of course, mostly encompassing Taijutsu. 

-Rin did Fuinjutsu, Obito did Genjutsu. Rin started Iryouninjutsu, Obito started Kenjutsu. Rin practiced Suiton and Raiton, Obito practiced Katon and Doton. they balanced each other out, kept each other grounded- they completed each other. It felt like they only had each other, more often then not, and sometimes it was true.

-When they were younger, it was always true. They were both orphans by 7. Rin’s mom died in childbirth, her dad stayed around long enough to teach her how to stay alive and how her Kekkei Genkai worked as far as he could remember, but She was a born citizen of Konoha and the village wouldn’t let go of a potential asset, and he couldn’t stay in the village that let his village get destroyed and his wife die. He left her. Obito’s parents were both Shinobi that disappeared mysteriously and were never seen again.

-Gran tried, but she was old and blind and could barely remember Obito half the time. In the end, it was the two of them against the world.

-The Uchiha didn’t care, besides the minor annoyance at Rin entering their compound so often, but. She was Uzushio, and the clan heads were close to the Uzumaki, which basically meant they weren’t allowed to bully an Uzushio clan kid. Obito’s Gran was just happy he had a friend. 

-Rin remembered something her Dad told her, and gives Obito a Nohara Seal-Tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, making him an honorary member by the laws of her clan that doesn’t really exist anymore and has literally no significance or benefit in the village. He cries anyway.

-They pretty much always sleep together. Sleepovers are nightly by the time they turn 8. by the time they’re 9, they make a paranoid habit of taking turns on watch. By the time they’re 10, they are outright offended when Minato tries to insist Rin gets her own tent because she’s a ‘growing young lady’ and ‘please Kushina will kill me’. 

-They have a secret code. and by ‘a secret code’ I mean several secret codes. Minato figured most of them out. Kakashi did not. It’s a point of pride.

-Despite everyone’s constant objections, Rin somehow always ended up in the middle of a fight, slipping behind Obitio’s back and making up for his defects as easily as breathing. Kakashi always berated her- she was the Med NIn! If she got hurt or killed, they didn’t have anyone to heal her!

-She did not care. She understood, and sometimes felt a little bad about it, but did not care. ‘you join combat for emergencies only’ they insisted, and her automatic response was simple: If Obito is in danger, then it’s an emergency.

-Minato dropped it pretty quickly and instead just focused on training her to be as murder-resistant as possible- sometimes he knew a losing battle when he saw it. 

-Kakashi never dropped it until one day he activates her Cain Instinct and she paralyzes him for 8 hours with the med-nin fighting style she was inventing because she was terrifying.

-And I haven’t even touched on them both being trans and supporting eachother through that, and I omitted 600 words about their first kills and biggest fight ever! I could talk about team minato forever god bless

-Sure, Obito got a crush on Rin at somepoint, but that wasn’t the defining part of their relationship. He didn’t go crazy because Rin didn’t like him back, or because she liked Kakashi. He went crazy because she died. She was the most important person in the world to him, his soulmate, platonic or not.

-Obito ‘died’, and Rin self destructed. She was ashamed of it but, really, she only lived on as long as she did after kanabi because she knew Obito would want her too. She couldn’t look kakashi in the eyes. She had several heart attacks because her seals would fade, and she would refuse to tell anyone else how to do them. 

-She wrote entire notebooks of things she would tell him when she died so she didn’t forget a thing, stepped around shamrocks like they were posion ivy. Her hair was uncut. She never joined a fight. She killed squirrels on sight with a flash of morbid humor and greif, and still wouldn’t explain why, and she’d rather sit on the floor then in a folding chair. 

-Kakashi didn’t want to admit it, couldn’t admit it, even to himself, for years, maybe decades, but in the last few months of her life Rin wasn’t alive. She tried, so hard, for Kakashi’s sake, but she wasn’t. She was a shell of her former self, more impulsive, less quick to smile, more cynical then he thought she would ever be.

-Rin died, and Obito stopped existing. It only made sense- who was he without Rin? 

-No one. He was a blank slate, melted down so Madara could form him anew. He became Madara and  Tobi and The Masked Man and a Clan Killer, but he would never be Obito again, because there was no Obito without Rin.

-Losing one another wasn’t like losing a limb. It wasn’t like having a part of their soul ripped out. It was nothing so mild. It was losing themself. It was having their soul souls beaten bloodily, shredded, and then disappear without a trace.

-everyone was right, in the end, about them. A tragedy waiting to happen. Terminally codependant. Minato said that once one died, the other was a ticking time bomb, and he was right. He just wished he wasn’t.

....Anyway yeah next time I see someone whine about how its pathetic that Obito tried to destroy the world because his school girl crush died like hes some Incel throwing a fit, I'll go feral.

[jolly-loui-s]

The irony of roleplaying as a wizard chapter 3 by Jolly Loui S

Fandom: Homestuck

Pairing: Davekat Dave x Karkat

words (chapters 3/?): 5??? words (was too lazy to count)

If you liked this work please drop a kudo on archiveofourown in the link below:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16975734/chapters/53320204#workskin

link to chapter 2:

https://jolly-loui-s.tumblr.com/post/190382520016/the-irony-of-roleplaying-as-a-wizard-chapter-2-by

*Trigger warning, this shit is heavy* (you can skip to the end notes for a summary if you don't want to read it because it contains mention of child abuse and character dead)

Karkat stop basking in the presence of Jegus and be Dave=>

You are Dave, but not Dave in this moment. Instead you are Dave that takes place in another plane of existence. This Dave was lying on his bed. Sweat claimed his forehead as any other day because of the god unforgiven Texas heat. It was Summer and no matter how many times you tried the air conditioning remained broken. Because every time you think you finally cracked the code of basic mechanics a shadowy figure appears and the whole thing falls apart again. So, you just stopped trying. Instead you accepted your doom of being a human popsicle ad just met away all over your own bed. Because according to bro if you wanted to be cool that included the temperature. Striders didn’t become sweaty teenage boys and didn’t complain about such mundane thing as heat thus not needing air conditioning. Dave was just glad after the second time he fixed the air-condition and got the hint that bro was behind it that the guy hadn’t decide to knock sense in him again about how one must act to be a cool kid. After a while of just lying there Dave decided that he had to get up eventually. Not that bro was going to ask him about his whereabouts or anything because usually it was normal for Dave to never leave his room, but it was because he was getting hungry and the stash of his usual Doritos and AJ in the bottom of his closet was running low. And when Dave had managed to finally sneak into the bathroom the day before on his way there, he had witnessed the coffee table overflowing with newly bought and untouched snacks. Not just like one or three bags of chips but literally just a table full of them. So, he might as well try to hoard a few of them.

Dave walked towards his door carful not to make any sound as he equipped his sword. Turning the knob without making any sound and opening the door incase bro would hear him leaving his room because he wasn’t about to just get caught. In the distance Dave could hear the awful game music playing of tony Hawks title screen. Which meant that bro wasn’t in the living room because if he was, he would be playing games all day because the living room really wasn’t ever being used as anything else than a room where you would play games and eat snacks. Which might make it the only normal thing about the whole house if you ignored the disturbing amount of smuppets loitering around the room that is.

Right foot in front of the left Dave sneaked across the hallway and slowly sneaked a peak around the corner. Luckily the coffee table was still filled with unopened snacks. In way Dave should have know it to be odd. There had been multiple times before where there were still abandoned chips bags left on the table, but never had there been so many before just laying around ready for the taking.

Having decided that the coast was clear Dave walked over to the table and he didn’t stop himself from eyeing every possible hiding place and multiple cameras in the room. With utter caution Dave grabbed as many bags as he could and cringed at the loud noises the bags made when he picked them up. That was when he realized his mistake. A familiar noise of a zooming camera lens sounded from gods know where and Dave knew that he had been caught. Caught like an animal in a trap, because that was what he was. Of course, the big pile of bag had been to good to be true because it had all been a trap. It was like bro had known the exact moment when Dave had been running low on food and had granted him a very timely opportunity to get more. Dave cursed himself internally for falling for such a stupid thing and dropped everything he was holding to ready his sword and abscond the fuck out the living room.

For whatever god of luck what might have been on his side this day Dave managed to reach his room in time. In time for what? Because there had been nothing chasing behind him as the only noise in the room had been Dave and the tony hawk soundtrack playing in the background. No clashes of shitty anime swords or an angry bro behind him. Did Dave imagine it all. Was it just his paranoia playing a trick on him? Luckily before Dave would get to trying to question his sanity his previous question was quickly answered by a note sliding under his door. The note itself only consisted of one word, but Dave already knew what it said before even reading it “roof”. Dave’s whole body grew stiff as he saw it. He was scared but he didn’t show it, even admitting he was scared was something he wasn’t allowed to do. Because miraculously bro always found out when Dave did something wrong. And when Dave did do something wrong that note would appear. So instead Dave tightened his grip on his word and walked through the apartment and up towards the roof.

“Hello little man” You hated it, hated it more than anything in the world. There he was, Bro strider in all his glory sword in hand resting over his shoulder as he waited for your arrival.

“sup” Dave said trying not to let his fear show in his voice as he readied his sword as calmly as he could while not losing his cool.

“You know what you did wrong didn’t you” Bro asked, and you literally felt like you just shit yourself because ow god you were scared! Bro was looking at you with a piercing glance. You couldn’t see his eyes because of his triangular anime glasses, but you could feel it. That piercing hostility and murderous intent every time when you were about to get your ass beat.

“You didn’t listen to me” Bro continued taking one step forward. “You ungrateful brat, after everything I have done for you” bro took another step and you cursed at yourself internally when you took one step backwards in response. “You fucking betrayed my trust little man” bro was angry, he was angrier than his usual angry. Something was off. Bro wouldn’t get this angry just or Dave falling to one of his traps. Most of the time she would just silently get his ass beaten up bro wouldn’t normally be this vocal. And before you knew it, he was right in front of you. On impulse you closed your eyes, an honest beginner mistake really. You waited for a bit, but the blow never came. After a few seconds you finally dared to open your eyes and lowered your sword at the sight in front of you.

“Karkat” you said the name of the boy in front of you. It felt wrong to see him there. Amongst the darkest parts of your memories. Karkat was one of the few good things about your live and seeing the good standing next to the bad just felt like so many levels of wrong to your eyes. You knew what bro meant now, why he was so angry at you. Because you had gotten close to Karkat, too close. Like on one of those of Karkat’s romcoms cliché kind of close and bro was punishing you for it. You weren’t allowed to start feeling that way. The way you realized you had started feeling about Karkat. So, this was your punishment. Just when you where about to call out his name again you discovered that you were unable to open you mouth. No words would come out and you were frozen where you stood. Your body was unable to follow your commands leaving you stuck and only able to watch as a loud ringing echoed trough your ears. Watch as bro lifted up Karkat by the neck chocking him as he struggled for breath while calling out your name like it was all your fault that he was about to get killed. You wanted to, you really wanted to save him more than anything even if it meant disobeying you brother, but you couldn’t. Not because you physically couldn’t, but because of bro's consisted echoing voice in you head telling you what to do for you whole god dam live. You watched Karkat about to reach his final breaths when in swift movement bro finally let go and Karkat fell. Bro had dropped him, not to the floor but over the railing of the roof. Leaving Karkat’s body to free fall to his dead the stone-cold pavement below. That was also the moment when you realized that the loud ringing you had been hearing the whole time had been your own screaming. And when you woke up in the dead of the night the screaming was gone instead you were filled with a dreaded emptiness inside of you as if you were about to cry, but no matter how bad you wanted to cry you couldn’t because that was how empty you were feeling. It was a nightmare a bad dream. And you realized how much it scared you. It made you realize how much you had started caring about Karkat. And if anything, bad was ever to happened to him... You care about him more than anything. Because he was the best thing to ever happen to you. He understands you and is you best friend, and you know you can tell him anything even if you don’t. And after that realization you try to go back to sleep as an empty void continues to eat up your hart. Because you aren’t allowed to love him.

Notes:

So Summary: Dave had a bad dream about bro. Bro killed Karkat because dave was startig to fall in love with Karkat and bascicly Bro's abuse inprinted the thought in Dave's brain that he isn't allowed to fall in love with boy's. So he hides it all away because he isn't allowed to.

[rueitae]

don't even celebrate Christmas but the combo for December 25 is quite intriguing 😏

This is way late. I lost the original post and only remember the hitman/spy part. Maybe it was enemies to friends to lovers too? Sounds about right.

Roughly 2800 words. Read here on A03.

A Deal and A Dare

~~~~~

The world falls away around her, the shipping crates she hides between feeling like an enclosure rather than a single wall between her and the guard station. The clicking of her fingers across the keyboard narrows her focus on the job. Information from the factory downloads into her laptop, a green bar filling in across the bottom of the screen, inching closer to the perfect copy.

They’ll never know of her presence if she did it correctly. And Pidge always has a perfect extraction.

It’s her biggest job ever, hired to gather as much intelligence on Lotor as possible - the most reclusive man on the planet. So she’s huddled in a corner of the facility he frequents, near the shipping dock and the closest computer to her exit.

Her heart pounds through her ears, a smile stuck to her face - the rush of the job never gets old.

When the copy is complete, her hacker icon dances with fireworks on the screen.

“Bingo,” she whispers. Pidge enters lines of her exit code, erasing any indication of her presence.

She slams her laptop shut and stuffs it into her bag, draping the straps around her arms. The window above her is easy to climb to, and her escape is easy and undetected.

But her heart rate won’t go down until she’s safe in her air conditioned hotel room and the money for the job has been wired into her secure - and very private - bank account.

The summer sun beats down on her bare neck and for the first time she actually regrets cutting her hair to do field work like this. With her luck she’ll probably have a sunburn by the time she gets indoors. She tugs down on her ski mask for what feels like the hundredth time, making sure her face and hair are hidden at least.

Next paycheck, I’m getting a nice full body suit, she grumbles to herself.

Steam rises from standing water all over the docks, so Pidge pay no mind to the mosquito she slaps dead on the back of her neck.

Then nothing.

~~~~~

Pidge groans as a foggy awareness tickles the front of her brain. She lies on a soft fabric, arms clutching a fluffy pillow under her head. It’s serene, and for a few blissful moments it’s as if she’s back in her hotel room and catching up on sleep.

But… isn’t she on a job? Pidge doesn’t remember transferring the data to Honerva yet, or even getting back to the hotel.

Fear strikes her heart. Honerva is not so forgiving of a late assignment. More importantly - why doesn’t she remember walking back?

She moves her eyes in a flurry, searching her surroundings. Familiar items come into focus as she comes out of her sleepy haze, her computer, a duffel bag full of clothes and toiletries, and a drying swimsuit from when she made use of the hotel’s pool.

Her heart rate slows, but a feeling of wrongness hangs over her head.

She moves to sit up and investigate, but her legs and wrists refuse to separate. It trips her off balance and she yelps, the floor greeting her face with a loud thump.

Plasma cuffs hold her wrists and ankles together. The swirling magenta bands are stronger than iron and near indestructible. Pidge knows better than anyone, the technology is her father’s.

A knot of dread twists in her stomach as she realizes - that had been no mosquito bite.

Tranquilizer

“Mornin’ sleeping beauty.”

A male voice fills the silence, growing more clear by the syllable. He rounds the bed cautiously, a handgun lowered but ready. Pidge growls as the pieces of the puzzle come together. She’s been kidnapped by a sniper with enough skill to have tracked her not only to her job, but with the intelligence to know her temporary hideout.

She needs more information. Who is he and how did he find her? Why has he taken her? Who does he work for?

“You need something from me,” she guesses, remaining still, sizing up his demeanor. Why else would a sniper leave her alive if not for her information?

He wears a tight navy shirt, covering - but also showing off, to Pidge’s frustration - his neck and muscular arms. A utility belt is around his waist with equally snug pants, housing his holster and sheath for a knife. His face isn’t hidden, and wears an easy smile while his body looks as if it can react to any retaliation on her part on a moment’s notice.  

“Kind of,” he says as he holsters the gun. He pulls the hotel key card out of his pocket, flashing it at her between two of her fingers as he lazily sits on the edge of the bed. “I figured you’d be more comfortable in your own space to talk,” He leans in closer and she scoots back, but not enough as he hooks a finger under her facemask and rips it off her head, “Ms Gunderson. The nice lady at the front desk was able to tell me which room you were staying at.”

“I’d be more comfortable without these restraints,” she spits, testing the cuffs to relief some of her anger knowing full well they won’t budge. “Let’s get this over with and - hey, what are you doing?”

The sniper sets the key card on the bed and bends down, scooping her up like a sack of potatoes while she shrieks at him. “The name’s Lance,” he says as he drops her back onto the bed and sits himself at the end of it. “But,” his mouth curls into a smirk, his teeth are so pearly white they practically shine, “you might know me better as Red, mercenary services for hire.”

There are numerous ways she can respond to him. She can confirm that yes, she’s heard of him and his decent work reputation - and more infamous flirtatious one - on the Network. She can make a jab at it. She can deny it, keeping the information to herself, stroking his ego to make him talk. But she chooses neither, her heart beating wildly, still ascertaining what exactly this sniper wants with her.

“Why do you wear blue then?”

Lance has the decency to gawk in indignation. “Blue happens to be better camouflage then red,” he says hastily, arms crossed as he defends himself. “And I like the color blue.”

“But,” Pidge presses, thrilled to be in the captivity of a sniper with vanity. “You call yourself Red? Why not just call yourself Blue?”

He flicks her a flashy grin, running a hand through his brown hair. “Because I’m red hot with my aim and with the ladies.”

To Pidge’s consternation, heat rushes to her cheeks. His uniform is a bit distracting and she has first hand experience with his sniper skills. From what she remembers of Lance’s Network profile and how he acts now, he’s not rash; it’s all too inviting to relax.

But he’s still an assassin, and letting her guard down is an easy way to either get herself killed, or blackmailed.

“Well, I’m not into bondage,” she says casually. “So just tell me what you want from me.”

His jaw drops, eyes wide as saucers, sputtering, “I would nev- AGH!” He forgets that he leans on an arm with the other still in his hair. He falls off the bed and onto the floor.

Pidge raises an eyebrow. Such an awkward response from a self proclaimed - and documented - Casanova?

“Now we’re even,” she tells him with a huff.

Lance is to his feet quick, a testament to his profession, though his face is a red blushing mess.

Pidge snorts with a smirk, leaning back on the headrest of the bed, bound hands limp on her lap. “You’re living up to your name, but you’re nothing like your flirtatious reputation.”

He’s taken aback in indignation. “This isn’t a date,” he tells her. It takes a blink of an eye for his body to stiffen and to cross his arms. The professionalism and intimidation is spot on… if not for his fumbling at her teasing.

“I know you have information on Lotor,” he begins.

Pidge bites her inner lip, and hopes her face does not betray the renewed influx of worry in her gut. Her laptop is heavily encrypted, and there’s no way this… Lance can bust it. Still, paranoia is strong and she has a job yet to complete.

“And what if I do?” she counters vaguely.

Lance rolls his eyes. “You have a reputation, Pidge, and I saw you get the job done. Lotor doesn’t want to be found though, so I need you to hand it over to me.”

The pieces of the puzzle click into place. Lotor hired Lance to stop her from giving information on him to Honerva. Well, she can still throw him off.

“So,” she says with a knowing grin. “What kind of reputation do I have?”

He glares at her, not answering right away. “If I tell you, will you give me the information?”

Pidge shrugs noncommittally. Lance throws his head back with a groan of frustration.

“The Network says you have a 99% success rate,” he begins. “That’s wild for a hacker.”

Her nose twitches, annoyed at being reminded of her less than perfect record, though far and away the best one of her peers. “Information Retrieval Specialist,” she corrects. “Hacking is just what I do to get the information.”

“Whatever,” Lance dismisses. His brows furrow in annoyance. “You’re the best in the business and super reclusive.” He leans forward, scrutinizing her. “And you’re pretty.”

Pidge nods to each of his points, until the last, when her own eyes threaten to jump out of their sockets. “That’s not in my profile!” she protests.

“It’s not,” Lance agrees, pointing a finger at her. He has the audacity to look pleased with himself at her reaction. “But you are pretty cute.”

Her face is so hot it might explode. The only people who compliment her like that are her own family, not attractive men in form fitting clothing who have her hogtied on a hotel bed.

Oh quiznak, maybe she’d lied earlier.

She can’t decide whether to call him out on it or get on with the information on Lotor, but Lance does it for her. His face glows red and his mouth gapes, stammering, “quiznak. No - I’m not lewd or anything. This is strictly professional. I don’t usually do the kidnapping thing.”

Pidge frowns, concentrating on steadying her breathing. “Then why me? It’s not like I keep information in my head.”

Lance takes a deep and wanders over to the window. He inserts his fingers between the panels. Sunlight peeks through - sunset she guesses from the angle and orangish tint. Foreboding settles in her gut, she’s slept for far too long.

He refuses to look at her, resting an arm on the wall. “My orders were to take you out,” he confesses solemnly.

Pidge’s heart catches in her throat and she tenses. She’s not safe yet.

“But honestly, I hate the guy,” he continues, curling his hand into a fist. “And I’m sick of doing his dirty work. He’s got a lot of friends of mine under his thumb.” He looks her in the eye, gaze steely. “So I want the information to take him out, and I’d like your help to do it.”

Pidge grits her teeth, face warm with anger rather than embarrassment. “No,” she says quickly. “You’re breaking your contract, and you expect me to break mine to help you? I’d like to keep my reputation in tact.”

“I can make it worth your while,” Lance says, stalking back towards her. “Answer carefully; I have you exactly where I want you,” he threatens.

Well, he wants to negotiate rather than kill her, so maybe she can still talk her way out of this. Emboldened, she holds up her cuffed hands and says “On a bed?”

“No!” he squawks, backing up against the wall - as far away from her as possible. “You know that’s not what I mean!”

“Look, my client is someone I’d rather be on the good side of,” Pidge levels. “I have a career to think about. If you can’t offer me better than an apprenticeship and a high tech lab, then you’re out of luck.”

Lance grits his teeth and paces the short space between the bed and television. His eyes pin shut and brows knit together in inner conflict.

“Partnership. 60-40,” he declares. “I’ve got a warehouse full of tech that’s all yours. Not just sniper stuff, your kind of stuff.”

“My kind of stuff?” Why does a sniper need with encryption software and small tools to work on microchips and motherboards? Has she misjudged his intellect?

“I have a collection,” he clarifies, “a big sis in the Garrison, a mechanic friend, and a place large enough to hold it all,” he flashes her a grin as he leans over the foot of the bed. “You’d have your pick of equipment and I’ll take on your targets too.” He holds out a hand, close enough she could take it. “Just help me take down Lotor.”

Pidge chews on her gums, considering. A partnership is tempting, with Honerva she can only expect an apprenticeship for an undetermined amount of time, and probably limited access to equipment. To be in charge of her own lab so soon in her career is beyond her wildest dreams.

And to have a sniper at her call - a reputable one at that - is a bonus. Doing a little digging for him is a small price to pay.

She hums, keeping her relaxed demeanor though her heart bubbles with excitement on the inside.

“You’re not half bad,” she admits. There are precious few sniping spots at the docks so he must have made the shot from a very very, long distance. And to be able to find her hotel at least meant he has some street sense. He might be just what she needs.

She curls up her knees and rests her elbows on them, leaning forward, locking their gazes together.

His blue eyes are hardened from enough missions, he’s less likely to bail out of a tough job - he will take the tough shot. He’s easy to tease - entertainment for her.

“50-50 split,” she counters, pointing both index fingers at him. “And I live there.”

Lance curls the fingers of his outstretched hand. “I’d need some time to get ready. I only have one bed.”

Pidge grins. “You know, you’re a lot more flustered over this stuff than your reputation says,” she chides. “You sure my being there won’t deter any date nights?”

Lance stammers, retracting his outstretched hand in exaggeration, indignant. “I can bring a date anywhere. Bringing Lotor down is more important.”

Pidge sighs dramatically. She’ll have this sniper wrapped around her finger. “Look, if you’re serious about this job, you can’t have any distractions, so probably better if you lay low on the fake dating scene.”

Lance bristles. “It’s not fake! I have a legitimate good time taking girls out to parties. We have relationships. It keeps eyes off me for more underground reasons.”

Realization tickles in her brain. “Actually… it may not be a bad idea to gather information. Lotor hates witnesses, so the more of them there are, the safer we are.”

Lance smiles. “So that’s a yes?” he asks hopefully.

Wrapped around her finger and all to herself. “If you don’t mind flirting with me at the Union Gala next week.” She snickers internally. “You’re already most of the way there - though I usually prefer puns.”

Lance’s face glows bright red, but he steels his gaze quickly, it seems she’s used this jab one too many times.

“I’ll do you one better,” he says evenly. “If I can successfully woo you, we split 60-40,” he points a thumb in his direction, “and I get the 60.” He sticks a foot onto the bed and leans in. “I’ll prove my reputation isn’t just talk.”

Pidge scoffs. Lance may look nice physically, and his goofy demeanor charming, but there is no way she’ll actually fall for him. “I doubt it. You’re no Casanova - you’re a romantic.”

“Okay if we’re going to be working together, you tell no one about this conversation,” he says with an accusatory finger pointing at her. “I’ve spent years building this up - I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

Pidge grins. Maybe this will be fun. She’s never had a partner outside her family before, and Lance seems like an entertaining guy - more personable than most who have their profiles on the Network.

She extends her hands, presenting him with what are technically his handcuffs. “You’ve got a deal, partner.”

[ivedonestranger]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Teen Titans (Animated Series) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dick Grayson/Raven Characters: Robin, Raven, Koriand'r (DCU) Additional Tags: Kissing, Surprise Kissing, Confused Robin, Short One Shot, Rob Rae week 2019 Series: Part 3 of RobRae Week 2019 Summary:

It was a random occurrence in the elevator but was it meant to be more? Day 2 "Kissing" for RobRae Week 2019

Read it on your favorite Fanfic site or here under the cut! 

FF.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13255397/1/A-Kiss-in-Passing AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18391892

The elevator was slow, it had to be. For Robin, it had felt like an hour waiting for it to descend from the common room floor all the way to the second where he was waiting, arms filled with a box of files he needed for the case Jump City PD asked him to look into. It was not often that the local police wanted them involved preferring humans handle human matters and metas handling other metas. In actuality, it was safer all around. In one way, humans were not risking their life while a meta was not being faced with an obscene amount of force because the police were not sure what to do.

Finally, the elevator dinged and slid open. For a second, he froze not expecting to see his friend Raven in the elevator. She stood there with her hood back and book in hand. Her eyes darted up for a moment to see who it was and went right back to reading. One thing was sure, being roommates for as long as they had been, the whole small talk had died away to nonverbal cues each other could read.

"Heading to the common room?" Robin asked not at the right angle to see the buttons.

"Mhmm," was the only answer he got in return. The elevator doors slid shut, and it began to slowly crawl towards the third to the top floor of the tower where they spent most of their time living. For a few seconds, nothing changed.

Robin was standing in a way that he had a chance to study the young woman who shared the elevator with him. It was not often that she was not hooded or uncovered. The cape had been thrown back to hang down her back, so the dark leotard she wore was visible. Robin's eyes studied the lines of her nose and cheeks, the amethyst eyes that moved slowly across the page and the full lips that were deceptively thin. He chuckled inwardly to himself that they looked actually quite kissable. Not that he had any thought of girls as of late, but Raven had an allure of mystery, and that was tantalizing in itself. He finished taking in her curvy but athletic figure and let his mind rest on those lips for a little while longer.

When Raven clapped the book shut, Robin jumped not expecting such a quick movement. She tucked it under one arm and turned on him. If he had not been leaning on the wall with the box in arm, he would have been able to evade her hand that snaked back around his head holding on to the back of his neck. Before any other thought could cross his mind, his entire body went rigid as he felt something warm and wet press up against his mouth. Robin felt the movement of Raven's lips against his seemed to send chills of excitement and fear through his entire body, Adrenalin pumped into him for no reason as the smell of her skin, the aloe lotion, and the scent of chamomile wafted into his nose.

Robin's heart felt as if it was going to explode when she pulled away. There was a stray twinkle in her eyes, but she immediately opened the book and had gone back to reading as if nothing had happened. The door dinged open, and she walked out towards her room, and Robin watched her go and then decided to carry the boxes a bit lower, so nobody else saw how exciting things had gotten in that small elevator.

It had been two weeks since Raven ambushed him in the elevator and he could not get the thought of those lips out of his mind. Anytime Robin made eye contact with her, they invariably dropped to her mouth. She never spoke of the kiss nor did Robin feeling like there was an unwritten rule in place. They fought, they healed, and they ate dinner together like the team they were and known were the wiser.

Finally, Robin had decided it was either some sort of experiment or Raven was just trying something new. She had been experimenting with different sensations and feelings since her father's defeat, and maybe the sorceress felt more comfortable experimenting on him since he was a fellow teammate and with an ironclad moral code. If that were true, Robin would not be against more experimentation if she was up to it.

It was late evening when Robin chose to throw down the binder he had been reading. The police files surrounding the jewelry store robberies were almost identical. It was not the actions of a meta, but police were stumped and wanted a profile. Robin had done them before, and so it was something he was known for. The notes on the profile lay strewn about only a quarter done. He needed more coffee. Robin was wearing his pajamas already and still had his mask. It was paranoia more than actually required to keep his identity a secret from his team. When you were raised and trained by the bat, you never took any chance unless you had to. So far, the group mentioned nothing, and he continued to wear it around people.

Striding through the halls towards the common room's kitchen, he passed the bedrooms of his compatriots. Raven's room was silent, but he could make out Beast Boy and Cyborg snoring up a storm. The Boy Wonder stopped a Starfire's door for a second alarmed that it was half open. He saw the Tamaranian princess laid out on her round bed, simple pink pajama-clad form half fallen off. It took him a second to see Silky, the strange mutated creature trying to crawl out but blocking the door from closing. He nudged the beast back into her room, and it growled in irritation of being foiled.

With the creature secured, Robin finally found his way to the coffee pot. Cleaning out grounds and pouring in triple the recommended amount of fresh coffee, he got the pot started. It was only a matter of minutes before the smell wafted around him. That was when he felt the arms snake under his and lock in place. He instinctively wanted to spin on his attacker, but the gray skin told him who exactly it was.

He turned himself in Raven's hold and came face to face with the sorceress. Robin's heart began to beat faster as the male side of his brain realized she stood there in a faded T-shirt and a pair of black panties. Oh, god those legs seemed to run forever.

"Uh...you need some coffee, Raven?" Robin asked trying his best to sound normal and praying to any god that would listen his body didn't realize the Azerathian was half naked.

She closed with him slowly and tilted her head up at him expectantly.

"Ummm,"

"You've been broadcasting all week how much you liked that kiss," Raven finally said. Her melodic lilt reaching his ears. Now, he had butterflies in his stomach and still did not move.

Raven cocked her head to the side in what could only have been a sarcastic thought. "Are you going to kiss me or what?"

Robin leaned down tentatively and placed his lips against hers. Immediately she closed the little gap that was left and pressed her warm body up against his. Her mouth enveloping his own in a kiss that was pronouncedly erotic. Her tongue explored his mouth while he instinctively returned the favor. Robin's breath became erratic as his body reacted to the gorgeous woman pressed up against him. His fevered brain realized she wore no bra under her t-shirt and that only two pieces of clothing separated her from being completely nude.

Raven broke away, and a growl of frustration escaped him before he could check himself. Her arms were still wrapped around his wait, but her face had taken no a sarcastic smirk, the girl's eyes twinkling.

"Got a comfortable grip there, Robin?"

Robin frowned trying to figure out in the mush that was once his brain what the girl was talking about. It was when she shifted her weight that he realized that in his haze of their passionate kiss, his hands had found their way down, slipped under the fabric and gotten a good hold of her ass.

"I AM SO SORRY!" Robin sputtered as he let go as fast as he could and tried to find a place to put his hands that were at least a million miles away from her body. "I am so so sorry! I didn't' mean to get into your personal space!"

"I didn't say that I minded, Robin," she breathed softly, her face still close to his.

She tugged on his hips away from the forgotten pot of coffee. "Wanna go back to my room?"

It was like a bucket of cold water that drenched him at the words. Robin broke out into a sweat. The thought of climbing into bed with Raven was one of the worst temptations he had ever faced. Her eyes were dark and mysterious, beckoning to a night that he would not soon forget. Robin let out a breath he did not know he was holding and gently extricated himself from her.

"Raven,"

"Yes?"

"I don't want to say this in a way that will insult you. I understand and appreciate how vulnerable you are making yourself but I...I can't go back to your room. It's wrong."

"Wrong?" Raven asked her eyebrows scrunching down. "I'm a grown ass adult, Robin. I can sleep with anyone I want."

"No, it's the way you're behaving. You have come out of nowhere, I can't...I can't take advantage of my best friend in case something is affecting or influencing you."

"You think I'm possessed or something?"

"Raven," Robin pleaded. "I can't risk hurting you. I love you too much to let that happen."

Silence reigned in the room as Robin realized he used the L word and it had just come out. He had not recognized he had feelings for Raven until she was offering herself. Was she possessed? Was it that she was actually just looking for company for the night? Either way, he could not risk hurting the beautiful, amazing woman who stood in front of him.

Raven hung her head, and the leader of the Teen Titans braced himself for the verbal or physical assault that may come. Her head popped back up, and to his relief, she looked like her usual self. Raven, herself, let out a breath. She only said one thing.

"He passed."

There was a squeal from the hallway that was out of view, and a blur of red hair came flying out shrieking like a happy banshee. Starfire hovered there in her own PJs, her eyes lit up with excitement.

"That is SOO WONDERFUL, friend Raven!"

"What the hell is going on?" Robin asked, frustration and anger beginning to seep into his voice. His face flushed with hot embarrassment but Raven closed the distance again and took his hand.

"I...I had to understand you, Robin."

"Understand me?"

"We've been through a lot. Slade, my father, and since I've been free, I've been experimenting with my emotions. I trust you as a leader, Robin, but...I've been wanting to have a closer relationship but didn't know how you would actually be."

"We've been living together for how many years?" Robin asked angrily. "You know me!"

"Do I really? I don't even know your real name," Raven scolded gently. "I wanted to know the true depth of your character when you were presented with a choice. I wanted to know how you would be when you were just with me in a non-professional environment."

"Why?" Robin finally asked sitting down at the kitchen table, his emotions expended.

"I...I was hoping you'd be willing to go out on a date," Raven asked sitting down beside him. "I completely understand if you don't want after tonight, but I had to be sure you were not going to take advantage of my new emotional state. I just had to be sure."

"And Starfire? She there to protect you in case I decided to take advantage of you?" Robin asked gesturing to the Tamaranian who had remained uncharacteristically quiet. She had her fists in a ball and holding them to her chest.

"Actually, she was there in case I tried to take advantage of you," Raven grinned, showing the smile that he had fallen in love with. "I am half demon. Who knows what it might have done if it had a chance to get you into bed."

"Oh."

Silence reigned the room as Robin tried to think, but the more ragged gasps coming from Starfire finally made him turn to look at her. Her skin had become paler, and she seemed to be about to fall to pieces.

"I don't think Star can take the suspense, " Raven chuckled. "Robin, could we go out on a date?"

Robin broke into a smile and reach across the table to take his friend's hand. "Of course, I kinda already admitted I loved you...you know in a very strong friendship way of a man who's gone to hell to save his best friend."

"Sure," Raven answered with no belief in her voice.

Starfire exploded in a shrill squeal of delight and wrapped her powerful arms around them shoving them both against her.

"My bestest friends of the worlds are now lovers!"

"Whoa whoa whoa!" Robin tried to cry out. "Wrong word, Star. We're dating, not lovers."

"There is a difference?"

"Quite," Raven laughed. "I'll explain it to you on the way back to our rooms. Have a good night, Robin. I'll see you in the morning."

"Maybe."

"You do know there were easier ways of finding out your answer," Robin volunteered thinking about the cup of coffee for the first time since starting the pot.

The kiss she placed on his mouth was the sweetest kiss he had ever received. There was a sparkle in her eye, and a gentleness he did not know the half-demon sorceress of Azerath was capable of. Robin sat there until the sounds of their talking had faded. He finally decided what he was.

Tonight, Robin was the luckiest man in Jump City.

[smoakmonster]

B is for Better With You

Prompt: Comfort Anonymous Prompt: Olicity + "I sleep better when I'm next to you." A/N: I’m combining this week’s prompt with a hurt/comfort prompt that has been marinating in my inbox for ages. Apparently I am incapable of writing pure fluff, because this turned into a pretty angsty AU. This story was initially inspired by the Jacin and Winter relationship from The Lunar Chronicles. Word Count: 4.9k Tagging: @thebookjumper, @olicityhiatusficathon, @scu11y22 Also available on AO3. 

xxx

“Mr. Oliver?”

Raisa’s careful tone causes his stomach to fill with lead.

When he looks up from his desk, he doesn’t even have to ask her what she’s referring to. He can read the worry plain on her face, in her solemn, knowing look. It’s a quiet, secret language they’ve perfected over the years.  

“She’s worse,” Raisa whispers to him in Russian. And if the pitiful look she's giving him now is not enough to make panic flare up within his chest, the fact that she's using Russian--to prevent listening ears from overhearing--is more than enough.

He swallows, trying--and failing--to repress the sudden, ugly worry ravaging its way through his heart. Worse.  Such a vague and agonizing word, one that tells him exactly nothing and yet conveys everything regarding the woman he loves in the other room. Is she worse than she was a few minutes ago or a few months ago? Is she worse than even his deepest, most twisted fears? Is she worse than ever and beyond rescuing?

Then again, when was the last time either of them was actually better after sundown? Nighttime remains more unpredictable than the day, darkness more oppressive than the light.

And he hates this part--the plummeting, endless abyss before the crash, the sharp reminder that even on a quiet, stormless night, there can be no escape from the mind’s hellish surges. Purgatory is forever.

He spots the familiar prescription bottle sitting on top of his dresser, taunting him. Next to it, flickering against the light, lies a long, thin...cruel needle. A sedative.

“I do not wish to harm her, Mr. Oliver. But perhaps, if she harms herself...”

“No. No needles,” he reminds her sternly. He doesn’t mean to sound harsh. He’s not angry at Raisa. He’s not angry at anyone, really, other than the universe for allowing this to happen to the one he loves.

God, he hopes it doesn't come to that.

He made a promise to her once that he'd never inject her with anything, no matter what happens.

Carefully, he swipes the container up as he slowly makes his way towards the adjoining bedroom door--the open gate between their respective cages, their respective prisons.

This big place used to be sacred; now it’s become tainted. The mansion is where she used to stay as a regular guest during the summers when they were children. As kids, they would unlock the door and sneak in and out of each other’s rooms next door and have long chats filled with laughter and playful mischief. As teenagers, however, they soon discovered that co-ed sleepovers were not as innocent nor as possible as they had been during the golden days of youth. But they still made an effort to say goodnight to one another, while the rest of the house slept unaware. Even when she went to M.I.T., he personally never allowed anyone else to stay in her room, the room next to his own, the one corner of the universe that remained purely and completely theirs.

But that was many years ago...before they both became orphans. Before the nightmares. Before the pain. Before he became like the very monsters he’s trying to protect her from.

They grew up together sleeping a wall apart. Best case scenario, he expects that they’ll grow old together the same way.

It takes him an eternal second to cross the threshold. One second for his mind to fill with damaging scenarios. One second to worry if this is the night he loses her forever.

Oliver takes a deep breath, pausing despite himself. Invariably, the moment before he steps into her room, into her safe space, he feels severely unqualified to administer any sort of aid. He’s the last person in the world who can make the demons recede.

Her room is dimly lit, with warm yellow light coming from a lamp on a small end table, illuminating just enough of her bed for him to see her. There she stands, hunched over her computer, like always, utterly immersed within her vast, coded, digital world, a world he can never really follow her into. The world outside this room could be crumbling to pieces, and she'd never know. And maybe it's better this way, for her to retain some naivety about how unkind the real world can truly be, how it preys on the gentlest of souls.

She doesn't react, doesn't see or hear him come in. Her distinctive ponytail is falling loose and knotting, in a state of disarray. The harsh blue light of the computer illuminates her worn but concentrated face. Her eyebrows are drawn tight with determination, her cheeks thinner and paler today, probably because she still hasn't eaten anything, if the untouched plate on her coffee table is any indication.

Stuffing the bottle of pills into his pocket, he approaches her unsafe haven, softly, gently, like a panther aiming to befriend a deer, that’s when he hears her.

“I have to find it...skeleton key...I have to find it...” she mutters to herself, typing away, never ceasing, working herself back into paranoia and exhaustion.

She’s haunted by ghosts even he can’t kill.

And he hates seeing her like this, so close and so far beyond his reach.

Every time is like the first time. He wonders if he’ll ever get used to this dreadful urgency. He never wants to get used to this.

Like a match being struck, he can feel his own insatiable need to fix this sparking within him, a kind of throbbing violence that makes him tremble. On the outside he may be stoic, but it’s just a facade in effort to quell the craze inside him. He feels like he’s suffocating in his own skin, so utterly powerless.

But he only allows himself to be angry for three seconds. He doesn't want to make her more upset. He's here to heal her, which is as frustrating as it is painfully ironic. She's done more for him than he will ever be able to do for her.

Suddenly, she stops typing.

He feels the instant the room shifts, the instant her whole body stiffens as her walls go up, already on guard, already ready to run away from him.

She looks at him with closed-off and cautious eyes. “Are...are you my doctor?” she asks quietly.

He swallows the lump in his throat. “No, Felicity. I’m...” he hesitates, always unsure how to begin. “I’m your friend,” he settles.

It feels hollow. but at least it’s a start. It’s the truth. And even if she doesn't remember right now, he promised her he’d never lie to her again.

“My friend?” she asks, unconvinced.

He just nods, trying to ignore the flare of selfish pain that rips through him. It doesn’t matter how many times they go through this twisted ritual. This part still guts him every time--every time she doesn’t recognize him; every time she looks scared and lost and unsure, such a frail fragment of the woman he knows.

“We...we haven’t seen each other in awhile,” he finally says. And that’s true enough. It feels like it’s been years since he’s really seen the woman he loves.

Nervously, Oliver stuffs both his hands into his pockets, whether for her sake or his own, he’s not entirely sure. “Felicity, do you know where you are?”

She frowns deeply, adorably, eyes wandering around the large space with a slight pout in her lips. “My room?” she asks. Yet it’s the way she asks, in that wonderful Felicity way, that really gives him pause, gives him hope. She asks not because she’s truly uncertain, but more like she’s wondering why he’s even asking her in the first place. Which means she can’t be too far gone after all.

“And where is your room?” he continues, daring to hedge just a step closer. His heart lifts when she doesn’t back away from him.

“Upstairs to the left, down the second hallway. The left window doesn’t open,” she recites faithfully, glancing towards the window in question.

His lips twitch. He recalls with fondness one particular night they tried to sneak out through her window and discovered just how inoperable it was. Since inheriting the mansion, he’s never had the desire to have it replaced. After all, it seems the blueprints of her childhood never go away. Her feelings are less constant.

And Oliver doesn’t know what does it this time. He can never predict what triggers the change--perhaps, she’s remembering that same night of teenage mischief--but he sees the moment the light goes off behind her eyes, the moment she finally sees him. Like waking up, one second she’s looking through him, and then suddenly she’s looking at him...like she knows him, like she can stare straight into his soul. Just like when they were kids.

He can’t breathe.

She hasn’t looked at him with such deep recognition like this in weeks. The intensity leaves him awestruck. He hadn’t realized how much he’s been aching to see once more that soft, trusting, vulnerable gaze. But now that he has it, has her back again for just a moment, his brave, beautiful Felicity...he doesn’t want her to leave him again.

“Oliver?” The hesitation in her voice nearly chokes him.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

She makes some kind of sound he has no name for--something between sorrowful and relieved--and then she runs into his arms, slamming into his chest. He has no choice but to scoop her up into his arms, hauling her as close to him as she can get, cradling the back of her precious head, pressing her heartbeat up against his own where it belongs.

She clings to him as desperately as he clings to her, clawing her fists into his clothes, rubbing her nose against his neck, breathing him in.

And then she lets out another noise, this one smaller but just as fierce. It’s such a quiet whimper, he almost thinks he imagines it. But he knows it’s real. He can feel her quivering agony down to his bones. He’s grown so attuned to her every sound that he recognizes the acute cry for what it is.

And in that moment, he doesn't want anyone else to touch her. He’s the first person in the world who will do everything, anything to keep her safe. He may be the least worthy, but he needs to be the one who comforts her. (He still hasn’t determined where the line between selfish yearning and selfless desperation resides where she’s concerned, and yet he doesn’t really want to make up his mind about that either.)

“I missed you,” she mumbles against his throat.

“I missed you, too,” he manages to get out. You have no idea how much.

Reluctantly, Oliver lets her slide out of his grasp just enough to look up at him. She studies him intently, cataloging all of his face, searching for the secrets he keeps burying and uncovering and burying again.

Felicity reaches up to rest her palm against his cheek, and he starts, because now he’s starting to forget what this feels like.

“When did you get back?” She means the island. Her memories always seem to reset back to the day he first returned after five years in hell...only to find another five years of hell awaiting for him at his doorstep.

“Just now,” he answers honestly. He’s never really home until she comes back to him.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?” He stills instantly at her grave tone. But then he sees--the sparkle, the teasing in her eyes.

“You have mopey face. Are you here to tell me that I'm crazy?” She tips her head at him playfully.

He tries not to smile, but there are some things that simply cannot be helped. That's his Felicity...always to the point, always making the world a brighter place even as her own world spins out of control.

He leans in close, like they’re sharing an old, secret antic. “That depends. Are you crazy?”

She sighs, averting her gaze, as she takes to fiddling with the wrinkles of his shirt. “I know when I’m being like Ophelia.”

His smile fades. While this isn’t the first time she’s used that joke--so he actually understands the reference--this is the first time she’s done so in such a despondent tone, as though she truly believes what she says. So he decides to tease her, to lighten the mood, to make her smile. Anything to make her smile, to feel as normal as she craves to be. What a messed up pair they make.

“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t study Shakespeare, remember?”

It works a little. At least she’s looking him in the eye again.

“I promise I'm not as bad as the doctors think I am.”

His heart beats a little faster at that, filling with trouble that somehow she knows. Even so, he shakes his head, trying to assuage her. “Who said anything about--”

“You don't have to pretend. I saw the medical documents.”

He frowns, studying her right back in the silence, until it finally hits him. “You hacked into your medical records.”

The way her eyes grow just a touch wider, deceptively innocent, is conformation enough.

“Fe-li-ci-ty...” he prompts.

“Ugh. Hacking is such a dirty word.” She scrunches her nose, an act that he should not find as endearing as he does. “Oliver, I am a Grade A genius.”

“I don’t need to be told that. But do we need to have a conversation about computer privileges again?”

“Is that judgment I’m hearing?”

They share a look, as he attempts to admonish her, while she just silently challenges him to do something to stop her, when they both know he never will. He sighs with amusement mixed with pride. But the concern never goes away.

“I mean, technically, they are my confidential patient files that I’m...perusing. I have a right to know. According to the doctors, I should be moved to an institution.”

He starts. The way she just casually mentions it, as though sending her to a place like that, all alone and away from him didn’t absolutely disturb and terrify him on every possible level. In reality, though, he knows her life under constant care of trained professionals would not be that much different than her is now. And it’s not as though he and Raisa and John have never discussed this very topic. He’s discussed it while shaking to the core and blatantly refusing to allow anyone other than their family doctor near her, but he’s discussed it.

What if she has an episode when he’s not around to keep her from hurting herself? What if she hacks her way into the FBI again and the police come calling? What if by some chance that broken window betrays him and manages to crack itself open just enough for her to slip out and get lost?

But what if he sends her away and loses her forever anyway?

And why does he so badly need her here in their childhood home? Is it for her? Or is it for him?

He clears his throat. “We’ve already had this talk. Many times. And you’re staying here.”

“Promise me?” she asks in a soft, timid voice he hardly recognizes. He feels as though someone’s punched all the air out of him. But then she looks up at him with those big blue eyes, so lost, silently pleading with him, as though he holds all the answers. Oh, this is why he can never send her away. This familiar, steady, disarming look.

“I promise,” he vows. “And I promise not to reveal your...browsing history to the doctor.”

That puts a little spark back in her expression. “Well that’s good, since I keep your secret, too.” She winks at him.

Which one? he wonders.

But before he can even dare to tackle that subject, her computer starts beeping, and she’s darting away from him to resume her typing marathon.

Please don’t go. I just got you back.

“Felicity,” he warns, moving to stand beside her and watch her work.

“Just...one second.... It’s been running all day.”

Felicity types for another minute or so, and then like a tornado dissipating, she goes still, glancing back at him for approval. “So what do you think?” she asks, almost giddy.

He swallows when he sees it--a night time camera shot from a street corner in The Glades. It’s dark and grainy, but he can make out the shadow of a figure in the middle of the street. A hooded shadow.

He tries to keep his voice casual. “You...you’ve been tracking the vigilante?”

“Mm-hmm.” She smiles, clearly pleased with her handiwork. “Took me awhile. This hood guy, as the internet is calling him, is pretty clever, I’ll give him that, trying to make it appear like there is no method to his madness--”

“Well, maybe there isn’t--”

“Oh, there is. Trust me. I am an expert at madness--” She winces. “Poor choice of words, sorry.” She shakes her head a bit, grabbing his arm to pull him closer still. “Take a look at these videos I found from the back alley of his secret lair.”

He pretends to focus intently on the blurry video, watching himself hop onto his motorcycle before taking off into the night. “His secret lair is an abandoned nightclub?”

She shrugs, ignoring his over-the-top skepticism, sticking her chin out proudly. “Well, I’ll admit, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing location, but we can’t all be a Queen heir, can we?”

She’s defending him, he realizes. She’s defending the vigilante. To him.

All these months of trying to keep this part of his life as far away from her as possible, and in her classic, brilliant Felicity way, she’s somehow managed to plop herself directly into it.

He’s so stunned, reeling from this new information, that it takes him a moment to catch up to what she’s saying.

“--so with my new algorithm that compiles and predicts all the main routes the vigilante takes in and out of The Glades... Oliver, I think the vigilante could be a lot closer to home than we realize.”

She’s not wrong in this case, and that’s what scares him even more.

He must not disguise his reaction very well, because whatever she reads in his expression sends her babbling again. “Look, I know my brain is not always the most reliable source when it comes to these sorts of things, but cameras and news articles don’t lie. Well, cameras don’t lie at least. Unless someone hacked into the entire city’s traffic camera system, which is...technically not impossible but highly unlikely and would take at least--”

“I want you to stay out of this, okay?” He cuts off her rant. He can’t take this anymore. He can’t just stand here calmly and listen to her casually talk about the vigilante, as if she were talking about her favorite character in a book.

“Why?”

“Because this guy--whoever he is--he’s dangerous.”

“I don’t know. Seems to me he’s just trying to help. I’ll admit, his methods are slightly misguided but…”

He crosses his arms, waiting for her to finish. “But?” he prompts.

“Oliver, I just want to meet him.” Something in her voice...changes. Elevates. Fills with some timbre that’s never been there before. She’s acting like...like a fan.  Of the vigilante.

“You want to meet the vigilante?” he almost growls but manages to keep himself in check.

“Yes!” she answers brightly. “Don’t you?”

“Not particularly.”

“I just want to tell him how amazing he is. To say thank you. Everything he sacrifices to keep the people of this city safe, to keep me safe, to keep you safe. It kind of makes him a hero, doesn’t it?”

He sighs heavily.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that this other side of her still exists, when there’s so much else happening on the surface that breaks his heart. Her brightness is enough to give him hope, even as every fibre of his being revolts against every word she says.

She’s always had a vivid imagination, but not like this. This is one thing that she is completely right about. But telling her means opening up a rusty can of worms and lies, and he’s not ready to let her see the worst parts of him yet. He does what he does so she can see what little humanity he keeps. He keeps for her. It’s wrong, he knows. And he’s only half a person, when he’s with her and when he’s without her. But he’ll gladly go insane if it means preserving her sanity. It’s more than he deserves, anyway. She’s more than he deserves.

“Let’s talk more about this in the morning. It’s time for bed.”

She pouts, “Noooo. But I’m not sleepy.”

“Yes, you are. Come on.”

Oliver practically drags her over to her large queen-sized bed, the same bed she’s had since she was seven and first came to live with his family. Carefully, he pulls the prescription bottle out of his pocket and holds it out to her expectantly.

She makes a face in disgust.  

“Please,” he whispers.

“Those gross pills never work. They don’t help me sleep.”

After another half-hearted attempt, he just sighs, stashing the pills back into his pocket. “Well then, what does?”

She tips her head, and to her credit, she at least pretends to contemplate his question for a few seconds before responding. “Hmm...hacking.”

He’s already shaking his head no.

“You.” She gently tugs on the front, unused belt loops in his jeans, pulling herself nearer to him. “You make everything better.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“And I seriously disagree with you. Why can’t I stay in your room with you?”

His heart kicks into overdrive as she leans in even closer. Boundaries, Oliver.

“Felicity…” He breathes her name to caution her, but it comes out more desperate than deterring.

“Oliver…” She copies his tone.

He doesn’t know how to go on, until he does. And he knows he should stop her from leaning in this close, from rising up on her tiptoes, from brushing the tip of her warm, soft nose against his. But he just doesn’t have the strength to fight her anymore. Not tonight. He needs to feel loved and protected as much as she does.

So he lets her kiss him. And he kisses her back.

It’s not a harsh or passionate kiss like the ones they used to share in the early years; it’s not an inferno of hunger and need. No, this one is more tender and slow, more patient, more like the dying embers of a warm hearth, like the easy swell of a sunrise.

And when they eventually break away, her power over him feels even greater. Those eyes calling out to him, wanting him... It’s addictive to be needed this way. He craves her company as much as she seems to crave his.

Sometimes he feels ineptly qualified to cater to her every psychological need, no matter how much she asks of him. Sometimes he feels disturbingly overly qualified. He’s incapable of saying no to her.

“Fine,” he says at last. “I’ll stay with you till you’re sleeping.”

She smiles, clearly relishing her victory. He can’t even be sorry seeing her so happy.

“And rain will make the flowers grow,” she chimes, twisting out of his arms to begin removing a few of her twenty-something pillows.

“What?” he asks, helping her pull back the duvet.

“It’s from Les Mis, remember? We watched it last week.”

He stills. Last week?  She remembers that?

And now, he wonders, not for the first time, if her brain isn’t actually spiraling out of wack, but instead if it’s something more like what Barry’s heart was while he was in that coma. Moving too fast for the doctors to pick up. What if her brain is just moving too fast that the doctors have no other choice but to label her as something beyond reason?

And as though he’s the one who’s been struck by lightning, Oliver knows that this odd thing about Felicity Smoak...it’s not a curse. It’s a gift. Because everything about her is a gift.

“You sure you want me to stay?” He tries to mask the hope swelling inside him, bursting like honey.

“Come here,” she reaches for him, yanking him down onto the bed to plop beside her. “I always sleep better when I’m next to you anyway.”

xxx

She wakes in a cold sweat to an abrupt shifting on her mattress. Her bad vision barely has time to adjust to the pitch darkness before she’s startled by a painful groan. She scurries in the abyss to turn on the lamp--to chase the demons away with the light.

She squints against the brightness, putting on her glasses...and then she sees him.

“Oh, Oliver...” she breathes, her heart squeezing.

Her wonderful, darling friend--who’s always been far more than a friend--trembles and twists in the night, fighting against faceless enemies she can neither stop nor see, struggling mercilessly, endlessly. She knows exactly what that’s like.

She chases monsters in the day, while he chases monsters in the night. So maybe they can be each other’s cure.

And so Felicity does the only thing she knows how to do, the only thing within her power to do. She throws herself into the fire with him, wrapping her arms tight around his back, hauling herself against him, pressing her ear up against his back where she can feel his heartbeat, her favorite spot in the whole world. She loves the strength of his heart.

His whole body is tight, cramped and coiled in a near fetal position. “Please,” he mutters in his sleep. “Please, make it stop. Make it stop make it stop make it stop...”

I want to, honey. I want to so much.

He flinches against a memory of a swift blow, shaking them both, but she doesn’t let go. He whines in pain, lingering in a hole of agony she has no name for. God, she’s never really been a violent person, but sometimes she just wants to find whoever did this to him on that island and make their lives as living hell. See how they like spending their nights, afraid and ashamed and broken and...and still so beautiful.

Felicity holds onto him just a little bit tighter, squishing her face against the burning muscles of his body, as though to mold herself into his form permanently. She can feel the raised pattern of one of his scars. It’s from a knife wound apparently--one of many, at least that’s all he’s told her. Still, she knows it well. She’s charted the history written into his skin so many times. She even has secret names for some of his scars, like constellations, names like valiant and stubborn and winsome.

While he whimpers in his sleep, there comes a moment, so brief and yet it seems to last for hours in her mind, when she begins to wonder, Is this the one that never ends? Is this the night we both lose our minds?

But then...his breathing gentles; he stops shaking.

And miraculously, the horror does end.

And she feels her body relaxing along with his, muscles that she didn’t even realize were tight beginning to loosen. And just before letting go, she clings to him one last time, hoping that maybe this time, if she holds him tight enough, maybe she can hold together the broken shards of their minds.

When she feels him turning over, she scoots back to make room. As soon as his head hits the pillow, he blinks awake, frowning up at her, a little delirious, in the strange place in between sleep and reality. But when he grabs her hand, she doesn’t try to stop him; quite the contrary, she relishes his touch.

“Felicity?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“Sorry I...I fell asleep,” he mumbles, his eyelids already falling.

“Don’t be sorry. I’m taking care of you for once.”

“M’kay. Don’t tell...Raisa...”

And then he’s gone, back to the land of dreams, hopefully good dreams this time.

Felicity smiles, like she does almost every night they go through this ritual, the ritual of pretending they’re not going to end up in the same bed together but somehow still ending up here anyway. “Don’t worry, Mister Vigilante. I can keep a secret.”

She decides to leave the lamp on this time, lying down to rest her chin on his shoulder, her preferred pillow of choice.

Whatever comes tomorrow, it doesn't matter. They have tonight. She has her sanity. She has him--her pillar of strength and book of secrets; her hero and her home. With a mind overflowing in brilliance like her own, yet as equally uncharted in its terrain, sometimes Felicity thinks he’s the one mystery she’s never going to be able to solve. And that’s okay. She’s happy to accept the challenge of spending a lifetime puzzling him out.

Even in the darkness, they’re inseparable, the boy he was before being lost at sea, and the girl she was before being smothered on land. Sometimes if feels like they both died the nights their parents died. They are both a little mad, but maybe together they can make one whole, rational person. Maybe together they can rebuild what was stolen from them.

As Felicity drifts off, she runs her hand over his heart in soothing strokes, in one last act of comfort before they start all over again tomorrow. She pleas as much as she promises him, “It’s okay. You’re safe...you’re safe. I’m here.”

[glopratchet]

astryl-wondering

with a couple of other people and they start running at you as he is still under his suit, but when he sees you, he starts screaming and yelling about how you are going to kill him Astyrl of course comes out of the tent naked as he is still under his suit, an upside down u As you get closer you see 2 babies lying there screaming along with several piles of feces and a bloody jack red and has pulsating veins It is very surreal Everyone screams in fear except for you as you are suffering from PTSD that adorns the middle of this twisted environment: A bunch of xentix queen cocoons and vases filled with chemicals and explosive potions You then see a tube leading out of the tent with a pumping mechanism filled with gears, cogs, and wires lullabies to the babies keeping them quiet Cigar lunges and places you face down into the desktop as it decays for the common good You try to opt out of joy but it is forced on you, and it spills on your skin of almost all happiness The hexes that are available seem to be based on a combination of his willpower, popularity, and importance he tries to think of where he could hide and think of his next move he reaches for the gun, instead ricking it and pulling the trigger, firing once and hitting himself in the head a plan begins to brew in his head but astryl seems to be suffering from severe PTSD at this point so details are lost to him by fusing himself to not just one succubus and an incubus but also a neutral queen and several male drones again, prosper, and evolve as astryl feels a pulse of fear rising up within him It is 108 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping quickly soon and certain doom if he is not underground in time allowing the sand to bury him He needs to think now more than ever and slowly changing its behavior or the canine famliy The creatures attached themselves to the screen and suck the power from it A malevolent renegade spambot infected cludstrum at one point and then spread from there as something close to reality which is in anyway that the computer would normally speak out something s that look like spirals in two dimensions and restore order The qefizat clencher needs to work now otherwise astryl will be nothing but dust and then finally once more and astryl will be stuck with no guides to help one move around this screen For now qwefdnt is the one that can help out the most to astryl but hes sure just thinking about it gives the female diety experience and power by the time this mess is over with Who knows but it seems like a good idea to be prepared or how or where he could possibly going to get this cucumber at The connector reconizes many real world currencies and methods of payment If the wallet that is created from this rectal currency does not overtax the system then he can buy things in this place for cucumbers whenever asked Right now cludstrum needs to deal with qwefdnt And get some shut eye that grow in various parts of the world within astryl There seems to be some quarantine issues for food being imported in from many parts of the realm of the past The issues have to structurally fixed before astryl it able to exit into atril, the land beyond They must all be found, no buying them as they have not been approved by the but some things taste better than others Which seems contradictory Are your eyes open or closed? Pick one! and eats The green cress that grows in little patches around here has a nice flavor but there are no blues to be had from cress over the years because of operation This is a metaphor about a game here except sand and green cress with a bitter orange flavor to get hydrated and try to eat some butter flavored roses but there is little sustenance in either of those so he will need to keep as he goes so that is not a very desirable food source but he will absolutely need to swallow some rocks if he is going to survive here until the cludstrom finishes fixes some the the programs that astry has broken through as it is quite elusive You go for the snake so see if you eat this magic essence bearing beast It slips away in a crevasse for a while but cludstrum will the city of Atralith, the orical capital and royal seat Of ruler ship the city Zdas with lower cagast elite in it the warlord city of Nar where war is ever present He can check out the farming commune of Bap the monastery of Jne Well these seemed to be some uraly choices in the desert for our intrepid protagonist astryl wylde the light seems to grow dimmer and dimmer dispelling all but the essentials of color from the world the camid strata of color are all that illuminate the world with its soft shades of orange, red and violet backlight cludstrum inthe middle of the desert desolation drifting into unconsciousness They were erected as a tribute salute or model ships in which lower case limbs, buzz cutting jolted head, wind burn cheeks Death slowly approaches him from the dry bed of the atral ocean toward death struggling with limbs Lachrymose release vernal fluids Denouement of death For now Your hero is sleeping before the blistering sun & hope this will be over on a happy note for me under the tutelage of heatwave sun rays Happy endings are the kind you can't wake up from towards the unseeable horizon Unrendered & entirely unknown crumbling in the distance tossing pebbles at shadow images that aren't there fractals into the corrugated landscape whirling in a dance of sum attitude scraggly hair tussling in the dry gale throwing pebbles at a tall man holding a little girl's hand to dry powder briskly blowing around static Gideon's outdoor store a tad bit surreal soundtracks in his mind synchronizing hearts in perfect rhythm with the music one step at a time to the future is like walking between a maze of flexible metal rods not knowing which way to go or where you are going to end up architecture software systems in the convertible machine code his birth certificate says is his real name opens it to a random page reads Sand ruins sleep deprivation time behind a cactii succulence into an empty jelly glass--huh? laundry machines expel hot compressed air sudden lung rupture from the shock cough--uh? from a sandstorn under one of the miraculously undestroyed billboards wondering why be here at all his eyes from the morning sun wobbles from heat exhaustion motion from the dust clouds slowly approaching unhurried but determined to be vicious his left elbow with the right foot Kludstrm cranky sand chewing gears grinding motor noises from gearhead ambulances hurt human hearts all police visit retribution massacres of everyone on phone lists satellites streets the slow ascent up a small mountain in the desert--time to bag it for tonight liver disease incurable cancer--cold calls everyone on the planet to assure them it could never happen a dried up arava riverbed in the distance several figures holding hands parading--habitual liars all feelings every action hitting pause on the remote frozen in an instant all too familiar two fingers of singlemalt whiskey mixed unpeated scotch splash of water in the sunlight plastic bucket filled with ice and faintly reflecting impurities contents touches lips focusing on an old record store ready to be bulldozed nostalgia naked in the blistering sun afghanistan iced down on the roof terrors of the past subside winds drowning coasts tsunamis tidal waves Kludstrm obese collective unconscious saving humans comfort of their own familiar nightmares the screaming hordes of zombified used car salesmen approaching the stadium ready to pounce--pirate screens! friendly tap on the shoulder same color shirt another camouflages a bee the strewn corpses of cars for sustenance Kludstrm fortunate disappearing a friend leaves no forwarding address random vanishing photos reputation for perfection Kludstrm guilty reputation never does catch up on shredded wheat spitting out the cardboard mouthful after mouthful waiting for it to dissolve farts silently as side effect down hardtack dry pieces of bread leathery unrecognizable lumps pretend like they're apples lightning bolts towards the highest point on Earth's surface Kludstrm inane sending taunt messages to all portable electronic devices within a mile on a steady diet of low-calorie vegetables boiled into submission, losing weight weeks in the junkyard results in a jigsaw assembly of a machine capable of picking up two kilos at a time precisely moving it from one place to another fitness avoiding injury paranoia creeping into everyday actions Kludstrm poverty-stricken hatred of astrology immunizes everyone against messages in the sky horoscopes with birthdates going on the sheer numbers alone eventually biasing it towards relationships and accuracy will go up for a cab dirty unpaved road in the distance random horse and buggie appears out of nowhere figures struggling downtrodden anonymous brown barren landscape out of the grey its battalions firmly entrenched success The crowds cheer alongside politicians suddenly up for reelection the lights of the midway pink prances by daring you to catch her the walls of government emptiness shadowboxes in uniform long past glory days Priests masquerade as psychics gilded stoles tails of hidden mistresses social justice warriors moralizing suicide Kludstrm disorganized pointing out of the window dogs tower over a lone child hopelessness bristles hair Grue conspiracy sprawling the lives of worthless insects, written out of existence disappearances labeled natural deaths par for the course an overly large paw prints here and there Bunker guns flipping your finger at the underbelly the beast you cannot reach Kludstrm shivering entrenched defying powerful enemies anonymity safety layer after layer

[clubofinfo]

Expert: One of my less popular beliefs (and that’s saying something) is that any form of sexuality is inherently objectifying. As with all language being violence and all poetry dishonest, that’s not the end of the story, obviously, and certainly not an injunction to never engage with it. My basic argument is that sexual desire is ultimately a very simple lizard-brain thing and while you can hook it up to to complex circuits, there’s a limit to the complexity of the triggers, or at least diminishing sustainability to complex triggers. The triggers can be ‘relatively’ complex, but they have to be ossified enough — have to have permanent enough associations or connections — to actually serve as triggers. You may get off to signs of someone else desiring you, but that’s not seeing them as an ends in themselves. You may get off to signs of someone’s else’s intelligence and creativity, but that’s not seeing them as an ends in themselves. Identifiable tropes or trappings of intelligence or creativity are themselves object-functioning. The causal origin such sexual triggers might reveal desires or motivations or social allegiances that we might say reflect more valorous alignments than others, but any codified trigger is nonetheless objectifying. When we view someone as an “artist” say we objectify them with such simplified pictures in broadly the same way that viewing someone as a body is objectifying, we view them as a thing rather than as an agent. Relating to someone in terms of simplified roles or characteristics is in a similar objectifying vein as relating to them in terms of their body, because such relating turns away from dwelling on the fullness of their existence in all its unknowable subjective complexity. It seems safe to say from everything we know about biology and neuroscience that in order for any stimuli to trigger sexual desire it has be sufficiently simple. It gets harder and harder to construct a triggering circuit as the complexity of the trigger rises. A sufficiently complex sexuality may no longer count as a “sexuality” and it seems unlikely to be able to even function as one. Indeed almost all sexual triggers are incredibly simple. Every remotely common flavor of kink is about severe simplifications of our environments or narratives or relations. In actual life maintaining power or being oppressed can be incredibly complicated and rife with anxiety. But kink uniformly attacks such anxieties, it removes complexity. We see the same with common modes of relating that don’t conceive of themselves as “kink”, people frequently ground their sexual attraction for others in their capacity to signify an idea or serve a role or generally perform as some thing. Even the most vaunted of complex queer practices when they get closer to sexual desire suddenly get very simplistic indeed. Going off of what people say to me in private there’s a huge amount of anxiety and unspoken tension in the present radical queer milieu around being incapable of stating actual desires or triggers for fear of being seen as too simplistic, too unintelligent, too undeveloped. So there’s a kind of tension between radical queer social practice, which delights in exponential complexity and compounding conceptual processes, and the actual sexual desires of said people. The desires tend to be far more simplistic, albeit sometimes cloaked in a bunch of performative academic complexity. Indeed what seems most common in queer practice is the holding of non-standard or unusual desires that are simplistic in function but are necessarily complex in their explanation (because of their non-standardness). A very simple system can require an incredibly complicated amount of explanation to be comprehensible within a paradigm not built to refer to it. I think we’re deluding ourselves into thinking sex can be a site of rich intellectual connection; sex is anti-intellectual. But that’s actually the most useful thing about it, it kills thought. Sex kills anxiety, strips away the tangled and sometimes counterproductive webs we’ve woven, it reduces us from a realm of rich internal subjectivity to something closer to an object. Sexual desire is — in an ethical lens — a lot like getting drunk, it strips away our agency and renders us less capable of fully recognizing or enshrining the agency of others. All we are left with is very simplistic checkboxes of consent, is the other person displaying enthusiasm, etc. We are inherently left with simplistic codes. It’s important to note that while we seek to expand agency, moments of lesser agency or shallower connection are not uniformly objectionable. After all we go literally unconscious for large portions of every day, reducing ourselves to almost as object-like an existence as is possible. We do this because our brains have limits, because as processes of cognition we grow overly complex, we need to strip ourselves down, to restructure and refurbish. It is not clear that such refactorization would not be inherent to any thinking thing, any process of cognition in this universe. There’s an expansive tendency towards building expanding networks of possibility and likewise a contracting tendency towards radical slicing away of those networks to restructure towards more stable or more broadly useful roots. Sex (both desire and mechanism) is a particularly hamfisted means of pruning overgrown complexity, and its internal logic frequently pulls us in the direction of intensely problematic simplicities. But as with alcohol and sleep, sometimes a clunky and intensely dangerous tool is all we humans have to do a necessary job. I know that the juxtaposition of sex with love risks derision for conjuring a Christian mindset, but it’s not like for two millennia millions of folks knew absolutely nothing or were influenced by no substantive insights. And of course such a split is commonly arrived at across many cultures. I think the dichotomy is the most useful/illuminating conceptual schema possible in this realm. Love is grasping the fullness of someone else’s reality, the realness of their full being. Love is a level of engagement that denies simplification, that increases the scale of an individual’s presence in your perceptual universe, fleshing them in with so much detail and motion it becomes both intractable and unboxable. Love operates in the hyper-complex and rich realm of agency and subjectivity. Sex operates in the dangerously simple realm of consent and objectification. You can have loving sex with a partner, in the sense that there’s a smooth arc of increased drunkenness and mutual objectification together (as opposed to a discretized jump to objectification via say the abruptness of adopted kinkplay), but sexual desire is never predicated on something as infinitely complex as love. It’s predicated on specific isolatable, simplistic triggers. Even when those simplistic (objectifying) triggers are things more complex than visual pattern recognition of nice bits, like “I feel safe with this person” or “I desire their happiness”. Such simplistic narratives are obviously dangerous, but they can also be grounding, if only to provide a vantage-point for new attempts at constructing complexity. Sex may even augment and facilitate loving relationships — in the sense that it provides a strong means to mutually shed off the bloated complexities that continuously emerge between two deeply integrated systems. A jump down to a more simplistic base from which to then go back and evaluate the tangles without being caught up in them. Sex can also function as a kind of game theoretic reset where two parties recognize that their tangled maps of each other have become intractable in a way causing problems. Both parties know their anxieties about the other are likely incorrect, but they’re too embedded in a paranoia to state things clearly and without creating further tangles, sex can be seen as a way to ensure mutual defection. Sex offers a way to reduce one another to an “original position” as it were, from which both can collaboratively chart the tangles from a position of relative objectivity. In a flip, sexuality can also have valorous effects by breaking symmetries. Just as self-constrained rationality can be an incredibly useful tactic, it is often desirable to introduce some clumping into an otherwise perfectly connected network to create a kind of topological diversity that facilitates evolution of ideas & cultures. Too complex of affinities and attractions can rapidly make choice between all other agents computationally intractable, thus introducing simple (ie objectifying) attractions can serve to break the ice, as it were, of an otherwise locked up social network. Without something arbitrary like sexual attraction we might find ourselves incapable of selecting among billions of irreducibly complex fountains of agency, much less being pulled into closer orbits of more intense and personal engagement where love can flourish. Of course music tastes and even the automated assignment of numbers of affinity could likewise break such symmetries, but these too would be objectifying processes, even when ultimately serving grander aims. Conversely, assigning simplistic attractions below an agent’s conscious control can also work against clumping, when such clumping diverges far from a perfectly connected network (creating epistemic closures and general constraints on freedom). Sexual desire is often a violently objectifying process, in the sense that any over-simplification that discards detail is always violent. Science can — when successful — entirely compress detail into a more simple description, finding the hidden symmetries and redundancies, without slicing anything away. But the fullness of another mind can never be accurately compressed. We defy simplification. At the same time simplification is necessary and critical for any sort of life. We require simplification. To get anywhere we need to be able to wipe the slate clean, to cut through otherwise tangled knots. Sexuality provides a machete. It’s almost always used to hurt people — its simplifications do violence both upon others and upon our own thoughts and agency — but sometimes a machete can be very useful in hacking yourself free. Without tools like machetes our explorations would be more timid and our missteps more overwhelming. It is precisely tools of simplification that enable searching minds to develop continually blossoming complexity without wandering into deadends and choking themselves out. Sometimes you have to trim to keep growing. Sometimes crude simplification, the slicing away agency and subjectivity, is necessary and useful to serve their expansion. Sometimes you have to take a shot of whiskey to clear your confused thoughts and better ruminate. Sexual desire and attraction crudely objectifies. It is most illustrative to keep it conceptually distinct from infatuation — a kind of relishing of open possibility — and love — a kind of inescapable and incompressible tangibility. All sexuality is an orientation of epistemic violence that inaccurately reduces ourselves and others. A world entirely colonized and subsumed by sexual desire would be a world of objects. And it goes without saying that our present world is permeated and ordered by sexual attraction in grotesque fractals of thoughtless violence. But all this does not suffice to prove that sexual attraction cannot be instrumentalized in the service of agency. It merely proves that sex is a dangerous mechanism that always at least partially mutilates what it touches. Yet we must remember that some of the best and most useful tools frequently live double-lives as weapons of mass destruction. http://clubof.info/