#they were there for funeral and the internment which honestly made the whole thing feel like bittersweet

[malevolencc]

. extended from my last post aksjd

[justrandommethoughts]

The Start

This post defines the start of my journey. It was way back in 2019 when I first went to therapy (Yeah for me that's way back, the whole covid period just makes everything before feel soo long ago).

I was still together with my first girlfriend back then, almost for 6 years to that day. I never thought I have mental issues, but I was never the 'feeling' kind of person. I did not really feel anything. Of course, I would tell my ex I loved her, I was sad at the funeral of my grandparents, but it felt artificial, not real. I was just acting along how I was supposed to feel, without really feeling it. But for me that was normal, I've been this way for as long as I could remember. But then, I started to develope random symptoms of illnesses that could not be diagnosed by doctors/specialists. I had issues/pain peeing, my head skin was itching, I developed a tinnitus. After going through some painful proedures (I am very much referring to an urologist, who had to take a 'sample' of my urethra and was sticking some thing into my penis. I think that was the most painful thing I ever experienced, I can't even describe the pain I was in. I really never cried, but that, that made me cry) Well, anyways, after all these tests were showing no results of some illness, my doctor referred me to a therapist. I even got a pretty fast appointment, it only took me a few weeks. I was super lucky with that and I am still grateful (I might have to add that I live in Germany, so I did not have to pay for any of these doctors visit, I am super lucky)

So, the first therapy session was ahead. I was super nervous and could not imagine what it would be like to talk to somebody like that. I had no clue what to talk to him about, as there were no emotions or internal thoughts that I could tell him about. It was just empty, nothing, a void. It felt a bit odd, but honestly my memory is rather blurry about these past days. I was with this therapist for almost a year and a half, having sessions about every 2 weeks. And it helped, I noticed my feelings again, I could feel again. It's crazy to think about it, but I actually can't remember what exactly we did. He asked me how I felt about certain things, and I could not answer. Like what do you feel when you think about this teacher. I could not tell, I had numbness. So we went through all feelings there are, and I tried to imagine what it would feel like. And after some time, I noticed them again, at least something. A tickle maybe, but enough to talk about it.

An interesting event we pointed out, which back then seemed to be really important was something a teacher did to me when I was in 6th grade (so about 12/13). It was geography, and the teacher was a real asshole. He was that kind of teacher that takes pleasure in embarrasing kids, making him feel superior. He would always insult classmates and tell them how dumb they are. Well, and then one day it happened to me. I was rather more open back then, more expressive. I wore a shirt saying something like 'Homework are dangerous for my freetime' and he looked at it and shouted across the classroom 'It should rather say Homework are dangerous for your stupidity'. It really hurt thinking about this event, back then during the therapy session it felt like a turning point. It had such a massive impact, I could not really deal with it. After the therapy I went home and I was feeling unwell already. I then basically puked the whole evening and cried until my parents came and picked me up. They live about an hour away by car, so not too close. I thought that was the event troubling me and being a turning point in my development, so processing it really helped (At least back then it was a good start, but not to imagine what would come lol). Anyways, a few weeks after my girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend broke up with me. I was done with everything, the whole world. My world was falling apart. Even though I did not really feel that I loved her, I was still having a connection. A closesness that I can not really describe, she just felt like home. The therapy really helped processing it, having somebody to talk to who does not judge you no matter what you say. Who even understands and helps you order your thoughts and feelings. I wrote letters to her, which I never sent, just for myself. A lot of letters. I also sent her one message, a very long message, talking about what good times we had and that we should try it again, but to no avail. It was over. About three months later she had a new boyfriend, somebody from her work, and I thought it would not really affect me. I was just shrugging it off, saying its her thing, I don't care. Thinking about it from my perspective now, I actually cared and still do. It made everything before feel artificial, questioning if she also wanted him when we were still together, if there was something happening maybe. I don't think so, my rational self tells me no, she is not such a person, but I nevertheless have these thoughts.

Then Covid hit, I still remeber it in March 2020, when everything shut down. I then moved back to my parents. I was living in a shared appartment, but I had no real connection to my roommates and all my other friends also moved back to their parents. I had remote therapy during that period, and it was actually ok. It felt a little hard to open up over a video call at first, but I can recommend it if you can't see a therapist in person. After a few months the therapy was at an end. We had to either file an application for long term treatment or stop, and we both agreed on that I was feeling better and could deal with myself without any help (Oh how wrong we were).

The next part of the story will come whenever I feel like it and have the time, but until my next therapy a couple years went by. It actually only started a few months ago. I will then also go a little more into detail, but that backstory might be intersting to see where I am coming from.

[mego42]

Shamelessly stealing @foxmagpie​’s monthly rec thing without the ability to get my life together to do these on a monthly basis so, seasonal recs! So excited to see if I manage to do this again with anything remotely resembling consistency but i’ve been keeping the notes for approximately 43 years (or since ~september, whatever that means) so by god i’m gonna use them. 

found my thrill - s_t_c_s / @sothischickshe​

Turner POV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

guys turner is SO OBSESSED with Beth and Rio

both canonically and in this fic

it’s gr9

also features a weirdly soothing and relatable cord untangling moment as a metaphor

truly disturbingly relatable turner pov tbh

relentless boomer disdain, always a plus

led to the creation of this monstrosity, not sure what kind of a monster would do that

War In My Mind - mintletters16

Backread!!!!

post-213, gorgeous character study 

guaranteed to make you feEl stUfF

I really love the like, cyclical, fractured pattern of Beth’s internal monologue, it gives the whole thing a really affecting at times dreamy, at times haunted vibe

the end twist is *chef’s kiss*

mourning bells - Ejunkiet / @ejunkiet​

Backread!!!!

Later s2 era, Rio’s at a funeral, gets drunk and calls Beth

V short, kind of…..mmm, not sweet, but almost? Idk

It’s got a wistful sort of almost/i can be quiet with you vibe that i go extremely bonkers for

delinquents - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie​

Lol are any of you actually not reading this yet?

g o d ch 8 where do i start

First off how ABSOLUTELY VERY DARE for the tragic angst that is delinquents!beth boland. This poor baby, this precious bean. MUST PROTEC

SHE’S TRYING HER BEST AND I LOVE HER

zero percent deserves dean’s clammy hands, no i have not forgotten, tattooed on my brain, will never forgive

I also love love love love LOVE the ruby/stan subplot happening

(and ruby’s mom!!!!!) (seriously though you write the best moms)

oh god and baby beth starting to have confusing feelings about rio?????? *chef’s kiss*

p sure i was just like, straight screaming the entire end of the chapter

the dugout is like, pure serotonin

I can’t even talk about the closet

tHe teNsiOn

thank you i will take eleventy billion

don't give it a hand, offer it a soul - medievalraven / @medievalraven

am a desperate heaux for any fic that features rio and mick friendship

you are all incredibly shocked i know

still would not be mad if this swerved into rio x mick fake dating but beth x rio is cool too i guess

Speaking of things i am a desperate heaux for: DIANE!!!!!!!!

and DATING ANNIE???????????? Blessed

honestly this fic is worth it purely for the assertion that mick watches queer eye

Why don't we go to Venus? - watermelonriddles / @bensonstablers​

another grief study! 

apparently i was working through some stuff in september, idk, that was like 4 years ago

considering it’s the premise of the fic, i don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this fic is canon divergent and working with the premise that rio killed beth in 302

he is uh, not coping well

extremely haunted you might say

lots of marcus and rhea which is a delight!

rhea is to good for him tbh

i said what i said

truly top notch dream (nightmare?) sequences

the conversation at the end is extremely uncalled for

drop the game - Ejunkiet / @ejunkiet​

Backread!!!!

Am going to die mad Beth and Rio didn’t hook up in 211 but luckily this fic scratched the itch 

(temporarily, it’s a fairly permanent itch)

Bonus rec: missing scene series i wanna do bad things to you featuring 2x02 and 2x04

Viva Voce - zetuslapetus / @querenaxx​

Whoops we woke up married Vegas shenanigans!! 

So cute!!!!! So sexy!!!!! 

What more do you want?

am desperately obsessed with how beth can’t help stalking rio

feels right, feels organic

this makes me feel a lot of stuff about how they could be without their canon garbage between them

🎶 we could’ve had it aaaaaaaaaaall 🎶

you showed me colors (i can't see them with anyone else) - gild_fire / @gild-and-fire​

really into the use of color to illustrate beth’s emotional state, i feel like there’s a word for that but idk what it is

UNIMPORTANT

really nice job capturing beth’s inner vulnerability balanced by her outer stubbornness

am DESPERATELY into Mick playing matchmaker

more please???????

Both Sides of the Law - JoeyLee / @joeyjoeylee​

LAW SCHOOL AU! I suuuuuuper love Beth and Rio here (alt pov!! a gift!!!!) I love how initially prickly they are, I love how it’s evolving into a grudging respect, I love how INCREDIBLY AND HILARIOUSLY OBSESSED WITH EACH OTHER THEY ARE and neither one of them seems to see it

listen I know we’re all already foaming at the mouth over this one but as it’s gonna go down as one of my all time favorites it bears repeating/rereccing

cannot stress enough how masterful the use of POV is here, both voices feel completely true and distinct and I love how the alternating chapters revisit, reveal and emphasize pieces of each other

i can’t talk about this fic without hyperventilating

I LOVE IT SO MUCH YOU GUYS

the slow burn is going to ACTUALLY KILL ME

rip, no regrats

Earned It - wakeupflawless / @wakeupflawless​

spanking

that’s it that’s the pitch

H O T

living for beth’s exit in the first chapter, rio and i are both incredibly into it

second chapter also features violently possessive Rio who cannot deal with anyone messing with his girl so if that’s your thing boy howdy get on it

shake, baby, shake - openhearts

backread!!!!!

according to my bookmarks this was a reread but ???????

must’ve read it in the fugue state that followed reading for a moment we were strangers which is gr9 and I believe I have recced it before. If not, horrible oversight, reccing it now

beth and Rio POV lead up to the bathroom break, beautifully done, low-key feel bad reccing it bc the end point of both chapters makes me want to throw things but it’s super worth it for the tEnsiOn. ENJOY

What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have - flashindie / @pynkhues​

I’m assuming all of y’all are already reading this

If not OH MY GOD FIX YOUR LIVES

P I R A T E  A U

I’m sorry maybe you didn’t hear me piRaTE aU

meticulously researched, brain-meltingly vibrant, already painfully sexy slow-burning PIRATE AU

god where to start okay so first off, the world-building here straight up breaks my brain, sophie’s put in the work and it SHOWS

second, the atmosphere. i’m generally a pretty like, vague mental picture sort of reader but the sensory detail here grabs you by the throat and like, forcibly hauls you in whether your brain’s wired that way or no

and hey speaking of throats if you, like me, go a little funny about the knees at the idea of beth holding a knife to rio’s throat (he’s fine, calm down), there’s a v excellent beth-in-a-barrel moment for you

oh christ and the sexy tension

it’s gonna be a race to see which slow burn takes me out first, this or law school

Stunner - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie​

Another high school AU, this time with baby Rio absolutely head over heels for his older sister’s bff

stunner!Rio has an emotional earnestness about him that I feel like delinquents!Rio has already outgrown and it’s so SWEET I can’t get enough

Desperately cute!!!!!!

alL he waNts iS foR beTh tO bE hiS girL

also unreasonably angsty???????

ANN ARBOR IS NOT THAT FAR MEGAN

A Heart's A Heavy Burden - tooshyforthis / @bathroombreaks​

Howl’s Moving Castle AU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love Howl’s!!!!!!!!!!!

perfect opp to roast Rio for being a Dramatique Heaux 

and it’s gonna be 9 chapters?????? H Y P E

author’s note boldly presumes I did not know I needed this AU when the reality is I did in fact know I needed this AU, I just wasn’t expecting anyone to deliver

so blessed

author also claims to not be team nose stud and yet it features prominently in all its magnificent glory

what is the truth dot gif

A Bit of a Stretch - septiembre / @septiembur​

SO????? CUTE?????????

would be on this list for Rio calling Beth E alone tbh

really really really really really love this Rio POV of being settled into a relationship with Beth

It manages to be sweetly domestic af while still holding the edge that makes brio brio which is a neat trick

@septiembur may be a witch

beth’s approach to getting rio to do yoga with her is hilarious and exactly right, canon-typical amounts of subtlety 

1000000/10

Post Break-Up Sex - femalegothic / @bethsuglywigs​

stg this was called Hit Shuffle

no matter

h O T

with a side of damn i’ve made some questionable choices in my life haven’t i introspection

(no regrats tho)

(esp not with this fic)

not the point of the fic by a long shot but i’m also extremely obsessed with Weed Eddie, so real

She drains my soul... she drains it not - niham87 / @niham87​

ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED WITH THIS CONCEPT

am a complete sucker for paranormal world building that satirizes bureaucracy 

Is that a trope? If so that’s my favorite

I did it. I’m picking a single favorite. You know what that is growth dot gif

ANYWAY i love the concept, i love the humor, i love beth instantly clicking with annie

I love her and mick’s sort of grudging professional courtesy

Love beth as a champion of environmental responsibility and all of the underworld being like …...okay??

cannot wait to see where this goes

Nine-Tenths - riosnecktattoo / @riosnecktattoo​

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

sometimes i think about rio putting beth’s hair in a ponytail and have to go lie down

science please explain why this rUinS mE

wait hold on i skipped ahead

HEY KIDS DO YOU LIKE UNBEARABLY CUTE DOMESTIC TENDERNESS

opens with rio sleepily holding beth’s hand to his heart so that’s the kind of thing you’ll be dealing with

uGH theY’RE sO CUTe

idk why precisely but rio adding hair ties to his bracelet collection is my undoing every time

Missed Call - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie​

Rio doesn’t come home from a job when he’s supposed to. Beth (and I!!!!!!!) slowly loses her mind

Truly a masterpiece of rising tension

Will literally never forgive her for calling this light angst

I was SO STRESSED OUT

The first person to point out there was an author’s note at the beginning I obvs didn’t read is getting blocked

crush - foxmagpie / @foxmagpie​

Listen even though this is centered around two OCs, they are OCs FROM a (n iconic) brio fic AND Beth, Ruby and Rio all make cameos (I mean, Rio’s pretty present since he lives in Mar’s mind rent free bc they are THE SWEETEST MOST ADORABLE BEST OF FRIENDS so idk if i’d call it a cameo but whatever)

and even if it didn’t feature any official GG characters I’d still rec is bc that’s mY SON AND this fic is TOO CUTE

I have so many feelings over mar and rio growing up and not knowing how to cope with girls becoming a Thing in their life and how it affects their friendship and mar feeling left behind but (SPOILERS) at the end of the story rio starts feeling that too and it’s so poignant knowing how that’s going to continue in delinquents

while mar may be my son, i also claim elena’s #1 stan status

before you’re like meg you’re only reccing it bc it’s a bday present ask yourselves do i really strike you as the kind of person that wouldn’t be equally obnoxious about this either way?

truly cannot fathom how hard i have fallen for these OCs i don’t normally do that

@foxmagpie is definitely a witch

The Ottoman - Niham87 / @niham87​

look i will be the first to admit that i don’t go near as bonkers over the ottoman line in 308 as y’all do

(don’t get me wrong, i love it!!! I love that he laughs and i love that she’s pleased it just doesn’t hit my lose my whole mind button like idk, the dubby or the 306 convo, idk why)

BUT i v v v much love the context this delightful Rio POV pwp gives it

am also absolutely feral for 209 missing scene fic

and anything that captures the complexity of Rio’s s3 feelings for Beth and how twisted they’ve become

so this scratches a bunch of itches, is what i’m trying to say

Bet On It - zetuslapetus / @querenaxx​

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

That’s what my brain does when I think about Beth and Rio meeting in ch 1

am DESPERATELY OBSESSED WITH the tension between the two of them in this fic

I love how it plays with the ways they have to rely on but don’t trust each other

plus FAKE DATING and BED SHARING (fair warning hasn’t happened yet but the set up is there)

originally supposed to be 2 chapters, already up to 4, prayer circle it goes on forever

do you like drugs (tonight) - s_t_c_s / @sothischickshe​

v important focus on hydration, other fic should take note

extremely about the use of cut to and then flashback to enhance the ‘we were on drugs’ vibe

speaking of, beth and rio absolutely would take ecstasy to prove they are fun bc they are the exact kind of idiots that would peer pressure themselves

so glad beth kept her purse, got a bit stressed there for a second, clutches in that kind of circumstance are A Risk

not that i would know

FLAWLESS USE OF VOICEMAIL TBH

really love the ongoing denial that they are remotely into each other while proceeding to demonstrate how they are in fact, extremely into each other, great vibe

rio dances

I know my brain broke too

mmmm bacon

Navigate A Broken Path - flashindie / @pynkhues​

*INCOHERENT PTERODACTYL SCREECHING*

I have a long standing tradition of getting unreasonably obsessed with side characters so i’m not like, entirely surprised by how obsessed i am with both Mick and Mary Pat but i never in a million years considered them as a ship

AND Y E T

they fit????? so perfectly?????? It’s amazing how she developes them individually enough that i look at them together and think ah yes this makes perfect sense for both characters

and they’re such an amazing foil to Beth and Rio? 

can ships have foils? do i know what a foil is? 

unimportant

GUYS you dON’T uNDERStAN d 

hell i don’t understand

how absolutely very dare you make me care about YET ANOTHER set of gg ‘verse children

do not read this fic if you have no interest in feelings you zero percent asked for

wHA t hAPPeNED iN aLASkA?????????

A Moment’s Silence - femalegothic / @bethsuglywigs​

*makes sign of the cross*

y’all are gonna make me rediscover religion

extremely appreciate the author’s note approach to backstory top notch prioritization

listen it’s basically 3k of beth deep throating rio idk what more you need me to say about it

it is…..good stuff

bless the kinkmeme or fest whatever we’re calling it

praise - civillove / @blainesebastian​

I mean you had me at “three times rio calls beth a good girl and one time he really means it”

ephemeral rio

I left that note for myself in here in the middle of the night and haven’t the foggiest what i was thinking but i stand by it none the less

okay okay i think i know what i meant, this fic (as do all of my fav civillove brio fics) has this sort of like, liminal, in the quiet moments feel to them that makes the moments and feelings somehow feel like i’m catching a glimpse of something secret and precious???

idk i just really like it okay

Heart and Soul - riosnecktattoo / @riosnecktattoo​

oh look more unbearably sweet domestic tenderness, this time to music

thank you ma’am for my life

rio remembers beth used to play piano and gets her one and revoltingly cute shenanigans result

also hilarity

and sexiness

this fic has it all, truly

shout out to mick who sees no reason to keep rio’s feelings to himself

good girls tumblr fic - prettylittlementirosa / @hypermania​​

cheating and reccing a whole series

It’s my list and i can do what i wanna

stop crying about it, it’s four fics and they’re all AMAZING absolutely impossible to pick a fav

truly flawless characterization, next level ability to capture evocative mood, cannot get enough

three’s a crowd: who knew ballroom dancing while dean watches and grinds his teeth could be so sexy 

(trick question everything about that premise sounds A++++ and boy howdy does it live up)

feel it on the way home: rio tries to break up with beth, it goes about as well as you’d expect

(thE angSty tenSioN)

i want to play the game: [from the floor] i’m still not ready to talk about it

(rio/turner, missing scene, 10000000% a taste of what went down in that hotel room)

june after dark: pitch perfect annie pov, really really love the take that Annie is the baby whisperer, can’t fully explain why but it feels incredibly right

(ANNIE X NANCY COULD WORK SO WELL YOU GUYS)

[cvastals]

look i kno i said i wasnt gna bring a 6th until i was caught up w replies bt i kno gunner well n therefore felt like he deserved his time to shine in the rp so i beg of u pls plot w him looks at u all like :B

* axel auriant, cis man + he/him | you know gunner paxton, right? they’re twenty-two, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, four years? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to bizarre love triangle by new order like, a million times this year, which makes sense ‘cause they’ve got that whole curling up for days in bed wearing a hello kitty comfort shirt, stuttering in the face of affection, and hand me downs two sizes too big thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is july 31st, so they’re a leo, which is unsurprising, all things considered. ( bri, 23, est, they/them )

background.

middle child of the paxton family, cliff being the eldest and wyatt being the youngest :D

they lived at the top of a hill in a trailer in a trailer park neighbourhood in laramie, wyoming so to say the least that fucking sucked for everyone involved

the trailer was so small that all 3 boys ended up sharing a room, gunner and wyatt sharing a bunk bed bc they cldnt fit 3 beds into one room it really was every childs nightmare bt they quickly grew used to it tbh

gunner was always more of an artsy child than invested in sports - though he does enjoy baseball and continued even to this day after their dad made him join SOMETHING in middle school - so he never rly earned their father’s respect, but he was always close with his mom since they had the same calm temperament

(depression/anxiety tw) he also gained a list of mental health issues that their mom had as well, including social anxiety and major depressive disorder

(violence/abuse tw) their father always encouraged pretty volatile behaviour and it caused a lot of physical fights and arguments between the brothers when their dad told them the best way to get over it was to start hurting until someone tapped out, it was just a chaotic and pretty abusive household but no one knew and their mom definitely wasn’t going to say anything about it to their dad

(missing child/kidnapping/anxiety/depression tw)  wyatt went missing on a weekend that their parents were gone because of a trip they won, and things just got worse from there, high school was really rough for gunner, his anxiety grew worse as time went on that no one found wyatt, their dad grew more hostile towards them, cliff left home in the middle of the night never to be seen again (merely leaving a note so that the family didn’t think they had a case of two kidnapped children), and their mom just grew sicker, it was rare that she would ever leave her room and if she did it was in fits of random energy where she would do something spontaneous and completely unnecessary to their house as a way of coping

the two years that gunner was at home after cliff left were pretty brutal and as soon as he could, he was fleeing wyoming and going to school in irving

(internalized homophobia tw)  things are far better now that he’s out of his home situation, but ofc he still has a few personal things he’s working thru; the paxton’s were raised in an incredibly religious household, and he’s got some classic Catholic Guilt going on upon realizing that he’s not jst attracted to women n he avoided talking abt it forever/stayed in the closet fr far too long bt he’s sort of come out now in his own way even tho he does still get a bit nervous talking abt it rly

he’s also ‘dealing’ rn (just pharmaceuticals) which is frankly funny to think abt bc this man is abt as threatening as a care bear bt money is tight all things considering and a librarian job doesn’t rly cover it, and with the amount of meds he’s on, plus incredibly frequent doctor’s visits, needing to pay for extra epi-pens, inhalers, etcs. bills add up so he’s cutting back his meds n selling wht he can spare which is . so unhealthy bt thts life in corporate america baybee!

details.

is literally allergic to everything. grass, cats, most fruits, milk, most nuts, bees, latex, probably more i cnt even keep up w them its pathetic

u can catch him strutting around town w his blinged out epipen holder (aka blinged out w pins of his fav horrors movies) LKSHDGKLHSKLDG

if things cldnt get worse he also has quite intense asthma so he carries an inhaler with him at all times

n to make matters even WORSE he frequently has dizzy spells n bad memory problems bc of all the concussions he’s suffered from (about 8-9 at this point) as well as consistent migraines that can b literally debilitating sometimes

awkward n jst a bit of a Weirdo to b frank like he barely knows how to converse with ppl

didnt have any friends in high school so took the time to teach himself rly weird things, knows a fuck ton of magic tricks, can yodel, juggle, solve a rubix cube with his eyes closed in under 30 seconds, just extremely weird and specific things

can honestly b a bit mean/barbaric to ppl he’s not close w/doesn’t kno - has told ppl to their face before he doesn’t enjoy talking to them bc he has no concept of social constructs/norms

loves 2 film random things at parties, makes him feel more comfortable at them n he makes short films of them all after

going off that fact he did a film internship in nyc during the summer and is trying to find a job in that field

doesn’t realize demisexuality is a thing so he’s never been that fond of sex but has this stigma in his mind that that makes him Broken so he still Tries n it jst doesnt go well tugs my shirt collar

connections.

ppl who r more into under the counter meds than Hard Drugs n buy off him?? probs wld have to kno him some way hes too scared to sell to Random randoms

ppl he went to school w? :D

some friends………. hes awkward bt he means well…………

ppl he has a crush on/unrequited crushes either way wtvr floats ur boat he crushes quite easily but never does anything abt it fr the most part

a mans he wld Risk It All fr (aka a guy tht he actually has a crush on n is Extra Awkward probs a lil mean to bc hes still New to That)

some enemies tbh, he has a temper n he tends to blow up rarely bt it happens n when it does it actually can b quite scary JKSHDGLHSDG

a muse….. mayhaps?? someone he always wants in his film projects

awkward past hook ups/one night stands where one of them cut ties off cuz every time they got together gunner acted like he was embalming a body for a funeral

current hook ups/fwb’s w ppl he’s actually close w/is comfortable w so its nowhere near as bad SDKHSLDGHKLSDGH

Anything u Desire

[jonjordanforrealz]

12 Years Is a Long Time

September 29th is my son Arron’s 11th birthday – a cause for celebrating for sure, and a time for this parent, as most parents do, to ponder aloud, “How in the hell did that go so fast?” For me, sentimental sap that I am, birthdays are always a time for reflection too.

In doing so this morning, I was, of course, reminded that September 29th is also the anniversary of my brother Michael’s passing. A year to the day before Arron came into this world, Mikey left it. 12 years ago today. That’s gone a different kind of so fast itself.

I’ve talked about my brother’s death many times over the years and it never bothers me to do so. Most of the time, it makes me happy just to talk about him at all. To be remembered is to be loved and he certainly is in both instances. But I don’t think I’ve ever really shared much publicly about his last day.

And I need to let it go.

Who knows? Maybe something like this can help somebody.

For 12 years, I’ve carried the weight of that day and never really faced it or dealt with it. And I’m tired. It’s heavy and I’m tired. And to fulfill my final promise to Mikey, actually, I need to get rid of it, once and for all.

Following a lifetime of major medical issues and severe mental and physical handicaps, and doing all he could over the course of his 25 years to beat the odds and somehow conquer and survive one and all, Michael would meet his match in the form of an internal bleeding issue that just couldn’t be solved.

A kid like Mikey, who couldn’t really communicate outside of very basic emotions, had no way of conveying to doctors what anything felt like, where it hurt, how long something had been bothering him, and so on and so forth. So oftentimes, things got worse, sometimes as bad as they possibly could get, before anyone could even get anywhere close to figuring out what the hell was going on. And in his final chapter, this reality first led to him being transported to be treated by specialists in Tampa, and then ultimately, to our family’s greatest test. That we were so conveniently able to face that final decision together thanks to his relocation to my neck of the woods was a stroke of luck that I don’t think anyone appreciated until years later.

Michael’s bleeding issue just wasn’t going away no matter what the doctors tried. Not to cheapen the matter, but I think someone likened it to plugging a hole in a hose with your finger, only to have another open shortly thereafter. At some point, you run out of fingers. And so, we were faced with two choices: An exploratory and very invasive surgery that guaranteed nothing or a nonsurgical Hail Mary that was every bit the final hope. My parents encouraged me to speak freely and honestly in that days-long conversation and as I recall, my opinion never wavered, though of course, I respected and understood their agonizing back-and-forth.

To me, this kid had already been through so much, literally since Day 1. Countless major surgeries and painful procedures that would absolutely hammer (and maybe finish) most “regular” people were the worst of the lot. Other concessions over time – simple things like eating and drinking normally – also took a toll, I’m sure, as every human needs simple joys.

Throughout his last ordeal, there had already been several procedures, and in my eyes, he didn’t need more of that. With the proposed surgery highly likely to kill him anyway, I didn’t see the justification to put him through that sort of torture again. I didn’t want that to be his way to go out. As his closest advocate, because “brothers” means something more that those who don’t have can know, I knew he didn’t want that to be his way to go out either.

Instead, I argued, that through the non-invasive course of treatment, while the odds of that working were stacked heavily against him, this put the ball in his court. This made it so that he could fight, if he wanted to. For a kid who rarely had the chance to call his shot at any time in his life, this was that. “Scrap if you want to, kid,” I thought. “If anyone can beat the odds one more time, it’s you.” And if not, I thought he had that right too. And I wanted to fight for that. This time, I wanted to fight for his right to fight. Or not.

And so, with my parents on board, we gave him his shot, and at first, true to form, the kid was responding positively. Amazed yet unsurprised, we carried on with some hope for the first time in seemingly forever … and then everything just tanked. Quickly.

I’d prepared for this my whole life. And I had thought I had been stepping into this moment already time and time before. But I wasn’t nervous. I felt a sense of urgency, after getting the call, because I wanted to be with him but I wasn’t nervous or scared. Something that always comforted me was a belief that if anyone ever deserved a peaceful end, it would be Mikey. Once we were faced with the grave news, the doctor assured that as they stopped doing whatever they had been doing to treat him, and focused on making him comfortable, that he would indeed get that peaceful transition. And I know in the medical world that nothing is ever guaranteed but I really believed it. I believed in that. It’s all I wanted, then, knowing that there was no winning this last fight.

But it didn’t go down like that. His last day wasn’t, at first, peaceful at all. It was prolonged. And there were gasps and groans. At one point, a seizure. And I was mad. I was so mad.

At the same time, I knew what it was, really. This kid’s will to fight just doesn’t go away. It’s funny because from the very beginning, one of the things he was diagnosed with was some syndrome called Failure to Thrive. Fuck that.

When the worst moments hit, and I watched my brother and my family suffering, I didn’t feel mad anymore. I just felt like I had to do something.

There’s a picture that I have of my brother and I in bed. I was maybe 10 and he, six. We shared a room at that time and when my mom or dad would come in to get us up, if I was being a bum and still laying there and we had somewhere to be, they’d plop Mikey right in my bed next to me. That always got me up. Nothing like an eye poke or swift kick from the kid who “couldn’t control his movements” to start your day – accompanied, of course, by his trademark giggle.

That little shit … It’s still my favorite picture in the world.

In those final moments, I just crawled as far into his hospital bed as I could to lay next to him, just like we did on those mornings as kids, and I whispered to him, “It’s okay. You don’t have to fight anymore. We’re going to be okay.”

You see, I’d often wondered, when I was very young, why he pulled through so many things that most people wouldn’t. After all, I’d always noticed people bitching and moaning about the stupidest things (oh, contemporary America!), wandering around aimlessly in perpetual woe-is-me mode. If anyone should have ever just said, “Screw this!” and checked out, Michael should have. But he had us. And we, him. He pretty much defined us, really, for better or worse. I felt like there was at least a little something in him that told him he needed to stick around for us. And I just wanted him to know that we would be okay if he couldn’t anymore.

Within minutes, things calmed down. His breathing slowed. The stupid machines making noise start doing so more sporadically. And then, before we knew it, it was over. That was it. The end.

I remember lots of hugs and tears and one of many goodbyes to come. And then we said thank you to some staff members – really a symbolic thank you, from me at least, to so many over the years. To people in the medical field, I look at you as I do teachers, and that is in the highest regard, having intimately known both worlds, whether I wanted to or not.

I remember going outside and nobody saying very much.

I remember sitting down at a table.

And then I remember saying, “Well, what do we do now?” I don’t think I ever quite figured out what to do. A purpose I’d always had was now gone.

Of course, in the coming days and weeks, we had plenty to do – plenty of the mind-numbing, gut-wrenching things you have to do to prepare for a loved one’s final arrangements and all that. I took on a lot more of the sort than I ever had at that time because I felt like my parents shouldn’t have to, so I was distracted by productivity. But soon after that, I don’t remember anything. Don’t remember his funeral. Don’t remember leaving my parents and coming back home. Don’t remember going back to work. Sports, friends, events … nothing.

Truly, I think I completely lost a year. I don’t remember a lot at all about the time in between Mikey’s death and Arron’s birth. And then the latter happened and it was like the pause button I’d pushed on life had been pushed again, whether I was ready or not.

And while I was obviously happy to be a dad for the second time, I was also still hurting, which I must have forgotten about too in that year prior. And again, I was mad. I was so mad.

In the years since, that anger lingered, because if you don’t hit something head-on, it doesn’t just go away. Anger leads to hurt, fear, panic, anxiety, a defensive existence, and isolation. I’ve experienced it all and I wouldn’t wish any of it on my worst enemy. I’ve distanced myself, I’ve been checked out and I’ve lashed out, retreated within and pushed people away. It has caused me problems in every element of my life at one time (or more) or another.

None of it is any excuse and it’s a lot for which to apologize over a long period of time but if my suffering has ever caused any sort of suffering for anyone reading this, I am sorry.

(Note: I’m still going to enjoy my space and my distance more than most people but, overall, I can be better!)

I feel like some of this might be a surprise to people because I don’t show it, hardly ever. I’ve gotten good at projecting this version of myself at any time, regardless of what’s really going on. I even manage to have and to be a good time, probably a bit too often influenced by some additives I’ve grown fond of over the years. But there are times when all of that is just masking a wreck. And it has to stop.

I don’t know why I’m shedding this now other than that I need to – because it can’t go on forever. I haven’t come close to being the best version of myself and I have people around me who deserve nothing less than that. What better time than now if I’m finally recognizing that, at times, I haven’t been good? And at my worst, I haven’t even been okay.

And the bottom line is that I promised my little brother, as he left us 12 years ago, that I would be.

I’ll never let go of him. He’s on my arm and in my heart and I hear his voice – especially that laugh! – every single day.

But I’m letting go of that day.

12 years is a long time.

It’s been heavy.

And I’m tired.

And I have to be okay.

[whenihaveyouromione]

When I Have You - Chapter 3

Read on Fanfiction.net or ao3 if you’d prefer!

Feel free to follow this story’s IG account (without spaces): ‘whenihaveyou . romione’

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Chapter 3

An argument broke out the next morning before breakfast, and it was over Ron and Hermione. Molly, who had woken up at four, had decided to distract herself from her thoughts by doing everyone’s washing. She had washed, dried with her wand, folded, and was sneaking into everyone’s rooms while they slept to hand-deliver them a neat pile of clothes. 

An innocent enough task, one she had apparently thought wouldn’t cause any distress. But upon entering Ron’s room, she’d gotten more than she bargained for.

Thankfully, much to Ron’s relief, he and Hermione had actually been sleeping at that time, and everyone was fully clothed (a different story to a few hours earlier), but the sight of her youngest son sharing his bed with another person had been too much for Molly. Her gasp had startled them both awake, which was then followed by Ron swearing at his mother and telling her to get out. The row had woken the rest of the house, which was now taking place in the kitchen, involving the rest of the family as well. 

What should have been the perfect morning for Ron, waking up feeling good about him and Hermione, was now one of misery for everyone. 

“Under my roof!” she bellowed at Ron, who shrunk into his chair despite the intense frustration surging through him at the same time. “Honestly, I thought better of you. Sneaking around, not even bothering to tell me… again… more lies...”

“Mum,” Percy said calmly, sitting a little straighter in his chair and pushing his glasses up his nose. “Mum, Ron is a legal adult and so is Hermione. They are at perfect liberty to —”

“Under my roof!” Molly said, ignoring Percy. “The pair of you… sneaking around...”

“They were just sleeping,” Ginny said, and both Ron and Hermione flushed a horrible red. 

Molly turned to Ginny, her eyes furious. “I suppose you knew about this! Encouraged it, even. Oh, and poor Harry. Where on Earth did he — ” If possible, her eyes narrowed even more. Steam was almost coming out of her ears. “You,” she cried, and Ginny shrunk away as well, turning back to the bench she’d been making her breakfast at. 

“Molly, dear, I think you’re overreacting,” Arthur said. “As Percy pointed out, Ron and Hermione are both of an age where they’re capable of making these decisions for themselves. If they wish for their sleeping arrangements to be… different, then I think —”

“Under my roof!” Molly said for a third time. “Neither you or Percy look surprised by this, Arthur. I suppose you knew of this arrangement our children had made?”

“Well,” Arthur spluttered, “I didn’t know, per se, but I —”

“No one bothered to tell me! How do you think it feels to be the only one to not know when her own son is… when her daughter…”

“Mum,” Ron said, his voice weak, “I said yesterday… you saw… we just thought… it would be too much for the moment.”

“Well, I know now!” Molly cried. “Is that how you wished for it to come out, Ronald?”

“Well, obviously not…”

Molly looked between everyone, having their full, terrified attention. “I am deeply hurt by this,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “From all of you. Even those of you who thought you’d keep it from me, thinking I wouldn’t be happy for my own children, even in this time, to see that they were… happy.” And she stormed from the room, leaving everyone behind her, speechless. 

“Oh, I just feel awful,” Hermione sighed, her shoulders slumping in the chair. 

“Yeah,” Ron mumbled, rubbing her back comfortingly. “In our defence, though, she told me off just yesterday about it being too soon, so I don’t think she would have been happy for us.”

“Ron —”

“No, he’s right, Hermione,” Ginny said. “But… maybe we should have… been a bit more direct about it.”

"We all thought it was for the best," Arthur said, his eyes following where Molly had gone. “I do think it was just the unexpected shock of… finding the two of you…”

Bill appeared in the kitchen suddenly, his clothes covered in soot and Floo powder. "Everything alright? I just saw Mum in —" He stopped, looking at everyone's ashen faces. "What happened?"

"Mum found Hermione in Ron's bed and lost it," Ginny said. 

Bill turned to Ron, eyes wide, and Ron felt himself go red, imagining what his brother was thinking. "We were only sleeping," he mumbled, turning away.

"Yeah, she carried on about being hurt no one told her, saying she would have been happy — though we all know she wouldn't have been — and stormed out," Ginny explained. "Was pretty bad, but at the same time, she has no right to be carrying on as she has about it. We're all adults here."

No one bothered to point out that Ginny wasn't quite an adult just yet. 

"I'll… go and see her then," Bill said. Ron heard him suppress a sigh. 

Everyone moved to busying themselves with breakfast after that, but the room was very quiet. Ron had never felt such guilt before, mixed with a burning anger. He got it, and it was why he'd tried to keep things from his mum for so long. Everyone got it. It seemed no one had anticipated the fall out of when she would find out. And Ron certainly hadn't anticipated her to walk into his room at five in the morning to drop off clothes. Usually, she used magic for that kind of thing. 

Still, he refused to feel guilty for having Hermione there. She was the best thing to happen to him since the end of the war, and he wasn't going to let his mother dictate that small bit of happiness for him. 

Last night had gone better than he'd hoped. The small moment he'd spent with Harry, having his mind off it, believing that it wasn't going to happen that night, had reduced his nerves. And then when he'd seen her and felt that overwhelming love for her, he hadn’t cared  about anything else. 

It had made the moment a whole lot easier, a whole lot more enjoyable, and he'd discovered with much satisfaction that he liked it. 

They may have fumbled their way through it, but that was over with now, and there'd been next to no awkwardness. It had felt right, like she'd always been more special than a friend to him; like he'd always known this was where they'd end up one day. 

Like he'd always loved her. 

He'd never kissed someone so much or loved someone so much in his life. Even now, hours later, he could still feel her lips against his, the way she had felt in his arms, the way she had looked… the way she had whispered his name...

And she had seemed rather happy afterwards as well, so it mustn't have been horrible for her either, which was good to kno. He’d been worried about her expectations and not fulfilling them. 

"You alright?"

"Hm?" Ron looked at her, realising she must have said something and he hadn't heard. 

She looked concerned. "I said, are you alright? You seemed to go somewhere else for a moment."

He smiled, nodding. "I'm alright. I was just thinking about… you.” 

She returned his smile, flushing, but said nothing else on the matter.  

The rest of breakfast went by in a blur. Molly and Bill had not returned, and everyone else ate in silence. Once finished, they hurried away to get themselves ready. They'd taken yesterday off, but today would be another day at the school. 

"I was thinking," Hermione said, coming to sit beside Ron on his bed just as he was putting his shoes on, "that I don't think it's a good idea to rub it in with your mum at the moment. I think we should —"

Ron kissed her, silencing her. He brought his hands to her face, deepening the kiss. She didn't fight him, didn't push him away, but when he looked at her, she seemed to be fighting an internal battle with herself as to whether she should throw herself at him or ask him to stop.

"She can't tell us what to do. I'll… apologise for keeping it from her, but I'm not going to stop being with you because she doesn't like it. I love you too much for that." He kissed her again. "I've wanted this for too long." Another kiss, and he felt her smile against him. "And you're the one bit of happiness in this dark time."

"I just feel so awful," she said. "She was so upset, and can we blame her? I mean, Fred's funeral is in two days…"

Ron let his hands fall into his lap, guilt creeping up on him. "Yeah, I know. I'll talk to her at some point today."

"Do you think maybe I should say something?" Hermione asked.

"Probably not," Ron said. "It's probably best if it's just me."

She nodded. "Are you ready to go?"

"As ready as I ever am to set foot in that castle again." Which was not much. 

She offered a hand, smiling. "In this together, remember?"

He accepted it, squeezing her fingers tightly. "In this together," he repeated.

…

Going back each day to the place where so many people had died was not what anyone wanted to be doing. The memories were so raw in everyone's minds that it couldn't be helped to stop and lose oneself at a place where they had witnessed death. 

Many tears had been shed over the week, yet people kept showing up, day in and day out, almost as if it were their duty to help with the restoration of Hogwarts. 

Students, former and present, staff and Ministry members, attended every day, working tirelessly to move or repair crumbled walls, fix leaking plumbing, or trying to retain the magic that had once filled every nook and cranny. But magic could only do so much, and there was much physical exertion used on top of spells. 

Ron found himself in the Gryffindor common room today, one place that had remained fairly intact throughout the Battle. Stepping into his old dormitory hit him with a wave of emotions he hadn't expected to feel. It had been more than a year since he'd last slept in his bed. Much had changed since then; he'd grown up so much in such a short time. It didn't even feel right being there; like he no longer belonged at Hogwarts at all. The reality of war had taught him more than what any schooling could do.

"Feels weird, doesn't it?" 

Ron spun around."Hi, Neville," he said. 

Neville had been one of the hardest working among them, showing up every day and giving his all to this place. Ron admired his dedication. 

"Almost like this was another time." He came to stand beside Ron, who'd been staring at his four poster bed. "I guess they're someone else's beds now, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess they are," Ron said. He watched the bed for a few more moments before Neville spoke again. 

"We're all about to head to the Great Hall for a break. Are you coming?"

Ron nodded, and without another word, he followed Neville down the staircase and into the common room. 

The portrait hole swung open before they had the chance to leave.

"Mum!" Ron said. "Wh—what are you doing here?" Molly had not been  to the castle once, the place where she had lost a son. No one had asked her to.

"Come to see you, Ronald. If you'd please." Her tone was neutral. 

Ron really didn't wish to have another argument, not in front of Neville, but he couldn't say no to her either. "I'll see you soon, Neville," he said instead. 

Neville nodded and disappeared from the common room, leaving Ron alone with his mother. It was the first time it had just been the two of them in almost two weeks. He shuffled his feet.

"Why don't we sit?" Molly suggested, indicating the armchairs by the fireplace. It had been their favourite spot over the years — Ron, Harry's and Hermione's. 

Ron shuffled over to them and sat down. He stared into the unlit fireplace, wondering just what she was going to say to him. Her stony expression didn't bode well. 

She sat beside him, her eyes boring into him, as if waiting for him to say something. He kept his gaze on the fireplace. Eventually, the silence must have become too much, because she spoke, and her voice was filled with anguish. "Horcruxes?"

Ron winced. He'd had a feeling, a part of him had always known, that Hermione had had nothing to do with his mum’s anger. It had been this; them leaving so abruptly after Bill’s wedding and not telling her where they were going. For going off the map for months, leaving her to worry. All to search for seven Horcruxes, the darkest of Dark magic. 

"All those months!" Molly went on. "All those times I forced myself to check that damned clock to make sure your name hadn't ticked over to 'dead'. Not even a message, a note, anything… Horcruxes, Ron? All three of you? Really?"

Ron sunk low into the armchair, wanting very much to disappear. His mother had a way of making anyone feel small, despite her own small stature. He had no desire to relive those horrendous months spent in a tent, the memories of Voldemort's soul speaking to him, preying on his deepest fears, and how worthless it had made him feel to the point where he couldn't take it anymore. It had been a truly awful time in his life.

“Harry was instructed by Dumbledore to not say anything,” he said weakly after a moment. 

“And yet he told you,” Molly said. 

“That was another instruction from Dumbledore.” Ron sucked in a breath and braved a look in his mother’s direction. Her expression had softened slightly, though he still wouldn’t want to have crossed her. 

“It wasn’t some big camping adventure, Mum. No doubt Bill has told you that I wasn’t exactly the best person during that time. We found them all, we destroyed them, but not before they almost destroyed us. Me. We had to do it. You know that, right? If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here, free of him.”

“Fred would still be alive,” Molly said, her voice barely audible. 

Ron looked away, unable to bear the look in his mother’s eyes. “Maybe. Or maybe we’d all be dead. Maybe he would have won the fight.”

“You were barely of age,” Molly whispered. “Ginny isn’t of age.”

Ron swallowed. He was so uncomfortable. His mother was on the brink of bursting into tears, and he’d have no idea what to do if she did. Usually, someone else was around to comfort her if that happened. His dad. Bill. Someone who was much better at dealing with these sorts of things. 

“It… just shows, I guess…” he said. “The way you’ve raised us all. What you’ve taught us. Never to back down from a fight.”

It had been the wrong thing to say. She burst into a wail of tears, burying her face in her hands. “Oh, Ron,” she sobbed. “Oh, Ron. How could you?”

Ron watched her, completely lost for words. He shifted, contemplating whether to hug her or not. He settled for patting her shoulder. “Sorry,” he mumbled. 

Molly started crying harder. “Sorry? Sorry for what?”

“For… leaving like I did. For not being able to tell you. For… Fred.”

“Sorry for being brave?” Molly wailed. “For doing what is right? Don’t be sorry for that!” And she threw herself into Ron’s arms, hugging him so tight that she almost suffocated him. “I’m so proud of you!”

“Er… thanks.” Ron patted her back. 

“My children,” Molly sobbed. “All true Gryffindors, if I’ve ever seen one. Brave, loyal, and stupidly careless about their own mortality. The Sorting Hat never gets it wrong.”

And there the two of them sat, Molly sobbing into Ron’s shoulder, mumbling words about being proud, about how stupid they all were, but emphasising how she was still 'so proud' of him. Ron could only sit there, allowing her to cry, as uncomfortable as it made him. 

After what felt like forever, Molly finally pulled back, wiping her red eyes. Ron looked away again; he was really bothered by seeing her cry so much. 

“Just no more secrets, Ron,” she said after a while. “I don’t care if you thought you were sparing my feelings; no more secrets. If something — or someone — makes you happy during this time, then I want to know about it.”

Ron nodded, but said nothing. 

Molly started sobbing again. Ron stared at her, wide-eyed. What was it now? 

“You and Hermione,” she sniffed. “How lovely. Such a nice, young woman… so lovely...”

At the same moment, the portrait hole swung open again and Hermione climbed through. Spotting Ron and Molly by the fireplace, her calm expression changed to one of alarm, and it looked as if she’d much rather be out there hunting for Horcruxes again. 

“It’s alright,” Ron said, standing up and going over to her. “Mum’s got it all off her chest now. Everything’s fine.”

Hermione eyed Molly nervously. “Mrs Weasley, I just want to say I’m really —”

“Oh, it’s Molly, dear!” She jumped to her feet and took Hermione into a crushing hug. 

“Alright,” Ron said after a moment. “I think maybe we should, er, go and get something to eat. I don’t think I could lift another boulder — magic or otherwise — without food.”

Molly let go of a startled Hermione, smiling between them. 

Sensing she might start crying again, Ron urged Hermione through the portrait hole and into the corridor, whispering, “She’s a bit sensitive at the moment. Was very uncomfortable.”

But at least one good thing had come from that discussion. As they walked through the corridor, his mum trailing a little behind them, he slipped his hand into Hermione’s. He no longer had to keep his feelings hidden. If he wanted to hold Hermione’s hand, sure as hell no one was going to stop him. 

[platypanthewriter]

Birdwatching for Dummies 1/3

Reality didn’t work as Billy knew it, in Hawkins.  

It wasn’t just that the rich kid whose ass he beat didn’t tell his parents, or that he didn't even seem pissed.  Maybe, Billy thought, the head trauma damaged his memory—when Billy cornered him against his locker, he looked blank, then sloooowly nodded, slapping his fist in his hand like he’d come up with the answer to a difficult Jeopardy question.  The bell rang then, and he pushed Billy away and walked off, waving over his shoulder.

That wasn’t the only weird thing.  There were mass funerals a couple months after they arrived—students, and researchers from the lab, and cops.  Then the lady at Radio Shack burst in tears as she rang up Billy’s batteries, telling him her boss was eaten.  

She then stared into his eyes, laughing too loudly, and tried to cover with some dumbshit story about how he’d ‘—overeaten, actually,’ leaving Billy adding the two incidents together, and wondering whether his dad had picked the one town in Indiana run by cannibals.

 He didn’t spend all his time wondering about Hawkins, obviously—if he was in a horror movie, he’d figure it out eventually—but occasionally something bizarre would happen, and he’d think Hawkins, you fucking ass-end of nowhere bullshit backwater shithole.  One night Max got up from the table in the middle of dinner, and he knew—obviously—she wouldn’t get the shit for it that he would, but then she grabbed a huge pair of binoculars that’d been around her neck, hidden by the table, and stared out at the woods.  

Neil just stared after her, his fork and knife in mid-air.  Susan cleared her throat, hunching her shoulders, and asked, “M-Max, what are you—?”

“Heard there might be a Fulvous Whistling-Duck in the area,” Max said flatly, focusing her binoculars.  They thumped lightly against the window.  “...or a Western Wood-Pewee.”

Billy wondered whether she was possessed.  Or a cannibal.

“I am a birdwatcher, now,” she said, which was honestly weirder, and Billy stared at her along with Susan and his dad.  “...I think it could be a Fulvous Whistling-Duck,” she muttered, in the serious tones she usually used to try and keep her mom from interfering between Billy and his dad.  He’d never heard her sound that vehement about skateboards, let alone birdwatching.

Billy bit his lips, regarding his meatloaf, but waited to see what his dad would do.  Cold meatloaf sounded even worse, he thought, with a stab of annoyance at Max for acting like a freak when it was a pretty okay night otherwise.  Neil leaned back in his chair, and everyone tensed at the creak.

“It’s for school,” Max huffed, craning around, and Susan relaxed a little, with a glance at Neil.  

She smiled nervously at her plate.  “For—for school,” she said, giving a high laugh, like she was a bird herself.  “Birds—birds wouldn’t be considerate of, of dinner, would they?”  She glanced over at Max, then at Neil again, biting her lips together as she shrank a little into her chair.  

“It’s good to see her working diligently,” Neil said, their judge and executioner, and Susan laughed, a breathy sound of relief.  

Max lowered the binoculars and walked back over—then stalked right by the table again on the way into the hall.  Neil’s tableware froze again, nearly lowered to his meatloaf, and Billy swore internally, listening to his step-sister make a goddamn phone call during the dinner her mother had cooked.  

“There’s a Fulvous Whistling-Duck out there,” she told the person on the other end.  “No, a Fulvous Whistling-Duck.  No, a—no—no, a Fulvous Whistling-Duck.  Just come over!  Come now.  No, the—the big one, moron—didn’t you write them down?!  The big one, there is a big one in our woods, and—and smaller—ones—just bring your biggest—goshdarn— ” she hissed,dropping to a whisper, “—binoculars and get your butt over here.”  The phone clunked into its cradle.

“...did you invite your friends over?” Neil asked, when she came back in the room to stare through her binoculars again.  His voice was levelly amused, but Susan flinched, dropping her fork with a clatter, and apologizing through her fingers.  

“Nope,” Max said dryly.  “They’ll stay outside.  We probably won’t even hear ‘em.  They just...want to see the duck.”

“It’s almost dark,” Billy said, finally, since nobody else was going to.  Max ignored him.

“Do—do you need to take a picture?” Susan asked softly, like Neil wouldn’t hear.  “Do you want my camera?”

“No,” Max said, and Susan flinched.  “No, sorry, Mom.  I’m just—just making sure I remember enough detail to mark it on my...bird report.”  She chewed her lip, shifting her feet, and dashed to the window again.  

Billy couldn’t see anything out there.

 Billy cleared the table while Susan did the dishes—the perfect ratio, he’d found, of showing her respect without actually taking over a chore he couldn’t even manage to do properly—while Max hovered at the window, squinting into the darkness.  She never did eat, which was probably healthier, on the whole, than eating the grayish meatloaf.

He went to his room after and cranked the music up as high as he dared, grabbing a Playboy.  When he went to lower the blinds, he saw Steve Harrington’s car in the street, with binoculars pressed against the window.  

Where it was parked between the streetlights, it was hard to be sure, but Billy knew his neighbor’s cheapass cars, and Harrington’s BMW stood out.  Billy waited for Max to head to her room, and grabbed her, dragging her inside to point.  “What the hell is Harrington doing here?!” he hissed, and she yelped so loud they both heard the soft thump of Neil’s recliner in the front room, and the squeak of floorboards as he neared.  

Max shoved Billy back as he yanked his hands away, and then Billy’s dad was in the doorway.  “You putting your hands on her?” he asked, and Max and Billy both said no, shaking their heads.  “...go help your mother,” Neil told her, gently, and she sidled past him, then ran.  

“I was just asking if that was her friend outside,” Billy said as Neil turned to survey his room, his gaze taking in the overflowing ashtrays, empty beer cans, and dirty clothes.  

“When we married,” Neil said, “—I told Susan I’d keep her little girl safe.  Safe and happy.  Do you think she’s happy...Billy?”

Billy backed away until his shoulder hit the sash of the window, and jerked his thumb at it, trying to hold Neil’s gaze, and failing.  “I was asking a goddamn question, that’s all—” 

“Sounded a bit scared, to me,” Neil told him, conversationally.  “You scared a little girl.  Whatever you’re seeing out the window, that justify that kind of behavior?  Billy?”

“No, sir,” Billy said, without meaning to, then, “—she was startled maybe, I didn’t—”

“Why don’t you take a good look,” his dad said next to his ear, pushing him against the window so hard it rattled the glass, “—and tell me what’s out there that’s so...damned... important.”  His hand came up Billy’s spine, cupping the back of his head and shoving him harder, so his cheekbone and jaw ached from pressure against the window.  His breath obscured the glass.  

The stuff Billy wanted to say—that it was stupid, Max pretending she was birdwatching, something else was obviously going on— sat in the back of his throat on a tide of acid, and he swallowed it back, reminding himself that none of that was what his dad wanted to hear.  The window creaked with the force of pressure, and Billy’s forehead ached.

His dad’s fingers dug painfully into the thin skin and bones at the base of his skull, and Billy started to cry with impotent fury like a fucking pussy, even as he remembered, his stomach sinking, that Harrington was out there, and he had binoculars too.  Neil’s nails ground against his skull, it felt like, and the glass creaked like he was about to go through it face first.  With Billy’s eyes full of tears, he couldn’t see whether the binoculars in Harrington’s car were focused on him.  

“Is there anything out there that makes this behavior acceptable?” his dad asked, and Billy couldn’t move to shake his head, so he cleared his throat, sniffling.  

“No, sir,” he whispered. 

“I hope we won’t have to have this talk again,” Neil said, patting his shoulder and walking out, and Billy realized he was just standing there furious and shaking, tears dripping down his face.  He yanked the blinds down.  The bed thumped into the wall as he dropped down against it to sit on the floor, trying to steady himself with deep breaths, and not scream.  

 Steve was still outside the next morning, one leg out the window, folded over his side mirror, the other wedged around the steering wheel.  Billy did his reps at him, flexing his biceps to remind Harrington that even if he had seen Billy bawling like a tiny fucking child, Billy could still feed him his own fists.  

Before Max left, she made her mother promise not to leave the house, not even to hang laundry, with some bogus explanation that the weather had predicted sudden showers of baseball-sized hail.  Billy covered his snort.

Max ran out with smuggled pop-tarts—you could tell Susan smelled ‘em, but she wasn’t gonna say anything—and Harrington disentangled himself, rubbed his face, and gave her a ride to school.

It had a Very Hawkins Episode feel to it, but Billy wasn’t gonna ask again.  

 That afternoon, Harrington was parked outside his house again, but before Billy could stalk out and ask what the everloving fuck, Max brought him inside.  He stood smiling around like a moron, and complimented Susan’s ruffled pillow shams.  Billy’d never thought much about them, but it touched off a whole explanation of how difficult they’d been to sew.

“I’m so glad to meet your friend!” she told Billy, who bristled, and Harrington shook her hand, introducing himself like he was used to infiltrating random people’s houses.

“I’m Steve Harrington,” he said, beaming at her.  “I’m in Billy’s, uh, third period class.”

“He’s here for a project,” said Max, and Billy frowned warily between them.

“Here for that, um,” Steve said, like a genius, and Max glared at him meaningfully.  Steve forged ahead.  “The uh, the...geology...report.  For class.”

“...the geometry test?” Billy offered, unable to take Harrington’s idiocy, whatever else was going on, and Harrington’s eyes widened in alarm as he thought.  

“Oh,” he said, frowning at his bag.  “Yeeessss?”

“You two can study out here until dinner,” said Max heavily, staring at Billy like she was trying to use the Force on him.  

“Will we be in the way, ma’am?” Steve asked Susan, and she smiled back at him, her shoulders relaxing.  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Oh, no, a kid’s job is school,” she told him, smiling.  “Feel free to use the table—” 

At the thought of actually helping Steve Harrington learn Geometry, with witnesses, Billy chose the less infuriating option.  “We’ll be in my room,” he said, stomping off, and Max and Steve both said “But—” as Susan said “I’ll bring you some cookies!”

“...she brings you cookies,” said Steve, following him, and Billy held the door open, rolling his eyes.  “I want some cookies…” he trailed off, his eyes fixed on the padlock on the outside of Billy’s door, and Billy shoved him inside.

“Last family kept a big dog in here,” he lied, and Steve nodded very slowly, like even he wasn’t that stupid.  Billy yanked the door shut and hissed “Why are you here,” as Steve walked over and sat on his bed, bouncing like he was testing it out.  

“Uh, birds,” Steve said, squinting like he was trying to remember, and then getting up to pick through Billy’s records.  

“Birds,” Billy ground out, his teeth clenched.  “You’re gonna watch for birds.  From my bedroom.”

“Uh,” Steve said, frowning back at him, like Billy was the one acting weird.  “Can’t see ‘em from here, that’s why we were setting up in the front room.  This, uh,” he smirked, raising his eyebrows, “—this wasn’t me trying to get in your bedroom, man.”

“Why are you here,” Billy growled, stalking up to him, and Harrington just sat down on the floor, flipping through records like Billy wasn’t standing there, fists clenched.

“Closer to the bathroom,” Steve said, shrugging.  He didn’t even look up.  “Told your sister I had to piss in a bottle last night, so—” he trailed off, his eyes flicking towards the window, and Billy knew he’d seen.  

“Answer the fucking question, Harrington,” he said, bristling, and Steve snorted a laugh.

“Yeah, you’re gonna kick my ass right here, huh?  In your house, while your mom brings us cookies.”

Billy flinched at the thought of what his dad would do if he and Steve Harrington got in a fistfight, and stumbled back.  “She’s not my mom,” he hissed, like he was five, and Harrington raised his eyebrows.

“Cookies!” Susan called, knocking on the door, and he heard her rattling around outside.  Once she got the door open, she smiled like she was fucking proud of Billy, bringing home a clean-cut kid like Steve Harrington to do homework.  Steve brightened at the cookies—and milk, Billy registered, a tray with cookies and milk— with a winning smile, and Susan beamed at them.  She surveyed them and waved, pulling the door shut, and Billy flipped the door off, mystified and annoyed.

Billy felt exhausted, suddenly, and he walked over to sit on his bed.  “...the fuck do you want,” he bit out at Harrington, just as Max clomped in.

“Mom’s phoning Neil to see if she can invite you to dinner,” she told Steve, who looked delighted.  

Billy wondered whether it was meaner to quash his hopes now with the reality of leftover meatloaf, or whether he should wait and watch Steve’s soul be crushed on a voyage of discovery as he bit into thrice-heated rubber tireloaf that night at the table.  He kept his mouth shut, raising his eyebrows at Max, who shrugged, grimacing.  

“Neil keeps trying to make her cook like his mom,” she whispered, pulling the door shut as she stepped in, and Billy resisted the urge to chase all these invaders out with a broom, like the fucking vermin they were.  

“Get the hell out of my room!” he hissed at her, and she ignored him, taking a cookie.  

Steve nodded slowly, picking up empty beer cans.  “Never met a home-cooked meal I didn’t like,” he said cheerfully, and hucked a can at the trash.  “He shoots, he scores!” he stage-whispered, and tossed two more, while Max got through the whole top layer of cookies like goddamn wood chipper.  

“I don’t know what the fuck is happening,” Billy hissed, “—but why is it in my room?!”

“We’re, um, birds—” Steve said, frowning like he was trying to remember his stupid lie, and Max groaned.

“You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” she sighed.

“Yeah, gee, I don’t think you’re really birds at all, goddamn,” Billy snarled.  “I’m going for a smoke, don’t break my shit, Harrington—”

“No, no, no!” they both shouted, scrambling to stand between him and the door, and they looked worried, which was weird as hell.  Billy began to seriously entertain the cannibals theory, and he wondered whether the cannibalism was scheduled.  Whether there were cannibals wandering the woods, and Max had... spotted them somehow.  

What made cannibals distinctive, Billy wondered, when they wandered around in the woods?  Were there cannibal team colors?  He raised his eyebrows as he stuck a cigarette in his mouth.  

“I’ll just go with him,” Steve said, waving Max off.  “It’s fine, I don’t have my bat, anyway, I’ll grab it from my car.”

“Your fucking what,” Billy asked, as Harrington pushed him outside, and Max chewed her lip some more.  Billy waited until they were on the front steps, lit up, and shoved Harrington’s shoulder so hard he staggered.  “You fucking told her.  Didn’t you.”

“Told her what,” Harrington snorted, looking around, until Billy grabbed his shirt and yanked him closer.  

“Told her I was crying like a fucking pussy,” he hissed, blowing smoke in Harrington’s wide brown eyes.  “Bawling my fucking eyes out, Harrington, what in the goddamn fuck do you think I mean—” 

“I didn’t—” Harrington waved the smoke away, rolling his eyes, and grabbed Billy’s arm, hauling him to the curb.  “I didn’t say anything, come on—” he stopped, looking both ways like a little kid, and drug Billy across the street to his car.

“That’s why she’s worried,” Billy told him, half-running behind, “—isn’t it?  She thinks I’m gonna break.”

“...are you?” Harrington asked, blinking at him, but it was the first time he’d stopped and listened, his eyes intent, and Billy just stared back, then took a long drag off his cigarette.  Steve cocked his head.  “What happens then, you just—just go on and beat the shit out’ve somebody?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Billy muttered, watching Harrington pull a bat full of nails out of the back seat.  He wasn’t sure what it would look like, breaking, but it felt like it would be breaking apart, sometimes, like he was fracturing like the old stones in the graveyard, crumbling where the Indiana winter had gotten in their cracks.  He’d kicked one over, once, drunk, and it’d fallen into a pile of gravel.  

Harrington stared past him at the treeline, spinning the bat around his hand, and Billy told his imagination to shut the hell up.  He blew out a cloud of smoke.  “There’s something out there, isn’t there.  Indiana get...bears?”

“Ohhh,” Harrington grinned at him, and grabbed his wrist, hauling him back towards the house.  “That’s closer than I thought you’d get,” he whispered, barely giving Billy time to toss his cigarette before he yanked them both inside.  He pulled Billy against him, so Billy wouldn’t bang his shoulder into the door.

It felt weirdly like being friends.

When they made it into Billy’s bedroom again—Steve hauled him the whole way, trying to hold the fucking nailbat out of sight, but also steering Billy around the hall table, and the doorjamb of his room—Steve let go, and Billy stomped over to stare out the window, waiting for his face to cool off.  It didn’t make sense to go comparing his dad to the King of Hawkins High, even if his dad would’ve maybe yanked him so his thigh banged into the table, and his shoulder hit the door.  

Steve had pushed him around, but like—like a teammate, Billy thought, a little rough, a little protective.  His cheeks heated worse, and he stared out at the Harringtonmobile, remembering Steve’s words about attacking somebody.  Billy bit his lips together, remembering the night he’d chased Max through the entire fucking town and arrived to see perfect Steve Harrington protecting Billy’s sister from him like Billy was a rabid fucking beast.

He snorted softly.

“Anything out there?” Steve asked, and Billy shook his head.  “...there really a test in Geometry?”

“...yep,” Billy said, wishing he still had his cigarette, for something to do with his hands.  “And I’m not helping you study.”

“Fine, asshole,” Steve sighed, and Billy heard his bed springs squeak, and the noise of a zipper.  He spun around to see Steve opening his backpack, and not his pants, and wondered what the hell had been in his cigarette that he’d even think—

“Ooo, Playboy,” Steve said, realizing part of the mess he was sitting on was a magazine.  He flipped it open, and Billy spun back around and leaned his face against the cool glass of the window, wanting to die.  

“Don’t jack off on my bed, Harrington,” he hissed—he didn’t mean to, but his voice came out hoarse.

“Why not, nothing else to do,” Steve said, on his bed.  “Wanna teach me geometry after all?  Nice centerfold.”  The bed creaked again, and Steve grunted with a little moan in the back of his throat.   

Billy spun around, snarling, and Steve burst out laughing, dropping the magazine on his face and rolling onto his side, shaking with giggles.  

“I’m not gonna whip my dick out on your bed, dumbass,” Steve cackled, and Billy growled deep in his throat.  Steve was pink-cheeked with laughter, clutching his ribs.  Every time he opened his eyes to look at Billy, he laughed harder, and Billy put his fists down, swiveling in place to glare out the window again.  His face was as hot as a southern California sidewalk.

“Oooo, mmm,” Steve called.  “Oh baby, look at those jugs,” and Billy spun back around and stomped over to murder him, but when he got there he didn’t know what he wanted to do, and Steve scrambled up and away.  He caught Billy’s arm and yanked him down face-first on the bed.  Billy started to slide off, and Steve shoved him all the way on the bed as Billy tried to figure out what was happening, and then Steve Harrington was sitting on his butt, Billy’s wrists securely in his hands.  “Yeah, we’re not doing the concussion thing again,” Steve said, a little darkly, and Billy tried to keep his breathing even.

“Get off me,” he panted.

“Nope,” Steve said cheerfully, and picked up the magazine, lying it across Billy’s back so he could read it and still hold Billy’s wrists.  Billy squirmed, rocking them around, and Steve snickered.  “You don’t think I’m really gonna let you up, do you?”

“Get off,” Billy hissed, trying to tip Steve over with his hips, and Steve shifted forward to sit on his waist, leaving Billy with a reason to have trouble breathing, at least.  His dick was a bar of hot iron against the bed, and Harrington’s ass cheeks were even softer through his shirt than through his jean pockets.  Steve’s legs were folded against his sides, his muscular thighs pressed against Billy’s ribs, and Billy’s heart thudded in his chest.  

Steve’s fingers lifted from his wrists, flipped a page, and then held him again, warm and a little sweaty.  It felt just like when Billy’d yanked him back up on the basketball court, but that had been fast, and Billy’d let go, and Steve’s hands were just holding him.  He kicked the mattress, groaning into his comforter.  

“I didn’t tell her,” Steve said, suddenly, as he sat on Billy, holding him still while he looked at topless women.  “Max.  I didn’t say anything.”

Billy took a shuddery breath, his face heating more at the thought that Harrington could feel him shake.  He tried to hold his breath, shutting his eyes until his lungs stopped jerking, but Steve leaned forward and brushed the curls off his neck, and Billy let his breath out with a startled wooof.

His scalp tingled as his hair stirred, and he hunched his shoulders, biting his lips together.  He clenched his eyes tighter as Steve combed his fingers up through his hair, tangled from the long day, but Steve stopped every time he hit a snag.  His fingers were firm, but gentle.  “...jesus,” Steve said, slowly.  “He bruised you up pretty good.  Actually made you bleed,” he said, brushing his fingertips over where Neil’s nails had dug in at the base of Billy’s skull.  

“...shut up,” Billy told him, and he could hear the tears in his own voice, thick and soggy-sounding.  His eyes were stinging, and he was almost grateful he had his face in a blanket, because it soaked up the evidence.  He wasn’t even less turned on, he thought with disgust, apparently just as goddamn horny for Steve’s gentle hands as he was for his muscled thighs.  He tried squirming again, just to make it clear he wasn’t into it, and then went perfectly still with a gasp as he nearly came in his pants.

“Sorry,” Steve said, smoothing Billy’s hair back over the marks Neil had left, and Billy nearly laughed aloud, his whole body shaking with tension.  His arm was starting to cramp, and he half desperately needed Steve to leave the room, and half wanted him to stay exactly where he was, forever.  “Oh,” Steve said then, leaning forward again, his muscled thighs pressing into Billy’s sides.

He tugged at the collar of Billy’s shirt, where it was crooked from Steve slamming him face first onto the bed.  “The fuck are you doing,” Billy wheezed, as Steve’s hand smoothed down his spine.  

“Don’t freak out,” Steve said, letting go of Billy’s wrists, and Billy just laid there, without being held down, letting Steve Harrington sit on him and straighten his shirt collar.  

“Not fucking freaking out,” Billy yelled, his voice muffled, and then he full-body shivered as Harrington laid his hands over Billy’s again, holding them to his back.  “Get the hell off, my dad’s gonna—he’s gonna think you’re queer, asshole—”

Steve was quiet for a long moment, and then Billy realized he was shaking with laughter.  “The—this isn’t—” Steve snickered, wheezing, “—he does know this isn’t how sex works, right?!”

“...fuck you,” Billy muttered, catching his sniggers.  They both laughed for way too long, and then Steve rolled off to lie next to him, and Billy scrambled up to sit on the edge of the bed, facing away, and rubbing his arms.  

“That didn’t actually...hurt, right,” Harrington said behind him, and Billy jerked at the sound of his voice.

“No, it didn’t fucking hurt, Harrington.  I’m not delicate.”  He didn’t turn around, though, because his whole body was radiating heat from the soft brush of Steve’s hand over his hands before letting him go.  He was fairly sure if he turned around and saw Steve Harrington in his bed, rumpled from wrestling, his cock would fucking burst through his pants like a Looney Toons characterthrough a wall.  He tried to think of unsexy things, like Looney Toons characters, and he wrinkled his nose at the idea of kissing Sylvester the cat.

Then the springs creaked as Harrington sat up, and Billy remembered why he’d let him go—and why he didn’t seem mad about getting beat up, probably—and wanted to punch him again.  “...fuck you, Harrington,” he said, going for threatening, but coming off tired.

“What’d I do now?” he asked, and Billy wondered, grimacing, what he’d looked like, crying in the fucking window.  

“Shut up,” Billy sighed, then startled as Harrington’s fingers slid up the side of his neck.  

“Your ears are all red,” Steve said, sounding entertained, and that was just— great.

“Fuck you,” Billy spat, smacking his hand away, and turning to glare at the most popular boy in school, currently in his bed.  “Yeah, you know all about me now, huh?!  You know all my shitty secrets, go ahead, tell the fucking world.”

Steve blinked his big, soft brown eyes, looking thoughtful.  For a wild second, Billy wondered whether he even remembered seeing Billy and his dad the night before—whether the King of Hawkins High was even capable of remembering Billy Fucking Hargrove, if even a fistfight hadn’t made an impression.  Steve cocked his head.  “...I’m not gonna...spread rumors about you, jesus.”

“Yeah, you fucking won’t,” Billy hissed.  The idea of King Steve not just...feeding Billy his own teeth at the idea of Billy’s eyes on him was...unlikely.  “Why the hell are you pretending this is all fine,” Billy hissed, glaring, gathering himself to beat Harrington into oblivion.    

“You gonna do something that isn’t?” Steve asked, and Billy took a shaky breath.

“...you already saw what I am,” he laughed, and Steve narrowed his eyes.

“I don’t give a shit what your dad thinks,” he hissed.  “You try to hit me again—”

Billy swung his arm out, just to see, and Steve slammed him into the bed again.  Billy stared up, panting for no reason.  His face was hot.  

“You can want me to hold you down all day, I don’t give a shit,” he said, and Billy choked, coughing.  “I know what I look like,” Steve said, leaning in, and Billy coughed harder, his eyes watering.  “You sure you don’t want me to jack off on your bed?” he whispered in Billy’s ear, and Billy clenched his fingers in his mattress as he recovered his breath, wiping his eyes.  

“...the fuck would you wanna give me a show,” Billy whispered, staring at him, and Steve’s grin widened.  

“I don’t mind an audience,” he said, settling back against Billy’s pillow, and Billy realized it would smell like him that night.  

His cock hadn’t gotten very distracted anyway, hadn’t even made it down to half-mast, and he nearly shut his eyes as it went granite-hard again.  He felt the burn of friction from his cheap cotton underwear.  “What,” he muttered.  “What the fuck.”

“Tell me you got some lotion in this shithole,” Steve said, folding his arm behind his head, and lifting his t-shirt to show a trail of hair leading into his pants, and Billy forgot there was anyone in the world besides him, and the boy on his bed, grinning over.

He turned like a fucking robot and walked over to where all his hair shit was.  He grabbed the Avon bottle Susan had bought—she’d been trying to get the Avon lady to leave her alone—and returned like he was on remote control, to slap the bottle into Steve Harrington’s outstretched hand.  

Steve hummed, opening the magazine back up—they’d scrunched it, rolling around and laughing—and folding his knees up to lean it against.  Billy remembered his door didn’t lock, so he backed away until his shoulder blades thumped into his door.  He slid down to sit against it as Steve fucking Harrington punched his blanket into a pile with his pillow, reclined back against them, and unzipped his jeans.  He shimmied them down around his hips, shoving his skivvies down over his bony hips, and his cock laid half-hard against his stomach.  

Billy swallowed thickly.

“This why you were such a fucking freak in the shower?” Steve asked, and Billy threw an empty beer can at him instinctively, like swatting a fly.  Steve laughed as it bounced off his knee, his abs flexing in the light of the window.  Billy’d seen him in the showers—he’d barely been able to tear his eyes away, but Harrington knowing he was looking and liking it was a whole different feeling.  It had Billy breathless.  Steve was going pink too, across his cheeks and ears.

He braced the magazine open against his knees, squirted some lotion into his hand, and slowly rucked his shirt up under his armpits.  Billy clenched his fingers in his thighs as Steve stopped, and checked his watch.  

“...man up or put your cock away, Harrington,” Billy hissed.

“When’s your dad get home?” Steve asked, and Billy laughed.

“Let a man pick the way he dies, Harrington, jesus.”

Steve looked over, his head cocked.  “We should still have a while, though, right?  Plenty of time.”

“Depends how good you make it,” Billy told him, his cheeks burning ever harder as he pushed, and pushed, and waited for the boy in his bed to back down, and admit he’d been bluffing.  Because Billy was apparently hallucinating, or possibly dead, Steve’s dick hardened visibly at the challenge.  Steve shrugged, his dick bobbing.  “You want my cock to be your last sight on earth, I can make that happen,” he said, flashing a grin Billy’s way.  

Billy bit his lips together, and silently unzipped his fly, letting his eyes flutter shut at the relief of pressure—and then he jerked his head up to watch Steve Harrington.  His head thumped the door, and Steve glanced over, smirking.  

“Shut up and yank your dick,” Billy growled, and Steve laughed, folding his arm behind his head to look at the magazine.  He ran his fingertips over his chest, and down his belly alongside his cock, and Billy threw another empty can at him.  “Just do it, what the fuck, you’re such a slut, Harrington!”

Steve burst out laughing with a full belly laugh, his head tipping back so his hair fanned against the sheets.  Hopefully Susan and Max thought that was just them fighting, Billy thought, listening.  He bit his lips together, hiding whatever sound he’d been about to make, and Steve ran a finger from the base to the tip of his cock.  “Can’t believe you just yelled that,” he snickered, grinning.  

“Can’t believe you’re doing some kind of— striptease in my bedroom,” Billy hissed back, his cheeks flaming as he watched Steve Harrington rub his thumb over the tip of his dick, then lift away a string of fluid.  

“Sometimes you gotta remind people what they’re missing if they, y’know, keep studying, and leave you lonely,” Steve said, staring at the magazine as he finally— finally— slicked up his dick, closing his eyes with a soft groan.  The lotion gleamed on his skin.

Billy had a vision of Nancy Wheeler studying until she looked over and saw this, and the jealousy felt like acid inside him.  He tried to imagine ignoring him, and laughed.  “You been lonely a lot, King Steve?”

“Ha,” Steve said, stroking his cock, and smiling crookedly at the naked woman in the centerfold. 

“Jesus,” Billy whispered, imagining his hand, his mouth on Steve’s dick, stretching around the shiny, blood-darkened skin, and Steve flashed him a grin.  He was flushed all over, sweating as his back arched, and Billy pressed the heel of his hand against his cock, trying not to squirm.

“Faster,” Billy muttered, as Harrington put on a fucking show, smirking the whole time.  At Billy’s voice, his fingers slowed further.  He moaned theatrically, trying not to laugh, as he squirmed in Billy’s bed, trailing his fingers over his balls.   “Christ, Harrington,” Billy said, punched out of him as he watched the muscles working in Steve’s ass and thighs.  

“Patience—patience is a virtue,” Steve panted, sliding both hands over his sweaty abs and then grasping his dick as he grunted, letting his head loll back, his eyes fluttering shut.  Billy didn’t even breathe, his whole being focused on Steve Harrington’s hand on his dick as he came over his thumb and belly, stilling for a long second, then relaxed against Billy’s bed with a soft sigh.  

“Holy shit,” Billy mumbled, his heart pounding probably harder than Harrington’s had been.  He was soaked with sweat.  He pressed his cock again, wishing he’d left his pants zipped—he’d done laundry, at least, so his underwear was stretched around his cock and nearly transparent, like a fucking wet t-shirt contest for cocks, but at least Steve didn’t have to look at his dick.  

He was still sprawled, the breeze from the window stirring his sweaty hair, and Billy tried not to look as he fumbled around and found the paper towels Susan had brought in with the cookies.  

“...gimme some of that milk,” Steve panted, and Billy rolled his eyes and brought it over, not realizing what he would look like, post-orgasmic Steve Harrington, his head tipped back as his throat worked, and a white trickle sliding down his jaw.  Billy dropped the paper towels on him, and then went still again as Harrington finished the milk and rolled the cool glass across his flushed chest.  “I’m not gonna scream, jesus,” Steve said, snorting a laugh.  “I’ve seen cocks before.  You never watch porn with anybody?”

Billy snorted so hard he nearly choked.  “Seems kinda different, Harrington,” he pointed out.  He couldn’t help imagining what Steve wanted, thin shoulders and soft tits, Nancy Wheeler’s, specifically, he was pretty sure, but he was so hard it felt like blood was pounding in his brain.  He sat heavily on the bed and reached in his pants, eyes fixed firmly on the floor, and Steve unfolded his long legs so one was behind him, one across his lap.  

Billy turned to glare at Harrington, and he was propped up on his elbow, offering the lotion, still covered in his own jizz.  He waggled the bottle, raising his eyebrows, and Billy took it, just holding it like a dumbass, because all he could think about was tipping sideways between Steve’s sprawled legs and sucking hickies into his thigh.  

Billy wanted to know what his skin tasted like.  

“Did you short out?” Steve asked, yawning and rubbing his face.  He squirmed, running his hands through his hair, and his whole torso flexed.

Billy squirted lotion in his hand, and they both snickered because it sounded like a series of wet farts.  Steve sighed with satisfaction, sprawling back, and Billy slid his hand in his briefs and yanked at his cock, groaning with relief.  He was in a hurry, unlike Steve, and it only took a few tugs before he was coming all over his jeans and skivvies.  He glanced over to see Harrington watching, his eyes dark and curious.

“...what,” he hissed, and got a crumpled-up paper towel to the head.  

“Clean yourself up before Max walks in,” Steve told him with a wide smirk, and Billy half wanted to punch it off his face, and half wanted to kiss it.  The bed creaked as Steve lifted his hips, yanking his pants back up.  “What the hell did you think I’d told her?  Your dad’s an asshole?  I mean, she knows, right?”

Billy stilled, his heart juddering like he’d worked it too hard watching Harrington.  “What,” he said, buying time.  “...how much did you see,” he gritted out.

“I’m not gonna go tell anybody, jesus,” Steve rolled his eyes.  “I mean, what the fuck are you gonna say then—tell everybody I did my best pinup thing on your bed?  What happens in your bedroom stays in your bedroom, christ.”  His ears were getting redder, even as the rest of him cooled off.

“...what,” Billy asked hoarsely, clearing his throat, “—you don’t do that with all the guys?”

“Ha…” Steve said.  “...not like that.”  He sighed, cocking his head to look at Billy’s back.  “I thought he was gonna put your head through the window,” he said, swinging his leg up and over Billy’s head so he could swing them both over the edge of the bed and sit up.  “I was looking up and down the street for a phone booth to call an ambulance.  I had a rock to throw at the house, distract him, but he left.”

“...he wanted to know what I was looking at.  Why I—I yanked Max in here,” Billy said through gritted teeth, remembering how her skinny arm felt in his hand.  He didn’t think he’d yanked hard.  

Steve cocked his head, watching him.  “...and you didn’t just...tell him?”

“The hell was I gonna say?!” Billy snarled at him.  “There’s a car outside?  I think I recognize it?”

“...sorry for making your life hell,” Steve said, and Billy laughed.

“You didn’t.  He’s gotta keep me in check, right, otherwise I attack people.”

“More...hell.  Hell...er,” Steve pulled his shirt down finally, considering.  “Helly?  Hellier?  I was about to huck a rock at the side of the house and just run when he came out to see what made the noise,” he said, steepling his fingers like it was a cunning plan, and Billy glanced sideways at him.

“...why?” he asked, snorting a dismissive laugh.  “Max said I gave you a goddamn concussion.  The fuck do you care if he makes me look out the window.”  Harrington opened his mouth, and his hand twitched towards Billy, but he didn’t say anything.  “...what the hell are you here for, anyway—” Billy started, remembering why he’d been watching at all.

“No, I think—” Harrington said, at the same time.  “I mean, it still matters, right, you’ve got bruises—”

“He doesn’t treat Max like that,” Billy shot back, feeling a little shaky, like he did whenever he had to look at the truth of himself.  “I’m a bad seed, right—”

Steve looked confused, but then he shook his head.  “M-maybe you are?!  But in school when some of the seeds came out, y’know, weird and crooked, we didn’t hit ‘em, that doesn’t help—”

Billy’s eyes went a little blurry with tears—of laughter, because of how stupid that argument was.  “Did you fucking...grow little pea plants in plastic cups or something?”

“Yeah,” Steve told him, decisively, like he’d won.  Like his dumb pea plant experiment made him the expert on what Billy Hargrove deserved.  He glared over as Billy started snickering.  “Hey,” he said, narrowing his eyes, and Billy laughed harder, kind of unable to stop.  His eyes teared up again, and his hands shook, and Steve’s frown went wide-eyed and uncertain.  

The garage door opened.

Billy snorted, wiping his eyes, and getting up to yank his jizz-covered jeans and tighty-whiteys off.  He yanked some black silk boxers on—the friction against his dick had been no joke—and realized the only clean jeans were his party pants, years old and strained across his ass and thighs.  He squirmed getting them on.

“...dinner and a show, huh?” Steve asked awkwardly, and Billy whipped around to glare at him suspiciously.  

“...shut up, you don’t give a crap about my ass,” Billy snorted, and Steve folded his arms, quirking his mouth.  His cheeks had gone pink again, and Billy stopped like he’d been turned to stone midmotion.  “...holy shit,” he whispered, but then the door from the garage into the house closed, and he listened for his dad’s voice, or nearing footsteps.  

“He’ll want dinner,” he said, nearly under his breath as he listened to his dad ask Max whether she was still birdwatching.

“...you have to talk nice to plants,” Steve said, like a moron.  “Some of them like music.”

“I’m not a plant,” Billy hissed back, but he couldn’t help a huff of laughter at the idea of him in a little plastic cup, with Steve Harrington playing him Def Leppard and spritzing his head.

Steve grinned at him.  “Dinner time?”

“Yeah,” Billy sighed.  He was setting his shoulders to leave his room when Steve threw his arm around them, and hauled them both out Billy’s door.  He pulled Billy close against his side, so Billy’s shoulder didn’t hit the edge of the doorway, then again when they passed the table in the hall, and Billy tried not to lean into him too much.

Part Two

[courtneystriker]

My Thoughts on the HG Prequel

I just finished reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and I got to say, my feelings are mixed. Below I have an entire review  for the story which included how I felt, the expectations, the biases I had going into the new book, and how I felt after reading. Please note there will be spoilers. Also this review isn’t meant to hurt anyone and if you absolutely love the book so far...good! Enjoy it fully! As an aspiring writer myself and someone who studied in college/loves creative writing I’m well aware that people just have different takes on writing. Glad you are enjoying it :)

Anyways, here it goes…

The Expectations

As the Hunger Games series is one of my favorites of all time, I had a strong bias to like this book. Since it was first announced, without knowing any details, I was extremely excited and optimistic. I re-read the entire Hunger Games series twice beforehand in preparation; once with my fiancé and once on my own. The only thing I really wanted, knowing that it took place during the tenth hunger games, was that the arena reflected how new the hunger games were. Then, when we learned what the series was about, people started voicing some concerns or were disappointed by the plot, instead wanting it to be something like Finnick’s arena, Haymitch’s, Mags’, etc. etc. I was not among this group. However, I understand where they were coming from, because I always thought the idea of the first Quarter Quell (the one where the districts voted for the tributes) was an extremely interesting concept. 

Yet I think these things are best left explored in fanfiction as they add nothing to the series and Suzanne Collins did an excellent job just giving us enough information to get the idea. At that point it’d just be a book on details, which could fall short or be a gimmicky, cheap way to keep people reading the series and keep her name relevant. And wasn’t that part of the message in her series, the thing Katniss so heavily criticized that gave a great irony to the books? Who would watch children killing each other for entertainment? Meanwhile, we as the reader are reading these books as a form of entertainment. Plus, Suzanne Collins so skillfully painted the illusion of knowing but not fully knowing their stories that it’s haunting, and I think that is one of the many reasons (along with the battle royale trope being naturally compelling, liking the characters, etc.) that a lot of us are more drawn towards these stories rather than (at least for me)  a book on Snow. 

That being said, I was not against the idea of a book on Snow because I find villain characters, especially grey ones, to be very interesting to read about, and I was pretty certain Suzanne was going to handle this beautifully, especially since you could already feel this atmosphere coming off of Snow in the Hunger Games series. I know some were really concerned about a Snow redemption arc, but to me it felt very obvious that it couldn’t be and it would be more of him sliding into evil.

I did have other concerns when I read the description for the first time. I could not believe they went with the whole tribute from District Twelve thing again. I loved Katniss and District Twelve, but I did not want Katniss 2.0. I said right from the beginning to my fiancé that she’d have to make the tribute from District Twelve extremely different for me to get on board (though I was holding on faith that Collins would). It just felt cheap and gimmicky to rehash the District Twelve thing, it sort of made me feel the same way I would have if she had written about one of the games I mentioned above. Sure, it’d sell, but it wouldn’t add anything to the series. I was thinking she better not hunt, sing, or have any qualities resembling Katniss really.  

Another thing I worried about was the love story they hinted at in the description. It just didn’t make sense to me. Because how was Snow going to ever support the games if from an earlier age he fell in love with a tribute and vowed to protect her? Then later he’s all like pro-hunger games? Just this itself could weaken the entire series if done poorly, because it would weaken the main antagonist’s motives for not only the prequel but also the Hunger Games series as well. I kept thinking either the girl has to die in the arena betraying Snow somehow (which is what I was hoping for), Snow will have to betray her, or perhaps he would have been faking love for her for some sort of personal gain I couldn’t imagine. Either way, I thought it weakened the story's appeal to me. Yet overall I was still excited, desperately waiting for the book’s release. 

And now that I have read it, I have to say it felt forced at a lot of parts and lackluster overall…

*Spoilers start here*

My Review:

Suszanne Collins’ writing style is one I’ve always loved and has consistently appealed to me. Even though this book is written in 3rd person (which some may like less if you don’t particularly like third person) it holds up well against the original series. So I really had no complaints in this regard besides the excessive use of songs (felt like fanfiction a bit). I think if you liked the original series and don’t mind third person you’ll feel right at home with her style.

The concerns others had about Snow’s redemption are completely dismissed in this book. Like I had predicted, she writes about his fall into evil, and although it’s not black and white evil (as I don’t like anyways) you can very much tell he’s a bad guy and that the hardships he faced in life only further pushed him towards obtaining status and power. Overall, he feels true to the character when we end up seeing him in the Hunger Games series, and his journey to power fits the images Finnick painted in Mockingjay. He is very well characterized in the book and perfectly unlikable while maintaining an intriguing internal dialogue (although it does occasionally feel tedious, but not enough to bother me; others may feel differently).

 The way he is written is very much in line with Collin’s great characterization, one of the reasons I always loved The Hunger Games. All the characters felt like real people. They all had an extreme depth to them and I felt they all resembled people I had actually met in real life. There were little to no characters that relied solely on gimmicky personalities to get by. Even very minor characters that seemed depthless and swallow at first--like Katniss’s prep team--had more to them. So I thought going into this book I had nothing to worry about in that regard. I didn’t even really spare it a thought, but boy was I wrong. 

I think Snow and Lucy Grey were the only characters that had (at least partly) the depth that the original Hunger Games cast had. I’ll discuss Lucy Grey later but first let me talk about some side characters. Where to even begin really? There’s a LOT of characters in this book. Frankly, way too many, which I think contributes heavily to the lack of depth in the characters. Honestly there’s so many that the names of characters were hard to keep track of while listening to the audiobook (my hard copy of the book was still in the mail and I didn’t want to wait). Things got a bit clustered in my mind quickly. There were twenty-four tributes, twenty-four mentors,  Snow’s family, The Dean and Drs at the university, Snow’s Peacekeeper crew, and the Covey, and those are just the groups that I can cluster together. At least, the ones I remember having names and getting introduced, but I think that’s everyone really important. There was no real time to develop or get to know them really, which made the tributes’ deaths more meaningless as I could barely recall their names. It caused impactful scenes to weaken significantly overall and it made characters serve only to characterize and amplify Snow’s fall into evil. 

Here’s what I mean by that. The head Gamemaker, Dr. Gaul, really was the character I hated the most while reading this. She was just evil without reason (one of the weakest villain types with little to no personality besides being evil). She even made creepy rhymes as if she was in some sort of horror movie, and the entire point of her character was to contribute a lot to some of the forced plot points driving Snow’s moral decline. For example, there were all her tests, which seemed contrived and all directly connected to getting Snow to think the Hunger Games was a good idea. She was seemingly supposed to be a Dr. Mengele type character, as this book has a lot of Holocaust-esqe imagery. I’m fine with irredeemably evil villains, but instead of getting the depth that a Dr. Mengele character could offer (as some may know, many children that were part of his experiments actually said he was kind and gave them candy, and I find that deeply haunting to this day.) She is a flat, one-dimensional character whose entire personality could be described with one word: sociopath. Evil people are master manipulators, which is how they get away with evil things. I think at one of the funerals she puts on a good public face, and she seems to have power, money and influence. Yet the book doesn’t show this seemingly present quality nearly enough to make her a haunting character. Instead we get nursery rhythms and clearly driven lessons towards evil at are contrived. Like “Write about what you most liked about the war” or the assignment to improve the hunger games? Like what class is this? Why are they taking it? And why are the young kids of the influential deciding this instead of the influential people themselves?

Another character I feel was just there for Snow’s development and to represent an opposite viewpoint but lacked Collin’s usual depth is Sejanus Plinth. As a District 2 citizen whose family got rich off the war and moved to the Capitol, he is the main opposing viewpoint of the book, presenting Snow with a chance to do the right thing. I’ve seen people say he’s a Peeta-like character, but I completely reject that idea. He lacks in the charm Peeta has, relishes in self-pity (although he’s completely justified in his sadness and has a right to be upset), and while he has a heart like Peeta, he ultimately doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of working within his position to get influence like Peeta so masterfully does, he’s hot-headed and continuously makes poor decisions that ultimately don’t help anyone. It’s like he wants to help but doesn’t know how as he’s driven completely by emotion without reason. He too contributes to some forced scenes, particularly my least favorite in the book; when they sneak into the arena. Overall, he just falls flat for me. Again, I feel I don’t know anything about him beyond what he contributes to Snow’s story line and he doesn’t come across as realistic. It’s like Collins just wrote how someone would normally react to the hunger games, slapped a district number on him and went on her merry way. 

I just wasn’t prepared for these sort of characters when the Hunger Games series made even the smallest of characters stand out dramatically. I feel neutral to annoyed by most characters in this novel. I could expand this portion, and maybe if people inquire I’ll elaborate on some of the other characters as I have strong opinions on them, but this post is already getting long, so I’ll move on to Lucy Grey.

Lucy Grey is by far my favorite character even though she is bordering towards being a character from a fanfiction. Not quite a Mary Sue in my opinion but there is a certain connection to fanfiction I made with her. You may have guessed some issues I had with her by reading my expectations earlier in the post, but that has not displaced my love for her. Her personality is very different from Katniss’s, or even Peeta’s or Haymitch’s. She had a different type of charm than all of them, is a natural performer, and seemed more extroverted. Also, the whole idea of the Covey and her “not really” being district was intriguing. It really highlighted the displacement that war can cause and how people can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Although I was confused on how much mobility between the districts there were….and did District Twelve have a fence or no?) It really emphasizes one of the main themes of the book, extreme prejudice against both Capitol and District. Her spot sort of in between really drives home the point that there's literally no difference except extreme poverty, and even then there was poverty in the Capitol, only better hidden. Her bright mood (and clothes), her poised attitude, and her optimism made her endearing. She was confident in her skin yet still held the fear of a sixteen year old going into the hunger games.

There were only two main things that bothered me about her, which was of course the direct connections made to Katniss (which I’ll elaborate on) and the forced “love” story between her and Snow. I suppose that has less to do with her and rather more to do with my dislike of that subplot. And I'm a sucker for some good romantic subplots, but yikes!

I think having one strong connection to Katniss was all that was really needed in this book. I really liked the idea of that connection being the Hanging Tree Song, as I can only imagine how it made Snow feel watching “The Mockingjay” sing it in the propo. Despite me not liking that fact that Lucy Grey is also an enchanting singer as that felt like directly stepping in Katniss’s territory, I did enjoy the little twist of Lucy Grey writing the song. Yet the connections between the two when the plot took us to District Twelve went too far. It felt like it took away all of Katniss’s special places and things. The lake, her katniss roots, her gift towards music, her fondness for the meadow, sneaking into the woods, etc. I think one solid connection would have solidified their bond beautifully. Having so many seemed like it was really trying to force the reader to make the connection when it was already painfully clear I guess? Plus, having Lucy stand out at her reaping ( the whole song part read like a bad, contrived fanfiction bit to me) and having people care about her in the Capitol while moral questions of the hunger games were still surfacing made me start to think...isn’t this how the rebellion for Katniss got started? At least partly. I get it’s a different time. Too close to the war. It just felt way too similar. I guess Collins was going for the idea of a lost rebellion that in a way Lucy Grey started that Katniss later revives. Yet it feels like that invalidates the specialness of what Katniss does in the original series as it’s already happened; it just got erased. I guess history repeats itself, but I really just didn’t like it. I could see the appeal to some extent, and it could be a beautiful connection, but it just wasn’t for me.

Now on to the plot, which is the last thing I’ll talk about as this post is getting ridiculously long. A lot of the plot felt very forced or contrived, which was another shocker coming from Collins because her pacing and plot was done really well in the original series. Of course, a lot of this was driven by Dr. Gaul and Sejanus Plinth as the entire plot hinged on the moral debate of the hunger games these two represent. Other plot points just hinged on what happened to establish the games. I mean the rebel bomb explosion seemingly only happened to change the terrain so Dr. Gaul can then bring up the idea of the different arena and how that made the tributes act differently, thus creating the crazy arenas we see later in the series. I do have some praise for how Collins established the disparities between the earlier hunger games and the ones we see in Katniss day. From the way they lock the tributes up, don’t feed them, the spotty coverage of the arena, etc. All of that was exceptionally well done. The only complaint I have was that so many tributes died before they even got to the arena (though not because I wanted to see them fight). I had been expecting one to escape or something to further establish that this was new territory and was waiting to see how they handled it in earlier times, but I wasn’t expecting that many to die before the arena got started. It just seemed like a huge Capitol failure that they advertised loudly. I really wasn’t expecting that level of incompetence, just an escaped tribute that threatened to embarrass or harm the fragile beginnings of post-war Panem. Instead, most of the pre-arena stuff felt disastrous. A lot of the mentors' deaths felt forced, and it was weird that the academy never really came under fire at all from all the rich and powerful parents whose children were getting killed because of the mentor experiment. Like it seemed there should have been some interaction there, but there wasn’t. Maybe some was passively mentioned but still, it could have been a whole subplot that further established the debate of the hunger games.

While the pre-arena up to the break-in to the arena felt like the most forced part of the book and certainly I felt it needed more workshopping plot wise, it also harbored some great and powerful scenes, like Arachne pulling the sandwich away from the tribute while she was starving and laughing about it. Basically, all those interactions of poverty and captivity meeting the citizens of the Capitol were done well, but nothing spectacular (unlike the scene of Katniss screaming at Buttercup at the end of Mockingjay which is heart wrenching.)

The last plot point I’ll talk about is the “love” story. I wasn’t a fan, but it was sort of what a lot of the plot hinged on and led to the great scene at the lake between Snow and Lucy Grey. How easy it was for him to betray his “love” for status. This led to some of the most interesting and evil internal monologue Snow had in the entire book. I honestly feel the ending scene, the interaction Snow had with the jabberjays and Mockingjays in District Twelve, and the lynching scenes were among the strongest and most memorable.

The love story again felt forced (sorry I’m using that word so much it’s just so accurate) into the story. This hindered the book from having a strong plot in the same way the weaker characters caused forced interactions and plot points to move things along. Yet at the same time the kind of abusive and lackluster nature of their relationship throughout the book fit perfectly with the ending. Unfortunately, it didn’t really make it very compelling for the reader. Luckily Lucy’s  personality kept my interested during these parts. I wouldn’t say their relationship was poorly written at all; in fact the way it was written makes perfect sense. I just think the plot relied too heavily on their “love”, which was gross because of the way Snow is, and the reader knew it had to inevitably end in some kind of betrayal or reveal that there was no love at all. This creates tension for the reader, but I kept wondering: if the love plot had been ditched could we have gotten a stronger plot altogether?

So overall, like I’ve said I’m really conflicted. I know I focused heavily on things I didn’t like, but honestly the book was well written in some regards, plot bouncing between really compelling and a little contrived, the two main characters being written well enough but other characters not so much. Some connections between Lucy Grey and Katniss made at the end were powerful, I loved the Covey, Collins still excelled at writing a lot of the social issues/scenes in the book, and honestly the idea of Lucy Grey being completely forgotten in the Districts that hurts my soul a little. Nothing compared to the feelings I got in any of the Hunger Games books but there’s still something there.

I really hope someone made it through this long ass post. The book was entertaining. I mean I listened to all 16 hours of the audiobook in like a day. I can’t wait until my hardcover comes so I can look through it. Maybe once I know what I’m getting into I can enjoy the book a little more than I did, because right now it’s sitting at very average for me. Maybe I went in with my expectations too high? I certainly like the Hunger Games a lot more and probably always will. Honestly, I love new content, but I’m also the type that likes firm, planned endings to stories (even though it hurts to let things end and the fandoms can suffer from lack of content). I think fans can oftentimes get caught up in what they want and pressure the writer into writing more, which ends up a disappointment since it wasn’t originally planned in the series from the beginning. While I don’t think this is by any means the case with Suzanna Collins or that Lionsgate even pressured her to write this book (I don’t like conspiracies of that sort of thing as a writer myself that plans to have a series in which a book comes out many years after the original part of the series is released), I do wonder if this is the end of the Hunger Games for good. I sure hope so, especially if she would be writing about the other victors. I love them too much and really don’t want to feel similarly about their books, and like I said at the beginning, it wouldn’t add to the series just to my guilty pleasure lol.

Hope you all have enjoyed your reading of the book more than I did :) Again sorry if I wrote anything to upset you! Please if you loved this book ENJOY IT! I’m actually kind of jealous if you did. Feels like missing out on something special.

[angst-fairygodmother]

Tinsel: All Aglow (A Light Fingers Christmas Special 2/2)

Read Chapter 1 here: First Christmas A/N: We go from happy Christmas fluff to angsty sort of plot relevant stuff. But still kind of soft? Word Count: 2314 Content Warnings: discussion of childhood poverty, social workers, implied/referenced child abuse and neglect (past), references to drugs Cross-posted to AO3: here

“Hey, Y/N,” Klaus asked after the others had left, having stuck around to help with clean up the party and have the chance to get to know you better. “You look really familiar. Have we met before?”

“What?” you asked, frowning in confusion, at the same time Diego did with a seemingly affronted tone, one you knew was a cover for his insecurity at being reminded of your colorful acquaintances.

“Yeah. Yeah, I definitely do. I’d recognize that adorable face anywhere. It’s the eyes I think…I just can’t figure out where from…”

You grimaced. You could think of a lot of places a junkie might know you from: pawn shops, back alleys, sketchy clubs, your fence’s house, to name just a few. Luckily Eudora was long gone, so reference to your illegal activities wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if it came up, but honestly you didn’t want to be reminded of them tonight of all nights, not after the evening had gone so well up until now. 

“The mausoleum!” he suddenly shouted with a snap of his fingers.

“What?” Diego asked with real confusion now. 

Klaus turned excitedly to Diego. “Remember, I swore you and Ben to secrecy because Dad would have been so pissed? The girl, the one that glowed and kept me company when Dad locked me up, and helped hold the ghosts at bay?”

“I always thought you were making that up. Or that it was a friendly ghost that made the others back off somehow. I never…You’re telling me it was Y/N?”

He turned back to you for confirmation. You studied Klaus, the pinch of your eyebrows as you concentrated creating that cute little furrow that was of Diego’s favorite quirks of yours. 

“Oh!” you cried suddenly, remembering. 

You had snuck into one of the creepy old buildings in the graveyard near your family’s home to hide from the woman discussing “removal.” You were just making yourself comfortable in one of the cubbies, meant for coffins and just tall enough to sit in, when the doors were thrown wide and a boy about your age had stumbled in. 

“Three hours,” a voice which later haunted your nightmares had barked. “Maybe by then you will have learned that death is to be controlled, not feared.”

The boy was crying. You felt terrible. So you made yourself glow, though it was hard without much to draw from, and poked your head out of your hiding spot. He screamed and started crying more. It took quite a bit to calm him down and explain that you weren’t a ghost or a monster, and then he’d explained that he could see ghosts but they terrified him and his father was unhappy with him because of it. 

“Your dad is a bully, and when he comes back, I’ll kick him,” you offered your new friend. 

While he hadn’t accepted that offer, he had the one to come back again in case he was ever thrown in there again, and to shed a little light while he was there (even though it made you feel sleepy and sick to keep it up for so long. It wasn’t like your new friend needed to know that, and he needed your power more than enough to make it worthwhile). 

It was no surprise, really, that you hadn’t recognized Klaus. He looked extremely different from his childhood self. It wasn’t a bad look by any means, but it certainly wasn’t the round-cheeked, freckle-faced and crying boy you had known. And it had been so long ago, a friendship that had ended when you were about seven, after one incident where you'd nearly been caught and he had been more scared of what his father might do to you than he was of the dark and the ghosts. He had insisted that he never wanted to see you again, and not knowing yet how to fight for the things that mattered, you had let him push you away.  

“Huh,” you finally said, acknowledging the accusation. “Small world.”

“You knew Klaus? Why didn’t you say anything?” Diego asked, unable to keep the hurt from his voice. 

“To be honest, I didn’t realize...I sort of forgot,” you said, hoping to brush the whole thing aside. “I try not to think about...roughly ages four to nine. It wasn’t a good time to be me.”

Diego raised an eyebrow and you knew he wouldn’t let it go, so you sighed.

“Look. It was after Dad died. Mom wasn’t doing well emotionally, and money was tight. Apparently when your kids constantly show up to school with no breakfast in them and no lunch, and their jeans are held together with strips of duct tape because a roll of that is cheaper than trying to get new clothes, it raises questions about parental fitness. There were a lot of social workers in and out of my life, and I spent a lot of time running away. Can we not talk about this on Christmas?” you asked quickly, your voice tight, before turning to Diego’s brother. “Where are you staying tonight Klaus? Our couch is available if you don’t already have a place.”

“I’d love to crash at yours, if my brother doesn’t mind,” Klaus said, offering you a hesitant smile. 

“He doesn’t,” you replied determinedly, and both brothers glanced at each other over your head, a silent conversation about your sudden terseness and the ways they might be able to help. 

~

Later that night, the three of you sat around the apartment, earlier tension forgotten. Your back rested against Diego's shins from your seat on the floor, head falling on his knees as you threw it back in laughter from some story Klaus was telling about when they were children and he and Diego had started some sort of prank war with Ben (secretly supported by Five or Vanya or maybe both, Diego had said he suspected). It made you happy to hear about the good times, that they had still found ways to be children despite their harsh upbringing. 

“The way he stuck to the honey in his mattress was so worth having mine taken away for a month,” Klaus concluded, laughing and oblivious to the horror widening your eyes. 

Diego’s fingers combed unconsciously through your hair, massaging your scalp. You started to feel calmer with each pass, matching your breathing to his movements. The physical contact grounded you, reminding you that, despite everything, you had both made it through and made it here. 

“It couldn’t have all been like that though...right?” you asked hesitantly. “There must have been just average days where you got to be normal kids?”

“We were allowed to have fun on Saturdays,” Diego was quick to assure you.

“For a whole half hour!” Klaus chimed in, still laughing, false cheerfulness radiating a sharp sting of bitterness. “And on special occasions, Mom made chocolate chip pancakes.” He paused, seeming to listen to something. “Yeah. I think Ben’s funeral was the last time we had any.”

“Oh.” 

You sighed, leaning as far into Diego as possible, as if he could give you strength, or you could give him back the peace he had been robbed of pretty much from birth.

“I used to envy you, growing up,” you admitted. “I thought if I had been adopted things would have been better. But really I just wouldn’t have known how bad they were. There really wasn’t a not shitty end of the deal, was there?”

Silence fell over the three of you, uncomfortable and awkward. 

“It’s okay though,” Klaus said eventually, shifting nervously and picking at his nails. “We survived it, figured out to be functioning - semi-functioning - adults. And never have to go back.”

“Right,” Diego said and you felt his body shift as he nodded at his brother. “It’s just a thing in our pasts. Everyone’s got...stuff.”

“Yeah,” you mumbled. “I guess.”

“Hey is there any of that roast left? I’m starving,” Klaus said, standing to climb over the back of the couch and wander toward the kitchen. 

You stared after him, unsure if he was serious or just trying to lighten the mood. When you shifted your gaze to Diego questioningly, he just shrugged.

“It should be in the container with the blue lid,” he told Klaus, waving vaguely at the fridge.

~

The three of you talked (one might even have dared to call it bonded) long into the night. It was past midnight when Diego finally bowed out, practically asleep on the couch already before he stumbled off to bed. You took his spot, sitting cross-legged and facing Klaus at the other end of the couch, and the pair of you continued to talk for at least another hour.

“Y/N, you should sleep,” Klaus eventually suggested. “You look exhausted, and it’s no surprise, with everything you did today, and putting up with my brother all the time to boot.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” you sighed. “I’ll go grab you some stuff to sleep and be right back.”

Quietly you slipped past the screen into the darkened bedroom area and frowned, scolding yourself internally for not doing this before Diego was in bed. He was a light sleeper and got so little of it on a regular basis, and though you could adjust the light to not wake him, it was an imperfect solution. Trying not to disturb your sleeping husband (the word still felt weird and wonderful to wrap your head around and you couldn’t help but smile), you lit your hand with a faint glow and dug through the bins beneath your bed to find your spare bedding. 

“You really don't have to worry about it, Y/N,” Klaus whispered, having followed you to the doorway, trying to wave off your efforts. “The couch alone is better than I've had lately. I can just use my coat as a blanket.”

“Absolutely not,” you hissed back determinedly. “You are a guest in my home. I want you to be comfortable, not just 'good enough.'”

He opened his mouth to protest and you held up a finger warningly. 

“Klaus, be smarter than Diego, and know that you can’t argue with me and win. Especially not over something as simple as me finding the spare bedding.”

His mouth shut with a dramatic popping sound that made you tense as Diego stirred in the bed.

“Go wait in the living room before you wake him up,” you asked, “please? He’s tired enough as it is most days.”

You felt more than saw Klaus’s eyes as he studied you for a moment before nodding and, shockingly, doing as he was told. A few minutes later, you emerged once more, handing Klaus a pile of bedding. 

“Blanket, light sheet, pillow,” you said, patting the pile. “I can grab another blanket if you need, if this won’t be warm enough. I have like a hundred of them.”

“No, this will be fine,” he said sincerely. “I sleep warm anyway. I think it’s the nightmares. Or the drugs.”

“Riiight. Are you sure you’re good? You don’t need anything else? Glass of water? More food? Cup of tea?”

He laughed, reaching out to rest his hands on your shoulders. “Relax, Y/N. I appreciate it, but I’m fine. If I need a drink, I’ll raid the kitchen later. I have everything I need. More than I deserve.”

“That’s not--” he put a finger to your lips dramatically, stopping you short as you squinted in confusion at him, going cross-eyed to try and look at the offending digit.

“Don’t try to argue it. It’s a lifetime of a feeling. But I appreciate you trying. And everything you’ve done, then and now.”

You cocked your head softly. “You know, that offer to kick your father remains on the table.”

He grinned.

“But maybe we should table that discussion for tomorrow, it’s getting late. I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Actually, I’ll be gone then,” Klaus said in a tone clearly meant to be reassuring. “Before you wake up, if my brother’s smart enough to take a day off or learn that there’s no reason in general to get up with the crack of dawn. Especially with a beautiful woman in his bed.” He shot you an exaggerated wink.

You rolled your eyes fondly. “You don’t have to, Klaus. You can stay for a while. Days, weeks, whatever.”

“You’re sweet. But you don’t really want me around.”

“Of course I do,” you insisted, frowning at how casually he said such a thing. “We do. You’re family.”

“I don’t think anyone with the last name of Hargreeves really knows what that means.”

“Actually, I took your brother’s name when we got married so…” you shrugged.

Klaus laughed and you smiled. 

“I’m serious though,” you pushed. “Diego will never admit it because he’s stubborn and dumb, but he cares about you, and worries. And I think he misses you.”

Suddenly, Klaus’s long arms were wrapped around you, hugging you fiercely. There were tears in his voice when he next spoke. 

“Thank you, Y/N. That means...a lot. And hey, take care of him, will you? He’s gonna get himself killed otherwise.”

“Of course I will, Klaus,” you said, hugging him back. “I do kinda love him.”

The pair of you pulled away to share a smile, and somewhere deep inside, you felt the stirrings of your ancient friendship awakening from hibernation. After a moment, you shook yourself.

“Anyway, I’ll let you get some sleep. And if you happen to stick around, I’ll make pancakes in the morning. See if I can’t scrounge up some chocolate chips?”

“You drive a hard bargain, Y/N. I’ll think about it.”

You chuckled, before flicking off most (leaving the one above the sink to help ease his fear of the dark) of the lights. “Goodnight, Klaus.”

[kohakhearts]

hello I'm here for more ☕ can I hear about your oldest oc(s) vs the newest? I don't have anything in particular in mind just go off bro

send me a ☕️ + a topic and i'll give you my opinion on it!

ahsjdfhj sure! there is Plenty to unpack here and tbh it's more self-reflection than opinon but i guess those are?? kinda the same thing? lol. anyway! lets compare some kids. i'm putting this under a cut bc i got musing so hard it got really long jfkjgk

so my oldest ocs are the lm crew, but the osa cast isn't too far behind them. mai and nerissa are very, very similar characters, though! they both have death motifs which is a little morbid for a 13/14 year old but hey. i was edgy. i can own that. but they're also similar in that they're very magically powerful. they both become some form of "god." and they both become symbols of life and death. both of them, actually, are narratively meant to subvert the trope of dark = bad/evil, because they might feel like they're ~evil~ but they're just teenage girls. and both of them are experiencing grief and trauma. everything that happens to them happens because the world is against them, or at least feels like it is. i think...i don't need to explain why this is an obvious outlet for me at the age i made them. i was pretty fucking repressed and i don't think i even realized the extent of that until i moved away. interestingly, though, they do both have this heavy...death thing. i was really fascinated with death apparently. just call me emily dickinson lmfao (but really - probably a pretty similar situation there! the general Thought is that, you know, she experienced a close loss really young and it gave her a lifelong fixation on death. i don't think that's a bad thing? it seems normal and healthy honestly. losing people is traumatic. personally i've been a regular funeral attendee since i was, like, 5 LOL. i think that's where a lot of these themes in my writing stem from? within one year alone i knew i think 5 people close to me in the sense of like i saw them often (family, neighbours, friends, classmates). only 2 of them were "natural" deaths. but i was 16/17 then; when i was 13/14, i'd just lost my grandfather and some other grandparents, great aunts/uncles. but still been to a whole lot of funerals lmao).

the other thing that mai and nerissa have in common is that they're really...closed off. when things get hard for them, they shut people out. and they both have moments where they start believing that they can either choose to live and let the world fall to ruin, or they can choose to die and save it. in both cases, they don't die (all the way, at least). there's one striking difference here, though, and it's that mai chooses not to die and so lives, whereas nerissa chooses to die and lives against her will. however, they both face the internal conflict of thinking that maybe them dying would be for the best, and, if nothing else, it would absolve them of their guilt surrounding certain deaths (elle for mai, adrienne for nerissa). they both are yearning for someone who's passed on, and they lose touch with reality because of it.

so, with that last point in mind, let's look at eveleen, who i made when i was 18 - so solidly 5 years after mai. she starts out a first year university student who has just tragically lost her parents, whom she was really close to and loved dearly. she's extremely depressed, but she keeps having dreams about this calm, nice garden. and it tempts her. lilith is behind these dreams obviously, and essentially is trying to tempt her into eating the fruit in the garden of eden so she'll be stuck there forever. eventually, eveleen does do that, and lilith possesses her body in order to get revenge. so already there's this commonality between my three protagonists here, which is that they're out of touch with reality, right? but where mai is very cold and closed off and nerissa is very cruel and angry, eveleen is just really sad and empty. i think what all three of them go through in a sense is a desire not to die but to stop living, because life's been not so nice to them. for nerissa and mai, it's a lot about "deserving," whereas for eveleen she's just really tired and feels like she can't keep up anymore. it's kind of weird to me, actually, because as an older teen and adult i've suffered from Chronic Feelings Of Intense Guilt LMAO but i don't know if that was really present when i was younger...and yet it's a feature of characters like mai and nerissa, not eveleen or ava or nisa.

ava and nisa are, like eveleen, really quite quiet and reserved. nisa literally has no voice. she can't speak. her whole arc is learning to be bold and brave and to communicate with her hands and make people listen to her. ava suffers from amnesia, and so she goes from not even having a name to being gifted one by artemis and finding out who ava is, not who she was - and even when she finds the "was," she decides she prefers the is, and wants to stay as ava. eveleen falls into lethargy and gets possessed. first she's used by adam, and then by lilith - but her entire arc is her wanting to reach out to lilith, to save her from herself and give her kindness where adam hurt her so horribly. all three of them have in common that they're really kind, charitable people who've been through some pretty horrific things - and more than anything, they just want to save people from suffering. they can't bear to see it. contrasted to mai and nerissa, who both wind up hurting people because they can't cope with the things that have happened to them and need to learn to be better, essentially...that's actually a pretty huge difference. the greater themes of grief and death and loss and love and family and especially identity are all still there, but it's through a very different lens.

i think this is probably the biggest difference here, and i do think it's something that comes from how i've grown up and how my worldview has changed. i look back on my teenage self pretty sadly these days. i don't think i "lost" anything, per se, but i think i was in a really tough spot for a really long time and my support system was exceptionally bad. it could've been a lot worse, and i'm grateful it wasn't, but that doesn't mean it was good, either. when i was 13/14, though...i was definitely angry at the world. it felt like everyone was against me, and i had one goal that was pushing me through everything. my rage drove me. in my best moments, i thought i wanted to see the day things got better and i was successful because it would prove that i didn't need anybody, and that even if the world was out for me then it didn't work. but i did need people, and i needed them badly. which is, i think, my mai's and nerissa's interpersonal relationships are so focussed on family, and their romances are both really centred on this like...unwavering sense of loyalty to the only person (sans poseidon, in nerissa's case) they feel can possibly understand them. lance and ada both find mai and nerissa at their lowest, in a sense; lance is the one who's saying if you really have to die, then i'm dying with you because i don't want to live in a world without you, while ada sits and listens as nerissa progressively opens up more and more about all the guilt and grief that's been eating at her for so long, that drove her to do the thing she did in the first place.

then...compared to eveleen and lilith, it feels a bit like a 180 in some senses? lilith is motivated by revenge. she wants to hurt adam at least as much as he hurt her, but eveleen is telling her that it won't heal the wound. she shows her kindness instead. and for ava...she's an amnesiac who's been horribly attacked and left for dead, and artemis finds her and gives her a name and takes her in. she's vague and mysterious, and ava wants to know about her. again, it's a subversion - the love interest is the closed off one, and the protagonist is the one who's gently urging her to open up. nisa doesn't have a love interest, but she has a similar sort of dynamic with aisling.

so i think, essentially, it really comes down to the fact that i went from being angry at my circumstances and life in general to really accepting of it. i know it's a real Hot Take, but i am grateful for all the shitty stuff i went through, because now i know, right? i mean - i know, if i have ever a student who's anything like i was, then...i've done everything in my power to immortalize those feelings as i experienced them. i never want to forget what it was like to be an angsty teen, because i never want to be anything but the sort of adult i needed at that age. and especially as i continue to grow away from my childhood, i see more and more that these feelings of guilt i've struggled with so much largely stem from a life of being blamed for the fact that my parents' lives sucked and things like that, and now that i see it, even if i don't always believe it, i have the ability to say "but that wasn't my fault," and so my newer characters might still grapple with guilt, but it's not as significant as "it's my fault my sister/mother/etc. died" LOL.

but in saying all this - there's one really, really big similarity between all of them. all of these characters have things happen to them. they don't like their circumstances. they don't want to be where they are. they suffered, and they didn't ask for it, and the biggest sort of grief they're experiencing is actually a sort of grief for the self, wherein they're thinking of the things they were robbed of by the actions of other people - things that happened when they were children, or things stolen from them by others' premature deaths, or gifts of godhood when they never wanted to be anything but mortal. the only difference here is that mai and nerissa are both "born special" in some way. eveleen, ava, and nisa are, essentially, just normal people. they're not magical. nisa has a bit of a "chosen one" thing going on too, but she doesn't become a god; she just gets used by people like saoirse and aisling because she might lead them to the real god. i think i've spent most of my life feeling in some way "out of control," and that's where this comes from. again, like - i think of my younger self, and i think i really do experience a large sense of mourning for them. i see a kid who was really alone, whose family wasn't much of a family at all, and who ultimately suffered for it. now especially, i look farther back then my preteen and early teen years, and i see a lot of things that just...were far, far out of my control that i felt like i had to fix. i don't really know why my sister and brother had the good sense to keep to themselves and i didn't, but i do think that there's probably a link between me as a youngest child, left by my sole role model and protector around age 8, and suddenly feeling like it was somehow my duty to put our family back together. because, i guess, in some convoluted way, i'd been made to feel like it was my fault in the first place? hard to say. it might a real chicken-egg scenario LMAO. either way, i think that's where a lot of that comes from. it's something that sticks out in a lot of my favourite characters too, this whole "i never wanted to be THIS" or "i didn't ask to be a hero or whatever, i just wanted a family." in a lot of ways, i'd actually say characters like eveleen, ava, and nisa are a lot more hopeless than ones like mai and nerissa. where mai and nerissa start out angry about their circumstances, and have to learn to accept them in order to act now to fix things, eveleen, ava, and nisa start out already having accepted their situations - accepted them as horrific and unchangeable, but then their development winds up being a journey of accepting that, yes, the things that happened to them can't be changed, but they can live beyond those things and they aren't defined by their suffering, and it gives them this ability characters like mai and nerissa don't have, which is to see that same sort of suffering in other people. they help others through trauma more than others help them, in a sense? but it's the act of helping others that really allows them to heal. which...definitely says something about me, i'd say!

anyway! this was fun to think about idk if i really said anything interesting here kldfgjkfl but thanks for the ask owo!!! <3<3<3

[yanderecandystore]

This, is one of the biggest oneshots that I ever made!! This is, wow, look, I'm insane XD

Look at this shit.

Okay, I'm going to put this warning:

-> Mentions of fail suicide attempt.

-> Sadistic bitch.

-> Reader may be a little depressed.

-> Death.

-> A lot of cursing?

-> Gay (lesbian) parring.

-> Also bad grammar and dumb edgy story (not that everything "edgy" is automatically dumb, is just so happens to be the two).

-> Also dumb author. But you already know that.

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

Prey - Chapter one

[ 1 . 2 . (...)]

You finished eating your breakfast pretty quickly that morning. Your mom was worried and tried to warn you that eating so fast could cause you harm, but you didn't listen to her as you were getting ready to leave the house. Honestly, you scared her that morning, she would be asking you "Are you okay, dear?" And then after telling her that yes, she would ask again if you were sure and if something had happen to you.

You waked up so early that morning. Actually, she might even think you didn't sleep at all.

And you didn't, you simply couldn't sleep.

Not after seeing what you saw, not after discovering the truth.

You live in a quiet little village. It was a simple, poor village. But you didn't mind that, even at hard times everyone helped each other out. Your village was known for your people's kindness and welcoming charm.

It's no surprise new families would come to leave in it, but you and all your fellow neighbors were surprised when a noble family decided to move in. Well, not really move in the village, they live in a beautiful mansion up the hills, nearby.

A family of a two parents and one daughter, although, you never saw any of them in person, you only heard humours about them being antisocial.

You helped your mom with her little shop everyday and would usually spend your free time reading books on the local library. The library wasn't exactly big, or filled of many books, but even if you had read all of the books you would still be amazed everytime by every word written in every page.

You could say that epidemics weren't so uncommon in your village, but the fact that no doctor that came from the capital couldn't even associate the symptoms to any known diseases made everyone very afraid.

People would get pale, loose appetite, be very tired, mumble nonsense, have strong fevers and eventually die because of blood loss. But what was causing the blood loss? No one knew. There was no way they could be losing so much blood like that naturally, there was no sign of cuts or any type external or internal bleeding. It started with most elders around your village, and then a couple of adults, and then a little boy, and now, your friend.

Oh, how you dread that twisted day. Your friend had just lost her little brother to a unknown epidemic and she had started to hate every second of her life. One day, she had disappeared for a whole day, and after the sun was down a group of adults decided to go search for her.

They only found her later at night, unconscious on the ground and with an dagger on her hand and a rope hanging on one of trees.

She was brought home, and you decided to spent the night with her, thinking it would be for the best to stay close to her. What was she planning to do with that rope and a dagger?

You honestly feared whatever that answer could be.

She opened her eyes and you tried talking with her.

"- Carol?" You asked trying to get her attention.

. . .

Nothing, she didn't seem to listen, she could only stare at the wall and mumble something you couldn't understand. Her mouth was dry and her voice was barely audible.

You were afraid for your friend's health, physically and mentally.

You slept on her room, hoping to be there to comfort her and help her out. And if something happened, you were supposed to call Carol's parents as quickly as possible. You couldn't remember the exact moment you falled asleep, but you remember hearing something that made you wake up.

You remember hearing your friend getting out of her bed and walking around. You opened your eyes and saw Carol walking towards her bedroom's window and opening it. After opening it she collapsed.

"- Carol, what are you doing? Are you okay?" You came up as fast as you could. Trying to help Carol balance herself on you.

She still didn't respond, it was dark but you could still see the lack of life on her eyes. The moonlight reflecting on them a empty beauty, as you're friend didn't seem to be there anymore.

She didn't seem to be fully awake.

You decided to pick an cup of water for her, so you let her on her bed while you were going to her kitchen.

At the time, you thought that maybe she was just trying to get some air in the room, that maybe you shouldn't bother her parents with something as simple as that.

You should had called them.

With the cup in hands, you were walking back towards her room, when you heard some weirds sounds in there. You were worried so without thinking you opened the door.

It was dark, but you could perfectly see a woman on top of the bed, drinking the blood of your friend's neck.

The woman's hair shined like the moonlight, a silver color tinted those beautiful curls. You would think it was beautiful if the whole situation wasn't so terrifying.

Dropping the cup on the ground, the woman looked up to see you, pitifully trying to say something, to scream, to make any noise come out of your mouth.

But you couldn't even scream. She got off of your friend and instantly jumped on you on a blink of an eye. You could barely see her face, the most noticeable characteristics were the silver hair and red pupils, staring right into your soul.

You closed your eyes waiting for the worse, the blood on her mouth was dripping in your face. But in the end, she didn't do anything, she chuckled and just disappeared. You don't even know how can she move so quickly, it freaks you out to this day.

When you managed to get back on your feet, you checked to see how your friend was. She was sleeping, like nothing had happened. Peacefully sleeping.

You noticed two bite marks on her neck, you called her parents immediately. Trying to explain to them what happened, which wasn't easy in the slightest.

You had read about this case once, vampires, granted that it was on a romantic fantasy book, but still! There was no way it wasn't a vampire! A demon of the night!

You were trying to explain to her parents that an stranger came in and attacked her.

But there wasn't any sign of that, the window was locked once again and your friend was peacefully sleeping. But when touching her forehead, you could tell she had a fever.

"-. . . But-" You tried to think of something to say, but you couldn't. There was nothing to say, it was crazy to say it was an myth that caused this!

Her parents saw the bite marks, but they insisted that it was bug bites, they thought they should contact a doctor to see this. "Maybe the epidemic was caused by a insect?" Was what they thought.

Bullshit, you knew it wasn't insects, you saw with your own eyes!

They wanted to believe in you but you were sounding crazy, panicking at your friend's state. You were telling the truth, but that didn't mean it sounded reasonable.

The next day you went home after saying goodbye to Carol and her parents. And two days later she was dead.

After two weeks of the funeral, after two weeks of studying about this creatures to the best that you could with your limitations, and after two weeks of innocent people dying in the fangs of beasts, you decided that you had enough of this.

No one believed in you, of course. After your friend's funeral you sounded like a crazy, angry lunatic. You tried to warn them earlier, but no one believed in you, you needed to prove them. You needed to find the culprits. You needed to make her pay for taking your friend's life like that.

That morning, you grabbed what you thought you would need to hunt down some vampires. Which was only a piece of carved wood. You start to get really suspicious that those books about vampires weren't too reliable. You remember how fast and silent that woman moved, how are you going to get close to her without getting bitten? And close enough to stab her with a stake? What happens if she bites you? Maybe you should go buy something in the market, see if there is something you could use. Garlic, maybe? Really, you have no idea if you should buy it just to throw it at a vampire. You may miss your target and it may not even have any effect on them, just a waist of gold and of fresh garlic.

People stopped talking to you after you said so many disturbing things about vampires and that your friend was killed by one. People would dismiss you as just a crazy girl, or either a stressed girl who couldn't take her friend's death.

You could hear them whispering. You couldn't understand what they said, but you could tell it was something nasty about you. Your cheerful village was becoming more empty, less lively, everyone was afraid for their family's lives and for their own lives. You don't want to stay in the market for too long, you decided to go look in the forest.

Carol was found there, so maybe they're hiding in the forest??

They're nocturnal, but maybe you can find some hints of them existing. You need at least something to show to the village.

While walking through the forest you start to feel, a bit sad, as the reality of the situation starts to settle in once again. You miss your friend, you miss how friendly your village used to be. How everyone was cheerful and no one needed to be worried about a "epidemic" spreading across land. You know what caused this, but no one will believe in you without any proof. Can you even do anything? Can you even help them?

You start to doubt yourself, step by step, thinking this is all foolishness. Maybe you were wrong, maybe your friend's death had made you mad and too stressed to the point you imagined a murderer. Maybe you didn't want to believe she was gone by some disease. Maybe you were going crazy after all.

No, that's not right, you remember what you saw, you remember how you felt! There is no way any of that was just your imagination!? How could it be? You remember those red pupils. You remember that silver hair!

That silver. . . Hair.

You stop on your tracks when you notice you had reached an river. Recognizing this place, you realized that you had walked a lot!

But that's not why you stopped. That's not even close to why you had stopped.

You hide against a tree, hoping it didn't see you.

You noticed a woman standing in the other side of the river, she seemed to be picking some wild berries. You noticed she is wearing a long purple dress and a even longer dark cape. It's kinda hot today, you can't see why she would wear that. Although, you had heard that vampires can't stand the sunlight, so maybe is because of that?

You could see some of her silver locks coming out of the cape. You have to admit, is pretty. But you hate every inch of it, how could you not hate it?

You were trying to hold your anger, to hold your need to go there and make her pay for her crimes. But maybe if you waited and followed her, she would lead you to her hiding spot.

And then you could go back to the village and call everyone so they can see for themselves.

Yeah, sounds like a solid plan.

You wait her to make her next move, she seems to have picked all that she needed and was now continuing with her journey. You wait a bit, you needed to cross the river, which isn't too difficult for you, but you can't let her hear you following her. These demons have better ears than you do.

After some time you start to follow her, trying to keep an good distance and pace but, goddammit, she is too fast, and she is just walking?!!

She keeps making quick turns, either she knows you're following her, or is some secret path to her den.

Whenever she stops, you make sure to be quickly hide behind some trees of bushes. But you can't hold your heart beats. They're going crazy! The anxiety is killing you and the fact that you need to keep up with her pace is making you're legs want to give up.

But... For a heartless monster, she does seems to have a bit of compassion inside her heart.

A little bird falled from their nest, she took them in her gloved hands and put them back.

She seems to be nice to the fauna around here. She seems to like the animals in the forest. You see her interacting with them, playfully. You can't see her face but you can hear her giggling at the curious animals around her, you can't see it clearly but you think you saw her feeding some of the animals with her berries. You wanted to laugh at the adorable sight yourself but you can't let her know you're there.

Perhaps you had misjudged her? You start to feel sympathy towards her, but deep down you know you can't forgive her. Maybe if things were different.

Maybe you two could get along, maybe humans and demons like her could get along.

She started walking again, dammit, you were distracted. You come up of the ground as fast as you could and started to follow her again.

She starts to run up a hill, fuck….

She runs as if it was nothing while you are just dying to get up there! At this point is clear that she knows you're following her and she is just fucking with you.

After getting on top of the hill, and feeling like your lungs may have been evaporated, you noticed the big, fancy house behind her. Wait, is she, is she one of the nobles??!

After feeling like the game of chase was finally ending, she turns her back to look at you.

"- Still following me, I see." She says.

"- Was it fun? Did you get what you wanted?"

"- Huff- Yeah I did, vampire!" Your legs can't hold you up any longer.

"- Oh, boo hoo. Is this all because of your little friend? Have you came here for revenge?"

"- Ho-How dare you?!" You try to strike a confident stand, but all you did was make the mistress laugh.

"- Oh Lord, pfft-Hahahahaha! You're pathetic, and your little friend is pathetic! All you humans go around acting like heroes that fight for the greater good, but when something like me comes around, I'm the bad guy~! Hahaha!"

"- ...You killed so many people! How can you-"

"- How can I what? How can I dare to try to survive? Oh, how bad of me, of wanting to survive. It's not our fault we can only feast on blood, is a curse that we all must deal with it." Her last sentence sounded a little more sad than what she probably intended.

"- I- I just, you can't go around killing everyone! Don't humans deserve to live too?" Your head is a bit dizzy, you wish you could say more but you can't process everything right now.

She takes her cape off, now you can see her face properly, silver hair, blue eyes, and a really pale skin. Looking straight at her pupils you can notice they're indeed red, but just looking at them made you light-headed for some reason.

Wait, she shouldn't be able to take her cape off unless-

The sun was setting down, you didn't noticed how long this took. You look at the orange sunlights shining through the trees, as the darkness of the night is near. You look back at the woman and-

"-Shit! Where are you, you demon?!" She is gone, fuck, all she left behind was her cape and the little basket with berries. You take the stake in your hand, you guess this is the time.

You can hear her, giggling like the psycho she is. Is like she is everywhere at the same time, you can hear her in the trees coming from all directions, you can see her jumping here and there. Maybe you can make a run for it, you know you won't be able to just stab her with a piece of wood, but you'll hold on to it to feel a little more safe.

You make a run for it. You don't care about anything, you need to get back to the village before is completely dark. You can see in the corner of your eyes, she is still following you, while using the trees to block the light from hitting her.

Shit, you feel dizzy, you feel like you need to rest for awhile, but this is clearly not the time to relax! Your heart is going to come out of your throat, and your head is pulsating with pain. If you can't run anymore, maybe you should hide from her.

You decided to try to lose her through the forest, instead of heading towards the village, you started to head towards the sunset, knowing that the lightest presence of sunlight would hurt her. She winced in pain after trying to follow you and getting hit by the light, she was burning and needed to recover herself from the sudden contact.

You may be able to hide from her for an while, just to calm your heart beats.

After running for what seemed to be hours, you found a little hiding spot against a tree. The bushes may be a little prickly, but you honestly don't care, you just need to survive a little more, you just need to be hidden here a little more. Until you're sure that she stopped looking for you, or that she had lost you.

Your heart aches, your legs are numb and your lungs are so heavy. You can't stop hyperventilating, you can't stop feeling terrified for your life. You're trying to calm down, but you can't stop feeling stupid for coming here.

Are you going to die?

"- ….Sorry mom, sorry Carol…" You whisper to yourself, if you're going to die, then you at least hope that someone else finds the truth, and that someone else saves your little village from this demon, or more demons if there is more. Are all the nobles in the mansion vampires? A family of vampires doesn't sound so unreasonable to you now. You put your face on your knees and start to cry. There is no hope left on you now.

"- Good evening." Goddammit.

"- . . ."

"- Rude, aren't you going to say "hi" to me?" You see her silhouette up in the tree sitting on a branch, two bright red dots staring at you.

"- Come on, make this quick. I can't run, I can't hide, I can't go back!" Your eyes might as well be waterfalls by now, your voice is shaky and you pray to whatever benevolent God is up there that this ends quickly.

"- Just do this already, I couldn't even save them…."

"- …" She becomes silent for a moment, thinking on how to answer you in such pathetic state.

"- No." Is all she says before coming down of the tree. She jumps off like is no big deal, apparently, no physical activity is too much for her.

"- Now, why would I do that?~" She grabs your arm and pulls you up, and pushes you with your hands up and your back against the tree.

"- You know, killing you right now you be interesting but I think that you be a little too easy on you. Don't you think?" You're starting to hate the "sweet voice" bullshit she is doing.

"- What do you want?" Even in this situation, you can't let her just toy with you around, fuck that.

"- Well, [Y/N], I'm feeling-" Wait, what?

"- How do you know my name?" You ask her.

She looked surprised for a moment, but that expression of shock had soon disappeared and got replaced by a little smirk.

"- Do you know how vampires pass their curse to mortals?" She whispers in your ear. What the hell is she is talking about?

"- Carol is a special one indeed. But also, she can't keep her mouth shut for a second. How did you managed to deal with her while she was alive?"

"- . . . What-"

"- You heard me." That, stupid, little grin on her face-

"- Where is Carol?! Where is she what did you do to her?!" You struggle under her grasp to no avail. She is stronger than you, but you don't care. You just want to punch that stupid little grin off of her face.

"- … Why ask, when you can join in?"

"- Don't- Don't you dare!"

"- Oh, shush! Is just one little bite. I'm a bit hungry." She bites your neck, it hurts so much, it's agonizing.

You can feel her fangs deepen, you can tell her breathing changed. You feel dizzy and your legs are shaking, you can tell she wants to drain every milliliter of your blood. You try to protest but you're too weak to push her off of you. Might as well die here.

She takes her fangs off in a rush, it sends pain through your veins. Fuck, at least be gentle about it!

"- Lord, is just-" She is panting. She looks so, high? She looks a bit out of character to you, her eyes are full of lust but you guess it could be she is just hungry.

Well, technically you can't even see anything in this dark. So what do you know?

"- Who would guess an pathetic little wimp like you tasted so marvelously?" Oh, back with that attitude. You don't know if you should take that as a compliment or not.

"- You know, I could suck all of your blood…" She takes a good look at you.

"- But I don't want to." She let you go, and you fall to the ground, you can't stand up and you can feel your eyes getting heavier and heavier.

"- I have better plans for you~"

You fall unconscious.

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

[wirewitchviolet]

Hate Mobs Gotta Go

Last night, I did something I have never expected to do, and just full on gave up on a fun RPG writing assignment. Which I had to do because I hit a point where it was so overdue and unfinished that I was falling asleep sitting up and stress vomiting and other such things. There’s a whole lot of factors behind that. Other health issues, the toll of being on total pandemic lockdown for months, with neighbors just straight up open mouth coughing at my door, emergencies with friends and family, multiple fires and hardware failures, but the main thing was, and still is, the constant harassment from a militant hate mob, completely out of touch with reality.

Years ago, I remember there was this thing the internet at large was fond of doing with foaming at the mouth far right religious extremists- Mercilessly ridiculing them in public to expose how disconnected everything they said or did was from reality. Remember seeing this one float around and laughing your head off?

And if I mention the Westboro Baptist Church, you immediately picture a single family of raving bigots picketing funerals and such with their big homophobic signs, with a bigger crowd mocking them, right?

For some reason, the modern version of that particular flavor of fringe weirdo doesn’t get that sort of ridicule. Presumably because they’re focusing almost exclusively on trans people, and most people have this weird thing where like if you stick up for trans people you get cooties or something and never dig into the real juicy ridicule fodder. But for real, this stuff is OUT THERE. Just look at a few examples here.

Come for the weird ravings about harvesting baby organs. Stay for the... adult woman who apparently believes breasts get their shape from actually being sacks filled with milk under women’s skin? Now, how about this colorful comparison?

For anyone who wasn’t aware, pronouns are words like “I” “you” “he” “she” “it” and “this,” while rohypnol is colloquially known as “the date rape drug,” so this is utter gibberish. The full context of course is that this person is trying to make the argument that forcing this bigot to refer to women she’s prejudiced against as “she” instead of arbitrarily tossing around “he” or “it” is... raping her brain, I guess?

So... this is pretty clearly some creep’s weird little fantasy. The obvious giveaway is pretending that trans women “aren’t in the correct bathroom” when going to... the correct bathroom, and that the non-existent law about this is somehow enforced by... random bigots opting to deputize themselves. What DOES happen for real though is bigots like this being arrested for barging into public restroom stalls with camcorders aimed at the crotches of women on toilets and trying to defend themselves by insisting they have some duty to check what their genitals look like. On which note...

That’s just disgusting. It’s also as close as I feel comfortable to posting all the graphic fantasies I see from these people about the barbaric genital mutilation they imagine trans women subject ourselves to which really has no basis at all in reality. Well maybe I can post this one.

I’m not going to go through and itemize all the baldfaced lies in that, because I really kinda hope I don’t have to, and also because the person who slapped this together was kind enough to break it up in such a way that I legitimately can say “every single line of this is a completely baseless lie.” Also the art in the corner is stolen from a child-friendly comic whose author is trans, so, that’s extra slimy. Also wow that “bone scans” bit is actually one I’ve never seen. Where the hell do they even get these ideas?

Also this one needs some setup. If you have time, this right here is a freaking journey, if not, I’ll try to summarize.

So a while ago, this one particular unhinged bigot decided the most productive way to spend all her time was to get in touch with a bulk sticker printing business and order thousands if not millions of these weird gross poorly framed slabs with a really crude drawing of a penis and bunch of gibberish she really wishes were the names of popular twitter hashtags that nobody else but her ever uses. And then after receiving these, just... wandering around the city she lives in all day every day plastering them on phone booths and power poles and the mirrors of bathrooms in like.. elementary schools and park benches, just everywhere. And then makes multiple passes a day apparently to make sure nobody has tried to remove any of them, as detailed in this amazing thread I’ll link again.

So the latest break in that particular saga is that same zealot going around plastering stickers like this around too, to make it seem like “both sides do it.”

It should be obvious that that’s a “blacks rule!” sort of fake between the baffling text and using the extra inclusive, particular emphasis on supporting people of color, general purpose LGBT+ flag, but also, like their fellows on 4chan, they plan this sort of “false flag” crap in broad daylight:

I should really properly credit the whistle-blowing on that particular oddity, and I should also note that aside from the breast milk sacks, this is all just stuff I saw TODAY catching up on my twitter feed, but my main point with all this is to illustrate that we really are dealing with Jack Chick/Westboro Baptist-level unhinged zealotry... but again, nobody’s out there pointing and laughing. And it turns out, when you don’t have people pointing and laughing at this sort of thing, you get people taking it seriously. So... when I went to quickly search for a news story to link with the bit about creeps barging in on women with cameras, the results I got were... this.

That... sure is a lot of stories about totally innocent people in a demographic I belong to being murdered by total strangers goaded into blind murderous hatred by the sort of people I’m pointing and laughing at! Ha ha! There’s a very real chance of that happening to me every time I step outside, for any reason! Tee hee! I live in a state of constant fear! Whoopsie!

And it’s not just stuff like that. The people posting these rambling tirades about “breast milk sack implants” and putting crude penis stickers everywhere, never being called out as the unhinged weirdos they are, either have the world turning a blind eye to all this crap, or have everything they do downplayed in the media to the point where outright sexual harassment, doxing, and slurs I don’t want to repeat get headlines like “so-and-so made comments that some fringe trans activists on the internet deem ‘possibly transphobic’” and that’s AT BEST. More often you get stuff like the one incident I managed to bring a lot of public attention to way back when, where some bigot just literally walked up to someone on the street, grabbed them, savagely beat the hell out of them until pulled apart, had friends film the whole thing, and bragged after the fact about it, and every story that appeared as a result claimed the assailant was the victim, because they were all written by her friends.

Face obscuring provided by me here, by the way.

And that isn’t a one-off incident. Because, see, most of these unhinged weirdos spewing out all this transphobic gibberish are not, as you would think, a bunch of barely educated Trump hat wearing members of some fringe religious congregation. They’re editors and producers in major British news outlets. This isn’t me shouting conspiracy nonsense either, this is well-documented. Like, The Guardian gets public internal protests over this crap. So does the BBC. Yes, other respected news sites cover this. Media watchdog groups do their best to reign this in with hearings and such, but, don’t actually have any power to enforce anything really. So when there’s “reporting” on this crap, it’s coming directly from the “breast milk sack implant” people. Oh and here’s some screenshots of the headlines of those stories you’re too lazy to click through and actually read:

And of course, sometimes when they want to really come across as respectful, they try to find “scientists” and “doctors” who back up their ravings but all they have to fall back on are disgraced quacks who spend most of their time on activism work to normalize pedophilia.

I’m not bringing that point about Cantor up to discredit his writings about trans people by the way. He doesn’t really HAVE any writings about trans people. He just pasted the names of a bunch of random studies from the 70s about whether playing with barbies makes you gay into his blog a few years back and this crowd was so desperate for validation they declared him an “expert in the field” and started passing out links to his.... pro-pedophila blog. Which is part of this whole pattern, but I’ve written about that before. Oh and the governments of multiple countries manage to treat all these people as “experts” and make policy decisions based on their ravings. That’s fun.

Anyway, aside from encouraging random people to, you know, just randomly murder anyone they see who looks like maybe a trans woman, every so often this weird little cult pulls in an actual celebrity who then has a public meltdown as they post all this gibberish to a wider audience. Currently this is going on with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (who’s actively promoting the pedophile guy up there on Twitter), and I think also William Shatner, but I haven’t really looked into it. The last big one though was Graham Linehan. Who you might remember from co-writing some sitcoms that were popular decades ago in Britain, or from being the weird cartoon villain who tried to kill the funding of a children’s charity, prompting this strange pledge drive marathon of Donkey Kong Country.

You might also know him as one of... I think honestly just two people who have ever managed to be such out of control stalking hate mongers that they were actually given a permanent no possible appeal ban from Twitter. Personally though I know him more as, you know, that one absolute creep who’s been obsessively stalking me for like 5 years and never shutting up about his weird personal obsession with me.

I WOULD link the recent freaking filmed interview he did where he spent forever rambling about me, but I’d have to actually watch it to confirm I had the right link, and also the only place I could quickly find a link to it would be on his twitter feed, which as stated, no longer exists. Oh and random side note there, despite being personally, by name, the person he was explicitly targeting all his hateful ramblings at, he wasn’t banned from that site for any of the disgusting stuff he said to me. He just slipped up and mentioned a cis woman with a professorship while shouting about this crap recently and that caused people to actually take action. I do so love being invisible.

Anyway, point is, prior to Rowling grabbing the baton from him as his social media presence went up in flames, this guy was name-dropping me a LOT. Presumably he still is, just in places fewer people see it. And when you have as big an audience as he did, and that audience is as full of hatemongers as his was, that has a pretty noticeable effect. I’ve been deluged with so much hateful garbage for so long it’s impossible for me to put any numbers on it. The closest I can do to quantify it is note that hate dump was big enough that I was also flooded with more weird messages intended as support from total strangers than I could deal with, totally losing access to social media feeds and my e-mail from the volume for a good bit, and THAT flood was big enough that I got this whole second wave of creepy stalkers who’d built up this whole weird fanon where this stalker here is like, someone I used to date or be business partners with and not just some creepy dude like twice my age stalking me over the internet, from a completely different hemisphere.

And I mean... in the broadest of strokes, I can kinda laugh all this off. Because... these people are completely ridiculous, out of touch with reality, and mostly live in other countries. But... all the threats and shouting are very real and very constant and like.. picture someone outside on the street shouting at your windows about how they’re going to break in and kill you. You really can’t ignore that. Even if they’re unarmed, and all they’re really capable of doing is shouting and pounding on your door, you can’t really just ignore that shouting and pounding and just watch a movie or play a game or write this article you promised would be done 3 months ago. You can certainly try, but a pretty big part of your brain is going to be occupied with thoughts about how maybe you should call someone to see if they’ll escort this violent person away, or maybe you should barricade your door in case all that pounding does something.

And I mean this isn’t a bad metaphor for how all the constant threats and stalking I’m dealing with thanks to celebrity bigots personally obsessed with me impacts my life, but it also does a pretty good job of describing how my night went pretty recently when I ACTUALLY DID HAVE SOMEONE POUNDING ON MY ACTUAL REAL PHYSICAL DOOR SHOUTING ABOUT STABBING ME TO DEATH, and no, there was no resolution to that beyond the sound of sirens causing that person to back off.

I also had an experience not too long ago where I was supposed to take a cab to a routine appointment, a car showed up with the cab company’s name on it, somewhat early, and proceeded to drive me... out to the middle of the freaking woods like an hour from where I live, and when my phone rang with my actual cab asking where I was the driver freaked out, had me get out of the car, and took off leaving me just... stuck in the middle of nowhere freezing to death and trying to find a landmark an actual cab could pick me up from. Still don’t know what the hell that whole thing was about and whether a cab driver just REALLY didn’t know what he was doing and panicked or what, but I do know that talking about it publicly in the vaguest of terms lead to a bunch of unhinged shouting from... apparently some unconnected ride share driver with a habit of dumping trans women between stops when they try to get medications or something, convinced I was calling him out for that.

So.... yeah. Things aren’t exactly going great in my neck of the woods. I’d really appreciate it if people would properly treat these unhinged violent weirdos like unhinged violent weirdos and not respectable members of society so they quit getting so bold and public with the violent stuff, and people who listen to them get properly shouted down for doing so.

[shittyfandomimagines]

Always Fix It

This is sloppy. I’m tired. I don’t wanna work tomorrow.

GIF creds to owner

“Ahh, my favorite person!” Manny opened the door after I knocked. “What’s up!” I hug him and he kissed my head. “We’re just waiting on you and Shawn, who isn’t with you?” He seemed just as confused as I was.

“Yeah, I think he’s at the studio still, I just decided to come over here without him.” I put my jacket on the rack, Manny leading me to the dinner table.

“My girl!” Karen yells and I hug her tightly. “Where’s Ali?” I ask and they both give me a look. “Wanted to go out with friends, family time is annoying at this age.” Karen rolls her eyes and it makes me chuckle.

I absolutely love Shawn’s family, they let me come to their house when Shawn’s on tour, they constantly invite me out for supper, they check in on me at least once a week, I couldn’t ask for a better relationship with my fiancé’s family.

“Well, let’s sit down. Want anything to drink?” She asks and I hesitate before I sit down. “I’ll get a glass of water.” I turn and Manny stops me. “I got it!”

I smile warmly and sit down with Karen, Manny comes back soon with a glass of wine and water. I give my thanks before sipping on it slowly. The food on the table looked absolutely wonderful, roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, beans, rolls. I mean the whole shebang.

“It looks amazing Karen, sorry Shawn isn’t here yet.” I pout a little, I wasn’t surprised honestly. It’s been like that for weeks now and I don’t know how he wanted me to feel about it. Maybe it’s been months, I don’t know, I’ve just learned to cope with it.

“He’d show up late to his own funeral if he could.” Manny joked and I felt like it was Shawn here, I missed his sense of humor and dad jokes.

“How’s the planning going?”

“Oh you know, slowly but surely. Shawn’s been so busy, it’s kind of hard to come to an agreement.”

“He is helping, right? Don’t let him make you do it on your own.”

His mom's scolding was cute, but I still felt the need to lie for him. He didn’t help a bit on the wedding plans, even when I asked and I never realized how much I’ve done alone until now.

“He helps when he can!” I lie straight through my teeth and I see her give me a weary smile.

I look at my phone shortly, hoping Shawn had sent a message to my previous one asking if he’d show up. There was absolutely no response and it was not even seen.

“Y/n, tell us about your promotion! Your mom had mentioned it at work the other day.” I smiled at the friendship between both of our moms, it was amazing. It also helped that they worked together at a real estate company.

“I get to go to the firms and work with the lawyers now, instead of just sitting on the sidelines. I’ll most likely do paperwork or assistant type things, but it’s still the idea of sitting with the council. I finish law school soon so this is just perfect training.” I explain and Manny’s eyes widen.

“No way! That’s amazing hun! Is that why Shawn posted that picture at the club the other night? A good celebration?” He asks and my smile faltered. “Um, well no. He, he went out with his friends to celebrate the song they finished. I worked at the restaurant that night.” I explained and their faces fell too. Truth was that I didn’t even get the chance to tell him, he was so excited about that song that I didn’t want to try to outdo him on it. He had been in a lyrical bend for a week prior to that day.

“Well, you two got to celebrate right?”

“Not exactly, but it’s okay! I celebrated with my mom and dad, though. It’s nothing that big! I mean once I graduate law school, it’ll be a big deal.”

“That’s not right, you worked so hard to get moved up. We’ll throw a party for Shawn’s side. You deserve all the praise.”

—

“Well, it’s been 20 minutes, let’s dig in. No sense in the food getting cold.” Manny said and I made a small plate of food. The nerves of tonight made my appetite decline.

We all ate in almost silence, I had sent Shawn a few voicemails and texts. The knots in my stomach were mostly from overthinking a lot of things in my life.

I felt like everything had been downhill since the proposal, which sounded completely awful. I feel like he did it to just keep me at bay for a while, make sure I was content so he could stay in the studio. I had nothing against his music and I love it fully; but if there ever came a day to wed me or wed his music, I’d be afraid of the outcome.

He’s such a hard worker and I would never want to make him choose, but I feel like I’m a little baby and giving me a ring was like giving me a pacifier; it kept everything at bay with planning and I didn’t have time to realize his total absence.

I felt like I could vomit just at the thought, so I slowly halted my eating. “Everything okay?” Karen’s eyes danced with worry and I nodded quickly. “Ate too fast.” I lied. They tried to ignore it and I just continued to look down at my plate sadly.

My mind went back to what Manny said about the clubbing, my heart hurt that I didn’t even get the chance to tell him. I knew I couldn’t be mad at anyone but myself because I could tell him at any point, but my good heart just tells me to let him have his moment.

“I made your absolute favorite dessert, Peanut Butter Pie, with cookie crust because you hate pie shells!” Karen was thrilled and I smiled warmly. “You’re too good to me.” That wasn’t was a lie for sure; they were both gracious and wonderful.

I took a small bite of the pie, my heart was so happy to have them but my fear of losing them made my heart soar. All of the doubts I was having right now made me panic internally.

The thoughts of Shawn maybe not wanting me as a wife and only doing this to satisfy me made me worry.

The front door opened and my heart hoped it was Shawn for sanity sake, but it was his beautiful sister. “Y/n!” She came to my side to give me a hug.

“Where’s Shawn, he bailed again?” She groans and I felt tears spring to my eyes. I kept my head low as I nod. “Yeah, I guess he’s just so busy.”

I felt all of them staring at me, I didn’t want to let them see me bawl my eyes out, so I shot up quickly to hide in the bathroom.

—

After a good 5-8 minutes of crying softly, a knock was placed on the door of the downstairs bathroom. “Hey doll, it’s Karen. Can I come in?” She asks so sweetly, I turned the lock carefully.

“Sorry about that.” I wiped the tears off and sniffled loudly. “Hey, there’s no need to apologize to me. I raised two kids and I’ve seen plenty of tears.” She got on the floor with me, I felt awful about that.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong? Was it us?” She asks and I look at her scared eyes. “No way! Your family is beyond amazing to me and my family. I just feel a little bad today, no biggie.” I brush it off to make her feel better and she pouts.

“My son is the problem, talk to me so I won’t have to punish my grown man-child.”

“I’m just not enough for him, you know? I’m average, I work a crappy internship and at a small restaurant to feel validated to him. I’m overly clingy and my heart is too sweet to let someone I love know they’ve absolutely crushed me. I’m average looking, I could lose some weight and I’m actually trash. I don’t like all the fancy things like Shawn, I don’t really fit into his lifestyle. Honestly, he probably doesn’t even want to marry me! I mean it’s like there's a ring, please stay hopeful that I love you and try to plan a wedding for a superstar and his mid-average fiancé.” I was ranting and blabbering, my tears had resurfaced before I had the first sentence finished.

“You don’t mean that. There’s no way you could possibly not be enough for him. I remember the day he came home from your first date, the whole hour prior to leaving he hated that I set him up with a coworkers daughter. Then, he came home with those sparkly eyes and was talking to Manny about how unrealistic you were. How crazy that something that good could possibly show up in his hectic life. He told his dad that he couldn’t wait for the next second he got to spend with you.” She explains and I smile at the memory.

“Yeah, that was then though. I’m still below average and I really don’t fit in anymore. That boy is constantly changing and I don’t know if I can keep up with me being my boring self.”

“I thought the same with Manny, he was a business owner and I sold houses, I wasn’t that special. I was afraid I couldn’t keep up but it turns out a good team knows how someone has to carry the torch a little bit further ahead. Some days you’ll be at the same pace or there are other days where someone is the turtle. It isn’t about who is ahead or behind, it’s about how you cross the finish line together.”

“I understand what you mean, I just don’t know how to ever approach him. I lied earlier, Shawn doesn’t even know I got promoted. I was going to tell him but he was so happy to finally get a song done, I knew he was in a rut. I can’t even make him happy and I know music does, I knew I could’ve told him anytime after that but I thought it was dumb too because it’s insignificant to his happiness. I wouldn’t want to bore him.”

“He loves you, he would be happy to hear that you’re happy. He brags about you constantly, he even bragged when you made it through your first tattoo session. He loves you.”

“I guess, I can’t remember the last time he said it nor can I remember the last time he slept in bed with me. I mean I know he’s asleep in the house because he’s thinking of a song but I miss him. I can’t ask him to give up music, I’m not that important compared to that.”

I tried so hard not to sob my eyes out in front of my soon-to-be-mother in law. I really didn’t want to even talk to her about it because I shouldn’t load my drama onto her about her son. I should’ve just cried myself to sleep like any other Thursday night.

“The night before he proposed, he came over to show us the ring. He bought it somewhere in Italy months prior because he knew that was the ring he wanted on your finger. I know he’s an idiot sometimes, he’s my spawn so I can say it, but he does love you. Manny talked about me that way when we were dating, engaged, and still now. I know he’s a mess but he does love you.”

I give her a hug and pull back to grab some tissues off the counter. I wipe the rest of my tears off for the sake of Karen and I’s relationship. I was still hurting so bad because his mom was telling me this but not him. It’s held minimum value even though I loved her.

We both stood up and I had a weak smile. “I shouldn’t have even done that, I’m so sorry. I’ll see ya Karen, love you bye!” I zipped out of the bathroom and bolted to the door.

“Wait!” Ali’s voice stopped me and I turned to her worried face. “Are you and Shawn do? Is everything okay?” She asked quickly and my heart broke. I didn’t even think that far. “It’s all good sweet girl, I just need to go home. I love you okay?” I kiss her forehead, bid Manny goodbye, and made it back to my car before the 4th round of tears.

—-

I found my way to the old walkway behind our old apartment. It wasn’t as awkward as it sounded because behind our old apartment meant 2 miles down the road yet it was accessible somewhere close to the house. Not important. I walked up to the trail, the stars were shiny and the slightly red moon was beautiful.

My phone was buzzing off the hook; between my mom, Shawn’s mom, Ali, and then Shawn. I could only imagine that his mom went off on him.

Deciding to turn off my phone seemed to be the best bet for now. I know it’s hard to love in our generation, even more so when my love is displayed online. And between such a caring family. Therefore, it’s so much for satisfying to just breathe.

I hadn’t even noticed that an hour had passed, I just felt so at ease with the cool air and pretty sky. The tears were off and on but they weren’t as bad. I had to at least face Shawn, even if it was cliche, we never left things hostile or rough between us.

When I pulled up to the house, Shawn’s car was parked there and I could see all the lights on. I took a deep breath before unlocking the door.

“Y/n?” Shawn’s voice was traveling down the stairs as ran down them. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where’ve you been? My mom told me something wasn’t right and she was concerned for us. Ali said she’s afraid you’re gonna leave, dad wants to murder me. Baby, please tell me what’s goin’ on.” He tried to take my hand and I pull it away, sticking them into my pockets.

“W-we need to talk.” I stutter out and I could see every ounce of fear soak through his body

He leads us to the dining room table and I see the flowers there, I try not to smile. “I picked them up before my mom yelled at me over the phone.”

“I’m not good enough for you.” I rip the bandaid right off and his eyes widen. “Are you insane? You’re more than enough.”

“I could probably never make you as happy as music or touring can. I don’t really have anything interesting about me anymore. I got promoted at work and the more I think about it, the more I realize that it isn’t that special.”

“Babe-“

“Wedding planning is very stressful. I don’t think you want to really marry me, I mean it’s not like you are right? I mean it was probably just a way to settle me down so you could work on music. Don’t get me wrong, I support you like I support eating chicken nuggets, but you don’t even help. I can’t remember the last time you said you loved me and I tell myself that you're busy with work so you don’t want to sleep with me, but maybe I’m just not something you want to wake up or fall asleep to anymore.”

“Can I plea-“

“I used to always be afraid that you would wake up one day and realize that I’m not enough. I-i think we both see that now. So I get it if you want to leave me, I’m not meant for your constantly changing lifestyle. I don’t like the same fancy things as you and maybe you’re meant to be with someone fully committed to the same things you love. I’m sorry.”

I had tears rushing down my face as I cried loudly, I didn’t even like to cry in front of him, but it didn’t help that he also had tears in his eyes.

“Baby, I love you more than I think anyone has ever loved something. I’m so sorry I neglected you and you are perfectly validated in my eyes. You never ever have to question if you’re enough because I’m the one questioning if I am. I literally don’t know how you love someone constantly on the move. You give so much of yourself to me and I could never thank you enough. I love you so much and I guess I never realized how absent I’ve been in our love.” He stopped his speech for a second to let out a very pained choke of air, I wanted to reach for his hand but it felt like mine weighed a thousand pounds.

“I wanted to marry you after our 3rd date. That sounds so silly but I wanted a ring on your finger for years now, but I knew I needed to wait when the time was right. I- I can’t believe I have made you think I didn’t love you or want to be with you solely for the reason that I get to be a family with you. It was never ever the reasoning you think, I did it solely because the love I feel for you couldn’t be contained to just a boyfriend. I’ll help you restart planning or help you find someone to plan it, whatever you want, I’ll do. You’re my fucking soulmate. I’m so sorry.”

He cried and never looked me in the eyes, I honestly have never seen him cry this hard. It didn’t matter how sad I was over our relationship, I couldn’t stand to see his pain this intensely.

“I didn’t lay with you because I didn’t want to wake you up, I knew how hard you’ve been working to get promoted at the firm, I didn’t want you being sleep deprived because of my constantly moving figure. Which by the way, I am so happy you’re promoted. You literally deserve it all because you are the hardest working woman I know. I wish you would’ve told me sooner. Oh God, I love waking up to you and id do some questionable things just to get to hold you at night. I could never love my music as much as I love you, music makes me happy but you make me live. You know me like the back of my hand, I could never possibly unlove you. I am so sorry, please understand.”

“I do understand and I should’ve come to you sooner, I’m just afraid Shawn. Always.”

“I am too, but I know there is no one else I’d rather face every tomorrow with. Can we call it a truce and let me make you a bowl of ice cream? I can put on Mulan and hold you.” He raised his eyebrows.

Nothing made my heart soar like that mischievous smile that also held so much love. “Fine, I could care less about anything m we watched or ate, I just want you.”

“So you don’t care about anything we get to eat?” He smirked

“You’re on thin ice buddy, thin ice.”

[in-tua-deep]

me n a friend have been talking abt how to make a happy au where everything works out for the best and tbh my proposal is: that last time five time travels he doesnt make it to the apocalypse, he jumps right into reginalds funeral and just the fact that their annoying rebellious preteen brother who needs people to look after him is there, they collectively pull their heads out their asses and the apocalypse doesnt happen thru the power of sibling love (+being made more responsible), ur thoughts?

OOH curious, an au where Five travels straight from when he was thirteen to his dad’s funeral? 

Five absolutely doesn’t believe that Dad is dead or that his siblings are his siblings until they PROVE it and then he basically is like what the fuCK luther you’re HUGE and allison your hair!! klaus you got so tall!! why is everyone except vanya tall as fuck!! 

“Hey where’s Ben?” Five asks, all excited and wide-eyed and the rest of the squad is like surprisedpikachu.jpg

When he finds out that Ben is dead he tries to travel back in time to prevent it and that’s when he comes to the realization that moving forwards in time is a whole different kettle of fish than moving backwards in time which sparks its own little breakdown because until that moment he was treating this as sort of a fun vacation with his cool older siblings and didn’t realize that he was stuck there

So the whole squad gets to find out via breakdown that Five hadn’t really meant to run away and was always intending on going back to them and that he just got stuck

Five calls them out on their bullshit regarding Vanya because he literally just came from a time where Vanya used to sneak into his room in tears after Reginald called her useless and ordinary for the nth time so maybe he’s a little protective and he’s just like “holy shit dad is DEAD and y’all are STILL spouting his same bullshit regarding Vanya”

Diego, who hates the fact that he was just compared to Reginald, decides to be a contrary bastard and immediately start treating Vanya nicer because honestly sometimes spite is the best motivator

Seriously how do the siblings not cotton onto the fact that their brother who sees the dead can see their very dead brother?? whatever, Five is from a time where Klaus was just doing weed and not heavy drugs so as soon as he finds out Ben is dead and after he has his subsequent breakdown he turns to Klaus like “hey hey ask Ben where the fuck he put my book on interdimensional theory I need it for reasons” and Klaus is so surprised he just automatically relays the information and then the rest of the family are like “what” as Five jumps to go retrieve it

Five is still conditioned by Reginald to like. Be a good little child soldier. And I’m gonna say the running out wasn’t a common occurrence, so instead Five gets to bug his siblings to take him places because also he’s thirteen and can’t drive

“Dad is DEAD” five says, wide eyed with possibilities, “holy shit. Is griddy’s still open? can we go to griddy’s? in DAYLIGHT? without sneaking out? holy SHIT”

in the face of this excitement over something as small and simple as being able to go to a diner when he wants, it’s not like they can say NO. even luther wavers because honestly griddy’s is a nostalgia trip and a half and he’s been on the moon for four years and… dad’s dead it can wait for like, an hour right?

The commission is like “hmm. fuck. better send some people to get the timeline back on track” except now it’s the whole squad who deal with the Griddy’s Assassin situation and Five helps because this is what’s he trained to do!! taking down armed gunmen! look at them doing their job as a family

meanwhile the others are freaking out internally because five is a BABY and he’s in DANGER also looking back they were ALL BABIES WHAT THE FUCK DAD and five is just smiling while warping around bashing people on the head with diner mugs

Klaus and Vanya are ducked under a table bonding about not being super helpful in fights and Klaus is like “tbh idk why dad let me go on missions and not you like i remember when you got allison to teach you that highkick p sure you’d be more useful than me” and vanya is touched

they don’t come out unscathed and Five is bleeding and everyone is freaking out over it and five is just like “dude i’ve had worse lmao like literally dad has given me worse than this” and everyone is reminded that their dad was a dick and even luther finds his faith shaken because five is so little and he doesn’t remember them being that little,,,

they still make Five get patched up when they get back home as they try to figure out Hey What The Fuck Was That and five is literally getting stitches and he’s still excitedly asking them questions about their lives

and he’s thirteen and so sheltered i cry so he’s very impressed by like, everything

“we should watch some of allison’s movies!! we can watch movies together now, right?? i mean even dad would let us watch a movie if it had one of us in it surely! i want to see!” “!! Luther you went to the MOON? what was it like? were there aliens? did you see the flag? did you bring back moonrocks? can I have one?” “klaus your skirt!! i know dad never let you wear the stuff you wanted and now you just can! you can wear whatever you want! that’s so cool. can i do that? can i wear whatever i want? klaus klaus can you paint my nails? can ben pick out the color?” “vanya you’re in an orchestra!!! and you have a concert! that’s soo cool! does it matter that you aren’t first chair? you’re in an ORCHESTRA. i knew you were gonna be great with the violin!! can we go to your concert?? please? how much are the tickets? I probably still have my piggy bank in my room if no one’s touched it”

(Klaus touched it. Klaus 100% stole that money a long time ago. Allison cuts in and decides that as the wealthiest sibling and the currently most maternal and she is just melting at all this she will buy the whole family tickets to Vanya’s concert and they’re all going to attend as a FAMILY even if she has to drag everyone there by the ear)

everyone is immediately like “i am going to give this child the world and do all the things that we never got to do as children holy shit also now that i’m more distant from the events i never realized just how little autonomy we had and the fact that Five is so excited about being able to wear non-uniform clothes is a little depressing”

luther out here like “but,,, but the murder mystery”

and they all consider that and think that hmm. maybe those mystery griddy gunmen actually had something to do with dad’s death? okay okay, maybe just maybe luther isn’t being an idiot about this

if you think thirteen year old five doesn’t JUMP at the chance to be a part of uncovering a murder mystery you are incorrect and the siblings are immediately like “hmm. five has already gotten hurt. he is child. we should be,,, protective.”

vanya goes back to her apartment and still meets leonard peabody sorry guys but it’s kind of her job and i don’t want to take that away from her

she does still end up going to leonard’s house except five gets really bored of being smother by the rest of the squad (and they’re all WEIRD about the oddest of topics it’s stupid) so he goes off to find her and ends up ALSO at leonard’s house except he find reggie’s notebook and is like “hey i recognize this!! this is dad’s! i saw him writing in it yesterday!” and instead of letting anyone know he just kind of stuffs it up his shirt and steals it (it’s not stealing if it belongs to dad) and bugs Vanya into going home with him

he looks at the journal (he was always too curious for his own good that’s what got him into this situation) and so he reads about vanya’s powers

and immediately busts into the kitchen for family dinner like “GUYS HOLY SHIT”

and so that’s how the family finds out vanya has powers, it’s a big revelation, five is super enthusiastic because now vanya can come on missions with them suck it dad!! because he 100% isn’t aware yet they don’t still go on missions together and five is already like “we gotta train this!!”

idk pogo probably comes by and reveals the whole nanny situation and allison makes that reveal and vanya is fucking DISTRESSED and tries to leave but five latches onto her wrist and is like “vanya’s never been ordinary a day in her life!! have you heard her play the violin!! your rumor didn’t even work!” which is v touching to vanya and calms her down at least to continue the convo

luther is like “clearly she’s on the meds bc she’s dangerous so we can just continue those it’s fine” because it’s not like she’s hurt someone he cares about in this timeline tbh

allison meanwhile is trying to be a better sister in general so she counters back with “she was FOUR she didn’t understand the concept of death, now that she’s older and past the toddler tantrum phase i think it would be fine for her to actually learn about her powers”

but it’s klaus who’s like “hey, maybe we should ask vanya what she wants??”

and vanya is like,, i want to know. it wasn’t nice feeling like a burden back during the diner shootout, and i think i’d like to maybe try and explore this - and if it’s too much then there are always the pills (bc at this point vanya is still on those and doesn’t realize they inhibit her emotions, when she does she ends up not wanting to go back on them)

vanya gets the love and support she needs!! luther gets some validation for his dad was murdered theory bc the squad investigates with him and they find out about reggie faking his murder a lot earlier! allison doesn’t get her throat cut! klaus gets the love and support HE needs!! and decides (with ben’s input) that he needs to at least attempt to be a good role model bc five has already asked him if the drugs are more important than family when klaus tried to duck out of an allison movie night! diego gets to leak his protective instincts all over five and also take out his anger issues on the commission agents being sent after them! five gets to have an actual childhood even if he does chafe sometimes at his siblings being weird and protective!

literally the apocalypse is ended by five gasping and saying “WAIT can we go to the ZOO?” and making them all go on family trips together where everyone is included because!! they’re his siblings! he wants everyone to be there! he’s gonna see a lion motherfuckers! in person!

also a lot of the things five thinks of are things the siblings just,, never had time for. so it’s a first experience for a lot of them, and so no one really has a good reason to say no?? because they kind of want to go, too?

five, literally vibrating in excitement: i want to go on a roller coaster

like i know you said about preteen rebellion but look he’s come out into a world where his dad is dead and so there’s the potential to do ALL the things he’s always wanted to do but knew dad would never let him like holy shit!! family laser tag! paintball! let’s take a roadtrip to the beach guys i’ve never seen the ocean!! let’s go ice skating! go on a ferris wheel! eat ice cream on the couch! throw popcorn at the tv! lets blast abba songs through the house and make a blanket fort!!!

like it’s gonna take a while to get through the exhausting excitement of “LOOK AT ALL THESE FORMERLY FORBIDDEN THINGS I CAN TRY”

and just throughout this they’re dispatching commission agents and fighting hazel and cha-cha and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with that as well as teaching vanya how to control her powers which everyone is trying to help out with and also dealing with five literally bouncing off the walls one half of the time and the other half of the time being passed out somewhere due to running out of energy

“klaus i want to get a puppy” “we are absolutely doing that, no ben we don’t need to consult anyone else about this” “i’m gonna name him mr. pennycrumb” “you do that buddy why the fuck not”

but yes. what an absolutely blessed and happy au. i love u and tell ur friend that i love them, too

prevent the apocalypse through the power of reconnecting with your inner child and dragging your family along behind you

[loverunderwater]

Life in a Year (2019) dir. Mitja Okorn

summary:

The movie follows 17-year-old Daryn who finds out that his girlfriend is dying. He sets out to give her an entire life in the last year she has left.

1/5 stars

For a moment, I worried I was being too hard on this movie, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. Spoilers, duh, but just don’t bother watching.

This movie is like if you took all of John Green’s favorite tropes (manic pixie dream girl, guy with hidden passion who claims his life only starts to have meaning once he gets a girlfriend, and of course, someone who’s dying) and combined it with every indie startup movie’s director’s favorite tropes (pressure to attend a prestigious college— directors definitely projecting their own childhoods here— from unbelievably toxic parents who were forgiven too easily, the main character’s secret quirky side passion, and dates where the MPDG shows the protagonist what “life is really all about—the journey and love”) in order to create this monstrosity of a cliche.

The main character is a pretentious dork with a secret passion for rapping. His parents, particularly his father, have an ideal life planned out for him. A 10-year plan, if you will. This movie follows his path through his senior year of high school as he meets a girl who teaches him how to stand up to his dad and follow his passion. I genuinely thought I was going like him, but alas, nay. Already, I disliked the overused trope that a love interest had to come into his life in order for him to be inspired to stand up to his parents, since nothing remarkable changes after Isabelle comes into his life, except for the fact that she’s there and “she’s different than other girls.”

The idea of “living a whole lifetime in a year“ seemed so unrelated to the topic of parental pressure to do well in schools, the topics were tied together with threads that were as close to snapping as my patience throughout the movie, and neither were particularly well-developed or expanded on beyond anything we could find in a contemporary YA novel from 2011.

I was frustrated by the simultaneously extremely realistic depiction of Daryn’s friends as teenagers, and the terribly Disney-princess-happily-ever-after fact that Daryn believes (“knows”) that he is in love with Isabelle after knowing her for two scant months. We get scenes that are totally unrealistic and immature for a movie that follows two 17-18 year olds, like the MPDG throwing a rock at security to a supposedly famous musician twice and getting off scot-free.

I was extremely put off by how quickly paced the first third of the movie went by. Isabelle went from being pissed off at Daryn, to being impressed at his (frankly embarrassing) rapping, to agreeing on a “not-date” date where a Daryn insults the food they eat because it’s not Michelin 3-star A grade wagyu beef. After that, I could not shake the thought that Isabelle was a dumbass for not dumping him right there, because who calls a burrito a wrinkled ballsack at a place his date clearly enjoys and cherishes? Then again, seeing the folks Daryn was raised by, maybe it’s an inherited behavior.

Daryn’s father is one of those people who believes that just because he started from rock bottom and worked his way up to the top, he has the right to trust people like shit for not being just like him, including his own son. For fuck’s sake, he was more distraught when Daryn destroyed the wooden board containing his 10-year plan than he was after he almost punched Daryn. I’m not sure whether to call this a caricature of toxic parenting or a Frankenstein’s monster of abuse.

When Daryn trusts his father enough to bring Isabelle home to meet him, the dinner is wracked with passive aggressive comments like “Some people just aren’t meant for higher education.” It’s a wonder Daryn’s father wasn’t rejected from each promotion he applied to with his infuriating god complex and tendency to insult people he is merely supposed to be tolerating. When Isabelle (understandably) gets upset and leaves, Daryn’s dad mutters, “I hope you’re happy” under his breath to a Daryn. Failure to recognize that he’s fucked up and blaming others for his mistakes paints Daryn’s father as a manipulative narcissist.

Daryn’s father had such an undeserved redemption arc, and the fact that he came back to apologize to Daryn at his girlfriend Isabelle’s funeral was so aggravating that it could be nothing but expected from someone like him. Coming to apologize while Daryn was grieving manipulated Daryn’s trauma and made it so easy for his father to appear like a savior, a shoulder to cry on, and be forgiven. On Isabelle (MPDG if it wasn’t painfully obvious already)’s side of the story, her mother was also let off the hook way too easily. Isabel claims “she wanted to be a mother, just not my mother,” after she is told to leave by her mother and her new family. Isabelle’s mother comes back and apologizes only after she finds out that her daughter is dying. She clearly did not feel remorseful at shitting on her daughter’s emotions but was only feeling guilty that she was rude to a dying girl. She apologized because she was selfish and didn’t want her past actions to haunt her, not because she cared about her kid, which she clearly doesn’t.

This movie’s only redeeming feature was Cara Delevigne and Jaden Smith’s acting, and they both deserved better. When Isabelle died, I found myself appreciating Cara’s emotion and Jaden’s reactions, but a voice in the back of my mind kept listing off everything I found unsatisfactory. I most definitely was not crying along, and I barely registered what was going in, which is probably not the reaction you want your viewers to have.

The characters start off in exactly the same mental state as they begin. Not one character experiences a conscious, intentional shift to overcome the very things that caused their internal conflict, which is what is supposed to drive the entire story. You could argue that Daryn matures and becomes an independent being after fighting with his parents, but that’s not true. All he does is hide behind Harvard and scholarships, and when his dad embarrasses his girlfriend, he relies on the fact that he takes care of her deteriorating health to paint himself as a good boyfriend, instead of a coward who doesn’t stand up for anything he believes in, including a girl he supposedly loves (which let’s be real, sounds just like Daryn, doesn’t it?).

Overall, the entire story was cliché and every aspect that the producers believed made the story “unique” or even worthwhile to produce, in fact detracted from the entire appeal of the movie or lack thereof.

This movie, along with The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, belongs in John Green’s personal closet of self-masturbatory material.

[redstarwriting]

Reliving Our Adventures

Thor x Reader

Request: “Your make it rain fic was so adorable!! Could your write more adventures about reader and Thor in the new asgardian village?“

Word Count: 1,202

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: Swearing, Loki sadness, Peter Quill bullying

A/N: Imma be honest, I never usually had a big thing for Thor but writing all these things about him is making my heart do the feels thing. It doesn’t help that I just went and saw Men In Black International either. Chris Hemsworth you’re ruining my life. Anyways, thank you to the Anon who requested this! I’m happy you enjoyed “Make It Rain!” As for the rest of my requests, I will bust them out as soon as I can but if I’m missing for a day or two it’s because my birthday is quite literally *glances at fake watch* tomorrow. So if I don’t post on the twentieth, I’m celebrating being brought into this world with my family! Other than that, I hope you enjoy!

───────────────────────────────────

Buying a polaroid camera was the best decision you had ever made. Being the girlfriend of the God of Thunder made things very interesting and you wanted to capture every moment. Not only that, though. It was nice having pictures of him around when he was off saving the universe and you weren’t with him. That’s exactly what was happening now, actually. The dumbass left around a week ago to go with the Guardians and do something that would result in saving the entire galaxy and didn’t take you. Shameful. You knew how to fight and quite honestly, were probably more intimidating than him at times. Especially when you got mad. Instead, you’re stuck here in his cottage in the new Asgardian village, looking through all of the polaroids you had taken.

You come across the first one you ever took, which was of Thor giving you a very confused and ‘oh my GOD I was just attacked by LIGHT’ look while in an apron and wearing oven mitts. To make it even funnier, there was a blur of a whole batch of cookies just falling on the floor. You didn’t tell him what the polaroid camera you were holding was, and he didn’t know what it was, so that’s where the confused look came from. The hilarious squinty look came from the big flash that temporarily obstructed his vision and caused him to drop the cookies you two had just made. The cookies were a queen-warming gift for Brunnhilde, but they became food for the floor because of Thor’s reaction. “Thor! The cookies!”

“(Y/N)! That contraption!”

You giggle at the memory, seeing the very next picture you took of him. It was the exact same scene, except he was smiling and holding the second batch of cookies instead of them being on the way to the ground. You fish through all the other pictures, your eyes landing on one of you and Thor huddled together by a bonfire. You two are swallowed by a blanket that Brunnhilde knit for you two as a housewarming gift. Your head is resting on him, and he’s gazing at you. His expression is literally lovesick puppy, and it’s absolutely adorable. Brunnhilde was the one who took this candid photo, actually. It was a nice night where you all just sat back and relaxed for once. Thor knew a lot about space, actually, and that night he was telling you all about it. “It is funny how small all those stars and planets look from here, but do not be fooled. They are big. Much bigger than what you would think. It is actually quite alarming, seeing a planet from the outside for the very first time. Very big.”

The next picture that catches your eye is the one of Thor and Rocket pointing and laughing at Peter Quill who is glaring at them and just so happens to be... soaking wet. You snort at this memory as it started a prank war between Peter and Thor that is still waging on to this day. “Thor I don’t get why you want me to stand here,” Peter says, standing on the edge of the dock. “Look out at the sunset Quill! It is lovely from this specific area here, believe me!” Peter turns and looks out at the horizon, only to be pushed in the water by Thor. It was a pretty lame prank, but Rocket and Thor could not stop laughing. You snapped this picture because seeing Thor with this much happiness on his face made your heart flutter. As many good memories you have with him, there are some dark ones as well.

With that thought, your eyes focus on another picture. This one is of Thor, his back to the camera, looking out at the water. On the water were spots of fire. This picture was a darker one, as it was a memorial of the death of his brother, Loki. Loki never got a proper Asgardian funeral, and it really affected Thor. Even though Loki’s body wasn’t there, it eased Thor knowing that he finally got a sendoff that he saw as fit. You took this picture so any time Thor missed him, he could look at the picture and know that he was still there. Ironically, the very next picture was of the time you got Thor a snake. You got it for him because Bruce told you about the times his brother would try to trick and kill him as a snake when they were little. If that happened with you and your sibling, you would probably be scarred and scared of any and all snakes for the rest of your life, but this is Thor we’re talking about. He looks overjoyed. The snake’s head is coiling around his wrist as he’s holding it, and he’s looking at you like an excited child in a candy shop. “He will be named Loki!”

“After your brother?”

“Yes! He did enjoy turning into a snake and attempting to end my life when we were children! It fits perfectly!”

Chuckling, you see another picture of your silly boyfriend. He’s wearing a dollar store Thor costume. Well, not the whole thing, just the wig and the fake Mjolnir. His eyebrow is raised and he’s doing his best to look sexy, but the bright yellow strings hanging down around his head made the picture hysterical. Not to mention the styrofoam hammer in his hand being half the size of his actual hammer. “Perhaps I should do what many humans do with their hair and get highlights in this color.”

“Perhaps you should definitely not do that.”

Your browsing is cut short by a flash of light. You jump, quickly looking in the direction of where it came from only to see Thor smiling at you. “You really are the most photogenic person in all of Asgard, my love,” he says, pulling the polaroid picture out of the camera and shaking it. You run over to him, basically jumping in his arms. He laughs, kissing your head. “Miss me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Yes, of course not. That is definitely not why you were looking at all of the pictures you have taken of me...” he starts, and you roll your eyes, cutting him off with a kiss. “Okay, fine. Maybe I did.” He grins at you, placing another quick peck on your lips before setting you down and walking over to where you were looking at all of the pictures. “I do love all of these. Thank you for trying to document everything we do here,” he tells you, sitting the newest picture down with the rest and grabbing a marker to date and title it. You walk over to him, smiling. “Of course! I wouldn’t want our adventures to go undocumented, would I?” you ask, and he smiles. “No, of course not,” he mumbles, writing the date and pausing for a second before titling the polaroid, ‘Reliving Our Adventures’ You smile as he puts his arm around you and pulls you to his side. Although you were reliving many adventures right now, you know there will be even more to come. And that thought excites you.