#this is basically just stream-of-consciousness coping with the bullshit. don’t mind me

[angelsarecomputers]

pre-martinaise pornstache harry du bois who’s creepy and demeaning and a hypermasculine misogynist at work going home from the brutal machismo-masochist shit factory and getting pegged through the fucking floor by his younger satellite officer. Do you see my vision

[spencersmagic]

One-sided good-bye.

Summary: Reader isn’t from Spencer’s reality, and their time is up. 

Couple: Reid x Shifter! Reader

Category: angst angst angst

Warnings: might trigger dissociation, mentions of dissociation, filthy angst.

Words: 930 (she a shortie)

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Shifting is basically the act of moving your consciousness to a parallel reality/universe. It is shifter common knowledge that there is an infinite number of universes, meaning an infinite number of you’s. In this fic, the reader shifts to their criminal minds alternate universe to be with Spencer, but at one point they must say good bye. 

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“Spencer... I’m 35. You know I don’t belong here and you know I can't stay here forever. You need to let me go”.

Your heart thudded against your chest, as you had told the love of your life, the man you had spent 18 years with, the man you had so graciously fallen in love with, that you could never visit him again.

He looked at you with such broken eyes. 

“You mean I’ll never see you anymore?” he whispers, heartbroken, a choked sob escaping his lips as you slowly fall to your knees. “You mean to say that th- this is it? what am I supposed to do now?” he backs up into the wall mindlessly, trying to steady himself as if you had punched him. 

“That’s not how this works...” you say, tears of your own streaming into your hands. “This body, this-” you gesture to yourself “this person that I have inhabited... its me. I will still be here. But I won't know” you explain between soft sobs, knowing how much you will miss the beautiful man that sat so broken at your feet. 

“I” you say, pointing to your temple, “I won’t be here. You will be with me but I cannot return here anymore I-” you felt your heart break at the way his eyes were looking at you, so soft and innocent and broken. You had broken this man. “I need to live in my own reality. Forever. I need to find somebody and-” you interrupted yourself by the heartbroken grunt, as he pressed his head into the palms of his hands, struggling against the pain your words were inflicting him.

You closed your eyes. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. You were supposed to shift once, maybe twice. This was supposed to be a childhood thing. A coping mechanism from all the bullshit that was happening in your original reality. You never expected it to go this far: to last 18 years, break down, find a family, find your dream job, find the love of your life... only for it all to fall apart.

You had aged. Not in your desired reality (if you even bared to call it that), but also in your original reality. You had left and you had come back a thousand times, only getting older and older. You had focused so much on JJ and Hotchner and Prentiss and Spencer. Oh god. Spencer. My sweet boy. You couldn’t think. You couldn’t bare to breathe as you looked at the damage you had made to the man you loved so much it ruined you.

“I just had to tell you. I thought you deserved to know. You will still live with me, but it will be my body. My own consciousness will be off somewhere else” you interrupted yourself, knowing no amount of words could fix the broken mess that you had literally created. You couldn’t bare looking at the broken boy in front of you for one more second.

You crouched down to hug him, but quickly backed down as he flinched. You choked out a sob. “Spencer, please” you whisper. “I never meant to hurt you. I only came here because I loved you and I needed you in my life”. He looks up, and you can see in how much pain he is in by how he looks at you. His hair is sticking out everywhere, his eyes are red and his cheeks are puffy, and he has the prettiest pout you would kiss if you didn’t know it would break him even more. 

“My sweet boy, come here” you say softly, trying to keep it together for him. You embrace him, his head falling into your chest and his arms clinging to your neck. You stay like this for a while before he breaks the silence. 

“Are you-” he manages to choke out before a violent sob shakes his whole body, but he powers through it “are you leaving because you don’t love me anymore?” his voice is reduced to a whisper, not having the energy to speak louder. You sob, mimicking his own. “Of course not, baby. I love you more than anything. But I need to find someone for myself. I need to have” you choke out a sob, hating the words that are filling your mouth “oh god I hate this. I need to have children. I need to move on” you say, trying to convince yourself more than you were convincing him. His eyebrows furrow and a new wave of tears and sobs hit his beautiful face as he thinks about anybody else feeling your touch. 

You two stay silent, the only sound being little “shh, I've got you”s and your sobs, before his eyebrows perk up. 

“What if-” he licks his lips “what if you still visited me, though? You can have your partner and your children, but you could still visit me. We could grow old together and then you could grow old with them, right?” he says in a whisper, somehow sensing what you’re going to say but desperately clinging onto what’s left of you. 

“I cannot, Spencer. It wouldn’t be fair to you” you say, heart breaking all over against at his eagerness to find a solution. 

“Can you at least come visit me periodically? Just to make sure I’m ok?” 

“Spence, this is just a one-sided goodbye. You will still have me here, I just won't have you” you choke out one last sob. “You won’t even notice the difference”. 

“I’ll notice” he chimes in way too quickly. “I am certain I will notice the difference. There is no other consciousness I could find as delightful as yours, my sweet angel”. 

_______

empty taglist :(

I took creative liberty with the concept of shifting. You are not supposed to tell anybody that you’ve shifted (because, technically, you’ve been there all along - you just didn’t realise). This is one of my greatest fears when shifting, and I wanted to put it into words. 

[moiraineswife]

Ep 55 Caleb Meta

Warning: This post will contain a)- Spoilers for episode 55. If you haven’t seen it yet BEGONE. b)- Angst. Bc. Caleb. c)- yelling. if u haven’t worked out already: these posts are not planned. these posts are not thought-through. these posts are not edited. these posts are a stream of consciousness shrieking at the void that is u lot. Enjoy. 

So. Uh. That episode was like..................A lot. Lots to unpack. LOTS. So I’m just going to touch on Caleb and the very specific niche deliciousness of him being completely and utterly retraumatised in that episode and how it may or may not pan out in future. 

Meta under the cut bc it got Long. 

So, DIVING IN: the nature of trauma in itself is repetition. Nightmares, flashbacks (of all their various forms) are ways in which the trauma itself repeats. Basically your brain Cannot Cope with what’s happened so it tries to just put you through the same thing over and over again like process this please. 

Caleb has been dealing with that for at least a decade since the original trauma took place. Then we pile on the (highly symbolic and super-interesting in a really fucked up way bit of magic that is Modify Memory (i assume) which I have to meta on more in future) which is effectively a false memory that was removed (that his parents were guilty/in his twisted-logic mind deserved what they got) which makes a very interesting mirror for suppressed memories (again: big trauma thing. In which your brain Cannot Cope so hard it just blots the bad memory out of existence entirely) so he’s a whole mess of being trapped in an endless cycle of his horrible past (PTSD is a Trip, y’all). 

This is...An echo of that but it’s something new. It’s very much the same KIND of thing, so it plays in to the trauma-repetition, but it’s a new incarnation of it. History repeating itself, etc, etc, delicious irony, all that great stuff fiction-creators live for.  

It’s going to be deeply upsetting for Caleb. (No shit, Taryn). But it so beautifully, and terribly, feeds in to his deep-rooted fears that he is a toxic person, and that those around him are destined to get hurt (by him, not by him, it doesn’t really matter to the guilt brain, it’s all just fuel for that fire). 

For example: Liam spoke on Talks about how, regarding Molly’s death, Caleb almost expected it because yup, that seems about right, par for the course. It’s one of the big reasons he’s been extremely reluctant to let the Mighty Nein get close to him (he’s directly said this in canon at this point, in his conversation with Beau). 

He feels dangerous. He sees himself as dangerous. Partly because he sees himself as being constantly in danger, and by extension, those around him are also in danger. That’s external. 

The internal part of him has been screaming ‘you killed the two people who loved you the most in the world in an unprovoked attack because you’re a monster’ for over a decade at this point. Not only does he not deserve any of these people, he feels like he’s destined to hurt them, no matter what he does, or how hard he tries. 

This, uh, reinforces that in a very deep, obvious, and painful way. Not to mention the fact that, not only did he hurt them he hurt them with fire. Again. So it’s almost exactly the same pattern of shit coming back to haunt him for a second time: 

Trent: Mental manipulation magic - fire - dead loved ones  Demon: mental manipulation magic - fire - nearly dead loved ones. 

It’s Bad. It’s Real Bad. That boy is going to have the panic attack of his life when he recovers from the immediate adrenaline rush of the fight. It’s not going to be pretty. 

It’s going to drive home everything that little voice inside his head that sounds like Trent has been telling him since he joined these people. It’s going to undo all the struggle it’s taken to ignore that voice up to this point because don’t you see what happens when you get close to people? They can be used against you. You can be used against them. They become your weakness and you become weak because you care. Because this hurts. And if you were stronger, and smarter, then it wouldn’t... etc etc etc. *insert emotionally manipulative bullshit here* 

BUT! 

I actually think this could actually be good for him in a really weird way? 

Hear me out: 

Caleb has been living in a trauma loop for over ten years at this point. He’s been going over the same memories again and again and again, but he hasn’t done anything with them. He hasn’t actually fully processed what happened to him. And, and this is the biggest part: he hasn’t had anyone to push against. 

It takes a lot to recognise abuse. It takes a lot in the modern world when there are phones, helplines, the internet and, let’s be honest: awareness. There are words for these experiences and there’s more chance of, accidentally or deliberately, stumbling across help out there that can look at a situation from an outside perspective and go: this is fucked up. 

This is what Caleb needs. 

On his own it’s almost impossible for him to recognise what was done to him and fully process it and begin to heal from it in a healthy way. Caleb has not actually started the process of recovery for anything that happened to him yet because Caleb does not yet recognise/understand what there is to process/recover from. 

In Caleb’s mind, he is a monster. He did an unforgivable thing because he believed his parents deserved it as they were traitors. He broke because he was not strong enough to handle what he’d done. He was sent to an asylum and since escaping he’s just been afraid. That’s the only emotion he’s got towards Trent right now: fear. And it’s suppressing all logic, self-awareness, and the ability to think rationally about what went on. 

Caleb was abused. Caleb was manipulated, mentally, emotionally, and magically. Caleb was a vulnerable kid who was deliberately chosen, carefully groomed, and then skilfully brainwashed by a figure with an enormous amount of literal and emotional power over him. Caleb was abused. 

Caleb does not see this. 

Caleb does not recognise that he was abused. 

And I think this is where a lot of issues with Caleb kinda stem from in fandom? Because people look at him and just...How can he NOT understand that he was manipulated. Huh. Maybe he wasn’t. Because it’s just that damned obvious how could he not understand this? 

Abusers rely on that. Abusers rely on their victims not understanding what they’re doing to them. Particularly when their victims are young, with relatively little real-world experience, and absolutely no grounding/preparation to recognise or combat any of this, in a society that is more accepting of the kind of teaching that radicalised Caleb than most are. 

Caleb needs an outside perspective to look at what he went through and go ‘you know that’s fucked up, right?’ He’s kind of had that from Beau and Nott but not enough. Someone has to sit him down and go through every piece of what happened and be like ‘this is not okay’ ‘what he did to you was not okay’ ‘this is called abuse’ and then consistently validate those experiences until he understands. 

Caleb has over ten years of trauma to process and unlearn. That...That does not happen overnight. That does not happen because your new friend looks at you and goes ‘yeah that was fucked up, dude’ and suddenly it all crystallises in your mind and becomes clear. That takes work. And effort. And a willingness to feel something beyond fear for your abuser and Caleb is Not There yet. 

What this last fight does, though, is open up the possibility of Caleb starting to accept this a little bit. 

Jester: “What the fuck, Caleb?” 

Caleb: “I am sorry...They got inside my head.” 

This is actually....Kinda huge for Caleb? Actually it’s kinda massive. This is Caleb experiencing a trauma incredibly similar to what he went through when he was younger (but on a much smaller scale, with far less dire outcomes) and being able to look at it and, still apologise, but explain that he was not in control of himself, and that ‘they got inside his head’. 

This is the step he needs to take with Trent, too, this is the same admission that he needs to make to himself, and this is the first step that has to happen before he can even begin to start processing and healing his trauma. And he needs help with that. 

This is not the part where I say I expect the mighty nein to become Caleb’s therapists. But they can be friends, they can be a support network, but most importantly: they can be an outside perspective. 

They can’t process his trauma for him. They can’t work through his issues for him. They can’t take away any of his grief, or his guilt, or his pain, or his PTSD. They can’t make what Trent did go away. But they can point it out. 

They can raise a red flag. They can point it out and say ‘this is not okay’. They can put a name to it. They can validate it. They can do the things that Caleb cannot do himself, which is look at what happened and be able to acknowledge, without the burden of guilt, and the fact that it’s so much easier to blame, and hurt, and punish himself than a figure he’s terrified of, and say that it was not okay, and explain to him what happened. 

They can help him acknowledge his abuse and then he can start to help himself heal from it. 

But this fight is, essentially, a microcosm of Caleb’s past. And I hope that if (when, please god when) the mighty nein, who were all either a)- directly charmed themselves, or b)- resisted the effect but were aware of its intentions and capabilities, do not react the way Caleb expects them to react (ie: the way he reacted to himself) with anger, and hatred, and blame, that’s going to start unlocking things. 

I don’t expect a massive breakthrough next episode, don’t get me wrong, this is going to be a long, careful, painful process. But I think even the acknowledgement that someone affected that way by magic, or by emotional abuse, is not themselves, and is not, ultimately, to blame for what they may have done (or weak/somehow complicit in ‘allowing�� themselves to be targeted/victimised) is going to prove a really big thing for Caleb in the future. 

Just that acknowledgement that they don’t blame him for what happened, that they understand he wasn’t himself, and that it wasn’t within his control to stop what was happening could, I think, prove huge in terms of his recovery further down the line... 

TL;DR: Caleb experienced his past again on a much smaller scale with this fight, but having the party around him to react to him/it and reach out to him, and tell him it’s okay and that they don’t blame him will do A Lot for unlocking his potential recognition of abuse and recovery down the line. 

[for-ghosts-like-me]

stream of consciousness venting about roommate bullshit post

tldr: my roommates asked me to move out before the lease is up because me asking them to hold themselves accountable for their shitty behavior is somehow worse than their shitty behavior 

One of the most exhausting things about being someone who has a reputation of being quiet and so nice is that when I stand up for myself people are like “this isn’t the Janet I know, you’ve changed!” and it’s like nah bro, this is how I felt all along you just didn’t hear about it yet because I operate my relationships with the understanding that you’re gonna be empathetic and hold yourself accountable for your actions the same way I do. I love to give people the benefit of the doubt because I always look for the best in people. But I’m fucking tired, there is no more benefit of the doubt to give, you’ve dried up the well. 

There is such a double standard with the people I live with and I am so over it. My one roommate never cleans or does anything for other people and then one day he finally will and he will make sure everyone knows about it. Meanwhile I take care of other people pets, clean up other peoples messes, etc all the time without being asked and then our other roommate comes at me that I don’t do enough. Like you’re pointing your finger at the wrong person. He’s allowed to punch holes in walls when he’s upset and never own up to the fact that how he acts makes others uncomfortable, but God forbid I finally stand up for myself. He can punch walls and we need to feel sorry for him. But me communicating my feelings is crossing a line. 

They’re basically like “Just go back to being quiet Janet, this isn’t the friend we though we had in you. Don’t get upset when we decide to do things without you on your birthday, you telling us that upsets you is exponentially worse than us excluding you how dare you speak up. Him punching walls is his coping mechanism but you calling him out for it is so much worse how could you be such a horrible friend to this 26 year old man who throws temper tantrums like a child. Have you no respect for the fact that his parents said no to him as a child? Do his sob stories about his childhood that sound like very average experiences mean nothing to you you heartless bitch? His teacher once told him to stop doing something he knew he shouldn’t be doing when he was in elementary school and that stuck with him man, why aren’t you feeling more sorry for him like everyone else? His best friend raped someone in high school but it just didn’t matter to him so why can’t you see him as a feminist icon because he finally stopped being friends with him nearly ten years later because that friend was better at throwing frisbees than him? He’s a man who isn’t afraid to cry, why can’t you praise him like every other woman in his life?” (The teacher story was true and legit something he thought was relevant to bring up when the rest of us were talking about times adults let us down when we were kids)(And I WISH I was making up the rapist friend story but he really did say the words “It just didn’t matter” in reaction to when his friend told him he had raped someone. It’s also a story I don’t think our other roommate or his gf know about and it’s taken me a lot of self control to not be like “btw his best friend raped someone and he was more than chill about it! How does that make you feel?”)

Like he can get upset and everyone jumps to baby him and I get upset and everyone is just like wow when did Janet become such a bitch. I’m over it. And I don’t understand why I am the one being told I make others uncomfortable so it would be best if I moved out before the lease is up. Like this is literally insane. I’m not moving out early because the roommate who said she’d cover my rent for me to move out early literally told that to our old roommate and then months later changed her mind and wanted a large sum of money that our old roommate didn’t have because she trusted her to not be shady. 

I sent a message to the roommate group chat that I plan to follow the lease agreement and as I type this I can literally hear my roommate stomping around, hitting things, and slamming doors. HOW AM I THE PROBLEM???????

Do they need my sob stories so then I am free to act however the fuck I want when I’m upset? Like I don’t get it. I’m studying to become a social worker and I’ve been to therapy, like I’ve literally studied and worked on how to manage interpersonal conflict. I’m still no expert but it’s not like I’m coming out the gate being rude af when I’m communicating my feelings with them. My empathy and accountability that everyone loved me for in the beginning of this friendship is still fucking there even when I’m communicating my feelings when I’m upset. It makes no fucking sense to me that I’m made out to be the bad guy. Like I used to be very into avoiding conflict too but I never reacted violently or gaslit any one like my roommates do. 

When I moved into this house three years ago I was the happiest I’d ever been. We didn’t have the wall punching roommate at the time, my other two best friends lived here and I never felt so at home before. It feels so bizarre to me that he moved into our home and immediately felt so entitled to act however he wanted and bring physical aggression into our house of love and friendship and that our other roommate embraced that with open arms. It makes me so sad that this is what my last few months of living in my favorite place I’ve ever lived is like.